"Outwardly
there are many causes, but there is a deeper
cause which is always there. I said the other day
that if the nervous envelope is intact, accidents
can be avoided, and even if there is an accident
it won't have any consequences. As soon as there
is a scratch or a defect in the nervous envelope
of the being and according to the nature of this
scratch, if one may say so, its place, its
character, there will be an accident which will
correspond to the diminution of resistance in the
envelope. I believe almost everybody is
psychologically aware of one thing: that
accidents occur when one has a sort of
uncomfortable feeling, when one is not fully
conscious and self-possessed, when one feels
uneasy. In any case, generally, people have a
feeling that they are not fully themselves, not
fully aware of what they are doing. If one were
fully conscious, the consciousness wide awake,
accidents would not occur; one would make just
the right gesture, the necessary movement to
avoid the accident. Hence, in an almost absolute
way, it is a flagging of consciousness. Or quite
possibly it may be that the consciousness is
fixed in a higher domain; for example, not to
speak of spiritual things, a man who is busy
solving a mental problem and is very concentrated
upon his mental problem, becomes inattentive to
physical things, and if he happens to be in a
street or in a crowd, his attention fixed upon
his problem, he will not make the movement
necessary to avoid the accident, and the accident
will occur. It is the same for sports, for games;
you can observe this easily, there is always a
flagging of the consciousness when accidents
occur, or a lack of attention, a little absent-mindedness;
suddenly one thinks of something else, the
attention is drawn elsewhere – one is not
fully conscious of what one is doing and the
accident happens.
As I was telling
you at the beginning, if for some reason or other
– for example, lack of sleep, lack of rest
or an absorbing preoccupation or all sorts of
things which tire you, that is to say, when you
are not above them – if the vital envelope
is a little damaged, it does not function
perfectly and any current of force whatever which
passes through is enough to produce an accident.
In the final analysis, the accident comes always
from that, it is what one may call
inattentiveness or a slackening of consciousness.
There are days when one feels quite… not
exactly uneasy, but as though one were trying to
catch something which escapes, one can't hold
together, one is as though half-diluted; these
are the days of accidents. You must be attentive.
Naturally, this is not to tell you to shut
yourself up in you room and not to stir out when
you feel like that! This is not what I mean.
Rather I mean that you must watch all the more
attentively, be all the more on your guard, not
allow, precisely, this inattentiveness, this
slackening of consciousness to come in.
*
… if , for
instance, one is constantly under the influence
of a depression, of pessimism, discouragement, a
lack of faith and of trust in life, all this
enters, so to say, into one's substance, and then
some people, when there is the possibility of an
accident, never miss it. Every time there is a
chance of something happening to them, they catch
it, be it an illness or an accident. You have a
whole field of observations here – it is
always the same people who meet with accidents.
Others do the same things, have as many chances
of having an accident, but they are not touched.
If you observe their character you will see that
the former have a tendency to pessimism and more
or less expect something unpleasant to happen to
them – and it happens. Or else they are
afraid. We know that fear always brings what one
fears. If you fear an accident, this acts like a
magnet drawing the accident towards you… And
the same thing holds for illness. There are
people who can move about among the sick and in
places where there are epidemics and never catch
a disease. There are others – it is enough
for them to spend an hour with a sick person,
they catch the illness. That too depends on what
they are within themselves.
