Sweet Mother,
These days they print your symbol and Sri Aurobindo’s name on all sorts of things, on all the thousand and one little trifles of daily life which have to be thrown away once they have served their purpose, as for example matchboxes, pencils, toothbrushes, combs, even the borders of a sari, which are much trampled on. Is it good to use these precious things in such a free and common way?
And then what can we do with these things, Mother, when we no longer need them? We can’t throw them away. The old calendars, for example; we have a thick pile of them.
The Lord is everywhere, in everything, in what we throw away as in what we keep preciously, in what we trample on as in what we adore. We must learn to live with respect and never forget His constant and immutable Presence.
https://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/2-june-1961
(1) How do we make sense of Mother’s reply and put it in practice in daily life? What is the way to deal with the things sacred and the mundane in the manifest world (even though it is a fact that the Lord pervades all)?
(2) In life, we are all taught that sacred objects (like relics, for instance) are more important than the everyday items and must be treated differently. So where is the boundary? If there is one, is it helpful in life or not so much?
She foresaw the future in a way, when the gap between the sacred and the profane will be, anyway, blurred as we see today. One way, as we see in today’s rebel children looking at the inverted image of equality, is to treat everything as profane, without the sense of the sacred. This is the way of the Asura in man, an equality that ends up causing much harm by reducing everything to the mundane level.
The other way, and I believe that to be much better, or the true and right way, is to treat everything as sacred since the Divine dwells within everything. The sky we look up to, the sun we pray to and the earth we trample upon are all sacred. The Mother is pointing out towards this old division that regards certain things as sacred while others as profane. Instead, we should treat everything with care and love and respect since the Divine dwells within everything. This is what The Mother is reminding us.
In practice, it means to remove these boundaries in our minds that end up creating division in our thoughts between what is Divine and what is not. Instead, respect all things and persons and creatures, since the Divine dwells in all, has become the All.
Affectionately,
Alok da
