WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust
Different fields of experiences for the psychic
16 Sptember1953
Suppose a man endeavours in this life to become very intelligent, but if in the next life he is born an idiot, what is the use of all these efforts?
No, I spoke a little briefly, but it is not that. His psychic being is not stupid! Granting, for example, that the psychic being has had the experience of a man who was a writer and could translate his experience through books and speeches; thus he covered a particular field of experience due to the associations and circumstances in which this being lived. But there is a field of experience he misses. For example, he says: "I have lived with my brain, with the reactions of an intellectual to life, now I want to live with my feeling." For usually this over-activity of the intellect in ordinary life diminishes very much the capacity of feeling. Therefore in order to have another field of experience, of development, he renounces his intellectual height; he is no longer a genius, a writer of genius, he becomes an ordinary man, but with a remarkable heart, very kind, very generous. I said "idiot", but it is a question of comparison. It is not rare, for example, that a psychic being which has reached its maximum growth, after having enjoyed the experiences of a ruling authority [old p. 269](of all that the life of an emperor or king may bring) may want to be able to work in an obscure life, without being fettered all the time by governmental pomps, and may very well choose to be [new p. 268]born in quite an ordinary environment, an ordinary bourgeois family, in the most mediocre conditions, so as to have that kind of incognito which will allow it to work without being hampered by all the necessities of governmental display that are binding on one who is at the head of a country. So if you look at the thing from one point of view, you say: "How is it? what is this downfall?" It is not a downfall. It is meeting the problem from another angle, from another point of view. For the consciousness (I mean the true consciousness, the divine consciousness) success or failure are the same, glory or mediocrity are the same. What is important is the growth of the consciousness. And certain conditions that appear very favourable to human beings can be very unfavourable for the growth of the consciousness.... You may look at yourself. Naturally, if you are careful to be always at the height of your being, you do not fall into this error. But with ordinary thought, with ordinary reaction, you judge everything by success or failure, but that is the last way of judging, for it is the most artificial, the most external, that which is the very contrary of truth. In human life as it is at present organised, not once in a million can one find the true value in the forefront, recognised. Usually a little cabotinage is always necessary. When a man gets success, great success, whatever it is, in whatever domain it may be, you can be sure that somewhere there is some "cabotinage".