The Lightning-Flash That Assures Realisation in This Life or Another

Everything in the world has its own timings and progressions of development. A tree grows, flowers, and develops fruits, which take their time to ripen and get picked or fall of the tree on their own. When one observes a chicken brooding over her eggs, she is incubating the chick which will eventually emerge. That happens when the chick is ready and it begins to peck at the shell until it can emerge ready to face the world. A human embryo starts from a fertilized ovum, grows for some 9 months within the mother’s womb and when the time is ready, it emerges into the external world.

As the child grows, we begin to notice that there are stages in its development. The first stage focuses on the physical development, and the child learns to stand, to crawl and to walk. At a next stage the vital nature begins to develop and we see the child testing boundaries, trying to determine what powers it has in the world and how to use them. Later, a mental stage of development occurs and the youth takes up the development of his powers of observation, analysis, and the use of his reasoning faculties.

It is therefore something to be expected that the development of the psychic stage of existence will take place when the being is ready. This readiness may be something that has been prepared in a series of past lifetimes, or it may be that the moment of the psychic expression in the life, as with the birth of a chick or a human baby, occurs at some point in the current lifetime.

When the moment comes, it generally does not come through a mental process of thought, analysis or logical inference. It feels like a revelation, or like a clarity of vision far beyond normal. It can come at any time, once the necessary preparation has occurred.

Many people have not reached the stage of emergence of the psychic presence in their external lives. They may be living primarily on the physical plane, the vital plane of the mental plane as those powers develop and flesh themselves out. Not every fruit on the tree ripens at the same time! If an opening comes, it changes the life for those who experience it, maybe not all at once, and maybe not immediately. But something has awakened which will inevitably bear its fruit in the opening of the psychic being and its emergence.

The Mother writes: “Even a fleeting idea in a child, at a certain moment in its childhood when the psychic being is most in front, if it succeeds in penetrating through the outer consciousness and giving the child just an impression of something beautiful which must be realised, it creats a little nucleus and upon this you build your action. There is a vast mass of humanity to whom one would never say, ‘You must realise the Divine’ or ‘Do yoga to find the Divine.’ If you observe well you will see that it is a tiny minority to whom this can be said. it means that this minority of beings is ‘prepared’ to do yoga, it is that. It is that there has been a beginning of realisation — a beginning is enough. With others it is perhaps an old thing, an awakening which may come from past lives. But we are speaking of those who are less ready; they are those who have had at a certain moment a flash which has passed through their whole being and created a response, but that suffices. This does not happen to many people. Those ready to do yoga are not many if you compare them with the unconscious human mass. But one thing is certain, the fact that you are all here proves that at the least you have had that — there are those who are very far on the path (sometimes they have no idea about it), but at the least all of you have had that, that kind of spontaneous integral contact which is like an electric shock, a lightning-flash which goes through you and wakes you up to something: there is something to be realised. It is possible that the experience is not translated into words, only into a flame. That is enough. And it is around this nucleus that one organises oneself, slowsly, slowly, progressively. And once it is there it never disappears. it is only if you have made a pact with the adverse forces and make a considerable effort to break the contact and not notice its existence, that you may believe it has disappeared. And yet a single flash suffices for it to come back.”

“If you have had this just once, you may tell yourself that in this life or another you are sure to realise.”

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 177-178