Will and love
On the Path, progress depends on continuous acts of Will and Love. You advance because you have chosen, through a lucid and strong act of Will, to advance; one loves because it is now manifest that Love is the driving force of the evolutionary process in this Universe, and therefore loving seems to be the only modality that makes sense.
Let's learn then to:
– educate the selfish, immature and habitual personality;
– submit the individual ego to the Good of the Group;
– make the field of our relationships an experiential laboratory of fraternal relationships;
– identify with increasingly broader and impersonal realities;
– subordinate any other achievement to compliance with the Plan.
We see the meaning of Universal Service and finally understand the strong warning of the Gospel, so far from the common emotional, personalistic and “family” feeling:
“If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14, 26).
The task of living as a disciple in the modern world appears to be more arduous than it might have been in centuries past, when those who devoted themselves “to the spirit” often retreated into isolation or to monasteries and convents. The new aspirant-seeker lives between different planes: he begins to awaken to the Reality of Creation, which until now had been excluded by his own ignorance, and, at the same time, he experiences the reality of illusion, which he gradually learn. manage with new and more effective ways of creative thinking and forward-thinking action.
In the East, the lotus plant represents a kind of synthesis of the human personality: the roots that descend into the mud represent the physical body, the stem that develops in the layer of water corresponds to the emotional body, the lotus flower symbolizes the mental body. The flower opens to the Beauty and Harmony of Creation, receiving air and light as nourishment; When the leaves turn yellow and fall into the water, they enrich the slime that prepares the plant for a new flowering.
Thus, in the natural rhythm of perpetual becoming, man rises from the mud of his material nature to the aerial regions of the spirit, evolving into Love and Beauty in successive expansions of consciousness.
It seems that new “initiatory tests” are proposed to those who intend to act “in the world”, but without being “of the world”: the chaos and tensions of daily life; the impossibility of anchoring oneself in the “fixed points” of the past, since they are evidently inadequate to the new reality and new feelings; overcome values and ideologies that are crystallized today; abandon dogmatic and fideistic religiosity; the need to “keep up to date” with the ever-new technological, economic and communication tools; the demand for continuous changes and/or reformulations of ideas, procedures, methodologies and ways of relating.
It is by feeding “the Fire” that the awakened will be able to “give birth to the New Age”:
“Verily, only he who is strengthened by the armor of Agni can more fully consummate his destiny. Agni should not be in a state of inaction.. The fire element is the most active, the fastest and the most spatial, and manifests itself in the midst of the tension of thought. Doesn't man preserve the planet through thought? The most precious substances are created by thought. Compare breadth of thought with dullness. I attest that people can accumulate a treasure of thought that, at the rhythm of the Cosmos, will create the New Age.. (Agni Yoga Series – Burning World I article 514)
“Thy will be done”
Only a few advanced individuals from each country and religious faith, having achieved a certain degree of freedom and decentralization, contribute to the outcome of the battle that humanity is fighting for eternal Freedom; His only sentence is “Thy will be done”.
The progress of humanity depends, dramatically, on the consciousness of a few awakened individuals, who work for evolution, having realized that the reality we experience outside ourselves (economics, politics, society, spirituality) is nothing more than the reproduction of the collective internal state of mind:
“In archery we have something like the path of the wise man. When the archer does not reach the center of the target, he turns around and look for the cause of his failure in itself.” (Confucius)
The greatest problem for the seeker on the Path, whatever the teaching he refers to, is to reduce ideas to the level of lived reality, to make them reflect their light in feelings and in relational life. In the practice of everyday life, we often pursue selfish desires, petty concerns and personal anxieties, showing that we do not know how to follow the flow of life with abandon, that deep down we do not feel that “Everything is for Good.”
The disciple on the Path does not undertake anything for personal benefit, does not betray what he has started and trusts in Love:
Remember Paul's teaching (in his First Letter to the Corinthians):
If I have all the faith to move mountains… and if I speak in human and angelic tongues but do not have love, I am nothing… I am a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
There are many stumbling blocks and ruinous falls, from which it is necessary, however, to get up quickly to get back on the path, having grasped the lesson and the personal or group message.
We remember the painful cry of the initiate Paul, who considers the aspects of his personality not yet transmuted:
“Lord, why do I always do what I would not like to do and instead I don't do what I should do?“
Tendencies to react according to inappropriate patterns, intransigent predispositions, “compulsions to repeat,” lifestyles that reproduce already realized scripts often go back to the past, to our current or previous incarnations. They recur punctually, until they are confronted and purified, and they make us do “what we do not want.” Sometimes we manage to change them, sometimes it is necessary for Life to intervene with a dramatic shock that “leaves us unconscious” and has the effect of accelerating or intensifying our contact with the soul.
This is until the human being is no longer a “prisoner of the planet”, that is, dominated by the ego and the search for individual pleasure, and the Transfigured Man (which Aurobindo desired) emerges, aware of his Destiny of Light.
“He (the Avatar) comes as a divine personality to fill consciousness from the bonds of the ego, opening it to the infinite and the universal, to free it from the obligation of birth and lead it to Being, Replace the selfish and limited personality and release it.to release him to immortality.” (Aurobindo, The Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita)
The hope for all humanity lies in the success of aspirants and disciples, who glimpse the “distant worlds” and aspire to the Infinite:
(…) The distant worlds are our manifested path.. The distant worlds are our illumination. The distant worlds are our visions of the powerful vision of the Mother of the World. The human spirit that seeks expansion finds distant worlds manifested. Let's say that the unattainable can become attainable and that deprivation can become wealth. (Agni Yoga Series – Infinity I article 61)
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Note: This article is published to coincide with the conjunction of Venus (5th Ray of Concrete Mind and Knowledge) with Jupiter (2North Dakota Ray of Love and Wisdom) in the sign of Taurus (4th Ray of Harmony through conflict)
