The Mother: When you are a being of justice, truth, harmony, compassion, understanding, of perfect goodwill, this inner attitude, the more sincere and total it is, the more it reacts upon the external circumstances; not that it necessarily diminishes the difﬁculties of life, but it gives these difﬁculties a new meaning and that allows you to face them with a new strength and a new wisdom; whereas the man, the human being who follows his impulses, who obeys his desires, who has no time for scruples, who comes to live in complete cynicism, not caring for the effect that his life has upon others or for the more or less harmful consequences of his acts, creates for himself an atmosphere of ugliness, selﬁshness, conﬂict and bad will which necessarily acts more and more upon his consciousness and gives a bitterness tohis life that inthe endbecomes a perpetual torment.  Of course this does not meanthat sucha manwill not succeed in what he undertakes, that he will not be able to possess what he desires; these external advantages disappear only when there is within the inmost being a spark of sincerity which persists and makes him worthy of this misfortune.  Ifyouseeabadmanbecomeunluckyandmiserable,youmust immediately respect him. It means that the ﬂame of inner sincerity is not altogether extinguishedandsomething still reacts tohis bad actions.  Finally, that leads us again to the observation that you must never, never judge on appearances and that all the judgments you make from outward circumstances are always, necessarily false judgments.


The Mother: To have a glimpse of the Truth, one must take at least one step back in one’s consciousness, enter a little more deeply into one’s beingandtrytoperceivetheplayofforcesbehindtheappearances and the divine Presence behind the play of forces.    The ﬁrst verse gives some very wise advice: the war elephant who has been well trained does not start running away as soon as he receives an arrow. He continues to advance and bears the pain, withnochangeinhisattitudeofheroicresistance. Thosewhowish  to follow the true path will naturally be exposed to the attacks of all forms of bad will, which not only do not understand, but generally hate what they do not understand.


The Mother: If you are worried, grieved or even discouraged by the malicious stupidities that men say about you, you will not advance far on the way. And such things come to you, not because you are unlucky or because your lot is not a happy one, but because, on the contrary, the divine Consciousness and the divine Grace take your resolution seriously and allow the circumstances to become a touchstone on your way, to see whether your resolution is sincere and whether you are strong enough to face the difﬁculties.  Therefore, if anyone sneers at you or says something that is not very charitable, the ﬁrst thing you should do is to look within yourself for whatever weakness or imperfection has allowed such a thing to happen and not to be disconsolate, indignant or aggrieved, because people do not appreciate you at what you think to be your true value; on the contrary, you must be thankful to the divine Grace for having pointed out to you the weakness or imperfection or deformation that you must correct.  Therefore,insteadofbeingunhappy ,youcanbefullysatisﬁed and derive advantage, a great advantage from the harm that was intended against you.


The Mother: Besides, if you truly want to follow the path and practise yoga, you must not do it for appreciation or honour, you must do it because it is an imperative need of your being, because you cannot be happy in any other way. Whether people appreciate you or do not appreciate you, it is of absolutely no importance.  You may tell yourself beforehand that the further you are from ordinary men, foreign to the ordinary mode of being, the less people will appreciate you, quite naturally, because they will not understand you. And I repeat, it has absolutely no importance.  True sincerity consists in advancing on the way because you cannot do otherwise, to consecrate yourself to the divine life  because you cannot do otherwise, to seek to transform your being and come out into the light because you cannot do otherwise, because it is the purpose of your life.


The Mother: When it is like that you may be sure that you are on the right path.       We shall keep the last one to meditate on.      Onepieceofadvicegivenhereisthatoneshouldalwaysbekind. It shouldnotbemistakenforthesortofadvicepeoplenormallygive.


The Mother: It says something interesting, even very interesting. My comment is: Always be kind and you will be free from suffering, always be contented and happy, and you will radiate your quiet happiness.   It is particularly noticeable that all the digestive functions are extremely sensitive to an attitude that is critical, bitter, full of ill-will, to a sour judgment.


The Mother: Nothing disturbs the functioning of the digestion more than that. And it is a vicious circle: the more the digestive function is disturbed, the more unkind you become, critical, dissatisﬁed with life and things and people. So you can’t ﬁnd any way out. And there is only one cure: to deliberately drop thisattitude,toabsolutelyforbidyourselftohaveitandtoimpose upon yourself, by constant self-control, a deliberate attitude of all-comprehending kindness. Just try and you will see that you feel much better.


The Mother: Such is the conclusion of the Dhammapada and if we have put into practice — to use its image — only a mustard seed of all that has been taught to us, well, we have not wasted our time.  Thereisonethingwhichisnotspokenofhere,intheDhammapada: a supreme disinterestedness and a supreme liberation is to follow the discipline of self-perfection, the march of progress, not with a precise end in view as described here, the liberation of Nirvana, but because this march of progress is the profound law and the purpose of earthly life, the truth of universal existence and because you put yourself in harmony with it, spontaneously, whatever the result may be.  There is a deep trust in the divine Grace, a total surrender to the divine Will, an integral adhesion to the divine Plan which makes one do the thing to be done without concern for the result.


The Mother: That is the perfect liberation.  That is truly the abolition of suffering. The consciousness is ﬁlled with an unchanging delight and each step you take reveals a marvel of splendour.  We are grateful to the Buddha for what he has brought for human progress and, as I told you at the beginning, we shall try to realise a little of all the beautiful things he has taught us, but we shallleavethegoalandtheresultofourendeavourtotheSupreme Wisdom that surpasses all understanding.


The Mother: This immobile Consciousness is the “Mother of Dreams”, the sphinx of eternity who keeps vigil on the conﬁnes of the world like an enigma to be solved. This enigma is the problem of our life, the very of the universe. The problem of our life is to realise the Divine or rather to become once again aware of the Divine who is the Universe, the origin, cause and goal of life.  Those who ﬁnd the secret of the sphinx of eternity become that active and creative Power.  To choose without preference and execute without desire is the great difﬁculty at the very root of the development of true consciousness and self-control.


The Mother: To choose in this sense means to see what is true and bring it into existence; and to choose thus, without the least personal bias for any thing, any person, action, circumstance, is exactly what is most difﬁcult for an ordinary human being. Yet one must learn to act without any preference, free from all attractions and likings, taking one’s stand solely on the Truth which guides. And having chosen in accordance with the Truth the necessary action, one must carry it out without any desire.  If you observe yourself attentively, you will see that before acting you need an inner impetus, something which pushes you.   In the ordinary man this impetus is generally desire.


The Mother: This desire ought to be replaced by a clear, precise, constant vision of the Truth.  Some call this the Voice of God or the Will of God. The true meaning of these words has been falsiﬁed, so I prefer to speak of “the Truth”, though this is but a very limited aspect of That which we cannot name but which is the Source and the Goal of all existence. I deliberately do not use the word God because religions have given this name to an all-powerful being who is other than his creation and outside it. This is not correct.


The Mother: However, on the physical plane the difference is obvious.  For we are yet all that we no longer want to be, and He, He is all that we want to become.  One does not know it, one feels it. And in order to feel it one must will with such an intensity, such sincerity, that every obstacle disappears. As long as you have a preference, a desire, an attraction, a liking, all these veil the Truth from you.


The Mother: Hence, the ﬁrst thing to do is to try to master, govern, correct all the movements of your consciousness and eliminate those which cannot be changed until all becomes a perfect and permanent expression of the Truth.  And even to will this is not enough, for very often one forgets to will it.  What is necessary is an aspiration which burns in the being like a constant ﬁre, and every time you have a desire, a preference, an attraction it must be thrown into this ﬁre. If you do this persistently, you will see that a little gleam of true consciousness begins to dawn in your ordinary consciousness.  At ﬁrst it will be faint, very far behind all the din of desires, preferences, attractions, likings.


The Mother: But you must go behind all this and ﬁnd that true consciousness, all calm, tranquil, almost silent.  Those who are in contact with the true consciousness see all  the possibilities at the same time and may deliberately choose even the most unfavourable, if necessary. But to reach this point, you must go a long way.  One should not have them!  When the mind becomes silent, when it stops judging, pushing itself forward with its so-called knowledge, one begins to solve the problem of life.


The Mother: One must refrain from judging, for the mind is only an instrument of action, not an instrument of true knowledge — true knowledge comes from elsewhere.   If one refrained from judging, one would arrive at an ever more precise knowledge of the Truth and nine-tenths of the world’s misery would disappear.  The great disorder in the world would to a large extent be neutralized if the mind could admit that it does not know.  ...according to the stage where you are.


The Mother: Naturally, I speak to those who sincerely want to become conscious of their true truth and to express it in their life.... I think this holds true for all who are here.  And I tell the teachers that they must teach more and more in accordance with the Truth; for if we have a school here, it is in order that it be different from the millions of schools in the world; it is to give the children a chance to distinguish between ordinary life and the divine life, the life of truth — to see things in a different way. It is useless to want to repeat here the ordinary life. The teacher’s mission is to open the eyes of the children to something which they will not ﬁnd anywhere else.


The Mother: To solve a problem, to learn a lesson, a lot of concentration and attention is needed, everyone knows that — an intellectual attention and concentration. But concentration is not only an intellectual thing, it may be found in all the activities of the being, including bodily activities. The control over the nerves should be such as would allow you a complete concentration on what you are doing and, through the very intensity of your concentration, you acquire an immediate response to external touches. To attain this concentration you need a conscious control of the energies.


The Mother: Are you conscious of the energies you receive and those you spend?  One is more or less conscious of the energy one spends, especially when one wastes it too much! It is a question here of the constant exchange between receiving and spending! Before the age of reason, little children receive a lot of energy and they spend it lavishly, without thinking, and this allows them to play for hours together without getting tired. But gradually, as thought develops, one begins to measure and calculate the energy spent — usually this is futile, for unless you have the knowledge of the process of receiving energy, it is better to spend freely what you get than let it stagnate within you.


The Mother: First, you must become conscious of the receiving of energies, their passing into your being and their expenditure. Next, you must have a sort of higher instinct which tells you whence the most favourable energies come; then you put yourself in contact with them through thought, through stillness or any other process — there are many. You must know what energy you want, whence it comes, of what it is composed. Later comes  the control of the energy received. Ninety per cent of men do not absorb enough energy or they take in too much and do not assimilate what they take — as soon as they have had a sufﬁcient dose they immediately throw it out by becoming restless, talking, shouting, etc.


The Mother: You must know how to keep within you the received energy and concentrate it fully on the desired activity and not on anything else. If you can do this, you won’t need to use your will. You need only gather together all the energies received and use them consciously, concentrate with the maximum attention in order to do everything you want.  And you must know how to give a real value to what you  to do — what the higher part of your being wants to do — for to do what one to do is not difﬁcult.  It is to bring back all the scattered threads of consciousness to a single point, a single idea.


The Mother: Those who can attain perfect attention succeed in everything they undertake; they will always make a rapid progress. And this kind of concentration can be developed exactly like the muscles; one may follow different systems, different methods of training. Today we know that the most pitiful weakling, for example, can with discipline become as strong as anyone else. One should not have a will which ﬂickers out like a candle.  The will, concentration must be cultivated; it is a question of method, of regular exercise.


The Mother: If you will, you can.  But the thought “What’s the use?” must not come in to weaken the will. The idea that one is born with a certain character and can do nothing about it is a stupidity.   That is why the 25th of December was a festival of Light long before Jesus Christ. This festival was in vogue long before Christianity; it originated in Egypt and very probably the birthday of Christ was ﬁxed on the same day as that of the return of the Light.


The Mother: In adults mental activity tends to paralyse the spontaneous movement of exchange of energies. Till he is fourteen, every child, apart from a few rare exceptions, is a little animal; he renews his energies spontaneously like an animal by means of the same activities and exchanges. But the mind introduces a disequilibrium in the being; spontaneous action is replaced by something that wants to know, to regulate, to decide, etc., and to get back this capacity to renew spontaneously one’s energies, one must rise to a higher rung above the instincts, that is, from ordinary mental activity one must pass directly into intuition.   In these articles I am trying to put into ordinary terms the whole yogic terminology, for these are meant more for people who lead an ordinary life, though also for students of yoga — I mean people who are primarily interested in a purely physical material life but who try to attain more perfection in their physical life than is usual in ordinary conditions.


The Mother: It is a very difﬁcult task but it is a kind of yoga. These people call themselves “materialists” and they are apt to get agitated or irritated if yogic terms are used, so one must speak their language avoiding terms likely to shock them. But I have known in my life persons who called themselves “materialists” and yet followed a much severer discipline than those who claim to do yoga.  What we want is that humanity should progress; whether it professes to lead a yogic life or not matters little, provided it makes the necessary effort for progress.  Meditation is a purely mental activity, it interests only the mental being.


The Mother: One can concentrate while meditating but this is a mental concentration; one can get a silence but it is a purely mental silence, and the other parts of the being are kept immobile and inactive so as not to disturb the meditation. You may pass twenty  hours of the day in meditation and for the remaining four hours you will be an altogether ordinary man because only the mind has been occupied — the rest of the being, the vital and the physical, is kept under pressure so that it may not disturb. In meditation nothing is directly done for the other parts of the being.  Certainly this indirect action can have an effect, but... I have known in my life people whose capacity for meditation was remarkable but who, when not in meditation, were quite ordinary men, even at times ill-natured people, who would become furious if their meditation was disturbed.


The Mother: For they had learnt to master only their mind, not the rest of their being.  Concentration is a more active state. You may concentrate mentally, you may concentrate vitally, psychically, physically, and you may concentrate integrally. Concentration or the capacity to gather oneself at one point is more difﬁcult than meditation. You may gather together one portion of your being or consciousness or you may gather together the whole of your consciousness or even fragments of it, that is, the concentration may be partial, total or integral, and in each case the result will be different.


The Mother: If you have the capacity to concentrate, your meditation will be more interesting and easier. But one can meditate without concentrating. Many follow a chain of ideas in their meditation — it is meditation, not concentration.


The Mother: Yes. You concentrate on something or simply you gather yourself together as much as is possible for you and when you attain a kind of perfection in concentration, if you can sustain this perfection for a sufﬁciently long time, then a door opens and you pass  beyond the limit of your ordinary consciousness — you enter into a deeper and higher knowledge. Or you go within. Then you may experience a kind of dazzling light, an inner wonder, a beatitude, a complete knowledge, a total silence.


The Mother: There are, of course, many possibilities but the phenomenon is always the same.  To have this experience all depends upon your capacity to maintain your concentration sufﬁciently long at its highest point of perfection.  In the beginning, yes, for you have not the capacity to keep what you have acquired, to maintain your concentration at its maximum — you slip back and lose even the memory of the experience you have had. But if you once follow a path, it is easier to follow the same path a second time and so on. The second concentration is therefore easier than the ﬁrst one.


The Mother: You must persevere in your concentration till you come to the point when you no longer lose the inner contact.  From that time onward you must remain in this inner and higher consciousness from where you can do everything. You see your body and the material world and you know what is to be done and how to do it.  That is the ﬁrst aim of concentration, but naturally not the last.  To attain that concentration much effort is necessary; an immediate or even a quick result is rarely possible.


The Mother: But if the inner door has once been opened, you may be sure that it will open again if you know how to persevere.   As long as the door has not been opened, you may doubt your capacity, but once opened, no more doubt is possible, if you go on willing and aspiring.  This experience has a considerable value.   When he speaks of the “immobile and serene Consciousness”, Sri Aurobindo often uses poetic terms which are very suggestive.


The Mother: He has used the term “Mother of Dreams” because he has put himself in the place of one who is below, one who sees, perceives something mysterious, altogether wonderful, inaccessible and almost incomprehensible; but if you look from another point of view, you may say that it is the creative Consciousness, the Origin of the universe, the universal Mother, the creative Power, and so on.  This is perfectly true. To enter into contact with terrestrial energy, one must establish a certain harmony within oneself. If you know the game well, if you know how to make the moves and if you take an enthusiastic interest, if you have a sort of ambition (quite childish perhaps), a desire to win, then as you go on succeeding you feel a kind of inner joy, not perhaps very profound, but creating the harmony necessary for the interchange of energy. On the other hand, those who do not know how to accept defeat, who get angry and bad-tempered when things do not go according to their wish, lose their energy more and more.


The Mother: Also, if you slip into depression, you cut every source of energy — from above, from below, from everywhere. That is the best way of falling into inertia. You must absolutely refuse to be depressed.  Depression is always the sign of an acute egoism. When you feel that it is coming near, tell yourself: “I am in a state of egoistic illness, I must cure myself of it.”


The Mother: The sense organs are under the inﬂuence of the psychological state of the individual because something comes in between the eye’s perception and the brain’s reception. It is very subtle; the brain receives the eye’s perceptions through the nerves; there is no reasoning, it is so to say instantaneous, but there is a short passage between the eye’s perception and the cell which is to respond and evaluate it in the brain. And it is this evaluation of the brain which is under the inﬂuence of feelings. It is the small vibration between what the eye sees and what the brain estimates which often falsiﬁes the response. And it is not a matter of sincerity, for even the most sincere persons do not know what is happening, even very calm people, without any violent emotion, who do not even feel an emotion, are inﬂuenced in this way without being aware of the intervention of this little falsifying vibration.


The Mother: At times moral notions also intermix and falsify the judgment but we must throw far away from us all moral notions; for morality and Truth are very far from each other (if I am shocking anybody by saying this, I am sorry, but it is like that).   It is only when you have conquered all attraction and all repulsion that you can have a correct judgment.


The Mother: As long as there are things that attract you and things that repel you, it is not possible for you to have an absolutely sure functioning of the senses.  Everybody knows, for example, that when there is an accident, there may be two, three or ten witnesses, but they do not see the same thing at all; one thing happens but there are no two  persons who see it in the same way. With the inner shock, they perceive only a very small part of what happens.  But there is a way of reconciling the impressions — the idea and the opposite idea — it is by considering them as two ends of one and the same line; then by putting between these two ends innumerable other ideas which follow each other, you come to ﬁnd that there is an accord among them. You also ﬁnd out that this is a very interesting exercise.


The Mother: I say “objective perception”. To see objectively is to see and judge without adding anything from oneself, free from all personal reaction. One must learn to see a thing without mixing up in it any personal feelings.  And I add that this “perfected machine” can do nothing without the clarity of a living consciousness. When the consciousness is you can know by identity; that is, by uniting your consciousness with the object or the person you want to know or judge impartially, you enter into an inner contact with this object or person, and then it is possible for you to know with absolute certainty....


The Mother: Also what deforms and falsiﬁes is the anxiety for the consequences. To have an absolutely true judgment, you must know how to execute and act without desire — only one in a thousand can do that. Almost all are anxious about the result or have the ambition to obtain a result. You must not be anxious about the results; simply do a thing because you have seen that it is that which must be done: tell yourself, “I am doing this because this  is the thing to be done, and whatever may happen afterwards is not my concern.”  That evidently is an ideal and until it is reached the action will always be mixed.


The Mother: Therefore unless you are moved by a clear vision of the Truth, you must take as your rule to do always what you have to do, for it is that and nothing else that has to be done.    What is perfection?  Some people put perfection at the apex. It is generally thought that perfection is the maximum one can do.


The Mother: But I say that perfection is not the apex, it is not an extreme. There is no extreme — whatever you may do, there is always the possibility of something better, and it is exactly this possibility of something better which is the very meaning of progress.  Since there is no extreme, how can we attain perfection?  You are mixing up perfection and progress. You do not necessarily progress towards perfection.


The Mother: In progress there is perhaps a certain perfection, but it can’t be said that progress is perfection.  Progress is rather an ascent.  Perfection is a harmony, an equilibrium.  But what is equilibrium? Who here has studied a little physics?


The Mother: That’s it. And so what do I mean when I say that perfection is an equilibrium?   Yes, it is more or less like that, but I should put it otherwise.   This is still an evolutionary idea.


The Mother: It is always said that when a creation reaches its maximum possibility, this is perfection; but it is not that! and it is exactly against this idea that I protest. All this is only a rung in the progress. That is, Nature goes to the extreme limit of what she has, and when she sees that she can go no further, can no longer stir, she destroys everything and begins again. This can’t be called a perfection, for perfection cannot be demolished.


The Mother: Perfection will come only when Nature can no longer undo what she has begun. For the moment there is no instance where she has not successively undone what she had begun, believing that it was not enough or it was not that which she wanted to do. Hence it cannot be said that she has attained perfection in her creation. It would be the maximum only if she had no need to undo what she has done.


The Mother: For the ordinary human mentality success is perhaps a perfection, but not for us.  Perfection is not a static state, it is an equilibrium. But a progressive, dynamic equilibrium. One may go from perfection to perfection. There can come a state from which it would not be necessary to descend to a lower rung in order to go farther;


The Mother: at the moment the march of Nature is like that, but in this new state, instead of being obliged to go back to be able to start again, one can walk always forward, without ever stopping. As things are, one comes to a certain point and, as human beings as they are at present cannot progress indeﬁnitely, one must pass to a higher species or leave the present species and create another.  The human being as he is at the moment cannot attain perfection unless he gets out of himself — man is a transitional being. In ordinary language it may be said: “Oh, this man is perfect”, but that is a literary ﬁgure. The maximum a human being can attain just now is an equilibrium which is not progressive.


The Mother: He may attain perhaps a static equilibrium but all that is static can be broken for lack of progress.  No, what you are thinking of is again a rung in progress and not perfection.  Now we are going to try to ﬁnd a deﬁnition which can ﬁt all instances, that is, the individual, the collectivity, the earth and the universe.   We may say that perfection will be attained in the individual, the collectivity, on the earth and in the universe, when, at , the receptivity will be equal in quality and quantity to the Force which wants to manifest.


The Mother: That is the supreme equilibrium.  Hence, there must be a perfect equilibrium between what comes from above and what answers from below, and when the two meet, that is perfect equilibrium, which is the Realisation — a realisation in constant progress.   When you are absolutely sincere, you make a constant effort to live in harmony with the highest ideal of your being, the truth of your being. At every moment, in all that you think, all that you feel and all that you do, you try as perfectly as possible, as completely as possible, to put yourself in harmony with the highest ideal or, if you are conscious of it, with the truth of your being — then you have reached true sincerity. And if you are like that, if truly you do not act from egoistic motives or for personal reasons, if you act guided by your inner truth, that is, if you are perfectly sincere, it is absolutely the same to you whether the whole world judges you in one way or another.


The Mother: In this state of perfect sincerity you do not need to appear good or to be approved by others, for the ﬁrst thing you experience when you are in harmony with your true consciousness is that you do not care what you look like. Whether you look like this or like that, whether you seem indifferent, cold, distant, proud, all this is of no importance; provided, I repeat this, you are absolutely sincere, that is, you never forget that you live in order to realise your inner, central truth.  Yes, if you like, but when one is not absolutely sincere, one deceives oneself very easily, and if one feels comfortable, one says: “Oh, I am sure that I please the Divine.”   We want an integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities.  Formerly, when one spoke of transformation one meant solely the transformation of the inner consciousness.


The Mother: One tried to discover in oneself this deep consciousness and rejected the body and its activities like an encumbrance and a useless thing, in order to attend only to the inner movement. Sri Aurobindo declared that this was not enough; the Truth demanded that the material world should also participate in this transformation and become an expression of the deeper Truth. But when people heard this, many thought that it was possible to transform the body and its activities without bothering in the least about what was happening within — naturally this is not quite true. Before you can undertake this work of physical transformation, which of all things is the most difﬁcult, your inner consciousness must be ﬁrmly established, solidly established in the Truth, so that this transformation may be the ﬁnal expression of the Truth — “ﬁnal” for the moment at least.  The starting-point of this transformation is receptivity, we have already spoken about it.


The Mother: That is the indispensable condition for obtaining the transformation. Then comes the change of consciousness. This change of consciousness and its preparation have often been compared with the formation of the chicken in the egg: till the very last second the egg remains the same, there is no change, and it is only when the chicken is completely formed, absolutely alive, that it itself makes with its little beak a hole in the shell and comes out. Something similar takes place at the moment of the change of consciousness. For a long  time you have the impression that nothing is happening, that your consciousness is the same as usual, and, if you have an intense aspiration, you even feel a resistance, as though you were knocking against a wall which does not yield.


The Mother: But when you are ready within, a last effort — the pecking in the shell of the being — and everything opens and you are projected into another consciousness.  I said that it was a revolution of the basic equilibrium, that is, a total reversal of consciousness comparable with what happens to light when it passes through a prism. Or it is as though you were turning a ball inside out, which cannot be done except in the fourth dimension. One comes out of the ordinary threedimensional consciousness to enter the higher four-dimensional consciousness, and into an inﬁnite number of dimensions. This is the indispensable starting-point.


The Mother: Unless your consciousness changes its dimension, it will remain just what it is with the superﬁcial vision of things, and all the profundities will escape you.  Is there anyone here who has already had the experience of this reversal of consciousness and who can explain what he has experienced?  X:  What was this pain like? a pressure?


The Mother: a tearing apart? a tension?  X:   It was undoubtedly a mental opening to the higher consciousness, an ascent of the mental consciousness towards the higher consciousness. And it was probably a resistance in the emotional vital which caused the pain, that disagreeable sensation which disappeared during the night with the liberation of the consciousness in a higher domain.


The Mother: Y:  This was a contact with your psychic being.  Z:  This is an opening of the inner being to the divine Presence in the psychic centre, and there you know at every moment not only what must be done but why it should be done and how it should be done, and you have the vision of the truth of things behind their appearances. Instead of seeing things in the usual way, that is, from outside, and so much from outside that, except in a few rare cases, one is incapable even of knowing what another person thinks (you must make a great effort, you see only the surface of things and nothing of what goes on behind); well, after this inner opening and this identiﬁcation with the Presence in the psychic centre, you see things from within outwards, and the outer existence becomes an expression, more or less deformed, of what you see within: you are aware of the inner existence of beings and their form; their outer existence  is only a more or less deformed expression of this inner truth.


The Mother: And it is because of this that I say that the basic equilibrium is completely changed. Instead of being outside the world and seeing it as something outside you, you are inside the world and see outer forms expressing in a more or less clumsy fashion what is within, which for you is the Truth.    Yes. Generally it is believed that things always end badly in Nature.


The Mother: Everyone knows the story of those who have met a lamentable end after having enjoyed great success in their life; of those who had extraordinary capacities and who ﬁnally lost them; of a nation which for a long period was the model of a marvellous civilisation — the civilisation vanishes and the nation is changed into something so deplorable that one can no longer recollect what it was. It seems that the story of the earth is a story of victories followed by defeats and not of defeats followed by victories.  But in fact, whenever it is a question of universal and divine things, what is needed is the universal vision and divine understanding of things in order to know how the truth expresses itself. There is a kind of general pessimism which says that even if things begin well they end badly, that it is weakness, hypocrisy, falsehood and wickedness which always seem to have the upper hand. That is why those who see the world in their own personal dimension have said that the world is bad and that we have only to ﬁnish with it and get out of it as soon as possible.


The Mother: Teachers have taught this but their teaching only proves that their vision is too narrow and in the dimension of their human individuality.  In truth, the movements of Nature are like those of the tides: they advance, they recede, advance and recede; in the universal  life and even in terrestrial life, this means a progressive advance, though apparently it is cut up by withdrawals. But these withdrawals are only an appearance, as when one draws back to spring forward. You seem to be drawing back but it is simply in order to go much farther.  You will tell me that all this is very well, but how to give a child the certitude that the truth will triumph?


The Mother: For, when he learns history, when he observes Nature, he will see that things don’t always end well.  No, if the child thinks that the Divine is different from the world, his idea that everything ends badly will be quite justiﬁed.   But we know nothing about it, for this justice does not manifest in the world as it is today.  However, if one observes things a little deeply, one perceives that there is progress, that things become better and better, though apparently they do not improve.


The Mother: And for a consciousness seated a little higher, it is quite evident that all evil — at least what we call evil — all falsehood, all that is contrary to the  Truth, all suffering, all opposition is the result of a disequilibrium. I believe that one who is habituated to seeing things from this higher plane sees immediately that it is like that. Consequently, the world cannot be founded upon a disequilibrium, for if so it would have long since disappeared. One feels that at the origin of the universe there must have been a supreme Equilibrium and, perhaps, as we said the other day, a progressive equilibrium, an equilibrium which is the exact opposite of all that we have been taught and all that we are accustomed to call “evil”. There is no absolute evil, but evil, a more or less partial disequilibrium.


The Mother: This may be taught to a child in a very simple way; it may be shown with the help of material things that an object will fall if it is not balanced, that only things in equilibrium can keep their position and duration.  There is another quality which must be cultivated in a child from a very young age: that is the feeling of uneasiness, of a moral disbalance which it feels when it has done certain things, not because it has been told not to do them, not because it fears punishment, but spontaneously. For example, a child who hurts its comrade through mischief, if it is in its normal, natural state, will experience uneasiness, a grief deep in its being, because what it has done is contrary to its inner truth.  For in spite of all teachings, in spite of all that thought can think, there is something in the depths which has a feeling of a perfection, a greatness, a truth, and is painfully contradicted by all the movements opposing this truth. If a child has not been spoilt by its milieu, by deplorable examples around it, that is, if it is in the normal state, spontaneously, without its being told anything, it will feel an uneasiness when it has done something against the truth of its being.


The Mother: And it is exactly upon this that later its effort for progress must be founded.  For, if you want to ﬁnd one teaching, one doctrine upon which to base your progress, you will never ﬁnd anything — or, to be more exact, you will ﬁnd something else, for in accordance  with the climate, the age, the civilisation, the teaching given is quite conﬂicting. When one person says, “This is good”, another will say, “No, this is bad”, and with the same logic, the same persuasive force. Consequently, it is not upon this that one can build. Religion has always tried to establish a dogma, and it will tell you that if you conform to the dogma you are in the truth and if you don’t you are in the falsehood.


The Mother: But all this has never led to anything and has only created confusion.  There is only one true guide, that is the inner guide, who does not pass through the mental consciousness.  Naturally, if a child gets a disastrous education, it will try ever harder to extinguish within itself this little true thing, and sometimes it succeeds so well that it loses all contact with it, and also the power of distinguishing between good and evil.  That is why I insist upon this, and I say that from their infancy children must be taught


The Mother: that there is an inner reality — within themselves, within the earth, within the universe — and that they, the earth and the universe exist only as a function of this truth, and that if it did not exist the child would not last, even the short time that it does, and that everything would dissolve even as it comes into being. And because this is the real basis of the universe, naturally it is this which will triumph; and all that opposes this cannot endure as long as this does, because it is That, the eternal thing which is at the base of the universe.  It is not a question, of course, of giving a child philosophical explanations, but he could very well be given the feeling of this kind of inner comfort, of satisfaction, and sometimes, of an intense joy when he obeys this little very silent thing within him which will prevent him from doing what is contrary to it. It is on an experience of this kind that teaching may be based. The child must be given the impression that nothing can endure if he does not have within himself this true satisfaction which alone is permanent.


The Mother: For a child this is very clear, for it is a perception without any complications of word or thought — there is that which puts him at ease and that which makes him uneasy (it is not necessarily joy or sorrow which come only when the thing is very intense).  And all this is much clearer in the child than in an adult, for the latter has always a mind which works and clouds his perception of the truth.  To give a child theories is absolutely useless, for as soon as his mind awakes he will ﬁnd a thousand reasons for contradicting your theories, and he will be right.  This little true thing in the child is the divine Presence in the psychic — it is also there in plants and animals.


The Mother: In plants it is not conscious, in animals it begins to be conscious, and in children it is very conscious. I have known children who were much more conscious of their psychic being at the age of ﬁve than at fourteen, and at fourteen than at twenty-ﬁve; and above all, from the moment they go to school where they undergo that kind of intensive mental training which draws their attention to the intellectual part of their being, they lose almost always and almost completely this contact with their psychic being.  If only you were an experienced observer, if you could tell what goes on in a person, simply by looking into his eyes!... It is said the eyes are the mirror of the soul; that is a popular way of speaking but if the eyes do not express to you the psychic, it is because it is very far behind, veiled by many things. Look carefully, then, into the eyes of little children, and you will see a kind of light — some describe it as candid — but so true, so true, which looks at the world with wonder.


The Mother: Well, this sense of wonder, it is the wonder of the psychic which sees the truth but does not understand much about the world, for it is too far from it. Children have this but as they learn more, become more intelligent, more educated, this is effaced, and you see all sorts  of things in their eyes: thoughts, desires, passions, wickedness — but this kind of little ﬂame, so pure, is no longer there. And you may be sure it is the mind that has got in there, and the psychic has gone very far behind.  Even a child who does not have a sufﬁciently developed brain to understand, if you simply pass on to him a vibration of protection or affection or solicitude or consolation, you will see that he responds. But if you take a boy of fourteen, for example, who is at school, who has ordinary parents and has been ill-treated, his mind is very much in the forefront; there is something hard in him, the psychic being has gone behind.


The Mother: Such boys do not respond to the vibration. One would say they are made of wood or plaster.  Why not? In animals there is sometimes a very intense psychic truth. Naturally, I believe that the psychic being is a little more formed, a little more conscious in a child than in an animal.


The Mother: But I have experimented with animals, just to know; well, I assure you that in human beings I have rarely come across some of the virtues which I have seen in animals, very simple, unpretentious virtues. As in cats, for example: I have studied cats a lot; if one knows them well they are marvellous creatures. I have known mother-cats which have sacriﬁced themselves entirely for their babies — people speak of maternal love with such admiration, as though it were purely a human privilege, but I have seen this love manifested by mother-cats to a degree far surpassing ordinary humanity. I have seen a mother-cat which would never touch her food until her babies had taken all they needed. I have seen another cat which stayed eight days beside her kittens, without satisfying any of her needs because she was afraid to leave them alone; and a cat which repeated more than ﬁfty times the same  movement to teach her young one how to jump from a wall on to a window, and I may add, with a care, an intelligence, a skill which many uneducated women do not have.


The Mother: And why is it thus? — since there was no mental intervention. It was altogether spontaneous instinct. But what is instinct? — it is the presence of the Divine in the genus of the species, and that, that is the psychic of animals; a collective, not an individual psychic.


The Mother: I have seen in animals all the reactions, emotional, affective, sentimental, all the feelings of which men are so proud. The only difference is that animals cannot speak of them and write about them, so we consider them inferior beings because they cannot ﬂood us with books on what they have felt.  A child should never be scolded. I am accused of speaking ill of parents! But I have seen them at work, you see, and I know that ninety per cent of parents snub a child who comes spontaneously to confess a mistake: “You are very naughty.


The Mother: Go away, I am busy” — instead of listening to the child with patience and explaining to him where his fault lies, how he ought to have acted. And the child, who had come with good intentions, goes away quite hurt, with the feeling: “Why am I treated thus?” Then the child sees his parents are not perfect — which is obviously true of them today — he sees that they are wrong and says to himself: “Why does he scold me, he is like me!”   This is to take oneself at one’s true worth.  Generally people pass from an excessive appreciation of their personal value to an equally excessive discouragement.


The Mother: One day they say, “I am wonderful”, and the next day, “Oh! I am good for nothing, I can do nothing.” That is like a pendulum, isn’t it? There is nothing more difﬁcult than knowing exactly what one is; one must neither overrate oneself nor depreciate oneself, but understand one’s limits and know how to advance towards the ideal set before oneself. There are people who see in a big way and immediately imagine they can do everything.  There are petty ofﬁcers, for example, who imagine themselves capable of winning all the battles of the world, and small people who think they surpass everybody in the world.


The Mother: On the other hand, I have known some people who had abilities but who spent their time thinking, “I am good for nothing.” Generally the two extremes are found in the same person. But to ﬁnd someone who knows exactly where he stands and exactly where he can go, is very rare. We have avoided speaking of vanity because we expect that you won’t be ﬁlled with vanity as soon as you score a success.  Just imagine, there are plants which are vain!


The Mother: I am speaking of plants one grows for oneself. If one pays them compliments, by words or by feelings, if one admires them, well, they hold up their head — with vanity! It is the same with animals. I am going to tell you a short amusing story.   In Paris there is a garden called “The Garden of Plants”:


The Mother: there are animals there also, as well as plants. They had just received a magniﬁcent lion. It was of course in a cage. And it was furious. There was a door in the cage behind which it could hide.


The Mother: And it would hide itself just when the visitors came to see it! I saw that and one day I went up to the cage and began speaking to it (animals are very sensitive to spoken language, they really listen). I began speaking softly to my lion, I said to it, “Oh! How handsome you are, what a pity that you are hiding yourself like this, how much we would like to see you....” Well, it listened.


The Mother: Then, little by little, it looked at me askance, slowly stretched its neck to see me better; later it brought out its paw and, ﬁnally, put the tip of its nose against the bars as if saying, “At last, here’s someone who understands me!”  I shall not speak here of material generosity which naturally consists in giving others what one has. But even this virtue is not very widespread, for as soon as one becomes rich one thinks more often of keeping one’s wealth than of giving it away. The more men possess, the less are they generous.  I want to speak of moral generosity.


The Mother: To feel happy, for example, when a comrade is successful. An act of courage, of unselﬁshness, a ﬁne sacriﬁce have a beauty in them which gives you joy. It may be said that moral generosity consists in being able to recognise the true worth and superiority of others.    Why?


The Mother: It is not necessary to have a goal in order to follow the way quietly. So many men who have no goal follow quite calmly the course of their daily round without making any effort!  Sometimes it takes an entire lifetime to attain one’s aim; one would then ﬁnd joy only at the end of one’s life!  Yes, but one may have an altogether material ideal; it is not the ideal which gives joy.  Exactly.


The Mother: It is the effort which gives joy; a human being who does not know how to make an effort will never ﬁnd joy. Those who are essentially lazy will never ﬁnd joy — they do not have the strength to be joyful! It is effort which gives joy. Effort makes the being vibrate at a certain degree of tension which makes it possible for you to feel the joy.   You are mixing up two things: one physical, the other psychological.


The Mother: It is quite obvious that an act done because one has decided to do it and an act imposed by circumstances, more or less favourable, do not have at all the same result. It is known, for instance, that people who follow yogic discipline often fast.  Many yogic disciplines require very long fastings and those who practise them are generally very happy to do so, for that is their own choice. But take this very person and put him in circumstances where food is scarce, either because it cannot be had or because this person has no money, and you will see him in a lamentable state, complaining that life is terrible, though the conditions may be identically the same; but in one case there was the decision not to eat, whilst in the other the man did not eat because he could not do otherwise. That is obvious, but this is not the only reason.


The Mother: It is only effort, in whatever domain it be — material effort, moral effort, intellectual effort — which creates in the being certain vibrations which enable you to get connected with universal vibrations; and it is this which gives joy. It is effort which pulls you out of inertia; it is effort which makes you receptive to the universal forces. And the one thing above all which spontaneously gives joy, even to those who do not practise yoga, who have no spiritual aspiration, who lead quite an ordinary life, is the exchange of forces with universal forces. People do not know this, they would not be able to tell you that it is due to this, but so it is.  There are people who are just like beautiful animals —


The Mother: all their movements are harmonious, their energies are spent harmoniously, their uncalculating efforts call in energies all the time and they are always happy; but sometimes they have no thoughts in their head, sometimes they have no feelings in their heart, they live an altogether animalish life. I have known people  like that: beautiful animals. They were handsome, their gestures were harmonious, their forces quite balanced and they spent without reckoning and received without measure. They were in harmony with the material universal forces and they lived in joy.  They could not perhaps have told you that they were happy — joy with them was so spontaneous that it was natural — and they would have been still less able to tell you why, for their intelligence was not very developed.


The Mother: I have known such people, who were capable of making the necessary effort (not a prudent and calculated effort but a spontaneous one) in no matter what ﬁeld: material, vital, intellectual, etc., and in this effort there was always joy. For example, a man sits down to write a book, he makes an effort which sets vibrating something in his brain to attract ideas; well, suddenly, this man experiences joy. It is quite certain that, whatever you do, even the most material work, like sweeping a room or cooking, if you make the necessary effort to do this work to the maximum of your ability, you will feel joy, even if what you do is against your nature. When you want to realise something, you make quite spontaneously the necessary effort; this concentrates your energies on the thing to be realised and that gives a meaning to your life. This compels you to a sort of organisation of yourself, a sort of concentration of your energies, because it is this that you wish to do and not ﬁfty other things which contradict it.


The Mother: And it is in this concentration, this intensity of the will, that lies the origin of joy. This gives you the power to receive energies in exchange for those you spend.   This means to be conscious of one’s inner truth, conscious of the different parts of one’s being and their respective functions. You must know why you do this, why you do that; you must know your thoughts, know your feelings, all your activities, all your movements, of what you are capable, etc. And to know oneself is not enough: this knowledge must bring a conscious control.


The Mother: To know oneself perfectly is to control oneself perfectly.  But there must be an aspiration at every moment. It is never too early to begin, never too late to continue. That is, even when you are quite young, you can begin to study yourself and know yourself and gradually to control yourself.


The Mother: And even when you are what is called “old”, when you are quite aged, it is not too late to make the effort to know yourself better and better and control yourself better and better. That is the Science of Living.  To perfect oneself, one must ﬁrst become conscious of oneself. I am sure, for instance, that the following situation has arisen many times in your life: someone asks you suddenly, “Why have you done that?” Well, the spontaneous reply is, “I don’t know.”


The Mother: If someone asks you, “What are you thinking of?” You reply, “I don’t know.” “Why are you tired?” — “I don’t know.” “Why are you happy?” — “I don’t know”, and so on. I can take indeed ﬁfty people and ask them suddenly, without preparation, “Why have you done that?” and if they are not inwardly “awake”, they will all answer, “I don’t know.”


The Mother: (Of course I am not speaking here of those who have practised a discipline of self-knowledge and of following up their movements to the extreme limits; these people can, naturally, collect themselves, concentrate and give the right answer, but only after a little while.) You will see that it is like that if you look well at your whole day. You say something and you don’t know why you say it — it is only after the words are out of your mouth that you notice that this was not quite what you wanted to say. For instance, you go to see someone, you prepare beforehand the words you are going to speak, but once you are in front of the person in question, you say nothing or it is other words which  come from your mouth. Are you able to say to what extent the atmosphere of the other person has inﬂuenced you and stopped you from saying what you had prepared?


The Mother: How many people can say that? They do not even observe that the person was in such or such a state and that it was because of this that they could not tell him what they had prepared. Of course, there are very obvious instances when you ﬁnd people in such a bad mood that you can ask nothing of them. I am not speaking of these.  I am speaking of the clear perception of reciprocal inﬂuences: what acts and reacts on your nature; it is this one does not have.


The Mother: For example, one becomes suddenly uneasy or happy, but how many people can say, “It is this”? And it is difﬁcult to know, it is not at all easy. One must be quite “awake”; one must be constantly in a very attentive state of observation.  There are people who sleep twelve hours a day and say the rest of the time, “I am awake”! There are people who sleep twenty hours a day and the rest of the time are but half awake!


The Mother: To be in this state of attentive observation, you must have, so to say, antennae everywhere which are in constant contact with your true centre of consciousness. You register everything, you organise everything and, in this way, you cannot be taken unawares, you cannot be deceived, mistaken, and you cannot say anything other than what you wanted to say. But how many people normally live in this state? It is this I mean, precisely, when I speak of “becoming conscious”. If you want to beneﬁt most from the conditions and circumstances in which you ﬁnd yourself, you must be fully awake: you must not be taken by surprise, you must not do things without knowing why, you must not say things without knowing why.


The Mother: You must be constantly awake.  You must also understand that you are not separate individualities, that life is a constant exchange of forces, of consciousnesses, of vibrations, of movements of all kinds. It is as in a crowd, you see: when everyone pushes all go forward, and when all recede, everyone recedes. It is the same thing in the inner world, in your consciousness. There are all the time forces  and inﬂuences acting and reacting upon you, it is like a gas in the atmosphere, and unless you are quite awake, these things enter into you, and it is only when they have gone well in and come out as if they came from you, that you become aware of them.


The Mother: How many times people meet those who are nervous, angry, in a bad mood, and themselves become nervous, angry, moody, just like that, without quite knowing why. Why is it that when you play against certain people you play very well, but when you play against others you cannot play? And those very quiet people, not at all wicked, who suddenly become furious when they are in a furious crowd! And no one knows who has started it: it is something that went past and swept off the consciousness.  There are people who can let out vibrations like this and others respond without knowing why.


The Mother: Everything is like that, from the smallest to the biggest things.  To be individualised in a collectivity, one must be absolutely conscious of oneself. And of which self? — the Self which is above all intermixture, that is, what I call the Truth of your being. And as long as you are not conscious of the Truth of your being, you are moved by all kinds of things, without taking any note of it at all.


The Mother: Collective thought, collective suggestions are a formidable inﬂuence which act constantly on individual thought.  And what is extraordinary is that one does not notice it. One believes that one thinks “like that”, but in truth it is the collectivity which thinks “like that”. The mass is always inferior to the individual. Take individuals with similar qualities, of similar categories, well, when they are alone these individuals are at least two degrees better than people of the same category in a crowd.


The Mother: There is a mixture of obscurities, a mixture of unconsciousness, and inevitably you slip into this unconsciousness. To escape this there is but one means: to become conscious of oneself, more and more conscious and more and more attentive.  Try this little exercise: at the beginning of the day, say: “I won’t speak without thinking of what I say.” You believe, don’t you, that you think all that you say! It is not at all true, you will  see that so many times the word you do not want to say is ready to come out, and that you are compelled to make a conscious effort to stop it from coming out.


The Mother: I have known people who were very scrupulous about not telling lies, but all of a sudden, when together in a group, instead of speaking the truth they would spontaneously tell a lie; they did not have the intention of doing so, they did not think of it a minute before doing it, but it came “like that” . Why? — because they were in the company of liars; there was an atmosphere of falsehood and they had quite simply caught the malady!  It is thus that gradually, slowly, with perseverance, ﬁrst of all with great care and much attention, one becomes conscious, learns to know oneself and then to become master of oneself.


The Mother: One must be clearly aware of the origin of one’s movements because there are contradictory velleities in the being — some pushing you here, others pushing you there, and that obviously creates a chaos in life. If you observe yourself, you will see that as soon as you do something which disturbs you a little, the mind immediately gives you a favourable reason to justify yourself — this mind is capable of gilding everything. In these conditions it is difﬁcult to know oneself. One must be absolutely sincere to be able to do it and to see clearly into all the little falsehoods of the mental being.  If in your mind you go over the various movements and reactions of the day like one repeating indeﬁnitely the same thing, you will not progress.


The Mother: If this reviewing is to make you progress, you must ﬁnd something within you in whose light you yourself can be your own judge, something which represents for you the best part of yourself, which has some light, some goodwill and which precisely is in love with progress. Place that before you and, ﬁrst of all, pass across it as at a cinema all that you have done, all that you have felt, your impulses, your thoughts, etc.; then try to coordinate them, that is, ﬁnd out why this has followed that. And look at the luminous screen that is before you: certain things pass across it well, without throwing a shadow; others, on the contrary, throw a little shadow; others yet cast a shadow altogether black and disagreeable. You must do this  very sincerely, as though you were playing a game: under such circumstances I did such and such a thing, feeling like this and thinking in this way; I have before me my ideal of knowledge and self-mastery, well, was this act in keeping with my ideal or not?  If it was, it would not leave any shadow on the screen, which would remain transparent, and one would not have to worry about it.


The Mother: If it is not in conformity, it casts a shadow. Why has it left this shadow? What was there in this act that was contrary to the will to self-knowledge and self-mastery? Most often you will ﬁnd that it corresponds to unconsciousness — then you ﬁle it among unconscious things and resolve that next time you will try to be conscious before doing anything. But in other cases you will see that it was a nasty little egoism, quite black, which had come to distort your action or your thought.


The Mother: Then you place this egoism before your “light” and ask yourself: “Why has it the right to make me act like that, think like that?...” And instead of accepting any odd explanation you must search and you will ﬁnd in a corner of your being something which thinks and says, “Ah, no, I shall accept everything but that. ” You will see that it is a petty vanity, a movement of self-love, an egoistic feeling hidden somewhere, a hundred things. Then you take a good look at these things in the light of your ideal: “Is cherishing this movement in conformity with my seeking and the realisation of my ideal or not?


The Mother: I put this little dark corner in front of the light until the light enters into it and it disappears.” Then the comedy is over. But the comedy of your whole day is not ﬁnished yet, you know, for there are many things which have to pass thus before the light. But if you continue this game — for truly it is a game, if you do this sincerely — I assure you that in six months you will not recognise yourself, you will say to yourself, “What?  I was like that!


The Mother: It is impossible!”  You may be ﬁve years old or twenty, ﬁfty or sixty and yet transform yourself in this way by putting everything before this inner light. You will see that the elements which do not conform with your ideal are not generally elements which you have to  throw wholly out of yourself (there are very few of this kind); they are simply things not in their place. If you organise everything — your feelings, your thoughts, your impulses, etc. — around the psychic centre which is the inner light, you will see that all inner disorder will change into a luminous order.  It is quite evident that if a similar procedure were adopted by a nation or by the earth, most of the things which make men unhappy would disappear, for the major part of the world’s misery comes from the fact that things are not in their place.


The Mother: If life were organised in such a way that nothing was wasted and each thing was in its place, most of these miseries would not exist any longer. An old sage has said: “There is no evil. There is only a lack of balance.  “There is nothing bad. Only things are not in their place.”


The Mother: If everything were in its place, in nations, in the material world, in the actions and thoughts and feelings of individuals, the greater part of human suffering would disappear.  There are two things to be considered: consciousness and the instruments through which consciousness manifests. Let us take the instruments: there is the mental being which produces thoughts, the emotional being which produces feeling, the vital being which produces the power of action and the physical being that acts.  The man of genius may use anything at all and make something beautiful because he has genius; but give this genius a perfect instrument and he will make something wonderful. Take a great musician; well, even with a wretched piano and missing notes, he will produce something beautiful; but give him a good piano, well-tuned, and he will do something still more beautiful.


The Mother: The consciousness is the same in either case but for expression it needs a good instrument — a body with mental, vital, psychic and physical capacities.  If physically you are badly built, badly set up, it will be difﬁcult for you, even with good training, to do gymnastics as well as one with a beautiful well-built body. It is the same  with the mind — one who has a well-organised mind, complex, complete, reﬁned, will express himself much better than one who has a rather mediocre or badly organised mind. First of all, you must educate your consciousness, become conscious of yourself, organise your consciousness according to your ideal, but at the same time do not neglect the instruments which are in your body.


The Mother: Take an example. You are in your body with your deepest ideal but you ﬁnd yourself before a school class and you have to teach something to the students. Well, this light is up there, this light of consciousness, but when you have to explain to your class the science you have to teach, is it more convenient to have a fund of knowledge or will the inspiration be such that you will not need this fund of knowledge? What is your personal experience?... You ﬁnd, don’t you, that there are days when everything goes well — you are eloquent, your students listen to you and understand you easily.


The Mother: But there are other days when what you have to teach does not come, they do not listen to you — that is, you are bored and are boring. This means that in the former case your consciousness is awake and concentrated upon what you are doing, while in the second it is more or less asleep — you are left to your most external means. But in this case, if you have a fund of knowledge you can tell your students something; if you have a mind trained, prepared, a good instrument responding well when you want to make use of it, and if you have also gathered all necessary notes and notions all will go very well.  But if you have nothing in your head and, besides, you are not in contact with your higher consciousness, then you have no other recourse than to take a book and read out your lesson — you will be obliged to make use of someone else’s mind.


The Mother: Take games. There too you ﬁnd days when everything goes well; you have done nothing special previously, but even so you succeed in everything; but if you have practised well beforehand, the result is still more magniﬁcent. If, for example, you ﬁnd yourself facing someone who has trained himself slowly,  seriously, with patience and endurance, and who all of a sudden has a strong aspiration, well, this one will beat you in spite of your aspiration unless your aspiration is very much superior to that of your adversary. If you have opposite you someone who knows only the technique of the game but has no conscious aspiration, while you are in a fully conscious state, evidently it is you who will defeat him because the quality of consciousness is superior to the quality of technique.


The Mother: But one cannot replace the other. The one which is superior is more important, granted, but you must also have nerves which respond quickly, spontaneous movements; you must know all the secrets of the game to be able to play perfectly. You must have both the things. What is higher is the consciousness which enables you to make the right movement at the right moment but it is not exclusive. When you seek perfection, you must not neglect the one under the pretext that you have the other.


The Mother: When you have a three or four-year old consciousness, this is an altogether necessary stimulant. But you may have a four-year old consciousness even at the age of ﬁfty, may you not? No, when you have a ripe consciousness you must not play in order to win. You must play for the sake of playing and to learn how to play and to progress in games and in order that your play may become the expression of your inner consciousness at its highest — it is this which is important. For example, people who like to play well do not go and choose bad players to play with, simply for the pleasure of winning — they choose those who are the best players and play with them.


The Mother: I remember having learned to play tennis when I was eight, it was a passion; but I never wished to play with my little comrades because I learned nothing (usually I used to defeat them), I always went to the best players.  At times they looked surprised, but in the end they played with me — I never won but I learned much.  Unfortunately, most people, the more they think, the more they believe themselves superior. The mind is satisﬁed with itself and does not aspire much for progress — it thinks it knows everything. And many people believe that their way of thinking is the best; they cannot understand that there are several ways of thinking about the same subject. And the more their thought is strong and precise, the more are they convinced that there is only way of thinking.


The Mother: That is why I have said here that certain exercises can enlarge your thought and give you the habit of seeing things from several points of view at the same time:   Give me a thesis.  X:  And the synthesis?  Y:


The Mother: Z :  W:  That is not a synthesis.


The Mother: X:  Yes, but you believe that extraordinary men do not have their cross! Even higher beings have their cross to bear.  It is a question of a difference of consciousness. In some it is the external states of consciousness which are most developed; others, on the contrary, have taken care to develop the higher states of consciousness.


The Mother: So, to say “each one bears his cross” is true of the external consciousness (of material happenings, happenings which touch the vital being, the emotional being and the mental being); for such people there will always be a considerable number of catastrophes, all the more because catastrophes seem to be proportionate to the capacity of the individual, they seem to be dealt out according to his capacity to bear things. It may just be that those who have greater capacities have an over-plus of suffering and misfortune.   But there are people who are above all misfortune and yet misfortunes exist for them. Why? Because the inner consciousness in them is stronger, more developed than the other consciousness (I do not speak here of “transformed” beings, for in them one can conceive of a state of things in which even the physical being is above suffering; we are speaking of men as they are at present).


The Mother: If your consciousness is seated in a place where these external things do not exist, then it may be said that you do not bear your cross because you are above it. Yet there are exceptions, there are human beings who are above afﬂictions, yet carry their cross. How can we reconcile these two apparently contradictory things?  No, human miseries and misfortunes are always of the same nature; there are sufferings that come from yourself, from circumstances or from the general state of things, that is, you are subject to these sufferings from your birth and none can escape them. They do not always have the same intensity but they are always there.


The Mother: Hence it seems there is a contradiction and yet this is not correct: because for some people it is as if the thing did not exist, even when it exists! As if it was not, even while it was!   Neither the one nor the other is wholly true, neither the one nor the other is wholly false.  There is a state of human consciousness (it is not yet superhuman, it is truly human) in which the two things may coexist.


The Mother: One may have sufferings and not feel them, be as if they did not exist. That is, a misfortune, a “cross” touches only the outer consciousness, the physical, the mental, the vital, but the psychic  — in truth, the psychic is above all suffering. Let us take a very simple example: an illness. A physical disorder brings suffering, at times much suffering, but there are people who are in such a state of consciousness that their physical sufferings do not exist, they are not real for them.


The Mother: It is the same thing with separation;  if you love someone and are separated from that person, you suffer — this is one of the most common of sufferings, it is the ties which are broken — well, in a certain state of consciousness the real link between two beings cannot be broken, for it does not belong to the domain where things break. Therefore one is above what may happen.  But before one reaches a higher state of consciousness, there is a stage where one can develop in oneself the faculty of reason — a clear, precise, logical reason, sufﬁciently objective in its vision of things. And when one has developed this reason well, all impulses, feelings, desires, all disturbances can be put in the presence of this reason and that makes you reasonable. Most people, when something troubles them, become very unreasonable.


The Mother: When, for example, they are ill, they pass their time saying, “Oh, how ill I am, how frightful it is; is it going to last like that all the time?” And naturally it gets worse and worse. Or when some misfortune befalls them, they cry out: “It is only to me that these things happen and I was thinking that everything was ﬁne before”, and they burst into a ﬁt of tears, a ﬁt of nerves. Well, not to speak of superman, in man himself there is a higher capacity called reason, which is able to look at things calmly, coolly, reasonably. And this reason tells you, “Don’t worry, that will improve nothing, you must not grumble, you must accept the thing since it has come.”


The Mother: Then you immediately become calm.   It is a very good mental training, it develops judgment, vision, objectivity and at the same time it has a very healthy action upon your character. It helps you to avoid the ridiculousness of giving way to your nerves and lets you behave like a reasonable person.  There is one thing very difﬁcult for the mind to do but very important, according to me: you must never allow your mind to judge things and men.


The Mother: To say, “This is good, that is bad, this is right, that is wrong, this one has this defect, that one has that bad thing, etc.” — this is depreciatory judgment.  For people who exercise their intelligence, the more intelligent they are, the more do they grow aware that they know  nothing at all and that with the mind one can know nothing.  One may think in a particular way, judge and see in a particular way, but one is never sure of anything — and never will be sure of anything. One can always say, “Perhaps it is like that” or “Perhaps it is like this” and so on, indeﬁnitely, because the mind is not an instrument of knowledge.  Above the thoughts, there are pure ideas; thoughts serve to express pure ideas.


The Mother: And Knowledge is well above the domain of pure ideas, as these are well above thought. One must hence know how to climb from thought to pure idea, and pure idea is itself nothing but a translation of Knowledge. And Knowledge can be obtained only by a total identiﬁcation. So, when you put yourself in your small human mentality, the mentality of the physical consciousness which is at work all the time, which looks at everything, judges everything from the height of its derisive superiority, which says, “That is bad, it should not be like that”, you are sure to be always mistaken, without exception. The best is to keep silent and look well at things, and little by little you make notes within yourself and keep the record without pronouncing any judgment.


The Mother: When you are able to keep all that within you, quietly, without agitation and present it very calmly before the highest part of your consciousness, with an attempt to maintain an attentive silence, and wait, then perhaps, slowly, as if coming from a far distance and from a great height, something like a light will manifest and you will know a little more of truth.  But as long as you excite your thoughts and cut them up into little bits, you will never know anything. I shall repeat this to you a hundred times if necessary, but I can assure you that so long as you are not convinced of this you will never come out of your ignorance.  To know that, you must go and see the Supreme and ask Him!  I am not interested in statistics!


The Mother: Here is a little story. One of my friends had made a trip to India and was requested to give an account of his travels. An old, very credulous lady was there and she asked him, “In India, do they count the souls?” He answered, “Yes.” “How many are there?” asked the old lady.


The Mother: He answered, “One only.”   It is very difﬁcult to ﬁnd the borderland between a true need and a desire (the yogic ideal, of course, is never to have any need, and therefore not to want anything), but this essay is written for all men of goodwill who try to know themselves and control themselves. And there we really face a problem which compels an extraordinary sincerity, for the very ﬁrst way in which the vital meets life is through desire — and yet, there are necessities.  But how to know if things are really necessary, not desired?... For that you must observe yourself very, very attentively, and if there is anything in you which produces something like a small intense vibration, then you may be sure that there lies a desire.


The Mother: For example, you say, “This food is necessary for me” — you believe, you imagine, you think that you need such and such a thing and you ﬁnd the necessary means to obtain the thing. To know if it is a need or a desire, you must look at yourself very closely and ask yourself, “What will happen if I cannot get the thing?” Then if the immediate answer is, “Oh, it will be very bad”, you may be sure that it is a matter of desire. It is the same for everything. For every problem you draw back, look at yourself and ask, “Let us  see, am I going to have the thing?”


The Mother: If at that moment something in you jumps up with joy, you may be certain there is a desire.  On the other hand, if something tells you, “Oh, I am not going to get it”, and you feel very depressed, then again it is a desire.  If the vital is not to deceive you, you must not only be very mindful but your sincerity must also be almost miraculous — it is not to discourage you that I have used the word “miraculous”; on the contrary, it is in order to give you a greater aspiration for sincerity.  It is this which is so wonderful. I believe the vital is very conscious of its power and that is why it is important: it has that dynamic energy which makes no difﬁculty too difﬁcult for it; but it must be on the right side.


The Mother: If it collaborates, everything is wonderful, but it is not easy to get from it this constant collaboration.  It is a very good worker, it works very, very well, but in working it seeks always its own satisfaction, it wants to get something from the work, all the pleasure that can be drawn from it, all the advantage that can be had, and when this satisfaction is not given for one reason or another (there may be many reasons), it is not happy, not at all happy: “That’s not fair, I work, and I am given nothing in return”; then it sulks, it does not move, it keeps mum, and at times it says, “I do not exist.” Then all energy runs out from the body, you get tired, exhausted, you can no longer do anything. And all of a sudden this becomes worse, for I must tell you that the mind is very friendly with the vital — not the reasoning mind but the physical mind is very, very friendly with the vital; so, as soon as the vital begins to say, “I have nothing to do with that, I have been badly treated, I won’t have anything to do with it”, the mind naturally comes in to encourage it, to explain, give good reasons, and it is the same  old story: “Life is not worth living, people are truly disgusting and all circumstances are against me, it is better to leave it all”, and so on. This happens very often, but at times there is a little glimmer of reason somewhere which tells you, “Ah, enough of this comedy!”


The Mother: But if this becomes very strong and you do not react in time, then you fall into despair: “Really this life is not made for people like me; I would be happier elsewhere, in heaven where everybody is very nice and one can do whatever one wants”, etc., whence paradisiac conceptions — indeed I think it is these two accomplices, the mind and the vital, who have invented paradise!  For if life, existence, does not conform to your desires, you begin to lament: “Oh, I have had enough of it, this world is miserable and deceitful, I want to die. ” Then there is a moment when this situation becomes serious; discouragement changes into revolt and depression into dissatisfaction: I speak of people who are rather ill-natured — there are people who are ill-natured (it is not their fault!) and there are people who are good-natured (it is not their fault either!) but things are like that — well, those who are ill-natured get angry, revolt, want to break and pull down everything: “You will see, they do not do what I want, they will be punished!” Then this becomes a little more serious, because the mind is always there to serve as the accomplice and it begins to have wonderful ideas of revenge — from discouragement you do one kind of stupid thing, from wickedness you do another.


The Mother: The stupidities of discouragement concern you personally, whilst the stupidities of wickedness concern others; and sometimes these latter stupidities are very serious. If you have a little goodwill, it is better at the time when such ﬁts seize you to make it a rule not to stir, telling yourself, “I am not going to move, I shall wait for the storm to pass”, for in a few moments one can destroy or ruin months of regular effort.  But here I give you a consolation:  And the last consolation. For those who are truly sincere, truly good-willed, all these ﬁts can be changed into a means for progress. Each time that you have an attack of this kind, a sort of storm, you can change the crisis into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal.


The Mother: If precisely you have the necessary sincerity to look straight in the face, within you, at the cause of the ﬁt — the wrong you have done, the wrong you have thought, the wrong you have felt — if you see the weakness, the violence or the vanity (for I forgot to tell you that the vital is much more full of vanity than the mind), if you look at all that full in the face and if you recognise honestly and sincerely that what has happened is due to your fault, then you are able to put a red-hot iron as it were on the affected spot. You can purify the weakness and turn it into a new consciousness. And you ﬁnd after the storm that you have grown a little more, you have truly made a progress.  If I lay stress here upon defects and difﬁculties, it is not to  discourage you from making an effort but to tell you that you must do things with the necessary courage and precisely not be disheartened because you are not successful at once; but if the aspiration is there in you, if the will is there in you, it is absolutely certain that sooner or later you will succeed. And I am saying this for people who live in very ordinary circumstances, less favourable perhaps than yours, but who can, even so, learn to know themselves and conquer themselves, master themselves, control themselves.


The Mother: Therefore, if the conditions are favourable you have a much greater chance of succeeding. One thing is always necessary, not to give up the game — for it is a great game and the result is worth the trouble of playing it through.  It is much easier to organise the body than the vital, for instance.  But the mind and the vital, with the character and temperament they have, what do they not do with this poor slave of a body! After having ill-treated it, perhaps ruined it (it protests a little, falls ill a little), this is what the two accomplices say: “What a beast is this body, it cannot follow us in our movement!”


The Mother: Unhappily, the body obeys its masters, the mind and the vital, blindly, without any discrimination. The mind comes along with its theories: “You must not eat that, it will harm you; you must not do that, it is bad”, and if the mind is not wise and clear-sighted, the poor body suffers the consequences of the orders it receives. I do not speak of the orders it receives from the vital. The mind with its rigid principles and the vital with its excesses and outbursts and passions are quick to destroy the body’s equilibrium and to create a condition of fatigue, exhaustion and illness.   That is evidently the cure of all ills.


The Mother: During the last war, it was proved that the body was capable of enduring such suffering as is normally impossible to endure. You have surely read or heard these stories of war in which the body was made to suffer and endure terrible things, and it withstood all that, it proved that it had almost inexhaustible capacities of endurance. Some people happened to be under conditions that should have killed them; if they survived, it was because they had in them a very strong will to survive and the body obeyed that will.   That is the last stage.


The Mother: If you compare the human body as it now is with a higher ideal of beauty, obviously very few would pass the examination. In almost everyone there is a sort of unbalance in the proportions; we are so accustomed to it that  we do not notice it, but if we look from the standpoint of the higher beauty, it becomes visible; very few bodies would bear comparison with perfect beauty. There are a thousand reasons for this unbalance but only one remedy, to instil into the being this instinct, this sense of true beauty, a supreme beauty which will gradually act on the cells and make the body capable of expressing beauty. This is still a thing which is not known: the body is inﬁnitely more plastic than you believe. You must have surely noticed (perhaps very vaguely) that those who live in an inner peace, in an inner beauty, a light, and perfect goodwill, have an expression which is not quite the same as of people who live in bad thoughts, in the lower part of their nature.


The Mother: When the human being is at his best, above his base animality, he reﬂects something which is not there when he lives in a state of beastiality.  If one tried to change one’s form out of egoism or that famous thing, vanity, naturally, one would not succeed, for it is something deeper which has the power to act; but if one could refrain from having at all times bad will, wicked thoughts, one would see a kind of harmony beginning to express itself gradually in the forms and features, for it is a fact that the body expresses the inner states.   But you forget one thing.


The Mother: If you have in the whole day ﬁve or six hours of higher consciousness, you feel that it is already much, and the rest of the time you live more or less like a little animal, you let yourself go, you are driven by circumstances. And you forget completely to approach the Thing which is above, which can prevent you from descending into the lower regions of your nature.  You could get much more from your body if you only took the trouble.  You must not despise it nor scold it too much, for it is not the culprit; if you follow a suitable method to train and educate your body, you will have an inﬁnitely greater output than you have now. It is quite recently that men have begun to speak of  physical culture as an important thing; if you go back a hundred years, it was the privilege of those who had nothing else to do.


The Mother: A hundred years ago it was a luxury. When someone said, “I do not want to send my child to school, he must earn his living”, there were many who answered, “No, pardon me, you make a serious mistake; if you do not prepare your child for his adult life, he will be incapable of doing what he should do.” People said this about the mind but it was not said about the body.  So many children lived in more or less good conditions, with a body which was indeed a difﬁculty, but it used to be said, “That will get corrected, that will be all right....” With training and patience you can acquire a body with which you can get along in life.


The Mother: Nowadays, people recognise the value of a healthy and balanced life. And I have said that this harmony will be progressive:  This is a thing very little known among mystics and religious people: in each part of the being the Divine manifests Himself  differently. In the higher parts He manifests as Power, Love, etc., but in the physical He manifests as Harmony and Beauty.  Hence, the problem of the expression of physical beauty is a spiritual problem.


The Mother: Physical sleep therefore well deserves our attention. I said “physical sleep”, for we are inclined to believe that the whole of our being goes to sleep when the body is asleep.  Their true nature does not mean their deeper nature but their spontaneous nature which is not under control, for the control of the will ceases during sleep. And all that one does not do in the waking state, one does during sleep because the control of the will is removed.  In another lesson we spoke of the power of mental formation: the mind shapes entities which have a more or less independent life and try to manifest themselves.


The Mother: Here I do not speak of thought but of desire. Desire belongs to the vital domain but at the core of this desire there is always a thought, and  the desire becomes all the more active and dynamic when it holds in itself this power of mental formation and the power of vital realisation. The vital is the centre of dynamism of the being, of active energy, and the two combined make something very strong which has a considerable tendency towards realising itself. Besides, everything in the universe tends towards manifestation, and things which are prevented from manifesting lose, by that very fact, their force and capacity. Most of the methods aiming at self-control have indeed made use of repression, of the suppression of movements with the idea that if one continues this suppression long enough, one succeeds in killing the element that is not wanted.


The Mother: This would be quite true if it were a question only of the physical world, but behind the physical world there is the subconscious world and behind the subconscious world there lies the immensity of the Inconscient. And what you do not know is this that unless you destroy within you the desire itself, that is, the seed of the formation, this formation which you are preventing from manifesting is so to say repressed in the subconscient — driven down and repressed right at the bottom — and if you go and search in the subconscient you will ﬁnd that it is waiting there to do its work. That is why so many people who have for years and years been able to control an unwanted movement are suddenly taken by surprise when this movement rushes up from below with all the greater force the longer it has been repressed. Hence dreams are of great use because this movement of repression exists no longer, the conscious will not being there (for it falls asleep or goes elsewhere) and the desire repressed below leaps up and manifests itself in the form of dreams, so much so that you come to know a good many things about your own nature; that is why it is said that man can discover in sleep and dreams his true nature; it is not his true nature, his deeper nature, which is his psychic nature, but the spontaneous, uncontrolled nature.   I do not know if anyone here has observed the phenomenon, but according to the hours of the night or according to how long you have slept, your sleep changes its quality.


The Mother: If you take the trouble of observing (there are very few people however who do take the trouble), it may happen that roused suddenly at an abnormal hour, you have noticed that you were not in the same state of sleep twice. There are also hours when you have different types of dreams; if you are careful you will see this very clearly. There are hours when it is very difﬁcult for you to wake up, for you are in deep sleep, you are altogether unconscious of external things.  At other times, on the contrary, just a little noise, however slight, is sufﬁcient to startle you out of your sleep.  That means your vital being is older than your physical being.


The Mother: Here I am going to correct one word: it is not the subconscient which has more knowledge than our normal consciousness but the superconscient, that which escapes our consciousness, not  because it is lower but because it is higher. When at night we put a problem to ourselves, the problem goes to the higher regions of our being and in the morning we get the answer, the solution, because there, in the depths of our consciousness, we know things which we do not know in our external consciousness.  That is because in the ladder of being which climbs from the most external to the highest consciousness, there are gaps, breaks of continuity, and when the consciousness rises, descends and goes up again, it passes through some kind of dark holes where there is nothing. Then it enters into a sleep, a sort of unconsciousness, and wakes up as best it can on the other side and hardly remembers what it has brought back from above. This is what happens very frequently and particularly in the state called


The Mother: People who enter into ﬁnd out that between their active external consciousness and their consciousness in meditation, there lies a blank. Up there, they are almost necessarily conscious — conscious of the state in which they ﬁnd themselves — but when coming down again towards their body, on the way they enter into a kind of hole where they lose everything — they are unable to bring back the experience with them. Quite a discipline is needed to create in oneself the many steps which enable the consciousness not to forget what it has experienced up there. It is not an impossible discipline but it is extremely long and requires an unshakable patience, for it is as if you wanted to build up in you a being, a body; and for that you require ﬁrst of all the necessary knowledge, but also such a prolonged persistence and perseverance as would discourage  many. But it is altogether indispensable if you want to take part in the knowledge of your higher being.


The Mother: Yes, for more than a year I applied myself to this kind of selfdiscipline. I noted down everything — a few words, just a little thing, an impression — and I tried to pass from one memory to another. At ﬁrst it was not very fruitful, but at the end of about fourteen months I could follow, beginning from the end, all the movements, all the dreams right up to the beginning of the night.  That puts you in such a conscious, continuously conscious state that ﬁnally I was not sleeping at all. My body lay stretched, deeply asleep, but there was no rest in the consciousness.


The Mother: The result was absolutely wonderful; you become conscious of the different phases of sleep, conscious absolutely of everything that happens there, to the least detail, then nothing can any longer escape your control. But if during the day you have a lot of work and you truly need sleep, I advise you not to try!  In any case, there is one thing altogether indispensable, not to make the least movement when you wake up; you must learn to wake up in a state of complete immobility, otherwise everything disappears.  Yes, an absolute need. And it is only in silence that the mind can receive the true light from above.


The Mother: I do not think that the mental being is liable to fatigue; if it feels tired, that is rather a reaction of the brain. It is only in silence that it can rise above itself. But from the point of view of sleep and dreams of which we were speaking , there is a very remarkable phenomenon. I have tried it out.