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375. Yoga of Self-Giving

Sri Aurobindo discarded the usual methods of yoga and advocated Surrender as the only desirable method. Surrender is all-inclusive. The main strand of surrender is Self-giving. It is interesting to know the ways of Self-giving. Its ways are peculiar. One of them is when someone wants to deprive you of something, he presses the key of Self-giving in the atmosphere. The atmosphere gives you the same thing in a greater measure. This is a kind of transformation of evil into good. In the life of devotees, such instances are legion. Apart from giving some examples, I wish I could communicate to the reader the logic of life forces or the mechanism through which this force works.

Education is a discipline and exams are bitter pills. When you tell a story which can educate the child, the child avidly listens. It is easy for us to understand that the child is eager to listen to a story and a little education comes through that. How to understand that one man's ill will ends up in my life as another man's good will? What happens, where, how? He who invokes the Spirit is enveloped in an atmosphere of GOOD will.  Good will can only do good. Your boss activates that atmosphere by being angry at you, and desires to punish you. The atmosphere around you is activated. It moves only in one way. It can do good. It does. The punishment the boss wants to give changes into a present.

A mean boss deprived his subordinate the use of the office cycle to go home and return. It was a facility the subordinate had enjoyed for a long time. Now the boss decided to deprive him of it. The subordinate's neighbour offered to take him to the office and back on his motorbike. Everyone in the office offered the man their two-wheeler. It so happened that on a few days he was brought to the office in somebody's car. In ordinary life, this does happen, but very rarely. When it does happen, it happens once. In the lives of the devotees, this is a permanent feature. It will be a rich yogic knowledge if we can disregard the convenience and SEE how the Force works. It is a Force of Self-giving. It can only be benevolent even when the intention of the prime mover is evil. A further understanding awaits us. It is the exact means by which the atmosphere changes evil into good.



story | by Dr. Radut