EWS #129: What is the Force + Q&A
Sept 17, 2022
Alina (0:00:31):
Namaste. Good evening everyone. I am Alina and I am going to host Evenings with Sraddhalu. Today we have an interesting topic, “What is the force?”. And we invite Sraddhalu to give us the answer to this question but before we will take Sraddhalu's talk on a few commentaries on Queen Elizabeth II by the Mother.
Namaste Sraddhalu.
Sraddhalu (0:01:01):
Namaste. Happy to be with all of you.
The last time we had the question about Queen Elizabeth II, and I had shared certain general perspectives. Subsequent to that I came to know of the Mother's comment on her and so I thought it necessary to share it here as a closure to that discussion. This was in a conversation that I was having with Vasanti-ji who was as you know secretary to my teacher M.P. Pandit who was secretary to the Mother, and as a result because he was going to the Mother often twice a day relating to work, many times she also had that privilege of that access or would know of things that the Mother spoke of and things like that.
So as we were discussing casually, subsequent to our last discussion, Vasanthi shared this, and so it comes with great authority. She said that when in 1952 the transition took place and the previous king passed on and Queen Elizabeth was travelling in Africa at that time, she was officially announced the Queen, so there were photographs which had come in the media. And the Mother looked at her photograph and showed great interest and appreciation and she liked her very much. So this was the first observation. And the second thing she said was, Mother's comment on seeing the photo. She said that she would become very famous, perhaps as famous or more famous than Queen Elizabeth I.
So this was a general observation, and that's all that I got from her, and I suppose that is one of the most authoritative, well, first-hand comments that we have of the Mother's observation on this.
So, I think, with this we close the discussion on the Queen and take up the topic for today.
Alina (0:03:02)
Very interesting.
So I will take Aditya’s question: What is the yoga force that Sri Aurobindo mentions in some of the letters regarding development of talents in himself and other sadhaks, etc. and how similar or different is it from what we generally call Mother's force? In some letters Sri Aurobindo also mentions that so-and-so person cannot bear the pressure of the Yoga yet, he must make himself ready, when does the exertion of this yogic pressure starts and the descent of the yoga force, because there's no rigidly defined starting point that says, one has actually started doing this yoga?
Sraddhalu (0:04:00):
Yes. The question has many aspects and needs a thorough discussion. It's a very practical question also. All aspects are practical.
Before going to the question proper, and we will see what Sri Aurobindo has to say about this as well as certain aspects of the multifaceted question, before going into this, I would like step back to look at the big picture of the force from which then we will focus on yoga force, Mother's force and the questions relating to its working in us, but the force generally.
And looking back, it's as if you step back to view the big picture, stepping back across infinity, across eternity, the whole cosmos, the whole universe, across all the levels, gradations of worlds, consciousness, and movements, and there is one thing common across it all, and that is the force, and so it is this that we will explore a little more and then come to the specific aspect of the yoga force, Mother's force etc.
When you look at this from a very material level, modern physical science has been exploring this question: What makes matter what it is. It goes deeper, it finds particles, atoms and so on. But at some point you realise that what seemed to be stable matter resolves itself into some kind of fluctuating unstable movement. You go deeper into the thing which is moving, you can say a particle, it’s is moving, but the particle itself dissolves to become some other particle or dissolves into pure energy or radiation of ripples of energy or ripples of energy come and coalesce and become a particle suddenly.
What happened there?
How does flowing energy which is formless, insubstantial suddenly become substance?
How does that transition take place?
And actually science doesn't have answers to this. It just says, and it sounds so mediaeval and so ignorant to say, that something which is pure energy suddenly becomes matter, matter suddenly becomes pure energy.
Why?
We don't know.
Or this matter becomes pure energy which becomes another kind of matter altogether.
Why?
We don't know.
The level of ignorance is so astounding, and it is so immature and primitive to even make declarations like this and then claim that you understand the world. So you can say we don't understand, we just observe this. This is where we are today.
But the question really when you go deep enough resolves itself into this first insight that so-called stable matter or particle is not really that. All is moving energy. Energy moving, rippling, somehow goes into a whirl. It still keeps moving and rippling but now repeating round and round. You release the knot, and the energy moves out.
So first we have got rid of so-called stable particle or stable matter. There is no such thing. There is only moving energy. Energy which takes up appearances of repeating, stable, movement, circulation, and the only stability is this constant repetition of the form of the change.
Think about it.
Once we have come to this, what is this energy?
You see it is again one of those very primitive, immature, insufficient declarations of science: all is energy. What is energy? It's the capacity to do something. That's how they would define it.
Whose capacity?
How does it do something?
What does it mean to have a capacity?
What is the thing itself that you call energy?
So when you start reading Sri Aurobindo, he he deals with this much more directly from the yoga perspective which aligns perfectly with also the Vedic science which is far more mature, far more developed in most ways than even modern science except we do not see directly or easily the correlation between the two because it starts from a top-down vision of an explanation of reality. But still we'll get to that.
So instead of talking about energy, the vocabulary used by Sri Aurobindo is “force”. There is a pressure as if, a wave of pressure pushing that is what science sees as energy. When that wave of pressure which is really something pushing, it is actually pushing, a force pushing. When it starts whirling seems to be stable in some place you could say it's a particle or you could say it's a concentration of energy. Energy is nothing but force which is held waiting, but it never stops moving, it is still a force or released, and so you move from potential to kinetic energy.
So at this point I'm going to discard all the superficial phenomenal descriptions of modern physical science, they are insufficient, and we resolve everything in reality to force.
Force moving, going into a loop of movement appearing to be static, stable, in the whirl, released from the loop, continuing to move but never stopping, in fact it keeps moving.
Force which is not just in one point but as a wave, not just as a wave but as a gigantic universal cosmic wave, not just one wave but waves upon waves upon waves layered, each following its own play of force, movement, direction, intensity, rhythm, oscillation, resonance, interaction, conflict, head-on collisions.
But what happens when there's a head-on collision of pure force? Force passes through force.
(0:10:49):
But when you have a rhythm of force, the rhythm interacts with rhythm and either adds to create a crest through resonance or cancels itself to create an appearance of lower rhythms. Think about it.
But always force passes right through. It never conflicts with itself. It just combines to make complex, phenomenal creations, appearances.
Now you begin to look at the universe, you begin to understand things better. What appears as, let's say, a stable wave or a gathering a bundle of energy is nothing but force waving, flowing, combining and rhythming.
Now if you look at, in science, they speak of a resonance. You take a string, tie strings on two ends and then wave it and it bounces back, and there's a point where the going wave and the coming wave combine and you get peaks and troughs and stable points. So where you have a peak, it's as if there's a bundle of energy sitting there static, isn't it? That's the appearance. That's where your physical science today looks at it and says, ah there is energy potential. No, actually there is only dynamic force. That force repeating, rhythming in a same place or in a same reasonably similar appearance becomes so-called energy, static, condensed, captured, moving, bundle of energy, particle, all these are phenomenal appearances of pure force.
Ok? So we have a very different view now. Everything in the universe is force. Where did this force come from? What is its essential origin, character? We will come to that shortly.
But you recognise first: everything is force, all is moving, there is no such thing as static, static is only an appearance.
So I'm going to read from Sri Aurobindo briefly for this elaboration. There's an entire chapter in The Life Divine which is titled “Conscious Force”. So we are already anticipating that the force is conscious. But first let's look at force. The chapter begins like this: “All phenomenal existence resolves itself into Force, into a movement of energy that assumes more or less material, more or less gross or subtle forms for self-presentation to its own experience.” There you have everything encapsulated in a single sentence.
First, “All phenomenal existence”, everything that you, well, experience in appearance, “resolves itself into Force,”-capital-‘F’. And this force is what we will play a little bit with this exploration, look at its ranges from higher and lower gradations and then go to the yoga force proper.
And then, from, after saying “into Force”, he elaborates or restates this term into force as “into a movement of energy that assumes more or less material, more or less gross or subtle forms”.
It's movement of an energy which “assumes” an appearance not just material, “more or less material” or “more or less gross” or more or less “subtle”.
So the thing is within that there is a ranging: more gross, more material, more subtle, and there are variations. The same energy is assuming all these forms but assuming all these forms “for self-presentation to its own experience”.
It looks at itself and says, ‘I am like this’, ‘I am this’, ‘I feel like this’, ‘I am that’ to present to itself an appearance. Think about what that means.
(0:15:05):
We look at the analogy we used of the rope first. The rope, which is going through waves forward and backward. Now these waves combine and create this appearance of a large circle and then a gap and a large circle and a gap which repeats. So you can say the rope assumes a form of large circles arranged neatly for its own sense of appearance. Of course this wouldn't apply to the rope because the rope is not conscious but here we will see the force is conscious so it can choose to take an appearance to itself.
“In the ancient images by which human thought attempted to make this origin and law of being intelligible and real to itself, this infinite existence of Force was figured as a sea,”-so, this is one way we visualise it, represent it-“initially at rest and therefore free from forms, but the first disturbance, the first initiation of movement necessitates the creation of forms and is the seed of a universe.”
So the way this is represented to us to help us understand is to conceive of a huge ocean, infinite ocean of force, “initially at rest”, and therefore you have no sense of form. But the moment it starts moving with disturbance, the cause of the disturbance also we will see, you have the sense of forms emerging, initially unstable because the movement doesn't repeat, but when the movement begins to repeat and combinations of movements create these resonant repetitive forms then we have appearance of stable forms, but anyway there are forms with movement, “and is the seed of a universe”, the entire universe emerges from this.
And then he comes straight to matter. “Matter is the presentation of force which is most easily intelligible to our intelligence, moulded as it is by contacts in Matter to which a mind involved in material brain gives the response.” So because our intelligence is moulded in matter so we understand matter better.
Now comment like this can only be appreciated when like Sri Aurobindo you have had at least glimpses of other worlds and our other states in those worlds, where our intelligence is not moulded by matter, not bound in a brain. So since Sri Aurobindo has actually explored all those domains and then he comes to the material world, he has to describe it in relation to what it's like to have a free intelligence. You could live, for example, in the mental consciousness, in the mental world, free of the body and your intelligence functions so differently. But here the same intelligence bound in the brain now formed with its physical way of looking at things moulded as it is by contacts in matter. So matter is the most intelligible presentation of force.
So when you look at matter, you say, ah, I don’t see force, but when matter collides, you say, ha, now I can feel force, in impact of matter with matter. What's really happening is the secret force inside this and the secret force inside that are entering in a relation where something of the interplay, which is already happening even without my fist touching my hand, which is already happening, there's exchange of force, I don't see, I don't feel, but now when it hits, then I say, ah, now I know this is force. So we are seeing a tiny quantity of the humongous force which is behind matter leaking out in very superficial phenomena. But this is the only way we can understand force.
He describes the five states, elemental states, by which form is built up and stable matter appears. So when he says: “All forms of Matter of which we are aware, all physical things even to the most subtle, are built up by the combination of these five elements.” We have discussed this before, I won't repeat this. Upon them also depends all our sensible experience and he describes how the five senses relate to the five elements.
And with all that we come to the recognition that finally through our senses what we are doing is experiencing contact of force on us. So through our sight the force that comes as light impinges and it translates in the mind as sight. Another force vibrating impinges on hearing, translates in mind as sound. Force impinges on our skin sensations, we translate as touch and so on. Finally all our perceptions through five senses are really representations of force meeting force. But in one of these five which correspond to the five statuses that originating force takes to form physical matter. We have discussed this, I don't think I should repeat.
But you will recall that pure force vibrating in itself entering in relation with itself in the rhythms of expansion and contraction is what we call the ‘etheric principle’.
The same force in expansion and contraction begins to build complex resonances which can push and pull. This becomes the basis for the air principle.
When those resonances now repeat to create stable appearance, we have the fire principle where you build a form but the form may not be solid, may not be permanent.
And so, two further principles of modification which is immergence- blending of two things into each other which becomes the water principle.
And the rigidity which becomes the earth principle.
(0:21:25):
So five statuses of force, modifications of force, to create stable appearance of matter, and according to each of these workings are our five senses.
Having said all this, here is a description of the entire universe:
Across all planes is one force. More or less dense, more or less material, more or less subtle, that's the only difference. Everywhere you have the five senses or the five principles operating and therefore five senses of perception. Interesting. Even if for example as some people have said, we do have the perception, the sense of magnetic fields. Birds can sense the earth's magnetic fields, so can we. With a little bit of training we can awaken it. The faculty is there. How would we feel it? We would feel it as a pressure, as a pull, as a sensation. Eventually it has to be translated into one of the five sensory modes of perception or as a sound or as a light.
See some birds which can see, in their eyes they have a filter which allows them to see light which has been polarised. So when they look at the sky they see bands aligning to the magnetic field of the earth, because the magnetic field modifies the light slightly, tilts the polarisation and so effectively you end up seeing magnetic fields as sight, as modifications in the light or a sensation or a smell, touch, taste. There cannot be any other, and you understand because this comes by the fact that force chooses five kinds of self-modification, you cannot have any other senses. All perceptions of anything would be resolved eventually to variations of these five.
So now I am still staying at the very big picture which is true across all the worlds. One force through five degrees of self-modification and therefore five senses. The senses might be enormously rich. You go into the subtle-physical worlds, vital worlds, mental worlds and everything is so much more deep, rich, nuanced, detailed, complex. Even as an experience, an emotion in the vital world is so much more multifaceted. You take for example a flower. In the physical world, which is world of form, you smell the flower, you look at the colour, form, through sight, taste, touch, smell. What you experience is so much reduced by the biology.
So as you breathe, first of all the nose has a dulling effect, within that the sensations have to be translated through so many chemical processes, into so many electrical limited signals, into the brain in so many processings. By the time your consciousness which is pure mind receives the imprint of the perfume it has been reduced a thousand fold at least in richness, in nuances and in depth. The same flower in the subtle-physical world you smell and it's as if you can experience the same thing a thousand times more rich details, diversity, depth of ranges of nuances and subtlety. And when you experience it slightly higher up in the higher gradations of subtle worlds or vital or mental worlds where you do not have the limits of the physical body in any way including when you breathe the flower, perfume, your entire being is breathing not just your nose, not just the biology sensory organs, your entire being is breathing not just the perfume but the taste, smell, texture, beingness, consciousness of flower, and you rhythm, resonate with flower, you become the flower and with full nuances of its richness, and you enjoy that.
But all this is really force having taken a certain complex rhythm, rhythming form, met by force, the same force, taking up another complex rhythming form, and the two meeting each other and enjoying each other, force enjoying force through its complex forms.
(0:26:06):
Now we see something is missing here, because we are not just force, we are also conscious. So there's a consciousness in the force that is enjoying it. Isn't it?
So Sri Aurobindo has another amazing insight, he says, when force repeats even unendingly to create let's say appearance of atom or stone or flower in this case, it's because force is repeating itself at humongous speed and a humongous quantum of content of energy whirling-whirling, repeating that you say, ah there's a flower. But the perception of something static comes because actually behind force there is something stable which is origin of the force.
And so the force when it repeats is actually representing a quality of that from which it is originating.
Think about it.
Behind force is something humongous, static, with infinite possibilities in its being, infinitely rich and diverse. And when the force whirls-whirls-whirls to become this flower, it is as if capturing or representing a tiny aspect of that infinitely rich and diverse consciousness, which is always complete, never moving, it is itself in every way, representing a tiny piece of it in the whirl and through the whirl's repetition.
Now you begin to see something quite amazing. You know the projector projects an image from the reel which is inside. Okay today we don't have reels, we have a television or a screen which is taking data from somewhere and projecting it as a picture. Isn't it? The whirl of the image is projecting something which was always existent. Now it is revealed, it is manifest, brought into multiplicity of appearance.
So flower is manifest by the force whirling, but flowerness of this flower was always present in the static-origin in which everything else is present also.
So now you get a very different picture.
Behind is this humongous static free consciousness with every possibility, anything you could imagine and everything beyond your imagination, all simultaneously present. And a force that bursts out from this whirling-whirling-whirling in across space-time into infinity, eternity, and every whirl, every rhythm is somehow representing an aspect of that which was already present in consciousness and therefore the whirling force repeating here creates in our perception the sense, aha there is a flower, oh this is beautiful perfume, beautiful experience.
So in a sense, this manifests the origin. But we who enjoy in our consciousness are also that origin, that consciousness meeting itself or an aspect of itself or a tiny portion of itself through this sensory perception as it enjoys the play of force.
In the Sankhya system, they say, we are so many different individual centres of consciousness, souls. But actually even the soul-limiting is a fragment, a piece, an appearance of the one soul which is all. There is no other. This fragmenting appearance itself is part of the objective of this play of the force limiting, and Sri Aurobindo explains this as the mind which is universal, which is one of the aspects of consciousness, allowing itself to be bound and limited in the whirling of the form, to create a sense of separation of mind, and therefore my mind is separate from flower mind, separate from your mind, and therefore all of us can have as if a separate experience of each other when in fact all experience that we are having is a fragment and part of the totality of experience of the one knowing itself entirely, utterly.
So you see what force does.
(0:30:37):
Force first of all reveals, manifests that one in forms. And because, well, no form is enough, because whatever you do in form is limiting, it is extended out into infinity and eternity unendingly so that eventually in some sense of totality everything will tend to be represented however to whatever limited degree. But because that is never limited, this can never end. So across space, across time, there will always be bursts of newness, and newness, and newness, unendingly, giving the sense of the growth, of an evolution, of an unfolding of something never before seen. And force is the means to reveal, manifest, express.
In the more material gradations, force has concentrated itself to create rigidity of form and as you bind everything into limitation of rigidity. As you go up in the finer gradations form is not so dominant. Of course form is there everywhere but it's not the dominant theme rather the quality of consciousness of the whirling of force and what it expresses, and the form is plastic.
So as the Mother describes, as you go into higher grades of consciousness, your form is a representation of your state of consciousness and it changes according to your state of consciousness.
Form is fluid. And yet there is something persistent, you meet somebody and say, of course it is this person. It may be in the form of a child, it may be in the form of an adult or just a big glow of light, you still know the person because of the quality of consciousness which is constant, the consciousness within, of which the whirling gives an expression.
So this force now we can see is so-so-so important.
But does it come out of that?
And this is the insight Sri Aurobindo gives: Not really. The two are aspects of each other. There is only one consciousness which is enjoying itself in its totality, in its sufficiency, complete autarky and freedom, and within it naturally is also this power which is represented by the working of the force, and simultaneously the two coexist.
Sri Aurobindo describes this in The Life Divine in this way: “Stability and movement, we must remember, are only our psychological representations of the Absolute, even as … oneness and multitude. The Absolute is beyond stability and movement as it is beyond unity and multiplicity.” So as “beyond” it includes both of these. But it is really as an experience not limited by either. “But it takes its eternal poise in the one and the stable and whirls round itself infinitely, …”
So, in the Absolute consciousness which is that, it takes a poise in the eternal and the stable and at the same time it “whirls round itself infinitely”.
So this is what we've been describing so far.
So, So, “whirls round itself infinitely, inconceivably, securely in the moving and multitudinous.”
Look at these, each of these words.
“whirls round itself infinitely”: so there's an infinity of the whirls in the same rhythm and in variations, and there's an infinity of variations, the true sense of infinite.
See infinite is a very poor translation of the Sanskrit word an-anta, unending or unlimited which has no bounding limit. So when you think of infinite, you have to think of a dynamic movement which is never ending, not merely repetition of the same form but all variations of all its possibilities unendingly in every way across space, across time, across all unending variations.
So “whirls round itself infinitely, inconceivably”.
If you try to conceive of it, you are limiting. It always exceeds your conception, because the richness and the nuances of whirls within whirls within whirls within whirls, because within each whirl there is also the stable, the whirl forms a centre which is stable. Right?
(0:35:26)
So within every movement of the whirl are as if is an implied stability and subwhirls which form within which are sub whirls, within which are sub whirls, unendingly. Ok? You cannot conceive in the infinity of the rich detailing “securely”. You can whirl with the most intense throw of yourself with the full power of the throw and never lose yourself because there is nothing other than your stable self around which you will whirl unendingly.
So it can have a humongous intensity and throw itself totally to point of self-loss but always utterly secure “in the moving and multitudinous”, the multiplicity that forms.
Then he says in summary: “World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: …”
So, behind this dance, what is it this movement of throwing?
It’s an “ecstatic” throwing, the full intensity of its infinite bliss in which it throws itself to reveal, and that is what we experience as the existence of this world when you say, ha there is a universe, there is a world, there is a cosmos.
“World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva”, that’s what you are seeing, that’s what you are, or rather not seeing when you stop with the surface appearance, but behind all appearances is this: “World-existence is the ecstatic dance of Shiva which multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: …”.
There is one.
Finally it's not two, you cannot divide it. But that body is now represented in each whirl. Remember the flower is a whirl to represent one aspect of that one body. So every single thing in the universe, every whirl in the universe, is like a lens capturing a tiny point of the projection, so I use this analogy of the projector, remember.
But if the thing which is being projected is infinite, you need an infinity of projectors to project different facets. Or we may stretch the analogy and say, an infinity of frames in the film to narrate the full story separately in pieces, in steps.
So even as this flower is an aspect of that one, because of the particular whirl, this flower is another aspect of the same one with its own particular expression, because of the nature of the whirl.
So “multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view: …”. You are looking at it and you say, oh my God, so many beautiful things, so many stars, so many galaxies, so many beautiful flowers, so many trees, mountains. But actually they are all one body of the one God “numberlessly” multiplied in aspects. Each is entirely the one God represented with a special aspect.
And while this is happening in the ecstatic dance what happens to that? Does it fragment itself? No, “it leaves that white existence precisely where and what it was, ever is and ever will be;”-nothing is changed-”its sole absolute object is the joy of the dancing".
So as he dances, in Shiva's dance, he is revealing his own body in a multitudinous way and yet he never changes, he remains always Shiva in his auspicious, pure, exalted, liberated, free poise at the peak of the Mount Kailash, as that's the grade or nature of the consciousness described, actually not a physical location, and that poise he is ever free, even as he multiplies his body numberlessly to the view.
Force and the poise of the consciousness of static: both are aspects of the same one absolute. But force is the means by which it is revealed.
Now that force when it moves in its most slow laborious mechanical seemingly lost self-lost, unconscious that we call ‘physical’.
When it reveals itself more free, more plastic, more expressive, more conscious, in its response to the play with the rest of the forces, we say, ah, this is life, living, it is responding, it is changing.
When it becomes even more expressive of its own autonomy and freely expresses its own forms and creates, we will say, ah, this is mind.
But it is always force in different degrees or gradations of expression.
For those of you who are interested, you may read further of this passage I have read from The Life Divine of the dance of Shiva. He expresses how both Shiva and Kali are really double aspects of the same one simultaneously present.
So, we come back to force now.
(0:40:50):
Force is this dance of Shiva. And even as it reveals everything, it develops as if in appearance gradations. As you go higher up, there is the pure working of the force where it expresses its greater freedom, almost as if it is at the creative source of its freedom of which specialised aspects become more and more limited, bound, lost, seemingly. But they are lost in what? In themselves, in their own whirl and the joy of the whirl, bliss of Shiva's concentration on his own bliss. That becomes matter or even inconscience. The bliss is never gone. It's just lost, wrapped in itself as if in trance.
But when he wakes from the trance in the higher ranges, he is actively expressing or the consciousness is freely expressing. There we will say the whirl, the force is conscious force or even superconscious force.
So now we see in the working of the force gradations, although the source of the force is one, the force itself is one, in its working there are as if gradations, degrees, statuses, and this is where we will begin to make a difference.
In your own body there is the same force working to form so to say your material substance. There is the same force now in its freer flow moving to animate the substance to fill it and to move it through biological processes, through electrical processes, through subtle-physical processes, through life-energy force processes, through mental awareness processes and so on. But all simultaneously present across so many layers. But always the same force ultimately taking stations, gradations of its freedom of working.
And then there is the particular consciousness which the force has so to say reflected from the origin which you say is, ‘ha I am conscious’, ‘I am choosing to move my hand’. But force is again as I said like the lens which is showing you a piece, a fragment, a special focus of the one consciousness.
When my mind truly stands back from force and it's, well, limiting appearance, it unites with its own source and origin, it says, ‘I am infinite’, ‘I am eternal’, ‘I am that’, ‘one’, ‘indivisible’.
When it leans to participate in the flow of the force and its limiting focus of lens, I say, ‘oh I am this one person’.
When it identifies fully with the knot that force has made with the body, I say, ‘I am so and so born on this date with a limited lifespan, as long as my body is there I exist otherwise I go, I am no more’. I shift my gradation of identification in the form, that force and play of force have created, I come to mind I say, ‘oh I'm actually eternal but I go through changes in appearance’.
So you have a gradation of consciousness represented or encased by the play of force.
All this is preparatory to our deeper understanding of the yoga force.
So since this force has formed this, this body is now working within its limitation, this consciousness now bound in the body form and life force and mind is limited in its consciousness and is struggling to free itself from erroneous identification. Well it could by a process of psychological stepping back disengage. But what happens to this formation of force?
So upon this force, who willed this form, shaped this form, guided this force?
Force itself in its freer superconscious status as it moved to flow to form this body, to represent a certain possibility from the divine, you can say, force originated from the delight of the divine to represent itself numberlessly to the view, to will itself into form, it has taken this form but now is bound in the rhythm. So that shaped this rhythm. That now is not far away, it is still there supporting the force, can enter this rhythm and reshape itself.
You're born let's say with your fist closed. Your consciousness enters your fingers and changes the shape. Isn't it? The movement of consciousness flowing through expresses you. But what does it express of you right now? The limited consciousness you are.
So there are two movements. One is your consciousness awakening to a wider, greater truth of itself and the second is the capacity of this consciousness now to will itself to express through a vehicle that is still somewhat rigid and limiting pushing it. If you push too hard, it might break. So you nudge slowly. But all this was happening unconsciously, now we are going to do it consciously.
(0:46:14):
So we ask the same force in its originating status, can you help to reshape? So you call as if the higher grade of the force to fill and reshape the lower grade of the force working. And this is where we are calling the yoga, shakti, energy of yoga and the spiritual force.
I wanted to give this background before we go to Sri Aurobindo's letter so that we can appreciate the sense of this continuum of the force. When that higher force comes, it is not dealing with anything other than itself, it is dealing with its own lower working, and therefore it can override, change, modify in any way.
If some let’s say external force which is not of that higher grade comes into it, you say, well change my body, it comes and pulls apart the pieces and they fall apart. Right? Because this is not capable of modifying this with a deeper and greater intelligence.
That which originated this knows this intimately and can infuse, infill the movement of the force and nudge and shape and recast itself inside out. Ok?
So this is the relationship of the two, and that's why that higher force can override the lower and modify it with no limit potentially, limit only to the extent that in the play of forces the balance has to be kept.
So now we come to a question put to Sri Aurobindo: “What is the Yoga shakti? What is Yogic mind-force, Yogic life-force and Yogic body-force?”
So the answer is quite, it’s a bit long, but we will go through it in detail because it covers many aspects of the question which has come before.
Sri Aurobindo: “In the Yogic consciousness one is not only aware of things, but of forces, not only of forces, but of the conscious being behind the forces. One is aware of all this not only in oneself but in the universe.”
So, well, as your consciousness begins to open to the deeper and higher ranges of itself, you become conscious of this.
“There is a force which accompanies the growth of this new consciousness and at once grows with it and helps it to come about and to perfect itself. This force is the Yoga shakti.”
Shakti is the general Sanskrit term for energy but implies conscious energy rather consciousness as energy.
So, “This force is the Yoga shakti. It is here asleep and coiled up in all the centres of our inner being (chakras) and is at the base what is called in the Tantras the Kundalini Shakti. But it is also above us, above our head as the Divine Force—not there coiled up, involved, asleep, but awake, scient, potent, extended and wide; …”
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So remember the knots we have spoken of so far. On every level there's a whirl. So within our physical body and within the nervous system of course there are physical whirls, but there is also the potency of the higher gradations lost as if hidden inside, bound to, identified with this. So those become the special focal points within us and that's why “coiled”, it's a whirl involved identifying itself with the more material, vital basis and asleep, it's as if forgotten its freedom here mechanically in the whirl.
Above us is the free working of that originating divine force, the one, the superconscious force that initially burst to move out in this way, so the divine force, and there not asleep, not coiled, not involved, awake, utterly conscious, with full power, extended into the wideness of the whole universe and wide, “it is there waiting for manifestation”.
So initially remember the force went to manifest as universe. But this is the station of the force waiting to manifest much more into universe. Universe was the first base into which so much more is being poured in as a continuing manifestation. So here “waiting for manifestation and to this Force we have to open ourselves—to the power of the Mother”.
So, so far we looked at force using the term ‘force’ as conscious even, but now when you relate to the force as force embracing you, nourishing you, forming you, the natural relationship is one of the creative presence not only being blissful but also utterly self-giving in love. And the divine love is the complete identification in the bliss of the divine, and it is this force with this love that pours, stations itself and then flows into us. So to this we have to open ourselves, to the power of the Mother.
Why? Because our whirl as a whirl is closed. As long as we remain closed, the force nudges, force against whirling. When we open our whirl, then force fills and participates in the whirling and changes from inside out the whirling. So it is also force in a more impersonal way, power of the Mother in a more personal way.
When this now fills at different statuses, stations, within us, it takes on different qualitative highlight. So in the mind it highlights differently, in the vital differently. So Sri Aurobindo says:
“In the mind it manifests itself as a divine mind-force or a universal mind-force and it can do everything that the personal mind cannot do;”-so, whatever you cannot do when you open, you receive that which can do everything that you cannot do, in the mind-“it is then the Yogic mind-force.”
So that filling your mind can not only give you knowledge but can reshape the working of the mind from its current whirling rhythm into a different whirling rhythm of a higher grade and a freer operation, even wider identification.
“When it manifests and works in the vital or physical in the same way, it is then apparent as a Yogic life-force or a Yogic body-force.” So, obviously in these levels also, it can do everything that these cannot do, so even in the vital and the physical, it can do all those things.
“When it manifests and works in the vital or physical in the same way,”-we repeat-”it is then apparent as a Yogic life-force or a Yogic body-force. It can awake in all these forms, bursting outwards and upwards, extending itself into wideness from below; ...”
So when it descends here, from inside it can burst out. And as it extends itself, it carries a part of you, shapes you and reforms you to open to these outward and upward, “extending itself into wideness from below”.
So the entire consciousness which is narrowly individualised now begins to as if feel wider-freer, wider-freer and opening to the higher ranges of its own wideness.
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Now what we are familiar with, but we have not brought into this model when we discuss only universe as force, is that on each plane there is a, or different each grade of density there is a narrow working of force and wider working of force, or if you translate it into consciousness you will say on every plane there is a lower grade of the consciousness and a higher grade. In the vital, they are the lower including hells, and the higher including heavens and some of these are really beautiful, sweet, incredibly heavenly, joyous and massively wide and still of the vital grade. In the mind similarly from the lower narrow petty to the wider freer almost universal and extraordinarily beautiful captivating mind regions. Each has its range, so this is what we recognise.
On each of these levels it can open to its higher possibilities, “bursting” outward and upward, “extending itself into wideness from below”, but in that grid.
“or it can descend and become there a definite power for things; …” So the thing comes, enters, develops power, a capacity, to operate on that lower level as a power of action.
“it can pour downwards into the body, working, establishing its reign, extending into wideness from above,”-linking-”the lowest in us with the highest above us, release the individual into a cosmic universality or into absoluteness and transcendence.”
So this of course being particularly the way we look at it as the consciousness of the Divine Mother who lives in that, who is that, as she enters into us because remember it's all one continuous force, she enters into all these ranges and from here she awakens the link to all these higher ranges which means our body is not dissolved into the higher, it becomes now a container into which the higher can pour itself and through which the higher can express itself.
So when the individual is released into the cosmic universality, you don't dissolve. There is a focal point of individuality but the consciousness it expresses is now of this cosmic universality. So the formation of the whirl of force retains still the individual focus but what it can hold now is as if it opens out to a consciousness which earlier was a narrow lens focusing, a narrow aspect of the divine, opens out now into a wider lens that reveals more and more of the totality of the divine.
So it's a very different way of looking at it from the point of view of force, and that was part of the objective of this exercise. But when you look at it this way as one continuum of force, you can understand why the highest force and the lowest being a continuum, there's nothing which prevents the yoga force from changing whatever it chooses to. Because it is conscious, superconscious force, when it changes one thing in one part it is simultaneously aware of everything else in every other part. And so the complex weaving of knots of the force are all held in perfect balance, and as one part grows it realigns and reshapes and holds in balance the rhythms of all the other parts which is why only a superconscious force can transform you, liberate you and accelerate this evolutionary process without breaking the balance.
Of course there are resistance points and now we come to our usual vocabulary of things which resist etc. But they represent only knots of force which are still lost in their sleep and when this free consciousness enters and participates in the whirl, it awakens those knots and brings them into a wider opening also.
So I took this occasion to share something of this vision of universe as manifestation of force, and this force is of course Mother's force, the divine Mother's force, it is the yoga force because it is the force which comes from the concentration of the creative power which brings or brings us back to our oneness. It is at the same time the “ecstatic dance of Shiva” that “multiplies the body of the God numberlessly to the view”. And in a sense, all this is taking place within his dance, in the rhythms of his dance.
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And coming back to the other statement of Sri Aurobindo where he says everything in this universe is force finally.
There's another letter of Sri Aurobindo where he says, somebody asked some kind of a silly question, Sri Aurobindo's response: “You can’t order anything to the Mother’s force; the Mother’s force is the manifestation of the Mother herself.”
So what you realise here also is the consciousness that pours into you is her consciousness, is herself, is form of her even. And so there we are.
“All phenomenal existence resolves itself into Force, into a movement of energy” which then represents consciousness of the divine.
I think that's about all I want to say in regard to this question. I'll take a quick look at the chat box. Rampal asks, how do we manage all of these forces?
We don't. We are formed of them.
So the chapter from The Life Divine is called “Conscious Force”.
And the letter which I read from Sri Aurobindo is, the letter dated 23rd March 1933 about what is this yoga force or yoga shakti and Mother's force.
So for a while now our discussions have been extending more and longer and longer and we even reached a point where it was about two hours, and I felt that gets a bit longish even for people to listen to and one hour is a good target to keep, and today I think we have just completed one hour so it will be a good point to pause.
In our relationship with the physical world, with matter itself, with our physical body, it is of great help to bring this perception of the force as the underlying truth of things. It makes us recognise that: even what is seemingly hard matter is only an appearance; even stone is nothing but that supreme creative consciousness and force in whirl expressing an aspect of the body of the Lord; and the totality of all these aspects is an attempt in the creative dance to represent the totality of the Lord in various states which is the reason why even in the physical universe everything is held in perfect harmony, in perfect alignment, a perfection of balance of forces and influences so beautifully held, so spontaneously held, that science, a scientist observing with the mind says, ‘ah that's a law’.
What law? Whose law? Who imposes the law? Who forms the law? Who compels the universe to follow the law?
It's again one of those childish formulations of the mind which is proud of its discovery, ‘I discovered a law of physics’.
No. There's no law.
There is only this consciousness that holds everything in perfect balance.
But because the divine itself is unending, Ananta, dynamically evolving so to say although never changing, so in the universe the body of the Lord as a totality itself is revealing more and more of itself which we call ‘evolution’ which is this whole forward thrust of the unfolding of time itself. It's his body so to say unfolding, revealing its own deeper and higher completeness. And so he is not completely represented in just infinity of space, but also into the unfolding eternity of time. That means, if the divine is ultimately supramental, Sachchidananda, then in the physical world itself, in the unfolding of time, the Sachchidananda must be represented in physical matter and through physical matter as physical matter. Otherwise it would not be representing the body of the Lord, isn't it?
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And therefore we see the unfolding of evolution, rhythming out, to grow to its supramental Sachchidananda manifesting in matter, and it is then that we can say, ‘ah yes now the totality of the body of the Lord is being expressed, is being revealed even in the material plane’.
So just keeping our focus on the material plane this perception of the force as the underlying reality of things is extremely helpful because it liberates us from the illusion of a rigidity and persistence of inertia. Finally, in a trice, this is whirling energy, in a trice it can be reshaped instantly, if the originating force so chooses, isn't it? So that's the power of the divine Shakti and the yoga force entering the flow of the stone force rhythm it can recast instantly for this lump of stone to become lump of gold just like that on a whim.
So within us too could be just like that on a whim. But here there's a different goal. It's not stone to gold which would still be of the same status. Here it is living conscious matter to living superconscious divinised matter, so the process is slower, there has to be a continuity in the evolutionary unfoldment, and therefore there's a sequence, but again potentially there's no limit on the rapidity.
Whatever you may experience as rigidity, resistance, heaviness, inertia, barriers, problems, blocks, remind yourself this is only an appearance of rhythming repetitive force. The higher force, freer conscious force, can enter, reshape, recast, dissolve, recreate anything instantly.
So the perception of force I'm highlighting for this advantage that it has of freeing us from the limitation of persistence of appearance of inertia and equally within us.
I think that would be a good point to end upon.
Within us the one who wields the play of this force around this individual, not just in the physical body, across all the gradations of all the bodies, who holds the individuality in place is a special aspect of the divine that presides over each one of us in the journey across space and time. That special aspect which presides over us, Sri Aurobindo uses the phrase “the central being”, aspect of the self, of which a special projection entering into the mind-life-body form of the whirl is the soul, the psychic being, which is still the divine.
So think of it from the experience of the psychic being when it looks out, encasing itself in the whirl of this form which builds gradations, layers of bodies around it, and then working through these forms to experience the world and then act upon the world.
It's a beautiful scene.
But it also means, to change the form is not difficult, it is only putting a nudge-nudge-nudge, and the flows change, modify whirls, new rhythms form, they take time to stabilise as new rhythms but nudge-nudge-nudge, everything can be changed. Nothing is bound, nothing is rigid, nothing is fixed. The only fixity is repetition of change in appearance, isn't it?
So it's a beautiful scene. We can dwell on this, meditate on this for a few minutes. And we will continue with other questions next time.
Namaste.