The Action of the Higher Grace

We normally judge things based on our own individual egoistic standpoint, basically, how a particular event or circumstance affects us in the moment. We build up expectations and plans, and suddenly, something gets in the way and destroys or diverts those plans. We naturally become disappointed, potentially even angry about what happened.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, we may frequently find that what took place at that time actually was an enormous act of Grace that helped us move into a direction that we otherwise would not have seen, or would have actively avoided.

There is the case of an individual who was poisoned and upon recovery he recognised that there was a divine existence in the world and he had been given back his life to serve that. He promptly gave up his career plans and set off to learn about and practice a spiritual discipline. There is the case of a man struck by lightning and pronounced clinically dead who returned to life with a new focus and mission and switched from being a hired mercenary to someone who founded a hospice care organization. Many such anecdotes can be reported to show that what appeared to be a tragedy was actually a positive turning point in someone’s life. This is particularly true for those who take up and follow a spiritual path after some traumatic event that they had, at the time, considered to be a very unfortunate circumstance.

The Mother writes: “If you are in a state of conscious aspiration and very sincere, well, everything around you will be arranged in order to help in your aspiration, whether directly or indirectly, that is, either to make you progress, put you in touch with something new or to eliminate from your nature something that has to disappear. This is something quite remarkable. If you are truly in a state of intensity of aspiration, there is not a circumstance which does not come to help you to realise this aspiration. Everything comes, everything, as though there were a perfect and absolute consciousness organising around you all things, and you yourself in your outer ignorance may not recognise it and may protest at first against the circumstances as they show themselves, may complain, may try to change them; but after a while, when you have become wiser, and there is a certain distance between you and the event, well, you will realise that it was just what you needed to do to make the necessary progress. And, you know, it is a will, a supreme goodwill which arranges all things around you, and even when you complain and protest instead of accepting, it is exactly at such moments that it acts most effectively.”

“… If you say to the divine with conviction, ‘I want only You’, the Divine will arrange all the circumstances in such a way as to compel you to be sincere. Something in the being… ‘I want only You.’ … the aspiration… and then one wants a hundred odd things all the time, isn’t that so? At times something comes, just… usually to disturb everything — it stands in the way and prevents you from realising your aspiration. Well, the Divine will come without showing Himself, without your seeing Him, without your having any inkling of it, and He will arrange all the circumstances in such a way that everything that prevents you from belonging solely to the Divine will be removed from your path, inevitably. Then when all is removed, you begin to howl and complain; but later, if you are sincere and look at yourself straight in the eye… you have said to the Lord, you have said, ‘I want only You.’ He will remain close to you, all the rest will go away. This is indeed a higher Grace. Only, you must say this with conviction. I don’t even mean that you must say it integrally, because if one says it integrally, the work is done. What is necessary is that one part of the being, indeed the central will, says it with conviction: “I want only You.’ Even once, and it suffices: all that takes more or less long, sometimes it stretches over years, but one reaches the goal.”

But one has all kinds of imperfections!

“Eh? The more the imperfections, the longer it takes; the more the attachments one has, the longer it takes. BUT THE GOAL IS SURE!”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 1, Looking at Life and Circumstances, pp. 21-23