separate from whatever it is that is being experienced or felt or done. And it is this ‘one’ that can — with constant and persistent vigilance — begin to develop a humble practice of remembering the Divine while outwardly engaged or occupied by feelings, thoughts, emotions, actions. And in time, with Mother’s Grace, the practice will begin to settle in. With inner remembrance will also come a feeling of calmness and a sense of objective or somewhat detached involvement in the outer actions, thoughts and emotions.
At the beginning remembrance may not come every hour. It may not come every two hours. But perhaps once or twice while one is ‘busy’, a little something (the ‘one’ perhaps?) begins to make itself heard — hey, you the busy bee, aren’t you forgetting something? Remember. Remember. Remember.
And so the journey begins, with first step, a sure step.
When I lived in a small town of Midwestern United States — a part of the country with relatively vast and open spaces and huge stretches of cornfields across the plains — many times I would experience a strange feeling while driving on the open and wide highways. This happened when I looked up at the vast Midwestern blue sky surrounding the trees, buildings and other structures along the highway. As the car kept moving ahead and taking me further and further into this vastness of the ever-expanding and ever-widening sky, I would feel a sense of deep insignificance and smallness against the infinite vastness that was all around me, enveloping me. And then there were those clear and bright mornings when one could clearly see — from in-between the silvery, fluffy clouds those sometimes bright-and-shining, sometimes hazy-and-thick rays of the Sun falling upon the Earth’s surface in all directions: Sun’s rays, Light, pouring itself down in abundance from the Source, shining from within the clouds, bringing Grace and Love to all of us, all of the Earth.
Every time such a perception came over while driving, a feeling of spontaneous joy would become part of me. This might be only for a few moments, but those moments brought tremendous sense of opening to the Infinite into which I would feel myself to be slowly driving. I remember clearly that at such moments my chest expanded, a liberating exhalation happened spontaneously, shoulders relaxed and if the hands didn’t have to hold the steering wheel, I would have also opened my arms wide and high in the Light Above.
Meditating while driving? Or a Remembrance of the Infinite? Of the Divine?
“Remember and Offer,” Remember to Offer — a simple practice at the heart of all sincere prayer and call to the Divine. Remember the Divine, Offer the Remembrance also to the Divine.
May be to “remember and offer” is to express one’s soul’s gratitude to the Mother for what she is and does for all of us at all times …
About the author: Beloo Mehra is Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Sri Aurobindo Darshan: The University of Tomorrow, SACAR. In addition to developing and coordinating new and existing programmes, she is a facilitator in the Orientation Programme, and chief editor of the quarterly journal New Race and monthly e-newsletter MĀSA.
