“The Mother” by Sri Aurobindo,
Continuation of Chapter VI on the Divine Shakti
Inspiring Quotes – The Divine Shakti – Conclusion.pdf
… Then can human nature change into dynamic divine nature because all the elemental lines of the supramental Truth-consciousness and Truth-force are strung together and the harp of life is fitted for the rhythms of the Eternal.
If you desire this transformation, put yourself in the hands of the Mother and her Powers without cavil or resistance and let her do unhindered her work within you. Three things you must have, consciousness, plasticity, unreserved surrender. For you must be conscious in your mind and soul and heart and life and the very souls of your body, aware of the Mother and her Powers and their working ; for although she can and does work in you even in your obscurity and your unconscious parts and moments, it is not the same thing as when you are in an awakened and living communion with her.
All your nature must be plastic to her touch, – not questioning as theself-sufficient ignorant mind questions and doubts and disputes and is the enemy of its enlightenment and change ; not insisting on its own movements as the vital in man insists and persistently opposes its refractory desires and ill-will to every divine influence ; not obstructing and entrenched in incapacity, inertia and tamas as man’s physical consciousness obstructs and clinging to its pleasure in smallness and darkness cries out against each touch that disturbs its soulless routine or its dull sloth or its torpid slumber.
The unreserved surrender of your inner and outer being will bring this plasticity into all the marts of your nature ; consciousness will awaken everywhere in you by constant openness to the Wisdom and Light, the Force, the Harmony and Beauty, the Perfection that come flowing down from above.
Even the body will awake and unite at last its consciousness subliminal no longer to the supramental superconscious Force, feel all her powers permeating from above and below and around it and thrill to a supreme Love and Ananda.
But be on your guard and do not try to understand and judge the Divine Mother by your little earthly mind that loves to subject even the things that are beyond it toits own norms and standards, its narrow reasonings and erring impressions, its bottomless aggressive ignorance and its petty self-confident knowledge.
The human mind that is shut in the prison of its half-lit obscurity cannot follow the manysided freedom of the steps of the Divine Shakti. The rapidity and complexity of her vision and action outrun its stumbling incomprehension; the measures of her movement are not its measures. Bewildered by the swift alteration of her many different personalities, her making of rhythms and her breaking of rhythms, her accelerations of speed and her retardations, her varied ways of dealing with the problem of one and another, her taking up and dropping now of this line and now of that one and her gathering of them together, it will not recognise the way of the Supreme Power when it is circling and sweeping upwards through the maze of the Ignorance to a supernal Light.
Open rather your soul to her and be content to feel her with the psychic nature and see her with the psychic vision that alone make a straight response to the Truth. Then the Mother herself will enlighten by their psychic elements your mind and heart and life and physical consciousness and reveal to them too her ways and her nature.
Avoid also the error of the ignorant mind’s demand on the Divine Power to act always according to our crude surface notions of omniscience and omnipotence. For the mind clamors to be impressed at every turn by miraculous power and easy success and dazzling splendour ; otherwise it cannot believe that here is the Divine.
The Mother is dealing with the Ignorance in the fields of the Ignorance ; she has descended there and is not all above. Partly she veils and partly she unveils her knowledge and her power, often holds them back from her instruments and personalities and follows that she may transform them the way of the seeking mind, the way of the aspiring psychic, the way of the battling vital, the way of the imprisoned and suffering physical nature.
There are conditions that have to been laid down by a Supreme Will, there are many tangled knots that have to be loosened and cannot be cut abruptly asunder. The Asura and rakshasa hold the evolving earth nature and have to be met and conquered on their own terms in their own long-conquered fief and province ; the human in us has to be led and prepared to transcend its limits and is too weak and obscure to be lifted suddenly to a form far beyond it. The Divine Consciousness and Force are there and do at each moment the thing that is needed in the conditions of the labour, take always the step that is decreed and shape in the midst of imperfection the perfection that is to come. But only when the supermind has descended in you can she deal directly as the Supramental Shakti with supramental natures.
If you follow your mind, it will not recognise the Mother even when she is manifest before you. Follow your soul and not your mind, your soul that answers to the Truth, not your mind that leaps at appearances ; trust the Divine Power and she will free the godlike elemnts in you and shape all into an expression of Divine Nature.
The Supramental change is a thing decreed and inevitable in the evolution of the earthconsciousness ; for its upward ascent is not ended and mind is not its last summit. But that the change may arrive, take form and endure, there is needed the call from below with a will to recognise and not deny the Light when it comes, and there is needed the sanction of the Supreme from above. The power that mediates between the snction and the call is the presence and power of the Divine Mother.
The Mother’s power and not any human endeavour and tapasya can alone rend the lid and tear the covering and shape the vessel and bring down into this world of obscurity and falsehood and death and suffering Truth and Light and Life divine and the immortal’s Ananda.
(End of Chapter VI and conclusion of the book “The Mother”)
The White Lotus is the symbol of the Divine Mother
