The Foundation

When can it be said that a sadhak has laid his foundation in sadhana?
When he has a settled calm and equality and devotion and a continuity of spiritual experience.

What is the right way to establish peace and equality in the nature?
The peace and the equality are there above you, you have to call them down into the mind and vital and the body. And whenever something disturbs, you have to reject the thing that disturbs and the disturbance.

Do calm and equality come down from above by the Mother's Grace?
When they descend, it is by the soul's aspiration and the Mother's Grace.

Please let me know if I have any possibility for spiritual realisation?
It is a waste of time to ask such a question. When you have entered the spiritual path, you have only to go on relying not on your possibility but on the Mother's Power.

What is the true sign indicating that equality is established in the nature? Is it to receive all the disturbance from outside or inside in perfect calm and without doing anything to remedy it?
It is to face it without being disturbed and to reject it calmly. Whether one tries to remedy or not remedy should make no difference. Only when one acts against it, one must do it calmly, without anger, excitement, grief or any other disturbing movement.

When a person has attained samata or equality can we say that he is egoless?
Samata does not mean the absence of ego, but the absence of desire and attachment. The ego-sense may disappear or it may remain in a subtilised or dense form—it depends on the person.

Does the Divine descent mean descent of Peace, Purity and Silence?
It is part of the Divine descent, not the whole of it.

I find that when Peace has come down in my being there is a play of a higher Force in it. Is this Force different from the force of Peace?
The peace is the condition of the right play of the Force. Force and Peace are two different powers of the Divine.

How to develop the capacity to receive the Divine Force?
Quietness of mind is the first requisite—for the rest aspiration and abhyäsa.

What is the exact meaning of calm mind? Does it mean that there will be no thought at all in the mind?
No. It is not necessary that there should be no thought. When there is no thought, it is silence. But the mind is said to be calm when thoughts, feelings, etc., may pass through it, but it is not disturbed. It feels that the thoughts are not its own; it observes them perhaps; but it is not perturbed by anything.

What is the real meaning of activity and passivity in sadhana?
Activity in aspiration, tapasya, rejection of the wrong forces; passivity to the true working, the working of the Mother's Force, are the right thing in sadhana.

- Sri Aurobindo

The Mother's Answers on The Foundation