Page 5 - NAMAH-Apr-2020

Faith and the body*

Mother, by a mental effort — for instance, the resolution not to take medicines when one is ill — can
one succeed in making the body understand?

That is not enough. A mental resolution is not enough, no. There are subtle reactions in
your body which do not obey the mental resolution, it is not enough. Something else is
needed.

Other regions must be contacted. A power higher than the mind’s is needed.

And from this point of view, all that is in the mind is always subject to inner questioning.
You take a resolution but you can be sure that something will always come in which perhaps
may not openly fight this resolution but will question its effectiveness. It is enough, you
see, to be subject to the least doubt for the resolution to lose half its effect. If at the same
time as you say “I want”, there is something silently lurking, somewhere behind, in the
background, something which asks itself, “What will the result be?” that is enough to ruin
everything.

This play of the mind’s working is extremely subtle and no ordinary human means can
succeed in controlling it perfectly. For instance, this is well known among people who
practise yoga and want to control their body: if through an assiduous yogic effort they
have succeeded in controlling something in themselves — a particular weakness of the
body, an opening to a certain disequilibrium — if they have managed to do this and had
some result, for instance the disappearance of this disequilibrium for a very long time, for
years, well, if one day at a particular moment, suddenly, the thought crosses their mind
that “Ah! Now it is done”, the very next minute it returns. That is enough. For it proves
that they have come into contact with the vibrations of the thing they had rejected, on a
plane where they are vulnerable, the plane of thought, and that for some reason or other in
the play of forces, they are open, and it comes back. This is something very well known in
yoga. The simple fact of observing the victory one has gained — observing it mentally, you
see, thinking about it — is enough to destroy the effect of the yoga which may have existed
for years. A mental silence strong enough to prevent all outer vibrations from coming in,
is indispensable. Well, that is something so difficult to achieve that one must really have
passed from what Sri Aurobindo calls “the lower hemisphere” to the higher, exclusively
spiritual hemisphere, for it not to happen.

No, it is not in the mental field that the victories are won. It is impossible. It is open to all

*Heading provided by the Editor.

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