Right way of working

Right way of working                                                             

If while doing what you have to do –whatever it may be, whatever work it is –if you do it and while doing it are careful not to forget the Divine, to offer to Him what you do and try so to give yourself to Him that He may change all your reactions – instead of their being selfish,petty,stupid and ignorant, making them luminous, generous – then in that way you will make progress. Not only will you have made some progress but you will have helped in the general progress. I have never seen people who have left everything in order to go and sit down in a more or less empty contemplation (for it is more or les empty), I have never seen such people making any progress, or in any case no pretensions of doing yoga, who were simply filled with enthusiasm by the idea of terrestrial transformation and of the descent of the Divine into the world and who did their little bit of work with that enthusiasm in the heart, giving themselves wholly, without reserve, without any selfish idea of a personal salvation, these I have seen making magnificent progress, truly magnificent.

                                                                                                                                                                   -The Mother

Not only in your inward concentration, but in yur outward acts and movements you muct take the right attitude. If you do that and put everything under the Mother’s guidance, you will find that difficulties begin to diminish or are much more easily got over and things become steadily smoother.

In your work and acts you must do the same as in your concentration. Open to Mother, put them under her guidance, call in the peace, the supporting Power, the protection and ,in order that they may work, reject all wrong influences that might come in their way by creating wrong careless or unconscious movements.

Follow this principle and your whole being will become one, under one rule, in the peace and sheltering Power and Light.

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What you have to realize is that your success or failure depends, first and always, on your keeping in the right attitude and in the true psychic and spiritual atmosphere and allowing the Mother’s force to act through you…

If I can judge from your letters, you take its support too much for granted and lay the first stress on your own ideas and plans words about the work…

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It is true that the Force can work effectively without any affort on your part. It is not the effort, it is the assent of the being that it needs for its work.

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Well, that is the idea in yoga – that be a right passivity one opens oneself to something greater tha one’s limited self, and effort in only useful for getting that condition. Even in the ordinary lige the individual is only on instrument in the hands of a universal Energy, though his ego takes the credit of all he does.

-Sri Aurobindo