Works of Sri Aurobindo

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-056_June 5_1971.htm

June 5, 1971

All circumstances have been furiously teaching the body to … call all the time, all the time — to call the Divine. And so now it’s got into the habit of repeating its mantra, and it repeats it ALL THE TIME. It’s a curious thing: if it repeats it, everything runs smoothly; if it doesn’t, it can’t even swallow food — everything seems on the verge of falling apart; so it repeats its mantra, and everything goes quite well. When it thinks of nothing but the Divine, everything is fine. This morning, while I was having breakfast, that’s how it was. It was so plain! If the body thinks about eating, everything goes wrong; if it repeats its mantra, it can absorb the food, it doesn’t even notice it, everything becomes so easy. Very interesting…. The same goes for people: when

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 they’re here, if I think about them, if I think there are difficulties, then … (grating gesture), but if I am like this (peaceful gesture, immovable in the Lord), everything goes well, quite naturally.

It’s a lesson, but a relentless one.

(silence)

And it has some old remnants of atavism. There’s (Mother laughs) a sort of fear — an altogether childish fear: “If I think of the Divine, there are going to be difficulties to be overcome”; that’s how it is in the cells (not everywhere, there’s very little of it, like some old remnants of something dragging over from previous lives), so then I laugh. The body asks but one thing, to melt into the Divine, to be nothing but That, to cease to exist separately — then all is well. It’s very interesting. It’s really the sadhana of the body, and in quite a compelling way — absolutely compelling. And when it leaves That, it feels it’s going to disintegrate the very next minute — that it is the only thing that keeps it together; without That, it doesn’t exist anymore.

That became quite concrete today.

(silence)

Humanity has a dread (it must have been necessary at one time, some thousands of years ago, I don’t know), a dread of the Divine. The human animal. For him, it is equivalent to disappearing. And in effect it is the disappearance of the ego. And the disappearance of that [physical] ego … for a long time one has had the impression that if the ego disappears, the being disappears, the form disappears — but that’s not true! It isn’t true. In any case, it has become ready [Mother's body] to live without an ego…. The trouble is that life’s ordinary laws no longer hold. Which means all the old habit, plus the new thing to be learned.

It’s as if the cells — not the body’s cells: the organization that makes up the form (that holds everything together and makes up a form, a form we call human), it’s as if that had to learn it can go on living without the sense of separate individuality. Curious. Without the sense of ego. While for thousands of years it’s been accustomed to existing separately only because of the ego — without ego it goes on … according to another law the body doesn’t yet know, and which … it finds incomprehensible. It

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 has nothing to do with a will, it’s not … I don’t know … a something … a way of being. But then, billions of ways of being.

It has to learn to be a certain way of being.

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