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HOW TO FEEL THAT WE BELONG TO THE DIVINE How to feel that we belong to the Divine and that the Divine is acting in us? Not with the head, although one can always begin by it; for the light touches the head first. One must feel with one's sensation, that is, sense it in a flaming aspiration that seeks to realise. For example, as it may happen sometimes to an athlete: supposing you are trying to lift a heavy weight and are intensely concentrated upon it. Suddenly you feel without your knowing it how, that another Force is lifting it up, something has taken hold of your hands and is making them do the impossible. The body seems to be inexistent at that moment. Many writers too have the same experience. Something in them which is not their own self thinks, sees much more clearly, is infinitely more conscious, and organises the thoughts and the words. It is not the writer that writes but this something else. At such times the small person which struggles and attempts is no longer there. Indeed, for the experience to be complete and not to disturb it, the physical person must keep quiet as much as possible. To have such an experience, you must first have the will for it; you must will and aspire, try to be less and less an egoist, to have less and less the feeling of being a particular Page-115 person. You must have then within you this flame, this ardent yearning, this need of union. It is a kind of luminous enthusiasm that possesses you, an irresistible necessity of your being to dissolve in the divine and not to be separately. True, it is a state that does not last long—in the beginning—you have the contrary experience immediately after. But if you continue, persist in your will and aspiration, the other state will come again. The two alternate for a time till the complete fusion is achieved. Finally there is no longer the distinction of your personal being and the Divine Being, the two are one. There is no more the state of yearning towards, an ecstatic sense of submission in which the two are still separate. The state of fusion and mingling, of complete identity is extremely simple and supremely spontaneous. I heard once from an Indian Sufi at Paris of this state of consciousness. They too knew of it. Is that then the final stage, no more progress after that? There is no end to progress. For, this perfect union can happen before the transformation of the body. The union is a thing of the consciousness. There is a great difference between even physical consciousness and physical matter. The most advanced mystic may get to the realisation in the physical consciousness, but that does not include physical matter. The transformation of the material body has not been done nor even attempted perhaps in the past. It can be done only if life is sufficiently prolonged; Page-116 you do not leave the body unless you will it so and thus have the necessary time at your disposal to bring about the change, Sri Aurobindo once said—and he said it without the least hesitation—that it will take about three hundred years to do it, I can add, from the time when the last stage of union with the Divine I have described is achieved. Three hundred years is the minimum, I should say. You must realise what it means to transform the body. The body with all its organs and functionings works automatically without the intervention of your consciousness, and is built upon an animal plan. If your heart stops for the hundredth part of a second, your body goes off. You cannot do without a single of your organs and you must keep watch over their proper functioning. Transformation means the replacement of this purely material arrangement by a systematic concentration of forces. You must bring about an arrangement of forces, according to a certain kind of vibrations, replacing each organ by a centre of self-conscious energy which governs through the concentration of a higher force. There will no longer be a stomach, no more a heart even. These things will give place to a system of vibrations which respresent what they really are. The material organs are symbols of energy centres; they are not the essential reality, they only give a form or figure to it under certain circumstances. The transformed body will function through its real energy centres, not through their representatives as developed in an animal body. For that you must first of all be Page-117 conscious of these centres and their functionings; instead of an unconscious automatic movement there has to be a movement of conscious control. Thus one will have at his disposal not physical animal organs but the symbolic vibrations, the symbolic energies. This does not mean that there will not be any definite recognizable form. The form will be built up with qualities rather than with solid (dust) particles. It will be so to say a practical or pragmatic form: it will be supple and mobile, unlike the fixed grossly material shape. As the expression of your face changes with your feeling, impulsion, even so the body will change according to the need of the inner movement: have you never had this kind of experience in your dream? You rise up in the air and you give as it were a push with your elbow in one direction and your body extends that way; you give a kick with your foot and you land somewhere else: you can be transparent at will and go easily through a solid wall! The transformed body will behave somewhat in the same way, it will be light, lurninous, elastic. Lightness, luminosity, elasticity will be the very fundamental qualities of the body. To prepare such a body 300 years is nothing; even a thousand years will not be too much. Naturally, I am speaking of the same body. If you change your body in between, it will no longer be the same body. At 50 the body already begins to wear out. But, on the contrary, if you have a body that goes on perfecting itself, if each passing year represents a step in progress, then you can continue indefinitely: for after all, you are immortal. Page-118 There is another difficulty one has to face in the work of transformation. A particular body cannot change unless there is some sort of a corresponding change in the surrounding bodies and in the surroundings generally also; for one lives and moves through mutual interchange in the midst of others. A collective change takes more time than individual change. So it is no longer an individual consciousness, but the collective consciousness that has to do the work. The world progresses. And being in the world you too must progress. It is a progress, however, which the Divine effects in you without your knowledge or collaboration. The progress is therefore very slow; Nature does not calculate the time she takes for her work, she has eternity before her and she is not in a hurry. Centuries and millenniums are mere instants in her march forward. One day she will arrive at the goal she has fixed for her, even at the complete transformation of the body and the advent of the superman. But the work will be hastened if there is conscious collaboration from man. Most people, by far the largest majority indeed, are not conscious of the action of the Divine in them. To be conscious means to be attentive to what is being done, to be receptive and to be passive to its influence. The more you give yourself and the more sincere you are, the swifter and the more assured is your realisation. You can do in a few moments what would otherwise take years. That is the aim of Yoga. Page-119 |