Chapter 8330 May 1958

choice of a few select moments and an immense elimination.

It is very true that the earliest lives are very rudimentary; very few things subsist out of that, scattered memories few and far between. But the more one progresses in consciousness, the more the psychic being is consciously associated with the outer activities; the memories grow in number and become more coherent and precise. But still, here also, the memory that remains is that of the contact with the soul and at times that of things which were associated with the psychic revelation — not the civic status or the changing scenes around. And this will explain to you why the so-called memories of past animal lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the outer life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one’s divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives.

1958 (2)

INNER REALISATION IS THE KEY

TO OUTER REALISATION When the adverse forces want to attack those who are around me and when they do not succeed in making them openly hostile to Sri Aurobindo’s work or in turning them against me personally, they proceed in the matter always in the same way, with the same argument: “You may have all the inner realisations you like,” they say, “the most beautiful experiences possible within the four walls of the Ashram, but on the outer plane your life is spoiled, wasted. There is an abyss that you will never fill between the inner experience and the concrete realisation in the world.”

This is the number one argument of the adverse forces. I know it. For millions of years I have heard the same thing repeated and each time I have unmasked it. It is a falsehood — it is the falsehood. Everything that tends to establish a divorce between earth and the Spirit, is good for them, everything that separates the inner experience from the divine realisation in the world. But it is the contrary that is true: it is the inner realisation that is the key to the outer realisation. How can you expect to know the true thing which you have to realise in the world so long as you do not possess the truth of your being?