The frontiers of the Ignorance shall recede,
More and more souls shall enter into light,
Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear
And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame
And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight
And human wills tune to the divine will,
These separate selves the Spirit's oneness feel,
These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,
The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy
And mortal bodies of immortality.

A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell
And take the charge of breath and speech and act
And allthe thoughts shall be a glow of suns
And every feeling a celestial thrill

Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come
Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;
A sudden bliss shall run through every limb
And nature with amightier Presence fill.

Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
Illumine common acts with the Spirit's ray
And meet the deity in common things.

Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine.

From 'Savitri' By Sri Aurobindo

A Start
Each day, I promise myself not to try to
solve all my life problems at once-nor
shall I expect you to do so;
Starting each day, I shall try to learn
something new about me and
about you and about the world I live in, so that I may
continue to experience all things as if they
had been newly born;
Starting each day I shall remember to
communicate my joy as well as my despair,
so that we can know each other better;
Starting each day, I shall remind myself to
really listen to you and to try to hear your
point of view and to discover the least-
threatening way of giving you mine,
remembering that we are both growing and
changing in a hundred different ways;
Starting each day, I shall remind myself that I
am a human being and not demand
perfection of you until I am prefect,
so you're safe;
Starting each day, I shall try to be more
aware of the beautiful things in our world-
I'll look at the flowers, I'll look at the birds,
I'll look at the children, I'll feel the cool
breezes, I'll eat good food-and I'll share
these things with you;
Starting each day, I shall remind myself to
reach out and touch you, gently, with my
words, my eyes and with my fingers, because
I don't want to miss feeling you;
Starting each day, I shall dedicate myself
again to the process of being a lover-and then
see what happens;
You know, I'm really convinced that if you
were to define love, the only word big
enough to engulf it all would be "life"-
LOVE IS LIFE-in all its aspects....And if
you miss love, you miss life!
Please don't
-Leo Buscaglia

A childlike Trust

What are the conditions in which there is a descent of faith ?

The most important condition is an almost childlike trust, the candid trust of a child who is sure that it will come, who doesn't even ask himself about it; when he needs something he is sure that it is going to come. Well, it is this, this kind of trust - this indeed is the most important condition.

To aspire is indispensable. But some people aspire with such a conflict inside them between faith and abasensce of faith, trust and distrust, between the optimism which is sure of victory and a pessimism which asks itself when the catastrophe will come. Now if this is in the being, you may aspire but you don't get anything. And you say, " I aspired but didn't get anything." It is because you demolish your aspiration all the time by your lack of confidence.

........."What I need will be given to me; if I pray I shall have and answer; if I am in a difficulty and ask for help, the help will come- and not only will it come but it will manage everything." If the trust is there, spontaneous, candid, unquestionning, it works better than anything else, and the results are marvellous. It is with the contradictions and doutbts of the mind that one spoils everything, with this kind of notion which comes when one is in difficulties : "Oh, it is impossible ! I shall never manage it. And if it is going to be aggravated, if this condition I am in, which I don't want, is going to grow still worse, if I continue to slide down farther and farthe, if , if, if, if....." like that, and one builds a wall between oneself and the force one wants to receive. The psychic beign has this trust, has it woderfully, without a shadow, without an argument without a contradiction. And when it is like that, there is not a prayer which does not get and answer, no aspiration which is not realised.

Certainely a personal effort is needed to preserve one's faith, to let it grow within. Later-much later- one day, looking back, we may see that everything that happened, even what seemed to us the worst, was a Divine Grace to make us advance on the way; and then we become aware that the personal effort too was a grace. But before reaching that point, one has to advance much, to struggle much, sometimes even to suffer a great deal.

To sit down in inert passivity and say, "If I am to have faith I shall have it, the Divine will give it to me", is an attitude of laziness, of unconsciousness and almost of bad-wil.

For the inner flame to burn, one must feed it; one must watcg iver tge fure, throw into it the fuel of all the errors one wants to get rid of, all that delays the progress, all that darkens the path. If one doesn't feed the fire, it smoulders under the ashes of one's unconsciousness and inertia, and then, not years but lives, centuries will pass before one reaches the goal.

One must watch over one's faith as one watches over the birth of something infinitely precious, and protect it very carefully from everything that can impair it.

From the writings of the Mother

Knowledge is within you
There is one thing certain about the mind and its workings; it is that you can understand only what you already know in your own inner self. What strikes you in a book is what you have already experienced deep within you. Men find a book or a teaching very wornderful and often you hear them say, "That is exactly what i myself feel and know, but I could not bring it out or express it as well as it is expressed here." When men come across a book of true knowledge, each finds himself there, and at every new reading he discovers things that he did not see in it at first; it opens to him each time a new field of knowledge that had till then escaped him in it.

But that is because it reaches layers of knowledge that were waiting for expression in the subconscious in him; the expression has now been given by somebody else and much better than he could himself have done it. But, once expressed, he immediately recognises it and feels that it is the truth. The knowledge that seems to come to you from outside is only an occasion for bringing out the knowledge that is within you.
From the writings of the Mother

The atmosphere u create
You carry with you, around you, in you, the atmosphere created by your actions, and if what you do is beautiful, good and harmonious, your atmosphere is beautiful, good and harmonious ; on the other hand, if you live in a sordid selfishness, unscrupulous self-interest, ruthless bad will, that is what you will breathe every moment of your life nad that means misery, constant uneasiness; it means ugliness that despairs of its own ugliness.
When you are good, when you are generous, noble, disinterested, kind, you create in you, around you, a particular atmosphere and this atmosphere is a sort of luminous release. You breathe, you blossom like a flower in the sun ; there is no painful recoil on yourself, no bitterness, no revolt, no miseries. Spontaneously, naturally, the atmosphere becomes luminous and the air you breathe is full of happiness. And this is the air that you breathe, in your body and out of your body, in the waking state and in the state of sleep, in life and in the passage beyond life, outside earthly life until your new life.
Every wrong action produces on the consciousness the effect of a wind that withers, of a cold that freezes or of burning flames that consume.
Every good and kind deed brings light, restfulness, joy - the sunshine in which flowers bloom.
From the writings of the Mother

The Divine Will is Unmistakable

How are we to know, you will ask, when it is the Divine Will that makes us act ? The Divine Will is not difficult to recognise. It is Unmistakable. You can know it without being very far on the path. Only you must listen to its voice, the small voice that is here in the heart. Once you are accustomed to listen, if you do anything that is contrary to the Divine Will, you feel an uneasiness. If you persist on the wrong track, you get very much disturbed. If, however, you give some material excuse as the cause of you uneasiness and proceed on you way, you gradually lose the faculty of perception and finally you may go on doing all kinds of wrong and feel no stop and ask of your inner self, "What is the cause of this ?"
then you do get the real answer and the whole thing becomes quite clear. Do not try to give a material excuse when you feel a little depression or a slight uneasiness. When you stop and look about for the reason, be absolutely straight and sincere. At first your mind will construct a very plausible and beautiful explanation. Do not accept it, but look beyond and ask, "What is it that is behind this movement ? Why am I doing this ?" Finally you will discover , hidden in a corner, the little ripple - a slight wrong turn or twist in your attitude that is causing the trouble or disturbance.
From writings of the Mother