Freedom and Fatalism

Conversations 1929-1931 - The Mother....................................Shrikant Soman

Freedom and Fatalism 28 April 1929, Pg 29
Sadhak : Is there then no real freedom? Is everything absolutely determined, even your freedom, and is fatalism the highest secret?
Mother : Freedom and fatality, liberty and determinism are truths that obtain on different levels of consciousness. It is ignorance that makes the mind put the two on the same level and pit one against the other. Consciousness is not a single uniform reality, it is complex; it is not something like a flat plain, it is multidimensional. On the highest height is the Supreme and in the lowest
depth is matter; and there is an infinite gradation of levels of consciousness between this lowest depth and the highest height….
SVS Interpretation of Mothers AnswerWe must first understand that the Consciousness is not FLAT. It is a whole Universe with higher and still higher levels. We make the mistake of putting everything in a very simplistic way on a single level. This is the real source of error and confusion. Freedom and Fatality (i.e. the notion that everything is predetermined – exact opposite of freedom) appear to be as MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE, i.e., we can either have freedom of choice, free will or we are forced to live under the conditions of fatalism and determinism, but NOT BOTH. This is NOT TRUE. BOTH EXIST. The apparent conflict is solved when we consider that these things have their own plane of consciousness. As an analogy, consider the night sky. We see thousands of stars above us. All of them appear to be more or less on the same level encircling the Earth. Actually, all these stars are on different levels. At the time of eclipse of Moon and Sun, in ignorance the man at earlier times thought that these two planetary bodies have banged on each other like the two aircrafts dashing each other mid air. After the advancement of astronomy, we now know that the Sun and Moon do NOT and cannot bang each other as visually appears from Earth. They are on the same line of vision from Earth, but because of their being at different levels in the cosmos, they are comfortably and safely far away from each other.

Mother explains to us that at the highest of the level is the Supreme and at the lowest level is the Matter.
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Mother : In the plane of matter and on the level of the ordinary consciousness you are bound hand and foot. A slave to the mechanism of Nature, you are tied to the chain of Karma, and there, in that chain, whatever happens is rigorously the consequence of what has been done before. There is an illusion of independent movement, but in fact you repeat what all others do, you echo Nature’s world-movements, you revolve helplessly on the crushing wheel of her cosmic machine…….
SVS Interpretation of Mothers Answer
At the plane of matter as we ordinarily perceive, we do not have much of a freedom. We are ‘slave’ to the mechanism of Nature. We are tied to the chain of Karma. It is an endless chain of ‘cause and effect’ … one leading to the other. We are under the illusion of having a free will. But in reality our actions are only ‘mechanical responses’ to the external stimulus of our environment. We are dragged in the ‘crushing wheel of cosmic machine’ of Nature – Prakriti.
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Mother : But it need not be so. You can shift your place if you will; instead of being below, crushed in the machinery or moved like a puppet, you can rise and look from above and by changing your consciousness you can even get hold of some handle to move apparently
inevitable circumstances and change fixed conditions. Once you draw yourself up out of the whirlpool and stand high above, you see you are free. Free from all compulsions, not only you are no longer a passive instrument, but you become an active agent. You are not only not bound by the consequences of your action, but you can even change the consequences. Once you see the play of forces, once you raise yourself to a plane of consciousness where lie the origins of forces and identify yourself with these dynamic sources, you belong no longer to what is moved but to that which moves…….
SVS Interpretation of Mothers Answer
However, one must note that this is NOT the final word in the matter. It is our CONSCIOUS CHOICE to operate at a particular LEVEL of Consciousness. At the lowest level, we have no free will. As explained above, this is the level where the principal of ‘fatalism’ operates. We are CRUSHED in the Wheel of Nature. We are mere Puppets in her hands. On the other hand, if we chose to operate at higher level of consciousness, we get more and more freedom to determine our life and our circumstances. If we learn the technique properly, we can even get a ‘handle’ – meaning some lever of the machinery. We can pull this handle or the lever, like a skilled operator of a machinery, and change the circumstance of our life which earlier appeared to us as inevitable when we operated at the lowest level of consciousness. What we thought as ‘fixed conditions’ become ‘flexible’ in our hands. So far as we are caught in the ‘whirlpool’ we are mercilessly moved with the current. All our efforts to swim against the current of the whirlpool are frustratingly and hopelessly ineffective. The solution is to get out and above the whirlpool completely and get free of the mechanisms of the Nature. Then we realise we are ‘master of our own destiny’. Instead of being ‘slave’ of the cosmic machinery of Nature, we are the ‘operators’ of this machinery. We can change the apparently fixed conditions of life at the lower level of material world. We then realise that it is all ‘play of forces’. This is the secret. Having known this secret, we take the thread of our journey further backwards to understand the ‘source’ of these forces. We then shift our identity from that of being something that is get moved by these forces to the origin of these forces – from that of SLAVE to that of MASTER.
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Mother : This precisely is the aim of Yoga,—to get out of the cycle of Karma into a divine movement. By Yoga you leave the mechanical round of Nature in which you are an ignorant slave, a helpless and miserable tool, and rise into another plane where you become a conscious participant and a dynamic agent in the working out of a Higher Destiny. This movement of the consciousness follows a double line. First of all there is an ascension; you raise yourself out of the level of material consciousness into superior ranges. But this ascension of the lower into the higher calls a descent of the higher into the lower. When you rise above the earth, you bring down too upon earth something of the above,—some light, some power that transforms or tends to transform its old nature. And then these things that were distinct, disconnected and disparate from each other—the higher in you and the lower, the inner and the outer strata of your being and consciousness—meet and are slowly joined together and gradually they fuse into one truth, one harmony……..
SVS Interpretation of Mothers Answer
The objective of Yoga is to get out of the cycle of Karma and into a divine movement. We have known ‘what’ needs to be done in order to get out of the crushing wheel of nature. Now we are told as to ‘how’ it is to be done – through Yoga. By practicing Yoga, we get ourselves free of the mechanical rule of Nature (e.g. Newton’s famous law of physics) and rise to a higher level of consciousness where we enjoy the freedom of our actions and become the master of our life. We become the ‘partner with God’ instead of his subjects. We become ‘conscious participant and a dynamic agent’ in executing the divine plan of action from the point of view of higher plane of consciousness.

Here we come to an important SECRET of the Cosmic Law. Mother tells us that this movement of consciousness has a ‘two way’ line of action. When we get out of the whirlpool or the crushing wheel of nature and rise to a higher plane, simultaneously, and as a necessary and inevitable part of it, something else is also happening. When we rise from material plane to higher plane, some force of the divine descends into our material plane. Therefore it is called a double or two way movement. Some light or force descends on Earth to transform and change her nature and get ‘enlightened’. Once this happens, the dichotomy of our inner and outer, lower and higher levels of consciousness is ‘fused’ into a harmonious unified whole. There is no more distinct and separate inner and outer levels of consciousness. It then becomes one harmonious TRUTH.
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Mother : It is in this way that what are called miracles happen. The world is made up of innumerable planes of consciousness and each has its own distinct laws; the laws of one plane do not hold good for another. A miracle is nothing but a sudden descent, a bursting forth of another consciousness and its powers—most often it is the powers of the vital—into this plane of matter.
There is a precipitation, upon the material mechanism, of the mechanism of a higher plane. It is as though a lightning flash tore through the cloud of our ordinary consciousness and poured into it other forces, other movements and sequences. The result we call a miracle, because we see a sudden alteration, an abrupt interference with the natural laws of our own ordinary range, but the reason and order of it we do not know or see, because the source of the miracle lies in another plane. Such incursions of the worlds beyond into our world of matter are not very uncommon, they are even a constant phenomenon, and if we have eyes and know how to observe we can see miracles in abundance. Especially must they be constant among those who are endeavoring to bring down the higher reaches into the earth-consciousness below.
SVS Interpretation of Mothers Answer
This is the origin of what we ordinarily call ‘miracles’. As we have already seen, our world is made up of different planes of consciousness. Each of these planes is having its own laws of action, independent of one another. The laws of one level do not operate on another level. When there is a sudden descent of the force of higher level into the lower level, it results in an abrupt and drastic change and alteration in the material condition of the lower level. As we are unable to understand or correlate it to our normal understanding of the laws of the material world, we call it miracle. This descent is like a bursting forth of the forces from higher plane to the lower plane – something like the effect of the bursting of the Dam. This generally happens in the case of the descent of the powers of the vital world into the material world. This is the most common and likely occurrence. It is like a ‘lightening flash’ we see on a rainy day, tearing down through the clouds in an abrupt manner. We are not able to ‘rationalize’ the sequence of events with the help of our normal intellectual mind. This is because this event is NOT governed by the laws of our material world. It belongs to the laws of the higher world. In any case, it DOES obey a LAW. It is NOT any irrational happening. It does NOT break any law of nature. It only belongs to the laws of higher plane of consciousness which we are not yet fully equipped to understand.

Here we should note that such type of miracles are not a rare happening. We ordinarily feel it is rare because we are unaware of its happenings. Actually they happen all the time. We need to develop our faculty of perception to observe these phenomenon. This is particularly true for the higher practitioners of Yoga who endeavor to bring down the higher levels of consciousness into our earth plane of consciousness.