Answering My Own Questions

The suggestion came to me that it is due to ego that I have been trying to answer the questions I write to you.

There may be an egoism in making answers according to one’s own mental or vital preference — but there is no egoism in trying to get an answer inwardly from the source of Truth. One may not succeed perfectly because the consciousness is not perfect, but to be inactive and inert out of fear of error is not the right thing.

But what about the ego getting into my answering the questions with the higher knowledge?

The only thing necessary is to do the thing without the ego, but to stop doing it because the ego gets in would end in an entire inaction; for the ego can get into any action — into your asking questions from me as well as into your answering them yourself.

Was there any egoism in my answers about the sadhana?

Sometimes the ego may have mixed itself. Questions and answers in themselves are not egoistic.

Now I feel a great disgust with my way of answering the questions myself. I seek permission to give it up in the future.

How then do you propose to grow in consciousness and knowledge? Simply by reading my written answers? Unless something within you responds and sees what I mean and sees it in the right way. But that something can also get answers from within. The only safeguard necessary is that the answers should be placed before me so that if there is anything seriously incorrect it may be put right.

When what you write is correct, I say nothing — when it is your physical mind that brings in wrong ideas, I correct.

Formerly you had to correct hardly anything I wrote! Why this difference between now and then?

It is because you have come down from the mental into the physical — therefore the physical mind comes across the knowledge.

If I am not able to answer my own mental questions properly, what shall I be able to answer? Are not the inner, subtle and higher questions even more difficult to answer?

Certainly they are if you try to answer them mentally. In the things of the subtle kind having to do with the working of consciousness in the sadhana, one has to learn to feel and observe and see with the inner consciousness and to decide by the intuition with a plastic look on things which does not make set definitions and rules as one has to do in outward life.

My inner being does not like this questioning business. It often gets tired of it since it is all mental. But what to do when the intuition is not available?

So long as the outer mind is not quiet, it is impossible for intuition to develop. So if you want to go on asking intellectual questions about what is beyond the intellect until the intuition develops in spite of this activity, you will have to go on forever.

Now I want to put aside mental questioning and return to knowledge. Was anything wrong in the way it was descending before?

It was all right. It is not the way of descending that can be wrong — what one has to guard against is the mind making a wrong transcript of it or a lower mental mixture.

For some time I have discontinued writing with the help of the higher knowledge because I found that there was an egoism lurking in the mind, which was answering my questions according to its own ideas.

That is the mixture which has to be kept out.

I wonder if you find some ego in the knowledge I am reporting to you. I did experience distinctly some restlessness in my consciousness while writing it down.

There is a shade of ego in the tone perhaps but the substance has not been altered by it.

I want to know why even the tone of the knowledge was influenced by the ego. What form of ego still has a hold on me?

It is the sense of superiority in passing judgment on others that is still there, subconsciently at least.

Now I know how to keep out the ego from the higher knowledge, but not the limitation. I can’t express more than one or two sides of the truth and I lack an integral grasp over things.

What is to be kept out is the ego. Limitation of knowledge will necessarily be there so long as there is not the fullest wideness from above; that does not matter.