A fire has come and touched men’s hearts and gone;
A few have caught flame and risen to greater life.
Sri Aurobindo
Savitri, Book I, Canto I, page 7.
Lighting the Psychic Fire
Sweet Mother, Sri Aurobindo writes:
“A psychic fire within must be lit into which all is thrown with the Divine Name upon it.” Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, SABCL, Vol. 20, p. 155
Isn’t the psychic fire always lit?
It is not always lit.
Then how to light it?
By aspiration.
By the will for progress, by the urge towards perfection.
Above all, it is the will for progress and self-purification which lights the fire. The will for progress. Those who have a strong will, when they turn it towards spiritual progress and purification, automatically light the fire within themselves.
And each defect one wants to cure or each progress one wants to make — if all that is thrown into the fire, it burns with a new intensity. And this is not an image, it is a fact in the subtle physical. One can feel the warmth of the flame, one can see in the subtle physical the light of the flame. And when there is something in the nature which prevents one from advancing and one throws it into this fire, it begins to burn and the flame becomes more intense.
The Mother, Questions and Answers 1956, CWM volume 8, page 251.