The Mother: All that we can  deduce from them is a probable state of the world, not a certainty. For phenomena on our own scale, the uncertainty is negligible, but this is not the case with the inﬁnitely small, the world of the atom. Here, it is an essential incapacity, an obstacle that we can never hope to surmount. It is due to the very nature of things and not to the imperfection of our methods of investigation, so that we shall never succeed in casting away the tinted glasses through which we study the universe. All my measurements, all my theories contain me, the human mind, just as much as they contain the universe.


The Mother: They are subjective as well as objective and perhaps, in fact, they exist only in my mind.  On the shores of the Inﬁnite, I discovered a footprint and I sought to reconstruct the being which had left its mark on the sands. I succeeded at last and found that it was myself. This is where I stand — where we all stand — and I see no way out.  ..................................................................................................


The Mother: But after all, perhaps the fact that I do not have any certitudes about the world, only probabilities, leaves a ray of hope — that the fate of humanity is not ﬁnally sealed.  T A  Born into a thoroughly respectable bourgeois family where art was considered as a pastime rather than a career and artists as rather unreliable people, prone to debauchery and with a dangerous disregard for money, I felt, perhaps out of contrariness, a compelling need to become a painter. My entire consciousness was centred in my eyes and I could express myself more easily by a sketch than in words. I learnt much better by looking at pictures than by reading books, and what I had once seen — landscapes, faces or drawings — I never forgot.


The Mother: At the age of thirteen, through much effort, I had almost mastered the techniques of drawing, water colour, pastels and oil painting. Then I had the chance to do some small commissions for friends and acquaintances of my parents, and as soon as  I earned some money, my family began to take my vocation seriously. I took advantage of this to pursue my studies as far as I could. When I was old enough to be admitted, I joined the School of Fine Arts and almost immediately started taking part in competitions. I was one of the youngest artists ever to win the Prix de Rome and that gave me the opportunity to make a thorough study of Italian art.


The Mother: Later on, travelling scholarships allowed me to visit Spain, Belgium, Holland, England and other countries too. I did not want to be a man of one period or one school, and I studied the art of all countries, in all forms, oriental as well as occidental.  At the same time I went ahead with my own work, trying to ﬁnd a new formula. Then came success and fame; I won ﬁrst prizes in exhibitions, I sat on juries, my paintings were shown in the leading museums of the world and snatched up by the art dealers. It meant wealth, titles, honours; even the word “genius” was used...


The Mother: But I am not satisﬁed. My conception of genius is quite different. We have to create new forms, with new methods and processes, in order to express a new kind of beauty that is higher and purer, truer and nobler. So long as I still feel bound to human animality, I cannot free myself completely from the forms of material Nature. The aspiration was there, but the knowledge, the vision was lacking.


The Mother: And now that we are about to die, I feel that I have produced nothing of what I wanted to produce, I have created nothing of what I wanted to create. And in spite of all the fame that has been heaped upon me, I feel that I am a failure.  T I Since we are all opening our hearts and, moreover, since what I am going to say cannot be used by my competitors or by those who resent my success — my so-called success — I shall tell you the story of my life as I see it and not as it has been so often related.


The Mother: The facts themselves have been correctly reported. My father was a blacksmith in a small country town. From him I inherited a liking for metal-work; it was he who taught me the joy of a work well done and the satisfaction of giving oneself entirely to one’s task. He also instilled into me the desire to do always better — better than others, better than before. The desire for gain was not his chief motive, but he never denied that he was proud of being at the top of his profession and he enjoyed the praise of his fellow-townsmen without any false modesty.


The Mother: At the beginning of the century, when the internal combustion engine made its ﬁrst appearance, we small boys were thrilled by the possibilities it opened up, and to build a horseless carriage, or a motor-car as it was beginning to be called, presented itself as a goal worthy of our greatest efforts. For the few models we had already seen were very far from perfect.  The ﬁrst car, built with my own hands from parts collected here and there and never intended for the use to which I put them, undoubtedly gave me the greatest joy of my whole life. Perched precariously on a somewhat uncomfortable seat, I drove the few hundred yards from my father’s workshop to the Town Hall, and nothing seemed more beautiful to me than this odd contraption, wobbling and pufﬁng its way along, scattering the pedestrians and making the dogs bark and the horses rear.  I shall not dwell on the years that followed, on the hostility of those who proclaimed that the horse had been created by God to draw carriages and that it was already quite impious enough to have made railways without going even further and launching these new diabolical inventions upon the roads and in the cities.


The Mother: Even more numerous were those who could see no future in a temperamental machine that could only be handled by experts or single-minded cranks. The few adventurous souls who lent me my ﬁrst dollars to set up a small workshop, hire a couple of hands and buy some steel, seemed to have the same blind faith as  the ﬁrst gold-seekers who went out in pursuit of a problematical and elusive fortune in a hostile and desolate country.  As for me, I was not seeking fortune but only the satisfaction of manufacturing a motor-car that would be easier to handle and cheaper than the existing models. I felt somehow that this means of transport should be economical because, after all, its driving power would only have to be fed while it was working. If its purchase price could be made low enough, many people would buy it who would shy at the permanent expense of maintaining a team of horses.


The Mother: Everybody still remembers my ﬁrst mass-produced model.  It was high on its wheels so that it could run on country roads, it was robustly built to stand up to the rough handling of the crudest farm-hand, but somewhat despised by those who still considered the motor-car a luxury for the wealthy. And yet this model, which could be driven easily, almost effortlessly, already foreshadowed the time when motor-cars would be handled even by the most inexperienced drivers.  Still it was not until the First World War that the motor-car won its ﬁrst great victory over the horse. Ambulances, ammunition transports, everything that had to move fast, everything that was unusually heavy was “motorised”.


The Mother: My factory reached a tremendous pitch of activity. The huge quantities ordered by the Army gave me the opportunity to improve my equipment and perfect new methods of manufacture and assembly.  By the end of the War, I had a smooth-running organisation which, however, seemed out of proportion to civilian needs.  My assistants got scared. They urged me to reduce the rate of manufacture, to dismiss some of the employees, to cancel orders placed with suppliers and to wait some time to see where the actual demand would stand.


The Mother: This was wise, no doubt; but here was an opportunity, probably unique, to produce the cheapest car in the world. Slowing down the production would mean an increase in costs. So I decided that the problem lay in selling our output rather than in producing what people were willing  to buy from us. Within six months, after a brilliant advertising campaign, I had proved my point.  From then onwards my company moved forward almost by itself.


The Mother: More and more I had to leave important decisions to my assistants and to conﬁne myself to laying down the guiding principles. These were, to produce at the lowest cost without sacriﬁcing quality and without reducing wages — actually, my workers should be the highest paid in the world; to sell at the lowest price in order to go on reaching ever new markets — not only should the proﬁt margin be brought down to a minimum without jeopardising the stability of the company, but the advertising should be handled so as to obtain the required turnover without unduly increasing the cost of production; ﬁnally, in case normal suppliers demanded too much proﬁt, to have no hesitation in undertaking the manufacture of our own spare parts, semi-ﬁnished products and even raw materials.  My business began to grow as if it were a living thing.  Whatever I undertook seemed to become successful. This is how I became almost a legendary ﬁgure, a demi-god who had created a new way of life, an example to follow, so much so that any triﬂing word of mine, any act however insigniﬁcant was analysed, turned inside out, made into a great principle and presented to the masses as a new gospel.


The Mother: Is there anything real in all this? My business survives only by getting bigger. Any check to its growth would be fatal. For the general expenses, which do not lag far behind the increasing production, would soon swallow up the proﬁt margin, which is very narrow in comparison with the overall turnover.


The Mother: My business is growing so rapidly that it now looks more like an inﬂated balloon than a living body moving harmoniously and steadily towards maturity. For instance, some departments have to drive their workers like galley-slaves in order to keep pace with the rest, and as soon as this is corrected at one point by improving the equipment, it reappears at another. I feel helpless in face of this state of affairs, because any disruption in  the production line would only result in more hardship for the workers.  And what have I contributed to humanity? Men travel more easily.


The Mother: Do they understand each other any better? Following my example, all sorts of labour-saving gadgets have been massproduced and made available to an increasing number of customers. How far has this done anything more than to create new needs and a corresponding greed for gain? My workers are well paid but it seems that I have only succeeded in arousing in them the desire to earn always more — and above all more than workers in other factories. I feel that they are dissatisﬁed, unhappy in fact.


The Mother: Contrary to my hopes, raising their standard of living, assuring their security, has not induced them to develop their human personality. Indeed, the mass of human suffering remains practically unchanged, as formidable as ever, and, it seems, incurable by the means I have used. There is something fundamentally wrong which my actions fail to correct and which I even fail to understand. I feel that there is a secret yet to be discovered; and without this discovery all our efforts are in vain.  T A I was born in a family of athletes.


The Mother: Both my parents were very good performers in all sorts of games, sports and physical exercises. The speciality of my mother lay in swimming, diving, archery, fencing and dancing. She was well known for her skill in these events and she also held several local championships.  My father was a wonderful fellow. Whatever he touched turned out a success.


The Mother: In his student days he was a renowned footballer, basketball and tennis player. In boxing and crosscountry running he was already the best in our district. Then, later, he entered a circus troupe and became famous in the ﬂying trapeze and in horse-riding displays. But his speciality was in body-building and wrestling. He won a wide reputation for these activities.


The Mother: Naturally these were ideal conditions to be born in and grow into a healthy, strong and capable state of physical ﬁtness. All the physical qualities that were acquired by my parents by ardent practice of the different athletic exercises were easily passed on to me. Moreover, my athlete parents wanted to see their dream fulﬁlled in me, — they wanted me to be a great and successful athlete. So they brought me up carefully, devoting to me all their knowledge and experience of attaining health, strength, vigour and vitality; and they would let nothing that would help me to achieve this end escape. From my very birth, they fulﬁlled all the best conditions of health and hygiene, as regards food, clothing, sleep, cleanliness, good habits and so on, that were materially possible.


The Mother: Afterwards, through wellplanned physical exercises, they brought out gradually in my body symmetry, proportion, grace, rhythm and harmony. Then they cultivated in me agility, a daring spirit, alertness, accuracy and co-ordination, and ﬁnally I was trained to acquire strength and endurance.  I was sent to a boarding school. Naturally the programme of physical education appealed to me the most. I started taking keen interest in it and in a few years I gradually took my place among the good players and athletes of my school.


The Mother: Then my ﬁrst success came when I won the inter-school boxing championship. How happy and proud my parents were when they saw their dream on the way to fulﬁlment! I was very much encouraged by my success, and henceforth put all my determination with earnestness, care and hard effort into mastering the technique and acquiring the skills of all the branches of physical education. I was taught to develop all the different capacities of the body by participating in all the sporting activities. I believed that by an all-round physical training one could be highly successful and be master of more than one or even a few activities.


The Mother: That is why I participated in all the sporting items that opportunity offered me.  Year after year, in open championship I regularly won the  wrestling, boxing, weight-lifting, body-building, swimming, track and ﬁeld events, tennis, gymnastics and many other activities also.  Now I was eighteen years old. I wanted to compete in the national games championship. As a believer in all-round development I selected the Decathlon event as my item in the national championship.


The Mother: It is the toughest of all events, — it demands a supreme test of speed, strength, endurance, co-ordination and many other qualities. I got down to training and after six months of hard work I took the championship easily, keeping my second man far behind.  Naturally my success made the national organisers of physical education think of sending me to compete in the world Olympics. I got an offer to represent my country in the world Olympiad which was going to be held within the next two years, in the Decathlon event. It is no joke to compete in the world championship, where the cream of the world’s best athletes come together.


The Mother: There was not much time to waste.  So I got down to training under my father’s coaching and mother’s care. I had to do a lot of hard work. Sometimes the progress seemed impossible and everything seemed so difﬁcult.  But I pushed on in my work day after day, month after month, and then ﬁnally came the date of the world Olympic sports.


The Mother: I should not boast, but I did much better than even I had expected. Not only did I become the world champion in the Decathlon event, but I scored so high as had never been done before, nor has again been repeated. Nobody thought it was possible. But so it happened, and the highest ambition both of myself and my parents was fulﬁlled.  But something strange happened in me.


The Mother: Though I was on the pinnacle of success and glory, I noticed a kind of sadness, a kind of emptiness was slowly approaching me; — as if somebody was saying within me that something was missing, something had to be found out, something had to be established in me. It seemed to be saying: perhaps there is something more for which my  physical skill, capacity and energy may be better utilised. But I had not the slightest idea what it could be. Then slowly this condition passed away. Afterwards I joined many important competitions and did very well in all of them.


The Mother: But I noticed this feeling used to possess me after each success.  My reputation caused a batch of young people to gather round me. They asked me to help them in different activities of physical training, which I gladly did. Then I found that there was a great joy in helping others in my favourite occupation, that is, games, sports and physical exercises. I was also doing well as a coach.


The Mother: Many of my students were showing wonderful results in different events of games, sports and physical activities. Seeing my success as a teacher of physical education and because I liked games and sports so much that I did not want to lose touch with them, I thought of taking up this teaching as my life’s work. In order to prepare myself in the theoretical side of it, I took my admission in a famous college of physical education and in four years I got my degree in physical education.  Being a master of both practice and theory in the subject of physical education I got down to work. So long as I was an athlete, my sole purpose had been to gain health, strength, skill, physical beauty and to reach a high perfection in my own body.


The Mother: Now I started helping others in order to make them do the same.  I organised teachers’ training centres all over my country and trained very good instructors and directors of physical education. With the help of them I opened innumerable centres of physical education in every corner of my country. The object of these centres was to spread the popularity and practice of health, physical education and recreation in a scientiﬁc way among the general masses of our country. They did their work very well and after several years the general health of my country was very much improved.


The Mother: They showed good results at home and abroad in games and sports. Soon my country got a very high international reputation in the sporting world. I must admit that I was helped and backed by the government of my country and  a special portfolio was given to me as the Minister of Physical Education. That is why I could do so much.  Soon my name spread to every part of the world as a great physical educator and organiser, and I was considered an authority on physical education in the international sphere.


The Mother: I was invited to many countries by the authorities to speak on and introduce my system of physical education to their land. Letters were pouring in from every corner of the earth asking me about my method and seeking my advice on their special problems in the ﬁeld of Physical Education.  But in the midst of my busy hours often I was feeling that all my energy and skill, all my country-wide organisation and the power that was growing from it, all the strong inﬂuence that I had in the international sphere, could be used perhaps for some higher, some nobler and loftier purpose and then only all that I did could have some true meaning. But up to now I could not know what it might be.  Even sometimes I have been called “superman”; but I am not a superman.


The Mother: I am still the slave of nature, a man with all his ignorance, his limitations and incapacities, at the mercy of an accident or illness or one of those human passions that empty you of all your energy. I feel that after all I am not above all these things and that there is something else to learn and to realise.  Now, when I am standing face to face with death, I am not afraid in the least to die. The thought of extreme suffering, hunger and thirst does not disturb me. But I am sorry that I could not solve my problems in my lifetime.


The Mother: I achieved a great success in life, got fame, honour, wealth and everything that a man could dream of. But I am not satisﬁed because I have no answers to my questions: —  “What is it that I miss so badly in the midst of all? What could be the highest use of my physical perfection and ability? For what purpose could the power of my country-wide organisation and my international inﬂuence be best utilised?”


The Mother: T U M  What you want to know, I can tell you.  All of you have had a similar experience, although your activities are so different in their nature and scope. All six of you have come to a similar conclusion in spite of the success that has crowned your efforts. For you have been living in the surface consciousness, seeing only the appearance of things and unaware of the true reality of the universe.


The Mother: You represent the ´elite of mankind, each one of you has achieved in his own sphere the utmost of what man is capable of; you are therefore at the summit of the human race. But from this summit you look down into an abyss and you can go no further. None of you are satisﬁed but at the same time none of you know what to do. None of you know the solution to the twofold problem presented by life and your own goodwill. I say a twofold problem, for in fact it has two aspects, one individual and the other collective: how can one fully realise one’s own good and the good of others?


The Mother: None of you have found the solution, for this riddle of life cannot be solved by mental man, however superior he may be. For that, one must be born into a new and higher consciousness, the TruthConsciousness. For behind these ﬂeeting appearances there is an eternal reality, behind this unconscious and warring multitude there is a single, serene Consciousness, behind these endless and innumerable falsehoods there is a pure, radiant Truth, behind this obscure and obdurate ignorance there is a sovereign knowledge.  And this Reality is here, very near, at the centre of your being as it is at the centre of the universe. You have only to ﬁnd it and live it and you will be able to solve all your problems, overcome all your difﬁculties.


The Mother: This, you may say, is what the religions preach: most of them have spoken of this Reality, calling it God, but they have supplied no satisfactory solution to your problem, no convincing answer to your questions, and they have totally failed in their attempt to provide a remedy to the ills of suffering humanity.  Some of these religions were based on prophetic revelation, others on a philosophical and spiritual ideal, but very soon the revelation changed to rituals and the philosophical ideal to dogmas, and so the truth they contained vanished. Moreover, and most important, all religions, almost without exception, offer man an almost identical other-worldly solution, based on death, not on life. Their solution amounts to this: bear all your miseries without complaining, for this world is irremediably evil, and you shall be rewarded for your meekness after death; or else: renounce all attachment to life and you shall escape forever from the cruel necessity of living. This certainly cannot provide any remedy to the sufferings of humanity on earth nor to the condition of the world in general.


The Mother: On the contrary, if we want to ﬁnd a true solution to the confusion, chaos and misery of the world, we have to ﬁnd it in the world itself. And this is in fact where it is to be found. It exists potentially, we have only to discover it; it is neither mystic nor imaginary; it is altogether concrete and disclosed to us by Nature herself, if we know how to observe her. For the movement of Nature is an ascending one; from one form, one species, she brings forth a new one capable of manifesting something more of the universal consciousness. All goes to show that man is not the last step in terrestrial evolution.


The Mother: The human species will necessarily be succeeded by a new one which will be to man what man is to the animal; the present human consciousness will be replaced by a new consciousness, no longer mental but supramental. And this consciousness will give birth to a higher race, superhuman and divine.  The time has come for this possibility, promised and anticipated for so long, to become a living reality upon earth, and  that is why you are all unsatisﬁed and feel that you have been unable to obtain what you wanted from life. Nothing but a radical change of consciousness can deliver the world from its present obscurity. Indeed, this transformation of the consciousness, this manifestation of a higher and truer consciousness, is not only possible but certain; it is the very aim of our existence, the purpose of life upon earth.


The Mother: First the consciousness must be transformed, then life, then forms; it is in this order that the new creation will unfold. All Nature’s activity is in fact a progressive return towards the Supreme Reality which is both the origin and the goal of the universe, in its totality as well as in its smallest element. We must become concretely what we are essentially; we must live integrally the truth, the beauty, the power and the perfection that are hidden in the depths of our being, and then all life will become the expression of the sublime, eternal, divine Joy.  T W  Your words have a compelling force, a contagious power.


The Mother: Yes, we feel that a new door has opened before us, a new hope is born in our hearts. But it will take time to realise, a long time perhaps. And now death awaits us, the end is near. Alas, it is too late.  T U M No, it is not too late, it is never too late.


The Mother: Let us unite our wills in a great aspiration; let us pray for an intervention of the Grace. A miracle can always happen.  Faith has a sovereign power. And if indeed we are to take part in the great work to be done, then an intervention will come  and prolong our lives. Let us pray with the humility of the wise and the candid faith of a child; let us invoke with sincerity this new Consciousness, this new Force, Truth and Beauty which must manifest, so that the earth may be transformed and the supramental life realised in the material world.


The Mother: “O Supreme Reality, grant that we may live integrally the marvellous secret that is now revealed to us.”  Look! Look!  Our prayer is heard.  They have seen us.


The Mother: They are coming!  Here is salvation, here is new life!    A Drama of Life in a Prologue, Seven Stages and an Epilogue  P D T P T P T S T A T S T L T A T A


The Mother: Prologue: In the Artist’s studio, preliminary meeting.  Seven stages of the ascent, of which the seventh is at the summit.  Epilogue: The new world.    A  My dear friends, our meeting is drawing to an end and before we close and take the ﬁnal resolution which will unite us in action, I must ask you once again if you have anything to add to the declarations you have already made.


The Mother: P   Yes, I would like to state once again that I have devoted my whole life to helping humanity; for many years I have tried all known and possible methods, but none has given me satisfactory results and I am now convinced that I must ﬁnd the Truth if I want to succeed in my endeavour. Yes, unless one has found the true meaning of life, how can one help men effectively?


The Mother: All the remedies we use are mere palliatives, not cures. Only the consciousness of Truth can save humanity.   P  I have suffered too much in life.


The Mother: I have experienced too many disillusionments, borne too much injustice, seen too much misery. I no longer believe in anything, I no longer expect anything from the world or from men. My last remaining hope is to ﬁnd the Truth — always supposing that it is possible to ﬁnd it.  F A  You see us together here because a common aspiration has linked our lives; but we are not bound by any carnal or even emotional ties.


The Mother: One single preoccupation dominates our existence: to ﬁnd the Truth.  O L ()  Unlike our two friends here, we two ( ) live only by each other and for each other. Our sole ambition is to realise a perfect union, to become a single being in two bodies, one thought, one will, one breath in two breasts, one beat in two hearts that live only by their love, in their love, for their love. It is the perfect truth of love that we want to discover and live: to that we have dedicated our lives.


The Mother: A  It does not seem to me that the Truth can be reached so easily.  The path that leads to it must be difﬁcult, steep, precipitous, full of dangers and risks, of threats and deceptive illusions. An  unshakable will and nerves of steel are needed to overcome all these obstacles.


The Mother: I am ready for every sacriﬁce, every austerity, every renunciation in order to make myself worthy of the sublime goal I have set before me.  A ()  You have nothing more to add? No. So we are all agreed: together, by uniting our efforts, we shall climb this sacred mountain that leads to the Truth.


The Mother: It is a difﬁcult and arduous enterprise, but well worth the attempt, for when one reaches the summit, one can look upon the Truth and all problems must necessarily be solved.  So tomorrow we shall all meet at the foot of the mountain and together we shall begin the ascent. Good-bye.   FIRST STAGE


The Mother: P   Friends, I must speak to you. I have something serious to tell you. (


The Mother: )  Cheerfully, easily, we have climbed the mountain all together as far as this plateau from which we can look at life and better understand its problems and the cause of human suffering. Our knowledge is becoming vaster and deeper and we are nearer to ﬁnding the solution I am seeking... ()  But here we come to a decisive turning-point. Now the ascent will become steeper and harder and above all, we are going to cross over to the other side of the mountain where we shall no longer be able to see the valley and men.


The Mother: This means that I shall have to give up my work and betray my pledge to help humanity. Do not ask me to stay with you; I must leave you and return to my duty. ( )   A Poor friend!


The Mother: He has gone back, vanquished by his attachment to his work, by the illusion of the outer world and its appearances.   But nothing should slow us down; let us continue on our way, without regret, without hesitation.  SECOND STAGE F S  Well, well, what’s the matter with you? Are you tired?  P ()


The Mother: No, leave me, leave me alone. I have had enough! It’s impossible!  F S


The Mother: But why? Come on, take heart!  P  No, no, I tell you I am worn out. It’s a stupid and impossible venture.


The Mother: ( ) Just look at that! We are completely cut off from the world and life. Nothing, nothing is left on which we can base our understanding.


The Mother: ( ) And there! We can’t even see where we are going!   It is an absurdity or a delusion — perhaps both! After all, there might not even be any Truth to discover.


The Mother: The world and life are only a dead end — a hell in which we are imprisoned. You can go on if you like, but I won’t move, I refuse to be taken in!  THIRD STAGE  S  Yes, as I was telling you, I believe we set out on this adventure a little rashly.


The Mother: A   It is true that so far our ascent seems to have been rather fruitless.  Of course, we have made some very interesting observations, but these observations have not had much result.


The Mother: S   Yes, I prefer my own methods — they are much more rational.  They are based on constant experimentation and I do not take a step forward until I am sure of the validity of the previous one.  Let us call our friends — I think I have something to communicate to them.


The Mother: ( )   My dear friends and fellow-travellers, as we move further and further away from the world and its concrete reality, I have  the growing feeling that we are behaving like children. It was revealed to us that if we climbed this precipitous mountain whose summit no one has yet been able to scale, we would reach the Truth — and we set out without even bothering to study the way up. How do we know that we have not taken the wrong path?


The Mother: Where is our assurance that the result will conform to our hopes? It seems to me that we have acted with unpardonable imprudence and that our endeavour is not at all scientiﬁc. I have therefore decided, although to my great regret, since my friendly feelings towards you all remain intact, that I must stop here in order to study the problem and if possible to form some certainty about the path to follow, the right path, the one which leads to the goal.   (


The Mother: ) Besides, I am convinced that if I can ﬁnd the secret of the composition of the smallest thing in Nature, for example this humble stone on the path, I shall have found the Truth we are seeking. So I shall stay here and bid you — yes,, I hope; for perhaps you will come back to me and to scientiﬁc methods. Or else, if I ﬁnd what I am looking for, I shall come to you to bring you the good news.  A I too am thinking of leaving you.


The Mother: My reasons are not the same as those of our friend the scientist, but they are just as compelling.  During this interesting climb of ours, I have had some experiences: new beauties have been revealed to me; or rather, a new sense of beauty has taken birth in me. At the same time, I have been seized with an ardent and imperious need to express my experience in concrete forms, to cast them in Matter, so that they may serve for the education of all and especially so that the physical world may be illumined by them.  I am going to leave you, then, regretfully, and stay here until I can give form to my new impressions. When I have said all that  I have to say, I shall take up the ascent again and rejoin you, wherever you are, in quest of new discoveries.


The Mother: Good-bye, and good luck!  S S   What do we care about these defections!


The Mother: Each one follows his destiny and acts according to his own nature. Nothing can turn us away from our endeavour. Let us continue on our way, courageously, boldly, without weakening.  FOURTH STAGE F S


The Mother: Well, my friends! This is what I call a climb! What a path! It goes up and up without a break — there’s no time to catch your breath. I am beginning to feel tired.


The Mother: S S What! You too want to give up? That’s not very sporting of you!   F S


The Mother: No, no, there’s no question of giving up. But why don’t we rest a while and sit down for a moment to get our breath back? My legs are hurting me. We shall climb much better after relaxing a little. Have a heart, let’s sit down for a moment, only for a moment.


The Mother: Afterwards we shall set out with more enthusiasm.  You’ll see!  T S  All right! We don’t want to leave you here moping all alone.


The Mother: Besides, I feel rather tired too. Let’s sit down together and tell each other what we have seen and learnt.  S S ( )  Well, it’s only because I don’t want to part company with you .


The Mother: But we must not stay here long. It is dangerous to linger on the way.  FIFTH STAGE  G ()  Look, no one is left...


The Mother: We are alone.   What do the others matter! We don’t need them — aren’t we perfectly happy together?  B ()  Look, darling, look at that little house on the hillside, isolated and yet so welcoming, so intimate and yet opening onto inﬁnite space.


The Mother: What more do we need? An ideal place to shelter our union. For we have realised, we two, a perfect, total union, without shadow or cloud. Let us leave the others to their climb towards a problematic Truth — we have found our own, our own truth. That is enough for us.


The Mother: G  Yes, my love. Let us settle in this house and enjoy our love without a care for anything else.  SIXTH STAGE  A


The Mother: I have something important to communicate to you. Will you kindly listen to me, both of you? In the course of our ascent I have discovered my true being, my true Self. I have become one  with the Eternal and nothing else exists for me, nothing else is necessary.


The Mother: All that is not That is illusory, worthless. So I consider that I have reached the end of the path. ( ) And here is a sublime and solitary spot, a place that is truly favourable to the life I shall lead from now on. I shall live here in perfect contemplation, far from earth and men, free at last from the need to live.


The Mother: S A No! That cannot be the Truth, the whole Truth. The universal creation cannot be merely an illusion from which one has to escape. Besides, we have not yet reached the summit of the mountain, we have not yet completed our ascent.  F A ( )


The Mother: But here the pathway stops. It seems that no human being has ever gone any further. To climb this sheer rock that rises before us and seems to be inaccessible, we must discover for ourselves the way to go on step by step, by our own efforts, with no other guide or help than our will and our faith. No doubt we shall have to hew our own path.  S A ()


The Mother: Never mind! Let us go on, ever onwards. We still have something left to ﬁnd: the creation has a meaning that we have yet to discover.   SEVENTH STAGE F A  The summit at last!


The Mother: The shining, dazzling Truth, nothing but the Truth!   S A


The Mother: Everything else has disappeared. The steps by which we so laboriously climbed to the summit have vanished.  F A  Emptiness behind, in front, everywhere; there is only room for our feet, nothing more.


The Mother: S A   Where do we go now?


The Mother: What shall we do?  F A   The Truth is here, Truth alone, all around, everywhere.


The Mother: S A   And yet to realise it we must go further. And for that another secret must be found.


The Mother: F A  Obviously, all possibility of personal effort ends here. Another power must intervene.  S A


The Mother: Grace, Grace alone can act. Grace alone can open the way for us, Grace alone can perform the miracle.  F A ()  Look, look over there, far away, on the other side of the bottomless abyss, that peak resplendent with brilliant light, those perfect forms, that marvellous harmony, the promised land, the new earth!  S


The Mother: A  Yes, that is where we must go. But how?  F A


The Mother: Since that is where we must go, the means will be given to us.  S A  Yes, we must have faith, an absolute trust in the Grace, a total surrender to the Divine.  F


The Mother: A  Yes, an absolute self-giving to the Divine Will. And since all visible paths have disappeared, we must leap forward without fear or hesitation, in complete trust.  S A


The Mother: And we shall be carried to the place where we must go.   F A   Here we are, borne upon invisible wings, by a miraculous power!


The Mother: S A ()  What marvellous splendour! Now we have only to learn to live the new life.    The Great Secret


The Mother: In this unending ﬂux, in this myriad mutability I stretch my helpless arms and cry out like Faustus, “Where, where shall I capture thee, O inﬁnite Nature?” Another great poet was once likened to “an ineffectual angel beating in vain its luminous wings in the void”. Our whole tribe is nothing better.  At the end of my life, I ask, in the ignorance of a child, what does all this mean? To which God shall we bow down and make our offering?


The Mother: What is the vision of the Shekinah like?  Wherefore to have lived, wherefore to die? What is the sense of this ﬂeeting appearance upon earth, all this effort and struggle, all this success balanced against so much suffering? The marvellous hopes and the triumphant enthusiasms leading but to abysses of inconscience and ignorance that nothing can ﬁll up?  And the inevitable ﬁnale of it all: disappearance, dissolution, more mysterious than appearance, that gives the impression of something absurd, a bad joke at once gruesome and useless.


The Mother: Someone has asked me, “Why are the powers allied?”  I suppose that we are so used to seeing all the elements in man quarrelling among themselves that the idea of their being “allied” causes astonishment. But these quarrels are only apparent. All the powers which come from the higher regions are in fact necessarily allied — they are united, they have agreed to ﬁght the Ignorance. And Sri Aurobindo says clearly enough — for those who understand — that one of these powers belongs to the mind and that the other belongs to the Spirit.


The Mother: This is precisely the profound truth that Sri Aurobindo wants to reveal in his aphorism: if the mind tries to obtain the second power, it is unable to do so, since it is a power that belongs to the Spirit and arises in the human being together with the spiritual consciousness.  Knowledge is something that the mind can obtain through much effort, although this is not the true knowledge, but only a mental aspect of knowledge; whereas Wisdom does not at all belong to the mind, which is altogether incapable of obtaining it, because, in fact, it doesn’t even know what it is. I repeat, Wisdom is essentially a power of the Spirit and it can arise only with the spiritual consciousness.  It would have been interesting to ask what Sri Aurobindo  means when he speaks of “the truth seen in a distorted medium”.  First of all, what is this “distorted medium”, and what does the truth become in a “distorted medium”?


The Mother: As always, what Sri Aurobindo says can have several levels of meaning — one is more speciﬁc, the other more general.  In the most speciﬁc sense, the distorted medium is the mental medium which works in ignorance and which is therefore unable to express truth in its purity. But since life as a whole is lived in ignorance, the distorted medium is also the earth-atmosphere which, in its entirety, distorts the truth seeking to express itself through it.  And here lies the most subtle point of this aphorism. What can the mind arrive at by groping?


The Mother: We know that it is always groping, seeking to know, erring, returning upon its previous attempts and trying again... Its progress is very, very halting. But what can it grasp of the truth? Is it a fragment, a piece, something which is still the truth, but only partially, incompletely, or is it something which is no longer the truth? That is the interesting point.


The Mother: We are used to being told — perhaps we have also repeated many times — that one can only have partial, incomplete, fragmentary knowledge which therefore cannot be true knowledge.  This point of view is rather trite: one need only to have studied a little in life to be aware of it. However, what Sri Aurobindo means by “the truth seen in a distorted medium” is far more interesting than that.  Truth itself takes on another aspect; in this medium it is no longer the truth, but a distortion of the truth. Consequently, what can be seized of it is not a fragment which would be true, but an aspect, the false appearance of a truth which has itself melted away.


The Mother: I am going to give you an image to try to make myself understood; it is nothing more than an image, do not take it literally.  If we compare the essential truth to a sphere of immaculate,  dazzling white light, we can say that in the mental medium, in the mental atmosphere, this integral white light is transformed into thousands and thousands of shades, each of which has its own distinct colour, because they are all separated from one another. The medium distorts the white light and makes it appear as innumerable different colours: red, green, yellow, blue, etc., which are sometimes very discordant. And the mind seizes, not a little fragment of the white light of the white sphere, but a larger or smaller number of little lights of various colours, with which it cannot even reconstitute the white light. Therefore it cannot reach the truth.


The Mother: It does not possess fragments of truth, but a truth that is broken up. It is a state of decomposition.  The truth is a whole and everything is necessary. The distorted medium through which you see, the mental atmosphere, is unsuited for the manifestation or the expression or even the perception of all the elements — and one can say that the better part is lost. So it can no longer be called the truth, but rather something which in essence is true, and yet no longer so at all in the mental atmosphere — it is an ignorance.


The Mother: So, to summarise, I shall say that knowledge, as it can be grasped by the human mind, is necessarily knowledge in ignorance, one could almost say an ignorant knowledge.  Wisdom is the vision of truth in its essence and of its application in the manifestation.  A certain number of the questions you have asked are alike: “Why did Sri Aurobindo say it like this?” — one thing or another.   I could reply, “He said it like this because he saw it like this.”  But, to begin with, one thing should be understood; these are deﬁnitions given by Sri Aurobindo, deﬁnitions which he gives mostly in a paradoxical form to compel us to think.


The Mother: There are dictionary deﬁnitions, which are the ordinary explanations of words as they are commonly understood. These do not make you think. What Sri Aurobindo says, however, is said in order to break up the usual conception, to bring you in touch with a deeper truth. In this way a whole lot of questions are eliminated.  The effort one must make is to try to ﬁnd the deeper knowledge, the deeper truth that Sri Aurobindo has expressed in this way, which is not the usual way of deﬁning a word.


The Mother: I shall select some questions: the ﬁrst one, which interested me because it comes from a thoughtful person, concerns the word “knowledge” and compares the way Sri Aurobindo has used the word in this aphorism with the way he used it in the aphorism we read last week.  When, in last week’s aphorism, Sri Aurobindo opposed — as one might say — “knowledge” to “Wisdom”, he was speaking of knowledge as it is lived in the average human consciousness, the knowledge which is obtained through effort and mental development, whereas here, on the contrary, the knowledge he speaks of is the essential Knowledge, the supramental divine Knowledge, Knowledge by identity. And this is why he describes it here as “vast and eternal”, which clearly indicates that it is not human knowledge as we normally understand it.  Many people have asked why Sri Aurobindo said that the river is “slender”. This is an expressive image which creates a striking contrast between the immensity of the divine, supramental Knowledge — the origin of this inspiration, which is inﬁnite — and what a human mind can perceive of it and receive from it.


The Mother: Even when you are in contact with these domains, the portion, so to say, which you perceive, is minimal, slender. It is like a tiny little stream or a few falling drops and these drops are so pure,  so brilliant, so complete in themselves, that they give you the sense of a marvellous inspiration, the impression that you have reached inﬁnite domains and risen very high above the ordinary human condition. And yet this is nothing in comparison with what is still to be perceived.  I have also been asked if the psychic being or psychic consciousness is the medium through which the inspiration is perceived.  Generally, yes.


The Mother: The ﬁrst contact you have with higher regions is a psychic one. Certainly, before an inner psychic opening is achieved, it is difﬁcult to have these inspirations. It can happen as an exception and under exceptional conditions as a grace, but the true contact comes through the psychic; because the psychic consciousness is certainly the medium with the greatest afﬁnity with the divine Truth.  Later, when one has emerged from the mental consciousness into a higher consciousness beyond the mind, beyond even the higher mind, and when one opens oneself to the Overmind regions, and through the Overmind to the Supermind, one can receive inspirations directly. And naturally at that point they become more frequent, richer, if one may say so, more complete.


The Mother: There comes a time when inspiration can be obtained at will, but this obviously demands considerable inner development.  As we have just said, this inspiration from regions far above the mind surpasses in value and quality the highest achievements of the mind, such as reason. Reason is certainly at the apex of human mental activity. It can review and control the knowledge acquired with the help of the senses. It has often been said that the senses are altogether defective instruments of knowledge, that they are incapable of perceiving things as they are, that the information they supply is superﬁcial and very often faulty.


The Mother: When it is fully developed, the human reason knows this and does not trust the knowledge of the senses. It is only if one is infrarational, if I may say so, that one believes that all one sees, hears, or touches is absolutely true. As soon as one is developed  in the region of higher reason, one knows that all these notions are almost essentially false, and that one can in no way rely on them. But the knowledge one receives from this supramental or divine region surpasses all that can be conceived or understood by reason, at least to the same extent that reason surpasses the knowledge of the senses.


The Mother: Several questions concern a practical point: “How to develop the capacity for inspiration?”; “What are the conditions needed to receive inspiration and is it possible to have it constantly?”  I have already replied to this. When one opens oneself to the supramental regions, one puts oneself in the right state for receiving constant inspirations. Until then, the best method is to silence the mind as much as possible, to turn it upwards and to remain in a state of silent and attentive receptivity. The more one is able to establish a silent, perfect calm in the mind, the more one becomes capable of receiving inspirations.


The Mother: It was also asked whether inspirations are of different qualities.  In their origin, no. They always come down from the regions of pure Knowledge and penetrate whatever part of the human being is most receptive, best adapted to receive them — but these inspirations may apply to different domains of action. They can be inspirations of pure knowledge, they can also be inspirations that contribute to one’s effort to progress, and they can also be inspirations for action which help in the practical and outer realisation. But the question here is the use one makes of the inspiration, rather than of the quality of the inspiration — the inspiration is always like a drop of light and truth which succeeds in penetrating the human consciousness.


The Mother: What the human consciousness does with this drop depends on the attitude, the need, the occasion, the circumstances; it does not alter the essential nature of the inspiration but it does alter the use one makes of it, its practical application.  Some of the other questions concern the difference between  inspiration and intuition. They are not the same thing; but I think that we will have the opportunity of returning to this subject in the course of our reading. When Sri Aurobindo tells us what he considers intuition to be, we shall come back to it.  In a general and almost absolute way, if you truly wish to proﬁt from these readings, as from all of Sri Aurobindo’s writings, the best method is this: having gathered your consciousness and focused your attention on what you are reading, you must establish a minimum of mental tranquillity — the best thing would be to obtain perfect silence — and achieve a state of immobility of the mind, immobility of the brain, I might say, so that the attention becomes as still and immobile as a mirror, like the surface of absolutely still water.


The Mother: Then what one has read passes through the surface and penetrates deep into the being where it is received with a minimum of distortion. Afterwards — sometimes long afterwards — it wells up again from the depths and manifests in the brain with its full power of comprehension, not as knowledge acquired from outside, but as a light one carried within.  In this way the faculty of understanding is at its highest,  whereas if, while you read, the mind remains agitated and tries to understand at once what it is reading, you lose more than three-quarters of the force, the knowledge and the truth contained in the words. And if you are able to refrain from asking questions until this process of absorption and inner awakening is completed, well, then you will ﬁnd that you have far fewer questions to ask because you will have a better understanding of what you have read.


The Mother: When Sri Aurobindo says “I”, he speaks of himself and of his own experience. We would like to be able to say that what he says is symbolic and that it could apply to many people, but unfortunately this is not so at all.  This experience, of not saying what you had meant to say when you speak, but something else, is very common; but it is the opposite of what Sri Aurobindo speaks of here. That is to say, when you are sitting calmly at home using your reason to its full extent, you decide to say this or that, that this is the reasonable thing, but all too often, when you begin to speak, it is the lower impulses, the unreasonable emotions and the vital reactions which take hold of the tongue and make you say things which you should not say.  Here it is the same phenomenon, but, as I said, the other way round.


The Mother: Instead of infrarational impulses which make you speak with excitement and passion, it is, on the contrary, an inspiration coming from above, a light and a knowledge greater than those of the reason which take hold of the tongue and make you say things that you would have been incapable of saying even with the most enlightened reason.  Sri Aurobindo tells us that “the reason trembles” because these higher truths always appear in the human domain as paradoxes, revelations contrary to reason; not because reason is incapable of understanding what comes from the higher regions, but because these revelations are always ahead of, very much ahead of, that which reason has understood or accepted. What the human reason of today ﬁnds reasonable has been paradoxical and mad in the past; and probably — one may say, certainly — these unexpected, paradoxical, revolutionary revelations which are manifesting now and making the reason tremble, will in time to come be very reasonable knowledge, which in turn will tremble before new revelations.  It is this sense of something which is always moving, progressing, being transformed, that Sri Aurobindo is trying to give us with these compact phrases which for a time shake  our understanding of things. It is to push us forward, to give us the sense of the complete relativity of all that manifests in the world, and of this universe which is always in motion, ever moving towards a higher and greater Truth.


The Mother: For us, right now, the supramental transformation is the expression of the highest truth, it is the revolution we must bring about on earth; and certainly this revolution must be felt as an absolute by the majority of human beings, otherwise they will not be able to bring it about. But Sri Aurobindo insists that we should not forget that this absolute is still relative and that any manifestation must always be relative with regard to an Absolute which is even more absolute — the Unmanifest that will manifest later.  “I am not a Jnani...” The Jnani is one who follows the path of Knowledge, one who wants to realise Yoga exclusively through Knowledge, and who follows a purely intellectual path with the will to go beyond it and attain Knowledge, which is no longer intellectual, but spiritual. And Sri Aurobindo says: I am not a Jnani....


The Mother: I do not seek knowledge. I have given myself to the Divine to accomplish His work and, by the divine Grace, at every moment I know what must be known in order to accomplish this work.  It is an admirable state; it is perfect peace of mind. There is no longer any need to accumulate acquired knowledge, received ideas which have to be memorised; it is no longer necessary  to clutter one’s brain with thousands and thousands of things in order to have at one’s command, when the time comes, the knowledge that is needed to perform an action, to impart a teaching, to solve a problem. The mind is silent, the brain is still, everything is clear, quiet, calm; and at the right moment, by divine Grace a drop of light falls into the consciousness and what needs to be known is known.


The Mother: Why should one care to remember — why try to retain that knowledge? On the day or at the moment that it is needed one will have it again. At each second one is a blank page on which what must be known will be inscribed — in the peace, the repose, the silence of a perfect receptivity.  One knows what must be known, one sees what must be seen, and since what must be known and seen comes directly from the Supreme, it is Truth itself; and it completely eludes all notions of reason or folly. What is true is true — that is all.


The Mother: And one has to sink very low to wonder whether it is folly or reason.   Silence and a modest, humble, attentive receptivity; no concern for appearances or even any anxiety to be — one is quite modestly, quite humbly, quite simply the instrument which of itself is nothing and knows nothing, but is ready to receive everything and transmit everything.  The ﬁrst condition is self-forgetfulness, a total self-giving, the absence of ego.  And the body says to the Supreme Lord: “What You want me to be, I shall be; what You want me to know, I shall know; what You want me to do, I shall do.”


The Mother: What Sri Aurobindo has written, the words [“caught a glimpse”] which have been translated as, means to see something in its totality, but for a very brief moment. It is obvious that a constant vision of all these wonders would automatically compel you to set out on the path. It is also certain that a little fragmentary glimpse is not enough — it would not have enough weight to compel you to follow the path.  But if you had a total vision, however brief, you would not be able to resist the temptation of making the effort needed to realise it. But, in fact, the total vision is exceptional, and that is why Sri Aurobindo says to us: “If mankind only...”


The Mother: To tell the truth, it very seldom happens that those who are ready, who are undoubtedly meant for realisation, do not have, at a certain moment in their lives, even if only for a few seconds, the experience of what this realisation is.  But even those whose destiny is certain have to struggle mightily, resolutely, against this “something” which one seems to take in with the very air one breathes: this fear, this dread of what may happen. And this is so stupid, because, in the ﬁnal analysis, the destiny of each individual is the same: you are born, you live — more or less satisfactorily — and you die; then you wait for a certain length of time, and again you are born, you live — more or less satisfactorily — and again you die, and so on indeﬁnitely, until you feel you have had enough of it.  Fear of what? Fear of coming out of the rut?


The Mother: Fear of being free? Fear of no longer being a prisoner?   And then, when you have enough courage to overcome this,  when you say, “Come what may! After all, there’s not much to lose”, then you become wary, you wonder if it is reasonable, if it is true, if all that is not an illusion, if you are not just imagining things, if there is really any substance to it....


The Mother: And mind you, this mistrust seems stupid, but you encounter it even in the most intelligent, even in those who have repeatedly had conclusive experiences — it is something that you take in with the food you eat, the air you breathe, your contacts with others; and that is why you can speak of the “tentacles of Nature”, everywhere, in all things, like an octopus stealing in and catching you and binding you.  Even when you have overcome these two obstacles, when the experiences are so strong that you can no longer doubt, that doubt becomes impossible — like doubting one’s own life — then there remains something awful, petty, dry, corrosive: scepticism. And this is founded on human pride, that is why it lasts so long. You want to think that you are above all these things, “Oh, I am not one to fall into those traps! I am a reasonable man, I see things from a practical point of view; I’m not so easily deceived.”


The Mother: It is awful!... It is sordid. But it is dangerous.  Even in moments of greatest enthusiasm, even when one is ﬁlled with an exceptional, marvellous experience — it rises from the lowest depths. It is ugly, slimy, disgusting.


The Mother: And yet it rises, and spoils everything.   To conquer it, one must be a mighty warrior. One must struggle against all the obscurities of Nature, against all her tricks, all her temptations.


The Mother: Why does she do this? It is as if she were moving away from her own goal. But I have already explained this to you many times. Nature knows very well where she is going and what the outcome is. She wants it, but... in her own way.


The Mother: She does not feel that any time is being wasted. She has all eternity before her. She  wants to follow her own way as she likes, meandering as much as she likes, going back on her tracks, straying from the straight path, starting the same thing all over again several times to see what will happen. And these enlightened cranks, who want to get there at once, as soon as possible, who thirst for truth, light, beauty, balance — they bother her, they urge her on, they tell her that she is wasting her time. Her time!


The Mother: She always replies, “But I have all eternity before me. Am I in a hurry? Why are you in such a hurry?” And again, with a smile: “Your haste is all too human; widen yourselves, become inﬁnite, be eternal, and you will no longer be in a hurry.”  There is so much fun on the way, for her... but not for everyone.


The Mother: This is what happens when one sees things from a great height, from a great distance, when one’s view is vast, almost inﬁnite. Everything that upsets human beings and makes them suffer, disappears; so those who are very wise, who have abandoned life for the sake of higher wisdom tell you with a smile, “Why suffer? Come out of it and you will suffer no more.” That is all very well individually but, in fact, if you think about others you may wish this rather tragic comedy would come to an end sooner. And it is very justiﬁable to feel tired of living like a beast at pasture, of roaming from one patch of grass to another, of ruminating in a corner, of having such narrow horizons and of missing all the splendours of life.


The Mother: Perhaps it amuses Nature that we should be like that, but we are tired of it, we want to be different.  And that is it. When you have truly had enough of it and want things to be different, then you have the courage, the strength, the capacity to conquer these three terrible enemies: fear, doubt and scepticism. But I repeat, it is not enough to sit down one ﬁne day, watch yourself be, and struggle with these things inside you once and for all. You have to do it and do it again and again and continue in a way which seems almost endless, to be sure that you have got rid of it all.


The Mother: In  reality, you are perhaps never truly rid of it, but there comes a time when inside yourself, you are so different that you can no longer be touched by these things. You can see them, but you see them with a smile, and at a simple gesture they go away, back to where they came from, perhaps a little changed, perhaps a little less strong, less obstinate, less aggressive — until the time when the Light is so strong that all darkness vanishes.  As for the marvels Sri Aurobindo tells us about, it is better not to describe them, because each individual feels them, undergoes them, experiences them in his own way — and for each person that is the best way. One must not adopt another’s way, one must go one’s own way, then the experience has its full value, its full inestimable value.


The Mother: And ﬁnally, I wish that you may all have these experiences yourselves. And for that, faith, conﬁdence, much humaneness and great goodwill are needed.   Open, aspire, and... wait. It will surely come, the Grace is there.


The Mother: It asks only to be able to work for everyone.  Once again I must repeat that the form of these aphorisms is purposely paradoxical in order to give the mind a little shock and awaken it enough for it to make an effort to understand. One must not take this aphorism literally. Some people seem worried by the idea that reason must disappear for one to become wise.  It is not that, it is not that at all.


The Mother: Reason must no longer be the summit and the master.  For a very long time in life, until one possesses anything resembling Knowledge, it is indispensable that reason be the master, otherwise one is the plaything of one’s impulses, one’s  fancies, one’s more or less disordered emotional imaginings, and one is in danger of being very far removed not merely from wisdom but even from the knowledge needed for conducting oneself acceptably. But when one has managed to control all the lower parts of the being with the help of reason, which is the apex of ordinary human intelligence, then if one wants to go beyond this point, if one wants to liberate oneself from ordinary life, from ordinary thought, from the ordinary vision of things, one must, if I may say so, stand upon the head of reason, not trampling it down disdainfully, but using it as a stepping stone to something higher, something beyond it, to attain to something which concerns itself very little with the decrees of reason; something which can allow itself to be irrational because it is a higher irrationality, with a higher light; something which is beyond ordinary knowledge and which receives its inspirations from above, from high above, from the divine Wisdom.  That is what this means.  As for the knowledge of which Sri Aurobindo speaks here, it is ordinary knowledge, it is not Knowledge by identity; it is knowledge that can be acquired by the intellect through thought, through ordinary means.


The Mother: But once again — and in any case we shall have occasion to return to this when we study the next aphorism — do not be in a hurry to abandon reason in the conviction that you will immediately attain to Wisdom, because you must be ready for Wisdom; otherwise, by abandoning reason, you run a great risk of falling into unreason, which is rather dangerous.  Many times in his writings, particularly in , Sri Aurobindo warns us against the imaginings of those who believe they can do sadhana without rigorous self-control and who heed all sorts of inspirations, which lead them to a dangerous imbalance where all their repressed, hidden, secret desires come out into the open under the pretence of liberation from ordinary conventions and ordinary reason.   One can be free only by soaring to the heights, high above human passions. Only when one has achieved a higher, selﬂess freedom and done away with all desires and impulses does one have the right to be free.  But neither should people who are very reasonable, very moral according to ordinary social laws, think themselves wise, for their wisdom is an illusion and holds no profound truth.


The Mother: One who would break the law must be above the law. One who would ignore conventions must be above conventions. One who would despise all rules must be above all rules. And the motive of this liberation should never be a personal, egoistic one: the desire to satisfy an ambition, aggrandise one’s personality, through a feeling of superiority, out of contempt for others, to set oneself above the herd and regard it with condescension. Be on your guard when you feel yourself superior and look down on others ironically, as if to say, “I’m no longer made of such stuff.”


The Mother: That’s when you go off the track and are in danger of falling into an abyss.  When one truly attains wisdom, the true wisdom, the wisdom Sri Aurobindo is speaking of here, there is no longer higher and lower; there is only a play of forces in which each thing has its place and its importance. And if there is a hierarchy it is a hierarchy of surrender to the Supreme. It is not a hierarchy of superiority with regard to what is below.  And with human understanding, human reason, human knowledge, one is unable to discern this hierarchy.


The Mother: Only the awakened soul can recognise another awakened soul, and then the sense of superiority disappears completely.  True wisdom comes only when the ego disappears, and the ego disappears only when you are ready to abandon yourself completely to the supreme Lord without any personal motive and without any expectation of proﬁt — when you do it because you cannot do otherwise.   All that Sri Aurobindo writes about knowledge, reason, Wisdom is said in order to bring us out of the rut of conventional thinking, and, if possible, make us perceive the reality behind the appearances.  As a general rule, with a few very rare exceptions, men are content to observe more or less accurately everything that happens around them, and sometimes within themselves, and to classify all these observations according to one superﬁcial system of logic or another. And they call this organisation, these systems, “knowledge”.


The Mother: It has never occurred to them, they have not even begun to perceive that all the things they see, touch, feel, experience, are false appearances and not reality itself.  The constant, general argument is, “But I see it, I touch it, I feel it — consequently it is true.”  They should, on the contrary, tell themselves, “I see it, I touch it, I feel it — consequently it is false.” We are at opposite poles and there is no way of coming to an understanding.  For Sri Aurobindo, true knowledge is precisely Knowledge by identity, and wisdom is the state one achieves when one is in this true knowledge.


The Mother: He says it here: Wisdom looks behind the veil of false appearances and sees the reality behind it. And Sri Aurobindo emphasises that when one deﬁnes something with the superﬁcial, outer knowledge, it is always in opposition to something else; it is always by means of a contrast that one explains what one sees, feels, touches — and does not understand.  Reason always sets one thing against another and compels you to make a choice. People whose thought and reason are clear see all the differences between things. It is rather remarkable that reason can only work through differences; it is because one perceives the difference between this and that, one act and  another, one object and another, that one makes decisions and that reason works.


The Mother: But it is precisely true Knowledge, Knowledge by identity and the wisdom which results from it that always see the point where all apparently contradictory things harmonise, complement each other, form a perfectly coherent, coordinated whole.  And naturally that changes entirely the point of view, the perception, and the consequences in action.  The ﬁrst absolutely indispensable step is not to repeat, more or less mechanically and without quite knowing what you are saying, that “appearances are false”. You say it because Sri Aurobindo has told us so — but without really understanding it.  And yet, when you want to understand something, you continue to look, to observe, to touch, to taste and to feel, because you believe there are no other means of observation.


The Mother: It is only when you have had the experience of the “reversal of consciousness”, when you have gone behind these things, when you can feel, experience, in the most concrete manner, their illusory appearance, that you are able to understand. But, unless you have had the experience, you can read all the aphorisms, repeat and learn them, have faith in them and still not perceive: they have no reality for you. All these appearances remain the only way of coming into contact with the outer world and of becoming aware of what it is. And sometimes you can spend a whole lifetime learning how things are in their appearances and be considered very cultured, very intelligent, highly knowledgeable, when you have observed all this in detail and remembered all that you have observed or learnt...  Strictly speaking, you can, when you have worked hard, have some slight effect on these appearances, change them a little — this is how, through science, you learn to manipulate matter — but there is no true change and there is no true power


The Mother: .  And when you are in that state, you are wholly convinced that there is nothing you can do to change your character. You feel trapped in a kind of fatalism that weighs you down, you know  neither whence nor how; you are born like this, in such and such a place, into such and such an environment, with such and such a character, and you get through life as best you can, adapting to things without having much inﬂuence on them, and trying to mitigate the drawbacks of your own character without having the power to transform it. You feel caught in a net, you are the slave of something of which you are unaware. You are the plaything of circumstances, of unknown forces, of a will you do not submit to, but which constrains you.


The Mother: Even the most rebellious are slaves, because the only thing that liberates you is precisely the act of passing behind the veil and discovering what lies beyond it. Once you have seen, you know who you are and once you have established your true identity, you have the key to the true transformation.  We read, we try to understand, we explain, we try to know.  But a single minute of true experience teaches us more than millions of words and hundreds of explanations.  So the ﬁrst question is: “How to have the experience?”


The Mother: To go within yourself, that is the ﬁrst step.  And then, once you have succeeded in going within yourself deeply enough to feel the reality of that which is within, to widen yourself progressively, systematically, to become as vast as the universe and lose the sense of limitation.   These are the ﬁrst two preparatory movements.  And these two things must be done in the greatest possible calm, peace and tranquillity.


The Mother: This peace, this tranquillity brings about silence in the mind and stillness in the vital.  This effort, this attempt must be renewed very regularly, persistently. And after a certain lapse of time, which may be longer or shorter, you begin to perceive a reality that is different from the reality perceived in the ordinary, external consciousness.  Naturally, by the action of Grace, the veil may suddenly be rent from within, and at once you can enter the true truth; but even when that happens, in order to obtain the full value and full effect of the experience, you must maintain yourself in a  state of inner receptivity, and to do that, it is indispensable for you to go within each day.


The Mother: The dogmas of sects and the intolerance of religions come from the fact that the sects and religions consider their beliefs alone to be knowledge, and the beliefs of others to be error, ignorance or charlatanism.  This simple movement causes them to set up what they believe to be true as dogma and to violently condemn what others believe to be true. To think that your knowledge is the only true one, that your belief is the only true one and that others’ beliefs are not true, is to do precisely what is done by all sects and religions.  So, if you are doing exactly the same thing as the sects and religions, you have no right to mock them. You do the same thing without being aware of it because it seems quite natural to you.


The Mother: What Sri Aurobindo wants to make you understand is that when you say, “We are in possession of the truth and what is not this truth is an error” — though you may not dare say it in such a crude way — you are doing exactly the same thing as all the religions and all the sects.  If you objectify a little you will see that you have spontaneously, without realising it, established as knowledge everything you have learnt, everything you have thought, everything which has given you the impression of being particularly true and of major importance; and you are quite ready to contradict any different notion held by those who say, “No, no, it is like this, it is not like that.”   If you watch yourself in action, you will understand the mechanism of this intolerance and you will immediately be able to put an end to all these useless discussions. This brings us back to what I have already told you once: the contact which you have had with the truth of things, your personal contact — a contact which is more or less clear, profound, vast, pure — may have given, as an individual, an interesting, perhaps even a decisive experience; but although this contact may have given you an experience of decisive importance, you must not imagine that it is a universal experience and that the same contact would give others the same experience. And if you understand this, that it is something purely personal, individual, subjective, that it is not at all an absolute and general law, then you can no longer despise the knowledge of others, nor seek to impose your own point of view and experience upon them.


The Mother: This understanding obviates all mental quarrels, which are always totally useless.  Obviously, the ﬁrst part of the aphorism can be taken as advice, but this is not what Sri Aurobindo meant when he wrote it; he wanted to make us conscious of the error we make ourselves but ridicule in others. This is a habit with us, not only in this particular case, but in all cases. It is rather remarkable that when we have a weakness — for example a ridiculous habit, a defect or an imperfection — since it is more or less part of our nature, we consider it to be very natural, it does not shock us. But as soon as we see this same weakness, this same imperfection, this same ridiculous habit in someone else, it seems quite shocking to us and we say, “What! He’s like that?” — without noticing that we ourselves are “like that”.


The Mother: And so to the weakness and imperfection we add the absurdity of not even noticing them.  There is a lesson to be drawn from this. When something in a person seems to you completely unacceptable or ridiculous — “What! He is like that, he behaves like that, he says things like that, he does things like that” — you should say to yourself, “Well, well, but perhaps I do the same thing without being aware of it. I would do better to look into myself ﬁrst before criticising  him, so as to make sure that I am not doing the very same thing in a slightly different way.”


The Mother: If you have the good sense and intelligence to do this each time you are shocked by another person’s behaviour, you will realise that in life your relations with others are like a mirror which is presented to you so that you can see more easily and clearly the weaknesses you carry within you.  In a general and almost absolute way anything that shocks you in other people is the very thing you carry in yourself in a more or less veiled, more or less hidden form, though perhaps in a slightly different guise which allows you to delude yourself. And what in yourself seems inoffensive enough, becomes monstrous as soon as you see it in others.  Try to experience this; it will greatly help you to change yourselves. At the same time it will bring a sunny tolerance to your relationships with others, the goodwill which comes from understanding, and it will very often put an end to these completely useless quarrels.


The Mother: One can live without quarrelling. It seems strange to say this because as things are, it would seem, on the contrary, that life is made for quarrelling in the sense that the main occupation of people who are together is to quarrel, overtly or covertly. You do not always come to words, you do not always come to blows — fortunately — but you are in a state of perpetual irritation within because you do not ﬁnd around you the perfection that you would yourself wish to realise, and which you ﬁnd rather difﬁcult to realise — but you ﬁnd it entirely natural that others should realise it.  “How can they be like that?...” You forget how difﬁcult you ﬁnd it in yourself not to be “like that”!


The Mother: Try, you will see.   Look upon everything with a benevolent smile. Take all the things which irritate you as a lesson for yourself and your life will be more peaceful and more effective as well, for a great percentage of your energy certainly goes to waste in the irritation  you feel when you do not ﬁnd in others the perfection that you would like to realise in yourself.  You stop short at the perfection that others should realise and you are seldom conscious of the goal you should be pursuing yourself.


The Mother: If you are conscious of it, well then, begin with the work which is given to, that is to say, realise what you have to do and do not concern yourself with what others do, because, after all, it is not your business. And the best way to the true attitude is simply to say, “All those around me, all the circumstances of my life, all the people near me, are a mirror held up to me by the Divine Consciousness to show me the progress I must make. Everything that shocks me in others means a work I have to do in myself.”  And perhaps if one carried true perfection in oneself, one would discover it more often in others.  This amounts to saying that all knowledge which is not the result of the soul’s vision or experience is without true value.


The Mother: But the question immediately arises — it was, in fact, put to me — “How do we know what the soul sees?”  Obviously there is only one solution: to become conscious of one’s soul. And this completes the aphorism: unless one is conscious of one’s soul one does not have true knowledge. Therefore the ﬁrst effort must be to ﬁnd the soul within, to unite with it and allow it to govern one’s life.  Some people ask, “How do we know whether this is the soul?”


The Mother: I have already answered this question several times. Those who ask this question, by the very fact of asking it, prove that they are not conscious of their souls, because as soon as you are conscious of your soul and identiﬁed with it, you have a  positive knowledge of it and you no longer ask how you are to know. And that experience can neither be counterfeited nor imagined; you cannot pretend to be in contact with your soul — it is something which cannot be contrived or counterfeited.  When the soul governs your life, you know it with absolute certainty and no longer ask any questions.  But the usefulness of the aphorism we have just read is to make you understand that everything you think you know, everything you have learnt, anything that has come to you in your life through personal observation, deduction, comparison — all that is a very relative knowledge on which you cannot found a durable and truly effective way of life.


The Mother: How many times have we repeated this: all that comes from the mind is wholly relative. The more the mind is educated and has applied itself to various disciplines, the more it becomes capable of proving that what it puts forward or what it says is true. One can prove the truth of anything by reasoning, but that does not make it true. It remains an opinion, a prejudice, a knowledge based on appearances which are themselves more than dubious.  So there seems to be only one way out and that is to go in search of one’s soul and to ﬁnd it.


The Mother: It is there, it does not make a point of hiding itself, it does not play with you just to make things difﬁcult; on the contrary, it makes great efforts to help you ﬁnd it and to make itself heard. Only, between your soul and your active consciousness there are two characters who are in the habit of making a lot of noise, the mind and the vital. And because they make a lot of noise, while the soul does not, or, rather, makes as little as possible, their noise prevents you from hearing the voice of the soul.  When you want to know what your soul knows, you have to make an inner effort, to be very attentive; and indeed, if you are attentive, behind the outer noise of the mind and the vital, you can discern something very subtle, very quiet, very peaceful, which knows and says what it knows.


The Mother: But the insistence of the  others is so imperious, while is so quiet, that you are very easily misled into listening to the one that makes the most noise; most often you become aware only afterwards that the other one was right. It does not impose itself, it does not compel you to listen, for it is without violence.  When you hesitate, when you wonder what to do in this or that circumstance, there come the desire, the preference both mental and vital, that press, insist, afﬁrm and impose themselves, and, with the best reasons in the world, build up a whole case for themselves. And if you are not on the alert, if you don’t have a ﬁrm discipline, if you don’t have the habit of control, they ﬁnally convince you that they are right. And as I was saying a little while ago, they make so much noise that you do not even hear the tiny voice or the tiny, very quiet indication of the soul which says, “Don’t do it.”


The Mother: This “Don’t do it” comes often, but you discard it as something which has no power and follow your impulsive destiny. But if you are truly sincere in your will to ﬁnd and live the truth, then you learn to listen better and better, you learn to discriminate more and more, and even if it costs you an effort, even if it causes you pain, you learn to obey. And even if you have obeyed only once, it is a powerful help, a considerable progress on the path towards the discrimination between what is and what is not the soul. With this discrimination and the necessary sincerity you are sure to reach the goal.  But you must not be in a hurry, you must not be impatient, you must be very persevering.


The Mother: You do the wrong thing ten times for every time that you do the right thing. But when you do the wrong thing you must not give up everything in despair, but tell yourself that the Grace will never abandon you and that next time it will be better.  So, in conclusion, we shall say that in order to know things as they are you must ﬁrst unite with your soul and to unite with your soul you must want it with persistence and perseverance.   Only the degree of concentration on the goal can shorten the way.  It has often been repeated — but except in certain cases very rarely understood — that only like knows like.


The Mother: If this were understood, a great deal of ignorance would vanish.  Only the soul can know the soul, and on each level of being, only the equivalent level can recognise the other. Only the Divine can know the Divine, and because we carry the Divine in ourselves we are capable of seeing Him and recognising Him.  But if we try to understand something of the inner life by using our senses and external methods, the result is sure to be total failure and we shall also deceive ourselves totally.  So when you imagine that you can know the secrets of Nature and still remain in a purely physical consciousness, you are entirely deceived.


The Mother: And this habit of demanding concrete, material proofs before accepting the reality of something, is one of the most glaring effects of ignorance. With that attitude any fool imagines that he can sit in judgment on the highest things and deny the most profound experiences.  It is certainly not by dissecting a body which is dead because the soul has departed from it that the soul can be found. Had the soul not departed, the body would not have been dead! It is to bring home to us the absurdity of this claim that Sri Aurobindo has written this aphorism.


The Mother: It applies to all judgments of the critical mind and to all scientiﬁc methods when they would judge any but purely material phenomena.  The conclusion is always the same: the only true attitude  is one of humility, of silent respect before what one does not know, and of inner aspiration to come out of one’s ignorance.  One of the things which would make humanity progress most would be for it to respect what it does not know, to acknowledge willingly that it does not know and is therefore unable to judge.  We constantly do just the opposite. We pass ﬁnal judgments on things of which we have no knowledge whatsoever, and say in a peremptory manner, “This is possible.


The Mother: That is impossible”, when we do not even know what it is we are speaking of. And we put on superior airs because we doubt things of which we have never had any knowledge.  Men believe that doubt is a sign of superiority, whereas it is really a sign of inferiority.  Scepticism and doubt are two of the greatest obstacles to progress; they add presumptuousness to ignorance.  There are three statements here which have raised questions.


The Mother: First, “What is the mental personality?”  In each human being the body is animated by the vital being, and governed, or partially governed, by a mental being.  This is a general rule, but the extent to which the mental being is formed and individualised varies greatly from one individual to the next. In the great mass of human beings the mind is something ﬂuid which has no organisation of its own, and therefore it is not a personality. And as long as the mind is like that, ﬂuid, unorganised, with no cohesive life of its own and without personality, it cannot survive.


The Mother: What made up the mental being dissolves in the mental region when the body, the  substance which made up the body, dissolves in the physical substance.  But as soon as the mental being is formed, organised, individualised, and has become a personality, it does not depend, it no longer depends on the body for its existence, and it therefore survives the body. The earth’s mental atmosphere is ﬁlled with beings, mental personalities which lead an entirely independent existence, even after the disappearance of the body; they can reincarnate in a new body when the soul, that is to say, the true Self, reincarnates, thus carrying with it the memory of its previous lives.  But this is not what Sri Aurobindo calls Immortality. Immortality is a life without beginning or end, without birth or death, which is altogether independent of the body.


The Mother: It is the life of the Self, the essential being of each individual, and it is not separate from the universal Self. And this essential being has a sense of oneness with the universal Self; it is in fact a personiﬁed, individualised expression of the universal Self and has neither beginning nor end, neither life nor death, it exists eternally and that is what is immortal. When we are fully conscious of this Self we participate in its eternal life, and we therefore become immortal.  But there is some misunderstanding about this word “Immortality” — and this is not something new; it is a misunderstanding which has recurred very frequently. When one speaks of immortality most people understand it as the indeﬁnite survival of the body.


The Mother: The body can survive indeﬁnitely only if, in the ﬁrst place, it becomes fully conscious of this immortal Self and unites with it, identiﬁes with it to the extent of having the same capacity, the same faculty of constant transformation which would enable it to follow the universal movement. This is an absolutely indispensable condition if the body is to endure. Because the body is rigid, because it does not follow the movement, because it cannot transform itself rapidly enough to constantly identify itself with  the universal evolution, it decomposes and dies. Its ﬁxity, its rigidity, its incapacity to transform itself, make its destruction necessary, so that its substance may return to the general realm of physical substance and so that the body may be remoulded into new forms in order to become capable of further progress.  But usually, when one speaks of immortality, people think of physical immortality — it goes without saying that this has not yet been realised.


The Mother: Sri Aurobindo says that it is possible and even that it will happen, but he lays down one condition: the body must be supramentalised, it must have some of the qualities of the supramental being, which are qualities of plasticity and constant transformation. And when Sri Aurobindo writes that the body is “only an instrument and a shadow”, he is speaking of the body as it is now and will probably continue to be for a long time to come. It is only the instrument of the Self, a very inadequate expression of this Self, and a shadow — a shadow, something vague and obscure in comparison with the light and precision of the eternal Self.  How this shadow, this instrument, can serve the development of the soul, and how by cultivating the instrument one can be of help to future lives, are questions which are not without interest.


The Mother: Each time that the soul takes birth in a new body it comes with the intention of having a new experience which will help it to develop and to perfect its personality. This is how the psychic being is formed from life to life and becomes a completely conscious and independent personality which, once it has arrived at the summit of its development, is free to choose not only the time of its incarnation, but the place, the purpose and the work to be accomplished.  Its descent into the physical body is necessarily a descent into darkness, ignorance, unconsciousness; and for a very long time it must labour simply to bring a little consciousness into the material substance of the body, before it can make use  of it for the experience it has come for. So, if we cultivate the body by a clear-sighted and rational method, at the same time we are helping the growth of the soul, its progress and enlightenment.  Physical culture is the process of infusing consciousness into the cells of the body.


The Mother: One may or may not know it, but it is a fact. When we concentrate to make our muscles move according to our will, when we endeavour to make our limbs more supple, to give them an agility, or a force, or a resistance, or a plasticity which they do not naturally possess, we infuse into the cells of the body a consciousness which was not there before, thus turning it into an increasingly homogeneous and receptive instrument, which progresses in and by its activities.  This is the primary importance of physical culture. Of course, that is not the only thing that brings consciousness into the body, but it is something which acts in an overall way, and this is rare. I have already told you several times that the artist infuses a very great consciousness into his hands, as the intellectual does into his brain.


The Mother: But these are, as it were, local phenomena, whereas the action of physical culture is more general. And when one sees the absolutely marvellous results of this culture, when one observes the extent to which the body is capable of perfecting itself, one understands how useful this can be to the action of the psychic being which has entered into this material substance. For naturally, when it is in possession of an organised and harmonised instrument which is full of strength and suppleness and possibilities, its task is greatly facilitated.  I do not say that people who practise physical culture necessarily do it for this purpose, because very few are aware of this result. But whether they are aware of it or not, this is the result.


The Mother: Moreover, if you are at all sensitive, when you observe the moving body of a person who has practised physical culture in a methodical and rational way, you see a light, a consciousness, a life, which is not there in others.   There are always people with a wholly external view of things who say, “Workers, for example, who have to do hard physical labour and who are compelled by their work to learn to carry heavy weights — they too build up their muscles, and instead of spending their time like aristocrats doing exercises with no useful outward results, they at least produce something.” This is ignorance. Because there is an essential difference between the muscles developed through specialised, local and limited use and muscles which have been cultivated deliberately and harmoniously according to an integral programme which leaves no part of the body without work or exercise.  People like workers and peasants, who have a specialised occupation and develop only certain muscles, always end up with occupational deformities.


The Mother: And this in no way helps their psychic progress because, although the whole of life necessarily contributes to the psychic development, it does so in such an unconscious way and so slowly that the poor psychic being must come back again and again and again, indeﬁnitely, to achieve its purpose. Therefore we can say without fear of being mistaken that physical culture is the sadhana of the body and that all sadhana necessarily helps to hasten the achievement of the goal.  The more consciously you do it, the quicker and more general the result, but even if you do it blindly, if you can see no further than the tips of your ﬁngers or your feet or your nose, you help the overall development.  Finally, one can say that any discipline that is followed rigorously, sincerely, deliberately, is a considerable help, for it enables life on earth to attain its goal more rapidly and prepares it to receive the new life. To discipline oneself is to hasten the arrival of this new life and the contact with the supramental reality.


The Mother: As it is, the physical body is truly nothing but a very disﬁgured shadow of the eternal life of the Self. But this physical body is capable of progressive development; through each individual formation, the physical substance progresses, and one day it will  be capable of building a bridge between physical life as we know it and the supramental life which is to manifest.  Sri Aurobindo is not asking a question, but rather making an ironic comment. It is to bring out clearly the stupidity of the reasonings of the mind, which imagines it can speak of what it does not know. It is nothing else.


The Mother: You can prove anything with the mind. When you know how to use it and have mastered reasoning and deduction, you can prove anything. As a matter of fact, this is an exercise that is given in universities to make the mind supple: you are given a thesis to prove and immediately afterwards, with equal conviction, you have to prove its antithesis — in the hope that if you rise a little above both, you will discover the synthesis.  Therefore, once it is conceded that anything can be proved, it follows that reasoning leads nowhere; because if you can prove something and in the next moment prove its opposite, this is the proof that your proofs are worthless.  There is experience.