For instance, when the booklet The Mother speaks of becoming conscious of one’s own nature, we tend to interpret the phrase psychologically—taking it to mean understanding the traumas and the familial or social conditioning that have shaped us. What is your interpretation?
Yes, I understand that. There is a difficulty with the Indian mind also because we are accustomed to a certain spiritual outlook that often misses many intermediary links that connect the spiritual and the material.
These links serve as various roads and bridges or else as roadblocks, obstacles to our spiritual journey. In simple words, our nature – meaning thereby our thoughts, feelings, impulses, motives, passions, desires, the entire range of our complex inner psychology and the forces that move us offer helpful or harmful energies that facilitate or come in the way of our progress. It is this that is implied when it is said that we must become conscious.
Especially it is important to know our inner motives. For example, why we do whatever we do, including the reason why we have undertaken the journey of yoga itself, the core aspiration and the faith behind the Yoga itself. Is it to gain good health, to get power, to have greater control over our life, or the life of others, or to help humanity, to earn name and satisfy some spiritual ambition, etc etc. None of these motives can propel us fully on the path. It is only when we seek the Divine for the sake of the Divine, not even for what He may give us, that the real journey in the truest sense begins. Before that we are like tourists circuiting around the hills. But if the motive is to love the Divine for the joy of loving, to serve the Divine for the joy of serving, to know the Divine for the joy of knowing, then one is on the royal road to the summits.
The light that helps us become conscious is sincerity. It is only if we are sincere, and not in the habit of giving convenient justifications, that yoga can truly arrive at full fruition.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
