Life and man’s consciousness are interacting with each other. Our day-to-day life is an expression of our minds and consciousness, which means that our pleasures, joys, depressions and our follies in life belong more to our inner self than to outside events. The consciousness of everybody is constantly interacting with everything, with every other person around him. This unbroken interaction between myself and everything around me is so consistent and so constant, as though everything is a combination of two. It is more important to understand that every expression and experience emerges not from the object or the events outside, but from our own self.
Therefore, everybody’s experience, expression and reaction is not the same. As you evolve, so you react. The reaction of an animal is different from the reaction of an intelligent person. The reaction of an intelligent person is different form the reaction of a wise man. In the same way, the reaction of a wise man is different form the reaction of a saint. A saint’s vision is guided by the developed consciousness. The attitude of a wise man is guided by a higher quality of common sense. The reaction of an intelligent person is guided by a complete process of analysis. Therefore, we have always been talking about the discovery of a higher quality of mind.
We have been visualizing the possibility of a higher type of reaction which occurs in the higher quality of mind. The purpose is to have a better understanding, experience and attitude to the whole of life around us. Man is not happy just because everything around him is congenial. He is happy because he has discovered a new approach to life. Man is not unhappy because everything is heavily loaded against him. He is unhappy because his approach to the whole of life is so negative. Why should he have a negative approach while another person has a different approach? This is because the mind is not an independent instrument of experience. It is guided by divine or monstrous forces.
There are three attitudes that control the actions of mind. In Samkhya, in yoga, in tantra, these three attitudes are known as, starting from the top, sattwic, rajasic and tamasic. When the mind is evolving, it undergoes these three phases. Mind is a product of nature and is subject to different grades of expression. Everything in this universe undergoes what we call different stages of transformation and evolution. Matter, which was crude in the beginning, at the ultimate point of evolution, becomes energy. In the same way, the mind at the primary and preliminary point of evolution is a tamasic mind, and at the ultimate point it is a sattwic mind. Therefore, your experience is born of the quality of the nature of the mind.
September 1981, Hôpital Tenon, Paris