April 1, 2023
Alina (0:00:27):
Namaste. Today is 1st of April and we invite you all to watch our live webcast, Evenings with Sraddhalu. Namaste Sraddhalu.
Sraddhalu (0:00:38):
Namaste. Happy to be with all of you.
Alina (0:00:40):
We are happy to continue our series and today we will take up some questions that derived from our previous talks on individuality. As usual you may send your questions in the chat box or you may send an email beforehand at our email id integralstudies.in[at]gmail.com. I will first read one question we received from Niyati: “If both husband and wife are working in company, then officework and housework is so much that it is difficult to spend time with child. Child is left alone to watch TV or iPad. But we all studied hard during high school to have a career, so it does not seem right to leave the job. How to handle this scenario?” I think a lot of parents are asking this question.
Sraddhalu (0:01:47):
Yes, it is a characteristic of the modern age that the family unit and the division of responsibility which we will say was ‘natural’ or ‘traditional’ has been destabilised. In a way it is good, but it comes with its problems. The good part is that there has been given at least, generally speaking in humanity, an equal opportunity, both for men and women to either develop the same skills and capacities, or having the same experiences, or even take up similar lines of work according to their interest and nature. Of course the goal is not that women should become like men or men should become like women. The idea is for each one to follow according to their need and their requirement for the evolution. Where earlier there were limitations largely from practical reasons, economic reasons, and then eventually social reasons, and then habits of society, which prevented often women from having access to certain kinds of education or work opportunities. Those have been broken. That's a good thing.
On the other side is this problem that if both parents are working, how, who will be there for the child? In the family unit as it used to be, there would be the grandparents naturally, which is already a great help. As things are today, largely even the grandparents are not there. We have what they call ‘nuclear families’, just the two parents and children. And so the parents hope that the school teachers will take care of their children and give them the values and the culture required. And the teachers are too busy with their curriculum which has nothing to do with values and culture, and it's all about largely rote learning or learning procedures and fitting into the programming that the educational system demands. And they hope that the good qualities and cultures will take place at home, looked after by parents.
In practice, we have only the television in between as Niyoti describes, or today the Internet generally through various devices, which becomes the only source of, I don't want to use the word ‘nourishment’ because mostly it is, it gives indigestion, but still it’s a kind of a imbibing and absorption of content, values, ‘consumption’ would be a more appropriate word, you consume whatever streams through as the programming, and the word ‘programming’ is of course it programmes you and binds you into those values. I find in the very nature of the question that the questioner knows the answer.
Because when she says, ‘How do you find this balance between these two things?’, there is the studying-hard during childhood to have a career and so it doesn't seem right to leave the job, on the other hand is the choice to have a child and so it doesn't feel right to leave the child. So job and child. Which comes first? Or, which is more important? And obviously in the very fact of asking the question is the guilt that somehow ‘We are neglecting the child’. Had she chosen the child first and abandoned job for the child, maybe for a while you would miss the job but you can always get back to it later. You would not feel the same guilt interestingly, because somewhere inside there is a recognition that something very important has been neglected.
And I would go so far as to say for parents who feel this conflict, consider the first six years of the child to be the single most important for the basic foundations of the turn of nature and the deepest set of values. If these six years you can dedicate yourself, the rest, as the child grows older, the individuality and separation of individuality having sufficiently happened, school can take you through all kinds of not always healthy experiences, but the child will know to manage them, and whatever little time you are able to provide at home would be enough to help navigate and compensate for the distortions coming from school.
(0:06:31):
So I would still say for all parents if you can: One of the parents at least should be available for the child 24 hours ideally, meaning, one of them if one goes to work the other is here, they switch turns, no problem, but one of them should be available always, especially in the first few years. And if you can commit to that, you will find the satisfaction you gain from this will be far greater than the job satisfaction combined with the guilt of having not been there for the child. And equally you can go back to the job, I don't know practically how it works because sometimes you may say five years is a long time, six years is a long time to be out of the industry. But there are ways.
The point is, there are ways to get around that. And there are today especially the possibilities of part-time work, online work, and so on, which allows for a mother to be at home with child and still manage part of the work. So between the two, the maximum time spent often is better with mother than with father for the simple reason that the bond is stronger on an emotional level because that's the age when the emotional development is most in, in front. Later stage you could switch turn, you could switch roles even. And when the intellectual phase comes in much more, the father could take the place and the mother could be even full-time work, and one would still not have too much of a problem. But in the early stage particularly, it is of great help when the mother is present throughout and that could make a critical difference in the child's growth and also in the development of individuality and self-confidence.
As a variation to this, if you can get the child into a school space, uh, I am, I would avoid the word ‘school’ because you are not yet in a formal education there, but even in what they call the ‘preschool stages’, where the environment allows a similar affection as would come from parents and particularly the mother and there is not too much of the blurring out of children individuality. So a Montessori environment would be very highly recommended if you can manage that. But otherwise I have seen preschool spaces where they just cluster all the children into one room and then somehow try to make them do something, but they are too young to do things on command. So it does not work. They get them to sleep if possible. They give them things to make them go to sleep so that you don't have to manage them. And all these can be very harmful for development.
So I think this is good enough to give you as a suggestion of what, how it could be done practically, but always there will be a choice. If there is a compromise you feel, then you have to find your balance, find a way that you do not feel uncomfortable. Remember the reference I gave earlier that if you are unhappy about something, then you can be sure the child is unhappy and something is wrong. And the deeper the poise of unhappiness, the more clearly you know that what you are doing is not quite right. How to make it right?
It's not always simple. But start doing the things at least which would make you the least happy, least unhappy, most happy, and the child, especially that initial stage of the first six years, bonding, would be extremely valuable. If you do have the benefit of a Montessori environment, even that would be for a few hours in a day, it cannot be the bulk of the day, and then the child would come home, you could still do a part-time job during that time and then interact much more with the child and find the balance. I think that is the best suggestion I could give.
We could go to the next question.
Alina (0:10:30):
Valbahi is writing: How to develop courage and leadership qualities in children and in adults? In one of your previous talks, you mentioned something about Mother left the last part of leadership quality in Ashram School. How to develop that? Another question is regarding the wideness, suppleness and clarity in energies of our personality. How to develop this? In one of your previous conversations, you gave an example of the Ashram girl having clarity and suppleness in regards to a competition or some hurdles, you mentioned it is regarding the physical training schedule given by the Mother. What is that schedule?
Sraddhalu (0:11:24):
It's a longish question. I will not be able to go too much into detail, but I think the general answer can be made simple enough. So developing courage and leadership qualities in children and in adults. The question is very general, covering a very broad age range.
So, very simply, by experiencing it. You cannot talk about courage, you cannot say, ‘be courageous, be courageous’ and expect courage to somehow wake up. It does not work. You have to go through experiences in which there is some kind of a demand, a challenge, which, well, challenges your courage but is not too hard, so that you are able to overcome by the experience of the courage, and then something more, and overcoming that, and something more, and overcoming that. That's the only way.
The same with leadership. You cannot develop leadership qualities by reading about it, or by thinking about it. It's by being in a space that demands leadership. Now some of us would have by temperament a turn of courage or leadership tendency already. Such people you don't need to do much, just provide them the opportunity and it will flower out because you just nourished it.
Others may need to develop it, awaken it, refine it. They will often learn by making mistakes, and again they are the only way is experiencing it. So since the question is very general, I will give a few, touch upon a few examples. As a child, for example, jumping across a little gap would demand some courage. Jumping from a height of 1 metre to the ground or into water would demand some courage. Perhaps even entering water might demand some courage. So you grade it experience-wise, familiarity-wise. You take the step in, you go into the water first, then invite the child, hold the hand, that way the child feels protected while still doing something which seems dangerous and overcome bit by bit. And in this way through hand-holding process of a graded experience, you can get them to enter and engage with things, where necessary provide prior explanation of what are the measures for protection and safety, and so on. That should be part of a normal package of a programme.
And as it comes to leadership again, by interacting in a group where your child is given a responsibility. If the child does not have a natural tendency, you may give them a prior training, explanation, what are the things you need to do as a leader, what are the responsibilities you take, how do you gauge, how do you make a decision, and there are various kinds of leadership.
So there is a leadership which the fellow, one person knows already what needs to be done and guides everybody. There is another kind of leadership where you consult everybody and then come to a conclusion by getting the best insights from the entire group, the entire team who may know more but you may still have to make the judgement. So, there are many scenarios, but depending on the person and the age and the kind of leadership you want to develop, thought leadership or vital leadership, physical leadership, you may create different kind of scenarios and again graded experience, and that is the only way it grows out.
Those who have it ready, it will flower out faster. Others may take smaller steps, need to make more mistakes. The others will watch them, learn from them, and then you can take turns in the leadership roles. So have little teams at various ages for different kind of tasks where they share the role of planning and organising, etc. And it's only by doing that you will grow like this. I would recommend at least in a classroom scenario, start with the children with whom, in whom you already see a potential. Spend more time with them initially to give them the opportunities so that that flowers out. Others watching them can then get inspired and then be given opportunities according to their capacity and readiness, creating small teams, assigning specific tasks for different groups, and so on.
(0:15:29):
And you rightly recall that I had mentioned the Mother had Dr. Kirit Joshi told me that the Mother had not completed that last part of the last few years, three years perhaps he felt, in which the natural instinct of the child is to assert his individuality and independence of capacity. So the term in Sanskrit in the yoga tradition is ‘Purushartha’, the capacity to execute and fulfil yourself, so to say. And so there is a stage where children are suddenly given a lot of freedom to develop their own programme, and then it's done suddenly, it's not integrated with the previous years. So at first they are a bit lost. Generally in the third year they realise, ‘Oh now I begin to get the hang of how it's to be done. But that's the third year, they finish their education.
So that part was not completed properly with Mother's guidance through to that stage, and this is Dr. Kirit Joshi who was the man in fact who was building these stages, so I would go by what he says. It's also my experience that, that part is a bit loose. How to develop it? Well, I just described the basic framework, into this one could fill many variations.
The second part of your question is regarding wideness, suppleness, clarity of energies. How to develop this?
Depending on age again, by exposure. You expose the child to demands of suppleness, something that demands clarity of thought, something which demands a wideness of perspective, and so on. Obviously many of these things you are describing would come at later stages, once the biological base and emotional base is largely filled, many of these would involve aspects of the mind.
But because we are biological beings as much as mental beings your mind is embedded in the body, the suppleness of one influences the other. So if the body is rigid, the suppleness of mind is constrained. And even though you may try to push the boundaries of the mind, there will always be something which tends to pull back, to limit, to create insecurity. So if early on, at the stage of the biology training, you make the body conscious and supple, at the stage of the emotional training, you make the emotions wide, large, embracing, inclusive, I mean ‘inclusive’ in a consciousness way, not in the racial way that the word is used for, but in a consciousness way this would include even identifying with plants, with animals, with human beings, with situations and learning from them. So if the emotions are widened, then by the time you come to the mind development, you already have a reasonably wide base, reasonably flexible base.
Now all this which I have just described regarding courage, leadership, wideness, suppleness, clarity, equally would apply to human beings at, at an adult level irrespective of your age. Start with what you can do now, today, for the courage, leadership, if you can create environments of, or experiences of that kind. Take responsibility for some work, some task, and especially if it involves working with a team where you have to lead or carry a team with you.
For courage, similarly, observe, there is something which you can call a ‘physical courage’ which may involve stepping into water, learning to swim, or various kinds of activities. There is an emotional courage of being able to face yourself, speak the truth. Intellectual courage, which involves also a kind of a psychological-facing yourself, expressing a truth, taking decisions of life which demand from you a risk. Finally, courage is not just about overcoming something physically, it's about taking decisions in life.
As earlier in the question of Niyoti, whether you could leave a job to dedicate yourself for a few years for the child and then hope that you might be able to get back a good job. It demands a courage. It's a risk you're taking. It's much safer to stay on with the job and say, ‘If I leave this, I might never get it, so I'm going to stay with this’. Or, you might do a courageous act and say, ‘All right, I trust that I will have the capacity, or that the help will be given and make a leap. So there are many ways in which the psychological courage could express itself. And as adults, we have this all the time. We have to take decisions which involve going out of the boundary of our comfort. You know that taking this decision means you will lose all the existing comfort systems or the little groove of habit that you have. But when you do that, that is when you will grow, you will experience real growth.
I may extend this discussion slightly off the framework of the question itself to say, we have discussed this that the brain actually grows new cells when you take up an activity that is new, any new learning. Actually the quantity of cells grows, quantity of interconnections grows, and with it your consciousness also widens, and with it your entire biology becomes younger. So acts of courage similarly would have that effect. Because they push the boundary, you grow, you widen, you become younger, you actually grow in strength on some level, and so on.
(0:21:03):
To the third part of your question which is about this physical training programme created by the Mother, this is the schedule which we have in the Ashram School, from the, every day in the evening, typically from about, let’s say, 4.30 to 7.00 for different age groups, it may be 4.30 to 5.30, or 5.00 to 6.00, or 5.00 to 7.00, and so on. During which time, in a full week, that means seven days, you will go through various activities such as gymnastics, athletics, swimming, combatives, boxing, wrestling, judo, football, volleyball, basketball, athletics, and within each of these such as gymnastics, you will have five or six different kinds of items, athletics you will have seven or eight different activities, in swimming multiple styles and ways of swimming. The spread of activities is so rich, so diverse.
You could say, almost like a perfect base to become an Olympic champion of any kind you might choose to be, except it's not specialising, it's broad. It was designed by the Mother primarily through Pranab-da, but some of the structuring was done by Udar-da, and the physical training framework largely was done by Pranab-da. And interestingly, while the morning school sessions are on the weekdays and on Sunday there is a holiday, the physical training programme is every single day, including Sunday.
No exceptions to that. And once a week, the Mother put the first of the month, today being that, for the school break for teachers to plan the content for the rest of the month. Nobody does it today, they just take it as a holiday. But it was meant for that. But again, on that day also you have the physical training programme. Physical training is every single day, no exception. Because she said, the body is a creature of habit, you have to have this routine fixed. And so through the year, with the rare exception of the one and a half months of holidays, which also the Mother did not want. It was a concession she made to parents. Every single day all the children do all these activities, in turn, through the week. That's the broad framework of the programme. So again, you can draw inspiration from it depending on your age and capacity and interest. Expose yourself to a rich diversity. Open all the different parts of your consciousness physically to different kinds of skills, activities, and experiences. That's the intention here.
We can go to the next question.
Alina (0:23:56):
Rohan is addressing: “I come from a Brahmin family and I have been under immense pressure to have my Upanayana thread ceremony. Having been a disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for the past five years, I'm curious to know that if I do get Upanaya, will it interfere with my Integral Yoga? I am 34 years old and I have managed to anger a lot of people in my family due to this delay. Please guide me.”
Sraddhalu (0:24:28):
Yes. The Upanayana ceremony is a formal ritual in which the child is initiated so to say into the spiritual life and a thread put which goes diagonally across from shoulder to waist on the other side and the thread has three threads inside it. The whole thing is very deeply symbolic, and as a ritual it is almost a standard for all Brahmin families, and all of this needs to be understood in the deeper symbolic and cultural context. In the framework of the ideal of the Brahmana is this thirst for knowledge. And for one who seeks a higher knowledge especially, the whole training is one of a renunciation of personal desires, building a base of equality, without which any access to higher knowledge is impossible.
So there were certain structures, social structures as well as ritual structures, to ease children into this kind of a psychological orientation. Now, if you take this as the principle behind, all of us at a certain age as we enter the journey of life as young students would go through a kind of an equivalent initiatory process. So, today the framework is a bit different because society is much more uniform and one could take the principle of it. Except that in the Upanayana ceremony, the, you are given a certain mantra, which then you are asked to repeat. Typically, it is the Gayatri mantra. You are asked to repeat it every day, and especially after your morning shower, when your mind is most clear, most fresh, that you repeat this as a form of prayer, along with it certain other practices which would help to clarify the mind, the pranayama or asanas and combinations like that.
But you see in all these, the rationale for it which one can easily generalise today. In this, typically, if one wanted to take it to an extreme, the person giving the mantra for initiation would be ideally somebody with a high knowledge or a spiritual consciousness, so that something of that consciousness comes into you in the act of initiation, and so on. So all of this is to give you the background of how it used to be. Today it's much more a ritual, the deeper sense is largely forgotten, people do it, ‘Because that's how we do it in our family’ or ‘in our lineage’ or ‘in our tradition’ or ‘culture’, and so the family is mostly upset because of that. If you ask them ‘What's the point of the Upanayana?’, they probably won't know. They'll just say, that's how it's done, otherwise you're not a good true Brahmin. Fine.
So the question now for you is this: Is this valuable? Do you need to concede to the family's demand or not? I will share my personal experience here when I was 12, because that was some remnant of the tradition still, and I don't know if we asked for it specifically, but my teacher M.P. Pandit, he said that he would give me the, he would teach me the Gayathri Mantra. So as a formal event on my 12th birthday, he taught me the Gayathri Mantra, taught me to repeat it three times and said, every day you will stand here after your shower and will repeat this.
And that's it. That was it. No thread required. The whole thing is symbolic. In this case, not needed. But the act of formally handing over a responsibility is, and this is the term used in the tradition, your second birth, Dvija. You are born a second time now into a higher, more conscious, ideally spiritual life, but at least a conscious life as a young adult. That's the point of the handover ritual itself. So these rituals can have a great impact if done rightly and with the right understanding and explanation also for what it represents. But if you withdraw it to its most essential level, you see what he did. He gave me that mantra, gave me a certain responsibility, explained to me the meaning. It is the invocation for the light to, the light of truth to fill the whole being. And that's the Sri Aurobindo's Gayathri which invokes it on the whole being, whereas the traditional Gayathri invokes it only in the mind. And that was it.
That was my, so to say, equivalent of the Upanayana initiation. The question for you, for Rohan, is this: What is the balance that for you feels right? If you feel compelled because of family and it will get a burden off, you could still go through that process. If you feel comfortable with the person who gives you the thread, go through the initiation ritual with that person that you feel comfortable with. Don't just hire somebody that is, whose vibes you don't feel pure or sacred enough. And then having got through the ritual, you don't need to wear the thread every day, you can discard it. Interestingly in the Ashram there were many who had come with the thread, they discarded, there was no point to it. Finally it's the psychological change, the spiritual change, which is more important. Champaklal interestingly held his thread, and much later afterwards he said, ‘Oh but Sri Aurobindo had hugged me when I was wearing the thread so I could never discard it’. That was a practical problem he had. And then he said, ‘But he has hugged the whole body, what do I do?’ Anyway, this is just as an aside.
The question really is for you to find your balance. If you feel it will simplify the psychological pressures, you could go through it as a formality and have nothing left from the imprint. If you feel an energetic imprint, avoid getting too deep into it. Once you're free of that, nobody bothers you again.
(0:30:29):
But, generally speaking, I would say, be very careful about any kind of initiation rituals done by anybody. However seemingly innocent they may be, behind initiatory rituals, especially when they are part of a larger system, for example, there is this pranic healing, I don’t know what to say, movement, or Reiki as a movement, which has a founder and then a being which presides over the whole movement. There is often a mechanism to link you with the being behind or the force of that, influence of that being. That's not healthy.
I've shared earlier similar discussion many, maybe more than a year ago or two years ago. My experience with a group from Japan, they had this, what they call ‘Jōrei’. They beam out light from the palm, and it's very effective, they do it to grow plants, and they will have one plot where the plants have been blessed with Jōrei and the other plot which is a control plot. The Jōrei plants are typically double the size and give much more benefits, fruits or whatever growth, just by this action of energy. No other things. Everything else is same. So you suddenly realise in agriculture how important the human contact with the plant is. And you see the mechanisation of agriculture, how much damage it has done.
But in the Jōrei experience, so the, we were a group, and they said, we will give you Jōrei. So I was sitting in the, with the group there. This was a young trainee. She was not even one of the experts. She comes, holds her hand and she does the thing. And I think she did a repetition of some mantra which was, would be their lineage. And then at some point, the hand gets tired, so they switch hands.
What happened was, she held the hand, and normally you would put the second hand behind and release the first hand, so that the continuity is there. She being a trainee was totally unconscious, her hand dropped, there was nothing there for a while before the next hand came up. And that's the moment when I sensed the streaming of energy which was very distinct, it seemed to be coming from the hand, when her hand dropped, it was not coming from the hand, but it was in the same location from behind her. And behind her was the sanctum sanctorum of their temple which was closed as in many Japanese temples. So I realised the actual source was not her at all, it was that thing, and she was just an intermediary for this purpose.
As is the case in many such cases when you get initiated into some structure of energy, work, and things like that. I have heard, I have heard from people who have gone into Reiki initiation or pranic healing initiations, they say, ‘Oh after initiation my power increased tremendously’. Yes, of course, because it's not your power, you have come under grip of some other power, which is now flowing through you, working through you, using you as an instrument. So from a spiritual point of view, I would highly discourage this. Because you want to become exclusively an instrument of the divine consciousness, you do not open to any intermediate power, especially these are mostly vital powers. They may be benevolent, but still they are vital powers. They don't like the fact that you go beyond them. They become a barrier. They even put an active influence to prevent you from going beyond them or being free of them. Because their goal is to increase their following. And that's for them good enough as a sense of purpose. Followings have increased. They feed sometimes on the human following energies, they grow stronger by that following. So they don't want to let go, they don't want to lose followers. And so there's a kind of a grip that comes through the vital energy and it grips your mind.
And so I would highly recommend not to do those kinds of initiations. When it comes to the Upanayana, there is no movement behind, it's more like a ritual with a symbolic value. But as I said, choose the person who does the ritual initiation, and these are typically, there's nothing behind them. If they are pure, there's something good. If they are not pure, you just expose yourself to some junk which will pass, it won't stick normally. So there you are, make a choice. For me, it's not such a big deal if you can just go through a formal minimal ritual, you do not expose yourself energetically to anything; to get over a social problem it's fine.
You can go to the next question.
Alina (0:35:01):
Maria: “What does it mean to belong to freemasonry from an occult point of view for a person who is deeply connected with the Mother?”
Sraddhalu (0:35:12):
Yes. In this case, this is one of those movements, freemasons, rosicrucians, and then within those there are many other schools and lineages and divisions and branches within these. So this is something interesting Sri Aurobindo observes that in India somehow you don't find these kinds of secret societies because there was no need for secrecy, and each, lo so to say, lineage, and each lineage or teacher is a thing in itself. But this organisation of multiple branches of a society, etc., is typically something of the west and it has to do with certain aspects of the temperament, particularly in Europe.
So the freemasonry is one of these. It used to be a movement going back long ago when they had not only an occult knowledge but they were masons, so they built sacred spaces using the symbolism of occult knowledge with proportions, materials, arrangements, and the idea was to be able to create a space where you could invoke or hold a higher grade of energy or power. Now again we have to make a distinction, in India we have similarly the Vastushastra for the temple architecture, etc. In China you have Feng Shui which is an equivalent concept where you use an occult knowledge of proportions and materials and alignments and positions to be able to amplify certain gradations of energy.
All these, anything which involves proportions, alignments, etc., all these would necessarily be energies of vital or at best mental, but mental-vital typically. It's largely physical-vital, vital-mental, but the vital is the link to the physical proportion. That's why the proportions are symbolic.
If you take a place which is purely spiritual, nothing like this matters. You can go into an empty space, you can build a room which is completely wrong from a Feng Shui or freemasonry or Vastu perspective and still invoke a spiritual presence, it would be tremendously powerful and it would work fine. And I know people who are practitioners of these systems of Vastu and Feng Shui and they shared this. They went to a house and there was a place where everyone did their prayer. It was completely wrong from the traditional systems but the presence was so strong, he didn't have the heart to tell them ‘Change it’. So he told him to change other things. That was his job. He made his money from that. It's okay. He did that. But this he didn't touch although it was totally wrong.
So from a spiritual point of view, it doesn't matter. But, now coming back to freemasonry specifically, as an occult group, and because it has this very hierarchical system, they create many levels, I believe 33 levels are supposed to be the official thing. You start low, you go up as you learn by heart and put into practice various systems.
There is a whole system that programmes your mind through beliefs and through rituals and repetitions of things learned by heart, rebuilding a kind of a fraternity, a group consciousness, a group identity, but under control of a larger group identity. So, the intention originally was to build, to assist the evolution of individuals, at least, as if you can go far enough, that was the original intention, to help people grow more conscious and even have a more evolutionary turn. But the problem of anything which is formalised and ritualised is that at some point the ritual overrides the consciousness growth. You go through the rituals, you have a kind of a fraternity of people. Do you actually grow in consciousness? Hmm, sometimes, some do, some don't, not all benefit equally.
But much more important, you come under grip of this formation of the collective. In fact, some of them, as you go up the chain, they have secrecies, they make you swear, they make you take oaths, and by an oath you are bound to it for life. Sometimes this is oath of secrecy with severe consequences if you break your oath, they can kill you as you go higher up when the secrets become more serious. What is it that you would want to keep so secret that you might be killed? Hmm, not always clear. One could say at a certain phase when the freemasons survived the Catholic church they had to keep the secrecy to protect themselves, because the church would kill you, so you had to kill your own members if they leaked out to the church. That was the rationale. But today that rationale does not apply.
What we do find is there is a lot of occultism as you go up the chain, a lot of power use, and application of occult knowledge to power, and with that naturally comes all this secrecy and requirement of serving the larger unit so that you don't break away using the same technology that they give you of occultism, you don't turn against them and they can control you. So then it gets into a murky space.
(0:40:21):
So coming back to the question now of Maria, within freemasonry there are many schools, some leaning more to the light, some which have openly gone to the dark side where the ego-satisfaction and power satisfaction overrides the growth of consciousness or spirit. And they justify it by many means. One of the means they use is to say that finally you are learning, you are freeing yourself by asserting your will over circumstances, you override nature, you become master of nature with your will leading you, except it's ego-will, it's not soul, it's not divine Will. So, that's when it becomes, goes into a dark side. The same knowledge could be used in both ways.
But, because there are so many schools, it's difficult to know in which school you have kind of fallen into. And if you are at the lowest levels of the rungs, then you don't get too much into the occult space, then it's more like a fraternity, friends, helping each other, looking after each other, you don’t, it's like, a kind of a club, people helping each other. As it goes up, it becomes more serious. You could even have a judge releasing a criminal, and this is what they tell you actually, if he is part of the same freemason framework. So many things can happen as you go up because they all deal with power. But at the lower level it could be just basic society, socialising.
I don't know what level Maria's question relates to, but in any case there is this influence, there is an occult influence in the very fact of being part of an occult body. I would say simply, notice what you gain from it, notice what binds you to it, or what limits you in it. And if you need it for a social support, fine, don't go too much into the other aspects, you have a friend circle, maybe that's all it gives you, that's fine. But if you are conscious enough and you feel there's an energy which grips your mind, then be careful. And I would suggest, gradually weaning off from that energy, because the energies don't like when they lose their following.
Here I am going to link it to something else which is more serious even, but in the same direction. The Mother speaks of baptism, and the, from the Catholic church perspective particularly. And she speaks of how it has this effect of gripping the mind in a way that is so powerful as an occult formation. There is a whole occult machinery behind to grip. And she gives an example of a friend that she had who was in her, she was in the elite circle of painters and there was a friend who was somewhat developed, who was part of a Catholic family of cardinals. And she was completely convinced of the need to liberate her consciousness.
So Mother says, when she had the occult teaching, when she had the teaching of Sri Aurobindo, she passed it on to her, and she was very inspired, and it freed her from a lot of these things. But then she said, and I read from the Mother: “But she often told me, "As long as I am awake, everything is fine, but in my sleep I'll suddenly wake up in a dreadful panic … and if the Catholic teaching is true, then I'll go to hell!" And so, a torture. And she would tell me, "When I am wide awake, I see how ridiculous it is….". But the thing catches you, you see at a, the sleep state when you're in the subconscious.
Then Mother's comment. This is the part I want you to read, to know, Mother says: “But all those who were baptized and went for a time to confession as part of an inner, a wholly psychological entity, and it's VERY difficult to break free of it; they are bound to a whole – there is … there is an invisible Church, and all those people are in its grip.” So, there are two things: the baptism, followed by the confession, this combination. “To break free of it, one must be a vital hero. A true hero, you understand. Because it's very strong. I saw that, all religions have in that way kinds of congregations in the invisible; but … the Christian one is the strongest of them, of them all from a terrestrial standpoint.”
So, again I am putting freemasonry as part of this, let’s say, a religious framework. Of course, as a religion, it’s much more rational, but still it’s a framework of a group-unit, and so it comes in the same category. “… but … the Christian one is the strongest of them, of them all from a terrestrial standpoint. It's much stronger than that of the Buddhists, much stronger than that of the Chinese, much stronger than the ancient Hindu religions – it's the strongest.” Now every religion has this, the tendency to form a kind of a, she uses this very interesting phrase, “congregation in the invisible”, like a invisible group-consciousness which grips and holds. And I have seen this again referring to a particular sect of one of the religions, I don't need to name it now. I saw all the members of them had a particular quality of a light.
So I would meet this person, and they were dressed in their tradition attire, but it could have been one of many sects, and that quality of light I recognised and said: Are you part of this? And they said: Yes, how do you know? I said, I recognise the light. Very interesting. So it's almost as if the group consciousness of that to which they have aligned totally is now containing them, carrying them even, they are a part of it as a unit.
(0:46:16):
But this kind of a formation exists in all the religions, and she mentions all these. “And naturally stronger than the more recent religions, too – the strongest.” She speaks of the church, Christian. “And when you are baptized, you are bound. If you don't go to mass and have never been to confession, with a little vital energy you can get out of it, but those who have gone to confession – especially confession – and when you take communion, when you are given Christ to eat (another frightful thing) …” And then she pauses. She doesn’t say more about that. And she goes back to the example of that woman, she says: “Now that girl was a true artist and a great intelligence, so I had the example. When she was awake, she understood wonderfully; and she herself was furious, but she didn't have … she didn't have the power to get free of the influence of her subconscient.” So, that’s it. We will skip this now. But this is to give an example of how this thing works. And being part of any such formation, group formation, anything which involves a kind of an initiation or ritual that binds, be, I would say generally, be careful.
So to Maria finally I will say: If you have a deeper sensitivity, try to feel the vibe of that space and the extent to which you feel held or bound in it. And if you feel it uncomfortable, then I would say wean off gradually. If it does not mean anything and you feel no difference, it doesn't matter. Even if there was a grip, it wouldn't matter. Right? So, but if you have a sensitivity, follow that. And if you need social support of, social interactions of various kinds, you might find other clubs, but, or, maybe this one is innocent in itself, there is not much of an occult structure and it might be just right for you also. So follow the feeling.
We can go to the next question.
Alina (0:48:23):
Maitai: “Should we leave it to the Divine or does the Divine expect us to stand up for ourselves when we are dealing with people who have selfish interests and has authoritative power taking advantage of you?”
Sraddhalu (0:48:43):
Hmm. This is a very common question for people in a spiritual life as many, very often you tend to be not so strong in the vital assertion. Quite a bit of it is because in the very training of spirituality you are told to be selfless, you are told to give, you are told to be nice, and so the vital does not have a strong domain of experience to strengthen itself or to assert itself. As a result, you become relatively weaker to somebody else who has a strong vital who then tends to take advantage of you. People who are very strong vitals don't like to participate in a spiritual training or discipline because it demands to give up too much of the vital dominance, or they use it as a cover, but really don't put it into practice.
So the questioner Maitai is asking: Should we leave it to the Divine or does the Divine expect us to stand up for ourselves when dealing with such people?
Remember the whole goal of this evolution is to build you as an individual, as a focal point for the Divine will to work through. If you can't stand up for yourself, then you have not developed that individuality and you have nothing worthwhile to offer to the divine. Remember?
(0:50:03):
So remember we also spoke of the nature of what distinguishes individuality. I used this phrase at that time two sessions ago about a focal point around which all of you is organised. But the other side of individuality is your ability to resist other external influences. If you get overwhelmed by an external influence, then your individuality is not sufficiently formed on that level. Typically in this case the vital. You may have in the mind a reasonable individuality. You understand, but when it comes to the pressure on the vital you yield, you are unable to resist. Or there are people who have the reverse: they are able to hold strongly here, but in the mind they can easily be get swayed by any reasonable-sounding idea, but not able to think in an organised way to counter just because it sounds reasonable but may not actually be, but this part is not developed.
So observe where your individuality is better organised, on which level, where it is not. And if you find yourself unable to resist an opposition or a strong influence from outside, then know that that's where you need to strengthen your individuality. And if you don't do that, then you don't have a worthwhile centre to offer to the Divine, but also from the Divine point of view, there is no clear focal point through which the Divine will can act. If your base is so unstable that something outside can destabilise, how will the Divine will act freely without getting overwhelmed by those other destabilising influences, isn't it? So to be able to offer a point of support that is stable enough, you have to develop that individuality and this problem is coming to you precisely to force you to develop that. How you develop that?
First step, step back from all these layers which are affected. Become conscious of a something within, maybe as a general backdrop layer or as a presence within which is unaffected by these pulls and pushes, including your own attractions and repulsions and desires and expectations. So it's one of the commonest mistakes is ‘I will resist that negative influence, but I will chase after my desires which I like’. It's the same machinery for both, attraction and repulsion.
So if you indulge in one, you will lose in the other. You have to treat both extremes as equal: ‘I like’, ‘I don't like’ – both are equally to be freed from. That would be a true sense of a deeper equality. And then equality in the, behind the mind, behind the vital, ideally even behind the physical tendencies of reaction, but become conscious of a layer within which is unaffected by all these: pulls, pushes, likes, dislikes and influences. If it goes closer to the psychic presence, wonderful. If not, a more mentalised kind of backdrop of awareness, whatever it is, hold that, centre yourself there more and more. Make it a discipline in your daily life for both likes and dislikes, positive and negatives, to hold yourself in the poise of equality. Yes, when the positive comes you will enjoy it, when the negative comes you will deal with it, but not losing this poise of equality. That's when you'll find, you can actually enjoy both. Even when the negative comes, you say, ‘Aha-ha, that's interesting’ and not be affected.
The moment you identify and are pulled to the positive, you have lost the centre, well, you will lose the centre on the other. So when this base is built, ideally with a strong psychic influence or whatever you are able to hold, from that point on, when you see something happening, you will find you can assert a choice and say ‘No’ or ‘Yes’ depending on what is required as to the best of your capacity. And still if you feel compelled, you say to the person, ‘All right, I'm going to make a choice, but I will tell you afterwards, let me think about it’. You break away. Come out of the immediate influence of this strong vital. Make a decision, come back and say it. So there are ways you can manage that. But first to be able to hold a clarity internally requires you to have a base which is sufficiently stable. Find that first and then build around it. And bit by bit by pushing back on the little things, you will find you can build sufficient organised centre that you will be able to push back on the bigger things, resist them, or manage them, modify them, as required.
That is how you will build this individuality from an influence which is closer to the true centre. You could still try artificially building something but that will be an ego-centre, it will not last, it will be changing and you will not know it. You will think it is ‘I’, but your ‘I’ is wandering all over the place. You have to always go back to something which is itself free and stable.
We can go to the next question.
Alina (0:55:16):
Under this nickname Formo4: “How to strengthen boundaries of the self if we try to open to the force above? If we are constantly aware of outer forces, how do we recognise the Mother’s force as opposed to another? Can we open to the force above before we have organised ourselves completely around the psychic?”
Sraddhalu (0:55:44):
Hmm. You are aware of outer forces and you are aware of Mother's Force. Can you feel a difference? If you can't, then that's the first thing you have to do: Disengage from all forces, become conscious of the purest, most essential centre within you, of a centre that is utterly still and quiet, where you hold the purest, clearest sense of an aspiration for the Divine, most selfless. Lean towards that, centre yourself more and more towards that. From that as your base, as your centre, and this relates to the previous question, the same movement, when you feel various kinds of forces, you will distinguish immediately in the quality of the force. Something which is lower or higher, purer or coarser. Observe. Initially, just observe. Allow some time for the observation to become clear enough without taking any hasty action. And then you will find you can refine, the perception itself will grow finer. And there will be a quality in the, what descends directly from above, from the divine Consciousness, there is a quality and a purity and a deep peace, and a, sometimes a wideness that you may feel, and impersonality or a deep personality, but something very distinct in quality and everything else in relation to that is found to be either too coarse or too distorted. Just that. Initially observing you will distinguish.
Then comes your choice you make: You accept only that which is the purer or the higher or truer. The others, you refuse to succumb to them. Sometimes the force passes through you. You don't have a choice. It passes through you, and anger impulse rises. If you don't engage with it, it passes right just like that. If you engage with it, accept it, then you get in trouble. So you choose to give yourself and open only to the highest, and even if others you cannot control, you do not engage with, you do not give them importance, you do not allow them access to your, to use you.
And for this one does not need to be completely organised around the psychic. Just having this basic centre of discrimination and a subtle sensitivity, which largely comes from the psychic influence, but that's good enough even to make this distinction. If subsequently as you organise yourself more and more, and that process can take its time, then everything becomes much simpler, more effortless. But already you have used this phrase ‘outer forces’. The moment you have a force coming from outside, it's not a deeper spiritual force.
What comes from the Divine Mother, even though it may seem to come from outside, is felt as if intimately belonging to you in your own deeper or higher parts. And that's why we use the phrase ‘descending from above’ or ‘emerging from within’. And even when it's descending from above, you can of course visualise or even experience vital energy coming, pouring in from above. That's not the same, because the quality of the energy is totally different. You would not use the word ‘energy’ for the Mother's, divine Force. The moment you say ‘It's energy’, it tends to be of a lower grade. This is pure spiritual consciousness, consciousness which has a certain intensity or a power, the feel is totally different, the substantiality is totally different. And this is the reason why Sri Aurobindo lays so much importance to the psychic influence because automatically that brings this discrimination and separation of what is what.
So that's why, same with the earlier question from Maitai: First build this focal point of your deeper sensitivity which is unaffected by these things. If it is aligned to the deeper centre within you, all the better. And from that sensitivity the discrimination will automatically happen.
(1:00:05):
But to the first part of your question, ‘How to strengthen boundaries of yourself when you open to the force above?’, I will simply say, I think what I understand by, what you mean about, about this is when you open above, you don’t want other forces to come in, if, if I have understood you correctly.
Simply the fact that you open only to the Presence above, the choice you make, the sense of movement in the opening, for example, you could just open yourself, ‘I am opening to the universe’, this is what you see, a lot of junk in the new-age stuff, ‘open to the universe, and the universe will do’, what you are doing is opening to all kinds of universal forces without discrimination, you become a cork on the sea, moved around, played around, and of course sometimes things fall in place, and you say, ‘Ha, the universe answered’, often it shapes you, it shapes your thinking and makes you feel you want this, you are a toy basically in the hands of lower Nature, here there is a clear sense, first you organise your individuality, you are not all these, what are you hold this awareness, and then this entire awareness you turn entirely to what you feel as the Presence in its highest or what you conceive of as the highest of the Divine, and open to that and hold there and ask for that to fill, to descend, to fill, to carry you, and you belong only to that.
This sense of initial clarity of: what it is you are and what you give yourself to, this is extremely important. Automatically with that you'll find the infusion of other forces don't have the same access. And then with that if this discrimination grows, you will sense when other things come, you'll be able to distinguish between mixtures. All that will be very rapid and most natural. I think this would be the easiest way for you to move forward.
I think with this we have covered most of the questions which related to what we have discussed so far. There are several questions which relate to the ‘What to do with the damaged nature from a not healthy education?’ and allied to that several questions which are there which we will take up in the subsequent sessions also.
But for now I wanted to build on our previous discussions where we have spoken of individuality forming. And then when you look at all these individualities, each is unique, and yet we can broadly categorise them into certain types, certain tendencies, certain habitual forms, certain temperaments, certain qualities, and so on. This is extremely important in any kind of education. Because according to your temperament, according to your turn of nature, will often be your way of learning and for a skilled teacher or parent, your way of teaching or supporting, nourishing.
And if you are none of these, you are just interacting in society, according to the nature of the people you are dealing with will be your way of dealing with them, if you want to be effective in any way, Isn't it? So this discussion is again applicable everywhere for all of us. Because all of us end up having to deal with people, even if they are not students or children. Isn't it? So what would be broadly the categories? Can we create some kind of framework?
You will go into many psychological systems including current fashionable psychological schools, they will say, ‘Oh, there are so many types’, and then they will classify each type and give them fancy names. But they are all arbitrary. Why is it you say ‘There are nine types’, someone else says ‘There are 12 types’, some other says ‘Six types’, someone else will come and say ‘Seven types’, and they'll classify them. If it's a management school, then they will say, so many types of managers, so many types of learners, so many types of… Why so many? There's no rationale.
And it sounds nice, someone will say, ‘Oh, you are a uh…’, I'm sorry, I don't remember the terms, but they have some pretty fanciful terms which work well, they sound nice, each seems to be somewhat distinct. But why those? And you could perhaps think of something, and if it is outside the box that they have created, they will say, ‘Ha-yes, but it is close enough to that type that you can weave it into that type’. Why not use this type and weave that into this? There is no rationale. So I am not criticising them to say they are not good. Yes, they may work, but there is no rationale, there is no universal principle, anybody could create their own list of types.
The Yoga tradition goes much deeper into the essentiality of human nature and Sri Aurobindo organises this in a way which is much more accessible to the modern mind. So we can broadly describe it in this way: In our nature there are three modes: tamasic, rajasic and sattvic, the inertia tendency, the kinetic tendency and the balancing harmonising tendencies. All three operate in all parts. So in the mind though the harmonising tendency is stronger. In the life energy, the kinetic tendency. In the physical body, the tendency of inertia and stability is stronger. So broadly we see already three types, depending on which of these three is more active in your overall nature, you see that person is a type of inertia, so he is not easy to change, but what he learns he will hold and retain because that is the base of stability.
(1:05:55):
Now a worker who is going to assemble, let’s say a mobile phone in a factory, you want him to have the inertia of the habit, he should not try to improvise, because we need consistency there. Isn't it? But such a person cannot be creative, at least not while in that mode, he must set aside his creativity, he should set aside his kinesis or kinesis only moderated to support the requirement of the mechanical process.
Somebody else in a different kind of work, for example, in an athletic circumstance, you want to have the kineses to push and break the boundaries and limits, inertia is a dead weight there.
In the domain of mind, particularly, you want that balance, you want the harmony, all the contradicting ideas need to be somehow harmonised, you cannot exaggerate one or deprecate one against another.
So each of these has a role depending on work, so they have a suitability of a certain nature for a particular role just by looking at these three. But then you see, always with nature comes also soul, consciousness. And the soul quality is fourfold or four powers of the soul which we have seen as:
the impulse to knowledge;
the impulse to leadership, heroism, courage;
the impulse to harmonising of various interests and forces; and the fourth is
the impulse to perfection.
Now each has certain broad variations, but these would be the four corresponding to the four aspects of the Divine Mother or the four soul forces with it.
So four soul forces, again in one of, in each one of us, one of them dominates, the others would be secondary. In the less developed, one will dominate, the other three would be weak. In the more developed, one will dominate, but the second will be quite developed and supporting the dominant one. In a still more developed, the third one will be also quite developed. And in a more developed, all four would be awakened but still one might dominate. And in the most perfect, at that point, of course, you have gone into the Integral Yoga or in the integral transformation to a very high degree, the four blend into each other in a single movement of the soul force as if four broad colours now blending in a full stream of all variations and easily able to modulate the four qualities or their blending as needed for a particular task. We are not there yet, but this would be the perfection of the soul power.
Where are we? We have one dominant and the other three more or less developed, somewhat integrated. So four distinct soul powers working through three modes of nature, typically makes for a combination of 12. And this you will see mapped out in the astrological chart where you have the 12 signs. And the 12 signs, interestingly, are sequentially the four soul powers repeating three times. And upon that mapped, the three modes of nature repeating in sequence mapped to make for a full combination of 3 × 4, 12 types. Very interesting!
Upon that are the variations of the sun being in this one, the moon being in that one, and the ascending sign being in another one which represent the mind, emotional mind and the physical mind or body consciousness. Interesting, isn't it? So, I don't go into the astrology, that's not so important here. But just recognise that here's a rationale which is somewhat universal, we could say.
You could go anywhere in the universe, any species of any creature, you'll find this mapping of 12 to be consistent. So I'm taking this as a starting point. Then you look at specific temperament, and this is like an individual mould of each person, upon that you will find certain qualities, strong, less developed, more developed. According to the ages, we looked at the model of the flower unfolding, which petals are more open, some are less, in sequence, sometimes there is an imbalance between their development, etc.
(1:10:21):
All these will give you a broad framework. Into this you can put still more variations of:
Gender, because there is a very distinct quality, characteristic of men and women, which is what I will come to a little more shortly.
Race, because each race has often developed or a lineage within a race has developed a specialisation.
And if this is true among animals that you can breed a dog to develop a special psychological characteristic in just three generations, should this not be equally true of human beings? And yes it is. Except that we are much more flexible as a mental consciousness. The soul power, what the soul brings as its own temperament, is much more strong because more evolved and able to somewhat override these tendencies, and yet these tendencies exist in a lineage of a family and then generalised even to a certain racial subgroup or within a race type even. But as you grow wider, the compulsion of this is less and less, because the human being is much more plastic.
This may be true of dogs much more easily because they're much more bound in the biology, less and less true of human beings. And the more you become conscious, the less true it becomes. So you have this gradation in spectrum. And yet those things do exist. Even it can happen for certain tendencies within the family lineage and even a race type, the orientation towards intelligence in abstraction versus intelligence turned to senses. It could be very different. And often these are bound in family types. The soul could bring a strong imprint and override this, but when the soul influence is weak, it would tend to slide back into the biology inherited tendency, or the psychological inherited tendency, tend to. If there has been active work to change your nature, you could be totally free of the past. Totally.
But if it has not been actively consciously done as a part of a Yogic process, you'll find the tendencies drawing you back. And often with age, if there has not been that change, with age as the hold of the consciousness on the biology weakens, and the biology begins to override the consciousness, all those tendencies start rising. ‘Atavism’ we say or the family inherited tendency. And you'll say, ‘Oh his grandfather was like that and now you see him behaving the same with age. You understand what happened there? The consciousness-hold on body weakened, body-hold on consciousness strengthened, and therefore you saw this. But you didn't see it in the youth, you didn't see it in earlier years. And the balance tilts. That's why it's so important for us to change our nature all the way down to our physical consciousness as early as possible while it is flexible, before it begins to harden. Okay? So, this is just to give you a background.
Recognising all this, and upon this I will still throw a few more variations of culture in which you grow up, civilisational imprints, environmental influences, the kind of media you've watched. Children today having watched a lot of exciting movies will tend to have build certain tendencies. You may say they turn to exciting movies because of rajasic tendency, but it highlights and warps that same rajasic turn which could have been a positive turn into an negative excitation, and then what you repeat over time becomes a habit, all these come into you to form these distinctive tendencies.
But if you have understood the broad psychological, universal principles behind, you can easily recognise a person, recognise their strengths, limitations, weaknesses, and assist them, deal with them, depending on what your role is, to either overcome or manage them in a group situation. So generally speaking in a school framework, we might say that there are children who are more visual learners, auditor learners and kinesthetic learners, so you will address them differently.
The visual types you will use even the vocabulary which is visual. Uh you describe pictures, you describe images, you draw on the blackboard, you show a movie, or you use terms such as, as you explain something, you say, ‘Do you see this?’, and the guy says, ‘Yes, I see it’.
But somebody who is an auditory learner, if you say, ‘Do you see it?’, he says, ‘No, I don't see because I'm not looking at pictures, I'm listening to you’. To them you would say ‘Do you hear what I'm saying?’, ‘Yes, I hear you’.
Kinesthetic learner, someone who needs to touch to learn. You’ll say, ‘Do you feel it? Can you touch? Is it tangible to you? Has it, does it make sense?’, ‘Yes, it makes’. ‘Do you see?’, ‘No’. ‘Do you hear?’, ‘No’. ‘But I can hold it, yes, I've got it in my grip.’
You'll actually modulate your vocabulary to match the learning types. You will formulate the learning experiences in a classroom or with an adult, a training programme to match the learning type. Interesting.
(1:15:48):
We had one of the, what I still consider the most exceptional among the teachers in the Ashram School, trained by the Mother, the most exceptional person I have ever met in that, in education but also in her own skills, was Amita Sen. She is no more teaching. And there are many interviews by Narad with her which you can see on Narad's website <motherandsriaurobindo.in>. I believe they are 7 or 8 interviews, they are quite exceptional. She was one of those who could actually listen to a piece of music and describe it in terms of a painting, and articulate in terms of a piece of a literature. Or take a piece of literature and articulate it as a painting or a music and actually go across these in a way that, as she describes or she speaks or she articulates, you go ‘wow’! That kind of skill. And she was also, she trained by the Mother in dramatics and theatre, and so on. But she was also an exceptional in the understanding of integral education and its practice.
So at the age of let's say about 10, 11, 12, we were with her. She had created three groups. Now what people do when they create groups, because we're 21 children, let's say, or maybe 24, so groups of 7 or 8. What normally is done in a school, based on your performance: You are a high performer, you were in group one.
No, she didn't do that. And she explained to us much later. At that time we didn't know what she was doing. She put the visual types in the first group. The emotional types which were more auditory or emotional in their right, they needed to feel the connection with you, hear it, that was the second group. And the third group was more kinesthetic. And so you could address the group as a whole using that particular modality of their temperament. Very interesting way of doing it. But it still meant, you had to observe the children and figure out what was their type. You see. So there is a responsibility and a skill that the teacher has to develop.
So having discussed all this now, and much of this maybe you will see in some of the videos that I will be putting up from next week on the, from the teacher training programmes. I want to focus on two particular distinctions, because these are immediately of value for all of us, and they represent something very important currently in the human evolutionary stage. And this has to do with the difference in learning approach between boys and girls but also as adults between men and women. So I don't think we will have enough time to take this up in detail, so I will keep that for next time.
But this is going to be a very important part of the discussion. We will try to go to what will be the essential characteristic distinction if there is one, as well as what can one do to leverage it and to complement it. And this is going to be very important for us individually also. So I think I'm going to keep that for next time. And I'll quickly take a look at the chat box and see if there are, some of the questions from our, from our discussion so far. Uh just a minute.
So I'm going to stay with questions which relate to what we have discussed, and there are other questions which I will keep for later based on the topic as we come into them. For some reason, I am unable to scroll. Okay, I am having a problem with my keyboard. Let me just ‘Refresh’. Okay.
So uh first question from, from Rupal: “The most difficult time comes, how do we take help from Mother and Sri Aurobindo?” So Rupal, you had asked this question about two weeks back, and I've kept it for the discussion on how to correct for when something comes upon us. Okay, let me just take this question anyway.
(1:20:33):
So, Rupal had asked this question: When it feels as if everything is lost, what happens when difficulty arrives? How do we cope with it? If one is in the path of integral sadhana and it accelerates the karma dissolution, puts you on the brink of life, what to do? And then he asks: ‘How do we develop occult or some power on the Integral Yoga path to protect ourselves and our loved ones’, and in today's variation, he says, ‘if someone has defrauded you, people who you have trusted unconditionally, they backstab you and destroy you and your family?’
So I think all these questions relate to the same thing, and I'm going to, let's look at it in a general way. First, your question itself is presupposing something. It says: If one is on the path of integral sadhana and it accelerates the karma dissolution which puts you on the brink of life, what to do?
That's a wrong understanding. That's not how it works. It's not that being in the path of integral sadhana will accelerate karma dissolution and karma dissolution will create problems for you. That's not how reality works. In fact, it's a very confused mix of teachings from various traditions. So, we have already spoken before about how in Buddhism, you have removed soul and God. So, the karma becomes the all-compelling power. And necessarily any progress involves dissolution of karma, dissolution of karma being almost mathematical. And this goes in an extreme in the Jain tradition: in the act of dissolving karma you have to pay back that much and so you have to suffer And all this is inherent to that worldview when you have removed the freedom of consciousness, of soul, and of the divine Grace, so you have to suffer in order to overcome, in order to overcome past sufferings, in order to be able to progress. You must consciously dissolve this idea. The soul is utterly free. It is not even bound by its own karma.
The way of the Integral Yoga particularly is not of accelerating karma dissolution. It is completely freeing from the past by change of nature. And so, if you are going to chase after karma dissolution in the act of dissolving it, you will create more karmas which you have to dissolve. It's meaningless. It does not work that way. When you change your nature, all the things, even the karmas associated with the past tendencies of your nature, no more apply to you. In that sense, you have dissolved the karma. But not by countering it with more contrary karma. It's by changing of consciousness itself.
So just as an analogy, if you throw a ball at this level, you throw a ball against the wall, it comes and, well, hits you back, if you don't catch it. But if you throw the ball now, meanwhile you've climbed up one floor, the ball comes back, there is nobody for it to touch. Isn't it? You've moved on, you're in a consciousness where it doesn't apply. And even if there is some backwash of some flow of energy, it comes, it passes through you, okay, well, it doesn't affect you profoundly. Karma is no more mathematical in the domain of freedom of consciousness and of change of consciousness.
It actually, when I asked my teacher once, I asked him this question, I said: In life practically every action you do builds some karma, so all the little karmas, do they all gang up in one big wave and come and hit you in a big way? Or do the little ones come back as so many little things? I was thinking mathematically, you see, in that way of thinking. And he said: No, most of them just fizzle away on their own. And that was such a, such a beautiful image that I started laughing. Because karma is not mathematical. It is not that if you have produced one today and one tomorrow, then day after it has come back to you as, as a two. The one can fizzle out, become 0.5, 0.1, or just become zero, just like that, because finally these are energies, they dissipate.
But if you have grown in consciousness, even if there was a 1 + 1 = 2 or 1 + 1 = 3, to your consciousness now it is equivalent to zero because you have grown. So if you are on the path of the Integral Yoga, first of all, it has not relating to karma dissolution as a means of growth, it is a change of consciousness which is means of growth. And so, the Yoga will not, or the consequence of the Yoga will not, bring you to crisis on the brink of life.
(1:25:20):
But to this question of, you are putting trust in people, and then unconditionally, and then getting back-stabbed, or being destroyed because you trusted them, I will say, that was a mistake that you made: your inexperience, or you are wanting to believe in the goodness of another as your weakness. And here was the consequence of an erroneous understanding and of a wrong relationship with somebody which brought you to this consequence. Again it's not karma. It's consequence of putting your trust on something wrong.
So let's say, you are standing in an unstable soil, so because the ground is shaky, you hold what you think is a tree or a strong piece, a rod, or wood. Thinking it is strong, you grip it, and so when the earth shakes you are reasonably stable. But if what you saw was not a tree, was not a metal piece, but was a piece of foam, but you convinced yourself, ah it's brown, I hope it is a tree and I grab it and give all my lean on it with all my strength, well, it's going to collapse, if not now, after a while. And when it collapses, you are going to fall. Whose fault is it? Not of It. But of your wrong perception or wrong trust.
So think of it in this way, it's not coming as a punishment first, it's not a karmic consequence in that sense. It is coming as a consequence of your immaturity, inexperience, or I will use the word, it's a bit strong but you must be conscious of it, ‘self-deception’. Because many of us, because we feel we want to be trusted, we are worthy of trust, we want to convince ourselves that everybody is worthy of trust. Even though you see in their behaviour that they are not worthy of trust, you want to convince yourself they are worthy of trust because that's the only way you feel good about yourself. You feel wrong in thinking that somebody is unworthy of trust: How can I be judgmental Or, if I put my trust in him totally, he will somehow become worthy of it. All these are self-deceptions.
One of the very important things required for you is to be able to see reality for what it is, without being affected negatively or excited positively. Okay, this person has a tendency of betraying trust. Or, when the person is nice, meaning, mean even well-intending, but when coming under pressure, he will protect his interest first and not your interest, he will not keep his word. You've seen that. You know that. You do not put your trust entirely. Or if you have to put your trust, you sign the right papers with all the required things that you have a legal or other backup. See when you create, this is one of the problems I faced initially, I went through the same kind of problems. I wanted to believe everybody was good. I wanted to believe that if I believed in their goodness that their goodness would live up to my expectation.
And it was a painful passage to wake up from it. And one of the problems it took for me was, when I had to make a sign an agreement with somebody, it was a, going to be a kind of a legal agreement, I felt very uncomfortable, because first I was resorting to legal means when the whole basis of the spiritual consciousness, the values, I grew up in the Ashram was trust, you trust somebody because they are worthy of trust, otherwise you don't even go to make an agreement with them. Why do I have to sign this paper? And I had a great struggle overcoming this.
I don't think the other person understood, he was in a, more a businessman. I said, what a difficult decision for me to have to sign this! He didn't get it. But I learned this later. I learned this later from somebody who was in the business field, and he explained to me, he said: You don't sign a paper because you distrust them, you sign a paper so that when there is a problem, this is what you fall back to. You're not starting with distrust. You're looking at a situation where eventually life is going to squeeze you and them so hard that your current goodwill and affection and trust is going to break down in some way, because someone is going to be squeezed hard. At that point, what do you fall back to? What's the mechanism of resolution? That's what the agreement is about. So in good times when we're all well, you don't need the agreement. You prepare it only when times go bad and really-really bad. When you too will be pushed to the limit of your conscience and capacity and truthfulness and integrity, and we all have weak points where we will break, and life will precisely push you on the point where you might break.
(1:30:27):
So it's really a part of developing yourself to greater level of maturity, to be able to face people, things, situations, for what they actually are, without hiding from yourself, something which is inconvenient for you to see, and without feeling guilty about taking a position which may seem judgemental. You don't pass a judgement over a person necessarily if you feel guilty about that. Instead, recognise, here are tendencies. ‘I hope, I will never have to face that tendency’. But if that pops up, well, this is the backup that we have to sign, here is the contract that we have to build accordingly. And then there are extremes where because of an earthquake, what they call ‘act of God’, things may happen where it is even beyond your capacity to live up to your word. And that's what the agreement is meant for.
So I would say for Rupal: Start looking at things from such a point of view. Take it as a training ground now. Don't mope too much about the damage done. Instead what are the lessons learned from this, and start rebuilding. Ask for the help. Ask for the help from the divine Grace, and you will get the help. It may not always come the way you expect. You may not suddenly get money. You may get inner strength to pass through this crisis, and maybe at some point you will find means to overcome whatever financial or other losses that you might have had.
And if you have the means depending on your relationship with the people whom you trusted, if you find they have still a little bit of conscience, you may access them on that level and ask them what can be done to minimise this loss which you have now, which you are now facing. So I don't know details of the circumstance, I'm showing you overall approaches as strategies. Move forward. But do not link that to your consequence of your sadhana or karma dissolution, that would be completely wrong understanding. It is consequence of your inexperience, if at all, or a form of self-deception.
As I said, it's a complex thing where you do not want to look at a negative side of a person. And it is only when you are able to see within you your negative side as well as your positive side, and I don't mean that in a negative way, you see it as a weaknesses, you have weaknesses, and we all have weaknesses on different parts, and pushed to our limits, they kick in at different times. In the extreme, I might end up lying or betraying a trust. But maybe that extreme is really far, but still it's there. Recognise it.
So in you, you should be able to look at yourself entirely, transparently, and place this before the Divine and say, ‘Here I am’. As long as you hide from yourself a part that is for you negative or deceitful or whatever that you cannot accept, if you cannot see it, you cannot open it to the Divine. And if you cannot see it in yourself, you cannot see it in others. And this is your weakness. Start with being totally bare to yourself.
It's very painful when you do that the first time. Because you will see so much, you will say, ‘Oh, I am so horrible, I am worse than all those people that I criticise’. No, you are not. You just can't see how much clutter is there in others. When you see it in yourself, you say, ‘Okay’, eventually you see everybody has the same, different forms, different aspects, different levels, different degrees, but all the things are there, pretty much in everyone in different ways. Okay, we are all in the same boat, that's our human nature, that's our starting point. So what do you do when you have to deal with somebody where you might have to put all your trust in one thing and maybe all your resources and finances on one thing, if that's going to be your stick, it better be a solid one, or it better be backed by solid documentation to protect, in case the stick breaks. And that's how you're going to start looking at life.
So take this as a learning experience, a very important one, it will have implications for the sadhana when you begin to look at yourself, and then begin to look at the world also. At first you may feel somewhat overwhelmed by this negative side that you've so far protected yourself from, but then make a correction: You see also the positive, also the negative, and they are all part of a spectrum of many layers. You have to deal with the positive as far as possible, but protect yourself from the negative when required, when the dealings would expose you to those things. And it is this poise of equality which is going to be the base for your own sadhana, but also for your dealings with others.
And ask for the help. First, put yourself in this poise of equality, ask for the help now: ‘Here mistakes were made, show me the way, how to proceed, give me the strength to be able to proceed’, and if you have lost everything, ‘help me to rebuild everything’, or ‘build the way required’, maybe something new, whatever it is. So always first the wisdom, and then the strength, and then the action, or whatever happens to you naturally, that's not so important.
(1:35:36):
But in this way you will find, this crisis will become a turning point for you on which you will be able to rebuild perhaps on stronger foundations with more mature, greater capacity, and even I would say, greater compassion. Because when you are able to see the limitations within you and then see the same limitations in others, you will also realise that everything you criticise in others is there within you, maybe less, but the things which they criticise in you is not in them or maybe less. And you realise, there is a certain kind of a deep acceptance that we are all in the same boat, different starting points, different degrees of growth and balance, maturity, but finally we are equally children of the Divine Mother, even in the most complex and messed up person. And there is a deep compassion that comes from that, and which will be a poise in which you will be able to deal with any situation that comes your way, but also great strength.
So, I think that covers most of the time we had, and there are a few other questions which I will weave into the next programme, the next sessions we have. So, for the next two weeks, I will, we will not have the live sessions, because I will have to be travelling. So, I will set up a pre-recorded session of the talks on, from the teacher training programmes, those will come on automatically at this time. And the live session, the subsequent live session will be on the, after two weeks, which will be on the 22nd.
We can take a moment to review what we have covered. Many of these were important questions which apply to all of us. And particularly this last: When passing through crisis and sometimes the most intense crises is an opportunity for the most radical and intense growth. And that's when we can also bare ourselves totally because we have as if lost everything, there is nothing left to protect, so let go of yourself and of everything and open yourself entirely to the Divine and say, ‘Here I am with all these limitations’. And everything you see in them, if you can recognise at least in seed form the same tendencies within you and turn it all to the Divine and say, ‘Here I am’ and then ‘here is the situation, help me, lead me, guide me’, and if so needed if you are in distress ‘save me, save me from the situation, protect me and take me through’.
You have asked how to develop occult powers, and so on, to protect ourselves and others! That's not the way. Any power you develop will be wielded by you, the ego person. You will always end up creating more problems out of it. You have just lifted a battleground of swords to a battleground of occult powers. Worse in side effects and in the damage to you. That's not the way. It’s not developing more sophisticated weapons. It's by put, surrounding yourself by the protection of the Divine Mother and the divine Presence and being open to that and being totally honest and true in relation to it.
And with that transparency you will find, even when you are dealing with someone you will be shown their weaknesses and you will have to then accept and make arrangements to protect from that. You will always be shown and you will be given the inner stability and strength to deal with it. Then that's the way to protect yourself. By total trust, by an entire self-giving to the Divine exclusively is the basis in which you will be fully protected. The part that is not given is the part that is vulnerable and will get hit.
So use this crisis. It's a wonderful opportunity. There's this very interesting statement of the Mother in the little booklet, The Supreme Discovery, where she ends that whole talk by saying, “verily in utter humiliation is the greatest victory”. And somebody who was translating said, ‘Ah, but that's wrong, it should be an utter humility is the greatest victory’. Mother said: “No, I meant humiliation.” When you have lost everything, there is nothing left to hide from, to protect from, to cling to, that's when you are able to give yourself totally to the Divine. Isn't it? Use this occasion. And for those of us, if you have been through such experiences, you know what it's like, it's a reminder that you need to be more and more transparent.
(1:40:47):
And if you have never been through such situation, hopefully you will never be, but learn the lesson of the situation that you must be entirely transparent and open yourself, bare yourself totally with everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. But then also with that same equality be able to perceive all these things in the complex play of the universe, behind all that complex play is always the Divine Mother's protection and strength and wisdom and love. And open to Her, not to people. Rely on Her, not to people, not on situations. And when you have to act on with people, ask for her help, and she will always give you a sign if you are vigilant and you are not blindly trusting, you will always be shown, and the guidance will come to protect you. But you must listen, you must follow. And even when you make a mistake like this, she is here to help you now to rise out of this mistake and rebuild whatever is required to be rebuilt. We can all concentrate on this in our aspiration together.
Namaste.
Alina (1:42:34):
Namaste.