The Mother: But it is precisely... it is part of the creation. What we call “Aditi” here, that is, the Creative Consciousness, well, the Creative Consciousness...  I am going to tell you about this in an absolutely childish way:  She formed at ﬁrst four beings; when she received the mission to create she put out four emanations from her being; and these four emanations were made and given the charge to develop the universe.


The Mother: And then — I think I have already spoken to you about this once — it turned out badly, we could put it like that; and so when things went wrong, she made another creation of all the beings who became the gods; and parallel to the disorder created by the ﬁrst four emanations, there was the development in order, that is, under the guidance of the Supreme, the creation in order of all the worlds descending further and further towards Matter. And it is to this line that the gods belong who were manifested later, a formation, a greater and greater materialisation in the domain which Sri Aurobindo has termed the Overmind. And from there they presided over the creation of the material universe and the earth. And one of the proceedings  was the formation of the earth as a symbolic creation representative of the whole universe, in order to condense and concentrate the problem so that it might be solved more easily.


The Mother: And this earth, though it may be from the astronomical point of view something inﬁnitesimal and as unimportant as can be, from the occult point of view of the universal creation it is a symbol which represents the universe so perfectly that by transforming the earth one can through contagion or analogy transform the universe, because the earth is the symbol of the universe. This was the procedure adopted by the gods. And the place that’s the seat of existence of these gods Sri Aurobindo has called the Overmind.  Of course things are not like that. Don’t think that I have just told you the story as it really happened.


The Mother: Things are not like that, but it’s a way of speaking, a way of making them understandable to the brain. It appears to have occurred like that.  But the four beings I ﬁrst spoke to you about are sexless, they were neither man nor woman; and in the vital world there is an entire part of the vital creation which is the result of these beings, an entire part which has no sex. Besides, the gods too made a world which was sexless. It is the world of angels, what are called angels, what in occultism are called fashioners.


The Mother: But these are sexless spirits; they are represented with wings, you know, they are sexless spirits.  There are in the universe, already, beings who have no sex, who are neither men nor women, and there are many of them in the vital world. There are entities with sex in the vital world but in its most material part, the one closest to the earth, and not in its most important part; the most important part is sexless.  This does not make them any better, however, since they are all beings hostile to the divine Will and divine realisation, but it gives them a terriﬁc force. And so in return the gods too have created a whole set of beings who have no sex and whom men speak of as angels; how does one call it?


The Mother: “Your guardian angel”, or what else? It is especially “angel”.   (Pavitra)  Yes, yes, that’s it. They have given many names.


The Mother: There, then.  What, the wives of the gods who were troubled by the asuras?  Yes!  It is in the vital world.  (Pavitra)


The Mother: There are beings of the mental world which are also sexless, not all, but many. There are many of them. There are some of these mental formations which are persistent, you see, which are very well made, very well harmonised, persistent, some kind of mental constructions, mental formations which are living beings, but which pass indifferently from a masculine to a feminine body when they incarnate. It is all the same to them, to them it makes no difference.  That’s all, or you still have something?


The Mother: That — it is Nature, my child, who has tried all kinds of methods. These are all means employed by Nature; she wanted... It would seem that for the perfection of the species the dividing  was necessary from the point of view of the material evolution; it seems so because obviously it was adopted later. This... Nature...


The Mother: I think she has tried every possible thing, everything.   Yes. Well, perhaps it is under their inspiration that Nature made it. It is certainly not because it appeared on earth that it is like that with the gods.


The Mother: So logically we can think that because it was like that among the gods it has become like that on earth.  But Nature doesn’t seem to have received direct inspirations; she seems to have followed her own path in her own fashion. Yet she has tried all possible things; I don’t think there’s anything she hasn’t tried, and she goes on. But Nature too has created sexless beings, even in human form; it has happened. I have even seen a Greek statue like that.


The Mother: The Greeks knew this.  Everything that one can imagine and much more, Nature has imagined. Only, she doesn’t want to be hurried. I think it amuses her. So she wants to go in her own way: trying, demolishing, re-starting, demolishing again.


The Mother: She can destroy an entire species by doing just this (), it is quite the same to her; she would simply say, “No, it was not good.” And then, there, it is ﬁnished. And she doesn’t want to be hurried. If she is told that we ﬁnd it has lasted long enough like this, that it could come to a slightly more harmonious conclusion, she revolts, she is not at all pleased. This is what she always says: “But why are you in a hurry?


The Mother: All that you want to do will happen, but it is not necessary that it should happen so fast. Why are you in such a hurry?” That’s what she always answers. She likes to roam about.  I think that Nature is the most material part of the creative force  which is concerned with the creation specially of the earth, of the material world as we know it upon earth.


The Mother: I want some information about the latest astronomical discoveries...  () Is similar matter known in the other worlds as that on the earth?   (Pavitra)  It is all the same.


The Mother: And then, how is it that we are told that human beings could not live on other planets, not even on Jupiter or Venus?   (Pavitra)  Yes. So the formation is not the same after all?


The Mother: (Pavitra) Yes, the one people usually know...  (Pavitra)  Cannot be the same, you see.  I have heard that only on the earth there are psychic beings, precisely because the earth has been created as a symbol for  concentrating the problem, and the psychic being, which is the result of the direct intervention of the Supreme, has been created here exactly for the necessities of this symbolic action.  For me, if you ask me, there are beings everywhere.


The Mother: Everywhere.  One doesn’t see them, that’s all. But they are everywhere. But certainly I don’t think they are like what we see in the pictures — the Martians you were shown in the pictures with grotesque forms. I have no reason to think that they are like that.


The Mother: Ah, yes! I have studied it also. However, I am waiting to have a physical experience. I indeed saw a ﬂying saucer pass over Pondicherry during the war, I saw it clearly, with open eyes, and going fairly slowly, coming from the sea to the land.


The Mother: It was light blue and had a slightly rounded shape like this. I saw it passing by and said to myself, “Why, I have a vision!” I rubbed my eyes but my eyes were open, completely open... Suddenly I saw a form passing in the sky like this; I told myself, “How strange it is!” but as no one had spoken about it till then, I thought that I had a vision. I see many things which people ordinarily don’t see; but when people started speaking about this, then I said to myself, “Why, I have seen a ﬂying saucer pass by.“


The Mother: But I think Udar also has seen a ﬂying saucer.  (Udar) (Laughter)  That it exists is unquestionable. What is it?


The Mother: Each one has his opinion. But what I would like is to ﬁnd myself face to face with the beings as they have been described. There is someone who has, supposedly... anyway, he said that he has spoken to a being who was in a ﬂying saucer. Well, I would be very happy to meet  a being like that.


The Mother: After that I shall tell you what it is — when I have met it.   You must go there and see. ()   Ah!


The Mother: Yes, one can go everywhere. What prevents us from going?  One goes everywhere. Only, you see, we must know that it is not the physical body which goes; it is the most material thing... the most material vital; and this is already very difﬁcult.  Usually it is the mental part of the vital which goes out; not the mind, the vital.


The Mother: For short distances one can go out from his body with the subtle physical, and in these cases one sees things materially as they are. But one can’t go long distances.  There are practical reasons, but above all there is the reason of safety; because if one goes too far with the subtle physical, the body is not only in a trance, it is in a cataleptic state, and then, unless it is guarded by someone who has a very profound knowledge and a great power, this can turn out badly. Therefore, for these long journeys it is usually the most subtle part of the vital (which corresponds to a kind of mental consciousness of the vital), which goes out.  So one sees everything which has a similar quality.


The Mother: But supposing there is something very material, one doesn’t see it as it is. So one can’t say with certainty, “It is like this or like that.”  One can say, “I saw this,” that’s all. But one can’t recount stories like those in the papers about what is happening on the moon or Jupiter or Venus. One can have an experience and know certain things but usually they are things of a more psychological nature.


The Mother: However, if it is in order to know whether there are some  beings there, I don’t think there’s any place in the universe where there aren’t beings, because that’s the very principle of this universe: individual creations. Everywhere there are individual creations but they have different densities. Most of them are invisible except to those with a similar density, and only those who have the capacity of coming out of their bodies and going for a stroll can see these things. But so long as you use these eyes you can’t see very much.  Such a limited ﬁeld of vision!


The Mother: In fact, when you think of it, such an absolutely ridiculous limitation! The ﬁeld of our sense experience has an absolutely ridiculous limitation; while in the mind, if you think of someone or something, a city or a place, you are there immediately, instantaneously, you see.  And you are there — it is not that you are not there, you are there, and you can have so precise a mental contact that you can have a conversation, ask questions and receive answers, on condition that the other person is fairly sensitive. Why, this is something which happens constantly, constantly. Only, you must have a little knowledge, naturally, for otherwise you don’t even understand what is happening.


The Mother: Even physically, with this, with the eyes, the nose, the ﬁngers, the mouth, the ears, oh, it is ridiculous! One can develop these if one wants. One can succeed, for example, in hearing something which occurs at a fairly great distance and hearing it physically, not by another means than the physical, but one must have a control over his senses and be able to prolong their vibrations sufﬁciently. One can see at a distance also, and not by an occult vision. One can manage to stretch his vision, and if he knows how to prolong the vibration of his nerves outside the organ, he can prolong the contact, I don’t say some kilometres away, no, but in a certain area, say, for example, through a wall, which is considered something impossible; one can see what is going on in a room which is separated from another by a wall.


The Mother: But a very methodical practice is necessary.  Yet this is possible, seeing, feeling, hearing. If one wants to take  the trouble, one can enlarge his ﬁeld considerably. But it asks for work, for perseverance, a kind of assiduous effort. Why, it has even been found that one can develop other visual centres than the eye.


The Mother: It has been tried out with people who, for some reason or other, have no vision in the eye. One can develop other centres or another centre of vision, by a continuous, methodical effort. Jules Romains has written a book about it. He himself conducted experiments and obtained very conclusive results.  This means that we have a number of possibilities which we let sleep within us, because we don’t take the trouble to develop them very much.


The Mother: We can do inﬁnitely more than we actually do.  But we take things like that, as they come.   I can see that you haven’t understood three-fourths of the thing.  Now we shall go slowly, step by step.  () Ask a question just from where it begins; simply say, “Here, what does this mean?”


The Mother: So?  By what should one begin?  You see, Sri Aurobindo deﬁnes religion as the seeking after the spiritual, that is, the Supermind, of what is beyond the ordinary human consciousness, and what ought to inﬂuence life from a higher realm. So, as religion seeks this it is beyond the reason, because it goes to the suprarational.


The Mother: And so how can reason help in the realm of religion? What he means is that if one uses reason to judge the ﬁeld of religion and progress in it, one is sure to make mistakes, because reason is not the master there and it is not capable of enlightening. If you want to judge any religion with your reason, you are sure to make mistakes, for  it is outside and beyond the ﬁeld of reason. Reason can judge things which belong to the rational domain of ordinary life. And as he says later, the true role of reason is to be like a control and an organiser of the movements of human life in the mind and the vital.


The Mother: Each time, for example, that one has some kind of vital disorder, of the passions, desires, impulses and all these things, if one calls the reason and looks at these things from the point of view of reason, one can put them back into order. It is truly the role of reason to organise and regulate all the movements of the vital and the mind. For instance, you can call the reason in order to see whether two ideas can go together or whether they contradict each other, whether two theories can stand side by side in your mental construction or one demolishes the other. It belongs to the domain of reason to judge and organise all these things, and also perhaps still more it is the work of reason to see whether the impulses are reasonable or not, whether they will lead to a catastrophe or can be tolerated and will not disturb anything in the life. So, this is its full domain; that’s what Sri Aurobindo says.


The Mother: But in order to know the value of a religion, whether it truly has the power to put you into contact with the Divine, with the spiritual life, to lead you to it, how can the reason judge, since it is beyond its domain? It knows nothing about it. It is not its ﬁeld, it understands nothing there. We must use other means.  Naturally, that’s how he begins, at the end he will say what means one can use; I don’t know whether it is at the end of these chapters, but in any case he always gives an indication.


The Mother: That’s what this means; he says: Don’t use reason, you cannot judge with it — that’s all.  Reason? Yes. If it is really reason, it is right. It is not absolutely right if one looks at things from the spiritual point of view, for  it understands nothing in these domains, but from the rational point of view it is naturally the sovereign judge.


The Mother: For everything that concerns the ordinary life, and as I say, the mental, vital and physical life of man, a perfectly reasonable being, one who lives according to his reason, cannot make a mistake from this point of view. It is only if one says, “Human life restricted to these planes is not complete, nor perfect in these three planes, it is necessary to introduce a fourth one in it, the spiritual or suprarational plane”, then from this point of view we begin to say, “Reason understands nothing of this, and here it must keep quiet and let the suprarational inﬂuence work.”  But from the viewpoint of the ordinary life, for people who lead the ordinary life, who do not want to do yoga or develop spiritually, reason is certainly an absolute and very recommendable master. People who live according to reason are usually very sattwic and do not commit any kind of excesses or make serious mistakes, they live reasonably. It is only when one comes out of the ordinary life, when one wants to enter a life leading to a spiritual realisation, that the reason has to abdicate.


The Mother: It can help all the same so long as one is not the absolute master of the movements of his mind and vital. As long as these two things are not transformed, to use your reason is very reasonable, because it will help you to master these movements.  Another question?  () You have understood, haven’t you? — understood something in any case.


The Mother: No? Then ask a question.   Ah! That, my child, when we have read the chapter you will know, because that’s the very subject of the chapter.


The Mother: So he is going to explain it to you right through. If I tell you about it now it won’t be worth the trouble to read the chapter. ( )   Of the mind properly speaking, of the human mind, yes, certainly.


The Mother: That is, with the reason one doesn’t risk making mistakes, as long as one remains in the purely human and purely mental domain.  Because it understands nothing about it. Spiritual life goes beyond it, it is not its domain, and it doesn’t understand anything there. It is a very good instrument for all ethics, morality, selfcontrol, but spiritual life goes beyond these things and reason understands nothing of it.


The Mother: Yes.   On condition that it keeps quiet, does not intervene any more... if it tries to intervene it is an obstacle, if it withdraws in an orderly way and remains quiet, then it is very good.  It is an obstacle if you want to use it as judge and master.


The Mother: But it is not an obstacle if you use it as an instrument, like all the other parts of the being. It is an excellent instrument on condition that it remains an instrument and doesn’t want to become the master who decides and judges. It is a power of judgment which, in its ﬁeld, is absolutely right. But as soon as it goes beyond its domain, it cannot understand, it has no discernment any longer.  So if the reason understands this and keeps quiet, with the attitude of an instrument and not of master and judge, it is perfect.


The Mother: But for this the growing consciousness must already be developed enough in a suprarational domain to be able to  act on the reason from above and make it understand the thing, because that domain is not a part of reason. So naturally it denies it unless there is a part of the consciousness which is sufﬁciently developed to be able to put something upon it that will make it understand. All depends on the degree of development of the individual’s consciousness. It is a purely individual question.  It is rather a state than a domain.


The Mother: In the physical it is possible to have a suprarational domain, in the vital it is possible to have a suprarational domain, in the mind too it is possible to have a suprarational domain, and there are suprarational regions which lie beyond all these domains. In a certain part of the consciousness and of life it is rather a state than a region.  It is a mode of being. It is something which goes beyond the state of ordinary consciousness. But even physically it can be experienced, vitally also.


The Mother: Suddenly one may feel that one is in contact with something surpassing all rational regions and it is there, in the vital itself, it is an inﬂuence acting from above.  Otherwise it would be absolutely impossible to hope for the transformation of the lower parts of the being — either mental or vital or physical; they could never be transformed if they were incapable of receiving into themselves the suprarational inﬂuence; and it is here, it is to be found, to be discovered.  Yes, this is what we said, that in the rational domain that’s what gives the true judgment, the true guidance. This is what we call an enlightener: one who gives light. When you are not sure of  something, when you are in darkness, in a confusion, if you call to reason, it can guide you very well, make you see clearly where you were in darkness; therefore it is an enlightener.


The Mother: Now, “minister of the Spirit” means precisely what he was asking, that is, that it can be transformed into an instrument for revealing the spiritual reality in the lower parts of the being; “minister of the Spirit” — that’s what it means; a minister is an instrument of something, you see, it means the instrument of the Spirit.  And it can prepare the paths for the coming of the rule of the Spirit, precisely make the being balanced and peaceful, right in its judgments, right in its way of acting, so that being in a state of luminous equilibrium, it becomes capable of receiving the Spirit.  A being who is in a whirlwind of darkness is obviously not ready to receive the Spirit. But when by the use of reason one has managed to organise his being logically and reasonably, in a balanced and wise way — reason is essentially an instrument of wisdom — well, this is an excellent preparation for going beyond, on condition that one knows that it is not a culmination, that it is only a preparation. It is like a base, you see; people who have spiritual experiences, who have a contact with the higher worlds and are not ready in the lower domains, have a lot of trouble, because they have to ﬁght constantly against a heap of elements which are neither organised nor puriﬁed nor classiﬁed; and each one pulls its own way, there are impulses and preferences and desires, and so this light which has come from above has to organise all this; whereas if the reason had worked to begin with and made the place at least a habitable one, when the Spirit came it would have been more easily installed.


The Mother: Oh! By using it. Reason is developed like the muscles, like the will. All these things are developed by a rational use.


The Mother: Reason!  Everyone possesses reason, only he doesn’t make use of it. Some people are very much afraid of reason because it contradicts their  impulses. So they prefer not to listen to it. Then, naturally, if one makes it a habit not to listen to reason, instead of developing, it loses its light more and more.


The Mother: To develop reason you must want to do it sincerely; if on one side you tell yourself, “I want to develop my reason”, and on the other you don’t listen to what the reason tells you to do, then you never come to anything, because naturally, if each time it tells you, “Don’t do this” or “Do this”, you do the opposite, it will lose the habit of saying anything at all.  It cannot do it. That’s exactly what Sri Aurobindo is going to tell you in here: that reason is quite useless for appreciating beauty. In the last analysis, it is worthless, because beauty is something analogous to religion and goes beyond reason. The whole chapter is going to explain this to you.


The Mother: That is why he calls it the suprarational beauty. The higher principle of beauty is a suprarational principle and therefore reason understands nothing at all about it. If you want to judge art by reason you are sure to say foolish things.  In here (I think it is in this very chapter), he shows that beauty belongs to a domain as lofty as that of religion; that through beauty one can come into contact with the Divine even as through religion. And the next chapter is “The Suprarational Good”, and there he is going to show that reason cannot be the ﬁnal judge also for what is good and not good; that the ﬁnal judge is a suprarational judge.


The Mother: Only, in the same way, it can be a preparation, it can prepare the road by which to go there; but it is only a preparation. Of course, to understand fully what he wanted to tell us, we should have to read the entire book. But that way it would take us something like ten years, so I am not  trying. I have taken only these because these two subjects are very interesting, apart from all the others: beauty and the good.


The Mother: Beauty is the aesthetic instinct of man, and the good is his ethical instinct, and these two things are very important in human education and growth; and that is why I have chosen these two chapters for you. But to have the full development of the idea you must read the whole book. Later you will read it... perhaps some of you will have the curiosity to read it.  Aesthetic is what is concerned with beauty, and ethical with the good.


The Mother: Look, my children, if there are words which you don’t understand, take a dictionary and look them up. Because that will teach you the language and at the same time you will learn a little French. But, these words are the same in English; you ought to know them. They are written a little differently, pronounced a little differently, but they are exactly the same words.  A function of preparation, as I said; it is in order to prepare for something higher which is suprarational and which must come.


The Mother: It is a preparation. You see, he has said, “one would think”, it means that it is just an impression one has that its right is indisputable. It is not indisputable. He says that its province is vast, you see, that its powers are ample, that its action is more self-conﬁdent, but it always ﬁnds itself standing between the two other powers of our being, the infrarational and the suprarational. It is an intermediary to free us from the infrarational inﬂuence — that of all the instincts, all the desires, all the  passions, all the impulses — to free us from this domain and prepare for the coming of the suprarational one.


The Mother: Therefore it is an instrument of mediation, of transition, and in this intermediating... in this region, it is the best master. But it cannot go further.   There is a point where it loses its power. When one is ready for the suprarational intervention, well, it has to keep quiet; and if for example, by an inner development, by a yogic action you have managed to come into contact with a divine consciousness and receive inspirations from this divine consciousness, if at this moment you want to judge these inspirations by the reason, then you are sure to make stupid mistakes, because reason understands nothing of this, and it should abdicate.


The Mother: But you must be sure that it is truly a contact with the divine Force; and to be sure of this... well, until one is sure of it, reason is very good for preventing you from deceiving yourself.  Usually people who have a tendency for not altogether ordinary experiences ﬁnd reason very troublesome; and even before being ready to surpass its action they reject it, and that is how usually they become absolutely unreasonable and end up by being half-mad. That is why, so long as you don’t have an absolute certainty of having reached where you want to go, well, you must keep the reason very active in yourself in order to prevent yourself from becoming derailed. This is very, very important.


The Mother: One cannot dethrone reason unless the experience of the higher regions is so absolute, so true, so complete, that it compels recognition. It is not a very frequent thing. So I always advise people to keep their reason. But there’s a point where it must cease having its superior rights — that’s to judge spiritual experience, because it cannot judge this, it does not understand it; but it must truly be a spiritual experience, not something which tries to imitate it; here an absolute sincerity is necessary.  One must not deceive oneself through ambition, or indeed let oneself be deceived by any odd humbugs who come and tell you extraordinary stories in order to make you believe in their superiority.


The Mother: That’s all?   Oh! What does it mean, to prepare the path?  Have you never had the feeling in your life that you were on the way towards something?


The Mother: No? One doesn’t have the impression that when he is born he begins to set his feet on a road which is going to lead him by a curve through his whole life? That’s the image. So if you take the path which must lead you to a spiritual realisation, well, it means that all your actions are deliberately going to be directed to this goal. And so he says that there is a bit of the way which is under the control of reason and that reason, if you follow it, helps you to go forward here without your making mistakes too often.


The Mother: For it is quite remarkable that in life you start without knowing anything, and that at each step you take you have to learn, and that usually you come to the end, to the end of the path, without having learnt anything very much, because too often you make mistakes and you have nothing to guide you.  Ordinary people enter life without even knowing what it is to live, and at each step they have to learn how to live. And before knowing what they want to realise, they must at least know how to walk; as we teach a tiny little child how to walk, in life one has also to learn how to live. Which people know how to live? And it is through experience, through mistakes, through all kinds of misfortunes and troubles of every sort that gradually one begins to be what is called reasonable, that is, when one has made a mistake a certain number of times and has had troublesome consequences from this mistake, one learns not to make it again.


The Mother: But there is a moment, when the brain is developed enough and you can use the reason, well, reason can help you to reduce the number of these mistakes, to teach you to walk the path without stumbling too often.  The immense majority of human beings are born, live and  die without knowing why this has happened to them. They take it... it is like that; they are born, they live, they have what they call their joys and their sorrows, and they come to the end and go away. They came in and went out without learning anything.


The Mother: This indeed is the immense majority.  There is among them a small number of people called the , who try to know what has happened to them, why they are upon earth and why all that happens to them happens. Then among these there are some who use their reason and they ﬁnd a way of walking properly on the path, much faster than the others. These are reasonable beings.  Now there is a handful — a big handful — of people who are born with the feeling that there is something else to ﬁnd in life, a higher purpose to life, that there is an aim, and they strive to ﬁnd it.


The Mother: So for these the path goes beyond reason, to regions which they have to explore either with or without help, as chance takes them, and they must then discover the higher worlds. But there are not many of this kind. I don’t know how many of these there are now in the world, but I have the impression that they could still be counted. So for these it depends on when they begin.  Now there are beings, I think, who are born and whose rational period of life may begin very early, when they are very young, and it may last for a very short time; and then they are almost immediately ready to set out on new and unexplored paths towards the higher realities.


The Mother: But in order to set out on these paths without fear and without any danger, one must have organised his being with the help of reason around the highest centre he consciously possesses, and organised it in such a way that it is inwardly in his control and he has not to say at every moment, “Ah! I have done this, I don’t know why. Ah! That’s happened to me, I don’t know why” — and always it is “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know”, and as long as it is like that, the path is somewhat dangerous. Only when one does what he wants, knows what he wants, does what he wants and is able to direct himself with certitude, without being tossed about by the  hazards of life, then one can go forward on the suprarational paths fearlessly, unhesitatingly and with the least danger. But one need not be very old for this to happen.


The Mother: One can begin very young; even a child of ﬁve can already make use of reason to control himself; I know it. There is enough mental organisation in the being in these little tots who look so spontaneous and irresponsible; there is enough cerebral organisation for them to organise themselves, their life, their nature, their movements, actions and thoughts with reason.  There are some little ones here of this kind. They are not all like that but there are some. There are some like that here, I know them.


The Mother: So if these were taught how to use their reason properly while still very young, they would be ready to start on the great adventure. They would gain much time. But one must not set out on this road with a baggage of impulses and desires, for that brings along all kinds of serious disturbances.  There, my children, that’s all?  Nobody is saying a word?


The Mother: () You have still something to say?  Oh, no!  Because human reason is higher than Nature.  Nature is infrarational. The laws of Nature are infrarational laws.


The Mother: So when men come along and tell you, “But what do you want, it is the law of Nature”, as for me, it makes me laugh.  It is not worth being a man, it would be better for you to be a monkey or an elephant or a lion. The laws of Nature are infrarational.   This is the only superiority that man has, his having a reason, and when he doesn’t make use of it he becomes absolutely an animal.  That’s the last excuse to give: “What do you want, it’s the law of Nature!”


The Mother: It is late, otherwise I would tell you a few stories.  We must stop.   What do you want to ask about this?  It is the consciousness of beauty. Aesthetic means that which concerns beauty, art.


The Mother: There are people, for example, who move around in life and see landscapes, see people and things and have absolutely no sense of whether it is beautiful or not; and into the bargain, it makes no difference at all to them. They look at the sky, see whether there are any clouds, whether it will rain or be clear, for instance; or whether the sun is hot or the wind cold. But there are others — when they raise their eyes and look at a beautiful sky, it gives them pleasure, they say, “Oh! It is ﬁne today, the sunrise is lovely today, the sunset is beautiful, the clouds have ﬁne shapes.” So, the ﬁrst kind do not have an aesthetic conscience, the second have.


The Mother: “Scale” gives the idea of a gradation from the lowest to the highest powers; as, for example, the faculty to walk and the faculty to think: there’s a gradation between the two; the faculty of walking is an altogether physical one, the faculty of thinking is something intellectual. So these are different gradations of the consciousness of which Sri Aurobindo speaks here, “the ordinary scale of our powers”; he is not speaking of spiritual or yogic things; it is the scale of ordinary life, that is, for everyone it is like that. For he says that even in the barbarian, the savage,  there is something which is not altogether savage, and that he has, he too, indeed, this scale; it is more rudimentary, more crude, but it exists, from the most material thing to an embryo of thought and speculation. As we are told, he has his own opinion about the world and what the world is, he has an idea about these things; it is perhaps a little childish but he has an idea about them. So he too has this gradation.


The Mother: Of course there are higher faculties than that of thought, but they are not frequent, that is, one doesn’t often come across them.  That’s all? What are we going to do?  The next one? But the next one is for next Wednesday, unless you want me to read it to you.


The Mother: You have some questions? You have questions, you? Over there, do you have any questions? No questions?


The Mother: There is a beauty of feelings; unless you think that feelings also have a form. What you mean is: “Is there a beauty outside any physical form?”   Ah! Yes, there is a beauty of thought, a beauty of feeling.


The Mother: This is something we perceive very often; when someone has done a very noble deed, very generous, very unselﬁsh, quite spontaneously we say, “It is beautiful!” And it’s true, it gives the sense of beauty.   Beauty is not something purely physical. However, we have said that the best expression of the Divine in the physical world is beauty; but it is not exclusive, it does not mean that it is only in the physical world.  (


The Mother: )  Isn’t that all right?  It springs from the roots of our life — so?  He means that it is instinctive, that it isn’t rational, it doesn’t depend on the domain of reason, it is something instinctive.


The Mother: We have a sense of beauty and love beauty without even knowing why, and there are things which give the sense of beauty without our knowing why, without our reasoning. It is instinctive. He says that this is the infrarational stage of the aesthetic sense. It is absolutely obvious that a child, who sees a pretty ﬂower and has the feeling of beauty he does not know why, would never be able to tell you that it’s because the form is balanced and the colours are lovely; he cannot explain it. Therefore it is not rational, it is altogether instinctive, it is an attraction, an impulse drawing one towards something, a harmony one feels, without being able to deﬁne it.


The Mother: But most often it is like that. It is rarely that one is able to say, “This thing is beautiful because of that, because of this,” and to give a whole lecture on the beauty of something.  Usually, one simply feels that it is beautiful; if later one wonders, “Why did I feel it is beautiful?” then, by making an effort with one’s intelligence one may succeed in understanding it; but at the  beginning one is not preoccupied with the why , one feels that it is beautiful, and that’s all, one is satisﬁed with that.  For example, you enter a historical building, and suddenly you are seized by the sense of a great beauty;


The Mother: how do you explain it? If someone asks you about it you would say, “Well, I feel that it is beautiful.” But if an architect enters a building and has the same feeling that it is beautiful, he will immediately tell you, “It’s because the lines meet harmoniously, the mass of the volumes is in harmony, the entire structure follows certain laws of beauty, order and rhythm”, and he will explain them to you.  But that’s because he is an architect, and yet you could have felt the beauty as much as he without being able to explain it. Well, your feeling for beauty is what Sri Aurobindo calls infrarational, and his feeling for beauty is what Sri Aurobindo calls rational, because he can explain with his reason why he ﬁnds it beautiful.


The Mother: But even when you look at someone, a person, and ﬁnd her beautiful, would you be able to tell yourself why? Not often. If you make an effort, look attentively, reﬂect, then you may begin to tell yourself, “Yes, why! it is for this, it is for that”, and it is not at all certain that you are right.  In fact, beauty is something very elusive. It is a kind of harmony which you experience much more than think, and the true suprarational relation with beauty is not at all a “reasonable” relation (Sri Aurobindo will tell you this at the end), it completely overpasses reason, it is a contact in a higher realm.


The Mother: But what precisely he tells us in this paragraph is that when it is an instinct it is found mixed with movements of ignorance and a lack of culture and reﬁnement. So this instinct is sometimes very gross and very imperfect in its expression. One can experience an aesthetic pleasure (let us call it that) in seeing something which is truly beautiful and at the same time something else which is not beautiful, but which gives one some sort of pleasure, because it is mixed, because one’s aesthetic instinct is not pure, it is mixed with all kinds of sensations which are very crude and untrained.  So it is here, as he says, that reason has its role, that it comes  in to explain why a thing is beautiful, to educate the taste; but it is not ﬁnal, and reason is not the ﬁnal judge; it can very well make mistakes, only it is a little higher, as judgment, than that of a completely infrarational being who has no reason and no understanding of things. It is a stage.


The Mother: It is a stage, that’s what he says, it is a stage. But if you want to realise true beauty, you must go beyond that, very far beyond this stage. In what follows in our reading he will explain it. But this is the summary of what he has said in this paragraph. At ﬁrst your sense of beauty is instinctive, impulsive, infrarational, lacking light, wanting reason, simply without any true understanding, and so, because the origin of the aesthetic sense is infrarational, it is understood, one always says this: “There’s no disputing tastes and colours.”


The Mother: You know, there are all kinds of popular proverbs which say that the appreciation of the beautiful is not a matter of reasoning, everyone likes a particular thing he doesn’t know why, he takes pleasure in looking at a thing, and this pleasure cannot be discussed. Well, this is the infrarational stage of the aesthetic sense.  Ah, you suppose that I remember! What was it about?


The Mother: Oh! It is not interesting.  It was a group of people whom I met in Paris. A certain gentleman had founded a group called “The Morality of Nature”, and so he took his stand on all the movements of Nature to set up his moral code. But we know that Nature is... how to put it... a force, a consciousness or being, call it what you like, which is absolutely amoral, for whom the moral sense does not exist  at all.


The Mother: So naturally this had rather disastrous results in practice.   And in the very meeting where this gentleman was expounding his theories, there was a Catholic priest, a very learned man who studied many things (he knew lots of things), who immediately began to tell him that his morality of Nature was not moral.  Then the other gentleman was not pleased and told him, “Oh, yes! You climb to the seventh storey of your ivory tower and from there you look at things without understanding them”.


The Mother: “The seventh storey of your ivory tower” was very amusing.  Well, he had found, according to himself (I don’t remember his name now), he had found the means of being happy, that everyone may be satisﬁed and men may love one another. So naturally people who did not agree with him, said to him, “But how does it happen that when the law of Nature alone reigns — as for example, without even going as far as the animal, in vegetable life — how does it happen that there are constant massacres between plants and the perpetual struggle for life?  Is this what you call harmony?” Then the other man did not understand anything.


The Mother: In fact, people who are interested in general questions, those who come out of their little daily preoccupations of being born, living and dying, living as well as possible — there are people not satisﬁed with this, who try to have general ideas and look at world problems — these people make an inner effort or a mental effort, and in one way or another enter into contact with the great currents of forces, at ﬁrst currents of mental force, of the higher light and sometimes of spiritual force. Then they receive a kind of drop of that within their consciousness, and this produces in them the illumination of a revelation, and they feel that they have grasped the truth. They have a revelation and so naturally are very happy and immediately think,“My happiness I am going to pass on to others”; for they are very ﬁne people, they have very good intentions. Then, to pass on their happiness to others they begin by making a construction around their revelation; they must make it into a system; otherwise how  to preach to others? So they make a system, like this gentleman.


The Mother: I have met hundreds like this in the world. Now, each one had had a revelation and had constructed something which seemed to him to be the solution to all problems. They wanted to apply it to everything. So they gathered people around them; according to the strength of their inﬂuence, their power, they gathered more people or less, from three or four to some hundreds; sometimes they had groups and they said, “Here we are, if everyone does what we do, well, the world will be transformed.”  Unfortunately it was only a spark of light, and their construction was purely mental and not free from the ordinary laws of life.


The Mother: And so the people in the groups who were to have preached to the world harmony, beauty, happiness, joy and peace, etc., quarrelled among themselves. This took away all power from their teaching. It is like this, and in fact it is true.  It is only when something absolutely new and absolutely superior enters the earth atmosphere and changes it by a kind of spiritual coercion, it is only at that moment that human consciousness will change sufﬁciently for circumstances also to change.  As for me, I have no illusions on the subject, because I know that Sri Aurobindo saw the truth of things and therefore, if humanity were ready to be transformed simply by the vision of the truth of things, well, at least all those who are in contact with this truth should be transformed.


The Mother: Well, they aren’t.   You know all the defects which you have, personally and collectively, and how in spite of a goodwill which must be obvious, there is still much to do for the world to be as one conceives it when one comes out of ordinary notions — simply, let us say a world of harmony, peace, understanding, broadmindedness, goodwill, unselﬁshness, disinterested consecration to a higher ideal, self-forgetfulness... you want more of these things, there are still many more. You must begin with just a little at ﬁrst, simply this: to have slightly greater ideas, a little vaster understanding, not to be sectarian.


The Mother: What kind of reason! But why do you suppose that it is reason?  Unless reason is just an explanation we give of what they do!  But otherwise why do you suppose that it is reason?  But perhaps it is just because it does not guide them that they do what they do and as they do it, isn’t that so?


The Mother: But have you ever seen that the human ascent is like that, a funicular ascent, quite straight? It turns all the time. So if you assume that there are vertical lines which are lines of a kind of human progress, then when things come there, they progress, but when they go further away they degenerate.  I shall tell you perhaps in ten years... I don’t know, perhaps in ten years I shall tell you whether there is something in


The Mother: modern painting. Because I am going to tell you something curious: for the moment I ﬁnd it downright ugly, not only ugly but stupid; but what is frightening is that it makes you completely sick of all other pictures. When one sees painting as it is done today... for we receive all the time art reviews in which, with much intelligence, are put reproductions of both ancient and modern pictures, and they are put side by side, which makes the thing very interesting, you can see both and compare. I can’t manage to have yet a very clear notion of beauty in what modern painters do, I confess this, I haven’t yet understood; but what is curious is that they have succeeded in taking away from me all the taste for the painting of old;


The Mother: except some very  rare things, the rest seems to me pompous, artiﬁcial, ridiculous, unbearable.  Now this means that behind this incoherence and chaos there certainly is, there must be a creative spirit which is trying to manifest.  We have passed from a particular world which had reached its perfection and was declining, this is absolutely obvious. And so to pass from that creation to a new creation (because... well, suppose that it is the forces of ordinary Nature which are acting), instead of passing through a continuous ascent, there was evidently a fall into a chaos, that is, the chaos is necessary for a new creation.  The methods of Nature are like that.


The Mother: Before our solar system could exist, there was chaos. Well, in passing from this artistic construction which had reached a kind of summit, before passing from this to a new creation, it seems to me still the same thing, evidently a chaos. And the impression I have when I look at these things is that they are not sincere, and that’s what is annoying.  It is not sincere: either it is someone who has amused himself by being as mad as possible or perhaps it is someone who wanted to deceive others or maybe deceive even himself, or again, a kind of incoherent fantasy in which one puts a blot of paint in one place and then says immediately, “Why, it would be funny to put it there, and if one put it here, like this, and again if one put this like that, and again...” There, for the moment this is the impression it gives me, and I don’t feel that it is something sincere.


The Mother: But there is a sincere creative spirit behind, which is trying to manifest, which, for the moment, does not manifest, but is strong enough to destroy the past. That is, there was a time when I used to look at the pictures of Rembrandt, of Titian, of Tintoretto, the pictures of Renoir and Monet, I felt a great aesthetic joy. This aesthetic joy I don’t feel any more. I have progressed because I follow the whole movement of terrestrial evolution; therefore, I have had to overpass this cycle, I have  arrived at another; and this one seems to me empty of aesthetic joy. From the point of view of reason one may dispute this, speak of all the beautiful and good things which have been done, all that is a different affair.


The Mother: But this subtle something, precisely, which is the true aesthetic joy, is gone, I don’t feel it any longer.  Of course I am a hundred miles away from having it when I look at the things they are now doing. But still it is something which is behind this that has made the other disappear. So perhaps by making just a little effort towards the future we are going to be able to ﬁnd the formula of the new beauty. That would be interesting.


The Mother: It is quite recently that this impression came to me; it is not old. I have tried with the most perfect goodwill, by abolishing all kinds of preferences, preconceived ideas, habits, past tastes, all that; all that eliminated, I look at their pictures and I don’t succeed in getting any pleasure; it doesn’t give me any, sometimes it gives me a disgust, but above all the impression of something that’s not true, a painful impression of insincerity.  But then quite recently, I suddenly felt this, this sensation of something very new, something of the future pushing, pushing, trying to manifest, trying to express itself and not succeeding, but something which will be a terriﬁc progress over all that has been felt and expressed before; and then, at the same time is born the movement of consciousness which turns to this new thing and wants to grasp it. This will perhaps be interesting.  That is why I told you: ten years.


The Mother: Perhaps in ten years there will be people who have found a new expression. A great progress would be necessary, an immense progress in the technique; the old technique seems barbarous. And now with the new scientiﬁc discoveries perhaps the technique of execution will change and one could ﬁnd a new technique which would then express this new beauty which wants to manifest. We shall speak about it in ten years’ time.  !


The Mother: Now then! We shall have impromptu, improvised questions, not prepared ones. ( ) You have any?


The Mother: But he stresses precisely that. It is simply in order to stress the point. It means that all this perfection which we are going to acquire is not for a personal and selﬁsh end, it is in order to be able to manifest the Divine, it is put at the service of the Divine.  We do not pursue this development with a selﬁsh intention of personal perfection; we pursue it because the divine Work has to be accomplished.


The Mother: No, not at all! It is because that’s the divine Will. It is not at all for a personal reason, it must not be that. It is because it’s the divine Will and it’s the divine Work.  So long as a personal aspiration or desire, a selﬁsh will, get mingled in it, it always creates a mixture and is not exactly an expression of the divine Will.


The Mother: The only thing which must count is the Divine, His Will, His manifestation, His expression. One is here for that, one is that, and nothing else. And so long as there is a feeling of self, of the ego, the person, which enters,  well, this proves that one is not yet what one ought to be, that’s all. I don’t say that this can be done overnight but still this indeed is the truth.  It is just because even in this ﬁeld, the spiritual ﬁeld, there are far too many people (I could say even the majority of those who take to the spiritual life and do yoga), far too many of these who do it for personal reasons, all kinds of personal reasons: some because they are disgusted with life, others because they are unhappy, others still because they want to know more, others because they want to become spiritually great, others because they want to learn things which they may be able to teach others;


The Mother: indeed there are a thousand personal reasons for taking up yoga.   But the simple fact of giving oneself to the Divine so that the Divine takes you and makes of you what He wills, and this in all its purity and constancy, well, there are not many who do that and yet this indeed is the truth; and with this one goes straight to the goal and never risks making mistakes. But all the other motives are always mixed, tainted with ego; and naturally they can lead you here and there, very far from the goal also.  But that kind of feeling that you have only one single reason for existence, one single goal, one single motive, the entire, perfect, complete consecration to the Divine to the point of not being able to distinguish yourself from Him any longer, to be Himself entirely, completely, totally without any personal reaction intervening, this is the ideal attitude; and besides, it is the only one which makes it possible for you to go forward in life and in the work, absolutely protected from everything and protected from yourself which is of all dangers the greatest for you — there is no greater danger than the self


The Mother: (I take “self” in the sense of an egoistic self).  This is what Sri Aurobindo meant there, nothing else.  Now, who has found a question?  It is not in the words of the book that you must ﬁnd the question, it is in the reaction that you had to what I read. If you have listened, it has had a certain effect on you, you must have  had some reactions: it is this, these reactions which you must elucidate in yourself and if you could tell me one day, “Why!


The Mother: I felt like that, what does it mean, this sensation? Why did I think like that?” These surely are the questions! For then it would be the opportunity to elucidate something in your consciousness.  When I read you surely must have some reaction somewhere, even were it only in your head.


The Mother: Well, this is what you should note and ask: “When I heard that sentence, why did I suddenly feel like this? When that was said, why did it make me think of this?” These would be interesting questions.   Yes.


The Mother: Because this is why He has created the earth, not for any other motive; the earth is He Himself in a deformation and He wants to establish it back again in its truth. Earth is not something separated from Him and alien to Him. It is a deformation of Himself which must once again become what it was in its essence, that is, the Divine.  But He is not a stranger, my child. You fancy that He is a stranger, but He is not, not in the least.


The Mother: He is the essence of your being — not at all alien. You may not know Him, but He is not a stranger; He is the very essence of your being. Without the Divine you would not exist. Without the Divine you could not exist even for the millionth part of a second. Only, because you live in a kind of false illusion and deformation, you are not  conscious.


The Mother: You are not conscious of yourself, you are conscious of something which you think to be yourself, but which isn’t you.   The Divine!  I didn’t catch the end of the sentence.  (Pavitra)


The Mother: Yes. Why?  (Pavitra)  Funny! Ah!


The Mother: That is why I didn’t understand. Funny, yes; but from a certain point of view it is true; what everybody does, from a certain point of view, is funny.  Change?...  (Pavitra)   Immediately?


The Mother: (Pavitra)   Yes, but a revolution can occur in half a second; it can also take years, even centuries, and even many lives. It can be done in a second.  One can do it.


The Mother: Precisely, when one has this inner reversal of consciousness, in one second everything, everything changes... precisely this bewilderment of being able to think that what one is, what one considers as oneself is not true, and that what is the truth of one’s being is something one doesn’t know. You see, this should have been the normal reaction, the one she had, of saying, “But then what is myself? If what I feel as myself is an illusory formation and not the truth of my being, then what is myself?” For that she doesn’t know. And so when one asks the question like that...


The Mother: There is a moment — because it is a question which becomes more and more intense and more and more acute — when you have even the feeling, precisely, that things are strange, that is, they are not real; a moment comes when this sensation that you have of yourself, of being yourself, becomes strange, a kind of sense of unreality. And the question continues coming up: “But then, what is myself?” Well, there is a moment when it comes up with so much concentration and such intensity that with this intensity of concentration suddenly there occurs a reversal, and then, instead of being on this side you are on that side, and when you are on that side everything is very simple; you understand, you know, you are, you live, and then you see clearly the unreality of the rest, and this is enough.  You see, one may have to wait for days, months, years, centuries, lives, before this moment comes. But if one intensiﬁes his aspiration, there is a moment when the pressure is so great and the intensity of the question so strong that something turns  over in the consciousness, and then this is absolutely what one feels: instead of being here one is there, instead of seeing from outside and seeking to see within, one is inside; and the minute one is within, absolutely everything changes, completely, and all that seemed to him true, natural, normal, real, tangible, all that, immediately, — yes, it seems to him very grotesque, very queer, very unreal, quite absurd; but one has touched something which is supremely true and eternally beautiful, and this one never loses again.


The Mother: Once the reversal has taken place, you can glide into an external consciousness, not lose the ordinary contact with the things of life, but that remains and it never moves. You may, in your dealings with others, fall back a little into their ignorance and blindness, but there is always something there, living, standing up within, which does not move any more, until it manages to penetrate everything, to the point where it is over, where the blindness disappears for ever. And this is an absolutely tangible experience, something more concrete than the most concrete object, more concrete than a blow on your head, something more real than anything whatever.  This is why I always say...


The Mother: when people ask me how one may know whether he is in contact with his psychic being or how one may know whether he has found the Divine, well, it makes me laugh; for when it happens to you it is over, you can no longer ask any questions, it is done; you do not ask how it happens, it is done.  That’s a purely personal question.   It is because, I think, you have kept the division in your being, that is, there is one part of your being which has refused to go along with the rest. It is usually like this that it happens.  There is one part which has progressed, one part which holds on and doesn’t want to move; so you feel it more and more as something which persists in being what it is.


The Mother: That’s because you have dropped some of your baggage on the way and left it on the roadside instead of carrying it along with you. That will always pull you backward. Sometimes, unfortunately, one has to turn back, go and pick it up and bring it along; so one loses much time. This is how, indeed, one loses time. It’s because one shuts one’s eyes to so many things in the being.


The Mother: One doesn’t want to see them, because they are not so pretty to see. So one prefers not to know them. But because one is ignorant of the thing it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist any longer. One does this: one puts it down on the way and then tries to go forward, but it is bound by threads, it pulls one back like a millstone drag, and so one must courageously take it up and hold it up like this () and tell it: “Now you will walk along with me!” It’s no use playing the ostrich.


The Mother: You see, one shuts the eyes and doesn’t want to see that one has this fault or that difﬁculty or that ignorance and stupidity; one doesn’t want to see, doesn’t want, one looks away to the other side, but it remains there all the same.  One day you have to face the thing, you have to. Otherwise you can never reach the end, it will always pull you backward.  You may feel ahead, may see the goal there, drawing near, all this more and more, you may have something which goes before and has almost the feeling that it is going to touch, but you will never touch it if you have these millstones pulling you back. One day you must make a clean sweep of everything.


The Mother: It sometimes takes very long but one must burn one’s bridges; otherwise you go in a round, progress bit by bit until the end of your life, and then, when the time to leave has come you suddenly feel: “Ah!  But... well, it will be perhaps for another time.” This is not pleasant; why, it must be something frightful; for if one has known  nothing, understood nothing, if one has never tried... People are born, live, die and are reborn and live and die again, and it goes on, continues indeﬁnitely, they don’t even put the problem before themselves. But when one has had the taste, the foretaste of what life is, and why one is here, and what one has to do here, and then in addition one has made some effort and tries to realise, if one doesn’t get rid of all the baggage of what does not follow, then it will be necessary to begin again yet another time.


The Mother: Better not. It is better to do one’s work while one can do it consciously, and indeed this is what is meant by “Never put off for tomorrow what you can do today.” This “today” means in this present life, because the occasion is here, the opportunity here; and perhaps one will have to wait many thousands of years to ﬁnd it once again. It is better to do one’s work, at any cost.


The Mother: There!... Losing as little time as possible.  Every time you are afraid to face yourself and hide carefully from yourself what prevents you from advancing, well, it is as though you were building a wall on the way; later you must demolish it to pass on. It is better to do your task immediately, look yourself straight in the face,, not try to sugar-coat the bitter pill. It is very bitter: all the weaknesses, uglinesses, all kinds of nasty little things which one has inside — there are, there are, there are, oh! lots of them.


The Mother: And so you are on the point of attaining a realisation, on the point of touching a light, having an illumination, and then suddenly you feel something pulling you back like this (), and you suffocate, you cannot advance further. Well, in these moments some people weep, some lament, some say, “Oh, poor me, here it is yet once again!” All this is a ridiculous weakness. You have only to look at yourself like this and say, “What petty meanness, small stupidity, little vanity, ignorance, bad will is still there, hidden in the corner, preventing me from crossing the threshold, the threshold of this new discovery? Who is there in me, who is so small, so mean and obstinate, hiding there like a worm in a fruit so that I may not be able to see it?”


The Mother: If you are sincere you ﬁnd  it; but above all it is this, absolutely this: you always sugar-coat the pill. The sugar-coating is a kind of what is called mental understanding of oneself. So one coats as thickly with sugar as possible in order to hide well from oneself what is there, the worm in the fruit; and one does it always, always gives oneself an excuse, always, always.  This is a frightful platitude!  It is one of the most foolish excuses imaginable.


The Mother: No, there are others much more subtle and much more dangerous than that.  But even if you must be the one and only being in the whole creation who gives himself integrally in all purity to the Divine, and being the only one, being naturally absolutely misunderstood by everybody, scoffed at, ridiculed, hated, even if you were that, there is no reason for not doing it. One must be either a tinsel actor or else a fool. Because others don’t do it? But what does it matter whether they do it or not?


The Mother: “Why, the whole world may go the wrong way, it does not concern me. There is only one thing with which I am concerned, to go straight. What others do, how is it my concern? It is their business, not mine.”  This is the worst of all slaveries!


The Mother: Excuse me! But there is... I don’t exactly know the proportion,  but still it is certainly not most of the people here who are doing yoga. They happen to be here for many reasons; but those who have taken the resolution to do yoga, sincerely, do not form the majority.


The Mother: And as I told you, for you, children, those of you who have come here as children, how could you at the moment have even the least idea of what yoga is and come for the yoga? It is impossible. For all those who have come quite small, there is an age when the problem comes up; it is then that you must reﬂect, and then at that time I ask them. Well, have I asked you often about it? Since I am giving you these lessons, I speak to you about the thing, but it is very rarely that I have taken you individually and asked you, “Do you want to do it or not?”


The Mother: — Only those who have within themselves, who have had an impulsion, a kind of instinct, who have come and said, “Yes, I want to do yoga.” Then it is ﬁnished. But I tell them, “Good, these are the conditions, this is how it is. And you know, it is not something easy.


The Mother: You have to start with an inner certitude that you are here for that and you want that; that’s enough.” You see, one may have a very good will, a life oriented towards a divine realisation, in any case, a kind of more or less superﬁcial consecration to a divine work,.  To do Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is to want to transform oneself integrally, it is to have a single aim in life, such that nothing else exists any longer, that alone exists. And so one feels it clearly in oneself whether one wants it or not; but if one doesn’t, one can still have a life of goodwill, a life of service, of understanding; one can labour for the Work to be accomplished more easily — all that — one can do many things. But between this and doing yoga there is a great difference.


The Mother: And to do yoga you must want it consciously, you must know what it is, to begin with. You must know what it is, you must take a resolution about it; but once you have taken the resolution, you must no longer ﬂinch. That is why you must take it in full knowledge of the thing. You must know what you are deciding upon when you say, “I want to do yoga”; and that is  why I don’t think that I have ever pressed you from this point of view. I can speak to you about the thing.


The Mother: Oh! I tell you a lot about it, you are here for me to speak to you about it; but individually it is only to those who have come saying, “Yes, in any case I have my idea about the yoga and want to do it”; it is good.  And then for them it’s something different, and the conditions of life are different, specially inwardly. Specially within, things change.  There is always a consciousness there acting constantly to rectify the situation, which puts you all the time in the presence of obstacles which prevent you from advancing, make you bump against your own errors and your own blindnesses.


The Mother: And this acts only for those who have decided to do the yoga. For others the Consciousness acts like a light, a knowledge, a protection, a force of progress, so that they may reach their maximum capacities and be able to develop as far as possible in an atmosphere as favourable as possible — but leaving them completely free in their choice.  The decision must come from within. Those who come consciously for the yoga, knowing what yoga is, well, their conditions of living here are... outwardly there is no difference but inwardly there is a very great difference.


The Mother: There is a kind of absoluteness in the consciousness, which does not let them deviate from the path: the errors one commits become immediately visible with consequences strong enough for one not to be able to make any mistake about it, and things become very serious.  But it is not often like that.  All of you, my children — I may tell you this, I have repeated it to you and still repeat it — live in an exceptional liberty.  Outwardly there are a few limitations, because, as there are many of us and we don’t have the whole earth at our disposal, we are obliged to submit to a certain discipline to a certain extent, so that there may not be too great a disorder; but inwardly you live in a marvellous liberty: no social constraint, no moral constraint, no intellectual constraint, no rule, nothing, nothing  but a light which is there. If you want to proﬁt by it, you proﬁt by it; if you don’t want to, you are free not to.


The Mother: But the day you make a choice — when you have done it in all sincerity and have felt within yourself a radical decision — the thing is different. There is the light and the path to be followed, quite straight, and you must not deviate from it. It fools no one, you know; yoga is not a joke. You must know what you are doing when you choose it. But when you choose it, you must hold on to it.


The Mother: You have no longer the right to vacillate. You must go straight ahead. There!  All that I ask for is a will to do well, an effort for progress and the wish to be a little better in life than ordinary human beings. You have grown up, developed under conditions which are exceptionally luminous, conscious, harmonious, and full of goodwill; and in response to these conditions you should be in the world an expression of this light, this harmony, this goodwill.


The Mother: This would already be very good, very good.  To do the yoga, this yoga of transformation which, of all things, is the most arduous — it is only if one feels that one has come here for that (I mean here upon earth) and that one has to do nothing else but that, and that it is the only reason of one’s existence — even if one has to toil hard, suffer, struggle, it is of no importance — “This is what I want, and nothing else” — then it is different. Otherwise I shall say, “Be happy and be good, and that’s all that is asked of you. Be good, in the sense of being understanding, knowing that the conditions in which you have lived are exceptional, and try to live a higher, more noble, more true life than the ordinary one, so as to allow a little of this consciousness, this light and its goodness to express itself in the world. It would be very good.”


The Mother: There we are.  But once you have set foot on the path of yoga, you must have a resolution of steel and walk straight on to the goal, whatever the cost.  There!    It is the realisation which is expressed in action.


The Mother: There is a realisation in inaction like that of those who enter into contemplations from which they don’t come out, and who don’t move; and then there is a dynamic realisation which transforms all your action, all your movements, all your way of being, your character. In the ﬁrst case one’s outer being remains the same, nothing changes, and usually it destroys all possibility of action, one can no longer do anything, one remains seated... In the second case, it changes everything, your character, your way of being, your way of acting, all your actions and even your surroundings, and ﬁnally all your existence, your total being: this is dynamic realisation, with the transformation of the body as its culmination.  Some people try to transform their body before even having transformed their intelligence, and this produces a complete displacement, it unbalances them totally. One must ﬁrst transform his thought, all his mind, all his mental activity, organise it with higher knowledge; and at the same time one must transform his character, all the movements of the vital, all impulses, all reactions.


The Mother: And ﬁnally, when these two things are done, in any case up to a certain point, one can begin to think of transforming the cells of his body, but not begin at the end; one must begin at the beginning.  One can do... Sri Aurobindo says, doesn’t he, that one can do everything at the same time, but the centre, the most important part, must ﬁrst be transformed sufﬁciently before one can think of transforming his body... like some people who, for example,  immediately want to change their food or even to stop eating, because, they say, ﬁnally when the Supermind comes one will no longer need to eat. So before the Supermind has come they want to begin by what will happen; they stop eating, stop sleeping, and the result is that they fall very ill.  It is preferable at ﬁrst to begin by receiving the Supermind in one’s mind with a sufﬁcient knowledge, and gradually come to transforming all the rest.


The Mother: It is the same thing. It is this side of the yoga.  There are two aspects: an aspect which is static and a preparation, and a dynamic aspect which is an aspect of transformation, of action. Dynamic means energetic; it means propulsion, action.  Ah, my child, you have certain faults, you know, things which prevent you from progressing.


The Mother: So, the negative side is to try and get rid of your defects. There are things which you have to be, to become, qualities which you must build in yourself in order to realise; so this side of construction is the positive side.  You have a defect, for example, a tendency not to speak the truth. Now this habit of falsehood, of not seeing or not speaking the truth, you ﬁght against it by rejecting falsehood from your consciousness and endeavouring to eliminate that habit of not speaking the truth. For the thing to be done, you must build in yourself the habit of speaking only the truth.


The Mother: For the thing to be done, you must build in yourself the habit of perceiving and always telling the truth. One is negative: you reject a fault. The other is positive: you build the quality. It is like that.   For everything it is like that.


The Mother: For example, you have somewhere in your being that kind of habit of revolt, ignorant, arrogant, obscure revolt, of refusing what comes from above. So, the negative side is to ﬁght against this, to prevent it from expressing itself and reject it from your nature; and on the other side you must build positively surrender, understanding, consecration, self-giving and the sense of a complete collaboration with the divine forces. This is the positive side. Do you understand?


The Mother: The same thing again: people who get angry... the habit of ﬂying into a rage, of getting angry... one ﬁghts against that, refuses to get angry, rejects these vibrations of anger from one’s being, but this must be replaced by an imperturbable calm, a perfect tolerance, an understanding of the point of view of others, a clear and tranquil vision, a calm decision — which is the positive side.  It is said that when one has realised (it is in here that he says it), one becomes like the dry coconut which moves in the shell, which is free inside, no longer attached to the envelope and moving freely within. That’s what I have heard; it is the image for there being no attachment any more.


The Mother: You have seen this, when a coconut becomes completely dry, the nut inside is no longer ﬁxed to the shell; and so when you move it, it moves inside; it is completely free, it is absolutely independent of the shell. So the image of the being is given: the ordinary physical consciousness is the shell; and so long as the Atman is not completely formed it is attached, it holds on, it is stuck to the shell, and it cannot be detached; but when it is completely formed it is absolutely free inside, it rolls freely in the shell without being ﬁxed to it. It must be this image.   You don’t know what this means?  In the ordinary case, of the ordinary being and ordinary life, the Purusha is subjected to Prakriti, to the external Nature, he is her slave.


The Mother: So Sri Aurobindo says that it is not enough to free oneself from this slavery. He begins that way: it is not enough to free oneself from the slavery; he must keep his allegiance, but instead of obeying Prakriti, he must obey the Divine Mother; that is, instead of obeying something which is lower than himself, he must obey what is higher. That is the sentence: transfer his allegiance from this to that.  Do you understand? No?


The Mother: Ah, it is probably someone who wrote to him saying that he wanted his Purusha to be completely free from allegiance to Prakriti. So he answered: No, that’s not enough; if you free it, it is only half the work; your allegiance must be there, but instead of being related to Prakriti, it must exist for the Divine Mother. And then later he explains the difference. There is an entire passage there in which he says that the Divine Mother should not be identiﬁed with Prakriti.  Naturally there is something of the Divine Mother there, because something of the Divine Mother is behind everything.


The Mother: But one must not think that Prakriti is the Divine Mother.  (Nolini)  Allegiance to Prakriti, yes, it’s true. To get rid of this allegiance to Prakriti is the negative side of the development; one frees himself from his allegiance to Prakriti, but one must take a step further and have the positive side of being surrendered to the Divine Mother.   The Truth-Creation... it is the last line?


The Mother: ( ) I think we have already spoken about this several times.  It has been said that in the process of creation, there is the movement of creation followed by a movement of preservation and ending in a movement of disintegration or destruction; and even it has been repeated very often: “All that begins must end”, etc., etc.  In fact in the history of our universe there have been six consecutive periods which began by a creation, were prolonged by a force of preservation and ended by a disintegration, a destruction, a return to the Origin, which is called Pralaya; and that is why this tradition is there. But it has been said that the seventh creation would be a progressive creation, that is, after the starting-point of the creation, instead of its being simply followed by a preservation, it would be followed by a progressive manifestation which would express the Divine more and more completely, so that no disintegration and return to the Origin would be necessary.


The Mother: And it has been announced that the period we are in is precisely the seventh, that is, it would not end by a Pralaya, a return to the Origin, a destruction, a disappearance, but that it would be replaced by a constant progress, because it would be a more and more perfect unfolding of the divine Origin in its creation.  And this is what Sri Aurobindo says. He speaks of a constant unfolding, that is, the Divine manifests more and more completely; more and more perfectly, in a progressive creation.  It is the nature of this progression which makes the return to the Origin, the destruction no longer necessary. All that does not progress disappears, and that is why physical bodies die, it’s because they are not progressive; they are progressive up to a certain moment, then there they stop and most often they remain stable for a certain time, and then they begin to decline, and then disappear.


The Mother: It’s because the physical body, physical matter as it is at present is not plastic enough to be able to progress constantly. But it is not impossible to make it sufﬁciently plastic  for the perfecting of the physical body to be such that it no longer needs disintegration, that is, death.  Only, this cannot be realised except by the descent of the Supermind which is a force higher than all those which have so far manifested and which will give the body a plasticity that will allow it to progress constantly, that is, to follow the divine movement in its unfolding.  Yes.  What is he saying?


The Mother: Pavitra, do you understand what he is saying?  (Pavitra)  Yes, in a way, yes.  I have said that there was no need to pass through the experiences of the Overmind in order to have the supramental experiences? Have I ever said such a thing?


The Mother: Ah, well! In any case I don’t think so. I don’t know if I have said it, but I don’t think so, because we are in a transitional period. It is absolutely certain that, in a general way, it is still the Overmind which is ruling and that if the Supermind comes, it’s that it is only beginning to come and to have an inﬂuence, and that, in a period of transition, what Sri Aurobindo says here is absolutely obvious: If you understand nothing of the Overmind you will understand still less of the Supermind, and he has repeated, I don’t know how often, that one must not try to leap to the highest summit without having climbed all the steps.


The Mother: Once again... when did I read... it’s not so long ago... that it was necessary to climb all the steps to go to the top? You can’t take a leap and neglect all the rest. It is not possible. You can do it quickly. What can happen is that what took several lifetimes can be done in a few years or even perhaps in a few months; but you have to do it.


The Mother: When we all have supramental bodies and when within ourselves we are in the supramental consciousness , we shall perhaps be able to manufacture little supramental beings who will not need to pass through these experiences! But it is only “when”, it is not so at present. ( )


The Mother: One must not hope for things before they are done. They will be done, but a little later.   It depends on this: when one thinks that it is the most important thing in his life. That’s all.


The Mother: Some people sit in meditation, concentrate on the base of the vertebral column and want it very much to awake, but that’s not enough. It is when truly it becomes the most important thing in one’s life, when all the rest seems to have lost all taste, all interest, all importance, when one feels within that one is born for this, that one is here upon earth for this, and that it is the only thing that truly counts, then that’s enough.  One can concentrate on the different centres; but sometimes one concentrates for so long, with so much effort, and has no result. And then one day something shakes you, you feel that you are going to lose your footing, you have to cling on to something; then you cling within yourself to the idea of union with the Divine, the idea of the divine Presence, the idea of the transformation of the consciousness, and you aspire, you want, you try to organise your feelings, movements, impulses around this. And it comes.


The Mother: Some people have recommended all kinds of methods; probably these were methods which had succeeded in their case; but to tell the truth, one must ﬁnd one’s own method, it is only after having done the thing that one knows how it should be done, not before.  If one knows it beforehand, one makes a mental construction and risks greatly living in his mental construction, which is an illusion; because when the mind builds certain conditions  and then they are realised, there are many chances of there being mostly pure mental construction which is not the experience itself but its image. So for all these truly spiritual experiences I think it is wiser to have them before knowing them. If one knows them, one imitates them, one doesn’t have them, one imagines oneself having them; whereas if one knows nothing — how things are and how they ought to happen, what should happen and how it will come about — if one knows nothing about all this, then by keeping very still and making a kind of inner sorting out within one’s being, one can suddenly have the experience, and then later knows what one has had.


The Mother: It is over, and one knows how it has to be done when one has done it — afterwards. Like that it is sure.  One may obviously make use of his imagination, imagine the Kundalini and try to pull it upwards. But one can also tell himself tales like this. I have had so many instances of people who described their experiences to me exactly as they are described in books, knowing all the words and putting down all the details, and then I asked them just a little question like that, casually: that if they had had the experience they should have known or felt a certain thing, and as this was not in the books, they could not answer.


The Mother: That is how they describe it. It is because there’s a centre there, very, very complicated. I think it means the countless powers of thought, it is the multiplicity of knowledge in all its forms.  It must be that. Why, this is still another instance: people who have read, studied, and have the experience afterwards, well, they always describe it like that, with names they have picked up in books and with descriptions of the lotuses as they are given in books; but those who have the spontaneous experience without having read or learnt anything before having it, they describe it  altogether vividly, with an individual reality, so to say.


The Mother: Each one approaches the experience in his own way. When these centres awake... it is a fact that there are centres, and it’s a fact that they awake, and it’s a fact that this changes vastly the whole working of the consciousness and energy, but the description, if it is spontaneous and sincere, is different for everyone. One can have the feeling of a similarity with something, but giving a ﬁxed and precise description of what happens is always an intervention of the mind.  This phenomenon is very real, concrete, it is felt with all the reality and intensity of even a physical phenomenon.


The Mother: But each person describes it with a form particular to himself, except as I say, when he has read and studied, and his brain is full of all that is written in books; then automatically what he has read gives a form to his experience, and this takes away from it something of the spontaneity which gives such an impression of being sincere and truthful; it becomes a mental construction. If you have read and read much that it is like a serpent which is coiled up, well, quite naturally when you concentrate and try to awaken it, you see a serpent which is coiled, because you think about it like that. If you are told about a thousand-petalled lotus, you see a thousand-petalled lotus. But it is a mental superimposition upon the fact of the experience itself. But the feeling of something that’s innumerable, that’s one and innumerable at the same time, and that kind of impression of something opening, awakening, beginning to vibrate, responding to the forces and giving you an intensity of light, of understanding, of opening to higher regions, this is... the substance of the experience.


The Mother: Yet when you begin to describe it with images which you have found in books, it is as though suddenly you were making it either superﬁcial — fossilised, so to say — or artiﬁcial or even insincere.  Always the most interesting cases for me have been those of people who had read nothing but had a very ardent aspiration and came to me saying, “Something funny has happened to me, I had this extraordinary experience, what can it mean truly?”   And then they describe a movement, a vibration, a force, a light, whatever it might be, it depends on each one, and they describe this, that it happened like that and came like that, and then this happened and then that, and what does it all mean, all this?  Then here one is on the right side. One knows that it is not an imagined experience, that it is a sincere, spontaneous one, and this always has a power of transformation much greater than the experience that was brought about by a mental knowledge.


The Mother: On condition that one truly has within himself the ardour of aspiration. If you are born for this, for the yoga, and this is the thing which dominates all your existence, that you feel, yes, before knowing anything, that you need to ﬁnd something which is in you, then sometimes a word is enough, a conversation which simply orients you — it is enough. But for those who are seeking, who grope, who are not absolutely sure, who are pulled this way and that, have many interests in life, are not steady, stabilised in their will for realisation, it is very good to read, because it puts them in touch with the subject, it gives them some interest in the thing.  What I mean is that every deﬁnite mental formation always gives a particular colouring to the experience.


The Mother: As for example, with all people brought up in a certain religion their experiences will always be coloured by this religion; and in fact, to reach the very source of the thing one must free oneself from the external formation.  But there is a kind of reading which awakens in you an interest in the thing and can help you in the ﬁrst seekings. Usually, even if one has had experiences one needs a contact of thought or idea with the thing so that the effort may be crystallized more consciously. But the more one knows, the more one must be absolutely sincere in his experience, that is, he must not use the formative power of his mind to imagine and so create the  experience in himself. From the point of view of orientation it can be useful; but from the point of view of the experience, it takes away from it its dynamic value, it has not the intensity of an experience which comes because the moral and spiritual conditions necessary for it to occur have been fulﬁlled.


The Mother: There is the whole mental conditioning which is added and which takes away something of the spontaneity. All this is a matter of proportion.  Each one must ﬁnd the exact amount he needs, how much of reading, how much meditation, how much concentration, how much... It is different for each one.


The Mother: Yes. The composition is completely different, otherwise everybody would be the same. There are not two beings with an identical combination; between the different parts of the being and the composition of these parts the proportion is different in each individual. There are people, primitive men, people like the yet undeveloped races or the degenerated ones whose combinations are fairly simple; they are still complicated, but comparatively simple. And there are people absolutely at the top of the human ladder, the ´elite of humanity; their combinations become so complicated that a very special discernment is needed to ﬁnd the relations between all these things.


The Mother: There are beings who carry in themselves thousands of different personalities, and then each one has its own rhythm and alternation, and there is a kind of combination; sometimes there are inner conﬂicts, and there is a play of activities which are rhythmic and with alternations of certain parts which come to the front and then go back and again come to the front. But when one takes all that, it makes such complicated combinations that  some people truly ﬁnd it difﬁcult to understand what is going on in themselves; and yet these are the ones most capable of a complete, coordinated, conscious, organised action; but their organisation is inﬁnitely more complicated than that of primitive or undeveloped men who have two or three impulses and four or ﬁve ideas, and who can arrange all this very easily in themselves and seem to be very co-ordinated and logical because there is not very much to organise. But there are people truly like a multitude, and so that gives them a plasticity, a ﬂuidity of action and an extraordinary complexity of perception, and these people are capable of understanding a considerable number of things, as though they had at their disposal a veritable army which they move according to circumstance and need; and all this is inside them. So when these people, with the help of yoga, the discipline of yoga, succeed in centralising all these beings around the central light of the divine Presence, they become powerful entities, precisely because of their complexity. So long as this is not organised they often give the impression of an incoherence, they are almost incomprehensible, one can’t manage to understand why they are like that, they are so complex.


The Mother: But when they have organised all these beings, that is, put each one in its place around the divine centre, then truly they are terriﬁc, for they have the capacity of understanding almost everything and doing almost everything because of the multitude of entities they contain, of which they are constituted. And the nearer one is to the top of the ladder, the more it is like that, and consequently the more difﬁcult it is to organise one’s being; because when you have about a dozen elements, you can quickly compass and organise them, but when you have thousands of them, it is difﬁcult.   Come out? What do you call coming out? You mean that ﬁrst there was the true vital being and that this expresses itself in the physical nature, the earth nature, by the vital which we see?


The Mother: Yes!  Why is the external world so total a contradiction of the divine world? It is exactly the same thing. It is like that.  The vital being, the true vital being which Sri Aurobindo describes, is the vital being which is in contact with the Divine, which is entirely surrendered to the Divine and is His instrument; whereas in the ordinary earth consciousness the vital being and also the physical being do not at all belong to the Divine, they think they belong to themselves, and the only thing that counts is their own little person; and that is why everything is like this.


The Mother: All the disorder in the universe is due to that.  There is a physical Nature which is perfectly harmonious, which has an absolutely... how to put it... yes, harmonious working, without any disorder, without disequilibrium, without any rupture of harmony, which would be expressed, if it existed upon earth, by a perfect health, a growing force, a continuous  progress; and then all that one would like to obtain from one’s body one would obtain; and this can go as far as an almost unimaginable progress of perfection.  The physical state as we see it with all its disharmonies, its weaknesses, its uglinesses, is the same deformation as that which has changed the higher vital, the true vital, into the kind of vital we see.


The Mother: And this comes from the same cause: it is cut off from its Origin, with an acute sense of separation which makes one live in an absolutely obscure consciousness which has become totally ignorant, instead of living constantly in the consciousness of one’s Origin. Now, to ask why it is like that is to ask too much.  That’s all?  You haven’t understood what the true physical is, because it is not a question of understanding. One is not conscious of it because one is not inside it, one doesn’t live in it.


The Mother: But can’t you conceive of a body which would be perfectly beautiful, perfectly harmonious, which would function perfectly well and would never be ill, never tired, and would be in a state of constant progress? First it would become taller and taller until it reaches its maximum height, and then it would become stronger and stronger, more and more skilful, more and more conscious, and always in a perfect harmony: never any illness and never any fatigue, never any error, making no mistakes, knowing exactly at each moment what ought to be done and why.  For the moment there is no true being in the most material domain. It is only a kind of subtle prototype which is not materially realised.   () You have something to ask?


The Mother: As there are forms, there is necessarily a Time, a Space, but it is not at all the same as the physical. It is neither the same Time nor the same Space.  For example, as soon as you come to the vital there is a Time and Space which are similar to the physical but without that ﬁxity and hardness and irremediability which are here. That is, for instance, in the vital a strong intelligent will has an immediate action; here, in the physical, it takes sometimes extremely long to be realised, an entire process has to be followed. In the vital it is direct, the will acts directly on the circumstances, and if it is truly of a very strong kind, it is instantaneous.


The Mother: But there is still a Space, that is, one has the impression of moving to go from one place to another, and that necessarily, as one moves, a certain time intervenes; but it is an extremely short time compared with physical time.   On the mental plane the notion of Time disappears almost totally. For example, you are in your mental consciousness, you think of someone or something or of a place, and immediately you are there. There is no need of any time between the thought and the realisation.