The Change in Standpoint That Puts the Seeker in Harmony With the Divine and its Intention in the Universal Manifestation

We frequently hear people complaining about how they are locked into and trapped in the lives they are leading. They feel like there is nothing they can do and nothing can change it. This was exemplified in a motion picture called ‘Groundhog Day’ which told the story of an individual who continually repeated the events of life on the same day. Each day he woke up and it was once again the prior day that he had just finished before he fell asleep. The storyline works through his different ways of trying to deal with the apparent meaninglessness of his life and the endless repetition of it, while he aspired to have a romantic relationship with someone who was employed by the same news station where he worked as a meteorologist. He tries a number of strategies including crime, suicide, and various attempts to gain information about his ‘target’ as he experiences these innumerable lives, all based on the surface being and the ego personality. Eventually, he understands and embraces the process and learns how to change within himself and at that moment, everything changes and he is released from the repetitive pattern and gains the true love he has been aspiring towards.

If we put aside the top level story line, we can see the deeper meaning that we all can relate to. We seem to repeat everything time and again, we have limited knowledge, try to steer our lives by that limited knowledge and experience success and failure in our endeavours along the way. Once we find the key, and understand the need to change our standpoint to identify with the Divine Presence, everything changes and our lives take on new meaning and direction. The change in standpoint represents a shift from the ego-personality and its focus on the exte
al circumstances to the psychic being and its focus on its oneness with the Divine.

The Mother observes: “Thou art perfect knowledge, absolute consciousness. He who unites with Thee is omniscient — while the union lasts. But even before attaining this stage, he who has given himself to Thee in all the sincerity of his being, with all his conscious will, he who has resolved to make every effort to help in the manifestation and triumph of Thy divine law of Love in himself and the whole field of his influence, sees all things in his life change, and all circumstances begin to express Thy law and assist his consecration: for him it is the best, the very best that always happens; and if in his intelligence there is still some obscurity, some ignorant desire which at times prevents him from becoming aware of it immediately, he recognises sooner or later that a beneficent power seemed to protect him even from himself and secure for him conditions most favourable to his blossoming and transfiguration, his integral conversion and utilisation.”

“As soon as one becomes conscious and convinced of this, one can no longer worry about future circumstances or the turn events take; it is with perfect serenity that one does at every moment what one thinks best, convinced that the best too is sure to come from it, even if it is not the results which we, with our limited reasoning, expected from it.”

“That is why, Lord, our heart is light, our thought in repose. That is why we turn to Thee in all confidence and say peacefully: ‘May Thy will be done, in it true harmony is realised.’ “

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 1, Looking at Life and Circumstances, pp. 32-33