The Call of the Divine Flute

An individual is living out his life, following his career, pursuing education, enjoying himself, raising a family, pursuing a hobby. All quite normal things. For most people, this is the frame within which his life carries on, and he experiences the joys and sorrows, the pains and the pleasures, the victories and the defeats that life doles out to him.

Some individuals, however, find that this normal trajectory is disrupted through some unexpected turn. In some cases these things creep up slowly and the individual experiences a nagging sense of dissatisfaction or longing, or simply feels that this cannot be all, this cannot be the entirety and the meaning and purpose of life. He seeks for answers, he tunes his hearing to the sound of the divine flute and its call to him, urging him to look further, to go deeper, to seek for the answers he somehow knows are out there, waiting for him.

For others, the shift of focus comes with some sudden event or circumstance. Saul on the road to Damascus had such a life-changing experience. Sometimes it is a major trauma such as a near-death experience, at other times, a deep feeling of loss or grief with the death of a loved one, or the breaking of a cherished objective in the life. In such cases, the veil is rent and the individual finds that he is thrust into an entirely new life, is forced into a new direction and he discovers, instantly, his purpose and his mission. In such instances, he is indelibly marked with the change and cannot go back to what he was doing prior. It is as if he is taking a new birth, and his entire frame of reference changes, immediately and irrevocably.

The Mother observes: ”This may come with a very strong emotion, with a very great sorrow, a very great enthusiasm. When one is called to perform a fairly exceptional action, in circumstances which are a little exceptional, all of a sudden, one feels something as though breaking or opening within him, and one feels as though he were dominating himself, as though he had climbed up a higher rung and from there was looking at his own existence with the habitual senses. Once one has experienced this, one does not forget; even if only once it has happened, one does not forget it. And one can by concentration reproduce the state at will, later. This is the first step to cultivate it.”

“Afterwards one can very easily call up this state each time a decision is to be taken, and then one takes it in full awareness of the implications and foreseeing everything that’s going to happen. I don’t think there’s one individual in the world who hasn’t experienced it — in any case one cultured individual — at least once in his life, something that breaks and opens…and one understands. This seems to astonish you very much!… (To a child) You have never felt this, you? Yes?

Child responds: I don’t know.

“You are not sure!” “ (Long silence)

“When one has had it one feels that one has begun to live, that before this one did not know what life was. Suddenly one has entered fully into life. This is not forgotten.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 169-170