September 14, 2011 – Pride and Vanity

Death transformed becomes Life that is Immortality;
Cruelty transfigured becomes Love that is intolerable ecstasy;
Ignorance transmuted becomes Light that leaps beyond wisdom and knowledge.

Sri Aurobindo

(Thoughts and Aphorisms 92)

Pride and Vanity

For the sage or the saint who is quite infatuated with his own importance and his own worth, and full of pride and vanity, there is not much chance that the Divine will manifest in him, for there is no place for the expression of the Divine! There is no place except for the important personality of the wise man and his moral worth.

Naturally, there is a state in which one may be perfectly pure, perfectly wise, and be in contact with the Divine! But then, that means that one has reached a certain degree of perfection and lost the sense of one’s personal importance and personal worth. I believe that’s most important. The greatest obstacle to the contact with the Divine is pride and the sense of one’s personal worth, one’s personal capacities, personal power- the person becomes very big, so big that there is no place for the Divine. No, the one truly important thing is the intensity of the aspiration. And this intensity of aspiration comes in all kinds of circumstances.

The Mother

The Great Adventure: Page 56