Habits die hard. We are not aware of most of our habits as they are subconscious. Mother says even death is a habit of the body. [We are not fortunate enough to have met someone who does not have that habit. Rishis, of course, have overcome that habit and acquire the power to leave their bodies at will, iccha mirutu.]*( If need be you can drop both these sentences) We seldom realise that language is one such habit. Reading especially, the speed of reading is completely a matter of habit. We see a college professor reads at ten or twenty pages an hour, while a young boy reads a hundred pages an hour. Our normal tendency is to believe that the boy is gifted and the professor is dull. It rarely strikes us that it is entirely a question of habit. Beyond the habit, there lies zones not open to the human mind. They are fascinating to know. Vivekananda saw when he read a book, rather the first sentence of the book, the entire book entered into his mind.
Just before death, the psychic surfaces and reviews the entire life and decides the place of the next birth. It occurs in a trice. In Vivekananda, the psychic was on the surface and received the entire book at once. In a room where some young men were making merry loudly, Sri Aurobindo was found reading. One of them wondered what he could remember. He took the book and questioned Sri Aurobindo and found him remembering everything he had read. Jean Paul Sartre, the famous French intellectual, cultivated the habit of reading. In one year, he managed to read 300 books. He maintained it for a long time. At the age of twelve, a mother gave her daughter a thousand page novel. The child is an avid reader. It is not a mere story like science fiction. The novel is an intellectual statement of the author who has become a famous writer. The girl read it in one day, cherishing every page she read. Of course, she had never gone to school and had been reading voraciously since the age of two years everything she came across.
One can feel helpless at the age of 30 or 40. Habits can be cultivated at any age. There will be hope when we know a woman at the age of 78 started learning sky-diving successfully. In my recently published book Spiritual Opulence, I detail a Token Experiment to make luck a permanent habit. The Force that descended in 1956 works on earth, is working at every point of receptivity. People in the software field report changes there are so fast that the field is not able to cope up with them. They wonder whether it is this Force that is behind it. This Force has come down to transform life on earth. It is the culmination of Sri Aurobindo's yoga in the subtle plane. Ordinary people, like us, can fully benefit by this Force, letting it into their lives as Luck settled permanently. Yoga is for yogis, yogic Force is for all of us is my formula.