A Method for the Seeker to Obtain Guidance Through Accessing a Random Passage in a Book

The idea that one can receive guidance in response to a question, or aspiration, one is holding within oneself, from a randomly chosen page of a book is not based on some idea of magic, but is grounded in an understanding of the unity of consciousness and the interactive nature of consciousness in action.

Shirley Maclaine in her book (and film of the same name) Out on a Limb, described an experience she felt was extraordinary. She entered a bookshop with questions about the meaning of her life, the significance of relationships she was forming, and the possibility of past lives impacting the present. These questions were very active in her being. As she started browsing the shelves, a particular book literally fell off a higher shelf and landed in her hands! It was a book that responded to the questions she had. Mysterious, no doubt! But it illustrates this interactive nature of the entire manifestation. With a deeply felt aspiration the answers are provided! Sometimes it comes through a book, sometimes through a ‘serendipitous’ meeting with a person or a particular event or experience that occurs.

Whether you call it a response to a prayer, or a matter of synchronicity, or a tuning of the individual consciousness to the universal consciousness, there is no doubt, based on the experience of vast numbers of people, throughout the world, and spanning virtually every spiritual tradition, that such guidance is available to the sincere seeker who concentrates his aspiration.

For this process to work, not only the seeker’s consciousness must be focused and concentrated, but he must be applying to a book that carries the force that can provide such answers. Great spiritual texts are thus more readily able to guide as they are created with the force of the wider, higher consciousness and thus are more easily accessed and themselves focused on the issues raised by sincere seekers. The Mother provides a clue that uses texts with aphorisms tends to work better simply because the answer is much more clear and easily assimilated than if one tries to ferret out the sense from a long passage in a much more dense text.

Many have found that using Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri: a Legend and a Symbol in this way seems to be particularly beneficial as it is a storehouse of spiritual energy in a very concentrated form.

The Mother notes: “There is always a way of reading and understanding what one reads, which gives an answer to what you want. It is not just a chance or an amusement, nor is it a kind of diversion. You may do it just ‘like that’, and then nothing at all happens to you, you have no reply and it is not interesting. But if you do it seriously, if seriously your aspiration tries to concentrate on this instrument — it is like a battery, isn’t it, which contains energies — if it tries to come into contact with the energy which is there and insists on having the answer to what it wants to know, well, naturally, the energy is there — the union of the two forces, the force given out by you and that accumulated in the book — will guide your hand and your paper-knife or whatever you have; it will guide you exactly to the thing that expresses what you ought to know…. Obviously, if one does it without sincerity or conviction, nothing at all happens. If it is done sincerely, one gets an answer.”

“Certain books are like this, more powerfully charged than others; there are others where the result is less clear. But generally, books containing aphorisms and short sentences — not very long philosophical explanations, but rather things in a condensed and precise form — it is with these that one succeeds best.”

“Naturally, the value of the answer depends on the value of the spiritual force contained in the book. If you take a novel, it will tell you nothing at all but stupidities. But if you take a book containing a condensation of forces — of knowledge or spiritual force or teaching power — you will receive your answer.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter X Obtaining Answers and Solutions pp. 93-94