Page 22 - All India Magazine Jun-2026

The First Step
The first absolutely indispensable step is not to repeat,
more or less mechanically and without quite knowing what
you are saying, that "appearances are false". You say it because
Sri Aurobindo has told us so — but without really understand-
ing it. And yet, when you want to understand something, you
continue to look, to observe, to touch, to taste and to feel, be-
cause you believe there are no other means of observation. It is
only when you have had the experience of the "reversal of con-
sciousness", when you have gone behind these things, when
you can feel, experience, in the most concrete manner, their il-
lusory appearance, that you are able to understand. But, unless
you have had the experience, you can read all the Aphorisms,
repeat and learn them, have faith in them and still not perceive:
they have no reality for you. All these appearances remain the
only way of coming into contact with the outer world and of
becoming aware of what it is. And sometimes you can spend a
whole lifetime learning how things are in their appearances and
be considered very cultured, very intelligent, highly knowledge-
able, when you have observed all this in detail and remembered
all that you have observed or learnt...
Strictly speaking, you can, when you have worked hard,
have some slight effect on these appearances, change them
a little — this is how, through science, you learn to manipulate
matter — but there is no true change and there is no true pow-
er. And when you are in that state, you are wholly convinced
that there is nothing you can do to change your character. You
feel trapped in a kind of fatalism that weighs you down, you
know neither whence nor how; you are born like this, in such
and such a place, into such and such an environment, with such
and such a character, and you get through life as best you can,
adapting to things without having much influence on them,

All India Magazine, June 2026
22