Q: Is gratitude a psychic virtue?
A: Mother: Compassion
and gratitude are essentially psychic virtues. They appear in the consciousness
only when the psychic being takes part in active life.
The vital and the physical experience them as weaknesses, for they
curb the free expression of their impulses, which are based on the power of
strength.
As always, the mind, when insufficiently educated, is the accomplice
of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature, whose laws, so
overpowering in their half-conscious mechanism, it does not fully understand.
When the mind awakens to the awareness of the first psychic movements, it
distorts them in its ignorance and changes compassion into pity or at best into
charity, and gratitude into the wish to repay, followed, little by little, by
the capacity to recognise and admire.
It is only when the psychic consciousness
is all-powerful in the being that compassion for all that needs help, in whatever
domain, and gratitude for all that manifests the divine presence and grace, in
whatever form, are expressed in all their original and luminous purity, without
mixing compassion with any trace of condescension or gratitude with any sense
of inferiority.
(The Psychic Being, Soul: Its Nature, mission and Evolution,
Selections from the works of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, Sri Aurobindo
Ashram, Pondicherry)
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