The Difference Between Living According to the Inner Truth of One’s Being or the External Ego Personality

The Mother draws a clear distinction between the individual who is in contact with his own deepest inner truth of being, his swadharma, and the individual who does not pay attention to this deepest truth but lives what we may call a “transactional” existence focused on the aggrandisement and enjoyment of his outer being and personality.

In the Mahabharata, we can identify two major people who embody these two opposite tendencies. There is King Yudhisthira (later emperor) who is the embodiment of Dharma, who works, not for his own self-aggrandisement, but to provide benefit to everyone under his umbrella. Then there is Duryodhana, his cousin, who, while a king in his own right, with power and wealth at his disposal, is so jealous of his cousin that he is willing to lie, cheat and steal to win the wealth and kingdom of Yudhisthira, and eventually becomes the proximate cause of the great battle that led to the destruction of vast numbers of Kshatriyas in the battle of Kurukshetra. One can see the peace and harmony at work in the person of Yudhisthira, and can observe the selfishness, bitterness and jealousy eating away at Duryodhana and clouding his wisdom.

The Mother notes: “The inner law, the truth of the being is the divine Presence in every human being, which should be the master and guide of our life.”

“When you acquire the habit of listening to this inner law, when you obey it, follow it, try more and more to let it guide your life, you create around you an atmosphere of truth and peace and harmony which naturally reacts upon circumstances and forms, so to say, the atmosphere in which you live. When you are a being of justice, truth, harmony, compassion, understanding, of perfect goodwill, this inner attitude, the more sincere and total it is, the more it reacts upon the external circumstances; not that it necessarily diminishes the difficulties of life, but it gives these difficulties a new meaning and that allows you to face them with a new strength and a new wisdom; whereas the man, the human being who follows his impulses, who obeys his desires, who has not time for scruples, who comes to live in complete cynicism, not caring for the effect that his life has upon others or for the more or less harmful consequences of his acts, creates for himself an atmosphere of ugliness, selfishness, conflict and bad will which necessarily acts more and more upon his consciousness and gives a bitterness to his life that in the end becomes a perpetual torment.”

Of course this does not mean that such a man will not succeed in what he undertakes, that he will not be able to possess what he desires; these external advantages disappear only when there is within the inmost being a spark of sincerity which persists and makes him worthy of this misfortune.”

“If you see a bad man become unlucky and miserable, you must immediately respect him. It means that the flame of inner sincerity is not altogether extinguished and something still reacts to his bad actions.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter VII Attitude, pp. 78-79