A consciousness lit by a Truth above
Was felt; it saw the light but not the Truth:
It caught the Idea and built from it a world;
It made an Image there and called it God.
Yet something true and inward harboured there.
The beings of that world of greater life,
Tenants of a larger air and freer space,
Live not by the body or in outward things:
A deeper living was their seat of self.
In that intense domain of intimacy
Objects dwell as companions of the soul;
The body’s actions are a minor script,
The surface rendering of a life within.
All forces are Life’s retinue in that world
And thought and body as her handmaids move.
The universal widenesses give her room:
All feel the cosmic movement in their acts
And are the instruments of her cosmic might
Sri Aurobindo, Savitri, Book II, Canto VI, page 183
Action is the knot we have first to loosen
Sweet Mother, it is written here: “In the path of works action is the knot we have first to loosen.”
The Synthesis of Yoga, p. 94
Why is action a knot?
Because one is attached to action. The knot is the knot of the ego. You act because of desire. Sri Aurobindo says this, doesn’t he? The ordinary way of acting is tied to desire in one form or another — a desire, a need — so that is the knot. If you act only to satisfy desire — a desire which you call a need or a necessity or anything else, but in truth, if you go to the very root of the thing, you see that it is the impulse of a desire which makes you act — well, if you act only under the effect of the impulse of desire, you will no longer be able to act when you eliminate the desire.
And this is the first answer people give you. When they are told, “Act without being attached to the result of action, have this consciousness that it is not you who are acting, it is the Divine who is acting”, the reply which ninety-nine and a half per cent give is, “But if I feel like that, I don’t move any longer! I don’t do anything any more; it is always a need, a desire, a personal impulse which makes me act in one way or another.” So Sri Aurobindo says, if you want to realise this teaching of the Gita, the first thing to do is to loosen this knot, the knot binding action to desire — so firmly tied are they that if you take away one you take away the other. He says the knot must be loosened in order to be able to remove desire and yet continue to act.
And this is a fact, this is what must be done. The knot must be loosened. It is a small inner operation which you can very easily perform; and when it has been performed, you realise that you act absolutely without any personal motive, but moved by a Force higher than your egoistic force, and also more powerful. And then you act, but the consequences of action no longer return upon you.
This is a wonderful phenomenon of consciousness, and quite concrete. In life you do something — whatever you do, good, bad, indifferent, it doesn’t matter — whatever it may be, it immediately has a series of consequences. In fact you do it to obtain a certain result, that is why you act, with an eye to the result. For example, if I stretch out my hand like this to take the mike, I am looking for the result, you see, to make sounds in the mike. And there is always a consequence, always. But if you loosen the knot and let a Force coming from above — or elsewhere — act through you and make you do things, though there are consequences of your action, they don’t come to you any longer, for it was not you who initiated the action, it was the Force from above. And the consequences pass above, or else they are guided, willed, directed, controlled by the Force which made you act. And you feel absolutely free, nothing comes back to you of the result of what you have done.
The Mother, Questions and Answers 1956, CWM volume 8, pages 70 – 71.