The Fruit and the Seed

Introduction

When Elio and Luciana knocked at our front door for the first time, I could not have imagined that they would enter my life and heart. ...

They were simply two of the many Italians Nata welcomed and helped on their arrival in Pondicherry. Since that day 20 years ago they came back punctually every year for the Christmas holidays, loaded with gifts.

Then Elio had a major surgical operation. He retired from his job and began spending the winter months in India. He enjoyed the Ashram and its atmosphere. At the first ray of dawn he would join the other Ashramites at the Dining Room to take his bread and milk.

Then he would go to the seafront for a walk and in thanksgiving gaze at the sun rising from the sea in a festival of colour. He was always happy and beautiful in his Indian silk shirts, with his silvery hair and his suntanned, golden face.

Elio was weaker by the day. He would never complain, never ask for help, never solicit compassion.

For him the illness was an act of Grace, an opportunity to grow, to pay his karmic debt, to dig ever deeper within himself until he touched the heart of transparence.

Behind that courage, that style, that gentleness was the Force and Love of the Divine. He was deeply and therefore happily aware of the purpose of our earthly existence and of death as life and not merely a fistful of ashes or a cup of oblivion into which all is dissolved. Even in the most difficult moments, Elio did not stop repeating, "How very blessed I am!" He knew how to receive and give love and finally, of course, Luciana, after long suffering, came round to understanding what it was that Elio had achieved.

We in the Ashram were struck by his radiant presence, moved by his decision to leave his body here, and many ashramites sustained his inner work with prayer, with gestures of tenderness, gifts, discreet visits.

Every evening a very high fever would inexorably overtake him.

And quietly Elio would announce, "It is time for me to go down into my tomb." Wrapped in woollen blankets for hours on end he would attempt to sweat the fever out, though normally his skin could hardly bear the touch of the lightest of cotton shirts, so hot and humid is our Indian summer. In silent and ceaseless prayer he would offer his gratitude to the Lord. In the evening he would change his clothes, comb his hair, wrap himself in his elegant gown and go and sit in his armchair padded with cushions. The smallest movement meant a cruel effort, yet he was bent on keeping himself exquisitely groomed, not so much out of a sense of his own dignity as from a wish not to offend his visitors and those around him. A smile always lighted his emaciated face.

Elio was ... submitting himself to the Lord. A self-surrender with folded hands, trusting heart, fearless and without attachment. ... For a long time during the painful X-rays, tests, check-ups and treatments in the hospitals and nursing homes, he had felt a warm protective Presence accompanying him...

In the very last days Elio lost his voice. He continued radiating love with his extraordinary smile. He asked Luciana for a pen and paper.

And with a trembling hand left his message:

Everything is falling silent: it is as if a new air has descended - more light, more light, more Light!

Elio's Journal

I am taking up again my rule of writing something each day. For no one but myself. I must do this regularly with perseverance. Maybe with great effort when the white page refuses to fill up or when one is almost convinced that the whiteness of the page is better than the blackness of the thought that is to be imprinted on it.

However, today I am starting with what has guided my meditation:

Absurd Love.

If Love is not absurd, if it has not gone beyond the logic of every day, beyond every norm of so-called civil living, then it is not true love, it is not love at any price because it will not pay the price, it will not go over the barrier of conventions. It is a courageless love, full of constraints, the fruit of a soul still chained to the human, to the much too human, a soul that does not want to turn the other cheek. Absurd Love is the love of courage, of strength and not of facile and soft sentiment. It is a love that demands a relentless battle with ourselves.

And we must always keep this goal in view as a guide to our thoughts and actions.

*

There are certain appointments and exercises the soul must respect unflinchingly, whatever the cost may be. With such perseverance alone can we march on the right spiritual path and transcend the human. Perseverance can never be painless - the Adversaries would

not allow it – as it is not natural to man, it is a silent and, at times, painful exercise of the Will.

*

There are some bonds to which the soul submits of which it is not aware at all. Such bonds mould his thinking and his feeling. The true seeker’s immediate task is to know these bonds. But we cannot know them through the ordinary thought already warped by the senses.

Look at it anyway you wish, man’s starting-point today can only be this: consciousness initiates with the liberation of thought. Only then can it liberate the Will and the Feeling.

*

It is essential at first that we liberate ourselves from our body. The body is a valuable instrument, the most valuable that the Spirit has created for man and which makes it capable of the present experience. But the sentient being gets attached and turns the body into its idol, thus changing it from an instrument to an object and at times to a subject.

This happens all the time in different forms, among which the most noticeable is the one linked with the beauty of our body. But there are subtler forms, apparently more innocent, but they are the most difficult to recognise and the real obstacles we must overcome. It is becoming truly urgent to become conscious of how these unexplored attachments of the soul to its own body affect our mode of living, our relations with others, our feeling, our choosing how we wish to appear and all that this entails. We have to become conscious of all this and set out to liberate ourselves from them.

*

This morning’s meditation was most difficult, almost impossible, hampered by a strange and powerful re-emergence of obstacles I thought I had overcome: like a forcible immersion into an obscure and pullulating zone of the soul. In this zone the thought was weighed down by being entangled in anxieties, fears, revolts and memories: a feeling full of aversion, bitterness, conflict.

It took me some time to re-ascend and to recover the élan, the strength and the courage; above all, to understand that I had laid my hand on the barrier to be removed. And at once I got down to work.

*

The illusion is to believe that the evil of others is only theirs and not ours. And it is ours each time that it churns up within us accusations and resentments and aversion of any sort: all that corrupts the Divine in us hinders the working of the Logos. It is a useful exercise to try and be grateful to him who raises resentment in us, because it allows us to discover what we have to conquer at any cost.

*

We must develop another triune of qualities: calm, gentleness, goodness.

This is a triune to be remembered each time we undertake something or when unexpected difficulties impede what one has undertaken. If only one could pause to consider filling the soul with these qualities, it would be easier to find the solutions to the difficulties that have arisen.

*

To deepen the imagination of the glass that is ever full, even when the water that fills it is poured into other glasses: a splendid, visible, powerful instance of the symbolic imagination. The complexity of Love becomes simple and clear within from this example: one who is brimful with Love keeps pouring it out of himself but instead of emptying himself he becomes ever richer. The image created by the force within continues to reinforce and develop the inner being.

*

At the end of the day if I were to ask myself what little progress I have made today I would not be able to answer.

An action accomplished? A thought corrected and readjusted? An emotion controlled? Maybe. But the crux is not in one thing, not over a segment of development. It is in the totality of my process of transformation; it is in the moving forward of the whole front of consciousness, in the ever-clearer emergence of the consciousness principle of myself, and all this in ever-widening waves. Consciousness, ever more consciousness of one’s Self: this is pure consecration.

*

It is useful from time to time to remember the crucial encounters of our life, be they positive or negative. From a distance – and having made this little progress in my evolution – the profound reasons for these encounters become clear as if they were selected by the Will that had initially inscribed them onto our destiny. But we also begin to understand how such encounters became our errors or risked becoming so, precisely because we failed to see the necessity of their occurrence, the real question they raised.

*

Most of the time we answer wrongly or almost do so because we stop at the form of the question, at its outer shell. We go towards it with the Ego and with the dual thought.

The right encounter is only the one that saves, even if it seems not to balance the account.

Going over these stages in the meditation, I know what I still need to mould within me and I am aware of my real distance from these errors.

*

An hour-long meditation that is clean, that does not lose focus and is free of disturbances, is most difficult to realise. Unknowingly we find ourselves diverted and immersed in something else. The earlier we become aware of this the better. But before picking up the thread of the meditation, it is necessary to get back to the moment when it was interrupted by the diversion that led us astray.

It is observed that almost always it is a feeling, a memory that makes itself felt and that affects the thought and paralyses the will. This wrong feeling always unleashes pleasure, a craving, even when the event is a painful one. There is a pain that sometimes is pleasant.

*

We need to stress our will to uncover the disturbances caused by feeling on our actions and our thoughts and to find out from what level the feeling rises. It is strenuous and unpleasant to discover who we are but once we do, we can start seeing concretely the chains that bind the soul, the instincts onto which the soul throws itself unconsciously and postures with the help of reason.

Without digging deep, without an assiduous effort at unveiling, we cannot liberate the Virgin in us. The Virgin in us: what should truly become an experience, the experience of the imagination of the original, divine soul, radiating forever celestial Light, a rhythmic feeling that pulsates from the Earth to the Sky and from the Sky to the Earth, a Love without end that exists only to give of itself.

The Virgin, silent and suffering its imprisonment, suffering for us because she is imprisoned in our sorrows, our incapacities, our incomprehensions and weaknesses. Without her liberation all possibility of true knowledge is shut out. She is the Virtue that always quickens the thought but whom we do not get to know by making our thought reflexive.

*

I have got back to meditating on the body again. We are prisoners of our body: of its beauty or of its ugliness. We either exalt or we mask it, embellish or attitudinise it so that it expresses us.

New techniques, passing for spiritual, are coming up exalting the functioning of the body. Today, health is only and essentially health of the body and this body is thought to be our body. Ours, only because it is built according to our needs, ours exclusively the responsibility for its use.

On the contrary, it is the Temple of the Divine, an instrument of the Divine: it is valuable only because the Spirit inhabits it. The external loveliness is truly a reflection of the inner one.

But yet again we entrust what we are to appearance, even if we are a den of thieves within. Beware of white-washed sepulchres!

*

Today, after Luciana’s departure from Pondicherry, I got the opportunity of experimenting on the possibility of mastering the body’s systems and feelings that assail us. Trying to meditate or, to express it better, to do the basic exercise of concentration, was very difficult indeed, most painful, even physically.

To break an emotional habit, to feel the physical absence of the person one loves and the sadness that it arouses, the obsessive memory that returns with every sound, every feeling: all this takes me back to her; to those feelings that are so linked to our corporeality and that of others.

This leads us to verify the tangible power of feeling and the equally necessary power to achieve the detachment from all this that paralyses both thought and will.

The detachment is effected from this sensible, chaotic feeling, not from the loved person who is re-discovered in a feeling that is more serene, sweeter, higher.

*

Every morning when I go out at 6 to fetch breakfast from the Dining-Room, I meet a majestic sky softened by clouds tinged with rose by the rising sun. The oldest and biggest tree of Pondicherry greets me: a world luxuriating in greenery and birds.

And this enables me to do the exercise of pure perception and to experience the work of the creative thought in its encounter with the outer reality.

I discover inexpressible meanings and beatitudes.

*

Pure contemplation that hinders the ordinary mind, that is the habitual reflexive thought, from acting as a filter vis-à-vis the world, leads us to our inner activities with the inner being of the world. It is this that gives us the certitude about that same force within and outside us: the discovery of this unity releases beatitude. A feeling that is genuine love, strong, vibrant, all light.

We experience the world by living within ourselves: and in the end we discover both.

*

After overcoming an obstacle, we are thrilled and see ourselves as good, courageous, full of extraordinary qualities: the Ego congratulates itself. Here, we should remind ourselves that what helped us was not the Ego at all. Its boast is misplaced and the virtues it glorifies are not the ones that really mattered, but others he does not even know of, such as humility and total surrender to the Spiritual World: from here comes the strength for every solution, the energy for every battle.

*

It is only now that I have begun getting accustomed to the perception of Indian time. It is not merely a question of patience as most people believe. Certainly there is that too. Developing patience is a most useful personal exercise and Time is simply an occasion.

But Indian time is something more than a mere exercise of patience: it is the transformation of mathematical time into a spiritual one. It is Time as an offshoot of Eternity: the offshoot is used for things of this world, it has a relative value, it is a momentary exit from eternity. Eternity is the true base of Indian time, the exact image of Transcendence of which the earthly (practical) life is an appendage.

World and Time correspond exactly to Transcendence and Eternity. World and Time are relative necessities vis-à-vis the absolute of Eternity-Transcendence.

It is absurd for an Indian to say there is no time: in reality there is time but it should not be so since time, like the world, is not a value.

*

I have learnt here in Pondy to transform repetitiveness and monotony into rhythm. Now my day has a rhythm. Rhythm is just the opposite of boredom: it is the having to do transformed into dedication.

But what is rhythm? The action is infused with the Spirit and this infusion is always a creation, a different way of action and not a different action itself. This different way of acting is, in the end, also a better way of acting.

Here is a glimpse perhaps of how it is possible to live shut up in a room for an extended period of time.

*

A sincere seeker must extract some profit also from his defeats: these always reveal to him the errors committed and the things that still need to be done. This applies to me as well. Usually I am assailed by irritation when my plans go awry. My discipline that is so intense needs a very precise and regular programming: a little nothing, a mere quarter of an hour that goes out of rhythm, can upset my whole day.

When this happens, I am overcome by irritation and disorientation. And this spoils my day and my night. The remedy consists in understanding at least two things:

1. I should give up the presumption of following rigorously my own plans. There are other plans that are different from mine and superior to these and have their own reasons for interfering: this is the significance of the saying Man proposes and God disposes. The acceptance of what is different from what was proposed should be immediate: this discipline is more relevant than following an inflexible programme.

2. Discipline is not thrown to the wind or left to chance because of such an attitude. It must, however, never become a rigid habit. The plasticity that enables us to understand the situations, to change, to accept and to adapt, is one of the most significant virtues of the soul to be developed.

*

Surrender, self-giving, self-abandoning, self-offering, trust, these are never passive or an act of giving oneself up to the world or to oneself: there is nothing more active than self-giving and trust.

I put myself in the hands of God, however, only after having done everything that I had to do, after having exhausted all the possibilities within my reach: only then does God, if he finds it useful, intervene. He never takes the place of man but he does what man is unable to.

*

Trust is the greatest responsibility that man takes upon himself: otherwise he might deceive God, which is really impossible because God does not let himself be deceived.

*

Self-transformation, if it is sincere and deep, always comes with pain. There is an endless desert in the soul we have to cross, where one after the other the forms of our personality fall off. And with each shedding a part of the Ego is cast off. We are not aware in the slightest of all the many affections, vanities and attachments that exist and these now rise and clamour for life but we know that in order to move forward we must send them to their death.

And this causes untold suffering and requires courage and total consecration.

*

The role of the cerebral intellectual, whether he be organised or disorganised, is now over, exhausted, extinct. The intellectual whose consciousness is centred in the head, has already contributed what he had to contribute: Science, the psyche’s attempt at abstraction – a necessary phase in the liberation of thought from surface sensibility.

The fact of lingering in this phase has alienated man from his real essence, separated him from the reality in order to make of him a manufacture whose symmetrical image is the robot. It is necessary to pass from a limited cerebral consciousness to a more complete consciousness, more integral, a consciousness so vast that it can embrace not only the whole of man but the entire Cosmos.

But this is not a passage on the basis of quantity but on the profundity of human forces. Heidegger perceived this necessity when he talked of the new Thought, the cordial Thought. The cordial Thought is thought rooted in the heart, that is in the depth and centre of human essence. It is the end of the mind-heart confrontation, by being their integration. From this point onward the Consciousness is integral where thinking, willing and feeling are one. The cerebral intellectual is now one of the impediments to human development, an insistence on the illuminist reason of pure concept, depriving the latter of the corresponding image.

*

We need not run. Being in a hurry is a sign of haste and of insecurity: above all it is an escape from oneself. Being in a hurry does not defeat time but turns time into an instrument of our fear.

It is better to take one small but sure step forward rather than get into a frenzied rush that is uncertain and, in the end, quite useless. A sure step is a right step at the right time and in the right direction. A sure step takes us closer to the goal than an agitated run which probably takes us further away from it. But only one step, even if it be right, seems to satisfy us less than a striding race that triggers applause along the route.

It is better to live in a tiny hut built on rock rather than in a skyscraper built on sand.

*

There is a phase of self-consecration which aims directly at the relationship with the Divine. A direct, exclusive relationship which shuts itself off from people and things; it is an all-consuming desire, almost violent in its eagerness to reach the Divine at any cost.

But we become conscious of having reached Him – and this is the next phase – when we meet Him everywhere, in people and in things, in an all-embracing relationship. Like a river in spate that finds its fulfilment and its peace by losing itself into the ocean.

*

The deepest fear of man is always the loss of possession: the fear of losing something unconsciously rules us. It is one end of a chain whose other end is the joy of possession: one cannot exist without the other. But the renunciation of possession does not signify the renunciation of joy: just the contrary! The joy of possession can never be true joy.

Ananda or joy, felicity, beatitude, comes from Love and Love is dedication and self-giving but not as it is understood by the ordinary consciousness for which self-giving is a form of possession of the other. I am good and so I expect the gratitude and thankfulness of the other and if the other is not grateful to me and does not recognise me, my joy is changed into its opposite.

Love and the consequent self-giving for love has no other end but itself. It is self-giving and that is all.

Thence arises pure joy, full only of itself, since it possesses naught but itself. It is not a joy that takes anything directly or indirectly. It only gives, and all the time.

*

A friend is very ill: they have emptied him of everything from the mouth of the stomach downward. Moreover there is the resultant mortification of not being able to perform the primary body-functions without assistance from others.

This could also happen to me. It will then be necessary to decisively separate the body from the soul, leaving the body to its process of disintegration without the soul being involved in any way.

The process of physical disintegration must not become the sole preoccupation of the being but the impulsion for it to become truly independent from the body. Then even the sense of humiliation changes into love and profound gratitude to those who help.

With the weakening of the body, the soul gathers strength. I can now already feel this.

It is the ordinary man who feels the need of being somebody, almost always in the eyes of others, of society or of the group, the chief in the versa and so on and so forth. And the mechanisms for being somebody are those that nature has set in motion in the psyche.

The Saint is he who wants to be a nobody, he who is capable of overcoming the mechanisms of nature in himself. It is he who chooses the most difficult and isolated path. He is the only real, free man. He breaks away from the common mass in order to vertically stand out among others towards God. The ordinary man is the natural man who thinks he has got his personality from the mechanisms of nature: his is the creation of these mechanisms. The other man is supra-nature in the sense that he has mastered nature and controls its mechanisms, dismantles his own natural personality, cancels out the I constructed by nature, so as to liberate the element that creates nature itself: that element which controls outer nature from outside and in man controls it from his inner being.

*

We are immersed in life and we do not realise it, for we are in fact immersed in Death and we flee it. Around and within us, there is a continuous working of creative and destructive forces: if only we could stop to see within and outside us all that happens, unburdened of fears and prejudices, unburdened of habitual patterns which now operate involuntarily without our even being conscious of them, then we would see this fabric of life and death renewing itself at every instant. Only then shall we understand the need for collaborating with the creative forces, always and anywhere.

But for this a new consciousness is necessary, not that ordinary consciousness which is always a consciousness of death. We must always remember that Death does not solve our problems. They must be solved here on the Earth and it is for this that we were born and it is for this that we must unceasingly battle Death. It is a sign of our incapacity that instead of doing it here we seek to do it somewhere else.

We do not fight Death in the physical but in the soul which insists on identifying itself with it.

*

Equanimity is the quality of the soul that we must concentrate on above everything else: in times that are precarious, superficial and indiscriminately and frenetically changing, we cannot do without equanimity.

Equanimity is not rigidity, pride or indifference: it is perfect mastery of the self and of one’s feelings. It is inner stability. It is freedom from the happenings of the world. It is disallowing any feeling or emotion from blinding our mind and our will. It is cultivated in small and big things, constantly without respite.

Equanimity is being constantly conscious of the I in the soul, and there is no other way of being awake.

*

Self-giving is the capacity of baring oneself completely of oneself: it is the Christic kenosis. The baring of oneself, in its turn, is not a mystic attachment, not an excess of self-destructive sentiment, since this stripping is always accompanied by an equally concrete action of thought and will.

Such baring of oneself is a profound plunge into our inner being in order to take our true being towards the light, towards the I of Light and Love.

Only he who sells off all, yields all he has, can acquire the one pearl that is worth possessing.

And finally, even when we offer all, it is always little we offer in regard to what we obtain. We barter a fistful of darkness for a ray of pure Light.

The problems that confront us and those that we create ourselves, the events in which we linger are not important in themselves but as opportunities that we give ourselves or that are given to us to help us bring out in us the necessary forces to resolve them.

Problems, even the most painful ones, are not the heart of life but the answers we give to them. It is in these answers that the true meaning of life resides.

Everything is contained in our capacity to understand what the events with their occurrence want from us. It is not their resolution for resolution’s sake that is important but what they convey to us.

*

I come back to the capacity of being nobody: acquiring this capacity is extremely important for the seeker of the Spirit.

I got the confirmation of pure perception during the daily morning exercise at Villa Borghese. The exercise consists in the pure contemplation of an element of nature (a flower, a tree, the splashing of a fountain) and it cannot succeed without this self-cancellation, without this total emptying of the being, without the absolute silence within.

Only then does the world enter and speak to us and in us and not in the Ego. We usually assail the world and the others with our so-called personality, we always project ourselves onto others in all possible ways. Whether we do it with belligerence or with sweetness, the result is the same because what we wish to obtain is always the same: the attention of others.

*

We live today in an unreal world and unreal are the situations and conditions of life in which man struggles since we persist in ignoring the very basis of this reality. The human measure of this unreality is pain, suffering and in the end, Death itself.

If we could stop only for a second and impose upon ourselves a living calm, not passive or indifferent, but a calm expectation, alert, alive with true life, we would be ready to understand the metaphysical meaning of pain and Death, we would become aware of their direction: a profound peace. However, in our attachment to unreality, we experience them as anguish and desperate fear.

*

To be everything with all, as goes a saying of St. Paul’s, requires a plasticity of the soul, such a readiness for change without losing, however, our own poise which is a sign of having attained a certain askesis.

The soul can be everything with everyone because it acts from an absolutely unmoving centre. It never takes the place of others and in moving towards the others it finds in them its centre. On the other hand it does not fear the unexpected because the unexpected does not exist for it: only that is unexpected which is beyond the pale of our horizon.

But the soul that has truly recovered its deep quiet (and it is only in this deep state of peace that it can be everything with everyone) has unlimited horizons. It cannot be overcome by anything that is unknown because it contains the unique integral knowledge. It cannot renounce itself in order to be all, since it knows that it will find itself in all beings. Gentleness changes into force, renunciation into possession. Because it does not become everything in appearance but it is the being and it is precisely in the being that it identifies itself with all the others.

Existence is always a shutting ourselves off from the others, a folding into ourselves, even when we think we are opening ourselves it is a self-opening that leans on ourselves: it is only the being that is open towards the others, towards all, because that alone is the others and all.

*

This morning’s meditation brought to me the sensation of the extreme justness and usefulness of everything that has happened to me in life, particularly the negative incidents. It led me almost to their roots, undoubtedly in this life but also in the preceding one, even if in a still indeterminate way. Understanding the necessity of these events gives me strength and a direction to the transformation. The negativity that is so judged by the ordinary consciousness is transformed into positivity in the higher consciousness.

We only have to thank with humility the help that has been given us, knowing that in most cases we are not capable of recognising it.

*

Prayer is a form of total self-giving.

For prayer to be truly prayer it must be rid of the slightest trace of egoism, that is to say, it never ought to ask for anything but only give. It is a giving without reserve, a limitless offering of ourselves but for the others. To ask the Spiritual World is to presuppose that the Spiritual World does not know the needs of the asker, and that is absurd. It is a reversal of positions since it usually is the asker who does not know what he truly needs. And finally the prayer that does not ask for anything but offers all, is the acceptance of what is proposed by the Spiritual World.

This is the amen, the so be it with which we end a prayer mentally and accept the decision.

*

For years now, I have been meditating at a fixed hour in the afternoon as in the morning. I cannot always respect the time, sometimes for subjective reasons and sometimes for objective ones. Almost always I am eager to accomplish the ritual. And yet I feel each time the part of the soul that is connected to the lower astral being resisting. I must, every time, force myself and gather courage not to let myself be overwhelmed by nature that runs loose and vacillates with sentiments, memories, the wanderings of the thoughts and so on.

*

There is no doubt that meditation and concentration done in a continued, repetitive, rhythmic way are always an act of will which the Impeders doggedly resist, and from their point of view quite rightly, as it is that force which defeats them.

*

To even think that money gives us freedom is a sin against the Spirit and will have to be dearly paid for. It is to understand freedom upside down. It frees our instincts and our desires from all check and, often, whips our animality.

We imagine ‘possessing means being’ and therefore money grants us being.

I am convinced that the more we have or make money, the more we are close-fisted and the more we need to exercise self-control: money is responsibility towards ourselves and towards the others, and it has to be respected and that is why the eye of the needle is always narrower for a rich man. To imagine that we are safe because of money, is to deny or anyway to know for certain what we are. The only truth lies in what we buy, that is, what we materially possess: all else is complementary. It is to be remembered that everything that can be acquired with money, if it is not transformed spiritually, will chain us to the contingent and will obstruct the ascent.

*

Our present civilisation rests on fear: fear of life, fear of death, fear of pain, fear of the others, fear of woman or of men. In fact, everything is inimical to us, everything is hostile to us. The traditional institutions are not capable of saving us from this ensnaring fear. In truth, this fear has one origin: the birth of the I. In order to dissolve this fear one focuses on the collective: mass-spectacles, mass-culture, mass-politics. The mass as an antidote to the I.

Mass and Ego like the false poles of human existence do not stand independent of each other. Together they make of man a confluence of fears and instincts. In such a framework freedom is understood to be the ‘running loose’ of the ego and instincts. Politics then becomes the vulgar channelling of this ‘running loose’. A nervous, subtle epidemic is consequently the disease of the mass which is now difficult to recognise in an environment which, even though sick, is considered to be healthy.

And even the present upsurge of individualism is, in reality, a recrudescence of pure and ruthless egoism.

*

At times I am overcome with fatigue and sadness, a feeling of emptiness, of disgust with the world. I must be wary: emptiness and disgust with the world are not the goal or the purpose of the discipline.

We do not live in this world to be disgusted with it: this could be even a positive sign if it points towards the necessity of the being to empty itself of the burden it has accumulated and break loose the wrong bonds that chain it. But it is absolutely negative if it is the sign of an incapacity to fully live a spirituality that interpenetrates the world. Woe to us if we live, in a positive or a negative way, only on the surface!

*

Need of a daily reflection on death: in order to give a realistic outlook to the soul that must experience death as a consequence of a rupture and of being an interference in the work of the Spiritual World. The victory over death is victory over sin, the need for giving back to the body its reality of being an instrument and not an end, the need for the Ego to reunite with the Self.

We will be able to conquer death if we die before death: that is the way to immortality.

And in order to die before death, we need to learn to die a little every day. It is the Ego, with which we identify both in good and bad, that must die; it is only at the death of the ego that the immortal Self is born. This usually occurs at the end of our life, without our being aware. But if this could happen consciously during our life then there would be no necessity at all for Death.

*

I cannot make myself the point of reference, to measure others on what I do or don’t, on the basis of the discipline I follow, etc. It would be doubly unjust.

Above all, it would be a common error of presumption and show an intolerance of other paths, other needs and someone else’s stages of evolution.

But unconsciously, this comparison between ourselves and others is always made. It is a part of the nature in us that we must conquer at any cost. The Spirit blows where it wishes: one way in someone and the opposite in another. We cannot claim that it should blow only according to our dictates. However, we can help the others not by compelling them to follow us but by simply explaining to them what we have truly experienced, not read or heard about, but truly experienced.

*

This morning at Villa Borghese under the transparent and luminous green of the trees, made more iridescent by the Sun’s rays playing among the branches, I felt the presence of the Gods. As if the thoughts of the Cosmos had bloomed from the Earth. I forgot myself completely and bathed in that world of light enveloping me, found myself suffused with a spiritual reality.

To think that we are always immersed in the Cosmic Thought but we are so involved with ourselves, with our petty doings that we have no time and are unable to forget ourselves, to come out of our unreal personality, of the inchoate mass of sensations in order to enter the Light of the World.

If that could be, we would not soil the earth with all sorts of garbage. Above all, we would not pollute it with the not-so-clean thoughts and feelings. How long shall we rebuff the hand that the Gods stretch out to us, how long shall we substitute our ridiculous presence in place of Gods? This ceaseless degradation is the destiny of the human world. The True Man is verily beyond man.

*

To truly go against the current is an inner process only since it implies climbing back through hereditary tendencies, acquired habits, ideas and impulses born from our psychic mechanisms that we allow to operate, thinking ourselves to be free. It is the tracing back of a nature that has built in us its structure with which it manoeuvres our faculties. We mistake spontaneity for the simply mechanical and repetitive. It is spontaneous merely because we are not conscious of it.

To climb back into ourselves and open our eyes within is to liberate from this nature the soul that is imprisoned, it is to dismantle this structure that has become culture, so as to use it in a different way, it is to activate the faculties that have been constrained to tread in pre-determined tracks. It is not a psycho-analytic operation that aims at accepting such a state of things and its going against the current signifies merely making the structure more adequate for the alienated faculties, so that their alienation does not appear as such.

No, first it is an operation of re-ascent, a coming out of nature and, therefore, a re-entry into it for its transformation. Knowledge and ascesis go hand in hand.

Climbing back into ourselves means also climbing back into others since we can recognise in others what we have recognised in us. But none can undertake this ascent for another person, neither can anyone communicate what he sees in the other, since the other, still fully immersed in the current, will never accept that he is in it.

*

Only example and the use of the instruments to dismantle the structure can be passed on. Each one then adapts them to his needs.

*

In the peak of illness, in the collapse from exhaustion, in stupefaction or in the revolt of the soul torn with the pain of daily living, may I be able, O Gods, to always find the strength to accomplish the Rite of Consecration to You. Like I did today, verily like today!

The soul has to be plucked from illness or from Death itself in order to detach itself from the meaninglessness of some of its problems; from the vanity of its desires, from the precariousness of some of its affections.

But can we not anticipate all this before illness and Death overtake us?

Can we not decide once and for all and independently to go beyond all this confused existence?

*

The seeker on the way to shedding false personality knows that sooner or later he will find himself on the brink of a precipice, of an illimitable void, as though the ground on which he was accustomed to standing suddenly gave way. Then the battle itself for our liberation loses meaning. But woe if we turn back. The foundation and the significances must now emerge from within us. The void will be filled with the Light of the Spiritual Heart.

It is from this abyss that rise the deep forces which, at first, came distorted to the ordinary consciousness. In the new consciousness they manifest themselves as cosmic forces which act according to the universal order.

From this moment, Love and Liberty have fused: acting, knowing and loving have become one.

Angel of God, Messenger of the Spiritual World, illumine me.
My consciousness of every day sees and understands only the little in which its senses enclose it.

But You, You who work in my astral body, You know my past, my previous life and join it to the present one.

In the same way as You will join my today to my tomorrow.

You are the spiritual continuity and weave in me the pattern of a destiny that You want to raise, transparent and luminous, to the Kingdom of Heaven.

You are the Kingdom of Heaven in me.

May I never impede Your work, may I never stain the weft of light that You are weaving.

Grant me the capacity to hear Your Words, Your sound of Light.

Grant that my heart never lose from its consciousness the Message of Love of the Spiritual World.

You are the resonance in me of the Music of the Spheres that I have only vaguely felt but not heard yet and this inaudibility has become a tormenting longing for what I heard at other times.

Angel of God, grant me the patience I need, the patience to wait for the Kingdom, the gift of the Gods to him who works for this Reign.

Grant me the patience, knowing that no personal merit can claim the reward, since there is no personal merit that can measure up to the Reign.

The Gods know what they do and to be patient for their gift is felicity.

Angel of God, may I be able to see Your face resplendent in the difficult hour and may that abundant light not overwhelm and blind me.

My Angel, so transparent in me that reaching You seems impossible. It is a miracle that only You can accomplish by becoming less “light” for my love.

I am thankful to You, O Angel of God, when my daily meditation attains Your World. Then I feel Your presence is certain.

I am as thankful to You, O Angel, to whom my lives have been entrusted, even when my meditation is hindered by my own moods.

None but You gives me strength to go to the end of it.

Far as my soul may be from You, You make Yourself close to it.

My gratitude to You.

*

A meditation on Death this morning. It necessarily liberates us from the obstacles separating us from the world of our origin. At first it liberates us from the physical body and from the forces that activate it: all returns to the immense cosmic ocean. Then it liberates us from the psyche, that is from that part of the soul that is attached to the physical world: all returns purified into the great, cosmic soul. In the end the I, now free, moves in the company of Gods in the spiritual world of the Divine.

In fact, Death accomplishes by force what we should accomplish in freedom: immortality, perhaps.

*

Today was a day of arduous test as well: it is necessary for breaking the still thick barrier of the world of senses; the powerful emotional impulse that rises suddenly, both unexpected and furtive, overwhelms the mind and the will by pushing the I to accomplish actions that are presented as totally legitimate and justified, as absolutely natural.

Only by constant control and obstinate presence of the self can this mechanism be checked at the threshold of the ordinary consciousness. But this threshold is mostly crossed and the soul identifies itself with this deceptive naturalness that paralyses the higher faculties of the soul. To arrest the invasion (at times the avalanche) inside the consciousness itself is not easy. Now I am able to throw it out. But it is at a terrible cost and it is enervating. I must succeed (and sometimes I do) in stopping this before it reaches the threshold of the ordinary consciousness.

This is the aim and this the victory over the spell of the world of senses, the absolute liberty attained.

*

I feel I should thank the Gods once more. The difficult moments are necessary ordeals for my development even when my own forces seem to be wanting and perhaps are indeed so.

These are moments of a painful tension that is inconceivable for one who has not faced himself in the depths. It is as though the dam that protects him has begun cracking and crumbling at places, waiting to be overrun by the mass of sensations, impulses, worries, in short, by everything from which we had freed ourselves.

But the help of the Gods is always there to one who follows the path with great seriousness and an unwavering discipline. The forces are reborn, the resolution is consolidated and the dedication made ampler and we realise we have advanced by a few steps.

*

True meditation is the only fount of knowledge; intellectual knowledge looks insipid compared with the knowledge gained through meditation. But meditation too, when it is rightly practised, is a gift of the Gods who come to reward us for our discipline.

During my afternoon meditation today, I received a flash of light about memory, the higher memory. Memory is always memory of our pre-earthly past, of our choices in the spiritual world after death, memory of the why’s that assail us here but which were placed (and resolved) in our past before birth. The higher memory is a return to the Gods and their nearness to the ‘I’ again enables us to choose freely what has already been chosen. It is the memory of a destiny that was overcome by the fact that we were able to recollect it.

*

There are two classes of creatures that reveal to us something that other human beings cannot – with rare exceptions (ascetics and saints):
the young children and the aged who have worked a lot on themselves.

In these two groups the Light of the Spirit is visible: the innocence at departure and the innocence at arrival.

In children, because subtle Entities preside over their lives and this supra-humanity is reflected in the child. In the aged who have worked on themselves because the diminished powers of the body are matched by a corresponding increase in the strength of the Spirit which shines through the physical weakening: there is an inner fire that moulds the old man and suffuses him with Light. It is with great devotion that we should approach these beings, at least those of us who are capable of seeing.

*

On the path of Initiation, it is not possible to stop at one stage of the journey. Adverse, extremely potent forces are at play at every step to arrest the initiation. If we do not confront them with equally powerful forces, the retreat is certain. But if the one who has to be initiated develops these forces within him, he then is certain to advance. Stopping midway is always risky: the battle is constant and all our forces are put into play, nothing more and absolutely nothing less.

Every test is a descent into self-knowledge and every stretch of descent requires the same force which then helps in a similar stretch of ascent. Otherwise we might not be able to come up again. 

*

When is a life harmonic? When one lives harmony?

A life is harmonic when it is not in contradiction with oneself, when outer and inner life are never in conflict; when this eternal exchange of ‘outer-inner’ is constantly transformed into an exchange between the Spirit of man and the Spirit of the world (true knowledge). This exchange can only be harmonic since the terms conform.

Outside this conformity there is only conflict and contradiction.

*

True Love, like the higher I, is above all law. It accepts the law but is absolutely independent and it can behave correctly even without the law. Its action is not conditioned by Law. In the same way as it is not conditioned by any impulse or attraction.

To love that which attracts us and evokes our sympathy is a love that is conditioned, chained, since not being free it cannot be love.
An act of love that breaks the chain of hatred and evil that shackle humanity, opens the bridge to Spiritual Forces.

True Love loves the undeserving. Only a truly strong I is capable of this. Love is moved only by Love: it irradiates without distinction and spreads over all human beings like the Sun that lets its light fall on the good as on the wicked.

None is wicked in the eyes of Love.

*

I would like to reach old age, if I am allowed, in a way that is different from the usual. In general, old age is the consolidation of habits, of places, of certain relationships with people, with things and undoubtedly with certain habits of the soul and the Spirit. I am working, on the contrary – and here is the main difference – on almost totally ridding myself of habits, on dropping automation of every kind.

The place I need is only my body from which, however, I am capable of distancing myself. My true house is my soul which I try to keep as empty as possible of attachments and as full of the Spirit.

For this, it is necessary to know how to distinguish between habit, discipline, and freedom.

Habit is always an automatisation that excludes freedom, an automatism that leaves the soul perturbed, in pain and surely ill-at-ease.

Discipline is the choice of norms to be followed. Every true choice is an exercise of freedom: there is no compulsion other than that of the free subject.

Discipline tends to become automatism but it is a tendency that needs to be checked.

Free choice includes beginning that we must renew everyday. In this way each day is new and fresh. Even when we contemplate the same plant over and over again, it is never the same. Its spiritual appearance is always new and so is our soul. This is the true art of living. Habit is the death of this art, it is the indolence of the soul getting extinguished, it is the refusal to see what truly surrounds us; the refusal to continue on the path and wanting to halt at the first resting-place.

Habit is not a defect of youth (forever moving and in quest of the new, even if at time erroneous), it is indeed a defect of old age that is tired and withered. Youth steeped in habit is premature old age.

I should like to remind myself, so as not to have any ambiguity, that every movement has its cause always in the spiritual and so habit is the extinguishing of the Spirit in us, the Spirit that needs our consent and not automatisms if it wishes to live in us.

*

To know oneself is the principal way in order to find out the reasons of our existence here and now, the reasons for our life’s situations, the reasons for our joys and for our sorrows but, above all, the reasons for which we have been made thus and not in any other way.

All these reasons are imprinted in us, in our deep-rooted will. It is only by knowing ourselves that we will be able to change the course of our events for us and, partially, for others. Destinies are interwoven.

I can help others by helping myself: but it is precisely this self that needs to be discovered.

*

The real dimension of the obstacles to be overcome, the power of the inner adversities to be conquered, the strength to be acquired to conquer the obstacles placed on the path of inner development by ourselves, can be observed only through concentration and meditation.

In the descent into ourselves, in retracing our past experiences and finding their real significance, we bring out into the open deep roots of evil that enslave our soul and its forces to destiny (Karma). Concentration and meditation allow us to acquire that Light which enables us to illumine our inner obscurity which is the real obscurity, the outer darkness being merely its projection.

The more Light we have the deeper we can descend and the deeper we descend, the clearer we see the obstacle to be conquered. If the obstacle were to come up at the beginning of our journey we would be confounded.

*

It is truly a great step forward to be conscious that our life with all its errors, from the time and place of birth till the present moment could not have been different from what it has been.

Our life is the general consequence of what we are and what we have been, of the development of our soul and of the forces that work in life. There is no external situation, economic, political, or personal, painful or happy, that is not the fruit of this development, that we did not consent to shaping.

Only when we are convinced that there is no cheater-destiny that can swindle us into ugly situations can there emerge a sense of responsibility which pushes us to truly free action. But we should know how to read ourselves, free of prejudices and recriminations.

*

And still, despite its errors and its falls, the soul is Light and strives to move towards the Light. It suffers and complains in the shadow projected on it by the badly used body, but even in this shadow it seeks its lost Light. The story of every man, why, indeed of mankind itself, is the quest for this Light: the pangs of the soul to recover itself and to return to its world of origin.

*

Angel of God who move in me and have interlaced yourself in my Karma, You who unite my past to my future, giving so much meaning and coherence to my successive lives, You who accompany and guide me in my waking up and in my dreams, You who reverberate in my deafened soul and relume its lustreless shadow, may I be capable of feeling Your Spiritual memory, the true path of my life.

*

In the Supra-sensible, time does not exist, time does not consume: all is perpetual present. We can get an inkling of this in meditation and concentration when they are practised with the right intensity. On the contrary, Time becomes the measure of the sensible: because either it passes too quickly or not at all. This is the constant preoccupation of the soul, the obsession of our ego, not of the I, since it lives and moves in the contemporaneity of the present.

And still it is on time that we here in the sensible consciousness have to work. We should stop it from haunting us, from becoming a source of uncontrollable agitation, we should have the force in these cases to leap out of time, to stop, whatever the situation might be. In the extended emptiness of the present, time, then, is transformed into Light and the Light reveals the solution. But despite that, we cannot waste even a moment of our time, because we would have to justify it. Today, Time has become a commodity as well, to be consumed, and consumed intellectually too.

And this is one of the greatest of responsibilities that man has to face: to guide time back to its human dimension and to make of it a quality of the soul.

*

The emotion that most urges the soul to free itself from its corporeality is pain, which can act at the deepest level of the body. It is only love that is superior to pain, the love that reaches upto its sacrificial height.

Love is transfiguration of pain: an unlimited capacity of sacrifice. Pain, like love, is unbearable when it is lived obtusely, without any awareness: pain is never absurd in itself but it is the rational being that denies it, and along with it, the help from the Spiritual World. It is the I that pushes us to the pain repulsed by Ego and it will continue to do so until we realise what we need to transform.

Every time that concentration and meditation bring me in touch with the Spiritual World and I am steeped in ananda, in beatitude, at the end of the exercise I feel completely undeserving of the felicity experienced and there is boundless gratitude to the Gods for their infinite goodness. Then, the many imperfections weighing on me, the many incapacities that I am unable to overcome, the things that I do not wish to do but still do become clear. The path to be trod is still long, but I am irreversibly determined to walk on it, especially now that I can feel the love of the Gods.

*

Lord, let my prayer be constant, let there not be a gulf between what is in me and what is outside me.
May the most intense of my prayers be that silence in whose depth You manifest yourself in the purest Light.

*

I am not very methodical or regular by nature: I abhor the repetitiveness but I have acquired method and rhythm thanks to a daily, severe exercise. None is more attached to being methodical and disciplined than he who has made them the fruit of his work. So during the last days I have also learnt patience and tolerance towards those who frequently upset my work. A patience and a tolerance that are calm, almost devout and even more difficult than discipline when lived in a spirit of total surrender.

However, I feel I should not lose or slow down the rhythm I have acquired. The important thing is to understand that there is no experience that does not have its essence of necessity and which always occurs at the right moment. It is we who fail to see their positiveness, who get irritated, chained to a time that is never the true one, a habiting time that keeps on repeating the past, being blind and obtuse before the new.

Today, I seem to have got back my rhythm: I need greater flexibility; to feel less hampered, to be much more free towards everything that surrounds me. We should concentrate on the world and take interest in it without, however, becoming attached to it. We become attached every time we comply to please it, when we act, and in some way or another, want to begin to please it. Not that wanting to please the world is bad: it becomes bad when it is done to satisfy the Ego. To be able to analyse, distinguish and evaluate emotions is the most difficult and the most important; an equilibrium in this field can be got only from our Higher Self.

This is the reason that turns our emotion into the most treacherous base, the base on which our defects can be masked better, the base on which we are happy to bask in the light warmth of a pleasure deemed innocent. But it is not so: the weight of the sensible, of the body is always present.

The lives of the Initiates, the Saints, the Yogis, are valuable documents in this field. Feeling is ploughed with the plough of pure thought and with the hoe of the will. After much strenuous labour, the hidden treasure is finally found, the pure pearl of a pure feeling few poets have sought, the diamond born from the womb of the earth after a gestation of millions of years. We cannot content ourselves with little trinkets that, in addition, are not even created with good taste.

But to liberate ourselves from superficial feeling, we risk death unless we arm ourselves with the solid filter of the mind and with the powerful support of the force of Will.

*

To feel the presence of the I in the physical world, to experience the encounter of the I with the physical world, signifies participating in the miracle of the imaginative creation of the world, truly seeing the world not from outside but from inside, it signifies being the I of things that are visible: this is identity, the tat tvam asi (you are That) of the Upanishads. All that is unknown to the ordinary consciousness. It is only through a daily ascetic exercise that it can help us participate in this encounter. It is the imaginative consciousness that the artists possess unconsciously. A new imaginative vision, a permanent artistic creation is within the reach of almost any man who wants to come out of the exclusive bondage of the rational consciousness.

A true thinker, an adept of meditation and concentration, cannot but be a creator of images, or rather to be more concrete, a seer of images, which are a gift of the Gods. Their descent to meet man. A parenthesis: for some days now, I have found myself, for one reason or another, interrupted, not for a moment but for a long time, in my growing determination to widen my discipline. This prevents me from completing it because the time is up by then for me to pass on to other things. This happens to me both in the morning and afternoon. It is useless to worry or to become tense: it is necessary not to lose patience and poise and stress one’s resolve. If necessary, modify the form of the rhythm. But it would be grave to let the soul become angry or depressed.

The Gods know the obstacles that have been placed and they plumb the quality of our progress, of our conduct in their regard. It is a good verification of whether we are living the Logos even in such trying situations: we come out fortified. In truth, I am often confronted, even though in different guises, with the problem of tolerance. One who thinks too highly of himself is certainly intolerant, intolerant of another’s point of view or even of the other’s ignorance and who, therefore, does not merit any form of devotion.

Tolerance is an exercise of willing, of thinking and of feeling.
Tolerance is never passive resignation, something to which we must submit because we cannot do anything else. It is always an action that is willed and won against our Ego, against our indomitable psyche. Tolerance is induced by thought, consciously, with awareness, not blindly and obtusely. Indeed we are so much more tolerant when we are conscious of what we tolerate, when we know how striking the difference is. Tolerance is true love that accepts the other, that sees things from another’s point of view, that gives itself totally to the other and this is not a sort of condescension but turns love into a vehicle of its own message.

Only when tolerance is lived in its totality, does it become an instrument of askesis. Only the higher ‘I’ can be tolerant and never the Ego: whatever the Ego may be, it is for reasons that are different from the goals of tolerance. Tolerance is, then, simply turned into an instrument.

*

When we meet someone we meet but ourselves whether he is good or bad, beautiful or ugly. It is not enough to say this or to repeat it, we need to truly feel it.

We usually reject the other when we perceive in him qualities that are not too pleasant. And yet we have them, consciously or unconsciously, consciously in the sense that we imagine to have conquered them and are very proud of the fact. But our presumption is out of place because nothing is definitively overcome and what we see in another should remind us of what in can still awaken in us. And this presumption is a result of ignorance due to our incapacity to know ourselves. Here is why I need to see myself in the person I meet: he is more than my brother, he is I.

*

If this is how we go through the encounter, we are victorious over Cain who wants to kill Abel. The ultimate purpose of the earthly I (the Ego) is to annihilate Cain who wants to invade the other, Abel, in order to kill him by asserting himself.

The exit from the earthly paradise, from the Edenic state, that is the exit from one’s own etheric body in order to enter one’s body of flesh, has produced the inversion of the spiritual forces. The expulsion of man from paradise brought about the birth of Cain, the reversal of spiritual forces which embodied in flesh became forces of aversion. The physical body that was to be the temple, the guardian of the spiritual part of man, has become, in fact, its killer. “What happened to your brother?” demanded the potent voice of God, that is, what have you done with your spiritual part? And Cain’s answer, that is of the body dominated by the adverse forces: “Why should I be Abel’s guardian?”

This is the rebellion, the birth of freedom, which asserts itself as the primordial act of free-will proclaimed over this homicide.

The body, Cain, does not wish anymore to be the spirit’s guardian or servant and goes beyond the assertion of his own autonomy, it desires the fall of the Spirit and Cain’s homicide is re-enacted in human life perpetually every day. The Spirit of Hatred offers no respite. Without its extinction, that is the extinction of the Ego, Spirit cannot rise again. The askesis for the elimination of Ego makes of the eliminating force a true and real force of the Higher I: the force that was born in the earthly paradise and which we need to reconquer. With it we can pursue the path beyond matter.

*

In every spiritual experience at least three qualities are necessary, necessary even though insufficient:

dignity without which we cannot cross the Threshold; the grade of dignity is judged from the spiritual hierarchies;
courage with which to face the inner impediments that hinder our transformation and which pushes us to follow the path till the end;
patience that consents to accept the verdict of the Gods, our failures and our falls without despairing.

The slow and constant acquisition of these qualities directs us towards the course to be run and encourages the intervention of superior forces.

Courage in the face of adversity, especially in illness, is finally our act of faith in the commands of the Spirit, in its power but, above all, in its love.

If I had to add a fourth quality, I would add faithfulness but I would be rather tempted to assimilate it into patience. Perhaps faithfulness needs a force of inflexible will, capable of mastering any temptation and it wants an unlimited self-giving too.

Dignity is what is required to bear fearlessly the illuminations that the Gods bestow on us, so as not to be buried under and destroyed by the weight of Wisdom that we feel coming into ourselves from above, without having the capacity to bear it.

*

This happens so rarely to me. After a meditation has reached truly its apex and a sudden flash tears the clouds from the spiritual sky, there descends a spark of Wisdom, a whole world of revelation and then a question rises to the lips: to someone like me? am I really worthy?

And the aspiration, the will to be better than what I have been invades me and I know that what I have been given is only out of the boundless goodness of the Gods.

*

To be certain every evening that one has moved one step forward, however small, on the path of self-betterment, would also mean that the day has not been lived in vain.

It is possible to make innumerable little improvements in our thinking, feeling and willing. Our conduct needs to be closely observed. We also need to be careful that the big aims that are difficult to attain, do not make us forget the smaller and constant steps to be taken in order to realise them. The small but ceaseless things that we have achieved take us closer to the dignity asked for by the Gods, than the Great Aims we only long for.

*

To avoid a discussion is better for the inner development. It is difficult to find common ground between one who is caught up by dialectics and one who strives to shape his thought with its originating light and its originating life. The discussion ends by getting bogged down in dialectics and by inevitably provoking the spirit of aversion and this happens precisely in the one who strives for the inner development: it is he who feels more poignantly the divergence of vision, the banality of the cultural automatisms that move the other and, therefore, he risks falling into intolerance and consequently into the spirit of aversion. In such a case, silence is better: to accept or at least not to challenge the other person’s opinion.

This is one of the most difficult disciplines because it means silencing the Ego when it is most roused. We have to succeed, we really must succeed in overcoming the sense of a fight with the other and the frustration that can follow from the other person’s interpretation of our silence. We must succeed, we must succeed at any cost: it is a hole that is made in one’s soul, a bringing to the surface of useless, even encumbering and harmful stuff that we need to throw off.

Then we feel light but strong, understanding but firm and confirmed in the vision.

Only then can we utter to the other the right word, at the right moment and in the right tone. This too is part of the discipline to be practised and the difficulties to be faced, specific to every discipline.

*

Christmas of ’87 in Pondicherry. When it will be midnight here, somewhere else it will be full day and the infant Jesus will not have been born yet. It is as though here we were anticipating his birth. This is so if we keep to the physical time.

But, in truth, it is our soul’s midnight. When all is despairingly dark, all is annulled, the sun rises at midnight. Until the deepest night sets in our soul, the Divine cannot be born at all. It is only when the physical sun ceases to shine on our senses, when our physical senses cease to cling to the sensible appearances of the world and a profound night sets on them and on the soul enveloped in darkness renouncing the false light, that the spiritual Sun, the Sun of Midnight, rises in us, resplendent, potent, in a dawn of love. This is the significance of Christmas Night.

At a given moment of our inner journey, we need to pass from the ordinary to the spiritual memory. We really feel the need to liberate ourselves from the memory of blood, that is of the mechanisms of the instincts, from the automatisms of a reason connected to the race, thanks to the ancestral deposits in our psyche. All said and done, we feel the need to be truly free, freed from the props of corporeality, crystallised in our memory of day-to-day. The greater part of our thoughts, our sentiments, our conduct are moved by this memory and no one quite realises this.

Knowledge of ourselves, a rigorous and persistent attention to every detail of our soul’s experience, leads us to become familiar with this mechanical life below, for the greater part concealed from us. When we uncover this unexpected part in ourselves (and this occurs as we liberate our thinking and ascend towards the higher parts of our being) we call down another kind of memory, another type of automatisms so that it shows at every moment our spiritual standard, a sort of intuition that gives us the memory of what we learned on the journey towards the supra-sensible world but which has fallen into oblivion.

We invoke the spiritual memory (and we feel its slowly emerging). It is this memory that replaces the lower automatisms with higher ones, even if the latter, in reality, are never automatisms, but new and instantaneous responses to the needs that come up.

The spiritual memory, thanks to the askesis of meditation and concentration, gets more and more consolidated and becomes a memory of preceding lives. The memory of preceding births directs us to interpret the events of the present incarnation and to prepare the qualities required for our perfecting.

*

My sister Isa is dying. She takes morphine every four hours to quieten the terrible and persistent pain. But now even morphine is not enough. And still, exhausted and weak as she may be, she saves the little energy she has to give lessons of old Greek at the Seminary of Cremona twice a week. It is her sacrificial offering, her self-offering which in her case is changed into an external rite as well, for the betterment of herself and of the others. I understand her force and her weakness. I understand the force of pain in its double nature, both paralysing and sublimating. I myself suffer from it even though not like her. Short but most piercing: if it were to last longer, I do not know if I would be able to bear it, I do not know if I would be able to do without would be able to bear it, I do not know if I would be able to do without would be able to bear it—(text repeats slightly but OCR consistent)—Nevertheless, pain is the only acceptable tranquilliser we have, and therefore, we cannot waste it in order to receive the commiseration from others or their praise, or things of that sort.

We cannot waste it either by throwing it away in despair or by denying it.

Pain should be an offering of oneself without compensation and at the same time, as far as possible, an instrument of self-knowledge and knowledge of one’s destiny, a ladder for a laborious ascent towards our highest self or an abyss into which we have to descend to recover our divine essence.

*

Tomorrow I will begin my day of silence: I want to experiment the maximum control I have upon myself, stop observing the others but observe and control my soul’s reactions to the words and behaviour of others. And so no more discussion, no more dialectic, no more intellectual or cultural interference. To fill up the soul with calm, with gentleness and to observe when and where the spirit of aversion rises in me and block off its every outlet or utterance. To start truly living the silence in the soul, not so much a silence of words (which, in any case, the less used, the better) but a silence of inner reactions, a silence of emotions, a silence of agitations and impulsive movements, a silence of everything that constitutes our agitated personality. In short, the silence of the Ego.

It is from this Silence, from this deep-rooted calm of the depths that the Light and Force of the I can emerge: from the soul that is totally consecrated to the Spirit.

*

There is no action, feeling or thought, however small, that is not part of the present Karma and that of the future. It might be easy for us to understand how memory preserves a record of the past and how this record deposited in the soul waits for an occasion, inner or outer, to re-emerge and form part of our consciousness again. But it is much more difficult for us to understand how an action of ours can, when the right occasion arises, recognise its roots in our I.

The difficulty of comprehension is probably at two levels: one at the level of time which makes us forget the action committed especially when we consider that action to be of no importance. And this urges us to be conscious of every action, including the one we mistakenly dismiss as trivial. The other difficulty is because of the change that the action has undergone after it has left us and run its course in the human world (and in the spiritual one). When it returns to us, it is so full of consequence and loaded with a sense of responsibility that it becomes unrecognisable and we are unable to believe that we were the origin of that action. We should reflect upon the weight of responsibilities that we ignored while the act was being done. Not to recognise this makes us responsible not only for our karma but also for the others’.

*

It is always a good exercise to verify the results of a past action, to analyse how it got changed and then reappeared to us.

It is an exercise of meditation and concentration and not merely of an intellectual giving and having. It is an exercise that brings to light the soul’s bonds to corporeality and it helps the soul to free itself from them.

*

The day of silence was half-successful: there are impulses and mechanisms that I still cannot grasp before their physical appearance. This is a sign of the long road I must still tread; the road is long and littered with unknown obstacles, never straight but tortuous and the goal is not visible at every curve. But the exercise of silence, the persistent observation of the soul’s life, enables me to know what I did not know about myself: the more confident one is of knowing oneself, the less one truly knows oneself. Feelings, thoughts, true meanings of what we do elude us, their knowledge is given only at a certain level of consciousness. When one starts approaching that level, there occurs the risk of slumping into discouragement and losing the hope of realising anything. One has the feeling of having done one precious little so far and what still remains to be done is too much for us.

At this point we must not get obsessed with haste: there are no short-cuts to the threshold of the Spiritual World. Faith and the certainty of the path we have taken must never fade. We have to be thankful to the Gods who deemed us worthy of seeing truly and at long last the obstacles that were so far concealed from us. A new force to sustain our determination is to be found. Probably new exercises will be shown.

But it is important to develop the knowledge of what happens in us and to persevere in changing. Now I have come to know that a will is necessary whereas previously I did not think it possible: a will that is strong, unstoppable and invincible.

*

I found myself fall suddenly silent while I was narrating an episode that happened to me. I became conscious of the pleasure I was experiencing in holding the listeners’ attention and telling them who I was. I felt the roots that the soul had thrown into the ego’s soil: it was an innocent thing on the surface but, in reality, it was a hidden bond that like the string of a kite, for all its length, does not allow the soul to fully take off. The pleasure of recounting is always the pleasure of recounting one’s self, the pleasure of narrating our own selves: how good we are, how courageous we are, etc. etc. The problem is being aware of this and to challenge the ego’s mechanism otherwise the soul and its forces continue to be nourished by the lower nature instead of by the higher. In such a case every impulse initially positive, every impetus of love, fall on rocky ground which does not foster growth; in fact, they fall on a ground that changes them.

It is this terrain that we should know and work on, ploughing it tenaciously, laboriously, clearing it not only of boulders but also of little stones: otherwise, how will the tender little plant of New Man ever grow?

*

And inevitably, today, December 31, the year comes to a close.

People are perhaps celebrating to forget their own failures, to forget what they do not know and that which will determine their future, or perhaps they are celebrating their hope which cannot throw roots without a will that pursues the profound and absolute intent which moves man unconsciously. It is this intent that I seek to realise and move within me so wholly conscious of himself knows well what this intent is only when it is lost from sight! A little disagreement, the smallest of joys or the smallest of personal satisfactions is enough to make us forget our resolve. It is only the Memory of Divine Things, that Grace descending from the Spiritual World, that can give us the Force of the unflinching resolve: the Force that runs through our whole life right up to the physical.

This is the entreaty of the new year and in making this entreaty I am quite aware of how much my responsibility has grown and how much more my faithfulness needs to grow.

May the Angel who works in me as He does in all beings, be my Guardian.

*

When the preciousness of life is affirmed and proclaimed, we usually affirm an abstract, mental thing. Life is indeed precious but for reasons we cannot know easily. We affirm that life is precious for itself and this is truly an abstraction.

Life is never an end in itself. Life as an end in itself justifies merely an indiscriminate desire of living which as the Buddha proclaimed, is the cause of all our suffering including death. Life is given to us in order to realise a very specific goal: the development and the overcoming of Karma and in this goal it is interconnected with the goals of all other beings and other collectivities. To take away life from any being signifies impeding it from attaining the goal for which it is born here and now, and at the same time precisely because of the interconnectedness of our destinies, it signifies changing the destiny of others. Seen thus, there is a far greater responsibility than we imagine. The society that condemns to death condemns ineluctably itself as well.

It is possible to sacrifice one’s own life out of self-abnegation and out of love for the others; but such an action enables us to attain not the goal of the Ego, its desires, its reminiscences, its false realities. Such a feeling, fixed to the egoistic nature, only converses with the Ego, either by projecting itself in the past or by projecting itself in the future: man remains inexorably closed in himself, in the noisy void of his lower imagination.

*

Something has happened here at the Ashram that has pushed people to judge. Judging in itself is not bad, it is what pushes us into making judgments. The impulse that seizes and moves our thought nearly always belongs to the dark zones of the soul. It is this impulse that we need to arrest and which stops us from seeing the thing to be judged in its bare reality over and above our psychic colouring. If the event is seen in its bareness, received rather with great readiness, it is possible to see a positive aspect instead of rushing at once into a judgment that almost always calls into question the morality of the others and never our own. All this is not possible without an unceasing and disciplined education of the soul, without a constant and disciplined observation of its movements, its impulses and an accurate identification of their origin. One cannot love one’s neighbour in this daily effort, otherwise the love is merely a proclamation, verbal and mental; or we take up as love that which is convenient to love and to repel with a moral judgment that which is difficult.

True love for one’s neighbour, especially when the neighbour is one’s enemy, is born from a soul that is free of judgments, capable of seizing, unaffected by its sympathies and antipathies, the Light of the other person’s ‘I’, splendour even in a sea of mud.

*

Meditation, like self-concentration, is a difficult activity because of its very simplicity. The difficulty consists in renouncing dialectics, the logical use of concepts, the ordinary analysis of the subject that one has chosen as the theme of the meditation. Meditating is not setting in motion the forces of the intellect bound to the cerebral organ: rather it is the contrary. It is putting into motion the inner forces of the soul, it is giving life to an imaginative activity, a deep contemplation of images that rise from the soul, which is the contemplation of the subject selected beforehand. The warmth of feeling accompanies the contemplation.

The art of meditation is to prolong as much as possible that state of contemplation, it is to fortify as much as possible the further forces of the soul. At a later stage when one is sure of possessing the forces in a state of calm and the clearest tranquillity, it is possible to pass on to the forms of thought that will appear to the soul as spontaneous and intuitive. But this will be an activity of a thought free of bonds, of a thought that is also contemplative.

*

The Spirit’s mode of working in us is always unexpected, unusual. The Spirit in us is the ‘I’ that throws up its signs, its suggestions, its spurs to the Ego, in accordance with the capacities of comprehension of the latter. And these capacities, honestly, are very rare.

I thank the Gods for having helped me in getting out of the sudden crisis that had engulfed me for the last two days. I suddenly felt out of place: the fact of being forced to interrupt my discipline, for a host of reasons, to see the disturbance caused to the resolve I made quite sometime back to intensify my exercises, which is, in the final account, the real purpose of my coming to Pondy, to find myself almost like a person come here to have a holiday or to do his shopping — all this gave me the feeling of being really out of place and if India was then my relationship with India was over. In short, two days of bad humour, of instability, of distress to the soul. And this is why I request the Gods to make me understand what was going on. Deep in my soul I had the feeling that it was the Spiritual World that had made the request to me. I did not clearly understand what the request was but felt certain it would take me forward.

Today in my afternoon meditation I received the answer — clear, unequivocal, difficult to express in words, extremely simple in its indication: to do better what I have been doing, adding to the realisation what Sri Aurobindo calls equanimity and which the Master describes as a conscious, stable positioning of the soul.

*

A still more potent will has to be developed in order to detach the ego from the soul, to liberate definitively the soul from the see-saw of the ups and downs of its sentient part, a see-saw characterised by a thought that is nourished by the downs instead of by the ups. This is why there rises a feeling that is affected indiscriminately by the varied situations, a feeling that affects our humour and is moulded by our moods and all this in turn moves our thought, our reasoning and these move the behaviour, which I hold to be justified when the help of a rationality that manages to hide the fact of having been moved by all that preceded: in short, we build our spider’s web in which we are finally enmeshed. In this spider’s web we are agitated and the soul, thinking to free itself, gets into a frantic flutter. Equanimity is the only remedy.

But it comes as the result of a victory of the Ego over itself, of its detachment from the soul which, when deprived of the focus of the Ego, slowly stops fluttering.

Immobile once again, calm, serene and ready for any eventuality, the force of the ‘I’ in its ascents and from it ascends the light of the celestial part of the soul. But it is necessary for the Will to take one more leap, one more step forward. It must block the feeling at the origin, the feeling should not be born at the trigger of an event. This must first be read by the free thought and out of this profound reading the corresponding feeling should rise. It is from the stability of the soul that the feeling must move, not from the Ego. I must from now on fix my aim on this: what is easy for the others is difficult for me, a twofold sign of fire. But this is my stuff from birth that I must renew.

Why do I say that the Gods have answered me? Because when I sat down to meditate I had chosen a totally different subject upon which, strangely, I was unable to concentrate despite my insistence. Then, all of a sudden and gushing out, the subject of equanimity came and with it alluded itself to the happenings of these days and the soul finally opened itself to me and appeared before me baring even its most hidden recesses.

From that moment, meditation flowed smoothly and full of memorable things. May the Gods grant me the Spiritual Memory in order to give to my Will and to my Intention, the right direction.

*

Now I can no more limit myself to living in the Spirit during certain pre-determined moments of the day only. The rhythm has been acquired, the surroundings prepared and the consecration is therefore easier. From now on, the whole day must become a temple of the Spirit: from morning when the soul takes possession of this body until evening when it leaves it. I must face with resolution, patience and care, the future course of my life in the Spirit or rather the permanence of the Spirit in my daily life. I must, henceforth, widen the sphere in which the soul irradiates its light: in any event, at any time, in any thought. In the beginning, it is always difficult but persistence; faith and the help of the Gods allow us to conquer the obstacle. We cannot invoke “O Lord! O Lord!” at every moment and then not do the work He expected from us.

*

I am once again confronted with the acquisition of equanimity: the sentient being and the affective soul rebel at the birth of this quality. It is mostly a rebellion of feeling and of reason which does its utmost to justify a rebellion of feeling. There are moments in which the protest turns into will and gives me the measure of the attachments that entangle the soul and the ‘I’. It is only by battling in the depth that we get the knowledge of ourselves, only when we plunge the scalpel of direct action into our most hidden part do we become conscious of the emergence of the negative forces, of our attachment to things, to people, to ourselves: diffidence, bitterness, envy, jealousy and so on, all mixed into one current contrary to any inner transformation of ourselves. We should not take equanimity to mean indifference to joy and to pain. Just the contrary. It is to feel them without being overwhelmed, it is to penetrate the heart of things and beings with a pure feeling.

But this feeling does not rise spontaneously, it must liberate itself — at the cost of pain — from all that impedes it from attaining the centre of every Being, that is from everything that hampers its path to the Divine. And this everything is within us. It is we.

*

Have you ever seen couch-grass? It is a small, apparently slender blade of grass that hardly emerges from the ground. Have you ever tried to uproot it? It may seem silly but just try. The little blade of grass keeps out to be surprisingly strong, you pull and the blade of grass keeps lengthening and pulling up a tangle of other blades of grass from under the earth and followed by roots that are even more profound and whose ends cannot be seen and grow ever stronger making their uprooting impossible. This small, superficial blade of grass thus revealed to be an unexpectedly solid, hidden knot of organic life rooted to the earth.

Our imperfections too are the same, they appear superficial and we do not pay them much attention. But if we were to seriously confront them we would realise in our depth how extensive they are and the resistance they can offer and the kind of roots that are implanted in our soul.

We usually think that battles presumed to be easy are not worth fighting but, in reality, they are the most difficult: this is how our egoistic presumption sees things.

*

O Lord, I am still far from You.

You fill me with bliss every morning when You manifest in the puissant clouds that reflect the golden sunrise or in the smile of those who meet and greet me.

I am full of joy and gratitude and I thank you but I know I am still far from You and that You are full of utterly profound and infinite sweetness. My inability to feel this covers me with a shadow of languor and sadness.

But what You bestow on me now is what I deserve; nevertheless, it is a sure point of support for me to resume my journey and to come ever closer to You.

*

The inevitability of Death, at least for now, should become a steady focus in our vision of life. We must not, however, let ourselves be obsessed by this inevitability, it should simply mean that the experience we are going through has this certainty: that it must end. The certainty of the inevitability of death should force us to change quantity into quality of experience and to replace the dispersion of our endeavours and the pressure of life’s desire with a more indrawn and more decisive attitude. We need to give a greater significance to life, to every fraction of its aim and finality.

Our inability to read our own destiny, our karma, our inability to understand the opportunities that come to us, being obsessed with living, seeing, experiencing, has never helped to understand what needs to be really done but has been found to be distracting from true self-knowledge and without self-knowledge we lack the real subject so as to give the real significance to our personal experience. Death, then, is not the end of our experience but the “halt” placed by the Spiritual World to prevent us from losing our way.

He who begins to understand what it means to truly live one’s own experience feels the responsibility of every instant of time that passes and the quantity of things that he has not done and must do. He knows he is always behind schedule.

Fear or haste are not what will save us but only the capacity of absolute calm that makes us ready to hear the Inner Word: it is this word that will suggest to us what needs to be done, the priorities to be respected, the basic activities to be taken up. And it is in this way that the thought about the inevitability of Death fills our life in a positive way.

*

The Spirit always seeks to manifest itself to us, but we impede its way with our imperfections, with our presumption, with all those links that act as a barrier to its manifestation.

The Spirit is generous and insistent and sometimes it succeeds in opening a passage through the tenebrous thickness of our consciousness. That is why we have very intense but very brief illuminations, instantaneous almost. Like the one I had this morning when I perceived the contradictory multiplicity of the egos and the harmonic unity of the I’s. I felt all around me a crowding of events, of anxieties, of the destinies of persons I keep running into. The weight of each existence in its own familiar circle, in its own country, in its own race, an intercrossing of destinies, of contrasting relationships, of desperate endeavours to come out of the circle of dark suffering that keeps clashing with the suffering of others and for each one this suffering, this living, this seeking his own suffering, his own living, his own seeking, closed, isolated and unrepeatable.

But above this teeming agitation that, at times, seems meaningless, self-contradictory and contradictory with the others, there is the harmonic world of the I’s.

A Higher ‘I’ silently guides each destiny, with respect for its own part that is incarnated and which intervenes realising the consequences of each event, sending summons and reminders, proposing encounters and so on. I have felt the action of these I’s according to the universal plan of the Spirit, in harmony among themselves so as to always protect from the wounds caused by their lower parts.

And thus, little by little, as I was climbing from the swarm of contradictory events and pains to the worlds above, harmony, light, truth opened the way in my soul to a great compassion, to a great tolerance, and a great bliss upheld me. All this was intense and quick. There remained in me only the desire of a silent prayer within.

*

My God, let Your Will be truly done!

I keep repeating this to myself and I feel this repetition to myself is the ante-chamber of the Grace.

Of Your Grace and not according to my merits but in accordance with Your Love let Your Will be done.

This laying myself before You is still a self-offering in ignorance, in a simple but total acceptance. It is an act of faith and not conscious yet, not an act of knowledge yet.

And therefore, my God, may I succeed in doing Your Will because I know it, because I know what I am doing; only in this way can the ascetic announce Your coming to men.

Solitude is always frightening but it is necessary to understand the positive and negative forces that are in us. Solitude is the measure of our autonomy from the world, the measure of the richness of our inner world, of our capacity of dialogue with the Spiritual World.

*

Solitude becomes a drama and, at times, a tragedy when our autonomy vis-à-vis feeling is non-existent or too scarce. It is feeling that assails the solitary man, makes him close upon himself, envelops his thoughts by distorting them; a feeling that has clearly remained at the level of the Ego, its desires, its reminiscences, its false realities. Such a feeling, fixed to the egoistic nature, only converses with the Ego, either by projecting itself in the past or by projecting itself in the future: man remains inexorably closed in himself, in the noisy void of his lower imagination.

*

I am in Madras at the Sindoori Hotel, next to the big Apollo Hospital. Within: music, swimming-pool, numerous little restaurants. Outside: pain, suffering, death. A wall of glass covered by a curtain is enough to hide the reality from us, to blunt the consciousness.

It is not necessary to keep hammering this truth but it should not be totally forgotten either. In the end, the reality of the Hospital is more real.

*

There is a saying: “Give up all and you will find all.” It is so very true, and yet this work takes so many lives.

The problem that I face is altogether different: what does leaving one’s body signify? What does giving up a part of oneself signify? We have to clearly stop looking upon the body as our life’s goal, and stop identifying ourselves with it: we are not our body, but it is always a part of us.

But how healthy is the mysticism that looks upon the body as a taboo to be rejected? And yet, it is an instrument created and inhabited by the Spirit, absolutely necessary to the Spirit for its experience here in the physical world. To drive back the body into sin, to refuse to consider it as part of us, to blame it for all the possible evil: do we not, in this way, deny the experience of the physical world? Then why are we born? The truth is that in the experience we need to have here and now, there is also the experience of the transformation of our body: the purpose of this experience is not to deny the instrument that enables us to do it, but to transform it, to make it an ever perfect instrument that is increasingly responsive to the final human condition.

*

The spiritual experience is thought to be very easy: a dash of “communion” in the West, some meditations in the East and both with a feeling of wishy-washy sentimentality. There is quite an abundance of this both in the East and in the West.

The spiritual experience, on the contrary, is most difficult. Yes, it is full of joy and feeling but these result from a discipline that has made the will keener. Yes, it is full of simplicity but that is due to the untying of the knots that bind our soul. Why do I keep repeating what I have already said? Because, as usual, the spiritual experience has touched me with one of its unexpected flashes, while I was doing my morning reading by the sea. An unexpected flash, clear and precise, and the scene before my eyes that I see every morning was suddenly transformed and yet remained the same. Things, people were all made of light in their physical appearance but what had really changed was what they truly were in their essence. But this essence was not in front of me, foreign to me, something different from me, it was in me. I felt I was experiencing the I.

And in me the feeling of bliss grew. An incalculably long flash. Only a yearning for that moment remained and the trusting and grateful hope that it would quickly return.

*

Patience towards ourselves is always needed, especially when we have resolved to take a step forward and we realise that we do not yet have the strength. Patience even towards ourselves, in such a case, is the most correct attitude, one that can save us from every type of depression and discouragement. Patience is a force higher than resignation since it is the preparation for acquiring what we lack; it is a sort of parenthesis that we give ourselves to understand better what needs to be done. It is a momentary rest of the will in order to get back its élan but above all it is a moment of the stronger faith, it is our speechless entreaty to the Spiritual World for help. It is the understanding that we cannot do anything on our own, that the autonomy that is required is vis-à-vis our lower nature and not vis-à-vis the Gods. Our patience is indeed a small thing compared with the patience of the Higher Forces.

*

I feel Love in me but not patient love. I feel love but it is still too linked to my nature that is over-enthusiastic, over-impetuous. A love that is a little more cold and perhaps more patient, does not rush towards the other, is not even wounded by the other. I experience this daily.

When the feelings are expressed through the temperament (sanguine or phlegmatic, bilious or cold) they get changed in any case. The truth is that they get filtered and coloured by temperament instead of by the liberated thought.

*

Now, I know that there are so many little things of everyday that give me the measure of my transformation, so many little things of everyday that if resolved within me, resolve, in their totality, big problems. And so I have learnt to be attentive to everything, to the slightest movement of my soul. But I am unable to control it always. I find observing others helpful because I find their defects in myself. This enables me to have goodwill towards them.

*

Men die so that man can live and God be born. A potent truth from the great spiritual Master that Sri Aurobindo was. Men will have to die until they are liberated from human limit, that is from all that psychological rubbish that our daily existence is fed day in and day out. Then the God-Man will be born and live, the Archetypal Man from whom we are derived and whom we have altered and rendered unrecognisable in our descent into the physical. So unrecognisable that God the Father had him reconstituted by God the Son, the God-Man. It is on this new model that we have to orient our re-ascent.

I have no doubt that Mother attempted and accomplished the work on the cells. The more our consciousness is transformed into the eternal consciousness, the more this can be done positively. But I am not sure about the disciples who want to do the same experiment without rising up to the level where those forces that work in the profundity of our corporeality can act. Not only do they not ascend, which demands an iron discipline, but for most the goal is eternal youth, that is of the sensible perennially lived through the Supra-sensible. What an absurdity!!!

*

The work upon ourselves is difficult, terribly difficult.

The obstacles in us become most powerful every time that something more is attempted.

There is no solitude and there is no protection or refuge where we can be safe from them, except our resistance, our faith, our total self-giving to the work to be accomplished.

*

Woe betide us if we are so sure of the victory! Fortunately, reality takes care to admonish us for our presumption. It is just when we feel we have taken a step forward that we have to be much more vigilant about our soul. Sooner or later, we are tested for what we think we have acquired, for the progress we claim to have made. Most of the time, there occurs something, almost in a violent way, that raises in front of us the Obstacle that we imagined to have overcome. Certainly, something has been done but we realise that the conclusive victory is still far away.

That these tests come is good and they should be seen as a help from the Supra-sensible World in order to re-orient our efforts, to sound the still dark parts of our soul. Askesis is always a battle with ourselves: hard, ceaseless, perhaps relentless.

But everything must happen on a foundation of calm and peace, or firmness and courage in our conscious soul.

*

O Lord, You are inconceivable in Your distance and in Your nearness!
You are the Word in God, You are the Word near God, You are the Word that is God: You are all things, You are Life and You are Light.
If I try to imagine You I fall into darkness as when I look at the Sun.
I have to be satisfied with feeling You as Warmth, as Strength and as Love within. And even this not with the constancy I long for.

*

We should not let the past lay its hands on us. There is a memory of the remote past and there is a memory of the recent past. Both are memories that condition our life and link us closely to our Karma, to our destiny.

The memory of the past is inscribed in our body and in our psyche: it has become a memory of blood, of the community, of the race. It is unconscious in us and acts through our impulses and our instincts. Karma develops through this. It is memory that brings up indications of preceding lives, according to automatisms that only a total self-knowledge and an absolute autonomy of the ‘I’ can overcome. It is the path of Freedom.

Outside this path, the past keeps us tied to Karma. The path of freedom transforms the memory of the past into spiritual memory: the possibility of overcoming destiny and Karma. The memory of the recent past is about the events of the present life. It conditions us as long as we are not capable of deciphering what happens to us: it links us to suffering, to pain and to joy, until, going backward with a detached soul, we perceive events once again from a different point of view: freer, more insightful, more impartial. In short, the viewpoint of the ‘I’ and not of the Ego.

Neither of the two memories should condition us. The memory of the recent past, if it is well directed, can, however, help us to acquire consciously the memory of the remote past.

*

Anita and Torquato: two occasions to meditate serenely on death without anguish, without fear, without a suffocating pain, through understanding—for the one who remains alive—to meditate on why this is such an obstinate and almost unsurmountable difficulty of the soul.

In my meditation I followed them as far as I could in their new journey. New, but in reality already made, even if the memory of it has been lost (and rightly too). It is the journey we make every night and which will be lived again in its entirety before entering the splendour of the Spirit.

It is a meditation that always brings serenity and a great awareness of our raison d’être.

The Lord has put me to a hard test but he did not deliver me to death.
It does not matter if He consigns me to physical death, even though this too, one day, will be overcome. In reality, He has not consigned me to spiritual death or rather to the death of the soul. And brushing so close to death through illness, I have been delivered to the life of the Spirit again.

Not a day passes when I awake without gratitude for my Resurrection. Now I am ready for physical death too. This hidden self-satisfaction is vainglory even when we seem to reject, though not with sufficient force, all that can upset the relation of the soul with the Spirit, with the I. A subtle vainglory that is always present in all the good deeds we think of having done. It is really the vainglory of the right hand that always manages to know what the right hand has done. Actually, we do not know how to protect the latter, the totally disinterested offering of the conscious soul (the right hand) from self-complacency of possessing the rational and sentient soul (the left hand).

Total detachment has still not been achieved and it is only when we stop identifying our soul with the lower parts that the transformation can take place.

*

The ascetic witnesses his death in life, in life because he liberates life—the undying life—from the corpse of egoism, of desire, of daily misery. To witness the death of our ego is to witness the death of falsehood in us: falsehood masked as culture, as facile sentiments, as gratifications, etc. To witness our own death is to liberate ourselves from our cross constituted by all the events that we created for ourselves and shall continue to create. It is the radical purification of a love we are unable to experience in its immaculate essence, of a love that is beyond the human. To remove ourselves from the cross of our destiny, the destiny that was given to us in order to resurrect, is to fully realise that destiny, right to the bottom without leaving anything unresolved, having worked out the entire past: illimitably free to launch ourselves towards a luminous future, free to serve the Spiritual World.

*

These are the last days of my retreat at Pondicherry. I would like to experience the same intensity I feel here in my spiritual ascesis elsewhere too. But I know that the difficulties will be greater and, therefore, greater the forces to move forward.

On the other hand, it is in the West that I still have some obstacles to overcome. It is not possible to think that these problems can be left behind, these problems that require an inner solution, problems that are rooted where destiny created them and nowhere else.

Destiny cannot be cheated: it has its own time, sometimes relentless, sometimes brief, but it never forgets.

*

Now we are at a time when deaths follow in quick succession: this is the sign that we have entered the final phase of our life. But it is no use looking upon this phase as survivors amid the fallen in a battle-field, waiting for our time. There is nothing that dies that does not relive, there is nothing that binds us here that does not bind us also in the hereafter. In the face of these deaths, we should hasten, not in an obsessive way, the step towards our spiritual home: when we step into this country, there is no difference between what is living and what is dead.

*

My Soul, you come down every morning from the Spiritual World here into this body that the Gods have built for you and entrusted to you so that you can experience the Spirit here in this sensible world.

My Soul, let each day see a true thought or a true action brought by you into this world. Let the little time that is left to you be directed at healing human Pain. But this is possible only if you can cure yourself from the servitude to your lower parts.

*

It is falsehood to feel ourselves to be better than others, it is letting ourselves be clouded by the Ego. Even the Indian caste-system does not permit such thoughts and comparisons. The different castes are different occasions, neither better nor worse, to work on ourselves according to the necessity imposed on us by our past. We feel superior to a poor Indian (or perhaps to a Calabrian too) because he is dirty and we are clean, because he is dressed in rags and we are well-attired, because he sleeps on the ground and we sleep on beds, because we know and he is ignorant. On these superficial signs do we judge others and ourselves. But if we could fathom his destiny (karma) from the point of view of the objective needs of his and of our soul and spiritual life (where the soul and spirit do not eat with hands or with forks), we would understand that even in such different conditions of life that are considered worse, the soul is in the process of transforming itself, it is acquiring a strength and assuming a nobility that the one who feels himself superior cannot achieve yet.

The spiritual eye when it opens sees the Spirit working everywhere, even when it is dressed in rags.

It is a useful exercise to put oneself in the shoes of another and try and live his reasons for living, to understand his karma. This not only promotes in us love for that which is different but it teaches us unexpected and useful lessons. The Spirit does not live on abstract ideas but on concrete life.

*

This exercise is possible only after we have acquired the highest respect for man, for all men. All this is not to be seen just intellectually. With the intellect any objective appears to be attainable easily, but in reality, with the intellect we can only attain the dead shell of the objective… not its essence. For attaining it fully, thought, feeling and will must combine as instrument. However, the preparation of this instrument requires discipline and the work of transformation which is the real meaning and purpose of life.

Patience is the foundation of calm: he who loses patience loses calm and he who is calm is patient. Patience is the opposite of being impulsive and hasty. Impulse and haste are impelled by time, they are time’s obsession. Patience, on the other hand, dwells on the fringe of time, one step more and we pass from sensible to Suprasensible time. Calm, peace and silence help us take this step.

The Force of the Adversaries is not only unimaginably violent but also intelligent, precise, taking advantage of every occasion from the most innocuous to the most complex. This Force demands from the one who is resolved to battle with it, the same capacities but at a higher level. I say this because for the umpteenth time I have to accept defeat.

My sudden, wild, relentless fall was as hard as the occasion was banal and foreseeable and even though I had prepared myself with the greatest determination and awareness of what I wanted to combat. Though I know these falls are necessary to make us conscious of our state of unpreparedness and to study the moves of the Adversary better, they still hurt the heart because they occur when we feel most well-equipped to cross the hurdle. The Adversary’s capacity to infiltrate within us is to succeed in projecting us without, in order to change ordinary, simple, harmless situations into situations of unease, disharmony, great difficulty— all this, however, in subjective and not objective terms or in any case, in situations that are subjectively worsened… this ability of the Adversary, then, to manoeuvre us in such a way leaves us disconcerted, frustrated and fills us with a feeling of helplessness in the face of the inevitable feats awaiting us.

But nothing can and must stop us: even failure has its positive side and if relieved with detachment, with objectivity and no more with the Ego but with the I, it can show us how the Adversary acts. If we can find out how and why it strikes us at a specific point in time and in a specific circumstance, that is, if, without deceiving ourselves, we can discover something in us we were not aware of, it is because the Adversary only works through us. His force is our force, the force that we yield to him.

And so there is nothing to do but to go on.

Every now and then I discover, and these are moments of grace, my attachment to things, to feelings, to beings that I did not think bound me. The voyage into ourselves is indeed never-ending!

For such a voyage, however, it is useful not to take superfast trains. These trains take us only to the big centres, that is the obstacles in us that are macroscopic, the most noticeable difficulties that hide from us the others, smaller in dimension but usually more tricky, those that truly impede the initial élan, our ascent towards the summit. We need to linger inside us, to alight at every stop, to explore this inner landscape: with calm, with patience, with courage.

We are kneaded also of mud and it is this that we should know in the work of spalina, that is of selection. It is a process of inner combustion that we have to initiate: what is light goes upward, what is heavy remains at the bottom. But what remains at the bottom must also be transformed.

*

All the qualities that man must acquire in his soul are not entities that are separate from one another even if we acquire them (but not always and not necessarily) one after the other.

We could, for instance, imagine that self-offering is an edifice built on the foundation of calm over which stand the pillars of tolerance and patience upholding the roof of peace and above the roof that touches the sky, the roof of silence. The whole edifice is then integrated by all the qualities required by our inner development, among which are courage, self-mastery, perseverance, and so on.

But nothing is separate, everything harmonizes, everything is balanced, everything broadly tends to assume the resonance of the inaudible (to ordinary ears) harmony of the spheres. So be it with me: in harmony with the resonance of Your Word in me.

When we affirm that life should be our yoga we are affirming something that is absolutely true with regard to any spiritual discipline. Life shows us the real difficulties we must face, it gives us the measure for the development of our inner being, the concrete acquisition of the faculties and qualities of the soul. But this truth is true if we do not blame life for all the challenges that it throws at us, since these challenges are not only what we need (whether we know it or not) but what we have been preparing ourselves for in this and in preceding lives.

To blame life is to blame the Spiritual World for misguiding us: and that can never be. If we could be a little more wary of the work accomplished in us by the Angel of God in whose hands we have been entrusted, our life here would become clearer, more meaningful and more useful to us and to others.

*

We are asked nothing more than to forgive: compared to what the Spiritual World has to forgive us, it is indeed very little what we are asked to forgive in men. If we could realise the disproportion in our life after death, we would not have to suffer as much as we do if we could perceive consciously the pain we caused because we knew the pain. And why are we asked only to forgive? Because in forgiveness are contained all the virtues necessary to our perfectioning, among which the most important: Love. Because you can never forgive unwillingly.

*

To forgive unwillingly can never be forgiving: it is tolerance, it is patience, it is so many other good things but it is not forgiveness, since it is without Love. At times, forgiveness must ripen in us, its birth is difficult. To come out, to burst into light in all its fulness, it must overcome the powerful resistance of our Ego, at times from a blind, pent-up, crystallised pain: a barrier of suffering that we refuse to come to terms with.

You conquer Death with Death and annihilate Life with Life.

This sums up man’s task today.

He can conquer Death by anticipating it. Death is the consequence of the Spirit’s submission to matter, of its incapacity to master it. After death, we are forced to liberate ourselves from all the conditionings that the Spirit had to go through during its incarnation. What we are forced to do later, we need to do before, that is during our earthly existence. The incarnation of God in man has no other significance than to conquer death here on this earth: it is a force and an example for every man. To anticipate Death is to die to everything that makes us die.

Do not die to the lower nature, to egoism, to everything that is transient.

When we live Life for everything that in truth must die, we destroy Life, we give ourselves to death, we live for death. To live for death is to live a life that is merely organic, of sentiment, of thought, merely organic. But everything that is organic is destined to death. In truth, life in its purity, life that is free from the organic is perennial, is immortal: not only does it not die but it need not be born. If Spirit does not dominate this organic life, that is, if the soul and I identify themselves with the organic life, with the body, we cannot, while we live, avoid running towards destruction.

In the Spirit free from the body (and it can master the body only in the purest of liberty) there is life that is deathless.

Death has the precision of a Swiss clock: it neither goes fast nor does it run slow, it is inexorably precise. It is for the one who lives that Death comes too early or too late, never for the one who dies. There is no inaccuracy of time for the one who is dying, it is only the ego that thinks that time can be inopportune, that Death can be untimely. Death, on the contrary, obeys the decisions of the Spiritual World. At times the I can postpone the time of death because it would like to give the ego another opportunity of reassessing itself or it can advance it believing it more opportune to continue its journey in other conditions that will be created during the life after death in the Spiritual World.

The truth is that the time of Death does not coincide with the time of the psyche: both the purpose and the goal are different. It is only the initiates who understand the time of Death. That is why they decide to live and they decide to die.

*

It is only now that my existentialist experience has acquired its full significance because it is only now that I have understood that it is incomplete. It is like having obtained only a one-way ticket without the possibility of returning. But it is necessary to return, because it is only after we return that we begin to see things we experienced in their true reality.

It is, therefore, necessary to pass from existence to being, because it is from being that we set out in order to arrive at existence: if one does not have the vision of the cycle in its entirety, but only a one-way experience, then all is confusing, misunderstood and off-track.

*

Today the exercise of pure thought, that is concentration on the point of a pinhead, lasting for over thirty-five minutes, has put some order in my soul and body. It has been a difficult week, both physically and spiritually. It seemed as though everything around me was conspiring to disrupt the rhythm. Some construction-work is in progress in the neighbouring house, people turn up during the hours of consecration or when I am about to leave for the collective meditation around the Samadhi. But despite all this I have persevered: patience and tolerance have become part of my rhythm.

I have understood how rhythm can be maintained outside its outer expression by completely interiorising it. It is a small, a very small step towards the state of continuous prayer, the esichia of the monks of Mount Athos. I am very conscious of how very far I am from it. But one single instant is enough to cancel this distance.

*

Futile curiosity and chatter: these are the tendencies of the soul that should be removed from the roots. Curiosity is a superficial form of knowledge moved by a desire of the soul to appropriate exactly that which is in front or that which is hidden from it, not to know more deeply but to satisfy its sense of possession: to possess the secret of something or someone in order to pass a subsequent judgement: he is good, he is bad, it pleases me, it displeases me. Curiosity always ends up by becoming morbid when knowledge is restricted to curiosity. It is thought that entitles us to judge everything, it becomes an improper way of relating to others and to the world: a relationship that is unilaterally oriented, stretched out only to take and to avoid the trouble of knowing really. Futile chatter is perhaps even more pernicious to inner development than curiosity. Chatter betrays the fear of silence even if it be cultural. Futile chatter betrays an incapacity of concentration and it is the indication of the soul’s dispersion and fraying, and these too, like curiosity, end up by speaking ill of people.

When we find ourselves embroiled in such tangles it is good to meet it with a courteous but severe silence.

*

If I had a good thought or a feeling of true love or if I accomplished some acts of any value, it is thanks to the Gods who thought, felt and acted in me.

In our daily ordinariness, we are nothing. We become truly powerful when we let the Gods speak and communicate through us.

The Angel and the whole celestial Hierarchy operate in us but we are such imperfect instruments that only the world of contingency can use us.

We live in the ocean of the Spirit, we are immersed in It and the creative Word does not cease to speak to us but we are only capable of hearing the noise in the background, this overpowering, futile tittle-tattle of a world that is possessed by the vainglory of a false sense of autonomy even though it floats on this sea of Light.

Is there anything else I can do but become the mouth and the heart, limpid and pure, of this Word? Is there anything else I can do but work and mould myself to be as perfect an instrument as possible of this Communication? But is not this goal too lofty to seem attainable?

It would be unattainable indeed if the Spiritual World did not respond to our sincere eagerness. The goal of this endeavour, of this abolition of the false personality which gives us a sense of existence despite its falsity, the goal of this work begun long long ago and which will go on in the future, is bliss.

But bliss and felicity are not the ends but the consequences of having reached the goal.

To look upon felicity as our goal may lead us astray. There is the danger of identifying this felicity with the lust of life and, therefore, with the annulment of any work of self-transformation. Thus we remain imperfect instruments, that is instruments of the world, of this lower world. It means losing ourselves in the contingency of possession, of any type of possession that the world can give, but it also means renouncing the possibility of acquiring the power to manifest ourselves as Sons of God, the power upon which ultimately the world rests.

The one who walks the path of spiritual knowledge usually starts by giving himself up to emotion in the belief of entering the path of mysticism. But it is not so in reality, since the true path of mysticism goes through the head. Honestly, it is easier, not to say more convenient, to give oneself up to emotion, to give oneself up to moods that seize the being as part of self-consecration, without passing through a strict work of inner cleaning, without verifying whether the states of being that come over us really have strong roots and, above all, whether they are nourished by a true spiritual purity. There is no doubt that the heart is the hub of the life of the Spirit but we mean here the spiritual heart not the sensible heart that is so much under the influence of the lower nature. But in order to reach this spiritual heart the path is long and difficult, strewn with obstacles and pleasantly distracting spots that lead us to believe we have reached the goal but it is merely an illusion, a trick to divert us from our long journey.

The path of emotion is slippery and we need to keep it clean with thought and will: a thought and will that are free from their bonds to the sensible. And thought has the power to liberate itself which, in the final analysis, is the awakening of self-consciousness.

*

Day after day we build ourselves with ourselves as the foundation, as indeed we are in the Spiritual World, and everyday we demolish ourselves, every day annihilate our nature debased into instinct, into banality, into dialectics. That is why each day has its pain. It means climbing onto the ladder of suffering: few, therefore, climb it, most lose heart on the very first rungs.

*

It would be necessary to constantly renew the promise of dedication to the Spirit and ceaselessly test our capacity of faithfulness to it. It is an exercise we need to prescribe to ourselves at the end of every hour in order to measure how far we are from what we promised ourselves. An hour’s time is a brief period in a day but it is sufficient to make us realise how many times our intensity slackened, how many little betrayals we are capable of.

*

It would be necessary to constantly renew the promise of dedication to the Spirit and ceaselessly test our capacity of faithfulness to it. It is an exercise we need to prescribe to ourselves at the end of every hour in order to measure how far we are from what we promised ourselves. An hour’s time is a brief period in a day but it is sufficient to make us realise how many times our intensity slackened, how many little betrayals we are capable of.

On a given day of the week, to make a short evaluation at the end of every hour forces us to know ourselves in a more analytic way, to a better and stricter control over our psychological automatisms. And these automatisms of thought, of feeling, of action are many and well-masked.

Self-offering and self-consecration demand the greatest awareness, they require eyes that are open and not passively sunk into sleep. If the I sleeps, the Ego is ever awake, since it knows what it wants and the automatisms are sleeping-pills it prescribes to the I.

*

I must have already referred to a saying of Leon Bloy’s (a French writer): “Suffering passes but the having suffered never passes.” It is a great truth and Leon Bloy may not have quite grasped its full significance despite intuiting it.

Suffering does pass but this truth needs to be qualified. Suffering is the revolt of the body and of those parts of the soul and the spirit which are against the detachment from the life of the “organs”, and this life of “organs” is always steeped in desires, in attachments and even in bonds of blood.

The revolt is the refusal to understand and accept the message of pain, it is a suffering that denies its significance. The having suffered, on the other hand, is the spiritual memory of suffering, it is the transformation of suffering into transformation of oneself. Whatever may have been the reason of suffering, it vanishes from the ordinary memory: there remains instead the memory of the resistance offered, the battle waged either against the pain or in order to grasp the reason for it or for its acceptance. This is the spiritual memory, it is the memory of the tryst with our destiny.

*

It is only separation, the separation we have willed and chosen as a trial that makes us touch with our hands the deep-rootedness and the tenacity of our attachments.

And it is not just the relationships, close at hand, so to say, of the world that surrounds us closely, that emerge as bondages, but the physical surroundings themselves even though they were the field of spiritual development. Even the Spirit can become a habit, a bondage. Only he who has experienced this solitude knows how facile and foolish it is to speak of freedom. The more we talk of it the less we are free. We talk about freedom, while being attached and propped by our environment, by our relationships, by a whole circle of habits, affections, deep bonds of which we do not even know the weight or the importance they have in what we call our freedom.

The crux of all this is in the inner being. If we do not descend into ourselves, we will never recognise that which binds us. It is within us that true freedom is born and its birth is always painful because the umbilical cord that binds us to the world is strong and complex.

*

That life is an instrument of work is a maxim that our contemporary world accepts by turning its significance upside down.

In fact, work today is seen as a means for acquiring power and money: any work that does not lead to that is either wasted labour and, therefore, futile, or labour of the slaves.

*

The barrier of appearance is the problem I need to tackle in the near or distant future. It is no more a question of playing games of prestige with the intellect but rather learning to see and to listen by placing next to the physical senses, the senses of the soul.

It would be good to see with new eyes one’s own story not as it has appeared to us so far but as it truly is. To discover the Truth of anything that happened to us is to liberate our life from false prospects, from partial visions.

*

The limit of appearance is what the soul chained to the body lays before the thought: the movement of offering which is always an impulse of love is used by the soul to express the world and things but the soul compels it to stop at their surface and thus changes the impulse of love into an impulse of desire. Its attachment to appearance is the degradation of thought.

But the impulse of love lives on within this degradation, hidden and invisible. Here we need to start all over again: by transforming desire into an impulse of love, and by giving back to thought the force of its original movement, releasing it from the senses in order to penetrate the appearance and to reunite it with the essence of love, to reunite thought to itself, that is, passing from human thought to cosmic thought. Human thought does not mean that thought is produced by man. It is given to man from the Suprasensible world as is the physical world. It is precisely an “appropriating” thought that man degrades, it, by enslaving it to corporeality in order to acquire his own consciousness, the initial sensible consciousness.

The acquisition of ever higher levels of consciousness is to transfer human thought to cosmic thought, it is to retrace, in the reverse, the descent of thought. This re-ascent is also the re-ascent of the soul which goes beyond itself upto the point where it awakes to its divine origin. It is with perseverance, with obstinacy, with enthusiasm that all this needs to be made to relive, silencing any interference of the nervous system, avoiding being caught by uncontrollable feelings. We must turn it into spontaneity in our ordinary way of living, so that by this very acquisition of spontaneity, it ceases to be ordinary, since a radical transformation is being worked out in us. And of this we need not have any fear.

*

I now see the exercises of contemplation quite clearly: it should no longer be an exercise but become a way of perception in our daily life, a conscious spontaneity that we have worked on, thanks to the habit of exercising the creator-thought.

The Spirit in man and the Spirit in the world come together in perception but of this encounter that ends into the subconscious, there remains only the sensible aspect, totally void and dead. We need to be always aware of the creative act of thought. Without this act the world would not emerge before us. Before us is an inadequate expression since it suggests a division that does not exist.

The meeting should be permanent. Spirit of the world and Spirit of man must be one and inseparable. Divided, the world and Man are dead things. The object cannot emerge without a consciousness that makes it emerge, exactly like the seed that cannot grow if it does not find the right soil.

*

Perseverance, steadiness and consecration always come to our aid in difficult moments and make us courageous and steadfast in our efforts. Discipline can never be an end in itself but it is the most powerful means of inner development. And its effects spread over our entire life quite unconsciously.

*

It is a mistake to think of self-consecration as an attitude full of mysticism and sentiment.

Self-consecration is ceaseless struggle, ceaseless self-correction, correction of one’s thoughts, one’s feelings, one’s perception. Right consecration consists in right perception and right perception does not leave out Spirit.

This is a continuous permanent exercise. Everytime we perceive without the Spirit, we perceive in the Ego: we are not on the path of self-consecration.

*

When we affirm that the world is Maya, we have really said nothing or said something we do not understand: either about the world or about Maya. As long as we have not understood why it is an illusion and whether the illusion is within us or outside, as long as we have not found out the mechanisms that prevent us from seeing the true reality, as long as we are unable to see how the Spirit works in its earthly manifestations, as long as we cannot unmask the prejudices of a science that is trapped in the sensible, it is better to accept the world as it appears to us: this is more honest and more useful.

*

The true Light that illumines every man was about to come into the world, was in the world. (Saint John) The Light that illumines every man is the same Light that illumines the world. And the Spirit of man always mingles with the Spirit of the world, since without this encounter we would not be able to see anything. The world is born from this meeting. But the ordinary consciousness slips away from this meeting as it is incapable of standing up to the Light. And therefore the world dies and with the world dies the soul that has renounced its own Light.

*

No one can walk the path of another, each one has his own journey to make and it would be wrong to undertake another’s path. It is a mistake even when one has met a Master, to wish to follow him in order to walk on his path.

The Master indicates, teaches, shows the techniques and the goal but the path to be traced is entirely one’s own and unique. Existentialism had underlined this thought not consciously.

*

If each destiny is individual and unique then every path that helps us realise it must also be equally individual and unique.

*

Like every year, the return to the West brings up before me my real problems. The East, that is Pondicherry, is the place where the Spirit in me can equip itself, in silence, and prepare itself in the depths to face the problems that come up in the West. They are for me, for my destiny, two complementary worlds.

However, the real battle is in the West. It is there that our real strength is tested, it is there that all that I contemplated about in Pondicherry, the knowledge and the answers and the quality of the new forces that I gained there, are measured.

*

Some more thoughts on running. One can run on the plains but we cannot run on a slope or on a wall. Running always suggests a horizontal flat dimension. We can face an ascent only with the help of walking: that has in it a vertical dimension. Walking for man is what wings are for the Angel.

We need to relive the memory of events and of the various moods of our life. It is possible with time to go on to a detachment from the impulses that have overwhelmed us and it is possible to know the real cause of whatever has happened. We also realise that the cause has not disappeared and we have to work on that. Repeating the exercise several times helps in reading our destiny correctly and it can give us indications for our future.

*

It is futile to rebel against the law of pain or to be furious with Almighty God, charging him with responsibilities that are ours. Pain is extinguished by accepting it with understanding. It is the instrument by which we are able to transform ourselves, it is the price of our askesis, a coin we mint unconsciously or which destiny mints for us. We rebel against this destiny, incapable of understanding our powerlessness and the help we are given to overcome it. But, consciously or unconsciously, it is always the I that acts.

*

There where the bodies dwell, the eagles will gather, says Luke.

He who entrusts himself to corporeal life (not merely the physical but everything that is linked to it: money, power, ambition, vanity) cannot but be devoured by it.

It is the soul that dies with the body and it will keep dying until it is freed from it.

*

O Lord, O Gods Most High, O Angel who guide my life, grant me the grace to be able to listen to You always and in all places and to have the strength to follow Your commands.

May my dialogue with others, with nature, with myself, be always a dialogue with You, since through them You make Yourself manifest.

Grant that I be not deaf and blind before Your Word of Light like the world usually is.

*

We always live dangerously. We are permanently perched on the edge of an abyss, hovering over the precipice. But we still remain unaware, we are immersed is totally blind. The courage required at the moment of awakening is what is needed to bear the danger that hangs over us, “Impeders” revealing to us their true nature.

We have glimpses of this abyss when destiny catches us unawares and strikes us down with pain. But even then we feel only the blow but rarely the abyss.

*

To pray to You without asking You for anything, Lord, to pray to You in order to find in us the strength and the courage to suffer and to rejoice with the certainty that the suffering and the rejoicing are not so much the decree of a despotics will but that they befall us more because we do not understand the reasons for this decree.

And to pray to You without forcing You to grant us understanding; for to understand the necessity of pain and joy we must be deserving: all knowledge we aspire for must be merited if it is to be true.

It is not a matter of intelligence, of scholariness, it is the Grace of the gods entering our efforts, and not our egoism.

And, therefore, to pray to You, O Lord, without any expectation.

*

Once the house of the soul is put in order, the adverse forces intensify their attempts at entering it. He who wishes to keep his cleaned-up house in order must increase his awareness and courage. Woe betide us if we be overconfident of our own strength. In times like this a fall is more likely and in those very areas where we least expect to stumble. A little opening is enough for the adverse forces to come in and devastate our long, strenuous labour.

*

We live for Death because we are incapable of living for Life.

Our every action, thought and feeling are for death. We are anguished, anxious, frenetic because Death does not give us any respite. In fact, time is death and what is passing changes endlessly, inexorably. Time leaves signs of decay on the body with which we always identify. And wherever we live with that identity, which is all the time, it can only lead us towards Death. We now mistake the support for the essence. We do not live in the body, we live by the body.

Our thinking, feeling, willing are all corporeal. They are already supports for the essence but we have turned them into supports of the supports instead. Life lived in this mode is no more ours but of the supports: it is Death in Death.

Saint Paul wondered, “Who will liberate me from this body of death?”

*

For the sake of the inner development of the soul, we have to take the ordeals head on, tirelessly, regardless of the failures. Here, too, faithfulness is demanded: in the courage to face our own failures.

This courage and this faithfulness prepare the conclusive victory, because they need and bring down the Grace of the Spiritual World.

*

I concentrated on a piece of lava from the Etna, light and porous, an excrement from the innards of the earth. So porous that it seemed the potent fire and the force that had hurled it out of the crater had burst out and dispersed skyward through the numberless pores. It is the residue of a process of combustion that has left behind its impure part. It is the same process that must take place within us. All that is heavy and is residual stays on the earth (the skeleton) and all that evaporates goes upward.

*

We should never tire of exercising the etheric centre of the head. It is from there that thought flows out, the imaginative thought free from the senses.

We should not be hesitant about creating suprasensible images. It is not an exercise of fantasy, even though it is connected with the corporeality, it is an action of pure thought.

It is necessary to experiment, to perceive how much ordinary thinking is tied to corporeality which is the fount of sense-appearance — all we do, feel, think is terribly connected with this appearance.

We are truly made of flesh. Every pleasure is changed into anguish, every thought into fear, every sentiment into disappointment. But despite this we are unable to liberate ourselves from this body of death. Saint Paul too cried out in anguish, “Who will liberate me from this body of death?”

There is no ambition, no vainglory, no love, no terror that is not moved by the body, by the soul that clothes itself with the body. It adorns itself with it, sees with it, takes pleasure in it and in its relationships, labours in it, is troubled by it and delights in it. All this is immersed in the deepest unconsciousness, in the gloomiest ignorance.

And when we have even a glimmer of consciousness then we too cry out horrified like Saint Paul, “Who will liberate me from this body of death?”

This cry, this tormenting feeling of the state of death, is the beginning of liberation. Liberation, above all, is purification: purification of the thought through will. With purification knowledge dawns. The soul knows what it must liberate itself from. It is aware of its own automatisms, it knows its good and bad motivations, its fears, its superstitions. And thus begins a work of clearing up which becomes more and more difficult as we bring to the surface the most hidden elements.

On the path of purification thought loses its ordinary sense-supports. Its difficult detachment from the daily patterns, from the ordinary feeling and willing which normally goad it, entangle it with emotions, push it into solutions thought to be the best or at least the only ones possible. All this leads to the opening of the etheric centre of the head.

Once this centre is activated, it is found to be a fount of strength which can penetrate our inner reality and which by a subsequent process of purification through concentration and meditation leads us to the heart.

But the penetration of the Force into our inner reality is simultaneously a penetration into the sensible, external reality.

The Force that flows out from the etheric centre to the head perceives the inner and the outer as one reality. This unique reality is identical to the penetrating force of pure thought emanating from the etheric centre of the head. The change in interests and attention is radical. The inner reversal that it causes changes objectively the situations which are no more fed by the activity of our soul pursued by fear and anguish. From the higher plane onto which the soul has ascended, from the state of calm and peace that it has reached, the right action to be accomplished becomes clear.

By liberating itself, it also liberates the situations and the reality that imprisons it.

*

During the meditation this morning I realised how important it was to know ourselves in the minutest and sincerest way. It is not possible without this knowledge to give a direction to self-transformation. It would end in a sentimental or at best an abstract activity, whereas we need to know the origin of our sentiments and to analyse them. We observe what we consider as objective – the preoccupations, events and relationships that are the fruit of our moods, of qualities that have to be changed and so on and so forth. What is surprising is to remark that even our thoughts considered to be more solid, rest on sentiments and moods that we are not aware of. The major part of our life is composed of this false objectivity which we need to pass through the sieve of a “liberated” thought. This false objectivity that pushes us to false joys and to false preoccupations is the bone of contention: on one side the Ego that wants to preserve and aggrandise itself, on the other the ‘I’ that can rise to the truth and to the reality only if we can rid ourselves of this unbearable harness.

*

We place before us the obstacles we need: illnesses, sufferings, events. And then we normally lament over these obstacles, we commiserate ourselves with great pleasure and wish that others too would commiserate and console us.

Woe betide the one who does not console us and who even pushes us into admitting that it is not commiseration but an inner action, pitiless though it may be, that can remove the obstacle. It is we who have placed the obstacle and we alone can remove it: with courage, with determination, by paying the necessary price.

*

It is erroneously believed that the duty or work of parents is to help their children to avoid difficulties. It is also true that often what happens is due to the parents who cannot bear their children’s difficulties and who, in order not to fall into tension and suffering, prefer assisting their children to avoid them. But it is equally true that life is always an ordeal. There is no other reason for our living and at birth we come with our baggage of trials so as to develop those qualities that can be acquired only through these trials.

The parents’ problem and work is not to deflect trials away from their children but to prepare them for these. Helping them to avoid means piling up on their heads burning coals, a host of obstacles that, however, sooner or later, must be dealt with assiduously and with pain. Felicity lies not in eliminating trials from life which is not possible but overcoming them, since by overcoming them we discover what we truly are.

*

We try to experience or understand the Death of others.

We cannot experience our own. We are close to such an experience only in one case: in the annihilation of Ego.

We experience here all the fears and anxieties of Death, the implacable attachment of the soul to the body.

Once we have experienced the death of the ego then dying or living, being here or there are one and the same thing.

*

My friend De Paola is dying. Tarsilla is seriously ill. Does man understand the significance of pain and illness? Does he see how they help? Help? and for what? To be different from what we were upto now. This is a prayer that rises from our inmost depth and which has not been in focus for the ego that was preoccupied with other things. Now it is forced to listen to it.

But if we succumb to despair, to lamentation, or at best to resignation, then we do not listen to it rightfully. This is not what is asked of us.

We are asked to battle against pain, not so much the physical pain but against that which though still unknown, acts in us and breaks out into illness. To think, however, of curing the body without changing our inner condition is to fool ourselves and one day, sooner or later, we will have to pay for it.

We should be grateful to others’ pain and illness since they also suffer for us.

*

Today I experienced the difficulty of making someone understand the relation between the soul and external incidents, that is the relation between what takes place outside and what takes place inside. This is the difficulty in understanding one’s destiny. People prefer a rigid predetermination or a total aloofness from events instead of a free connection between our capacities and what happens or will happen to us.

*

It would be enough not to pronounce the word I for just one day in a month to make significant progress in our battle against egoism. You only have to try doing it to understand the difficulty and to experience the solidity of the soul’s connection with the Ego.

*

And still life is truly a means, not an end in itself: it is the means that the Spiritual World gives us to work on ourselves in the conditions and in the set-up that are necessary for us.

Any work that is done in this spirit, not just spiritual work, is always useful, even necessary. It forces us to adopt a system of values that is less contingent and closer to the real value of man, that is, man seen in his inner being, where work is a means of reaching out to our destiny (karma).

*

We need to learn not to be in a hurry: things that are decided and done in a hurry rarely succeed. Even when the outcome seems to be good, in reality, we have accustomed the soul to superimposing itself on the I. Haste is the antonym of calm and, therefore, of patience and of tolerance. However, this is now the morbid condition of the Westerner: the perpetual sickness of his soul. His motto “Time is money” is one of the worst aspects of Western civilisation. Time has been reduced to a mercenary level, time seen as a banking object, time identified with the interest.

*

It is the soul seized by the lower nature which inculcates in it the importance of getting results at any cost, with a permanent sense of turmoil and restlessness. It is indeed true that haste is always the worst counsellor. Not being in a hurry does not mean being lazy and inactive but doing things in the stability of the soul, refusing to be overtaken by events, to listen to the ‘I’ rather than to the Ego. Not being in a hurry takes us far not so much in the outer world which undoubtedly prefers and values haste, but in the inner world.

*

I have not been feeling well: pains in the intestines, a number of minor discomforts similar to the ones experienced at Agra. Probably the consequences of that terrible experience. But I must search within to understand what is behind these symptoms of the body. And I think I now understand.

One cannot be frivolous with the Gods and the promises made to them must be kept. We cannot serve two masters: only he who is not on this Path of Spiritual Knowledge can do it. Woe to the one who is on the path and yet serves two masters.

I know clearly the shortcoming, and I cannot fail to take the test. I must gather all my inner strength so as to maintain and respect my consecration. The Gods give me concrete proofs of their participation, both in the good and in the bad. Therefore, to continue on the path with seriousness is the greatest faithfulness. Any delay is betrayal.

*

All life cannot be but a purification, that is the only true spiritual vision and not the one that sees life itself as a field of negativity.

We can see and perceive this pile-up of moral, vital and physical rubble that buries us only by a profound and sincere enquiry into our daily living, an enquiry made with a thought freed from its patterns, from the distortions caused by prejudices, vitiated by the acceptance of values not passed through the sieve of a greater consciousness. It is only an enquiry by this thought that can let us perceive all this.

We are thus led by the desire to liberate ourselves from this weight, to arrest the process of degradation of what is our noblest part. We need to permeate ourselves with this will to purify: this is not bigotry, fear or passive adoration but struggle, suffering caused by a detachment from what we loved until then, a pitiless, cold knowledge of what free from hatred for the others.

The will-to-purify is always a sacrificial act that transforms our personality and which places at its centre a Light of Love that keeps intensifying and spreading: the Light of the Love of Virgin Sophia, the Light of the complete self-offering to the Divine.

*

Karma is inscribed within us, within the profound will that prepares our acts in the same way that it broods over our physical pains. This hidden will that guides our lower nature, our instincts, if it does not find before it the dominant and free subject, envelops our thoughts, our sentiments, moulds the forces of the soul in such a way that the projected event happens. It is the Will of Fate: Fate-Necessity that we determine during the period between death and new life, to repair what we have to repair and to cultivate those qualities that we lacked then. It is the necessity of a profound past that casts a shadow on the whole of our present life. The past is ours and not of another, and it is futile to curse it. It is more useful to try and decipher it instead, since it is engraved in us and it is us that we need to learn to read it.

With this knowledge of the past we release our future from the law of the past. By understanding it we forestall it, by accepting it, that is discerning its intimation and responding adequately, we deliver life from its bonds.

If we do not respond correctly, that is freed from our lower nature, then our lower nature egged on by the will, leads us to the painful event, it even prepares the conditions for its occurrence even though we may not be aware of moving towards events that we have caused or are causing.

Nothing occurs that does not occur justly. What is important is to find the point of view that lets us see the right significance of each event. And this point of view is beyond the reach of the ordinary man or rather of the lower nature. We need to rise higher.

*

We have to learn to keep silent, especially when the urge rises in us to say what we want to say: to keep silent in order to decant the force of the emotion that impels us to speak. To keep silent so as to deeply reflect on what we want to say and whether it is to be said. To keep silent so as to have the time to choose the tone and manner of saying it, in order to offer our opinion in such a way that it does not offend anyone and is not taken as criticism, but rather as an aid for the resolution of his problems. Since all this is difficult, it is better to remain silent so as not to be in danger of being egged on by the argumentative impulse, obvious or concealed, which is usually the case.

For one who has resolved to walk on the path of self-liberation, there is nothing more perilous than the argumentative impulse, the dialectic chatter, the habitual cultural and professional assertion. To master oneself by keeping silent is a worthy goal to be attained. Subsequently, our speech will always be more appropriate and significant.

*

The expectations, the projections, the picture we have of our own immediate future (I will have this, I will do that, I will meet so-and-so, etc.) are merely creations of our sentient being tied to the body of desire. The soul is exulted or is sad because of these expectations, it is upset, the mind is forcefully pulled in fixed directions, neither free nor chosen by it. Calm disappears and with it our autonomy.

If we wish to take charge of ourselves again, we need to detach ourselves from the immediate future, detach ourselves from the emotions that are raised by such an imagination, detach ourselves from the sentiments that dog us.

*

Calm comes before sentiments, before everything; it is this that prevents the soul and the Spirit from being enmeshed, against their consent. When the consent is given in a state of calm, all disturbance ceases and nothing is out of proportion or excessive.

*

My friend Arturo is a victim of terrible despair caused by the huge, unstoppable pain of having lost his companion. He is closed up and trapped in his pain and the mere thought of wanting to free himself from it or of stopping or even mitigating it, fills him with a sense of guilt.

I listened to his lament as long as possible with the greatest concentration and in the profoundest silence. This pain for which he cannot find any justification takes on the colour of his weakness. He refuses to see himself, to lend a meaning other than self-destruction to this event that has ended a phase of his life. He is immersed in the physical remembrance of his love for the dead person and keeps looking for her in places where she is no more, inexorably plunging into the past where he will definitely lose himself as well as the memory of the other person.

Pain comes from the past, from everything that was and is no more, but is turned towards the future, towards what must be. Pain without a future is a pain that has not been understood, a pain of which we are unable to grasp the real significance, it is merely pain and nothing else, a purposeless pain.

Pain is always an instrument of knowledge with which to plan our future. That knowledge which we could not get cannot be got through the ordinary means, through the insufficient qualities of our soul. If it is not in tune with the real needs of our inner evolution, that knowledge is given to us in a drastic and violent way through pain. It is a way of conquering the resistances to our inner change. If pain is not experienced as a stimulant to new powers, all is postponed to the next life with even more burdensome consequences.

It is only when we understand pain correctly that we are on the path of resurrection. What we think as living is actually dead and what we believe to be dead is, in reality, alive.

*

We are nailed to the cross of our karma: destiny goads us on and leads us into events that we normally undergo. There is nothing that happens to us which has not been willed by us, including the great natural phenomena that overtake us: floods, earthquakes, fires, etc. There is a profound will in us that pushes us without our knowledge to meet the event, if not to actually create it.

When we know and identify ourselves with this occult will we become free of karma; if we are not totally free we can, at least, modify the consequences. We can identify ourselves with this will only when we free it from our lower nature, only then can we purify the forces that operate in the soul by clearly individualising them and by taking them back to their cosmic origin.

But this can be done only by the ‘I’ and not the Ego that is controlled by this deep-seated will. This will operates precisely by controlling the lower nature and it is also the force that realises our destiny.

*

There is one rule that we must always bear in mind: we are co-responsible for the society we live in. It is an inner co-responsibility which does not allow any judgment of condemnation. Whatever we have is on the account of someone who has not. His possibilities exist for someone else’s impossibilities. We have been given something that has been taken from someone else: from a thief, an evil-doer, from one we call a criminal.

Every possibility and every quality that we have is a gift and we are responsible for this gift before the Spiritual World, before others, before our ‘I’. It is no use condemning society or human beings. What matters is to control what we do with what has been given to us. This goes hand in hand with our inner transformation.

We have no right to any possession, not merely to material things but even to spiritual ones. What we have attained by our virtue is also a gift, a grace from above. This is what Saint Paul wished to say when he declared that he Just live not by works but by Grace: not I but Christ in me.

This is the true “kenosis”, the true baring of ourselves. Man’s task lies in this baring, God’s in filling him with Grace.

*

Most of the time when we give a material gift, we give what is superfluous to us and in exchange for this superfluous we expect gratitude and thankfulness. This is incorrect and an unfair barter since gratitude and thankfulness are inner acts that are worth much more than the superfluous we have given.

It is much more difficult and of an infinitely greater value to offer an “act of love” even when it is not materially quantifiable: a forgiving gesture, a helping hand to someone who may have hurt us, a gesture of atonement and of humility and so on and so forth. These are acts that do not require compensations, that do not stimulate the pleasure of giving but, are, in fact, the fruit of our inner victory over the resistances of our nature. The former, the material gift, leaves us as we are, the second transforms us.

*

A permanent stability of the soul can be maintained by a continued presence of the ‘I’ during the whole day.

The moments of depression or of excessive enthusiasm are many; in fact, they are becoming more and more frequent as the soul refuses to face the day with bravery. It loses serenity as the soul refuses to renounce its autonomy or rather as it escapes the control of the ‘I’. This see-saw of the soul makes it hard to look on events objectively. All this is aggravated by the fact that we always lay the blame for our depression on external factors, on events or on blind fate as if we did not exist, were outside everything. That is why we are doubly perplexed that all this should befall us.

The stability of the soul signifies a different relationship with the world and with the others, a relationship that is willed, controlled, lived in its deepest reality which is of the essence and not of the surface. It is free from prejudices, from sympathy and antipathy, from hatred, from everything that rises in us from the lower nature.

The stability of the soul is secured by calm, by patience and by tolerance. It opens in the silence within.

*

Everything that occurs always occurs at the right time and could not occur either earlier or later. It is only by gathering this truth within ourselves that we can discover the meaning of our own existence and that of others. Everything that happens is always the interaction of human act and the corresponding answer from the Spiritual World. This answer is, at times, instantaneous, at times, delayed and at other times it is postponed to the successive life. It reaches us, however, after it has taken the measure of man’s capacity of understanding it and it is according to this capacity that the answer chooses its form.

Man’s capacity of understanding is linked to his spiritual development.

*

To feel the greatest and sincerest respect for the pain of a human being even when he is unaware of the cause of his pain and, therefore, blames the injustices of life. A pain that we experience is the seed of a necessary quality that is in the process of development. The moment the suffering person realises that the unjust situations of life are not the cause but the effects, he is ready for resurrection, he is ready for the inner decisions that will modify his mode of experiencing the world.

This initiates an awakening that transforms pain into a previously unknown force that impels him to enter within himself and to recognise his karmic attachments. This is a discovery that radically transforms his personality.

The memory of such a pain, once its meaning has been understood, will always arouse a sense of gratitude towards the Gods and impel him not to waste its significance for his own transformation.

*

It is necessary to descend within ourselves in order to verify the mood we are in. This should be done from time to time. We always need to correct something, to reorient ourselves, to decide on things to give up and bonds to sever for good. We might otherwise delude ourselves into thinking that all is well, feeling secure in these habits that are brought about by the way our inner life is organised.

However, our inner life is not programmed, since it cannot be enclosed in habits: habit dries it up. Even when we repeat an exercise, a reading, a meditation, everything is perpetually new, always different.

If it dawns on the ascetic that it is not so, an alarm should ring in him and he has to resume his journey because then he knows that he stopped far longer than was necessary.

*

The events are always difficult to understand when interpreted by the logic of things and not by the logic of essence. The logic of things does not have the necessary strength of penetration and it breaks up against the barrier of appearance, of sensibility: it bends us to appearance instead of to essence and, therefore, can only be the logic of error. And thus, we create situations in which any decision ceases to be moral, even when it is thought to be taken morally. Knowledge is always moral: if it is false, then the morality that sustains it or is derived from it is false.

Everytime that we perceive an Entity, whether it be a person, thing or event, a beam of inner Light from the depth of our being illumines and permeates it: it is the essence of the Entity that meets our essence.

Nothing would come out without this meeting.

The landscape illumined by the soul can be seen only by our inner eye: the eye of Cyclops in the middle of the forehead or the third eye, spoken of in Eastern wisdom.

*

To think that life’s aim is felicity as it is ordinarily understood, is due to the blindness of our materialistic consciousness. But then why restrict this rare felicity to the brief span of life? We are born and we die for the duration of a breath. Can this breath justify the human existence? And what about the huge mass of mankind that is not happy? Does the material consciousness have a justification for all this? Does science? Since it sees everything in terms of pure matter even when it is transformed into force. In the chain of the “why’s” I am what I am and not someone else and the final answer of the materialist is a recourse to the “God of Chance”.

But I seek permanent felicity, eternal, not limited to a mere breath and this I can receive only from the Permanent that lives and works in me. It cannot be content to see life as a series of physical benefits, a mere opportunity for economic consumerism. It wants to see, to know, to go beyond the temporary, beyond a reality that is perceived to be unreal every time we try to grasp it.

How can felicity be built on such a pile of rottenness? How much wasted labour, how much futile intelligence is put into movement to embellish with trinkets and illusions this immanent desert of rottenness! To pass off the pleasure of these trinkets for felicity is not only an attempt at concealing the real human condition but, above all, an operation of evil, since it corrupts human nature by depriving it of the right development. In fact, evil dominates us. It is by becoming conscious of this evil that the ascetic who has attained freedom and knowledge realises the real significance of life as a holocaust, as a need to pay back the accumulated debt in preceding lives and to take upon himself the debt of others as well. It is in this free self-giving that he feels the fulness of the work entrusted to his life, a life not for consuming, not of ignorant, blind pride, not of the affirmation of one’s own thoughts, emotions and actions on others but a life that tacitly, humbly, silently and in the greatest of patience, transforms one’s own and the others’ evil into harmony and love. It is in this transformation that he finds felicity, in this consecration renewed every day. This is, unthinkable for the ordinary man.

Ultimately, to live life as a holocaust is to die in order to relive in the Spirit; it is the ante-chamber of the Reign of Peace and Bliss.

Being here or there is the same thing when one lives in the One, Indivisible Spirit.

*

Resurrection Easter: the task of resurrecting Christ in us in order to resurrect ourselves in Him.

But no resurrection is possible before death. We need, therefore, to die in Christ and not put Him to death in us.

And we should not think of physical death. That is not an event of great importance if we have first succeeded in the Ego’s death. It is the Ego’s death that renders physical death useless; the Ego, however, cannot die until the ‘I’ emerges in us.

Christ does not ever compel us, neither does He want to be compelled. He only asks from us complete freedom. He is the source of freedom, of the free ‘I’. Buddha brought down to the Earth love and compassion. Christ brings down freedom since love in its fulness is made possible only in freedom. He died and rose for the whole of humanity, past present and future. Without this resurrection one cannot enter the Spiritual World.

*

Redemption passes through the state of agony. None born of the Earth can deceive himself into thinking that without “agony” one can be redeemed, or without experiencing death. And here we mean the inner death which is not less painful than physical death.

Every saint has had his “Garden of Gethsemane”, every ascetic has gone through this experience. There is no true beatitude unless preceded by this inner death.

It is an illusion to think we can conquer our lower nature and transform our instincts by avoiding suffering, it is an illusion nourished only by such distorted doctrines and methods that are in vogue today. These are doctrines and methods that, by distorting ancient traditions or by missing their real significance, offer to lead us to an effortless felicity that, in fact, conceals the darkest of despair. These are doctrines and methods of a world that is “frightened” of pain, that uses analgesics and tranquillisers in an exaggerated way, in an atmosphere of total defeat, to whatever that may be, including drugs.

But it is in real pain that we get to meet our ‘I’, that we pause to ponder who we are. It is thanks to the pain we meet along the way that we re-orient our life. By living through pain consciously, with the courage of dedication, we can perceive the light of beatitude: a felicity that we can conquer, win and merit in proportion to how worthy we are for obtaining it in the eyes of the Spiritual World.

Felicity is always the result of an intense inner labour. Besides this, however, there are other kinds.

*

Easter time, time for peace. But it would be good to remember that we cannot restrict the time for peace only to preset dates. The time for peace must run continually throughout our life, it must become part of it. It is useless to sermonise on peace in the world if this peace is not born from men: the peace in the world is the sum total of the peace that is found in men themselves. To speak about peace and not to realise it in oneself is the worst of hypocrisies.

To realise peace in oneself before preaching it means refusing useless chatter. Peace needs examples, not words, and the example should be unconditional. Peace is like love, or rather the direct consequence of love: it does not need any compensations. It gives itself completely and does not judge whether the receiver is peaceful.

It gives because it loves and he who is not capable of love cannot have and give peace. Peace, like love, is first a victory over oneself. It is not a feeling that switches on and off or lasts the length of a flash. It is an arduous daily work within ourselves in order to win that spirit of aversion that it is always present in us. To offer the other cheek to the one who has slapped us once is not weakness or resignation: it is simply an offering of peace and, therefore, an act of love. It is not worth much to love someone who loves us already. Love breaks that limit and goes in search of the proof that confirms it, it loves the one who impedes that love. It is so with peace, one does not offer peace to the one who is already peaceful but to the one who is not.

Christ affirms this when he says: “I give you my peace”: that is the peace that enables him to die for all.

*

Today the problem of the aged has become most urgent. The number of old people is increasing and this, besides raising urgent social issues, is whetting the appetite of those who sense some business in it. Society is busy providing for the needs of the aged but it does not know clearly what those needs are.

There are obvious and urgent needs like sanitation, economy, housing; there are other needs that are less obvious which go under the name of welfare. There is then the problem of the abandonment and loneliness of the aged. It is thought that these so-called psychological problems can be solved by giving the aged the same chances available to the youth: make them useful in work, provide them with entertainment, make them travel, study, in short, to help them somehow to pass time. We mostly tend to make the old relive a belated youth. In fact, today, we keep talking about the sexuality of the old. There is nothing more confusing, ludicrous or unnatural than the old man who does not feel like an old man, who is seized by the anguish of being old.

And it is here that society with vested interests most of the time, gears itself to provide him with a climate and an environment in which he does not feel old. Everything becomes like those greenhouse flowers: the fruit is so beautiful in appearance but lacking in fragrance and taste.

The old man must not accept this regression but leave to the youth and to the aged their respective domain. The aged have capacities and powers that the youth cannot have.

The old man is like a seasoned pole on which life has sculpted its long story and there is no need to make any more engravings on him. His beauty lies in this finished sculpture. He is beyond time and has no need to run after it. He does not look back. In him the ordinary memory is transformed into spiritual memory. It is only the spiritual memory in him that can travel back to past events in order to understand his present (and not merely his own present) and to prepare himself for his future. For him time does not flow any longer and his only activity, in immobile time, is contemplation.

The old man who has the real experience and the privilege of feeling old is a man of contemplation, his eyes closed to the sense-reality but turned inward to contemplate the real landscape beyond the confusion that surrounds him. The old man lives his solitude in society and seeks it in order to be in the company of Entities that are the power of this world: they are his real future.

Youth is all external and explicit, old age is all internal and implicit. What was on the surface has turned inward. Life, in all its intensity, has now stationed itself in him at the spiritual plane above.

The young man runs but does not know the forces that move him. The old man is immobile but he knows the forces that move the world.

He is the bridge between the visible and the invisible, between the earth and the sky: he has entered the waiting-chamber where he will be received by the Lords of the World. And it is in this waiting that he projects himself into the future. It is wicked to try and hinder this waiting in the waiting-chamber in order to push him back into places that can bring him nothing.

It is in youth that society must prepare man for old age if it wishes to have a receptacle of wisdom instead of a useless, inert heavy burden. Now, the task of the old man is no more that of transmitting his external work which the speed of change has rendered useless but his inner work, his experience of spiritual life, the knowledge of the forces that have sculpted on his seasoned being, his experiences. Not the transient but the permanent: that which youth, bewitched by speeding time, cannot either see or understand.

*

I need to accelerate. I don’t mean to be in a hurry, since haste not only gives bad counsel but it reveals the conduct of a soul still accustomed to identifying itself with the sensible world. No, it has nothing to do with haste even if, at times, I feel pursued by my precarious and vacillating health. We need to make the will more radical, to keep it always under control, to lead it to accomplish actions that reinforce the faithfulness in the consecration. It is time to turn the whole life to the promised endeavour. A continuity is needed of a higher consciousness that I still do not possess: the ‘I’ can never be absent from such a consciousness, not even in sleep.

However, the flow of the will is still broken at moments, and elements of the lower nature infiltrate into it. This is something to be avoided.

It is irrelevant to ask whether these infiltrations are small or big since their value is commensurate with the paralysis they cause. The smallest of dust particle can upset the delicate mechanism of a watch.

The flow of the will must be uninterrupted: the day must unfold as an uninterrupted flux of dedication that nothing can impede. It is an inner flux of thought, of will and emotion, harmonised and oriented by the Spiritual Reality towards itself. The external day will not be anything but the manifestation of this inner flow and not its obstacle.

To accelerate the movement signifies to stop having moments of pause and of emptiness: the ‘I’ does not need either rest or sleep. Even if the force flows from it, it acts as an absolutely immobile motor.

*

It is still hard for me to recognise myself in others, whoever they may be. The Ego continues to divide, to raise barriers, to differentiate between values which, in reality, do not exist objectively but are all in him who sets them.

It is difficult for me and I am sincerely troubled by the fact of experiencing myself in another: the other is I in other experiences and situations, other qualities and defects, other relationships, another destiny altogether.

But it is this other precisely that needs to be abolished since it does not exist: since living this other is living myself, helping or loving this other is helping and loving myself: what other meaning can there be in “love your neighbour as yourself” if not to recognise him as another way of my being? But one must guard against the danger of a morbid sentimentality, of a blind sense of goodness, of a somnambulist type of relationship. To recognise oneself in others is a strong, solid feeling that requires an equally solid will and a lucid thought that allow us to correct in us what we see in the other, to accept the other but not his evil.

*

There are moments of great inner anguish that devastate the soul shaking it out of its faith in itself.

On the path of self-transformation and self-perfection, such moments are crucial, in the sense that we feel the necessity of understanding what is to be done. It is as if we were suddenly filled with darkness, filled with pain for a light that has gone out and no one knows when it will be rekindled. Faced with such a state of things we need to rely on the patience of endurance to a point where we can show tolerance towards the events that triggered off that mood and finally attain calm. It is the nervous system that must fall silent, become absolutely immobile. The effort of the will needed to calm the nervous system is the same that helps the rebirth of faith in us, steadfast, clear and unassailable.

From here we must start the descent into the darkness through a process of introspection that enables us to know the obstacle and its nature. Both the descent and the discovery resulting from it are painful. Most of the times, the obstacle is known, since it is the same that hinders our further inner growth. But each time, we get to know some new aspects, influences and changes that either were hidden from us or some undisclosed sense of shame prevented us from unveiling. Faced with this umpteenth discovery we are invaded by discouragement and tearing despair. We are seized by weakness, a concrete dread of not being able to ever overcome the obstacle and we feel as if we are falling into a bottomless abyss. But at the same time, we feel that all the darkness and pain we encounter impel us to seek radical solutions, to do better than what we normally do, to reinforce our capacity of introspection, and not waver and be a victim of nervous fits or nervous excitement. It pushes us to return with perseverance, inflexible steadfastness and total dedication to exercises of concentration and meditation.

We become conscious that this additional knowledge of ourselves we got, thanks to the painful condition we were in, is a help that we must carefully keep aside.

A calm faith, a strong will to go on, a clear knowledge of the difficulties to be overcome, establish themselves in the soul. Even if we do not know if we will manage to attain “what has been indicated to us”, we have, however, the certainty that nothing will be able to impede our progress.

And this is surely what the Gods desire.

*

To keep every day of our life to its essence should be the task of man. But it is enormously difficult. The non-essential is overwhelming and potent and it usually comes to us as a deep-rooted impulse, as an absolute urgency, as a duty, preventing the soul from being calm in order to make a correct choice.

In reality, it is the absence of free thought that causes this incapacity of distinguishing between the essential and what is non-essential. Modern psychology often advocates doing what pleases us or what our inclination impels us to do but this is one of the founts of error. The inclination most often signifies the inclination of the Ego and the Ego is never essential. The Ego always goes after the inclination of pleasure and tends to satisfy rather dangerously our longing for life. The inclination of the I is quite different, it seeks truly to resolve the reality of life. The inclination of the ‘I’ is liberty put at the service of working out of Karma. The inclination of the Ego is a necessity, pushed by impulses that bind us ever more to the intransigence of Karma.

*

I usually tell myself: give up this or that, leave all attachment, renounce all that binds you to this sense-world, wealth, recognition, pleasures, clothes, etc., since you cannot carry anything of all this with you after death. An old leitmotiv but always valid. Then I reconsider and tell myself: all right, all this is true, but my motivation for kenosis, for giving up, does not arise from the fact that I cannot take with me all these so-called good things. There is no doubt that after we die, in the world that will receive us all, some with less and some with much difficulty, we must give up all that we were attached to.

But it is here, in this sensible world that I would like to achieve the detachment, especially for one reason: each time I bind myself to a situation, to a desire, to any sense-object, I encapsulate in this bond a force of the soul, I imprison it, immobilise it instead of using it for the goal that has been set before me: to rise to that world of light, of beauty, of love, without the need of being subjected to Death.

*

If we have completely explored ourselves, if we have not concealed anything of what we really are, then we can also have an insight into others and love them for what they are, since we can verify in them what in a different measure, perhaps, we have found in ourselves. A profound knowledge of ourselves prevents us from feeling superior to anyone: it is only by correcting and working on ourselves that we can help the others, by indicating to them the way and the obstacles to be confronted. But this does not, in any way, allow us to become role-models.

*

The soul is called to overcome the limits of the possible.
He who is familiar with meditation and concentration knows that at a given time he must try to go beyond his present human capacity: man has to be transcended. In the beginning, this is a desire, an impulse appeased until and unless the Ego, starting to liberate itself from itself, the self. One feels that man and the Ego are a whole and in order to go beyond man we need to go beyond the Ego. On the other hand, we get glimpses of the Higher Self that is at work and that urges us on.

From the very beginning we try to surmount in a quantitative way and subsequently the discipline is widened and extended. The attempt demands an unimaginable effort of will. Then the discipline ceases to be perceived as such and gradually becomes a natural extension of devotion, of our day’s consecration.

Our own continuous presence, attentive and immediate, accompanies us in our daily life, from our thoughts to our most involuntary actions. The automatisms that govern us begin to appear no more as such. We know and we feel that everything has to be turned towards consecration, in a willed and instantaneous spontaneity.

The path has been traced, the forces needed for its realisation have been released. And now the Grace of the Gods is to be sought and won even more ardently and deservedly.

*

Each time that my soul’s marvellous bird of paradise is almost at the confines of the sky, it is pierced by the hunter-Ego’s arrow. Each time it is shot down, it rises again and takes flight: higher still, more sure of itself. Its rainbow wings scintillating in the sun and its hunger for the sky exalting it above the earth.

When will it rise so high that no arrow is able to reach it?

*

Today I tried something more than the usual: I felt the body’s rebellion which, all of a sudden, started aching all over. But I still persisted. Then all fell profoundly silent. The ‘I’ released itself from the body and the soul.

What I did today should become a daily exercise to be improved, to be intensified.

To feel this self-giving as a flight towards He who waits.
Trembling, I thanked the Gods.

*

Only he who can immerse himself in deep concentration by freeing the soul from the body, only he who knows what he must conquer in himself in order to truly achieve this immersion in this concentration of quiet and silence; only he who is conscious of the heroic effort needed to break the barrier that the human raises to impede the entry into transcendence; he knows what surrender means: of one’s will, one’s thought and one’s feeling.

But in such a great effort, in this test that he himself and he alone sets to himself, he feels, he perceives concretely the presence of the Gods that lovingly help in his askesis.

And peace descends in the soul that finds repose in it.

*

I do not anymore belong to this world, understood as it ordinarily is: with that sort of interests, needs and relationships, that conscious or unconscious desire to assert myself.

I live in this world in order to extract the positive from the negative. I exist in the world behind seen by few and I feel things that are felt by few. I know I am only at the beginning of this extraordinary adventure but this simple beginning itself has already begun reshaping my new life. Because I live a new life and this is the miracle the Gods have performed in me, I cannot simply let myself live in it but I must live by being conscious of every moment. It is a life almost timeless in an immobility that is at the origin of the inner movement. There are no more adventures or voyages to be made. The new life is one unique luminous adventure, a unique voyage in the unique, real world: full of surprises, of unknown feelings, sounds and beings.

And I experience this world in the opaque world of day-to-day: opaque for the others but dense with light for me, dense with the light that emanates from the world behind.

I know I cannot just let myself go: rest in this world is pain and suffering, action is the ceaseless movement produced by love. It is not possible to cease from loving, it would mean death.

Rest is not having even a second, an inch of space that is void of Love.

*

We need to keep an immense seriousness for life which is not the physical life or our health, however important they may be. That immense seriousness that makes us renounce life, the life which rests on the sheer longing for life. It is the seriousness that is reserved for a precious instrument and the only one relevant in helping us to attain and to realise our true humanity.

The ceaseless perfectioning of the instrument allows us to define our aim even more clearly, to have ever wider fields of action. This seriousness is not like gloom but awareness of what can be achieved, it is a push towards askesis and, therefore, a continuous refinement of the instrument for ascending.

Life as an end in itself is sheer egoism, there is nothing more futile. It is Jacob’s ladder, a battle against the impeding spiritual powers or the celestial Hierarchy that does not deem us worthy yet.

At an advanced age, we realise having lived life lightly even when we thought of doing things seriously: but seriousness towards life is always a gain of askesis. Apart from this, what is usually called seriousness is simply a manner of speaking, a cliché.

*

The more I advance on the path of askesis, the more I discover myself and the real significance of the life I have lived. In my incredibly detailed memories of certain events or certain meetings, the real reasons for their occurrence are revealed and my incomprehension of these has determined the course of my very life, it has put up obstacles before me which now appear very clear. The more I advance on the path of askesis, the more I understand how much force I still need to acquire: each time we feel we have reached the goal, we realise that it is only a stage in the journey. And not the most difficult. There are stages that could become final even before we reach the goal: a terminus of the soul, as it were, incapable of advancing further. In such a stalemate there is a powerful whirlpool of rhythms and forces obtained through discipline to which is added an unspoken and an unconfessed disaffection for the World of the Spirit. The intellectual impulse revives in order to get back to its satisfactions and, therefore, to its interest in the cultural current. This plunge into the cultural current compensates for the slow loss of spiritual feeling. And the soul certainly tends to go back to movements and habits that were thought to have been conquered for good. This whirlpool becomes potent and unstoppable.

*

But the work that has been accomplished can never be cancelled: the Dragon’s bite is never healed, says an old Oriental adage. And the Dragon’s bite is the Spirit’s imprint on the soul. The flash brings light to that zone of inner darkness that must be confronted, it exposes the deep roots and shows the way to acquire or rather to consolidate the force. The soul reemerges from its momentary somnambulism: one’s discipline is reviewed, modified and reinforced. We get a better knowledge of the path to be trod, thanks to the dangers we experience on the way. The halt is soon forgotten and the journey resumed.

We know with utmost certainty that the healing flash was the Gods stretching out their Hand to their faithful disciple in difficulty.

*

Never to cease hoping for the Divine’s intervention in our experiences, never. There is no force more fruitful than this tenacity to hope which can lead us up to the certainty of faith. Seen thus, faith is the flower blossomed on the plant of our perseverance, of our resistance against the temptations of drifting along the crashing and impetuous currents of life.

Faith always goes against the current and we must build up this force day after day.

*

To look upon death as a just necessity of the soul. Even if my work has to be done here, in this way, in this situation with these relationships, I know that I will be able to fully understand who I am only in the Spiritual World. Even when being here or there makes no difference I will understand. Therefore, I do not fear death, even if I enjoy life: the error lies in looking upon them as exact opposites.

Death is matter’s opposition to Spirit, the body’s to the soul. Each time we give an autonomous reality to matter and to the physical, we open in ourselves the passage for death, we die a little. Spirit is Matter’s support, Spirit is the body’s support: until we perceive this concretely, instantaneously, spontaneously, by unifying in us all that is Spirit, until we continue to experience the material reality as its antithesis, we keep living for Death. Man lives for Death: he is afraid of Death because he is afraid of life. He does not live Life but the desire of life, inextinguishable, unappeasable. He is frightened of Death because Death is the extinction of this desire of life.

To die to the desire of life, to lose the life that is connected to this desire is to find and to live the true life, it is to resurrect from death even before dying.

*

To understand the great, irreplaceable path of suffering is to get in touch with the Spiritual World. It signifies taking a more real view of things, one that allows us to go into and beyond the surface-reality.

By understanding pain, irrespective of the source or the way it appears, we are close to the real fraternity of destinies, to the realisation that our soul is still unprepared for helping others. We do feel the urge to help, but at the same time the need to prepare ourselves to consecrate that fraternity which cannot be just an impulse or pleasure of giving, a superficial emotion but a laborious and long transformation. It is only at the end of this ceaseless preparation that we are able to see the other in his true form and we perceive the weave of destinies that wrap us in multiple centres, where each one is his own centre as well as the centre of others.

My Soul,
Dove of sweetness and light,
That the faltering hand of the I
Too much loved;
My Soul,
Compelled to inhospitable climes
By relentless violence of the world.
Warmed by futile loves
Nourished with poisonous fruit
Astonishing still in beautiful brilliance;
My Soul,
Thirstless now,
So full of faith,
So diaphanous despite your weight.
O dove of sweetness
Descended from the bosom of the Mother
Who reverberate within.

The hour has come,
The hour has come to return.
To linger now,
My Soul,
Would be a sheer waste of light.

*

Every battle has to be won here in this sensible world. It is good to keep a tranquil heart. No escape is possible, no leap out of this world. There is no refuge except within ourselves, in the profound peace of our soul. And there is no battle other than the one waged by the soul to liberate itself and to get back to its depths: it is here that God waits for us, it is here that the path opens to the other world.

*

As we move on the initiate’s path, the path becomes increasingly narrow. We cannot advance if we keep dragging some imperfection.

Little imperfections that initially passed unnoticed behind our screen now become burdensome. It is difficult to rid oneself of them in order not to risk regressing. We realise that the major difficulties are those stamped on the physical body, that surreptitiously and firmly hold that part of the soul down that has acquired unconscious habits. When we get stuck in this phase, we do not feel we have progressed but have laboured for nothing.

We have to sustain ourselves with a boundless courage and will and a total trust in the Divine.

*

The true ascetic has no other task but the one assigned to him by the Spiritual World. And this is indicated to him by the Gods as and when they decide. In the meantime his life is a continuous preparation. This is what Sri Aurobindo meant when he said: this life is your yoga. Life as a preparation to welcome and to awaken the Divine within us. This is the fundamental aim of every human being even if each one has his own preparation. This preparation is never theoretical, to be learnt from books or from another human being. It is our own life, our own experience, our difficult re-ascent from the pit in which we have fallen for no one else’s fault but our own.

To start recognising the pit and to look above at the opening in the sky that can be glimpsed, this is the beginning of the preparation.

Merely raising our head, our thoughts towards the heights, helps to stimulate the Spiritual World in giving us a hand. It is left to us not to fritter away this help.

*

The image of our soul as the purest chalice of a luminous flower that opens and is suffused with the rays of the sun helps us to understand its reawakening and the purification from the lower nature, from its unworthy claimants in order to offer itself to the only claimant capable of leaving its celestial nature intact. It is the immaculateness of the soul that we must raise towards the Light once again.

*

There are many things to be done to widen my inner being, even though it is difficult to enumerate them. They weigh at the bottom of my soul which is becoming burdensome and stagnant and this I have to overcome at different levels.

*

The soul is happy in solitude and immersed in the Spiritual World but I feel that this is not the right condition: it must ascend only to redescend. Solitude and the Spiritual World must not become a refuge but the fountain of the forces that allow me to see “my” problems and to resolve them. I do not wish to mean by this that it is necessary for me to live among people permanently: it is not a question of the number of people or meetings, nor to apply any sociological method. There is always the privilege of age which enables me to avoid this frenetic (and inconclusive) immersion into so-called society. No, nothing of the sort. It is simply to understand, directly or indirectly, how much the urges that mould the interior of our existence influence the rhythms of our journey. This interior is mostly restrictive, impeding, ever ready to put up that against which I struggled to detach myself and from which I am seeking to liberate myself. In short, a whole series of offerings, of favours to be received or to be returned, a maze of emotions that disclose necessities and weaknesses, a re-surfacing of anxieties which, at a different level, are a most negative thing but those around me continue having them, incapable of lifting their eyes and seeing their real dimension.

This so-called concrete reality is fascinating in its limitation, it immobilises the one whom it seizes and like a blindfolded mule makes him go round and round the same pivot in a limited space which, when trod repeatedly without a halt, seems unending.

And yet this impact with my interior has to be accepted and borne, it is part of a plot and of a scrutiny not to be avoided. But it is difficult for me, cruelly difficult. It is a constant renewal of an inner battle that I thought was over.

This re-making of what the interior has undone or has sought to undo tires me, makes me unbearable to myself, compels me to focus forces on obstacles that I thought I had already overcome. It is these ordeals of the interior that measure my patience with me and my tolerance of myself.

However, the truth that I must recognise, even if it be with bitterness, is that this interior, this ambient world I am plunged in is still coloured by my subjectivity. It is still a projection of my myself, I have still not objectivised it. To make it objective is to put my soul into equilibrium and make it absolutely unchangeable.

Imperturbability and unchangeability are the measures of overcoming all attachments or bondages: it is to make the soul the cloak of the Spirit.

*

Now I have no more time but from now on I have Eternity before me. Time is only for contingent things, most of which are useless and transient, but I have no more time except a few moments to be spent prudently. But I have Eternity for things that are not contingent.

I have Eternity for Truth that is eternal. It is Truth that transforms Time into Eternity. Time that is merely time is inevitably a destructive flow, destructive above all of the thinking because it is caught by the transient and the transient is the appearance that detaches itself from the eternal content through which it comes into appearance and for which Time is the measure of appearance, of a surface that thinks only in movement.

Eternity is the measure of the content that seems immobile, but can we measure something that is limitless?

*

There are not different kinds of light but only One. The other lights are either suffused with this One or they are false. It is this Unique Light that must irradiate us. The rest is falsehood and masked obscurity.

The parable of the Pearl has precisely this meaning: one cannot keep a genuine Pearl amidst the fake. It is better to rid oneself of the latter. In this way we mix the true and the false light. We must renounce the latter. However painful and difficult that may be.

*

He who always keeps joy in every situation, even in the worst of illnesses, carries with him the Consciousness of the world, since he knows the reason for every occurrence, knows the spiritual background and knows that all moves towards Love, is propelled by Love, is known only by Love.

There are moments of intense joy that we have to make impersonal, above all, to always transform into thanksgiving to the Gods, for such moments are an unmerited gift of their Grace. Such is the joy I have experienced today, during and after my meditation, the joy of the identity of thought.

It is only by perceiving and contemplating this force in the thought, that one can find it back in the refuelling zone, in the depth of the body where the force for the ordinary consciousness is in a state of sleep. It is like a beatific flash. Concentration-meditation becomes a splendour and a gleam of light. An instantaneous vision between thinking and willing, there in that refuelling zone.

In concentration, the correlation with thought happens before the nervous structure can intervene. This very structure makes us conscious of a correlation that has already occurred and in the place where it must happen. But it is not this that makes it happen, it is merely a transferring medium for something that has already happened.

What a joy to have experienced this!

*

We carry in us our Death that we have already chosen for ourselves as we have already chosen the basic traits of our destiny.

The sum of the preceding lives always determines in the broad outlines the events that we have to go through: the present life determines in accordance with its evolution or involution, the manner in which we will tackle these events, according to the forces and qualities that we have developed. It is the same for Death.

*

This morning I am feeling happy for my daily struggle, almost in a hurry. But I have to always remind myself about the patience I need for the final battle. I know for certain that here there is nothing final except for the continuity of the transformation and the perception of the successive stages.

*

The joy comes from the certainty of the spiritual Entities’ support. There is not a divine world divorced from the human. No more. The Kingdom of Heaven has descended on the earth. And what operates here on the earth outside this Kingdom of Heaven is meaningless Evil, an empty dialectic.

The soul’s fear of dying arises from the necessity of tearing itself from the body. And this body, in fact, is constituted of its habits, its attitudes, its need to be revered physically, in short, all that makes it “appear” tangibly to others in a certain way. If Death did not intervene, we would think this body was the goal of life. But fortunately, at least until man refuses to progress in his evolution, Death compels us to see the reality by leading us there where this reality is completely unveiled to us.

This reality has already been seen by the Saints and by the initiates in this life but it is only insofar as their soul has confronted Death, insofar as it has died to the worldly appearance, has destroyed all the possible and useful masks to hide behind. It has died and been reborn here, in this life, living the reality without the veils. For these conquerors, there has not been a march towards another world outside this world but the discovery of the unique and true world. They have anticipated what Death would have revealed to them.

*

I am like a kite that strives to fly ever higher, to lose itself in the sky as it is released from the earth. But it does not realise the thread that binds it to the earth. A little jerk of this thread is enough to make it lose its height. A subtle but strong thread is held firmly by the Adversary, the psycho-somatic element in us.

We need have no more fear of perfect solitude, of total autonomy, or in other words, to cut ourselves off from this thread. Necessary though painful. Otherwise, after death, the judgment of Gods will fall on me: “We waited for you and you did not come.”

*

“We waited for you and you did not come” because we lingered along the way to get ourselves caught in things not asked for, useless, because we burdened ourselves with ballast that we did not dare throw away, because we thought we would walk faster on the wide road parallel to the little path, a road filled with people, with lights, with comforts, with exchanged greetings and smiles. A road that leads to nowhere.

“We waited for you and you did not come.” We always manage to miss our real appointment.

*

The cycle has almost come full circle. The seed has germinated, has become a plant, the plant has thrown up leaves and flowers. Now the fruiting season is at hand, the last stage of the plant’s progress. The fruit has to be picked. It can no more live on the life of the plant. Left on the tree, it would rot. Death is the separation of the fruit from the tree. The fruit has to be tasted and it may be more or less delicious. But that is not its main characteristic. Its true function is to be a carrier of seed.

What is the worth of a useless fruit, with a past but no future?

The cycle is complete only when it can resume and it is not an eternal return but an eternal future.

May the seed bless our fruit.

Everything is falling silent: it is as if a new air has descended — more light, more light, more Light!

*

In the very last days Elio lost his voice. He continued to radiate love with his extraordinary smile. He asked Luciana for a pen and paper. And with a trembling hand left his message:

Everything is falling silent: it is as if a new air has descended — more light, more light, more Light!