Page 32 - All India Magazine Mar-2026

ing these forces, can with difficulty resist the tendency to seize
on and use them for the ego’s objects or, which comes practi-
cally to the same thing, they mix the demands of the ego with
the service of a higher object.
*
The Ego’s Shadow in Sadhana

There is [when one receives forces without a basis of peace,
light and love] more a sense of having power than real power.
There are some mixed and quite relative powers — sometimes
a little effective, sometimes ineffective — which could be devel-
oped into something real if put under the control of the Divine,
surrendered. But the ego comes in, exaggerates these small
things and represents them as something huge and unique and
refuses to surrender. Then the sadhak makes no progress — he
wanders about in the jungle of his own imaginations without
any discrimination or critical sense or among a play of confused
forces he is unable to understand or master.
Forces can come anywhere. The Asuras have their forces,
but without peace, light or love — only they are forces of dark-
ness.
*
The man there [in the correspondent’s dream] symbolises
that ego-tendency in the human nature which makes a man,
when some realisation comes, to think how great a realisation
is this and how great a sadhak am I and to call others to see
and admire — perhaps he thinks like the man in the dream, “I
have seen the Divine, indeed I feel I am one with the Divine, — I
will call everybody to see that.” This is a tendency which has in-
jured the sadhana of many and sometimes ruined the sadhana
altogether.

32 All India Magazine, March 2026