Page 30 - All India Magazine Mar-2025

Divine on the material plane. To hold up a mental ideal or principle
and impose that on the inner working brings the danger of limiting
ourselves to a mental realisation or of impeding or even falsifying
by a half-way formation the true growth into the full communion
and union with the Divine and the free and intimate outflowing
of His will in our life. This is a mistake of orientation to which the
mind of today is especially prone. It is far better to approach the
Divine for the Peace or Light or Bliss that the realisation of Him
gives than to bring in these minor things which can divert us from
the one thing needful. The divinisation of the material life also as
well as the inner life is part of what we see as the Divine Plan, but
it can only be fulfilled by an outflowing of the inner realisation,
something that grows from within outward, not by the working
out of a mental principle.

You have asked what is the discipline to be followed in order
to convert the mental seeking into a living spiritual experience.
The first necessity is the practice of concentration of your con-
sciousness within yourself. The ordinary human mind has an activ-
ity on the surface which veils the real self. But there is another, a
hidden consciousness within behind the surface one in which we
can become aware of the real self and of a larger, deeper truth of
nature, can realise the self and liberate and transform the nature.
To quiet the surface mind and begin to live within is the object
of this concentration. Of this true consciousness other than the
superficial there are two main centres, one in the heart (not the
physical heart, but the cardiac centre in the middle of the chest),
one in the head. The concentration in the heart opens within and
by following this inward opening and going deep one becomes
aware of the soul or psychic being, the divine element in the in-
dividual. This being unveiled begins to come forward, to govern
the nature, to turn it and all its movements towards the Truth,

30 All India Magazine, March 2025