Seek Spiritual Progress in Happiness

A Compilation from the Works of

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

Seek Spiritual Progress in Happiness

© All writings of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother

are copyright of Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

and have been reproduced here with their kind permission.

©2020 AuroPublications, Sri Aurobindo Society, Puducherry

www.aurosociety.org

Year of Publication 2020

Compilation done by Jamshed M. Mavalwalla

Proof reading done by Archana Udaykumar

Cover done by Kavita Dutta

Help in making e-book by Uttam Mondal

Foreword

All over the world, there is a growing interest in Spirituality and Yoga.  There is a search for the true meaning and purpose of life, for deeper solutions to the problems which confront us all, and how we can contribute to the evolutionary change and progress.

In this search, more and more persons are turning to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for guidance and enlightenment.  But in their voluminous literature, they do not know where to find the answers they are looking for.

In this regard the Mother has said,

“It is not by books that Sri Aurobindo ought to be studied but by subjects—what he has said on the Divine, on Unity, on religion, on evolution, on education, on self perfection, on supermind, etc., etc.” (CWM 12: 206)

On another occasion she said:

“If you want to know what Sri Aurobindo has said on a given subject, you must at least read all he has written on that subject. You will then see that he seems to have said the most contradictory things. But when one has read everything and understood a little, one sees that all the contradictions complement one another and are organised and unified in an integral synthesis.” (CWM 16: 309-310)

While there are several compilations which are now available, many sincere spiritual seekers have felt the need of Comprehensive Compilations from Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on specific subjects, where the contents are further organised into sub-topics, so that one can get all that one is looking for at one place.

These books are an effort to fulfill this need and thus help spiritual seekers in their journey and sadhana.  We hope these compilations will help us to get a greater mental clarity about a subject so that we can channel our efforts in the right direction. For Sri Aurobindo has written:

“It is always better to make an effort in the right direction; even if one fails the effort bears some result and is never lost.” (CWSA 29: 87)

We will be glad to get suggestions and feedback from the readers.

Vijay

Preface

In the series of comprehensive compilations on the virtues and qualities as prescribed by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother necessary for doing Integral Yoga we present the twelfth virtue in this book ‘Seek Spiritual Progress in Happiness’.

The quotations in this compilation are taken from the volumes of the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) and the Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), Second Edition. Each quotation is followed by the book title, volume number and the page number it has been taken from.

While the passages from Sri Aurobindo are in the original English, most of the passages from the Mother (selections from her talks and writings) are translations from the original French. We must also bear in mind that the excerpts have been taken out of their original context and that a compilation, in its very nature, is likely to have a personal and subjective approach. A sincere attempt, however, has been made to be faithful to the vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. Those who would like to go through the fuller text are advised to go through the Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo (CWSA) and the Collected Works of the Mother (CWM), Second Edition.

The section headings and sub-headings have also been provided by the compiler to bring clarity on the selected virtue. Also to emphasize certain portion in the quotations, the compiler has bold-faced some words.

Jamshed M. Mavalwalla

Contents

I—Happiness Is …

II—Always Seek to Progress in Happiness

III—Silence and Happiness Are the Basis of Successful Sadhana

IV—Sri Aurobindo Is Not Asking to be Frivolously Happy

V—Spiritual Joy is Quite Different from Mental Happiness

VI—Each One Carries His Capacity of Happiness in Himself

VII—Happiness Is Contagious

VIII-Happiness Comes from the Psychic

IX—Psychic Happiness Is Different from Vital Joy

X—When Psychic Prevails Unhappiness Disappear

XI—If the Psychic Happiness Is Founded then Not Easy for Other Forces to Cloud that State

XII—For Lasting Happiness Live Within

XIII—Inner Happiness Is Peaceful and Happy and Not an Excited Movement

XIV—The Divine Consciousness Is the Only True Happiness

XV—To Remain Open to the Mother Is to Remain Always Happy

XVI—To be Close to Mahalakshmi Is a Profound Happiness

XVII—Mahakali’s Blow Makes You Feel Very Happy

XVIII—Descending Force Brings Happiness

XIX—The Mind in Higher Part Remains Happy with the Light of the Supreme Knowledge

XX—The Higher Consciousness Is a Happier and Nobler Consciousness

XXI—To be an Instrument of the Divine Will is the Happiest Condition

XXII—Surrender Brings Happiness

XXIII—Self-giving Brings Happiness

XXIV-Consecration Is Finalized When You Move From Happiness to Increasing Happiness

XXV—Making Progress Makes One Truly Happy

XXVI—Express Gratitude to the Divine by Feeling Happy

XXVII—Free from Egoism Is to Become Truly Happy

XXVIII—Happy When You Concentrate on Your Goal

XXIX—The Exchange of Forces with Universal Forces Gives Joy

XXX—To Feel Divine Love in Oneself Is to Possess an Immutable Happiness

XXXI—Be Happy to Love

XXXII—Union with Grace, One Lives Life of Infinite Happiness

XXXIII—Self-mastery Is the Basis of All Enduring Happiness

XXXIV—To do Best and Leave the Result to the Divine Is the Surest Way to Happiness

XXXV—To be Happy Free Yourself from All Human Attachment

XXXVI—Love Work to be Happy

XXXVII—Seek Happiness in Spiritual Consciousness

XXXVIII—Result of Spiritual Realisation Is Happiness

XXXIX—Who Is Happy

XL—The Seer Knows that Misfortune Is the Condition of Obtaining Happiness

XLI—Charity Rises from a Happy Heart

XLII—Become Happy When You Find Fault in Yourself

XLIII—Confess to the Mother and Feel Happy

XLIV—Happy Is He Who Has No Sense of Possession

XLV—Feel Happy in the Ashram

XLVI—To Make the Air You Breathe Full of Happiness

XLVII—Benefits of Being Happy

XLVIII—For the World to be Happy

XLIX—A Greater and Happier Life to be Brought into the World

L—Essentials for a Happy and Effective Life

LI—If Inner Happiness Cannot be There Then an Inner State of Equality and Calm

LII—Peace Has Certain Happiness

LIII—The Gladness or Joy in the Peace Is Internal, Self-existent

LIV—When the Peace and the Inner Happiness Increase

LV—Happiness Do Not Depend upon Outside Happenings

LVI—We call the Divine Power but Live in Outer Consciousness Then

LVII—Mentally Developed Humanity, Happy with Life

LVIII—The Goal of Life Is Not to Secure Personal Happiness

LIX—In this Unhappy World Evolution Leads Through Happiness and Suffering

LX—When the Divine Moment Arrives

LXI—Happiness Is Not Normal Conditions in This World

LXII—Happiness and Misery Are Phenomena of Cosmic Experience

LXIII—Joys and Pleasures Are Not the Object of Yoga

LXIV—Vital Joy in Ordinary Life

LXV—Vital Joy Has to be Replaced by Psychic Gladness

LXVI—Desires to be Replaced by a Happy Will, One with a Happy Divine’s Will

LXVII—Vigilance and Happiness

LXVIII—Wealth and Happiness

LXIX—Aspiration and Happiness

LXX—Unhappiness Can Arouses the Aspiration for a Better State

LXXI—Unhappy Due to …

LXXII—Adverse Vital Force Wants You to Fall from Happiness

LXXIII-Happiness for Students

LXXIV—Only Vital Beings Love to be Worshiped and Feel Happy

LXXV—Other Quotations on Happiness

LXXVI—Short Summary

I—Happiness Is …

“Happiness is a condition of gladness, sense of inner ease and welfare, contentment, a sunlit life—it is more quiet in its nature than joy and delight.” (CWSA 29: 157)

“What is real happiness and when does it come?

When one no longer feels any attraction for the other, false happiness.

Real happiness is of divine origin; it is pure and unconditioned. Ordinary happiness is of vital origin; it is impure and depends on circumstances.” (CWM 17: 17–18)

“Happiness in the ordinary sense is a sunlit state of the vital with or without cause. Contentment is less than happiness—joy of peace or being free from difficulty is rather a state of joyful śānti. Happiness ought not to be a state of self-satisfaction or inertia, and need not be, for one can combine happiness and aspiration. Of course there can be a state of happy inertia, but most people don’t remain satisfied with that long, they begin to want something else. There are Yogins who are satisfied with a happy calm immobility, but that is because the happiness is a form of Ananda and in the immobility they feel the Self and its eternal calm and want nothing more.” (CWSA 31: 175–176)

“Spiritual happiness: calm and smiling, nothing can disturb it.” (CWM 14: 181)

“Happy heart: smiling, peaceful, wide open, without a shadow.” (CWM 14: 179)

“The crane is the messenger of happiness.” (CWSA 30: 175)

II—Always Seek to Progress in Happiness

“The intense love and bhakti does not come at once. It comes as the power of the psychic grows more and more in the being. But to aspire for it is right and the sincere aspiration is sure to fulfil itself. Always seek to progress in quietude, happiness and confidence, that is the most helpful attitude. Do not listen to contrary suggestions from outside.” (CWSA 31: 702–703)

“Impatience is always a mistake, it does not help but hinders. A quiet happy faith and confidence is the best foundation for sadhana; for the rest a constant opening wide of oneself to receive with an aspiration which may be intense, but must always be calm and steady. Full Yogic realisation does not come all at once, it comes after a long preparation of the Adhara which may take a long time.” (CWSA 29: 111–112)

“Whosoever is weary of the littlenesses that are, whosoever is enamoured of the divine greatnesses that shall be, whosoever has any glimpse of the Supreme within him or above him or around him let him hear the call, let him follow the path. The way is difficult, the labour heavy and arduous and long, but its reward is habitation in an unimaginable glory, a fathomless felicity, a happy and endless vastness.” (CWSA 12: 353)

“We must go farther on, we must advance, climb greater heights and go beyond the arid search for pleasure and personal welfare, not through fear of punishment, even punishment after death, but through the development of a new sense of beauty, a thirst for truth and light, through understanding that it is only by widening yourself, illumining yourself, setting yourself ablaze with the ardour for progress, that you can find both integral peace and enduring happiness.” (CWM 3: 236)

“One must be a child all one’s life, as much as one can, as long as one can. Be happy, joyful, content to be a child and remain a child, plastic stuff for shaping.” (CWM 5: 287)

III—Silence and Happiness Are the Basis of Successful Sadhana

“The quietude and silence which you feel and the sense of happiness in it are indeed the very basis of successful sadhana. When one has got that, then one may be sure that the sadhana is placing itself on a sound footing. You are also right in thinking that if this quietude is fully established all that is concealed within will come out. It is true also that the happiness of this peace is far greater than anything outer objects can bring—there can be no comparison.” (CWSA 29: 148)

“One piece of advice given [in Dhammapada] here is that one should always be kind. It should not be mistaken for the sort of advice people normally give. It says something interesting, even very interesting. My comment is: Always be kind and you will be free from suffering, always be contented and happy, and you will radiate your quiet happiness.” (CWM 3: 291)

IV—Sri Aurobindo Is Not Asking to be Frivolously Happy

“To be miserable may remind you of the defects of your external nature, but I do not see how it is going to cure them. I am not asking you to be frivolously [lightheartedly] happy, but to be quiet and quietly confident, rejecting these old movements, but for the rest trusting not in a restless self-torturing personal effort but to the Divine Force to change the external nature.” (CWSA 31: 737)

V—Spiritual Joy is Quite Different from Mental Happiness

“It is true that I have by the practice of Yoga attained to the higher spiritual consciousness which comes by Yoga, and this carries with it a certain power. Especially there is the power to communicate to those who are ready or to help them towards that spiritual state which, in its perfection is a condition of unalterable inner calm, strength and felicity. But this spiritual peace and joy is something quite different from mental peace and happiness. And it cannot be reached without a spiritual discipline.” (CWSA 36: 440) Letter to Maharani Chimnabai II

“Today I feel happy. I would like to know whether this happiness is spiritual or not.

Instead of asking yourself such questions, it would be better to remain very quiet, concentrated and calm, so that the happiness may last.” (CWM 17: 49)

VI—Each One Carries His Capacity of Happiness in Himself

“Each one carries his capacity of happiness in himself but I am convinced that those who cannot be happy here can be happy nowhere.” (CWM 13: 126)

VII—Happiness Is Contagious

“Happiness is as contagious as gloom—and nothing can be more useful than to pass on to people the contagion of a true and deep happiness.” (CWM 14: 180)

VIII-Happiness Comes from the Psychic

“Love, joy and happiness come from the psychic. The Self gives peace or a universal Ananda.” (CWSA 28: 106)

“For the psychic is there behind the emotional surface, deep behind the heart centre. Once one reaches it, these things [the difficulties of the emotional] can no longer touch; what will be there is the inner peace and happiness, the untroubled aspiration, the presence or nearness of the Mother.” (CWSA 29: 351)

“For the psychic has the happy confidence, the ready understanding and response, the spontaneous surrender; it knows that the touch of the Guru is meant to help and not to hurt, or, like Radha in the poem, that whatever the Beloved does is meant to lead to the Divine Rapture.” (CWSA 29: 386)

“You are right in thinking that this psychic attitude is your true need; it is that which can make the progress simple, happy and easy.

Persevere; there is no reason for giving up. Let no

uprising of difficulties discourage you. At the end there is victory and lasting peace.” (CWSA 30: 340)

“The psychic being is in the heart centre in the middle of the chest (not in the physical heart, for all the centres are in the middle of the body), but it is deep behind. When one is going away from the vital into the psychic, it is felt as if one is going deep deep down till one reaches that central place of the psychic. The surface of the heart centre is the place of the emotional being; from there one goes deep to find the psychic. The more one goes, the more intense becomes the psychic happiness which you describe.” (CWSA 30: 341)

“Let the sweetness and the happy feeling increase, for they are the strongest sign of the soul, the psychic being awake and in touch with us. Let not mistakes of thought or speech or action disturb you—put them away from you as something superficial which the Power and Light will deal with and remove. Keep to the one central thing—your soul and these higher realities it brings with it.” (CWSA 30: 344)

“… for what the psychic being brings with it always is

light and happiness, an inner understanding and relief and solace.” (CWSA 30: 350)

“It is the psychic being in you that has come forward—and when the psychic being comes forward all is happiness, the right attitude, the right vision of things. Of course in one sense it is the same I that puts forward different parts of itself. But when these different parts are all under the control of the psychic and turned by it towards the reception of the higher consciousness, then there begins the harmonisation of all the parts and their progressive recasting into moulds of the higher consciousness growing in peace, light, force, love, knowledge, Ananda which is what we call the transformation.” (CWSA 30: 355)

“The psychic being emerges slowly in most men, even after taking up sadhana. There is so much in the mind and vital that has to change and readjust itself before the psychic can be entirely free. One has to wait till the necessary process has gone far enough before it can burst its agelong veil and come in front to control the nature. It is true that nothing can give so much inner happiness and joy—though peace can come by the mental and vital liberation or through the growth of a strong samata in the being.” (CWSA 30: 363)

“Happiness comes from the soul’s satisfaction, not from the vital’s or the body’s. The vital is never satisfied; the body soon ceases to be moved at all by what it easily or always has. Only the psychic being brings the real joy and felicity.” (CWSA 32: 496)

“Both the love for the Mother which you feel so strongly and the other tendency of harmony and affection with those with whom you live or work come from the psychic being. When the psychic intensifies its influence, this love for the Mother becomes strong and is the main mover of the nature. But there is also a feeling of good will, harmony, kindness or affection towards others which also comes up and is not so much personal as the result of the soul’s inmost relation to all souls who are children of the Mother. There is no harm in this psychic feeling, on the contrary it creates happiness and harmony—it is only the vital love between persons that has to be rejected because it draws away from full consecration to the Divine. But this helps the growth of the soul into the Mother’s consciousness and helps the work and helps also the inner life to grow.” (CWSA 32: 463)

“On Darshan Day and the day before it I felt an intense

love for you and for the Mother. It possessed my whole being for some time. There was a high and profound reverence for both of you and ‘a happiness that no worldly pleasure can give us’.

That is obviously psychic.” (CWSA 32: 128)

“The heart is beginning to open to the Mother, but it is still easily touched by lower vital suggestions. That is probably why the vital is not always happy with the way the Mother deals with me at pranam.

What the psychic always feels is ‘What the Mother does is for the best’, and it accepts all with gladness. It is the vital part of the heart that is easily touched by the suggestions.” (CWSA 32: 163)

“In the psychic is the source of constant happiness.” (CWM 14: 337)

“The soul can neither be troubled nor unhappy, for it has faith in its own eternity and is aware of it; but it may sometimes feel a certain melancholy.” (CWM 15: 162)

“It is not the psychic being that suffers for personal reasons, it is the mind, the vital and the ordinary consciousness of ignorant man. This is because the contact between the outer consciousness and the psychic consciousness is not well established. He in whom the contact has been well established is always happy.

The psychic being works with perseverance and ardour for the union to be made an accomplished fact, but it never complains and knows how to wait for the hour of realisation to come.” (CWM 14: 335)

“Mother, if the psychic always feels the Divine Presence, why does the human being cry and lament the lack of this Presence?

I have already told you that it is because the contact between the outer consciousness and the psychic consciousness is not well established. He in whom this contact is well established is always happy.” (CWM 16: 166)

“I don’t see the need of your suffering. Psychic love is always peaceful and joyous; it is the vital which dramatises and makes itself unhappy without any reason. I hope, indeed, that you will soon become conscious of my presence always near you, and that it will give you peace and joy.” (CWM 16: 171–172)

“It is the vital which asks and asks and is never satisfied... The psychic, the true deep feelings are always satisfied and never ask for anything. The psychic feels my constant presence, is aware of my love and solicitude, and is always peaceful, happy and satisfied.” (CWM 16: 172)

“True happiness does not depend on the external circumstances of life. One can obtain true happiness and keep it constantly only by discovering one’s psychic being and uniting with it. (CWM 16: 289)

Your vital is discontented because I have not given it the compliments it desired. But your psychic is always with me; it is happy that I am making you conscious of what needs to be changed in you, and it insists that I should do so in spite of the vital’s discontent.” (CWM 17: 167)

“By what signs can one tell that the psychic being has come to the surface?

One feels peaceful and happy, full of trust, full of a deep and true benevolence, and very close to the divine presence.” (CWM 17: 73)

“In children the psychic is often very much on the surface and it makes them peaceful and happy. As one grows up, the vital and the mind develop and take on more importance—and then the troubles and sorrows begin.” (CWM 17: 118)

IX—Psychic Happiness Is Different from Vital Joy

“What you describe is the same neutral condition that you had before. It is a transitional state in which the old consciousness has ceased to be active, the new is preparing behind a neutral quietude. One must take it quietly and wait for it to turn into the spiritual peace and the psychic happiness which is quite different from vital joy and grief. To have neither vital joy nor vital grief is considered by the Yogins to be a very desirable release,—it makes it possible to pass from the ordinary human vital feelings to the true and constant inner peace, joy or happiness.” (CWSA 30: 76)

“Joy is a vital movement, exciting, restless and transient.

In Ananda there is no excitement, it is a calm and happy and intense spiritual state or spiritual movement.” (CWSA 29: 157)

“Joy (harṣa) is more intense. It is a strong movement of great gladness with an exultation [excitement], a leaping up of the vital to take some happiness, good fortune or other thing pleasant to the being.” (CWSA 29: 157)

X—When Psychic Prevails Unhappiness Disappear

“Love does not consist in demands and desires—demand and desire spring from ego. Love exists for its own sake and does not offer itself on conditions. These feelings do not spring from the psychic and it is only by the psychic prevailing in you that the true consciousness can become free and full in the nature and all these repinings and unhappinesses disappear.” (CWSA 31: 300–301)

“The reason why you have these alternating moods is because there are two different elements in you. On one side there is trying to develop in you your psychic being which, when it awakes, gives you the sense of closeness or union with the Mother and the feeling of Ananda; on the other, there is your old vital nature, restless and full of desires and, because of this restlessness and desire, unhappy. It is this old vital nature, which you were accepting and indulging, that made you go wrong and stood in the way of your progress. It is when the desire and restlessness of the vital are rejected that the psychic in you comes forward and then the vital itself changes and feels full of the joy and the nearness. When the old unhappy and restless vital comes up again, you feel yourself unfit, without pleasure in anything. What you have to do when this returns is not to accept it, to call in the Mother’s nearness again and let the psychic being grow in you. If you do that persistently, rejecting restlessness and desire, the vital part of you will change and become fit for the sadhana.” (CWSA 31: 640–641)

XI—If the Psychic Happiness Is Founded then Not Easy for Other Forces to Cloud that State

“I am glad the cloud is lifting and hope to find it lifted altogether soon. It is the usual experience that if the humility and resignation are firmly founded in the heart, other things like trust come naturally afterwards. If once the psychic light and happiness which is born of these things is founded, it is not easy for other forces to cloud that state and not possible for them to destroy it. That is the common experience.” (CWSA 31: 184)

XII—For Lasting Happiness Live Within

“If it is like that, it is probably because you are living outside, allowing yourself to be disturbed by outward contacts. One cannot find happiness of a lasting character unless one lives within. Work, action must be offered to the Mother, done for her sake only, without any thought for yourself, your own ideas, preferences, feelings, likes and dislikes. If one’s eyes are fixed on these latter things, then at every step one gets some friction either in the mind or vital or, if these are comparatively quiet, in the body and nerves. Peace and joy can only become stable if one lives within with the Mother.” (CWSA 32: 460)

“There are always two different consciousnesses in the human being, one outward in which he ordinarily lives, the other inward and concealed of which he knows nothing. … The inner consciousness begins to be a place of deep peace, light, happiness, love, closeness to the Divine or the presence of the Divine, the Mother. One is then aware of two consciousnesses, this inner one and the outer which has to be changed into its counterpart and instrument—that also must become full of peace, light, union with the Divine.” (CWSA 28: 89)

“The condition you describe in your work shows that the inner being is awake and that there is now the double consciousness. It is the inner being which has the inner happiness, the calm and quiet, the silence free from any ripple of thought, the inwardly silent repetition of the name. The automatic repetition of the mantra is part of the same phenomenon—that is what ought to happen to the mantra, it must become a conscious but spontaneous thing repeating itself in the very substance of the consciousness itself, no longer needing any effort of the mind. All these doubts and questionings of the mind are useless. What has to happen is that this inner consciousness should be always there not troubled by any disturbance with the constant silence, inner happiness, calm quietude, etc., while the outer consciousness does what is necessary in the way of work etc. or, what is better, has that done through it—it is the latter experience that you have some days as someone pushing the work with so much continuous force without your feeling tired.” (CWSA 30: 232)

“The ease and peace are felt very deep and far within because they are in the psychic and the psychic is very deep within us, covered over by the mind and vital. When you meditate you open to the psychic, become aware of your psychic consciousness deep within and feel these things. In order that this ease and peace and happiness may become strong and stable and felt in all the being and in the body, you have to go still deeper within and bring out the full force of the psychic into the physical. This can most easily be done by regular concentration and meditation with the aspiration for this true consciousness. It can be done by work also, by dedication, by doing the work for the Divine only without thought of self and keeping the idea of consecration to the Mother always in the heart. But this is not easy to do perfectly.” (CWSA 29: 299)

“I have explained to you that there is a division between your internal and external being—as it is in the case of most people. Your inner being wants and has always wanted the Truth and the Divine—when the peace and power are felt it comes forward and you feel it as yourself and understand things and grow in knowledge and happiness and true feeling. The external nature is being changed by the influence of the inner being, but what is pushed out returns constantly from old habit—and then you feel this old nature as if it were yourself. This external nature has been like that of almost all human beings, like that of most of the sadhaks here, selfish and full of desires and wanting its own desires, not the Truth and the Divine.” (CWSA 31: 641)

“When the Divine grants the true inner happiness nothing in the world has the power to snatch it away.” (CWM 14: 181)

XIII—Inner Happiness Is Peaceful and Happy and Not an Excited Movement

“It is a very good sign that when the thoughts and the attempt at disturbance come there is something that remains calm and cool —for that, like the psychic reply from within, shows that the inner consciousness is fixed or fixing itself in part of the being. This is a well-recognised stage of the inner change in sadhana. Equally good is the emerging of the self-existent Ananda from within not dependent on outward things. It is a fact that this inner gladness and happiness is something peaceful and happy at once—it is not an excited movement like the vital outward pleasure, though it can be more ardent and intense. Another good result is the fading out of the feeling that ‘the work is mine’ and the power to do it with the outward consciousness not engaging the inner being.

The sense of release as if from jail always accompanies the emergence of the psychic being or the realisation of the self above. It is therefore spoken of as a liberation, mukti. It is a release into peace, happiness, the soul’s freedom not tied down by the thousand ties and cares of the outward ignorant existence.” (CWSA 30: 224–225)

XIV—The Divine Consciousness Is the Only True Happiness

“The Divine Consciousness is the only true help, the only true happiness.” (CWM 14: 11)

“The Divine’s Presence gives us peace in strength, serenity in action and an unchanging happiness in the midst of all circumstances.” (CWM 14: 13)

“The Divine is the unalloyed happiness, the blissful felicity, but this felicity is perfect only when it is integral.” (CWM 14: 14)

“What you describe in your letter as the response of the Divine would not be called that in the language of Yogic experience—this feeling of greater peace, light, ease, trust, difficulties lessening, certitude would rather be called a response of your own nature to the Divine. There is a Peace or a Light which is the response of the Divine, but that is a wide Peace, a great Light which is felt as a presence other than one’s personal self, not part of one’s personal nature, but something that comes from above, though in the end it possesses the nature—or there is the Presence itself which carries with it indeed the absolute liberation, happiness, certitude. But the first responses of the Divine are not often like that—they come rather as a touch, a pressure one must be in a condition to recognise and to accept, or it is a voice of assurance, sometimes a very ‘still small voice’, a momentary Image or Presence; a whisper of Guidance sometimes,— there are many forms it may take. Then it withdraws and the preparation of the nature goes on till it is possible for the touch to come again and again, to last longer, to change into something more pressing and near and intimate. The Divine in the beginning does not impose himself—he asks for recognition, for acceptance. That is one reason why the mind must fall silent, not put tests, not make claims—there must be room for the true intuition which recognises at once the true touch and accepts it.” (CWSA 29: 175)

“It is not good to allow yourself to be upset so much by what others say or do—whether it be X or anybody else. There is a quietude and happiness which you can find by living in yourself in contact with the Divine which you will never get from outside.” (CWSA 31: 314)

“It is evident that you still cherish some misunderstanding

about peace and joy and Ananda. (Peace by the way is not joy—for peace can be there even when joy is quiescent.) It is not a fact that one ought not to pray or aspire for peace or spiritual joy. Peace is the very basis of all the siddhi in the Yoga, and why should not one pray or aspire for foundation in the Yoga? Spiritual joy or a deep inner happiness (not disturbed even when there come superficial storms or perturbations) is a constant concomitant of contact or union with the Divine, and why should it be forbidden to pray or aspire for contact with the Divine and the joy that attends it? As for Ananda, I have already explained that I mean by Ananda something greater than peace or joy, something that, like Truth and Light, is the very nature of the supramental Divine. It can come by frequent inrushes or descents, partially or for a time even now, but it cannot remain in the system so long as the system has not been prepared for it. Meanwhile, peace and joy can be there permanently, but the condition of this permanence is that one should have the constant contact or indwelling of the Divine, and this comes naturally not to the outer mind or vital but to the inner soul or psychic being. Therefore one who wants his Yoga to be a path of peace or joy, must be prepared to dwell in his soul rather than in his outer mental and emotional nature.” (CWSA 31: 167–168)

“For life is not as it is portrayed in novels; day-to-day existence is full of sufferings great and small, and it is only by identification with the Divine Consciousness that one can attain and preserve the true unchanging happiness.”

(CWM 16: 61)

“Let the physical consciousness as well as the rest of the nature turn wholly to the Light and the Divine and seek only the one true source of happiness and Ananda.” (CWSA 35: 710)

A Prayer

“Lord, give us true happiness, the happiness that depends on Thee alone.” (CWM 15: 216)

“Lord, give me the real happiness, that which depends only upon Thee.” (CWM 15: 214)

I am with you always, and will be with you throughout your journey to help you to find the Divine—the only way to have lasting happiness. I expect to see you on your birthday; pray for this grace which is the true aim of your life.

I ask only that you have faith and trust.

I am putting myself into your heart so that you may always find me there.

With love and blessings.” (CWM 17: 374)

“To waste one’s time seeking the satisfaction of one’s petty desires is sheer folly. True happiness is possible only when one has found the Divine.” (CWM 16: 437)

“Let us seek our happiness only in the Divine.” (CWM 14: 180)

XV—To Remain Open to the Mother Is to Remain Always Happy

“To remain open to the Mother is to remain always quiet and happy and confident, not restless, not grieving or desponding, to let her force work in you, guide you, give you knowledge, give you peace and Ananda. If you cannot keep yourself open, then aspire constantly but quietly that you may be open.” (CWSA 32: 151)

“Mother gave me a quiet mind today. Ever since pranam I have been feeling her atmosphere; some force which I feel to be hers is upon my head and around me. My restlessness is much less, almost gone.

It is the Mother’s touch that you feel upon you—and that indicates her presence. In the state of the consciousness it is the Force working on the system which brings what is needed or aspired to, peace or light or happiness and the psychic opening.

Peace, quiet, followed by a happy state and a psychic opening is what you need—let that grow always.” (CWSA 32: 175)

“It is the pressure of Mother’s force. If you keep quiet and don’t resist, then instead of being uneasy, it will make you happy.” (CWSA 32: 209)

“There are people who start at once, others take time.

X recognised the Mother as divine at first sight and has been happy ever afterwards; others who rank among Mother’s devotees took years to discover or admit it, but they arrived all the same. There are people who had nothing but difficulties and revolts for the first five, six, seven or more years of the sadhana, yet the psychic ended by awaking. The time taken is a secondary matter: the one thing needful is—soon or late, easily or with difficulty—to get there.” (CWSA 32: 338)

“There are always in a sadhak two sides of the nature, one that wants the Divine, the other that wants only its own way and will and expects the Divine to satisfy it. When you were in the first, the Mother was always close to you and you were happy; when you indulged the second, then all went wrong. Your mistake recently has been to indulge this second part too much. But you can always recover the constant closeness of the Mother in your inner being and happiness and progress in the sadhana. But to do so you must make it a point to give your love without asking for anything at all except the inner nearness—for unless you do that very strongly, it will be difficult for you to get rid of the other tendency and change the demanding vital part in you.” (CWSA 32: 475)

“You are mistaken in thinking that the Mother keeps you at a distance; you have only to open yourself to her sincerely and entirely. What has been done in the past does not matter if there is a sincere aspiration and resolution to change. Neither to lament nor to complain or be angry will help; a confident and happy opening of oneself to the Mother without insistence on personal demands and desires is the only thing to do.” (CWSA 32: 502)

“The Mother’s Force is always pouring down—your body must now forget its habit of depression or sadness. Let the happiness come into it also.” (CWSA 32: 233–234)

“It is not that you have to do what you dislike, but that you have to cease to dislike. To do only what you like is to indulge the vital and maintain its domination over the nature—for that is the very principle of the untransformed nature, to be governed by its likes and dislikes. To be able to do anything with equanimity is the principle of karmayoga and to do it with joy because it is done for the Mother is the true psychic and vital condition in this Yoga.” (CWSA 29: 248)

“It [the cause of fatigue] is probably some desire or vital preference— likes and dislikes in the vital. All work given you must be felt as the Mother’s and done with joy, opening yourself for the Mother’s force to work through you.” (CWSA 29: 273)

XVI—To be Close to Mahalakshmi Is a Profound Happiness

“Maheshwari can appear too calm and great and distant for the littleness of earthly nature to approach or contain her, Mahakali too swift and formidable for its weakness to bear; but all turn with joy and longing to Mahalakshmi. For she throws the spell of the intoxicating sweetness of the Divine: to be close to her is a profound happiness and to feel her within the heart is to make existence a rapture and a marvel; grace and charm and tenderness flow out from her like light from the sun and wherever she fixes her wonderful gaze or lets fall the loveliness of her smile, the soul is seized and made captive and plunged into the depths of an unfathomable bliss. Magnetic is the touch of her hands and their occult and delicate influence refines mind and life and body and where she presses her feet course miraculous streams of an entrancing Ananda.” (CWSA 32: 20–21)

“But all that is ugly and mean and base, all that is poor and sordid and squalid, all that is brutal and coarse repels her advent. Where love and beauty are not or are reluctant to be born, she does not come; where they are mixed and disfigured with baser things, she turns soon to depart or cares little to pour her riches. If she finds herself in men’s hearts surrounded with selfishness and hatred and jealousy and malignance and envy and strife, if treachery and greed and ingratitude are mixed in the sacred chalice, if grossness of passion and unrefined desire degrade devotion, in such hearts the gracious and beautiful Goddess will not linger. A divine disgust seizes upon her and she withdraws, for she is not one who insists or strives; or, veiling her face, she waits for this bitter and poisonous devil’s stuff to be rejected and disappear before she will found anew her happy influence.” (CWSA 32: 21)

XVII—Mahakali’s Blow Makes You Feel Very Happy

“What is the nature of Mahakali’s blow?

It makes you feel very happy. It gives you a sweet warmth in the heart, like that. You feel quite satisfied.

Does one have to aspire for it or does it come naturally?

Yes, one must have a sincerity in the aspiration, really want to progress. One must truly say, ‘Yes, I want to progress’ with sincerity... ‘Whatever happens, I want to progress.’ Then it comes.

But as I said, it comes with a power of plenitude which holds an intense joy. When one has taken a decision, has decided to stop something in oneself, just not to repeat a stupidity one has committed, or to do something which one finds impossible or difficult to do and which, one knows, should be done, and when one has taken the decision and has put in the full sincerity of one’s will, well, then if a terrible blow comes to compel you to do what you have decided to do, it is a blow, but you feel glorified, you are quite happy, it is magnificent, you see, you feel something magnificent here (Mother points to the heart).” (CWM 6: 325)

XVIII—Descending Force Brings Happiness

“The Force usually comes down through the head and afterwards descends lower in the body to the heart, afterwards through the navel downwards.

The sadhak becomes restless under the Force only if he resists it—otherwise it brings peace and calm and happiness and strength.

It is probably some other part of the mind—the vital mind or physical mind—it is these usually that resist.” (CWSA 30: 446)

“The experience you had was simply the descent of the Divine Force into the body. By your attitude and aspiration you called for it to work in you, so it came. Such a descent brings naturally a deep inward condition and a silence of the mind, and it may bring much more—peace, a sense of liberation, happiness, Ananda. … The coming of this experience, occupation of the body by the Force from above, is a great step forward in the sadhana.” (CWSA 30: 456–457)

“It [the descent of the higher consciousness into the most physical] brings light, consciousness, force, Ananda into the cells and all the physical movements. The body becomes conscious and vigilant and performs the right movements, obeying the higher will or else automatically by force of the consciousness that has come into it. It becomes more possible to control the functionings of the body and set right anything that is wrong, to deal with illness and pain etc. A greater control comes over the actions of the body and even over happenings to it from outside, e.g. minimising of accidents and small mishaps. The body becomes a more effective instrument for work. It becomes possible to minimise fatigue. Peace, happiness, strength, lightness in the whole physical system. These are the more obvious and normal results which grow as the consciousness grows, but there are many others that are possible.” (CWSA 30: 493)

“The more the calm, peace, joy and happiness descend and take possession, the stronger the foundation. It is the sign of the [Divine] contact.” (CWSA 29: 361)

“Mother, on what does receptivity depend?

It depends first of all upon sincerity—on whether one really wants to receive—and then... yes, I believe the principal factors are sincerity and humility. There is nothing that closes you up more than vanity. When you are self-satisfied, you have that kind of vanity of not wanting to admit that you lack something, that you make mistakes, that you are incomplete, that you are imperfect, that you are... There is something in the nature, you know, which grows stiff in this way, which does not want to admit—it is this which prevents you from receiving. You have, however, only to try it out and get the experience. If, by an effort of will you manage to make even a very tiny part of the being admit that “Ah, well, yes, I am mistaken, I should not be like that, and I should not do that and should not feel that, yes, it is a mistake”, if you manage to make it admit this, at first, as I said just now, it begins by hurting you very much, but when you hold on firmly, until this is admitted, immediately it is open—it is open and strangely a flood of light enters, and then you feel so glad afterwards, so happy that you ask yourself, ‘Why, was I foolish enough to resist so long’?” (CWM 6: 117)

XIX—The Mind in Higher Part Remains Happy with the Light of the Supreme Knowledge

“The mind in its higher part is aware of being one with the Divine, in all ways, in all things—having that supreme knowledge, it is not disturbed by its own ignorance and impotence in its lower instrumental parts; it looks on all that with a smile and remains happy and luminous with the light of the supreme knowledge.

The consciousness of union with the Divine is for the spiritual seeker the supreme knowledge.” (CWSA 31: 50)

XX—The Higher Consciousness Is a Happier and Nobler Consciousness

“There are two movements necessary for this connection to be established. One is upward; the vital rises to join with the higher consciousness and steeps itself in the light and in the impulsion of a higher force: the other is downward; the vital remains silent, tranquillised, pure, empty of the ordinary movements, waiting, till the dynamic power from above descends into it, changes it to its true self and informs its movements with knowledge as well as power. That is why the sadhak feels sometimes that he is rising up into a happier and nobler consciousness, entering into a brighter domain and purer experience, but sometimes, on the contrary, feels the necessity of going back into the vital, doing sadhana there and bringing down into it the true consciousness. There is no real contradiction between these two movements; they are complementary and necessary to each other, the ascension enabling the divine descent, the descent fulfilling that for which the ascension aspires and which it makes inevitable.” (CWSA 31: 117–118)

“The experience you had of the wideness with many roads opening was an image of the higher consciousness in which all the movements of the being are open, true and happy—the ignorance and incapacity of the lower nature disappear. It is that that the light from above is bringing.” (CWSA 30: 402)

“That is an experiment you can make if you are just a little conscious. There is something in you which you don’t want, something bad—for one reason or another you don’t want it, you want to pull it out—well, if you identify yourself ever so little with that thing, you feel the pain of the extraction; if, on the contrary, you identify yourself with the divine Force which comes to liberate you, you feel the joy of the divine Grace—and you experience the deep delight of the progress you have made.

And this is a sure sign for you, a sure indication of what you identify yourself with. If you are identified with the forces from below, you suffer; if you are identified with the forces from above, you are happy. And I am not speaking about feeling pleasure; you must not think that when one jumps about, dances, shouts and plays, one is identified with the divine forces—one may or may not be. That is not what I am speaking of. I am speaking of the divine Joy, the inner Joy which is unalloyed.” (CWM 8: 84–85)

“The spiritual is a new consciousness that has to evolve and has been evolving. It is quite natural that at first and for a long time only a few should get the full light, while a greater number but still only a few compared with the mass of humanity, should get it partially. But what has been gained by the few can at a stage of the evolution be completed and more generalised and that is the attempt which we are making. But if this greater consciousness of light, peace and joy is to be gained, it cannot be by questioning and scepticism which can only fall back on what is and say, ‘It is impossible, impossible —what has not been in the past cannot be in the future; what is so imperfectly realised as yet, cannot be better realised in the future.’ A faith, a will or at least a persistent demand and aspiration are needed—a feeling that with this and this alone I can be satisfied and a push towards it that will not cease till it is done.” (CWSA 28: 271)

XXI—To be an Instrument of the Divine Will is the Happiest Condition

“Your vital mind (which is the one which revolts and doubts) has strange misconceptions about the spiritual state. There is no grimness in being an instrument of the divine Will—it is the happiest and most joyous condition possible—it brings not only peace but an intense Ananda. Anyhow, the hold of the Yoga-force is increasing in spite of everything and you have only to go on for it to solve the struggle between the outer man and the inner Spirit.” (CWSA 31: 142)

“But a time will come when you will feel more and more that you are the instrument and not the worker. For first by the force of your devotion your contact with the Divine Mother will become so intimate that at all times you will have only to concentrate and to put everything into her hands to have her present guidance, her direct command or impulse, the sure indication of the thing to be done and the way to do it and the result. And afterwards you will realise that the divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and carries out your works; all your movements are originated by her, all your powers are hers, mind, life and body are conscious and joyful instruments of her action, means for her play, moulds for her manifestation in the physical universe. There can be no more happy condition than this union and dependence; for this step carries you back beyond the border-line from the life of stress and suffering in the ignorance into the truth of your spiritual being, into its deep peace and its intense Ananda.” (CWSA 32: 12–13)

“Yes, if you type this out on a piece of paper:

We want to be true servitors of the Divine.’

And then the prayer:

‘Supreme Lord, Perfect Consciousness, You alone truly know what we are, what we can do, the progress we must make in order to become capable and worthy of serving You as we want to do. Make us conscious of our capacities, but also of our difficulties, so that we may be able to surmount them and serve You faithfully.’

And then this—the conclusion:

‘The supreme happiness is to be true servitors of the Divine.’ (CWM 12: 379–380)

“My dear child,

I am very happy to know that you want to be my instrument. To be able to be my instrument, you must be regular, energetic, courageous, enduring and always good-tempered. I have no doubt that you can acquire these qualities.” (CWM 16: 128–129)

“If you truly want peace and happiness, your constant preoccupation should be:

“What progress must I make to be able to know and serve the Divine?” (CWM 12: 383)

“For it is to the Divine Work that one must exclusively belong because it alone can, in our life, give us true happiness.” (CWM 15: 250)

“Do not live to be happy, live to serve the Divine, and the happiness you enjoy will exceed all expectation.” (CWM 16: 429)

“Keep this attitude—never side with anybody nor take up any personal quarrel—think only of the Divine Peace, Harmony, Light and Happiness and become more and more their purified and quiet instrument.” (CWM 14: 262)

XXII—Surrender Brings Happiness

“What comes back like that is the old vital movements which you used to have and which you have been throwing out. The vital gets disturbed and filled with these thoughts whenever something happens that hurts or displeases it strongly. To get rid of it one must have always a sense of complete reliance on the Mother, of surrender; that brings a calm which refuses to be moved by any outward happening or by what people do or say, a happiness which is not disturbed by any occurrence.” (CWSA 31: 146)

“All the parts are essentially offered, but the surrender has to be made complete by the growth of the psychic self-offering in all of them and in all their movements separately and together.

To be enjoyed by the Divine is to be entirely surrendered so that one feels the Divine Presence, Power, Light, Ananda possessing the whole being rather than oneself possessing these things for one’s own satisfaction. It is a much greater ecstasy to be thus surrendered and possessed by the Divine than oneself to be the possessor. At the same time by this surrender there comes also a calm and happy mastery of self and nature.” (CWSA 29: 77)

“There is not much spiritual meaning in keeping open to the Mother if you withhold your surrender. Self-giving or surrender is demanded of those who practise this Yoga, because without such a progressive surrender of the being it is quite impossible to get anywhere near the goal. To keep open means to call in her Force to work in you, and if you do not surrender to it, it amounts to not allowing the Force to work in you at all … The soul, the true being, on the contrary, turns towards the Divine and is not only willing but eager and happy to surrender.” (CWSA 32: 140–141)

“Surrender is the decision taken to hand over the responsibility of your life to the Divine. Without this decision nothing is at all possible; if you do not surrender, the Yoga is entirely out of the question. Everything else comes naturally after it, for the whole process starts with surrender. You can surrender either through knowledge or through devotion. You may have a strong intuition that the Divine alone is the truth and a luminous conviction that without the Divine you cannot manage. Or you may have a spontaneous feeling that this line is the only way of being happy, a strong psychic desire to belong exclusively to the Divine: ‘I do not belong to myself,’ you say, and give up the responsibility of your being to the Truth.” (CWM 3: 126)

“The lords of Falsehood hold, at present, almost complete sway over poor humanity. Not only the lower life-energy, the lower vital being, but also the whole mind of man accepts them. Countless are the ways in which they are worshipped, for they are most subtle in their cunning and seek their ends in variously seductive disguises. The result is that men cling to their falsehood as if it were a treasure, cherishing it more than even the most beautiful things of life. Apprehensive of its safety, they take care to bury it deep down in themselves; but unless they take it out and surrender it to the Divine they will never find true happiness.

Indeed the very act of bringing it out and showing it to the Light would be in itself a momentous conversion and pave the way to the final victory.” (CWM 3: 141)

“Sweet Mother, how can we make our submission gladly?

It must be sincere. If it is truly sincere, it becomes happy. So long as it is not—you may reverse the thing—so long as it is not happy, you may be sure it is not perfectly sincere; for if it is perfectly sincere, it is always happy. If it is not happy, it means that there is something which holds back, something which would like things to be otherwise, something that has a will of its own, a desire of its own, its own purpose and is not satisfied, and therefore is not completely surrendered, not sincere in its surrender. But if one is sincere in one’s surrender, one is perfectly happy, automatically; rather, one automatically enjoys an ineffable happiness. Therefore, as long as this ineffable happiness is not there, it is a sure indication that you are not sincere, that there is something, some part of the being, larger or smaller, which is not sincere.” (CWM 6: 210–211)

“There are all kinds of absolutely undesirable things in the atmosphere. And so, if one must always be on the watch, looking around on all sides, one would think only of one thing, how to protect oneself. First of all, it is tiresome, and then, you see, it makes you waste much time. If you are well enveloped in this way, with this light, the light of a perfectly glad, totally sincere surrender, when you are enveloped with that, it serves you as a marvelous filter. Nothing that is altogether undesirable, nothing that has ill-will can pass through. So, automatically, these things return where they came from. If there is a conscious ill-will against you, it comes, but cannot pass; the door is closed, for it is open only to divine things, it is not open to anything else. So it returns very quietly to the source from where it came.

But all these things are... One can learn how to do

them through a kind of study and science. But they can be done without any study or science provided the aspiration and surrender are absolute and total. If the aspiration and surrender are total, it is done automatically. But you must see to it that they are total; and besides, as I was saying just now, you become very clearly aware of it, for the moment they are not total, you are no longer happy. You feel uneasy, very miserable, dejected, a bit unhappy: ‘Things are not quite pleasant today. They are the same as they were yesterday; yesterday they were marvellous, today they are not pleasing!’—Why? Because yesterday you were in a perfect state of surrender, more or less perfect—and today you aren’t any more. So, what was so beautiful yesterday is no longer beautiful today. That joy you had within you, that confidence, the assurance that all will be well and the great Work will be accomplished, that certitude—all this, you see, has become veiled, has been replaced by a kind of doubt and, yes, by a discontent: ‘Things are not beautiful, the world is nasty, people are not pleasant.’ It goes sometimes to this length: ‘The food is not good, yesterday it was excellent.’ It is the same but today it is not good! This is the barometer! You may immediately tell yourself that an insincerity has crept in somewhere. It is very easy to know, you don’t need to be very learned, for, as Sri Aurobindo has said in Elements of Yoga: One knows whether one is happy or unhappy, one knows whether one is content or discontented, one doesn’t need to ask oneself, put complicated questions for this, one knows it!—Well, it is very simple.

The moment you feel unhappy, you may write beneath it: ‘I am not sincere!’ These two sentences go together:

“I FEEL UNHAPPY.”

“I AM NOT SINCERE.”

Now, what is it that is wrong? Then one begins to take a look, it is easy to find out...” (CWM 6: 214–215)

“A human being is made of many different parts and it takes time and conscious effort to harmonise and unify all these parts. When you surrendered, it is not the whole of your being that did so. Little by little some other part that had not surrendered came to the surface and the joy of the surrender vanished and was replaced by dullness and indifference. But after sometime this part also gets converted and thus the happy condition comes back.” (CWM 14: 333)

“Well, the surrender, that is, the self-giving to the Divine, must be happy, joyful, made gladly; it must be strong, one must not give oneself through weakness and impotence but with an active and strong will.” (CWM 4: 357)

“It is those who are of a highly sattwic nature, especially if strongly surrendered to the Mother, who escape the invasion or attacks of the hostile Forces on the mind and vital. That does not mean that they escape the difficulties of the lower human nature or of the sadhana, but these are not complicated by the effective support given to them by the hostiles. It is not that there is no point in them that might be pressed upon by the hostiles but in actual fact they cannot get at these points because of the build of the nature which is fortified against them owing to the large proportion of prakāśa and sukha which the sattwic brings with it. But otherwise there is an internal clarity, a balance, a happy composition in the being reflecting sunlight easily, less amenable to the touch of cloud and tempest, which gives no handle to the hostile forces. The nature refuses to be violently agitated or darkened or upset. At most it is the body that the hostiles can attack and there too because the nervous being is calm and it is only through the most material that it can be done.” (CWSA 31: 794–795)

Radha’s Prayer

“O Thou whom at first sight I knew for the Lord of my being and my God, receive my offering.

Thine are all my thoughts, all my emotions, all the

sentiments of my heart, all my sensations, all the movements of my life, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood. I am absolutely and altogether Thine, Thine without reserve. What Thou wilt of me, that I shall be. Whether Thou choosest for me life or death, happiness or sorrow, pleasure or suffering, all that comes to me from Thee will be welcome. Each one of Thy gifts will be always for me a gift divine bringing with it the supreme Felicity.” (CWSA 32: 647) (CWM 15: 210)

“The Mother wrote this prayer for a disciple who was preparing to perform a dance about Radha. In a letter to the disciple the Mother wrote:

To complete what I told you yesterday about Radha’s dance I have noted this down as an indication of the thought and feeling Radha must have within her when she stands at the end in front of Krishna:

“Every thought of my mind, every emotion of my heart, every movement of my being, every feeling and every sensation, each cell of my body, each drop of my blood, all, all is yours, yours absolutely, yours without reserve. You can decide my life or my death, my happiness or my sorrow, my pleasure or my pain; whatever you do with me, whatever comes to me from you will lead me to the Divine Rapture.” (CWM 15: 209) (CWSA 32: 662)

“The progressive surrender of our ignorant personal will and its merger into a greater divine or on the highest summits greatest supreme Will is the whole secret of Karma Yoga. To bring about the conditions in which alone this vast and happy identity becomes possible and to work out the lines we must follow to their end if we are to reach it, is all the deeper purpose of this discipline. The first condition is the elimination of personal vital desire, for if desire intervenes, all harmony with the supreme Divine Will becomes impossible. Even if we receive it, we shall disfigure its working and distort its dynamic impulse. To give up all desire, all insistence upon fruit and reward and success must be renounced from our will and all vital attachment to the work itself excised from our nature; for attachment makes it our own and no longer the Godhead's. The elimination of egoism is the second condition, not only of the rajasic and tamasic egoisms that twine around desire, but of the sattwic egoism that takes refuge in the idea of the I as the worker.” (CWSA 12: 351)

XXIII—Self-giving Brings Happiness

“Indeed the very act of genuine self-giving is its own immediate reward—it brings with it such happiness, such confidence, such security as nothing else can give. But till the self-giving is firmly psychic there will be disturbances, the interval of dark moments between bright ones. It is only the psychic that keeps on progressing in an unbroken line, its movement a continuous ascension.” (CWM 3: 124)

“Patiently you have to go round your whole being, exploring each nook and corner, facing all those anarchic elements in you which are waiting for their psychological moment to come up. And it is only when you have made the entire round of your mental, vital and physical nature, persuaded everything to give itself to the Divine and thus achieved an absolute unified consecration that you put an end to your difficulties. Then indeed yours is a glorious walk towards transformation, for you no longer go from darkness to knowledge but from knowledge to knowledge, light to light, happiness to happiness.... The complete consecration is undoubtedly not an easy matter, and it might take an almost indefinitely long time if you had to do it all by yourself, by your own independent effort. But when the Divine’s Grace is with you it is not exactly like that. With a little push from the Divine now and then, a little push in this direction and in that, the work becomes comparatively quite easy.” (CWM 3: 127)

“To want what the Divine wants, in all sincerity, is the essential condition for peace and joy in life. Almost all human miseries come from the fact that men are nearly always convinced that they know better than the Divine what they need and what life ought to give them. Most human beings want other human beings to conform to their expectations and circumstances to conform to their desires—therefore they suffer and are unhappy.

It is only when one gives one self in all sincerity to the Divine Will that one has the peace and calm joy which come from the abolition of desires.

The psychic being knows this with certainty; so, by uniting with one’s psychic, one can know it. But the first condition is not to be subject to one’s desires and mistake them for the truth of one’s being.” (CWM 16: 433)

“But, most often, the sacrifice is done unconsciously, egoistically and without knowledge or acceptance of the true meaning of the great world-rite. It is so that the vast majority of earth creatures do it; and, when it is so done, the individual derives only a mechanical minimum of natural inevitable profit, achieves by it only a slow painful progress limited and tortured by the smallness and suffering of the ego. Only when the heart, the will and the mind of knowledge associate themselves with the law and gladly follow it, can there come the deep joy and the happy fruitfulness of divine sacrifice. The mind’s knowledge of the law and the heart’s gladness in it culminate in the perception that it is to our own Self and Spirit and the one Self and Spirit of all that we give. And this is true even when our self-offering is still to our fellow-creatures or to lesser Powers and Principles and not yet to the Supreme.” (CWSA 23: 107)

“Not to impose one’s mind and vital will on the Divine but to receive the Divine’s will and follow it, is the true attitude of sadhana. Not to say, ‘This is my right, want, claim, need, requirement, why do I not get it?’ but to give oneself, to surrender and to receive with joy whatever the Divine gives, not grieving or revolting, is the better way. Then what you receive will be the right thing for you.” (CWSA 29: 75)

XXIV-Consecration Is Finalized When You Move From Happiness to Increasing Happiness

“Consecration is the consummation [finalized], when the Light has illuminated all the parts of your being, with a central will acting on the feelings, impulses, thoughts, emotions, activities, directing them always towards the Divine and when you move no more from darkness to light or from falsehood to truth or from misery to happiness but from light to more light, from truth to greater truth, from happiness to increasing happiness.” (CWM 14: 99)

“… consecration to the spiritual joy, that was happiness indeed.” (CWM 3: 203)

“The signs of the consecration of the vital in action are these among others:

The feeling (not merely the idea or the aspiration) that all the life and the work are the Mother’s and a strong joy of the vital nature in this consecration and surrender. A consequent calm content and disappearance of egoistic attachment to the work and its personal results, but at the same time a great joy in the work and in the use of the capacities for the divine purpose.

The feeling that the Divine Force is working behind one’s actions and leading at every moment.” (CWSA 29: 233–234)

XXV—Making Progress Makes One Truly Happy

“Simply welcome the fact that you have become aware of a lack of thoroughness, since this awareness allows you to make further progress. Indeed, making progress, overcoming a difficulty, learning something, seeing clearly into an element of unconsciousness—these are the things that make one truly happy.” (CWM 16: 32)

“Yes. When one comes out of the depression and one’s bad will, well, then one realises that there was an attack and that some progress had to be made, and that in spite of everything something within has made progress, that one has taken a step forward. Usually, hardly consciously, it is something which needs to progress but doesn’t want to, and so takes this way; like a child who sulks, becomes low-spirited, sad, unhappy, misunderstood, abandoned, helpless; and then, refusing to collaborate, and as I just said, indulging in his depression, to show that he is not happy. It is specially in order to show that one is not satisfied that one becomes depressed. One can show it to Nature, one can show it (that depends on the case, you see), one can show it to the Divine, one can show it to the people around one, but it is always a kind of way of expressing one’s dissatisfaction. ‘I am not happy about what you demand’, but this means, ‘I am not happy. And I shall make you too see it, that I am not happy.’ (CWM 7: 10–11)

XXVI—Express Gratitude to the Divine by Feeling Happy

“The best way to express one’s gratitude to the Divine is to feel simply happy.” (CWM 14: 154)

“To accept gladly what I give is never selfish.

There is no better cure for egoism than a happy gratefulness.” (CWM 14: 155)

“To feel deeply, intensely and constantly a total gratitude towards the Divine is the best way to be happy and peaceful.” (CWM 16: 314)

“There is no better way to show one’s gratefulness to the Divine than to be quietly happy.” (CWM 14: 155)

XXVII—Free from Egoism Is to Become Truly Happy

“In reality, even for a purely egoistic reason, to do good, to be just, straight, honest is the best means to be quiet and peaceful, to reduce one’s anxiety to a minimum. And if, besides, one could be disinterested, free from personal motives and egoism, then it would be possible to become truly happy.” (CWM 3: 197)

“It is the ego which changes all the contacts of life into suffering, it is the ego which prevents us from being conscious of the Divine Presence within us and from becoming His calm, strong and happy instruments.

Let us make a complete offering of this ego with all its desires to the Divine, let us be confident and wait for the liberation that is sure to come.” (CWM 10: 319)

That [‘To seek pleasure is certainly the best way to make yourself miserable’] is an absolute truth. It affirms that if you want to satisfy your little ego, you are sure to be unhappy. For sure! It is the best way to make yourself miserable.” (CWM 12:383)

“If a man feels, ‘I am the happiest child of the Mother’, is it due to ego-feeling?

It depends on the source of the feeling. If it is true happiness, then it is not ego. If it is due to a feeling of superiority, then it is ego.” (CWSA 32: 456)

XXVIII—Happy When You Concentrate on Your Goal

“Certainly there is a moment in the course of the inner growth when far from having to make an effort to concentrate, to become absorbed in the contemplation and the seeking of the truth and its best expression—what the Buddhists call meditation—you feel, on the contrary, a kind of relief, ease, rest, joy, and to have to come out of that in order to deal with things that are not essential, everything that may seem like a waste of time, becomes terribly painful. External activities get reduced to what is absolutely necessary, to those that are done as service to the Divine. All that is futile, useless, precisely those things which seem like a waste of time and effort, all that, far from giving the least satisfaction, creates a kind of discomfort and fatigue; you feel happy only when you are concentrated on your goal.

Then you are really on the way.” (CWM 3: 209)

XXIX—The Exchange of Forces with Universal Forces Gives Joy

“It is only effort, in whatever domain it be—material effort, moral effort, intellectual effort—which creates in the being certain vibrations which enable you to get connected with universal vibrations; and it is this which gives joy. It is effort which pulls you out of inertia; it is effort which makes you receptive to the universal forces. And the one thing above all which spontaneously gives joy, even to those who do not practise yoga, who have no spiritual aspiration, who lead quite an ordinary life, is the exchange of forces with universal forces. People do not know this, they would not be able to tell you that it is due to this, but so it is.

There are people who are just like beautiful animals—all their movements are harmonious, their energies are spent harmoniously, their uncalculating efforts call in energies all the time and they are always happy; but sometimes they have no thoughts in their head, sometimes they have no feelings in their heart, they live an altogether animalish life. I have known people like that: beautiful animals. They were handsome, their gestures were harmonious, their forces quite balanced and they spent without reckoning and received without measure. They were in harmony with the material universal forces and they lived in joy. They could not perhaps have told you that they were happy joy with them was so spontaneous that it was natural—and they would have been still less able to tell you why, for their intelligence was not very developed. I have known such people, who were capable of making the necessary effort (not a prudent and calculated effort but a spontaneous one) in no matter what field: material, vital, intellectual, etc., and in this effort there was always joy. For example, a man sits down to write a book, he makes an effort which sets vibrating something in his brain to attract ideas; well, suddenly, this man experiences joy. It is quite certain that, whatever you do, even the most material work, like sweeping a room or cooking, if you make the necessary effort to do this work to the maximum of your ability, you will feel joy, even if what you do is against your nature. When you want to realise something, you make quite spontaneously the necessary effort; this concentrates your energies on the thing to be realised and that gives a meaning to your life. This compels you to a sort of organisation of yourself, a sort of concentration of your energies, because it is this that you wish to do and not fifty other things which contradict it. And it is in this concentration, this intensity of the will, that lies the origin of joy. This gives you the power to receive energies in exchange for those you spend.” (CWM 4: 32–33)

XXX—To Feel Divine Love in Oneself Is to Possess an Immutable Happiness

“Divine Love, true love, finds its delight and its satisfaction in itself; it has no need to be received and appreciated, nor to be shared—it loves for the sake of loving, as a flower blooms.

To feel this love in oneself is to possess an immutable happiness.” (CWM 14: 124–125)

XXXI—Be Happy to Love

“For instance, love between human beings, in all its forms, the love of parents for children, of children for parents, of brothers and sisters, of friends and lovers, is all tainted with ignorance, selfishness and all the other defects which are man’s ordinary drawbacks; so instead of completely ceasing to love—which, besides, is very difficult as Sri Aurobindo says, which would simply dry up the heart and serve no end—one must learn how to love better: to love with devotion, with self-giving, self abnegation, and to struggle, not against love itself, but against its distorted forms: against all forms of monopolising, of attachment, possessiveness, jealousy, and all the feelings which accompany these main movements. Not to want to possess, to dominate; and not to want to impose one’s will, one’s whims, one’s desires; not to want to take, to receive, but to give; not to insist on the other’s response, but be content with one’s own love; not to seek one’s personal interest and joy and the fulfillment of one’s personal desire, but to be satisfied with the giving of one’s love and affection; and not to ask for any response. Simply to be happy to love, nothing more.” (CWM 8: 301–302)

“It is not the love that someone feels for you that can

make you happy, it is the love you feel for others that makes you happy: for you receive the love that you give from the Divine, who loves eternally and unfailingly.” (CWM 14: 122)

“Indeed, nothing brings more happiness than a pure and disinterested love.” (CWM 16: 172)

(Regarding a friend)

Find your happiness and your joy in the very fact of loving, and it will help you in your inner progress; because if you are sincere, you will one day realise that it is the Divine in her that you love and that the outer person is merely a pretext.” (CWM 16: 274)

“To love for the joy of loving is the best condition for a peaceful and happy life; it amounts, in other words, to loving the Divine in all things.” (CWM 17: 371)

“The power of Love supramentalised can take hold of all living relations without hesitation or danger and turn them Godwards delivered from their crude, mixed and petty human settings and sublimated into the happy material of a divine life.” (CWSA 23: 169)

“It is for this reason that we discourage this lower vital way of human love and would like people to reject and eliminate these elements as soon as may be from their nature. Love should be a flowering of joy and union and confidence and self-giving and Ananda,—but this lower vital way is only a source of suffering, trouble, disappointment, disillusion and disunion. Even a slight element of it shakes the foundations of peace and replaces the movement towards Ananda by a fall towards sorrow, discontent and Nirananda.” (CWSA 29: 343)

XXXII—Union with Grace, One Lives Life of Infinite Happiness

“As soon as you are in contact with It [Grace], there is not a second in time, not a point in space, which does not show you dazzlingly this perpetual work of the Grace, this constant intervention of the Grace.

And once you have seen this, you feel you are never equal to it, for you should never forget it, never have any fears, any anguish, any regrets, any recoils... or even suffering. If one were in union with this Grace, if one saw It everywhere, one would begin living a life of exultation, of all-power, of infinite happiness. And that would be the best possible collaboration in the divine Work.” (CWM 8: 250)

“A sannyasi who makes demands is not sincere. To be sincere a sannyasi must be perfectly satisfied with what is given to him and ask for nothing more. In all that happens to him, he must see the Divine’s Grace and be at once happy and grateful for it.” (CWM 14: 47)

“So many problems have been facing me of late. I wonder how they are to be solved happily.

The only way to a true and lasting happiness is a complete and exclusive reliance on the Divine’s Grace.”

(CWM 14: 180)

“It is only the Divine’s Grace that can give peace, happiness, power, light, knowledge, beatitude and love in their essence and their truth.” (CWM 14: 85)

“There is a Power that no ruler can command; there is a Happiness that no earthly success can bring; there is a Light that no wisdom can possess; there is a Knowledge that no philosophy and no science can master; there is a Bliss of which no satisfaction of desire can give the enjoyment; there is a thirst for Love that no human relation can appease; there is a Peace that one finds nowhere here, not even in death.

It is the Power, the Happiness, the Light, the Knowledge, the Bliss, the Love, the Peace that flow from the Divine Grace.” (CWSA 32: 644)

XXXIII—Self-mastery Is the Basis of All Enduring Happiness

“Self-mastery is the greatest conquest, it is the basis of all enduring happiness.” (CWM 14: 256)

“Never forget that, as much outside as in the Ashram, if you want to lead a happy life, you must be the master of your lower nature and control your desires and vital impulses; otherwise there is no end to the miseries and the troubles.” (CWM 14: 255)

“To harmonise the vital is a psychological masterpiece.

Happy is he who accomplishes it.” (CWM 14: 356)

“To evolve in the sense of the God is to grow in intuition, in light, in joy, in love, in happy mastery; to serve by rule and to rule by service; to be able to be bold and swift and even violent without hurt or wickedness and mild and kindly and even self-indulgent without laxity or vice or weakness; to make a bright and happy whole in oneself and, by sympathy, with mankind and all creatures. And in the end it is to evolve a large impersonal personality and to heighten sympathy into constant experience of world-oneness. For such are the Gods, conscious always of their universality and therefore divine.” (CWSA 13: 153)

“My dear child,

When one’s attention is always turned towards oneself, one is never happy. When one allows oneself to be ruled by every passing impulse, one is never peaceful.

It is through work and self-mastery that one can find happiness and peace.” (CWM 16:132)

XXXIV—To do Best and Leave the Result to the Divine Is the Surest Way to Happiness

“To do at each moment the best we can and leave the result to the Divine’s decision, is the surest way to peace, happiness, strength, progress and final perfection.” (CWM 14: 111)

XXXV—To be Happy Free Yourself from All Human Attachment

“Keep yourself free from all human attachment and you will be happy.” (CWM 14: 284)

XXXVI—Love Work to be Happy

“In order to be truly happy in life, one must love work.” (CWM 12: 337)

“My dear children, love work and you will be happy. Love to learn and you will progress.” (CWM 12: 337)

XXXVII—Seek Happiness in Spiritual Consciousness

“Those who live and act in the normal consciousness are governed entirely by the common movements of the mind and are naturally subject to grief and joy and anxiety and desire or to everything else that makes up the ordinary stuff of life. Mental quiet and happiness they can get, but it can never be permanent or secure. But the spiritual consciousness is all light, peace, power and bliss. If one can live entirely in it, there is no question; these things become naturally and securely his. But even if he can live partly in it or keep himself constantly open to it, he receives enough of this spiritual light and peace and strength and happiness to carry him securely through all the shocks of life. What one gains by opening to this spiritual consciousness, depends on what one seeks from it; if it is peace, one gets peace; if it is light or knowledge, one lives in a great light and receives a knowledge deeper and truer than any the normal mind of man can acquire; if it [is] strength or power, one gets a spiritual strength for the inner life or Yogic power to govern the outer work and action; if it is happiness, one enters into a beatitude far greater than any joy or happiness that the ordinary human life can give.”

(CWSA 36: 440–441)

“When one is in the right consciousness, then there is the right movement, the right happiness, everything in harmony with the Truth. When there is the wrong consciousness, there is demand, dissatisfaction, doubt, all kinds of disharmony.” (CWSA 30: 228)

“When the sadhana was going on in you, you had periods when you had this right attitude and could get glimpses of the true happiness and dedication. But the physical mind became active and with it there began the period of obscuration and trouble. The physical mind must become quiet and the heart open and the psychic become again active. It is for this you should aspire always and in time it will come.” (CWSA 31: 315–316)

XXXVIII—Result of Spiritual Realisation Is Happiness

“My sweet mother,

I shall be what you want me to be. Dear mother, accept my childlike prayer.

For you I want consciousness, knowledge, artistic capacity, self mastery in peace and perfect equality, and the happiness that is the result of spiritual realisation. Is this too grand and vast a programme?

With your mother’s blessings.” (CWM 16: 123)

“Thus, the purpose and goal of life is not suffering and struggle but an all-powerful and happy realisation.

All the rest is painful illusion.” (CWM 16: 434)

“If it is a good experience, I don’t understand why I don’t feel Your love and happiness.

Happiness and love do not accompany all experiences.” (CWM 17: 88)

XXXIX—Who Is Happy

“Indeed he is happy who loves the Divine because the Divine is always with him.” (CWM 14: 180)

“Always be good and you will always be happy.” (CWM 14: 180)

“One should not do good in the hope of getting a reward, but for the pleasure of doing good. Then one is always happy, whatever happens.” (CWM 17: 143)

“Let us always do the right thing and we shall always be quiet and happy.” (CWM 14: 180)

“I want to speak of moral generosity. To feel happy, for example, when a comrade is successful. An act of courage, of unselfishness, a fine sacrifice have a beauty in them which gives you joy. It may be said that moral generosity consists in being able to recognise the true worth and superiority of others.” (CWM 4: 30)

“Yes, you are right to have hope; it is hope which builds

happy futures.” (CWM 16: 183)

“It is so good to be simple, simply good-willed, to do the best one can, and in the best way possible; not to build any thing very considerable but only to aspire for progress, for light, a peace full of goodwill, and let That which knows in the world decide for you what you will become, and what you will have to do. One no longer has any cares, and one is perfectly happy!” (CWM 6: 248)

“Be simple,

Be happy,

Remain quiet,

Do your work as well as you can,

Keep yourself always open towards me—

This is all that is asked from you.” (CWM 13: 77)

“You must never forget that you are much more helpful when you are quietly happy than when you become dramatic.” (CWM 14: 179)

“Always remember that on the happiness you give will depend the happiness you get.” (CWM 14: 181)

“The happiness you give makes you more happy than the happiness you receive.” (CWM 14: 181)

“Divine purity: it is happy just to be, in all simplicity.” (CWM 14: 150)

“If we want to keep our happiness intact and pure, we must do our best not to attract upon it the attention of unfriendly thoughts.” (CWM 14: 181)

“To be always happy, with an unclouded, unfluctuating happiness—of all things this is the most difficult to accomplish.” (CWM 14: 181)

XL—The Seer Knows that Misfortune Is the Condition of Obtaining Happiness

“The knowledge of the Yogin is not the knowledge of the average desire-driven mind. Neither is it the knowledge of the scientific or of the worldly-wise reason which anchors itself on surface facts and leans upon experience and probability. The Yogin knows God’s way of working and is aware that the improbable often happens, that facts mislead. He rises above reason to that direct and illuminated knowledge which we call vijñānam. The desire-driven mind is emmeshed in the intricate tangle of good and evil, of the pleasant and the unpleasant, of happiness and misfortune. It strives to have the good always, the pleasant always, the happiness always. It is elated by fortunate happenings, disturbed and unnerved by their opposite. But the illuminated eye of the seer perceives that all leads to good; for God is all and God is sarvamaṅgalam He knows that the apparent evil is often the shortest way to the good, the unpleasant indispensable to prepare the pleasant, misfortune the condition of obtaining a more perfect happiness. His intellect is delivered from enslavement to the dualities.” (CWSA 13: 58)

“The problem of pain remains. Was it necessary that the

process should be accompanied with pain to the individual? At one time the capacity for pain, physical and mental, was infinitely less than it is now, so little that it might be pronounced to be nil. It is a remarkable fact that disease, pain and grief have grown keener with the growing fineness of the human organisation. Obviously this can only be a temporary development necessary to prepare a higher race which shall rise above pain to a higher capacity for pleasure and happiness. The lower organisation resisted the saṁskāra of pain and grief by the coarseness of its composition, it rejected pain in the sense of not knowing it. The higher organisation of the future will not be below it, but rise above it. It was the knowledge of good and evil that brought grief and sin into the world; when that knowledge is surmounted, man will rise above grief and sin.” (CWSA 13: 62)

“Another question occurs. Is pain real or a shadow? The Vedantist believes that the soul is a part of God or one with God Himself, and cannot feel pain or grief, but only ānanda bliss. The jīva  or soul takes the rasa, the delight of the dualities, and it changes to bliss in his nature; but this is veiled by the ignorance and separates the jīva in his svarūpa from the mind and the heart. Pain is a negative vikāra or corruption of true experience in the mind, pleasure a positive vikāra. The truth is ānanda. But this is a knowledge for which mankind is not ready. Only the Yogin realises it and becomes sama, like-minded to pain and pleasure, good or evil, happiness or misfortune. He takes the rasa of both and they give him strength and bliss; for the veil between his mind and his soul is removed and the apparent man in him has become one with the svarūpa or real man. If mankind as a whole came too early by that knowledge, the evolution of the perfect good would be delayed. The utter sweetness of dayā and prema, pity and love, might never be extracted from the līlā.” (CWSA 13: 63)

“No, I now perceive that these sufferings come from the very imperfection of Matter which, in its disorder and crudeness, is unfit to manifest thee; and thou art the very first to suffer from it, to bewail it, thou art the first to toil and strive in thy ardent desire to change disorder into order, suffering into happiness, discord into harmony.

Suffering is not something inevitable or even desirable, but when it comes to us, how helpful it can be!

Each time we feel that our heart is breaking, a deeper door opens within us, revealing new horizons, ever richer in hidden treasures, whose golden influx brings once more a new and intenser life to the organism on the brink of destruction.

And when, by these successive descents, we reach the veil that reveals thee as it is lifted, O Lord, who can describe the intensity of Life that penetrates the whole being, the radiance of the Light that floods it, the sublimity of the Love that transforms it for ever!” (CWM 2: 21)

XLI—Charity Rises from a Happy Heart

“Yes, there is a sublime charity, one which rises from a happy heart, from a serene soul.” (CWM 2: 105)

XLII—Become Happy When You Find Fault in Yourself

“So then the first thing is to be perfectly happy when someone or some circumstance puts you in the conscious presence of a fault in yourself which you did not know. Instead of lamenting, you must rejoice and in this joy must find the strength to get rid of the thing which should not be.” (CWM 3: 221–222)

“Each time one sees in oneself something which seems really nasty, well, that proves that one has made progress. So, instead of lamenting and falling into despair, one should be happy; one says, “Ah! that’s good. I am getting on.” (CWM 8: 7)

“This is not the practice here. Usually things are such, arranged in such a way, that the satisfaction of having done well seems to be the best of rewards and one punishes oneself when one does badly, in the sense that one feels miserable and unhappy and ill at ease, and this is indeed the most concrete punishment one has. And so, all these movements, from the point of view of the inner spiritual growth, have an infinitely greater value than when they are the result of an outer rule.” (CWM 6: 431–432)

“... if you have made a mistake, for every mistake can be corrected; from the moment you have found it is a mistake, there is an opportunity to work within you, to make progress and be very happy!” (CWM 4: 116)

“So, do not despair if you find in yourself the greatest weakness, for perhaps it is the sign of the greatest divine strength. Do not say, ‘I am like that, I can’t be otherwise.’ It is not true. You are ‘like that’ because, precisely, you ought to be the opposite. And all your difficulties are there just so that you may learn to transform them into the truth they are hiding. Once you have understood this, many worries come to an end and you are very happy, very happy.” (CWM 4: 118–119)

XLIII—Confess to the Mother and Feel Happy

“Besides, your confessions are not so terrible as all that, no matter what you may think of them. And as soon as you tell me all the things that are troubling you, you will see that they have disappeared and you will feel free and happy.” (CWM 16: 65)

“Smiles are like rays of the sun, they dissolve the clouds... And if you want the radical remedy it lies in this: frankness, be absolutely frank; tell me fully all that is going on in you, and soon the cure will come, a complete and happy cure.” (CWM 16: 101)

XLIV—Happy Is He Who Has No Sense of Possession

“One of these verses [from Dhammapada] is very beautiful. We could translate it like this: ‘Happy is he who possesses nothing, he will partake of the delight of the radiant gods.’ To possess nothing does not at all mean not to make use of anything, not to have anything at one’s disposal. ‘Happy is he who possesses nothing’: he is someone who has no sense of possession, who can make use of things when they come to him, knowing that they are not his, that they belong to the Supreme, and who, for the same reason, does not regret it when things leave him; he finds it quite natural that the Lord who gave him these things should take them away from him for others to enjoy. Such a man finds equal joy in the use of things as in the absence of things.” (CWM 3: 253)

XLV—Feel Happy in the Ashram

“There are certain things that X must fix in his mind and feel and act in their spirit, if he is to get rid of his depression and unrest and feel happy and at home. You will explain clearly to him what I write here.

(1)He is not here as Y’s nephew, but as a child of the Mother.

(2) He is not here under the care, guardianship and control of Y, but under the Mother’s control and care and he owes allegiance to her alone.

(3) The work given to him in the stores is the Mother’s work and not Y’s; he must do it with that idea, as the Mother’s work, and no other.

(4) Y is at the head of the stores, garden, granary and receives his directions from the Mother or reports his arrangements to her for approval—just as Z in the B.D. [Building Department] or A in the Dining Room or B or C in their departments. Others in these departments are supposed to receive their directions from the head and act in accordance. But this is because it is necessary for the discipline and good order of the work; it does not mean that the work is Y’s or the building work is Z’s or the dining room work is A’s—all is the Mother’s work and must be done by each, by the head as by the others, for her. It would not be possible to get the work done if each and every worker insisted on being independent and directly responsible to her or on doing things in his own way; there is too much of this spirit and it is the cause of much confusion and disorder. The Mother cannot see to the whole work herself physically and give orders direct to each worker; therefore the arrangement made is indispensable. On the other hand, the head of a department is also supposed to act according to the Mother’s directions—or in their spirit where he is left free—and not otherwise; if he does according to his mere fancy or obeys his own personal likes and dislikes or misuses his trust for his personal satisfaction or convenience, he is answerable for any failure in the work that may result or wrong spirit or clash or confusion or false atmosphere.” (CWSA 32: 421)

“It is only those who have come for sadhana and really do sadhana who can be happy and satisfied here. The others have constant trouble because their desires are not satisfied.” (CWM 13: 127)

“Finally, he should clear his vital of restlessness and desires—for that in him as in everybody is the root cause of depression, and, if he were elsewhere and under other circumstances, the depression would still come because the root cause would still be there. Here if he turns entirely to the Mother, opens to her and works and lives turning towards her, he will get release and happiness and grow into light and peace and become in all his being a child of the Divine.” 19 March 1932 (CWSA 32: 422)

“We are all born for the highest Ideal: therefore, whenever in our Ashram some petty request for more comfort and material happiness is refused, it is for your own good and to make you fulfil what you are here for. The refusal is actually a favour in as much as you are thereby considered worthy to stand before the highest Ideal and be shaped according to it.” (CWM 3: 131)

“Sometimes children ask us why we are here. What should we tell them?

That depends upon their age, my child, and upon what they are. It depends upon their sincerity. You can’t give the same answer to everyone.

But do the tiny tots sometimes ask?... Do the youngest ask why they are here?

Not the youngest—Purnima, Tarulata.

At that age, already it’s the age when one questions and doubts.

The very tiny ones, if they ask this, it is wonderful. There is only one very simple answer to give them: ‘My children, it is because this is the divine will. It is due to the divine grace that you are here. Be happy, be calm, be at peace, do not question, all will be well.’ And when they grow older they already begin to reason, then it is no longer so well, no longer so easy. But that depends, as I said, that depends upon how intelligent they are, how great is their opening. There are those who are predestined, who are here because they should be here. With these it is easy. You have only to tell them: ‘My children, it is because you belong to a future which is being built up, and it is here that it is being built.’ For them it is very simple, it is true. There are those who are here because their parents are here, for no other reason. So it is difficult to tell them that, unless you tell them quite simply: “Because your father and mother are here.” (CWM 5: 298)

“Already future teachers and future students are beginning to arrive, some from outside, new to the climate and customs of the country. They are arriving in the Ashram for the first time and know nothing of its life or its customs. Some of them come with a mental aspiration, either to serve or to learn; others come in the hope of doing yoga, of finding the Divine and uniting with Him; finally there are those who want to devote themselves entirely to the divine work upon earth. All of them come impelled by their psychic being, which wants to lead them towards self-realisation. They come with their psychic in front and ruling their consciousness; they have a psychic contact with people and things. Everything seems beautiful and good to them, their health improves, their consciousness grows more luminous; they feel happy, peaceful and safe; they think that they have reached their utmost possibility of consciousness. This peace and fullness and joy given by the psychic contact they naturally find everywhere, in everything and everybody. It gives an openness towards the true consciousness pervading here and working out everything. So long as the openness is there, the peace, the fullness and the joy remain with their immediate results of progress, health and fitness in the physical, quietness and goodwill in the vital, clear understanding and broadness in the mental and a general feeling of security and satisfaction. But it is difficult for a human being to keep up a constant contact with his psychic. As soon as he settles down and the freshness of the new experience fades away, the old person comes back to the surface with all its habits, preferences, small manias, shortcomings and misunderstandings; the peace is replaced by restlessness, the joy vanishes, the understanding is blinded and the feeling that the place is the same as everywhere else creeps in, because one has become what one was everywhere else. Instead of seeing only what has been accomplished, he becomes aware more and more and almost exclusively of what has yet to be done; he becomes morose and discontented and blames people and things instead of blaming himself.” (CWM 12: 45–46)

“People must be happy when they are here, otherwise they cannot have the full advantage of the exceptional opportunity.” (CWM 13: 126)

“The reason for people to come and settle here is surely not to find comfort and luxury—this can be found anywhere if one is lucky enough. But what one can get here, that is not got in any other place: it is the Divine Love, Grace and Care. It is when this is forgotten or disregarded that people begin to feel miserable here. Indeed whenever somebody feels unhappy and discontented, it can be taken as a sure sign that he is turning his back on what the Divine is always giving and that he has gone astray in pursuit of worldly satisfaction.” (CWM 13: 127)

“If you want to be happy here, you must come with the will to do the yoga of self-perfection; for if you do not come for that, you will be shocked at every moment by things that are contrary to your habits and to the principles of ordinary life, and it will not be possible for you to stay here, because these things are necessary for the work and organisation here and cannot be changed.” (CWM 13: 128)

“My second reason for not agreeing to your departure was that I did not believe that you really wanted to go or that what spoke of going was the true Y. But if your desire to go is serious and deliberate, if you cannot be happy here with us, then it would not be right for me to keep you against your will. That is a thing which I never do with anyone.

My third reason was that I could only sanction your going if I saw that you were too young or otherwise unfit to bear the pressure of the Asram atmosphere. I know that there is in you the capacity if you choose to exercise it. But a certain attitude towards this life and towards the Mother is needed which you seem unwilling to keep. If you cannot be satisfied, if you are constantly revolting and discontented and unhappy, if you again and again violently insist on going away, if you are constantly driven by something in you into these outbreaks which might have been excusable when you were a young child but are no longer proper to your age, it will be difficult for me to avoid coming to the conclusion that, as yet at least, you are not ready, not only for the Yoga, but even for living here.

One thing I wish to make clear. Neither myself nor the Mother wishes you to leave us. I do not approve or sanction your going, still less do I decide that you must go. But if your desire to go is real, insistent and imperative, if you cannot be happy here and feel that you would be happier elsewhere, then I shall be obliged to withdraw my refusal.” (CWSA 32: 504)

“X is quite happy here and she is progressing very well in her sadhana. If she goes away from here, the progress will be stopped and much of what she has gained may be lost. An intensive and concentrated sadhana once begun has to be persistently continued in the right atmosphere. If it is kept up only for a short time and then dropped for another kind of life in which the concentration is diffused and weakened, there is no likelihood of fruition. For this reason we would disapprove of her departure.” (CWSA 35: 604)

“You are right, my dear child; those who are not happy here cannot be happy anywhere.” (CWM 17: 127)

“The Asram is not a place where people can come merely because they are unhappy in their homes. At that rate we should have to keep thousands of people. The Asram is for those who want to practise Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga.”

(CWSA 35: 591)

XLVI—To Make the Air You Breathe Full of Happiness

“But when you are good, when you are generous, noble, disinterested, kind, you create in you, around you, a particular atmosphere and this atmosphere is a sort of luminous release. You breathe, you blossom like a flower in the sun; there is no painful recoil on yourself, no bitterness, no revolt, no miseries. Spontaneously, naturally, the atmosphere becomes luminous and the air you breathe is full of happiness. And this is the air that you breathe, in your body and out of your body, in the waking state and in the state of sleep, in life and in the passage beyond life, outside earthly life until your new life.” (CWM 3: 199–200)

XLVII—Benefits of Being Happy

“For it there is very little of what we call good and bad. It could rather be said that there is what is constructive and what is destructive, what is progressive and what is retrogressive. That indeed is very important. And then there are those who are luminous, sunny, happy, smiling and those who are gloomy, dull, misanthropic, dissatisfied, who live in grey shadows. It is the latter who catch all the unpleasant things. Those who are radiant (they may be radiant without it being a spiritual radiance, they may simply radiate good sense, balance, an inner confidence, the joy of living), those who carry in themselves the joy of living, these are in harmony with Nature and, being in harmony with Nature, generally avoid accidents, they are immune from diseases and their life develops pleasantly as far as it is possible in the world as it is.” (CWM 6: 3)

“Yes, the higher vital is usually much less difficult to surrender, for it is under the influence of the mind and at times even of the psychic; so it understands more easily. It is much easier to convert this than the lower vital which is essentially the vital of desires and impulses. So, you see, what he means is that the lower vital can submit, it agrees to obey, to do what it is asked, but it is not at all satisfied. It is not happy; sometimes it even suffers; it pushes its revolt down into itself through obedience, but it does not collaborate. And unless the vital collaborates with joy and true love, nothing can be done; the transformation cannot come.” (CWM 6: 204)

“Try to be happy—immediately you will be closer to the Light.” (CWM 14: 180)

“When we come to you for the distribution [Until 1958 Mother used to distribute groundnuts and sweets every evening at the Playground (except on class days), making it possible for all disciples to go to her one by one in order to receive her spiritual help directly.], at times we feel free and joyful, but at times we feel nothing, we are empty. What does this indicate?

When one is joyful, it means that one is open and receives the Force; when one feels nothing, it means that one is shut up.

But what makes you open or shuts you up? For each one it is different. It depends on a number of things. Haven’t you noticed the difference in yourself, whether it depends on outside circumstances or on something within

you? No?

Yes.

Yes. Ah, good!

There are many different reasons which make one feel at times more alive, more full of force and joy.... Usually, in ordinary life, there are people who, due to their very constitution, the way they are made, are in a certain harmony with Nature, as though they breathed with the same rhythm, and these people are usually always joyful, happy; they succeed in all they do, they avoid many troubles and catastrophes, indeed they are in harmony with the rhythm of life and Nature. And, moreover, there are days when one is in contact with the divine Consciousness which is at work, with the Grace, and then everything is tinged, coloured with this Presence, and things which usually seem to you dull and uninteresting become charming, pleasant, attractive, instructive—everything lives and vibrates, and is full of promise and force. So, when one opens to that, one feels stronger, freer, happier, full of energy, and everything has a meaning. One understands why things are as they are and one participates in the general movement.

There are other times when, for some reason or other, one is clouded or closed or down in a hole, and so one no longer feels anything and all things lose their taste, their interest, their value; one goes about like a walking block of wood.” (CWM 8: 303–304)

“Be happy, my child, it is the surest way of progress.” (CWM 14: 179)

XLVIII—For the World to be Happy

“Communal life must necessarily have a discipline so that the weaker are not bullied by the stronger; and this discipline must be respected by all those who want to live in that community.

But for the community to be happy, this discipline should be set by the most broad-minded person or persons, if possible the person or persons who are conscious of the Divine Presence and are surrendered to it.

For the world to be happy, power should only be in the hands of those who are conscious of the Divine Will. But for the time being that is impossible because the number of those who are truly conscious of the Divine Will is very small, and because they necessarily have no ambition.

In fact, when the time comes for this realisation, it will take place quite naturally.

The duty of each one is to prepare himself for it as completely as he can.” (CWM 12: 381–382) (CWM 13: 165)

“And what are the things that man should cherish and defend? All those that give him life and make him better,

stronger and more joyful.

...

Let him preserve with care the holy temples, statues, pictures, vases, embroidery, as well as beautiful songs and poems, and all that increases his happiness with its beauty.

But above all, children of India and other lands, let men cherish the heart that loves, the mind that thinks honest thoughts and the hand that accomplishes loyal deeds.” (CWM 2: 241–242)

XLIX—A Greater and Happier Life to be Brought into the World

“The misery of the world or the activity of the Asuras is also irrelevant. Nobody has ever contended that this is a happy and perfect world, nobody in India at least, or the best possible world or put that forth as a proof of the Divine Existence. It is known that it is a world of death, ignorance, suffering and that its pleasures are not enduring. The spiritual seeker takes that not as a disproof of the Divine Existence, but as a greater spur for seeking and finding it out. He may seek it as a means of escape from life and entry into Nirvana or moksha or Goloka, Brahmaloka or Vaikuntha; he may seek the divine Self and its peace or Ananda behind existence and if he attains to that and is satisfied with it he can move through the world untouched by its vicissitudes and troubles; or he may seek it, as I have done, for the base of a greater and happier life to be brought now or hereafter into the world-existence. But whatever be the aim, the actual state of the world is no argument at all against the seeking for the Divine or the truth of Yoga.”(CWSA 31: 728–729)

“I said more or less this, that those who are here in the

Ashram will know the descent of the Supermind—they can’t blame me for not having informed them when it came, I made no mystery of it!—and that they will participate in it—indeed, I did not forbid anyone to participate in it! On the contrary, I believe I encouraged everybody to be open and to receive it, and try to profit by it.

And so I said: From that moment the transforming Grace will radiate in the most effective way. Well, I challenge anyone to tell me the opposite!

But here indeed it begins to be a little more... I added: And fortunately for the aspirants this happy future—I don’t think I wrote it in this way, but that doesn’t matter—this happy future will materialise for them in spite of all the obstacles that the unregenerate human nature may put up against it. I continue to hope that it will be like this!” (CWM 8: 218–219)

“Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men. He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it.” (CWM 12: 116)

“All my effort is towards realising in the world as much truth as actual circumstances will allow; and with the increase of truth, the welfare and happiness of all will necessarily increase.” (CWM 13: 175)

“So long as we go on telling lies, we go on pushing the happy Future far from us.” (CWM 13: 216)

L—Essentials for a Happy and Effective Life

“For a happy and effective life, the essentials are sincerity, humility, perseverance and an insatiable thirst for progress. Above all, one must be convinced of a limitless possibility of progress. Progress is youth; at a hundred years of age one can be young.” (CWM 12: 123) (CWM 16: 431)

“... in order to proceed on the path, …

Give up all personal seeking for comfort, satisfaction, enjoyment or happiness. Be only a burning fire for progress, take whatever comes to you as an aid to your progress and immediately make whatever progress is required.

Try to take pleasure in all you do, but never do anything for the sake of pleasure.” (CWM 12: 33–34)

“The true freedom is to be free from desire.

The true independence is to be independent from passion.

The true mastery is to be master of oneself.

That alone is the key to happiness; all the rest is passing illusion.

It is not in division but in unity that can be found the solution of human problems and the remedy to human miseries.” (CWM 13: 380)

“Surely it is not necessary to be always laughing; but liveliness, serenity, good humour are never out of place. And how helpful they are! With them the mother makes the home happy for her children; ...” (CWM 2: 192)

“And above all, don’t imagine that being orderly, regular, punctual, must prevent you from being happy and smiling. It is not necessary to pull a long face when carrying out a task exactly.” (CWM 2: 236)

“There is no reason why you should not get over them [unreasoning jealousy] as many others have done. The Mother’s love and the Mother’s grace are with you. The only other thing needed is the growth of the psychic consciousness and the psychic movement within you. That had begun and was fast increasing; it has only to reach a certain point, to occupy the mind and vital consciousness more strongly, then these things will no longer be able to return. What difficulties remain will then be minor things; there will be nothing that will try to take you away from the Mother. Be patient therefore and persevere; recover your confidence in the Mother and let your soul grow in you. Beyond these storms there is a haven of joy and love and happiness that are your true goal. Persevere till you reach it.” (CWSA 32: 387)

LI—If Inner Happiness Cannot be There Then an Inner State of Equality and Calm

“The inner spiritual progress does not depend on outer conditions so much as on the way we react to them from within—that has always been the ultimate verdict of spiritual experience. It is why we insist on taking the right attitude and persisting in it, on an inner state not dependent on outer circumstances, a state of equality and calm, if it cannot be at once of inner happiness, on going more and more within and looking from within outwards instead of living in the surface mind which is always at the mercy of the shocks and blows of life. It is only from that inner state that one can be stronger than life and its disturbing forces and hope to conquer.” (CWSA 29: 140)

“There are two conditions, one of Ananda, another of great calm and equality in which there is no joy or grief. If one attains the latter, afterwards a greater more permanent Ananda becomes possible.” (CWSA 29: 157)

“The active Ananda can culminate in the shanta Ananda. Also when the shanta Ananda is established, it is the base from which active Ananda arises without disturbing its calmness.” (CWSA 29: 157)

“… in the calm mind, it is the substance of the mental being that is still, so still that nothing disturbs it. If thoughts or activities come, they do not rise at all out of the mind, but they come from outside and cross the mind as a flight of birds crosses the sky in a windless air. It passes, disturbs nothing, leaving no trace. Even if a thousand images or the most violent events pass across it, the calm stillness remains as if the very texture of the mind were a substance of eternal and indestructible peace. A mind that has achieved this calmness can begin to act, even incessantly and powerfully, but it will keep its fundamental stillness—originating nothing from itself but receiving from Above and giving it a mental form without adding anything of its own, calmly, dispassionately, though with the joy of the Truth and the happy power and light of its passage.” (CWSA 29: 145)

“One must already be very strong, very far along the way, to be able to face success and the little enjoyments it brings without giving way. Those who can do this, those who are strong, do not run after success; they do not seek it, and accept it with indifference. For they know and appreciate the value of the lashes given by unhappiness and misfortune.

But ultimately the true attitude, the sign and proof that we are near the goal, is a perfect equality which enables us to accept success and failure, fortune and misfortune, happiness and sorrow with the same tranquil joy; for all these things become marvellous gifts that the Lord in his infinite solicitude showers upon us.” (CWM 10: 58–59)

LII—Peace Has Certain Happiness

“Peace is more positive than calm—there can be a negative calm which is merely an absence of disturbance or trouble, but peace is always something positive bringing not merely a release as calm does but a certain happiness or Ananda of itself.” (CWSA 29: 148)

“It is very good news. The peace settling in the system and with it a happy activity—that is the basis for your Yoga which I always wanted you to have—a sunny condition in which what has to come in will come in and expand like a bud into flower and what has to fall off will fall off in its time like a slough discarded.” (CWSA 29: 148)

LIII—The Gladness or Joy in the Peace Is Internal, Self-existent

“The peace need not be grave or joyless—there should be nothing grey in it—but the gladness or joy or sense of lightness that comes in the peace must be necessarily something internal, self-existent or due to a deepening of experience—it cannot, like the laughter of which you speak, be conveyed by an external cause or dependent upon it, e.g. something amusing, exhilarating etc.” (CWSA 29: 156)

“It is when one is full of peace that one laughs most gladly. It is an inner condition, not something external like being silent or not laughing. It is a condition of serenity and stillness within in which there is no disturbance even if things go wrong or people are unpleasant or the body feels unwell—the state of serene inner gladness remains the same. It is self-existent.” (CWSA 29: 156)

LIV—When the Peace and the Inner Happiness Increase

“It is because the centre of your difficulties has been there [in the chest and stomach]. The chest = the emotional nature exposed to wrong feelings; the stomach = the dynamic vital centre, exposed to wrong desires, ambitions, sense of possession and vital ego etc. But all that will progressively become things of the past, when the Peace, the Presence, the inner happiness increase and take possession of the external nature.” (CWSA 28: 246)

“Ignorance is not a state of innocence or purity; that is an old blunder. Only a consciousness full of light can be pure. For instance, when you are conscious, your mind is clear and you have the right ideas about things and people; your mind is pure of ignorance. But when the mind is clouded by some impurity,—say, anger, jealousy or pride or some unreasonable desire,— you at once become ignorant and mistake and misunderstand everything.

Again, when your heart is turned to the Mother and satisfied with her love, when you are full of peace, contentment and happiness, then there is no room for wrong feelings and desires; your heart is pure.

This is what the Mother meant by purity; to be free from false ideas, wrong feelings, desires, demands etc. is to be pure.” (CWSA 29: 49)

“You are right again about the imaginary obstacles. Good Lord! what mountains of them you have piled up on the way —a regular Abyssinia. It is why we always express depreciation of mental constructions and vital formations—because they are the defence works mind and vital throw up against their capture by the Divine. However the first thing is to become conscious of all that as you have now become,—the next thing is to be firm in knocking it all down and making a tabula rasa, a foundation of calm, peace, happy openness for the true building.” (CWSA 29: 173)

LV—Happiness Do Not Depend upon Outside Happenings

“This is quite right. If you keep this condition [of trust and devotion], not allowing it to be entirely obscured or long clouded, you can move rapidly towards a new birth of your nature and the foundation of your life and all your thoughts and acts and movements in your true being, the psychic being. Never consent to the ideas, suggestions, feelings that bring back the cloud, the confusion and the revolt. It is the consent that makes them strong to recur. Refuse the consent and they will be obliged to retire either immediately or after a time.

Remain fixed in the sunlight of the true consciousness—for only there is happiness and peace. They do not depend upon outside happenings, but on this alone.” (CWSA 31: 711–712)

“But even in animals one feels it [Delight]; it is already a little more difficult than in plants. But in plants, in flowers, it is so wonderful! They speak all their joy, they express it. And as I said, in all familiar objects, the things around you, which you use, there is a state of consciousness in which each one is happy to be, just as it is. So at that moment one knows one has touched true Delight. And it is not conditioned. I mean it does not depend upon... it depends on nothing. It does not depend on outer circumstances, does not depend on a more or less favourable state, it does not depend on anything: it is a communion with the raison d'être of the universe.” (CWM 9: 22–23)

“Indeed, true happiness is the happiness one can feel in any circumstances whatsoever, because it comes from regions which cannot be affected by any external circumstances. But this happiness is accessible only to a very few individuals, and most of the human race is still subject to terrestrial conditions. So we can say on one hand that a change in the human consciousness is absolutely indispensable and, on the other, that without an integral transformation of the terrestrial atmosphere, the conditions of human life cannot be effectively changed. In either case, the remedy is the same: a new consciousness must manifest on earth and in man. Only the appearance of a new force and light and power accompanying the descent of the supramental consciousness into this world can raise man out of the anguish and pain and misery in which he is submerged. For only the supramental consciousness bringing down upon earth a higher poise and a purer and truer light can achieve the great miracle of transformation.” (CWM 12: 97–98)

LVI—We call the Divine Power but Live in Outer Consciousness Then

“Take now the call for the Divine Power, Light, Ananda. If we live only in the outward physical consciousness, it may descend and work behind the veil but we shall feel nothing and only see certain results after a long time. Or at most we feel a certain clarity and peace in the mind, a joy in the vital, a happy state in the physical and infer the touch of the Divine. But if we are awake in the inward physical, we shall feel the light, power or Ananda flowing through the body, the limbs, nerves, blood, breath and, through the subtle body, affecting the most material cells and making them conscious and blissful and we shall sense directly the Divine Power and Presence.” (CWSA 28: 205)

LVII—Mentally Developed Humanity, Happy with Life

“There was all the humanity which is no longer altogether animal, which has benefited by mental development and created a kind of harmony in its life—a harmony vital and artistic, literary—in which the large majority are content to live. They have caught a kind of harmony, and within it they live life as it exists in a civilised surrounding, that is to say, somewhat cultured, with refined tastes and refined habits. And all this life has a certain beauty where they are at ease, and unless something catastrophic happens to them, they live happy and contented, satisfied with life. These people can be drawn (because they have a taste, they are intellectually developed), they can be attracted by the new forces, the new things, the future life; for example, they can become disciples of Sri Aurobindo mentally, intellectually. But they do not feel at all the need to change materially; and if they were compelled to do so, it would be first of all premature, unjust, and would simply create a great disorder and disturb their life altogether uselessly.

This was very clear.” (CWM 11: 24)

LVIII—The Goal of Life Is Not to Secure Personal Happiness

“Two ideas which are very wide-spread, especially in the West, contribute towards making its domination more sovereign. One is that the chief aim of life is to be happy; the other that one is born with a certain character and that it is impossible to change it.

The first idea is a childish deformation of a very profound truth: that all existence is based upon delight of being and without delight of being there would be no life. But this delight of being, which is a quality of the Divine and therefore unconditioned, must not be confused with the pursuit of pleasure in life, which depends largely upon circumstances. The conviction that one has the right to be happy leads, as a matter of course, to the will to ‘live one’s own life’ at any cost. This attitude, by its obscure and aggressive egoism, leads to every kind of conflict and misery, disappointment and discouragement, and very often ends in catastrophe.

In the world as it is now the goal of life is not to secure personal happiness, but to awaken the individual progressively to the Truth-consciousness.” (CWM 12: 18)

“A mistake [to think that all men seek after happiness];

many men are not after happiness and do not believe it is the true aim of life. It is the physical vital that seeks after happiness, the bigger vital is ready to sacrifice it in order to satisfy its passions, search for power, ambition, fame or any other motive. If you say it is because of the happiness power, fame etc. gives, that again is not universally true. Power can give anything else, but not happiness; it is something in its very nature arduous and full of difficulty to get, to keep or to use—I speak of course of power in the ordinary sense. A man may know he can never have fame in this life but yet work in the hope of posthumous fame or in the chance of it. He may know that the satisfaction of his passion will bring him everything rather than happiness—suffering, torture, destruction—yet he will follow his impulse. So also the mind as well as the larger vital is not bound by the pursuit of happiness. It can seek Truth rather or the victory of a cause. To reduce all to a single hedonistic strain seems to me very poor psychology. Neither Nature nor the vast Spirit in things are so limited and one-tracked as that.” (CWSA 28: 194)

“Q: I quote the following remarks of Ramana Maharshi as recorded by Paul Brunton: ‘All human beings are ever wanting happiness, untainted with sorrow. They want to grasp a happiness which will not come to an end. The instinct is a true one.’ [Paul Brunton, A Search in Secret India (London: Rider & Company, [1934] 1943),

p. 157.]

A: All? It is far too sweeping a generalisation. If he had said that is one very strong strain in human nature it could be accepted. But mark that it is in human physical consciousness only. The human vital tends rather to reject a happiness untainted by sorrow and to find it a monotonous, boring condition. Even if it accepts it, after a time it kicks over the traces and goes to some new painful or risky adventure.

Q: ‘Man’s real nature is happiness. Happiness is inborn in the true self. His search for happiness is an unconscious search for his true self. The true self is imperishable; therefore, when a man finds it, he finds a happiness which does not come to an end’ [pp. 157 – 58].

A: The true Self is quite a different proposition. But what it has is not happiness but something more.

Q: ‘Even they [the wicked and the criminal] sin because they are trying to find the self’s happiness in every sin which they commit. This striving is instinctive in man, but they do not know that they are really seeking their true selves, and so they try these wicked ways first as a

means to happiness’ [p. 158].

A: Who is this ‘they’? I fear it is a very summary and misleading criminal psychology. To say that a Paris crook or apache steals, swindles, murders for the happiness of stealing, swindling, murdering is a little startling. He does it for quite other reasons. He does it as his métier just as you do your doctor’s work. Do you really do your doctor’s work because of the happiness you find in it?

Q: People will not seek a sorrowless, untainted, everlasting happiness, even if shown the way—because they will consider it beyond their power to attain, or so it seems to me.

A: It is also with many because they prefer the joy mixed with sorrow, … and consider your everlasting happiness an everlasting bore.” (CWSA 35: 167–168)

“Ramana Maharshi seems a real Maharshi.

He is more of a Yogi than a Rishi, it seems to me. The happiness theory does not impress me,—it is as old as the mountains but not so solid. But he knows a lot about Yoga.” (CWSA 35: 169–170)

“Is the aim of life to be happy?

This is just putting things topsy-turvy.

The aim of human life is to discover the Divine and to manifest It. Naturally this discovery leads to happiness; but this happiness is a consequence, not an aim in itself. And it is this mistake of taking a mere consequence for aim of life that has been the cause of most of the miseries which are afflicting human life.”

(CWM 12: 311–312)

“In the world as it is now the goal of life is not to secure personal happiness, but to awaken the individual progressively to the Truth-consciousness.” (CWM 12: 18) (CWM 14: 7)

“It is not in order to be happy that we are upon earth, for in the present conditions of terrestrial life happiness is an impossibility. We are upon earth to find and realise the Divine, for the Divine Consciousness alone can give true happiness.” (CWM 14: 7)

“Do not live to be happy, live to serve the Divine and the joy that you will experience will be beyond all expectations.” (CWM 14: 7)

“Happiness is not the aim of life.

The aim of ordinary life is to carry out one’s duty, the aim of spiritual life is to realise the Divine.” (CWM 14: 7)

LIX—In this Unhappy World Evolution Leads Through Happiness and Suffering

“It is quite obvious that this world is full of suffering and afflicted with transience to a degree that seems to justify the Gita’s description of it as ‘this unhappy and transient world’, anityam asukham The question is whether it is a mere creation of Chance or governed by a mechanic inconscient Law or whether there is a meaning in it and something beyond its present appearance towards which we move. If there is a meaning and if there is something towards which things are evolving, then inevitably there must be a guidance—and that means that a supporting Consciousness and Will is there with which we can come into inner contact. If there is such a Consciousness and Will, it is not likely that it would stultify itself by annulling the worlds meaning or turning it into a perpetual or eventual failure.

This world has a double aspect. It seems to be based on a material Inconscience and an ignorant mind and life full of that Inconscience; error and sorrow, death and suffering are the necessary consequence. But there is evidently too a partially successful endeavour and an imperfect growth towards Light, Knowledge, Truth, Good, Happiness, Harmony, Beauty,—at least a partial flowering of these things. The meaning of this world must evidently lie in this opposition; it must be an evolution which is leading or struggling towards higher things out of a first darker appearance. Whatever guidance there is must be given under these conditions of opposition and struggle and must be leading towards that higher state of things. It is leading the individual, certainly, and the world, presumably, towards the higher state, but through the double terms of knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, death and life, pain and pleasure, happiness and suffering; none of the terms can be excluded until the higher status is reached and established. It is not and cannot be, ordinarily, a guidance which at once rejects the darker terms or still less a guidance which brings us solely and always nothing but happiness, success and good fortune. Its main concern is with the growth of our being and consciousness, the growth towards a higher self, towards the Divine, eventually towards a highest Light, Truth and Bliss; the rest is secondary, sometimes a means, sometimes a result, not a primary purpose.” (CWSA 29: 176–177)

“I don’t remember saying anything on this subject [of pain and suffering], except that disappointed vital desire must bring about suffering. Pain and suffering are necessary results of the Ignorance in which we live; men grow by all kinds of experience, pain and suffering as well as their opposites, joy and happiness and ecstasy. One can get strength from them if one meets them in the right way. Many take a joy in pain and suffering when associated with struggle or endeavour or adventure, but that is more because of the exhilaration and excitement of the struggle than because of suffering for its own sake. There is, however, something in the vital which takes joy in the whole of life, its dark as well as its bright sides. There is also something perverse in the vital which takes a kind of dramatic pleasure in its own misery and tragedy, even in degradation or in illness. … Whatever fulfilment one may feel in pain or in doubt belongs to the Ignorance; the real fulfilment is in the divine joy and the divine Truth and its certitude and it is that for which the Yogin strives. In the strife he may have to pass through doubt, not by his own choice or will, but because there is still imperfection in his knowledge.” (CWSA 31: 203–204)

“Doubt, struggle, efforts and failures, lapses, alternations of happy and unhappy or good and bad conditions, states of light and states of darkness are the common lot of human beings. They are not created by Yoga or by the effort after perfection; only in Yoga one becomes conscious of their movements and their causes instead of feeling them blindly, and in the end one makes one’s way out of them into a clearer and happier consciousness. The ordinary life remains to the last a series of troubles and struggles, but the sadhak of the Yoga comes out of the trouble and struggle to a ground of fundamental serenity which superficial disturbances may still touch but cannot destroy, and, finally, all disturbance ceases altogether.” (CWSA 31: 650)

“The sufferings and distress which come to people are part of their karma, part of the experience the being has to go through on its way through life after life till it is ready for spiritual change. In the life of the sadhak all vicissitudes are part of the path and, if he is a sadhak, he will recognise them as such though he may not understand their full meaning till afterwards—good and bad fortune, outward happiness and suffering are to be taken with an unshaken equality and trust in the Divine Wisdom till one has attained a position in which, united with the Divine Will, one can dominate them.” (CWSA 31: 670)

“As for the Divine working, the experience of the Vedantic realisation is that behind the confused mixture of good and evil something is working that he realises as the Divine and in his own life he can look back and see what each step, happy or unhappy, meant for his progress and how it led towards the growth of his spirit. Naturally this comes fully as the realisation progresses; before that he had to walk by faith and may have often felt his faith fail and yielded to grief, doubt and despair for a time.” (CWSA 35: 181)

“Ordinary men, on the contrary, always ask God to give them an easy, pleasant and successful life. In every personal satisfaction they see a sign of divine mercy; but if on the contrary they meet with unhappiness and misfortune in life, they complain and say to God, ‘You do not love me.’

In opposition to this crude and ignorant attitude, Sri Aurobindo says to the divine Beloved, ‘Strike, strike hard, let me feel the intensity of Thy love for me.’” (CWM 10: 58)

“We were saying the other day that it is only his friends whom God treats with severity; you thought it was a joke, but it is true. It is only to those who are full of hope, who will pass through this purifying flame, that the conditions for attaining the maximum result are given. And the human mind is made in such away that you may test this; when something extremely unpleasant happens to you, you may tell yourself, “Well, this proves I am worth the trouble of being given this difficulty, this proves there is something in me which can resist the difficulty”, and you will notice that instead of tormenting yourself, you rejoice—you will be so happy and so strong that even the most unpleasant things will seem to you quite charming!” (CWM 4: 353–354)

“Only when egoism dies & God in man governs his own human universality, can this earth support a happy and contented race of beings.” (CWSA 12: 470)

Thoughts and Aphorisms

“And what of suffering and happiness, misfortune and prosperity? These are experiences of the soul in its training, helps, props, means, disciplines, tests, ordeals,—and prosperity often a worse ordeal than suffering. Indeed, adversity, suffering may often be regarded rather as a reward to virtue than as a punishment for sin, since it turns out to be the greatest help and purifier of the soul struggling to unfold itself. To regard it merely as the stern award of a Judge, the anger of an irritated Ruler or even the mechanical recoil of result of evil upon cause of evil is to take the most superficial view possible of God’s dealings with the soul and the law of the world’s evolution. And what of worldly prosperity, wealth, progeny, the outward enjoyment of art, beauty, power? Good, if they be achieved without loss to the soul and enjoyed only as the outflowing of the divine Joy and Grace upon our material existence. But let us seek them first for others or rather for all, and for ourselves only as a part of the universal condition or as one means of bringing perfection nearer.” (CWSA 13: 267–268)

“True progressive evolution, an evolution which can lead man to his rightful happiness, does not lie in any external means, material improvement or social change. Only a deep and inner process of individual self-perfection can make for real progress and completely transform the present state of things, and change suffering and misery into a serene and lasting contentment.” (CWM 2: 69)

LX—When the Divine Moment Arrives

“There are moments when the Spirit moves among men and the breath of the Lord is abroad upon the waters of our being; there are others when it retires and men are left to act in the strength or the weakness of their own egoism. The first are periods when even a little effort produces great results and changes destiny; the second are spaces of time when much labour goes to the making of a little result. It is true that the latter may prepare the former, may be the little smoke of sacrifice going up to heaven which calls down the rain of God's bounty. Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it, because the lamp has not been kept trimmed for the welcome and the ears are sealed to the call. But thrice woe to them who are strong and ready, yet waste the force or misuse the moment; for them is irreparable loss or a great destruction.” (CWSA 12: 146)

LXI—Happiness Is Not Normal Conditions in This World

“As yet happiness and good health are not normal conditions in this world.

We must protect them carefully against the intrusion of their opposites.” (CWM 15: 136)

“There are many dismal spectacles in the world, but that is after all the very reason why Yoga has to be done. If the world were all happy and beautiful and ideal, who would want to change it or find it necessary to bring down a higher consciousness into earthly Mind and Matter? Your other argument is that the work of the Yoga itself is difficult, not easy, not a happy canter to the goal. Of course it is, because the world and human nature are what they are. I never said it was easy or that there were not obstinate difficulties in the way of the endeavour. Again I do not understand your point” (CWSA 31: 672)

“The people of the Punjab have a song which goes like this:

The bulbul does not always sing in the garden,

And the garden is not always in bloom;

Happiness does not always reign,

And friends are not always together.

The conclusion to be drawn from this song is that we cannot expect to be always happy, and that to know how to be patient is most useful. For there are few days in our lives which do not give us the opportunity to learn greater patience.” (CWM 2: 198)

LXII—Happiness and Misery Are Phenomena of Cosmic Experience

“The Indian view is that the Divine is the inmost substance of the Universe, but he is also outside it, transcendent; good and evil, happiness and misery are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and diminution of consciousness in the manifestation, but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-consciousness either of the Divine or of our own spiritual being.” (CWSA 35: 122–123)

“But what explanation of the evil and misery can there be there? The Indian view is that the Divine is the inmost substance of the Universe, but he is also outside it, transcendent; good and evil, happiness and misery are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and diminution of consciousness in the manifestation, but are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-consciousness either of the Divine or of our own spiritual being.” (CWSA 28: 9)

‘I knew some poets who used to say, ‘It is my enemies’ hatred which makes me value the affection of my friends....’ And it is the almost inevitable likelihood of misfortune which gives all its savour to happiness, and so on. And they value repose only in contrast with the daily agitation, silence only because of the usual noise, and some of them even tell you, ‘Oh! it is because there are illnesses that good health is cherished.’ It goes so far that a thing is valued only when it is lost. And as Sri Aurobindo says here: When this fever of action, of movement, this agitation of creative thought is not there, one feels one is falling into inertia. Most people fear silence, calm, quietude. They no longer feel alive when they are not agitated.” (CWM 9: 28)

LXIII—Joys and Pleasures Are Not the Object of Yoga

“It may be that behind this persistence of the lower vital demand for satisfaction there was something not quite clear —in the obscurer part of the physical mind—in your mental attitude towards the Yoga. You seem to regard this demand for the replacement of the old lower vital satisfactions by other joys and pleasures as something quite legitimate; but joys and pleasures are not the object of Yoga and a bargain or demand for a replacement of this kind can be no legitimate or healthy element in the sadhana. If it is there, it will surely impede the flow of spiritual experience. Ananda, yes; but Ananda and the spiritual happiness which precedes it (adhyātma-sukham) are something quite different from joys and pleasures. And even Ananda one cannot demand or make it a condition for pursuing the sadhana—it comes as a crown, a natural outcome and its precondition is the growth of the true consciousness, peace, calm, light, strength, the equanimity which resists all shocks and persists through success and failure. It is these things which must be the first objects of the sadhana, not any hedonistic experience even of the highest kind; for that must come of itself as a result of the Divine Presence.” (CWSA 31: 166–167)

“I objected in a former letter not to aspiration but to a demand, to making peace, joy or Ananda a condition for following the Yoga. And it is undesirable because if you do so, then the vital, not the psychic, takes the lead. When the vital takes the lead, then unrest, despondency, unhappiness can always come, since these things are the very nature of the vital—the vital can never remain constantly in joy and peace, for it needs their opposites in order to have the sense of the drama of life. And yet when unrest and unhappiness come, the vital at once cries, ‘I am not given my due, what is the use of my doing this Yoga?’ Or else it makes a gospel of its unhappiness and says, as you say in your letter, that the path to fulfilment must be a tragic road through the desert. And yet it is precisely this predominance of the vital in us that makes the necessity of passing through the desert. If the psychic were always there in front, the desert would be no longer a desert and the wilderness would blossom with the rose.” (CWSA 31: 168)

LXIV—Vital Joy in Ordinary Life

“Part of the physical cannot do without work, another part (more material) finds it an infliction. What gives the force and joy of the work is however not physical but vital.” (CWSA 29: 251)

“The vital delight in the work is a necessary element for the work itself. Work done without it is much less easy to do and much less easy to offer.” (CWSA 29: 251)

“Most people do things because they have to, not out of the happiness they find in the things. It is only its hobbies and penchants that the nature finds some happiness in, not usually in work— unless of course the work itself is one’s hobby or penchant and can be indulged in or dropped as one likes.” (CWSA 29: 251)

“Joy and enthusiasm and buoyancy are good things, but it must be on a basis of calm and with the head clear for work. (CWSA 29: 251)

“It is not true love, for true love seeks for union and self-

giving and that is the love one must bring to the Divine. This vital (so-called) love brings only suffering and disappointment; it does not bring happiness; it never gets satisfied and, even if it is granted something that it asks for, it is never satisfied with it.” (CWSA 29: 349)

“The joylessness also comes from the vital. It is partly due to the disappointment but not solely, for it is a very common phenomenon when there is a pressure from the mind and soul on the vital to give up its attachments and its full unpurified acceptance of the outward life; it often gets a rajasic or tamasic vairagya instead of the sattwic kind, refuses to take a joy in anything, becomes dry, listless or unhappy, or it says, ‘Well, I have given up, I am giving up, but in exchange I must have the realisation you promise me; why don’t I get it, I can’t wait.’ To get rid of that, it is best, even while observing it, not to identify oneself with it; if the mind or some part of the mind sanctions or justifies, it will persist or recur. If sorrow there must be, the other kind you described in the previous letter is preferable, the sadness that has a sweetness in it, no revolt, no despair, only the psychic longing for the true thing to come.” (CWSA 29: 474)

“When the vital resists the change from the human into the divine consciousness, what it is defending is its right to sorrow and suffering and all the rest of it, varied and relieved no doubt by some vital or mental pleasures and satisfactions, but very partially relieved by them and only for a time. In your own case, it was already beginning to pall on you and that was why you turned from it. No doubt, there were the joys of the intellect and of artistic creation, but a man cannot be an artist alone; there is the outer quite human lower vital part and, in all but a few, it is the most clamorous and insistent part. But what was dissatisfied in you? It was the soul within, first of all, and through it the higher mind and the higher vital. Why then find fault with the Divine for misleading you when it turned you to the Yoga or brought you here? It was simply answering to the demand of your own inner being and the higher parts of your nature. If you have so much difficulty and become restless, it is because you are still divided and something in your lower vital still regrets what it has lost or, as a price for its adhesion or a compensation—a price to be immediately paid down to it,—asks for something similar and equivalent in the spiritual life. It refuses to believe that there is a greater compensation, a larger vital life waiting for it in which there shall not be the old inadequacy and unrest and final dissatisfaction. The foolishness is not in the Divine guidance, but in the irrational and obstinate resistance of this confused and obscure part of you to the demand, made not only by this Yoga, but by all Yoga—to the necessary conditions for the satisfaction of the aspiration of your own soul and higher nature.” (CWSA 29: 476)

“There is no reason why the void should be a dull or unhappy condition. It is usually the habit of the mind and vital to associate happiness or interest only with activity, but the spiritual consciousness has no such limitations.” (CWSA 30: 78)

“Your analysis [of certain vital movements] is perfectly accurate —with this clear knowledge of the mechanism of the whole thing it should be easier to get rid of these ignorant forces. It is true that they care nothing for truth or reason and appeal only to the blind feelings of the vital, but still the light of the true consciousness turned steadily on them ought to so much enlighten your own vital that it will no longer lend itself to the things that seek to disturb it and be ready to take its stand on the calm and happiness of surrender to the Divine.” (CWSA 31: 119)

“All these suggestions are very familiar, and they are always the same both in expression and substance. The reactions too are always the same and their very nature is sufficient to show the source from which they come,—disappointment of unsatisfied desire, despondency, discontent, unhappiness, the sense of grievance and injustice, revolt, a fall to tamas and inertia (because the vital being refuses participation in the spiritual effort unless its egoistic demands are conceded), dryness, dullness, cessation of the sadhana. The same phrases even are repeated,— ‘no life in this existence’, ‘suffocation’, ‘limitation’, ‘air-tight compartments’; and all this simply means that the lower vital nature—or some part of it—is in revolt and wants something else than the divine Truth and the tapasya that leads to the supramental change. It refuses to give up ego and desire and claim and demand or to accept a true self-giving and surrender, while yet it feels the pressure on it to transform itself into an instrument of the divine life.” (CWSA 31: 160)

“It is clear that the force and peace are descending and working more and more to fix themselves in you.

The other feelings, the wanting to be sad, the fear of being happy, the suggestion of incapacity or unfitness are the usual movements of the vital formation which is not yourself and they come up to try and prevent the change in you. You have only to refuse to accept these suggestions and put yourself persistently on the side of the Truth in you which will make you free and happy, and all will be well.” (CWSA 31: 180)

“By the ‘Physical’ I mean the physical consciousness, the most ordinary outward-going consciousness, the normal consciousness of most human beings, which sets such great store by comfort, good food, good clothes, happy relationships, etc., instead of aspiring for the higher things. Aspiration in the physical for the Divine’s Love implies that the physical asks for nothing else save that it should feel how the Divine loves it. It realizes that all its usual satisfactions are utterly insufficient.” (CWM 3: 130)

LXV—Vital Joy Has to be Replaced by Psychic Gladness

“The reason of the difference of result between the two moods in work is that the first mood is that of a vital joy, while the other is that of a psychic quiet. Vital joy, though it is a very helpful thing for the ordinary human life, is something excited, eager, mobile without a settled basis—that is why it soon gets tired and cannot continue. Vital joy has to be replaced by a quiet settled psychic gladness with the mind and vital very clear and very peaceful. When one works on this basis, then everything becomes glad and easy, in touch with the Mother’s force and fatigue or depression do not come.” (CWSA 29: 252)

LXVI—Desires to be Replaced by a Happy Will, One with a Happy Divine’s Will

“It is good. No one can easily get rid of desires. What has first to be done is to exteriorise them, to push them out on the surface and get the inner parts quiet and clear. Afterwards they can be thrown out and replaced by the true thing, a happy and luminous will one with the Divine’s.” (CWSA 31: 262–263)

“The fear is again that of the physical consciousness or of the vital element in it—it is afraid if it gives up desire that it will lose everything—or everything it wants—and gain nothing in exchange or at least nothing it wants. It does not realise that it will get something far greater and more powerful and happy in place of this troubled desire and its doubtful and precarious fruits—for it has been accustomed to think of desire as the only possible motive of life. It does not know that the divine Force is there waiting to descend with its light and peace and joy bringing much greater things and a happier life. When this part can be enlightened and persuaded to want wholeheartedly the change, then a great difficulty, indeed the central difficulty will have gone.” (CWSA 31: 263)

“And when the answer to your aspiration or prayer is not in accord with your desire, this preference makes you feel unhappy, you find it difficult to accept the answer, you must fight to accept it; whereas if you had no preferences, whatever the answer to your aspiration, when it comes, you cling to it joyfully, spontaneously with a sincere élan. Otherwise you are compelled to make an effort to accept what comes, the decision which comes in answer to your aspiration; you wish, desire, prefer things to be like this and not like that. But that, indeed, is not a choice. The choice is there at every minute; every minute you are faced with a choice: the choice to climb up or go down, the choice to progress or go backwards. But this choice does not imply that you prefer things to be like this or like that; it is a fact of every moment, an attitude you take.” (CWM 8: 406–407)

“What to our ignorance looks like luck is simply the result of causes we know nothing about.

It is certain that for someone who has desires, when his desires are not satisfied, it is a sign that the Divine Grace is with him and wants, through experience, to make him progress rapidly, by teaching him that a willing and spontaneous surrender to the Divine Will is a much surer way to be happy in peace and light than the satisfaction of any desire.” (CWM 10: 261)

“In Yoga one uses the inner will and compels the vital to submit itself to tapasya so that it may become calm, strong, obedient—or else one calls down the calm from above obliging the vital to renounce desire and become quiet and receptive. The vital is a good instrument but a bad master. If you allow it to follow its likes and dislikes, its fancies, its desires, its bad habits, it becomes your master and peace and happiness are no longer possible. It becomes not your instrument or the instrument of the Divine Shakti, but of any force of the Ignorance or even any hostile force that is able to seize and use it.” (CWSA 31: 105–106)

“One has to go inside into the inner being and one can minimise contacts, if necessary, not as an absolute rule—provided there is a real living in the inner being and sufficient contact with outside things not to lose one’s hold of practical realities. But if there is an isolation which brings depression, inertia, unhappiness, gloom or else morbidity of any kind, then it is evident that the retirement is not wholesome.” (CWSA 31: 337)

“These results [unhappiness, dullness, obscurity] are not a punishment, they are a natural result of yielding to egoism. All quarrels proceed from egoism which pushes its own opinion and affirms its own importance, considering that it is right and everybody else wrong and thus creates anger and sense of injury etc. These things must not be indulged, but rejected at once.” (CWSA 31: 348)

LXVII—Vigilance and Happiness

“And one who is vigilant, who does not waste his time, sees his bonds falling, every one, great and small; all his difficulties vanish, because of his vigilance; and if he persists in his attitude, finding in it entire satisfaction, it happens after a time that the happiness he feels in being vigilant becomes so strong that he would soon feel very unhappy if he were to lose this vigilance.” (CWM 3: 209)

LXVIII—Wealth and Happiness

“For example, you imagine very easily that a man who is craving for wealth and tries to deceive people in order to get money... According to your idea of justice, this man ought to be deprived of all his wealth and reduced to poverty. We find that usually just the opposite happens. But that, of course, is only a matter of appearances. Behind the appearances, there is something else.... He exchanges this for other possibilities. He may have money, but he no longer has a conscience. And, in fact, what almost always happens is that when he has the money he desired, he is not happy.... And the more he has, usually the less happy he is! He is tormented, you see, by the wealth he has gained.” (CWM 6: 238)

“When you are rich and have a lot of money to spend, generally you spend it on things you find pleasant, and you become habituated to these things, attached to these things, and if one day the money is gone, you miss it, you are unhappy, you are miserable and feel all lost because you no longer have what you were in the habit of having. It is a bondage, a weak attachment. He who is quite detached, when he lives in the midst of these things, it is well with him; when these things are gone, it is well also; he is totally indifferent to both. That is the right attitude: when it is there he uses it, when it is not he does without it. And for his inner consciousness this makes no difference. That surprises you, but it is like that.” (CWM 4: 375)

“ ‘Do not dream that when thou hast got rid of material poverty, men will even so be happy or satisfied or society freed from ills, troubles and problems. This is only the first and lowest necessity. While the soul within remains defectively organised, there will always be outward unrest, disorder and revolution.’ [Thoughts and Aphorism]

This is quite obvious and this is what we are trying to make people understand. A safe and quiet life is not enough to make people happy. Inner development is necessary, and the peace that comes from a conscious contact with the Divine.” (CWM 10: 269)

“Bodily well-being does not inevitably bring peace and joy; and poverty is not necessarily a cause of misery, as is shown by the voluntary poverty of the ascetics of all countries and all ages, who found in their destitution the source and condition of a perfect peace and happiness. Whereas on the contrary, the enjoyment of worldly possessions, of all that material wealth can provide in the way of comfort and pleasure and external satisfaction is powerless to prevent one who possesses these things from suffering pain and sorrow.” (CWM 12: 97)

“Money does not bring happiness. The Sannyasi who possesses nothing and usually eats only one meal a day is perfectly happy if he is sincere. Whereas a rich man may be thoroughly unhappy if he has ruined his health by all sorts of excess and over-indulgence.

I repeat, it is not money that makes a man happy, but rather an inner balance of energy, good health and good feelings. Stop drinking, smoking and over-indulging, stop hating and envying, and then you will no longer lament your lot, you will no longer feel that the world is full of misery.” (CWM 13: 174)

LXIX—Aspiration and Happiness

“One must have a solid well-balanced body, a well controlled vital and a mind organised, supple, logical; then, if you are in a state of aspiration and you receive an answer, all your being will feel enriched, enlarged, splendid, and you will be perfectly happy and you will not spill your cup because it is too full, like a clumsy fellow who does not know how to hold a full tumbler. It is like that, you see, it is as if you had a small vase there, quite small, which will remain small if you do not take care to make it bigger; then if all of a sudden it is filled up with something which is too strong, everything overflows!” (CWM 4: 99–100)

“Intense aspiration is always good, but let there also be calm and peace and joy in the mind and heart, and a confidence that all will be done in its due time.” (CWSA 29: 59)

“The core of this inner surrender is trust and confidence in the Divine. One takes the attitude, ‘I want the Divine and nothing else.’ I do not know why you should think that you can be asked to give up that—if there is not that, then the Yoga cannot be done. ‘I want to give myself entirely to him and since my soul wants that, it cannot be but that I shall meet him and realise him. I ask nothing but that and his action in me to bring me to him, his action secret or open, veiled or manifest. I do not insist on my own time and way; let him do all in his own time and way, I shall believe in him, accept his will, aspire steadily for his light and presence and joy, go through all difficulties and delays relying on him and never giving up. Let my mind be quiet and turn to him and let him open it to his light; let my vital be quiet and turn to him alone and let him open it to his calm and joy. All for him and myself for him. Whatever happens, I will keep to this aspiration and self-giving and go on in perfect reliance that it will be done.” That is the attitude into which one must grow; for, certainly, it cannot be made perfect at once; mental and vital movements come across; but if one keeps the will to it, it will grow in the being.” (CWSA 29: 70–71)

LXX—Unhappiness Can Arouses the Aspiration for a Better State

“I don’t understand the meaning. Why is this opposition the starting-point of spiritual experience?

What is ordinarily called a spiritual experience is the intense need for something other than the life one lives, and most often this awakens after difficulties or disappointments or pain or sorrow, all these things which bring unhappiness and at the same time arouse the aspiration for a better state. It is this that is generally at the root of spiritual experiences: it is something negative.

The positive need to know the Divine and unite with Him usually comes much later. I say usually; there are exceptions, but usually it is at first a flight from the miseries of life which pushes you towards the spiritual life. Very few people, if they were in a state of perfect inner and outer harmony and nothing unpleasant or painful happened to them, very few people would think of the Divine; they would not concern themselves with Him, they would be content with the half-measures of ordinary things and would not seek for an absolute. That is what Sri Aurobindo means.” (CWM 8: 96–97)

LXXI—Unhappy Due to …

1. You are Unhappy because You Want to be Unhapppy

“Well, if you ask me, I would say that behind this there is a vital taste for suffering which imposes suffering on the body because the vital takes a very perverse pleasure in suffering. I have known children who had hurt themselves somewhere or other and who pressed as hard as they could on the injury to make it hurt still more! And they took pleasure in it. I have known grown-ups also. Morally, it is a very well known fact. I spend my time telling people, ‘If you are unhappy, it is because you want to be. If you suffer, it is because you like suffering, otherwise you would not suffer.’ This sort of thing I call unhealthy, for it is against harmony and beauty, it is a kind of morbid need for strong sensations.” (CWM 6: 70)

2. Unhappy due to Ugliness of Actions

“It is quite evident that when you act in an ugly and mean way, naturally you are unhappy; but to be unhappy because you are conscious of the ugliness of your actions seems to me to be already a very advanced stage, for one needs to be very conscious in order to be aware of the evil that one does, and to be conscious of the evil that one does is already a first step towards not doing it any more.” (CWM 3: 197)

3. Unhappy due to Doing Stupid Things

“Well, you pass your life in quarrelling with yourself! One draws you to one side and the other tries to be your good mentor but you don’t listen to it. So you feel as though pulled from all sides. You know what you ought to do and you do not do it. You know what ought not to be done and you do it. And because you do stupid things, you feel sorry. So there are two things, you are unhappy for two reasons: first of all, because of the stupid things you have done, and then due to the regret they bring. It is a somewhat painful situation....” (CWM 5: 253)

4. Unhappy due to coming across People Who Do Not Believe

“So there is only one thing to do: to proceed on one’s way keeping one’s own faith and certitude, and to pay no heed to contradictions and denials.

There are people who need the support and trust and certitude of others to feel comfortable and to be at ease—they are always unhappy because, of course, they will always come across people who do not believe, and so they will be upset and it will trouble them. One must find one’s certitude within oneself, keep it in spite of everything and go one’s way whatever the cost, to the very end. The Victory is for the most enduring.” (CWM 9: 255)

5. To be concerned for one’s happiness is the surest way of becoming unhappy

“To be concerned for one’s happiness is the surest way of becoming unhappy.” (CWM 14: 181)

6. Unhappy circumstance as the proof that the Lord considers that he is ready for spiritual life

“You can say to X, on my behalf, that he must look at this apparently unhappy circumstance as the proof that the Lord considers that he is ready for spiritual life and that he must no more be attached to any exterior or material thing.

If he takes things that way, he will soon feel that all sorrow is gone away from him.

What I meant was, not to worry about it. Let him take what comes to him without getting upset or sorry, excited or nervous.” (CWM 14: 220)

7. Feeling unhappy means that you have a progress to make

“When you feel unhappy like that, it means that you have a progress to make. You can say that we always need to progress, it is true. But at times our nature gives its consent to the needed change and then everything goes smoothly, even happily. On the contrary sometimes the part that has to progress refuses to move and clings to its old habits through inertia, ignorance, attachment or desire. Then, under the pressure of the perfecting force, the struggle starts translating itself into unhappiness or revolt or both together.

The only remedy is to keep quiet, look within oneself honestly to find out what is wrong and set to work courageously to put it right.

The Divine Consciousness will always be there to help you if your endeavour is sincere; and the more sincere your endeavour the more the Divine Consciousness will help and assist you.” (CWM 14: 246)

8. Unhappy movements disturb the nature and cloud it and make it more difficult for the Force to work

“The important thing is to get rid of the habit of the invasion of troubling thoughts, wrong feelings, confusion of ideas, unhappy movements. These disturb the nature and cloud it and make it more difficult for the Force to work; when the mind is quiet and at peace, the Force can work more easily. It should be possible to see things that have to be changed in you without being upset or depressed; the change is the more easily done.” (CWSA 29: 161)

9. The unhappiness is not necessary or inevitable in the sadhana

“The unhappiness is not necessary or inevitable in the sadhana, but it comes because your inner nature feels the touch of the Divine Presence indispensable to it and uneasy when it does not feel it. To feel it always a certain constant detachment within allowing you to remain within and do everything from within is necessary. This can more easily be done in quiet occupations and quiet contacts. For it is quietness and inwardness that enable one to feel the Presence.” (CWSA 30: 379)

10. Those who are satisfied with their own liberation, they leave the world to its unhappy plight

“The usual sadhanas have for aim the union with the Supreme Consciousness (Sat-chit-ananda). And those who reach there are satisfied with their own liberation and leave the world to its unhappy plight. On the contrary, Sri Aurobindo’s sadhana starts where the others end. Once the union with the Supreme is realised one must bring down that realisation to the exterior world and change the conditions of life upon the earth until a total transformation is accomplished.” (CWM 14: 33–34)

11. The Vital is a very good worker, it works very well, but in working it seeks always its own satisfaction

12. When this satisfaction is not given for one reason or another the vital is not happy, not at all happy

“I believe the vital is very conscious of its power and that is why it is important: it has that dynamic energy which makes no difficulty too difficult for it; but it must be on the right side. If it collaborates, everything is wonderful, but it is not easy to get from it this constant collaboration. It is a very good worker, it works very, very well, but in working it seeks always its own satisfaction, it wants to get something from the work, all the pleasure that can be drawn from it, all the advantage that can be had, and when this satisfaction is not given for one reason or another (there may be many reasons), it is not happy, not at all happy: ‘That’s not fair, I work, and I am given nothing in return’; then it sulks, it does not move, it keeps mum, and at times it says, ‘I do not exist.’ Then all energy runs out from the body, you get tired, exhausted, you can no longer do anything.” (CWM 4: 50)

13. The world is divine and that it is unhappy because it has separated from the Divine

“We say, don’t we, that the world is divine and that it is unhappy because it has separated from the Divine.”

(CWM 4: 291)

“We say the world is unhappy because it has forgotten its origin, that is, its divine origin. You say, child, that we are unhappy because ‘we’ are ignorant—the ‘we’ is men. Consequently, unhappiness has come into the world with men—here is something serious! That is, with man mind has come upon earth, you see, for man is a mental animal, and with the mind has come misery. The mind is capable of objectifying, and so it finds that such and such a thing is miserable—without the mind there would be no such discovery and no unhappiness. So, there is no unhappiness for animals nor for plants, and yet less for stones. Are we agreed on this: there is no unhappiness for animals, plants and stones? We say unhappiness has come with the mind which has become conscious of it. Mark that I am trying to lead you to something which is not so stupid, for in the ancient Teaching it was said, ‘Change your consciousness and what appears to you unfortunate will not so appear to you any longer.’ The Buddha taught that if you are free from desire, things that seemed to you unfortunate would no longer seem to you unfortunate at all. Therefore, we come to this: it is the thought you have about it which makes you consider this or that thing unfortunate. If you thought an event happy, it would become happy for you; and that is what it is, in fact. In most cases when the thought has accepted that a thing ought  to be, for whatever reason, it is no longer unhappy; when the thought has not accepted this, it finds this unhappy. So, as long as you are in the field of emotions, of sentiments and thoughts, all this is true. That is, the notion of ‘unhappiness’ has entered the world with the capacity to consider that things were unfortunate. You follow the logic? Thus, plants do not suffer because they do not know that they suffer and animals do not suffer because they do not know that they

suffer. You are sure of it? Aren’t you?” (CWM 4: 292–293)

14. One is unhappy only when one is not generous

“Moreover, one is unhappy only when one is not generous—if one has a generous nature which gives of itself without reckoning, one is never unhappy. It is those who are coiled up on themselves and who always want to draw things towards themselves, who see things and the world only through themselves—it is these who are unhappy. But when one gives oneself generously, without reckoning, one is never unhappy, never. It is he who wants to take who is unhappy; he who gives himself is never so.” (CWM 4: 404)

15. Happiness can no longer enter where there is depression, discouragement and revolt

“Be careful, child, do not open the door to depression, discouragement and revolt—this leads far, far away from consciousness and makes you sink into the depths of obscurity where happiness can no longer enter. Your great strength was your smile; because you knew how to smile at life, you also knew how to work with courage and steadiness, and in this you were exceptional. But you have followed the example of other people, you have learned from them to be discontented, rebellious, depressed, and now you have let your smile slip away, and with it your faith and confidence in me; in this condition, if all the divine forces were to concentrate on you, it would be in vain—you would refuse to receive them.” (CWM 16: 67–68)

16. Revolt is the most useless and foolish of all things

17. When you give up this bad habit of revolt, you will see that suffering too will go away and be replaced by an unvarying happiness

“My dear child,

You will no longer revolt when you understand that it is the most useless and foolish of all things; and when you give up this bad habit of revolt, you will see that suffering too will go away and be replaced by an unvarying happiness.

With all my being, I want this progress and this transformation for you.

With love.” (CWM 16: 123)

18. When one’s attention is always turned towards oneself, one is never happy

“My dear child,

When one’s attention is always turned towards oneself, one is never happy. When one allows oneself to be ruled by every passing impulse, one is never peaceful.

It is through work and self-mastery that one can find happiness and peace.” (CWM 16: 132)

19. Unhappiness comes from desires and ambitions

“My dear child, I am only too willing to help you out of this absurd unhappiness, but I am afraid that it comes only from thwarted desires—and in that case you must first renounce those desires and ambitions. But you can be sure that my help is always with you.” (CWM 17: 100)

LXXII—Adverse Vital Force Wants You to Fall from Happiness

1.

“The experience you write of in today’s letter shows clearly the only way of safety against these attacks, to get back to the close and happy connection, the psychic openness to the Mother which has been so long the foundation of your sadhana and the cause of the great progress you were making.

Do not listen to the clamour of the adverse vital Force which has been attacking you, its reasonings or its wrong emotional suggestions—it only wants you to fall from happiness, to suffer and to descend into a lower consciousness and lose your progress.

Get back into the true spirit of love and closeness, surrender and confidence and Ananda and remain there—then in due time all problems and difficulties will solve themselves as the light and power of the Truth descend into the still weak and obscure parts of the nature.” (CWSA 31: 795)

LXXIII-Happiness for Students

1.

“… if you could go to the class in order to make progress, every day a new little progress—even if it be the understanding why your professor bores you—it would be wonderful, for all of a sudden he will no longer be boring to you, all of a sudden you will discover that he is very interesting! It is like that. If you look at life in this way, life becomes something wonderful. That is the only way of making it interesting, because life upon earth is made to be a field for progress and if we progress to the maximum we draw the maximum benefit from our life upon earth. And then one feels happy. When one does the best one can, one is happy.” (CWM 5: 49–50)

“As the capacity of understanding grows in the child, he should be taught, in the course of his education, to add artistic taste and refinement to power and precision. He should be shown, led to appreciate, taught to love beautiful, lofty, healthy and noble things, whether in Nature or in human creation. This should be a true aesthetic culture, which will protect him from degrading influences. For, in the wake of the last wars and the terrible nervous tension which they provoked, as a sign, perhaps, of the decline of civilisation and social decay, a growing vulgarity seems to have taken possession of human life, individual as well as collective, particularly in what concerns aesthetic life and the life of the senses. A methodical and enlightened cultivation of the senses can, little by little, eliminate from the child whatever is by contagion vulgar, commonplace and crude. This [vital] education will have very happy effects even on his character. For one who has developed a truly refined taste will, because of this very refinement, feel incapable of acting in a crude, brutal or vulgar manner. This refinement, if it is sincere, brings to the being a nobility and generosity which will spontaneously find expression in his behaviour and will protect him from many base and perverse movements.” (CWM 12: 21)

“When one is very young and as I say ‘well-born’, that is, born with a conscious psychic being within, there is always, in the dreams of the child, a kind of aspiration, which for its child’s consciousness is a sort of ambition, for something which would be beauty without ugliness, justice without injustice, goodness without limits, and a conscious, constant success, a perpetual miracle. One dreams of miracles when one is young, one wants all wickedness to disappear, everything to be always luminous, beautiful, happy, one likes stories which end happily. This is what one should rely on. When the body feels its miseries, its limitations, one must establish this dream in it—of a strength which would have no limit, a beauty which would have no ugliness, and of marvellous capacities: one dreams of being able to rise into the air, of being wherever it is necessary to be, of setting things right when they go wrong, of healing the sick; indeed, one has all sorts of dreams when one is very young.... Usually parents or teachers pass their time throwing cold water on it, telling you, ‘Oh! it’s a dream, it is not a reality.’ They should do the very opposite! Children should be taught, ‘Yes, this is what you must try to realise and not only is it possible but it is certain if you come in contact with the part in you which is capable of doing this thing. This is what should guide your life, organise it, make you develop in the direction of the true reality which the ordinary world calls illusion’.” (CWM 9: 162)

“The children must be educated in an atmosphere of love and gentleness.

No violence, never.

No scolding, never.

Always a gentle kindness and the teacher must be the living example of the virtues the child must acquire.

The children must be happy to go to school, happy to learn, and the teacher must be their best friend who gives them the example of the qualities they must acquire.” (CWM 12: 194)

“There were some children who were doing very well and were very happy. They went to their parents for the holidays and came back completely changed and spoiled. And then if we tell them that, it will be even worse because their parents will tell them, ‘Oh, these people are bad, they are turning you against us.’ So it must be... the parents must know that before they send them.

This has been my experience for so many, so many, so many years, so many years! The danger is not the children, it is not laziness, it is not even that the children are rebellious: the danger, the great danger is the parents.” (CWM 12: 433)

“I would like... I would like the attitude of our school to be made known to people before they send their children, because it is a pity when the children are happy and the parents are not; and that creates situations that are ridiculous and sometimes dangerous. This is very important, very important!” (CWM 12: 433)

“Which path must I take then? What is the right and true way of making the effort?

“... make your brain work by studying regularly and systematically; then during the hours when you are not studying, your brain, having worked enough, will be able to rest and it will be possible for you to concentrate in the depths of your heart and find there the psychic source; with it you will become conscious of both gratitude and true happiness.” (CWM 12: 134)

“So, brave children of every land, what are the evil things that you should learn to fight? What are the things that man must master or destroy?

All that threatens his life and is harmful to his progress, all that weakens or degrades him, all that makes him unhappy.” (CWM 2: 241)

LXXIV—Only Vital Beings Love to be Worshiped and Feel Happy

1.

“Besides, in the invisible world hardly any beings love to be worshipped, except those of the vital. These, as I said, are quite pleased by it. And then, it gives them importance. They are puffed up with pride and feel very happy, and when they can get a herd of people to worship them they are quite satisfied.

But if you take real divine beings, this is not a tall something they value. They do not like to be worshipped. No, it does not give them any special pleasure at all! Don’t think they are happy, for they have no pride. It is because of pride that a man likes to be worshipped; if a man has no pride he doesn’t like to be worshipped; and if, for instance, they see a good intention or a fine feeling or a movement of unselfishness or enthusiasm, a joy, a spiritual joy, these things have for them an infinitely greater value than prayers and acts of worship and pujas...

I assure you what I am telling you is very serious: if you seat a real god in a chair and oblige him to remain there all the while you are doing puja, he may perhaps have a little fun watching you do it, but it certainly gives him no satisfaction. None at all! He does not feel either flattered or happy or glorified by your puja. You must get rid of that idea. There is an entire domain between the spiritual and the material worlds which belongs to vital beings, and it is this domain that is full of all these things, because these beings live upon that, are happy with it, and it immediately gives them importance; and the one who has the greatest number of believers, devotees and worshippers is the happiest and the most puffed up. But how can anyone imagine that the gods could value... The gods—I am speaking of the true gods, even those of the Overmind, though they are still a bit... well, so-so... they seem to have taken on many human defects, but still, despite all that, they really have a higher consciousness—it does not please them at all.” (CWM 6: 195–196)

LXXV—Other Quotations on Happiness

“It was not at all Rama’s business to establish the spiritual stage of that evolution—so he did not at all concern himself with that. His business was to destroy Ravana and to establish the Ramarajya—in other words, to fix for the future the possibility of an order proper to the sattwic civilised human being who governs his life by the reason, the finer emotions, morality or at least moral ideals, such as truth, obedience, cooperation and harmony, the sense of humour, the sense of domestic and public order, to establish this in a world still occupied by anarchic forces, the Animal Mind and the powers of the vital Ego making its own satisfaction the rule of life, in other words, the Vanara and the Rakshasa. This is the meaning of Rama and his life-work and it is according as he fulfilled it or not that he must be judged as Avatar or no Avatar. … But most of all, it was his business to typify and establish the things on which the social idea and its stability depend, truth and honour, the sense of the Dharma, public spirit and the sense of order. To the first, to truth and honour, much more even than to his filial love and obedience to his father—though to that also—he sacrificed his personal rights as the elect of the King and the Assembly and fourteen of the best years of his life and went into exile in the forests. To his public spirit and his sense of public order (the great and supreme civic virtue in the eyes of the ancient Indians, Greeks, Romans, for at that time the maintenance of the ordered community, not the separate development and satisfaction of the individual was the pressing need of human evolution) he sacrificed his own happiness and domestic life and the happiness of Sita. In that he was at one with the moral sense of all the antique races, though at variance with the later romantic individualistic sentimental morality of the modern man who can afford to have that less stern morality just because the ancients sacrificed the individual in order to make the world safe for the spirit of social order. Finally it was Rama’s business to make the world safe for the ideal of the sattwic human being by destroying the sovereignty of Ravana, the Rakshasa menace. All this he did with such a divine afflatus in his personality and action that his figure has been stamped for more than two millenniums on the mind of Indian culture and what he stood for has dominated the reason and idealising mind of man in all countries—and in spite of the constant revolt of the human vital is likely to continue to do so until a greater Ideal arises. And you say in spite of all this that he was no Avatar? If you like—but at any rate he stands among the few greatest of the great Vibhutis. You may dethrone him now—for man is no longer satisfied with the sattwic ideal and is seeking for something more—but his work and meaning remain stamped on the past of the earth’s evolving race.” (CWSA 28: 491–492)

“India has achieved her freedom but as yet with limitations and under circumstances which it did not desire and which do not admit of a complete rejoicing at the victory; for it is not the united India for which we had hoped that has emerged, but an India parcelled out and divided and threatened with perils and difficulties and disadvantages which would not have been there but for the disunion and the internal quarrels which brought about this unhappy result. Among the leaders of the country who have reluctantly consented to the settlement made there is no enthusiasm over it but only a regretful acceptance and a firm determination to make the most of what has been won, overcome the difficulties and dangers and achieve for the country as great a position in the world and as much power and prosperity as is possible for a divided India.” (CWSA 36: 481–482)

“But if you have united your consciousness with the psychic consciousness, when you die you remain conscious of your psychic being and the psychic being returns to the psychic world which is a world of bliss and delight and peace and tranquillity and of a growing knowledge. So, if you like to call that a paradise, it is all right; because in fact, to the extent to which you are identified with your psychic being, you remain conscious of it, you are one with it, and it is immortal and goes to its immortal domain to enjoy a perfectly happy life or rest. If you like to call that paradise, call it paradise. If you are good, if you have become conscious of your psychic and live in it, well, when your body dies, you will go with your psychic being to take rest in the psychic world, in a blissful state.” (CWM 5: 134)

“Solicitude”—do you know what that means?

Not very well.

Not very well? It is... well, it is ‘care’ in English, that is, attention, help, concern, precisely the concern to help and do good; this is solicitude. When you feel solicitude for someone, you do... you find out his needs and try to satisfy them; you have good thoughts, good feelings, you want to help, support, make him happy. This is solicitude. So, to stand back from solicitude is to refuse these things when they come, either to disregard them or refuse them.

However, very often one does it without knowing it. For example, every feeling of independence, of the need to look after oneself, of not wanting to submit to any discipline, any rule, of standing on one’s own feet, not wanting any support except one’s own, and being free, independent in one’s movements: this is to stand back from the divine solicitude. To want to do what one likes, one’s own will, in quite a free and independent way —‘only doing what I want’—this is to stand back from the divine solicitude.

One does it quite frequently!” (CWM 6: 374–375)

“Someone wrote to me saying that he was very unhappy, for he longed to have wonderful capacities to put at the disposal of the Divine, for the Realisation, for the Work; and that he also longed to have immense riches to be able to give them, to put them at the feet of the Divine for the Work. So I replied to him that he need not be unhappy, that each one is asked to give what he has, that is, all his possessions whatever they may be, and what he is, that is, all his potentialities—which corresponds to the consecration of one’s life and the giving of all one’s possessions—and that nothing more than this is asked. What you are, give that; what you have, give that, and your gift will be perfect; from the spiritual point of view it will be perfect. This does not depend upon the amount of wealth you have or the number of capacities in your nature; it depends upon the perfection of your gift, that is to say, on the totality of your gift.” (CWM 8: 14–15)

“It is quite certain, for instance, that if you have a special affection for a plant, if, in addition to the material care you give it, you love it, if you feel close to it, it feels this; its blossoming is much more harmonious and happy, it grows better, it lives longer. All this means a response in the plant itself. Consequently, there is the presence there of a certain consciousness; and surely the plant has a vital being.” (CWM 8: 26)

“But Delight without detachment would be a very dangerous gift which could very easily be perverted. So, to seek Delight before having acquired detachment does not seem to be very wise. One must first be above all possible opposites: indeed, above pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness, enthusiasm and depression. If one is above all that, then one may safely aspire for Delight.

But as long as this detachment is not realised, one can easily confuse Delight with an exalted state of ordinary human happiness, and this would not at all be the true thing nor even a perversion of the thing, for the nature of the two is so different, almost opposite, that you cannot pass from one to the other.

So, if one wants to be safe on the path, it seems to me that to seek for peace, for perfect calm, perfect equality, for a widening of the consciousness, a vaster understanding and liberation from all desire, all preference, all attachment, is certainly an indispensable preliminary condition.

It is the guarantee of both inner and outer equipoise.

And then on this equilibrium, on this foundation which must be very solid, one may build whatever one wants. But to begin with, the foundation must be there, unshakable.” (CWM 8: 327–328)

“Nature is happy to be beautiful.” (CWM 15: 10)

“What should be the ideal of a woman’s physical beauty?

A perfect harmony in the proportions, suppleness and strength, grace and force, plasticity and endurance, and above all, an excellent health, unvarying and unchanging, which is the result of a pure soul, a happy trust in life and an unshakable faith in the Divine Grace.” (CWM 12: 296–297)

“Au revoir, my children, I wish that life may prove happy for you, and that one day you may be born into the Light and Truth.” (CWM 12: 165)

“I am happy with this awakening in your consciousness. You should allow it to develop more and more so that the light can penetrate everywhere, even into the darkest corners.

My help and protection are always with you.” (CWM 13: 68)

“I am always happy to receive and to help those who wish for harmony and conciliation, and are ready to correct their mistakes and to progress. But I can be of no help to those who throw all the blame on the others for they are inapt to see the truth and to act accordingly.

But it goes without saying that those who are here and are ready to face some difficulties in order to remain here, will always be welcome.” (CWM 13: 126)

“Harmony is my aim and all that leads to harmony makes me happy.” (CWM 14: 184)

“Where is your faith in the Divine? Having faith in the Divine you ought to rejoice that X has received the inner call and decided to lead the divine life; you ought to be made happy by this sign of the

Divine’s Grace and feel grateful for it.

Quietly face the social difficulties with equality and cheerfulness; then you will know that my love and blessings are with you.” (CWM 13: 133)

“I am happy if your stay here has widened your vision and understanding and deepened your consciousness.”

(CWM 13: 143)

“My very dear child, live in my love, feel it, be filled with it and be happy—nothing can please me more than that.

Most affectionately.” (CWM 16: 205)

(About A. B. Purani, a disciple who passed away on 11 December 1965)

Purani

His higher intellectual part has gone to Sri Aurobindo and united with him.

His psychic is with me, and he is very happy and in peace.

His vital is still helping those who seek his help.” (CWM 13: 181)

“Auroville wants to shelter people happy to be in Auroville. Those who are dissatisfied ought to return to the world where they can do what they want and where there is place for everybody.” (CWM 13: 216)

What I want to bring about in the material world, upon the earth.

1. Perfect Consciousness.

2. Integral Knowledge, omniscience.

3. Power invincible, irresistible, ineluctable; omnipotence.

4. Health, perfect, constant, unshakable; perpetually renewed energy.

5. Eternal youth, constant growth, uninterrupted progress.

6. Perfect beauty, complex and total harmony.

7. Inexhaustible unparalleled riches, control over all the wealth of this world.

8. The gift of healing and giving happiness.

9. Immunity from all accidents, invulnerability against all adverse attacks.

10. Perfect power of expression in all fields and all activities.

11. The gift of tongues, the power of making oneself understood perfectly by all.

12. And all else necessary for the accomplishment

of Thy work.” (CWM 13: 41)

“Effort and expenditure of energy are not necessarily the same thing; the best expenditure of energy is that which flows easily without effort at all—when the Inspiration or Force (any Force) works of itself and the mind and vital and even body are glowing instruments and the Force flows out in an intense and happy working—an almost labourless labour.” (CWSA 29: 268)

“On the contrary, the relation of the disciple to the Guru in the Guruvada is supposed always to be that of worship, respect, complete happy confidence, unquestioning acceptance of the guidance.” (CWSA 29: 479)  (CWSA 32: 448)

“We speak here also of Krishna’s light—Krishna’s light in the mind, Krishna’s light in the vital; but it is a special light—in the mind it brings clarity, freedom from obscurity, mental error and perversion; in the vital it clears out all perilous stuff and where it is there is a pure and divine happiness and gladness.” (CWSA 29: 490)

“Emptiness is not in itself a bad condition, only if it is a

sad and restless emptiness of the dissatisfied vital. In sadhana emptiness is very usually a necessary transition from one state to another. When mind and vital fall quiet and their restless movements, thoughts and desires cease, then one feels empty. This is at first often a neutral emptiness with nothing in it, nothing in it either good or bad, happy or unhappy, no impulse or movement. This neutral state is often or even usually followed by the opening to inner experience. There is also an emptiness made of peace and silence, when the peace and silence come out from the psychic within or descend from the higher consciousness above. This is not neutral, for in it there is the sense of peace, often also of wideness and freedom. There is also a happy emptiness with the sense of something close or drawing near which is not yet there, e.g. the closeness of the Mother or some other preparing experience. What you describe is the neutral quiet. There is no need for anxiety. When it comes, one has only to remain quiet and open and turned to the Mother till something develops from within.” (CWSA 30: 75–76)

“These two parts are the inner being and the outer being. The outer being (mind, vital and physical) has now become capable of quietude and it sits in meditation in a free, happy, vacant quietude which is the first step towards the true consciousness. The inner being (inner mind, vital, physical) is not lost but gone inside—the outer part does not know where—but probably gone inside into union with the psychic. The only thing that can have gone is something of the old nature that was standing in the way of this experience.” (CWSA 30: 213)

“These two parts are the inner being and the outer being. The outer being (mind, vital and physical) has now become capable of quietude and it sits in meditation in a free, happy, vacant quietude which is the first step towards the true consciousness. The inner being (inner mind, vital, physical) is not lost but gone inside—the outer part does not know where—but probably gone inside into union with the psychic. The only thing that can have gone is something of the old nature that was standing in the way of this experience.” (CWSA 30: 213)

“There is no difficulty about explaining [how a thought rejected by one person gets picked up by another]. You are as naive and ignorant as a newborn lamb. That is the way things come, only one does not notice. Thoughts, ideas, happy inventions etc. etc. are always wandering about (in thought waves or otherwise) seeking a mind that may embody them. One mind takes, looks, rejects—another takes, looks, accepts. Two different minds catch the same thought-form or thought-wave, but the mental activities being different make different results out of them. Or it comes to one and he does nothing, then it walks off, crying ‘O this unready animal!’ and goes to another who promptly annexes it and it settles into expression with a joyous bubble of inspiration, illumination or enthusiasm of original discovery or …” (CWSA 31: 40)

“The Mother extends the divine love and protection to all, but the form she gives to her action must vary with the different nature and need of each, the demands of the work, the necessities of their sadhana. The idea about Europeans is quite wrong—since with the exception of X and Y all those who see most of the Mother or are given special positions of confidence are Indians. If one starts comparisons each has something which another has not. And to have that something does not prevent complaints of being worse treated than others. These feelings therefore are merely the product of the restless discontent of the vital and there is nothing to be done with them except to send them away whenever they come as useless disturbers of happiness and progress.” (CWSA 32: 355)

“All that [sense of grief and sorrow] is probably things that rise from the subconscient—or perhaps the subconscient itself is being worked upon to arrive at a state of light and peace. It sometimes enters into a happy condition, sometimes into a neutral one, sometimes it raises up a causeless sorrow. The movements of the subconscient take place even without reason, of themselves, owing to the inherent habit in Nature, that is why the grief is without discoverable cause. It is only because it is in the subconscient that you cannot locate it. When the grief comes, you must dissociate yourself from it and reject it, not taking it as your own, until it ceases to come and call down the Mother’s peace and Ananda in its place.” (CWSA 31: 607–608)

“You should realise that these periods of clouding are not due to any special incapacity or perversity in you—even the best sadhaks have them. It is the difficulty of the human nature in getting transformed. … What is there, is the mechanical habit of the lower nature in general—mechanical, not voluntary—to repeat the old movements to which it has been or was quite recently accustomed when any strong wave of them comes in from the surrounding universal Nature. This creates a kind of recurrence of relapse into the states which the spiritual progress is pushing out and it is not easy to get rid of this recurrence altogether. The one thing when they come is not to get distressed or upset, to realise what it is and to remain very quiet calling for the Mother’s Force to push it away. In this way the habit of these recurrences diminishes, the strength and intensity also, and on the other side one is able to recall the true consciousness and the true force, the bright, happy, peaceful, open condition more and more easily and quicker. One can then proceed on an assured basis to a more and more positive progress.” (CWSA 31: 665–666)

“The differences would come in the details, for in one country people prefer one thing and in another, another; and then, in the society in which one is born, there are certain customs and an ideal of happiness, and in another society there are other customs and another ideal of happiness—and that’s all.” (CWM 8: 58)

“The initial error was to hope to recommence the same experience as the one you had in your youth.

In life, experiences are not repeated identically, and if they are not better, that is, higher and more true, they become necessarily worse.

After a happy and favourable experience it is necessary to rise from the human to the divine, otherwise one risks falling into the infernal and diabolic.” (CWM 14: 54)

“Others who are greatly troubled, who have a very difficult life, who have worries, sorrows, many cares, say, ‘Oh, I shall find something that will give me peace, tranquillity, and I shall be able to get a little rest.’ And they rush into Yoga thinking they are going to be quite happy and satisfied. Unfortunately, it is not altogether like that. When you begin the Yoga for reasons of this kind, you are sure to meet great difficulties on the way. And then there is this great virtue in men’s eyes: ‘philanthropy’, ‘love of humanity’; so many people say, ‘I am going to do Yoga to be able to serve humanity, make the unhappy happy, organise the world in the happiest way for everybody.’ I say this is not sufficient—I do not say that this is bad in itself, although I have heard an old occultist say wittily: ‘It won’t be so very soon that there will be no more misery in the world, because there are too many people who are happy to live on this misery.’ It was a witticism but it is not altogether wrong. If there were no misery to soothe, the philanthropist would no longer have any reason for his existence—he is so satisfied with himself, he has so strong an impression that he is not selfish! I knew such people who would be very unhappy if there were no more misery upon earth! What would they do if there were no longer any misery to relieve, what would be their activity and what their glorification? How would they be able to show people ‘I am not selfish!’, and that they are generous, full of kindness?” (CWM 4: 66–67)

“Flowers are very receptive and they are happy when they are loved.” (CWM 16: 371)

“It is wise to receive the descending Force in silence and concentration, but this silence and concentration should not come from the vital’s resentment at not being allowed to follow its whims.

This concentration and silence should not only be full of a great peace but also of a very intense happiness. Then one knows that the movement is true and unmixed.” (CWM 17: 54)

[Self-giving]

“We must know how to give our life and also our death, our happiness and also our suffering.” (CWM 14: 102)

“I have a sweet little Mother

Who lives in my heart;

We are so happy together,

We shall never part.” (CWM 15: 215)

“A being free from all bondages, flying from height to height in a happy seeking for divine transformation.” (CWM 15: 228)

“A resplendent sun rises above the horizon. It is your Lord that comes to you.

The whole world awakes and stretches in delight at the contact of His glory.

As the earth that heaves and opens, as the tree that grows, as the flower that blossoms, as the bird that sings, as the man that loves, let His light permeate you and radiate in an ever increasing and widening happiness, a happiness steadily moving onward as the stars move in heaven.” (CWM 15: 228)

“I simply meant to say that you were happy and confident as a child or an animal is confident and happy without knowing why. Now you must learn to be happy and confident while knowing why and understanding the deeper cause of your happiness and confidence.” (CWM 16: 59–60)

LXXVI—Short Summary

Seek Spiritual Progress in Happiness

I—Happiness Is …

1.      Happiness is a condition of gladness, sense of inner ease and welfare, contentment, a sunlit life

2.      Happiness is quieter in its nature than joy and delight

3.      Real happiness is of divine origin; it is pure and unconditioned

4.      Ordinary happiness is of vital origin; it is impure and depends on circumstances

5.      Happiness is a sunlit state of the vital with or without cause

6.      Joy of peace is rather a state of joyful śānti

7.      Happiness ought not to be a state of self-satisfaction or inertia, for one can combine happiness and aspiration

8.      There are Yogins who are satisfied with a happy calm immobility because the happiness is a form of Ananda

9.      And in the immobility they feel the Self and its eternal calm

10.      Spiritual happiness is calm and smiling, nothing can disturb it

11.      Happy heart is smiling, peaceful, wide open, without a shadow

12.      The crane is the messenger of happiness

II—Always Seek to Progress in Happiness

1.      Always seek to progress in quietude, happiness and confidence, that is the most helpful attitude

2.      A quiet happy faith and confidence is the best foundation for sadhana

3.      The reward at the end of the path is a fathomless felicity, a happy and endless vastness

4.      To Find Enduring Happiness

5.      We must go farther on, we must advance, climb greater heights

6.      Go beyond the search for pleasure and personal welfare, not through fear of punishment, even punishment after death

7.      Go beyond through the development of a new sense of beauty, a thirst for truth and light, through understanding that it is only by widening yourself, illumining yourself, setting yourself ablaze with the ardour for progress

8.      One must be a child all one’s life, a child, plastic stuff for shaping

9.      Be happy, joyful and content to be a child

III—Silence and Happiness Are the Basis of Successful Sadhana

1.      In the quietude and silence and the sense of happiness in it are indeed the very basis of successful sadhana

2.      When one has got that, then one may be sure that the sadhana is placing itself on a sound footing

3.      It is true also that the happiness of this peace is far greater than anything outer objects can bring and there can be no comparison

4.      Always be contented and happy, and you will radiate your quiet happiness

IV—Sri Aurobindo Is Not Asking to be Frivolously Happy

1.      Sri Aurobindo is not asking you to be frivolously happy, lightheartedly happy but to be quiet and quietly confident, rejecting these old movements

V—Spiritual Joy is Quite Different from Mental Happiness

1.      Spiritual peace and joy is something quite different from mental peace and happiness

2.      Spiritual peace and joy cannot be reached without a spiritual discipline

3.      Instead of trying to know that happiness is spiritual or not it would be better to remain very quiet, concentrated and calm, so that the happiness may last

VI—Each One Carries His Capacity of Happiness in Himself

1.      Each one carries his capacity of happiness in himself

2.      The Mother is convinced that those who cannot be happy in the Ashram can be happy nowhere

VII—Happiness Is Contagious

1.      Happiness is as contagious

2.      Nothing can be more useful than to pass on to people the contagion of a true and deep happiness

VIII-Happiness Comes from the Psychic

1.      Happiness comes from the psychic

2.      There is in the psychic the inner peace and happiness, the untroubled aspiration, the presence or nearness of the Mother

3.      The psychic has the happy confidence

4.      Psychic attitude can make the progress happy and easy

5.      When one is going away from the vital into the psychic the more one goes, the more intense becomes the psychic happiness

6.      Let the sweetness and the happy feeling increase, for they are the strongest sign of the soul, the psychic being awake and in touch with us

7.      What the psychic being brings with it always is light and happiness

8.      When the psychic being comes forward all is happiness

9.      It is true that nothing can give so much inner happiness and joy when the psychic being emerges

10.      Happiness comes from the soul’s satisfaction, not from the vital’s or the body’s

11.      The vital is never satisfied

12.      Only the psychic being brings the real joy and felicity

13.      The psychic feeling, creates happiness and harmony

14.      If you feel a high and profound reverence for Sri Aurobindo and the Mother and a happiness that no worldly pleasure can give us then obviously it is psychic

15.      The psychic always accepts all that happens with gladness

16.      It is the vital part of the heart is not always happy

17.      In the psychic is the source of constant happiness

18.      The soul can neither be troubled nor unhappy

19.      For soul has faith in its own eternity and is aware of

it

20.      It is not the psychic being that suffers, it is the mind, the vital and the ordinary consciousness of ignorant man

21.      This is because the contact between the outer consciousness and the psychic consciousness is not well established

22.      He in whom the contact has been well established is always happy

23.      The psychic being works with perseverance and ardour for the union to be made an accomplished fact, but it never complains and knows how to wait for the hour of realisation to come

24.      The human being are unhappy because the contact between the outer consciousness and the psychic consciousness is not well established

25.      He in whom this contact is well established is always happy

26.      Psychic love is always peaceful and joyous

27.      The vital love dramatises and makes itself unhappy without any reason

28.      Once you become conscious of the Mother’s presence always near you, and that it will give you peace and joy

29.      The psychic feels the Mother’s constant presence and is aware of her love and solicitude

30.      The psychic is always peaceful, happy and satisfied

31.      One can obtain true happiness and keep it constantly only by discovering one’s psychic being and uniting with it

32.      Psychic is happy that the Mother is making you conscious of what needs to be changed in you

33.      Psychic insists that the Mother should do so in spite of the vital’s discontent

34.      When the psychic being comes to the surface one feels peaceful and happy, full of trust, full of a deep and true benevolence, and very close to the divine presence

35.      In children the psychic is often very much on the surface and it makes them peaceful and happy

IX—Psychic Happiness Is Different from Vital Joy

1.      The spiritual peace and the psychic happiness is quite different from vital joy and grief

2.      To have neither vital joy nor vital grief is considered by the Yogins to be a very desirable release

3.      It makes it possible to pass from the ordinary human vital feelings to the true and constant inner peace, joy or happiness

4.      Joy is a vital movement, exciting, restless and transient

5.      In Ananda there is no excitement, it is a calm and happy and intense spiritual state or spiritual movement

6.      Joy is a strong movement of great gladness with an

exultation, an excitement, a leaping up of the vital to take some happiness, good fortune or other thing pleasant to the being

7.      Joy is more intense than happiness

X—When Psychic Prevails Unhappiness Disappear

1.      It is only by the psychic prevailing in you that the true consciousness can become full in the nature and all these unhappiness’s disappear

2.      Because the vital nature is restlessness and full of desires that you are unhappy

3.      When the desire and restlessness of the vital are rejected that the psychic in you comes forward

4.      Then the vital itself changes and feels full of the joy

5.      When the old unhappy and restless vital comes up again, you feel yourself unfit, without pleasure in anything

6.      Do not accept the unhappy and restless vital, call in the Mother’s nearness again and let the psychic being grow in you

7.      If you do that persistently, rejecting restlessness and desire, the vital part of you will change and become fit for the sadhana

XI—If the Psychic Happiness Is Founded then Not Easy for Other Forces to Cloud that State

1.      If once the psychic light and happiness is founded then it is not easy for other forces to cloud that state

XII—For Lasting Happiness Live Within

1.      One cannot find happiness of a lasting character unless one lives within

2.      Peace and joy can only become stable if one lives within with the Mother

3.      The inner consciousness is a place of happiness, love, closeness to the Divine and the Mother

4.      It is the inner being which has the inner happiness

5.      What has to happen is that this inner consciousness should be always there with the inner happiness and calm quietude

6.      In order that happiness may become strong and stable and felt in all the being you have to go deeper within and bring out the full force of the psychic into the physical

7.      This can most easily be done by regular concentration and meditation with the aspiration for this true consciousness

8.      It can be done by work also, by dedication, by doing the work for the Divine only without thought of self and keeping the idea of consecration to the Mother always in the heart

9.      Your inner being wants and has always wanted the

Truth and the Divine

10.      When the peace and power are felt, the inner being comes forward and you feel it as yourself and understand things and grow in knowledge and happiness and true feeling

11.      When the Divine grants the true inner happiness nothing in the world has the power to snatch it away

XIII—Inner Happiness Is Peaceful and Happy and Not an Excited Movement

1.      This inner gladness and happiness is something peaceful and happy and is not an excited movement like the vital outward pleasure, though it can be more ardent and intense

2.      The sense of release as if from jail always accompanies the emergence of the psychic being or the realisation of the self above

3.      This emergence of the psychic being or the realisation of the self above is a release into peace, happiness, the soul’s freedom not tied down by the thousand ties and cares of the outward ignorant existence

XIV—The Divine Consciousness Is the Only True Happiness

1.      The Divine Consciousness is the only true help, the

only true happiness

2.      The Divine’s Presence gives us peace in strength, serenity in action and an unchanging happiness in the midst of all circumstances

3.      The Divine is the unalloyed happiness, the blissful felicity

4.      This felicity is perfect only when it is integral

5.      The Divine Presence carries with it happiness

6.      There is a quietude and happiness which you can find by living in contact with the Divine

7.      Spiritual joy or a deep inner happiness is a constant concomitant of contact or union with the Divine

8.      Ananda is something greater than peace or joy

9.      Ananda can come by frequent inrushes or descents, partially or for a time even now, but it cannot remain in the system so long as the system has not been prepared for it

10.      Meanwhile, peace and joy can be there permanently, but the condition of this permanence is that one should have the constant contact of the Divine

11.      One who wants his Yoga to be a path of peace or joy, must be prepared to dwell in his soul rather than in his outer mental and emotional nature

12.      It is only by identification with the Divine Consciousness that one can attain and preserve the true unchanging happiness

13.      Seek only the one true source of happiness and

Ananda

14.      A Prayer

Lord, give us true happiness, the happiness that depends on Thee alone

15.      The only way to have lasting happiness is to find the Divine

16.      True happiness is possible only when one has found the Divine

17.      Let us seek our happiness only in the Divine

XV—To Remain Open to the Mother Is to Remain Always Happy

1.      To remain open to the Mother is to remain always quiet and happy and confident

2.      It is the Mother’s Force working which brings happiness and the psychic opening

3.      If you keep quiet and don’t resist, the Mother’s force will make you happy

4.      Those who recognised the Mother as divine at first sight, has been happy ever afterwards

5.      When you want the Divine then the Mother was always close to you and you were happy

6.      When you want your own way and will and expect the Divine to satisfy it, then all went wrong

7.      You can always recover the constant closeness of the Mother in your inner being

8.      And recover the happiness and progress in the sadhana

9.      But to do so you must make it a point to give your love without asking for anything at all except the inner nearness

10.      For unless you do that very strongly, it will be difficult for you to get rid of the wrong tendency and change the demanding vital part in you

11.      What has been done in the past does not matter if there is a sincere aspiration and resolution to change

12.      You have only to open yourself to her sincerely and entirely

13.      Neither to lament nor to complain or be angry will help

14.      A confident and happy opening of oneself to the Mother without insistence on personal demands and desires is the only thing to do

15.      Let happiness come when the Mother’s Force pours down

16.      To do work with joy because it is done for the Mother is the true psychic and vital condition in this Yoga

17.      All work given must be felt as the Mother’s and done with joy, opening yourself for the Mother’s force to work through you

XVI—To be Close to Mahalakshmi Is a Profound Happiness

1.      To be close to Mahalakshmi aspect of the Mother is a profound happiness

2.      For all turn with joy and longing to Mahalakshmi

3.      To feel Mahalakshmi within the heart is to make existence a rapture and a marvel

4.      Grace and charm and tenderness flow out from Mahalakshmi like light from the sun

5.      Wherever Mahalakshmi fixes her wonderful gaze or lets fall the loveliness of her smile, the soul is seized and made captive and plunged into the depths of an unfathomable bliss

6.      Magnetic is the touch of Mahalakshmi’s hands and their occult and delicate influence refines mind and life and body and where she presses her feet course miraculous streams of an entrancing Ananda

XVII—Mahakali’s Blow Makes You Feel Very Happy

1.      Mahakali’s blow makes you feel very happy

2.      Mahakali’s blow gives you a sweet warmth in the heart, you feel quite satisfied

3.      Mahakali’s blow comes when you want to progress with sincerity

4.      When one has taken a decision to stop something in oneself, not to repeat a stupidity one has committed

5.  Or to do something which one finds impossible or difficult to do and which, one knows, should be done

6.      This decision is with full sincerity of one’s will, then if a terrible blow comes to compel you to do what you have decided to do

7.      It is a blow, but you feel glorified, you are quite happy, it is magnificent, you feel something magnificent in the heart

XVIII—Descending Force Brings Happiness

1.      Descending Force brings peace and calm and happiness and strength

2.      The sadhak becomes restless under the descending Force only if he resists it

3.      The vital mind or physical mind usually resists the descending Force

4.      The descent of the Divine Force into the body brings peace, a sense of liberation, happiness, Ananda

5.      The descent of the higher consciousness into the most physical results in peace, happiness, strength, lightness in the whole physical system

6.      The sign of the Divine contact is when the calm, peace, joy and happiness descend and take possession

7.      When the being opens and floods of light enters, then you feel so glad so happy

8.      When you are self-satisfied, you have that kind of vanity of not wanting to admit that you lack something that you make mistakes, that you are incomplete, that you are imperfect

9.      There is something in the nature, which grows stiff in this way, which does not want to admit

10.      It is this which prevents you from receiving

11.      If, by an effort of will you manage to make even a very tiny part of the being admit that you are mistaken, it should not be like that and you should not do that

12.      Then at first, it begins by hurting you very much, but when you hold on firmly, until this is admitted, immediately the being opens up

13.      When it is open a flood of light enters, and then you feel so glad afterwards, so happy that you ask yourself, why, was I foolish enough to resist so long

XIX—The Mind in Higher Part Remains Happy with the Light of the Supreme Knowledge

1.      The mind in its higher part is aware of being one with the Divine

2.      The mind in its higher part is not disturbed by its own ignorance and impotence in its lower instrumental parts

3.      The mind in its higher part looks on all that with a smile and remains happy and luminous with the light of the supreme knowledge

XX—The Higher Consciousness Is a Happier and Nobler Consciousness

1.      The movement where the vital rises to join with the higher consciousness there the sadhak feels that he is rising up into a happier and nobler consciousness

2.      All the movements of the being are open, true and happy in the experience of the higher consciousness

3.      If you identify yourself with the divine Force which comes to liberate you, you feel the joy of the divine Grace and you experience the deep delight of the progress you have made

4.      If you are identified with the forces from above, you are happy

5.      If you are identified with the forces from below, you suffer

6.      The Mother here is not speaking about feeling pleasure; you must not think that when one jumps about, dances, shouts and plays, one is identified with the divine forces

7.      The Mother is speaking of the divine Joy, the inner Joy which is unalloyed

8.      If this greater consciousness of light, peace and joy is to be gained, a faith, a will or a persistent demand and aspiration are needed

XXI—To be an Instrument of the Divine Will is the Happiest Condition

1.      To be an instrument of the divine Will is the

happiest and most joyous condition possible

2.      When you will feel that you are the instrument and not the worker

3.      By the force of your devotion your and contact with the Divine Mother you put everything into her hands and have her guidance, her direct command

4.      This will be a sure indication of the things to be done and the way to do it and the result

5.      And afterwards you will realise that the divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and carries out your works; all your movements are originated by her

6.      All your powers are hers; mind, life and body are conscious and joyful instruments of her action, means for her play, and moulds for her manifestation in the physical universe

7.      The supreme happiness is to be true servitors of the Divine

8.      A Prayer to be true servitors of the Divine

9.      Supreme Lord, Perfect Consciousness, You alone truly know what we are, what we can do, the progress we must make in order to become capable and worthy of serving You as we want to do. Make us conscious of our capacities, but also of our difficulties, so that we may be able to surmount them and serve You faithfully

10.      The Mother is very happy to know that you want to be her instrument

11.      To be able to be the Mother’s instrument, you must be regular, energetic, courageous, enduring and always good-tempered

12.      If you truly want happiness, your constant preoccupation should be what progress must one make to be able to know and serve the Divine

13.      One must exclusively belong to the Divine Work because it alone can, in our life, give us true happiness

14.      Live to serve the Divine and the happiness you enjoy will exceed all expectation

15.      Think only of the Divine Peace, Harmony, Light and Happiness and become more and more their purified and quiet instrument

XXII—Surrender Brings Happiness

1.      A sense of complete reliance on the Mother, of surrender brings a happiness which is not disturbed by any occurrence

2.      By surrender there comes a calm and happy mastery of self and nature

3.      It is a much greater ecstasy to be surrendered and possessed by the Divine than oneself to be the possessor

4.      The soul, the true being, is not only willing but eager and happy to surrender

5.      Self-giving or surrender is demanded of those who practise this Yoga, because without such a progressive surrender of the being it is quite impossible to get anywhere near the goal

6.      When one surrenders you may have a spontaneous feeling that this line is the only way of being happy

7.      Men cling to their falsehood as if it were a treasure, cherishing it more than even the most beautiful things of life

8.      Apprehensive of its safety, they take care to bury it deep down in themselves

9.      But unless they take this falsehood out and surrender it to the Divine they will never find true happiness

10.      If submission is truly sincere, submission always becomes happy

11.      So long as submission is not happy, you may be sure it is not perfectly sincere

12.      If submission is not happy, it means that there is something which holds back, something which would like things to be otherwise, something that has a will of its own, a desire of its own, its own purpose and is not satisfied

13.      Therefore submission is not completely surrendered, not sincere in its surrender

14.      But if one is sincere in one’s surrender, one is perfectly happy, one automatically enjoys an ineffable happiness

15.      If you are well enveloped with the light of a

perfectly glad, totally sincere surrender, it serves you as a marvelous filter

16.      Nothing that is altogether undesirable, nothing that has ill-will can pass through

17.      So, automatically, these things return where they came from

18.      If there is a conscious ill-will against you, it comes, but cannot pass; the door is closed, for it is open only to divine things

19.      For the moment aspiration and surrender are not total, you are no longer happy, you feel uneasy, very miserable, dejected, a bit unhappy

20.      If things are not quite pleasant today and yesterday they were marvellous, it is because yesterday you were in a perfect state of surrender, more or less perfect and today you aren’t any more

21.      That joy you had within you, that confidence, the assurance that all will be well and the great Work will be accomplished, that certitude comes with absolute and total aspiration and surrender

22.      One knows when one is happy or unhappy, one knows when one is content or discontented, one doesn’t need to ask oneself

23.      This feeling of happy or unhappy is the barometer

24.      The moment you feel unhappy, you may write beneath it: ‘I am not sincere!’

25.      Then one begins to take a look and find out what is

wrong

26.      When you surrendered, it is not the whole of your being that did so

27.      Little by little some other part that had not surrendered came to the surface and the joy of the surrender vanished and was replaced by dullness and indifference

28.      But after sometime this part also gets converted and thus the happy condition comes back

29.      Surrender, that is, the self-giving to the Divine, must be happy, joyful, made gladly

30.      In a Sattwic and strongly surrendered person to the Mother there is a balance, a happy composition in the being reflecting sunlight

31.      This is less amenable to the touch of cloud and tempest, which gives no handle to the hostile forces

32.      Radha’s Prayer bring out complete Surrender

33.      The prayer says that whether Thou choosest happiness or sorrow, pleasure or suffering, all that comes from Thee will be welcome

34.      Each one of Thy gifts will be always a gift divine bringing with it the supreme Felicity

35.      While doing Radha’s dance, the thought and feeling Radha must have within her is Krishna you can decide my life or my death, my happiness or my sorrow

36.      Whatever comes to me from you Krishna will lead me to the Divine Rapture

37.      To have a condition of progressive surrender then the vast and happy identity becomes possible

XXIII—Self-giving Brings Happiness

1.      The very act of genuine self-giving is its own immediate reward; it brings with it such happiness, as nothing else can give

2.      Persuade everything to give itself to the Divine and thus achieve an absolute unified consecration

3.      Then indeed yours is a glorious walk towards transformation

4.      For you no longer go from darkness to knowledge but from knowledge to knowledge, happiness to happiness

5.      Only when one gives oneself in all sincerity to the Divine Will that one has the peace and calm joy which come from the abolition of desires

6.      Only when the heart, the will and the mind of knowledge associate themselves with the law of sacrifice and gladly follow it, can there come the deep joy and the happy fruitfulness of divine sacrifice

7.      Give oneself to the Divine, surrender and receive with joy whatever the Divine gives

XXIV-Consecration Is Finalized When You Move From Happiness to Increasing Happiness

1.      Consecration is finalized, when you move no more from misery to happiness but from happiness to increasing happiness

2.      Consecration to the spiritual joy, that was happiness indeed

3.      There is a strong joy of the vital nature in this consecration and surrender

4.      There is a great joy in the work done with consecration and surrender

5.       There is a great joy in the use of the capacities for the divine purpose

XXV—Making Progress Makes One Truly Happy

1.      Making progress, overcoming a difficulty, learning something are the things that make one truly happy

2.      When one comes out of the depression and one’s bad will, then one realises that there was an attack as some progress had to be made

3.      And in spite of everything something within has made progress, one has taken a step forward

4.      Usually, hardly consciously, it is something which needs to progress but doesn’t want to, and so takes the following way

5.      Like a child who sulks, becomes low-spirited, sad, unhappy, misunderstood, abandoned, helpless; and then, refusing to collaborate, and indulging in his depression, to show that he is not happy

6.      It is in order to show that one is not satisfied that one becomes depressed

XXVI—Express Gratitude to the Divine by Feeling Happy

1.      Best way to express one’s gratitude to the Divine is to feel simply happy

2.      To accept gladly what the Mother gives is never selfish

3.      There is no better cure for egoism than a happy gratefulness

4.      To feel deeply, intensely and constantly a total gratitude towards the Divine is the best way to be happy

5.      To show one’s gratefulness to the Divine is to be quietly happy

XXVII—Free from Egoism Is to Become Truly Happy

1.      To do good, to be just, straight, honest is the best means to be quiet and peaceful

2.      If, one could be disinterested, free from personal motives and egoism, then it would be possible to become truly happy

3.      It is the ego which prevents us from becoming His calm, strong and happy instruments

4.      To seek pleasure is certainly the best way to make yourself miserable; this is an absolute truth

5.      It affirms that if you want to satisfy your little ego, you are sure to be unhappy

6.      If a man feels, ‘I am the happiest child of the Mother’, and this feeling is due to a feeling of superiority, then it is ego

7.      If it is true happiness, then it is not ego

XXVIII—Happy When You Concentrate on Your Goal

1.      You feel happy only when you are concentrated on your goal

XXIX—The Exchange of Forces with Universal Forces Gives Joy

1.      The effort which creates in the being certain vibrations which enables you to get connected with universal vibrations gives joy

3.      This effort makes you receptive to the universal forces

4.      The effort which spontaneously gives joy, is the exchange of forces with universal forces

5.      If you make the necessary effort to do any work to the maximum of your ability, you will feel joy

6.      When you want to realise something, you make quite spontaneously the necessary effort; this concentrates your energies on the thing to be realised and that gives a meaning to your life

7.      This compels you to a sort of concentration of your energies, and in this concentration, this intensity of the will, lies the origin of joy

8.      This gives you the power to receive energies in exchange for those you spend

XXX—To Feel Divine Love in Oneself Is to Possess an Immutable Happiness

1.      Divine love finds its delight and its satisfaction in itself; it has no need to be received and appreciated, nor to be shared

2.      Divine love loves for the sake of loving

3.      To feel Divine love in oneself is to possess an immutable happiness

XXXI—Be Happy to Love

1.      Love between human beings, in all its forms, is all tainted with ignorance, selfishness

2.      So instead of completely ceasing to love one must learn how to love better

3.      To love with devotion, with self-giving, self abnegation

4.      And to struggle against its distorted forms: against all forms of monopolising, of attachment, possessiveness, jealousy

5.      Not to want to possess, to dominate; and not to want to impose one’s will, one’s whims, one’s desires

6.      Not to want to take, to receive, but to give; not to insist on the other’s response, but be content with one’s own love

7.      Not to seek one’s personal interest and joy and the fulfillment of one’s personal desire, but to be satisfied with the giving of one’s love and affection; and not to ask for any response

8.      Simply to be happy to love

9.      The love you feel for others makes you happy

10.      Nothing brings more happiness than a pure and disinterested love

11.      Find your happiness and your joy in the very fact of loving

12.      Act of loving will help you in your inner progress

13.      Because if you are sincere, you will one day realise that it is the Divine in her that you love and that the outer person is merely a pretext

14.      To love for the joy of loving is the best condition for a peaceful and happy life

15.      To love for the joy of loving is loving the Divine in all things

16.      The power of Love supramentalised can turn all

living relations Godwards and sublimates into the happy material of a divine life

17.      Supramentalised Love delivers human love from their crude, mixed and petty human settings

18.      Love should be a flowering of joy and union and confidence and self-giving and Ananda

19.      But lower vital way is only a source of suffering, trouble, disappointment, disillusion and disunion

XXXII—Union with Grace, One Lives Life of Infinite Happiness

1.      If one were in union with this Grace one would begin living a life of infinite happiness

2.      For a sannyasi all that happens to him, he must see it as a Divine’s Grace and be at once happy and grateful for it

3.      The only way to a true and lasting happiness is a complete and exclusive reliance on the Divine’s Grace

4.      It is the Divine’s Grace that can give peace, happiness

5.      There is a Happiness that no earthly success can bring

6.      It is the Power, the Happiness that flow from the Divine Grace

XXXIII—Self-mastery Is the Basis of All Enduring Happiness

1.      Self-mastery is the greatest conquest

2.      Self-mastery is the basis of all enduring happiness

3.      To lead a happy life, master your lower nature and control desires and vital impulses

4.      If you do not mater your lower nature then there is no end to the miseries and the troubles

5.      Happy is he who accomplishes to harmonise the vital

6.      To harmonise the vital is a psychological masterpiece

7.      To evolve in the sense of the God is to grow in intuition, in happy mastery

8.      To evolve in the sense of the God is to make a bright and happy whole in oneself

9.      When one’s attention is always turned towards oneself, one is never happy

10.      When one allows oneself to be ruled by every passing impulse, one is never peaceful

11.      It is through work and self-mastery that one can find happiness and peace

XXXIV—To do Best and Leave the Result to the Divine Is the Surest Way to Happiness

1.      To do at each moment the best we can and leave the result to the Divine’s decision, is the surest way to happiness

XXXV—To be Happy Free Yourself from All Human Attachment

1.      Keep yourself free from all human attachment and you will be happy

XXXVI—Love Work to be Happy

1.      In order to be truly happy in life, one must love work

2.      Love to learn and you will progress

XXXVII—Seek Happiness in Spiritual Consciousness

1.      Those who live in the normal consciousness are subject to grief and joy and anxiety and desire or to everything else that makes up the ordinary stuff of life

2.      Mental quiet and happiness they can get, but it can never be permanent or secure

3.      But the spiritual consciousness is all light, peace, power and bliss

4.      If one can live entirely in the spiritual consciousness these things become naturally and securely his

5.      But even if he can live partly in the spiritual consciousness or keep himself constantly open to it, he receives enough of happiness to carry him securely through all the shocks of life

6.      What one gains by opening to this spiritual consciousness, depends on what one seeks from it

7.      If one seeks happiness in spiritual consciousness, one enters into beatitude far greater than any joy or happiness that the ordinary human life can give

8.      When one is in the right consciousness, then there is the right happiness

9.      When you had this right attitude and could get glimpses of the true happiness and dedication

XXXVIII—Result of Spiritual Realisation Is Happiness

1.      Happiness is the result of spiritual realisation

2.      The purpose and goal of life is not suffering and struggle

3.      The purpose and goal of life is an all-powerful and happy realisation

4.      Besides happy realisation all the rest is painful illusion

5.      Happiness and love do not accompany all experiences

XXXIX—Who Is Happy

1.      Indeed he is happy who loves the Divine

2.      Because the Divine is always with him

3.      Always be good and you will always be happy

4.      One should not do good in the hope of getting a reward, but for the pleasure of doing good, then one is always happy

5.      Let us always do the right thing and we shall always be quiet and happy

6.      Moral generosity is to feel happy, when a comrade is successful

7.      An act of courage of unselfishness or a fine sacrifice gives joy

8.      Hope builds happy futures

9.      If one is simply good-willed, to do the best one can, only to aspire for progress, for light and peace

10.      And let That decide for you what you will become

11.      And what you will have to do and one no longer has any care then one is perfectly happy

12.      Be simple, be happy, remain quiet and do your work as well as you can

13.      Keep yourself always open towards the Mother for this is all that is asked from you

14.      You are much more helpful when you are quietly happy than when you become dramatic

15.      The happiness you get depends on the happiness you give

16.      The happiness you give makes you more happy than the happiness you receive

17.      Divine purity is happy just to be, in all simplicity

18.      If we want to keep our happiness intact and pure, we must do our best not to attract upon it the attention of unfriendly thoughts

19.      To be always happy, with an unclouded, unfluctuating happiness is the most difficult to accomplish

XL—The Seer Knows that Misfortune Is the Condition of Obtaining Happiness

1. The seer knows that misfortune is the condition of obtaining a more perfect happiness

2. The desire-driven mind is enmeshed in the intricate tangle of happiness and misfortune

3. The desire-driven mind strives to have the happiness always

4. It is elated by fortunate happenings, disturbed and unnerved by their opposite

5. But the illuminated eye of the seer perceives that all leads to good; for God is all

6. The seer knows that the misfortune the condition of obtaining a more perfect happiness

7. His intellect is delivered from enslavement to the dualities

8. At one time the capacity for pain, was infinitely less than it is now

9. Disease, pain and grief have grown keener with the growing fineness of the human organization

10. Obviously this can only be a temporary development necessary to prepare a higher race which shall rise above pain to a higher capacity for pleasure and happiness

11. It was the knowledge of good and evil that brought grief and sin into the world

12. When that knowledge is surmounted, man will rise above grief and sin

13. The Vedantist believes that the soul is a part of God or one with God Himself, and cannot feel pain or grief, but only  ānanda, bliss

14. The soul takes the rasa, the delight of the dualities, and it changes to bliss in his nature

15. But this is veiled by the ignorance and separates the soul in his form from the mind and the heart

16. Pain is a negative corruption of true experience in the mind, pleasure a positive corruption

17. The truth is ānanda

18. But this is a knowledge for which mankind is not ready

19. Only the Yogin realises it and becomes sama, like-minded to pain and pleasure, good or evil, happiness or misfortune

20. He takes the rasa of both and they give him strength and bliss; for the veil between his mind and his soul is removed and the apparent man in him has become one with the svarūpa or real man

21. If mankind as a whole came too early by that knowledge, the evolution of the perfect good would be delayed

22. Suffering is not something inevitable or even desirable, but when it comes to us, how helpful it can be!

23. Each time we feel that our heart is breaking, a deeper door opens within us, revealing new horizons, ever richer in hidden treasures, whose golden influx brings once more a new and intenser life

24. And when, by these successive descents, we reach the veil that reveals thee as it is lifted

1. Lord, who can describe the intensity of Life that penetrates the whole being, the radiance of the Light that floods it, the sublimity of the Love that transforms it for ever

XLI—Charity Rises from a Happy Heart

XLII—Become Happy When You Find Fault in Yourself

1. The first thing is to be perfectly happy when someone or some circumstance puts you in the conscious presence of a fault in yourself which you did not know

2. Each time one sees in oneself something which seems really nasty, well, that proves that one has made progress

3. So, instead of lamenting and falling into despair, one should be happy

4. When one does anything badly, then one feels miserable and unhappy and ill at ease, and this is indeed the most concrete punishment one has

5. From the point of view of the inner spiritual growth, feeling unhappy when one does badly have an infinitely greater value than when they are the result of an outer rule

6. From the moment you have found a mistake, there is an opportunity to work within you, to make progress and be very happy

7. The greatest weakness, is the sign of the greatest divine strength

8. You are ‘like that’ because, precisely, you ought to be the opposite

9. All your difficulties are there just so that you may learn to transform them into the truth they are hiding

10. Once you have understood this, many worries come to an end and you are very happy, very happy

XLIII—Confess to the Mother and Feel Happy

1.  Confess to the Mother and all the things that are troubling will disappear and will feel free and happy

2.  To have radical remedy to dissolve the clouds be absolutely frank; tell the Mother fully all that is going on in you, and soon the cure will come, a complete and happy cure

XLIV—Happy Is He Who Has No Sense of Possession

1. Happy is he who possesses nothing means that he is someone who has no sense of possession

2. He can make use of things when they come to him, knowing that they are not his, that they belong to the Supreme, and who, for the same reason, does not regret it when things leave him

3. Such a man finds equal joy in the use of things as in the absence of things

XLV—Feel Happy in the Ashram

1. To feel happy in the Ashram one must understand the following

2. One is a child of the Mother

3. One is under the Mother’s control and care and he owes allegiance to her alone

4. One must do work with the idea that it is the Mother’s work

5. Others in these departments are supposed to receive their directions from the head and act in accordance

6. But this is because it is necessary for the discipline and good order of the work

7. It does not mean that the work is the head of the department’s work for all is the Mother’s work and must be done by each, by the head as by the others, for her

8. It would not be possible to get the work done if each and every worker insisted on being independent and directly responsible to her or on doing things in his own way

9. There is too much of this spirit and it is the cause of much confusion and disorder

10.      It is only those who have come for sadhana and really do sadhana who can be happy and satisfied here

11.      The others have constant trouble because their desires are not satisfied

12.      In the Ashram if he turns entirely to the Mother, opens to her and works and lives turning towards her, he will get happiness and grow into light and peace

13.      Whenever in our Ashram some petty request for more comfort and material happiness is refused, it is for your own good and to make you fulfill what you are here for

14.      The refusal is actually a favour in as much as you

are thereby considered worthy to stand before the highest Ideal and be shaped according to it

15.      When children asks why are we in the Ashram the simple answer is

16.      Because this is the divine will, it is due to the divine grace that you are here

17.      Be happy, be calm, be at peace

18.      There are children who are predestined, who are here because they should be here

19.      To these tell them: ‘My children, it is because you belong to a future which is being built up, and it is here that it is being built

20.      Some people come to the Ashram with a mental aspiration, either to serve or to learn

21.      Others come to the Ashram in the hope of doing yoga, of finding the Divine and uniting with Him

22.      There are some who want to devote themselves entirely to the divine work upon earth

23.      All of them come impelled by their psychic being, which wants to lead them towards self-realisation

24.      They come with their psychic in front and ruling their consciousness; they have a psychic contact with people and things

25.      Everything seems beautiful and good to them, their health improves, their consciousness grows more luminous

26.      They feel happy, peaceful and safe

27.      This joy given by the psychic contact they naturally find everywhere, in everything and everybody

28.      It gives openness towards the true consciousness pervading here and working out everything

29.      So long as the openness is there, the peace, the fullness and the joy remain with their immediate results of progress, health and fitness in the physical, quietness and goodwill in the vital, clear understanding and broadness in the mental and a general feeling of security and satisfaction

30.      But it is difficult for a human being to keep up a constant contact with his psychic

31.      As soon as he settles down and the freshness of the new experience fades away, the old person comes back to the surface with all its habits, preferences, small manias, shortcomings and misunderstandings

32.      The joy vanishes, the understanding is blinded and the feeling that the place is the same as everywhere else creeps in, because one has become what one was everywhere else

33.      Instead of seeing only what has been accomplished, he becomes aware more and more and almost exclusively of what has yet to be done

34.      He becomes morose and discontented and blames people and things instead of blaming himself

35.      People must be happy in the Ashram, otherwise they cannot have the full advantage of the exceptional

opportunity

36.      What one can get by staying in the Ashram that cannot be got in any other place is the Divine Love, Grace and Care

37.      Whenever somebody feels unhappy and discontented in the Ashram

38.      It can be taken as a sure sign that he is turning his back on what the Divine is always giving

39.      And that he has gone astray in pursuit of worldly satisfaction

40.      If you want to be happy in the Ashram you must come with the will to do the yoga of self-perfection

41.      If you cannot be happy here in the Ashram then Sri Aurobindo says that it would not be right to keep you against your will

42.      Sri Aurobindo says that if one has the capacity for sadhana but a certain attitude towards Ashram’s life and towards the Mother is needed

43.      If you cannot be happy here and feel that you would be happier elsewhere, then Sri Aurobindo shall be obliged to withdraw his refusal

44.      In the Ashram if one is happy and progressing very well in her sadhana and if that person goes away the progress will be stopped and much of what one has gained may be lost

45.      An intensive and concentrated sadhana once begun has to be persistently continued in the right atmosphere

46.      If it is kept up only for a short time and then dropped for another kind of life in which the concentration is diffused and weakened, there is no likelihood of fruition

47.      Those who are not happy here in the Ashram cannot be happy anywhere

48.      The Ashram is not a place where people can come merely because they are unhappy in their homes

49.      The Ashram is for those who want to practise Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga

XLVI—To Make the Air You Breathe Full of Happiness

1.      When you are good, generous, noble, disinterested, kind, you create in you, around you, a particular atmosphere

2.      This atmosphere is a luminous release, you breathe, and you blossom like a flower in the sun

3.      Then there is no painful recoil, no bitterness, no revolt, and no miseries

4.      Spontaneously, naturally, the atmosphere becomes luminous and the air you breathe is full of happiness

XLVII—Benefits of Being Happy

1.      Those who are luminous, sunny, happy, smiling

carry in themselves the joy of living, these are in harmony with Nature

2.      They generally avoid accidents, they are immune from diseases and their life develops pleasantly

3.      Those who are gloomy, dull, misanthropic, dissatisfied, who live in grey shadows they catch all the unpleasant things

4.      Unless the vital collaborates with joy and true love, the transformation cannot come

5.      Try to be happy and immediately you will be closer to the Light

6.      When one is joyful, it means that one is open and receives the Force

7.      When one feels nothing, it means that one is shut up

8.      In ordinary life, there are people who, due to their very constitution, are in a certain harmony with Nature, as though they breathed with the same rhythm, and these people are usually always joyful, happy

9.      They succeed in all they do, they avoid many troubles and catastrophes, and indeed they are in harmony with the rhythm of life and Nature

10.      And there are days when one is in contact with the divine Consciousness which is at work, with the Grace, and then everything is tinged, coloured with this Presence, and things which usually seem to you dull and uninteresting become charming, pleasant, attractive and

instructive

11.      Then everything lives and vibrates, and is full of promise and force

12.      So, when one opens to that, one feels stronger, freer, happier and full of energy and everything has a meaning

13.      One understands why things are as they are and one participates in the general movement

14.      There are other times when one is clouded or closed or down in a hole, and so one no longer feels anything and all things lose their taste, their interest, their value; one goes about like a walking block of wood

15.      Be happy for it is the surest way of progress

XLVIII—For the World to be Happy

1. For the community to be happy, the discipline should be set by the most broad-minded persons

2. If possible the persons who are conscious of the Divine Presence and are surrendered to it

3.      For the world to be happy, power should only be in the hands of those who are conscious of the Divine Will

4.      But for the time being that is impossible because the number of those who are truly conscious of the Divine Will is very small, and because they necessarily have no ambition

5.      When the time comes for this realisation, it will take

place quite naturally

6.      The duty of each one is to prepare oneself to be truly conscious of the Divine Will

7.      The things that man should cherish and defend are all those that make him better, stronger and more joyful

8.      Preserve with care the holy temples, statues, pictures, vases, embroidery, as well as beautiful songs and poems, and all that increases his happiness with its beauty

9.      Let men cherish the heart that loves, the mind that thinks honest thoughts and the hand that accomplishes loyal deeds

XLIX—A Greater and Happier Life to be Brought into the World

1.      Nobody has ever contended that this is a happy and perfect world

2.      It is known that it is a world of death, ignorance, suffering and that its pleasures are not enduring

3.      The spiritual seeker may seek it as a means of escape from life and entry into Nirvana or moksha

4.      Or the spiritual seeker may seek it, as Sri Aurobindo have done, for the base of a greater and happier life to be brought now or hereafter into the world-existence

5.      The Mother informed about the descent of the Supermind when it came

6.      The Mother encouraged everybody to be open and to receive it, and try to profit by it

7.      From the moment of descent the transforming Grace will radiate in the most effective way

8.      Fortunately for the aspirants this happy future will materialise for them in spite of all the obstacles that the unregenerate human nature may put up against it

9.      Sri Aurobindo said that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness

10.      With the Truth-consciousness man is capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious

11.      During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it

12.      With the increase of truth, the welfare and happiness of all will necessarily increase

13.      So long as we go on telling lies, we go on pushing the happy Future far from us

L—Essentials for a Happy and Effective Life

1. For a happy and effective life, the essentials are sincerity, humility, perseverance and an insatiable thirst for progress

2. One must be convinced of a limitless possibility of progress

3. Progress is youth

4. To proceed on the path give up all personal seeking for comfort, satisfaction, enjoyment or happiness

5. Be only a burning fire for progress, take whatever comes to you as an aid to your progress and immediately make whatever progress is required

6. Try to take pleasure in all you do, but never do anything for the sake of pleasure

7. Freedom from desire, independence from passion mastery of oneself is the key to happiness

8. The mother makes the home happy for her children with liveliness, serenity, good humour

9. Being orderly, regular, punctual does not prevent from being happy and smiling

10. Beyond storms there is a haven of joy and love and happiness that are your true goal

11. Persevere till you reach it

LI—If Inner Happiness Cannot be There Then an Inner State of Equality and Calm

1.      The inner spiritual progress does not depend on outer conditions so much as on the way we react to outer conditions from within

2.      It is only from that inner state that one can be

stronger than life and its disturbing forces and hope to

conquer

3.      If there cannot be at once of inner happiness there can be a inner state of equality and calm

4.      If one attains a great calm and equality in which there is no joy or grief then afterwards a greater more permanent Ananda becomes possible

5.      A mind that has achieved calmness can begin to act, keeping its fundamental stillness and receiving from Above and giving it a mental form

6.      This, the calm mind is able to do with the joy of the Truth and the happy power and light of its passage

7.      The true attitude, the sign and proof that we are near the goal, is a perfect equality which enables us to accept success and failure, fortune and misfortune, happiness and sorrow with the same tranquil joy

8.      For all these things become marvellous gifts that the Lord in his infinite solicitude showers upon us

LII—Peace Has Certain Happiness

1. Peace is more positive than calm and has a certain happiness or Ananda of itself

2. A sunny condition is a peace settling in the system and with it a happy activity

3. In this sunny condition what has to come in will come in and expand like a bud into flower and what has to fall

off will fall off in its time like a slough discarded

LIII—The Gladness or Joy in the Peace Is Internal, Self-existent

1. The peace need not be grave or joyless

2. The gladness or joy or sense of lightness that comes in the peace must be necessarily something internal, self-existent or due to a deepening of experience

3. Peace cannot, like the laughter be conveyed by an external cause or dependent upon it, something amusing, exhilarating

4. Serene inner gladness is self-existent in Peace

5. When one is full of peace then one laughs most gladly

6. Peace is an inner condition, not something external like being silent or not laughing

7. Peace is a condition of serenity and stillness within in which there is no disturbance

8. Even if things go wrong or people are unpleasant or the body feels unwell for the state of serene inner gladness remains the same

9. This serene inner gladness is self-existent in Peace

LIV—When the Peace and the Inner Happiness Increase

1.      When the Peace and the inner happiness increase and take possession of the external nature

2.      Then the difficulties of the emotional nature exposed to wrong feelings and wrong desires, ambitions, sense of possession and vital ego will progressively become things of the past

3.      When your heart is turned to the Mother and satisfied with her love, when you are full of peace, contentment and happiness, then there is no room for wrong feelings and desires and your heart is pure

4.      Become conscious and knock off all imaginary obstacles, mental constructions and vital formations

5.      Then make a foundation of calm, peace, happy openness for the true building

LV—Happiness Do Not Depend upon Outside Happenings

1.      Remain fixed in the sunlight of the true consciousness—for only there is happiness and peace

2.      Happiness and peace do not depend upon outside happenings, but on of trust and devotion, movements in your true being, the psychic being

3.      There is a state of consciousness in which each one is happy to be, just as it is

4.      So at that moment one knows one has touched true Delight

5.      True Delight is not conditioned, it does not depend on outer circumstances, does not depend on a more or less favourable state, it does not depend on anything

6.      It is a communion with the raison d'être of the universe

7.      True happiness is the happiness one can feel in any circumstances because it comes from regions which cannot be affected by any external circumstances

8.      But this happiness is accessible only to a very few individuals, and most of the human race is still subject to terrestrial conditions

9.      So we can say on one hand that a change in the human consciousness is absolutely indispensable

10.      On the other, without an integral transformation of the terrestrial atmosphere, the conditions of human life cannot be effectively changed

11.      In either case, the remedy is the same: a new consciousness must manifest on earth and in man

12.      Only the appearance of a new force and light and power accompanying the descent of the supramental consciousness into this world can raise man out of the anguish and pain and misery in which he is submerged

13.      For only the supramental consciousness bringing down upon earth a higher poise and a purer and truer light can achieve the great miracle of transformation

LVI—We call the Divine Power but Live in Outer Consciousness Then

1.      When we call for the Divine Power, Light, Ananda and if we live only in the outward physical consciousness

2.      Then the Divine Power may descend and work behind the veil but we shall feel nothing and only see certain results after a long time

3.      Then we feel certain clarity and peace in the mind, a joy in the vital, a happy state in the physical and infer the touch of the Divine

4.      But if we are awake in the inward physical, we shall feel the light, power or Ananda flowing through the body, the limbs, nerves, blood, breath and, through the subtle body

5.      This will affect the most material cells and make them conscious and blissful and we shall sense directly the Divine Power and Presence

LVII—Mentally Developed Humanity, Happy with Life

1.      Humanity which has benefited by mental development and created harmony in its life are contented with life

2.      They live this harmony of artistic and literary life in a civilised surrounding with refined tastes and refined habits

3.      And all this life has a certain beauty where they are at ease, and unless something catastrophic happens to them, they live happy and contented, satisfied with life

4.      These people can be drawn to spiritual because they have a taste, they are intellectually developed, they can be attracted by the new forces, the new things, the future life

5.      They can become disciples of Sri Aurobindo mentally, intellectually

6.      But they do not feel at all the need to change materially

7.      If they were compelled to change it would be first of all premature, unjust, and would simply create a great disorder and disturb their life altogether uselessly

LVIII—The Goal of Life Is Not to Secure Personal Happiness

1.      There is a wide-spread idea that the chief aim of life is to be happy

2.      This idea is a childish deformation of a very profound truth, that all existence is based upon delight of being and without delight of being there would be no life

3.      This delight of being is a quality of the Divine and it must not be confused with the pursuit of pleasure in life

4.      The conviction that one has the right to be happy leads to the will to ‘live one’s own life’ at any cost

5.      This attitude, by its obscure and aggressive egoism, leads to every kind of conflict and misery, disappointment and discouragement, and very often ends in catastrophe

6.      In the world as it is now the goal of life is not to secure personal happiness

7.      But to awaken the individual progressively to the Truth-consciousness

8.      It is a mistake to think that all men seek after happiness

9.      Many men are not after happiness and do not believe it is the true aim of life

10.      It is the physical vital that seeks after happiness

11.      The bigger vital is ready to sacrifice happiness in order to satisfy its passions, search for power, ambition, fame or any other motive

12.      It is not universally true that power and fame gives happiness

13.      Power can give anything else, but not happiness

14.      A man may know he can never have fame in this life but yet work in the hope of posthumous fame or in the chance of getting it

15.      He may know that the satisfaction of his passion will bring him everything rather than happiness

16.      The satisfaction of his passion will bring him suffering, torture, destruction, yet he will follow his impulse

17.      So also the mind as well as the larger vital is not bound by the pursuit of happiness

18.      The mind and the larger vital can seek Truth or the victory of a cause

19.      To reduce all to a single hedonistic strain that man seek after happiness seems to be very poor psychology

20.      Neither Nature nor the vast Spirit in things are so limited and one-tracked as that

21.      One very strong strain in human physical consciousness wants happiness

22.      The human vital tends rather to reject a happiness untainted by sorrow and to find it a monotonous, boring condition

23.      Even if human vital accepts happiness, after a time it kicks over the traces and goes to some new painful or risky adventure

24.      People prefer the joy mixed with sorrow and consider everlasting happiness an everlasting bore

25.      Asking is the aim of life to be happy is just putting things topsy-turvy

26.      The aim of human life is to discover the Divine and to manifest It

27.      Naturally this discovery leads to happiness; but this happiness is a consequence, not an aim in it self

28.      It is this mistake of taking a mere consequence for aim of life that has been the cause of most of the miseries which are afflicting human life

29.      In the world as it is now the goal of life is not to secure personal happiness, but to awaken the individual progressively to the Truth-consciousness

30.      In the present conditions of terrestrial life happiness is impossibility

31.      We are upon earth to find and realise the Divine,

for the Divine Consciousness alone can give true happiness

32.      Do not live to be happy, live to serve the Divine and the joy that you will experience will be beyond all expectations

33.      Happiness is not the aim of life, the aim of ordinary life is to carry out one’s duty

34.      The aim of spiritual life is to realise the Divine

LIX—In this Unhappy World Evolution Leads Through Happiness and Suffering

1.      This world is full of suffering and afflicted with transience to a degree that seems to justify the Gita’s description of it as ‘this unhappy and transient world’

2.      This world seems to be based on a life full of Inconscience so error and sorrow, death and suffering are the necessary consequence

3.      But there is evidently a partially successful endeavour and an imperfect growth towards Light, Knowledge, Truth, Good, Happiness

4.      It must be an evolution which is leading or struggling towards higher things out of a first darker appearance

5.      It is leading the world, towards the higher state, but through the double terms of happiness and suffering

6.      It is not and cannot be, ordinarily, a guidance which

at once rejects the darker terms or still less a guidance which brings us solely and always nothing but happiness

7.      Men grow by all kinds of experience, pain and suffering as well as their opposites, joy and happiness and ecstasy

8.      One can get strength from them if one meets them in the right way

9.      Many take a joy in pain and suffering when associated with struggle or endeavour or adventure, but that is more because of the exhilaration and excitement of the struggle than because of suffering for its own sake

10.      There is, however, something in the vital which takes joy in the whole of life, it's dark as well as its bright sides

11.      There is also something perverse in the vital which takes a kind of dramatic pleasure in its own misery and tragedy, even in degradation or in illness

12.      Whatever fulfillment one may feel in pain or in doubt belongs to the Ignorance

13.      The real fulfillment is in the divine joy and the divine Truth and its certitude and it is that for which the Yogin strives

14.      Alternations of happy and unhappy or good and bad conditions, are the common lot of human beings

15.      They are not created by Yoga or by the effort after perfection

16.      In Yoga one becomes conscious of their movements

and their causes instead of feeling them blindly

17.      In the end one makes one’s way out of them into a clearer and happier consciousness

18.      Outward happiness and suffering are to be taken with an unshaken equality and trust in the Divine Wisdom

19.      Till one has attained a position in which, united with the Divine Will, one can dominate them

20.      In one’s own life one can look back and see what each step, happy or unhappy, meant for one’s progress and how it led towards the growth of his spirit

21.      Ordinary men if they meet with unhappiness and misfortune in life, they complain to God

22.      In opposition to this crude and ignorant attitude, Sri Aurobindo says to the divine Beloved, ‘Strike, strike hard, let me feel the intensity of Thy love for me’

23.      It is only God’s friends whom God treats with severity

24.      It is only to those who will pass through this purifying flame, that the conditions for attaining the maximum result are given

25.      When something extremely unpleasant happens to you, you may tell yourself, ‘Well, this proves I am worth the trouble of being given this difficulty, this proves there is something in me which can resist the difficulty’

26.      And you will notice that instead of tormenting yourself, you rejoice

27.      You will be so happy and so strong that even the

most unpleasant things will seem to you quite charming

28.      Only when egoism dies & God in man governs his own human universality

29.      Only then can this earth support a happy and contented race of beings

30.      Suffering and happiness, misfortune and prosperity are experiences of the soul in its training

31.      Prosperity is often a worse ordeal than suffering

32.      Adversity, suffering may often be regarded rather as a reward to virtue than as a punishment for sin

33.      Since suffering turns out to be the greatest help and purifier of the soul struggling to unfold itself

34.      To regard suffering merely as the stern award of a Judge, the anger of an irritated Ruler or even the mechanical recoil of result of evil upon cause of evil is to take the most superficial view possible of God’s dealings with the soul and the law of the world’s evolution

35.      The worldly prosperity, wealth, progeny, the outward enjoyment of art, beauty, power need be achieved without loss to the soul and enjoyed only as the out flowing of the divine Joy and Grace upon our material existence

36.      But let us seek them first for others or rather for all, and for ourselves only as a part of the universal condition or as one means of bringing perfection nearer

37.      True progressive evolution which can lead man to his rightful happiness, does not lie in any external means,

material improvement or social change

38.      Only a deep and inner process of individual self-perfection can make for real progress and completely transform the present state of things

39.      And change suffering and misery into a serene and lasting contentment

LX—When the Divine Moment Arrives

1. Unhappy is the man or the nation which, when the divine moment arrives, is found sleeping or unprepared to use it

LXI—Happiness Is Not Normal Conditions in This World

1. Happiness and good health are not normal conditions in this world

2. We must protect happiness and good health carefully against the intrusion of their opposites

3. There are many dismal spectacles in the world, but that is after all the very reason why Yoga has to be done

4. If the world were all happy and beautiful and ideal, who would want to change it or find it necessary to bring down a higher consciousness into earthly Mind and Matter?

5. The work of the Yoga is difficult, not easy, not a happy

canter to the goal

6. It is, because the world and human nature are what they are

8.      The people of the Punjab have a song which says ‘Happiness does not always reign’

9.      We cannot expect to be always happy, and know how to be patient is most useful

LXII—Happiness and Misery Are Phenomena of Cosmic Experience

1. Happiness and misery are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and diminution of consciousness in the manifestation

2. Philosophically happiness and misery, good and evil, are only phenomena of cosmic experience due to a division and diminution of consciousness in the manifestation

3. Philosophically happiness and misery are not part of the essence or of the undivided whole-consciousness either of the Divine or of our own spiritual being

4. It is the misfortune which gives all its savour to happiness

LXIII—Joys and Pleasures Are Not the Object of Yoga

1.      Joys and pleasures are not the object of Yoga and a

bargain or demand for a replacement of this kind can be no legitimate or healthy element in the sadhana

2.      Ananda and the spiritual happiness are something quite different from joys and pleasures

3.      Even Ananda one cannot demand or make it a condition for pursuing the sadhana

4.      Ananda comes as a crown, a natural outcome and its precondition is the growth of the true consciousness, peace, calm, light, strength, the equanimity which resists all shocks and persists through success and failure

5.      Sri Aurobindo objected to a demand, to making peace, joy or Ananda a condition for following the Yoga

6.      This demand is undesirable because if you do so, then the vital, not the psychic, takes the lead

7.      When the vital takes the lead, then unrest, despondency, unhappiness can always come, since these things are the very nature of the vital

8.      The vital can never remain constantly in joy and peace, for it needs their opposites in order to have the sense of the drama of life

9.      And yet when unrest and unhappiness come, the vital at once cries, ‘I am not given my due, what is the use of my doing this Yoga?’

10.      Or else it makes a gospel of its unhappiness and says, as you say in your letter, that the path to fulfillment must be a tragic road through the desert

11.      And yet it is precisely this predominance of the vital

in us that makes the necessity of passing through the desert

12.      If the psychic were always there in front, the desert would be no longer a desert and the wilderness would blossom with the rose

LXIV—Vital Joy in Ordinary Life

1. What gives the joy of the work is vital

2. The vital delight in the work is a necessary element for the work itself

3. Work done without the vital delight is much less easy to do and much less easy to offer

4. Most people do things because they have to, not out of the happiness they find in the things

5. It is only its hobbies that the nature finds some happiness in, not usually in work

6. Unless of course the work itself is one’s hobby or penchant and can be indulged in

7. Joy and enthusiasm and buoyancy are good things, but it must be on a basis of calm and with the head clear for work

8. Vital love does not bring happiness; it brings only suffering and disappointment

9. Vital love never gets satisfied and, even if it is granted something that it asks for, it is never satisfied with it

10.      The joylessness also comes from the vital

11.      When there is a pressure from the mind and soul on the vital to give up its attachments and its full unpurified acceptance of the outward life; it refuses to take a joy in anything, becomes unhappy

12.      When the vital resists the change from the human into the divine consciousness, what it is defending is its right to sorrow and suffering

13.      What was dissatisfied in you, was the soul within, the higher mind and the higher vital

14.      When the Divine turned you to the Yoga or brought you in Sri Aurobindo Ashram it was simply answering to the demand of your own inner being and the higher parts of your nature

15.      If you have much difficulty and become restless, it is because you are still divided and something in your lower vital still regrets what it has lost and asks a price or compensation

16.      Asks for something similar and equivalent in the spiritual life

17.      It refuses to believe that there is a greater compensation, a larger vital life waiting for it in which there shall not be the old inadequacy and unrest and final dissatisfaction

18.      The foolishness is in the irrational and obstinate resistance of this confused and obscure part of you to the demand, made not only by this Yoga, but by all Yoga, to the necessary conditions for the satisfaction of the

aspiration of your own soul and higher nature

19.      It is usually the habit of the mind and vital to associate happiness or interest only with activity, but the spiritual consciousness has no such limitations

20.      There is no reason why the void should be a dull or unhappy condition

21.      It is true that certain vital movements care nothing for truth or reason and appeal only to the blind feelings of the vital

22.      But still the light of the true consciousness turned steadily on the vital ought to enlighten your own vital that it will no longer lend itself to the things that seek to disturb it

23.      Then the vital is ready to take its stand on the calm and happiness of surrender to the Divine

24.      The fear of being happy is the usual movements of the vital formation which is not yourself and they come up to try and prevent the change in you

25.      You have only to refuse to accept these suggestions and put yourself persistently on the side of the Truth in you which will make you free and happy, and all will be well

26.      The physical consciousness, the most ordinary outward-going consciousness of most human beings, sets such great store by comfort, good food, good clothes, happy relationships, instead of aspiring for the higher things

LXV—Vital Joy Has to be Replaced by Psychic Gladness

1. Vital joy, though it is a very helpful thing for the ordinary human life, is something excited, eager, mobile without a settled basis

2. That is why vital joy soon gets tired and cannot continue

3. Vital joy has to be replaced by a quiet settled psychic gladness with the mind and vital very clear and very peaceful

4. When one works on psychic gladness, then everything becomes glad and easy, in touch with the Mother’s force and fatigue or depression do not come

LXVI—Desires to be Replaced by a Happy Will, One with a Happy Divine’s Will

1.      Desires has to be replaced by the true thing, a happy and luminous will one with the Divine’s will

2.      The physical consciousness or of the vital element of physical consciousness is afraid to give up desires for it feels it will lose everything it wants and gain nothing in exchange

3.      It does not realise that it will get something far greater and more powerful and happy in place of this troubled desire and its doubtful and precarious fruits

4.      For it has been accustomed to think of desire as the only possible motive of life

5.      It does not know that the divine Force is there waiting to descend with its light and peace and joy bringing much greater things and a happier life

6.      When this part of physical consciousness can be enlightened and persuaded to want wholeheartedly the change, then a great difficulty, indeed the central difficulty will have gone

7.      When the answer to your aspiration or prayer is not in accord with your desire, this preference makes you feel unhappy

8.      You find it difficult to accept the answer then you must fight to accept it

9.      Otherwise you are compelled to make an effort to accept what comes

10.      Whereas if you had no preferences, whatever the answer to your aspiration, when it comes, you cling to it joyfully, spontaneously

11.      You wish desire and prefer things to be like this and not like that but that indeed, is not a choice

12.      The choice is there at every minute; the choice to climb up or go down, the choice to progress or go backwards

13.      But this choice does not imply that you prefer things to be like this or like that

14.      It is an attitude that you take that matters

15.      For someone who has desires, when his desires are not satisfied, it is a sign that the Divine Grace is with him and wants, through experience, to make him progress rapidly

16.      By teaching him that a willing and spontaneous surrender to the Divine Will is a much surer way to be happy in peace and light than the satisfaction of any desire

17.      If you allow the vital to follow its likes and dislikes, its fancies, its desires, it’s bad habits, it becomes your master and peace and happiness are no longer possible

18.      There can be an isolation and minimise contacts so that one can go inside into the inner being

19.      If this isolation brings unhappiness, gloom then it is evident that the retirement is not wholesome

20.      The results of unhappiness, are not a punishment, they are a natural result of yielding to egoism

LXVII—Vigilance and Happiness

1.      One who is vigilant, all his difficulties vanish

2.      If he persists in his vigilance it happens after a time that the happiness he feels in being vigilant becomes so strong that he would soon feel very unhappy if he were to lose this vigilance

LXVIII—Wealth and Happiness

1.      A man who is craving for wealth and tries to deceive people in order to get money then he exchanges this for other possibilities

2.      He may have money, but he no longer has a conscience

3.      He has the money he desired, but he is not happy and the more he has, usually the less happy he is

4.      He is tormented, you see, by the wealth he has gained

5.      If one day all your money is gone, you miss it, you are unhappy, you are miserable

6.      It is a bondage, a weak attachment

7.      He who is quite detached, when he lives in the midst of these things, it is well with him

8.      When these things are gone, it is well also; he is totally indifferent to both

9.      That is the right attitude: when it is there he uses it, when it is not he does without it

10.      And for his inner consciousness this makes no difference

11.      Do not dream that when thou hast got rid of material poverty, men will even so be happy or satisfied or society freed from ills, troubles & problems

12.      Rid of material poverty is only the first & lowest necessity

13.      While the soul within remains defectively organised, there will always be outward unrest, disorder & revolution

14.      A safe and quiet life is not enough to make people happy

15.      Inner development is necessary, and the peace that comes from a conscious contact with the Divine

16.      Poverty is not necessarily a cause of misery

17.      The voluntary poverty of the ascetics found in their destitution the source and condition of a perfect peace and happiness

18.      Whereas on the contrary, the enjoyment of worldly possessions, of all that material wealth can provide in the way of comfort and pleasure and external satisfaction is powerless to prevent one who possesses these things from suffering pain and sorrow

19.      Money does not bring happiness

20.      The Sannyasi who possesses nothing and usually eats only one meal a day is perfectly happy if he is sincere

21.      Whereas a rich man may be thoroughly unhappy if he has ruined his health by all sorts of excess and over-indulgence

22.      What makes a man happy is rather an inner balance of energy, good health and good feelings

LXIX—Aspiration and Happiness

1.      One must have a solid well-balanced body, a well controlled vital and a mind organised, supple, logical

2.      Then, if you are in a state of aspiration and you receive an answer, all your being will feel enriched, enlarged, splendid, and you will be perfectly happy

3.      If you had a small vase, quite small, which will remain small if you do not take care to make it bigger; then if all of a sudden it is filled up with something which is too strong, everything overflows

4.      In intense aspiration let there be peace and joy in the mind and heart

5.      In surrender aspire steadily for Divine’s presence and joy

6.      And let the Divine open the vital to his calm and joy

LXX—Unhappiness Can Arouses the Aspiration for a Better State

1.      All things which bring unhappiness arouses the aspiration for a better state

2.      It is this that is generally at the root of spiritual experiences, it is something negative

3.      These are the intense need for something other than the life one lives, difficulties or disappointments or pain or sorrow

4.      Usually it is at first a flight from the miseries of life which pushes you towards the spiritual life

5.      Very few people, when they are in a state of perfect inner and outer harmony and nothing unpleasant or painful happened to them, they would think of the Divine

6.      That is the positive need to know the Divine and unite with Him

LXXI—Unhappy Due to …

1. You are Unhappy because You Want to be Unhapppy

i.      There is a vital taste for suffering which imposes suffering on the body

ii.      Because the vital takes a very perverse pleasure in suffering

iii.      If you are unhappy, it is because you want to be

iv.      If you suffer, it is because you like suffering, otherwise you would not suffer

v.      This sort of thing I call unhealthy, for it is against harmony and beauty

vi.      It is a kind of morbid need for strong sensations

2. Unhappy due to Ugliness of Actions

i.      When you act in an ugly and mean way, naturally you are unhappy

ii.      But to be unhappy because you are conscious of the ugliness of your actions is already a first step towards not doing it any more

3. Unhappy due to Doing Stupid Things

i.      When you know what you ought to do and you do not do it and do stupid things

ii.      Then you are unhappy for two reasons

iii.      First because of the stupid things you have done, and then due to the regret they bring

iv.      It is a somewhat painful situation

4. Unhappy due to coming across People Who Do Not Believe

i.      There are people who need the support and trust and certitude of others to feel comfortable and they are always unhappy

ii.      They are always unhappy because, they will always come across people, who do not believe, and so they will be upset and it will trouble them

iii.      One must find one’s certitude within oneself, keep it in spite of everything and go one’s way whatever the cost, to the very end

iv.      The Victory is for the most enduring

5. To be concerned for one’s happiness is the surest way of becoming unhappy

6. Unhappy circumstance as the proof that the Lord considers that he is ready for spiritual life

7. Feeling unhappy means that you have a progress to make

i.      At times our nature gives its consent to the needed change, to progress and then everything goes smoothly, happily

ii.      If the part that has to progress refuses to move and clings to its old habits through inertia, ignorance, attachment or desire

iii.      Then, under the pressure of the perfecting force, the struggle starts translating itself into unhappiness or revolt

iv.      The only remedy is to keep quiet, look within oneself honestly to find out what is wrong and set to work courageously to put it right

8. Unhappy movements disturb the nature and cloud it and make it more difficult for the Force to work

9. The unhappiness is not necessary or inevitable in the sadhana

i.      The unhappiness comes because your inner nature

feels the touch of the Divine Presence indispensable but does not get it

ii.      To feel the touch of the Divine Presence a certain constant detachment within is required

10. Those who are satisfied with their own liberation, they leave the world to its unhappy plight

i.      Those who are satisfied with their own liberation, the union with the Supreme Consciousness then they leave the world to its unhappy plight

11. The Vital is a very good worker, it works very well, but in working it seeks always its own satisfaction

12. When this satisfaction is not given for one reason or another the vital is not at all happy

13. The world is divine and that it is unhappy because it has separated from the Divine

i.      The world is unhappy because it has forgotten its origin, that is, its divine origin

ii.      With man mind has come upon earth, and with the mind has come misery

iii.      The mind is capable of objectifying, and so it finds that such and such a thing is miserable

iv.      Without the mind there would be no such discovery and no unhappiness

v.      So, there is no unhappiness for animals nor for plants, and yet less for stones

vi.      In the ancient Teaching it was said, ‘Change your consciousness and what appears to you unfortunate will not so appear to you any longer’

vii.      The Buddha taught that if you are free from desire, things that seemed to you unfortunate would no longer seem to you unfortunate at all

viii.      Therefore it is the thought you have about it which makes you consider this or that thing unfortunate

ix.      If you thought an event happy, it would become happy for you; and that is what it is, in fact

x.      So, as long as you are in the field of emotions, of sentiments and thoughts, all this is true

xi.      That is, the notion of ‘unhappiness’ has entered the world with the capacity to consider that things were unfortunate

14. One is unhappy only when one is not generous

i.      If one has a generous nature which gives of itself without reckoning, one is never unhappy

ii.      It is those who are coiled up on themselves and

who always want to draw things towards themselves, who see things and the world only through themselves, it is these who are unhappy

iii.      It is he who wants to take who is unhappy; he who gives himself is never so

15. Happiness can no longer enter where there is depression, discouragement and revolt

16. Revolt is the most useless and foolish of all things

17. When you give up this bad habit of revolt, you will see that suffering too will go away and be replaced by an unvarying happiness

18. When one’s attention is always turned towards oneself, one is never happy

19. Unhappiness comes from desires and ambitions

LXXII—Adverse Vital Force Wants You to Fall from Happiness

1.      Adverse vital Force only wants you to fall from happiness, to suffer and to descend into a lower

consciousness and lose your progress

2.      Do not listen to the clamour of the adverse vital Force which has been attacking you, its reasonings or its wrong emotional suggestions

LXXIII-Happiness for Students

1.      If you go to the class in order to make progress, every day a new little progress you will not find your professor boring

2.      You will discover that he is very interesting

3.      If you look at life as means of progressing then life becomes something wonderful and interesting

4.      Life upon earth is made to be a field for progress and if we progress to the maximum we draw the maximum benefit from our life upon earth and then one feels happy

5.      When one does the best one can, one is happy

6.      Vital education will have very happy effects even on child’s character

7.      This Vital education teaches artistic taste and refinement, to love beautiful, lofty, healthy and noble things

8.      This true aesthetic culture will protect him from degrading influences

9.      A methodical and enlightened cultivation of the senses can, little by little, eliminate from the child

whatever is by contagion vulgar, commonplace and crude

10.      A truly refined taste will, because of this very refinement, feel incapable of acting in a crude, brutal or vulgar manner

11.      This refinement, if it is sincere, brings to the being a nobility and generosity which will spontaneously find expression in his behaviour and will protect him from many base and perverse movements

12.      When one is very young and born with a conscious psychic being within, there is always, in the dreams of the child, a kind of aspiration for beauty without ugliness, justice without injustice, goodness without limits

13.      One dreams of miracles when one is young, one wants all wickedness to disappear, everything to be always luminous, beautiful, happy

14.      One likes stories which end happily

15.      This is what one should rely on

16.      When the body feels its miseries, its limitations, one must establish this dream in it of a strength which would have no limit, a beauty which would have no ugliness, and of marvellous capacities

17.      One dreams of being able to rise into the air, of being wherever it is necessary to be, of setting things right when they go wrong, of healing the sick

18.      Usually parents or teachers pass their time throwing cold water on it, telling the child that it is a dream, it is not a reality

19.      But the parents should do the very opposite

20.      Children should be taught, Yes, this is what you must try to realise and not only is it possible but it is certain if you come in contact with the part in you which is capable of doing this thing

21.      This is what should guide your life, organise it, make you develop in the direction of the true reality which the ordinary world calls illusion

22.      The children must be happy to go to school, happy to learn

23.      There were some children who were doing very well and were very happy

24.      They went to their parents for the holidays and came back completely changed and spoiled

25.      And then if we tell them that, it will be even worse because their parents will tell them that these people are bad, they are turning you against us

26.      The parents must know that before they send them to the Ashram

27.      The danger is not the children, it is not laziness, it is not even that the children are rebellious, the danger, the great danger is the parents

28.      The Mother would like parents to know the attitude of the Ashram school to be made known to people before they send their children

29.      Because it is a pity when the children are happy and the parents are not; and that creates situations that are

ridiculous and sometimes dangerous

30.      Make your brain work by studying regularly and systematically

31.      Then you will be able to rest and it will be possible for you to concentrate in the depths of your heart

32.      Concentrate in the depths of your heart and find there the psychic source, with it you will become conscious of both gratitude and true happiness

33.      Brave children of every land, what are the evil things that you should learn to fight? What are the things that man must master or destroy?

34.      All that threatens his life and is harmful to his progress, all that weakens or degrades him, all that makes him unhappy

LXXIV—Only Vital Beings Love to be Worshiped and Feel Happy

1.      Only Vital Beings Love to be Worshiped and are quite pleased by it

2.      Then Vital Beings are puffed up with pride and feel very happy

3.      But real divine beings, do not value this, they do not like to be worshipped

4.      Don’t think that real divine beings are happy, for they have no pride

5.      It is because of pride that a man likes to be

worshipped; if a man has no pride he doesn’t like to be worshipped

6.      A man who has no pride sees a good intention or a fine feeling or a movement of unselfishness or enthusiasm, a joy, a spiritual joy, these things have for them an infinitely greater value than prayers and acts of worship and pujas

7.      If you seat a real god in a chair and oblige him to remain there all the while you are doing puja, he may perhaps have a little fun watching you do it, but it certainly gives him no satisfaction

8.      He does not feel either flattered or happy or glorified by your puja and you must get rid of that idea

9.      There is an entire domain between the spiritual and the material worlds which belongs to vital beings

10.      The vital beings are happy because it immediately gives them importance

11.      The vital being who has the greatest number of believers, devotees and worshippers is the happiest and the most puffed up

12.      The true gods, even those of the Overmind, who seem to have taken on many human defects, but still, despite all that, they really have a higher consciousness and it does not please them at all

LXXV—Other Quotations on Happiness

1. Rama sacrificed his own happiness and domestic life and the happiness of Sita

2. India has achieved her freedom but not the united India for which we had hoped

3. The internal quarrels which brought about this unhappy result

4. If you have united your consciousness with the psychic consciousness, when you die your psychic being returns to the psychic world which is a world of bliss and delight

5. After death the psychic being goes to its immortal domain to enjoy a perfectly happy life or rest

6. Blossoming of a plant is more harmonious and happy when you have a special affection for a plant and the material care you give it and you love it

7. The Mother wishes that life may prove happy for you, and that one day you may be born into the Light and Truth

8. The Mother is happy with awakening of consciousness in you

9. The Mother is happy to help those who wish for harmony and conciliation, and are ready to correct their mistakes and to progress

10. All that leads to harmony makes the Mother happy

11. You ought to be happy that X has received the inner call and decided to lead the divine life

12. The Mother is happy if the stay in the Ashram has widened your vision and understanding and deepened your consciousness

13. Nothing can please the Mother more than to live in her love, feel it, be filled with it and be happy

14. Auroville wants to shelter people happy to be in Auroville

15. The Mother want to bring about in the material world, upon the earth the gift of healing and giving happiness

16. The best expenditure of energy is when the Force flows out in an intense and happy working

17. The relation of the disciple to the Guru in the Guruvada has always complete happy confidence, unquestioning acceptance of the guidance

18. Where Krishna’s light is there is a pure and divine happiness and gladness

19. There is a neutral emptiness with nothing in it, either happy or unhappy

20. In sadhana emptiness is very usually a necessary transition from one state to another

21. This neutral state is often or even usually followed by the opening to inner experience

22. There is also an emptiness made of peace and silence, when the peace and silence come out from the psychic within or descend from the higher consciousness above

23. This is not neutral, for in it there is the sense of peace, often also of wideness and freedom

24. There is also a happy emptiness with the sense of something close or drawing near which is not yet there

25. For example the closeness of the Mother or some other preparing experience

26. When the outer being becomes capable of quietude and it sits in meditation in a free, happy, vacant quietude which is the first step towards the true consciousness

27. When the outer being becomes capable of quietude and it sits in meditation in a free, happy, vacant quietude which is the first step towards the true consciousness

28. Happy inventions, thoughts, ideas, are always wandering about seeking a mind that may embody them

29. One mind takes, looks, rejects while another takes, looks, accepts

30. Two different minds catch the same thought-form or thought-wave, but the mental activities being different make different results out of them

31. The feelings of complaints are merely the product of the restless discontent of the vital and they are useless disturbers of happiness

32. The subconscient sometimes enters into a happy condition, sometimes into a neutral one, sometimes it raises up a causeless sorrow

33. The true consciousness is happy

34. When periods of clouding comes one must not to get distressed or upset, to realise what it is and to remain very quiet calling for the Mother’s Force to push it away

35. In this way the habit of these recurrences diminishes, their strength and intensity also diminishes

36. Then one is able to recall the true consciousness and the true force, the bright, happy, peaceful, open condition more and more easily and quicker

37. After a happy and favourable experience it is necessary to rise from the human to the divine, otherwise one risks falling into the infernal and diabolic

38. In life, experiences are not repeated identically, and if they are not better, that is, higher and more true, they become necessarily worse

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