Calm Summary

Read more about Calm from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

What Is Calm?

Calm is a still, unmoved condition which no disturbance can affect.

Calm is a strong and positive quietude, firm and solid.

Calm is not to have restless, excited, agitated thoughts; it is to quieten the mind and stop turning around in all the imaginations and observations and mental constructions.

Why Is Calm Important?

This calm, peace and surrender are the right atmosphere for all the rest to come, knowledge, strength, Ananda. Let it become complete.

We always tell people to be calm and detached and look upon these things not as their true selves but as an outer part that has to be worked upon quietly until it is what it should be.

...it is in a calm and patient confidence that lies the certitude of victory.

One must will with persistence, but not get impatient. Through calm determination you will achieve it more quickly. By getting restless, one wastes more time than one saves.

In Different Parts of Being

Physical

To relieve tension, ten minutes of real calm, inner and outer, are more effective than all the remedies in the world. In silence lies the most effective help.

To bear illness with calm, equanimity, endurance, even recognition of it, since it has come, as something that had to be passed through in the course of experience.

Mental

So long as the mind is restless, it is not possible to get at the inner Truth. Calm, peace, quietude—that is the first necessary condition.

Vital

It is only in the calm that one can know and do. All that is done in agitation and violence is an aberration and a folly. The first sign of the divine presence in the being is peace.

You have only to calm the agitation of your mind and vital a little, remain a bit quiet and concentrated, and at once you will find my presence within you and around you.

For Yoga

It is the first secret of Yoga, to maintain the inner calm always and from that calm to meet everything.

The Yogic attitude consists in calm, detachment, equality, universality—added to this the psychic element, bhakti, love, devotion to the Divine.

For Descent of Force

Peace, Calm, Quiet as a Basis for the Descent

Calm of the Self must be fixed—otherwise the active Descent may find the forces it awakes seized on by lower Powers and a confusion created. That has happened with many.

For Work

What you write about the work is correct; to work in this calm ever-widening consciousness is at once a sādhanā and a siddhi.

How Can One Achieve Calm?

You sit quietly, to begin with; and then, instead of thinking of fifty things, you begin saying to yourself, "Peace, peace, peace, peace, peace, calm, peace!" You imagine peace and calm. You aspire, ask that it may come: "Peace, peace, calm." And then, when something comes and touches you and acts, say quietly, like this, "Peace, peace, peace." Do not look at the thoughts, do not listen to the thoughts, you understand. You must not pay attention to everything that comes.

It is as though you were learning how to call a friend: by dint of being called he comes. Well, make peace and calm your friends and call them: "Come, peace, peace, peace, peace, come!"

Before you go to sleep, concentrate a few seconds in the aspiration that the sleep may restore your fatigued nerves, bring calm and quietness to your brain so that on waking you may, with renewed vigour, begin again your journey on the path of the great discovery.

By Surrender

This complete self-surrender must be the chief mainstay of the sadhaka because it is the only way, apart from complete quiescence and indifference to all action,—and that has to be avoided,—by which the absolute calm and peace can come. The persistence of trouble, "aśānti", the length of time taken for this purification and perfection, itself must not be allowed to become a reason for discouragement and impatience.

Read more about Calm from the works of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.