WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Power of true aspiration

16 June 1954

Why do we sometimes have a special preference for a certain chapter, for instance, the one on sincerity or aspiration?

You mean the desire to read it? Because one probably needs what is in it! If you have an attraction for something, usually it is that you need to read it, and it is exactly the thing you need to understand which comes to you. You can use this even with an altogether material method which I have often given you. See, you concentrate--if you have a difficulty or want to be helped, you concentrate and then insert a marker in a book and you alight upon the thing which is the answer to what you have asked. That is the most material means; but if the mind is well disposed, then, quite naturally, when it reads the titles, it will say, "Oh, this is what I want to read", without even knowing what is within, because it will feel that this is what has to be read to answer its question or its need.

Some people have this power even without having tried to make any progress, and somebody will always come along to give them a book and tell them, without even knowing why, "Here, read this book, it will interest you"; or else they will [new p. 176]enter [old p. 176]a house and see a book lying on the table--it is just the one thing they will want to read. It depends a great deal on the intensity of the inner aspiration. If you are in a state of conscious aspiration and very sincere, well, everything around you will be arranged in order to help in your aspiration, whether directly or indirectly, that is, either to make you progress, put you in touch with something new or to eliminate from your nature something that has to disappear. This is something quite remarkable. If you are truly in a state of intensity of aspiration, there is not a circumstance which does not come to help you to realise this aspiration. Everything comes, everything, as though there were a perfect and absolute consciousness organising around you all things, and you yourself in your outer ignorance may not recognise it and may protest at first against the circumstances as they show themselves, may complain, may try to change them; but after a while, when you have become wiser, and there is a certain distance between you and the event, well, you will realise that it was just what you needed to do to make the necessary progress. And, you know, it is a will, a supreme goodwill which arranges all things around you, and even when you complain and protest instead of accepting, it is exactly at such moments that it acts most effectively.

I have written a short sentence which will appear in the Bulletin, the next Bulletin. It goes something like this (I don't remember the words exactly now): If you say to the Divine with conviction, "I want only You", the Divine will arrange all the circumstances in such a way as to compel you to be sincere. [Note: "If earnestly you say to the Divine, `I want only Thee', the Divine will arrange the circumstances in such a way that you are compelled to be sincere."] Something in the being... "I want only You."... the aspiration... and then one wants a hundred odd things all the time, isn't that so? At times something comes, just... usually to disturb everything--it stands in the way and prevents you from realising your aspiration. Well, the Divine will come without showing [new p. 177]Himself, without your seeing Him, without your having any inkling [old p. 177]of it, and He will arrange all the circumstances in such a way that everything that prevents you from belonging solely to the Divine will be removed from your path, inevitably. Then when all is removed, you begin to howl and complain; but later, if you are sincere and look at yourself straight in the eye... you have said to the Lord, you have said, "I want only You." He will remain close to you, all the rest will go away. This is indeed a higher Grace. Only, you must say this with conviction. I don't even mean that you must say it integrally, because if one says it integrally, the work is done. What is necessary is that one part of the being, indeed the central will, says it with conviction: "I want only You." Even once, and it suffices: all that takes more or less long, sometimes it stretches over years, but one reaches the goal.

But one has all kinds of imperfections!

Eh? The more the imperfections, the longer it takes; the more the attachments one has, the longer it takes.

BUT THE GOAL IS SURE!