The Mother: That depends. They have been given many names. All has been done by gradations and through individual beings of all kinds.  Each state of being is inhabited by entities, individualities and personalities and each one has created a world around him or has contributed to the formation of certain beings upon earth.  The last creators are those of the vital world, but there are beings of the Overmind (Sri Aurobindo calls this plane the Overmind), who have created, given forms, sent out emanations, and these  emanations again had their emanations and so on.


The Mother: What I meant is that it is not the Divine Will that acted directly on Matter to give to the world the required form, it is by passing through layers, so to say, planes of the world, as for example, the mental plane — there are so many beings on the mental plane who are form-makers, who have taken part in the formation of some beings who have incarnated upon earth. On the vital plane also the same thing happens.  For example, there is a tradition which says that the whole world of insects is the outcome of the form-makers of the vital world, and that this is why they take such absolutely diabolical shapes when they are magniﬁed under the microscope. You saw the other day, when you were shown the microbes in water?  Naturally the pictures were made to amuse, to strike the imagination, but they are based on real forms, so magniﬁed, however, that they look like monsters.


The Mother: Almost the whole world of insects is a world of microscopic monsters which, had they been larger in size, would have been quite terrifying. So it is said these are entities of the vital world, beings of the vital who created that for fun and amused themselves forming all these impossible beasts which make human life altogether unpleasant.  Through intermediaries, yes, not directly. These beings are not in direct contact with the Divine (there are exceptions, I mean as a general rule), they are beings who are in relation with other beings, who are again in relation with others, and these with still others, and so on, in a hierarchy, up to the Supreme.


The Mother: Evil? I think I have explained that to you once: just by not remaining under the direct inﬂuence of the Divine and not  following the movement of creation or expansion as willed by the Divine; this rupture of contact is enough to produce the greatest of disorders, that of division. Well, even the most luminous, the most powerful beings may choose to follow their own movement instead of obeying the divine movement. And though in themselves they may be quite wonderful and if human beings saw them they would take them for the very Godhead, they can, because they follow their own will instead of working in harmony with the universe, be the source of very great evils, very great disorders, very great massive obstructions. But don’t you see, the question is badly put, I laughed just now when I read the question.


The Mother: It is a childish way of speaking. This person says: “If God is everything in the world, why are there evil things in the world?” Now, if she had told me that, I would have simply answered: there is nothing which is not God, only it is in a disorder. One must try to remedy it — God is not love alone, He is all things, and if that appears to us — to us — altogether wrong, it is because it is not arranged properly. There have been movements exactly of the kind I spoke to you about.


The Mother: You may ask why it happened. Well, certainly it is not the mind, you know, which can say why it happened. It happened, that is all. In reality the only thing that concerns us is that it has happened. It is perhaps an accident to begin with....


The Mother: If you look at the thing from a philosophical point of view, it is evident that the universe in which we live is a movement among many others and this movement follows a law which is its own (and which is perhaps not the same in the others), and if the Will was for the world to be built on the principle of choice, of the freedom of choice, then one cannot prevent disorderly movements from taking place until knowledge comes and the choice is enlightened. If one is free to choose, one can also choose bad things, not necessarily the good, for if it were a  thing decided beforehand, it would no longer be a free choice.  You see, when such questions are put, the mind only answers and it reduces the problem, it reduces it to a more or less elementary mental formula; but that corresponds only very vaguely and superﬁcially and incompletely with the reality of things.  To be able to understand, one must become. If you want to understand the why and how of the universe, you must identify yourself with the universe.


The Mother: It is not impossible but it is not very easy either, particularly for children.  This was one of the most childish questions that she put — altogether childish: “If He is just, why is there injustice? If He is good, why is there wickedness? If He is love, why is there hatred?” — But He is all!


The Mother: So He is not merely this or that, or only, exclusively this — He is all. That is, to be more correct, it should be said that all is He. There are notions about creation, very widespread upon earth, which have been accepted more or less for a long time in human thought, that are quite simplistic!  There is “something” (truly speaking, one does not know what), and then there is a God who puts this something into form and creates the world out of it. So if you have such notions, you have a justiﬁable right to say to this God: “Well, you have indeed created a world, it’s a pretty one, that world of yours!”


The Mother: Although, according to the story, after seven days of labour, he declared that it was very good — but it was good for him.  Perhaps it may have amused him immensely, but as for us who are in the world, we do not ﬁnd it good at all! Don’t you see, the conception and the way of putting it are altogether childish.  It is just like the story of the potter who puts his pot in shape — this God is a human being, formidable in proportions and power, but looking strangely like a man. It is man who makes God in his image, not God who makes man in his image!


The Mother: So each time a question is put in an incomplete or childish way, it is impossible to give an answer to it truly, for the question is badly put. You say something, you afﬁrm it. But what right have you to assert it? Because you afﬁrm that, you conclude: “Since that  is this, how does it happen that it is so?” But “that is this” is your statement.


The Mother: It does not mean that it is so!  There is only one single solution to the problem — not to make any distinction between God and the universe at the origin.  The universe the Divine projected in space, and God the universe at its origin. It is the same thing under one aspect or another. And you cannot divide them.


The Mother: It is the opposite conception to that of the “creator” and his “work”. Only, it is very convenient to speak of the creator and his work, it makes explanations very easy and the teaching quite elementary. But it is not the truth. And then you say: “How is it that God who is all-powerful has allowed the world to be like this?” But it is your own conception!


The Mother: It is because you yourself happen to be in the midst of a set of circumstances that seems to you unpleasant, so you project that upon the Divine and you tell him: “Why have you made such a world?” — “I did not make it. It is you yourself.  And if you become Myself once again, you will no longer feel as you do. What makes you feel as you do is that you are no longer Myself.” This is what He could tell you in answer.


The Mother: And the fact is that when you succeed in uniting your consciousness with the divine consciousness, there is no problem left. Everything appears quite natural and simple and all right and exactly what it had to be. But when you cut yourself off from the origin and stand over against Him, then truly everything goes wrong, nothing can go right!  But if you ask for a logic that pushes things to the extreme end, you question how it is that the Divine has tolerated parts of his own self to be separated from him and all this disorder to be created. You may say that.


The Mother: And I then will reply: “If you want to know, it is better to unite yourself with the Divine, for that is the only way of knowing why He has done these things.”  It is not by questioning Him mentally, for your mind cannot understand. And I repeat it, when you reach such an identiﬁcation, all problems are solved. And this feeling that things are not all right and that they should be otherwise, comes just because there  is a divine will for a constant unfolding in perpetual progress and things that were must give place to things that shall be and shall be better than what the others were. And the world that was good yesterday is no longer good tomorrow.


The Mother: The whole world that could appear absolutely harmonious and perfect at one time, well, today it is discordant, no longer harmonious, because now we conceive and see the possibility of a better world. And if we were to ﬁnd it all right we would not do what we ought to do, that is, make the effort needed for it to become better.  There comes a time when all these notions appear so childish! And this happens solely because one is shut up within oneself. With this consciousness which is your own, which is like a grain of sand in the inﬁnite vastness, you want to know and judge the inﬁnite?


The Mother: It is impossible. You must ﬁrst of all come out of yourself, and then unite with the inﬁnite and only afterwards can you begin to understand what it is, not before. You project your consciousness — what you are, the thoughts you have, the capacity of understanding you have — you project this upon the Divine and then say: “That is all wrong.” I quite understand! But there is no possibility of knowing unless you identify yourself.


The Mother: I do not see how, for example, a drop of water could tell you what the ocean is like. That’s how it is.   It seems more inevitable than necessary!... One doesn’t even perceive that one is accepting them.


The Mother: We said the other day that  when a psychic being enters a body, it is as though it fell on its head — it is a little stunned for a time. So during this period it is under the inﬂuence of these suggestions without even knowing it. But as soon as it wakes up, it can come out of that; it is not at all necessary to accept them. Only, one must know that they are suggestions. One must be able to separate oneself from the purely human consciousness, the body consciousness.


The Mother: And once you can look at it from above, you can free yourself from these suggestions quite well. You can free yourself from all suggestions, but for that you must rise above them. If that were not possible, it would be impossible to do yoga.  But you do not become aware of it, it is a constant thing. For example, there is that formidable collective suggestion of death.


The Mother: But how can you get rid of that idea unless you are able to create in you an immortal consciousness? Once you have created in you the immortal consciousness, you can be freed of the suggestion.  Otherwise it is not possible. And you are not aware of it because you live in it quite normally — you are full of the movements and ideas belonging to the human race, which are not personal to you at all. You are not aware of them because they are very intimately bound up with your consciousness.


The Mother: But the moment you can free yourself from this human consciousness and enter a domain where, for example, life in the body becomes almost an accident — it can be here, it can be there, it can be over there — you are no longer tied to the body. You look at it and say: it is almost like an accident (it may be a choice also, but most often it is an accident). Then, from that moment you are no longer tied down, for you are conscious in a being which is no longer merely, exclusively human. But till that moment you are not even aware. You have no means of becoming aware.


The Mother: And if you come to the purely mental domain, there are such strong ideas; for example, that the inﬁnite cannot be within the ﬁnite, that what begins will surely have an end — ideas of this kind which seem wonderfully luminous, and yet are idiocies.  But all that belongs to the collective human mentality and there  is nothing more difﬁcult than to drive this out of the head of people who think themselves very clever.... Perhaps you have not yet put these problems to yourselves because you have not yet begun studying philosophy, but when you begin, you will see.  And this will be given to you as immortal truths which cannot be touched! Yet this is nonsense.


The Mother: One day I would like... ( ) You don’t have the here? It is in the, that text of Sri Aurobindo’s. One day we shall translate it together from English into French.


The Mother: He has made a wonderful observation upon logic and reason... And all that never even crossed your mind: that these are collective suggestions and one must come out of them. Not only does it not appear to you as slavery, but it appears to you as an illumination. Well, it’s not that at all!


The Mother: Ah! that depends on the nature of the fear. Is it a fear without a cause or is it based on a cause? Because the remedy differs.


The Mother: Ah! For example, when someone is ill, one is afraid of catching the illness....  And one is afraid to die.   There are two remedies.


The Mother: There are many, but two at least are there. In any case, the use of a deeper consciousness is essential.   One remedy consists in saying that it is something that happens to everyone (let us take it on that level), yes, it is a thing that happens to everybody, and therefore, sooner or later, it will come and there is no reason why one should be afraid, it is quite a normal thing. You may add one more idea to this, that according to experience (not yours but just the collective human experience), circumstances being the same, absolutely identical, in one case people die, in another they do not — why? And if you push the thing a little further still, you say to yourself that after all it must depend on something which is altogether outside your consciousness — and in the end one dies when one has to die.


The Mother: That is all. When one has to die one dies, and when one has not to die, one does not die. Even when you are in mortal danger, if it is not your hour to die, you will not die, and even if you are out of all danger, just a scratch on your foot will be enough to make you die, for there are people who have died of a pin-scratch on the foot — because the time had come. Therefore, fear has no sense. What you can do is to rise to a state of consciousness where you can say, “It is like that, we accept the fact because it seems to be recognised as an inevitable fact.


The Mother: But I do not need to worry, for it will come only when it must come. So I don’t need to feel afraid: when it is not to come, it will not come to me, but when it must come to me, it will come. And as it will come to me inevitably, it is better I do not fear the thing; on the contrary, one must accept what is perfectly natural.” This is a well-known remedy, that is to say, very much in use.  There is another, a little more difﬁcult, but better, I believe.


The Mother: It lies in telling oneself: “This body is not I”, and in trying to ﬁnd in oneself the part which is truly one’s self, until one has found one’s psychic being. And when one has found one’s psychic being — immediately, you understand — one has the sense of immortality. And one knows that what goes out or what comes in is just a matter of convenience: “I am not going to weep over a pair of shoes I put aside when it is full of holes! When my pair of shoes is worn out I cast it aside, and I do not weep.” Well, the  psychic being has taken this body because it needed to use it for its work, but when the time comes to leave the body, that is to say, when one must leave it because it is no longer of any use for some reason or other, one leaves the body and has no fear.


The Mother: It is quite a natural gesture — and it is done without the least regret, that’s all.  And the moment you are in your psychic being, you have that feeling, spontaneously, effortlessly. You soar above the physical life and have the sense of immortality. As for me, I consider this the best remedy. The other is an intellectual, common-sense, rational remedy.


The Mother: This is a deep experience and you can always get it back as soon as you recover the contact with your psychic being. This is a truly interesting phenomenon, for it is automatic.  The moment you are in contact with your psychic being, you have the feeling of immortality, of having always been and being always, eternally. And then what comes and goes — these are life’s accidents, they have no importance. Yes, this is the best remedy.


The Mother: The other is like the prisoner ﬁnding good reasons for accepting his prison. This one is like a man for whom there’s no longer any prison.  Now, a third thing also one must know, but for this one has to be a mighty yogi. For this means knowing that death is not an inevitable thing, it is an accident which has been occurring till now (which seems in any case to have always occurred till now), and that we have put it into our head and our will to conquer this accident and overcome it. But it is so terrible, so formidable a battle against all the laws of Nature, against all collective suggestions, all earthly habits, that unless, as I have said, you are a ﬁrst-rate warrior whom nothing frightens, it is better not to begin the battle.


The Mother: You must be an absolutely intrepid hero, for at every step, at every second you have to ﬁght a battle against all established things. So it is not a very easy thing.  And even as an individual it is a battle against oneself, because (I think I have already told you this once), if you want your physical consciousness to be in a state which admits of physical  immortality, you must be free to such an extent from everything which at present represents the physical consciousness that it becomes every second a battle. All feelings, all sensations, all thoughts, all reﬂexes, all attractions, all repulsions, all existing things, all that forms the fabric of our physical life must be overcome, transformed and freed from all their habits. This is a battle of every second against thousands and millions of enemies.


The Mother: Unless you feel you are a hero, it is better not to try. Because this solution, well... I do not know, but I believe I was asked this question once before: “Has anyone succeeded so far?” To tell you the truth I don’t know, for I have not met such a person.... I do not have the feeling that anyone has succeeded till now.


The Mother: But it is possible. Only, he or she who has done it has not declared it, at least, not till now.  The other two solutions are safe and sure and within your reach. Now, there is a small remedy which is very very easy.  For it is based on a simple personal question of one’s common sense....


The Mother: You must observe yourself a little and say that when you are afraid it is as though the fear was attracting the thing you are afraid of. If you are afraid of illness, it is as though you were attracting the illness. If you are afraid of an accident, it is as though you were attracting the accident. And if you look into yourself and around yourself a little, you will ﬁnd it out, it is a persistent fact. So if you have just a little common sense, you say: “It is stupid to be afraid of anything, for it is precisely as though I were making a sign to that thing to come to me.


The Mother: If I had an enemy who wanted to kill me, I would not go and tell him: ‘You know, it’s me you want to kill!’ ” It is something like that. So since fear is bad, we won’t have it. And if you say you are unable to prevent it by your reason, well, that shows you have no control over yourselves and must make a little effort to control yourselves. That is all.


The Mother: Oh! There are many ways of curing oneself of fear. But in reality everyone ﬁnds his own way, the one good for him. There are people to whom you have simply to say: “Your fear is a  weakness”, and they would immediately ﬁnd the means to look at it with contempt, for they have a horror of weakness.


The Mother: There are others, you tell them: “Fear is a suggestion from hostile forces, you must push it away, as you drive off hostile forces”, and this is very effective. For each one it is different. But ﬁrst of all you must know that fear is a very bad thing, very bad, it is a dissolvent; it is like an acid. If you put a drop of it on something, it eats into the substance. The ﬁrst step is not to admit the possibility of fear.


The Mother: Yes, that’s the ﬁrst step. I knew people who used to boast about their fear. These are incurable.  That is, quite naturally they would say, “Ah, just imagine, I was so frightened!” And then what!


The Mother: It is nothing to be proud of.  With such people you can do nothing.  However, when once you recognise that fear is neither good nor favourable nor noble nor worthy of a consciousness a little enlightened, you begin to ﬁght against it. And I say, one man’s way is not another’s; one must ﬁnd one’s own way; it depends on each one. Fear is also a terribly contagious collective thing — contagious, it is much more catching than the most contagious of illnesses.


The Mother: You breathe an atmosphere of fear and instantly you feel frightened, without even knowing why or how, nothing, simply because there was an atmosphere of fear. A panic at an accident is nothing but an atmosphere of fear spreading round over everybody. And it is quite curable. There have been numerous cases of a panic being stopped outright simply because some people refused the suggestion and could counteract it with an opposite suggestion.


The Mother: For mystics the best cure as soon as one begins to feel afraid of something is to think of the Divine and then snuggle in his arms or at his feet and leave him entirely responsible for everything that happens, within, outside, everywhere — and immediately the fear disappears. That is the cure for the mystic. It is the easiest of all. But everybody does not enjoy the grace of being a mystic.   How can one know whether one is capable of doing it or not!


The Mother: By. That’s the best thing. And if you do not succeed immediately, persevere. And you must know that if a strong urge, a very strong urge to do something comes to you, that means this work has something to do with you and you are capable of doing it.


The Mother: But one can have powers which are so well hidden that one has to dig long before ﬁnding them. So you must not get discouraged at the ﬁrst setback, you must persist.   And why not? Whom do you call an artist, ﬁrst of all? A painter, a sculptor —


The Mother: Is that all? What else? What meaning do you give to the word “artist”? Of whom do you think when you speak of an artist? Of a painter or a sculptor?


The Mother: Yes, a painter, someone who can draw, it is the same thing. Of a painter, a sculptor, that’s all? Painter and sculptor? Not of a musician or a writer or... I am asking you because the answer would be different according to the instances....


The Mother: For instance, there were in the Middle Ages — there still are today, but they were already there in the Middle Ages — men who made stained-glass windows, designs with pieces of coloured glass and in various forms. In the churches, in cathedrals, there were always stained-glass windows. Instead of ordinary windows, there were these coloured panes which made designs.  It is a wonderful material, for there is the sun behind (in any case the full light), and these glasses were transparent; so they gave out a colour which was as though self-luminous, and these men made designs, made pictures with these coloured glasses cut out, you know, in special forms and painted in different colours. And that indeed was art.


The Mother: In all the cathedrals, the big churches, there were stained-glass windows; some of them were quite marvellous. And they expressed, for instance, the life of a  saint or scenes from the life of Christ or... all kinds of things like that.  So, what is your question? Put it clearly.  Whether one can express the Divine himself in art?


The Mother: But in what can one express Him? I mean, what exactly do you call “expressing the Divine”? In words? In teachings? In books, ﬁnally?


The Mother: Or how else? Who has expressed the Divine completely in the material world?... It is only when the material world is transformed that it will be possible to express the Divine in his purity.  And I don’t see what difference there can be between art and any other activity. It is something which has the capacity to become fused, but not entirely, and it remains (how to put it?) an instrument for giving a form.


The Mother: And I don’t see what difference this makes, whatever may be the form. If one can express the Divine with words, one can express Him with colours, express Him with sounds, express Him with forms. But in none of these instances is the expression perfect, for the union is not perfect.  But when the world is transformed and the Divine is able to manifest Himself without being deformed, the expression will be perfect. But for the moment all expressions are on the same plane.


The Mother: None of them is better than any other. One mode of expression (I mean in itself) is not better than another. There is always of the human personality, the being in form, which is there to give a limitation or deformation to what has to be expressed.  Art is just one activity like all others. Truly speaking, I was too polite to tell that lady this, but I thought: “Why do you make distinctions like that, all this is the same thing.”


The Mother: Do you catch what I mean?   Usually. It is very rare — unless one is able to get rid of one’s mental formation completely — it is very rare to see Him quite objectively. Besides, Sri Aurobindo always used to say that the relation with the Divine depended on what one wanted it to be.  Everyone aspires for a particular form of relation, and for him the relation takes that form.


The Mother: Probably something that escapes form totally — or that can take all forms. There is no limitation to the expression of the Divine. He can express Himself without form and He can express Himself in all forms. And He expresses Himself in everyone according to each one’s need. For even if somebody succeeds in becoming sufﬁciently impersonal so as to identify himself completely with the Divine, at that moment he will not be able to express it.


The Mother: And as soon as he is in a condition to express it, there will be something of the limited personality intervening  and through this the experience has to pass. The moment of the experience is one thing and the expression of this experience is another. It may be simultaneous: there are people who while having the experience express what they feel in some form or other. Then it is simultaneous.


The Mother: But that does not prevent that which has the experience in its purity and that which expresses it from being two fairly different modes of being. And this difference is enough for one to be able to say in truth that it is impossible to know the Divine unless one becomes the Divine.  As for expressing Him, there is always a shifting; it always causes something like this (), whatever the mode of expression.  There remains only one ﬁeld in which the experience has not been totally achieved, that is the purely material ﬁeld. And  there, it may be asked if truly, when the divine Consciousness descends into the body, the transformations will not be sufﬁcient for there to be a possibility of integral expression....


The Mother: But that is yet to come; it has not yet been done. And so long as it is not done, one cannot know. For even in the highest mental expression there is something which intervenes, due to the physical body. For the inspiration to come right down to the paper, for instance, well, despite everything, it must pass through very material vibrations which may change it. But if these very vibrations are transformed, then in that case it is possible that the outer expression is absolutely identical with the inner; that is, the corporeal manifestation truly becomes a manifestation of the divine essence.


The Mother: Is that all?   True, in what sense? Whether it all really happened on earth like that? Hanuman and the monkeys and the?... ()


The Mother: I can’t tell. I have the feeling that it is symbolical; that, for instance, when one speaks of Hanuman, this represents the evolutionary man, and Rama is the involutionary being, the one who comes from above. But...  The evolutionary being is the one that’s the continuation of the animals, and the other is a being from higher worlds who, when the earth was formed, materialised itself upon earth — it does not come from below, it has come from above. But in the evolutionary being there is that central light which is the origin of the psychic being, which will develop into the psychic being, and when the psychic being is fully formed, there is a moment  when it can unite with a being from above which can incarnate in it.


The Mother: So this being from above which descends into a psychic being is an involutionary being — a being of the Overmind plane or from elsewhere.  That is all?  I don’t know. That depends (that’s just what I was asking Parul), it depends on the deﬁnition you give to the word “artist”.  If you ask me, I believe that all those who produce something artistic are artists!


The Mother: A word depends upon the way it is used, upon what one puts into it. One may put into it all that one wants.   For instance, in Japan there are gardeners who spend their time correcting the forms of trees so that in the landscape they make a beautiful picture. By all kinds of trimmings, props, etc. they adjust the forms of trees.


The Mother: They give them special forms so that each form may be just what is needed in the landscape. A tree is planted in a garden at the spot where it is needed and moreover, it is given the form that’s required for it to go well with the whole set-up. And they succeed in doing wonderful things. You have but to take a photograph of the garden, it is a real picture, it is so good. Well, I certainly call the man an artist.


The Mother: One may call him a gardener but he is an artist.... All those who have a sure and developed sense of harmony in all its forms, and the harmony of all the forms among themselves, are necessarily artists, whatever may be the type of their production.  (Laughter)  I did not ﬁnish? But yes, I said...


The Mother: Oh! because he asked what difference there was between an involutionary and an evolutionary being. But that’s enough as it is. Once you know that you have the key to the whole story. Besides, I don’t know whether there  is a single authentic text or many texts of the Ramayana. For I have heard different versions.


The Mother: There are different versions, aren’t there? Above all, for two very important facts ( ) concerning the end: the defeat and death of Ravana, and then the death of Sita. I have heard it narrated very differently, with different signiﬁcances, by different pandits. According to their turn of mind, if I may say so, some who were very very very orthodox told me certain things and others who were not orthodox told me something very different. So I don’t know if there are several texts or whether it was their own interpretation.


The Mother: (Nolini)   Ah! as for Buddhism. The people of the South and the North have different kinds of imagination. The southern people are generally more rigid, aren’t they?...


The Mother: I don’t know, but for Buddhism, the Buddhism of the South is quite rigid and doesn’t allow any suppleness in the understanding of the text. And it is a terribly strict Buddhism in which all notion of the Godhead in any form whatsoever, is completely done away with.  On the other hand, the Buddhism of the North is an orgy of gods! It is true that these are former Buddhas, but still they are turned into gods. And it is this latter that has spread into China and from China gone to Japan.


The Mother: So, one enters a Buddhist temple in Japan and sees... There is a temple where there were more than a thousand Buddhas, all sculptured — a thousand ﬁgures seated around the central Buddha — they were there all around, the entire back wall of the temple was covered with images: small ones, big ones, fat ones, thin ones, women, men — there was everything, a whole pantheon there, formidable, and they were like gods. And then too, there were little beings down below with all kinds of forms including those of animals, and these were the worshippers. It was... it was an orgy of images.


The Mother: But the Buddhism of the South has the austerity of  Protestantism: there must be no images. And there is no divine Consciousness, besides. One comes into the world through desire, into a world of desire, and abandoning desire one goes out of the world and creation and returns to Nirvana — even the nought is something too concrete. There is no Creator in Buddhism. So, I don’t know.


The Mother: The Buddhism of the South is written in Pali and that of the North in Sanskrit. And naturally, there is Tibetan Buddhism written in Tibetan, and Chinese Buddhism written in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism in Japanese.  And each one, I believe, is very very different from the others.  Well, probably there must be several versions of the Ramayana.


The Mother: And still more versions of the Mahabharata — that indeed is amazing!  (Nolini)  Then texts have been added later.  I suppose something did exist. In all these things, there is “something” that’s true and then what has been made of it.


The Mother: These are two very different things. But in all religions, everywhere, it is the same thing: there is something which is there, something exists, and then one makes quite a different thing of it. That’s the difference between history and legend — but history itself is a legend.  The same story, even taken quite objectively, when it is repeated several times, changes; and so after thousands of years it is altogether deformed. Which are the original texts — I mean the ﬁrst recognised original texts — of the Mahabharata?


The Mother: It was related orally for a very long time, wasn’t it? So you can imagine how it could have changed. These were oral traditions for a very long time. But who wrote the ﬁrst version?   (Nolini)


The Mother: Ah!  (Nolini)  Oh! Oh! it has grown: from 36,000 it has become quite inﬂated!


The Mother: But the Gita — are there several versions?  (Nolini)  But the Gita is a part of the Mahabharata.  (Nolini) Is the Ramayana more recent?  (Nolini) Is it of the same period?


The Mother: And is the author known?  (Nolini)  Yes, and this has not changed so much.   (Nolini)


The Mother: But there are differences. There is one tradition which says that Ravana died deliberately, that it was deliberately he chose the role of the Asura and that he died willingly in order to shorten his “stay” outside the Divine. He dissolved into Rama when he died, saying that thus he had succeeded sooner in uniting with him deﬁnitively. Which version is this? Is it orthodox or not?


The Mother: (Nolini)   It is orthodox. The idea (it is an idea, isn’t it?) is that the Asuras have chosen to be Asuras because they will be dissolved by the Divine and thus return more quickly, unite more swiftly with the divine essence than the gods or sages who take a big round of labour before being able to return to the Divine. The Asuras, on the other hand, having chosen to be very wicked, will be destroyed much more quickly, they will return much faster.


The Mother: It’s one way of looking at it! ()  In the same way, I have heard two versions (but as I said, one was broad-minded and the other extremely orthodox) about the end of Sita; one said that Sita chose to be swallowed up in the earth to prove her innocence, whilst the very orthodox version said that it was just because she was not innocent that she was swallowed up! ()   Ah!


The Mother: that again is another story.... I heard the Ramayana from a man called Pandit, and he was the son of a pandit and had come to Paris to study Law. But he had remained orthodox, as orthodox as one could be, it was tremendous! And he had with him a Ramayana translated into English, with pictures, and he showed it to me. And he told me the story.


The Mother: And then, when he came to the end he told me that. So I said: “What do you mean?” He told me: “You understand, for an Indian, if a woman has lived even for a few hours in another man’s house, she is impure....” Oh! it is terrible...


The Mother: So, it was because she was impure that she was swallowed up.... I remember, he was quite short. He was from a Bombay family — not Bombay proper but from that side. He was a Gujarati. I believe he spoke Gujarati.


The Mother: And then the other version, I heard that from... that man was called Shastri. He was another pandit. He was in Japan.  There we are, then.  Is that all?


The Mother: No questions? You... Be quick, it is late.   Yes.


The Mother: I mean one must have a universal in order to see and recognise it. For instance, if your consciousness is limited to one place, that is, it is a national consciousness (the consciousness of any one country), what is beautiful for one country is not beautiful for another. The sense of beauty is different. For example (I could make you laugh with a story), I knew in Paris the son of the king of Dahomey (he was a negro — the king of Dahomey was a negro) and this boy had come to Paris to study Law. He used to speak French like a Frenchman.


The Mother: But he had remained a negro, you understand. And he was asked (he used to tell us all kinds of stories about his life as a student), someone asked him in front of me: “Well, when you marry, whom will you marry?” — “Ah! a girl from my country, naturally, they alone are beautiful....” ( ) Now, for those who are not negroes, negro beauty is a little difﬁcult to see!


The Mother: And yet, this was quite spontaneous. He was fully convinced it was impossible for anyone to think otherwise.... “Only the women of my country are beautiful!”  It is the same thing everywhere. Only those who have developed a little artistic taste, have travelled much and seen many things have widened their consciousness and they are no longer so sectarian.


The Mother: But it is very difﬁcult to pull a person out of the specialised tastes of his race — I am not even speaking now of the country, I am speaking of the race. It is very difﬁcult. It is there, you know, hidden right at the bottom, in the subconscious, and it comes back without your even noticing it, quite spontaneously,  quite naturally. Even on this very point: the woman of your race is always much more beautiful than the woman of other races — spontaneously, it is the spontaneous taste. That’s what I mean.


The Mother: So, you must rise above that. I am not even speaking of those who ﬁnd everything that’s outside their own family or caste very ugly and bad. I am not speaking at all of these people. I am not even speaking of those for whom one country is much more beautiful than another. And yet, these people have already risen above the altogether ordinary way of thinking.


The Mother: I am not even speaking of a question of race.... It is very difﬁcult, one must go right down, right down within oneself into the subconscious — and even farther — to discover the root of these things. Therefore, if you want to have the sense of beauty in itself — which is quite independent of all these tastes, the taste of the race — you must have a universal consciousness. Otherwise how can you have it? You will always have preferences.


The Mother: Even if these are not active and conscious preferences, they are subconscious preferences, instincts. So, to know true beauty independent of all form, one must rise above all form. And once you have known it beyond every form, you can recognise it in any form whatsoever, indifferently. And that becomes very interesting.  So that’s all., my children.


The Mother: What I have said? Nothing else but that true art is the expression of beauty in the material world; and in a world entirely changed spiritually, that is to say, one expressing completely the divine reality, art must act as a revealer and teacher of this divine beauty in life; that is to say, an artist should be capable of entering into communion with the Divine and of receiving inspiration about what form or forms ought to be used to express the divine beauty in matter. And thus, if it does that, art can be a means of realisation of beauty, and at the same time a teacher of what beauty ought to be, that is, art should be an element in the  education of men’s taste, of young and old, and it is the teaching of true beauty, that is, the essential beauty which expresses the divine truth. This is the of art. Now, between this and what is done there is a great difference, but this is the true  of art.


The Mother: Have you understood? A little!  Because human evolution goes in spirals. I have explained this.  I said that art had become an altogether mercenary affair, obscure and ignorant, from the beginning of the last century till its middle.


The Mother: It had become something very commercial and quite remote from the true sense of art. And so, naturally, the artistic spirit does not come! It followed bad forms, yet it tried to manifest to counteract the degradation of taste which prevailed.  But naturally, as with every movement of Nature in man, some having gone to one extreme, others went to the other extreme; and as these made a sort of servile copy of life — not even that, in those days it was called “a photographic view” of things, but now one can no longer say that, for photography has progressed so much that it would be doing it an injustice to say this, wouldn’t it? Photography has become artistic; so a picture cannot be criticised by calling it photographic; nor can one call it “realistic” any longer, for there is a realistic painting which is not at all like that — but it was conventional, artiﬁcial and without any true life, so the reaction was to the very opposite, and naturally to another absurdity: “art” was no longer to express physical life but mental life or vital life.


The Mother: And so came all the schools, like the Cubists and others, who created from their head. But in art it is not the head that dominates, it is the feeling for beauty. And they produced absurd and ridiculous and  frightful things. Now they have gone farther still, but that, that is due to the wars — with every war there descends upon earth a world in decomposition which produces a sort of chaos. And some, of course, ﬁnd all this very beautiful and admire it very much.


The Mother: I understand what they want to do, I understand it very well, but I cannot say that I ﬁnd they do it well. All I can say is that they are trying.  But it is perhaps (with all its horror, from a certain point of view), it is perhaps better than what was produced in that age of extreme and practical philistinism: the Victorian age or in France the Second Empire. So, one starts from a point where there was a harmony and describes a curve, and with this curve one goes completely out of this harmony and may enter into a total darkness; and then one climbs up, and when one ﬁnds oneself in line with the old realisation of art, one becomes aware of the truth there was in this realisation, but with the necessity of expressing something more complete and more conscious. But in describing the circle one forgets that art is the expression of forms and one tries to express ideas and feelings with a minimum of forms.


The Mother: That gives what we have, what you may see (I believe we have reproductions of the most modern painters in the University Library). But if one goes a little farther still, this idea and these feelings they wish to express and express very clumsily — if one returns to the same point of the spiral (only a little higher), one will discover that it is the embryo of a new art which will be an art of beauty and will express not only material life but will also try to express its soul.  Anyway, we have not yet come to that, but let us hope we shall reach there soon. So that’s all.  It is a constant progress.


The Mother: But if you made it in a straight line,  you would cover only a single part — the world is a globe, it is not a line.  Even for a cylinder, if you drew only one line, one part of the cylinder would escape you altogether. This movement in a spiral is precisely to try and make everything enter this phenomenon of evolution — so that not only one thing may advance whilst the others remain behind. And so, according to the centre where the progress is concentrated, one seems to move away from one thing and enter into another. But in the long run, when one evolves consciously, one does not forget one thing in order to do another.


The Mother: What is bad at present is forgetfulness; it is that when following a certain activity for a realisation, one forgets all the others or they go into the background, they have no longer any intensity. But this is a human shortcoming which can be corrected — it ought to be corrected.  I fear it is not very harmonious, for the world seems to me rather chaotic! If indeed the march were totally organised, it would be a harmonious development, and if one could see where one is going — having the line of what has been done, one could prolong these lines and see what would come. But for the moment this is open only to an ´elite.


The Mother: And the mass follows the movement, and all the movements are not homogeneous and simultaneous — certain things are slower to put into line and movement than others. So, even a little difference like this sufﬁces for it to create an immense difference in the movement.  There is even a considerable number of spirals intersecting and giving the impression of contradiction. If one could follow in its totality the movement of universal progress, one would see that there is such a great number of spirals which intersect, that  ﬁnally one does not know at all whether one is advancing or going back. For, at the same moment some things are going up and others falling back into the darkness, and all these are not absolutely independent of one another.


The Mother: There is a kind of coordination, so that instead of imagining a spiral like that, we should have to think of spherical spirals. If this could be described, all these spirals taken together would form an immense globe. And it is at the intersection of these spirals that there are moments of progress. But before the progress is coherent, total, there must be an inner organisation of life, different from that of Nature, arranged in accordance with a plan. For Nature — her plan is only made with an aspiration, a decision and a goal.


The Mother: And the road seems quite fantastic, following the impulses of every minute — trials, set-backs, contradictions, progress and demolition of what has already been done; and it is such a chaos that one can understand nothing there. She has the air of somebody doing things impulsively — giving out certain impulses and destroying them, beginning others again, and going on and on like that.  She makes and unmakes, she remakes and again demolishes, she mixes, destroys, constructs and all this at the same time.  It is incomprehensible. And yet, she evidently has a plan, and herself goes towards a certain goal which is very clear to her but quite veiled to human consciousness....


The Mother: It is very interesting. If one could construct something like that, it would give an idea: a globe made of intersecting spirals of different colours, and each representing one aspect of Nature’s creation. And these aspects are made to complete one another — but so far they are rather in competition than collaboration, and it seems she is always obliged to destroy something in order to make another, which makes for a terrible wastage, and a still greater disorder.  But if all this were seen in its totality, it would be extremely interesting. For it is an extremely complex criss-crossing, in all possible directions, of a spiralling ascent.


The Mother: Now, for your question, there could be another answer.  What I have said just now is also exactly the same for art, it  also follows an evolution and at a certain moment seems to drift away from its goal and at others it draws close to a greater height. But there is something else, that is a social point of view: there is a period, like the Age of Louis XIV for example, in which what predominated was the sense of artistic creation, and this sense seems to have given a certain perception of beauty at that moment; but afterwards social evolution brought in other needs and other ideas, and now, for more than a century it is commercialism which is uppermost in the world, and there is nothing more in contradiction with art than commerce. For it is precisely the vulgarisation of something which ought to be exceptional. It is putting within everybody’s range something which could be understood only by an ´elite.


The Mother: And as we are in an age of mechanisation and commercialism, it is a time altogether uncongenial for a blossoming of art. And probably this is why art, not ﬁnding the conditions necessary for its full ﬂowering, tries to seek another outlet and enters the mental and vital ﬁeld for its expression. That is the reason. When the time comes to shake off, so to say, to reject this mercantilism and to wake up to a more beautiful reality, then art too will be reborn in a greater consciousness of harmony.  Yes, it is even an obstacle to intelligence.


The Mother: Fatuity is one of the greatest of human stupidities. There is a very great difference between having faith in what can be done, the will to realise it, the certitude of the possibilities open in creation (and also the certitude that these possibilities will be realised), and selfcomplacency; these are two things which turn their backs completely on each other. To be convinced that nothing is impossible if one puts in the time, energy, will, trust, sincerity and all else, is very essential, but to be self-satisﬁed in any way whatever is always, without exception, a stupidity. And this is one of the things that takes you farthest away from the divine realisation,  for it makes you foolish. And it is at the same time one of the things most contrary to the goodwill of Nature, for Nature laughs at you immediately.


The Mother: You become an object of ridicule at once. For, in truth, there is no human being who is something by himself. He is only a possibility created by the Divine and one which can be developed only by the Divine, which exists only by the Divine, and which should live only for the Divine.  And so, in this I do not see any place for self-complacency;  for, as we are nothing in ourselves but what the Divine makes of us, and as we can do nothing by ourselves except what the Divine wants to do through us, I don’t see what satisfaction one can have in that.


The Mother: One can only have the feeling of one’s perfect powerlessness. Only, what is very bad is to have this the wrong side out — for there is always a wrong side and a right to every state of consciousness — and, fundamentally, it is the same vanity which makes you say: “I can do nothing, I am good for nothing, I am incapable of doing anything whatsoever”; that, that is the wrong side of “I can, I am great, I have all sorts of powers in me.” It is the same thing. One is the shadow and the other the light, but they are exactly alike: one is no better than the other. And if really one were aware of being nothing at all, one would not bother to know what one is like.


The Mother: That would already be something. But truly, sincerely, I tell you, and I have a sufﬁciently long experience of life, I know nothing so grotesque as people who are satisﬁed with themselves. It is truly ridiculous.  They make themselves utterly ridiculous. There are people like that; some of them came to see Sri Aurobindo telling him all that they were capable of, all that they had done and all they could do, all that they had realised — and so Sri Aurobindo looked at them very seriously and replied: “Oh!


The Mother: you are too perfect to be here. It would be better for you to go away.”   Don’t you know what a mushroom is? how mushrooms grow?  Mushrooms spring up anywhere and seem not to belong to any cultivation.


The Mother: The idea is of a kind of spontaneous growth which has no roots in the totality of creation. These are things which do not belong to a whole, which are as though extraneous. Instead of mushrooms I could have said parasites on trees. You know there are parasites on trees, like the mistletoe on the oak; here too I have seen them on certain trees; I have seen plants grow clinging to the tree, plants which lived on the life of the tree, which did not have their own separate life, their own roots, which did not take their food directly from the soil; they clung to another plant, as though they made use of others’ work. The others work to obtain the food and these cling upon them and live by it.


The Mother: Really, how parasites live on animals!  I don’t know, I thought I went into great detail. But I have said enough about it for those who know.... In the old days, I mean in the artistic ages, as for instance in Greece or even during the Italian renaissance (but much more in Greece and Egypt), buildings were made for public utility. Mostly too, in Greece and Egypt, a kind of sanctuary was built to house their  gods.


The Mother: Well, what they tried to do was something total, beautiful in itself, complete. And in that they used architecture, that is to say, the sense of harmony of lines, and sculpture to add to architecture the detail of expression, and painting to complete this expression, but all this was held in a coordinated unity which was the created monument. The sculpture formed a part of the building, the painting was a part of the building. These were not things apart, just put there one knew not why — they belonged to the general plan. And so, when these people made a temple, for example, it was a whole wherein were found almost all the manifestations of art, united in a single will to express the beauty they wished to express, that is, a garment for the god they wished to adore.


The Mother: All the beautiful periods of art were of this kind. But precisely, these days, though not quite recently — at the end of the last century, art became commercial, mercenary, and pictures were made to be sold; they were painted on canvas, a frame was put and then, without any deﬁnite reason, a picture was put here or another there, or else some sculpture was made representing one thing or another, and it was put no matter where. It had nothing to do with the house in which it was placed. It did not ﬁt in. Things could be beautiful in themselves but they had no meaning.


The Mother: It was not a whole having cohesion and attempting to express something: it was an exhibition of talent, cleverness, the ability to make a picture or a statue. So too the architecture of those days, it had no precise meaning. One did not build with the idea of expressing the force one wanted to incarnate in that building; the architecture was not the expression of an aspiration or of something that uplifts your spirit or the expression of the magniﬁcence of the godhead one wanted to house. They were nothing else but mushrooms. They put up a house here, a house there, made this and that, pictures, statues, objects of all kinds.


The Mother: So, on entering a house one saw, as I have just told you, a bit of sculpture here, a bit of painting there, show-cases with a heap of bizarre objects having no connection with one another.  And wherefore all this? To make a sort of exhibition, a show  of art-objects which had nothing to do with art and beauty!  But that — one must understand the deep meaning of art to feel to what an extent this was shocking. Otherwise, when one is accustomed to it, when one has lived in that period and that milieu, it seems quite natural — but it is not natural.


The Mother: It is a commercial deformation.  There is only one justiﬁcation, that is to make it a means of education. Then it becomes a museum. If you make a museum, it is a historical sampling of all that has been done. It serves to give you a historical knowledge of things.


The Mother: But a museum is not something beautiful in itself, far from it! For an artist it is something quite shocking. From the point of view of education it is very good, for specimens of all kinds of things have been collected there in a single place; and in this way you may learn, acquire erudition. But from the point of view of beauty, it is frightful.  And so there was an attempt, later, to return (for instance, at the beginning of this century — I am speaking of the ﬁrst years of this century) an attempt to create what was called “decorative art”, that is, to try to get back to a vision of the ensemble and to make, when arranging a house, a coordinated whole in which things were in a certain place because they were meant to be there, and where every object had not only its but its exact place and could not be displaced.


The Mother: An ensemble was created, a whole. So that was already a little better. They were trying.  Here (in India), it is altogether different, for there is a tradition of art which has remained, the whole country is full of things which were made at a ﬁne moment of the artistic history of the country. One lives in its midst.


The Mother: One has hardly undergone the after-effects of what happened in the rest of the world, above all in Europe. Only those parts of India which are a little too anglicised have lost the sense of beauty. There are certain schools in Bombay, schools of artists, which are frightful. And then, there was that attempt of the Calcutta School to revive Indian art, but that was only on a very small scale. From the point of view of  art what you have most within your reach are the old creations, the old temples, old pictures.


The Mother: All that was very good. And that had been made to express a faith. And it was done precisely with a sense of the whole, not in disorder.  You have followed very little of this movement of art I am speaking about, which is related to European civilisation, it has not been felt much here — just a little but not deeply. Here, the majority of creations (this is a very good example), the majority of works, I believe even almost all the beautiful works, are not signed.


The Mother: All those paintings in the caves, those statues in the temples — these are not signed. One does not know at all who created them. And all this was not done with the idea of making a name for oneself as at present. One happened to be a great sculptor, a great painter, a great architect, and then that was all, there was no question of putting one’s name on everything and proclaiming it aloud in the newspapers so that no one might forget it! In those days the artist did what he had to do without caring whether his name would go down to posterity or not.


The Mother: All was done in a movement of aspiration to express a higher beauty, and above all with the idea of giving an appropriate abode to the godhead who was evoked. In the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, it was the same thing, and I don’t think that there too the names of the artists who made them have remained. If any are there, it is quite exceptional and it is only by chance that the name has been preserved. Whilst today, there is not a tiny little piece of canvas, painted or daubed, but on it is a signature to tell you: it is Mr. So-and-so who made this!


The Mother: Yes. One can make a synthesis of everything if one rises sufﬁciently high.   If it is necessary, it will be done. But fundamentally, these are things in the making. For, the advantage of modern times and specially of this hideous commercialism is that everything is now mixed up; that things from the East go to the West, and things from the West to the East, and they inﬂuence each other.


The Mother: For the moment this creates a confusion, a sort of pot-pourri. But a new expression will come out of it — it is not so far from its realisation. People cannot intermix, as men today are intermixing, without its producing a reciprocal effect. For instance, with their mania of conquest, the nations of the West which conquered all sorts of countries in the world, have undergone a very strong inﬂuence of the conquered countries. In the old days, when Rome conquered Greece it came under the inﬂuence of Greece much more than if it had not conquered it.


The Mother: And the Americans — all that they make now is full of Japanese things, and perhaps they are not even aware of it. But since they occupied Japan, I see that the magazines received from America are full of Japanese things.  And even in certain details of objects received from America, one now feels the inﬂuence of Japan. That happens automatically. It is quite strange, there always comes about a sort of equilibrium, and he who made the material conquest is conquered by the spirit of the vanquished.


The Mother: It is reciprocal. He made the material conquest, he possesses materially, but it is the spirit of the conquered one who possesses the conqueror.   So, through mixing... The ways of Nature are slow, obscure and complicated.


The Mother: She takes a very long time to do a thing which could probably be done much more rapidly, easily and without wastage by means of the spirit. At present there is a terrible wastage in the world. But it is getting done. She has her own way of mixing people.  Not the way men understand “intentional”.


The Mother: But it is certainly the expression of an intention and a goal towards which one is  going. Only, all depends on the amount of consciousness. For a man this seems a confusion, for he can see only details, and it appears to be a terrible loss of time, because for him the idea of time is limited to the duration of his person. But Nature has eternity before her. And it is all the same to her to waste, for she is like someone who had a huge cauldron; she throws things in and makes a mixture, and if that does not succeed she throws all this out, for she knows that by taking back the same things she will make another mixture.


The Mother: And that is how it is. Nothing is lost, for it comes into use again all the time. Forms are broken and the substance is taken back, and it goes on constantly like that.  It is made, it is unmade, it is turned inside out — what harm can it do her to try a hundred thousand times if it so pleases her! For there is nothing that is wasted, except her work.


The Mother: But her work is her pleasure. Without work she would not exist.  No, certainly, I quite agree. I ﬁnd it a little too cruel an amusement..   ...


The Mother: The sphere is touched only by a part of the curve, the rest is evolved inside. It cannot be made. This one is opaque. But it was... there was at the centre of the sphere an intersection of all the spirals.


The Mother: What you have done there makes it ﬂat, the way it is done. It is ﬂat. As I saw it, the edge was touched by a section of the curve.  Each curve has one part of the edge as section. And the colours were seen distinctly and one could see right through....


The Mother: I think you could do this geometrically. The whole surface is taken up by one section of the curve of the spiral.   Pavitra:  No, the spirals are inside.


The Mother: They are intersecting. Their direction is such that the whole sphere is formed by sections of each spiral.   The whole inside was naturally full of spirals. But as there was no substance (there were only spirals), one could see through.


The Mother: They were not so joined up as to make an opaque mass. And  one could follow: the colours were brilliant, they were luminous.  One could follow the line inside. And so it should be inferred that they were countless.  Not regularly as to have all the ﬁrst rounds at the centre.


The Mother: It was not a series of spirals beginning with the ﬁrst circle and working towards the centre.   No, not at all. The ﬁnishing-point was not the same as the starting-point. Still, in this way, seen from far, it gave that impression a little.


The Mother: It was much more complex than that. And then there were none of those dull things.  Here you have three greens and only one blue. That one is blue, but greenish blue. Then there are two browns, one black and one grey, two reds...


The Mother: These colours are dead colours, aren’t they?  They can be given a particular meaning.  There was no black.   I don’t quite understand the question. Why should they not do it!


The Mother: There is not much difference between killing a goat and killing a man. I don’t know. In any case, what has come down to posterity and what really happened may be two very different things. When they spoke of sacriﬁce, it was perhaps only symbolic. Certain religions, we are told, have massacred men by thousands.


The Mother: It is possible, it is the same instinct which makes men destroy things. And these were certainly religions which tended towards destruction. Now, there are many different cases, and if someone asks why people offered material sacriﬁces, one should ﬁrst be sure about it. As for me, I am not sure of it. It is possible.


The Mother: It depends on the way one looks at life. And in any case, if one arrogates to oneself the right to make use of another man’s existence to offer a sacriﬁce to the Divine, or if one looks at it in a certain way, it is a pretty bad attitude. I was saying at the beginning I don’t see why one should make a difference between any other animal and a human animal. It is a very strange thing.  In the majority of religions, I believe it used to be as it still is here in the temple of the headless Kali — it is an extremely dark  and ignorant affair.


The Mother: It comes from a sort of unhealthy fear of a monstrous god who needs either blood or force or no matter what in order to be satisﬁed and not to do harm . And all this comes from a dread and a conception of the Divine which is a monstrosity. But should it be admitted, there would be only one tolerable sacriﬁce, the sacriﬁce of oneself.


The Mother: If one wants to sacriﬁce something to the Divine, I don’t see by what right one can seek the life of another, be it human being or animal, to offer it in one’s own stead. If one wants to sacriﬁce, it is one’s own self one must sacriﬁce, not others. And as the movement itself is sufﬁciently ugly and obscure and unconscious, I don’t see why there should be such a difference between sacriﬁcing a goat and sacriﬁcing a human being. From the goat’s point of view it is an intolerable idea — if a goat were to be asked why....  Men have strange ideas about their own importance in the world and the respective worth of their person.


The Mother: It does not make much difference. If they are told, “You have no right to take the life of another”, it is acceptable; but then do not offer sacriﬁces, or if you want to sacriﬁce, sacriﬁce your own self; if you believe there is a terrible God who needs to be given blood or whatever else it may be, vital forces to satisfy him , do it. But by what right are you going to take the life of others to give it? That is an intolerable tyranny.


The Mother: Even were it only all those chickens one kills! But I believe there is another reason for that — it is that people can enjoy a good feast! It is simply an opportunity to swallow a considerable amount of food.  I don’t know, for me it does not make a great difference.


The Mother: Provided the atmosphere is not within oneself! For if so, it is difﬁcult. And yet! We have had frequent instances of people who used to lead a more than doubtful life and who had revelations.   There is the instance of a drunkard who, in his drunkenness, suddenly had a contact with the Divine — which, moreover, changed his life and, I must tell you, prevented him from drinking in future.


The Mother: But still, at the time he had the revelation of the divine Presence, he was in an intoxicated state. I don’t think — here again we fall back into the same things — I don’t think the Divine is a moralist. It is man who is a moralist, not the Divine. If it happens that, just then, at that moment, there is a concurrence of events and perhaps an opening in the being, the Divine, who is always present, manifests himself. On the other hand, for the sage or the saint who is quite infatuated with his own importance and his own worth, and full of pride and vanity, there is not much chance that the Divine will manifest in him, for there is no place for the expression of the Divine!


The Mother: There is no place except for the important personality of the wise man and his moral worth.  Naturally, there is a state in which one may be perfectly pure, perfectly wise, and be in contact with the Divine! But then, that means that one has reached a certain degree of perfection and lost the sense of one’s personal importance and personal worth.  I believe that’s most important. The greatest obstacle to the contact with the Divine is pride and the sense of one’s personal worth, one’s personal capacities, personal power — the person becomes very big, so big that there is no place for the Divine.


The Mother: No, the one truly important thing is the intensity of the aspiration. And this intensity of aspiration comes in all kinds of circumstances.  There are two things we must not confuse: certain necessities (which are purely necessities if one wants to succeed in completely controlling physical matter), and then moral notions.  These are two very different things. One may, for instance, refrain from poisoning one’s body or besotting one’s brains or annulling one’s will because one wants to become master of one’s physical consciousness and capable of transforming one’s body.


The Mother: But if one does these things solely because one thinks one will gain moral merit by doing so, that will lead you nowhere,  to nothing at all. Because it is not meant for that. One does it for purely practical reasons: for the same reason, for instance, that you are not in the habit of taking poison, for you know it will poison you. And then, there are some very slow poisons taken by people (they think, with impunity, because the effect is so slow that they cannot discern it easily), but if one wants to succeed in becoming entirely master of one’s physical activities and capable of putting the light into the reﬂexes of one’s body, then one must abstain from these things — but not for moral reasons: for altogether practical reasons, from the point of view of the realisation of the yoga. One must not do this with the idea of gaining merit, or the idea that because you will gain merit God will be very pleased and come and manifest within you!


The Mother: It is not at all that, not at all! Perhaps even, He feels closer to him who has made mistakes, who is conscious of his faults and has the sense of his weakness, and aspires sincerely to come out of it all — He feels perhaps closer to him than to one who has never made a mistake and is satisﬁed with his external superiority over other human beings. In any case, that does not make a great difference. What does make a lot of difference is the sincerity, the spontaneity, the intensity of the aspiration — the need, that need which seizes you and which is so powerful that nothing else in the world counts.  As I have said elsewhere about surrender and sacriﬁce, if one regrets something, that means that one is not in a spiritual state of consciousness.


The Mother: If one regrets that one can no longer satisfy one’s desires, that means the desires are at least as important as, if not more than, the thing one aspires for. You may say, “Desires are something of which I am quite conscious, whilst if I give up my desires with the idea of getting the Divine, I am yet not sure that I shall have Him; hence I call this a sacriﬁce.” But I, I call that bargaining! It is bargaining with the Divine. One tells Him, “Give and take; I, I give You the joy I have in satisfying my desires, You must give me in exchange the joy of feeling You within myself, else it is not just.”


The Mother: — This is not self-giving, this is bargaining.   This is something I have heard so often, so often: “I have sacriﬁced so many things, I have made so much effort, have taken so much trouble, and now see, I have nothing in exchange. ” All that I can answer is, “No wonder!”  Why not?


The Mother: The very proud person may receive blows and become sensible; besides, when he receives a blow, that may awaken him a little! Then he has an aspiration. And if it is someone who has intensity in his nature and some strength, well, then his aspiration is powerful.   That may happen.


The Mother: Only in that case it will be very mixed up.  In all instances it will be very mixed — but always everything is mixed. A long time is necessary for things to become clear. One may begin anywhere at all, at any stage whatever and in any condition.


The Mother: One can always begin. Only, in some cases it takes a very long time. For the mixture is such that with every step forward one takes half a step back. But there is no reason for this. Fundamentally, as it is the true of life and of individual existence to become aware of the Divine, that may emerge anywhere at all, at any moment whatsoever.


The Mother: If there is the least possibility, it springs up. Naturally, if one is perfectly satisﬁed, then that is an obstacle, because one sleeps in selfsatisfaction. But that cannot last. In life, in the world as it is at present, an egoistic satisfaction, a personal satisfaction cannot last, and — as long as it lasts, yes, one may grow hard, not aspire at all. But it does not last.


The Mother: Anything else?  Nobody has anything to say?  Then, my children, good-night!   The ﬁrst texts were written in 1912.


The Mother: Many of you were not yet born. It was a small group of about twelve people who met once a week. A subject was given; an answer was to be prepared for the following week. Each one brought along his little work.  Generally, I too used to prepare a short paper and, at the end, I read it out.


The Mother: That is what is given here — not all, only these two.  These two ﬁrst ones. Later, it was something else. The others appeared in.  There were four meetings.


The Mother: The subject for the ﬁrst meeting was: What is the aim to be achieved, the work to be done, the means of achievement? And here is my answer:  Mother reads the text of 7 May 1912: This is the Supermind.  I did not know Sri Aurobindo at that time and he had not written anything yet.   I no longer remember.


The Mother: The three formed modes — love, light and life — which correspond to Sachchidananda. The seven attributes... I have a list somewhere. There is an old tradition which says that the world was created seven times, that is, the ﬁrst six times it returned into the Creator. This is the idea of .


The Mother: It is said that this happened six times and that we are now the seventh creation, and that this is the last one. It is the one which will persist, and it is the “creation of Equilibrium”. All these creations I have also noted down somewhere, it is written down. I no longer know their order. There are six creations, one after another, created in accordance with this special mode, found imperfect and withdrawn into the Origin, recreated and withdrawn into the Origin — six times thus.


The Mother: And it is a progressive order. When one knows that order, one understands the principle of each creation. Well, this tradition said that the principle of our latest creation, at present, is the principle of Equilibrium, and that this is the last. That means the world will not go back again into, and there will be a perpetual progress. And this is the creation of Equilibrium.


The Mother: Consequently, now, there is no longer anything good or bad: there is what is in equilibrium and what is not in equilibrium.  There is imbalance and balance. That’s all. And what I have said there was based upon that.  The twelve qualities — that is something else still.


The Mother: That too is noted somewhere. In order that the world may continue, it must realise a perfect equilibrium of all its elements by means of these twelve qualities, all present there. And then it will be a world which, whilst progressing indeﬁnitely, will constantly be in harmony, and hence will not be open to destruction.   I am using “word” in the sense of truth. There is an eternal Truth which is eternally true, but which ﬁnds expression in deﬁnite forms, and these deﬁnite forms are changing, ﬂuctuating; they may become distorted; and to have the truth one must always go back to the source, which is... it may be called the eternal word, that is, the creative Word.


The Mother: It is a truth which is eternal, which manifests itself through all possible words and ideas. I use “word” in a literary sense — it is what is called elsewhere the creative Word. It is the origin of all speech and all thought.  The aim to be achieved? What have I said?


The Mother: It is the harmonisation of the earth, I think, isn’t it?  Yes, you do not understand? I have said it ﬁfty thousand times already, haven’t I? ... Ah, you understand now? ()   “The individualisation of states of being which have so far never been conscious in man”, that is to say, there are superposed states of consciousness, and there are new regions which have never yet been manifested on earth, and which Sri Aurobindo called supramental.


The Mother: It is that, this was the same idea. That is, one must go into the depths or the heights of creation which have never been manifested upon earth, and become conscious of that, and manifest it on earth. Sri Aurobindo called it the Supermind. I simply say these are states of being which were never yet conscious in man (that is, that man has so far never been aware of them). One must get identiﬁed with them, then bring them into the outer consciousness, and manifest them in action.


The Mother: And then, I add (exactly what I foresaw — I did not know that Sri Aurobindo would do it, but still I foresaw that this had to be done): That is, the supreme Truth, Harmony. It was the whole programme of what Sri Aurobindo has done, and the method of doing the work on earth, and I had foreseen this in 1912. I met Sri Aurobindo for the ﬁrst time in 1914, that is, two years later, and I had already made the whole programme.  Where did I decide to do it?... I never decided anything at all!


The Mother: I had simply said that it had to be done. I did not have the  least idea, except that I had a great desire to come to India. But still, I did not even know if it corresponded to something. I had decided nothing at all. Simply, I had seen that state, what had to be done.


The Mother: What is the sentence?... ( ) Ah! it is the  spirit of the type; just as we said that behind each animal type there was a spirit of the type, so behind each type of man there is a spirit of the type.


The Mother: This is what I call soul-type. It is a soul-type which may be progressive, but which is indestructible.  The soul-type corresponds, individually or in groups, to the  of things. Sometimes it is also called the truth of things, of each thing.  Yes, all human qualities are deformations of a truth which is behind them.


The Mother: All that you call either qualities or defects are always a deformation of something which is behind, and which is neither this nor that but something else. But I say, moreover, what truth is found behind generosity: it is the movement of the spreading forces. But in order that these forces may spread, they must ﬁrst become concentrated. So there is a sort of movement of pulsation: the forces are concentrated, then they spread, and then they are again concentrated and again spread.... But if you always want to spread out without ever concentrating, after a certain time you have nothing left to spread.


The Mother: For the forces — all forces — it is the same thing. I have written, besides, (or rather I shall write some time) that money is a force, it is nothing but that. And that is why nobody has the right to own it personally, for it is only a force, just like all other forces of Nature and the universe. If you take light as a force, it would never occur to anyone to say: “I possess the light”, and to want to shut it up in his room and not give it to others! Well, with money people are so stupeﬁed as to imagine that it is something they can possess and keep, as though it belonged to them, and make something personal of it.


The Mother: It is exactly the same thing. I am not speaking of money as paper, naturally, because that would be just like the light you put in a lamp, you may own the lamp, and so you say: “It is my light.” Money, your notes, your coins, that is money. But that is not money. This is a force which is  behind all that, the power of exchange which is money.


The Mother: That does not belong to anybody. It belongs to everyone. It is something which is alive only if it circulates. If you want to heap it up, it decays. It is as though you wanted to enclose water in a vase and keep it always; after some time your water would be absolutely putreﬁed.


The Mother: With money it is the same thing. And people have not yet understood that. Later on I shall write about it.  That won’t last always.  Avarice for things — there is an avarice for spiritual things also.


The Mother: There are misers who want to keep all the forces for themselves and never give them. But I have just told you the truth about it: one must have the power to accumulate in order to have the power of spreading. If you have only one of the two, that causes an imbalance. And it is then that it becomes avarice or wastage. One must have both in a balanced, rhythmic movement — the equilibrium we just spoke about.


The Mother: For it would be quite easy to prove that in fact at present equilibrium is the true thing: one must be neither here nor there, that is what Buddha called “the middle path”. The middle path is the path of equilibrium.  And so one must know how to manage as when rope-walking with a stick to keep one’s balance.  But the most generous man in the world could give nothing if he had nothing to begin with. Hence, if it is not he who has accumulated, it is someone else who has accumulated for him.


The Mother: But if he has nothing in his pocket, he cannot distribute anything! That is evident. And the power of accumulation is as important as the power of distribution. It is only when these two things become egoistic that they are deformed, altogether deformed, and lose all their value.  , my children.


The Mother: It happens only to the extent the progress of these parts has brought them close to the psychic, that is, to the extent the progress lies in putting all the parts of the being successively under the psychic inﬂuence. For all that is under the psychic inﬂuence and identiﬁed with the psychic continues, and it is that alone which continues. But if the psychic is made the centre of one’s life and consciousness, and if the whole being is organised around it, the whole being passes under the psychic inﬂuence, becomes united with it, and can continue — if it is necessary for it to continue. Indeed, if the physical body could be given the same movement — the same movements of progress and the same capacity to ascend that the psychic being has — well, it wouldn’t  be necessary for it to decompose. But that indeed is the difﬁculty.


The Mother: And only that which is in contact with the psychic lasts, and only what can last can remember, for the rest disappears, is again dissolved into small pieces and utilised elsewhere — as the body is dissolved again to dust and used elsewhere. It goes back to the earth, plants use the soil, men eat the plants. It is in this way that it goes on. And then it returns to the earth and begins again.  That’s the way Nature progresses.


The Mother: In order to progress she makes a heap of forms, then, when that seems no longer important or necessary to her, she demolishes them, takes up all the elements again, chemical or other, and reconstitutes something else, and so it goes on changing all the time, coming and going. And she ﬁnds that very good, for she sees very far, her work extends over centuries, and a small human life is nothing, just a breath in eternity. So she takes up, shapes; she takes a certain time, it’s fun for her, she ﬁnds it very good; and then, when it is no longer so good, she demolishes it — she takes up, mixes everything, begins another form, makes something else. And so perhaps with this process which is evidently very slow, ﬁnally the whole of matter prog


The Mother: resses . It is possible — always in this way, intermingling, breaking up, remixing, breaking up again. Essentially, it is as though one made a heap of small objects and then destroyed them, remade something from the dust, remade other toys, and again broke them, and remade others out of that. Each time one adds something so that it mixes well.


The Mother: And then, one day, perhaps all that will produce something. In any case, she is in no hurry. And when we are in a hurry, she says: “Why are you in such a haste? It is sure to happen one day. You don’t need to worry, it will surely come.


The Mother: Wait quietly.” Then we tell her: “But it is not I who am waiting!” — “Ah! that’s because you call ‘I’ that thing which comes and goes away. If you were to call consciousness — the one, eternal and divine consciousness — if you were to call that ‘I’, then you would see everything, you would witness everything. Nobody prevents you from doing it!  It is only because you identify yourself with this (  ).


The Mother: You have only to stop identifying yourself with that.”   tapasya    You know the law of determinism, don’t you? You have not studied philosophy at all? ()


The Mother: Pavitra, explain what determinism is to them. Try to be brief and clear.   Pavitra: If it is the same thing — on condition it is identically the same thing. Are there two identical things in the universe?


The Mother: No.   Nolini:  Yes. The same cause produces the same effect.


The Mother: That is the principle on which science is founded. But I have used the word here in a little more general and precise a way at once. I mean that each thing (whether the same or not) always produces an effect and that this effect produces still another and that other produces yet another and so on — always a cause produces an effect and each effect becomes the cause of another effect, and so on, indeﬁnitely.  And so justice means that each thing, as Nolini said, the same cause always produces the same effect automatically. And hence one cannot say a word, make a movement without its being the cause of something else.


The Mother: And this something else is the cause of yet another thing. And all this follows automatically and strictly, and that is universal justice.   An act carried out has always a consequence and this consequence brings along another and so on. And this is absolutely ineluctable.


The Mother: That is universal justice. You have a bad thought, it has a result. And that result has yet another. And you cannot escape it except through the intervention of Grace. Grace is exactly something which has the power of changing all that.


The Mother: But only the Grace can change it. It is so strict a law and so terrible  that once one has entered within it, one cannot get out. And the moment one is upon earth, one enters into this. The whole earthly existence is like that, constructed in this way. And each thing one does, each thing one says, each thing one thinks, each thing one feels has a consequence.


The Mother: And this consequence brings another, and so on. Now, if one wants to have a more practical point of view, one may take examples and say: “If you do this, it will automatically produce that.” For instance, in societies organised by men, if you commit a crime, you will be punished for your crime. In your own conscience, if you make a mistake, you suffer for the mistake you have made. And in the law as man has made it, it is always said that to be ignorant of the law is no excuse.


The Mother: If you are ignorant of the law, you are punished. If you make a mistake without knowing that it is a mistake, that does not protect you, you are punished. Well, in Nature it is the same thing. If you take poison without knowing that it is poison, it will poison you all the same. Do you understand?


The Mother: ... Unless the Grace intervenes. And as the Grace is omnipotent, it can change everything. That is what I have explained. But without the Grace there is no hope.


The Mother: For precisely it is ignorance that’s the constant factor of mankind.  I was thinking today how many deplorable and frightful experiences man has had to go through before knowing how to make use of Nature’s things. It is possible that there was just this Grace which made him ﬁnd things instinctively; but if he had to learn his lesson... I thought about that because... there are a certain number of fruits on the trees: there are fruits which are good, and then others which are poisoned — this is not written upon the tree. Now, there is always someone to tell you: “No, do not eat this, this will poison you.”


The Mother: But if there were nobody to tell you that, how would you know? — By eating it and poisoning yourself. And then it would be somebody else who would have the beneﬁt of your experience.  I thought of that because some fruits, when ripe, are excellent; they have a great nourishing power, they are very useful.   But if they are not ripe they poison you. And it is the same fruit.


The Mother: Take, for instance, the avocado, (butterfruit, I think), take the butterfruit; if you eat an unripe butterfruit (you won’t eat it because it tastes very bad), but if you eat an unripe butterfruit, it poisons you radically, whilst as soon as it is ripe, it is excellent.   Now, in some countries as in South America or certain parts of Africa, these trees grow as high as the tallest mango trees.  And all the fruits hang down in the same way. Somebody who comes along not knowing the tree, not knowing anything and without anyone to warn him, takes the fruit, cuts it, eats it and dies.


The Mother: Then someone else comes by a month later, all the fruits are ripe; he takes them, eats them, ﬁnds himself well nourished — it is excellent, it is wonderful. Now, somebody tells him: “Ah! how is it you have eaten that fruit, and the other man is dead....” So how many experiences are necessary to learn that it is because one ate the unripe fruit and the other the ripe. And when it is not ripe, it is bad and when ripe, good.  And we beneﬁt by all the experiences of those who were upon earth before us.


The Mother: But if we had to come to a country about which we knew nothing, and had to learn everything by ourselves, we would have very unpleasant experiences. There are other fruits like that, this is not the only one, there are many such. For example, the ﬁg — the unripe ﬁg — if you touch the white juice that oozes from the ﬁg — but it’s awful — you have boils all over the mouth and become quite ill, and you get ulcers in the stomach also. But when the ﬁg is ripe and you take care not to touch the white juice, it is a perfect food. I could give you a great many examples of this kind.


The Mother: But now we know this because we have been told. Those who told us learnt it from others. But who ﬁrst made the experiment, who learnt all that, all the things in Nature? ... There are many, there are countless things in Nature.


The Mother: Well, take plant life in Nature, we don’t yet know everything today. For instance, some people tell you: “The remedy is always there along with the illness, in Nature; Nature has made it thus.” I don’t know if this is strictly so, but in any  case, in a way it works, it is true. It is said, for instance, that if a snake has its hole somewhere, you may be sure you will ﬁnd beside it a plant which will cure you if bitten. But which plant?


The Mother: There are so many there and who will teach you? There are people who go up to the mountains in the moonlight and collect herbs which cure diseases generally considered incurable. How have they learnt that? Who has made the experiment?


The Mother: Ah! yes, it is the same thing. You have side by side, just next to one another, a mushroom that’s an excellent food and another which will send you to the other world immediately. We beneﬁt by an accumulated knowledge. And I dare say much of this knowledge must have been lost, for many men have discovered things like these and never noted them down; and we too, we may make discoveries but don’t always take care to note them down and make them accessible to others.


The Mother: And Nature is an almost inﬁnite ﬁeld of study and discovery.   Pavitra:  That’s man, it is his own fault. If he had not meddled with that, it would not have happened.


The Mother: But it is still an explosive. It is always the fault of another man, isn’t it?  If they didn’t know what it was, yes. For instance, you take some  potassium chlorate, quite harmless, white, pretty, crystallised, charming. But then you take a hammer and start hitting it with all your might, and suddenly it explodes.


The Mother: Yes, it is like that.  But the number of plants — nobody has ever known and nobody will probably ever know the number of different plants there are upon earth. Yet when a list is made of the number of plants men know and use, it is ridiculously small. I believe, when I was in Japan, the Japanese used to tell me that Europeans eat only three hundred and ﬁfty types of different plants, whilst they use more than six hundred. That makes a considerable difference.


The Mother: They used to say: “Oh, how you waste your food! Nature produces inﬁnitely more than you know; you waste all that.” Have you ever eaten (not here, but in Europe) bamboo sprouts?... You have eaten bamboo sprouts? You have eaten palm-tree buds?


The Mother: Coconut buds? — That, indeed, makes a marvellous salad, coconut buds. Only, this kills the tree. For a salad, one kills a tree. But when there is a cyclone, for instance, which knocks down hundreds of coconut trees, the only way of utilising the catastrophe is to eat all the buds and make yourself a magniﬁcent dish.


The Mother: Haven’t you ever eaten coconut buds? As for me, I was not surprised, for I had eaten bamboo sprouts before they sprang up from the ground — somewhat like the asparagus.  It is quite a classical dish in Japan. And their bamboos are much more tender than the bamboos here. Their bamboos are very tender and their sprouts are wonderful.


The Mother: Still, that’s how it is. It seems in Europe one knows how to use only three hundred and ﬁfty varieties of vegetables from the vegetable kingdom, whilst in Japan they use six hundred of them and more. But perhaps if people knew, they would not die of hunger, at least those who live in the countryside..  In any case, things are like that. We don’t know how it would be if it were only justice reigning over the world.


The Mother: But I believe it wouldn’t be fun! For, as I have said, there is not a single person who can stand before the Lord and tell him: “I have never made a mistake.” And when I speak of making a  mistake, ignorance is not an excuse; for whether you touch the ﬁre through ignorance or knowing it, the difference is rather in favour of the stupidity of touching it when one knows, for one can take precautions. But when one touches the ﬁre through ignorance, without knowing, one burns oneself completely. And then one can’t tell Nature: “Oh! I should not have been burnt, for I did not know that it burnt.”


The Mother: It burns, nobody will listen to you!  When one calls? I think so. Anyway, not exclusively and solely.  But certainly, yes, if one has faith in the Grace and an aspiration and if one does what a little child would when it runs to its mother and says: “Mamma, give me this”, if one calls with that simplicity, if one turns to the Grace and says “Give me this”, I believe it listens.


The Mother: Unless one asks for something that is not good for one, then it does not listen. If one asks from it something that does harm or is not favourable, it does not listen.  Perhaps one was destined to call. That is: Did the hen produce the egg or the egg the hen? I don’t know whether it is the Grace which makes you call the Grace or whether because the Grace is called the Grace comes.


The Mother: It is difﬁcult to say.  Essentially, it is quite possible that what is most lacking is faith. There is always a tiny corner in the thought which doubts and debates. So that spoils everything. It is only just when one is in an absolutely critical situation, when the mind realises that it can do nothing, absolutely nothing, when it stands there quite stupid and incapable, then, at that moment, if one aspires for a higher help, the aspiration has exactly that kind of intensity which comes from despair, and that takes effect.


The Mother: But if your thought continues to argue, if it says: “Yes, yes, I have aspired, I  have prayed, but God knows if this is the moment, and whether it will come and whether it is possible”, well, then it is ﬁnished, it doesn’t work. This is one of the commonest of things. People are told: “If you want to advance in the yoga, you must have no desires”. One goes even a little further and says: “You must not have any needs.” One goes a little further still and says: “Never ask anything from the Divine.”


The Mother: Well, I don’t know, more than ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people’s reaction is: “Ah! if I don’t ask, I won’t have what I need. ” They don’t see that they cut the whole movement at the very root! They don’t have faith.


The Mother: “I need this....”  I am not even discussing the idea of need, for it is quite arbitrary. I knew a Dutch painter who had come here, and done Sri Aurobindo’s portrait (it seems this portrait is still existent).  This Dutch painter was practising a yoga. And so, one day, he told me this: “Oh! as for me, I think I can do without anything.