Can Reading Random Passages of Books Provide True Guidance and Direction?

The human mind tries to find patterns and meaning in things. We see random cloud shapes and we want to understand a ‘message’. We look into the night sky and create shapes out of stars which are enormous distances separated from one another by seeing a particular form or image in the pattern created by the starlight of those disparate stars. Moving closer to our daily lives, we try to understand patterns in divination, tarot cards, and other practices which we use to build inner linkages and thus, provide meaning for our present and future actions. We do the same thing, in many cases, when we read books. The question then is whether we can trust the guidance we receive as true and appropriate for our needs, and the mechanism that works through whatever method we use to put ourselves in contact with that guidance.

When we understand the concept of the oneness of the manifestation, the ‘unified field’, it is relatively easier to appreciate that when we send out an aspiration or even just a powerful thought, that it meets with corresponding vibrations and links to them, thereby associating to us the things on which we are focusing our attention. Some people call this a divine response, some call it synchronicity, some the ‘law of attraction’ and some a unified field. By whatever terminology we know it, however, the underlying truth is that we are intimately connected to the beings, forms, and events of the universe within which we live and we are always sending out signals and receiving signals within the vibratory range within which we are able to function.

This provides us, then, the clue for how to use spiritual literature, or photographs, or images, icons or other visible objects as reminders and doorways to the consciousness that stands behind those forms.

A disciple asks: “Once or twice, as a game, you took one of your books or Sri Aurobindo’s and opened a page at random, and read out a sentence. Can these sentences give one a sign or an indication? What should we do to get a true answer?

The Mother responds: “Everybody can do it. It is done in this way: you concentrate. Now, it depends on what you want. If you have an inner problem and want the solution, you concentrate on this problem; if you want to know the condition you are in, which you are not aware of — if you want to get some light on the state you are in, you just come forward with simplicity and ask for the light. Or else, quite simply, if you are curious to know what the invisible knowledge has to tell you, you remain silent and still for a moment and then open the book. I always used to recommend taking a paper-knife, because it is thinner; while you are concentrated you insert it in the book and with the tip indicate something. Then, if you know how to concentrate, that is to say, if you really do it with an aspiration to have an answer, it always comes.”

“For, in books of this kind (Mother shows The Synthesis of Yoga), books of revelation, there is always an accumulation of forces — at least of higher mental forces, and most often of spiritual forces of the highest knowledge. Every book, on account of the words it contains, is like a small accumulator of these forces. People don’t know this, for they don’t know how to make use of it, but it is so. In the same way, in every picture, photograph, there is an accumulation, a small accumulation representative of the force of the person whose picture it is, of his nature and, if he has powers, of his powers. Now, you, when you are sincere and have an aspiration which goes and meets the corresponding force in the book, and it is a higher consciousness which gives you the answer.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter X Obtaining Answers and Solutions pp. 92-94