It is said that to get abundance and divine power we first need a sense of our own inner expansiveness. I often end in a kind of dejection after what I feel as my expansiveness. And the final conclusion is, to feel expansive; we can’t cram ourselves into a space that doesn’t fit us. It is like a plant that is in a pot too small for it, with no room to grow?
First let me say how I feel about expansiveness. In my younger ages I fight a competition within my class tooth and nail with no mercy on even next seat guys. When it is between the sections I identify with my whole class of about 40 students with their short comings not affecting me. Then when it is between classes I identify with all sections say all students of seventh standard of about 140 students and rarely did I display my individuality over the common cause. Then when I represented as a school I identified with the whole school and in district games I am always a part of all schools in my town. With this small analogy I understood that we are as expansive as the level we play demands. I think when we identify that we are playing for the whole world the kind of expansiveness APPA asks may come to us. He always asks to fix the grade we are at present and move from there by fixing one to ten or one to hundred steps. So to start with the first grade I understand expansiveness as follows:
Expansiveness is coming to terms: This coming to terms- starts with an acknowledgment of the world as it is, inside of us and outside of us; we know that we cannot repress or ignore that which confronts us but instead we must create peaceful, constructive relationships because we intuit that these things have something to contribute to our wholeness, life, health, and success. We come to terms even if the conditions are currently disturbing, painful, or apparently “negative”; underlying each of those unpleasant conditions is of life itself which we can understand and then express in a more-productive form.
Expansiveness is wholeness: It is an acknowledgment that the various parts of all human around us are members of one large system. The system includes everything- people, nature, spirit, our physical body and the aspects of the human nature such as the egoistic attitudes, emotions, thoughts, etc. When we recognize this system, we realize that it has a synergistic character, and that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts which is expansiveness.
When we talk of expansiveness the words Generosity and Vanity also comes to mind. In APPA’s views, Generosity is to give the other man what he by his best efforts cannot reach. To do so by exerting yourself to the utmost is desirable. Its cultured expression emerges when it is given to the other man before he asks for it. Vanity is its opposite. We do not come across pure generosity or pure vanity. We meet with generous vanity or vain generosity. The weak person trying to be generous becomes vain because the generosity of the weak arises out of a desire to give what it does not have. Vanity belongs to the ego. While vanity cannot survive without generosity, generosity can survive without vanity.
Sri Aurobindo said the higher consciousness does not need the lower human consciousness, while the lower cannot exist without the higher. We can move to the higher and be rid of the lower. Generosity is a pleasant feeling and hurts no one. Vanity offends everyone who comes into contact with it. Vanity does good to others while it destroys the person. In a philosophical sense, vanity too does good to a person as its urge for expansion dissolves all the other weaknesses in him.
Generous behaviour brings the Spirit to the surface. Generosity is natural to the Spirit. Spiritual generosity, though informed of the same weakness to some little extent, is strong enough not to be offended by life circumstances. Spirit is naturally generous as Spirit emerges into existence by an expansive movement.
