Mental Formations Are Created All the Time Even Without Our Conscious Recognition of Them and Their Action

An individual in the business of wholesaling products to stores reported the following phenomenon he had experienced with one of his wholesale customers who ran a metaphysical bookshop in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for a number of years. He would get a feeling that the buyer was reaching out to him to place an order, and he would regularly call after that occurred and be told that she wanted to place an order. This went on regularly for some years. One time, he was travelling in Europe and got the feeling from this customer but could not respond immediately. The feeling repeated itself day after day during his travels, and eventually he got a headache from the intensity of the pressure. He tried sending the thought back to the buyer that he was unavailable and would call as soon as he could, but apparently this was a one-way street of communication. After he returned to his office, he called and she was quite upset with him. ‘I have been trying to reach you to place an order for two weeks now, but you did not call!’ The individual replied that he had been traveling and could not contact her, although he knew she wanted to order, and had tried to let her know, using the same methods, that he would call when he was back in his office. (This was in the days before email, whatsapp, and all these other inventions that make such communication so easy world wide nowadays). Clearly the bookstore owner/buyer was able to create mental formations that contacted this individual wherever he was in the world, and she relied so heavily on this that she never reached out to phone her supplier.

The Mother writes: “But, you see, in a smaller measure and less perfectly one is making formations all the time. When, for instance, one thinks of somebody quite powerfully, there is a small emanation of mental substance which, instantaneously, goes to this person, you understand, a vibration of your thought which goes and touches his; and if he is receptive, he sees you. He sees you and tells you, ‘You came last night to me!’ That’s because you made a small formation and this formation went and did its work, which was to put you into contact with this person or else to carry a message if you had something special to tell him; and that was done. This happens constantly, but as it is quite a constant and spontaneous phenomenon and done in ignorance, one is not even aware that one does this, one does it automatically.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter II Power of Thought, pp. 15-16