October 3, 2018 – There are countless possibilities within you

A Power within her awed the imperfect flesh;

The self-protecting genius in our clay

Divined the goddess in the woman’s shape

And drew back from a touch beyond its kind

The earth-nature bound in sense-life’s narrow make.

The hearts of men are amorous of clay-kin

And bear not spirits lone and high who bring

Fire-intimations from the deathless planes

Too vast for souls not born to mate with heaven.

Whoever is too great must lonely live.

Adored he walks in mighty solitude;

Vain is his labour to create his kind,

His only comrade is the Strength within.

Thus was it for a while with Savitri.

All worshipped marvellingly, none dared to claim.

Her mind sat high pouring its golden beams,

Her heart was a crowded temple of delight.

A single lamp lit in perfection’s house,

A bright pure image in a priestless shrine,

Midst those encircling lives her spirit dwelt,

Apart in herself until her hour of fate.

Sri Aurobindo

Savitri, Book IV, Canto II, page 367-368

There are countless possibilities within you

…everyone has countless possibilities within him of which he is unaware and which develop only if he does what is to be done in the way it should be done…. But there are two types of progress, not only one; there is the progress that consists in perfecting more and more the capacities, possibilities, faculties and qualities you have — this is what is normally obtained by education; but if you go in for a little more thorough development by approaching a deeper truth, you can add, to the qualities you already have, other new ones which seem to be asleep in your being.

You can multiply your possibilities, enlarge and increase them; you can suddenly bring up something you did not think you had. I have already explained this to you several times. When one discovers one’s psychic being within, at the same time there develop and manifest, quite unexpectedly, things one could not do at all before and which one didn’t think were in one’s nature. Of this too I have had numerous examples. I have given you this one, but I am repeating it to you once more to make myself understood.

I used to know a young girl who was born in a very ordinary environment, who had not received much education and wrote rather clumsy French, who had not developed her imagination and had absolutely no literary sense: that seemed to be among the possibilities she did not have. Well, when she had the inner experience of contact with her psychic being, and as long as the contact was living and very present, she wrote admirable things. When she fell back from that state into an ordinary one, she could not even put two sentences together correctly! And I saw examples of both kinds of her writing.

There is a genius within everyone of us — we don’t know it. We must find the way to make it come out — but it is there sleeping, it asks for nothing better than to manifest; we must open the door to it.

The Mother

Questions and Answers 1957-58, CWM vol 9, page 396