THE HIDDEN FORCES OF LIFE

Selections from the Works of

SRI AUROBINDO

and

THE MOTHER

Compiled by

A. S. Dalal

INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY

OJAI, CALIFORNIA

First Edition 1990

Published in the United States by Institute of Integral Psychology, Ojai, California, and simultaneously in India by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Publication Department, Pondicherry, India.

Copyright © 1990 by Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust, Pondicherry, India.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without prior permission of Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Publication Department, Pondicherry, India, excepting brief quotations for purposes of a review.

Distributed in the United States by

Lotus Light Publications

P.O. Box 2 Wilmot, W1 53192

ISBN 0-941524-60-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 89-51865

Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry

PRINTED IN INDIA

The compiler is grateful to Lloyd W. Fellows, Ph.D., Founder-Director of the Institute of Integral Psychology for sponsoring the publication of this book in the United States, and to Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Copyright Department, for permission to bring out an American edition of the book.

All that transpires on earth and all beyond

Are parts of an illimitable plan

The One keeps in his heart and knows alone.

Our outward happenings have their seed within,

And even this random Fate that imitates Chance,

This mass of unintelligible results,

Are the dumb graph of truths that work unseen:

The laws of the Unknown create the known.

The events that shape the appearance of our lives

Are a cipher of subliminal quiverings

Which rarely we surprise or vaguely feel,

Are an outcome of suppressed realities

That hardly rise into material day.

They are born from the spirit's sun of hidden powers

Digging a tunnel through emergency.

But who shall pierce into the cryptic gulf

And learn what deep necessity of the soul

Determined casual deed and consequence?

Absorbed in a routine of daily acts,

Our eyes are fixed on an external scene;

We hear the crash of the wheels of Circumstance

And wonder at the hidden cause of things.

SRI AUROBINDO

Savitri, Book One, Canto Four

Our conscious movements have sealed origins

But with those shadowy seats no converse hold;

No understanding binds our comrade parts;

Our acts emerge from a crypt our minds ignore.

Our deepest depths are ignorant of themselves;

Even our body is a mystery shop;

As our earth's roots lurk screened below our earth,

So lie unseen our roots of mind and life.

Our springs are kept close hid beneath, within;

Our souls are moved by powers behind the wall.

In the subterranean reaches of the spirit

A puissance acts and recks not what it means;

Using unthinking monitors and scribes,

It is the cause of what we think and feel.

The troglodytes of the subconscious Mind,

Ill-trained slow stammering interpreters,

Only of their small task's routine aware

And busy with the record in our cells,

Concealed in the subliminal secrecies

Mid an obscure occult machinery,

Capture the mystic Morse whose measured lilt

Transmits the messages of the cosmic Force.

A whisper falls into life's inner ear

And echoes from the dun subconscient caves,

Speech leaps, thought quivers, the heart vibrates, the will

Answers and tissue and nerve obey the call.

Our lives translate these subtle intimacies;

All is the commerce of a secret Power.

SRI AUROBINDO

Savitri, Book Two, Canto Five

A.S. Dalal is a clinical psychologist

now residing in Pondicherry, India. He

was Director of the Klamath Mental

Health Center, Klamath Falls, Oregon

(1971-81) and Co-Director of the

Institute of Integral Psychology, Ojai,

California (1982-84).