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Personal Effort and Will IN personal
effort there is a feeling of effort, of tension: the effort is felt as personal
i.e. you rely upon yourself and you have the impression that if you do not do
at each step what is to be done all will be lost. Will is different. It is the
capacity to concentrate upon what one does so that it may be done well and to
continue to do so till the thing is done. Supposing
under given circumstances a work has come upon you. Take an artist, for
example, a painter. He has an inspiration and has decided to do a painting. He
knows very well that if he has not the inspiration he will not be able to do
anything good, the painting would be nothing more than a daub. If he were
simply passive, with neither effort nor will, he would tell the Divine: Here I
leave the palette, the brush and the canvas, you will do the painting now. But
the Divine does not act in that way. The painter himself must arrange
everything, concentrate upon his subject, put all his
will upon a perfect execution. On the other hand, if he has not the
inspiration, he may take all the trouble and yet the result be
nothing more than a work like other thousands of examples. You must feel what
your painting is to express and know or find out how to express it. A great
painter often gets a very exact vision of the painting he is to do. He has the
vision and he sets himself to work out the vision. He labours day by day, with a will and
consciousness, to reproduce as exactly as possible what he sees clearly with
his inner sight. He works for the Divine; his surrender is active and dynamic.
For the poet too it is the same thing. Anyone who wants to do something for the
Divine, it is the same.
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