Accidents do happen in our life. Outwardly there are many causes, but there is a deeper cause which is always there. 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, its place, its character, there will be an accident which will correspond to the diminution of resistance in the envelope.
Almost everybody is psychologically aware of one thing: that accidents occur when one … is not fully conscious and self-possessed, when one feels uneasy. If one was fully conscious, 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 … a man who is busy solving a mental problem, becomes inattentive to physical things, and 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…
If for some reason – for example, lack of sleep, lack of rest, an absorbing preoccupation, or all sorts of things which tire you – if the vital envelope is a little damaged, it does not function perfectly and any current of force… 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 … 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 your room … I mean that you must 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…. If you observe their character, you will see that they… have a tendency to pessimism and more or less expect something unpleasant to happen to them – and it happens.… In this sense, it may be said that it is the result of character.
Why or how is it that some persons seem to come out unhurt…?
There is an accident. For instance, one slips and falls. Just between the moment one has slipped and the moment one falls there is a fraction of a second. At that moment one has the choice: it may be nothing much, it may be very serious. Only, the consciousness must naturally be wide awake constantly.
-The Mother