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The Force of Body-Consciousness THERE is a
state of consciousness in which you perceive that the effect of things,
circumstances, movements, all the activities of life upon yourself depends
almost exclusively upon your attitude towards them. You become then conscious,
conscious to the extent of realising
that things in themselves are neither good nor bad, they are so only in
relation to ourselves: their effect, I say, depends entirely upon the way in
which we regard these things. If we take, for example, a circumstance as a gift
from God, as a divine Grace, as an outcome of the total harmony, it will help
us to become more conscious and truer and stronger. The same identical
circumstance, if we take it differently, as a blow of Fate, as a bad force
wishing us harm, becomes, on the contrary, a damper on our consciousness, it
saps our strength, brings obscurity, creates disharmony. And yet in either case
it is altogether the same circumstance. I would like you to have the experience
and make the experiment. For your ideal is to be master of yourselves. But not that only. You should not only be master of your own
selves, but master of the circumstances of your life, the circumstances, at
least, that immediately surround you and concern you. You must note further
that it is an experience that is not confined to the mind alone: it need not
happen in your head only, it may and indeed must
continue into the body. Certainly, this is a realisation needing great labour,
much concentration and self-mastery: you have to force the consciousness into
the body, into dense Matter. It is the attitude of the body that will in the
end determine everything: shocks and contacts of the outside world will change
its nature according to the way in which they are received by the body. And if
you attain perfection in that line, you can become even master of accidents.
Such a
Page – 390 thing is possible, not only possible, but it is bound to
happen, for it is a forward step in man's progress. First of all, you have to
realise the power in your mind to the extent that it can act upon circumstances
and change their effect upon you. Then the power can descend into Matter, into
the substance, the cells of your body and endow the body with this capacity of
control over things outside and around you. There
is nothing impossible in the world. We ourselves put the bar: always we say,
this is possible, that is impossible, one can do this, one
cannot do that. Sometimes we admit a thing to be possible but ask who would do
it, so it is impossible and so on. Like slaves, like prisoners we bind
ourselves to our limits. You call it common sense, but it is a stupid, narrow
and ignorant sense; it does not truly know the laws of life. The laws of life
are not what we think them to be, what our mind or intellect conceives them to
be; they are quite otherwise.
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