What is really important is to build a contact with God. He is everywhere and in everything and yet a veil hangs behind our heart and a lid above our head because of which our individual being and consciousness remain imprisoned within a small and narrow state of consciousness. The result is ignorance and suffering. The first thing needed therefore is to open some window, however small, so that from time to time we can have a little glimpse and breathe a little air and let in a little sunshine and rain without which one begins to experience stifled even with everything and everyone around. This little gap is rent by the force of concentration upon the Divine. It means to think of the Divine, to let one’s heart flow towards Him, to offer all one’s actions to Him. The rending of the veil is greatly assisted by a steady aspiration for Her Light and Peace and Love to grow within us.
As we grow in love for Her and as an inner quietude begins to envelope us, the veil thins and tears and the lid breaks open. By this concentration our consciousness starts getting ingathered and centered around the one single goal. This ingathering of consciousness gives it the power, turning it into something like a laser beam that one day pierces through the prison walls of the ego within which our soul is trapped. Then life begins to experience a beginning of freedom. Otherwise we remain dispersed and restlessly roam here and there from pillar to post within a narrow circle of various wants and desires.
To facilitate this concentration one can use various tools. Meditation is one such tool wherein one thinks of the Divine or if that is difficult reads something uplifting and beautiful about the Divine or something that has emerged as the spoken or written word from the embodied Divine. Reading such works is itself a meditation. More powerful than meditation is concentration upon the Divine Mother, on Her image and Her Name, very simply as Maa, Maa, Maa, preferably in the heart (center of the chest) or the head (anywhere in the head) or above the head. Initially it may be important and helpful to take out some time specifically for this but later it can go on unhindered through all the various activities of the day.
This can be a good start. Rest gradually develops on this basis. But this is the foundation of the spiritual path as shown by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Let us close with a few messages given by Sri Aurobindo to various disciples.
Let the new birth become manifest in your heart and radiate in calm and joy and take up all the parts of your being, mind and vision and will and feeling and life and body. Let each date in your life be a date of its growth and greater completeness till all in you is the child of the Mother. Let the Light and Power and Presence envelop you and protect and cherish and foster, till all in your inner and outer existence is one movement and an expression of its peace and strength and Ananda.
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It is the lesson of life that always in this world everything fails a man—only the Divine does not fail him, if he turns entirely to the Divine. It is not because there is something bad in you that blows fall on you—blows fall on all human beings because they are full of desire for things that cannot last and they lose them or, even if they get, it brings disappointment and cannot satisfy them. To turn to the Divine is the only truth in life.
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The Divine gives itself to those who give themselves without reserve and in all their parts to the Divine. For them the calm, the light, the power, the bliss, the freedom, the wideness, the heights of knowledge, the seas of Ananda.
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Live always as if you were under the very eye of the Supreme and of the Divine Mother. Do nothing, try to think and feel nothing that would be unworthy of the Divine Presence. 16 April 1930
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A veil behind the heart, a lid over the mind divide us from the Divine. Love and devotion rend the veil, in the quietude of the mind the lid thins and vanishes. 9 September 1936
