When I read these lines , these questions came to my mind.
“Feelings pushed through a packed and burdened heart,
Each forced it’s separate inconsequent ways
But cared for nothing but it’s ego’s self”
The original principle of the ego-self starts with ‘division and separativeness’, what is known as Avidya or ignorance in traditional terminology. This too was / is needed so that the One Consciousness can experience the multiplicity needed for creation. At first multiple centres are created within the One by the Vidyamayi Maya. Each of these centres is the Jivatma. But as it enters the play and is identified with the form the principle of the ego becomes fully operative. The Jivatma now forgets that it is a portion of the Divine, one of the many divine centres brought into existence for the Divine play. Every centre now begins to see itself as the sole centre and starts drawing all the forces towards itself as if the whole cosmos exists for itself. Hence the distortion begins at every layer, the mind, the vital sheath and the body. The remedy is that the Jivatma must first disengage itself from this wrong identification and reconnect with the Divine in which it discovers its original truth as being a portion of the Divine. Once this is done then it can open the knot of the ego, and open and align the different parts to the Divine Will and the Divine Force by sincere surrender to the Divine Mother. As a result of the action of the Divine Mother’s Force, Shakti, the instruments of Nature designed so far for her lower purposes begin to be reshaped and remodelled by the Divine Shakti to receive, bear and transmit Her Will without diminution or distortion. This is the essence of the process. Sri Aurobindo describes it thus in The Synthesis of Yoga.
‘The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into relation and contact with the Divine and to call Him in to transform our entire being into His. Thus in a sense God Himself, the real Person in us, becomes the sadhaka of the sadhana1 as well as the Master of the Yoga by whom the lower personality is used as the centre of a divine transfiguration and the instrument of its own perfection. In effect, the pressure of the Tapas, the force of consciousness in us dwelling in the Idea of the divine Nature upon that which we are in our entirety, produces its own realisation. The divine and all-knowing and all-effecting descends upon the limited and obscure, progressively illumines and energises the whole lower nature and substitutes its own action for all the terms of the inferior human light and mortal activity.
In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego with its whole field and all its apparatus to the Beyond-ego with its vast and incalculable but always inevitable workings. Certainly, this is no short cut or easy sadhana. It requires a colossal faith, an absolute courage and above all an unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid,—the attempt of the ego to enter into contact with the Divine, the wide, full and therefore laborious preparation of the whole lower Nature by the divine working to receive and become the higher Nature, and the eventual transformation. In fact, however, the divine Strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for our weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It “makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills.” The intellect becomes aware of a Law that beneficently insists and a succour that upholds; the heart speaks of a Master of all things and Friend of man or a universal Mother who upholds through all stumblings. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet, in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the most easy and sure of all.’
Affectionately,
Alok Da
