Author: Beloo Mehra
Date published: April 3, 2025
As a Collaborating Center of SAIEN (Sri Aurobindo Integral Education Network), BhāratShakti regularly contributes to the SAIEN Blog. Remember to Reject: Learning on the Way is our fourth blog published on SAIEN platform.
Life gives us many opportunities to become aware of those countless little, pesky flaws in our ordinary nature that stand in the way of making the inner aspiration more sincere and truer and completer. We are reminded that the path to becoming self-aware and gaining even a tiny bit of self-mastery is full of immense difficulties.
When such moments come, it is truly the Mother’s Grace if we can recall the ever-helpful, ever-compassionate advice from Sri Aurobindo –
“For the sadhak outward struggles, troubles, calamities are only a means of surmounting ego and rajasic desire and attaining to complete surrender.” (CWSA, Vol. 29, p. 241)
We must be immensely grateful if we can recall this and try to live with this awareness as we go through the difficulties or struggles! Yet we also recognise that it is not easy to take all that comes up as an opportunity to grow in one’s will to surrender and not get my “I” involved in it!
As I write this, I am reminded of those little and not-so-little tiffs, and often-inconsequential conflicts with family members and friends. Those times when I did get my “I” involved in the situation, and it ended up creating trouble, disharmony, uneasiness – not only for me but also for others involved. In some of those situations I think a part of me was uncomfortably aware that I was not surrendering to the moment, not acknowledging the other person’s opinion which he or she felt very strongly at that moment.
That discomfort was perhaps there because while on the outer surface I might have been trying to convince myself that I shouldn’t be obstinate or rigid, on the inside I was getting upset as to why my view wasn’t accepted by all. What insincerity! Such insincerity results from an attachment to one’s mental preference or opinion – strange are the ways of the mind indeed! Whatever might be the cause for insincerity and the feeling of conflict, the consequence would often be the same –a strange discomfort, even on the physical level, sort of like what happens when one has eaten some bad food.
Maybe that’s how we are supposed to learn, to experience the consequence of our every little insincerity.
“It is no part of the sadhana to accept the uglinesses of the lower nature on the ground that they exist—if that is what is meant by realism. Our object is not to accept or enjoy these things but to get rid of them and create a life of spiritual beauty and perfection. So long as we accept these things, that cannot be done. To observe that these things are there and reject them, refusing to allow them to touch you, is one thing; to accept and acquiesce in them is quite another.” (ibid., p. 64)