Page 14 - All India Magazine Feb-2026

First Step to Perfection of Oneself

Become consciousness
To perfect oneself, one must first become conscious of
oneself. I am sure, for instance, that the following situation
has arisen many times in your life: someone asks you suddenly,
“Why have you done that?” Well, the spontaneous reply is,
“I don’t know.” If someone asks you, “What are you thinking
of?” You reply, “I don’t know.” “Why are you tired?” — “I don’t
know.” “Why are you happy?” —“I don’t know”, and so on. I
can take indeed fifty people and ask them suddenly, without
preparation, “Why have you done that?” and if they are not in-
wardly “awake”, they will all answer, “I don’t know.” (Of course
I am not speaking here of those who have practised a discipline
of self-knowledge and of following up their movements to the
extreme limits; these people can, naturally, collect themselves,
concentrate and give the right answer, but only after a little
while.) You will see that it is like that if you look well at your
whole day. You say something and you don’t know why you
say it — it is only after the words are out of your mouth that
you notice that this was not quite what you wanted to say. For
instance, you go to see someone, you prepare beforehand the
words you are going to speak, but once you are in front of the
person in question, you say nothing or it is other words which
come from your mouth. Are you able to say to what extent the
atmosphere of the other person has influenced you and stopped
you from saying what you had prepared? How many people can
say that? They do not even observe that the person was in such
or such a state and that it was because of this that they could
not tell him what they had prepared. Of course, there are very
obvious instances when you find people in such a bad mood
that you can ask nothing of them. I am not speaking of these.

14 All India Magazine, February 2026