The Miracles and Mysteries in Our Everyday Lives and the Conclusions We Can Draw From Them

We are constantly surrounded by ‘miracles’ in the sense that our lives are filled with activities, events, processes and circumstances that we clearly do not understand, but accept based on some explanation, assuming that someone knows what it is all about. Airplanes flying through the air, rockets traveling to outer space and visiting the moon, wireless communication anywhere in the world, wireless electric charging, and all the myriad inventions that we take for granted in the modern world — who really knows what powers are at work to make these things happen. We can harness energies, but can we truly appreciate how these things are even possible?

We were traveling once from India to the USA and took an escalator down to a baggage claim area. We looked up and saw a young man standing at the top of the escalator, apparently seeing one for the first time in his life, and unable to comprehend what this was, how it worked, and how he should interact with it. We went back up, held his hand and helped him down the escalator. It turns out he was a young villager from India who was traveling on an airplane for the very first time, and had never been inside a modern airport previously. To him, this whole thing was a mystifying and miraculous situation.

The very processes of life, the organization of birth, growth and death, the genetic code embedded in every living being, the atomic structure of all material elements — these are also all miraculous things which we tend to overlook as we explain the ‘science’ of it all to ourselves.

The functioning of our senses and the powers of the mind, the power of creativity, the power of intuition, the power of instinct, all of these represent other powers that we do not fully understand, but tend to take for granted.

Why then should we find it so mysterious that there are also laws of cause and effect, the law of karma, the process of soul-growth and development, and that there are powers that direct, guide, and oversee this entire creation including the evolution of consciousness.

If all of these miraculous things surround us everywhere in our lives, why do we find it difficult to understand that just as there are material forces at work, there are also vital, mental and spiritual forces at work in their own various ways, accomplishing their own form of result.

The Mother observes: “But even from the purely material point of view, you are used to certain things, they have been explained to you: for example, electric light, or that it is enough to press a button to start a car. You can explain it, you have been told why, and so it seems absolutely natural to you. But I had instances of people who did not know, who were completely ignorant, who came from a place where these things had not yet penetrated, and who were suddenly shown a statue being lighted up by rays of light; they fell on their knees in adoration: it was a divine manifestation.”

“And I have seen someone else who was in the same state, it was a child who knew nothing. In front of him a button was pressed and the car started; it seemed a tremendous miracle to him. Well, it is like that. You are used to certain things, they seem absolutely natural to you. If you were not used to them, you would see, you would think them miracles.”

“Well, turn over the problem. There is a heap of things you cannot explain to yourself, there is a host of interventions which change the course of circumstances and which you don’t even notice. And so everything seems to you ordinary, monotonous and without any particular interest. But if you had the knowledge and could see that all these things which seem absolutely normal to you because you are used to them and have not even asked yourself ‘How does this happen in this way?’ — if you had the knowledge and saw how it happens, what it is that acts, why for example someone who acts so imprudently that he would have broken his head does not break it, why everything seems arranged for a frightful accident to take place and it does not occur, and thousands, millions of things like that which happen every day and everywhere — if you had enough knowledge to see why it is like that, then at the same time you could say, ‘Look, there is something like a force, a consciousness, a power which acts and which is not from the material domain. Materially, logically, this is what should have happened, and it did not happen.’ You say, ‘Ah! it was his good luck’, don’t you? And then you are satisfied, it’s all right for you.”

(Silence)

“It is the ignorant, limited, egoistic consciousness which demands miracles. As soon as one is enlightened, one knows that everywhere and always there is miracle.”

“And the more faith one has in this miracle and this Grace, the more capable one becomes of seeing it, or perceiving it constantly at every place where it is. It is ignorance and lack of faith, it is blind egoism which prevents one from seeing.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch.7 Spiritual Forces of Help and Succour, pp. 172-173