Apart, living within, all lives she bore;
Aloof, she carried in herself the world:
Her dread was one with the great cosmic dread,
Her strength was founded on the cosmic mights;
The universal Mother’s love was hers.
Against the evil at life’s afflicted roots,
Her own calamity its private sign,
Of her pangs she made a mystic poignant sword.
Sri Aurobindo
Savitri, Book I, Canto I, pages 8 – 9.
Sweet Mother, what is our universal being?
Our universal being?… What it is?… I don’t understand your question very well.
What is it? “For our entire nature and its environment, all our personal and all our universal self, are full of habits and of influences that are opposed to our spiritual rebirth…”
Our universal self is our relation with all others and all the movements of Nature.
And I have often told you, haven’t I?, that the first state of your being is a state of an almost total mixture with all things from outside, and that there is almost no individualisation, that is, specialisation which makes you a different being. You are moved — a kind of form which is your physical being is moved — by all the common universal forces, vital forces or mental forces, which go through your form and put it in motion.
So that is the universal being.
And all that you have wrested from this general semi-consciousness, and have crystallised into a more or less independent being, conscious of itself and having its own qualities, all this is your individual being. And this individual being is full of all the movements of obscurity, unconsciousness, and of the limitations of ordinary life, and that’s… and that’s what you must gradually open to the divine influence and bring to the consciousness and understanding of things. That’s what Sri Aurobindo says.
In fact, the first victory is to create an individuality. And then later, the second victory is to give this individuality to the Divine. And the third victory is that the Divine changes your individuality into a divine being.
There are three stages: the first is to become an individual; the second is to consecrate the individual, that he may surrender entirely to the Divine and be identified with Him; and the third is that the Divine takes possession of this individual and changes him into a being in His own image, that is, he too becomes divine.
Generally, all the yogas stopped at the second. When one had succeeded in surrendering the individual and giving him without reserve to the Divine to be identified with Him, one considered that his work was finished, that all was accomplished.
But we begin there, and we say, “No, this is only a beginning. We want this Divine with whom we are identified to enter our individuality and make it into a divine personality acting in a divine world.” And this is what we call transformation. But the other precedes it, must precede it. If that is not done, there is no possibility of doing the third. One can’t go from the first to the third; one must pass through the second.
Mother, the third depends entirely on the Divine, whether He wills to take possession or not.
In fact everything depends entirely on the Divine. It is only the consciousness you have of it which is different. So in the third stage, obviously, one becomes conscious that it is the Divine who does everything; so it depends entirely on the Divine.
When you say this, the part of your consciousness which is still convinced of its separation and its own existence is looking at the other and saying, “Ah, good! Now I shall no longer have to do anything.” But if it no longer exists, if it becomes conscious that it is the Divine, then it can’t have this impression. It does the work, continues to do it, but with the true consciousness, instead of having the distorted consciousness.
The Mother
Questions and Answers 1955, CWM volume 7, pages 401 – 403.