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Fit and Unfit (A Letter) You have written that you
are only an ordinary man, not out of the ordinary like me. You do not dare to
be above the average, for you believe that you are wanting in capacity and
power that make a man extraordinary. And therefore you have to go through life
as others. However, I ask you one thing, who has told you that you are a mere
nobody? How are you so positive about the limits of your power without
exercising it in the field of work? Have you understood yourself entirely? No,
you will say, and you will add that your shortcomings and aberrations are the
proof. How can one be great with such imperfections? In order to be great, one
has to aspire and that aspiration you lack. But I see at the very outset, that
you have formed a wrong conception about yourself. May it not be that under
cover of your despair there lies hidden the fire of your aspiration? But you
have found no chance to give it a practical form. It is there lying repressed.
You are only cherishing a feeling of self-depreciation. Well, have you probed
it? You are wide awake to your shortcomings. Have you ever tried to see your
good qualities? Before you jump to a conclusion about your own capacities, do
not look only at your faults, but also at your good qualities. And in truth, I
see in you a number of good qualities. Faults you have, but have you no
virtues? You will ask, to what extent? Well, look at both the extremes of your
merits and demerits, and form no estimate of yourself in advance. Man is an
amalgam of
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and bad. As there is in him an adhara for
good qualities, even so there is another for bad. You call me an extraordinary
man, but if you had seen me when I was of your age, you would have simply said,
"What a miserable fellow you are! You have gone to dogs. There's no hope
for you." And if you go through history you will find that no great
personality was born with an unqualified greatness. All of them, as it is with
us, came into the world, burdened with hope and despair, desire and frustration.
To me the tall talk that you hear about the wonderful exploits of their
childhood and boyhood is no better than a cock-and-bull story. People fabricate
such stories to attract our attention to them after they have become great.
Before they rose to greatness these had passed unnoticed. Be sure, you too will
hear many such stories about your early life the moment you grow into a great
personality. You may, however, say that all and sundry cannot become great. It
is only a few that are actually great and it is God's Grace or the results of
their actions in their previous lives that have made them so. There's no
building on the sand. But who says that there is no power dormant in you? Or
that you have no virtues acquired in your past lives? Or that you have no Grace
of God? Who says that you .are only sand? So I tell you, first try to know yourself.
And before trying to do so bear in mind the words of Man
is a bottomless mine of gems. Above, there, are many layers of sand, stone,
clay and Goal intermixed. The deeper you dive, the more you glimpse the real
gems. The deeper
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you go, you will find less and still less of mixture – there's only the gem.
You have lost heart at the sight of sand, stone and coal that are on the
surface. Man, as man, is such a mine. I don't say that diamonds are found in
every mine. But be sure, something useful and valuable can be found in it. To
an individual this precious thing is his individuality, I mean, his speciality.
You will be a great personage, but that does not mean that you will grow into a
Napoleon or a Buddha. And even if you could, I think, you must not try to be
so. For to be a mere Napoleon or a mere Buddha is not the
ideal of the world. Everybody must be his own self. Your whole greatness
lies in what you should be. You
have to recognise that you are a mass of energy. Indeed, you have potentiality,
whatever be your failure to manifest it fully and
integrally. To be conscious of this power, to make it dynamic, to awaken this
potentiality is to manifest your own individuality, your own uniqueness. Only
you are not to measure this power, this potentiality by something else. Do you
know the limit of the power that resides within you? In other words, this
hidden power, this speciality of yours is the divine quality, is God himself.
And surrender to the Divine means to let the hidden power act according to its
will within you to make you calm and quiet and free your inner being from all
limitations. One
more word and I stop for the moment. Just observe that our society lays great
stress on modesty. If the word modesty means only to belittle oneself, to make
nothing of oneself, one need not be modest at all. But
what is the true meaning of modesty? It is simply to keep off pride and vanity.
But pride, i.e., to boast, to give oneself airs, to look upon oneself as a big
gun – all these we generally call vanity. Besides these, pride has other forms.
There is a rajasic way of displaying one's pride. Truly; to think oneself poor, sinful, miserable, inferior to all, is also a
sign of pride. All this is called tamasic pride. The word pride actually means
I am aloof and unique, other than all you people.
Page – 302 Man
is a bundle of virtues and vices. The root of pride either rajasic or tamasic
must be pulled out, for it does not allow us to see or manifest the Truth.
Besides, there is another kind of-pride, called sattwic pride (illumined
pride). We must rise above all the three modes of
pride. We do not want any kind of pride. What we want is self-surrender. Behind
your modesty there lies the pride of your ignorance and self-debasement. The
rajasic pride is better than this tamasic one. For tamas makes you absolutely inactive, and owing to the influence of rajas you become
full of life, full of dynamism and self-confidence. What is wanted is that you
should purify this self-confidence. I hope, you will gradually be aware of all
the forms of pride and you will be able steadily to remove them so that your
whole being may be filled with the glory of your own true Self
that resides deep within you.
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