An expression of gratitude

Matthijs Cornelissen
last revision: 08 November 2025

This text is an attempt at helping with the development of a new type of psychology that is more respectful for who we are as human beings, as living souls, growing up in an ever-changing social and physical world.

As it is largely based on Sri Aurobindo's work, one could also say that it is my attempt to give an accurate impression of Sri Aurobindo's synthesis — and expansion — of the ancient Indian wisdom tradition in a language that is understandable and relevant for those who are engaged with contemporary psychology. In this attempt I have tried to remain faithful to what I could confirm in my own experience, and to make it explicit whenever I wrote something solely on the authority of Sri Aurobindo or others.

I am aware that these different objectives are not fully compatible. The language of modern psychology is not really suitable to deal with the type of experiences on which Sri Aurobindo bases his ideas, and the limited nature of my own experience enables me to see and understand only a small corner of his work. Still, I hope the result has been intriguing enough for the reader to give a serious thought to the ideas expressed in this text and to turn for further clarification to Sri Aurobindo's own writings, to those of the Mother, and to the many other texts, ancient and modern, that deal with the same territory.

The reader can safely assume that whatever is true in my writing is Sri Aurobindo's, and that whatever is not must be mine. This may sound a bit too sugary, but it is almost certainly factual. When I had just started reading Sri Aurobindo, it sometimes occurred to me that I had found some error or lacuna in Sri Aurobindo's descriptions of life and yoga. But especially with his later writings, I was always led soon after to a concrete experience showing that it was me who was wrong and he who was right or I found that he had described somewhere in a few words, often tucked away in the midst of one of his long sentences, what had taken me months to discover. It made me wonder how he had managed to pack so much experience in one short life-time. For it is clear that he wrote from experience; he was not into compiling the second hand thinkings of others. The more I understand of what he has done in the area of yoga and psychology, the more my admiration and gratitude have grown.

Closing the circle

To end, I'd like to go back to beginning of this story. Right in the opening paragraph of the Introduction, I mentioned two people who had the kind of wisdom one would wish for in psychology. To one of them I'm more indebted than I'll ever be able to express because it was the contagiousness of his happiness that showed me that "doing yoga" was not just some selfish indulgence giving subjective happiness to the practitioner, but something that had a concrete effect in the physical outside world, and that as such could "actually, objectively" benefit people. From the way I thought at the time, it is clear that the outer, physical world was still more important to me than the inner one. Related to that i did not understand the method Parasharji followed in the way he understood it himself. Technically what he did was clear enough. He derived his happiness from taking everything that happened to him as divine Grace. And for him this worked stunningly well. During the last three months of his life he sometimes greeted me in the morning half-crying, saying "there is no way I can share the bliss I feel when I'm alone at night." But to me taking everything as Grace looked almost like a trick, a perhaps not 100% honest shortcut, because, however much I tried, I could not see everything as Grace. It is only very, very slowly, almost surreptitiously that I've started to see the Divine in everything and begin to realise that even the smallest tiniest detail of the creation exists because of the divine Presence within it, because it is that, because it is that Love, Power, Beauty, Harmony....

What I missed at the time is that seeing everything that happens as Grace, is not a method at all, but itself a sign of "the Grace that answers" as Sri Aurobindo described it at the end of the previous chapter.

The Mother,1 wrote about it the following:

No matter how great your faith and trust in the divine Grace, no matter how great your capacity to see it at work in all circumstances, at every moment, at every point in life, you will never succeed in understanding the marvellous immensity of Its Action, and the precision, the exactitude with which this Action is accomplished; you will never be able to grasp to what extent the Grace does everything, is behind everything, organises everything, conducts everything, so that the march forward to the divine realisation may be as swift, as complete, as total and harmonious as possible, considering the circumstances of the world.

As soon as you are in contact with It, there is not a second in time, not a point in space, which does not show you dazzlingly this perpetual work of the Grace, this constant intervention of the Grace.

And once you have seen this, you feel you are never equal to it, for you should never forget it, never have any fears, any anguish, any regrets, any recoils... or even suffering. If one were in union with this Grace, if one saw It everywhere, one would begin living a life of exultation, of all-power, of infinite happiness.

And that would be the best possible collaboration in the divine Work.

The Mother, MCW vol 8, p. 250

Endnotes