The Need to Achieve a Calm Equality Not Shaken By Outward Happenings

If we examine our reactions to circumstances that occur daily in our lives, we will see we generally go through a range of feelings from elation when something we deem positive occurs, to depression when it seems like the house is falling in on us. Major events, such as achievements in school, falling in love and getting married, having children, developing a successful career, enjoying amazing travel opportunities, spending time with loved ones, all create feelings of pleasure or joy. When we fall ill, or we lose a loved one, or experience a major traumatic event, lose a job, suffer through a divorce, we experience pain and grief.

It is difficult to imagine, when we reflect on all these life events and our reactions to them, how we are supposed to accept all of them, positive and negative alike, with an equality that treats them both with not only forbearance and acceptance, but with a calm and tranquil evenness of temper, much less with a sense of joyfulness at the gift the Divine is giving us at that moment!

Every once in a while, we get a glimpse of the state of equality and we understand that it is not only possible, but achievable if we find a way to separate our awareness from the exte
al surface personality and observe it from a standpoint of a neutral observer.

A young individual related a story from his time at Sri Aurobindo Ashram in 1973. He received a message from the Mother for his birthday which indicated “Live within, be not shaken by outward happenings.” He reported that he walked around the entire day in a state of almost trancelike abstraction. That evening he slept and dreamt that there was a great darkness and then suddenly an intense Light illuminated everything in the dream and he woke with a feeling that some great event had occurred. He went to the Ashram only to find that all the lights were on (it was still dark, early morning before sunrise) and people were milling around in the streets. He soon learned that the Mother had left her body. People were crying and stricken with emotion. He felt strangely abstracted from everything, and heard a voice inwardly that said ‘live within, be not shaken by outward happenings.” Over the next few days he remained in that state, and watched the events unfold as people came from all over the world, with tears and grief, only to come away from the Darshan of the Mother at peace and with their grief removed. He felt this was a Grace to be shown how equality was not only possible, but could be experienced in actual real-life situations.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “To be free from all preference and receive joyfully whatever comes from the Divine Will is not possible at first for any human being. What one should have at first is the constant idea that what the Divine wills is always for the best even when the mind does not see how it is so, to accept with resignation what one cannot yet accept with gladness and so to arrive at a calm equality which is not shaken even when on the surface there may be passing movements of a momentary reaction to outward happenings. If that is once firmly founded, the rest can come.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 1, Looking at Life and Circumstances, pp. 27-28