Divine Grace and Faith, Sincerity and Surrender

To walk through life armoured against fear, peril and disaster, only two things are needed, two that go always together:

• Grace of the Divine
• Your inner state made up of faith, sincerity and surrender.

Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect.

An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted with ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards to heaven.

Regard your life as given to you only for Divine work and to help in Divine manifestation. Desire nothing but the purity, force, light, wideness, calm, ananda of the Divine consciousness and its insistence to transform and perfect your mind, life and body. Ask for nothing but the divine, spiritual and supramental Truth, its realization on earth, in you and in all who are called and chosen, and for its victory over all opposing forces.

Let your sincerity and surrender be genuine and entire.

When you give yourself, give completely, without demand, without condition, without reservation so that all in you shall belong to the Divine Mother and nothing left to the ego or given to any other power.

The more complete your faith, sincerity and surrender, the more will grace and protection be with you. When the grace and protection of the Divine Mother are with you, what is there that can touch you or whom need you fear? A little of it even will carry you through all difficulties, obstacles and dangers; surrounded by its full presence you can go on surely on your way because it is Hers, careless of all menace, unaffected by any hostility however powerful, whether from this world or from the worlds invisible. Its touch can turn difficulties into opportunities, failure into success and weakness into unfaltering strength. For the grace of the Divine Mother is the sanction of the Supreme and now or tomorrow its effect is sure, a thing decreed, inevitable and irresistible.

Money

Money is a sign of universal force, and this force in its manifestation on earth works on the vital and physical planes and is indispensable to the fullness of outer life.

In its origin and in its true action, it belongs to the Divine. But like other powers of the Divine, it is delegated and then usurped for the uses of the ego or held by demonic influences and perverted to their purpose.

This is indeed one of the three forces - power, wealth, sex - that have the strongest attraction for the human ego and the Asura and are most generally misheld and misused by those who retain them.

The seekers or keepers of wealth are more often possessed rather than its possessors; few escape entirely its distorting influence. For this reason, most spiritual disciplines insist on complete self-control, detachment and renunciation of all bondage to wealth and of all personal and egoistic desire for its possession. Some even put a ban on money and riches and proclaim poverty and bareness of life as the only spiritual condition.

But this is an error; it leaves the power in the hands of the hostile forces. To reconquer it for the Divine to whom it belongs and to use it for divine purposes is the right way for the sadhaka.

You must neither turn an ascetic, shrinking from the money power, the means it gives and the object it brings, nor cherish a rajasic attachment to them or a spirit of enslaving self-indulgence in its gratification.

This is the right attitude and only those who can keep it, preserve a faith unshaken by disappointments and difficulties and shall pass through life’s ordeals, onwards to the supreme victory and the greatest transmutation.

Regard wealth simply as a power to be won back for the Mother and placed at her service. All wealth belongs to the Divine and those who hold it are trustees, not possessors. It is with them today, tomorrow it may be elsewhere. All depends on the way they discharge their trust while it is with them, in what spirit, with what consciousness in their use of it, to what purpose.

In your personal use of money, look on all you have or get or bring as the Mother’s. Make no demand but accept what you receive from her and use it for the purposes for which it is given to you. Be entirely selfless, entirely scrupulous, exact, careful in detail, a good trustee; always consider that it is her possessions and not your own that you are handling.

On the other hand, what you receive for her, lay religiously before her; turn nothing to your own or anybody else’s purpose.

Do not look up to men because of their riches or allow yourself to be impressed by the show, the power of influence. When you ask for the Mother, you must feel that it is She who is demanding through you a very little of what belongs to Her and the man from whom you ask will be judged by his response.

If you are free from money-taint but without any ascetic withdrawal, you will have greater power to command the money for the Divine work. Equality of mind, absence of demand and the full dedication of all you possess and receive and all your power of acquisition to the Divine Shakti and her work are the signs of this freedom. Any perturbation of mind with regard to money and its use, any claim, any grudging is a sure index of some imperfection or bondage.

The ideal sadhaka in this kind is one who, if required to live poorly, can so live and no sense of want will affect him or interfere with the full inner play of the divine consciousness. If he is required to live richly, can so live and never for a moment fall into desire or attachment to his wealth or to the things that he uses or servitude to self-indulgence or a weak bondage to the habits that the possession of riches creates. The Divine Will and Divine Ananda is all for him.

In the supramental creation, the money forces have to be restored to the Divine Power and used for ordering of a new divinised, vital and physical existence in whatever way the Divine Mother Herself decides in Her creative vision.

The true doer of Divine work

If you want to be a true doer of Divine work, your first aim must be to totally free from all desire and self-regarding ego. All your life must be an offering and a sacrifice to the Supreme; your only object in action shall be to serve, to receive, to fulfil, to become a manifesting instrument of the Divine Shakti in Her work. You must grow in the Divine consciousness till there is no difference between your will and Hers, no motive except Her impulsion in you, no action that is not Her conscious action in you and through you.

Until you are capable of this complete dynamic identification, you have to regard yourself as a soul and body created for Her service, one who does all for Her sake. Even if the idea of being a separate worker is strong in you and you feel that it is you who do the act, yet it must be done for Her.

All stress of egoistic choice, all hankering after personal profit, all stipulation of self-regarding desire must be extirpated from your nature. There must be no demand for fruit and no seeking for reward; the only fruit for you is the pleasure of the Divine Mother and the fulfilment of Her work, your only reward a constant progression in Divine consciousness and calm and strength and bliss. The joy of service and the joy of inner growth through Divine work is sufficient recompense of the selfless worker.

But a time will come when you are more and more of the instrument and not the worker. For first by the force of your devotion, your contact with the Divine Mother will become so intimate that at all times you will have only to concentrate and to put everything into Her hands to have Her present guidance, Her direct command or impulse, the sure indication of the thing to be done, the way to do it and its result.

Afterwards you will realise that the Divine Shakti not only inspires and guides, but initiates and carries out your work; all your movements are originated by Her, all your powers are Hers, mind, life and body are conscious and joyful instruments of Her action, means for Her play, moulds for Her manifestation in the physical universe.

There can be no more happy condition than this union and dependence; for this step carries you back beyond the border-line from the life of stress, suffering and ignorance into the truth of your spiritual being, into its deep peace and its intense ananda.

While this transformation is being done, it is more than ever necessary to keep yourself free from all taint of the perversions of the ego. Let no demand or insistence creep in to stain the purity of the self-giving and the sacrifice. There must be no attachment to the work or the result, no laying down of conditions, no claim to possess power, no pride of the instrument, no vanity or arrogance. Nothing in the mind or in the vital or physical parts should be suffered to distort to its own use or seize for its own personal and separate satisfaction.

Let your faith, your sincerity, your purity of aspiration be absolute and pervasive of all planes and layers of your being; then every disturbing element and distorting influence will progressively fall away from your nature.

The last stage of this perfection will come when you are completely identified with the Divine Mother and feel yourself no longer to be another and separate being, instrument, servant or worker but truly a child and eternal portion of Her consciousness and force. Always She will be in you and you in Her; it will be your constant, simple and natural experience that all your thought and seeing and action, your every breathing or moving comes from Her and are Hers.

You will experience that you are a person and power formed out of Herself, put out from Her for the play and yet always safe in Her, being of Her being, consciousness of Her consciousness, force of Her force, ananda of Her ananda.

When this condition is entire and Her supramental energies can freely move you, then you will be perfect for Divine works; knowledge, will, action will become sure, simple, luminous, spontaneous, flawless, an outflow from the Supreme, a Divine movement of the Eternal.