The Mother: But when you are all alone — usually not amidst very favourable surroundings, or in any case where people understand nothing of this, don’t think about it — if they are not hostile — you have to ﬁnd out everything by yourself; you have nobody to tell you, “Well, read this book, it is better, it is truer than that one.” You have to read a huge number of things, be  able to compare them in your own thought, compare the effect they have on you, how far they help you or don’t.  Naturally, people who are predestined are guided by the inner Guide. It happens that they come across the book they should read or meet the person who can give them a useful indication; but this is... After some time they become aware that there was a consciousness there; they did not know very well either where it came from or what it was, or who organised their life, who organised the circumstances of their life — and who helped them at every step to ﬁnd just the thing which would lead them farther.


The Mother: But it is... it is not very frequent; rather, it is rare. These people are predestined.  Otherwise it is difﬁcult; it takes time, much time. And yet it is just the beginning, you see; it is to ﬁnd the truths on which to base one’s yoga.


The Mother: It is not yoga; it is the general principles on which one is going to construct one’s yoga.  Obviously, those who are particularly interested can ﬁnd something. It goes without saying that for those who are in India, it is extremely easy, extremely easy; there is a living tradition; whoever wants to do yoga will always ﬁnd someone to give him information. And even the most ignorant and uneducated have a vague idea of what ought to be done or of what can help them.  But if you are transplanted to the West, well, you will see how difﬁcult it is, with a whole world organised not only “not for”, not only indifferent, but almost totally against, which deliberately refuses to know this Reality, because it is troublesome; so when this happens within you, when the need manifests, you truly don’t know where to turn to ﬁnd a way out.


The Mother: Now it is a little better. But ﬁfty years ago it was not too good — ﬁfty, sixty years ago, it was difﬁcult. Now they have made some progress; there is a little more light there, everywhere.  That’s all?


The Mother: It is a magniﬁcent sentence!  And it is absolutely true. There is in also a sentence like this where I think he uses the word “God” instead of the Inﬁnite. But the idea is the same — that it is God who has chosen you, the Divine who has chosen you. And that is why you run after Him!


The Mother: And this is what gives — that’s what he says, doesn’t he? — this is what gives that kind of conﬁdence, of certitude, precisely, that one is predestined; and if one is predestined, even if there are mountains of difﬁculties, what can that matter since one is sure to succeed! This gives you an indomitable courage to face all difﬁculties and a patience that stands all trials: you are sure to succeed.  And it’s a fact — in fact, it is like that: the moment you thought about it, well, you thought about it because someone thought about you; you chose because you were chosen. And once you have been chosen, you are sure of the thing. Therefore, doubts, hesitations, depressions, uncertainties, all this is quite simply a waste of time and energy; it is of no use at all.


The Mother: From the moment one has felt just once within himself: “Ah!  is the truth for me”, it is ﬁnished; it is ﬁnished, it is settled.   Even if you spend years cutting your way through the virgin forest, it’s of no importance — it is ﬁnished, it is settled.  That is why I told you one day, “After all, you all are here because you have wanted it somewhere; and if you wanted it somewhere, it means that the Divine wanted it thus in you.”  So there are some who follow a very straight path and arrive very quickly; there are others who love labyrinths, it takes longer.


The Mother: But the end is there, the goal is there. I know by experience that there isn’t one being who, were it only once in his life, has had a great urge towards... it doesn’t matter what he calls it — let us say the Divine for facility of speech, who is not sure to arrive; even if he turns his back on Him at a certain time, it’s of no importance — he is sure to arrive. He will have to struggle more or less, will have more or less difﬁculty, but he is sure to succeed  one day. It’s a soul that has been chosen, it has become conscious because its hour has come — once the hour has come, well, the result will follow more or less quickly. You can do this in a few months; you can do it in some years; you can do it in some lives — but you will do it.


The Mother: And what is remarkable is that this freedom of choice is left to you and that, if you decide within yourself that you will do it in this lifetime, you will do it. And I am not speaking here of a permanent and continuous decision because then you can arrive in twelve months. No, I mean: if you have suddenly been seized by this, “I want this”, even once, in a ﬂash, the seal is put, there, like that.  There we are.  That’s not a reason for wasting time on the way; that’s not a reason for just following all the meanderings of the labyrinth and arriving with... with considerable rubbish when you are at the end.


The Mother: No. But, in any case it is a reason for never despairing, whatever the difﬁculties may be.  I am of the opinion that when there is something to do, it is better to do it as quickly as possible. But still, there are people who like to waste their time. Perhaps they need to turn and turn and turn and return and make lots of windings before reaching the place they have to.


The Mother: But that’s a question of choice. Unfortunately, those who are in this habit of turning and returning and turning aside and making all kinds of useless meanderings, are the ones who complain most; they moan, and they are the workers of their own misery!  If one decided to go quite straight upon his path, whatever the cost — knowing how to bear a few difﬁculties, facing discomforts, without weakness, you see — well, one would avoid much trouble. But some people go only if they are taken by the scruff of the neck and dragged with a terrible force. Then they shout that they are violently forced.


The Mother: However, it’s they who wanted it.   There, then.   No questions!  There aren’t any questions here, it is clear as crystal.


The Mother: The universal Teacher is only an aspect of the Divine, you see.  The Divine contains all the possible activities; the Teacher is only one activity, the One who teaches. Sri Aurobindo means that either it is a direct contact with the Divine or a contact with an aspect of the Divine, the One who teaches, the divine Guru.  But the Divine is not only a Guru.  That’s all?


The Mother: This depends a great deal on the degree of the sadhak’s development, you see. If he is developed and conscious enough to be in direct contact with the spiritual Force which is working behind the words, then the word is only an excuse. But if for him it must pass through his mental understanding in order to have its effect, then the word takes on a much greater importance. It depends on the degree of development.   If one is capable of receiving directly, then one opens a book for instance, ﬁnds a sentence and has an illumination; because it was just the word one was waiting for in order to put himself into contact with the Force he needed to take the next step.


The Mother: Otherwise one must take a book, study it, read it sentence by sentence, word by word, and then reﬂect and then understand it and then assimilate it and then, later, very slowly, after the assimilation and understanding, it begins to have an effect on the character and one makes some progress.  In one case it is a direct contact, you see, and just one sentence, one word... one reads a word, reads a sentence, and has an illumination. And then one receives all the Force that one needs. The other is the path of the learned man, the scholar, who is an intellectual being and needs to learn, reﬂect, assimilate, reason about all he has learnt, in order to make progress.


The Mother: It is long, it is laborious.  That’s all?  Yes.  It is the word which creates.  There are all kinds of old traditions, old Hindu traditions, old Chaldean traditions in which the Divine, in the form of the Creator, that is, in His aspect as Creator, pronounces a word which has the power to create.


The Mother: So it is this... And it is the origin of the mantra. The mantra is the spoken word which has a creative power. An invocation is made and there is an answer to the invocation; or one makes a prayer and the prayer is granted.  This is the Word, the Word which, in its sound...


The Mother: it is not only  the idea, it is in the sound that there’s a power of creation. It is the origin, you see, of the mantra.  In Indian mythology the creator God is Brahma, and I think that it was precisely his power which has been symbolised by this ﬂower, “The Creative Word”. And when one is in contact with it, the words spoken have a power of evocation or creation or formation or transformation; the words... sound always has a power; it has much more power than men think. It may be a good power and it may be a bad power.


The Mother: It creates vibrations which have an undeniable effect. It is not so much the idea as the sound; the idea too has its own power, but in its own domain — whereas the sound has a power in the material world.  I think I have explained this to you once; I told you, for example, that words spoken casually, usually without any reﬂection and without attaching any importance to them, can be used to do something very good. I think I spoke to you about “Bonjour”, “Good Day”, didn’t I? When people meet and say “Bonjour”, they do so mechanically and without thinking.


The Mother: But if you put a will into it, an aspiration to indeed wish someone a good day, well, there is a way of saying “Good Day” which is very effective, much more effective than if simply meeting someone you thought: “Ah! I hope he has a good day”, without saying anything. If with this hope in your thought you say to him in a certain way, “Good Day”, you make it more concrete and more effective.  It’s the same thing, by the way, with curses, or when one gets angry and says bad things to people. This can do them as much harm — more harm sometimes — than if you were to give them a slap. With very sensitive people it can put their stomach out of order or give them palpitation, because you put into it an evil force which has a power of destruction.


The Mother: It is not at all ineffective to speak. Naturally it depends a great deal on each one’s inner power. People who have no strength and no consciousness can’t do very much — unless they employ material means. But to the extent that you are strong,  especially when you have a powerful vital, you must have a great control on what you say, otherwise you can do much harm.


The Mother: Without wanting to, without knowing it; through ignorance.  Anything? No? Nothing?  Another question?


The Mother: ... Everything’s over?   But when one is perceptive, sensitive enough, if someone speaks a language which one does not know at all, but he puts into it a very precise intention, the same effects are felt.  If someone wishes you a good day or good health in a tongue that you don’t know at all and which has no relation with yours, you can feel the effect without understanding the words.


The Mother: Or else if someone says something violent to you or curses you in a language you are totally ignorant of, you can very well receive the vibrations. This does not depend on the understood word.  In each language there are sounds which are expressive; it is not only one language that is expressive. And there are several ways of expressing the same thing. There are countless ways of expressing the same thing.


The Mother: I remember having heard learned people discussing things, and they thought themselves very wise — and discussed with an imperturbable seriousness to ﬁnd out in which language God had said: “Let there be Light.”  Some of them said that it must have been in Sanskrit, others said that it must have been a still more ancient tongue, others said that it must have been Syrian, and so on, you see; and nobody thought that perhaps it was not any language at all!  That means?...   What Word?


The Mother: Of the old traditions?... Yes. But Sri Aurobindo also says that there is no reason for it not to change, for things not to be added, changed. He says... he himself answers your question.


The Mother: It is very good to keep the memory of the past if it helps you, but it should not prevent you from going forward. And the teaching which was good at one time is no longer so at another, that’s absolutely certain.  What evolution?  Logically, one should always add.  But, usually, those who are attached to the past want to keep the past by itself, and the others who want to go forward want to reject everything and keep only what they have found.


The Mother: And so both of them make a common mistake... that is, of limiting themselves and making their consciousness narrow instead of widening it.  There is sound there also.   There certainly is a sound in all the manifested worlds, and when one has the appropriate organs one hears it.  There are sounds which belong to the highest regions, and in fact, the sound we have here gives the feeling of a noise in comparison with that sound.  For example, there are regions harmonious and musical in which one hears something which is the origin of the music we have here — but the sounds of material, physical music seem absolutely barbaric in comparison with that music!


The Mother: When one has heard that, even the most perfect instrument is inadequate.  All constructed instruments, among which the violin certainly has the purest sound, are very much inferior in their expression to the music of this world of harmonies.  The human voice when absolutely pure is of all instruments the one which expresses it best; but it is still... it has a sound which seems so harsh, so gross compared with that. When one has been in that region, one truly knows what music is.


The Mother: And it has so perfect a clarity that at the same time as the sound one has the full understanding of what is said. That is, one has the principle of the idea, without words, simply with the sound and all the inﬂexions of the... one can’t call it sensations, nor feelings... what seems to be closest would be some kind of soul-states or states of consciousness. All these inﬂexions are clearly perceptible through the nuances of the sound.


The Mother: And certainly, those who were great musicians, geniuses from the point of view of music, must have been more or less consciously in contact with that. The physical world as we have it today is an absolutely gross world; it looks like a caricature.  It’s the same thing with painting: all the pictures we know today look like daubings when one has seen the domain of form and colour, the source of the things expressed through the painting.  And fundamentally it is the same thing from the point of  view of ideas. If one enters into contact with the domain of pure ideas beyond words, all words are such limitations, restrictions...


The Mother: it becomes a kind of caricature. The intensity of life contained in the idea is untranslatable. One can receive it if one is capable of entering consciously this domain. One can transmit it to a certain extent if one is master of its vibrations and can let them pass and emanate from him. But all that one says or all that one writes is truly a caricature.


The Mother: Is that enough?  Or other questions still?  But in order to have the right to know it, you must have at least some faint experience of it.  What victory has been won today?


The Mother: Do you know it, you, eh?  No? You haven’t had any experience of this kind?  Has anyone had an experience?  What?


The Mother: You no longer have any desires, you? It is ﬁnished? I congratulate you! ()  ()  Even following the tradition — which is only a local tradition, you know, not even a terrestrial tradition and still less a universal one — for how many thousands of years has she been winning a victory every year?


The Mother: And then she must begin once again always.  It must be something very difﬁcult to destroy.  Is that all?    Ah!


The Mother: We are going to make an experiment. We are going to meditate for ten minutes and during these ten minutes I shall put you in touch with what has happened; but I won’t say a word to you. If there is someone who becomes aware of something, well, you will write it down on a sheet of paper later and I shall see it tomorrow.   There, now.


The Mother: Now then, your question?  People are occupied with outward things. That means that the consciousness is turned towards external things — that is, all the things of life which one sees, knows, does — instead of being turned inwards in order to ﬁnd the deeper truth, the divine Presence. This is the ﬁrst movement. You are busy with all that you do, with the people around you, the things you use; and then with life: sleeping, eating, talking, working a little, having a little fun also; and then beginning over again: sleeping, eating, etc., etc., and then it begins again.


The Mother: And then what this one has said, what that one has done, what one ought to do, the lesson one ought to learn, the exercise one ought to prepare; and then again whether one is keeping well, whether one is feeling ﬁt, etc.  This is what one usually thinks about.  So the ﬁrst movement — and it is not so easy — is to make all that pass to the background, and let one thing come inside and in front of the consciousness as important thing: the discovery of the very purpose of existence and life, to learn what one is, why one lives, and what there is behind all this. This is the ﬁrst step: to be interested more in the cause and goal than in the manifestation. That is, the ﬁrst movement is a withdrawal of the consciousness from this total identiﬁcation with outward  and apparent things, and a kind of inward concentration on what one wants to discover, the Truth one wants to discover.


The Mother: This is the ﬁrst movement.  Many people who are here forget one thing. They want to begin by the end. They think that they are ready to express in their life what they call the supramental Force or Consciousness, and they want to infuse this in their actions, their movements, their daily life.


The Mother: But the trouble is that they don’t at all know what the supramental Force or Consciousness is and that ﬁrst of all it is necessary to take the reverse path, the way of interiorisation and of withdrawal from life, in order to ﬁnd within oneself this Truth which has to be expressed.  For as long as one has not found it, there is nothing to express. And by imagining that one is living an exceptional life, one lives only in the illusion of one’s exceptional state. Therefore, at ﬁrst not only must one ﬁnd one’s soul and the Divine who possesses it, but one must identify oneself with it. And then later, one may begin to come back to outward activities, and then transform them; because then one knows in what direction to turn them, into what to transform them.


The Mother: One can’t jump over this stage. One must ﬁrst ﬁnd one’s soul, this is absolutely indispensable, and identify oneself with it. Later one can come to the transformation. Sri Aurobindo has written somewhere: “Our Yoga begins where the others end.”  Usually yoga leads precisely to this identiﬁcation, this union with the Divine — that is why it is called “yoga”.


The Mother: And when people reach this, well, they are at the end of their path and are satisﬁed. But Sri Aurobindo has written: we begin when they ﬁnish; you have found the Divine but instead of sitting down in contemplation and waiting for the Divine to take you out of your body which has become useless, on the contrary, with this consciousness you turn to the body and to life and begin the work of transformation — which is very hard labour. It’s here that he compares it with cutting one’s way through a virgin forest; because as nobody has done it before, one must make  one’s path where there was none. But to try to do this without having the indispensable directive of the union with the Divine within, within one’s soul, is childishness. There.


The Mother: I am speaking of yoga. I am not speaking of your life, of you all, you children here. That’s different. You are here to develop yourselves. And when you are developed and have a precise thought of your own, a vision of your own, when you have enough knowledge to be able to choose freely what life you want to lead, then at that time you will take a decision.


The Mother: But those who have already taken the decision, well for them it is ﬁrst of all indispensable to ﬁnd their soul and unite with their psychic being, and with the Divine who is within it.  This is an absolutely indispensable beginning. One can’t leap over that bridge; it is not possible. It can be done very quickly if you know how to use the help that’s given to you; but it has to be done.  That’s all?


The Mother: Has anyone anything to ask?  Pavitra is looking for his soul!   Yes. That’s exactly what I have just said.


The Mother: The problem remains the same...  The problem is to ﬁnd one’s soul and unite with the Divine.  To ﬁnd their soul and the Divine? Of course.   No, Sri Aurobindo says that in the Vedic age they tried to bring the spiritual life into the physical life, but he says that the means they employed, the paths they followed at that time are no longer any good now.


The Mother: Just imagine us before an altar making a!... It won’t do now, it is not suitable.  I think so.  In any case, there were several ages in the earth’s history in which there was given a kind of example, as a promise, of what would be there one day. These were called the golden ages.


The Mother: But certainly there were times in which a more or less complete representation of what had to be was as though lived out. Only it was just a demonstration, an example, which the world was completely unﬁt to take up as a realisation.  It was only to say: you see, this is how it will be, but not like this in all its details, like this in essence. And I think it did not last very long. In any case the memory of the thing is very limited, very localised and extremely short.


The Mother: There was an intensity, there was a great beauty in the expression, but it was something as though altogether independent of the whole of terrestrial life: an example... almost an example which is not to be followed, which cannot be followed, and which was always accompanied by a promise: “It will be like this”... a promise which has been repeated in very different words, of the New Earth or the Divine World or a New Creation, etc.  And I think it was perhaps at the beginning... not exactly the beginning of humanity but the beginning of the conscious evolution of humanity towards a realisation. We said last time that for a very long time humanity was very static and as though undergoing a preparation so slow, so invisible that it has taken perhaps millions of years. But these promises and examples were like starting-points, like the ﬁrst push given to begin the evolution of the consciousness towards a higher realisation.   I think the Vedic age was the latest.


The Mother: There were others before it, but of a very short duration.  Something over there?  A question?... Is that all?  It’s still that fellow asking questions!


The Mother: What do you want to know?  Vivekananda, as far as I know, was not much for a material realisation. He belonged rather to the order of those who want to escape from life, cure themselves of this illness.  I had once read something, I don’t know where now, because it was in France, it was a translation in a book, perhaps one of those theosophical books which make translations of Indian things. I had read an incident recounted about Vivekananda who had been deeply shocked and had scolded a disciple because the latter had told him: “Oh!


The Mother: Look how magniﬁcent is the sunset!”  This had shocked him deeply. I remember I read this in France and it struck me; I still remember it because it seemed to me... it was his remark that seemed scandalous to me! He said, “Oh!


The Mother: Is it beautiful? If you appreciate the beauty of Nature you will never attain the Divine.” I don’t know, by the way, whether this was true or had been invented by the one who narrated it, I know nothing about it. I am only saying I had read it and that it struck me so much that many times when I look at the sunset or  sunrise or a lovely effect of light I still recall this and tell myself, “Why! Such a dissociation...


The Mother: how strange that one can’t live the spiritual life if one admires Nature!”  So if it is true that he was like that, he was certainly at the other end of our programme. I am telling you I don’t know whether it is true, but still, I am giving it to you for what it’s worth. And all that I read about him was like this: that he had a deep contempt for all physical things, that he took them at the most as a means of self-development and liberation — nothing more.


The Mother: To the Earth and men.  They left a kind of oral document of their experience. It was transmitted — and this was the promise.  They used an imaged language. Some people say that it was because they wanted it to be an initiation which would be understood only by the initiates.


The Mother: But it could also be an absolutely spontaneous expression without a precise aim to veil things, but which could not be understood except by those who had the experience. For it is quite obviously something that is not mental, which came spontaneously — as though it sprang from the heart and the aspiration — which was the completely spontaneous expression of an experience or knowledge, and naturally, an expression which was poetic, which had its own rhythm, its own beauty and could be accessible only to those who had an identical experience. So it was veiled of itself, there was no need to add a veil upon it. It is more than likely that it happened like that.  When one has a true experience which is not the result of a preliminary thought constructing and obtaining the experience by a special effort, when it is a direct and spontaneous experience, an experience that comes from the very intensity of the  aspiration, it is spontaneously formulated into words.


The Mother: When it is total and complete enough, it is formulated into words... which are not thought out, which are spontaneous, which come out spontaneously from the consciousness. Well, it is more than likely that the Vedas were like that. But only those who have had the experience, had the same state of consciousness, can understand what it means.  There are those sentences which seem absolutely banal and ordinary, in which things seem to be said in an almost childish way and which are written out or heard and then noted down, like that. Well, when read with an ordinary consciousness, they seem sometimes even altogether banal.


The Mother: But if one has the experience, one sees that there is a power of realisation and a truth of expression which give you the key to the experience itself.  But it seems obvious that the modern equivalent, at present, of the Rishi of the olden days... even his spontaneous Vedic expression will be very different in its formulation. For the terrestrial development and human development change the conditions of expression. The way of saying of those times and the way of saying today cannot be the same; and yet the experience can be the same experience of something which cannot be thought about but comes as its living expression.  What do you mean?


The Mother: Whether they were evolutionary beings or involutionary beings?  They were probably... no... they were surely involutionary beings. But the body was the result of evolution.


The Mother: But it is absolutely certain that they were involutionary beings, that is, beings who had come down from higher regions and used these bodies, who had identiﬁed themselves with these bodies.   This is it, what I said the other day, you know, that what has changed the course of terrestrial and human development totally is bodies becoming perfected enough to be able to serve as instruments for beings of higher regions who have come to incarnate in them in order to use them. And it seems obvious that the Rishis were of these — if not all at least those who were the leaders, those who were at the head. But very probably they formed a group which must have had its own realisation, very independent of the surroundings. They lived, besides, quite isolated, if what is reported is correct.


The Mother: ( )  That’s all?... Nothing more?


The Mother: No?  Yes, I understand... But what I don’t understand is the point of your question — whether the process of terrestrial development will continue by an evolution...  Yes... but there is one thing you forget.


The Mother: That Sri Aurobindo has said that each new species which appeared upon earth was the result of an involution. So there has always been the combination of the two. A double work: a work that goes from below upward, and an answer which comes from above downward.  Involution or evolution?


The Mother: In principle...  In principle, yes. And what prepares it is this: you see, it has been called by all kinds of names: a divine spark, a Presence, etc., which is infused in the darkness of matter in order to start the evolution. But there is something else: there is a descent and identiﬁcation of beings, of conscious beings, individualities, in the forms produced by the evolution — and so there is a union which takes place between beings of higher regions and the forms evolved by this divine Presence. And the identiﬁcation takes place between this immanent godhead and this being which comes down.


The Mother: You see, it is when the psychic being, for instance, identiﬁes itself with a personality of a higher order, a divine emanation, a who comes to get identiﬁed with a psychic being — that is it, this is the thing. But it is not just this one or the other. One does a work of this kind, as I say, a work of development from within outwards; and the other is something which comes down and takes possession of what the ﬁrst has prepared.  Usually these are individual phenomena. These identiﬁcations are individual phenomena.


The Mother: Usually. I don’t say that it is impossible for it to be a collective phenomenon; but still, usually they are individual phenomena.  However, it is enough to have the experience and one understands. It becomes very clear.  So, one must not speak, one must act.


The Mother: There we are. That’s all?   Good night, my children.   What is it that you do not understand?


The Mother: The sentence or the idea?  It can be put in very familiar terms.  The individual being, and particularly the mind in it, have an instinctive repulsion to admitting that it’s another force than their own small personal one which does things. There is a kind of instinct which makes you feel absolutely convinced that the effort of aspiration, the will to progress are things belonging to you by your own right and, therefore, that you have all the merit.


The Mother: From the man of art or of literature or of science, who produces something, studies something, and is absolutely convinced that it is he himself who is doing it, to the aspirant yogi who is convinced that it is the ardour of his own aspiration, his personal need for realisation which push him — if someone tells these people (I have had this experience), if someone tells them a little too soon, “Why, no, it is the Divine who aspires in you, it is the divine Force which produces in you...” , they no longer do anything, they fall ﬂat, it doesn’t interest them at all any longer; they say, “Good, I have nothing to do then, let the Divine do it.”  And this is what Sri Aurobindo means — that the mind is something so egoistic and so proud that if you take away from  it the satisfaction it seeks, it no longer collaborates; nor the vital either. And as the physical is very obedient to the vital and the mind, it too collaborates no longer.


The Mother: Then one is before an inert mass which says, “Good, if it isn’t I, well, let the Divine do what He likes, I am not going to do anything at all any more.”  I knew people who had truly made a lot of progress, who were very close to the moment when one emerges into the truth of things, and who were held back simply by this. Because this need to be the source of the action, to have the merit of the effort, this need is so deeply rooted that they cannot take the last step. Sometimes it takes years. If they are told, “No, it isn’t you, this energy which is in you, this will which is in you, this knowledge which is in you, all this is the Divine; it is not what you call yourself”, this makes them so miserable that they can’t do anything any more.


The Mother: That’s what Sri Aurobindo wants to say in this sentence.  There are people who have such a need to keep the sense of their separate personality that if they are forced to admit that all that springs upwards is inspired by the Divine or even done by Him, they keep for their little person the whole side of defects, faults, errors, and they cherish their defects, so that at least something remains theirs, which is indeed their own, their personal property: “Yes, all that is beautiful, luminous, is the Divine; all horrible things — that’s myself.” But a self... a big self; one must not touch it!  Sri Aurobindo answers this. He describes it extremely well.


The Mother: For all this darkness, all this inconscience, all this ignorance is not at all something personal. It is the condition of the world,  the state of matter, the state of physical life. And it enters you, makes you act; it’s like something pulling the strings of the puppet. All these desires, all these impulses, all these currents of force are things which pass through you, which you obey without even being aware of it, and which you take for yourself.  And there is no yourself in this affair.


The Mother: It comes from everywhere and goes everywhere. You are a public square: things enter, go out, make you move.  This is the work of Nature.  Why are there some plants of one kind and others of another, some animals of one sort and others of another? There are no two exactly alike combinations in the universe.


The Mother: All the combinations are different. There are no two movements exactly similar in the universe. There is nothing which is reproduced exactly.   There are analogies, there are similarities, there are families — there are families of movements which may be called families of vibrations — but there are no two identical things; neither in time nor in space.


The Mother: Nothing is repeated. Otherwise there would be no manifestation, there would be only one single thing.  Manifestation is simply diversity. It is the One deploying Himself in the innumerable, indeﬁnitely.  Nothing?


The Mother: Nowhere?  When it is ready to become it.  How does it happen?... In each one, I believe, it happens in a different way. It may happen suddenly, in the space of a moment,  by a kind of inner reversal; it may take years; it may take centuries; it may take several lives.


The Mother: For each one there is a moment when it happens: when he is ready.  And I think he is ready when he is completely formed. The purpose of existence of the ego is the formation of the individual.  When the individual is ready the ego can disappear. But before that it does not disappear because it has still some work to do.


The Mother: When the world is ready to receive the new creation, the adverse forces will disappear. But so long as the world needs to be tempted, kneaded, churned in order to be prepared, the adverse forces will be there to be the temptation and that which strikes you, pushes you, prevents you from sleeping, compels you to be absolutely sincere.  A being that is absolutely sincere becomes the master of the adverse forces. But so long as there is egoism in a being or pride or ill-will, it will always be the object of temptation, of attack; and it will always be fully subject to this constant conﬂict with what, under the appearance of hostile beings, toils in spite of itself at the divine Work.  The time is not absolutely determined.


The Mother: I have already explained this to you several times. There are many ﬁelds of consciousness, zones of consciousness superimposed upon one another; and in each one of these ﬁelds of consciousness or action there is a determinism which seems absolute. But the intervention in one ﬁeld of even the next higher ﬁeld, like the intervention of the vital in the physical, introduces the determinism of the vital in that of the physical, and necessarily transforms the determinism of the physical. And if through aspiration, the inner will, self-giving and true surrender one can enter into contact with the higher regions or even the supreme region, from up there the supreme determinism will come down and transform all the intermediate determinisms and it will be able to bring about in a so-to-say almost inexistent span of time what would have otherwise taken either years or lives to be accomplished.  But this is the only way.


The Mother: If at the time of some event or circumstance — take for instance, to simplify things, of a danger — if at that time instead of trying to struggle in the domain where one is, one can traverse in a great soaring all the domains which are rungs in the consciousness, and go to the supreme region, what Sri Aurobindo calls the Transcendent, if one can enter into contact with this Transcendent, in a state of perfect surrender, it is He who will act and change everything, in all circumstances — to the extent that this will be what people call miracles, because they do not understand how it can happen.  The sole secret is to know how to climb up right to the top.  That’s all?  You wanted a meditation...   (


The Mother: ) Have you prepared a question for your Birthday?  Of the number 18?  It depends on how it is read.  It can be read as 10+8; it can be read as 9+9; it can be read as 12+6.


The Mother: And each of these readings has a different meaning.  If we take 10+8, it can indicate something quite immobile: because 10 indicates a static perfection, something which has reached its perfection and stops there; and 8 is a double enclosure, that is, something which is framed in, surrounded, demarcated, and which naturally stops there. So if we put 10 and 8 together it truly makes something which can be an accomplishment but one that is terminated.  On the other hand, if we take 9+9: 9 is the process of creation — not the creation itself but its process — and 9+9 is a process of creation which continues and follows another process of creation, that is, a creation which is dual and implies the idea that it continues indeﬁnitely. This gives us two meanings which are almost contradictory.


The Mother: And if we take 12 and 6, then it becomes something very good. 12, you know what it is, don’t you? It is the number of perfection in conception and creation; and 6 is the number of the new creation. So if you put 12 and 6 together, you truly have something absolutely remarkable.  Now we can have other combinations.


The Mother: But it becomes a little more complicated.   18 itself — as 18 — was the number of the consciousness in its effort for material realisation: the consciousness trying to realise itself materially, express itself materially.  So now you have something...  From the social point of view it is the ﬁrst number for attaining majority, the ﬁrst majority; that is, from eighteen onwards one has one’s own will, one has the right to have one’s own will, from the social point of view. It is clearly a very interesting starting-point.


The Mother: There, then.  If one wants to give it, yes.  If one doesn’t think about it, it doesn’t signify anything at all. It’s the importance one gives it which counts.


The Mother: Numbers are a way of speaking. It is a language, as all the sciences, all the arts, everything that man produces; it is always a way of speaking, it is a language. If one adopts this language it becomes living, expressive, useful. As we need words to make ourselves understood usually — unfortunately it is liable to all kinds of confusions, but still we haven’t yet reached the state where we can communicate in silence, which, obviously, would be a very much higher state — well, if you want to give numbers a meaning in your life, they can reveal to you quite a lot of things. But it’s like that.


The Mother: It is like astrology: if one wants to study the relation between his life and the movement of the stars, one can also ﬁnd all kinds of useful information.   Fundamentally it is a way of knowing, nothing else — a process. True knowledge is beyond words, beyond systems, beyond languages; it is in a silent identity. It is in fact the only one which does not err.


The Mother: What else?    It is Sri Aurobindo who has written a mantra.  Why has he written this?  Why don’t you ask him?


The Mother: Perhaps he will tell you.  It is an evocation. You know what it means? Did you ﬁnd someone to explain it to you? No?


The Mother: Ah, that’s the ﬁrst thing you should have done, ask what the meaning of these four words is.  The transcription underneath: there are only two of them.  He had begun transcribing and then his paper... it was on a tiny little scrap of paper, and there wasn’t any more space to write everything; so he stopped.  Have you read it?


The Mother: You don’t know how to read Sanskrit?  So now you must ﬁnd someone to show you how to read it; and then to give you the signiﬁcance. And after that you will ask me why he wrote it. Not now!  Yes, my child, because on Kali Puja day I distribute the ﬂowers of “Divine’s Love”; for Kali is the most loving of all the aspects of the Mahashakti; hers is the most active and most powerful Love.


The Mother: And that is why every year I distribute the petals of “Divine’s Love” on Kali’s Day. And so naturally this explanation of why these ﬂowers were chosen to express the Divine’s Love — it is a sufﬁcient explanation.   Who told you that it was a man?  I haven’t said whether it was a man or a woman. I took care to put only “a divine being”.


The Mother: It is a prehistoric story, so you cannot ﬁnd any information about it. It isn’t written anywhere. There are no written documents.   Haven’t you any questions to ask on what we read today?


The Mother: There we are, you see. French is not as rich a language as we could hope for. In English there are two words: “selﬁsh” and “egoistic”. And they don’t mean the same thing. You know the difference in English, don’t you?


The Mother: Well, in this case, the French word “´ego¨ısme” is in the sense of egoism in English, not in the sense of “selﬁshness”.  There may be an effort which is not at all selﬁsh and is yet egoistic, because the moment it becomes personal it is egoistic — that means, it is based on the ego. But this does not mean that it is not generous, compassionate, unselﬁsh nor that it is for narrow personal ends. It is not like that. It may be for a very unselﬁsh work.


The Mother: But so long as an ego is there it is egoistic. And so long as the sense of one’s own personality is there, it is naturally something egoistic; it is founded on the presence of the ego.  And this must last for a fairly long time, because it must last until the individuality is completely formed, until it has reached a certain state of individual perfection; then the presence of the ego is no longer necessary — but not before one has attained the maximum individual development.  It is not just a tiny little job. It asks for much time and much effort.


The Mother: And when one has attained the perfection of his  own development, when one is an individual being who is truly personal, that is, who has all the characteristics of something different from all others — for in principle there are no two individualities exactly alike in the world — then, when one has succeeded in expressing the individuality one is, is exclusively, represents exclusively in the universal creation, then one is ready for the ego to disappear — but not before.  It asks for a certain length of time, not a little effort, a fairly complete education. But one may be quite unselﬁsh long before being ready not to have the ego any longer. That is something else.


The Mother: For years, all the time I have been translating from English into French — that is, for a very long time, something like thirty years of this work, perhaps thirty-ﬁve — I have tried to ﬁnd two words to say that, to make a difference. I haven’t found them yet, because in French one can’t fabricate words, it is not allowed; that’s the misfortune! In English you can make as many words as you like and if they are ﬁne and well made they are accepted.  In French, unless it is recognised by the French Academy in its dictionary, you will be told, “This is not correct.” So I haven’t yet found them.


The Mother: () He is up to some mischief! (Laughter)  He is in search of an absolute in life, that’s obvious. Perhaps it is analogous, I don’t know.   jiva


The Mother: Yes. But you are not told anything about the love of riches or the love of power or the love of knowledge. You are told about the divine Love; it is not altogether the same thing. Nothing is said about enjoying ambition or desire or even aspiration; what is spoken of is the enjoying of the divine Presence. That’s completely different; there is no similarity.


The Mother: I admit that I don’t quite catch the meaning of your question.  I think you are mixing up the Divine with growth and increase and development, no? perhaps at best with progress. But it is not the same thing. Progress is perhaps the base upon which the present world was constructed, one can take it like that; but it is not the Divine.


The Mother: What were you trying to say?  That the thirst for something is the Divine? No, my child. It can be quite simply a desire. How can the thirst for something be the Divine?


The Mother: I see clearly what you are trying to say, but truly you do not say it: that is, this inner ﬂame of aspiration is what you call the Divine; this inner ﬂame of aspiration which never dies out, which always burns, burns more and more; what in India is called Agni, you know, the will to progress, the power of aspiration; this is what you call the Divine. It is an aspect of the Divine, that’s true, but it is not the Divine. It is only one aspect, that is, a divine way of being.  What kind of question is this, I don’t understand it very well.  Past evolution?...


The Mother: And the present nature? It is not the same thing, they are two different things.  Yes, these two things are completely different. That is, the evolution in former lives and the present nature, that is, the nature of the present body, determine one’s approach to the Divine.  We can take a very... an over-simple example.


The Mother: If one is born in any particular religion, quite naturally the ﬁrst effort to approach the Divine will be within that religion; or else if in former lives one has passed through a certain number of experiences which determined the necessity of another kind of experiences, quite naturally one will follow the path which leads to those experiences.  You see, the life of the psychic being is made up of successive experiences in successive physical existences. So, it may be put a little childishly or romantically: you have a psychic which for some reason or other has incarnated so as to be able to have all the experiences which royalty gives — for instance, supreme power. After it has had its experience, has had what it wanted, it can, before leaving the body, decide that in the next life it will take birth in obscure conditions, because it needs to have experiences which can be had in a modest condition and with the freedom one feels when he has no responsibilities, you see, responsibilities like those the heads of states have, for instance.  So quite naturally, in its next life it will be born in certain conditions which fulﬁl its need.


The Mother: And it is in accordance with this experience that it will approach the Divine.  Then, in addition, it is the product of the union of two physical natures, you know, and sometimes of two vital natures.   The result of this is more or less a kind of mixture of these natures; but it brings about a tendency, what is called a character.  Well, this character will make it ﬁt for a certain ﬁeld, a certain category of experiences.  So with what has been determined, decided in former lives or in a former life, and then the environment in which it is born — that is, the conditions in which its present body has been formed — its approach to and search for the Divine will be in accordance with a deﬁnite line which is its own, and which, naturally, is not at all the same as that of its neighbour or any other being.


The Mother: I said a while ago: each individual is a special manifestation in the universe, therefore his true path must be an absolutely unique path. There are similarities, there are resemblances, there are categories, families, churches, ideals also, that is, a certain collective way of approaching the Divine, which creates a kind of church, not materialised but in a more subtle world — there are all these things — but for the details of the path, the details of yoga, it will be different according to each individual, necessarily, and conditioned physically by his present bodily structure, and vitally, mentally and psychically, of course, by former lives.  That is to say, whether it is predestined that the higher planes...   Yes


The Mother: But look here! Let us take an altogether ordinary example which  is very partial and very superﬁcial. You are born in India. Being born in India you are born with a certain religious and philosophic attitude. But if for some reason or other you want to free yourself from this atavism and inﬂuence, if you begin to follow, study, practise the religion or philosophy of another country, you can change the conditions of your inner development.


The Mother: It is a little more difﬁcult, that is, it asks for a greater effort for liberation, but it is very far from being impossible. In fact there are many people who do it, who love to free themselves from what comes to them from their present birth; by some sort of special taste they like to seek elsewhere what they think they won’t be able to ﬁnd at home. And in this way you change the consequences of your birth completely.  Now you may tell me that this taste for the new or the unknown can come to you from a former life; this is probable.  But it depends on what dominates in your being: whether it is the result of former psychic lives and psychic resolutions or whether it is the immediate consequence of your present constitution.


The Mother: Contradictory? In what way contradictory? To former inﬂuences? It is never contradictory. It can be only complementary.


The Mother: When things seem contradictory to you, it is always because you have remained on too low a plane. If you know how to climb up a few rungs of the ladder, all contradictions disappear, everything becomes complementary.  What prevents you? ...  It prevents many people.


The Mother: It is not very easy.  This is a part of the liberation. Liberation is obtained   through austerities, we know that. But there are certain austerities which people refuse to practise, for example this ( ) They talk, talk, talk — much too much.


The Mother: ()  We are going to enact a storm-scene! That’s how thunder is created on the stage.  There you are, my children. That’s all?


The Mother: Who has a interesting question to ask?  To ask an interesting question one must begin by thinking in an interesting way.   Ah! A question worth answering.


The Mother: ( ) Something which raises the possibility of a new answer and an opening on a new ﬁeld of knowledge.  For example, when you ask me for the explanation of a word, I ﬁnd that this is not an interesting question, because you have only to open a dictionary. When you ask me the answer to a question which has been given by Sri Aurobindo or by someone else in published books, it doesn’t seem to be an interesting question to me, because you have only to open the book and read.  But when, for instance, you have a personal experience which you do not understand very well and for which you need clariﬁcation, then your question can become interesting.


The Mother: ()  No interesting question?  So nobody has an interesting question according to the deﬁnition just given...?    APPENDIX


The Mother: Long, long ago, in the dry land which is now Arabia, a divine being incarnated upon earth to awaken in it the supreme love. As expected it was persecuted by men, misunderstood, suspected, pursued. Mortally wounded by its assailants, it wanted to die quietly in solitude in order to be able to accomplish its work, and being pursued, it ran away. Suddenly, in the vast desert land there appeared a small pomegranate bush.


The Mother: The saviour crept in under the low branches, to leave its body in peace; and immediately the bush spread out miraculously, it grew higher, larger, became deep and thick, so that when the pursuers passed by, they did not even suspect that the One whom they were chasing was hidden there, and they went their way.   While drop by drop the sacred blood fell, fertilising the soil, the bush was covered with marvellous ﬂowers, scarlet, large, crowded with petals... innumerable drops of blood.  These are the ﬂowers which express and contain for us the Divine’s Love.   Which last part, my child?


The Mother: Yes.  Why? It says what it means. What is it that you don’t understand there? What don’t you understand?


The Mother: ( )  But my child... You are told: there is only one reality and all that is is only a multiple expression of a single reality. Therefore, all the divine manifestations, all the forms it has taken in the course of time, all the names which men have given it, are only manifestations, forms and names of one sole, unique Godhead.


The Mother: As human beings are very limited, it is usually easier for them to follow one path rather than another. But that is just a tiny little beginning; and if one wants to attain the heights, one must be able to ﬁnd the Divine equally through all the paths, and understand that it is the sole and same Divine, whatever the different appearances may be.  This is what Sri Aurobindo tells you: that you cannot stop, you cannot be satisﬁed until you have felt  that there is only one Divine, there is only one Reality, and that, from whatever angle It is seen or whatever path is taken to attain It, it will always be one sole and same thing which you will meet. So one who is developed enough, vast enough to be able to follow what we call the Integral Yoga, must have the capacity to approach the Divine by all possible paths. If he doesn’t want to follow them himself because it takes time... though there is a certain degree of development which enables one in a few days or a few hours to follow a path which would otherwise take a whole lifetime...


The Mother: still, if one has no taste for this kind of gymnastics, at least one should have an understanding open enough to be aware that all this is fundamentally one sole and identical thing. And whether you give it this name or that or no name at all, you understand, or several names, you are always speaking of the same thing which is the single Divine who is all things.  Don’t you catch it?  It is only the mind and the limited human consciousness which make distinctions. And through these differences you get into a confusion.


The Mother: You distinguish only by differences, and differences mean just the illusory outer consciousness. As soon as you really enter within, you immediately have the sense of a total identity and all these divergences seem absolutely ridiculous to you.  In one case it is the peak of humanity. “Supreme” means the human being who is at the peak of humanity, that is, the perfect man.  In the other case, it is God who has entered a human body.


The Mother: What is human is only the body, the outer form, not the consciousness. In the ﬁrst case it is the human consciousness which has attained its perfection.   That’s all?  Something over there?


The Mother: Like that. As the world is today.  He explains it at great length afterwards. He says that the human mind would accept to have faith only if the Divine acted in accordance with its conception; and man’s ordinary conception of what is divine is that of a perpetual miracle — what he calls a miracle, that is, something that takes place without rhyme or reason. And so, as he is not in the presence of this...


The Mother: But it is much more subtle than that... If we arrived from another world where things happen altogether differently, which is difﬁcult for us to conceive... but which would happen in a way where the logic would be totally different — the logic of events, causes, consequences and effects — if we arrived suddenly from another world into this one, all that we would see would appear absolutely miraculous to us, because we wouldn’t be able to understand the logic of events.  We are habituated to what occurs as it occurs; it is simply a matter of habit, for from the ﬁrst breath we drew upon earth we have been accustomed to see things in this way, and so it seems quite ordinary to us, because it occurs in this way. But if we could manage to get out of this habit, if


The Mother: we could see things from another point of view, we would immediately be able to feel that kind of impression of the miraculous, because we would no longer see the logic of events with the habitual sense.  We have a certain habit of a particular logic of causes and effects, of the consequences of all things, the relation between all movements. It is for us a fact which we accept, even without  thinking about it, because we have always lived inside it. But if we had not always lived inside it, we would see it in another way.


The Mother: And one can make this experiment: if one goes out of the determinism of the world as it is at present — this world which is a mixture of the physical, vital, mental and of something of a spiritual inﬂuence or infusion (quite veiled), everything that happens is the combination of all this — if we go out of all that (we can do it), if we rise above the physical, material world as it is, and enter another consciousness, we perceive things differently.   And then we see that behind these appearances which seem to us absolutely logical and extremely natural, and almost necessary, there is an action which, if perceived in one’s ordinary consciousness, would seem miraculous.  There is an intervention of forces, consciousnesses, movements, inﬂuences, which is invisible or imperceptible for our ordinary consciousness and changes the whole course of circumstances.  We don’t need to go very far; it is enough to take just a step outside the ordinary consciousness in order to realise this.


The Mother: I have already said several times that if one ﬁnds the psychic consciousness within oneself and identiﬁes oneself with it, well, immediately one feels a complete reversal of circumstances and sees things almost totally differently from the way one ordinarily sees them. For one perceives the force which is acting instead of the result of this action.  At present you see only the result of the action of the forces, and this seems to you natural, logical. And it’s only when something a little abnormal occurs — or it’s a little abnormal for you — that you begin to feel surprised. But if you were in another state of consciousness, what seems abnormal to you now would no longer be so.


The Mother: You would see that it is the effect of something else, of another action than the one you perceive.  But even from the purely material point of view, you are used to certain things, they have been explained to you: for  example, electric light, or that it is enough to press a button to start a car. You can explain it, you have been told why, and so it seems absolutely natural to you. But I had instances of people who did not know, who were completely ignorant, who came from a place where these things had not yet penetrated, and who were suddenly shown a statue being lighted up by rays of light; they fell on their knees in adoration: it was a divine manifestation.  And I have seen someone else who was in the same state, it was a child who knew nothing.


The Mother: In front of him a button was pressed and the car started; it seemed a miracle to him. Well, it is like that. You are used to certain things, they seem absolutely natural to you. If you were not used to them, you would see, you would think them miracles.


The Mother: Well, turn over the problem. There is a heap of things you cannot explain to yourself, there is a host of interventions which change the course of circumstances and which you don’t even notice. And so everything seems to you ordinary, monotonous and without any particular interest. But if you had the knowledge and could see that all these things which seem absolutely normal to you because you are used to them and have not even asked yourself “How does this happen in this way?” — if you had the knowledge and saw how it happens, what it is that acts, why for example someone who acts so imprudently that he would have broken his head does not break it, why everything seems arranged for a frightful accident to take place and it does not occur, and thousands, millions of things like that which happen every day and everywhere — if you had enough knowledge to see why it is like that, then at the same time you could say, “Look, there is something like a force, a consciousness, a power which acts and which is not from the material domain. Materially, logically, this is what should have happened, and it did not happen.”


The Mother: You say, “Ah! It was his good luck”, don’t you? And then you are satisﬁed, it’s all right for you.   ( )


The Mother: It is the ignorant, limited, egoistic consciousness which demands miracles. As soon as one is enlightened, one knows that everywhere and always there is miracle.  And the more faith one has in this miracle and this Grace, the more capable one becomes of seeing it, or perceiving it constantly at every place where it is. It is ignorance and lack of faith, it is blind egoism which prevents one from seeing.   It depends on how you look at it.


The Mother: Everything depends on the relation you have with it. If you take it as a friend, it becomes a friend. If you consider it as an enemy, it becomes your enemy.  But that’s not what you are asking. What you are asking is how one feels when it is an enemy and how when it is a friend.


The Mother: Well, when you become impatient and tell yourself, “Oh, I must succeed in doing this and why don’t I succeed in doing it?” and when you don’t succeed immediately in doing it and fall into despair, then it is your enemy. But when you tell yourself, “It is all right, I didn’t succeed this time, I shall succeed next time, and I am sure one day or another I shall do it”, then it becomes your friend.  Perhaps this also depends on how you consider it. All forces are personal; all things in Nature are personal. But if we consider them as impersonal things, our relation with them is impersonal.


The Mother: Take for instance what has just happened. If you are a meteorologist and have calculated all the wind-currents and all that, and say, “Given that this has happened, that will happen, and there will be so many days of rain, and all that.” So this is a force for you, which we are compelled to call a force of Nature, and you can do nothing about it except look on quietly and wait for the number of days to pass. But if it happens that you have this personal relation with the little conscious entities which are  behind the wind, behind the storm, behind the rain, the thunder, behind all these so-called forces of Nature, which are forces and personal forces, if you have a personal relation with them and can create a kind of friendship through this relation, instead of considering them as enemies and inexorable mechanisms which you have to put up with without being able to do anything, perhaps you could manage to establish a slightly more friendly relation and have an inﬂuence over them and ask them: “Why do you feel like blowing and making the rain fall, why don’t you do it elsewhere?”


The Mother: And with my own eyes I have seen... I have seen this here, seen it in France, seen it in Algeria... the rain falling at a particular, altogether ﬁxed place, and it was exactly a place where it absolutely needed to rain, because it was dry and there was a ﬁeld which needed watering, and at another place there was... at a distance from here to the end of the hall, at the other place there was a small sunlit spot, everything was dry, because to have the sun there was necessary.


The Mother: Naturally, if you seek the scientiﬁc point of view, they will explain this to you very scientiﬁcally. But I indeed have seen it as the result of an intervention... someone who knew how to ask it and obtained it.  In Algeria I saw not a few things like that, very interesting ones. And there, just because there was a certain atmosphere of a little more real knowledge it could be said, there were little entities, as for example entities which handled snow, you see, which produced snow, and which could come, enter a room and tell someone, “Now snow should fall here!” (It had never snowed in that country, never.)


The Mother: “Snow! You are joking. So near the Sahara it is going to snow?” “It must, because they have planted ﬁr trees on the mountain, and when we see ﬁr trees, we come. The ﬁr trees are there to call us; so we come.”


The Mother: And so, you see, there was a discussion, and the little being went away with the permission to bring snow, and when it had gone, there was a little pool of snow water on the ﬂoor, melted snow which had turned into water. It was physical... and the mountain was  covered with snow. In Algeria! It is the Sahara, you go down a few kilometres and you are at the Sahara.


The Mother: Someone had playfully covered all the hills with ﬁr trees. “The ﬁr tree belongs to cold countries. Why do you call us? We are coming.” All this is a true story, it is not an invention.


The Mother: All depends on your relation. This too, it is quite possible the meteorologist scholars would have been able to explain, I know nothing about it, they explain everything one wants.  ( )  What, in fact, is regularity? I know that from the time I have come here I have seen all possible things, and only on a few days — very few — I could say, “Look!


The Mother: We are at the height of summer, it’s summer weather”, and that was at the beginning of November. It was much hotter than it was in May this year.  Only we think like that: “Now it is summer; after that comes autumn, then winter will come.” And so we adapt ourselves, but it is not true. Well, look!


The Mother: There are things like that. The people of the country told me... I came in the month of April the second time... the ﬁrst time, the ﬁrst time, as we know it was on the 29th of March, that is, April follows. In those days it was understood: it rained here for at least three months — not a drop of water; all used to become dry, the leaves which are put on the roofs used to dry up so much that suddenly one day they burst into ﬂames, it was like that.


The Mother: I come, and a  rainfall! Then the people looked at me (here they have a little of something like a feeling that things are not altogether mechanical, you see). “How does it happen to rain?” Then I answered, “I don’t know, it’s not I, but I have friendship with the rain.”  I went to Pau in the South of France at a time when it never rains there — that is, people who could remember from  their very infancy had never seen a drop of water — it rained in torrents.


The Mother: I went to South Algeria, naturally it was dry and there was torrid heat — it began to rain! ()  And then here the same thing happened, and they said that it had been seen only once before... I don’t know any more... something like two hundred years ago. They remembered this, and that someone had come and it had rained, and they had taken it as an absolutely auspicious sign, you see, that it was the sign of an exceptional destiny. They have ideas here about auspicious and inauspicious hours, and auspicious events and inauspicious events.


The Mother: Well, when someone arrives at a time when it does not rain and the rain falls, it seems to be a very auspicious event.  Therefore things are as one looks at them. But I have seen other things which are like this, but not very pleasant. It is from the time men have invented — not invented but discovered — and begun to play like babies with things they did not know, and have made atom bombs and other worse things still. This has truly disturbed all these little entities which lived indeed according to a certain rhythm which was their own, and were in the habit of commanding at least events that can be foreseen.


The Mother: This has disturbed them very very much, they have suffered terribly from it, and it has made them lose their heads, they no longer know what they are doing.  There was a time at the end of the War, when things had truly become chaotic up there, they lived in a kind of absurdity; and as these unfortunate experiences continue, they have not yet come out of their panic. They are panic-stricken.  Truly men play with things which they know only from outside, that is, don’t know at all. They know just enough to make a wrong use of them.


The Mother: Anything may happen, including, alas, catastrophes which were foretold long ago. It may happen... It depends... on what will intervene.  There is something to be done. I told you this.


The Mother: I said, “If you don’t want it to rain, pray.” You took it as a joke.    Ah! It seems... there must have been a fault somewhere.


The Mother: Someone has been displeased... Who is displeased?  Not what we do. Surely not that. Perhaps something in the way we do it.


The Mother: You want me to tell you something... my experience of things... because all this interests me, and I observe it. Unfortunately I am a spectator, I don’t intervene. It is very difﬁcult to make me intervene in these things. Still, I wanted to know and I observed... and this... today I saw, saw this... how to put it?...


The Mother: it is neither heard nor seen, it is at once heard and seen and known and everything else you may like.  All this work which you have done, which has taken almost a year, all these efforts you have made, all the difﬁculties you have overcome, all this you have done as an offering to the divine Work, you see, with all your sincerity and goodwill, the best of your ability and a complete good-heartedness. Yes, you have put into it all that you could, you have succeeded to a certain extent, in any case you have done things as well as you could. Then “this” added with a smile which, indeed, was a little impish: “What is it to you whether a few stupid fools see what you have done or not? Now you have done the work, you have accomplished it, you have shown what you could do.


The Mother: What is it to you whether a few foolish spectators see it or not?” It was , you see. I am expressing it; in expressing it I take away something from it. It was a state of consciousness, and then, indeed, it troubled me a little, because... trouble! that’s a way of speaking...


The Mother: I told myself: “Heavens! If it is like that after all, we can’t be sure that the rain will stop. For if truly it is of no  importance that some thousand odd people should see what we have done, if our offering has been accepted as an offering made as well as possible and with all our heart, the attitude is not to be anxious about the result — we do not care for the result.  Then, perhaps, the rain will continue.”  I am continuing my investigation, I don’t know what is going to happen.


The Mother: But in any case, I ought to tell you that I have not yet taken any decision to stop the rain. I am still at the stage of looking on. We shall see. In any case, it was charming.  I said, “Was there someone who introduced an egoistic or selfinterested feeling into this, and who did not do the thing as it ought to be done, in the right spirit?


The Mother: Where is the fault?” and all that. There was nothing of all this. We were perfectly satisﬁed with what we had done. It was work well done, done in the right spirit, as well as we could do it.


The Mother: Everybody was happy.  There was some impishness somewhere. Was it impishness? It was something much higher than that: it was an observation.  So we are going to see.


The Mother: As for me, it interests me, these things.  Unfortunately it is like this, I can’t take sides, I look on, and it amuses me. ( )  I ought to say that if I consider all the effort you have made, and made so well, I tell myself, “Oh, they are very sweet.


The Mother: Truly they should be able to show it.” But it’s like that, you see, it’s like that, it is not a will which wakes up and says, “Now that’s it!” When wakes up, everything goes well, everybody obeys, even the little entities up there. And that is why I told you, “You must pray to them”, because if you begin praying, you, I shall naturally be with you in your prayer. That is it, that’s the trick.


The Mother: ( )  Well, you see, if I place myself at the outward point of view of human capacity and of what can be done, I am obliged to say, “One can do better.” But thing does not look at that.


The Mother: It’s  the thing I spoke to you about yesterday, which, you see, takes the effort in its deeper sense, as the offering that’s made.  We know, we have said this many a time, that all work is a prayer made with the body and that the true attitude in work is an offering to the Divine. Well, was satisﬁed with the way the thing was done. For I was looking on, to see, as I said, if there were things which were not as they should have been. But in any case, to the eye of this consciousness which was looking on, it was satisfying.


The Mother: Materially, you see, I said, “In the outer human consciousness this can be done much better.”  That of course is understood, we haven’t reached the height of perfection, far from that, but it must also be said that it is only a very small part of our activity... that we are trying much more than this, that it is only one of the movements of our sadhana, you see. We are busy with many other things besides this... one thing among many others... and to put up something like this according to the accomplishment which the laws of human perfection demand, inﬁnitely more time, inﬁnitely more work and inﬁnitely more means would have been necessary.  But we are not seeking an exclusive perfection in one thing or another, we are trying to make everything go forward together to a common, integral perfection. And these things have their place and importance, but they don’t have an exclusive place and importance.


The Mother: Therefore, from the external point of view, one may criticise and ﬁnd something to say and all that; but it is not that, the true point of view. Inwardly, it is well.  You see, it happens all the time to the newcomers, strangers, visitors, to those who come with all ordinary human mental constructions. They come here and say, “Bah, bah, bah, there is nothing so remarkable, it’s not so extraordinary, all their capacities are of the average kind.” But this is because they think like what I call dull-witted fellows, with an altogether ordinary consciousness; but if they could see behind the appearances the reality of things, they would see that it is not as easy as that, that there is something else which is advancing all together towards  a realisation which goes inﬁnitely beyond all their little conceptions; this they cannot see.


The Mother: And that is why, probably... this thing which was answering me said, “But what is it to you whether a thousand odd fools see or not the effort you have made?” For it is truly... one thing is certain, that if you see the deep law of things and are in contact with a higher consciousness in order to realise something that far surpasses all human conceptions, what can a human opinion mean to you? It is as though you asked a dog the value of a problem of science you have solved.


The Mother: It wouldn’t occur to you, would it? You know that the dog doesn’t have the elements necessary for judging your scientiﬁc problem.  But here there’s a still greater difference... people haven’t even the slightest notion of what the spiritual life is and the divine realisation, and naturally because of their very ignorance they come and judge all this with a perfect ease, what you do or don’t do and the way of doing it and how you live, because they understand nothing about it and see nothing at all.  That is why to those who come and ask what qualiﬁcations are obtained at Sri Aurobindo International University, I reply: “Go then, go and see, there are numerous universities which are  better than ours, much better equipped, much better organised.


The Mother: Ours is nothing, you see, it is just a drop of water in the ocean. Go then, there are others everywhere, there are many even in India, there are many in all the great countries, inﬁnitely more important universities, better than ours. Go there then.  You will have much more of what you need.” This is why we do not try to enter into competition with other institutions.


The Mother: To love them with all your heart, my children, and wish that they may be born to the light, that’s the only thing, that’s the only  way of solving the problem. If they begin to talk thoughtlessly, you can be polite and not contradict them — not say anything at all to them. You must avoid above all discussing and trying to convince them, because that’s an impossible attempt. You must be absolutely indifferent to their compliments and their criticisms. It is much easier to be indifferent to criticism than to compliments.


The Mother: When Mme. David-Neel — I have spoken to you about her, haven’t I? Mme. David-Neel who is a militant Buddhist and a great Buddhistic luminary — when she came to India she went to meet some of those great sages or gurus — I shan’t give you the names, but she went to one who looked at her and asked her... for they were speaking of yoga and personal effort and all that... he looked at her and asked her, “Are you indifferent to criticism?”


The Mother: Then she answered him with the classical expression, “Does one care about a dog’s barking?” But she added to me when telling me the story, very wittily: “Fortunately he did not ask me whether I was indifferent to compliments, because is much more difﬁcult!”  Still, there we are. Naturally you must avoid thinking that you are in the least superior, and I am going to tell you why. For I have just spoken to you about something and about an inner realisation, but except for a few vague and imprecise phrases, you would be almost absolutely incapable of telling me what I spoke about.


The Mother: You know vaguely, like that, that we are in the course of doing something, but what it is and what it’s leading to and what are the inner changes which can set us a little apart from ordinary humanity, you are not conscious of, and you would feel extremely uneasy if I asked you to explain to me what it is. So, as in a being it is only the consciousness which counts, you must not think yourselves at all superior.  For — one of two things — you cannot think yourselves superior unless you are unconscious. The minute you are truly conscious you lose this notion of superiority and inferiority completely. So, in both the cases, you must not feel yourselves  superior — for it is a smallness and a meanness — but feel full of goodwill and sympathy and not care at all for what people say or don’t say, but be polite, because it is always preferable to be polite rather than impolite, for you put yourself into contact with more harmonious forces and can ﬁght much better against the forces of destruction and ugliness, for no other reasons than these, because we like harmony and it is better to keep that; but essentially you should be far above all this and feel interested only in your relation with the Divine, what He expects from you and what you want to do for Him.


The Mother: For is the only thing which matters. All the rest has no importance.  There are people who want to show their superiority. This proves that they are quite small. The more one wants to show his superiority, the more it proves that he is quite small.


The Mother: You see, a little child who lives simply without looking at itself and how it lives, is much greater than you because it is spontaneous.   There, then. Now, you have something to ask me?  No, nothing?


The Mother: That the little ill-will disturbs all the work of goodwill? Who said that?  ( )  It always happens?


The Mother: Letters   But surely I have never seen this. I admit that I don’t understand.  I rather ﬁnd it just the other way, that even when there is a mass of bad wills, if there is only one good will somewhere (), it makes the Grace act and everything goes well.


The Mother: That has nothing to do with this.  What did I say? Why, I am forgetting... I am hearing impossible things. What was it?


The Mother: (Pavitra) An observation of what?  ( )  Do you understand what he is saying? I don’t.  (A child)


The Mother: He hasn’t understood anything at all, understood absolutely nothing of what I said. Absolutely nothing. It is not at all that.  It is not at all that. It did not come from below, it came from a much higher plane than your consciousness can reach.


The Mother: It is not ill-will, inﬁnitely far from that...  That’s how people understand what I say! I must be really careful! Is there anyone else who has understood in this way? ( ) You too understood it like this, didn’t you?


The Mother: ( )   Look, it never even occurred to me. I understood of what he wanted to say. It was so different.


The Mother: If for a moment I had thought it could be understood like this, I would never have said anything.  Good!  Then, that’s all, I think that’s enough for today...   By climbing somewhere up on the ladder — in one’s own consciousness — looking at things a little more vastly, a little more generally.


The Mother: For example, if at a particular moment there is something which holds you, grips you like that, holds you tight, close pressed, and you absolutely want it to happen, and you are ﬁghting against a terrible obstacle, you see, something which is preventing it from happening; if simply just at that moment you begin to feel, to realise the myriads and myriads of years there were before this present moment, and the myriads and myriads of years there will be after this present moment, and what importance this little event has in relation to all that — there is no need to enter a spiritual consciousness or anything else, simply enter into relation with space and time, with all that is before, all that is after and all that is happening at the same time — if one is not an idiot, immediately he tells himself, “Oh, well, I am attaching importance to something which doesn’t have any.” Necessarily so, you see. It loses all its importance, immediately.  If you can visualise, you know, simply the immensity of the creation — I am not now speaking of rising to spiritual heights — simply the immensity of the creation in time and space, and this little event on which you are concentrated with an importance... as though it were something of some importance... immediately it does this () and it dissolves, if you do it sincerely.


The Mother: If, naturally, there is one part of yourself which tells you, “Ah, but for me it has an importance”, then, there, you  have only to leave that part behind and keep your consciousness as it is. But if sincerely you want to see the true value of things, it is very easy.  There are other methods, you know. There is a Chinese sage who advises you to lie down upon events as one ﬂoats on one’s back upon the sea, imagining the immensity of the ocean and that you let yourself go ﬂoating upon this... upon the waves, you see, like something contemplating the skies and letting itself be carried away. In Chinese they call this When you can do this all your troubles are gone.


The Mother: I knew an Irishman who used to lie ﬂat on his back and look outside, as much as possible on an evening when stars were in the sky, he looked, contemplated the sky and imagined that he was ﬂoating in that immensity of countless luminous points.  And immediately all troubles are calmed.  There are many ways. But sincerely, you have only to... have the sense of relativity between your little person and the importance you give to the things which concern you, and the universal immensity; this is enough. Naturally, there is another way, it is to free oneself from the earth consciousness and rise into a higher consciousness where these terrestrial things take their true place — which is quite small, you see.


The Mother: But... indeed, once, very long ago, when I was still in Paris and used to see Mme. David-Neel almost every day, she, you see, was full of her own idea and told me, “You should not think of an action, it means attachment for the action; when you want to do something, it means that you are still tied to the things of this world.” Then I told her, “No, there is nothing easier. You have only to imagine that has been done before and all that will be done later and all that is happening now, and you will then realise that your action is a breath, like this, one second in eternity, and you can no longer be attached to it.” At that time I didn’t know the text of the Gita. I had not read it completely yet, you see... ()... not this verse which I translate in my own way: “And detached from  all fruit of action, act.”


The Mother: It is not like this, but still that’s what it means. This I did not know, but I said exactly what is said in the Gita.  But it is not because you believe in your action that you ought to act; you act because you must act, that’s all. Only, it is a condition which can sometimes be a little dangerous from the external point of view, because instead of willing with a sovereign authority that the rain should stop, one looks on at what is happening. There we are.


The Mother: But I tell you, “If you like to pray, pray.”   (Laughter)  He is very witty!  Good, then, lights off. We shall pray.


The Mother: It depends on people, my child.   There are people in whom the psychic movement, the emotional impulse is stronger than intellectual understanding. They feel an irresistible attraction for the Divine without knowing, without having the slightest idea of what it is, of what it can be, what it represents — nothing, no intellectual notion — but a kind of impulse, attraction, a need, an inevitable need.  And these people who have that, if, I may say as a result of the Grace, they have a mind which does not trouble them, does not question, does not discuss, go very fast.


The Mother: And then, what is quite miraculous according to ordinary ideas is that as soon as they reach that degree of consecration which identiﬁes them through their psychic being with the Divine Presence, suddenly they become endowed with capacities of expression absolutely unknown to their nature.  I had a case like this in France, a long time ago, of a young, very young girl who had never had any education so to say, any instruction; she was an Opera dancer, a very good one, and had been put to study there at the age of eight, as they are always put, that is, as a child; and she had learnt to dance instead of learning history, geography, mathematics and the rest. She almost did  not know how to express herself, and her intelligence, though evident, was untrained. Well, she was attracted like that and felt an imperious need to seek the Divine, to consecrate herself to Him. And she began to dance in His honour at ﬁrst, like the juggler of Notre Dame; and she truly danced most remarkably.


The Mother: And then, suddenly, she wanted to express what she was feeling:  she began writing letters which were wonderfully poetic; she said surprising things and in a still more surprising way; page followed page, and she wrote all with an extraordinary facility.  It happened that, due to certain circumstances, she had some difﬁculties, there was something in her nature which pulled her back towards the old nature she had given up — which made her practical and materialistic, made her see things externally.  And immediately she became incapable of putting two words together, she could not write a line without making numberless spelling mistakes.  When she was in the state of inspiration she wrote without a mistake, like a great writer; and as soon as she came out of that state and fell back into her down-to-earth consciousness — the needs of life, the necessities of each minute, etc. — everything disappeared, she could not even write a single line without making mistakes and it was totally unreﬁned stuff.


The Mother: So you see, this proves that if one attains the true consciousness, there is no longer any problem to solve. What you have to be, you become. What you have to know, you know. And what you have to do, you have the power to do. And it naturally follows that all those so-called difﬁculties immediately vanish.


The Mother: In the case I am speaking about, what pulled her down was not something in herself, it was in another person. And unfortunately that’s what happens most often: one takes on in life the burden of certain responsibilities and they prevent him from advancing.  That’s my story.  There are others who understand ﬁrst, who are very intellectual, have studied, can play with words and ideas, who will give  you brilliant lectures on all the philosophies, all the religions, all human conceptions and who, perhaps, will take years to advance one step. Because all that goes on in the head.


The Mother: Many things go on in the head. I have told you this already several times, the head is like a public square. Anything at all can enter there, come, cross over, go out, and create a lot of disorder. And people who are in the habit of playing with ideas are the ones most hampered from going farther. It is a game that’s pretty, attractive; it gives you the impression that you are not altogether ordinary, at the level of ordinary life, but it cuts the wings.


The Mother: It’s not the head which has wings: it’s the heart. It’s this... yes, this inevitable need. Nothing else counts. That’s everything.  Only that.


The Mother: And so, after all, one doesn’t care a rap for obstacles and difﬁculties. What can that do to you?... It doesn’t count. One laughs at time also. What does it matter to you if it takes long?


The Mother: For a much longer time you will have the joy of aspiration, of consecration, of self-giving.  For this is the one true joy. And this joy fades away when there is something egoistic, and because there is a demand — which one calls a need — which is mixed in the consecration.  Otherwise the joy never disappears.  This is the ﬁrst thing one obtains, and the last one realises.


The Mother: And it is the sign of Victory.  So long as you can’t be in joy, a constant, calm, peaceful, luminous, invariable joy, well, it means that you have still to work to purify yourself, and sometimes work hard . But this is the sign.  It is with the sense of separation that pain, suffering, misery, ignorance, and all incapacities have come.


The Mother: It is with an absolute self-giving, self-forgetfulness in a total consecration that suffering disappears and is replaced by a joy which nothing can veil.  And only when this joy is established here in this world can it be truly transformed and there be a new life, a new creation,  a new realisation. The joy must ﬁrst be established in the consciousness and then later the material transformation will take place; but not before.  Truly speaking, it is with the Adversary that suffering came into the world. And it’s only joy which can vanquish him, nothing else — vanquish him deﬁnitively, ﬁnally.


The Mother: ()  It is Delight which has created, and it is Delight which will accomplish.  ( )  Note that I am not speaking of what men call joy, which is not even a caricature, which, I think, is a diabolic invention in order to make one lose the way: the joy which comes from pleasure, from forgetfulness, from indifference.


The Mother: ()  am speaking of a joy which is perfect peace, shadowless light, harmony, total beauty and an irresistible power, that joy which is the divine Presence itself, in its essence, in its Will and its Realisation.  Why no! One must go beyond him and ignore him.  There is one thing you must begin by doing, it is true, that is to free yourself from his inﬂuence.


The Mother: But there is a difference between freeing oneself from the Adversary’s inﬂuence and conquering the Adversary. To conquer the Adversary is not a small  thing. One must have a greater power than his to vanquish him.  But one can liberate oneself totally from his inﬂuence. And from the minute one is completely free from his inﬂuence, one’s selfgiving can be total.


The Mother: And with the self-giving comes joy, long before the Adversary is truly vanquished and disappears.  The Adversary will disappear only when he is no longer necessary in the world. And we know very well that he is necessary, as the touch-stone for gold: to know if it is pure.  But if you, whoever it may be, become truly sincere — what I call sincere, you see, what Sri Aurobindo calls sincere, that is, when nothing in the being contradicts the aspiration and the will to consecration, nothing disguises itself to continue living its own independent life... The disguises are countless, they are full of craftiness and malice, very deceptive, and unfortunately the human being has a very great innate tendency to deceive himself; and the more one deceives himself, the less one recognises the self-deception.


The Mother: But if one is sincere, the Adversary can’t even approach him any longer; and he doesn’t try it, because that would be courting his own destruction.  Only, some people have in them a kind of ﬁghting instinct and they are not content to liberate themselves and come out of the inﬂuence; indeed they think they have the capacity to go to war and ﬁght with the Adversary. So sometimes, if they are not quite ready, they go and land in very bad situations, difﬁcult predicaments.  These are saved only by their trust in the divine Grace. Because, even if they act foolishly and land in difﬁcult situations, there will always be something which comes and pulls them out of the hole at the last moment.


The Mother: A little like the mother cat catching its young one which is going to drown because it has made a mistake and wanted to walk upon water — she catches it, pulls it, brings it out. A little like that.  But it is always said that one must not tempt God. One should not do something through — how to put it sweetly — premature boldness, with the idea: “Oh, it doesn’t matter, the  Divine will always pull me out of the difﬁculty.” This is not good.


The Mother: Because instead of helping the work, it complicates it.  There we are. Is that all?  You want to try to be silent for a few minutes? I mean inside.


The Mother: Yes?  ()   Which paragraph?  It is a certain attitude which produces this. He says it earlier, doesn’t he?


The Mother: He explains it. There is an attitude in which all material things appear to be not only not the expression of the Divine but incapable of becoming that and essentially opposed to the spiritual life. And so there is only one solution — it was that of the old Yogas, you know — the total rejection of life as not being able to participate in the spiritual life at all, the rejection of material life. This is what he explains. He says that with this attitude, that’s how one looks at life.


The Mother: He does not say that it is like that; he says that one looks at it, considers it like that; that it is the attitude of those who have completely separated life from the spirit, and who say that life is an illusion, a falsiﬁcation, and that it is incapable of expressing the Divine.  That’s all?    Yes.  All the adverse forces at work in the world.


The Mother: The world as it is today is in its greater part under the inﬂuence of the adverse forces. We call them adverse because they do not want the divine life; they oppose the divine life.  They want things to remain as they are, because it is their ﬁeld and their power in the world. They know very well that they will lose all power and all inﬂuence the moment the Divine manifests.  So they are ﬁghting openly and completely against the Divine, and we have to tear away from them bit by bit, little by little, all the things they have conquered in the outer life.


The Mother: And so when it is torn away from them, it is so much gained.  On the other hand, if, as was done formerly, we try what is called clearing the ground, that is, if we let go all the things we consider as not capable of being transformed, then it is so much lost for the divine realisation.  All the realisations of Nature in the outer life, all that it has created — for example upon earth all this vegetable and animal kingdom, you see, and this ordinary human world which it has created — if we give up all this as an illusion incapable of expressing the Divine, then this is so much left in the hands of the adverse forces which try to keep it, no doubt, for their own ends.  Whereas if we consider that all this may be at present deformed but that in its essence and origin not only does it belong to the Divine but is the Divine Himself, then we can work consciously, deliberately at the transformation and wrest all these things from the hostile inﬂuence which now governs them.  That’s all?


The Mother: ... Still...?  Our universal being?... What it is?... I don’t understand your  question very well.