The Mother: You see it immobile on your bed. There are other means of knowing also.   So too I knew quite a remarkable clairvoyant. One day she had to undergo an operation and she was chloroformed ; she went out of her body.


The Mother: Suddenly she began to see what was going on in the minds of the people who were there. She had the habit of talking, even while asleep, and she began to speak out quite aloud: she said that so-and-so had worries, that another had a problem to solve, and that its solution was such and such a thing.  This was an exceptional case — that happens only to gifted persons and there are not many of these. But the number of persons who remain conscious under chloroform is greater than one thinks; but generally, when one wakes up from chloroform one feels pretty uneasy and remembers but vaguely his experiences outside the body. Is there anyone here who has fainted suddenly, as if by accident?


The Mother: You see your body, don’t you? And you ask yourself, “But what is it doing there in that ridiculous position?” And you rush back into it! That happened to me once in Paris. I had been treated to a good dinner, and then I went to a conference hall, I believe.


The Mother: There were many people, it was very hot, I was standing there with the good dinner in my stomach, and suddenly I felt ill at ease. I told the person who was with me, “I must go out immediately.” Once outside (it was in Trocadero Square) I fainted away completely. I saw my body there, stretched out, and I found it so ridiculous that I rushed into it and I gave it a good scolding, saying, “You must not play such tricks with me!”  Many people faint like this and see themselves.


The Mother: There is one condition for this: the organ of sight in the subtle physical body or in the most material vital must be developed.  I must tell you that this kind of capacity may come spontaneously, without effort — one may be a born clairvoyant. They are not necessarily very intelligent people, their vital consciousness may be mediocre, but they are born clairvoyant. It is not a sign of a great development — it comes from something else, from a capacity of the parents, of past lives, etc. But if you are not born clairvoyant, and if you do not carry in you the other  extreme, I mean a psychic being wholly conscious and fully developed which leads its own independent life in the body, and you want to learn to see and have visions, then it is a very long, very slow discipline and there are very few people who have the necessary patience and endurance to go to the end of the training.


The Mother: It is interesting but it is not essential, one can do without it. It is the same as with dreams. But if you can develop this capacity, it can make your life more rich, it can make your consciousness progress more quickly.  You are told.


The Mother: Certainly, I am here for that!  You are speaking of a somnambulist? But that is quite another thing. This means that the part which goes out (whether a part of the mind or a part of the vital) is so strongly attached to the body, or rather that the body is so attached to this part, that when this part decides to do something the body follows it automatically.   In your inner being you decide to do a certain thing and your body is so closely tied to your inner being that without thinking of it, without wanting to do so, without making any effort, it follows and does the same thing.


The Mother: Note that in this matter, the physical body has capacities it would not have in the ordinary waking condition. For instance, it is well known that one can walk in dangerous places where one would ﬁnd it rather difﬁcult to walk in the waking state. The body follows the consciousness of the inner being and its own consciousness is asleep — for the body has a consciousness. All the parts of the being, including the most material, have an independent consciousness. Hence when you go to sleep dead tired, when your physical body needs rest absolutely, your physical consciousness sleeps, while the consciousness of your subtle physical body or your vital or of your mind does not sleep, it continues its activity; but your physical consciousness is separated from the body, it is asleep in a state of unconsciousness, and then the part which does not sleep, which is active, uses the body without the physical consciousness as intermediary and makes it do things directly.


The Mother: That is how one becomes a somnambulist. According to my experience, the waking consciousness goes to sleep for some reason or other (usually due to fatigue), but the inner being is awake, and the body is so tied to it that it follows it automatically. That is why you do fantastic things, because you do not see them physically, you see them in a different way.  Somnambulism is not always due to preoccupations and cares!  Yes, there are people who write wonderful things when in a state of somnambulism.


The Mother: But Tartini was not a somnambulist — it was in the dream-state that he wrote sonatas.   The other state is always a little dangerous, always. Unexpected things can happen, an accident to the vital, for instance.  Quite simply, by putting a will upon the body before going to sleep. One becomes a somnambulist because the mind is not developed enough to break the inner ties.


The Mother: For the mind always separates the external being from the deeper consciousness. Little children are quite tied up. I knew children who were quite sincere but could not distinguish whether a thing was going on in their imagination or in reality. For them the inner life was as real as the external life. They were not telling stories, they were not liars; simply the inner life was as real as the external life.


The Mother: There are children who go night after night to the same spot in order to continue the dream they have begun — they are experts in the art of going out of their bodies.  It is dangerous if you sleep surrounded by people who may come and shake you up, believing that something has happened to you. But if you are alone and sleep quietly, there is no danger.  One can get back into the body at any time and generally it is much more difﬁcult to remain outside than to get back — as soon as the least thing happens, one rushes back quickly into the body.  That can happen but it is extremely rare, once in a hundred thousand cases.


The Mother: “Someone” cannot enter — a human being cannot enter the body of another unless he has quite an exceptional and unique occult knowledge and in that case he will not do it.  But if a human being does not enter, at times there are beings of the vital world who do not have a body and want to have one for the fun of the experience, and when they see that someone has gone out of the body (but he must go out very materially) and is not sufﬁciently protected, they can rush in to take his place. But it is such a rare thing that if you had not put the question I would not have spoken about it. Still it is not an impossibility.  People who have nightmares of this kind should always protect themselves occultly before going out of the body — it can be done in many ways.


The Mother: The simplest way, one which needs no special knowledge is to call the Guru or, if one knows somebody who has the knowledge, to call him in thought or spirit; or to protect oneself by making a kind of wall of protection around oneself (one can do many things, can’t one?); this can prevent such beings from entering.  If you have a disposition for exteriorisation and if you follow a yoga, you are always asked to protect your sleep : by some contemplation, a mental movement, any movement — there are many ways of protecting oneself. But I think there is no such danger for you; perhaps not for everybody, but still one would have to be terribly ambitious, terribly insincere for such a thing to happen; one would have to be in relation with truly wicked entities, for, a being who lives in orderliness and truth will never rush into the body of another, that is an act of disorder and it is not done.  If it is the psychic being which goes out, one would not be aware of it, the more so as most of the time it is not within you!


The Mother: Very few people carry their psychic being within them because the dwelling-place is not ready. What goes out is sometimes the subtle physical, this is when one sees one’s body stretched out — for the physical vision to remain conscious, it must be a very material part of the being which goes out; one must go out very materially in the subtle physical body or in the most material vital. But usually it is the vital which goes out and still more often the mental being; but when it is the mind which goes out one is not aware of it at all , for the mind is like the psychic, it is very rarely within you. If you think of something or somebody, one part of your mind is immediately there — the mind is a vagabond, it roves, it comes and goes, it enters and goes out.


The Mother: There are very few people who have organised their mind sufﬁciently to keep it within them, close-packed, and prevent it from gadding about.  But that is a mere dream; probably you did not go out of your body at all. There are people who dream they are dead. But that is of no importance.  Not one in a hundred!


The Mother: If you did that, very interesting things would happen to you.  I knew someone in France who used to come to me every evening in order that I might show him some unknown region and take him for a ramble in the vital or mental world, and actually I used to take him there. At times there were others also, at times this person was alone. I showed him how to go out of the body, how to get back into it, how to keep the consciousness, etc., I showed him many places telling him “There you must take this  precaution, here you must do such and such a thing.”


The Mother: And this continued for a long time.  I do not mean that no one among you comes to me in the night, but there are very few who do it consciously. Generally (you will tell me if I am wrong, but that is my impression), when you go to sleep and have decided to remember me before going to sleep, it is rather a call than a will to “rush” to me, as you say.  You are there on your bed, you want to rest, to have a good sleep, remain in a good consciousness; then you call me rather than have the idea of going out of the body and coming to see me.   The two words are almost synonymous: “I make the offering of myself and I surrender myself”, but in the gesture of offering there is something more active than in the gesture of surrender.


The Mother: Unfortunately,, in French, is not the true word; in English we use “surrender”; between the words “surrender” and “offering” there is hardly any difference. But the French word  gives the impression of something more passive: you accept, while offering is a giving — a voluntary giving.  “Consecration” generally has a more mystical sense but this is not absolute. A total consecration signiﬁes a total giving of one’s self; hence it is the equivalent of the word “surrender”, not of the word which always gives the impression that one “accepts” passively. You feel a ﬂame in the word “consecration”, a ﬂame even greater than in the word “offering”.


The Mother: To consecrate oneself is “to give oneself to an action”; hence, in the yogic sense, it is to give oneself to some divine work with the idea of accomplishing the divine work.    Because the least detail of life and action, each movement of thought, even of sensation, of feeling, which is normally of little importance, becomes different the moment you look at it asking yourself, “Did I think this as an offering to the Divine, did I feel this as an offering to the Divine?...” If you recall this every moment of your life, the attitude becomes quite different from what it was before. It becomes very wide; it is a chain of innumerable little things each having its own place, whilst formerly you used to let them go by without being aware of them.


The Mother: That widens the ﬁeld of consciousness. If you take a halfhour of your life and think of it, putting to yourself this question: “Is it a consecration to the Divine?” you will see that the small things become a big thing and you will have the impression that life becomes rich and luminous.  No, some begin with an offering and end with surrender. It depends upon the character of each one. You may perhaps begin by having a feeling of inferiority — you are a little crushed by the grandeur of the Divine, and then you feel a little freer and  give with joy what you are.


The Mother: This is not always so. Many begin by self-giving; for them the easiest movement is to give themselves.  In the beginning the giving is a little indeﬁnite, then one has to make an effort at times to surrender in detail; you can give yourself with much enthusiasm, but when at every step you have to submit to the higher Will, the thing becomes more difﬁcult.  Not at all. You can give for the joy of giving, without any idea of surrender.


The Mother: In a movement of enthusiasm, when you have glimpsed something inﬁnitely higher than yourself, you can give yourself in an, but when it is a question of living that every minute, of surrendering oneself every minute to the higher Will and when every minute requires this surrender, it is more difﬁcult. But if by “offering” you mean the integral offering of all your movements, all your activities, that is equivalent to surrender, without implying it necessarily. But then it is no longer a movement made in enthusiasm, it is something which has to be realised in detail. One may say that any movement made in ardour and enthusiasm is relatively easy (that depends upon the intensity of the movement in you), but when it is a question of realising one’s aspiration every minute of one’s life and in all its details, the enthusiasm recedes a little and one feels the difﬁculty.  Once one begins to live in the presence of the Divine, one does not question any longer.


The Mother: It carries its own certitude — one feels, one knows, and it becomes impossible to question. One lives in the presence of the Divine and it is for you an absolute fact.  Till then you ask, because you do not have the experience, but once you have the experience, it has such an authority that it is indisputable. One who says, “I think I live in the presence of the  Divine but I am not sure”, has not had the true experience, for as soon as one has the inner shock of this experience, no more questioning is possible. It is like those who ask, “What is the divine Will?”


The Mother: As long as you have not glimpsed this Will, you cannot know. One may have an idea of it through deduction, inference, etc., but once you have felt the precise contact with the divine Will, this too is not disputable any longer — you know.  I add, so that there may not be any misunderstanding: all experience has its worth only in the measure of the sincerity of the one who has it. Some are not sincere and fabricate wonderful experiences, and they imagine they have them. I put all that aside, it is not interesting.


The Mother: But for sincere people who have a sincere experience, once you have the experience of the divine presence, the whole world may tell you it is not true, and you will not budge.  If you are not sincere, you may have wonderful experiences, but these have no value either for you or for others. You should distrust your thought a good deal, for the mind is a wonderful constructor and it can give you wonderful experiences solely by its work of formation; but these experiences have no value.  It is hence preferable not to know beforehand what is going to happen. For even with a great will to be sincere, the mind fabricates so much and so well that it can present to you a wonderful picture or even play for you a splendid comedy without your being aware of it, by its sheer power of formation, and it is very difﬁcult to ﬁnd out.


The Mother: Hence one essential condition for having true experiences: leave this machine in quietness; the less it moves, the better it is, and beware of everything it imagines for you.  When you have experienced both, you can easily make the distinction. In aspiration there is what I might call an unselﬁsh ﬂame which is not present in desire. Your aspiration is not a  turning back upon self — desire is always a turning back upon oneself. From the purely psychological point of view, aspiration is a self-giving, always, while desire is always something which one draws to oneself; aspiration is something which gives itself, not necessarily in the form of thought but in the movement, in the vibration, in the vital impulse.


The Mother: True aspiration does not come from the head; even when it is formulated by a thought, it springs up like a ﬂame from the heart. I do not know if you have read the articles Sri Aurobindo has written on the Vedas. He explains somewhere that these hymns were not written with the mind; they were not, as one thinks, prayers, but the expression of an aspiration which was an impulse, like a ﬂame coming from the heart (though it is not the “heart” but the psychological centre of the being, to use the exact words). They were not “thought out”, words were not set to experiences, the experience came wholly formulated with the precise, exact, inevitable words — they could not be changed. This is the very nature of aspiration: you do not seek to formulate it, it springs up from you like a ready ﬂame.


The Mother: And if there are words (sometimes there aren’t any), they cannot be changed: you cannot replace one word by another, every word is just the right one. When the aspiration is formulated, this is done categorically, absolutely, without any possibility of change. And it is always something that springs up and gives itself, whereas the very nature of desire is to pull things to oneself.  The essential difference between love in aspiration and love in desire is that love in aspiration gives itself entirely and asks nothing in return — it does not claim anything; whereas love in desire gives itself as little as possible, asks as much as possible, it pulls things to itself and always makes demands.  Rather a feeling of plenitude — “joy” is a misleading word; a feeling of plenitude, of force, of an inner ﬂame which ﬁlls you.


The Mother: Aspiration can give you joy, but a very special joy, which has no excitement in it.  That depends on the deﬁnition you give to the words. In most religions, and perhaps in most philosophies also, it is the vital being which is called “soul”, for it is said that “the soul leaves the body”, while it is the vital being which leaves the body. One speaks of “saving the soul”, “wicked souls”, “redeeming the soul”... but all that applies to the vital being, for the psychic being has no need to be saved!


The Mother: It does not share the faults of the external person, it is free from all reaction.  It is a very interesting subject and I wanted to speak to you about it in detail, one day. Generally when men are in a hurry, they do not do completely what they have to do or they do badly what they do. Well, there is a third way, it is to intensify one’s concentration. If you do that you can gain half the time, even from a very short time.


The Mother: Take a very ordinary example: to have your bath and to dress; the time needed varies with people, doesn’t it? But let us say, half an hour is required for doing everything without losing time and without hurrying. Then, if you are in a hurry, one of two things happens: you don’t wash so well or you dress badly! But there is another way — to concentrate one’s attention and one’s energy, think only of what one is doing and not of anything else, not to make a movement too much, to make the exact movement in the most exact way, and (it is an experience lived, I can speak of it with certitude) you can  do in ﬁfteen minutes what you were formerly doing in half an hour, and do it as well, at times even better, without forgetting anything, without leaving out anything, simply by the intensity of the concentration.  And this is the best answer to all those who say, “Oh, if one wants to do things well, one must have time.”


The Mother: This is not true. For all that you do — study, play, work — there is only one solution: to increase one’s power of concentration. And when you acquire this concentration, it is no longer tiring. Naturally, in the beginning, it creates a tension, but when you have grown used to it, the tension diminishes, and a moment comes when what fatigues you is to be not thus concentrated, to disperse yourself, allow yourself to be swallowed by all kinds of things, and not to concentrate on what you do. One can succeed in doing things even better and more quickly by the power of concentration.


The Mother: And in this way you can make use of work as a means of growth; otherwise you have this vague idea that work must be done “disinterestedly”, but there is a great danger there, for one is very quick to confuse disinterestedness with indifference.    The other day I said that most of the time people do not have their psychic being within them. I would like to explain this in greater detail.... You must remember that the inner beings are not in the third dimension.


The Mother: If you open up your body you will ﬁnd only the viscera of the body which are in the third dimension. The inner beings are in another dimension, and when I say that some men do not have their psychic being within them, I do not mean that it is not at the centre of their being, but that their outer consciousness is so small, so limited, so obscure that it is not able to keep a contact, not only conscious but intimate, with the psychic being which extends beyond it in every way; it is so much higher and deeper than the other outer consciousness that there is no relation either of quality or of nature between them. Religions say that you have a divine spark in you — it is well they call it a “spark”, for it is so small indeed that it can be placed anywhere in the body without difﬁculty. But this does not mean that it is in the body: it is within the consciousness in another dimension, and there are beings who have a contact with it, others who haven’t.  But if you come to the divine Presence in the atom, the image is easier to understand, for there you touch so inﬁnitesimal a domain that you are on the border-line where you can no longer distinguish between two, three, four or ﬁve dimensions.


The Mother: If you study modern physics you will understand what I mean. The movements constituting an atom are, in the matter of size, so imperceptible that they cannot be understood with our threedimensional understanding, the more so as they follow laws which elude completely this three-dimensional idea. So if you take refuge there, you may say that the divine spark is at the centre of each atom and you won’t be far from the truth; but I was not speaking of the divine spark, I was speaking of the being,  the psychic consciousness, which is another thing. The psychic being is an entity which has a form; it is organised around a central consciousness and, having a form it has a dimension, but a dimension of another kind than the third dimension of the outer consciousness.  This is not correct.


The Mother: There are people whose psychic being watches over their formation before their birth, even before they are in the womb of their mother. There are children whose psychic being comes into contact with them at the very moment they utter their ﬁrst cry. There are also people whose psychic being comes a few hours after their birth, or some days after, or some weeks, some months, some years after or... never!  That is quite different. There it is a question only of the formation of the physical brain which develops slowly, little by little.


The Mother: If you ask of a brain in formation an effort beyond its capacity, you tire it, you overwork it or you make it ill.  No, I never said that — it would be foolish! The psychic being is organised the divine spark. The divine spark is one, universal, the same everywhere and in everything, one and inﬁnite, of the same kind in all. You cannot say that it is a being — it is , if you like, but not being.


The Mother: Naturally, if you go back to the origin, you may say that there is only one soul, for the  origin of all souls is the same, as the origin of the whole universe is the same, as the origin of the entire creation is the same.  But the psychic being is an individual, personal being with its own experience, its own development, its own growth, its own organisation; only, this organisation is the product of the action of a central divine spark.  But the day an external being (physical, mental, vital) enters into direct and constant contact with the psychic being, one may say in the same way that the being of this person is organised by the central divine consciousness. The moment you put yourself in contact with it, submit yourself to it, you are organised by it, by the central divine consciousness; one may say that the body is organised by it, but it is a, not a soul.  The fact of being organised by this divine spark does not make it a soul.


The Mother: No, it is not yet there. It can be said that there is a possibility of psychic consciousness in Matter — the diffusion of the divine Consciousness had only one object: to make possible an organisation which would be under the direct inﬂuence of the Divine.  That is why it passes over all the worlds of disorder. It may hence be said that the Origin of the soul is also in the atom, in all the elements constituting the atom, but it is only the Origin.... I must tell you that when it is fully formed, the psychic being has a distinct form which corresponds to our physical form.


The Mother: It is not altogether similar, but it has a deﬁnite form. Every psychic being is different from another — they are not all cut out, modelled  to one pattern. They are different, each has an individuality, a personality.  It was a partial exteriorisation; it was not a total exteriorisation which indeed causes death. If one goes out entirely, that is, if there is a complete separation from the body and one is really dead, and then one comes back, that causes such an intense suffering that one cannot forget it.


The Mother: It is said that babies cry when they come into the world because the ﬁrst contact with air makes them cry, but I think it is something else. The reentry into the body causes a kind of friction, for what goes out has to be something very material if it is to bring about death, something even more material than the subtle physical, and this friction is extremely painful. Otherwise one may be externally unconscious, but one is not dead for all that. It is only when something extremely material goes out of the body and all ties are broken that there is truly “death”. And that is why (I believe we are beginning to discover it) people do not die till six or seven days after their death.


The Mother: That is, they are not “dead” as long as the body remains intact, but only when a part of the body begins to decompose. Hence during this period, someone who has the necessary knowledge, power and capacity may “raise”  a person in such a state. I believe this explains most of the cases of “miraculous” resurrection.  Yes, in that sphere they are beginning to work “miracles”!  You must always distrust people who go rambling in some kind of mental or vital domain, and then tell you stories imagining that they remember their past lives.


The Mother: You know the classical example of that well-known lady who narrated her lives from the time she had been a monkey! I may assure you that it is pure imagination, for it is impossible to remember like that.  This is what happens. Let us take a divine spark which, through attraction, through afﬁnity and selection, gathers around it a beginning of psychic consciousness (this work is already very perceptible in animals — don’t think you are exceptional beings, that you alone have a psychic being and the rest of creation hasn’t. It begins in the mineral, it is a little more developed in the plant, and in the animal there is a ﬁrst glimmer of the psychic presence).


The Mother: Then there comes a moment when this psychic being is sufﬁciently developed to have an independent  consciousness and a personal will. And then after innumerable lives more or less individualised, it becomes conscious of itself, of its movements and of the environment it has chosen for its growth. Arriving at a certain state of perception, it decides — generally at the last minute of the life it has just ﬁnished upon earth — the conditions in which its next life will be passed. Here I must tell you a very important thing: the psychic being can progress and form itself only in the physical life and upon earth.  As soon as it leaves a body, it enters into a rest which lasts for a more or less long time according to its own choice and its degree of development — a rest for assimilation, for a passive progress so to say, a rest for passive growth which will allow this same psychic being to pass on to new experiences and make a more active progress.


The Mother: But after having ﬁnished one life (which usually ends only when it has done what it wanted to do), it will have chosen the environment where it will be born, the approximate place where it will be born, the conditions and the kind of life in which it will be born, and a very precise programme of the experiences through which it will have to pass to be able to make the progress it wants to make.  I am going to give you quite a concrete example. Let us take a psychic being that has decided, for some reason or other, to enter the body of a being destined to become king, because there is a whole series of experiences it can have only under those conditions. After having passed through these experiences of a king, it ﬁnds that there is a whole domain in which it cannot make a progress due to these very conditions of life where it is. So when it has ﬁnished its term upon earth and decides to go away, it decides that in its next life it will take birth in an ordinary environment and in ordinary conditions, neither high nor low, but such that the body which it will take up will be free to do what it likes.


The Mother: For I do not tell you anything new when I say that the life of a king is the life of a slave; a king is obliged to submit to a whole protocol and to all kinds of ceremonies to keep his prestige (it is perhaps  very pleasant for vain people, but for a psychic being it is not pleasant, for this deprives it of the possibility of a large number of experiences). So having taken this decision, it carries in itself all the memories which a royal life can give it and it takes rest for the period it considers necessary. (Here, I must say that I am speaking of a psychic being exclusively occupied with itself, not one consecrated to a work, because in that case it is the work which decides the future lives and their conditions; I am speaking of a psychic being at work completing its development.) Hence it decides that at a certain moment it will take a body. Having already had a number of experiences, it knows that in a certain country, a certain part of the consciousness has developed; in another, another part, and so on; so it chooses the place which offers it easy possibilities of development: the country, the conditions of living, the approximate nature of the parents, and also the condition of the body itself, its physical structure and the qualities it needs for its experiences.


The Mother: It takes rest, then at the required moment, wakes up and projects its consciousness upon earth centralising it in the chosen domain and the chosen conditions — or almost so; there is a small margin you know, for in the psychic consciousness one is too far away from the material physical consciousness to be able to see with a clear vision; it is an approximation. It does not make a mistake about the country or the environment and it sees quite clearly the inner vibrations of the people chosen, but there may happen to be a slight indecision. But if, just at this moment, there is a couple upon earth or rather a woman who has a psychic aspiration herself and, for some reason or other, without knowing why or how, would like to have an exceptional child, answering certain exceptional conditions; if at this moment there is this aspiration upon earth, it creates a vibration, a psychic light which the psychic being sees immediately and, without hesitation it rushes towards it. Then, from that moment (which is the moment of conception), it watches over the formation of the child, so that this formation may be  as favourable as possible to the plan it has; consequently its inﬂuence is there over the child even before it appears in the physical world.  If all goes well, if there is no accident (accidents can always happen), if all goes well at the moment the child is about to be born, the psychic force (perhaps not in its totality, but a part of the psychic consciousness) rushes into the being and from its very ﬁrst cry gives it a push towards the experiences it wants the child to acquire.


The Mother: The result is that even if the parents are not conscious, even if the child in its external consciousness is not quite conscious (a little child does not have the necessary brain for that, it forms slowly, little by little), in spite of that, it will be possible for the psychic inﬂuence to direct all the events, all the circumstances of the life of this child till the moment it becomes capable of coming into conscious contact with its psychic being (physically it is generally between the age of four and seven, sometimes sooner, sometimes almost immediately, but in such a case we deal with children who are not “children”, who have “supernatural” qualities, as they say — they are not “supernatural”, but simply the expression of the presence of the psychic being). But there are people who have not had the chance or rather the good fortune if one may call it that, of meeting someone, physically, who could instruct them. And yet they have the feeling that every step of their existence, every circumstance of their life is arranged by someone conscious, so that they may make the maximum progress. When they need a certain circumstance, it comes; when they need to meet certain people, they come; when they need to read certain books, they ﬁnd them within their reach. Everything is arranged like that, as if someone was watching over them so that their life may have the maximum possibilities of development.


The Mother: These people may very well say: “But what is a psychic being?”, for no one has ever used these words in speaking to them or they have not found anybody who could explain to them all that; but for them often just one meeting is sufﬁcient, just one look, in order  to wake up; one word sufﬁces to make them remember: “But I knew all that!”   This is exactly what happens to a psychic being which has reached the last stage of its development. After that, it will no longer be bound by the necessity of coming upon earth, it will have completed its development and will be able to choose freely either to consecrate itself to the divine Work or go elsewhere, that is, in the higher worlds. But generally, having come to this stage, it remembers all that has happened to it and understands the great necessity of coming to the help of those who are yet struggling in the midst of difﬁculties.


The Mother: These psychic beings give their whole existence to the divine Work — this is not absolute, inevitable, they choose freely, but ninety times out of a hundred this is what they do.  But in ordinary lives — and by that I mean the life of a certain of sufﬁciently well-developed people — the contact between the external being and the psychic is quite intermittent; it is the result of certain experiences or certain inner needs. At that moment the psychic being is “in front”, as Sri Aurobindo says, that is, it comes to the surface of the consciousness, it is in direct contact with material circumstances, with forms and words and sounds, etc., for a very short time; so it records all that like a photograph or a cinema, but it is just a minute, a few moments in a lifetime. These moments may repeat themselves several times, but they do not last; and it is this the psychic being remembers; and when you have real psychic memories, sincere, spontaneous, not fabricated by the mind or the vital, that is, purely psychic, exact, your memory is And it is often very difﬁcult to locate your past lives, to say: “I was this or that.” It is only when the psychic experience has taken place at a very important moment of your life and a whole set of circumstances gives you, so to say, the key to the story (dresses, spoken words, customs or an environment giving you the key) that you can say: “Oh! That life, I have lived it.”


The Mother: But if someone comes and narrates to you all his previous lives from the monkey  onwards, with a mass of details, you may be sure that he is a humbug!  No, I said “accident”; an accident is not a chance.  In life there is always a conﬂict between opposing forces, and the result of this conﬂict is not always foreseen except when one is conscious in the highest consciousness. One cannot foresee the result of a conﬂict with a consciousness which does not go beyond the human consciousness, so one calls it an “accident”.  It is not chance, it is not even an accident without reason, but an accident caused by reasons which one is not in a condition to foresee.


The Mother: There is such a strong suggestion here [in India] that to live the spiritual life, one must take up the life of a sannyasin, that this perhaps is the cause of your pictures. In any case, if it was really a previous life, it was not the last one. You have surely had intermediary lives, for rarely is a being born in the same country several times consecutively — it would not be very proﬁtable. If it had been the ascetic life of the time of the ﬁrst Christians, for instance, you would have noticed certain details: the different colour of your skin, a dress, etc., whereas you probably saw the usual pictures of Indian life.... Everything is possible, of course.


The Mother: The universe is constituted in such a way that all the possibilities can be realised there: but, as I said, it is rare for one to be born several times in the same country unless it be to accomplish a special work, with a special end in view; and then it is very rare for one not to know it, for this means that the psychic being is fully formed and has itself chosen to come back to the same  country to do a special work or to continue what it had already begun.  Many have had a previous ascetic life, for the collective suggestion is very strong here. It is very rare for a person not to think that to perfect oneself and to live a spiritual life one must leave the world.


The Mother: There are also symbolic and premonitory dreams, but very rarely do dreams consist of true memories of past lives, because for that one must dream in one’s psychic consciousness and there are not many who are capable of this. One dreams in the mental or vital consciousness but rarely does one dream in the psychic consciousness. That can happen, but it is rare.  At times, there are dreams which one takes for memories, but they are only symbols: what one sees comes from a mental formation which is objectiﬁed on an inner screen and which enacts a scene, so to say, in which you are an actor.  Yes, but generally these are children who have died as children or very young and whose previous life had not fully run out.


The Mother: This can happen.  Individualisation, the capacity to take up all experiences and organise them around the divine centre.  The aim of the psychic being is to form an individual being, individualised, “personalised” around the divine centre. Normally, all the experiences of the external life (unless one does yoga and becomes conscious) pass without organising the inner  being, while the psychic being organises these experiences serially. It wants to realise a particular attitude towards the Divine.


The Mother: Hence it looks for all favourable experiences in order to have the complete series of opportunities, so to say, which will allow it to realise this attitude towards the Divine. Take someone, for example, who wants to have the experience of nobility — a nobility which makes it impossible for you to act like an ordinary person, which infuses into you a bravery, a courage which may almost be taken for rashness because the attitude, the experience demands that you face danger without showing the least fear. I was telling you a while ago that I would explain to you what one could acquire by entering into the body of a king. A king is an ordinary man, isn’t he, like all others; he does not have a special consciousness, but through the necessities of his life, because he is a kind of symbol to his people, there are things he is obliged to do which he could never do if he were an ordinary man. I know this by experience, but I saw this also while looking at photographs which represented a king in actual circumstances: something had happened, which might have been an attempt on his life, but was averted.


The Mother: The photographs showed the king inspecting a regiment; all of a sudden someone had rushed forward, perhaps with a bad intention, perhaps not, for nothing had happened; in any case, the king had remained completely impassive, absolutely calm, the same smile on his lips, without moving the least from the place where he was; and he was quite within sight, an easy target for one who wanted to rush forward and hurt him. For all I know, this king was not a hero, but because he was a king, he could not take to ﬂight!  That would have been ignoble. So he remained calm, without stirring, without showing any outward fear. This is an example of what one can learn in the life of a king.


The Mother: There is also a true story about Queen Elizabeth. She had come to the last days of her life and was extremely ill. But there was trouble in the country and, about questions of taxation, a group of people (merchants, I believe) had formed a delegation  to present a petition to her in the name of a party of the people.  She lay very ill in her room, so ill that she could hardly stand.


The Mother: But she got up and dressed to receive them. The lady who was attending upon her cried out, “But it is impossible, you will die of this!” The queen answered quietly, “We shall die afterwards”.... This is an example from a whole series of experiences one can have in the life of a king, and it is this which justiﬁes the choice of the psychic being when it takes up this kind of life.  It is memories of this kind which prove the authenticity of the experience; for what generally happens when people tell you about their past lives is this: in these lives there is always a progress, naturally; so they become more and more splendid people in more and more marvellous circumstances!


The Mother: It is wrong, things never happen like that. The psychic being follows a certain line of existence which develops certain qualities, certain powers, etc., but the psychic being always sees what it lacks and it can choose the opposite line in a future life, a negation, so to say, of this experience in order to have complementary experiences.   It is a question I have been asked many times. If someone can tell me the effect on him of the reading of ordinary books, it will interest me very much.  It is a good sign.


The Mother: No! The subconscient records everything, and if you have the impression that an ordinary book leaves no effect, it means that you are not conscious of what goes on within you. Each time you read a book in which the consciousness is very low, it strengthens your subconscient and inconscient — it prevents your consciousness from rising upward. It is as if you threw buckets of dirty water on the efforts you had made to purify your subconscient.


The Mother: It is inevitable, but there are people who are not even aware that their consciousness has fallen very low.  There is a state in which a simple conversation which obliges you to remain on the level of ordinary life gives you a headache, turns your stomach and, if it continues, may give you a fever.  I am speaking of course about the gossip-type of conversations. I believe that apart from a few exceptions, everybody  indulges in this exercise and talks of things about which he should keep silent or chatters about other things. It becomes so natural that you are not troubled by it.


The Mother: But if you continue in this way, you hinder your consciousness completely from rising up; you bind yourself with iron chains to the ordinary consciousness and the work in the subconscious is not done or has not even begun. Those who want to rise up have already enough difﬁculties without looking for encouragements outside.  Naturally, the effort to keep the consciousness at a high level is tiring in the beginning, like the exercises you do to develop your muscles. But you do not give up gymnastics because of that! So mentally also you must do the same thing.


The Mother: You must not allow your mind to stoop low: gossiping degrades you and, if you want to do Yoga, you must abstain from it, that’s all.  The state of consciousness of which I speak here is very difﬁcult to attain; it is a discipline which needs years and it is a realisation which is not within everybody’s reach. There is, however, an intermediate state through which one has to pass: a state in which one cuts the connection between oneself and all that one does not want to hear or see.   The whole universe explains each thing at each moment. That is very important.


The Mother: Yes, if one reads to study the language, to understand how an author expresses himself, it is quite all right. But this should not be made an excuse for reading anything whatever.  That depends on the quality of the imagination. If you say that it is a good thing to develop one’s imagination, this is true, only you must take care not to develop an untruthful imagination.


The Mother: Not always! And what does “contact with truth” mean? — there is a truth in a grain of sand. That means nothing.   Don’t you think there are enough ugly things in the world without one’s giving a picture of them in books?


The Mother: This is something which always used to surprise me, even when I was a child — life is so ugly, so full of mean, miserable, even at times repulsive things, what is the use of imagining yet worse things than are already there? If you imagined something more beautiful, a more beautiful life, that would be worth the trouble.  People who take pleasure in writing ugly things show a great poverty of mind — it is always a sign of a poverty of mind. It is inﬁnitely more difﬁcult to tell a story beautiful from beginning to end than to write a story ending with a sensational event or a catastrophe. Many authors, if they had to write a story which ends happily, beautifully, would not be able to do it — they do not have enough imagination for that.


The Mother: Very few stories have an uplifting ending, almost all end in a failure — for a very simple reason, it is much more easy to fall than to rise. It is much more difﬁcult to end one’s story on a note of greatness and splendour, to make one’s hero a genius seeking to transcend himself, because for that one must be a genius oneself, and this is not given to everybody.   Yes, because work, especially if it is technical work, is the expression of the best in the man, while in his private life he comes down to a lower level, with very few exceptions. So many remarkable scholars, writers, artists who produce remarkable things, once they enter their homes, become detestable husbands, unpleasant fathers, intolerable people for those who are  around them.


The Mother: And I am speaking of an ´elite, those who make special studies, discoveries, who run big institutions: outside, they are uncommon people, men of great abilities; back home they become commonplace and often unbearable — they have a nice time, they take rest, relax themselves. And if they begin to amuse themselves, that’s the end of it all! I knew people of great intelligence, admirable artists who, as soon as they began to “relax”, became utterly foolish! They did the most vulgar things, behaved like ill-bred children — they were relaxing. Everything comes from this “need” of relaxation; and what does that mean for most men?


The Mother: It means, always, coming down to a lower level.  They do not know that for a true relaxation one must rise one degree higher, one must rise above oneself. If one goes down, it adds to one’s fatigue and brings a kind of stupor. Besides, each time one comes down, one increases the load of the subconscient — this huge subconscient load which one must clean and clean if one wants to mount, and which is like fetters on the feet. But it is difﬁcult to teach that, for one must know it oneself before one can teach it to others.


The Mother: This is never told to children, they are allowed to commit all the stupidities in the world under the pretext that they need relaxation.  It is not by sinking below oneself that one removes fatigue.  One must climb the ladder and there one has true rest, because one has the inner peace, the light, the universal energy. And little by little one puts oneself in touch with the truth which is the very reason of one’s existence.  If you contact that deﬁnitively, it removes completely all fatigue.


The Mother: If one is sincere, no. If you repeat the same errors several times, you may be sure you are not sincere somewhere. When one  recognises one’s mistake and yet repeats it, it means that only a superﬁcial part of the consciousness has recognised it and the rest is perfectly satisﬁed with it and generally justiﬁes it. You may tell yourself without the risk of making a mistake: “If I repeat the same fault, I am not sincere.” So try to be sincere.


The Mother: That means you are not plastic. You may be sure that if you ﬁnd a person boring, he will also ﬁnd you boring. You will never arrive at anything if you do not take the attitude of putting yourself in the place of the other, this is indispensable. When someone tells you something you do not understand, you must not say, “He knows nothing”, but you must try to understand.  If you want to be quite sincere, even when a child comes and tells you something you do not understand, you must not say, “This child is stupid”, but “It is I who am stupid, because I do not understand!”


The Mother: There are a hundred ways of looking at a problem. If you want to ﬁnd the solution, you must take up all the elements one after another, rise above them and see how they harmonise.  There is a state of consciousness which may be called “gnostic”, in which you are able to see all the theories, all the beliefs, all the ideas men have expressed in their highest consciousness — the most contradictory notions, like the Buddhistic, the Vedantic, the Christian theories, all the philosophical theories, all the expressions of the human mind when it has managed to catch a little corner of the Truth — and in that state, not only do you put each thing in its place, but everything appears to you marvellously true and quite indispensable in order to be able to understand anything at all about anything whatsoever. There is a state of consciousness... Oh, I was going to tell you things you cannot yet understand.


The Mother: I shall give you a simpler example.    Anatole France said in one of his books: “So long as men did not try to make the world progress, all went well and everybody was satisﬁed — no worry about perfecting oneself or perfecting the world, consequently all went well. Therefore the worst thing is to want to make others progress; let them do what they like and don’t bother about anything, that will be much more wise.” On the contrary, others tell you: “There is a Truth to be attained; the world is in a state of ignorance and one must at all costs, in spite of the difﬁculty of the way, enlighten man’s consciousness and pull him out of his ignorance.”


The Mother: But I tell you that there is a state of consciousness in which both the ways of seeing are absolutely equally true. Naturally, if you take only two aspects, it is difﬁcult to see clearly; one must be able to see all the aspects of the truth glimpsed by the human intelligence and... something more. And then, in that state, nothing is absolutely false, nothing is absolutely bad. In that state one is free from all problems, all difﬁculties, all battles and everything appears to you wonderfully harmonious.  But if you try to imitate this condition mentally — do you understand?


The Mother: To make a mental imitation of it — you may be sure of doing stupid things; you will be one of those who have a chaos in their head and can say the most contradictory things without even being aware of it.  In that condition there is no contradiction — it is a totality and a totality in which one has the full knowledge of all the truths expressed (which are not sufﬁcient to express the total Truth), in which one knows the respective places of all things, why and of what the universe is formed. Only — I hasten to tell you this — it is not by a personal effort that one reaches this condition; it is not because one tries to obtain it that one obtains it. You that, spontaneously. It is, if you like, the crowning of an absolute mental sincerity, when you no longer have any partiality, any preference, any attachment to an idea, when you do not even try any longer to know the truth.


The Mother: You are simply open in the Light, that’s all.   I am telling you this, this evening, because what is done, what has been realised by one can be realised by others. It is enough that one body has been able to realise that, one human body, to have the assurance that it be done. You may consider it still very far off, but you can say, “Yes, the gnostic life is certain, because it has begun to be realised.”   The word “predetermined” does not correspond to the reality; the word “pre-existent” would be more correct.


The Mother: The consciousness of an unfolding has a reality, it is not only an appearance.  Imagine the world as a single whole and, in a certain sense, ﬁnite, limited but containing potentially innumerable possibilities of which the combinations are so numerous that they are equivalent to an inﬁnite (you must be careful with words, however; I am very much cramped by words, they do not express exactly what I mean). So, the universe is objectiﬁed by the Divine Consciousness, by the Supreme, according to certain determined laws of which we shall speak later. The universe is a single whole, in the sense that it the Divine — it does not contain  the whole of the Divine, but it is as though the Divine deployed Himself so as to objectify Himself; that is the of the manifestation of the universe. It is as if the divine Consciousness wandered into all divine possibilities following a path it had chosen.


The Mother: Imagine then a multitude of possibles of which all the possible combinations are equivalent to an inﬁnite. The divine Consciousness is essentially free — It wanders therein and objectiﬁes Itself. The path traversed is free in the midst of an inﬁnite multiplicity which is at the same time pre-existent and absolutely undetermined according to the action of the free divine Will. It may be conceived that this Will, being free, is able to change the course of the deployment, change the path and, although everything is pre-existent and consequently inevitable, the road, the path is free and absolutely unexpected. These changes of the route, if one may say so, can therefore change the relations between things and circumstances, and consequently the determinism is changed.


The Mother: This change of the circuit is called “the effect of the Grace”; well, through the aid of the Grace, if the Grace decides it, things can change, the course can be different. Things can change their places and instead of following a certain circuit follow another. A circumstance which, according to a particular determinism, should occur at a certain place ahead, for instance, would instead occur behind, and so on. The relations between things consequently change.   No, Time is a succession; you must be able to conceive that the Supreme Consciousness, before objectifying itself, becomes aware of Itself in Itself.


The Mother: There is a global, total and simultaneous perception and there, there is no Time. Likewise one cannot speak of “Space”, for the same reason, because all is simultaneous. It is something more; it corresponds to a state of consciousness subjective rather than objective, for the aim, the motive of creation is objectivisation; but there is a ﬁrst step in this objectivisation in which there is a plenary consciousness, total and simultaneous, beyond Time and Space, of what will constitute the content of this universe; and there, the universe is pre-existent, but not manifested, and Time begins with objectivisation.  It is not the same kind of Time. There is only a beginning of Time and a beginning of form.


The Mother: Time there is of a very different quality.  There is a global, static consciousness before arriving at the supramental level, in which everything appears simultaneously — Time is the result of the fact that there is a succession in the organisation of the whole. While the totality you perceive all at once, on the supramental level, is not a static totality — the static totality gives place to another totality which gives the impression of Time. These are inner relations within the Supermind, in the sense that one is not aware of something which happens outside oneself; one is conscious only of something within oneself, internal, but the internal relations vary, and this gives a ﬁrst impression of Time.


The Mother: Oh, no! Nothing of the kind.  If you undertake a work and are told beforehand that all will be useless and you will not be able to do what you want, would you do it? No, surely not! Well, it is something like that which happens.


The Mother: Ninety times out of a hundred, what you do does not give the expected result. Not one person in a million would do his work if he were told: “Do this, but the result will not be at all what you want.” But in the play of forces many must work for the aggregate of forces, for the totality of forces, although individually this work has no personal utility for the one who does it. So, if the individual had the knowledge that the part he plays in the whole is inﬁnitesimal, he would not play it. But the moment you go above that, when you do things, not with a ﬁxed end in view, but because you know within yourself that this is the thing to be done, whatever the result, then with this kind of detachment you know and see in the higher Consciousness that all action is done exclusively because it has to be done whatever may be the result; and generally you are sufﬁciently clear-sighted to know, at least vaguely, what will be the result of this action.


The Mother: For knowing it will not change in the least your way of doing it.  Instead of an explanation which goes from below upward, it would be wiser to look for an explanation which comes from above downward and rather to conceive that little by little the  Consciousness comes down and as it comes down is obscured, and one no longer understands by what mechanism things are done — that is what is called a state of ignorance.  If I were told that things are going to stop at a certain point, I would ﬁnd it very boring, so boring that I would not stir!  The only thing which consoles me is that everything continues always, inﬁnitely, that there is always something new to be done.  Whatever be the goal attained, it is only a beginning.


The Mother: It is not the same thing. The psychic is the being organised by the divine Presence and it belongs to the earth — I am not speaking of the universe, only of the earth; it is only upon earth that you will ﬁnd the psychic being. The rest of the universe is formed in quite a different way.  The universe contains all the domains higher than the physical: there is a global physical comprising the mental, the vital, etc., and all the domains above the mental are domains of a spiritual order, domains which are, for us, domains of the spirit,  and it is this “spirit” which little by little, progressively, materialises itself to arrive at Matter as we conceive it. The beings of the Overmind, for instance, and all the beings of the higher regions have no psychic being — the “angels” have no psychic being.


The Mother: It is only upon earth that the psychic life begins, and it is just the process by which the Divine has awakened material life to the necessity of rejoining its divine origin. Without the psychic, Matter would never have awakened from its inconscience, it would never have aspired for the life of its origin, the spiritual life. Therefore, the psychic being in the human being is the manifestation of spiritual aspiration; but there is a spiritual life independent of the psychic.  But I have already told you that it is only upon earth that the psychic being gets its experiences to individualise itself. Hence there is an almost absolute interdependence between the psychic world and the earth.


The Mother: But it is wide awake! And not only is it awake, but it acts, only you are not aware of it. It appears to you asleep because you don’t perceive it!  Fundamentally, without this kind of inner will of the psychic being, I believe human beings would be quite dismal, dull, they would have an altogether animal life. Every gleam of aspiration is always the expression of a psychic inﬂuence.


The Mother: Without the presence of the psychic, without the psychic inﬂuence, there would never be any sense of progress or any will for progress.    Yes. Perhaps not the highest sense of beauty, but in the vital one ﬁnds a complete sense of beauty and harmony. The beauty which is fundamental, profound, universal, constant belongs only to the psychic, but


The Mother: the sense of the beauty of form, of appearance, of colour, the educated, reﬁned vital fully possesses.  That depends on what you mean by “love”! There would not be divine love there, naturally, but all passions, attractions, desires  exist in the vital. Only, the quality of these movements has been completely changed due to the descent and diffusion of the divine Consciousness in Matter.


The Mother: It has awakened the possibility of true love; otherwise, all those things which are taken for love, all passions and attractions and desires — the need of devouring — all that exists very well in the vital. The ﬁrst form of love in Matter is the need of devouring: one wants to possess, assimilate; and the best way of doing it is to swallow and to digest! It can be said that the cat is full of love for its kittens when it eats them and the tiger full of love for the lamb it devours!  As soon as there is organic life, the vital element comes in, and it is this vital element which gives to ﬂowers the sense of beauty. It is not perhaps individualised in the sense we understand it, but it is a sense of the species and the species always tries to realise it.


The Mother: I have noticed a ﬁrst rudiment of the psychic presence and vibration in vegetable life, and truly this blossoming one calls a ﬂower is the ﬁrst manifestation of the psychic presence. The psychic is individualised only in man, but it was there before him; but it is not the same kind of individualisation as in man, it is more ﬂuid: it manifests as force, as consciousness rather than  as individuality. Take the rose, for example; its great perfection of form, colour, scent expresses an aspiration and a psychic giving. Look at a rose opening in the morning at the ﬁrst touch of the sun, it is a magniﬁcent self-giving in aspiration.


The Mother: Not as we understand it mentally. There is a mental projection when one gives a precise meaning to a ﬂower. It may answer, vibrate to the touch of this projection, accept the meaning, but a ﬂower has no equivalent of the mental consciousness. In the vegetable kingdom there is a beginning of the psychic, but there is no beginning of the mental consciousness. In animals it is different; mental life begins to form and for them things have a meaning.


The Mother: But in ﬂowers it is rather like the movement of a little baby — it is neither a sensation nor a feeling, but something of both; it is a spontaneous movement, a very special vibration. So, if one is in contact with it, if one feels it, one gets an impression which may be translated by a thought. That is how I have given a meaning to ﬂowers and plants — there is a kind of identiﬁcation with the vibration, a perception of the quality it represents and, little by little, through a kind of approximation (sometimes this comes suddenly, occasionally it takes time), there is a coming together of these vibrations (which are of a vital-emotional order) and the vibration of the mental thought, and if there is a sufﬁcient harmony, one has a direct perception of what the plant may signify.  In some countries (particularly here) certain plants are used as the media for worship, offering, devotion. Certain plants are given on special occasions.


The Mother: And I have often seen that this identiﬁcation was quite in keeping with the nature of the plant, because spontaneously, without knowing anything, I happened to give the same meaning as that given in religious ceremonies.  The vibration was really there in the ﬂower itself.... Did it come from the use that had been made of it or did it come from very  far, from somewhere deep down, from a beginning of the psychic life? It would be difﬁcult to say.  If a psychic being sees from its psychic world a light on the earth, it may rush down there without knowing exactly where it is.


The Mother: Everything is possible. But if the psychic being is very conscious, sufﬁciently conscious , it will seek the light of aspiration in a precise place, because of the culture, the education it will ﬁnd there.  This happens much more frequently than one believes, especially in somewhat educated circles. An intelligent woman with some artistic or philosophical culture, a beginning of conscious individuality, may aspire that the child she is going to have may be the best possible according to her idea or according to what she has read.


The Mother: Hence it is not so very complicated to ﬁnd a place. The number of psychic beings born constantly being considerable, if each time exceptional conditions have to be found it would be difﬁcult. Surely, there are instances where the psychic being seems to have fallen headlong and been stunned, but this is bad luck; in such a case it generally requires a long time to wake up. It is bad luck in the sense that it probably lacked a certain power of discrimination, or perhaps it had to face certain forces which thwarted its decision and won a partial victory over it.  There are a thousand possibilities, you know.


The Mother: One cannot say that everything goes according to the same plan — every psychic being is different.   The best way of facing hostile forces is always to aspire, always to remember the Divine. And never to fear.  Where does the being stop? ...


The Mother: What is the difference between outside and inside, if the consciousness is everywhere!   Seekers are always told, “If you want to get rid of something, say that it is outside.” This is only an impression, but it is easier to get rid of a difﬁculty if you have the impression that it is outside you. However, I have just told you the opposite, that if nothing “in you” answers to the hostile forces, they will never attack you.


The Mother: Therefore, what is inside is also outside and what is outside is also inside! The secret lies in knowing how to place it just where it is most convenient for the immediate action.   If you have a serious difﬁculty in your character, for example, the habit of losing your temper, and you decide: “I must not get angry again”, it is very difﬁcult, but if on the other hand, you tell yourself: “Anger is something which circulates through the whole world, it is not in me, it belongs to everybody; it wanders about here and there and if I close my door, it will not enter”, it is much more easy. If you think: “It is my character, I am born like that”, it becomes almost impossible. It is true there is something in your character which answers to this force of anger.


The Mother: All movements, all vibrations are general — they enter, they go out, they move about — but they rush upon you and enter into you only to the extent you leave the door in you open. And if you have, besides, some afﬁnity with these forces, you may get angry without even knowing why. Everything is everywhere and it is arbitrary to draw limits.  I read somewhere, in a book written by a conﬁrmed materialist, that human beings are as though shut in a leather sack and have no contact with other beings. It is a stupidity evidently, but there are people who are helped by it; this idea that they are shut up in a shell and have no contact with others except through this shell, protects them and prevents them from receiving anything whatever from outside.


The Mother: True, it is a stupidity, but some stupidities are at times useful! We said the other day that the mind is not an instrument for knowledge and that in the domain of ideas everything is relative, everything is a way of seeing, everything is a way of living. Every science has its language, every religion its language, every philosophy its language, every activity its own language, and the more you learn these languages, the more do you have the impression of knowing many things. What matters is that you do know all the languages. You must come to the point where all these movements of the mind are for you a play altogether relative — you may play well or ill, but it is all a play.


The Mother: There are people who know how to make use of it, these are the so-called “intelligent” people and there are those who do not know how to use it, these are the so-called “fools”.   This is an altogether subjective way of speaking. To act, you have to make some classiﬁcations and it is just for this that the mind is useful: it organises, it puts each thing in its place, it plays the game; and it is this activity which creates the rules of the game and by obeying these rules it can win the game. But true knowledge comes from elsewhere.  This is a negative way of looking at the problem.


The Mother: If one believed that immortality was possible, that would be a more active way of seeing; and not only that it is possible but it will be realised later, then one would be strong enough to resist.    Who will tell me what constitutes an individual? What is it that gives you the impression that you are a person existing in himself?


The Mother: Ah, no! That does not prove that you are individualised.  What is it that gives you the impression that you are an individual?... When you were ten, you were very different from what you were when you were born, and now you are very different from what you were at ten, aren’t you? The form grows within certain limits and there is a similarity, but even so, it is quite different from what it was at your birth; you may almost say, “It was not I.”


The Mother: So much for the physical. Now, take your inner consciousness when you were ﬁve and now. Nobody would say it is the same person. And your thoughts, at ﬁve and now? All are different.


The Mother: But in spite of everything, what is it that gives you the impression that it is who is thinking?  Let us take the example of a river following its course: it is never the same water which ﬂows. What is a river? There is not a drop that ever is the same, no stability is there, then where is the river? (Some take this example to prove that there is no personality — they are very anxious to prove that there is no personality.)


The Mother: For beings it is the same thing: the consciousness changes, ideas change, sensations change, what then is the being? Some say that individuality is based upon memory, remembrance: you remember therefore you are an individual being. This is absolutely wrong, for even if you had no memory you would still be an individual being.  The bed localises the river, but the bed also changes much; which  means that all is inconstant, all is fugitive, and this is true.


The Mother: But it is only one part of the truth, it is not the whole. You feel quite  clearly that there is something “stable” in you, don’t you, but where does this sensation of stability come from?  When the vast majority of people say “I”, it is a part of them, of their feeling, their body, their thought, indifferently, which speaks; it is something that always changes. Therefore, their “I” is innumerable, or the “I” always varies. What is the constant thing therein?...


The Mother: The psychic being, evidently. For, to be constant a thing must ﬁrst be immortal. Otherwise it cannot be constant.  Then, it must also be independent of the experiences through which it passes: it cannot be the experiences themselves. Hence, it is certainly not the bed of the river which constitutes the river; the bed is only a circumstance.


The Mother: If the comparison is carried a little farther (besides, comparisons are worthless, people ﬁnd in them whatever they want), it can be said that the river is a good symbol of life, that what is constant in the river is the species “water”. It is not always the same drop of water, but it is always water — without water there would be no river. And what endures in the human being is the species “consciousness”.  It is because it has a consciousness that it endures. It is not the forms which last, it is the consciousness, the power of binding together all these forms, of passing through all these things, not only keeping a memory of them (memory is something very external), but keeping the same vibration of consciousness.


The Mother: And that is the great mystery of creation, for it is the same consciousness, the Consciousness is one. But the very moment this Consciousness manifests itself, exteriorises itself, deploys itself, it divides itself into innumerable fragments for the need  of expansion, and each one of these fragmentations has been the beginning, the origin of an individual being. The origin of every individual form is the law of this form or the truth of this form. If there were no law, no truth of each form, there would be no possibility of individualisation. It would be something extending indeﬁnitely; there would be perhaps points of concentration, assemblages, but no individual consciousness.


The Mother: Each form then represents one element in the changing of the One into the many. This multiplicity implies an innumerable quantity of laws, elements of consciousness, truths which spread out into the universe and ﬁnally become separate individualities. So the individual being seems constantly to go farther and farther away from its origin by the very necessity of individualisation. But once this individualisation, that is, this awareness of the inner truth is complete, it becomes possible, by an inner identiﬁcation, to reestablish in the multiplicity the original unity; that is the purpose of the universe as we perceive it. The universe has been made so that this phenomenon may take place.


The Mother: The Supreme has manifested Himself to Himself so as to become aware of Himself.  In any case, that is the purpose of creation. Let us be satisﬁed with our universe, let us make the best use possible of our life upon earth and the rest will come in its time.  It is purposely, mind you, that I have not mentioned the ego as one of the causes of the sense of individuality. For the ego being a falsehood and an illusion, the sense of individuality would itself be false and illusory (as Buddha and Shankara afﬁrm), whereas the origin of individualisation being in the Supreme Himself, the ego is only a passing deformation, necessary for the moment, which will disappear when its utility is over, when the Truth-Consciousness will be established.


The Mother: Why do disasters occur?  This is partly true. But I don’t think Nature has this feeling.  When there is an earthquake, for instance, or a volcano erupts, if there are men staying nearby and these events cause their death, obviously it is for these men a catastrophe, but we could very well imagine that for Nature it is good fun! We say, “What a terrible wind!”


The Mother: Naturally, for men it is “terrible”, but not for Nature. It is a question of proportion, isn’t it? I don’t know if it is necessary to bring into the picture a higher force wanting to manifest and a resistance from Nature; it is possible, but not indispensable. It can be understood quite easily that it is the play of Nature with tremendous forces and that for her it is only a diversion; in any case, nothing catastrophic. For the consciousness of Nature or the material consciousness, physical forms and humanity upon earth are like ants.


The Mother: You yourself, when you walk, you do not ﬁnd it necessary to move out of the way to avoid crushing the ants!—unless you are a stubborn “nonviolent” fellow. You walk, and if you crush a few hundred ants, it can’t be helped! Well, it is the same with Nature. She goes on, and if in the course of her march she destroys a few thousand men, it is not of much importance for her, she can make again a few millions! It is not difﬁcult.


The Mother: This reminds me of what happened in Paris when I was seventeen or eighteen. There was a “charity bazaar”. This charity  bazaar was a place where men from all over the world came to buy and sell all kinds of things, and the proceeds of the sale went to works of charity (it was meant more for amusement than for doing good, but still, charitable works proﬁted by it).  All the elegance, all the reﬁnement of high society was gathered there. Now, the bazaar was very beautiful but not solidly built, because it was to last only for three or four days.


The Mother: The roof was of painted tarpaulin which had been suspended. Everything was lighted by electricity; the work was more or less decently done, but naturally with the idea that it was only for a few days. There was a short-circuit, everything began to blaze up; the roof caught ﬁre and suddenly collapsed upon the people. As I said, all the ´elite of society were there — for them, from the human point of view, it was a frightful catastrophe. There were people near the entrance who tried to escape; others, all ablaze, also tried to reach the door and run away.


The Mother: It was a veritable scufﬂe! All these elegant, reﬁned people, who usually were so well-mannered, began to ﬁght like street rowdies. There was even a Count of something or other, a very well-known man, a poet, a man of perfect elegance, who carried a silver-knobbed stick, and he was surprised in the act of hitting women on the head with his stick, and trying to push forward! Indeed, it was a ﬁne sight, something most elegant! Afterwards, lamentations in society, big funerals and many stories....


The Mother: Now, a Dominican, a well-known orator, was asked to give a speech over the tombs of the unfortunate who had perished in the ﬁre. He said something to this effect: “It serves you right. You did not live according to the law of God and He has punished you by burning you.”  And every time there was a disaster this story was repeated.  Naturally many people protested and said, “Here’s a God whom we won’t have!”


The Mother: But these ideas are quite typical of ordinary humanity.  “Sinning” humanity is altogether a Christian idea, which falsiﬁes our idea of the Divine — a Divine who punishes poor  people because it is their misfortune to be born “sinners” would not be very generous! However...  “To ﬁt the universe into the size of the human mind”, this is precisely what everybody does. And not only do they judge the universe, but they judge the divine principles which have made it and they imagine they are able to know something.


The Mother: It is not only a freedom from all attachment, but a liberation from all bondage to the law of consequences. In the material ﬁeld there is a determinism which comes from the law of consequences, from the law of cause and effect; hence inner liberation does not free you only from all attachment but from all consequences. As I have told you many a time, by your inner liberation your consciousness rises to a level far above the level which governs the material world and, from this high level, the Force can descend and cancel all the material consequences.  If you succeed in forcing it, very well. But it is not so easy.


The Mother: It is not enough to decide to force it for this to happen! It revolts.  And it is not the only one to revolt. Then what are you going to do with this mind in revolt? Leave it to do what it likes?


The Mother: Exhaust all that? It is not a very ﬁne procedure!   The functioning is not the same with everyone. There are people who have a great light in the mind (or think they have it!), they know things, they know how the world and others ought to behave and, moreover, they are sure that they, they are very far on the road, but when they begin to act they are more stupid than the little street urchin. Why?


The Mother: Because it is not the mind which has decided, and even if it has decided, it is not the mind which has executed; what has executed does not recognise at all the authority of the mind, but tells it: “Leave me alone, don’t bother me! I act according to my own inspiration!” Then, what are you going to do? Try to give a lesson to your mind?  You may always try, but it is not sure that you will succeed.


The Mother: It is not an easy problem.... Human nature is very unstable; after having thought in one way, it thinks in another; after having felt in one way, it feels in another, and so on; nothing lasts: the good not longer than the bad; the bad, a little longer than the good!  But anyway, this does not last indeﬁnitely. So, if you have the patience to wait, surely it will change!  Yes, surely


The Mother: , because in this way nothing will change, it is only the rhythm which will change. It is like those colour-wheels: sometimes one sees one colour, sometimes another, and if one waits long enough one sees the red, blue, white, red, blue, white... indeﬁnitely. There are people who have a pretty little theory like that, which I have often heard; they say that one’s vital should never be repressed, it must be allowed to do all it wants, it will get tired and be cured! This is the height of stupidity!


The Mother: First, because the vital by its very nature is never satisﬁed, and if a certain kind of activity becomes insipid, it will double the dose: if its stupidities bore it, it will increase its stupidities and its excesses, and if that tires it, as soon as it has rested it will start again. For it will not be changed. Others say that if you sit upon your vital it will be suppressed and, one day, it will shoot up like  a steam-jet... and this is true. Hence, to repress the vital is not a solution.


The Mother: To let it do what it likes is not a solution either, and generally this brings on fairly serious disorders. There must be a third solution.  Obviously, but the problem remains. You aspire for a change, perhaps for a speciﬁc change; but the answer to your aspiration will not come immediately and in the meantime your nature will resist. Things happen like this: at a given moment the nature seems to have yielded and you think you have got the desired result.


The Mother: Your aspiration diminishes in intensity because you think you have the desired result. But the other fellow, who is very cunning and is waiting quietly in his corner, when you are off your guard, he springs up like a jack-in-the-box, and then you must begin all over again.   Ah! One must not be so sure of that.


The Mother: I have known people who wanted to save the world by reducing it so much that there was no longer a world left! This is the ascetic way — you want to do away with the problem by doing away with the possibility of the problem. But this will never change anything.  No, there is a method — a sure one — but your method must be very clear-sighted and you must have a wide-awake consciousness of your person and of what goes on there and the way in which things happen. Let us take the instance of a person subject to outbursts of rage and violence.


The Mother: According to one method he would be told: “Get as angry as you like, you will suffer the consequences of your anger and this will cure you.” This is debatable. According to another method he would be told: “Sit upon your anger and it will disappear.” This too  is debatable. In any case, you will have to sit upon it all the time, for if ever you should get up for a minute you will see immediately what happens!


The Mother: Then, what is to be done?  You must become more and more conscious. You must observe how the thing happens, by what road the danger approaches, and stand in the way before it can take hold of you.  If you want to cure yourself of a defect or a difﬁculty, there is but one method: to be perfectly vigilant, to have a very alert and vigilant consciousness. First you must see very clearly what you want to do.


The Mother: You must not hesitate, be full of doubt and say, “Is it good to do this or not, does this come into the synthesis or should it not come in?” You will see that if you trust your mind, it will always shuttle back and forth: it vacillates all the time. If you take a decision it will put before you all the arguments to show you that your decision is not good, and you will be tossed between the “yes” and “no”, the black and white, and will arrive at nothing. Hence, ﬁrst, you must know exactly what you want — know, not mentally, but through concentration, through aspiration and a very conscious will. That is the important point.


The Mother: Afterwards, gradually, by observation, by a sustained vigilance, you must realise a sort of method which will be personal to you — it is useless to convince others to adopt the same method as yours, for that won’t succeed. Everyone must ﬁnd his own method, everyone must have his own method, and to the extent you put into practice your method, it will become clearer and clearer, more and more precise. You can correct a certain point, make clear another, etc. So, you start working.... For a while, all will go well.


The Mother: Then, one day, you will ﬁnd yourself facing an insurmountable difﬁculty and will tell yourself, “I have done all that and look, everything is as bad as before!” Then, in this case, you must, through a yet more sustained concentration, open an inner door in you and bring into this movement a force which was not there formerly, a state of consciousness which was not there before. And there, there will be a power, when your own personal power will be exhausted and no longer effective. When  the personal power runs out ordinary people say, “That’s good, I can no longer do anything, it is ﬁnished.” But I tell you that when you ﬁnd yourself before this wall, it is the beginning of something new.


The Mother: By an obstinate concentration, you must pass over to the other side of the wall and there you will ﬁnd a new knowledge, a new force, a new power, a new help, and you will be able to work out a new system, a new method which surely will take you very far.  I do not say this to discourage you; only, things happen like that. And the worst of all is to get discouraged when it happens.  You must tell yourself, “With the means of transport at my disposal I have reached a certain point, but these means do not allow me to go further. What should I do?


The Mother: ... Sit there and not stir any longer? — not at all. I must ﬁnd other means of transport.”  This will happen quite often, but after a while you will get used to it.


The Mother: You must sit down for a moment, meditate, and then ﬁnd other means. You must increase your concentration, your aspiration and your trust and with the new help which comes to you, make a new programme, work out other means to replace those you have left behind. This is how one progresses stage by stage.  But you must take great care to apply at each stage, as perfectly as possible, what you have gained or learnt. If you remain in an indrawn state of consciousness and do not apply materially the inner progress, a time will certainly come when you will not be able to move at all, for your outer being, unchanged, will be like a fetter pulling you back and hindering you from advancing.


The Mother: So, the most important point (what everybody says but only a few do) is to put into practice what you know. With that you have a good chance of succeeding, and with perseverance you will certainly get there.  You must never get discouraged when you ﬁnd yourself before a wall, never say, “Oh! What shall I do? It is still there.”


The Mother: In this way the difﬁculty will still be there and still there and still there, till the very end. It is only when you reach the goal that everything will suddenly crumble down.   The mind must learn to be silent — remain calm, attentive, without making a noise. If you try to silence your mind directly, it is a hard job, almost impossible; for the most material part of the mind never stops its activity — it goes on and on like a non-stop recording machine. It repeats all that it records and unless there is a switch to stop it, it continues and continues indeﬁnitely.


The Mother: If, on the other hand, you manage to shift your consciousness into a higher domain, above the ordinary mind, this opening to the Light calms the mind, it does not stir any longer, and the mental silence so obtained can become constant. Once you enter into this domain, you may very well never come out of it — the external mind always remains calm.   The only true solution is aspiration for the higher light.


The Mother: Try to make them understand, as one does with a child who does not understand, by all kinds of means: pictures, explanations, symbols. Make them understand the necessity of union and harmony with the other parts of the being; reason with them, try to make them conscious of their acts and the consequences of these. Above all, be very patient, do not tire of repeating the same things.  Yes, if a part of the mind is fully enlightened, if it is surrendered to the psychic light and has a sense of the truth, the mind can be of great help, it can explain things in the true way.


The Mother: All depends on the category to which one belongs, and the degree of the psychic being’s development. If the psychic being is in an advanced stage, near maturity, the choice before death, about which I spoke to you the other day, is quite real and this choice means that everything is possible; but in other cases, the rebirth takes place almost automatically. The will of the psychic being is not developed and it does not choose. Hence, there are no rules. It depends very much on circumstances, and especially on the line of formation which the psychic being will follow, and that depends on its origin.


The Mother: It is difﬁcult to say. In the matter of sex, that may vary for a long time. As the consciousness grows and gains some unity of action, of consciousness, it can choose to follow one line to the exclusion of another, but before this choice, through innumerable creations you have been undoubtedly of different sexes. That is why perhaps some women have a masculine character, and vice versa, or have tendencies opposite to their sex. But at the time of the “choice” one may decide to belong to the creatrix Consciousness or to the immobile Witness.


The Mother: That depends upon the origin.  This is how things happen. The origin of the psychic life, the divine Presence in Matter is one and the same, that’s understood, but there are beings in the higher world who have never taken a body upon earth and who want to act there, have a terrestrial action. So they wait till some psychic beings attain their full development and unite with them to do some work according to their nature. Their consciousness is added to the psychic consciousness upon earth.


The Mother: These are beings who have never taken birth here, beings who materialised themselves more and more as the creation proceeded. They are perhaps the ﬁrst emanations, beings sent into the universe for special reasons — men call them “gods” or “demi-gods”. So, one of these beings may have chosen, for some special reason, a psychic being in formation — he helps it, follows its development and, when this psychic is sufﬁciently ready and sufﬁciently strong to be able to support the identiﬁcation, he unites with it, identiﬁes with it to do some work upon earth. This is not very frequent, but it has happened and still happens. You ﬁnd stories in ancient traditions about gods incarnating upon earth; some mythologies speak of them.


The Mother: That corresponds to something true. But all psychic beings are not necessarily united with a being of the higher planes.  No, I said that the ﬁrst thing they have to do to incarnate is to drive away the psychic being of the person whom they possess.  That may happen from the very birth. There are children who  are almost stillborn; they are taken to be dead and suddenly they revive — this means that a vital being has incarnated in them.


The Mother: I have known such cases. This may happen also in the course of an illness: someone is very ill and gradually he begins to lose contact with the psychic being, then, in a swoon or some other similar state, he cuts the contact entirely and the vital being rushes into the body. I have known cases of this kind also. Or it may be a slow action: the vital being enters into the atmosphere of the person, goes on inﬂuencing him and ﬁnally brings about illness, attacks, especially mental illness; then a time comes when the connection with the psychic being is entirely cut and the vital being takes possession of the body. There are cases of people falling very ill and coming out of the illness altogether different from what they were.


The Mother: Very often it is this that happens.  They are attracted, but this does not mean that they have decided sincerely to follow the spiritual life. The chief characteristic of these beings is falsehood: their nature is made of deceit. They have a power of illusion; they can take the appearance of divine beings or higher beings, they can appear in a dazzling light, but truly sincere people are not deceived, they immediately feel something that warns them. But if one likes the marvellous, the unexpected, if one loves fantastic things, if one likes to live a romance, one is likely to be easily deceived.


The Mother: Not long ago there was a historical instance, that of Hitler, who was in contact with a being whom he considered to be the Supreme: this being came and gave him advice, told him all that he had to do. Hitler used to retire into solitude and remain there as long as it was necessary to come into contact with his “guide” and receive from him inspirations which he carried out later very faithfully. This being which Hitler took for the Supreme was quite plainly an Asura, one who is called the “Lord  of Falsehood” in occultism, but who proclaimed himself the “Lord of the Nations”. He had a shining appearance, he could mislead anybody except one who really had occult knowledge and could see what was there behind the appearance. He would have deceived anybody, he was truly splendid.


The Mother: Generally he used to appear to Hitler wearing a silver cuirass and helmet; a kind of ﬂame came out of his head and there was an atmosphere of dazzling light around him, so dazzling that Hitler could hardly look at him. He used to tell Hitler everything that had to be done — he played with him as with a monkey or a mouse. He had decided clearly to make Hitler commit all possible extravagances till the day he would break his neck, which did happen. But cases like this are frequent, though on a smaller scale, of course.


The Mother: Hitler was a very good medium, he had great mediumistic capacities, but he lacked intelligence and discrimination. This being could tell him anything whatever and he swallowed it all.  It was he who pushed Hitler little by little. And he was doing this as a distraction, he did not take life seriously. For these beings men are very tiny things with whom they play, as a cat plays with a mouse, till ﬁnally they eat them up.


The Mother: Yes, unless there is a physical lesion, a defect in the formation or an accident, a congestion. In all other cases it is always a possession. The proof of it is that if a person is brought to you who is altogether mentally deranged, if he has a lesion, he cannot be cured, while if there is no physical lesion, if it is a possession, then one can cure him. Unfortunately these things happen only to people who like them; there must be in the being much ambition, vanity, combined with much stupidity and a terrible pride — it is on such things that those beings play.


The Mother: I have known cases like that, of persons who were partially possessed, and I succeeded in freeing them from the beings who possessed them. Naturally they felt some relief, a kind of ease  for a time, but it did not last long; almost immediately it wore off and they thought: “Now I have become quite an ordinary creature, whereas before I was an exceptional being!” They used to feel within them an exceptional power, even if it was a power to do evil, and they were satisﬁed with it. So what did they do? They called back with all their force the power they had lost!


The Mother: Of course, the being that had been destroyed could not come back, but as these beings exist in thousands it was replaced by another. I have seen this happen three times consecutively in a case, so much so that in the end I had to tell the person: “I am tired, get rid of it yourself, I am no longer interested!”  Generally, it goes away.  I must tell you that the beings of the vital world are immortal — they cannot die. They can be destroyed, but it is only the pure spiritual force which can destroy them.