At Peace with Oneself

It has been remarked that the cardinal sign of maturity is to be able to ask–and answer in the affirmative–these interlinked questions:

First: Can I entertain and be at peace with a stranger?
Second: Can I entertain and be at peace with a new idea? and
Third: Can I entertain and be at peace with myself?

Challenges to our equanimity come at all times, and in different ways, and from different quarters. Somebody suddenly barges in, and even if he makes no demands, or starts no embarrassing conversation, his mere presence is enough to cause annoyance, or worse. Crowds, of course, can have a very disturbing effect upon us. Even someone near or dear, even one’s colleagues or subordinates, can sometimes cause acute uneasiness. Not to be so easily upset but to understand and accept everything–be it the arrival of astranger, the bursting of a tyre, the wail of a siren, the progress of a gherao, the physiognomy of a mob–and to refuse to be upset by such intrusions, or to allow them to ruffle one’s immobility: this is to cultivate the poise of the spirit, this is self-control and self-mastery.

Things, persons, crowds, physical phenomena have their instantaneous impact on our consciousness, and in the Sadhana of the Yoga of Life one has to discipline one’s antennae to be un-flappable under all circumstances. Not a question of indifference or insensitivity or uninvolvement; rather it is the deeper controlling perception of the Bass that permits, yet regulates, an infinite range of musical notes.

Of a more disquieting nature than the intrusion of a person or of a physical occurrence is the prick of a new idea, the eruption of a new thought, the solicitation by a new emotion. Anything almost might spark off this sort of psychological reaction: say, a news-item in the morning’s paper, an article in a learned journal, a thesis set forth in a book exploring the probable Unthinkable in global human affairs. Thus one might be unpredictably subjected to the random invasion by a sense of romantic despair, a view of all human endeavour as the Theatre of the Absurd, or perhaps the speculative spiral regarding an imminent nuclear holocaust and the probable end of civilisation: and such psychic bombardments could rock one’s inner quiet much more than any outer or physical offensive.

Here too one needs the poise of the spirit: a stationing of oneself on the native wisdom that refuses to be frightened by the unbridled orgies of the mere mental faculty. Doubtless the human psyche is compounded of divers elements: romance and agony, farce and derisive laughter, despair and the death-wish. But there’s the deeper Ground of our being too, where the contradictions are resolved and only the poise, the immobility, the impregnability remain. Let thoughts, ideological offensives, dialectical formulations, come from all sides: but if they can be filtered through the wide-awake Consciousness, they’ll lose their power to disturb, to distort or to damage the inner being. Again, as with the Ground that sustains skyscraper, factory, school and swimming pool alike, as with the srutiin music, so too the immobility of the spirit receives all, contains all and is sovereignty itself.

There’s, finally, the enemy within: the subtle serpent in the Garden of Eden which comes ingratiatingly as the sly insinuation, the devious proposition, the deceptive jugglery of suppressio veri and, suggestio falsi. In a mood of sloth and ennui, one might respond to a movement of avarice, of lust, of jealousy, of despair: just a faint first rustle on the placid main, yet instinct with dangerous consequences. Like the microbe that tests its strength to enter the healthy human body. Throw it out! A healthy body invariably throws it out–even a whole battalion of microbes. But once our boredom–our listlessness–our lethargic paralysis of will in the place of the puissant immobility of the spirit–once this ennui invites the microbe of psychic disturbance to enter the system, farewell to the peace within, for an intestine civil war has to be fought, a war of attrition:

The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council, and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

Once the enemies of peace have been carelessly admitted, undercover of the Trojan Horse of boredom, it will need a whole Kurukshetra to corner the evils and throw them out.

It will be clear, then, that to be at peace with oneself is verily to grow increasingly aware and remain unwaveringly conscious of the deeper reality about oneself and one’s apparently changing environment, both of which are quintessentially of a piece with omnipresent Reality, Sat-chit-ananda. No doubt, the eye it cannot fail to see, the ear it cannot fail to hear, but with the third eye and the subtle hearing of the soul one should also learn to see through and penetrate the crust of confusion and discord, and reach the abiding peace and harmony within.

All phenomenal life is the drama of evolutionary change, and our surface lives, with all the incidental fever and fret, the distracting noise and fury, are actors in the drama. On the other hand, there is no need to feel excessively agitated about this drama of Becoming. Like the birds described in the Veda,–

Two birds beautiful of wing,
friends and comrades,
cling to a common tree;
and one eats the sweet fruit,
the other regards him,
and eats not,–

the Witness Self within is unaffected by the intrusions and disturbances, and retains its poise of ocean oneness, its peace of inner certitude and illumination. Everyone has of course his particular individuality, his unique role in the theatre of life but even in order to discharge this role effectively, he needs must open himself to the infinitudes of the spirit, and he should learn from the plenitude of his true Consciousness to possess by self-knowledge his unity with the environment and the Transcendent.

The mere capacity to withdraw from life and to sit quiet in a corner, or in a mountain cave, is not necessarily a thing to boast about. The Mother has warned us that “it could become mere inertia.” The Sadhana she recommends is of quite another kind. When one cultivates the right habit of quietude and peace, instead of indifference, insensitiveness or inertia, there slowly surges a luminous understanding; “one is living differently, with a light in the mind that was not there before, with a peace in the heart that was not there before.” One still thinks, talks, acts, but one retains also the inner silence, the poise and puissance of the witness Spirit.

All this, however, is easier said than achieved. The yearning for peace and the achievement of peace–whether outer peace between the nations, or between warring rival factions, or the ineffable peace within–are two very different things, though the first usually leads to the second. The aspiration and the effort have to be mounted in all sincerity, the sporadic acts of peace-breaking honestly recognised, and prayer renewed once again as in Hopkins’s poem:

When, when, Peace, will you, Peace?
….I yield you do come sometimes: but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of if?

Being at peace with oneself is thus no easy hop to the goal, except to the elect. Sri Aurobindo, for example, attained the immutable immaculate silence at Baroda in January, 1908, and whatever the subsequent outer vicissitudes of his life-history, this inner silence of mind, this creative peace that passeth understanding, never left him. But for most of us the search for lasting inner peace must be a sustained Tapasya, a Yoga of steady aspiration, continued effort and progressive realisation. Always, however, ardent aspiration buttressed by adequate effort invokes the action of Grace, and the Peace of our quest can then elude us no more.
–Courtesy, A. I. R., Pondicherry