Opening the Door to Our Latent Capacities

For the most part, we live within a framework set for us by our parents, community, society, education and the individual choices we make as a result of these things. To some extent these things determine where we will concentrate our focus, what capacities we will practice and develop, and where we will direct our lives going forward. Once we get onto a specific road in life, we tend to stay on that road, for better or worse. While initially we may have had a wide number of potential choices about direction in life, as evidenced by how young children and adolescents fantasize about ‘what they will be when they grow up’, eventually these potentialities are narrowed down until they all collapse into a specific chosen career or life-direction.

Once chosen we tend to stay with the direction based on, first and foremost, the law of inertia; in other words, we have made our decision, we have focused our training, education and line of action on the choice made, and it is then the ‘path of least resistance’.

If we contemplate going outside the chosen path, we experience feelings of fear and uncertainty, and likely feelings of inadequacy due to lack of experience, training, education or aptitude outside the narrow focus we have developed.

Occasionally, we are motivated to reach out beyond the self-imposed boundaries we have set for our lives. It may be a collapse or failure of a business, unemployment, difficulties in a marriage, some experience of grief or sorrow, a near-death experience, influence of a friend or significant other, some change in the environment, a health concern, or an opening through a spiritual experience of some sort. Whatever the cause may be, we have a chance to try new things, take new chances, discover and develop new capabilities.

Of all of these potential causative forces, the opening to a spiritual direction provides perhaps the most impetus, as it speaks to the force of growth and development secretly at work within each individual to make the life they are leading one that can help them achieve their deepest aspirations, and make their lives the most meaningful for themselves and others. It also has the potential to reorient one’s entire way of looking at life, and thus, provides the widest menu of options for future direction.

We can look at an illustrative tale told by an elder from the Wesst as he reflected back on his journey in his lifetime. He was attending college when he experienced something of an epiphany that changed his life. He had a near-death experience in fact and when he survived, he suddenly knew that there was a divine intention in the world, something he had not reflected on or internalized prior to that time. He quickly determined that following his career path of college and a job in the society was not going to work, and thus, he left college to take up the study and practice of yoga. Thereafter he devoted his entire adult life to the new direction he had identified, far outside any possible realm of development he had considered prior to the experience. Along the way he was tasked with numerous activities which he had to understand and deal with, including business development and management, publishing, importing, regulatory matters, accounting , personnel training and management, sales and marketing, modern technology and its applications to the various projects he was working on, legal battles, family life and a broad field of study and reflection, writing and public speaking, all without formal education, training or qualifications. Each new challenge wound up expanding his range of action and the development of abilities he had never reflected on in his earlier dreams about college and career. The central motivating factor was the spiritual opening he had as a result of the near death experience and its redirection of his life and focus. He cited a proverb that says that the Divine can make the “dumb to speak and the lame to stride over the hills.” So felt this individual as he looked back at his life integrating spirituality into daily life.

The Mother notes: “… everyone has countless possibilities within him of which he is unaware and which develop only if he does what is to be done in the way it should be done…. But there are two types of progress, not only one; there is the progress that consists in perfecting more and more the capacities, possibilities, faculties and qualities you have — this is what is normally obtained by education; but if you go in for a little more thorough development by approaching a deeper truth, you can add, to the qualities you already have, other new ones which seem to be asleep in your being.”

“You can multiply your possibilities, enlarge and increase them; you can suddenly bring up something you did not think you had. I have already explained this to you several times. When one discovers one’s psychic being within, at the same time there develop and manifest, quite unexpectedly, things one could not do at all before and which one didn’t think were in one’s nature. Of this too I have had numerous examples. I have given you this one, but I am repeating it to you once more to make myself understood.”

“I used to know a young girl who was born in a very ordinary environment, who had not received much education and wrote rather clumsy French, who had not developed her imagination and had absolutely no literary sense: that seemed to be among the possibilities she did not have. Well, when she had the inner experience of contact with her psychic being, and as long as the contact was living and very present, she wrote admirable things. When she fell back from that state into an ordinary one, she could not even put two sentences together correctly! And I saw examples of both kinds of her writing.”

“There is a genius within everyone of us — we don’t know it. We must find the way to make it come out — but it is there sleeping, it asks for nothing better than to manifest; we must open the door to it.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Powers Within, Chapter I Latent Powers, pp.5-6