How to not get offended by their armored ignorance and dereliction of the truth when I can clearly see the flashes, glimpses and pulses of a world that can be MUCH better, MUCH FASTER with the cooperation they are withholding?
Here is my difficulty: As I have been reading Sri Aurobindo and learning the grades of ascending consciousness and working hard myself to detect, purge, or sublimate my own drawbacks, insecurities, and conditioned or prideful needs, I am becoming acutely aware of people who have a DECIDED agenda of NOT CHOOSING to do so.
A portion of them don’t feel the need to seek for a higher meaning, and the latter, when the meaning is given to them, absolutely REJECT IT with a vengeance of “self” preservation. Needless to say this has a rippling effect on them, the people they touch as they go and there seems to be an unstoppable diffusion and majestic waste in the workings of this nexus, because more often than not each person in this nexus of influence feels corroborated and reinforced in their bleak picture of the world and harden their hearts and we create more people, in another round of the vicious cycle, where they don’t seek or reject even if the testimonials of someone who has sought comes to them for their own good.
Now, I understand everyone in this nexus is divine and all is the Divine Play, but there can be no doubt that there is a hierarchy of quality in these plays, a spectrum of consciousness informing the rules, goals and reasons of every level of play. I am having a mildly hard time, a frustration almost, with these lower-order plays because players of this level make up the bulk of the population and so, as a rule of chance, but I am having a RADICALLY hard time with the people who would reject the very idea of working on themselves when all their questions and scepticism have been dismantled.
They wouldn’t absorb it. They would hug the ego principle and slumber in their vanity. This ego principle I have in my family, in my friends, in the loves that came and went, in the future that lies ahead of me. People who lie, use others, think only about themselves, are mortally attached to “status”, vain, deceitful.
If we want to get rid of the ego, we must learn to rise above these lower movements of anger, annoyance, criticisms of ourselves and others and learn to live in a state of wide peace and equality. Feelings of superiority and inferiority are both contrary to the true spiritual life. What we need to understand is that all, in fact, most are not ready for deliverance from the egoistic life. A premature bursting of the shell of the ego will destabilise them. Evolution is a slow, deliberate process and it is best handled by the Divine. We too should do our best and leave the rest in the hands of the Divine. The ego of being good and righteous itself can become a big stumbling block. What we need to understand is that just as the Divine Grace is pulling us out of lower things, so too it is working upon others. We don’t need to convince anyone about it. At best, we can share our views and then leave the rest in God’s safe hands. Nishkama Karma and Samata, absence of attachment to the results of our actions and a perfect equanimity, are the first basic necessity to be a Divine instrument, a Divine worker, or a Divine warrior. To remain inwardly undisturbed as we navigate through life is the firm foundation for change within us and in others. The conquest of knowledge, true knowledge that looks behind and beyond appearances, is the next requirement to bring the needed change. All the rest comes later.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
