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SECTION SEVENTEEN
LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS IN YOGA
Bhakti and Love in Yoga
THE nature of Bhakti is adoration, worship, self-offering to what is greater than oneself; the nature of love is a feeling or a seeking for closeness and union. Self-giving is the character of both; both are necessary in the Yoga and each gets its full force when supported by the other.
THE love that belongs to the spiritual planes is of a different kind—the psychic has its own more personal love, bhakti, surrender. Love in the higher or spiritual mind is more universal and impersonal. The two must go together to make the highest divine love.
27-6-1936 Page-589
UNIVERSAL love is always universal—psychic love can individualise itself.
24-5-1936
THAT was exactly what X tried to do—to express the love in connection with this or that person. But universal love is not personal—it has to be held within as a condition of the consciousness which will have its effects according to the Divine Will or be used by that Will if necessary; but to run about expressing it for one’s personal satisfaction or the satisfaction of others is only to spoil and lose it.
5-6-1936
ONE can love divinely only by becoming divine in nature; there is no other way. Page-590
THE relation with the Divine, the relation with the Mother must be one of love, faith, trust, confidence, surrender; any other relation of the vital ordinary kind brings reactions contrary to the sadhana,—desire, egoistic abhimān, demand, revolt and all the disturbance of ignorant rajasic human nature from which it is the object of the sadhana to escape.
26-4-1933 True Psychic Relation with the Mother
WHAT you write here is an exact description of the psychic being and its relation to the Mother. That is the true relation. If you want to succeed in this Yoga, you must take your stand on the psychic relation and reject the egoistic vital movement. The psychic being coming to the front and staying there is the decisive movement in the Yoga. It is that which happened when you saw the Mother last, the psychic came in front. But you must keep it in front. You will not be able to do that if you listen to the vital ego and its outcries. It is by faith Page-591 and surrender and the joy of pure self-giving— the psychic attitude—that one grows into the Truth and becomes united with the Divine.
26-2-1933 Psychic and Vital Love for the Mother
LOVE and devotion depend on the opening of the psychic and for that the desires must go. The vital love offered by many to the Mother instead of the psychic love brings more disturbance than anything else because it is coupled with desire.
8-9-1936 Pure Vital Love for the Mother
THERE is no harm in the vital love provided it is purified of all insincerity (as, for example, self-importance etc.) and from all demand. To feel joy in seeing the Mother is all right, but to demand it as a right, to be upset or in revolt or abhimān when it is not given, to be jealous of others who get it— all that is demand and creates an impurity which spoils both the joy and the love.
13-9-1934 Page-592 Love of the Divine and Other Attachments
IT is as the love of the Divine grows that the other things cease to trouble the mind.
Turning to the Divine and Withdrawal from Old Relations
THE inner being turned to the Divine naturally draws away from old vital relations and outer movements and contacts till it can bring a new consciousness into the external being.
September 1933
THESE movements are part of man’s ignorant vital nature. The love which human beings feel for one another is also usually an egoistic vital love and these other movements, claim, demand, jealousy, abhimān, anger, etc., are its common accompaniments. There is no place for them in Yoga—nor in Page-593 true love, psychic or divine. In Yoga all love should be turned towards the Divine and to human or other beings only as Vessels of the Divine—abhimān and the rest should have no place in it.
3-8-1933 Relations with Others in Sadhana
IT cannot be said that these affinities are either bad or good in a general way. It depends on the person, the effects and many other things. As a general rule, all these affinities have to be surrendered to the Divine along with the rest of the old nature, so that only what is in harmony with the Divine Truth can be kept and transformed for its work in you. All relations with Others must be relations in the Divine and not of the old personal nature.
1933 Page-594 The Rule about Personal Relations in Yoga
A PERSONAL relation is formed when there is an exclusive mutual looking to each other. The rule about personal relations in this Yoga is this: (1) All personal relations to disappear in the single relation between the sadhak and the Divine: (2) All personal (psychic-spiritual) relations to proceed from the Divine Mother, determined by her, and to be part of the single relation with the Divine Mother. In so far as it keeps to this double rule and admits no physical indulgence or vital deformation or mixture, a personal relation can be there. But since as yet the Supramental has not taken possession but is only descending and there is still struggle in the vital and physical levels, there must be a great carefulness such as would not be necessary if the supramental transformation were already there. Both have to be in direct relation with the Mother and in a total dependence on her and to see that that remains and that nothing diminishes its totality or cuts across it in the least degree.
Yogic Relations between Sadhaks and Sadhikas
IN a general way the only method for succeeding in having between a man and a woman the free and natural yogic relations that should exist between a sadhak and a sadhika in this Yoga is to be able Page-595 to meet each other without thinking at all that one is a man and another a woman—both are simply human beings, both sadhaks, both striving to serve the Divine and seeking the Divine alone and none else. Have that fully in yourself and no difficulty is likely to come.
IT is by the force of the white light in the vital consciousness bringing an exclusive consecration that these attachments can disappear.
10-1-1934
I AM glad to see that the right consciousness is returning and the attack is over. As it is past, I need not say anything about what you wrote in the interval since you can with the sight of the true consciousness see for yourself what is the right answer. Only one thing I must note so that no wrong idea may linger in your understanding. You seem Page-596 to say in one passage of a letter that the Mother had said to you that jealousy is inevitable in true love in ordinary life, and if it is not there when one sees the other loving elsewhere, then they don’t love each other! You must have strangely misheard and misunderstood the Mother. It is just the opposite of what the Mother has always said and thought and the very contrary of all her knowledge and experience. It is the idea of the ordinary mind about jealousy and love, not hers. She remembers very well having told you just the opposite that, even in ordinary life, one is not jealous if one has the true love. Jealousy is the common movement of the human egoistic lower vital with its grasping possessive instinct and it cannot be anything else. I thought it better to make this clear so that there might be no misleading impression that such movements of the lower vital nature have any sanction or support in the truth of the soul; they belong to the vital Ignorance, they are fruits of the vital ego.
1-2-1933 Page-597
IT is of course the old reaction—jealousy is certainly there, or you would not feel this violent sorrow. That it subsists still in the recesses and rises with such vehemence shows how deeply rooted this movement was in your physical consciousness. You have not been able to root it out because when it comes you associate yourself entirely with it and abandon yourself to its outcries and violence. You must have the strength to stand back from it in that part of your nature which is free—only then will you be able to push it away from you; and it is only if it is pushed away from you each time it rises that it will consent to disappear and return no more. As for our support and help it is there, but you must remain conscious of it—and you must not allow any wrong ideas like those of this morning to diminish the sense of unity and contact with the Mother.
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