Vol. VII, Issue 6
Author: Beloo Mehra
Editor’s Note: A special offering on the occasion of International Day of Yoga, focusing on a few practical aspects of the path of Integral Yoga. A longer version of these 2-part musings was first published in New Race: The Journal of Integral Studies, in April 2008.
In all pursuits, intellectual or active, your one motto should be, “Remember and Offer”.
~ The Mother, CWM, 3: 26
Remember and Offer is an integral practice for the aspirants walking the sunlit path of Integral Yoga. While it may sound simple, but it is not that easy to practice.
Remember the Divine at every moment and offer everything. Offer every act in which we are outwardly engaged, every movement going on within. No matter how small or how mundane it may seem, remember and offer. This is what is asked of us.
Indeed the path would become easy if one could actually do this!
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“To make Yoga the ideal of human life India rises today”
But it is our mixed-up, egoistic outer nature which prevents us from practicing this advice of “remember and offer”. From brushing teeth in the morning to eating dinner, watching Netflix or entertaining guests, folding laundry or mopping the floor, working at desk in the office or running after children at home, driving back home in the evening or cooking an elaborate meal — every task, every situation is a field or an opportunity to help us grow in inner consciousness.
But this is only possible if at every such moment I spontaneously remember that it is not the separate ‘I’ that is doing all this, but that all this is Mother’s work and I am only Her instrument. If only I can always remember that the Divine is always present all around me, inside me, everywhere, that all work that gets done through me is nothing but an offering of myself and everything that I am at Her Feet.
A lot of stuff occupies our daily lives — stuff that keeps us away from remembering. Have we not heard ourselves saying – oh, let me finish this work and then I’ll sit down and meditate for half an hour? Now I have this one more thing to do, so where’s the time for my prayers? After I am done with this I need to go and do this other thing, so there is no way I will be able to sit quietly for ten minutes and remember God.
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Now this, now that and so on and so forth it goes. We keep postponing the act of remembering. And slowly we tend to stay more and more in a state of forgetfulness.
We don’t offer because we ignorantly perceive that what we are doing, feeling, thinking are not the ‘stuff of Gods’, but the ‘stuff of us’. We forget that it is all His, it is all He, He is in All, and is All. So how can the ‘stuff’ be ours? Or if all the stuff is His to begin with, why offer it back to Him? This question doesn’t even make sense. Because if all is His and He is in all, we are also His and He is also in us — so who is offering what to whom?
We forget that by not offering we keep living under the illusion that the stuff is ours, and that the outcomes of our actions are determined by us. That the responses to emotions and thoughts are ours and the consequences are also ours. We keep getting sucked in by this ignorance. And we keep living with the pain and suffering of ‘owning’ our ‘stuff’.
By remembering to offer, we let go of this ownership of stuff, we become un-involved, we begin to evolve.
People say that you remember something only if you have forgotten that thing in the first place. In our egoistic journeys through life, we do forget the Divine, we do forget that we are only instruments of the Divine who are here on earth to manifest His Divine Will, to play our part in His Lila. We forget, therefore we have to remember.
We forget that this is all Hers, so we have to remember to offer it all to Her. Because we forget that we are only children of Hers struggling in Ignorance, so we must remember that only Her Force and Her Grace can help us crawl out of this Ignorance and show us the Light. We forget that we are not really doing anything that we think we are doing, so we have to remember that it is the Divine Will manifesting itself through the outward actions that are being done through our hands and minds.
We forget that we only have a responsibility for our actions and no claim on their outcome, and we take all the credit for the success of our actions and put all the blame on to the Divine if there is failure (or cry about our Bad Luck!). So we have to remember and offer all work to the Divine with no concern whatsoever for the outcome. We know we must do this, but still we don’t, we can’t.
We don’t do it because we forget.
Perhaps there is a deeper necessity for this forgetfulness because all is part of the Divine Plan. As Sri Aurobindo writes in Savitri:
A conscious power has drawn the plan of life,
There is meaning in each curve and line.
We are perhaps led by some lower derivation of the Divine Plan to this forgetfulness so we may focus on the external world and the action that we must pursue. It is this action in the outer world that allows us to manifest and express outwardly what we may have experienced as part of an inward growth, whatever little that may be.
Without the outward action we may not be able to translate any inner change into a concrete and sustained transformation. Without a reasonable dose of forgetfulness we may not be fully immersed in the outward action. And without such an immersion an identification with the task may not be there, without which the task may not become a natural expression or outpouring of whatever part in us that has begun the journey of transformation.
In the ultimate analysis, this simultaneous inner and outer journey leads to progressive transformation of our outer nature. And for the purpose of our individual growth, this ‘back and forth’ between the outward external action and an inward redirecting of energies is what keeps us ‘testing’ for ourselves whether we are really growing. Perhaps for that we are given this state of forgetfulness.
Continued in Part 2
~ Design: Beloo Mehra
