February 5, 1913
THY voice is heard as a melodious chant in the stillness of my heart, and is translated in my head by words which are inadequate and yet replete with Thee. And these words are addressed to the Earth and say to her: "Poor sorrowful Earth, remember Page – 10 that I am present in thee and lose not hope; each effort, each grief, each joy and each pang, each call of thy heart, each aspiration of thy soul, each renewal of thy seasons, all, all without exception, what seems to thee sorrowful and what seems to thee joyous, what seems to thee ugly and what seems to thee beautiful, all infallibly lead thee towards me, who am endless Peace, shadowless Light, perfect Harmony, Certitude, Rest and Supreme Blessedness. Hearken, O Earth, to the sublime voice that arises. Hearken and take new courage.
February 8, 1913
O LORD, Thou art my refuge and my blessing, my strength, my health, my hope, and my courage. Thou art supreme Peace, unalloyed Joy, perfect Serenity. My whole being prostrates before Thee in a gratitude beyond measure and a ceaseless worship; and that worship goes up from my heart and my mind towards Thee like the pure smoke of incense of the perfumes of India. Let me be Thy herald among men, so that all who are ready may taste the beatitude that Thou grantest me in Thy infinite Mercy, and let Thy Peace reign upon earth. Page – 11
MY being goes up to Thee in thanksgiving, not because Thou usest this weak and imperfect body to manifest Thyself, but because Thou dost manifest Thyself, and that is the Splendour of splendours, the Joy of joys, the Marvel of marvels. All who seek Thee with ardour should understand that Thou art there whenever there is need of Thee; and if they could have the supreme faith to give up seeking Thee, but rather to await Thee, at each moment putting them selves integrally at Thy service. Thou wouldst be there whenever there was need of Thee; and is there not always need of Thee with us, whatever may be the different, and often unexpected, forms of Thy manifestation?
Let Thy glory be proclaimed, Let life be sanctified by it, Let it transform men’s hearts, Let Thy Peace reign on earth.
AS soon as all effort disappears from a manifestation, it becomes very simple, with the simplicity of a flower opening, manifesting its Beauty and spreading its fragrance without clamour or vehement Page – 12 gesture. And in this simplicity lies the greatest power, the power which is least mixed and least gives rise: to harmful reactions. The power of the vital should be mistrusted, it is a tempter on the path of the work, and there is always a risk of falling into its trap, for it gives you the taste of immediate results; and, in our first eagerness to do the work well, we let ourselves be carried away to make use of this power. But very soon it deflects all our action from the right course and introduces a seed of illusion and death into what we do. Simplicity, simplicity! How sweet is the purity of Thy Presence!
LET the pure perfume of sanctification burn always, rising higher and higher, and straighter and straighter, like the ceaseless prayer of the integral being, desiring to unite with Thee so as to manifest Thee.
As soon as I have no longer any material responsibilities, all thoughts about these things flee far away from me, and I am solely and entirely occupied Page – 13 with Thee and Thy service. Then, in that perfect peace and serenity, I unite my will to Thine, and in that integral silence I listen to Thy truth and hear its expression. It is by becoming conscious of Thy will and identifying ours with Thine that there is found the secret of true liberty and all-puissance, the secret of the regeneration of forces and the transfiguration of the being, To be constantly and integrally at one with Thee is to have the assurance that we shall overcome every obstacle and triumph over all difficulties, both within and without, O Lord, Lord, a boundless joy fills my heart songs of gladness surge through my head in marvellous waves, and in the full confidence of Thy certain triumph, I find a sovereign Peace and an invincible Power. Thou fillest my being, Thou animatest it, Thou settest in motion its hidden springs, Thou illuminest its understanding. Thou intensifiest its life. Thou increasest tenfold its love; and I in longer know whether the universe is I or I the universe, whether Thou art in me or I in Thee Thou alone art and all is Thou; and the streams Sing, O lands, sing, O peoples, sing, O men, The Divine Harmony Is there. Page – 14
EVEN he who might have arrived at perfect contemplation in silence and solitude, could only have done so by extracting himself from his body, by making an abstraction of himself; and thus the substance of which the body is constituted would remain as impure, as imperfect as before, since he would have abandoned it to itself; by a misguided mysticism, by the attraction of supraphysical splendours, by the egoistic desire of being united with Thee for his personal satisfaction, he would have turned his back upon the reason of his earthly existence, he would have refused cowardlike to accomplish his mission to redeem and purify Matter. To know that a part of our being is perfectly pure, to commune with that purity, to be identified with it, can be useful only if we subsequently utilise this knowledge for hastening the earthly transfiguration, for accomplishing Thy sublime work.
GRANT, O Lord that I may be like a fire that illumines and warms, like a fountain that takes away thirst, like a tree that shelters and protects… men are so unhappy, so ignorant, they need so much to be helped. Page – 15 My confidence in Thee, my inner certitude grow from day to day; and from day to day also I feel Thy love more living in my heart. Thy light at once brighter and more soft; and more and more I fail to make a distinction between Thy work and my life, between my personality and the whole earth. Lord, Lord, Thy splendour is infinite. Thy Truth is marvellous; and Thy all-powerful Love will save the world.
TO turn towards Thee, unite with Thee, live in Thee and for Thee, is supreme happiness, unmixed joy, immutable peace; it is to breathe infinity, to soar in eternity, no longer feel one’s limits, escape from time and space. Why do men flee from these boons as though they fear them? What a strange thing is ignorance, that source of all suffering! How miserable that obscurity which keeps men away from the very thing which would bring them happiness and subjects them to this painful school of ordinary existence fashioned entirely from struggle and suffering! Page – 16
THY voice is so modest, impartial, sublime in its patience and its mercy that it does not make itself heard with any authority, any potency of will; it is like a cool, soft and pure breeze; it is like a crystalline murmur that imparts a note of harmony to a discordant concert. Only for him who knows how to listen to that note, how to breathe that breeze, it contains such a treasure of beauty and such a perfume of pure serenity and noble grandeur, that all extravagant illusions vanish or are transformed into a joyful acceptance of the marvellous truth that has been glimpsed.
YET what patience is needed! How imperceptible the stages of progress!… Oh! how I call Thee from the very depths of my heart. True Light, Sublime Love, Divine Master who art the source of our light and of our living, our guide and our protector, the Soul of out soul and the Life of our life, the Reason of our being, the supreme Knowledge, the immutable Peace! Page – 17
O LORD, O inconceivable Splendour, may Thy — Beauty overflow the earth, may Thy Love be kindled in all hearts and the reign of Thy Peace be upon all. A chant grave and profound, smiling and subtle, rises from my heart, and I do not know whether this chant travels from me towards Thee or from Thee towards me or whether Thou, I and the whole universe are this marvellous chant of which I have now become conscious……There is certainly no more Thou, nor I, nor any separate and distinct universe: there is an immense harmony, sublime and infinite, which is everything and of which everything will become conscious, one day. It is the harmony of limitless Love, Love victor over all suffering and every obscurity. By this law of Love, Thy Law, I would live more and more totally; to it I give myself without reserve. . And my being exults in an ineffable Peace.
AS I cast a glance this morning on the month which is about to begin, asking myself what was the best means of serving Thee, I heard the small inner voice like a murmur in the silence, and it said Page – 18 this to me: "See, how small is the importance of external circumstances. Why strain and stiffen in the effort to realise thy conception of the Truth? Be more supple, more confident. The only thing thou hast to do is not to let thyself be troubled by anything. To torment oneself about doing good brings about as bad results as bad will. It is in the calm of deep waters that lies the sole possibility of True Service." And this reply was so luminous and so pure, it carried in it such an effective reality that the state described was communicated without any difficulty. I seemed to myself to be floating in the calm of deep waters; I understood; I saw clearly the attitude which was the best; and I have only to ask Thee, O Sublime Master, Supreme Instructor, to give me the strength and the clairvoyance necessary to maintain myself constantly in this state. "Child, trouble not thyself, silence, peace, peace."
O SWEET harmony dwelling in all things, sweet harmony filling my heart, manifest thyself in the most outward forms of life, in every feeling, in every thought, in every act. All appears to me beautiful, harmonious, silent, in spite of the din outside. And in this silence, it Page – 19 is Thou, O Lord, whom I see, and I so perceive Thee that I can only express this perception as that of a constant smile. In truth, the essence of the impression that is felt in the presence of the most sweet, the most calm, the most compassionate smile has a feeble analogy with what I feel when I so perceive Thee. May Thy Peace be with all.
August 15, 1913
IN this falling dusk. Thy Peace becomes more deep and intimate and Thy Voice more clearly perceived in the silence which fills my being. O Divine Master, for Thee is our life, our thought, our love, all our being. Take back possession of Thy own; for Thou art ourselves in our real being.
O LOVE, Divine Love, Thou fillest my being and overflowest to every side. I am Thyself and Thou art I, and I see Thee in every being, in every thing, from the slightest passing breeze to the radiant Sun that illumines us and is Thy symbol. Page – 20 O Thou whom I cannot understand, in the silence of the purest devotion I adore Thee.
O LORD, Master of our life, let us soar up high, very high, far above all care of the preservation of the body. Nothing can be more humiliating, nothing more depressing than these thoughts turned always towards the preservation of the body, this pre- occupation with health, with our subsistence, with the frame-work of our life. How trivial are these things, a thin smoke dissolved by a simple breath, vanishing like mirage before a single thought turned towards Thee. Liberate those who live in this slavery, even as those who live in slavery to their passions. These obstacles on the path that leads towards Thee are at once terrible and puerile; terrible to those who are still subjected to them, puerile to one who has passed beyond them. How inexpressible is the utter sense of relief, the delicious lightness we feel when we are disembarrassed of all this anxious care for ourself, for our life, for our health, for our satisfactions and even for our progress. This relief, this liberation Thou hast granted to me, O Divine Master, Life of my life. Light Page – 21 of my light. Thou who ever teachest me the lesson of love and hast made me know the reason of my existence. It is Thou who livest in me and Thou alone; and why should I be preoccupied with myself and what may happen to me? Without Thee the dust constituting this body which is striving to manifest Thee, would be dispersed shapeless and inconscient; without Thee this sensibility which opens to us a relation with all these other centres of manifestation, would vanish in an obscure inertia; without Thee this thought which animates and throws its light on the synthesis, would be diffuse, toneless, unrealised; without Thee the sublime love which vivifies, which coordinates which animates and gives a warmth to all, would remain an unawakened possibility. Without Thee all is inert, brute or inconscient. Thou art all that illumines and enchants us, our sole reason for existing and our whole aim. Is that not enough to cure us of all personal thoughts and to make us unfurl our wings and soar above the contingencies of the material life, so that we can fly up into Thy divine atmosphere with the power to return as messengers to the earth and announce the glorious tidings of Thy Advent which is near? O Divine Master, Sublime Friend, Marvellous Teacher, in a fecund silence, I salute Thee. Page – 22 October 7, 1913
THIS return, after three months of absence, to the house which is consecrated to Thee, O Lord has been an occasion for two experiences. The first is that in my outer being, my surface consciousness, I have no longer any feeling that I am in my own house or the owner of anything at all. I am a stranger in a foreign land, much more of a stranger here than in an open field among the trees; and I smile, now that I have learnt what I did not know before, I smile at the idea of the feeling of being the "mistress of the house" which I had before my departure; it was necessary that all pride should be broken, crushed, trampled down definitively, so that I may at last be capable of understanding, seeing and feeling things as they are. I offered Thee this dwelling, O Lord, as if it was possible for me to possess anything and so make of it an offering to Thee. All is Thine, O Lord, it is Thou who placest everything at our disposal; but how great is our blindness when we imagine that we can be the owners of anything! I am a visitor here as everywhere else. Thy messenger and Thy servant upon earth, a stranger among men, and yet the very soul of their life and the love in their hearts. In the second place, the whole atmosphere of the house is charged with a religious gravity; here one descends immediately into the depths; meditation is more gathered in and more serious; dispersion Page – 23 disappears and gives place to concentration; and I feel this concentration literally descending From my head to enter into my heart, and my heart seems to reach greater depths than my head. It is as if for three months I had been loving with my head and that now only I begin to love with my heart; and this brings with it an incomparable gravity and sweetness of feeling. A new door has opened in my being and an immensity has appeared before me! I cross the threshold with devotion, feeling hardly worthy yet to enter upon this hidden path veiled from the sight and, as though, invisibly luminous within. All is changed, all is new; the old garbs have dropped and the new-born child half-opens its eyes to the light of the dawn.
A FEW minutes passed in silence before Thee are worth centuries of felicity…… Grant, O Lord, that all shadows may be dispersed and that, more and more, I may become Thy faithful servant in constancy and in serenity; may my heart be before Thee pure like a pure crystal, so that all of it may reflect Thee. How sweet it is to be before Thee in silence. Page – 24
THE greatest enemy of a silent contemplation turned towards Thee is certainly this constant subconscient registering of the multitude of phenomena with which we are put into contact. So long as we are occupied with cerebral activity, our conscious thought veils for us this excessive activity of our subconscient reception of things; quite a portion of our sensibility, and not perhaps the smallest, plays the role of a cinematographic apparatus without our knowledge and indeed to our detriment. It is only when we silence our active thought, which is comparatively easy to do, that we find surging from all sides the multitude of little subconscient notations which often drown us in their overflowing stream. This is why it happens, as soon as we try to enter into the silence of deep contemplation, that we are assailed by innumerable thoughts—if thoughts they can be called—which do not in the least interest us, do not represent for us any action of desire, any conscious attachment, but which only prove to us our inability to control the receptivity, we might say, mechanical, of our subconscient. A considerable labour is needed to silence all these useless noises, to stop this tiresome succession of images, to purify our minds from these thousand little cumbersome and valueless nullities. And it means so much time unprofitably lost, a terrible waste. Page – 25 What is the remedy? In their simplistic way, some ascetic disciplines preconize solitude and inaction: to shelter the subconscient from all possibility of any registration; this appears to me a child’s remedy, for it leaves the ascetic at the mercy of the first surprise, and when he thinks he is perfectly master of himself, if one day, he wishes to come back among his fellows to help them, his subconscient so long deprived of its receptive activity, is sure to abandon itself to it with an intensity greater than ever as soon as it gets the smallest opportunity. There is certainly another remedy. Which? Undoubtedly we must learn how to control our subconscient as we control our conscious thought. The means for arriving at that are numerous. A regular introspection in the manner of the Buddhists and a systematic analysis of one’s dreams—almost always constructed with this subconscient registration— form part of the method to be discovered. But there is certainly something more rapidly effective…… O Lord, Eternal Master, it is Thou who wilt be the Teacher, the Inspirer; Thou who wilt teach me what I should do; so that I can, after an indispensable application to my own case, make others profit by what Thou wilt have taught me. With a loving and confident devotion, I salute Thee. Page – 26
IN that calm of collected contemplation which precedes the break of day, more than at any other moment, my thought rises towards Thee, O Lord of our being, in an ardent prayer. May this day which is about to begin bring to earth and to men a little more of pure light and true peace; may Thy manifestation be more complete and Thy sweet law better recognised; may something higher, nobler, truer be revealed to mankind; may there spread a vaster and deeper love so that the wounds and the pain may be healed; and may this first ray of the sun which is about to dawn be an announcer of joy and harmony, the symbol of the glorious splendour hidden in the essence of life. O Divine Master, grant that this day may be for us an opening to a completer consecration to Thy law, a more integral self-giving to Thy work, a more total forgetfulness of self, a greater illumination, a purer love; grant that in a communion with Thee ever deeper and more constant, we may unite always more, so that we may be Thy worthy servitors. Remove from us all egoism and mean pride, all covetousness and obscurity, so that all aflame with Thy divine love, we may be Thy torches in the world. A silent canticle rises from my heart like the white smoke of the perfumes of the East. Page – 27 And with the serenity of a perfect surrender, I salute Thee in the light of this rising day.
WHY all this noise, all this movement, this vain and hollow agitation; why this whirlwind sweeping men away like a swarm of flies caught in a storm? How sad is the spectacle of all this energy wasted, all these efforts lost. When will they cease from dancing like puppets at the end of threads held they know not by whom or by what? When will they take the time to sit and draw inwards, to collect themselves and open that inner door which hides from them Thy priceless treasures. Thy infinite boons? … How painful and miserable seems to me their life of ignorance and obscurity, their life of foolish agitation and profitless dissipation, when a single spark of Thy sublime light, a single drop of Thy divine love can transform this suffering into an ocean of joy! O Lord, my prayer rises towards Thee: may they know at last Thy peace and that calm and irresistible power which springs from an immutable serenity appanage of those whose eyes have been opened and who can contemplate Thee in the enkindled core of their being. But the hour of Thy manifestation has come. Page – 28 And canticles of joy will soon break out from every wide. I bow down religiously before the solemnity of that hour.
ENLIGHTEN me, O Lord, grant that I may not be mistaken. Grant that the infinite respect the utmost devotion, the love so intense and profound with which I approach Thee may be irradiating, convincing, contagious, and that they may be awakened in the hearts of all. O Lord, Eternal Master, Thou art my Light and. my Peace; guide my steps, open my eyes, enlighten my heart, and direct me on the paths which lead straight towards Thee. O Lord, Lord, grant that I may have no other will than Thine and that all my acts be an expression of Thy diine law. A great light bathes me all over, and I am no longer conscious of anything else than Thee… Peace, peace, peace on all the earth.
LOVE pure and disinterested. Thy love in so far as we can perceive and manifest it, is the only key Page – 29 that can open the hearts seeking for Thee. Those who follow the path of the intellect can have a conception very high and very true, they can conceive the true life the life One with Thee, but they do not know it; they have no inner experience of that life and they are unaware of any contact with Thee. These, who have an intellectual knowledge and who have shut themselves up for action in a construction which appears to them the best, are the most difficult of all to convert; one finds it harder to awaken in them the consciousness of the Divine than in any other being of good-will. It is love alone that can accomplish this miracle, for love opens all doors, pierces through all walls, crosses beyond all obstacles. And a little of true love does more than the finest speeches. O Lord, let this pure flower of love blossom in me, so that it may make fragrant all who approach us and its perfume sanctify them. In this love are found peace and joy, the source of all strength and realisation. It is the infallible physician, the supreme consoler; it is the conqueror, the sovereign teacher, O Lord, my sweet Master, whom I adore m silence and to whom I am wholly consecrated, who governest my life, inflame my heart with Thy pure love, so that it may bum like a fiery brazier, consuming all imperfections and transforming into a comforting warmth and radiating light the dead wood of egoism and the black coal of ignorance. Lord, I turn towards Thee with a devotion Page – 30 at once joyful and grave and I implore Thee: May Thy love be manifested, May Thy reign come, May Thy peace govern the world.
O LORD, grant that this collective convention of the end of the year may be for us an opportunity for finishing at once with the whole mass of ties and attachments, illusions and weaknesses that have no longer any reason for existence in our life. We must at each moment shake off the past like falling dust so that it may not soil the virgin path which, also at each moment, opens before us. May our errors, recognised and repaired within us, be no longer anything else than vain mirages incapable of producing any consequences, and may we setting our foot firmly on all that should no more be on all ignorances, all obscurities, all egoisms, boldly take our flight towards larger horizons and an intenser light, a more perfect compassion, a more disinterested love ….towards Thee. I salute Thee, O Lord, Master of all life and I would proclaim Thy reign upon earth. Page – 31 |