March 7, 2012 – Control Your Impulses

That which men term a hallucination is the reflection
in the mind and senses of that which is beyond
our ordinary mental and sensory perceptions.
Superstition arises from the mind’s wrong understanding of these reflections.
There is no other hallucination.

Sri Aurobindo

(Thoughts and Aphorisms 16)

Control Your Impulses

From the time you are quite young, the work of your educators is to teach you to control your impulses and obey only those which are in conformity with the laws under which you live or with the ideal you wish to follow or the customs of the environment in which you are. The value of this mental construction which will govern your impulses depends a great deal on the surroundings in which you live and the character of the parents or people who educate you. But whether it be good or bad, mediocre or excellent, it is always the result of a mental control over the impulses. When your parents tell you, “You should not do this” , or when they say, “You have to do that” , this is a beginning of education for the mind’s control over the impulses….

So the man of real merit or the more civilised man has a whole mental construction to which he must conform in order to be in harmony with the ideal of the environment in which he lives.

The Mother

The Great Adventure, p12