The Mother: And to ﬁx rigid laws in this way — not that you cut yourself off from the apparent surface laws, for the mind makes many laws, and the surface very obligingly seems to comply with these laws, but it is only an appearance — but anyway this cuts you off from the creative Power of the Spirit , it cuts you off from the true Power of the Grace, for you can understand that if by your aspiration or your attitude you introduce a higher element, a new element — what we may now call a supramental element — into the existing combinations, you can suddenly change their nature, and all these so-called necessary and ineluctable laws become absurdities. That is to say that you yourself, with your conception, with your attitude and your acceptance of certain alleged principles, you yourself close the door upon the possibility of the miracle — they are not miracles when one knows how they happen, but obviously for the outer consciousness they seem miraculous. And it is you, saying to yourself with a logic that seems quite reasonable, “Well, if I do this, that will necessarily happen, or if I don’t do that, necessarily this other thing will happen”, it is you yourself who close the door — it  is as though you were putting an iron curtain between yourself and the free action of the Grace.


The Mother: How nice it would be to imagine that the Supreme Consciousness, essentially free, presiding at the universal Manifestation, could be full of fantasy in its choice and make things follow one another not according to a logic accessible to human thought but in accordance with another kind of logic, that of the unforeseen!  Then there would no longer be any limits to the possibilities, to the unexpected, the marvellous; and one could hope for the most splendid, the most delightful things from this sovereignly free Will, playing eternally with all the elements and creating unceasingly a new world which logically would have absolutely nothing to do with the preceding one.  Don’t you think it would be charming? We have had enough of the world as it is! Why not let it become at least what we think it ought to be?


The Mother: And I am telling you all this in order that each one of you may put as few barriers as you can in the way of the possibilities to come. That’s my conclusion.  I don’t know if I have made myself understood, but indeed a day will come, I suppose, when you will know what I meant.  That’s all, then.  Recently, in one of the Wednesday classes, we talked about child prodigies.


The Mother: Some say that the number of child prodigies is increasing considerably, and some — even among Americans — say it is the inﬂuence and work of Sri Aurobindo, and others say it is a result of atom bombs! But the fact is that there is a fairly large number of child prodigies. I did not want to speak about it in much detail, for I did not have any proofs in hand, that is, I did not have any good examples to give. It happens that since  then someone has brought me a French book written by a child of eight. Naturally there are people who dispute the possibility, but I shall explain to you later how such a thing is possible.


The Mother: The book is remarkable for a child of eight. This does not mean that if the age of the child were not known the book would be considered wonderful; but there are, here and there, some sentences in it which are quite astonishing. I have noted down these sentences and am going to read them out to you.   (.)


The Mother: A little phrase like this: “If we truly love one another, we can hide nothing from each other”.... Obviously this is ﬁne.  And then something else written to a boy with freckles — you know what freckles are, don’t you? She writes to him: “You are beautiful, yes indeed, your freckles are so pretty; one would say that an angel had sown grains of wheat all over your face so as to attract the birds of the sky there.” Surely this is very poetic.


The Mother: And ﬁnally, something really ﬁne which opens the door to the explanation I am going to give you: “I am only an ear, a mouth; the ear hears a storm of words which I cannot explain to you, which an immense voice hurls within me, and my mouth repeats them and nothing of what I say can compare with the streaming of light which is within me.”  Obviously this is very beautiful.  It seems that here and there in her poems — she has written many — one can ﬁnd reminiscences of Maeterlinck, for instance; so people have concluded that it was not she who had written them, for at the age of eight one doesn’t read Maeterlinck, that it must have been someone else. But in fact there is no need at all to suppose a hoax, and the publisher indeed declares that he is sure of what he is about, that he knows the child very intimately — in fact he was in a way her adoptive father, for her father was dead — and can guarantee that there is no deception. But it is  not at all necessary to suppose a deception in order to explain this phenomenon.


The Mother: Authors, writers, who were inspired and serious in their creative work, that is to say, who were concentrated in a kind of consecration of their being to their literary work, form within themselves a sort of mental entity extremely well-constituted and coordinated, having its own life,, so that when they die, when the body returns to the earth, this mental formation continues to exist altogether autonomously and independently, and as it has been fashioned for expression it always seeks a means of expression somewhere. And if there happens to be a child who has been formed in particularly favourable circumstances — for instance, the mother of this little girl is herself a poetess and a writer; perhaps the mother herself had an aspiration, a wish that her child would be a remarkable, exceptional being — anyway, if the child who is conceived is formed in particularly favourable circumstances, an entity of this kind may enter into the child at the time of birth and try to use him to express itself; and in that case, this gives a maturity to the child’s mind, which is quite extraordinary, exceptional and which enables him to do things of the kind we have just read.  We could say, without fear of sounding quite absurd, that if what she has written surprisingly resembles certain things in Maeterlinck or has the characteristics of his writings, even with certain almost identical turns of phrase, we could very well imagine that a mental formation of Maeterlinck has incarnated in this child and is using this young instrument to express itself.  There are similar examples, for instance, among musicians.  There are pianists who have individualised their hands and made them so wonderfully conscious that these hands are not decomposed — not the physical hands: the hands of the subtle physical and vital — they are not decomposed, do not dissolve at the time of death.


The Mother: They remain as instruments to play the piano and always try to incarnate in the hands of someone playing the piano. I have known some cases of people who, as they were  about to play, felt as though other hands entered into theirs and started playing really marvellously, in a way they could not have done themselves.  These things are not as exceptional as one might believe, they happen quite often.  I saw the same thing in someone who used to play the violin and another who played the cello — two different cases — and who were not very wonderful performers themselves.  One of them was just beginning his studies and the other was a good performer, but nothing marvellous.


The Mother: But all of a sudden, the moment they played the compositions of certain musicians, something of that musician entered into their hands and made their performance absolutely wonderful.  There was even a person — a woman — who used to play the cello, and the moment she played Beethoven, the expression of her face completely changed into Beethoven’s and what she played was sublime, which she could not have played unless something of Beethoven’s mind had entered into her.  Why do you suppose it would do them harm? It does them good!  It is always good to make a progress or to exceed oneself.


The Mother: I don’t understand. For the child?  But it is something wonderful to be at the age of eight the expression of something which surpasses the intelligence! In what way do you suppose it could harm her? I don’t quite understand your question.


The Mother: No. You mean that what often happens is that a child prodigy is no longer a prodigy at all when he grows up. But, precisely, those who have studied these cases say that what is exceptional about the things happening now is that child prodigies become, as they put it, prodigious men, that is, the exceptional faculty remains in them and becomes more ﬁrmly established as they grow up.  But I don’t see how it can be bad, it can only be good.


The Mother: In what way can it be bad? It is as if you said, “If one has a beautiful soul, that is bad!”  When something of a higher nature enters into you, it is a grace, isn’t it?    Some days ago, during the Translation Class I found a passage in which, I thought, might interest you this evening.


The Mother: Sri Aurobindo is speaking of the movement of Nature and he explains how from matter which seems inert came life, then how from life mind emerged and also how from mind will emerge the supermind or the spiritual life; and he gives a kind of brief survey of the time it takes. I am going to read this passage to you and shall tell you later what connection it has with our present situation: I am reading this to you because I have been asked about the action of the Supermind, and I had compared this manifestation of the Supermind to that of the mind which, according to all modern scientiﬁc discoveries, took nearly a million years to evolve from the animal brain, the ape-brain, to the ﬁrst human brain. And I told you that, consequently, one should not expect this to take place in a few months or a few years, that it would  obviously take much longer. Some people, it seems, thought that I was announcing that the superman would not come before another million years! I want to correct this impression.


The Mother: Sri Aurobindo has said that as the development rises in the scale of consciousness, the movement becomes more and more rapid, and that when the Spirit or the Supermind intervenes, it can go much faster. Therefore we may hope that in a few centuries, the ﬁrst supramental race will appear.  But even that is rather disconcerting for some people, for they think it contradicts what Sri Aurobindo has always promised: that the time has come for the supramental transformation to be possible.... But we must not confuse a supramental transformation with the appearing of a new race.  What Sri Aurobindo promised and what naturally interests us, we who are here now, is that the time has come when some beings among the of humanity, who fulﬁl the conditions necessary for spiritualisation, will be able to transform their bodies with the help of the supramental Force, Consciousness and Light, so as no longer to be animal-men but become supermen.


The Mother: This promise Sri Aurobindo has made and he based it on the knowledge he had that the supramental Force was on the point of manifesting on the earth. In fact it had descended in him long ago, he knew it and knew what its effects were.  And now that it has manifested universally, I could say, generally, the certainty of the possibility of transformation is of course still greater. There is no longer any doubt that those who will fulﬁl or who now fulﬁl the conditions are on the way to this transformation.  The conditions Sri Aurobindo gives in detail in  and in still greater detail in his last articles on the Supramental Manifestation.


The Mother: So now it is only a question of realisation.   Now, if someone wants to ask me a question on the subject....  What I read today seems to be the most essential condition for starting, because it is the most universal.  ( )


The Mother: Everyone must follow his path in accordance with his own nature, and there is always a preference for one way rather than another. As we read in one of our recent classes, for one who follows the path of action, it is much more difﬁcult to feel that the human personality does not exist and that only the divine Force works. For one who follows the path of knowledge it is relatively very easy, it is something one discovers  almost immediately. For one who follows the path of love it is elementary, since it is by giving himself that he progresses. But for one who follows the path of action it is much more difﬁcult, and consequently for him the ﬁrst step is to do what is said here in the passage of which we have just read: to create in himself this complete detachment from the fruit of action, to act because this is what must be done, to do it in the best possible way, and not to be anxious about the consequences, to leave the consequences to a Will higher than his own.


The Mother: One can’t make a general rule for the order of importance of the paths, it is an exclusively personal affair. And there is a time when one understands very well, it is apparent, that no two paths are alike, no two paths can be alike, and that every man follows his own path and that this is the truth of his being. One can, if one looks from a sufﬁcient height, see a difference in the speed of advance, but it does not always conform to the external signs; and one could say a little humorously, that it is not always the wisest who goes fastest!  ( )


The Mother: It seems to me no longer possible to make general rules. Indeed, the Grace is upon all. And what is necessary to let it act? It is very difﬁcult to say.  If one can see it, feel it, experience its action, so to say, be conscious of its presence and movement, then one has the joy of the movement, the progress, the realisation; but this does not mean that if one doesn’t feel this joy, the action of the Grace is not there, the realisation not there.


The Mother: And after all, all the ways of being of the Divine, all the forms of being in the manifestation are necessary to express the Divine. It is this manifestation as a whole, in its totality, which progresses towards a growing, inﬁnite, eternal perfection. It is not each separate element, individually, it is all together, as a  collective and total expression of the divine Truth. All this is moving forward constantly, eternally, towards a greater perfection. The universe of tomorrow will necessarily be more divine, if one may say so, than the universe of yesterday; and that of yesterday was more divine than the one preceding it.


The Mother: And so, it could be said that the Divine, in his expression of Himself, is in perpetual progress towards a more and more perfect, a more and more divine manifestation.  And in that case, each element has only to manifest, as perfectly as possible, its own law, what it should be in the whole, in order to do the utmost of what ought to be done. It is thus a conscious, an enlightened, one could almost say a disinterested, discovery of this truth of each being, which for it is the ﬁrst and most important necessity.   Sri Aurobindo has said that the universe is built upon the delight of existence and that delight, being its origin is necessarily also its goal, so this would mean in fact that delight is the highest state.  But I don’t need to tell you that this is not delight as it is understood in the ordinary human consciousness....


The Mother: Indeed, that delight is beyond the states which are generally considered as the highest from the yogic point of view, as for instance, the state of perfect serenity, of perfect equality of soul, of absolute detachment, of identity with the inﬁnite and eternal Divine, which necessarily raises you above all contingencies. Parallel to this state there can be another which is the state of perfect, integral, universal love, which is the very essence of compassion and the most perfect expression of the Grace which wipes out the consequences of all error and all ignorance. These two states have always been considered as the summit of consciousness; they are what could be called the frontier, the extreme limit of what the individual consciousness can attain in its union with the Divine.  But there is something which lies beyond; it is precisely a state of perfect delight which is not static: delight in a progressive manifestation, a perfect unfolding of the supreme Consciousness.  The ﬁrst of the two states I spoke about leads almost always to a withdrawal from action, an almost static condition, and very easily would it lead to Nirvana — in fact, it has always been the way


The Mother: prescribed for all those in search of Nirvana . But this state of delight I am speaking about, which is essentially divine  because it is free, totally free from all possibility of oppositions and opposites, does not break away from action; on the contrary, it leads to an integral action, perfect in its essence and completely liberated from all ignorance and all bondage to ignorance.  One can experience, on the path — when one has made some progress, when there is a greater understanding, a more total opening, a more intimate union with the divine Consciousness, one can experience this Delight as something that passes by and colours life and gives it its true meaning, but as long as one is in the human consciousness, this Delight is very easily deformed and changes into something which no longer resembles it at all.  Therefore, one could hardly say that if one loses the delight, one’s consciousness is lowered, for...


The Mother: the Delight I am speaking about is something which cannot ever be lost. If one has reached beyond the two states I spoke about a while ago, that is to say, the state of perfect detachment and close union, and the state of perfect love and compassion, if one has gone beyond these two states and found the divine Delight, it is practically impossible to come down from there. But in practical life, that is, on the path of yoga, if you are touched, even in passing, by this divine Delight, it is obvious that, should it leave you, you are bound to feel that you have come down from a peak into a rather dark valley.  But Delight without detachment would be a very dangerous gift which could very easily be perverted. So, to seek Delight before having acquired detachment does not seem to be very wise.


The Mother: One must ﬁrst be above all possible opposites: indeed, above pain and pleasure, suffering and happiness, enthusiasm and depression. If one is above all that, then one may safely aspire for Delight.  But as long as this detachment is not realised, one can easily confuse Delight with an exalted state of ordinary human happiness, and this would not at all be the true thing nor even a perversion of the thing, for the nature of the two is so different, almost opposite, that you cannot pass from one to the other.   So, if one wants to be safe on the path, it seems to me that to seek for peace, for perfect calm, perfect equality, for a widening of the consciousness, a vaster understanding and liberation from all desire, all preference, all attachment, is certainly an indispensable preliminary condition.


The Mother: It is the guarantee of both inner and outer equipoise.  And then on this equilibrium, on this foundation which must be, one may build whatever one wants. But to begin with, the foundation must be there, unshakable.  ( )


The Mother: Someone has asked me what I meant by these words:  It is obvious that when I tell someone, “Be calm”, I mean many different things according to the person. But the ﬁrst indispensable calm is mental quietude, for generally that is the one that’s most lacking. When I tell someone, “Be calm”, I mean: Try not to have restless, excited, agitated thoughts; try to quieten your mind and to stop turning around in all your imaginations and observations and mental constructions.  One could justiﬁably add a question: You tell us “Be calm”, but what should we do to be calm?...


The Mother: The answer is always more or less the same: you must ﬁrst of all feel the need for it and want it, and then aspire, and then try! For trying, there are innumerable methods which have been prescribed and attempted by many. These methods are generally long, arduous, difﬁcult; and many people get discouraged before reaching the goal, for, the more they try, the more do their thoughts start whirling around and becoming restless in their heads.  For each one the method is different, but one must feel the need, for whatever reason it may be — whether because one is tired or because one is overstrained or because one truly wants  to rise beyond the state one lives in — one must ﬁrst understand, feel the need of this quietude, this peace in the mind. And then, afterwards, one may try out successively all the methods, known ones and new, to attain the result.


The Mother: Now, one quickly realises that there is another quietude which is necessary, and even very urgently needed — this is vital quietude, that is to say, the absence of desire. Only, the vital when not sufﬁciently developed, as soon as it is told to keep quiet, either goes to sleep or goes on strike; it says, “Ah! no.  Nothing doing! I won’t go any farther. If you don’t give me the sustenance I need, excitement, enthusiasm, desire, even passion, I prefer not to move and I won’t do anything any longer.”


The Mother: So there the problem becomes a little more delicate and perhaps even more difﬁcult still; for surely, to fall from excitement into inertia is very far from being a progress! One must never mistake inertia or a somnolent passivity for calm.  Quietude is a very positive state; there is a positive peace which is not the opposite of conﬂict — an active peace, contagious, powerful, which controls and calms, which puts everything in order, organises. It is of this I am speaking; when I tell someone, “Be calm”, I don’t mean to say “Go and sleep, be inert and passive, and don’t do anything”, far from it!... True quietude is a very great force, a very great strength.


The Mother: In fact one can say, looking at the problem from the other side, that all those who are really strong, powerful, are always very calm. It is only the weak who are agitated; as soon as one becomes truly strong, one is peaceful, calm, quiet, and one has the power of endurance to face the adverse waves which come rushing from outside in the hope of disturbing one. This true quietude is always a sign of force. Calmness belongs to the strong.  And this is true even in the physical ﬁeld.


The Mother: I don’t know if you have observed animals like lions, tigers, elephants, but it is a fact that when they are not in action, they are always so perfectly still. A lion sitting and looking at you always seems to be telling you, “Oh, how ﬁdgety you are!” It looks at you  with such a peaceful air of wisdom! And all its power, energy, physical strength are there, gathered, collected, concentrated and — without a shadow of agitation — ready for action when the order is given.  I have seen people, many people, who could not sit still for half an hour without ﬁdgeting.


The Mother: They had to move a foot or a leg, or an arm or their head; they had to stir restlessly all the time, for they did not have the power or the strength to remain quiet.  This capacity to remain still when one wants to, to gather all one’s energies and spend them as one wishes, completely if one wants, or to apportion them as one wants in action, with a perfect calm even in action — that is always the sign of strength.   It may be physical strength or vital strength or mental strength.


The Mother: But if you are in the least agitated, you may be sure there is a weakness somewhere; and if your restlessness is integral, it is an integral weakness.  So, if I tell someone “Be calm”, I may be telling him all kinds of things, it depends upon each person. But obviously, most often it is, “Make your mind quiet, don’t be restless all the time in your head, don’t stir up lots of ideas, calm yourself.”  For most people an experience exists only when they can explain it to themselves. The experience in itself — contact with a certain force, a widening of consciousness, communion with an aspect of the Divine, no matter what experience, an opening of the being, the breaking down of an obstacle, crossing over a stage, opening new doors — all these experiences, if people cannot explain them to themselves in so many words and materialise them in precise thoughts, it is as though these did not exist!


The Mother: And it is just this need for expression, this need for translation, which causes the greater part of the experience to lose its power of action on the individual consciousness. How is it that you have a decisive, deﬁnitive experience, that, for instance, you have opened the door of your psychic being, you have been in communion with it, you know what this means, and then — it  does not stay? It is because it does not have a sufﬁciently tangible power unless you can express it to yourself. The experience begins for you only when you are able to describe it. Well, when you are able to describe it, the greater part of its intensity and its capacity of action for the inner and outer transformation has already evaporated.


The Mother: There it may be said that expression, explanation is always a coming down. The experience itself is on a much higher plane.   I have something here, I don’t know if it will take us very far, but still it will make a good change. All these last few weeks the subject was always progress: how to progress, what hindered progress, how to use the supramental Force, etc. This is going on, I have a whole packet still!


The Mother: But we may change the subject for once.  Someone has asked me a question about death: what happens after death and how one takes a new body.  Needless to say, it is a subject which could ﬁll volumes, no two cases are alike: practically is possible in the life after death as everything is possible on earth when one is in a physical body, and all statements when generalised become dogmatic. But still one may look at the problem in some detail, and sometimes one makes interesting discoveries.


The Mother: The question is like this: Even to answer this, as I have told you, it would be necessary to write volumes or to speak for hours. For, to tell the truth, no two cases are alike — there are similarities, classiﬁcations can be made, but they are purely arbitrary. What I wanted to do was to read to you the following, for it is quite amusing — oh, I don’t want to be... not serious! Let us say it is quite interesting:   So a question: We shall keep aside the questions; I am continuing: This is really a rather complicated process, isn’t it? ()


The Mother: But I found it very amusing. And now the question ():  There we are!  The only thing I can say is that it is possible things sometimes happen like that. Quite probably — at least I hope so — the person who described this may have observed a phenomenon of this kind; I hope it is not a mere mental construction of his occult imagination.... It raises a few practical problems!


The Mother: But still, of course, there is nothing impossible. Only, it is difﬁcult to imagine the soul entering the rain, which enters the seed, which makes the plant sprout up, and then entering the father’s stomach in the form of food, more or less cooked (!) and ﬁnally proceeding to the conception of the child. I don’t say it is impossible, but it is very, very, complicated!  I may say that I have been present at innumerable incarnations of evolved souls in beings either preparing to be born or already born. As I said, the cases are quite different; it depends more on psychological conditions than on material ones, but it also depends on material conditions.


The Mother: It depends on the state of development of the soul which wants to reincarnate — we take the word “soul” here in the sense of the psychic being, what we call the psychic being — it depends on its state of development, on the milieu in which it is going to incarnate, on the mission it has to fulﬁl — that makes many different conditions.... It depends very largely on the state of consciousness of the parents.  For it goes without saying that there is a stupendous difference between conceiving a child deliberately, with a conscious aspiration, a call to the invisible world and a spiritual ardour, and conceiving a child by accident and without intending to have it, and sometimes even without wanting it at all. I don’t say that in the latter case there cannot also be an incarnation, but it usually takes place later, not at the conception.  For the formation of the child it makes a great difference.


The Mother: If the incarnation takes place at the conception, the whole  formation of the child to be born is directed and governed by the consciousness which is going to incarnate: the choice of the elements, the attraction of the substance — a choice of the forces and even the substance of the matter which is assimilated.  There is already a selection. And this naturally creates altogether special conditions for the formation of the body, which may already be fairly developed, evolved, harmonised before its birth.  I must say that this is quite, quite exceptional; but still it does happen.  More frequently there are cases in which, just at the moment of its birth, that is to say, of its ﬁrst gesture of independence, when the child begins to develop its lungs by crying as much as it can, at that moment, very often, this sort of call from life makes the descent easier and more effective.


The Mother: Sometimes days and at times months pass, and the preparation is slow and the entry takes place very gradually, in quite a subtle and almost imperceptible way.  Sometimes it comes much later, when the child itself becomes a little conscious and feels a very subtle but very real relation with something from above, far above, which is like an inﬂuence pressing upon it; and then it can begin to feel the need of being in contact with this something which it does not know, does not understand, but which it can only feel; and this aspiration draws the psychic and makes it descend into the child.  I am giving you here a few fairly common instances; there are many others; this may happen in innumerable different ways.  What I have described to you are the most frequent cases I have seen.  So, the soul which wants to incarnate stays at times in a domain of the higher mind, quite close to the earth, having chosen its future home; or else it can descend further, into the vital, and from there have a more direct action; or again it can enter the subtle physical and very closely govern the development of its future body.


The Mother: Now the other question — the one about departure.   That too depends on the degree of development, the conditions of death — and above all on the uniﬁcation of the being and its attitude at the time of leaving the body. The question here was about fully developed beings, that is, fully developed psychic beings — and I don’t know if it means a psychic being which has proﬁted by its presence in a physical body to do yoga, for then the conditions are quite different. But in a more general way, I have often told you that, with regard to the external envelope of the being, everything depends on its attitude at the moment of death, and that attitude necessarily depends on its inner development and its uniﬁcation.  If we take the best instance, of someone who has uniﬁed his being completely around the divine Presence within him, who is now only will, consciousness, this person will have grouped around his central psychic being a fully developed and organised mind, an absolutely surrendered and collaborating vital and an obedient, docile and supple physical being.


The Mother: This physical being, as it is fully developed, will have a subtle body — what Sri Aurobindo calls the “true physical” — which will inﬁnitely surpass the limits of its body and have enough suppleness, plasticity, balance to be able to adhere to the inner parts of the being and follow the movement of the soul in its... I don’t want to say in its ascent, but in its peregrinations outside the body. What the soul will do, where it will go — it all depends on what it has decided before leaving the body. And this capacity to keep around itself the being that has been fully organised and uniﬁed in its physical life, will allow it to really choose what it wants to do. And this also represents a very different ﬁeld of possibilities, from passing consciously from one body into another, directly — there are instances in which one of these fully conscious and fully developed beings has slowly prepared another being capable of receiving and assimilating it, and in order not to stop its material work when it leaves one body, it goes and joins another psychic being, merges with it, combines with it in another physical body; that is an extreme case, extremely  rare also, but one which forms part of an altogether traditional occult knowledge — to the instance at the other extreme, where the soul having ﬁnished its bodily experience, wants to assimilate it in repose and prepare for another physical existence later, sometimes much later.


The Mother: And so this is what happens, among many other possibilities: it leaves in each domain — in the subtle physical, in the vital, in the mental domain — the corresponding beings; it leaves them with a sort of link between them, but each one keeps its independent existence, and it itself goes into the zone, the reality, the world of the psychic proper, and enters into a blissful repose for assimilation, until it has assimilated (), as described in this paper, all its good deeds, digested all its good deeds, and is ready to begin a new experience. And then, if its work has been well done and the parts or sheaths of its being which it has left in their different domains have acted as they should there, when it descends again, it will put on one after another all these parts which lived with it in a former life, and with this wealth of knowledge and experience it will prepare to enter a new body.... This may be after hundreds or thousands of years, for in those domains all that is organised is no longer necessarily subject to the decomposition which here we call “death”. As soon as a vital being is fully harmonised, it becomes immortal. What dissolves it and breaks it up are all the disorders within it and all the tendencies towards destruction and decomposition; but if it is fully harmonised and organised and, so to say, divinised, it becomes immortal.


The Mother: It is the same thing for the mind. And even in the subtle physical, beings who are fully developed and have been impregnated with spiritual forces do not necessarily dissolve after death. They may continue to act or may take a beneﬁcial rest in certain elements of Nature like water — generally it is in some liquid, in water or the sap of trees — or it may be, as described here (), in the clouds.  But they may also remain active and continue to act on the more material elements of physical Nature.  I have given you here a certain number of examples; I tell  you, I could talk to you for hours and there would always be new examples to give!


The Mother: But this covers the subject broadly and opens the door to imagination.  There we are.    Oh! you are repeating it a little freely!


The Mother: Well, what does he want to know?  I don’t think this is what is meant. Surely what you mean is that Divine Love cannot manifest until man becomes divine. Is that what you mean?


The Mother: Oh! that’s how you understand it!... But I don’t think this is what is meant.  First of all, we are going to take the historical fact, if there is one. That is to say, through the action of the forces of separation, Consciousness became inconscience and matter was created such as it is, on a basis of inconscience so total that no contact seemed possible between the Origin and what was created.


The Mother: And this total inconscience made a direct descent necessary, without passing through the intermediate regions, a direct descent of the divine Consciousness in its form of Love. And it is this descent of Divine Love into matter, penetrating it and adding a new element to its composition, which has made possible the ascent, slow for us, but an uninterrupted ascent, from inconscience to consciousness and from darkness to light. Therefore, one cannot say that Love  can manifest only when the creation becomes divine, for it is  because of its manifestation that creation can become divine once again.   What I said there has nothing to do with this.


The Mother: I was speaking not of the world in general but of human consciousness in particular; and certainly, I was alluding to the fact that this Divine Love which animates all things, penetrates all, upbears all and leads all towards progress and an ascent to the Divine, is not felt, not perceived by the human consciousness, and that even to the extent the human being does perceive it, he ﬁnds it difﬁcult to bear — not only to contain it, but be able to tolerate it, I might say, for its power in its purity, its intensity in its purity, are of too strong a kind to be endured by human nature. It is only when it is diluted, deformed, attenuated and obscured, so to say, that it becomes acceptable to human nature.  It is only when it moves away from its true nature and essential quality that man accepts it, and even () approves of it and gloriﬁes it. This means that it must already be quite warped in order to be accepted by the human consciousness. And to accept it, bear it and receive it in its plenitude and purity, the human consciousness must become divine.


The Mother: This was what I meant, not anything else. I was stating that a human being, unless he raises himself to the divine heights, is incapable of receiving, appreciating and knowing what divine Love is. Love must cease to be divine to be accepted by man.  But that is a phenomenon of the outer, superﬁcial consciousness; it doesn’t prevent Love in its form of Grace from being at work everywhere and always, and from doing its work in an unknown but constant way, to put it thus; and I think, in fact, that it never works so well as when it is not known... for even the so-called human understanding is already a deformation.


The Mother: That is the meaning of the sentence, and nothing else. I was not speaking of a cosmic phenomenon.   So?...  There too, what I meant was that the experience precedes and transcends by far the formulation you give it in your mind.  The experience comes before, often long before the capacity to formulate it.


The Mother: The experience has a fullness, a force, a power of  action on the nature, which is immediate, instantaneous.   Let us take as an example that in certain circumstances or by an exceptional grace you are suddenly put into contact with a supramental light, power or consciousness. It is like an abrupt opening in your closed shell, like a rent in that opaque envelope which separates you from the Truth, and the contact is established. Immediately this force, this consciousness, this light acts, even on your physical cells; it acts in the mind, in the vital, in the body, changes the vibrations, organises the substance and begins its work of transformation.


The Mother: You are under the impact of this sudden contact and action; for you it is a sort of indescribable, inexpressible state which takes hold of you, you haven’t any clear, precise, deﬁnite idea of it, it is... “something that happens”. It may give you the impression of being wonderful or tremendous, but it is inexpressible and incomprehensible for you. That is the experience in its essence and its true power.  Gradually, as the action is prolonged and the outer being begins to assimilate this action, there awakens a capacity of observation, ﬁrst in the mental consciousness, and a kind of  objectivisation occurs: something in the mind looks on, observes and translates in its own way. This is what you call understanding, and this is what gives you the impression () that you are having an experience.


The Mother: But that is already considerably diminished in comparison with the experience itself, it is a transcription adapted to your mental, vital and physical dimension, that is, something that is shrunken, hardened — and it gives you at the same time the impression that it is growing clearer; that is to say, it has become as limited as your understanding.  That is a phenomenon which always occurs even in the best cases. I am not speaking of those instances where this power of experience is absorbed by the unconsciousness of your being and expressed by a more and more unconscious movement; I am speaking of the case in which your mind is clear, your aspiration clear, and where you have already advanced quite considerably on the path.... And even when your mind begins to be transformed, when it is used to receiving this Light, when it can be penetrated by it, is sufﬁciently receptive to absorb it, the moment it wants to express it in a way understandable to the human consciousness — I don’t mean the ordinary consciousness but even the enlightened human consciousness — the moment it wants to formulate, to make it precise and understandable, it reduces, diminishes, limits — it attenuates, weakens, blurs the experience, even granting that it is pure enough not to falsify it. For if, anywhere in the being, in the mind or the vital, there is some insincerity which is tolerated, well, then the experience is completely falsiﬁed and deformed.


The Mother: But I am speaking of the best instances, where the being is sincere, under control, and where it functions most favourably: the formulation in words which are understandable by the human mind is, inevitably, a restriction, a diminution of the power of action of the experience. When you can tell yourself clearly and consciously: “This and that and the other happened”, when you can describe the phenomenon comprehensibly, it has already lost some of its power of action, its intensity, its truth and force. But this does  not mean that the intensity, the power of action and the force were not there — they were there, and probably in the best cases the utmost effect of the experience is produced before you begin to give it a comprehensible form.  I am speaking here of the best cases. I am not speaking of the innumerable cases of those who begin to have an experience and whose mind becomes curious, wakes up and says, “Oh! what is happening?”


The Mother: Then everything vanishes. Or maybe one catches the deformed tail of something which has lost all its force and all its reality.... The ﬁrst thing to do is to teach your mind : “Above all, don’t move! Above all, don’t move, let the thing develop fully without wanting to know what is happening; don’t be stupid, keep quiet, be still, and wait. Your turn will always come too soon, never too late.”


The Mother: It should be possible to live an experience for hours and for days together without feeling the need to formulate it to yourself. When one does that, one gets the full beneﬁt from it. Then it works, it churns the nature, it transforms the cells — it begins its real work of transformation.  But as soon as you begin to look and to understand and to formulate, it is already something that belongs to the past.  There we are.


The Mother: Because the forces of the universal Mind enter into our heads.  We are bathed in forces, we are not aware of it. We are not something enclosed in a bag and independent from the rest: all forces, all vibrations, all movements enter into us and pass  through us. And so we have a certain mental force held in, that is to say, ready to be used by the formative or creative mental power. These are, as it were, free forces.


The Mother: As soon as a thought coming from outside or a force or movement enters our consciousness, we give it a concrete form, a logical appearance and all kinds of precise details; but in fact all this belongs to a domain one is rarely conscious of.  But this is not a special instance which occurs only from time to time: it is something constant. If a current of force is passing, with a particular thought formation, one sees it passing from one into another, and in each one it forms a kind of centre of light or force which keeps the imprint — more or less pure, more or less clear, more or less mixed — of the initial current; and the result is what we call “our” thought.  But our thought is something which hardly exists. It can be “our” thought only if, instead of being like a public place as we generally are in our normal state — we are like a public place and all the forces pass there, come and go, enter, depart, jostle each other and even quarrel — if instead of being like that, we are a concentrated consciousness, turned upwards in an aspiration, and open beyond the limits of the human mind to something higher; then, being open like this brings down that higher something across all the layers of reality, and this something may enter into contact with our conscious brain and take a form there which is no longer the creation of a universal force or a personal mind stronger than ours, but the expression and creation of a light which is above us, and which may be a light of the highest kind if our aspiration and opening allow it.


The Mother: That is the only case in which one can say that the thought is our own. Otherwise, all the rest is simply a passing notation: we note down, we invest a force with words, a force that’s altogether universal and collective, which enters, goes out, moves and passes freely from one person to another.    In the universal Mind?  Ideas have a higher origin than the mind.


The Mother: There is a region of the mind, higher than the ordinary mind, in which there are ideas, typal ideas, really prototypes; and these ideas descend and are clothed in mental substance. So, in accordance with — how to put it? — the quality of the receiver, they either keep all their own qualities and original nature or become distorted, coloured, transformed in the individual consciousness. But the idea goes far beyond the mind; the idea has an origin much higher than the mind. So, the functioning is the same from both the universal and the individual point of view; the individual movement is only representative of the universal one. The is different, but the phenomenon is the same.


The Mother: Of course, these are no longer “thoughts” as we conceive thoughts; they are universal principles — but it’s the same thing — universal principles on which the universes are built.  The universe, after all, is only one person, only one individuality in the midst of the eternal Creation. Each universe is a person who takes form, lives, dissolves, and another takes shape — it is the same thing. For us, the person is the human individual; and from the universal point of view the person is the universal individual; it is one universe in the midst of all the universes.   Now we have ﬁnished.


The Mother: Do you have something to ask about this subject, in conclusion? What are your reﬂections? Your comments?  ()  All right.


The Mother: What effect has this had on you? Has it helped you, did you have the impression that it put you on the way, that it gave you the of the discovery?  Didn’t you think anything? Didn’t you feel anything, experience anything? You did not... did you listen?


The Mother: ( )  Now the last question; if you do not answer, we won’t talk about it any more: Did this make you want to do yoga or not?  (.) A nod of the head but, all the same, that’s something.


The Mother: Yes or no? A little, much, not at all?... So () it is your turn to speak. Has it made you want to do yoga or not?


The Mother: Why? Because you did not follow or because there was no response?   Has anyone else anything to say?  When I read it is all right and then it burns out!... Then I must read to you about that very often in order to re-light the spark!


The Mother: Very well, next time we shall take.   Is that all? Has anyone a question to ask on the subject?


The Mother: Oh, Lord!... To appear good in others’ eyes, to have public approval? Is that it?   First, the best way is to ask oneself why one values others’ approval.


The Mother: For what particular reason, because there are many reasons.... If you have a career and your career depends on the good opinion others have of you, then that’s a utilitarian reason.  If you have a little, or much, vanity and like compliments, that’s another reason. If you attach great value to others’ opinion of you because you feel they are wiser or more enlightened or have more knowledge, that’s yet another reason. There are many others still, but these are the three chief reasons: utility, vanity — usually this is the strongest — and progress.


The Mother: Naturally, when it is a reason of progress, the attitude is not quite the same, for instead of trying to make a good impression, one must ﬁrst endeavour to know the impression one is actually making, in all humility, in order to proﬁt by the lesson this gives. That is quite rare, and in fact, if one isn’t too na¨ıve, one  usually attaches importance only to the opinion of those who have more experience, more knowledge and more wisdom than oneself. And so that leads us straight to one of the best methods of cure. It is precisely to come to understand that the opinion of those who are as ignorant and blind as ourselves cannot have a very great value for us from the point of view of the deeper reality and the will to progress, and so one stops attaching much importance to that.  Finally, if one is sincere one desires no other approval except that of one’s teacher or one’s guru or of the Divine Himself.


The Mother: And that’s the ﬁrst step towards a total cure of this little weakness of wishing to make a good impression on people. Now, if the movement comes from a motive of utility, the one I spoke of ﬁrst, the question does not arise here, for here we do not depend upon the opinion others have of us, either for living or for our development. So there remains the most frequent instance, the one most difﬁcult to cure: that kind of small, very foolish vanity which makes you like to be complimented and dislike being criticised. So the best way is to look at yourself, to see how very ridiculous you are, how petty, paltry, stupid and all that, to laugh a little at yourself and resolve to do without the compliments of others.  That is all I have to offer.


The Mother: It is obvious that if it is a matter of yoga, of yogic discipline, an indispensable preliminary condition is to free oneself from this little stupidity of wanting to be appreciated by others. That is not the ﬁrst step on the path, it is one of the ﬁrst steps in the preparation for being able to enter on the path. For so long as one needs to be appreciated and complimented, one is a slavish being and a deplorable weakling.  Indeed, it is better not to care at all about what others think of you, whether it is good or bad. But in any case, before reaching this stage, it would be less ridiculous to try to ﬁnd out the impression you make on others simply by taking them as a mirror in which you see your reﬂection more exactly than in  your own consciousness which is always over-indulgent to all your weakness, blindness, passions, ignorance.


The Mother: There is always quite a charming and pleasant mental explanation to give you a good impression of yourself. But to conclude, when you have the chance of getting information that’s a little more trustworthy and reliable about the condition you are in, it is better not to ask the opinion of others, but only to refer all to the vision of the guru. If you really want to progress, this is the surest path.  There we are. Is that all?


The Mother: Self-control and the control of what surrounds you? ... That depends on your standpoint. The police superintendent, for instance, has a certain control over the circumstances around him, but he doesn’t usually have much self-control! ()  What exactly do you want to know?


The Mother: Oh! it is a phrase from the book!  It is quite obvious that one must ﬁrst begin by self-control, otherwise one has no effect on the surroundings except to increase the confusion.   This is the ﬁrst time I’ve heard that.


The Mother: He had no control over his anger? Who told you that story?  Did he say it himself? Is it authentic, this story?  (Another disciple)


The Mother: But he knew it himself?  Anyway, he did not have a “great control” over his surroundings: he had a great inﬂuence, which is something very different.  One can’t control outer matter if one does not control inner matter, for they are the same thing. But he had an inﬂuence, which is quite different. It is not a mastery, it is an inﬂuence.


The Mother: That is, he could awaken certain movements in others, but he could not control them, it was they who had to control themselves with the awakening, it was not — I say “he”, it can be anyone you see, it is a general rule.  Besides, it is childishly simple, for mastery means the knowledge of handling certain vibrations; if you know how to handle these vibrations you have the mastery. The best ﬁeld of experimentation is yourself: ﬁrst you have the control in yourself and once you have it in yourself you can transmit the vibration to others, to the extent you are capable of identifying yourself with them and of thus creating this vibration in them. And if you cannot handle a vibration in yourself, you don’t even know the procedure; you don’t even know what to do, so how can you manipulate it in others? You may encourage them by words, by an inﬂuence over them, to do what is needed to learn self-control, but you cannot control them directly.


The Mother: To control something, a movement, is simply to replace by one’s presence, without words or explanations, the bad vibration by the true one. This is what constitutes the power of mastery.  It does not lie in speaking, in explaining; with words and explanations and even a certain emanation of force, you may have an inﬂuence on someone, but you do not control his movement. The control of the movement is the capacity to oppose the vibration of this movement by a stronger, truer vibration which can stop the other one... I could give you an example, you know, a very easy one.


The Mother: Two people are arguing in front of you; not only are they arguing, but they are on the point of coming to blows; so you explain to them that this is not the thing to do, you give them good reasons for stopping and they come to a stop. You will have had an inﬂuence on them. But if you simply stand before them and look at them and send out a vibration of peace, calm, quietude, without saying a word, without any explanation, the other vibration will no longer be able to last, it will fall away of itself. That is mastery.


The Mother: The same thing applies to the cure of ignorance. If you need words to explain something, that is not true knowledge. If I have to say all that I do say for you to understand me, that is not mastery, it is simply that I am able to exercise an inﬂuence on your intelligence and help you to understand and awaken in you the desire to know and discipline yourselves, etc. But if by looking at you, without saying anything I am not able to make the light enter into you, the light which will make you understand, I won’t have mastered the movement or the state of ignorance. Do you understand this?


The Mother: So I can tell you with certainty that at least in this matter, if it is historically correct that Vivekananda had movements of anger which he could not control, that is, that he was carried away either in word or action, well, in this matter he was incapable of controlling those around him. He could only awaken similar vibrations in them, and so probably justify their weakness as regards this. He could say to them in so many words “Above  all, don’t ﬂy into a temper”, but that is no use at all. It is the eternal “Do what I say, not what I do.” But that has no effect.


The Mother: ( )  Oh! oh! you get into a temper with your students?


The Mother: ( )  Then one can’t! ( )


The Mother: Oh! what a pity! ()  But how can you hope... Let us see, you have an indisciplined, disobedient, insolent pupil; well, that represents a certain vibration in the atmosphere which, besides, is unfortunately very contagious; but if you yourself do not have within you the opposite vibration, the vibration of discipline, order, humility, of a quietude and peace which nothing can disturb, how do you expect to have any inﬂuence? You are going to tell him that this should not be done?


The Mother: — Either that will make things worse or he will make fun of you!  And if by chance you don’t have any control yourself and become angry, then it’s ﬁnished! You lose for ever all possibility of exercising any authority over your students.  Teachers who are not perfectly calm, who do not have an endurance that never fails, and a quietude which nothing can  disturb, who have no self-respect — those who are like that will get nowhere.


The Mother: One must be a saint and a hero to be a good teacher. One must be a great yogi to be a good teacher. One must have a perfect attitude to be able to exact a perfect attitude from the students. You cannot ask anyone to do what you don’t do yourself. That is a rule.


The Mother: So look at the difference between what is and what ought to be, and you will be able to estimate the extent of your failure in class.  That is all I can offer you.  And I may add, since there’s the occasion for it: we ask many students here when they grow up and know something, to teach others. There are some, I believe, who understand why; but there are also others who think it is because it is good to serve in some way or other and that teachers are needed and we are happy to have them. But I tell you — for it is a fact — that I have never asked anyone educated here to give lessons without seeing that this would be for him the best way of disciplining himself, of learning better what he is to teach and of reaching an inner perfection he would never have if he were not a teacher and had not this opportunity of disciplining himself, which is severe.


The Mother: Those who succeed as teachers here — I don’t mean an outer, artiﬁcial and superﬁcial success, but becoming truly good teachers — this means that they are capable of making an inner progress of impersonalisation, of eliminating their egoism, controlling their movements, capable of a clear-sightedness, an understanding of others and a never-failing patience.  If you go through that discipline and succeed, well, you have not wasted your time here.  And I ask all those who accept to give lessons, to accept it in that spirit. It is all very well to be kind and do some service and be useful; that is good of course, a very good thing; but it is only one aspect and perhaps the least important aspect of the problem. The most important one is that it is a Grace given to you so that you can achieve self-control, an understanding of  the subject and of others which you could never have acquired but for this opportunity.


The Mother: And if you have not beneﬁted from this all these years you have been teaching others, it means that you have at the very least wasted half your time.  ( )  Is that all? Convinced?


The Mother: You are going to set to work!  (Another disciple)  Yes.  Disputes! Not too many, I hope!


The Mother: (Laughter)  How do I want it?  I can tell you things in general, you see, but the details of the organisation... What is your problem?


The Mother: Yes...   But excuse me, ﬁrst you must tell me from what point of view.  “Organisation” is very vague, isn’t it? If it is about the courses of study, that’s quite a formidable subject which can’t be settled just like that. If it is the method of teaching, that is something quite personal — personal in both cases.


The Mother: The general plan is easy, that is, it has been given quite clearly; but unless you give me an instance about which, let us say, there is some discussion and different opinions...  Quite impossible! But when did I say that the student must be left free to come or not?...  Excuse me, you must not confuse things. I have said and I repeat that if a student feels quite alien to a subject, for example, if a student feels he has an ability for literature and poetry and has a distaste or at least an indifference for mathematics, if he tells me, “I prefer not to follow the mathematics course”, I can’t tell him, “No, it is absolutely necessary to go to it.”


The Mother: But if a student has decided to follow a class, it is an absolutely discipline that he follows it, goes to it regularly and behaves himself properly there; otherwise he is of going to school. I have never encouraged anyone to roam about during class-hours and to come one day and be absent the next, never, for, to begin with, if he can’t submit to this quite elementary  discipline, he will never acquire the least control over himself, he will always be the slave of all his impulses and all his fancies.  If you don’t want to study a certain branch of knowledge, that is all right, no one can compel you to do it; but if you decide to do something — anything in life, if you decide to do a thing — you must do it, with discipline, regularity and method.  And without whims. I have never approved of anyone being the plaything of his own impulses and fancies, never, and you will never be able to have that from me, for then one is no longer a human being, one is an animal.


The Mother: So, here is one of the questions quite settled, without any discussion.  Now, another problem?    (Laughter)  Good.


The Mother: Let us keep it for another time. We shall stop here.   Five paragraphs dealing with ﬁve modes of being or ﬁve states of being, and the same thing recurs in all the different domains:  This is about the mental being in man, that is, his mental activities; and Sri Aurobindo contrasts knowings with Knowledge.  Actually I should be the one to ask you if you know what Sri Aurobindo means by “knowings”, and why he contrasts them with Knowledge.


The Mother: For if I explain all this to you without your making any effort, it is () spoon-feeding you, giving you a meal all cooked without your taking the trouble to cook it!  And the result will be that sooner or later, in half an hour or in a day’s time, you will have completely forgotten what I told you and it will have had no effect on you. I should like someone to tell me what he understands by “knowings”. () Tell me, come along.


The Mother: It is obviously that. It is everything that can be learnt through the study of outer phenomena and in all ﬁelds of mental activity, all that can be learnt by material observation and technical studies in different subjects, scientiﬁc, artistic, philosophical, literary; in fact all that the human mind has produced through the external  study of life and things: all that can be found in books, all that can be found through the direct study of Nature and all that can be found by reasoning, deduction, analysis and all the speculative activities of the human mind.  And Sri Aurobindo puts reason at the summit of man’s mental activity; he tells us that in the development of the mind, reason is the surest guide, the master, so to speak, who prevents you from deviating from the path or taking the wrong one, from straying away and losing your common sense. He makes reason the arbiter of man’s mental activity, which guides and controls; and so long as you have to deal with mental activities, even the most speculative, it is reason which must guide you and prevent you from going astray from the right path and entering more or less fantastic and unhealthy imaginations.  But if you want to attain true knowledge, that is, spiritual knowledge, which can be obtained only through identiﬁcation, you must go beyond this reason and enter a domain higher than the mind, where one is in direct contact with the Light either of the Overmind or the Supermind.


The Mother: And Sri Aurobindo says this, that so long as you are in the mental ﬁeld, reason helps you, it is your helper, your guide; but if you want to have true knowledge by identity, reason becomes a limitation and a bar. That is not to say that you should lose it! But it must be subordinated to your movement of ascent. Sri Aurobindo does not tell you to become unreasonable, he says you must pass beyond reason into a higher Truth and Light.  And what is interesting in the structure of this section is that the reﬂection Sri Aurobindo makes about the mental being, the intellectual activity of man, he also makes for the vital activity, the power of action and realisation.


The Mother: He takes mental activity as the basis of human life, for it belongs to man in his own right, exclusively; and in the process of life, that is, of human existence, human realisation, thought normally comes ﬁrst. Man, because he is a thinking being, ﬁrst gets an idea, then he invests this idea with a force, a vital power, a power for action, and changes  it, transforms it into will. This will is then concentrated on the object to be realised, and with the vital force and effort added to the thought, the conception, it becomes the lever of action.  But here Sri Aurobindo uses a word which is not “will”, he speaks of “willings”: And he contrasts these “willings” — that is, all these superﬁcial wills, often opposite and contradictory and without any lasting basis because they are founded on what he calls a “knowing” and not on knowledge — with the true will. These willings are necessarily fragmentary, passing, and often in opposition to one another, and this is what gives to the individual life and even to the collective its nature of incoherence, inconsistency and confusion....


The Mother: The word “will” is normally reserved to indicate what comes from the deeper being or the higher reality and what expresses in action the true knowledge which Sri Aurobindo has contrasted with knowings. So, when this will which expresses the true knowledge manifests in action, it manifests through the intervention of a deep and power which no longer requires any effort. And that is why Sri Aurobindo says here that the true power for action cannot come until one has gone beyond the stage of willings, that is, until the motive of action is the result not of a mere mental activity but of true knowledge.  True knowledge acting in the outer being gives true power.  This seems to be an explanation, the real explanation of that very familiar saying which is not understood in its essence but expresses a truth: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”, to will is to have the power.


The Mother: It is quite obvious that this does not refer to “willings”, that is, to the more or less incoherent expression of desires but to the true will expressing a true knowledge; for this  true will carries in itself the force of truth which gives power — an invincible power. And so, when one expresses “willings”, to be able to apply them in life and make them effective, some effort must come in — it is through personal effort that one progresses, and it is through effort that one imposes one’s willings upon life to make it yield to their demands — but when they are no longer willings, when it is the true will expressing the true knowledge, effort is no longer required, for the power is omnipotent.  Now, I should like you to ask me questions on what I have just told you.   So?


The Mother: Nothing?  The ﬁrst step?... To get rid of the illusion of the absolute value of “knowings”, that is, of human knowledge and mental activity.  First, to come out of the illusion that they really have a concrete and absolute value.  And you will notice that this is perhaps the most difﬁcult thing to do; it is the most difﬁcult step, for, when you study general subjects like science, the different branches of science or philosophy and all such activities, when you study them a little seriously and deeply, you very easily come to the sense of the relativity of this knowledge.


The Mother: But when you come down a step again, just to the next level of mental activity and look at the different problems of life — for example, what should be done in this or that case, the conditions for realising something, a skill one wants to learn, or even the different necessities of life, the conditions of living, of health — you will ﬁnd that generally a rational being, or somebody about to become one, forms a set of ideas for himself, which are really knowings: such a thing will produce such an effect, or in order to obtain this thing, that other must be done, etc. And you have a whole mental construction in yourself, made of observations, studies, experiments; and the more you advance in age, the greater becomes the number of  experiments and results of study and observation. You make for yourself a sort of mental structure in which you live. And unless you are powerfully intelligent, with an opening to the higher worlds, you have an innate, spontaneous, unshakable conviction of the absolute worth of your observations, and even without your having to think, it acts automatically in your being: by a sort of habit this thing inevitably brings that particular result. So for you, when this has happened quite often, the habit of associating the two movements naturally gives rise within you to the feeling of the absolute value of your ideas or your knowings about yourself and your life.


The Mother: And there it is more difﬁcult to come to an understanding of the relativity — the uncertainty bordering on illusion — of that knowledge. You ﬁnd this out only if, with a will for spiritual discipline and progress, you look at these things with a deep critical sense and see the kind of bondage into which you have put yourself, which acts without any need of intervention from you, automatically, with the support of the subconscious and that kind of automatism of reﬂexes which makes causes and effects follow each other in a habitual order without your being in the least aware of it.  Well, if you want to attain knowledge, the ﬁrst thing, the ﬁrst indispensable step is not to believe in the validity of those things. And if you observe yourself, you will realise that this belief in the validity of these observations and deductions is almost absolute in you. It expresses itself through all sorts of ideas which reasonably enough appear evident to you, yet are exactly the limitations which prevent you from reaching knowledge by identity.


The Mother: For instance, if a man plunges into the water without knowing how to swim, he will be drowned; if there is a fairly powerful wind, it will upset things; when it rains, you get wet, etc. — you see, there are instances like this at every second, it is like that. And this seems so obvious to you that when you are told, “Well, but no, this is a relative knowledge, it is like that but it could be different”, the one who tells you this seems to you half-mad. And you say, “But still, these things  are concrete! These are things we can see, touch, feel, these are proofs our senses give to us every minute, and if we do not take our stand on them, we are sure to go astray and enter the irrational.”  So, if you remember what Sri Aurobindo has said, you will understand that the ﬁrst condition for having knowledge is to go beyond reason.


The Mother: That is why he says, “Reason was the helper” — yes, during the whole childhood of humanity and the whole period of growth of the individual being — but if you want to go beyond the human being, the ordinary human state, well, you must go beyond reason; and these things which seem to you obvious that they are indisputable, you should be able to understand, to feel from within yourself that they are relative and that what seems completely similar, identical in everyone’s experiences, these very things, if seen from above with a higher consciousness, become absolutely subjective and relative and are only individual formations adapted to the individual need and consciousness, and that instead of having an absolute reality, they have only an altogether relative reality which completely disappears as soon as you rise to a higher level.  So now, if you look at the state of your thought in this light, you will see that it is not so easy to take even this ﬁrst step.  Examples can be given, but they are superﬁcial examples, very fragmentary in themselves, and have only an altogether relative value, as for instance this, which I have many a time given you, about medical knowledge in the world: if you have studied enough or lived long enough, that is, a fairly good number of years, you will ﬁnd that with the same authority, the same certitude, the same conviction, at one time certain things are not only considered bad, but on the basis of an absolute knowledge, an unquestionable observation, they are reputed to have a certain effect, and at another time these very unquestionable observations lead to diametrically opposite results. Very often I give an example which I happened to observe, especially as regards the value of certain foods and their effects on the  body, like certain fruits or vegetables: at a particular time in medical history — not so long ago, about ﬁfty or sixty years ago — when you had a certain illness, the doctor gave you a list of things recommending to you with absolute seriousness not to touch any of these lest you become even more ill — I could give you the list, but it is not interesting. Well, about these very same things, ﬁfty or sixty years later, not the same doctor perhaps but another one will tell you with the same seriousness, the same unquestionable certitude and authority that these are the very things you must eat if you want to be cured!


The Mother: So if you have observed things pretty well and have a slightly critical mind, you can tell yourself, “Oh! it must depend on people or perhaps on the period.” And I shall tell you, as the doctor-friend I knew in France forty or ﬁfty years ago used to tell all his patients, “Take a remedy while it is in fashion, for then it will cure you.”   There.  Well, there is a kind of ﬁnely sensitive state, in which one understands this extraordinary relativity of things, a state in which it becomes so acute that to afﬁrm something, to say “This is like that” or “Such a thing has that particular result”, spontaneously seems to you a stupidity....


The Mother: But before reaching that point, one may reﬂect a little and say, “After all, we shall believe in a particular thing so long as it is in fashion.”  Is that all?  I have always said that studies have the same effect on the brain as gymnastics on the muscles. For example, mental gymnastics are very necessary to make one’s mental activity supple, to strengthen and enrich it and give it a subtlety of understanding it would not have if you didn’t do these gymnastics. Of  late — indeed for quite a long time already — I have noticed, for instance, that if I am unfortunate enough to read to you something with philosophical terms or to speak to you from a slightly philosophical point of view, you cannot follow.


The Mother: And that is simply because you have not done any philosophical gymnastics. It is not that you are not intelligent, it is not that you don’t have the capacity to understand: it is because you haven’t done the proper gymnastics. I could tell you the same thing in another way: you have not learnt the language. But the same words are used, only with a slightly different relation between them, with different turns of phrase, with a different mental attitude to things. Well, this difference of attitude you cannot have unless you have done the corresponding gymnastics.


The Mother: And it is very easy for you to understand this example, for you all know very well that you could never do your athletic exercises if you were not trained. Even if you have special abilities, even if you are gifted, if you do not practise and train yourself, you cannot do them. Consider all your agility exercises, if you were asked to do them on the ﬁrst day, you could not, it would be quite impossible, and you know it very well. If someone were to tell you spontaneously, “Ah! now do this” — say, a certain kind of jump, what used to be called the ﬂying somersault — you would say, “This person is truly unreasonable, it is impossible!” Well, this is the same thing; if I take certain books and read them to you, you cannot follow because you have completely neglected philosophical mental gymnastics.


The Mother: It is exactly the same thing if someone who has not done mathematics is asked to follow a mathematical reasoning — he won’t be able to.... And so, this means that if you want to express fully, totally, the deeper reality of your being, you will express it in a much richer, more integral, more varied, more productive way if all the parts of your being are fully developed like this by appropriate gymnastics.  I believe I have already explained this to you once. If it were a question of leading what till today was considered the true spiritual life, that is, of giving up altogether all physical  activities in order to unite with the supreme divine Reality and remain in this union, of leaving life and all outer expression and going away into Nirvana, into an identity which not only will no longer be expressed in the world, but which takes you of the world completely, then it is obvious that all these gymnastics, whether physical, vital, sensory or mental, are absolutely useless, and that those people considered all this simply a waste of time and quite futile. But who want to realise almost the very opposite, that is, who, after having identiﬁed ourselves with the supreme Reality, want to make It descend into life and transform the world, if we offer to this Reality instruments which are reﬁned, rich, developed, fully conscious, the work of transformation will be more effective.


The Mother: And that is why instead of telling you when you are a little mite, to do () what those little children are asked to do, to sit still and enter or pretend to enter into meditation, instead of telling you that you must be in constant contemplation and totally indifferent to all things in the world, that you must have only one thought, to prepare yourself to receive the divine Grace, instead of that you are told, “No, try to become developed and conscious beings who know things and have healthy, strong, agile bodies capable of doing exceptional things, an adequate will and a rich, supple, agile mind; these will be useful for the future realisation.”  That is why, moreover, people who are used to judging from appearances and without knowing what they are talking about, say that in the Ashram there is no spiritual life, that we lead an altogether material life. That’s how it is! But it is so much the worse for them, it is not any the worse for us; indeed it is all the same to us.  There we are.


The Mother: No more questions? Nobody has anything to say?   It is the same principle expressed in all the activities or aspects of the being.... It is obvious that in order to come out of the state of the original inconscience desire was indispensable, for without desire there would have been no awakening to activity.  But once you are into consciousness, this very desire which helped you to come out of the inconscience prevents you from liberating yourself from the bonds of matter and rising to a higher consciousness.


The Mother: It is the same thing for the ego, the self. In order to pass on to a higher plane, one must ﬁrst exist; and to exist one must become a conscious, separate individual, and to become a conscious separate individual , the ego is indispensable, otherwise one remains mingled with all that lies around us. But once the individuality is formed, if one wants to rise to a higher level and live a spiritual life, if one wants even to become simply  a higher type of man, the limitations of the ego are the worst obstacles, and the ego must be surpassed in order to enter the true consciousness.  And indeed, for the ordinary elementary life of man, all the qualities belonging to the animal nature, especially those of the body, were indispensable, otherwise man would not have existed.


The Mother: But when man has become a conscious, mental being, everything that binds him to his animal origin necessarily becomes a hindrance to progress and to the liberation of the being.  So, for everyone — except for those who are born free, and this is obviously very rare — for everyone this state of reason, of effort, desire, individualisation and solid physical balance in accordance with the ordinary mode of living is indispensable to begin with, until the time one becomes a conscious being, when one must give up all these things in order to become a spiritual being.  Now, has anybody a question to ask on the subject?  That is always a relative question. One is never altogether unconscious and one is never completely conscious.


The Mother: It is a progressive state.  But a time comes when instead of doing things automatically, impelled by a consciousness and force of which one is quite unaware — a time comes when one can observe what goes on in oneself, study one’s movements, ﬁnd their causes, and at the same time begin to exercise a control ﬁrst over what goes on within us, then on the inﬂuence cast on us from outside which makes us act, in the beginning altogether unconsciously and almost involuntarily, but gradually more and more consciously; and the will can wake up and react. Then at that moment, the moment there is a conscious will capable of reacting, one may say, “I have become conscious.” This does not mean that it is a  total and perfect consciousness, it means that it is a beginning: for example, when one is able to observe all the reactions in one’s being and to have a certain control over them, to let those one approves of have play, and to control, stop, annul those one doesn’t approve of.  Besides, you must become aware within of something like a goal or a purpose or an ideal you want to realise; something other than the mere instinct which impels you to live without your knowing why or how.


The Mother: At that time you may say you are conscious, but it doesn’t mean you are perfectly conscious. And moreover, this perfection is so progressive that I believe nobody can say he is perfectly conscious; he is on the way to becoming perfectly conscious, but he isn’t yet.  Well, it is a desireless state in which one lives — as Sri Aurobindo explains later — in an Ananda which has no cause, which does not depend on any circumstances, inner or outer, which is a permanent state, independent of the circumstances of life, causeless. One is in Ananda because one is in Ananda. And in fact it is simply because one has become aware of the divine Reality.


The Mother: But one cannot feel the Ananda unless one has become desireless. If one has desires, all one feels is just pleasures and enjoyments, but that is not Ananda. Ananda has an altogether different nature and can only manifest in the being when the desires are abolished. So long as one is a being of desire, one cannot feel the Ananda; even were a force of Ananda to descend, it would immediately be falsiﬁed by the presence of desires.  ()


The Mother: (.) Here I have a question  referring to what we said last time about effort, personal effort.  The question is this: This has been very well observed.  What is not mentioned here is the nature of the effort, for it is a certain kind of effort which leads to the result described here, which is either a revolt or a sort of — yes, petrifaction, truly, something that becomes absolutely insensible and no longer responds at all to this effort. This happens when the effort is almost exclusively mental and quite arbitrary, in the sense that it does not at all take into account the state of the rest of the being; it has its own idea, its own will, and without any consideration for the rest of the being, it imposes this will on the being as a whole.


The Mother: This is what usually brings about the revolt or the petrifaction. And the only thing to do is to make the mind quiet.  And this is the time to make a movement of self-giving, full of peace, quietude, conﬁdence. If one makes this movement of selfgiving, of complete surrender to the divine Will, all the tension arising from the effort, an effort which could be called premature or unconsidered — all the tension arising from this effort gives way. There is a relaxation in the being.


The Mother: And the progress one could not make by this purely mental effort usually comes about almost automatically, by the very fact that one has relaxed in conﬁdence and self-giving to the divine Will.  And then, this is what follows:  That is exactly what I have just explained, which shows that the observation is quite correct.  It is an arbitrary decision of the mind, and being arbitrary and not in conformity with the truth of things, it naturally brings about these wrong reactions. This does not imply that no effort must ever be made but the effort also must be spontaneous. So too I told you once that for meditation to be effective, it must be a spontaneous meditation which takes hold of you rather than one you make an effort to have; well, effort, that kind of tension of the will in the being, must also be something spontaneous, and not the result of a more or less inopportune mental decision.


The Mother: ( )  Any other question? No? No one has anything to say?


The Mother: (incorrect text)  (Laughter)  What do you mean exactly? I don’t understand.  If one lets the mind act?


The Mother: Why? I don’t understand your question.   You said at the beginning, “When one has gone beyond the mind”?...   Oh!


The Mother: to go beyond the mind, let the mind act?... Yes, that is the theory: to go beyond desire, one must let the desires be realised, and to...  (A child)  Let go? Oh!


The Mother: but one can’t “let go the mind acting”, that’s not English.  Ah, now we have it! that’s how you should have put it. So? To stop the action of the mind, is that it?


The Mother: The way to do it?  Naturally! But that is already difﬁcult enough. So what are you asking?


The Mother: One acts like an idiot! ( ) Then it is better not to stop the reason before going beyond that state!  To be unreasonable?


The Mother: Unfortunately that happens very often!    Is it possible to disregard reason?... It is possible only when you have passed beyond mental activity. It is possible only when you have achieved a surrender, a total giving of yourself.


The Mother: It is possible only when you no longer have any desires. So long as you have desires, have an ego and a will of your own, you cannot give up reason, because, as I said just a moment ago, you would become quite unbalanced and perhaps insane. Therefore reason must be the master until one has gone beyond the state in which it is useful. And as I said, as long as there is an ego and as long as there are desires, and so long as there are impulses and so long as there are passions and preferences, and so long as there are attractions and repulsions, etc., as long as all these things are there, reason is useful.  I shall also add that there is another quite indispensable condition in order not to have recourse to reason any more; that is to open no door, no part of the being to the suggestions of the adverse forces.


The Mother: For if you are not completely liberated from the habit of responding to adverse suggestions, if you give up your reason, you also give up reason itself, that is, common sense.  And you begin to act in an incoherent way which may ﬁnally become quite unbalanced. Well, to be free from suggestions and adverse inﬂuences, you must be exclusively under the inﬂuence of the Divine.  Now you see the problem; it is a little difﬁcult. This means that unless you are in the presence of a completely illumined and transformed being, it is always better to advise people to act according to their reason.


The Mother: It is perhaps a limitation — it is in fact a great limitation — but it is also a control and it prevents you from becoming one of those half-idiots who are far too numerous in the world.  Reason is a very respectable person. Like all respectable people it has its limitations and prejudices, but that does not prevent it from being very useful. And it keeps you from making a fool of yourself. You would do many things if you did not have reason, things which would lead you straight to your ruin  and could have extremely unfortunate consequences, for your best means of discernment until you have attained higher levels is reason.


The Mother: When one no longer listens to reason, one can be led into all sorts of absurdities. Naturally, it is neither the ideal nor the summit, it is only a kind of control and a guide for leading a good life, it keeps you from extravagances, excesses, inordinate passions and above all from those impulsive actions which may lead you to the abyss. There you are.  One must be very sure of oneself, quite free from the ego and perfectly surrendered to the divine Will to be able to do safely without reason.


The Mother: Ah! no, you are playing with words. That word, as you use it here, has altogether another meaning, altogether; they are two very different things. Reason is a faculty of discernment. You are speaking of the reasons you give yourself for doing one thing or another — these are excuses the mind gives itself; but the meaning of the word “reason” is quite different there, it is not the same word at all, though it is pronounced and written in the same way.


The Mother: You can look it up in your dictionary, it will give you two completely different deﬁnitions of the word “reason”. The reasons one gives oneself — that is, the excuses or explanations one gives oneself — are always tinged with egoism and a need to delude oneself that one is indeed a reasonable being. Ninetynine and a half times out of a hundred this is the way to convince oneself that one is very good, what one does is very good, what one feels is very good, what one thinks is very good; it is to give oneself the impression that one is truly quite satisfactory.  So, whatever you do, if you begin to reﬂect a little, you will tell yourself, “But certainly, I did that because it was like that, that’s the real reason; I felt like that, but it was because of this, that’s an excellent reason” — and so on. But that has nothing to do with  being reasonable; quite the contrary.


The Mother: It is an excellent means of deceiving oneself and keeping oneself from progressing. It is justifying oneself in one’s own eyes.  Moreover, these are always reasons which whitewash you and blacken others; it is a means of keeping your conscience very comfortable, isn’t it? What happens to you is the fault of circumstances, if you have made a mistake it is the fault of others, if you have a bad reaction it is others who are responsible, etc.; you emerge white as snow from the judgment of your mind.  Is that all?


The Mother: Now we are going to read what should be done to realise what was expressed in the ﬁve preceding paragraphs: This is what ought to be done.  I believe there is no need for any explanations, it is quite clear.... Unless you have some questions? Yes? (


The Mother: ) Very well, ask your question.  Yes, this means that it has no cause.   Usually one feels pleasure or joy or enjoyment due to this thing or due to that — from the most material things to things psychological or even mental.


The Mother: For example, to take a mental thing, you read a sentence which gives you a great joy, for it brings you a light, a new understanding; so that joy is a joy which has an object, it is because you read that sentence that  you feel this joy, if you had not read the sentence, you would not have felt the joy. In the same way, when you hear beautiful music or when you see a beautiful picture or a beautiful landscape, that brings you joy; without those things you would not have felt that joy; it is these which brought you the joy. It is a joy which has an object, which has a cause.  What Sri Aurobindo says is that this enjoying, this joy, this pleasure, on whatever level it be, high or low, must be replaced by an inner bliss which is communicated to the whole being and is continuous, “even”, that is, something that needs no reason, no cause for its existence. The cause is the contact with the divine Bliss which is everywhere and in all things.


The Mother: So once you are in relation with this universal and eternal Bliss, you no longer need an outer object, an outer cause to have joy; it is objectless, and being objectless it can be continuous, “even”. Whatever the outer circumstances, whatever you may be doing, you are in the same state of joy, for this joy does not depend upon outer things, it depends upon your inner condition. You have found the source of joy in yourself, that is, the divine Presence, communion with the Divine; and having found this source of joy in yourself, you need nothing else, nothing whatsoever to have this joy. And as it has no cause, it does not cease; it is a constant state.  () Do you understand?


The Mother: Not very well? Yes — ah!  Does anyone else have a question on what I have just read?   Oh!


The Mother: that is an image.  The animal — that’s all the instincts of the physical being, the needs of the physical being and all the habits, all the impulses, all the movements of the physical being, the need for food, the  need for sleep, the need for activity, indeed all that constitutes the animal part of the being. And then Sri Aurobindo gives the image of Krishna, whom he describes as the Driver of the herds, which is only an image; this means that it is the divine Consciousness which takes possession of all the activities of the physical being and directs and guides all those activities, all its needs, which controls and governs all the movements of the physical animal in man. Sri Aurobindo uses what could be called Indian mythology, taking Krishna as the symbol of the Divine and the herds as the symbol of the animal instincts and animal needs of man. So instead of being one of the animals of the herd, you become the one who leads the herds and governs all their movements instead of allowing them to dominate him....


The Mother: One is bound; in ordinary life one is bound to all these activities of the physical life and all the needs it represents — the need for food, sleep, activity, rest, etc. — well, instead of being an animal, that is, one subjected to these things and obliged to submit to them, one becomes the Driver of the herd whom Sri Aurobindo calls Krishna, that is, the Divine who takes possession of all the movements of the being and guides and leads them in accordance with the divine Truth.   Need?... I don’t understand.  But it is the individual personality which is transformed into the world-personality.


The Mother: Instead of having the sense of the individual as he ordinarily is — this altogether limited individual who is one little person amidst so many millions and millions of others, a little separate person — instead of feeling like that, this separate  isolated individual, this little person amidst all the others, becomes aware of the world-individuality, the world-personality, and naturally becomes divine. It is a transformation. It is one thing being transformed into the other.  And Sri Aurobindo does not mean that one loses one’s body, he does not speak of the body; he speaks of the vital consciousness, the psychological consciousness, the sense of the separate individual. Just think, you, child, you are one person amidst so many others, aren’t you?


The Mother: Well, instead of being like that, you feel you are the world-personality; this sense of division and separation goes away, this limitation disappears. But you remain in your body, you are not compelled necessarily to lose your body; the body is something else.  And it is precisely the body that he is speaking about in the last paragraph: “Transform the animal into the Driver of the herds.” When one becomes a divine consciousness, a divine personality, then one can become the master of all the bodily activities, because one is superior to them; one is not bound to these activities, not subject to them, one dominates them, one has a greater consciousness than that of the individual, of the little separate individual; one can make just a little more progress and instead of being subject to all these animal needs of the being, one dominates them. But these are not two consciousnesses, one superimposed on the other, it is one consciousness being transformed into another.


The Mother: ( ) I am afraid she doesn’t understand at all! She is looking at me completely bewildered!  You are wondering how in a body like this, you can be different from what you are?


The Mother: Well, you can! ( ) It is something that can happen!


The Mother: ( )  ( ) Here is the exact complement of your question.


The Mother: I am asked:  The most characteristic feature is precisely this change of consciousness. Instead of feeling like a little, isolated person, separated from others, one feels one is a universal person, containing all others and intimately united and identiﬁed with all others.  And I am asked: Speak!... The question is not very well put, for if you ask how he speaks, well, he speaks as everybody does, with his voice, his tongue, his mouth and with words! If you were to ask what is the nature of what he says...


The Mother: obviously, if he expresses the state of consciousness in which he lives, he expresses a universal state of consciousness, and seeing things in a different way from ordinary men, he will express them differently, in accordance with what he sees and feels. As for acting... if all the parts of his being are in harmony, his action will obviously express his state of consciousness.  Now, there are people who have very decisive experiences in one part of their being, but these are not necessarily translated, or at least not immediately, in the other parts of their being. It is possible that through sadhana or concentration or through Grace, somebody has attained the consciousness of a worldpersonality, but that he still continues to act physically in quite an ordinary, nondescript way, because he has not taken care to unify his whole being, and though one part of his being is universally conscious, as soon as he begins to eat, to sleep, walk, act, he does this like all human animals.