The Mother: But unfortunately it is not always true, for this goes down into the subconscient and, one day, when the balance of forces is not so well established, when the strength is not the same, it begins again. And one laments, “I believed that it was over! I had succeeded and told myself, ‘It is true that spiritual power has an action upon the body, it is true that something can be done’, and there! it is not true. And yet it was a small thing, and I who want to conquer immortality!


The Mother: How will I succeed?... For years I have been free from this small thing and here it is beginning anew!” It is then that you must be careful.  You must arm yourself with an endless patience and endurance. You do a thing once, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times if necessary, but you do it till it gets done.


The Mother: And not done only here and there, but everywhere and everywhere at the same time. This is the great problem one sets oneself. That is why, to those who come to tell me very light-heartedly, “I want to do yoga”, I reply, “Think it over, one may do the yoga for a number of years without noticing the least result. But if you want to do it, you must persist and persist with such a will that you should be ready to do it for ten lifetimes, a hundred lifetimes if necessary, in order to succeed.” I do not say it will be like that, but the must be like that.


The Mother: Nothing must discourage you; for there are all the difﬁculties of ignorance  of the different states of being, to which are added the endless malice and the unbounded cunning of the hostile forces in the world.... They are there, do you know why? They have been tolerated, do you know why? — simply to see how long one can last out and how great is the sincerity in one’s action. For everything depends upon your sincerity.


The Mother: If you are truly sincere in your will, nothing will stop you, you will go right to the end, and if it is necessary for you to live a thousand years to do it, you will live a thousand years to do it.  If it seeks to transform itself, it is truly wonderful! And if it aspires for transformation, it will try to free itself. If the vital is weak, its aspiration will be weak. And mark that weakness is an insincerity, a sort of excuse one gives oneself — not very, very consciously perhaps, but you must be told that the subconscient is a place full of insincerity.


The Mother: And the weakness which says, “I would like it so much, but I can’t” is insincerity. Because, if one is sincere, what one cannot do today one will do tomorrow, and what one cannot do tomorrow one will do the day after, and so on, until one can do it. If you understand once for all that the entire universe (or, if you like, our earth, to concentrate the problem) is nothing other than the Divine who has forgotten Himself, where will you ﬁnd a place for weakness there? Not in the Divine surely! Then, in forgetfulness.


The Mother: And if you struggle against forgetfulness you struggle against weakness, and to the extent you draw closer to the Divine your weakness disappears.  And that holds good not only for the mind, but also for the vital and even for the body. All suffering, all weaknesses, all incapabilities are, in the last analysis, insincerities.  There are many places where insincerity may be lodged, and hence it should never be said as so often people say to me, “I  am perfectly sincere.” It is like those who assure you, “I have never told a lie.”


The Mother: If you were perfectly sincere, you would be the Divine, if you had never told a lie, that is, something that is not true, you would be the Truth! So, as you are neither the Divine nor the Truth in fact (you are that in essence but not in fact), you have always a long way to go to reach the Truth and sincerity.  You need not look unhappy because it is like that.  It is like those people in despair who tell you, “Why is the world so frightful?” What is the use of lamenting, since it is like that?


The Mother: The only thing you can do is to work to change it. Naturally, from a speculative point of view one may try to understand, but the human mind is incapable of understanding such things. For the moment it is quite useless. What is useful is to change it. We all agree that the world is detestable, that it is not what it ought to be, and the only thing we have to do is to work to make it otherwise.


The Mother: Consequently, our whole preoccupation should be to ﬁnd the best means of making it different; and we can understand one thing, it is that the best means (though we do not know it quite well yet), is we ourselves, isn’t it? And surely you know yourself better than you know your neighbour — you understand better the consciousness manifested in a human being than that manifested in the stars, for instance. So, after a little hesitation you could say, “After all, the best means is what I am. I don’t know very well what I am, but this kind of collection of things that I am, this perhaps is my work, this is perhaps my part of the work, and if I do it as well as I can, perhaps I shall be doing the best I can do.” This is a very big beginning, very big.


The Mother: It is not overwhelming, not beyond the limits of your possibilities.  You have your work at hand, it is always within your reach, so to say, it is always there for you to attend to it — a ﬁeld of action proportionate to your strength, but varied enough, complex, vast, deep enough to be interesting. And you explore this unknown world.  Many people tell you, “But then this is egoism!” It is egoism  if you do it in an egoistic way, for your personal proﬁt, if you try to acquire powers, to become powerful enough to inﬂuence others, or if you seek means to make a comfortable life for yourself.


The Mother: Naturally, if you do it in this spirit, it will be egoistic. But the beauty of it is that you will not get anywhere! You will begin by deceiving yourself, you will live in increasing illusions and you will fall back into a greater and greater obscurity. Consequently, things are organised much better than one thinks; if you do your work egoistically (we have said that our ﬁeld of work is always within our reach), it will come to nothing. And hence the required condition is to do it with an absolute sincerity in your aspiration for the realisation of the divine work.


The Mother: So if you start like that I can assure you that you will have such an interesting journey that even if it takes very long, you will never get tired.  But you must do it like that with an intensity of will, with perseverance and that indispensable cheerfulness which smiles at difﬁculties and laughs at mistakes. Then everything will go well.  Consciousness itself. It is because that is there, without it one would never get anywhere.


The Mother: If the supreme Consciousness were not at the centre of all creation, never could the creation become aware of the Consciousness.  The source of sincerity, of will, of perseverance is in the psychic being, but this translates itself differently in different people.  Generally it is in the higher part of the mind that this begins to take shape, but for it to be effective at least one part of the vital must respond, because the intensity of your will comes from   there, the realising power of the will comes from its contact with the vital. If there were only refractory elements in the vital, you would not be able to do anything at all.


The Mother: But there is always something, somewhere, which is willing — it is perhaps something insigniﬁcant, but there is always something which is willing. It is enough to have had once one minute of aspiration and a will even if it be very fugitive, to become conscious of the Divine, to realise the Divine, for it to ﬂash like lightning through the whole being — there are even cells of the body which respond. This is not visible all at once, but there is a response everywhere.  And it is by slowly, carefully, putting together all these parts which have responded, though it be but once, that one can build up something which will be coherent and organised, and which will permit one’s action to continue with will, sincerity and perseverance.  Even a ﬂeeting idea in a child, at a certain moment in its childhood when the psychic being is most in front, if it succeeds in penetrating through the outer consciousness and giving the child just an impression of something beautiful which must be realised, it creates a little nucleus and upon this you build your action.


The Mother: There is a vast mass of humanity to whom one would never say, “You must realise the Divine” or “Do yoga to ﬁnd the Divine.” If you observe well you will see that it is a tiny minority to whom this can be said. It means that this minority of beings is “prepared” to do yoga, it is that. It is that there has been a beginning of realisation — a beginning is enough. With others it is perhaps an old thing, an awakening which may come from past lives.


The Mother: But we are speaking of those who are less ready; they are those who have had at a certain moment a ﬂash which has passed through their whole being and created a response, but that sufﬁces. This does not happen to many people. Those ready to do yoga are not many if you compare them with the unconscious human mass. But one thing is certain, the fact that you are all here proves that at least you have had that — there are those who are very far on the path (sometimes they have no  idea about it), but at least all of you have had that, that kind of spontaneous integral contact which is like an electric shock, a lightning-ﬂash which goes through you and wakes you up to something: there is something to be realised. It is possible that the experience is not translated into words, only into a ﬂame.


The Mother: That is enough. And it is around this nucleus that one organises oneself, slowly, slowly, progressively. And once it is there it never disappears. It is only if you have made a pact with the adverse forces and make a considerable effort to break the contact and not notice its existence, that you may believe it has disappeared.  And yet a single ﬂash sufﬁces for it to come back


The Mother: .  If you have had this just once, you may tell yourself that in this life or another you are sure to realise.   All religions were perhaps not that in their beginning, but they have certainly become that with time.   These are Buddhist terms.


The Mother: This is the translation of a Pali word, I believe. It is said that the religion of the North is the “Great Vehicle” and the religion of the South the “Little Vehicle”. The Little Vehicle abides by quite a strict teaching according to what has been preserved or is believed to have been preserved of the words of the Buddha.  You know the Buddha used to say that there was no God, there was no persistence of the ego, there were no beings of higher worlds who could incarnate here, there were no...


The Mother: He  denied almost every possible thing. The religion of the South is like that, it is extremely nihilistic, it says no, no, no to everything;  while in the religion of the North, which has been practised in Tibet, and spread from Tibet into China and from China to Japan, one ﬁnds the Bodhisattvas (who stand for saints as in all other religions), all the previous Buddhas who are also like some sort of demigods or gods. I don’t know if you have ever had a chance to visit a Buddhist temple of the North (I saw them in China and Japan), for you enter halls where there are innumerable statuettes — all the Bodhisattvas, all the disciples of those Bodhisattvas, all the forces of nature deiﬁed, indeed you are overwhelmed by the number of gods! On the other hand, if you go to the South, there is nothing, not a single image.


The Mother: I believe they speak of the “Great Vehicle” because there are lots of things inside, and the “Little Vehicle” because there are few!  I don’t know exactly the origin of the two terms.  You have come into the world in a certain milieu, among certain people. When you are quite young, but for a few rare exceptions, what surrounds you seems altogether natural to you, because you are born in its midst and are quite used to it. But when, a little later, a spiritual aspiration wakes up in you, you may quite possibly feel yourself completely ill at ease in the environment where you have lived, if, for instance, the people who have  brought you up don’t have the same aspiration or if their ideas are the very opposite of what is developing in you.


The Mother: Instead of saying, “You see, I belong to this family, what shall I do? I have a mother, a father, brothers, sisters...”, you can set out in search (I don’t mean necessarily travel), set out in search of spirits who have an afﬁnity with yours, people who have a similar aspiration and, if you have the sincere aspiration to ﬁnd those who like you are in quest of something, you will always have the occasion to meet them in one way or another, through quite unexpected circumstances; and when you have found one or more people who are in exactly the same state of mind and have the same aspiration, quite naturally there will be created bonds of closeness, intimacy, friendship and, among you, you will form a kind of brotherhood, that is to say, a true family. You are together because you are close to one another, you are together because you have the same aspiration, you are together because you want to create the same goal in life; you understand one another when you speak, you have no need to discuss anything which is said and you live in a kind of inner harmony. This is the true family, this is the family of aspiration, the family of spiritual inclinations.  Now, about the country, this may depend upon all sorts of things, this may depend upon a sort of inner afﬁnity.


The Mother: For instance, if you come to a country and there you ﬁnd a kind of response, an inner response to your aspiration, you ﬁnd the surroundings more in conformity with your tastes, your tendencies, you may very well choose to live in this country, which is not necessarily that of your birth; and since you choose that country to live there, you may say, “This is my country.” There are people, many people who go and settle elsewhere for very materialistic and uninteresting reasons most of the time, but there are also others who are in search of an environment which suits their inner taste, their aspiration, or who seek lands, ways of living more in keeping with their deeper nature; then they settle down somewhere and don’t move again, and when they  stay there for a number of years, they can really feel that this country is theirs, much more than the house or village or city where they were born.  If your birth was not an accident, you could very well think there was no distortion, but what you are at your birth is most of the time almost absolutely what your mother and father have made you, and also, through them, what your grandparents have made you. There are certain vital traditions in families and, besides, there is the state of consciousness in which you were formed, conceived — the moment at which you were conceived — and that, not once in a million times does that state conform to true aspiration; and it is only a true aspiration which could make your vital pure of all mixture, make the vital element attracted for the formation of the being a pure element, free from all contagion ; I mean that if a psychic being enters there, it can gather elements favourable to its growth.


The Mother: In the world as it is, things are so mixed up, have been so mixed up in every way, that it is almost impossible to have elements of the vital sufﬁciently pure not to suffer the contagion of all other contaminated beings.  I think I have already spoken about that, I have said what kind of aspiration ought to be there in the parents before the birth; but as I said, this does not happen even once in a hundred thousand instances. The willed conception of a child is extremely rare; mostly it is an accident. Among innumerable parents it is quite a small minority that even simply bothers about what a child could be; they do not even know that what the child will be depends on what they are. It is a very small ´elite which knows this.


The Mother: Most of the time things go as they can; anything at all happens and people don’t even realise what is happening. So, in these conditions how do you expect to be born with a vital being sufﬁciently pure to be of help to you? One is born with a slough to clean before one begins to live. And once you have made  a good start on the way to the inner transformation and you go down to the subconscient root of the being — that exactly which comes from parents, from atavism — well, you do see what it is! And all, almost all difﬁculties are there, there are very few things added to existence after the ﬁrst years of life.


The Mother: This happens at any odd moment; if you keep bad company or read bad books, the poison may enter you; but there are all the imprints deep-rooted in the subconscient, the dirty habits you have and against which you struggle. For instance, there are people who can’t open their mouth without telling a lie, and they don’t always do this deliberately (that is the worst of it), or people who can’t come in touch with others without quarrelling, all sorts of stupidities — they are there in the subconscient, deeply rooted. Now, when you have a goodwill, externally you do your best to avoid all that, to correct it if possible; you work, you ﬁght; then become aware that this thing always keeps coming up, it comes up from some part which escapes your control.  But if you enter this subconscient, if you let your consciousness inﬁltrate it, and look carefully, gradually you will discover all the sources, all the origins of all your difﬁculties; then you will begin to understand what your fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers were, and if at a certain moment you are unable to control yourself, you will understand, “I am like that because they were like that.”  If you have within you a psychic being sufﬁciently awake to watch over you, to prepare your path, it can draw towards you things which help you, draw people, books, circumstances, all sorts of little coincidences which come to you as though brought by some benevolent will and give you an indication, a help, a support to take decisions and turn you in the right direction.


The Mother: But once you have taken this decision, once you have decided to ﬁnd the truth of your being, once you start sincerely on the road, then everything seems to conspire to help you to advance, and if you observe carefully you see gradually the source of your difﬁculties: “Ah! Wait a minute, this defect was in my father; oh!   this habit was my mother’s; oh! my grandmother was like this, my grandfather was like that.” Or it could well be the nurse who took care of you when you were small, or brothers and sisters who played with you, the little friends you met, and you will ﬁnd that all this was there, in this person or that or the other. But if you continue to be sincere, you ﬁnd you can cross all this quite calmly, and after a time you cut all the moorings with which you were born, break the chains and go freely on the path.


The Mother: If you really want to transform your character, it is that you must do. It has always been said that it is impossible to change one’s nature; in all books of philosophy, even of yoga, you are told the same story: “You cannot change your character, you are born like that, you are like that.” This is absolutely false, I guarantee it is false; but there is something very difﬁcult to do to change your character, because it is not your character which must be changed, it is the character of your antecedents. In them you will not change it (because they have no such intention), but it is in you that it must be changed. It is what they have given you, all the little gifts made to you at your birth — nice gifts — it is this which must be changed.


The Mother: But if you succeed in getting hold of the thread of these things, the true thread, since you have worked upon this with perseverance and sincerity, one ﬁne morning you will be free; all this will fall off from you and you will be able to get a start in life without any burden. Then you will be a new man, living a new life, almost with a new nature.  And if you look back you will say, “It is not possible, I was never like that!”   If there is one mental disorder which can bring about all illnesses, it is fear.  But, each man can make his own experiment.


The Mother: If one has a bad throat, this may be due to the fact that the day before one was in a state of depression. Or perhaps one is very unhappy, dissatisﬁed, one ﬁnds everything very bad, and the next day one gets a cold in the head.... Everyone must make his own observations.   In the ancient schools of initiation there was the practice of saying simply “This is true” or “This is false” to those who already had the knowledge of these things.  Can anyone relate his experience on this subject?


The Mother: Naturally you must be able to give the correlation between a certain psychological state and a particular part of the body.  I don’t see any contradiction!... There are two ways of curing an illness spiritually. One consists in putting a force of consciousness and truth on the physical spot which is affected. In this case the effect produced depends naturally on the receptivity of the person.


The Mother: Supposing the person is receptive; the force of consciousness is put upon the affected part and its pressure restores order. Many of you here can tell how Sri Aurobindo cured them. It was like a hand which came and took away the pain. It is as clear as that.  In other cases, if the body lacks receptivity altogether or if its receptivity is insufﬁcient, one sees the inner correspondence with the psychological state which has brought about the illness and acts on that.


The Mother: But if the cause of the illness is refractory, not much can be done. Let us say the origin is vital. The vital absolutely refuses to change, it clings terriﬁcally to the condition in which it is; then that is hopeless. You put the force, and usually it provokes an increase in the illness, produced by the resistance of the vital which did not want to accept anything. I speak of the vital but it can be the mind or something else.


The Mother: When the action is directly upon the body, that is, on the  affected part, it is possible that one is relieved; then, some hours later or even after a few days, the illness returns. This means that the cause has not been changed, that the cause is in the vital and is still there; it is only the effect which has been cured. But if one can act simultaneously upon both the cause and the effect, and the cause is sufﬁciently receptive to consent to change, then one is completely cured, once for all.  I knew it was that!  It depends on the part.


The Mother: The method is almost the same for all parts of the being. To begin with, the ﬁrst condition: to remain as quiet as possible. You may notice that in the different parts of your being, when something comes and you do not receive it, this produces a shrinking — there is something which hardens in the vital, the mind or the body. There is a stiffening and this hurts, one feels a mental, vital or physical pain. So, the ﬁrst thing is to put one’s will and relax this shrinking, as one does a twitching nerve or a cramped muscle; you must learn how to relax, be able to relieve this tension in whatever part of the being it may be.


The Mother: The method of relaxing the contraction may be different  in the mind, the vital or the body, but logically it is the same thing. Once you have relaxed the tension, you see ﬁrst if the disagreeable effect ceases, which would prove that it was a small momentary resistance, but if the pain continues and if it is indeed necessary to increase the receptivity in order to be able to receive what is helpful, what should be received, you must, after having relaxed this contraction, begin trying to widen yourself — you feel you are widening yourself. There are many methods. Some ﬁnd it very useful to imagine they are ﬂoating on water with a plank under their back. Then they widen themselves, widen, until they become the vast liquid mass.


The Mother: Others make an effort to identify themselves with the sky and the stars, so they widen, widen themselves, identifying themselves more and more with the sky. Others again don’t need these pictures; they can become conscious of their consciousness, enlarge their consciousness more and more until it becomes unlimited. One can enlarge it till it becomes vast as the earth and even the universe. When one does that one becomes really receptive. As I have said, it is a question of training.


The Mother: In any case, from an immediate point of view, when something comes and one feels that it is too strong, that it gives a headache, that one can’t bear it, the method is just the same, you must act upon the contraction. One can act through thought, by calling the peace, tranquillity (the feeling of peace takes away much of the difﬁculty) like this: “Peace, peace, peace... tranquillity... calm.” Many discomforts, even physical, like all these contractions of the solar plexus, which are so unpleasant and give you at times nausea, the sensation of being suffocated, of not being able to breathe again, can disappear thus. It is the nervous centre which is affected, it gets affected very easily. As soon as there is something which affects the solar plexus, you must say, “Calm... calm... calm”, become more and more calm until the tension is destroyed.


The Mother: In thought also. For instance, you are reading something and come across a thought you don’t understand — it is beyond you, you understand nothing and so in your head it lies like a brick,  and if you try to understand, it becomes more and more like a brick, a stiffening, and if you persist it gives you a headache.  There is but one thing to do: not to struggle with the words, remain just like this (), create a relaxation, simply widen, widen. And don’t try to understand, above all, don’t try to understand — let it enter like that, quite gently, and relax, relax, and in this relaxing your headache goes away.


The Mother: You no longer think of anything, you wait for a few days and after some days you see from inside: “Oh! How clear it is!  I understand what I had not understood.” It is as easy as that.  When you read a book which is beyond you, when you come across sentences which you cannot understand — one feels that there is no correspondence in the head — well, you must do this; one reads the thing once, twice, thrice, then remains calm and makes the mind silent. A fortnight later, one takes up the same passage again and it is clear as daylight.


The Mother: Everything has been organised in the head, the elements of the brain which were wanted for the understanding have been formed, everything has been done gradually and one understands. I knew many people who, when I used to tell them something, argued, — they did not understand anything at all. They were shut up in their mind which could not catch the thought, which threw it out, refused it violently. You have said something, you don’t insist; you have said it, that’s all; if need be you say it a second time, but you don’t insist. A week, a month later, those very people come looking for you and tell you with strong conviction, “But things are like that, you don’t understand, things are like that!”


The Mother: It is exactly what you have told them, you know. But they tell you, “I thought about it, now I know, it is this, it is truly this.” If you have the misfortune to tell them, “But this is exactly what I had told you”, they pull a long face! And they don’t understand any longer.   Ah!


The Mother: Here we are.... If one is very sensitive, very sensitive — one must be very sensitive — the moment they touch the subtle body and try to pass through, one feels it. It is not like something touching the body, it is a sort of feeling. If you are able to perceive it at that moment, you have still the power to say “no”, and it goes away. But for this one must be extremely sensitive.


The Mother: However, that develops. All these things can be developed methodically by the will. You can become quite conscious of this envelope, and if you develop it sufﬁciently, you don’t even need to look and see, you feel that something has touched you. I can give you an instance of this, there are many similar ones.  Someone was seeking to establish a constant and conscious contact — absolutely constant and conscious — with the inner Godhead, not only with the psychic being but the divine Presence in the psychic being, and she had decided


The Mother: that she would be like this, that she would busy herself with nothing else, that is to say, whatever she might be doing, her concentration was upon this, and even when she went out walking in the street, her concentration was upon this. She lived in a big city where there was much trafﬁc: buses, tramways, etc., many things, and to cross the street one had to be considerably careful, wide-awake and attentive, otherwise one could get run over, but this person had resolved that she would not come out of her concentration.  One day when she was crossing one of the big avenues with all its cars and its tramways, still deep in her concentration, in her inner seeking, she suddenly felt at about an arm’s length a little shock, like this; she jumped back and a car passed just by her side. If she had not jumped back she would have been run over.... This is an extreme point, but without going so far one can very easily feel a kind of little discomfort (it is not something which is imposed with a great force), a little uneasiness


The Mother: coming near you from anywhere at all: front, behind, above, below . If at that moment you are sufﬁciently alert, you say “no”, as though you were cutting off the contact with great strength, and it is ﬁnished.  If you are not conscious at that moment, the next minute or a  few minutes later you get a queer sick feeling inside, a cold in the back, a little uneasiness, the beginning of some disharmony; you feel a maladjustment somewhere, as though the general harmony had been disturbed. Then you must concentrate all the more and with a great strength of will keep the faith that nothing can do you harm, nothing can touch you.


The Mother: This sufﬁces, you can throw off the illness at that moment. But you must do this immediately, you understand, you must not wait ﬁve minutes, it must be done at once. If you wait too long and begin to feel really an uneasiness somewhere, and something begins to get quite disturbed, then it is good to sit down, concentrate and call the Force, concentrate it on the place which is getting disturbed, that is to say, which is beginning to become ill. But if you don’t do anything at all, an illness indeed gets lodged somewhere; and all this, because you were not sufﬁciently alert.  And sometimes one is obliged to follow the entire curve to ﬁnd the favourable moment again and get rid of the business.


The Mother: I have said somewhere that in the physical domain all is a question of method — a method is necessary for realising everything. And if the illness has succeeded in touching the physical-physical, well, you must follow the procedure needed to get rid of it.  This is what medical science calls “the course of the illness”.  One can hasten the course with the help of spiritual forces, but all the same the procedure must be followed. There are some four different stages.


The Mother: The very ﬁrst is instantaneous. The second can be done in some minutes, the third may take several hours and the fourth several days. And then, once the thing is lodged there, all will depend not only on the receptivity of the body but still more on the willingness of the part which is the cause of the disorder. You know, when the thing comes from outside it is in afﬁnity with something inside. If it manages to pass through, to enter without one’s being aware of it, it means there is some afﬁnity somewhere, and the part of the being which has responded must be convinced.


The Mother: I have known some truly extraordinary instances. If you can  at the moment... Wait, take an example which is quite concrete: sunstroke. This upsets you considerably, it is one of the things which makes you most ill — a sunstroke upsets everything, it disturbs the inner functions, it generally causes a congestion in the head and very high fever. So, if this has happened, if it has succeeded in getting through the protection and entering you, well, if you can just go into a quiet place, stretch yourself out ﬂat, go out of your body (naturally, you must learn this; there are people who do this spontaneously, for others a long discipline is necessary), go out of your body, remain above in a way to be able to see the body (you know the phenomenon, seeing one’s body when one is outside?


The Mother: This can be done at will, going out of one’s body and remaining just above it), the body is stretched out on a bed, a bench, on the ground, anywhere; you are stretched just above it and from there, consciously, you pull the Force from above, and if you are used to doing it, if your aspiration is strong enough, you get the answer; and then, from there, taking care not to re-enter your body, you begin to push these forces into the body, like that, regularly, until you see the body receiving them (for, the ﬁrst few moments they don’t enter, because the body is quite upset by the illness, it is not receptive, it is tensed up), you push them gently, gently, quietly, without nervousness, very peacefully, into the body. But you must not be disturbed by anyone. If someone comes along, sees you stretched out and shakes you, it is extremely dangerous.  You must do this in quiet conditions, ask people not to disturb you or better shut yourself up where they can’t disturb you. But you can concentrate slowly (this takes more or less time — ten minutes, half an hour, one hour, two hours — it depends upon the seriousness of the disorder which has set in), slowly, from above, you concentrate the Force until you see that the body is receiving, that the Force is entering, the disorder is being set right and there is a relaxation in the body itself.


The Mother: Once that is done you can get back and you are cured. This has been done for a sunstroke, which is a fairly violent thing, and also for typhoid  fever, and many other illnesses, as, for instance, for a liver which was suddenly upset somehow (not due to indigestion, but a liver which doesn’t function properly for the moment); it may also be cured in the same way. There was a case of cholera which was healed like that. The cholera had just been caught, had entered, but was not yet lodged; it was completely cured. Consequently, when I say that if one masters the spiritual force and knows how to use it, there is no malady which cannot be cured.


The Mother: I don’t say it just like that in the air; it is said from experience with the thing.  Of course, you will say you don’t know how to go out of the body, draw the Force, concentrate it, have all this mastery.... It is not very frequent, but it is not impossible. And one can be sure that if one is helped... In fact, there is a much easier method, it is to call for help.


The Mother: But the condition in every case — in every case — whether one does it oneself and depending only on oneself or whether one does it by asking someone to do it for one, the ﬁrst condition: not to fear and to be calm. If you begin to boil and get ﬁdgety in your body, it is ﬁnished, you can do nothing.  For everything — to live the spiritual life, heal sickness — for everything, one must be calm.   That depends upon people. Each case is different.


The Mother: Individual precautions would be different according to individual reactions, difﬁculties, resistances. For each one there is a programme to follow which is good only for him. There is no general rule.  These things cannot be distributed as one distributes sweets. If someone asks me “What should I do?” — well that, yes.


The Mother: If one answers deeply... Outwardly there are many causes, but there is a deeper cause which is always there. I said the other day that if the nervous envelope is intact, accidents can be avoided, and even if there is an accident it won’t have any consequences.  As soon as there is a scratch or a defect in the nervous envelope of the being and according to the nature of this scratch, if one may say so, its place, its character, there will be an accident which will correspond to the diminution of resistance in the envelope. I believe almost everybody is psychologically aware of one thing: that accidents occur when one has a sort  of uncomfortable feeling, when one is not fully conscious and self-possessed, when one feels uneasy.


The Mother: In any case, generally, people have a feeling that they are not fully themselves, not fully aware of what they are doing. If one were fully conscious, the consciousness wide awake, accidents would not occur; one would make just the right gesture, the necessary movement to avoid the accident. Hence, in an almost absolute way, it is a ﬂagging of consciousness. Or quite possibly it may be that the consciousness is ﬁxed in a higher domain; for example, not to speak of spiritual things, a man who is busy solving a mental problem and is very concentrated upon his mental problem, becomes inattentive to physical things, and if he happens to be in a street or in a crowd, his attention ﬁxed upon his problem, he will not make the movement necessary to avoid the accident, and the accident will occur. It is the same for sports, for games; you can observe this easily, there is always a ﬂagging of the consciousness when accidents occur, or a lack of attention, a little absent-mindedness; suddenly one thinks of something else, the attention is drawn elsewhere — one is not fully conscious of what one is doing and the accident happens.


The Mother: As I was telling you at the beginning, if for some reason or other — for example, lack of sleep, lack of rest or an absorbing preoccupation or all sorts of things which tire you, that is to say, when you are not above them — if the vital envelope is a little damaged, it does not function perfectly and any current of force whatever which passes through is enough to produce an accident. In the ﬁnal analysis, the accident comes always from that, it is what one may call inattentiveness or a slackening of consciousness. There are days when one feels quite... not exactly uneasy, but as though one were trying to catch something which escapes, one can’t hold together, one is as though half-diluted; these are the days of accidents. You must be attentive. Naturally, this is not to tell you to shut yourself up in your room and not to stir out when you feel like that!


The Mother: This is not what I mean. Rather I mean that you must watch all the more attentively, be all the  more on your guard, not allow, precisely, this inattentiveness, this slackening of consciousness to come in.  Certainly this may be true, but without having the vision oneself, one can’t explain it.  It may be a question of two absolutely different things.  Perhaps, indeed, it was its destiny, in the sense that it was the end of the life necessary for its psychic being, it was a death which had been predestined for some reason, because that can happen.


The Mother: Or perhaps it could be an adverse force which he took to be an angel of light, for generally people make this mistake — when they see an apparition they always think it is something heavenly. It is heavenly if you like, but it depends on what heaven it comes from!  It is a strange thing because.... Yes, the moment of unconsciousness, the slackening of consciousness may be translated by this someone putting the hand over the eyes.  One of the most common activities of these intolerable little entities which are in the human physical atmosphere and amuse themselves at men’s expense, is to blind you to such an extent that when you look for something, and the thing is staring you in the face, you do not see it!


The Mother: This happens very often. You search in vain, you turn everything over, you look into all possible  corners, but you don’t ﬁnd the thing. Then you give up the problem and some time later (precisely when “the hand over the eyes” is removed), you come back to the same place and it is exactly there where you have looked, quietly lying there, it had not stirred! Only you were unconscious, you did not see. This is a very, very frequent amusement of these little entities.


The Mother: They also take pleasure in removing things, then they put them back, but at times they also don’t put them back! They displace them, indeed they have all sorts of little pranks. They are intolerable.  Madame Blavatsky made much use of them, but I don’t know how she managed to make them so amiable, because generally they are quite unpleasant.


The Mother: I had the experience — among innumerable instances — but precisely of two very striking cases, of two opposite things, only it was not the same beings.... There are little beings like fairies who are very sweet, very obliging, but they are not always there, they come from time to time when it pleases them. I remember the time I used to cook for Sri Aurobindo; I was also doing many other things at the same time, so I often happened to leave the milk on the ﬁre and go for some other work or to see something with him, to discuss with somebody, and truly I was not always aware of the time, I used to forget the milk on the ﬁre. And whenever I forgot the milk on the ﬁre, I felt suddenly (in those days I used to wear a sari) a little hand catching a fold of my sari and pulling it, like this. Then I used to run quickly and would see that the milk was just on the point of boiling over.


The Mother: This did not happen just once, but several times, and very clearly, like a little child’s hand clutching and pulling.  The other story is of the days Sri Aurobindo had the habit of walking up and down in his rooms. He used to walk for several hours like that, it was his way of meditating. Only, he wanted to know the time, so a clock had been put in each room to enable him to see the time at any moment. There were three such clocks.


The Mother: One was in the room where I worked; it was, so to say, his starting-point. One day he came and asked, “What time  is it?” He looked and the clock had stopped. He went into the next room, saying, “I shall see the time there” — the clock had stopped. And it had stopped at the same minute as the other, you understand, with the difference of a few seconds.


The Mother: He went to the third room... the clock had stopped. He continued walking three times like that — all the clocks had stopped! Then he returned to my room and said, “But this is impossible! This is a bad joke!”


The Mother: and all the clocks, one after the other, started working again.  I saw it myself, you know, it was a charming incident. He was annoyed, he said, “This is a bad joke!” And all the clocks started going again!  It is concomitant.


The Mother: One cannot say that the material world is the result of obscurity and ignorance; one cannot say either that the obscurity and ignorance are the result of the world of Matter; but the two are concomitant, in the sense that both have exactly the same cause. What we call the material world came into being at the same time as the obscurity and ignorance, they are closely bound, but there is no cause and effect in the sense of a sequence in time. It is concomitant, both the things are the concomitant result of another cause: what has brought about obscurity and ignorance has at one go and at one time brought about the material world as we know it.   So you think you are not in the illusion? You imagine you are outside the illusion?


The Mother: In the world as it is now, all is illusion. It is  perhaps an advantage, but you see only the surface of things, at most a very small part — you do not see the depth of things, you do not see the core of things, you do not see the cause of things.  Do you know what is going to happen tomorrow? ... You may guess it more or less, telling yourself that it will be like today


The Mother: but you don’t know it at all. You do not know what is going to happen tomorrow, still less in a month’s time, yet less in a year.  And do you know where you were before your birth? And do you know what will happen to you after your death?... You take interest in what you do just because you do not know what is going to happen.


The Mother: If you were fully in the know of what is going to happen, I am sure that 999 persons in a 1000 would sit down quietly waiting for it to happen. If you know exactly what is going to take place, all your enthusiasm would evaporate and in most cases you would say, “Have I to do all this to get there?   Ah, no!”  I do not say it is necessary, I say that it is evident, which is not quite the same thing.


The Mother: What is necessary is to change.  One of the great things, you see, is just to be able to do something with as much interest, as much intensity, as much energy, while knowing perfectly what the result will be and even if the result is the opposite of what you seem to expect. This is not easy, but still it is indispensable.  I am saying that it is indispensable to reach the state in which one can do things, continue to act, while knowing perfectly what the result will be and even if this result is the opposite of what one hopes for. It is this condition of detachment which is indispensable — not being in illusion!


The Mother: But ﬁrst you must will it, I believe that is quite important! There is no method to follow.... I read this and at the same time ask myself how many people would be satisﬁed to hear this. All the materialism and positivism in the world have been constructed just because people do not want the divine Grace to come in at all. If they are cured they want to say, “It is who cured myself”; if they make a progress, they want to think, “It is who have progressed”; if they organise something, they want to proclaim, “It is who am organising.”


The Mother: And many, many of those who try to do otherwise, if they look within themselves, would see how seldom spontaneously, sincerely (not as when one says something because one knows it should be said, or as one thinks something because it is the fashion to think like that but spontaneously, sincerely, with all their heart) they that it is not they who have done the thing, but the divine force. When they have made a progress, when they have changed something in themselves, when they have learnt something, then when is it that spontaneously, without an effort of will, without thinking, without needing to tell oneself, “One ought to think like this”, spontaneously one that without the divine force nothing would have been done? Look into yourself, it is a very interesting thing, very interesting, how many times a day you think (without even telling yourself), “I have done this”, “I have been able to  do that”, “I succeeded in this”, “I failed in that”, and when you have made a good effort, when you have obtained a result, you need a little moment for thought, or more, to tell yourself, “If the divine force had not helped me, probably I would not have been able to do it.” The spontaneous thing is, “Oh! I have succeeded”, isn’t that true? There is indeed a part of the mind which has been educated, which has learnt, has reﬂected, understood, which is well-disposed and truly feels that in reality it is like that, but this is only one part of the mind, and it is not always active, sometimes it must be called up, asked its advice, “What is then the best attitude to have?”, “What should I think?”


The Mother: I believe all who have taken up yoga, if they are sincere, if they reﬂect for a moment, tell themselves, “I was not aware of it, but if I have succeeded, it was probably because the divine forces were there to help me, otherwise I would not have been able to succeed.” This is well understood. But there comes a moment when one knows that one would not have been able to lift a ﬁnger if these forces had not been there. That comes later.... But to begin with, how many times, if one thinks, if one quite simply observes oneself, does one catch oneself saying, “It is!”


The Mother: And, then, one congratulates oneself sometimes, one says, “After all I can do something, I am capable!” I am going further: how many people would be capable of doing anything at all if simply deprived of the pleasure of being able to tell themselves, “I have done this, I have realised that, I have made a progress, how well I played this game”? How many people would be able to sincerely do something if this pleasure were taken away? I have known individuals whose mind was much more developed than the rest of the being, they had understood very well (almost too well); they sat down to meditate and all their energy was gone, all vitality evaporated into a kind of peace, not unpleasant, but very still. There is no more need to do anything, no longer any need to move, one dreams....


The Mother: Under a tree, arms crossed, one leaves the Divine to do everything for oneself, even feeding you if you need it. This is perhaps very well, but this shows  that the instrument is not ready; it is not really at the service of the Divine, it is at the service of the ego, and when the ego is taken away, it does nothing any longer. Therefore, so long as one lives in the ego this illusion is necessary to make you act; it is necessary to keep up action until one is completely transformed or, in any case, till the true consciousness is established.  I have said this and I repeat it (): Well, it is this idea, which has been taught in almost all religions, that has made men atheistic, so much does it anger them — an anger of revolt: “What! It is not I!”  And this “I”, if you only knew how big it is!


The Mother: how it occupies the whole place.... It is this which is the base of all materialism.  I think there is a confusion between silence in the mind and the complete emptiness in the being, they are two very different things. Besides, I don’t see very well how one can make oneself completely empty — one would not exist any longer!


The Mother: Aspiration and will produce a stress in the being. But I say “degree”, for there is also the point upon which the stress works.  I say “to make yourself blank” is to release the stress of your consciousness towards realisation, towards the goal you want to realise. The “stress” is the pressure upon a point, what is concentrated upon a point and insists that it be done. Consciousness — the consciousness of the being, individual consciousness — puts a pressure upon a point, you see.


The Mother: We may take the example we were just speaking of: you have a chronic illness, a malformation of the body, a physical defect. Then your consciousness, in its aspiration and will puts a more or less constant stress on the thing it wants to realise, what you want to cure.  Well, when you make yourself empty within in meditation (this is one form of meditation if you like), this means that you stop this concentration of will: your consciousness becomes neutral for the moment. Its stress is upon this point (it may be on other points, on things more or less concrete or abstract, but the stress is on one point) and when you make yourself empty you withdraw this pressure, this stress, and you remain like a blank page upon which nothing is written. This is what I call “making yourself empty”, not to have any active will concentrated upon one point or another.


The Mother: And so I say the moment you make yourself empty, the stress indeed stops, and yet in your silent aspiration you put yourself in contact with the forces attracted by this stress you usually have, the special point of stress you  have normally. That is why I have emphasised the fact that all depends upon the person, because everything depends upon his habitual aspiration, the thing he usually wants to realise, for he is naturally in touch with the forces which will answer his aspiration. So, if for a certain time one stops the activity of this aspiration and remains silently receptive, passive, well, the effect of the habitual aspiration remains and will draw just those forces which ought to answer it.  The cause... is the light which has become the darkness and the consciousness which has become the inconscience! How to speak about these things?


The Mother: You may call this an accident if you like, if that satisﬁes your mind. It was perhaps, after all, the best thing that could have happened, one can’t tell. All depends upon the point of view one takes. There must certainly be a consciousness in which this was foreseen, and if it has not been avoided, it means that it forms part of the programme!... It is a human way of looking at the problem, for things do not happen quite like that in those regions.


The Mother: One may also relate a story which could make a subject, a magniﬁcent drama, but it would be only a story, a way of saying things.  A story is of value only to the extent it can help you to understand things. Ah! Here is an interesting subject.... A story, that is, a way of saying things, is of value only if it can make you understand the thing.


The Mother: A language (which is a kind of story) is of value only to the extent it is capable of putting you in contact with the Reality. Science is a language, Art is a language — all activity is a sort of language, that is, a way of expression. And the way of expression is of value only if it puts you in contact with what it wants to express. It is a very interesting generalisation, for you can bring into it all the categories you want and you will see that it is true.   It is the same for everything.


The Mother: The way of approaching the universe and the universal truth is also a language and all depends upon the person who uses it, the person to whom the understanding is to be communicated. Whatever may be the way of telling, if you understand, that is all that is necessary. If you do not understand, even if it be the wonder of wonders, the truth of truths, it will have no value for you. This is an essentially pragmatic point of view of the universe; things have value only if they realise that for which they have been made, and the most beautiful philosophies of the world are of no use to those who do not understand them. The most beautiful works of art in the world are quite useless to those whom they do not put on the path of the Truth.


The Mother: And the most perfect yoga in the world is useless to those whom it does not lead to the Realisation. And if you have this sense of relativity, you have ﬁnished with all dogmatism, all sectarianism, all that kind of absolutism which leads one always to think that all that has done us good is “the truth” — it is the truth for us, it is not necessarily the truth for our neighbour. And what our neighbour thinks is the truth for him, and when you say, “It is idiotic, it is quite useless”, if it helps him to realise the truth, it is excellent, it is the best thing possible for him. And everything, everything on earth is like that. And if you do not want to be altogether narrow, to put on visors and not see farther than the tip of your nose, you must ﬁrst of all understand this.


The Mother: You must understand that all things in the universe tend towards a goal and that it is to the extent they help to realise this goal that they have a value, and that this value is quite relative; and what is good for one may not be so for another, what is good at one moment may not be so at another and, consequently, every kind of dogmatism is an absurdity.   It is very easy to say,“That, that’s true, now I know that it is true and I shall not think otherwise”; this is very easy, and in fact something has suddenly put you in touch with a light, you have had an experience, you have become conscious of yourself,  conscious of something which transcends you and is the reality of your being, so for you it is perfect. But do not imagine that you must go from door to door, from city to city, country to country, telling people, “I proclaim the Truth”, because what is true for you may not be at all good for another. What you have seen has its truth in itself — everything has its truth in itself — but the true of this truth is that it has helped you to ﬁnd yourself, to ﬁnd the truth of your being, and it may quite possibly not help your neighbour, unless you have a considerable power of persuasion and oblige him to see things as you have seen them yourself, but this has not much value.


The Mother: When you have understood this, you will no longer say, “Why is there such a diversity in the world, why all this multiplicity, why all this confusion, why...?” It is a confusion simply because you don’t understand and things are not in their place.  If things were in their place, there would be no confusion. And we come to this, that you cannot take away one atom from this world without dislocating the universe. All that is, was necessary — if it had not been necessary, it would not have been.


The Mother: The whole totality of things is indispensable for realising the Divine.  If you took away one of these things, there would be a hole in the realisation. And I am not speaking only of material things, material points, I am speaking of all the depths. So when you say as many do, “Ah! If that were not there in the world, how ﬁne the world would be”, you are displaying your ignorance.  I met in Japan one of the sons of Tolstoy; he was going round the world preaching human unity.


The Mother: He had caught this from his father and was going everywhere in the world preaching human unity. I met him at some friends’ place and asked him, “How are you going to realise this human unity?” Do you know what reply he gave me? “Oh! It is very simple — if everybody spoke the same language, if everybody dressed in the same manner, if everybody lived in the same manner, the whole world would be united!”


The Mother: Then I told him, “That would be a poor world not worth living in.” He did not understand me!   Whence come the evils?... Who is going to answer me? A philosophic answer, a scientiﬁc answer, a psychological answer and a poetic answer!


The Mother: A mystic answer, a religious answer. Oh! You have no imagination!  Evil is sent so that one may perfect oneself? What you say is quite defensible, but this would have terribly shocked the lady who asked me the question, she would have said, “How could God have done that, He who is all love?...


The Mother: The creation was not well done!”  Someone told me after having read,“God took seven days to do all that, then He said that it was good! He has a strange opinion!”   Now we touch the source of the difﬁculty. I don’t know if you have understood it, but there is a central fault in the question of that lady; she makes God or the Divine a personality quite independent of his creation.


The Mother: She should have said, “Someone who, having the power of creation, has created a world like this, truly, he must be sadistic”, and she would have been right, wouldn’t she?... The question is badly put, because the Divine spoken about here is not the true Divine, it is the Divine of religion — and of a certain kind of religion — but it is not the Divine as He is at all.  I would not reply in this manner now, it is an altogether “administrative” answer! It is thus that governments always reply; they say, “It is not I who am responsible, it is my agents.” That’s not nice, it is better to take the responsibility upon oneself.


The Mother: This lady had deﬁnitely an altogether Chaldean idea of God, who from nothing made a world (which is badly made, I admit it; if it has been made like that, it was truly badly made) and yet a God who looks at it and says, “I made it on purpose,” which crowns the horror of this lady!  Why is there so much misery in the world? Come on, I ask you for a scientiﬁc, a philosophic, a mystical, a religious, a poetic answer....   This is not a poetic answer — you must use many images and symbols for that! You are like the person who said that if one were not unhappy, one could not be happy, because one would not know what it is to be happy!


The Mother: As others say, “If there were no shadow, there would be no light. One would not know what light is if all were light”... and so on. So you say that without unhappiness there would be no novelty in the world? It is a rather lugubrious novelty, isn’t it?  If everybody entered a beatiﬁc state the world would be beatiﬁc; as a reason, it is very good.


The Mother: But it is a cure, it is not a cause. You are asked here what is. Whence comes the unhappiness if it is not from God — who is, of course, all beneﬁcent and who would never do such a horrible thing!   Ah!


The Mother: Try telling this to someone who is suffering from liver colic, for instance!  That is what I was saying, isn’t it (), that if there were no misery upon earth what would become of philanthropy?... If we explore all the ﬁelds like this, we shall end up perhaps by understanding that all was necessary, otherwise the world would not have been. This is perhaps one conclusion. No, it is not a conclusion, for it would justify the indeﬁnite perpetuation of what is.


The Mother: No one has said that, if so there would be nothing else to do but sit down and not move any more!  We have already granted that the world is not what it ought to be and that we are here to work so that it may become what it ought to be. But to know this one must ﬁrst know what it ought to be, isn’t that so? That is the problem. What should the world be?


The Mother: X: Y:  When one makes a construction, one doesn’t begin by saying, “I don’t want this, I don’t want that”, else you will never make your construction. You must say what it ought to be, not what it ought not to be. To begin with, what it ought not to be we know already: that is what it is! We don’t need to go very far — such as it is, we don’t want it.


The Mother: So, what should it be?  This sounds very ﬁne, it is very good — “God is a child playing,” Sri Aurobindo has said. It seems this has shocked many people.  When we translated this into French and sent it to Europe, there were people who were shocked and said, “Well, He plays at our expense!”  What light?


The Mother: What love?   When you say “divine light”, what do you understand by it?   Receptive to what?  So, it is the world which has separated from the Divine.


The Mother: We come to that: the world is miserable because it has separated from the Divine. Here is an answer which is neither philosophic nor poetic nor... We shall call it a practical expression. And how has it managed to separate itself from the Divine, since it the Divine?... Now it becomes very complicated.


The Mother: We say, don’t we, that the world is divine and that it is unhappy because it has separated from the Divine. How has it separated?  Good heavens! From where then does the ignorance come?


The Mother: Ignorance of what? Ignorance of itself?  Yes, that means ignorance of itself! This is why everyone is told: “Know thyself” — it ought to be that!


The Mother: Ah! Then I must ask you, “What do you call the world?” Is it the earth or the universe?   Then, the whole universe is not ignorant — there are parts of the universe which are not ignorant. When you say “we” you identify yourself with the universe or with mankind?


The Mother: Because this is a very important question. We say the world is unhappy because it has forgotten its origin, that is, its divine origin. You say, child, that we are unhappy because “we” are ignorant — the “we” is men. Consequently, unhappiness has come into the world with men — here is something serious! That is, with man mind has come upon earth, you see, for man is a mental animal, and with the mind has come misery.


The Mother: The mind is capable of objectifying, and so it ﬁnds that such and such a thing is miserable — without the mind there would be no such discovery and no unhappiness.  So, there is no unhappiness for animals nor for plants, and yet less for stones. Are we agreed on this: there is no unhappiness for animals, plants and stones? We say unhappiness has come with the mind which has become conscious of it. Mark that I am trying to lead you to something which is not so stupid, for in the ancient Teaching it was said, “Change your consciousness and what appears to you unfortunate will not so appear to you any longer.”


The Mother: The Buddha taught that if you are free from desire, things that seemed to you unfortunate would no longer seem to you unfortunate at all. Therefore, we come to this: it is the thought you have about it which makes you consider this or that thing unfortunate. If you thought an event happy, it would become happy for you; and that is what it is, in fact. In most cases when the thought has accepted that a thing to be, for whatever reason, it is no longer unhappy; when the thought has not accepted this, it ﬁnds this unhappy. So, as long as you are in the ﬁeld of emotions, of sentiments and thoughts, all this is true.


The Mother: That is, the notion of “unhappiness” has entered the world with the capacity to consider that things were unfortunate. You follow the logic? Thus, plants do not suffer because they do not know that they suffer and animals do not suffer  because they do not know that they suffer. You are sure of it?  Aren’t you?


The Mother: It is said you see in others what you have in yourself!  I have always been told that he was an intelligent man!   Ah! Here is logic!


The Mother: When there is unhappiness there is happiness... without unhappiness, no happiness. How difﬁcult philosophy is!... Has your Mr. Descartes told us from where the soul of man has come?  The rest of the world is not a creation of God?  Then, suddenly, he bethought himself that it was necessary to put in his creation something that he calls “a soul” and he chose this animal, man, to put it in.


The Mother: Then it becomes very difﬁcult to get out of it.... But we were trying to ﬁnd out what the world  to be. It is this we must ﬁnd, for the minute we know what it ought to be, we must start working on this.    The misfortune is that it is precisely open to certain forces and manifests them.


The Mother: It is the quality of the Force which matters.  The world as it is manifests forces, it does not exist without a manifestation of forces; but what forces does it manifest? For the moment it seems to manifest the forces of obscurity, ignorance, disharmony, suffering and all the rest.  You mean it should choose the force which is necessary? Yes, but this is not the transformation of the world, this is for us.


The Mother: It is we who must have discernment to know which force we want to manifest, that’s understood. But to come back to our subject, you all agree that in the world we are going to build, there should not be any suffering? You agree?... You are not quite sure of it?... Then you are satisﬁed with suffering?


The Mother: I don’t know, perhaps it has its purpose. But, you see, as long as one is satisﬁed with a thing, there are many chances that it stays. We have been told in the more or less sacred scriptures that suffering comes from ignorance; hence if you do not think of getting rid of suffering, it means that you want to keep the ignorance also?  That becomes very difﬁcult. It is like the artist to whom someone spoke of the future world which would be made all of light, and he said, “Then I won’t be able to paint any longer” and he was miserable!


The Mother: Perhaps, indeed, there are many people who cling to their ignorance?...  That is true, in many cases it is like that and that is the apparent justiﬁcation of suffering. If human beings did not suffer, perhaps they would never make any progress. Aspiration is quite lukewarm when one is perfectly satisﬁed.   Now then, here we are quite muddled up!


The Mother: Well, this is an exact example of the way the human mind functions; and after that there are people who have caught the tail of something and are so satisﬁed with this tail, they say, “I have the truth, and you ought to believe what I tell you, otherwise you will never get out of it.” The fact is that in the state of your thought at that moment, anyone at all could come to tell you “I have the truth”, and you would be happy to catch on to it to come out of your confusion.... Let’s see, we have two minutes, and during those two minutes we won’t speak, and all our confusion will disappear. Then we shall disperse. So, do not talk, try to be as silent as possible for two minutes.


The Mother: ()   What is the relation between art and yoga? Can the artist and the yogi have the same source of inspiration? ( ) Amrita, will you tell us what relation there is between art and yoga?


The Mother: That’s very ﬁne! I knew someone, an American lady, who said that spirituality was supreme good taste, the best possible good taste. This is quite similar.  That depends on the books! That depends on the dreams!


The Mother: If you give me an example from a dream I shall tell you what the nature of your serpent was, but just like that, “snakes” is too vague.  I believe the chief reason is that people have become more and more lazy and do not want to work. They want to produce something before having worked, they want to know before having studied and they want to make a name before having done anything good. So, this is the open door for all sorts of things, as we see.... Naturally, there are exceptions.


The Mother: I have known artists who were great artists, who had worked hard and produced remarkable things, classical, that  is, not ultra-modern. But they were not in fashion because, precisely, one had not to be classical. When a brush was put in the hands of an individual who had never touched a brush, and when a brush was put on a palette of colours and the man had never touched a palette before, then if this individual had in front of him a bit of canvas on an easel and he had never done a picture before, naturally he daubed anything at all; he took the colours and threw them in a haphazard way; then everybody cried out “Admirable”, “Marvellous”, “It is the expression of your soul”, “How well this reveals the truth of things”, etc.!  This was the fashion and people who knew nothing were very successful. The poor men who had worked, who knew their art well, were not asked for their pictures any longer; people said, “Oh!


The Mother: This is old-fashioned, you will never ﬁnd customers for such things. ” But, after all, they were hungry, you see, they had to pay their rent and buy their colours and all the rest, and that is costly. Then what could they do? When they had received rebuffs from the picture dealers who all told them the same thing, “But try to be modern, my friend; look here, you are behind the times”, as they were very hungry, what could they do?...


The Mother: I knew a painter, a disciple of Gustave Moreau; he was truly a very ﬁne artist, he knew his work quite well, and then... he was starving, he did not know how to make both ends meet and he used to lament. One day, a friend intending to help him, sent a picture dealer to see him. When the merchant entered his studio, this poor man told himself, “At last! Here’s my chance”, and he showed him all the best work he had done.


The Mother: The art dealer made a face, looked around, turned over things and began rummaging in all the corners; and suddenly he found... Ah! I must explain this to you, you are not familiar with these things: a painter, after his day’s work has at times some mixed colours left on his palette; he cannot keep them, they dry up in a day; so he always has with him some pieces of canvas which are not well prepared and which he daubs with what are called “the scrapings of palettes” (with supple  knives he scrapes all the colours from the palette and applies them on the canvases) and as there are many mixed colours, this makes unexpected designs. There was in a corner a canvas like that on which he used to put his palette-scrapings.


The Mother: The merchant suddenly falls upon that and exclaims, “Here you are! My friend, you are a genius, this is a miracle, it is this you should show! Look at this richness of tones, this variety of forms, and what an imagination!” And this poor man who was starving said shyly, “But sir, these are my palette-scrapings!”


The Mother: And the art-dealer caught hold of him: “Silly fool, this is not to be told!” Then he said, “Give me this, I undertake to sell it. Give me as many of these as you like; ten, twenty, thirty a month, I shall sell them all for you and I shall make you famous.” Then, as I told you, his stomach was protesting; he was not happy, but he said, “All right, take it, I shall see.” Then the landlord comes to demand his rent, the paint merchant comes demanding payment of the old bill; the purse is quite empty, and what is to be done?


The Mother: So though he did not make pictures with palettescrapings, he did something which gave the imagination free play, where the forms were not too precise, the colours were all mixed and brilliant, and one could not know overmuch what one was seeing; and as people did not know very much what they saw, those who understood nothing about it exclaimed, “How beautiful it is!” And he supplied this to his art-dealer.  He never made a name for himself with his real painting, which was truly very ﬁne (it was really very ﬁne, he was a very good painter), but he won a world reputation with these horrors!  And this was just at the beginning of modern painting, this goes back to the Universal Exhibition of 1900; if I were to tell you his name, you would all recognise it.... Now, of course, they have gone far beyond, they have done much better.


The Mother: However, he had the sense of harmony and beauty and his colours were beautiful.  But at present, as soon as there is the least beauty, it won’t do at all, it has to be outrageously ugly, then that, that is modern!  The story began with... the man who used to do still-life and  whose plates were never round.... C´ezanne! It was he who began it; he said that if plates were painted round that would not be living; that when one looks at things spontaneously, never does one see plates round: one sees them like this ().


The Mother: I don’t know why, but he said that it is only the mind that makes us see plates as round, because one knows they are round, otherwise one does not see them round. It is he who began.... He painted a still-life which was truly a very beautiful thing, note that; a very beautiful thing, with an impression of colour and form truly surprising (I could show you reproductions one day, I must be having them, but they are not colour reproductions unfortunately; the beauty is really in the colour). But, of course, his plate was not round. He had friends who told him just this, “But after all, why don’t you make your plate round?”


The Mother: He replied, “My dear fellow, you are altogether mental, you are not an artist; it is because you think that you make your plates round: if you only see, you will do it like this” (). It is in accordance with the impression that the plate ought to be painted; it gives you an impact, you translate the impact, and it is this which is truly artistic. It is like this that modern art began. And note that he was right. His plates were not round, but he was right in principle.


The Mother: What has made art what it is (do you want me to tell you this, psychologically?) is photography. Photographers did not know their job and gave you hideous things, frightfully ugly; it was mechanical, it had no soul, it had no art, it was horrible.  All the ﬁrst attempts of photography until... not very long ago, were like that. It is about ﬁfty years ago that it became tolerable, and now with gradual improvement it has become something good; but it must be said that the process is absolutely different. In those days, when your portrait was taken, you sat in a comfortable chair, you had to sit leaning nicely and facing an enormous thing with a black cloth, which opened like this towards you.


The Mother: And the man ordered, “Don’t move! Steady!”  That, of course, was the end of the old painting. When the  painter made something lifelike, a lifelike portrait, his friends said, “Why now, this is photography!”  It must be said that the art of the end of the last century, the art of the Second Empire, was bad.


The Mother: It was an age of businessmen, above all an age of bankers, ﬁnanciers, and taste, upon my word, had gone very low. I don’t believe that businessmen are people necessarily very competent in art, but when they wanted their portrait, they wanted a likeness! One could not leave out the least detail, it was quite comic: “But you know I have a little wrinkle there, don’t forget to put it in!” and the lady who said, “You know, you must make my shoulders quite round”, and so on. So the artists made portraits which indeed turned into photography. They were ﬂat, cold, without soul and without vision.


The Mother: I can name a number of artists of that period, it was truly a shame for art. This lasted till about the end of the last century, till about 1875. Afterwards, there started the reaction. Then there was an entire very beautiful period (I don’t say this because I myself was painting) but all the artists I then knew were truly artists, they were serious and did admirable things which have remained admirable. It was the period of the impressionists; it was the period of Manet, it was a beautiful period, they did beautiful things.


The Mother: But people tire of beautiful things as they tire of bad ones. So there were those who wanted to found the “Salon d’Automne”. They wanted to surpass the others, go more towards the new, towards the truly anti-photographic. And my goodness, they went a little beyond the limit (according to my taste). They began to depreciate Rembrandt — Rembrandt was a dauber, Titian was a dauber, all the great painters of the Italian Renaissance were daubers.


The Mother: You were not to pronounce the name of Raphael, it was a shame. And all the great period of the Italian Renaissance was “not worth very much”; even the works of Leonardo da Vinci; “You know, you must take them with a pinch of salt.”  Then they went a little further; they wanted something entirely new, they became extravagant. And then, from there, there was  only one more step to take for the palette-scrapings and then it was ﬁnished.  This is the history of art as I knew it.


The Mother: Now, to tell you the truth, we are climbing up the curve again. Truly, I think we had gone down to the depths of incoherence, absurdity, nastiness — of the taste for the sordid and ugly, the dirty, the outrageous. We had gone, I believe, to the very bottom.  I think so. Recently I saw some pictures which truly showed something other than ugliness and ﬁlth.


The Mother: It is not yet art, it is very far from being beautiful, but there are signs that we are going up again. You will see, ﬁfty years hence we shall perhaps have beautiful things to see. I felt this some days ago, that truly we had come to the end of the descending curve — we are still very low down, but are beginning to climb up. There is a kind of anguish and there is still a complete lack of understanding of what beauty can and should be, but one ﬁnds an aspiration towards something which will not be sordidly material. For a time art had wanted to wallow in the mire, to be what they called “realistic”.


The Mother: They had chosen as “real” what was most repulsive in the world, most ugly: all deformities, all ﬁlth, all ugliness, all the horrors, all the incoherences of colour and form; well, I believe this is behind us now. I had this feeling very strongly these last few days (not through seeing pictures, for we do not have a chance to see much here, but by “sensing the atmosphere”).  And even in the reproductions we are shown, there is some aspiration towards something which would be a little higher. It will need about ﬁfty years; then... Unless there is another war, another catastrophe; because certainly, to a large extent, what is responsible for this taste for the sordid are the wars and the horrors of war.


The Mother: People were compelled to put aside all reﬁned sensibility, the love of harmony, the need for beauty, to be able  to undergo all that; otherwise, I believe, they would really have died of horror. It was so unspeakably foul that it could not be tolerated, so it perverted men’s taste everywhere and when the war was over (admitting that it ever ended), they wanted only one thing, to forget, forget, forget. To seek distraction, not to think of all the horror they had suffered. Then, one goes very low. The whole vital atmosphere is completely vitiated and the physical atmosphere is terribly obscure.


The Mother: Hence, if we can escape another world war... Because war is there, it has never stopped. It has been there from almost the beginning of this century; it began with China, Turkey, Tripolitania, Morocco — you are following? — the Balkans, it has never stopped, it has become worse, but each time it has become a world war, it has assumed altogether sordid proportions. All you my children, you have been born after the war (I am speaking of the First [World] War), so you do not know much about this, and then you have been born here, in a country which has been truly privileged. But the children born in Europe, latterly, these little ones, who were children of the war, carry something in them which will be very difﬁcult to eradicate, a kind of horror, a fright.


The Mother: One could not have been mixed up with that without knowing what horror is. The ﬁrst war was perhaps worse than the second. The second was so atrocious that all was lost.... But the ﬁrst, oh! I don’t know....


The Mother: The last months I spent in Paris were truly fantastic. And it can’t be told. The life in the trenches, for example, is something that cannot be told. The new generations do not know.... But, you see, the children born now will not even know if this was true, all these horrors which are related to them.


The Mother: What happened in the conquered countries, in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in France — the frightful things, unbelievable, unthinkable, which took place — unless one has been very close by, has seen, one cannot believe it. It was... I was saying the other day that the vital world is a world of horrors; well, all the horrors of the vital world had descended upon earth, and upon earth they are still more horrible than in the vital world, because  in the vital world, if you have an inner power, if you have the knowledge, if you have strength, you act upon them — you act, you can subdue them, you can show yourself stronger. But all your knowledge, all your power, all your strength is nothing in this material world when you are subjected to the horrors of a war. And this acts in the terrestrial atmosphere in such a way that it is very, very difﬁcult to eradicate it.


The Mother: Naturally, men are always very anxious to forget. There are already those who have begun to say, “Are you quite sure it was like that?” But those who have gone through that, do not want it to be forgotten; so the places of torture, massacre — hideous places which go beyond all the worst the human imagination can conceive — some of these places have been preserved. You can go and visit the torture-chambers the Germans built in Paris, and they will never be destroyed, I hope, so that those who come and say, “Oh! You know, these things have been exaggerated” (for one does not like to know that such frightful things have happened), could be taken by the hand and told, “Come and see, if you are not afraid.”  This forms character.


The Mother: If it is taken in the right way (and I think there are people who have taken it in the right way), this may lead you straight to yoga, straight. That is, one feels such a deep detachment for all things in the world, such a great need to ﬁnd something else, an imperious need to ﬁnd something which is truly beautiful, truly fresh, truly good... then, quite naturally, this brings you to a spiritual aspiration. And these horrors have, as it were, divided men: there was a minority which was ready and rose very high, there was a majority which was not ready and went down very low. These wallow in the mud at present, and hence, for the moment, one does not get out of it; and if this continues, we shall go towards another war and this time it will truly be the end of this civilisation — I don’t say the end of the world, because nothing can be the end of the world, but the end of this civilisation, that is to say, another will have to be built.


The Mother: You will perhaps tell me that this would be very well, for  this civilisation is in its decline, it is on the way to perish; but after all, there are very beautiful things in it, worthy of being preserved, and it would be a great pity if all this disappeared. But if there is another war, I can tell you that all this will disappear.  For men are very intelligent creatures and they have found the means of destroying everything, and they will make use of this, for what’s the good of spending billions to ﬁnd certain bombs, if one might not use them? What is the use of discovering that one can destroy a city in a few minutes, if it is not for destroying it! One wants to see the fruit of one’s efforts.


The Mother: If there is war, this is what will happen.  There we are, I am telling you things which are not very cheerful, but it is sometimes good to knock some sense into you to make one think.   The art of Japan is a kind of directly mental expression in physical life. The Japanese use the vital world very little. Their art is extremely mentalised; their life is extremely mentalised.


The Mother: It expresses in detail quite precise mental formations. Only, in the physical, they have spontaneously the sense of beauty. For example, a thing one sees very rarely in Europe but constantly, daily in Japan: very simple people, men of the working class or even peasants go for rest or enjoyment to a place where they can see a beautiful landscape. This gives them a much greater joy than going to play cards or indulging in all sorts of distractions as they do in the countries of Europe. They are seen in groups at times, going on the roads or sometimes taking a train or a tram up to a certain point, then walking to a place from where one gets a beautiful view.


The Mother: Then at this place there is a small house which ﬁts very well into the landscape, there is a kind of small platform on which one can sit: one takes a cup of tea and at the same time sees the landscape. For them, this is the supreme enjoyment; they know nothing more pleasant. One can understand this among artists, educated people, quite learned people, but I am speaking of people of the most ordinary class, poor people who like this better than resting or relaxing at home.  This is for them the greatest joy.  And in that country, for each season there are known sites.


The Mother: For instance, in autumn leaves become red; they have large numbers of maple-trees (the leaves of the maple turn into all the shades of the most vivid red in autumn, it is absolutely marvellous), so they arrange a place near a temple, for instance, on the top of a hill, and the entire hill is covered with maples. There  is a stairway which climbs straight up, almost like a ladder, from the base to the top, and it is so steep that one cannot see what is at the top, one gets the feeling of a ladder rising to the skies — a stone stairway, very well made, rising steeply and seeming to lose itself in the sky — clouds pass, and both the sides of the hill are covered with maples, and these maples have the most magniﬁcent colours you could ever imagine. Well, an artist who goes there will experience an emotion of absolutely exceptional, marvellous beauty. But one sees very small children, families even, with a baby on the shoulder, going there in groups.


The Mother: In autumn they will go there. In springtime they will go elsewhere.   There is a garden quite close to Tokyo where irises are grown, a garden with very tiny rivulets, and along the rivulets, irises — irises of all possible colours — and it is arranged according to colour, organised in such a way that on entering one is dazzled, there is a blaze of colour from all these ﬂowers standing upright; and there are heaps and heaps of them, as far as the eye can reach. At another time, just at the beginning of spring (it is a slightly early spring there), there are the ﬁrst cherry-trees.


The Mother: These cherry-trees never give fruit, they are grown only for the ﬂowers. They range from white to pink, to a rather vivid pink. There are long avenues all bordered with cherrytrees, all pink; they are huge trees which have turned all pink.  There are entire mountains covered with these cherry-trees, and on the little rivulets bridges have been built which too are all red: you see these bridges of red lacquer among all these pink ﬂowers and, below, a great river ﬂowing and a mountain which seems to scale the sky, and they go to this place in springtime.... For each season there are ﬂowers and for each ﬂower there are gardens.


The Mother: And people travel by train as easily as one goes from house to house; they have a small packet like this which they carry; in it they have a change of clothes, that’s quite enough for them; on their feet they wear rope or ﬁbre sandals; when these get worn out they throw them away and take others, for they cost nothing at all. All their life is like that. They have paper handkerchiefs,  when they have used them they get rid of them, and so on — they don’t burden themselves with anything. When they go by train, at the stations small meals are sold in boxes (it is quite clean, quite neat), small meals in boxes of white wood with little chop-sticks for eating; then, as all this has no value, when one has ﬁnished, one puts them aside, doesn’t bother about them or encumber oneself. They live like that.


The Mother: When they have a garden or a park, they plant trees, and they plant them just at the place where when the tree has grown it will create a landscape, will ﬁt into a landscape. And as they want the tree to have a particular shape, they trim it, cut it, they manage to give it all the shapes they want. You have trees with fantastic forms; they have cut off the unnecessary branches, fostered others, contrived things as they liked. Then you come to a place and you see a house which seems to be altogether a part of the landscape; it has exactly the right colour, it is made of the right materials; it is not like a blow in your face, as are all those European buildings which spoil the whole landscape. It is just there where it should be, hidden under the trees; then you see a creeper and suddenly a wonderful tree: it is there at the right place, it has the right form.


The Mother: I had everything to learn in Japan. For four years, from an artistic point of view, I lived from wonder to wonder.  And in the cities, a city like Tokyo, for example, which is the biggest city in the world, bigger than London, and which extends far, far (now the houses are modernised, the whole centre of the city is very unpleasant, but when I was there, it was still good), in the outlying parts of the city, those which are not business quarters, every house has at the most two storeys and a garden — there is always a garden, there are always one or two trees which are quite lovely. And then, if you go for a walk... it is very difﬁcult to ﬁnd your way in Tokyo; there are no straight streets with houses on either side according to the number, and you lose your way easily.


The Mother: Then you go wandering around — always one wanders at random in that country — you go wandering and all of a sudden you turn the corner of a street and come  to a kind of paradise: there are magniﬁcent trees, a temple as truly beautiful, you see nothing of the city any longer, no more trafﬁc, no tramways; a corner, a corner of trees with magniﬁcent colours, and it is beautiful, truly beautiful. You do not know how you have reached there, you seem to have come by luck. And then you turn, you seek your way, you wander off again and go elsewhere. And some days later you want to come back to this very place, but it is impossible, it is as though it had disappeared.


The Mother: And this is so frequent, this is so true that such stories are often told in Japan. Their literature is full of enchantment. They tell you a story in which the hero comes suddenly to a magic place: he sees fairies, he sees marvellous beings, he spends exquisite hours among ﬂowers, music; all is splendid. The next day he is obliged to leave; it is the law of the place, he goes away. He tries to come back, but never does.


The Mother: He can no longer ﬁnd the place: it was there, it has disappeared!... And everything in this city, in this country, from beginning to end, gives you the impression of impermanence, of the unexpected, the exceptional. You always come to things you did not expect; you want to ﬁnd them again and they are lost — they have made something else which is equally charming. From the artistic point of view, the point of view of beauty, I don’t think there is a country as beautiful as that.  Now, I ought to say, to complete my picture, that the four years I was there I found a dearth of spirituality as entire as could be.


The Mother: These people have a wonderful morality, live according to quite strict moral rules, they have a mental construction even in the least detail of life: one must eat in a certain way and not another, one must bow in a certain way and not another, one must say certain words but not all; when addressing certain people one must express oneself in a certain way; when speaking with others, one must express oneself in another. If you go to buy something in a shop, you must say a particular sentence; if you don’t say it, you are not served: they look at you quizzically and do not move! But if you say the word, they wait upon you  with full attention and bring, if necessary, a cushion for you to sit upon and a cup of tea to drink. And everything is like that. However, not once do you have the feeling that you are in contact with something other than a marvellously organised mental-physical domain.


The Mother: And what energy they have! Their whole vital being is turned into energy. They have an extraordinary endurance but no direct aspiration: one must obey the rule, one is obliged. If one does not submit oneself to rules there, one may live as Europeans do, who are considered barbarians and looked upon altogether as intruders, but if you want to live a Japanese life among the Japanese you must do as they do, otherwise you make them so unhappy that you can’t even have any relation with them. In their house you must live in a particular way, when you meet them you must greet them in a particular way....


The Mother: I think I have already told you the story of that Japanese who was an intimate friend of ours, and whom I helped to come into contact with his soul — and who ran away. He was in the countryside with us and I had put him in touch with his psychic being; he had the experience, a revelation, the contact, the dazzling inner contact.  And the next morning, he was no longer there, he had taken ﬂight! Later, when I saw him again in town after the holidays, I asked him, “But what happened to you, why did you go away?”  —


The Mother: “Oh! You understand, I discovered my soul and saw that my soul was more powerful than my faith in the country and the Mikado; I would have had to obey my soul and I would no longer have been a faithful subject of my emperor. I had to go away.” There you are! All this is authentically true.


The Mother: That depends on the person to whom you put the question.  The explanation will be different accordingly. From the point of view of evolution, I think Sri Aurobindo has explained this very clearly in Evolution, that is to say, culture  and civilisation, describes a more or less regular spiral movement around the earth, and the results of one civilisation, it may be said, slowly go to form another; then, when the total development is harmonious, this creates simultaneously the ﬁeld of action and the actors, in the sense that at the time of the great artistic periods all the conditions were favourable to the development of art, and naturally, the fact that all the circumstances were favourable, attracted the men who could use them. There have been concrete movements like that, great ages like that of the Italian Renaissance or the similar period in France, almost at the same time, when artists from all countries were gathered at the same place because the conditions were favourable to the development of their art. This is one of the reasons — a so-to-say external reason — for the formation of civilisations.


The Mother: There is another, this is that from an occult point of view it is almost always the same forces and same beings which incarnate during all the ages of artistic beauty upon earth and that, according to occultists, there are cycles of rebirth: beings return, group themselves through afﬁnity at the time of birth; so it happens that regularly, almost all come together for a similar action. Some occultists have studied this question and given very precise numbers based upon the actual facts of the development of the earth: they have said that once in a hundred years, once in a thousand years, once in ﬁve thousand years, etc., certain cycles were repeated; that certain great civilisations appeared every ﬁve thousand years, and that it was (according to their special knowledge) the same people who came back. This is not quite exact, that is why I am not going into details, but in a sense this is true: it is the same forces which are at work. It is the same forces and they are grouped according to their afﬁnities and, for a reason which may be quite material or for a mental or cyclic reason, they reunite at a certain place, and in this place there is a new civilisation or a special progress in a civilisation or a kind of effervescence, blossoming, ﬂowering of beauty, as in the great ages in Greece, Egypt, India, Italy, Spain.... Everywhere,  in all the countries of the world, there have been more or less beautiful periods.