Methods of Invoking the
Spirit
Tapas, dhyana, Japa, etc.
are some of the methods of invoking the Spirit. This is the Spirit of the Tapasvi,
Muni, Rishi, Yogi. It is powerful away from life. The Spirit I am talking
about is the Spirit in Life, called Psychic by The Mother and Sri Aurobindo. This
is the Spirit that acts in life directly, giving us great results. For the same
reason it is more difficult to evoke, in the sense, it demands a greater purity
of Truth. There is Truth by itself and Truth in Life, just as there is capacity
by itself and capacity expressed in acts.
The Psychic hears the call
of the Truth in Life.
A lawyer taking the case of a client and doing a good job is the first stage, but when he takes interest in the client as a personal friend, his performance rises in quality. If he is a lawyer in a lower court but knowledgeable, it is open to him to marshal all the legal points usually raised in the higher courts and fight his case here. That may move him to the practice in the higher courts. Sense of justice is a keen faculty in men. Every man is actuated by it, every one who is your enemy. Often we appeal to it while confronting a malicious person with success. Even to the tyrant's sense of justice, we appeal irrespective of the outcome. Draupadi appealed so to Bhisma, Drona, Kripa, and Vidura in vain. These great souls may fail as they did, but god never fails. God's answer is not a social rescue but a divine bounty.
Suppose this lawyer in the
lower court appeals to the sense of justice of the Judge, his reward will have
no parallel. The above are the four stages of invoking the Spirit. They are
called Sakthi, Viryam, Deivaprakriti and Sraddha. Crossing the first three
stages, one resting on Sraddha, Faith, works to invoke the Spirit. The reply of
the Spirit in Life, the Psychic, is copious, in infinite measure.
One may feel "I am not
Draupadi and Lord Krishna is not going to answer my call." Before giving
several examples from the lives of ordinary people, the theme needs to be
explained and illustrated. One successfully reaches God's ear – Psychic -- when
in his work he moves away from Sakthi, Viryam and Deiva Prakriti and acts from
Shraddha, Faith, is the theme. Sakthi means energy, work done by energy,
the energy of the physical body. To take interest in a work, to pour into it
the temperamental energy is Viryam. To do so relying on God's energy is to
resort to Deiva Prakriti. This means his energy is not merely of his own
interest, his own temperamental energy but the energy of his faith and interest
in the god he worships. Work rises in quality and he sees his own personality
recedes in the background. At this stage when he desires to move higher still,
he witnesses that it is not he, the man, who is at work but the Lokamatha is. In
his own perception of work, he dissolves and only SHE remains. It is not a mere, idea, a
thought or a religious teaching. SHE works, She alone works and we are an
instrument in Her hands, much as we see that the train carries us. We realise
we do not have to carry our bag on our lap but can let it lie on the loft of
the compartment as the train that carries us can carry our little bag too. It
is a fact in our perception, not an intellectual argument. Acting thus, we act
in faith. Acting in faith we successfully call the Spirit into our lives.
The Spirit Moves Into
Action.
Once the Spirit acts, the results defy our rational understanding. Every act in life can thus be lifted to the plane of Spirit and be blessed by the Force of Gods.
In
the prewar days, weddings in the villages would be prepared for over some
months as paddy was to be ground into rice at home by human hands, appalam was
not to be bought from the market but to be home-made. All the articles of food
were to be procured locally, some grown on one's own fields. It was a process
of labour of prolonged agony. There are unfortunate individuals isolated from
the community either by poverty or cantankerous temperament. To them the labour
was more onerous, as they had to do all the work themselves with little help.
Normally family live together in work as well as Spirit.
On an occasion like wedding,
all the relatives come to one's help. Though the work remains formidable,
several hands share it, lightening it for the individual. The situation changed
after the war, especially after the 70's and 80's. The 9 day pre-war function
over the decades got abridged to one day. The venue got shifted from the
village to the towns. Marriage Halls began to spring up like cinema theatres.
Trade and commerce organised themselves into specialised services to take care
of decorations, feast -- the cooking and serving -- Nadaswaram, etc. Now all
that one has to do is to pay for these services and receive their benefit. A
Himalayan labour has become a child's play.
There are highly placed wealthy persons. When his daughter is to be married, there are dozens of families ready to respond awaiting the nod of the great man, as an alliance with his family is a privilege. Money is never an issue. Should a wedding be fixed, his relatives and friends and his company staff are waiting for the privilege of rendering that service to him. His part is to give his assent. Sakthi, Viryam, Deiva Prakriti, and Faith can be compared to the lone individual, the village function, the one in the town, Kalyana Mandapam and the wedding of an affluent influential person of eminence. How are we to move along these lines in our daily work?
Moving from Sakthi, Viryam,
Deiva Prakriti to Faith can be said to be the method here. Sakthi is to do the
work on hand. Viryam is to do the work with full interest. Deiva Prakriti is to
raise our personal interest in the work to a higher interest. To bring to
bear on the work the best professional skill will be Deiva Prakriti in practice.
Put in simple words, a work must be done to the very best of our honest
abilities leaving no stone unturned. In this there is no compromise. This power
of Spirit is for those who work hard and with skill and intelligence.
Completing them prepares one to move to faith. Moving to faith, acting from
faith can be divided into two parts or three parts as Mental and Physical or
Mental, Vital and Physical. The first part of Mind gives the knowledge, the
second vital part gives the energy, and finally the third physical part gives
the power which brings about the results.
Mental part of knowledge –
One's mind should understand the theme of faith moving Spirit in Life and that
Spirit yielding inconceivable results. The Mind must know this fact. As soon
as the mind begins to know this fact, a calm enters the Mind and the gathering
of power in the Mind is visibly felt. The power thus felt is the Spiritual
power of the Mind. This much is for the
knowing. Knowing is followed by taking emotional interest in the glory of the
Idea. The power felt in the mind begins to swell into a flood. Knowing is
power, taking interest is a flood of power. There is a further stage of believing
the theme, the power, the Spirit. The swelling flood endlessly extends
itself in an infinite expansion. In the experience of devotees, results
have multiplied in various cases 24 times, 365 times and in one case 1500
times. There is one isolated good case where the expansion cannot be expressed
in numbers.
Om is the pranava mantra. Om
is the sound that emanates from the transition from the Immutable Brahman to
the Mutable Brahman, known as Akshara Brahman to Kshara Brahman, the Spirit to
Nature. That plane is Cosmic Consciousness where the God is the Cosmic Self.
When repeated as it should be, Om takes one to the Cosmic Consciousness. The
right method is genuine inner seeking of God. Oral repetition or mental
repetition without that inner Truth will not have that result. That genuine
inner seeking is the trump in Spirituality. In a soul otherwise inwardly mature
without his own surface knowledge OM can directly take him to that higher region on
being pronounced a few times. One will be face to face with God.
In life, we call people good
if their inner being is ripe and mature. These people when they work are gentle. They
speak little and softly. They are invariably patient and rarely react to
situations. Generally, their work is more efficient than others, often perfect.
Perfection in work is a call to the Spirit in work. One who is clumsy realising
it lately may go about establishing certain orderliness in his work. This is to
enter into the path towards spirituality. One who is fully emotional, who never
thinks or is incapable of thinking, launching himself consciously on the path
of thinking moves towards Spirit. In theory, all life is Spirit and any
positive move such as cleaning a filthy house and keeping it clean thereafter
is a step towards Spirituality. Moving from negative to positive side is to
move towards the Spirit. Life will begin to respond in proportion to such efforts.
Reaching perfection on any such lines as cleanliness, orderliness,
truthfulness, etc. results in a vast spiritual opening.
Man's physical work gives
him skills. His vital work endows him with social skills of interpersonal
relationships. Mental work offers understanding and skills of memory, thinking,
judgement, etc. Values are spiritual skills. To employ values in a work
is to render it spiritual. Every work of any description on earth has a value
attached to it, maybe all the conceivable values. Loyalty, honesty, integrity,
safety, the other man's point of view are the values generally known. There are
work values such as punctuality, cleanliness, orderliness; life values such as
pleasant behaviour, kindness, attention, affection, dynamism; mental values of
loyalty, honesty, etc. and Spiritual values of Silence, subtlety, insight, intuition,
etc.
To raise a work from the
physical or mental plane to the plane of Spirit is to release the Spirit in the
work. Spiritual
values raise any work from its plane to the plane of Spirit. In India
punctuality is the exception, not the rule. Let a company, where there is no
punctuality at all NOW,
vow to implement punctuality at all levels. The Spirit in the work will double
the level of the company.
Of the two schools in a
small municipal town one drew the elite children, employed teachers of reputation,
and was in the centre of town. The other drew children from the first
generation of education, could attract no teacher permanently and was situated
outside the town. But this school followed the discipline of punctuality in
every aspect of work and once in the heydays of the British Raj denied the D.E.O. entry as he came for
inspection an hour late! The other enjoyed total absence of punctuality of any
description. In the 1950's the first school had 80% results while the better
one never raised its percentage of passes to two digits.