At first out of the busy hum of mind
As if from a loud thronged market into a cave
By an inward moment’s magic she had come.
A stark hushed emptiness became her self:
Her mind unvisited by the voice of thought
Stared at a void deep’s dumb infinity.
Her heights receded, her depths behind her closed;
All fled away from her and left her blank.
But when she came back to her self of thought,
Once more she was a human thing on earth,
A lump of Matter, a house of closed sight,
A mind compelled to think out ignorance,
A life-force pressed into a camp of works
And the material world her limiting field.
Amazed like one unknowing she sought her way
Out of the tangle of man’s ignorant past
That took the surface person for the soul.
Then a Voice spoke that dwelt on secret heights:
“For man thou seekst, not for thyself alone.
Only if God assumes the human mind
And puts on mortal ignorance for his cloak
And makes himself the Dwarf with triple stride,
Can he help man to grow into the God.
As man disguised the cosmic Greatness works
And finds the mystic inaccessible gate
And opens the Immortal’s golden door.
Man, human, follows in God’s human steps.
Accepting his darkness thou must bring to him light,
Accepting his sorrow thou must bring to him bliss.
In Matter’s body find thy heaven-born soul.”
Sri Aurobindo
Savitri, Book VII, Canto III, page 488
To be near me
What attitude should one take to get out of the ego?
Attitude? It is rather a will, isn’t it? You must will it…. What should one do, are you asking that?
The surest means is to give oneself to the Divine; not to try to draw the Divine to oneself but try to give oneself to the Divine. Then you are compelled at least to come out a little from yourself to begin with. Usually, you know, when people think of the Divine, the first thing they do is to “pull” as much as they can into themselves. And then, generally, they receive nothing at all. They tell you, “Ah! I called, I prayed and I did not have the answer. I had no answer, nothing came.” But then, if you ask, “Did you offer yourself?” — “No, I pulled.” — “Ah, yes, that is why it did not come!” It is not that it did not come, it is that when you pull you remain so shut up in your ego, as I told you just now, that it raises a wall between what is to be received and yourself. You put yourself in prison and then you are astonished that in your prison you feel nothing.
A prison, and worse: without any windows on the street.
Throw yourself out (Mother opens her hands), give yourself without holding back anything, simply for the joy of giving yourself. Then there’s a chance that you may feel something.
The Mother, Questions and Answers 1934, CWM volume 6, page 137.