Controlling One’s Imagination

More frequently than not, the spiritual aspirant has both a great upward aspiration and a corresponding ‘knot’ that he needs to work out which is the counter-part to the upward capacity. It is the dynamic tension between the two that forces him to persevere. He will either given in to the lower impulse or find a way to work it out, dissolve it, eliminate it and realise the highest potentiality of his being.

The Mother observes: “I have known people with such opposite sides in their nature, so contradictory, that one day they could make a magnificent, luminous, powerful formation for realisation, and then the next day a defeatist, dark, black formation — a formation of despair — and so both would go out. And I was able to follow in the course of circumstances the beautiful one being realised, and while it was being realised, the dark one demolishing what the first one had done. And that is how it is in the larger lines of life as in its smaller details. And all that because one does not watch oneself thinking, because one believes one is the slave of these contradictory movements, because one says, ‘Oh! today I am not feeling well, oh! today things seem sad to me’, and one says this as if it were an ineluctable fate against which one could do nothing. But if one stands back or ascends a step, one can look at all these things, put them in their place, keep some, destroy or get rid of those one does not want and put all one’s imaginative power — what is called imaginative — only in those one wants and which conform with one’s highest aspiration. That is what I call controlling one’s imagination.”

“It is very interesting. When one learns to do it and does it regularly one no longer has time to feel bored.”

“And instead of being a cork afloat on the waves of the sea and tossed here and there by each wave, defencelessly, one becomes a bird which opens its wings, flies above the waves and goes wherever it wants.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter III Imagination, pg. 30