Don't exaggerate yourself

Can you remember youself in your very early childhood? A little child, as little as you had just learnt to walk a measured length and been managing to utter some words with indistinctive syllables; you were then an uncertain being. You could not think as your mind was still in its shape and its grasp was as insignificant as the measure of your walking strides. Most of the time you remained satisfied (I do not use the word 'happy') or content with you except at times of physical discomfort. You had your little world, better say, a sense-world. Can you remember what it was exactly like? It was unlike what it is now to you characteristically. Now, to you, the world and you are two different entities. But at that period of your childhood, we are discussing, you could not as yet been able to detach your surroundings off from your sense of existence. So you were comfortable with everything known, as stuck to your senses-the faces, places, sounds, and touches. Anything unknown was an adverse intrusion and it upset your balance. The centre of this tiny sense-being was your mom.

So, if for reasons, whenever you found yourself none around you in the middle of the corridor of the house –you had never been kept in before, you cried out, not out of fear but because you could not be of what you were accustomed to in your sense world. Yes, you were an ensemble of senses.

It was a justified suffering more justified than when you were afraid of a ghost in a haunted house-much later when you were enough grown-up as a boy. Unlike the child's it was a mentally constructed fear. There can be no raison d'être of such suffering. The child suffered as a part of his being was cut off, he was unshaped, reduced as less. Have you ever noticed how the tail of a domestic lizard when cut off from the body moving and fidgeting with life impulse even after the lizard has gone into hiding? It is in desperation for the body it is a part of.

You still continue to suffer. And you know it has no end. You suffer in myriad ways the types and nature of which were not known to the early Homo sapiens. It is all because you are not consciously living in unity with the real existence you are a part of. All our suffering is rooted in our ignorance in feeling us as separated from the whole. You exaggerate you when you feel alone or separated. What we require is to expand ourselves without limit.

In the last phase of her life The Mother of Sri Aurobindo Ashram –while doing her sadhana with the cells of her body she told once to one of her disciples that there was only one physical body in this world!