It means that we often carry within us the opposite of what we are meant to realise. We all carry in us a divine possibility. But to bring it out, we are provided within us the challenge, the opposition to the possibility that we must conquer. Take for instance someone meant to realise true love will find in his life surrounded by some of the most difficult people who will awaken emotions quite the opposite of love. But on the other hand, if you can conquer these opposing emotions, then the energy of love can be perfected within you. So too the man born to realise the deepest faith will have in his life situations and circumstances that would trigger doubt. Or someone meant to is extremely generous in one way will be opposed in another part by avarice; a man who is quite courageous in one dimension will be quite cowardly in another area. So by taking this difficulty, an apparent negative tendency as a challenge to be overcome, one opens the doors of a great corresponding possibility hidden behind it like the sun behind the clouds.ย
Basically, what we see as defects and difficulties of nature are actually distortions of a truth. If the distortion can be rectified, then the possibility begins to emerge. The door blocking the entry is also the door that, if opened, can let you into the riches hidden behind. So if we are besieged by a persistent difficulty, then it means that the difficulty, once conquered, becomes the door for taking the lead.ย
Here is a conversation of The Mother explaining this.
‘You have said: “Everyone possesses… two opposite tendencies of character,… which are like the light and the shadow of the same thing.”2
Why are things made in this way? Can’t one have only the light?
Yes, if one eliminates the shadow. But it must be eliminated. That does not happen by itself. The world as it is is a mixed world. You cannot have an object which gets the light from one side without its casting a shadow on the other. It is like that, and indeed it is the shadows which make you see the lights. The world is like that, and to have only the light one must definitely go through the entire discipline necessary for eliminating the shadow. This is what I have explained a little farther; I have said that this shadow was like a sign of what you had to conquer in your nature in order to be able to realise what you have come to do. If you have a part to play, a mission to fulfil, you will always carry in yourself the main difficulty preventing you from realizing it, so that you have within your reach the victory you must win. If you had to fight against a difficulty which is everywhere on earth, it would be very difficult (you would need to have a very vast consciousness and a very great power), while if you carry in your own nature just the shadow or defect you must conquer, well, it is there, within your reach: you see all the time the effects of this thing and can fight it directly, immediately. It is a very practical organisation.
You haven’t seen in the Bulletin that letter of Sri Aurobindo’s: the “Evil Persona”? It is in the Bulletin. The thing is very well explained there.3
- “In certain cases this education will encourage the movements that express the light, in others, on the contrary, those that express the shadow. If the circumstances and the environment are favourable, the light will grow at the expense of the shadow; otherwise the opposite will happen. And in this way the individual’s character will crystallize according to the whims of Nature and the determinisms of material and vital life, unless a higher element comes in in time, a conscious will which, refusing to allow Nature to follow her whimsical ways, will replace them by a logical and clear-sighted discipline. This conscious will is what we mean by a rational method of education.” โฉ
- “… Everyone possesses in a large measure, and the exceptional individual in an increasing degree of precision, two opposite tendencies of character, in almost equal proportions, which are like the light and the shadow of the same thing. Thus someone who has the capacity of being exceptionally generous will suddenly find an obstinate avarice rising up in his nature, the courageous man will be a coward in some part of his being and the good man will suddenly have wicked impulses. In this way life seems to endow everyone not only with the possibility of expressing an ideal, but also with contrary elements representing in a concrete manner the battle he has to wage and the victory he has to win for the realisation to become possible. Consequently, all life is an education pursued more or less consciously, more or less willingly.” โฉ
- The “Evil Persona””What you say about the “Evil Persona” interests me greatly as it answers to my consistent experience that a person greatly endowed for the work has, always or almost always,โperhaps one ought not to make a too rigid universal rule about these thingsโa being attached to him, sometimes appearing like a part of him, which is just the contradiction of the thing he centrally represents in the work to be done. Or, if it is not there at first, not bound to his personality, a force of this kind enters into his environment as soon as he begins his movement to realise. Its business seems to be to oppose, to create stumbling and wrong conditions, in a word, to set before him the whole problem of the work he has started to do. It would seem as if the problem could not, in the occult economy of things, be solved otherwise than by the predestined instrument making the difficulty his own. That would explain many things that seem very disconcerting on the surface.”
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/3-february-1954#p12)
Affectionately,ย
Alok Da
