threads that can guide and solve the problems. The animal sets itself no problems: it
just lives. Its instinct drives it, it relies on a collective consciousness which has an innate
knowledge and is higher than itself, but it is automatic, spontaneous, it has no need to
will something and make an effort to bring it about, it is quite naturally like that, and as
it is not responsible for its life, it does not worry. With man is born the sense of having
to depend on himself, and as he does not have the necessary knowledge the result is a
perpetual torment. This torment can come to an end only with a total surrender to a
higher consciousness than his own to which he can totally entrust himself, hand over his
worries and leave the care of guiding his life and organising everything.
How can a problem be solved when one doesn’t have the necessary knowledge? And
the unfortunate thing is that man believes that he has to re solve all the problems of his
life, and he does not have the knowledge needed to do it. That is the source, the origin
of all his troubles—that perpetual question, “What should I do?...” which is followed by
another one still more acute, “What is going to happen?” and at the same time, more or
less, the inability to answer.
That is why all spiritual disciplines begin with the necessity of surrendering all
responsibility and relying on a higher principle. Otherwise peace is impossible.
And yet, consciousness has been given to man so that he can progress, can discover what
he doesn’t know, develop into what he has not yet become; and so it may be said that
there is a higher state than that of an immobile and static peace: it is a trust total enough
for one to keep the will to progress, to preserve the effort for progress while ridding it of
all anxiety, all care for results and consequences. This is one step ahead of the methods
which may be called “quietist”, which are founded on the rejection of all activity and a
plunging into an immobility and inner silence, which forsake all life because it has been
suddenly felt that without peace one can’t have any inner realisation and, quite naturally,
one thought that one couldn’t have peace so long as one was living in outer conditions,
in the state of anxiety in which problems are set and cannot be solved, for one does not
have the knowledge to do so.
The next step is to face the problem, but with the calm and certitude of an absolute
trust in the supreme Power which knows, and can make you act. And then, instead of
abandoning action, one can act in a higher peace that is strong and dynamic.
This is what could be called a new aspect of the divine intervention in life, a new form of
intervention of the divine forces in existence, a new aspect of spiritual realisation.
- The Mother
Conversation dated 26 March 1958
Collected Works of the Mother, vol.9
Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
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