Extra Report: Mercury Stationary Gift

Mercury will be stationary on Sunday (May 22) at 6:21a PT | 9:21a ET | 1:21p UT, that is, motionless from geocentric perspective, while it is changing from apparent backward motion to apparent forward motion. An amazing fact is that Sri Aurobindo was born on a day when that was happening (one day out of approximately 120) and that a salient factor of his teaching is that to do the Integral Yoga we need to go beyond, live beyond, or be conscious beyond "the mind" or our ordinary intellectual thinking functions. That is often not easy for us, certainly not for me. I was born while Mercury was traveling fast forward, and my proclivity is endless thinking and pondering of things, while I "chase the planets" for astrological perspective. So silent thought-free meditation is something that doesn't come naturally to me, nor does it to a great many others. Here is something from the Master which could help myself and perhaps you on this Saturday-Sunday "retreat" from our usual ways of thought:

"So long as we are dominated by the intellectual habit and by the lower workings, the intuitive mind can only send its messages to us subconsciously and subject to a distortion more or less entire before it reaches the conscious mind; or if it works consciously, then only with an inadequate rarity and a great imperfection in its functioning. . . . The remedy is to train first the intellect to recognise the true intuition, to distinguish it from the false and then to accustom it, when it arrives at an intellectual perception or conclusion, to attach no final value to it, but rather look upward, refer all to the divine principle and wait in as complete a silence as it can command for the light from above. 

. . . But for the knowledge of the Self it is necessary to have the power of a complete intellectual passivity, the power of dismissing all thought, the power of the mind to think not at all which the Gita in one passage enjoins. This is a hard saying for the occidental mind to which thought is the highest thing and which will be apt to mistake the power of the mind not to think, its complete silence for the incapacity of thought. But this power of silence is a capacity and not an incapacity, a power and not a weakness. It is a profound and pregnant stillness. Only when the mind is thus entirely still, like clear, motionless and level water, in a perfect purity and peace of the whole being and the soul transcends thought, can the Self which exceeds and originates all activities and becomings, the Silence from which all words are born, the Absolute of which all relativities are partial reflections manifest itself in the pure essence of our being."

--The Synthesis of Yoga, pp. 301-302 (I left out the final sentence of the chapter, which you might find helpful.) 

Even those of us who have a hard time attaining that Silence may have more success this weekend. No coffee for me tomorrow morning!

Hugh

P. S. This report does not replace the regular one for the weekend, already posted.