Making Matter Spiritual

From my visit to auroville and attending a session on Aurobindo’s integral yoga, a new perspective arose.

The infinite permanent divine has involved itself with the limited impermanent matter with the goal of making matter spiritual.

And so, we are the divine in material form and whatever we experience — separation, fear, dislike, like, love, hate, various feelings, sensations, thoughts, situations, sights, imaginations, bodies can be responded with spiritual wisdom.

Another line I heard recently :

“Opposite of love is not hate, its indiference.”

So, in context to Vipassana meditation, this translates as — when we look at feelings/sensations within us that we love or crave for, we must be indifferent to them or to their presence or absence, as they are impermanent. Similarly, the vice versa of the quote is:

“Opposite of hate is not love, its to pay attention.”

So, when we detect something unpleasant during meditation, we must just pay great attention to it. Find all the areas and spots in the body that feel unpleasant and just be attentive towards it. Makes sense to me. To extend , maybe we must experience it without hating it and then accepting it & maybe even loving it. So, for unpleasantness — pay attention first, send love later and then finally become indifferent.

I guess, I now also understand why one must cultivate a meditative presence. In meditation, you have been kind, accepting and loving of all the unpleasantness you felt and sensed but to continue that practice, life outside meditation presents ample opportunities and the practice in outer world is much harder than inner world. How do you deal with people you disagree with ? How can your presence make a situation better ? How can you pour life into dull situations ? How can you make matter around you spiritual ? When I ask these questions, I don’t want to respond to anger and shouting with shouting, I want to pay attention to it, I want to really listen to it, understand it, send love towards the pain that arose in matter around me and finally respond to it with an indifference.

The last line — respond to it with indiference .. doesn’t make sense right ? But somehow it does to me.. Have you ever felt that you had a great comeback after an arguement ? Have you ever felt maybe you could have told something else to convince a person to do something that you think would be great for them ? The point is simple, we get carried away by something and fail to deliver the right response that was needed in the world from us. So I think now, that maybe if we were indifferent to the anger, shouting and conflict and then responded with a calm, attentive, accepting and loving composure then the response would be perfect.

Another perspective change : Enlightenment of some person, somewhere in a remote cave, I thought, serves no purspose to society but holding Aurobindo’s view, I now think that an enlightened person is making material spiritual or divine continually through him. He contributes to the fabric of existence in a silent way.