The Mother: What you can say before is that there will be a new creation upon earth; this you say through faith, since the exact character of it escapes you. And if you are called upon to deﬁne realisation, you may declare that, individually speaking, it means the transformation of your ordinary human consciousness into the divine and supramental.  The consciousness is like a ladder: at each great epoch there has been one great being capable of adding one more step to the ladder and reaching a place where the ordinary consciousness had never been. It is possible to attain a high level and get completely out of the material consciousness; but then one does not retain the ladder, whereas the great achievement of the great epochs of the universe has been the capacity to add one more step to the ladder without losing contact with the material, the capacity to reach the Highest and at the same time connect the top with the bottom instead of letting a kind of emptiness cut off all connection between the different planes.


The Mother: To go up and down and join the top to the bottom is the whole secret of realisation, and that is the work of the Avatar. Each time he adds one more step to the ladder there is a new creation upon earth.... The step which is being added now Sri Aurobindo has called the Supramental; as a result of it, the consciousness will be able to enter the supramental world and yet retain its personal form,  its individualisation and then come down to establish here a new creation. Certainly this is not the last, for there are farther ranges of being; but now we are at work to bring down the supramental, to effect a reorganisation of the world, to bring the world back to the true divine order. It is essentially a creation of order, a putting of everything in its true place; and the chief spirit or force, the Shakti active at present is Mahasaraswati, the Goddess of perfect organisation.


The Mother: The work of achieving a continuity which permits one to go up and down and bring into the material what is above, is done inside the consciousness. He who is meant to do it, the Avatar, even if he were shut up in a prison and saw nobody and never moved out, still would he do the work, because it is a work in the consciousness, a work of connection between the Supermind and the material being. He does not need to be recognised, he need have no outward power in order to be able to establish this conscious connection. Once, however, the connection is made, it must have its effect in the outward world in the form of a new creation, beginning with a model town and ending with a perfect world.   Do you know what the ﬂower which we have called “Successful Future” signiﬁes when given to you?


The Mother: It signiﬁes the hope — nay, even the promise — that you will participate in the descent of the supramental world. For that descent will be the successful consummation of our work, a descent of which the full glory has not yet been or else the whole face of life would have been different . By slow degrees the Supramental is exerting its inﬂuence; now one part of the being and now another feels the embrace or the touch of its divinity; but when it comes down in all its self-existent power, a supreme radical change will seize the whole nature. We are moving nearer and nearer the hour of its complete triumph.


The Mother: Once the world-conditions are ready the full descent will take place carrying everything before it. Its presence will be unmistakable, its force will brook no resistance, doubts and difﬁculties will not torture you any longer. For the Divine will stand manifest — unveiled in its total perfection. I do not, however, mean to say that the whole world will at once feel its presence or be transformed; but I do mean that a part of humanity will know and participate in its descent — say, this little world of ours here. From there the transﬁguring grace will most effectively radiate.


The Mother: And, fortunately for the aspirants, that successful future will materialise for them in spite of all the obstacles set in its way by unregenerate human nature!      Every Friday I shall read out to you a few verses of the Dhammapada, then we shall meditate on that text. This is to teach you mental control. If I think it necessary I shall give you an explanation.


The Mother: The Dhammapada begins with conjugate verses; here is the ﬁrst one:  Naturally, this concerns the physical life, there is no question of the universe.  That is to say, ordinary human life, such as it is in the present world, is ruled by the mind; therefore the most important thing is to control one’s mind; so we shall follow a graded or “conjugate” discipline, to use the Dhammapada’s expression, in order to develop and control our minds.  There are four movements which are usually consecutive, but which in the end may be simultaneous: to observe one’s thoughts is the ﬁrst, to watch over one’s thoughts is the second, to control one’s thoughts is the third and to master one’s thoughts is the fourth. To observe, to watch over, to control, to master.


The Mother: All that to get rid of an evil mind, for we are told that the man who acts or speaks with an evil mind is followed by suffering as closely as the wheel follows the hoof of a bullock that ploughs or draws the cart.   This is our ﬁrst meditation.  This is the counterpart of what we read last time. The Dhammapada contrasts a puriﬁed mind with an evil mind. We have already said that there are four successive stages for the puriﬁcation of the mind.


The Mother: A puriﬁed mind is naturally a mind that does not admit any wrong thought, and we have seen that the complete mastery of thought which is required to gain this result is the last achievement in the four stages I have spoken of. The ﬁrst is: to observe one’s mind.  Do not believe that it is such an easy thing, for to observe your thoughts, you must ﬁrst of all separate yourself from them.   In the ordinary state, the ordinary man does not distinguish himself from his thoughts.


The Mother: He does not even know that he thinks. He thinks by habit. And if he is asked all of a sudden, “What are you thinking of?”, he knows nothing about it. That is to say, ninety-ﬁve times out of a hundred he will answer, “I do not know.” There is a complete identiﬁcation between the movement of thought and the consciousness of the being.


The Mother: To observe the thought, the ﬁrst movement then is to step back and look at it, to separate yourself from your thoughts so that the movement of the consciousness and that of thought may not be confused. Thus when we say that one must observe one’s thoughts, do not believe that it is so simple; it is the ﬁrst step. I suggest that this evening in our meditation we take up this ﬁrst exercise which consists in standing back from one’s thought and looking at it.   The Dhammapada tells us ﬁrst of all that bad thoughts bring about suffering and good thoughts bring about happiness. Now it gives examples of what bad thoughts are and tells us how to avoid suffering.


The Mother: Here is the ﬁrst example, I repeat: “He has insulted me, he has beaten me, he has humiliated me, he has robbed me”; and it adds: “Those who nourish thoughts such as these never appease their hatred.”  We have begun our mental discipline, basing ourselves on the successive stages of mental development and we have seen that this discipline consists of four consecutive movements, which we have described in this way, as you surely remember: to observe, to watch over, to control and to master; and in the course of the last lesson we have learnt — I hope — to separate ourselves from our thoughts so as to be able to observe them as an attentive spectator.   Today we have to learn how to watch over these thoughts.  First you look at them and then you watch over them.


The Mother: Learn to look at them as an enlightened judge so that you may distinguish between the good and the bad, between thoughts that are useful and those that are harmful, between constructive thoughts that lead to victory and defeatist thoughts which turn us away from it. It is this power of discernment that we must acquire now; that will be the subject of our meditation tonight.  As I have told you, the Dhammapada will give us examples,  but examples are only examples.


The Mother: We must ourselves learn how to distinguish thoughts that are good from those that are not, and for that you must observe, as I have said, like an enlightened judge — that is to say, as impartially as possible; it is one of the most indispensable conditions.   This is the counterpart of what we read the other day. But note that this concerns only thoughts that generate resentment.  It is because rancour, along with jealousy, is one of the most widespread causes of human misery.  But how to avoid having rancour?


The Mother: A large and generous heart is certainly the best means, but that is not within the reach of all. Controlling one’s thought may be of more general use.  Thought-control is the third step of our mental discipline.  Once the enlightened judge of our consciousness has distinguished between useful and harmful thoughts, the inner guard will come and allow to pass only approved thoughts, strictly refusing admission to all undesirable elements.  With a commanding gesture the guard will refuse entry to every bad thought and push it back as far as possible.


The Mother: It is this movement of admission and refusal that we call thought-control and this will be the subject of our meditation tonight.  This is one of the most celebrated verses of the Dhammapada, one of those most often cited — I would have liked to be able to say, “one of the most obeyed in the world”; unfortunately that would not be true. For people speak much of this teaching but do not follow it.  Yet, there is one aspect of the problem which is less spoken of but which seems perhaps more urgent still if you want things to change in the world, something to which people give very little  thought.


The Mother: I am going to surprise you. It is this: if love must be returned for hatred in order that the world may change, would it not be even more natural that love should be returned for Love?   If one considers the life and action and heart of men as they are, one would have every right to be surprised at all the hatred, contempt, or at best, the indifference which are returned for this immensity of Love which the divine Grace pours upon the world, for this immensity of Love which acts upon the world at every second to lead it towards the divine delight and which ﬁnds so poor a response in the human heart. But people have compassion only for the wicked, the deﬁcient, the misshapen, for the unsuccessful ones and the failures — truly it is an encouragement to wickedness and failure.


The Mother: If one thought a little more of this aspect of the problem, perhaps one would have less need to insist on the necessity of returning love for hatred, because if the human heart responded in all sincerity to the Love that is being poured into it with the spontaneous gratitude of a love which understands and appreciates , then things would change quickly in the world.  When you think you may die the next moment, immediately, automatically, there occurs in you a detachment from all material things; it is logical that from then on you think only of what does not depend upon this physical life and which is the only thing that will still belong to you once you have left this body, that is to say, the eternal existence. The Buddha did not use the word “Divine”, but it is essentially the same thing.  To think that one might die the next moment was formerly, in the ancient initiations, a discipline that one had to follow for a  certain time, for the reason I have just mentioned and also in order to overcome all fear of death and to accustom oneself to it.


The Mother: In that age and at the time when the Dhammapada was spoken by the Buddha, the possibility of an earthly immortality was never mentioned because this possibility belonged to such a far-off future that there would have been no point in speaking of it.  Today Sri Aurobindo tells us that this possibility is near at hand and that we have only to prepare for it. But the essential condition even to prepare for it is to completely abolish all fear of death.  You must neither fear it nor desire it.


The Mother: Stand above it, in an absolute tranquillity, neither fear it nor desire it.   In Buddhist literature, Mara represents the Spirit of Evil, all that is contrary or opposed to the spiritual life; in certain cases he represents death — not so much physical death as death to truth, to the spiritual being.  Here, it means that so long as one does not control one’s senses and desires, and concerns oneself with external material satisfactions as the most important thing, one has not the will necessary to resist the attack of hostile forces and all that pulls us down and leads us away from the spiritual reality.  The Dhammapada does not take its stand so much on the moral point of view; it is not evil as men understand it with their blind justice and their arbitrary sense of good and bad.


The Mother: Evil, from the spiritual point of view, is truly that which leads us away from the goal, which sometimes even tears us away from  the deepest purpose of our existence, from the truth of our being and prevents us from realising it.  This is the way in which it should be understood.  What the Dhammapada means when it speaks of faith is not at all the belief in a dogma or a religion, it is not even faith in the teaching of the Master; it is faith in one’s own possibilities, the certitude that whatever the difﬁculties, whatever the obstacles, whatever the imperfections, even the negations in the being, one is born for the realisation and one realise.  The will must never falter, the effort must be persevering  and the faith unshakable.


The Mother: Then instead of spending years to realise what one has to realise, one can do it in a few months, sometimes even in a few days and, if there is sufﬁcient intensity, in a few hours. That is to say, you can take a position within yourself and no bad will that attacks the realisation will have any more power over you than the storm has over a rock.  After that, the way is no longer difﬁcult; it becomes extraordinarily interesting.  Of course, the yellow robe, in the literal sense, is the robe of the Buddhist monks; it became the robe of all who practised  asceticism. But this is not what the Dhammapada truly means to say, because there is no lack of men who wear the yellow robe but are not puriﬁed of their taints.


The Mother: The yellow robe is taken as the symbol of consecration to the spiritual life, the external sign of renunciation of all that is not an exclusive concentration upon the spiritual life.  What Buddhism means by “impurities” is chieﬂy egoism and ignorance; because, from the Buddhist standpoint, the greatest of all taints is ignorance, not ignorance of external things, of the laws of Nature and of all that you learn at school, but the ignorance of the deepest truth of things, of the law of the being, of the Dharma.  It is noteworthy that the two defects insisted upon here are lack of self-control and lack of loyalty. Loyalty means here sincerity, honesty; what the Dhammapada censures most severely is hypocrisy: to pretend that you want to live the spiritual life and not to do it, to pretend that you want to seek the truth and not to do it, to display the external signs of consecration to the divine life — here symbolised by the yellow robe — but within to be concerned only with oneself, one’s selﬁshness and one’s own needs.  It is interesting to note the insistence of the Dhammapada on self-control, for according to the Buddhist teaching, excess in all things is bad.


The Mother: The Buddha always insisted on the Middle Path. You must not be too much on one side nor too much on the other, exaggerate one thing or the other. You must have measure, balance in all things, the balance of moderation.  Therefore the qualities that make you worthy of leading the spiritual life are to have an inner balance, a balance in your action, and to be moderate in everything, to be sincere, honest, loyal.  Balance, moderation, loyalty, honesty: this is the subject of our meditation.


The Mother: I would not like you to take this text as a moral catechism. It certainly has a much deeper and truer meaning, because in all truly spiritual teachings, morality as it is mentally conceived is out of place.   So too the word “impurity”. Pure, as it is understood morally, has not at all the meaning it is given in a truly spiritual teaching; and particularly from the Buddhist standpoint, purity is absence of ignorance, as I have already told you last time, and ignorance means ignoring the inner law, the truth of the being.


The Mother: And loyalty means not to take the illusion for the reality, the changing and ﬂuctuating appearances for the inner and real permanence of the being.  We can say then that self-control and self-mastery, measure, absence of desire, the search for the inner truth of the being and the law of its self-manifestation are very necessary preoccupations for those who want to practise the spiritual life.  To be true to oneself, to one’s goal, not to let oneself be moved by disorderly impulses, not to take the changing appearances for the Reality, these are the virtues that one must have in order to progress on the way of spirituality.  A comment could be added; for, if one were satisﬁed with taking error for truth and truth for error, it should be logically very easy to make one’s choice as soon as one found for some reason or other or with some help, what is truly the truth and what is  truly the error; one adopts the truth and rejects the error. But unfortunately one loves one’s error, somewhere in the being there is an unwillingness to recognise what is true.


The Mother: My experience is like this: whenever you sincerely want to know the truth, you do know it. There is something to point out the error to you, to make you recognise the truth. And if you observe yourself attentively you ﬁnd out that it is because you prefer error that you do not ﬁnd the truth.  Even in small details, the very smallest — not to speak of the big things of life, the big decisions that one has to take — even in the smallest things, whenever the aspiration for the truth and the will to be true are wholly sincere, the indication always comes.  And precisely, with the method of the Buddhist discipline, if you follow up within yourself the causes of your way of being, you always ﬁnd out that persistence in error comes from desire.


The Mother: It is because you have the preference, the desire to feel, to act, to think in a particular way, that you make the mistake. It is not simply because you do not know what is true. You do not know it precisely because you say in a vague, general, imprecise way, “Oh, I want the truth.” In fact, if you take a detail, each detail, and put your ﬁnger on it, you discover that you are playing the ostrich in order not to see. You put up something uncertain, something vague, a veil, in order not to see behind it.


The Mother: Whenever there is sincerity, you ﬁnd that the help, the guidance, the grace are always there to give you the answer and you are not mistaken for long.  It is this sincerity in the aspiration for progress, in the will for truth, in the need to be truly pure — pure as it is understood in the spiritual life — it is this sincerity which is the key to all progress. With it you know — and you.  There is always, somewhere in the being, something which prefers to deceive itself, otherwise the light is there, always ready to guide, but you shut your eyes in order not to see it.   We saw last time that it is not sufﬁcient to be able to distinguish what is right from what is wrong.


The Mother: At ﬁrst sight this seems to be the most difﬁcult point. It is quite obvious that if everyone had to ﬁnd it out for himself, it would be a very long work; you can pass your whole life going through innumerable experiences which little by little will enlighten you as to what is right and what is not.  Therefore it is easier to rely on someone who has done the work before you and whom you have simply to ask, “Is this true? Is that false?” Evidently, that offers a great advantage, but unfortunately it is not always sufﬁcient; for if you have the desire that things should be in a certain way and that what you prefer should be right, then you are not always ready to listen to good advice.


The Mother: The last sentence, “for they pursue right desires”, which seems to be a commonplace, is perhaps the most difﬁcult part of the problem.  In this book, in this teaching, there are short sentences that appear so simple. If you read without sufﬁcient reﬂection, you tell yourself, “But it is self-evident, you recognise as true what is true and as false what is false, what does that mean then?” But ﬁrst of all it is not so easy to distinguish what is true from what is not, then to recognise, that is to say, to admit that a certain thing is true; and above all it is more difﬁcult still perhaps to recognise that a certain thing is false.


The Mother: In reality, in order to discern exactly what is false requires such sincerity in the aspiration, such resolution in the will to be true that even this little phrase “to know the true to be true and the false to be false” means a very considerable realisation.   And the conclusion, “they attain the supreme goal” is a great promise.   There are teachings which say that one must have no desire at all; they are the ones that aim at a complete withdrawal from life in order to enter into the immobility of the Spirit, the absence of all activity, all movement, all form, all external reality. To attain that one must have no desire at all, that is to say, one must completely leave behind all will for progress; progress itself becomes something unreal and external.


The Mother: But if in your conception of Yoga you keep the idea of progress, and if you admit that the whole universe follows a progression, then what you have to do is to shift the objective of desire; instead of turning it towards things that are external, artiﬁcial, superﬁcial and egoistical, you must join it as a force of realisation to the aspiration directed to the truth.  These few words, “they pursue right desires”, are a proof that the teaching of the Buddha, in its essence, did not turn away from the realisation upon earth, but only from what is false in the conception of the world and in activities as they are carried on in the world. Thus when he teaches that one must escape from life, it is not to escape from a life that would be the expression of the truth but from the illusory life as it is ordinarily lived in the world.   Sri Aurobindo tells us that in order to reach the Truth and to have the power of realising this Truth you must join the spiritual consciousness to a progressive mental consciousness.


The Mother: And these few words certainly prove that such was the original conception of the Buddhist teaching.  There are innumerable small Buddhist sects of all kinds, in China, in Japan, in Burma, and each one follows its own methods; but the most widespread among them are those whose sole practice is to make the mind quiet.   They sit down for a few hours in the day and even at night and quiet their mind. This is for them the key to all realisation — a quiet mind that knows how to keep quiet for hours together without roving. You must not believe however that it is a very easy thing to do, but they have no other object.


The Mother: They do not concentrate upon any thought, they do not try to understand better, to know more, nothing of the kind; for them the only way is to have a quiet mind and sometimes they pass through years and years of effort before they arrive at this result — to silence the mind, to keep it absolutely silent and still; for, as it is said here in the Dhammapada, if the mind is unbalanced, then this constant movement of ideas following one another, sometimes without any order, ideas contradicting and opposing each other, ideas that speculate on things, all that jostles about in the head, makes holes in the roof, as it were. So through these holes all undesirable movements enter into the consciousness, as water enters into a house with a leaky roof.  However that may be, I believe it is a practice to be recommended to everyone: to keep a certain time every day for trying to make the mind quiet, even, still. And it is an undeniable fact that the more mentally developed one is, the quicker one succeeds; and the more the mind is in a rudimentary state, the more difﬁcult it is.  Those who are at the bottom of the scale, who have never trained their minds, ﬁnd it necessary to speak in order to think.


The Mother: It happens even that it is the sound of their voice which enables them to associate ideas; if they do not express them, they do not think. At a higher level there are those who still have to move words about in their heads in order to think, even though they do not utter them aloud. Those who truly begin to think are those who are able to think without words, that is to say, to be in contact with the idea and express it through a wide variety of words and phrases. There are higher degrees — many higher degrees — but those who think without words truly begin to reach an intellectual state and for them it is much easier to make  the mind quiet, that is to say, to stop the movement of associating the words that constantly move about like passers-by in a public square, and to contemplate an idea in silence.  I emphasise this fact because there are quite a few people who, when mental silence has been transmitted to them by occult means, are immediately alarmed and afraid of losing their intelligence.


The Mother: Because they can no longer think, they fear they may become stupid! But to cease thinking is a much higher achievement than to be able to spin out thoughts endlessly and it demands a much greater development.  So from every point of view, and not only from the spiritual point of view, it is always very good to practise silence for a few minutes, at least twice a day, but it must be a true silence, not merely abstention from talking.  Now let us try to be completely silent for a few minutes.


The Mother: ( )  () That’s it. The mind of the sky must be out of balance. ()


The Mother: It is raining.  So I think the sky has no balance and it is better for you to go home. ( ) Well, there is nothing to be done!


The Mother: The balance is not being restored. You should all go home and meditate on the necessity of having a balanced mind. That’s all.   It is quite evident that when you act in an ugly and mean way, naturally you are unhappy; but to be unhappy because you are conscious of the ugliness of your actions seems to me to be already a very advanced stage, for one needs to be very conscious in order to be aware of the evil that one does, and to be conscious of the evil that one does is already a ﬁrst step towards not doing it any more.


The Mother: Generally, people are altogether blind to the ugliness of their own actions. They do wrong through ignorance, through unconsciousness, through smallness, through that sort of doubling back on oneself which comes from unconsciousness and ignorance, that obscure instinct of self-preservation which makes one ready to sacriﬁce the whole world for the sake of one’s own well-being. And the smaller one is, the more natural appears the sacriﬁce offered to one’s smallness.  One must be very much higher on the scale to see that what one does is ugly


The Mother: . One must already have at the core of oneself a kind of foreknowledge of what beauty, nobility, generosity are, to be able to suffer from the fact that one doesn’t carry them within oneself.  I think the Dhammapada speaks here of those who already know what is beautiful and noble and who do evil wilfully, deliberately. For them life becomes terribly painful indeed. To do persistently what one knows should not be done, is at the cost of all peace, all possible tranquillity, all the well-being that one can have.


The Mother: He who lies is constantly uneasy in the fear that his lie may be discovered; he who has acted wrongly is in a constant anxiety at the idea that perhaps he will be punished; he who tries to deceive has no peace lest it should be found out that he deceives.  In reality, even for a purely egoistic reason, to do good, to be just, straight, honest is the best means to be quiet and peaceful, to reduce one’s anxiety to a minimum. And if, besides, one could be disinterested, free from personal motives and egoism, then it would be possible to become truly happy.   You carry with you, around you, in you, the atmosphere created by your actions, and if what you do is beautiful, good and harmonious, your atmosphere is beautiful, good and harmonious ; on the other hand, if you live in a sordid selﬁshness, unscrupulous self-interest, ruthless bad will, that is what you will breathe every moment of your life and that means misery, constant uneasiness; it means ugliness that despairs of its own ugliness.


The Mother: And you must not believe that by leaving the body you will free yourself of this atmosphere; on the contrary, the body is a kind of a veil of unconsciousness which diminishes the intensity of the suffering. If you are without the protection of the body in the most material vital life, the suffering becomes much more acute and you no longer have the opportunity to change what is to be changed, to correct what is to be corrected, to open yourself to a higher, happier and more luminous life and consciousness.  You must make haste to do your work here, for it is here that you can truly do it.   Expect nothing from death.


The Mother: Life is your salvation.  It is in life that you must transform yourself. It is upon earth that you progress and it is upon earth that you realise. It is in the body that you win the Victory.   It would almost seem from these texts that Buddhism accepts the idea of a hell and a heaven; but that is quite a superﬁcial way of understanding; for, in a deeper sense, this was not the thought of the Buddha.


The Mother: The idea on which he always insisted is that you create, by your conduct and the state of your consciousness, the world in which you live. Everyone carries in himself the world in which he lives and in which he will continue to live even when he loses his body, because, according to the Buddha’s teaching, there is, so to say, no difference between life in the body and life outside the body.   Some persons believe, some traditions teach that to leave the body is a blessing and that all difﬁculties disappear, provided, however, you fulﬁl certain rites, as in some religions, and that is also why so much importance is given to the religious rites which are, as it were, a passport for going to a happier region once you have left the body. Some even imagine that as soon as you leave the body you at once leave your miseries behind; but it is far from being true and this is what the Dhammapada points out here: what it calls the infernal world consists of psychological ranges, particular states of consciousness you enter when you do wrong, that is to say, when you stray away from all that is beautiful, pure, happy and you live in ugliness and wickedness.


The Mother: Nothing is more disheartening than to live in an atmosphere of wickedness.  What the Dhammapada says here in an almost puerile way is essentially true. Naturally, it does not refer to those who think, “Oh, how good I am, how nice I am!” and therefore feel happy.  That is childishness. But when you are good, when you are generous, noble, disinterested, kind, you create in you, around you, a particular atmosphere and this atmosphere is a sort of luminous release.


The Mother: You breathe, you blossom like a ﬂower in  the sun; there is no painful recoil on yourself, no bitterness, no revolt, no miseries. Spontaneously, naturally, the atmosphere becomes luminous and the air you breathe is full of happiness.  And this is the air that you breathe, in your body and out of your body, in the waking state and in the state of sleep, in life and in the passage beyond life, outside earthly life until your new life.   Every wrong action produces on the consciousness the effect of a wind that withers, of a cold that freezes or of burning ﬂames that consume.


The Mother: Every good and kind deed brings light, restfulness, joy — the sunshine in which ﬂowers bloom.  The thing has been so often said and repeated that it seems quite unnecessary to insist on the fact that a mite of practice is inﬁnitely more precious than mountains of talk. Surely, all the energy that one spends in explaining a theory would be much better utilised in overcoming in oneself a weakness or a defect.  Therefore to conform to the wisdom of this teaching, we  shall consider the best means of rejecting all passion and ill-will and delusion.  The delusion consists in taking the appearance for the reality and transient things for the only thing worthy of pursuit, the everlasting Truth.


The Mother: It is rather interesting to note that the Dhammapada clearly underlines that it is not enough to be free from the bonds of this world only, but of all the worlds.  For the true and zealous Buddhists tell you that ordinary religions captivate you by enticing you with the glittering advantages that you will ﬁnd after death in their Paradise, if you practise their principles. Buddhism, on the other hand, has neither hell nor heaven. It does not terrify you with eternal punishment nor does it tempt you with celestial felicities.  It is in the pure Truth that you will ﬁnd your satisfaction and the reward of all your efforts.


The Mother: In these texts the word Nirvana is not used in the sense of annihilation, as you see, but in the sense of an eternal existence in opposition to life and death, as we know them in the present earthly existence, and which are contrary to each other: life contrary to death, death contrary to life. It is not life which is spoken of, but the eternal existence which is beyond life and death — the true existence.  Vigilance means to be awake, to be on one’s guard, to be sincere — never to be taken by surprise. When you want to do sadhana, at each moment of your life, there is a choice between taking a step that leads to the goal and falling asleep or sometimes even going backwards, telling yourself, “Oh, later on, not immediately” — sitting down on the way.


The Mother: To be vigilant is not merely to resist what pulls you downward, but above all to be alert in order not to lose any opportunity to progress, any opportunity to overcome a weakness, to resist a temptation, any opportunity to learn something, to correct something, to master something. If you are vigilant, you can do in a few days what would otherwise take years. If you are vigilant, you change each circumstance of your life, each action, each movement into an occasion for coming nearer the goal.  There are two kinds of vigilance, active and passive. There is a vigilance that gives you a warning if you are about to make a mistake, if you are making a wrong choice, if you are being weak or allowing yourself to be tempted, and there is the active  vigilance which seeks an opportunity to progress, seeks to utilise every circumstance to advance more quickly.


The Mother: There is a difference between preventing yourself from falling and advancing more quickly.   And both are absolutely necessary.  He who is not vigilant is already dead.


The Mother: He has lost contact with the true purpose of existence and of life.  So the hours, circumstances, life pass in vain, bringing nothing, and you awake from your somnolence in a hole from which it is very difﬁcult to escape.  Throughout this teaching there is one thing to be noticed; it is this: you are never told that to live well, to think well, is the result of a struggle or of a sacriﬁce; on the contrary it is a delightful state which cures all suffering. At that time, the time of the Buddha, to live a spiritual life was a joy, a beatitude, the happiest state, which freed you from all the troubles of the world, all the sufferings, all the cares, making you happy, satisﬁed, contented.  It is the materialism of modern times that has turned spiritual effort into a hard struggle and a sacriﬁce, a painful renunciation of all the so-called joys of life.


The Mother: This insistence on the exclusive reality of the physical world, of physical pleasures, physical joys, physical possessions, is the result of the whole materialistic tendency of human civilisation. It was unthinkable in ancient times. On the contrary, withdrawal, concentration, liberation from all material cares, consecration to the spiritual joy, that was happiness indeed.  From this point of view it is quite evident that humanity is far from having progressed; and those who were born into  the world in the centres of materialistic civilisation have in their subconscient this horrible notion that only material realities are real and that to be concerned with things that are not material represents a wonderful spirit of sacriﬁce, an almost sublime effort. Not to be preoccupied from dawn to dusk and from dusk to dawn with all the little physical satisfactions, physical pleasures, physical sensations, physical preoccupations, is to bear evidence of a remarkable spirit.


The Mother: One is not aware of it, but the whole of modern civilisation is built on this conception: “Ah, what you can touch, you are sure that is true; what you can see, you are sure that is true; what you have eaten, you are sure of having eaten it; but all the rest — pooh! We are not sure whether they are not vain dreams and whether we are not giving up the real for the unreal, the substance for the shadow. After all, what are you going to gain? A few dreams! But when you have some coins in your pocket, you are sure that they are there!”


The Mother: And that is everywhere, underneath everything. Scratch the appearances just a little, it is there, within your consciousness; and from time to time you hear this thing whispering within you, “Take care, don’t be taken in.” Indeed, it is lamentable.  We have been told that evolution is progressive and that it follows a spiral of ascending progression. I do not doubt that what one calls comfort in modern cities is a much higher degree of evolution than the comfort of the cave-man.


The Mother: But in ancient narratives, they always spoke of a power of foresight, of the prophetic spirit, the announcement of future events through visions, life’s intimacy with something more subtle that had for the simple people of that age a more concrete reality.  Now, in those beautiful cities that are so comfortable, when one wants to condemn anything, what does one say? — “It’s a dream, it is imagination.”  And precisely, if a person lives in an inner perception, people look at him slightly askance and wonder whether he is altogether mentally sound. One who does not pass his time in striving for wealth or in trying to increase his comforts and well-being, to  secure a good position and become an important person, a man who is not like that is mistrusted, people wonder whether he is in his right mind.  And all that is so much the stuff of the atmosphere, the content of the air you breathe, the orientation of the thoughts received from others that it seems absolutely natural.


The Mother: You do not feel that it is a grotesque monstrosity.  To become a little more conscious of oneself, to enter into relation with the life behind the appearances, does not seem to you to be the greatest good. When you sit in a comfortable chair, in front of a lavish meal, when you ﬁll your stomach with delicious dishes, that certainly appears to you much more concrete and much more interesting. And if you look at the day that has passed, if you take stock of your day, if you have had some material advantage, some pleasure, a physical satisfaction, you mark it as a good day; but if you have received a good lesson from life, if it has given you a knock on your nose to tell you that you are a stupid fellow, you do not give thanks to the Grace, you say, “Oh, life is not always fun!”


The Mother: When I read these ancient texts, I really have the impression that from the inner point of view, from the point of view of the true life, we have fallen back terribly and that for the acquisition of a few ingenious mechanisms, a few encouragements to physical laziness, the acquisition of instruments and gadgets that lessen the effort of living, we have renounced the reality of the inner life. It is that sense which has been lost and it needs an effort for you to think of learning the meaning of life, the purpose of existence, the goal towards which we must advance, towards which all life advances, whether you want it or not. One step towards the goal, oh! it needs so much effort to do that. And generally one thinks of it only when the outer circumstances are not pleasant.


The Mother: How far we are from the times when the shepherd, who did not go to school and kept watch over his ﬂock at night under the stars, could read in the stars what was going to happen,  commune with something which expressed itself through Nature, and had the sense of the profound beauty and that peace which a simple life gives!  It is very unfortunate that one has to give up one thing in order to gain another. When I speak of the inner life, I am far from opposing any modern inventions, far from it, but how much these inventions have made us artiﬁcial and stupid! How much we have lost the sense of true beauty, how much we burden ourselves with useless needs!  Perhaps the time has come to continue the ascent in the curve of the spiral and now with all that this knowledge of matter has brought us, we shall be able to give to our spiritual progress a more solid basis.


The Mother: Strong with what we have learnt of the secrets of material Nature, we shall be able to join the two extremes and rediscover the supreme Reality in the very heart of the atom.  This promise of a good name does not seem to me quite worthy of the Buddhist teaching. It probably meant something else. And to live according to morality, one must know which morality is intended, for if it is the usually recognised social morality, that also does not seem to me a very alluring promise. Those who have decided to abandon all worldly weaknesses certainly do not care about satisfying social morality... nor about acquiring a good name!


The Mother: To sustain one’s zeal is an excellent thing, to remain pure in one’s actions is also indispensable, to act wisely is also perfect, one cannot do it too often; to restrain one’s passions, that goes without saying, is the beginning... but that conclusion!!  However I see “Dhamma” has been translated here as “Law”, and “Yasa” as “renown”, whereas Dhamma should mean rather the inner truth and Yasa the spiritual glory. So we can interpret the text in this way: “Whosoever can sustain his zeal, remain pure in his actions, act wisely, restrain his passions, live according to the inner truth, he shall see his spiritual glory ever growing.”  Thus understood, this text is quite excellent.


The Mother: One cannot do better than to conform to it.   I have read out to you the whole chapter because it seemed to me that it is the totality of the verses that creates an atmosphere and that they are meant to be taken all together and not each one separately. But I strongly recommend to you not to take the words used here in their usual literal sense.  Thus, for example, I am quite convinced that the original thought did not mean that you are to be vigilant in order that you may be admired and that you must not be negligent in order not to be reproved. Besides, the example given proves it, for certainly it was not for the sake of gaining admiration that Indra, the chief of the overmental gods in the Hindu tradition, practised vigilance.


The Mother: It is a very childish way of saying things.  Yet, if you take these verses all together, they have by their repetition and insistence, a power that evokes the thing which seeks expression; it puts you in relation with a psychological attitude which is very useful and has a very considerable effect, if you follow this discipline.   The last two verses particularly are very evocative. The Bhikkhu moves forward like a burning ﬂame of aspiration and he shuns negligence.


The Mother: Negligence truly means the relaxation of the will which makes one forget his goal and pass his time in doing all kinds  of things which, far from contributing towards the goal to be attained, stop you on the path and often turn you away from it. Therefore the ﬂame of aspiration makes the Bhikkhu shun negligence. Every moment he remembers that time is relatively short, that one must not waste it on the way, one must go quickly, as quickly as possible, without losing a moment. And one who is vigilant, who does not waste his time, sees his bonds falling, every one, great and small; all his difﬁculties vanish, because of his vigilance; and if he persists in his attitude, ﬁnding in it entire satisfaction, it happens after a time that the happiness he feels in being vigilant becomes so strong that he would soon feel very unhappy if he were to lose this vigilance.  It is a fact that when one has made an effort not to lose time on the way, any time lost becomes a suffering and one can ﬁnd no pleasure of any kind in it.


The Mother: And once you are in that state, once this effort for progress and transformation becomes the most important thing in your life, the thing to which you give constant thought, then indeed you are on the way towards the eternal existence, the truth of your being.  Certainly there is a moment in the course of the inner growth when far from having to make an effort to concentrate, to become absorbed in the contemplation and the seeking of the truth and its best expression — what the Buddhists call meditation —  you feel, on the contrary, a kind of relief, ease, rest, joy, and to have to come out of that in order to deal with things that are not essential, everything that may seem like a waste of time, becomes terribly painful. External activities get reduced to what is absolutely necessary, to those that are done as service to the Divine. All that is futile, useless, precisely those things which seem like a waste of time and effort,


The Mother: all that, far from giving the least satisfaction, creates a kind of discomfort and fatigue; you feel happy only when you are concentrated on your goal.  Then you are really on the way.    These few verses correspond to all the needs of those whose mind has not been mastered. They point out the attachment that one has to one’s old ways of being, thinking and reacting, even when one is trying to get away from them. As soon as you emerge by your effort, you are like a ﬁsh out of water and you gasp for breath because you are no longer in your element of obscure desires.


The Mother: Even when you make a resolution, the mind remains unstable. It is subtle, difﬁcult to seize. Without seeming to do so, it is continually seeking its own satisfaction; and its intentions are hidden in the core of the heart so as not to show their true nature.  And while not forgetting the weakness of the body, you must try to strengthen the mind against its own weakness; with the sword of wisdom, you must ﬁght against the hostile forces and treasure the progress you have made so that these forces may not despoil you of your progress, for they are terrible thieves.  And then there is a short couplet for those who are afraid of death, intended to liberate them from that fear.


The Mother: Finally there is a last short couplet for those who are attached to their family to show them the vanity of this attachment.  In the end, a last warning: an ill-directed, ill-controlled thought does more harm than an enemy can do to an enemy or a hater to a hater. That is to say, even those who have the best intentions in the world, if they do not have a wise control over  their thought, will do more harm to themselves and to those whom they love than an enemy can do to an enemy or a hater to a hater.  The mind has a power of deception in its own regard which is incalculable. It clothes its desires and preferences with all kinds of wonderful intentions and it hides its trickeries, resentments and disappointments under the most favourable appearances.


The Mother: To overcome all that, you must have the fearlessness of a true warrior, and an honesty, a straightforwardness, a sincerity that never fail.      There are some very wise recommendations here, for example, not to concern oneself with what others do nor with the mistakes they make, but to attend to one’s own faults and negligences and rectify them. Another wise counsel is never to utter too many eloquent words which are not effectuated in action — speak little, act well. Beautiful words, they say, that are mere words, are like ﬂowers without fragrance.


The Mother: And ﬁnally, lest you get discouraged by your own faults, the Dhammapada gives you this solacing image: the purest lily can spring out of a heap of rubbish by the wayside. That is to say, there is nothing so rotten that it cannot give birth to the purest realisation.  Whatever may be the past, whatever may be the faults committed, whatever the ignorance in which one might have lived, one carries deep within oneself the supreme purity which can translate itself into a wonderful realisation.   The whole point is to think of that, to concentrate on that and not to be concerned with all the difﬁculties and obstacles and hindrances.


The Mother: Concentrate exclusively on what you want to be, forget as entirely as possible what you do not want to be.      This seems to point directly to hypocrites who take up the external forms and appearances of wisdom but in their hearts keep all the desires, ambitions, the need for show, and live to satisfy this ambition and these desires instead of living for the only thing that is worth living for: attainment of the true consciousness, integral self-giving to the Divine, the peace, the light and the delight that come from the true wisdom and self-forgetfulness.  One could easily replace throughout this text the word fool by the word ego. One who lives in his ego, for his ego, in the hope of satisfying his ego is a fool.


The Mother: Unless you transcend ego, unless you reach a state of consciousness in which ego has no reason for existing, you cannot hope to attain the goal.  The ego seems to have been indispensable at one time for the formation of the individual consciousness, but with the ego were born all the obstacles, sufferings, difﬁculties, all that now appears to us as adverse and anti-divine forces. But these forces themselves were a necessity for attaining an inner puriﬁcation and the liberation from ego. The ego is at once the result of their action and the cause of their prolongation. When the ego disappears, the adverse forces will also disappear, having no longer any reason for their existence in the world.


The Mother: With the inner liberation, with a total sincerity and perfect purity, all suffering will disappear, because it will no longer be necessary for the progress of the consciousness towards its ﬁnal goal.  Wisdom, then, consists in working energetically at the inner transformation so that you may emerge victorious from a struggle which will have borne its fruits but will no longer have any need to exist.    There is a sentence here which is particularly felicitous. It is the very ﬁrst sentence we have read, “We should seek the company of the sage who shows our faults, as if he were showing us a hidden treasure.”  In all Scriptures meant to help mankind to progress, it is always said that you must be very grateful to those who show you your faults and so you must seek their company;


The Mother: but the form used here is particularly felicitous : if a fault is shown to you it is as if a treasure were shown to you; that is to say, each time that you discover in yourself a fault, incapacity, lack of understanding, weakness, insincerity, all that prevents you  from making a progress, it is as if you discovered a wonderful treasure.  Instead of growing sad and telling yourself, “Oh, there is still another defect”, you should, on the contrary, rejoice as if you had made a wonderful acquisition, because you have just caught hold of one of those things that prevented you from progressing.  And once you have caught hold of it, pull it out! For those who practise a yogic discipline consider that the moment you know that a thing should not be, you have the power to remove it, discard it, destroy it.


The Mother: To discover a fault is an acquisition. It is as though a ﬂood of light had come to replace the little speck of obscurity which has just been driven out.  When you follow a yogic discipline, you must not accept this weakness, this baseness, this lack of will, which means that knowledge is not immediately followed by power. To know that a thing should not be and yet continue to allow it to be is such a sign of weakness that it is not accepted in any serious discipline, it is a lack of will that verges on insincerity. You know that a thing should not be and the moment you know it, you are the one who decides that it shall not be.


The Mother: For knowledge and power are essentially the same thing — that is to say, you must not admit in any part of your being this shadow of bad will which is in contradiction to the central will for progress and which makes you impotent, without courage, without strength in the face of an evil that you must destroy.  To sin through ignorance is not a sin; that is part of the general evil in the world as it is, but to sin when you know, that is serious. It means that there is hidden somewhere, like a worm in the fruit, an element of bad will that must be hunted out and destroyed, at any cost, because any weakness on such a point is the source of difﬁculties that sometimes, later on, become irreparable.  So then the ﬁrst thing is to be perfectly happy when someone or some circumstance puts you in the conscious presence of a  fault in yourself which you did not know. Instead of lamenting, you must rejoice and in this joy must ﬁnd the strength to get rid of the thing which should not be.


The Mother: There is a very interesting sentence here: “He who is not credulous but has the sense of the Uncreated....”  One who is not credulous — all kinds of things can be understood from this word. The ﬁrst impression is that it refers to one who does not believe in invisible things without having an experience of them, as distinct from people who follow, for example, a particular religion and have faith in dogmas simply because that is what they have been taught. But he “has the sense of the Uncreated”, that is to say, he is in contact with invisible things and knows them as they are, by identity. The Dhammapada has told us, to begin with, that the greatest of men is he who has no faith in what is taught but has a personal experience of things that are not visible, he who is free from all belief and has himself had the experience of invisible things.


The Mother: Another explanation can also be given: one who is not credulous is he who does not believe in the reality of appearances, in things as we see them, who does not take them for the truth, who knows that these are only misleading appearances and that behind them lies a truth that is to be found and known by personal experience and by identity.  And this makes one reﬂect on the number of things, the countless number of things that we believe without any personal knowledge, simply because we have been taught that they are like that, or because we are accustomed to think they are like that, or because we are surrounded by people who believe that things are like that. If we look at all the things that we believe and not only believe but assert with an indisputable authority, “This is like this”, “That, but of course it is like that”, “And  this thing, yes, it is so....” In truth, however, we know nothing about it, it is simply because we are in the habit of thinking that they are like that. What are the things that you have experienced personally, with which you have had a direct contact, of which you can at least say with sincerity, “I am convinced that it is like that, because I have experienced it”?


The Mother: Not many.  In reality, if you truly want to have knowledge, you must begin by making a very important study: verify the things that we have been taught, even the most common and the most insigniﬁcant. Then you will understand why the text says “the greatest among men”, because I do not think that many have made this experiment.  Just to ﬁnd out the number of things we believe and assert, simply because it is customary to believe and assert them, is indeed a very interesting discovery.  Now go and look into your thought and consciousness for all the things that you assert without proof.


The Mother: You will see!    All kinds of different things are gathered here under the same heading. It is an association of words more than an association of ideas. But the central trend is this, that it is preferable to have one moment of sincerity rather than a long life of apparent devotion and that a psychological and spiritual victory over oneself is more important than all external victories.   There is also an interesting reﬂection, that a victory over oneself is the only victory which is truly safe from the intervention of any god or power of Nature or any instrument of evil.


The Mother: If you have gained self-mastery on one point, that goes beyond the reach of any intervention even from the very highest powers, whether they are gods of the Overmind or any anti-divine powers in the world.   The opening text says that a single word that gives you peace is worth more than thousands of words that have no meaning — this anybody can understand — but it is also said that the word that gives you peace is worth more than thousands of words that can satisfy the mental activity but have no psychological effect on your being.  Indeed, when you have found something which has the power to help you in gaining a victory over your unconsciousness and inertia, you must, till you reach the ﬁnal result, exhaust all the effects produced by that word or phrase before you look for others.  It is more important to pursue to its end the practice of the effect produced by an idea that one has met somehow, than to try to accumulate in the head a large number of ideas.


The Mother: Ideas may all be very useful in their own time, if they are allowed in at the opportune moment, particularly if you carry to the extreme limit the result of one of those dynamic ideas that are capable of making you win an inner victory. That is to say, one should have for one’s chief, if not only aim the practice of what one knows rather than the accumulation in oneself of a knowledge which remains purely theoretical.  So one could sum up: put into practice integrally what you know, only then can you usefully increase your theoretical knowledge.    People have the habit of dealing lightly with thoughts that come.  And the atmosphere is full of thoughts of all kinds which do not in fact belong to anybody in particular, which move perpetually from one person to another, very freely, much too freely, because there are very few people who can keep their thoughts under control.


The Mother: When you take up the Buddhist discipline to learn how to control your thoughts, you make very interesting discoveries.  You try to observe your thoughts. Instead of letting them pass freely, sometimes even letting them enter your head and establish themselves in a quite inopportune way, you look at them, observe them and you realise with stupefaction that in the space of  a few seconds there passes through the head a series of absolutely improbable thoughts that are altogether harmful.  You believe you are so good, so kind, so well disposed and always full of good feelings.


The Mother: You wish no harm to anybody, you wish only good — all that you tell yourself complacently. But if you look at yourself sincerely as you are thinking, you notice that you have in your head a collection of thoughts which are sometimes frightful and of which you were not at all aware.  For example, your reactions when something has not pleased you: how eager you are to send your friends, relatives, acquaintances, everyone, to the devil! How you wish them all kinds of unpleasant things, without even being aware of it! And how you say, “Ah, that will teach him to be like that!”


The Mother: And when you criticise, you say, “He must be made aware of his faults.” And when someone has not acted according to your ideas, you say, “He will be punished for it!” and so on.  You do not know it because you do not look at yourself in the act of thinking. Sometimes you know it, when it becomes a little too strong.


The Mother: But when the thing simply passes through, you hardly notice it — it comes, it enters, it leaves. Then you ﬁnd out that if you truly want to be pure and wholly on the side of the Truth, then that requires a vigilance, a sincerity, a selfobservation, a self-control which are not common. You begin to realise that it is difﬁcult to be truly sincere.  You ﬂatter yourself that you have nothing but good feelings and good intentions and that whatever you do, you do for the sake of what is good — yes, so long as you are conscious and have control, but the moment you are not very attentive, all kinds of things happen within you of which you are not at all conscious and which are not very pretty.  If you want to clean your house thoroughly, you must be vigilant for a long time, for a very long time and especially not believe that you have reached the goal, like that, at one stroke, because one day you happened to decide that you would be on the right side.


The Mother: That is of course a very essential and important  point, but it must be followed by a good many other days when you have to keep a strict guard on yourself so as not to belie your resolution.    One has the impression that these things were written for rather  primitive people. The series of calamities that will befall you if you do harm is quite amusing.  It would seem — provided of course that this is an exact record of the words that the Buddha spoke — that he must have changed the terms of his talks according to his audience and if he had to do with rustic people without education, he would speak a very material language with very practical and concrete comparisons so that they might understand him. There is a considerable difference of level in these verses.


The Mother: Some have become very famous, as, for example, the last verse here, where it is said that the artisan shapes his material to achieve what he has to do, and this striking conclusion: the sage controls himself.  Truly one has the impression that human mentality has progressed since that age. Thought has become more complex, psychology more profound, to the extent that these arguments appear almost puerile. But when we mean to practise them, then we realise that we have remained almost on the same level, and that if thought has progressed, practice, far from being better, seems to have become worse. And here there is a childlike simplicity, something rather healthy, an absence of perversion that unfortunately the human race no longer possesses.


The Mother: There was a moral healthiness in those days which has now completely disappeared. These arguments make you smile, but the practice of what is taught here is much more difﬁcult now than it was at that time. A kind of hypocrisy, pretension, underhand duplicity seems to have taken possession of the human mind and especially its way of being, and men have learnt to deceive themselves in a most pernicious way.  In those times, one could say, “Don’t do harm, you will be punished”; hearts were simple and the mind as well, and one said, “Yes, it is better not to do harm, because I will be punished.” But now, with an ironical smile, you say, “Oh!


The Mother: I shall surely ﬁnd a way to avoid punishment.”  Mental capacity seems to have grown, mental power seems to have developed, men seem to be much more capable of playing  with ideas, of having mental command over all principles, but at the same time they have lost the simple and healthy candour of people who lived closer to Nature and knew less how to play with ideas. Thus humanity as a whole seems to have reached a very dangerous turning-point. Those who are trying to ﬁnd a solution to the general corruption preach a return to the simplicity of yore, but of course that is quite impossible: you cannot go back.  We must go farther on, we must advance, climb greater heights and go beyond the arid search for pleasure and personal welfare, not through fear of punishment, even punishment after death, but through the development of a new sense of beauty, a thirst for truth and light, through understanding that it is only by widening yourself, illumining yourself, setting yourself ablaze with the ardour for progress, that you can ﬁnd both integral peace and enduring happiness.


The Mother: One must rise up and widen — rise up... and widen.    There is one thing certain which is not clearly stated here, but which is at least as important as all the rest. It is this, that there is an old age much more dangerous and much more real than the amassing of years: the incapacity to grow and progress.  As soon as you stop advancing, as soon as you stop progressing, as soon as you cease to better yourself, cease to gain and grow, cease to transform yourself, you truly become old, that is to say, you go downhill towards disintegration.  There are young people who are old and there are old people who are young.


The Mother: If you carry in you this ﬂame for progress and transformation, if you are ready to leave everything behind so that you may advance with an alert step, if you are always open to a new progress, a new improvement, a new transformation, then you are eternally young. But if you sit back satisﬁed with what has been accomplished, if you have the feeling that you have reached your goal and you have nothing left to do but enjoy the fruit of your efforts, then already more than half your body is in the tomb: it is decrepitude and the true death.  Everything that has been done is always nothing compared with what remains to be done.  Do not look behind. Look ahead, always ahead and go forward always.


The Mother: The question here seems to be more about egoism than ego.  Egoism is a relatively easy thing to correct, because everyone knows what it is. It is easy to discover, easy to correct, if one truly wants to do it and is bent on it.  But the ego is much more difﬁcult to seize, because, in fact, to realise what the ego is one must already be out of it, otherwise one cannot ﬁnd it out. You are wholly moulded from it, from head to foot, from the outermost to the innermost, from the physical to the spiritual, you are steeped in ego.


The Mother: It is mixed with everything and you are not aware of what it is. You must have already conquered it, come out of it, freed yourself from it, at least partially, at least in some little corner of your being somewhere, in order to realise what the ego is.  The ego is what helps us to individualise ourselves and what prevents us from becoming divine. It is like that. Put that together and you will ﬁnd the ego.


The Mother: Without the ego, as the world is organised, there would be no individual, and with the ego the world cannot become divine.  It would be logical to conclude, “Well, let us ﬁrst of all become conscious individuals and then we shall send away the ego and become divine.” Only, when we have become conscious individuals, we have grown so accustomed to living with our ego that we are no longer able to discern it and much labour is needed to become aware of its presence.   On the other hand, everyone knows what egoism is.


The Mother: When you want to pull everything towards you and other people do not interest you, that is called egoism; when you put yourself  at the centre of the universe and all things exist only in relation to you, that is egoism. But it is very obvious, one must be blind not to see that one is egoistic. Everybody is a little egoistic, more or less, and at least a certain proportion of egoism is normally acceptable; but even in ordinary life, when one is a little too egoistic, well, one receives knocks on the nose, because, since everyone is egoistic, no one much likes egoism in others.  It is taken for granted, it is part of public morality. Yes, one must be a little bit egoistic, not too much, so it is not conspicuous!


The Mother: On the other hand, nobody speaks of the ego, because nobody knows it. It is such an intimate companion that one does not even recognise its existence; and yet so long as it is there one will never have the divine consciousness.  The ego is what makes one conscious of being separate from others. If there were no ego, you would not perceive that you are a person separate from others. You would have the impression that you are a small part of a whole, a very small part of a very great whole.


The Mother: On the other hand, every one of you is most certainly quite conscious of being a separate person. Well, it is the ego that gives you this impression. As long as you are conscious in this way, it means that you have an ego.  When you begin to be aware that everything is yourself, and that this is only a very small point in the midst of thousands and thousands of other points of the same person that you are everywhere, when you feel that you are yourself in everything and that there is no separation, then you know that you are on the way towards having no more ego.  There even comes a time when it is impossible to conceive oneself and say, “It is not I”, for even to express it in this way, to saythattheAllisyou,thatyouaretheAllorthatyouaretheDivine or that the Divine is you, proves that something still remains.


The Mother: There is a moment — this happens in a ﬂash and can hardly stay — when it is the All that thinks, it is the All that knows, it is the All that feels, it is the All that lives. There is not even... not even the impression that... you have reached that point.   Then it is all right. But until then, there is still a little remnant ofegosomewhere;usuallyitisthepartwhichlookson,thewitness that looks on.  So do not assert that you have no more ego.


The Mother: It is not accurate.  Say you are on the way towards having no more ego, that is the only correct thing to say.  I do not believe that it has happened to you, has it? — not yet! And yet it is indispensable, if you truly intend to know what the supramental is.


The Mother: If you are a candidate for supermanhood, you mustresolvetodispensewithyourego,togobeyondit,foraslong as you keep it with you, the supermind will be for you something unknown and inaccessible.  But if through effort, through discipline, through progressive mastery, you surmount your ego and go beyond it, even if only in the tiniest part of your being, this acts like the opening of a small window somewhere, and by looking carefully through the window, you will be able to glimpse the supermind. And that is a promise. When you glimpse it, you ﬁnd it so beautiful that you immediately want to get rid of all the rest... of the ego!


The Mother: Please note that I am not saying that you must be totally free from all ego in order to have a glimpse of the supramental ; for then that would be something almost impossible. No, to be free from ego, just a little bit somewhere, in some corner of your being, even only a little corner of the mind ; if it is the mind and the vital, it is well and good, but if by chance — oh! not by chance — if by repeated efforts you have entered into contact with your psychic being, then the door is wide open. Through the psychic youcansuddenlyhaveaveryclearandbeautifulvisionofwhatthe supermindis, only a vision, not a realisation.


The Mother: That is the great way out. But even without going so far as this beautiful realisation, the psychic realisation, if you succeed in liberating some part of your mind or your vital, that makes a kind of hole in the door, a keyhole; through this keyhole you have a glimpse, just a little glimpse. And that is already very attractive, very interesting.    There are four pieces of advice here which I would like to retain for our meditation. “Do not cultivate indolence of mind.”


The Mother: “Do not choose wrong views” — unfortunately this is something one does all the time. And, “Arise. Cast off negligence.”  The world has been so made — at least up to now, let us hope that it will not be so for much longer — that, spontaneously, a man who is not cultured, when he is brought into contact with ideas, always chooses wrong ideas.  Andachildwhoisnoteducatedalwayschoosesbadcompany.


The Mother: It is a thing I experience constantly and concretely. If you keep a child in a special atmosphere and if, from a very early age, you instillinhimaspecialatmosphere,aspecialpurity,hehasachance of not making a wrong choice. But a child who is taken from the world as it is and is placed in a society where there are good and bad elements will go straight to those who can spoil him, teach him wrong things, that is to say, towards the worst company.  A man who has no intellectual culture, if you give him some mixedideas,justatrandom,tochoosefrom,hewillalwayschoose the stupid ones; because, as Sri Aurobindo has told us, this is a world of falsehood, of ignorance and an effort is needed, an aspiration; one must come in contact with one’s inmost being — a conscious and luminous contact — if one is to distinguish the true  from the false, the good inﬂuence from the bad. If you let yourself go, you sink into a hole.


The Mother: Things are like that because what rules the world — oh! let us put it in the past tense, so that it becomes true — what ruled the world was falsehood and ignorance.  In fact, for the moment, it is still like that; one should have no illusions about it. But perhaps with a great effort and great vigilance we shall be able to make it otherwise... soon — the “perhaps” is for “soon”.  Surely it will come one day, but we want it soon, and that is why the last two recommendations please me: “Arise. Cast off negligence.”


The Mother: This concerns the Four Truths and the Eightfold Path that lead to the annihilation of suffering. Here are the details given in the text: The Four Noble Truths are: (1) Life — taken in the sense of ordinary life, the life of ignorance and falsehood — is indissolubly linked with suffering: suffering of the body and suffering of the mind.  (2) The cause of suffering is desire, which is caused by ignorance of the nature of separative life.  (3) There is a way to escape from suffering, to put an end to pain.  (4) This liberation is obtained by following the discipline of the Eightfold Path which gradually puriﬁes the mind from the Ignorance.


The Mother: The fourth Truth is called the method of the Eightfold Path.  The Noble Path consists in a training in the following eight stages: (1) To see things as they are, that is to say, a pure, accurate vision, the best vision.  Three conditions characterise existence: pain, impermanence, the absence of a ﬁxed ego. So the Dhammapada says. But it is not quite that, it is rather the absence of a ﬁxed, durable and separate personality in the psychological aggregate, the lack of a true continuity in the personal consciousness.


The Mother: It is for this reason that,forexample,intheordinarystateonecannotrememberone’s past lives nor have the sense of a conscious continuity through all one’s lives.  The ﬁrst point then is to see correctly, and to see correctly is to see that pain is associated with ordinary life, that all things  are impermanent and that there is no continuity in the personal consciousness.  (2) But the same word “desire” should not have been used, because we have just been told that we should not have desire. It is rather “correct aspiration”. The word “desire” should be replaced by “aspiration”.


The Mother: “To be freed from attachments and to have kind thoughts for everything that exists.” To be constantly in a state of kindness. To wish the best for all, always.  (3) Never speak uselessly and scrupulously avoid all malevolent speech.  (4) From all points of view, not only materially, but morally, mentally.


The Mother: Mental honesty is one of the most difﬁcult things to achieve.  (5)   This is relatively easy to understand. There are people whocarrythisprincipletotheextreme,againstallcommonsense.


The Mother: Those who put a handkerchief to their mouths, for example, so as not to swallow germs, who have the path in front of them swept so as not to step on an insect. This seems to me a little excessive, becausethewholeoflifeasitisatpresentismadeupofdestruction.  But if you understand the text correctly, it means that one must avoid all possibility of doing harm, one must not deliberately endanger any creature. You can include here all living creatures andifyouextendthiscareandthiskindnesstoeverythingthatlives in the universe, it will be very favourable to your inner growth.  (6) Do not make useless efforts for useless things, rather keep all the energy of your effort to conquer ignoranceandfreeyourselffromfalsehood.Thatyoucanneverdotoo much.


The Mother: (7) The seventh principle comes to conﬁrm the sixth:    You must have an active and vigilant mind. Do not live in a half-somnolence, half-unconsciousness — usually in life you let yourself go, come what may!


The Mother: This is what everyone does. Now and then you wake up and you realise that you have wasted your  time; then you make a big effort only to fall back again, a minute later, into indolence. It would be better to have something less vehement but more constant.   (8)


The Mother: And ﬁnally, Egoless thought concentrated on the essence of things, on the inmost truth and on the goal to be attained.  How often there is a kind of emptiness in the course of life, an unoccupied moment, a few minutes, sometimes more. And what do you do? Immediately you try to distract yourself, and you invent some foolishness or other to pass your time. That is a common fact.


The Mother: All men, from the youngest to the oldest, spend most of their time in trying not to be bored. Their pet aversion is boredom and the way to escape from boredom is to act foolishly.  Well, there is a better way than that — to remember.  When you have a little time, whether it is one hour or a few minutes, tell yourself, “At last, I have some time to concentrate, to collect myself, to relive the purpose of my life, to offer myself to theTrueandtheEternal.”Ifyoutookcaretodothiseachtimeyou are not harassed by outer circumstances, you would ﬁnd out that you were advancing very quickly on the path. Instead of wasting your time in chattering, in doing useless things, reading things that lower the consciousness — tochoose only the best cases, I am not speaking of other imbecilities which are much more serious — instead of trying to make yourself giddy, to make time, that is already so short, still shorter only to realise at the end of your life that you have lost three-quarters of your chance — then you want to put in double time, but that does not work — it is better to be moderate, balanced, patient, quiet, but never to lose an opportunity that is given to you, that is to say, to utilise for the true purpose the unoccupied moment before you.


The Mother: When you have nothing to do, you become restless, you run about, you meet friends, you take a walk, to speak only of the best; I amnot referring tothings that are obviously not tobe done.  Instead of that, sit down quietly before the sky, before the sea or under trees, whatever is possible (here you have all of them) and  try to realise one of these things — to understand why you live, to learn how you must live, to ponder over what you want to do and what should be done, what is the best way of escaping from the ignorance and falsehood and pain in which you live.    One of these verses is very beautiful. We could translate it like this: “Happy is he who possesses nothing, he will partake of the delight of the radiant gods.” To possess nothing does not at all mean not to make use of anything, not to have anything at one’s disposal.


The Mother: “Happy is he who possesses nothing”: he is someone who has no sense of possession, who can make use of things when they come to him, knowing that they are not his, that they belong to the Supreme, and who, for the same reason, does not regret it when things leave him; he ﬁnds it quite natural that the Lord who gave him these things should take them away from him for otherstoenjoy. Suchamanﬁndsequaljoyintheuseofthingsasin the absence of things . When you have them at your disposal, you receivethemasagiftofGraceandwhentheyleaveyou,whenthey have been taken away from you, you live in the joy of destitution.  For it is the sense of ownership that makes you cling to things, makes you their slave, otherwise one could live in constant joy and in the ceaseless movement of things that come and go and pass, that bring with them both the sense of fullness when they are there and, when they go, the delight of detachment.


The Mother: Delight! Delight means to live in the Truth, to live in communion with Eternity, with the true Life, the Light that never fails.   Delight means to be free, free with the true Freedom, the Freedom of the constant, invariable union with the Divine Will.  Gods are those that are immortal, who are not bound to the vicissitudes of material life in all its narrowness, pettiness, unreality and falsehood.


The Mother: Gods are those who are turned to the Light, who live in the Power and the Knowledge; that is what the Buddha means, he does not mean the gods of religion. They are beings who have the divine nature, who may live in human bodies, but free from ignorance and falsehood.  When you no longer possess anything, you can become as vast as the universe.    It always seems to me that the reasons usually given for becoming wise are poor reasons: “Don’t do this, it will bring you suffering; don’t do that, it will give birth to fear in you”... and the consciousness dries up more and more, it hardens, because it is afraid of grief, afraid of pain.


The Mother: I think it would be better to say that there is a certain state of consciousness — which one can acquire by aspiration and a persistent inner effort — in which joy is unmixed and light shadowless, where all possibility of fear disappears. It is the state in which one does not live for oneself but where whatever one does, whatever one feels, all movements are an offering made to the Supreme, in an absolute trust, freeing oneself of all responsibility foroneself,handingovertoHimallthisburdenwhichisnolonger a burden.  It is an inexpressible joy not to have any responsibility for oneself, nolonger tothinkof oneself. It is sodull andmonotonous and insipid to be thinking of oneself, to be worrying about what to do and what not to do, what will be good for you and what will be bad for you, what to shun and what to pursue — oh, how wearisome it is! But when one lives like this, quite open, like a  ﬂower blossoming in the sun before the Supreme Consciousness, the Supreme Wisdom, the Supreme Light, the Supreme Love, which knows all, which can do all, which takes charge of you and you have no more worries — that is the ideal condition.


The Mother: And why is it not done?  One does not think of it, one forgets to do it, the old habits comeback. Andaboveall,behind,hiddensomewhereintheinconscientoreveninthesubconscient,thereisthisinsidiousdoubtthat whispersinyourear:“Oh!ifyouarenotcareful,somemisfortune will happen to you. If you forget to watch over yourself, you do not know what may happen” — and you are so silly, so silly, so obscure, so stupid that you listen and you begin to pay attention to yourself and everything is ruined.  You have to begin all over again to infuse into your cells a little wisdom, a little common sense and learn once more not to worry.


The Mother: I suggest that every one of you should try — oh! not for long, just for one hour a day — to say nothing but the absolutely indispensable words. Not one more, not one less.   Take one hour of your life, the one which is most convenient foryou,andduringthattimeobserveyourselfcloselyandsayonly the absolutely indispensable words.  At the outset, the ﬁrst difﬁculty will be to know what is absolutely indispensable and what is not.


The Mother: It is already a study in itself and every day you will do better.  Next, you will see that so long as one says nothing, it is not difﬁcult to remain absolutely silent, but as soon as you begin to speak, always or almost always you say two or three or ten or twenty useless words which it was not at all necessary to say.   I give you this as an exercise till next Friday. We shall see how you succeed. You may, at the end of the week, on Friday, give me a brief note telling me how far you have succeeded — those who have tried.


The Mother: That’s all.      I have read your notes on the control of speech. Some have tried very seriously. I am happy with the result.


The Mother: I believe it will be good for everyone if you continue.  Someone has written me something which is very true: that when one begins, one has no reason to stop, one begins with one hour a day, but this becomes a kind of necessity, a habit and one continues quite naturally.  Ifyourexercisetrulyhasthisresult,thenitwillbeanexcellent thing .  We can select three things from what I have read this evening.


The Mother: The ﬁrst is that you must persist in what you do if you want to get a result. The Dhammapada tells us, for example, that if you have a mantra and do not repeat it sufﬁciently, there is no use in having it and that if you are inattentive, you lose the beneﬁt of vigilance, and that if you do not continue in the good habits that you acquire, they are useless — that is to say, you must persevere.  As for example, with the exercise which I asked you to do last  time; I asked you to do it with the idea that if you form the habit of doing it, that will help you much in overcoming your difﬁculties.  Already someone has told me, quite rightly, that while practising this half-silence, or at any rate this continence of speech, one achieves quite naturally the mastery of numerous difﬁculties in one’s character and also one avoids a great many frictions and misunderstandings. This is true.


The Mother: Another point to remember from our reading concerns impurity and the Dhammapada gives the example of bad will and wrong action. Wrong action, says our text, is a taint in this world as well as in others. In the next verse it is said that there is no greater impurity than ignorance, that is to say, ignorance is considered as the essential, the central fault, which urgently needs to be corrected, and what is called ignorance is not simply not knowing things, not having the superﬁcial knowledge of things, it means forgetting the very reason of our existence, the truth that has to be discovered.  There was a third thing? ...


The Mother: Yes, you must not cherish the illusion that if you want to follow the straight path, if you are modest, if you seek purity, if you are disinterested, if you want to lead a solitary existence and have a clear judgment, things will become easy.... It is quite the contrary! When you begin to advance towards inner and outer perfection, the difﬁculties start at the same time.  I have very often heard people saying, “Oh! now that I am trying to be good, everybody seems to be bad to me!” But this is precisely to teach you that one should not be good with an interested motive, one should not be good so that others will be good to you — one must be good for the sake of being good.


The Mother: It is always the same lesson: one must do as well as one can, the best one can, but without expecting a result, without doing it with a view to the result. Just this attitude, to expect a reward for a good action — to become good because one thinks that this will make life easier — takes away all value from the good action.  You must be good for the love of goodness, you must be just  for the love of justice, you must be pure for the love of purity and you must be disinterested for the love of disinterestedness; then you are sure to advance on the way.    We shall take the last text. It is an interesting one.


The Mother: “It is neither by moral precepts and observances, nor by a wide knowledge, nor by practising meditation, nor by a solitary life, nor by thinking”, that one attains the true bliss; it is by getting rid of all desires. Certainly it is not easy to get rid of all desires, it sometimes needs a whole lifetime. But to tell the truth, it seems to be a very negative way, although at a certain stage of development, it is a discipline which it is very useful, even indispensable  to practise, if one does not want to deceive oneself. Because at ﬁrst you begin by getting rid of the major desires, those that are most obvious and trouble you so much that you cannot even have any illusions about them; then come subtler desires that take the form of things that have to be done, that are necessary, even at times of commands from within, and it requires time and much sincerity to discover and overcome them


The Mother: ; at last it seems as if you had done away with these wretched desires in the material world, in external things, in the world of feelings, in the emotions and sentiments, in the mental world as regards ideas, and then you ﬁnd them again in the spiritual world, and there they are far more dangerous, more subtle, more penetrating and much more invisible and covered by such a saintly appearance that one dare not call them desires.  And when one has succeeded in overcoming all that, in discovering, dislodging and getting rid of them, even then one has done only the negative side of the work.  The Buddha said or has been made to say that when one is free from all desire, one necessarily enters into inﬁnite bliss. This bliss may be a little dry and anyway it does not seem to me to be the quickest way.  Ifattheoutsetoneweretoseizetheproblembodily,jumpinto it with courage and determination


The Mother: and, instead of undertaking a long, arduous, painful, disappointing hunt after desires, one gives oneself simply, totally, unconditionally, if one surrenders to the Supreme Reality, to the Supreme Will, to the Supreme Being, putting oneself entirely in His hands, in an upsurge of the whole being and all the elements of the being, without calculating, that would be the swiftest and the most radical way to get rid of the ego. People will say that it is difﬁcult todoit, but at least a warmth is there, an ardour, an enthusiasm, a light, a beauty, an ardent and creative life.  It is true that without desire nothing much remains to sustain theegoandonehastheimpressionthattheconsciousnessbecomes so hardened that if the ego crumbles into dust, then something of  one’sselfalsofallsintodustandoneisreadytoenterintoaNirvana which is annihilation pure and simple.  But what we consider here as the true Nirvana is the disappearance of the ego into the splendour of the Supreme. And this way is what I call the positive way, the self-giving that is integral, total, perfect, without reserve, without bargaining.


The Mother: In the mere fact of not thinking of oneself, not existing for oneself, referring nothing to oneself, thinking only of what is supremelybeautiful,luminous,delightful,powerful,compassionate and inﬁnite, there is such a profound delight that nothing can be compared to it.  This is the only thing that deserves... that is worthy of being attempted. All the rest is only marking time.  The difference is between climbing a mountain by going round and round, slowly, laboriously, step by step, for hundreds of years, and spreading invisible wings and soaring straight to the summit.     Here are some very useful recommendations: moderation in speech, control of the mind, abstention from evil actions.


The Mother: This is very good.  Here is something radical, but it is also very good: “As long as one has not rooted out of oneself entirely the desire of a man for a woman, the mind is captive, as dependent as a suckling on its mother.”  And ﬁnally: “Root out self-love, as one plucks with his hand an autumn lotus.” These are good subjects for meditation.  These recommendations seem to have been meant for people who are just at the beginning of the Path from the intellectual point of view.


The Mother: We can easily imagine a gathering of country people, people with simple minds, to whom one has to say, “Listen carefully, it is no use making plans, for you do not know what will happen to you tomorrow. You are amassing wealth, you are taking your ease among your family, you are making schemes for tomorrow and for the day after, and you are not aware that death is on the watch and that at any moment it can fall on you.”  All the same, there is a slightly more advanced stage of intellectual development in which these things need not be said — one must live them! Live in the consciousness that things are altogether impermanent, never become attached, if you are to be free to progress with the universe and grow according to the eternal rhythm. This one understands.


The Mother: But what is important is to practise it. Here one has the impression that these things were told to people who had never thought of them before and so they had the full power of an active force.  After all, in spite of all appearances, humanity progresses; it has progressed particularly in the mind. There are things that no longer need to be said.... Or else one must go to countries that are at a very primitive stage, and even so...


The Mother: ideas have spread  everywhere, the mental light has spread everywhere and in the most unexpected places one ﬁnds instances of receptivity and understanding.  One really has the impression that during the last century a light came and spread upon the earth with the result that certain ideas, which were once idea-forces, new ideas with the power to stir up the consciousness in men, have lost their relevance, they are now old. A new light is at work.  Inpractice,theprogressisnotverygreat,eveninsomerespects perhaps there has been a retrogression, but in the mind, in the understanding, in the intellectual vision of things, there has truly been a great change.  Itseemswearemarchingonthewayatanacceleratedpaceand these things which used to be of the ﬁrst importance are becoming almost commonplace in the light of new discoveries.


The Mother: Life as it is is bad, disorder is everywhere, suffering is everywhere, confusion is everywhere, chaos is everywhere, ignorance is everywhere — we all know it, don’t we? It seems so hackneyed.  But that one can emerge from it through a total realisation, a total transformation, through a new light that will establish order and harmony in things, is a message of hope that has to be given.  This is the true, the dynamic message.  A new life must be built.


The Mother: Then all these difﬁculties that seemed so unsurmountable — oh! they fall of themselves.  When you can live in light and joy, are you going to cling to shadow and suffering?    Still you should not be mistaken. For I believe all these are images rather than material facts, because it is quite certain that eating alone, sleeping alone, living in the forest all alone is not enough to give you freedom of spirit.   It has been noticed that most people who live alone in the forest become friendly with all the animals and plants around them; but it is not at all the fact of being all alone that gives you the power of entering into an inner contemplation and living in communion with the Supreme Truth.


The Mother: Perhaps it is easier, when by force of circumstance you have nothing else to do, but I am not convinced of it. One can always invent occupations and it seems to me, according to my experience of life, that if one succeeds in subduingone’snatureinthemidstofdifﬁculties,ifoneendeavours to be all alone within oneself with the eternal Presence, while keeping the same surroundings which the Grace has given us, the realisation which one obtains then is inﬁnitely more true, more profound, more lasting.  To run away from difﬁculties in order to conquer them is not a solution. It is very attractive. In those who seek the spiritual life, there is something which says, “Oh! to sit down under a tree, all alone, to remain in meditation, not to have the temptation to speak or act, how ﬁne it must be!”


The Mother: It is because there is a very strong formation in this direction, but it is very illusory.  The best meditations are those that one has all of a sudden, becausetheytakepossessionofyouasanimperativenecessity.You havenochoicebuttoconcentrate,tomeditate,tolookbeyondthe appearances. And it is not necessarily in the solitude of the forest thatitseizesyou,ithappenswhensomethinginyouisready,when the time has come, when the true need is there, when the Grace is with you.  It seems to me that humanity has made some progress and the true victory must be won in life itself.  You must know how to live alone with the Eternal and Inﬁnite in the midst of all circumstances.


The Mother: You must know how to be free, with the Supreme as your companion, in the midst of all occupations. That is indeed the true victory.     As in all these teachings there are always several ways of understanding them. The external way is quite commonplace.


The Mother: In all moral principles, the same thing is always said. This Niraya for example, which some take as a kind of hell where one is punished for one’s sins, has also another sense. The true sense of Niraya is that particular kind of atmosphere which one creates around oneself when one acts in contradiction, not with outer moral rules or social principles, but with the inner law of one’s being, the particular truth of each one which ought to govern all the movements of our consciousness and all the acts of our body. The inner law, the truth of the being is the divine Presence in every human being, which should be the master and guide of our life.  When you acquire the habit of listening to this inner law,  when you obey it, follow it, try more and more to let it guide your life, you create around you an atmosphere of truth and peace and harmony which naturally reacts upon circumstances and forms, so to say, the atmosphere in which you live.