PORTRAITS, RELICS AND MEDICAMENTS
May be it’s good to remember, about Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s portraits, that also if the Mother knew very well the need for many sadhaks of keeping some of these portraits at home as a help for their personal sadhana, she never encouraged an exhibition of the same portraits in public places. Why? Because such exhibition, like every other exhibition of portraits of saints or “realized” people all over the world, can only invite the sadhak or the believer to “adore” or to depend on the “embodied being” there represented, to ask him for some miracle. In other words, that would help the Old Story to continue, with its religious way of approaching the Divine. When Sri Aurobindo and the Mother came for a completely New Story.
It’s much easier to adore than to transform oneself, we know that. But when our mind is at the command of our being, i.e. when there is separation (from our Source, the Divine inside), the inevitable result is exactly that: the need to address something outside which could help us. And everything – everything – can help us if we trust it. But only to a certain point. The same point which the Old World is still stranded in and doesn’t want to give up. The point from which Sri Aurobindo’s integral yoga starts. Just at the end of all the other previous attempts – and realizations too.
(By the way, there is a strong movement in these days in Italy
Of course, to address a familiar Mother’s portrait for our peace is one thing, and to contact the Transcendent’s Power (the “Divine Mother”) inside ourselves and let it work is another one. If the first attitude belongs to the Old Story, the second one requires a transcendence of all the three traditional Yogas - karma, bhakti and Jnana -, where separation is still there.
We have to realize that nothing belonging to the Old Story can be a spring-board to jump into the New One. And until we resort to old means we delay endlessly the beginning of the New Story, which starts by a quantum leap integrating all the previous three yogas in something else. Something requiring a deeper surrender to the Now (whatever it can be), only possible if our psychic being is at the command of our being, when we fully inhabit our body (something that the mind cannot catch at all, as it needs always to grasp something outside). Only then transformation can start – and, step by step, can last, because our matter, at the end, is touched, as there is no more separation. This is the “miracle” which has to become “a common act”, as Sri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri.
What before we were believing in as a miracle, was only magic. And magic cannot really change our Matter, because it cannot unroot the problem. It can only feed magicians, priests or witches. Behind separation, in fact, there is always an ego (also a spiritual one) – with its interest on some power (“I don’t hold powers” was saying the Mother, who was the last iconoclast, a living example of perfect surrender to Divine Will).
Whenever we resort to something outside for our healing, we resort to magic. (We can remember here how the hint given by Christ to his disciples to make them to get a glimpse of the Consciousness of Unity in Multiplicity was inevitably translated by human mind into a cannibalistic ritual). So, it’s just a matter of good taste not to mix in such a process of magic the relics of somebody who spent his/her life for something else. To label some manufactured articles with the name of Auroville, or to distribute them officially in Auroville because they are “sanctified” or “charged” by those relics, would mean only to degrade the Town of the Future by pointing out to the world that Auroville has missed the point.
“And above all, don’t make a religion” (the Mother).
Paola De Paolis
from Paola De Paolis depaolis.paola@gmail.com
date 4 January 2010 03:49
subject article by Paola De Paolis
Mr. Tusar,
I am in Italy
I would like to underline that this article was meant for Auroville, as I wrote it because of something wretched happening there in these last times: the more or less "official" distribution of "medicaments" manufactured with relics of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo (!).
So, if all reference to that specific issue is suppressed, the same article cannot really stand and lends itself to useless comments by readers who are unaware of all that.
I thank you very much for your attention, wishing you a happy 2010,
Paola De Paolis
from Paola De Paolis depaolis.paola@gmail.com
to "Tusar N. Mohapatra" tusarnmohapatra@gmail.com
date 5 January 2010 21:48
subject Re: article by Paola De Paolis
Dear Tusar,
it was not my intention, with my article, to convince anybody. I don't need to convince anybody. Each one is FREE to experience what he needs to experience, religion or not religion. But as an Aurovilian (and my article was meant for Auroville), I needed and I had to express my feelings towards an "expedient" using Auroville for something not belonging to Auroville's spirit - which is open to every new experience, i.e. every experience not repeating the past. That's all.
Paola De Paolis
date 6 January 2010 15:07
subject Re: article by Paola De Paolis
Inside Auroville I respect the choices which respect Auroville and its founders.
You are free not to catch the discrepancy of the "expedient" in question, but I am free to feel it and to express it.
Paola De Paolis
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