There is a little bit of divine trick here. The onus is not on man at all. The entire evolutionary history is a witness to the fact that something else intervenes and picks up those marked out for evolution. No animal ever changes itself by its own effort. Yet there is a passage, a difficult transition because of the old form of life attached and clinging to its own ways. So either it can be left to its fate in which case life itself would not have been or ended up with prokaryotes. Or else to keep spurring it through a series of crisis which push it to grow. If when Nature is pushing it to grow, it still holds on to the old form then either it stays stuck in the little pool of muddy water or else dies off. Unfortunately, this is what is going to happen even now. There is a tremendous pressure mounting upon man and evolution is happening, will happen regardless of his effort. However, those who do not recognise this possibility or do not take the challenge that a crisis brings will either stay stuck in the human muddle which will gradually become worse and worse (given what we are and what we keep doing all around) or else die off like many species before. for nature it is only the breaking of a useless or dangerous toy.
The forms are gone and Nature moves on. So then what is the effort needed for? It is for collaborating in the process of change over to a new species and a new way. This effort makes the transition easier for us though it does not depend upon us, – a significant difference! Secondly by opting to surrender and follow the Guidance, the way shown we do not even have to face the crisis. she will take us through a safer smoother passage. It is out of Her immense Love that She is asking us to make a little effort which mainly consists of wanting the change (aspiration) since God is quite democratic in His ways, rejection (of the old ways of life, which is nothing external but only a change over from the lower and lesser to a higher and better mode of functioning) and surrender (which is akin to signing up for the changeover lest we start quibbling and complaining, in which case we can be shown that we signed up for it!). Naturally since we neither know nor understand the process there is also needed trust and faith. Finally, there is a super-shortcut through love and devotion since we then grow into the likeness of the person whom we love. Now all this is hardly any effort. Ask of traditional yogis wherein they are asked to do all sorts of long postures, breathing exercises and sit in meditation for hours, renounce all that you cherish and love, sometimes walk away from life as it unfolds in real time, eat grass or whatever, give yourself all kinds of sufferings and what not. Here the only thing needed is Remember and Offer and call Her Name. I think of all the yogas I have known, I have never encountered one that is easier than this yet the most far-reaching and fulfilling in its goal.
The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His. Thus in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sadhaka of the sadhana1 as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces its own realisation. The divine and all-knowing and all-effecting descends upon the limited and obscure, progressively illumines and energises the whole lower nature and substitutes its own action for all the terms of the inferior human light and mortal activity.
In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but always inevitable workings. Certainly, this is no short cut or easy sadhana. It requires a colossal faith, an absolute courage and above all an unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid,—the attempt of the ego to enter into contact with the Divine, the wide, full and therefore laborious preparation of the whole lower Nature by the divine working to receive and become the higher Nature, and the eventual transformation. In fact, however, the divine Strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for our weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It “makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills.” The intellect becomes aware of a Law that beneficently insists and a succour that upholds; the heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet, in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the most easy and sure of all.
