Chapter 3Peace — The Basis of the Sadhana · Difficulties, Disturbances and Peace

Aspire, concentrate in the right spirit and, whatever the dif-ficulties, you are sure to attain the aim you have put before you.

It is in the peace behind and that “something truer” in you that you must learn to live and feel it to be yourself. You must regard the rest as not your real self, but only a flux of changing or recurring movements on the surface which are sure to go as the true self emerges. temporary relief — although a certain amount of work is necessary for the proper balance of the different parts of the being. To feel the peace above or about your head is a first step; you have to get connected with it and it must descend into you and fill your mind and life and body and surround you so that you live in it — for this peace is one sign of the Divine’s presence with you, and once you have it all the rest will begin to come.

Truth in speech and truth in thought are very important. The more you can feel falsehood as being not part of yourself, as coming on you from outside, the easier it will be to reject and refuse it.

Persevere and what is still crooked will be made straight and you will know and feel concretely the truth of the Divine’s presence and your faith will be justified by direct experience.

* So long as the mind is restless, it is not possible to get at the inner Truth. Calm, peace, quietude — that is the first necessary condition.

* To be calm, undisturbed and quiet is not the first condition for sadhana but for siddhi. It is only a few people (very few, one, two, three, four in a hundred sadhaks) who can get it from the first. Most have to go through a long preparation before they can get anywhere near it. Even afterwards when they begin to feel the peace and calm, it takes time to establish it — they swing between peace and disturbance for a fairly long time until all parts of the nature have accepted the truth and the peace. So there is no reason for you to suppose you cannot progress or arrive. You are finding a great difficulty with one part of your nature which has been accustomed to open itself to these feel-ings, separation from the Mother and attachment to relatives, and is not willing to give them up — that is all. But everybody finds such obstinate difficulties in that part of the nature, even the most successful sadhaks here. One has to persevere until the light conquers there.

* It is the quietness in which the Force can act and an entire reliance on that Force to do for you what is necessary — and for the rest a quiet vigilance not to consent to the confusion and restlessness — that you must achieve. It has been evident throughout since the working in you began that this is the only possible foundation for your sadhana.

* That is the right way — to keep the peace of the higher consciousness, then even if there is vital disturbance, it will be only on the surface. The foundation will remain till the Force can release the true vital.

* Detachment, silence, inner peace are certainly indispensable for the spiritual progress — a quiet peace-filled detachment. In that etc. — the one thing to arrive at is to be able to stand back from them, to feel detachment from them, separate and call down the Force to act. Whenever one can do that, the attack, the difficulty after a time retires — or even if it lasts a little cannot disturb what has been gained.

* The depression and vital struggle must have been due to some defect of over-eagerness and straining for a result in your former effort — so that when a fall in the consciousness came it was a depressed, disappointed and confused vital that came to the surface giving full entry to the suggestions of doubt, despair and inertia from the adverse side of Nature. You have to move towards a firm basis of calm and equality in the vital and physical no less than in the mental consciousness; let there be the full downflow of Power and Ananda, but into a firm adhara capable of containing it — it is a complete equality that gives that capacity and firmness.

* When the peace of the higher consciousness descends, it brings always with it this tendency towards equality, samata, because without samata peace is always liable to be attacked by the waves of the lower nature.

Chapter Two