The Mother: Note that I don’t disapprove of your having all these ideas: it is good to be able to look at things from all sides at once and, as we were saying the other day, there is a way to reconcile the most contrary ideas. But you must take the trouble to do it, you have to organise them in your mind, otherwise you live in a chaos. I have noticed something else: people whose minds are in disorder keep their rooms and their belongings in a similar state of disorder. I have seen people who had no order in their minds and if you open their chest of drawers or their cupboards, you will ﬁnd an awful mess — everything is in a jumble. There are people who are intelligent and have slips of paper on which they jot things down — authors, for example — but if by chance they need one of these notes, they have to spend an hour hunting it out and turning everything upside down!


The Mother: They either ﬁnd the paper in the waste-paper basket or in the drawer where they put their handkerchiefs. Well, that’s how it is, isn’t it?  There are people who may not be very intelligent, but who have taken the trouble to put some order among the few ideas they have. If you open their cupboard, you will ﬁnd that they have very few things, but these things are neatly and tidily  arranged, because they have organised material things in the same way as they have organised their thoughts. The mind is therefore an instrument of organisation.


The Mother: People who have some power of organisation may start by organising their little personal belongings, then their lives and the events in their lives. They may be in charge of a certain number of people — they can organise a business, a school, anything. Or else if they have the power to govern, they are able to organise a country. Some people have this power of organisation and others don’t.  I shall give you an example of someone who had this gift of organisation.


The Mother: It is an old story, but one can always tell old stories.  I used to know Sir Akbar Hydari, who was Finance Minister and then Prime Minister of Hyderabad. Before his time, the Hyderabad ﬁnances were in the state of chaos I have just mentioned and the Government was always short of money. It was a rich area which ought not to have been in that position. Then came Sir Akbar.


The Mother: He became Finance Minister and from the very ﬁrst year, they had a few lakhs of revenue and everything was so wonderfully organised that it was perhaps one of the only places in the world where people had no taxes to pay. They had no taxes or duties to pay and the State was never short of money and this went on throughout his whole ministry. But he fell ill and had to leave; in the end, he died. He was replaced by someone who did not have his gift of organisation and immediately, from the very ﬁrst year, again they were short of 17,000 lakhs!


The Mother: It was the same province, with the same revenue, the same people, but Sir Akbar’s marvellous gift of organisation was no longer there.  That is a true story. Very few people have this gift.  It is as if you had a large number of miscellaneous things in front of you: it would take a century to make all the possible combinations of them. Some people don’t need to do that — they have the vision, they immediately know where to put things and establish an organised relation between them so as to form something orderly and organised


The Mother: . This capacity for organisation  is indispensable in life, and if you want to learn to organise, begin by organising your own drawer and you will end up by organising your own head! Some people should do both these things. You must ﬁrst the ideas in your mind before you can organise them — at least you can see your handkerchiefs and clothes! But you will ﬁnd that a certain care is needed to achieve an intelligent arrangement — don’t put the things you use every day beneath the things you use once a month!


The Mother: The mind is also an instrument of action. The thoughts form plans. The mind forms a plan of action and with this formation of independent and active entities which I mentioned earlier, it stirs the other parts of the being — the vital and physical — and impels them to action. It often happens that you think of some action or other — you don’t do it immediately, but the thought that wants to manifest in this action returns again and again.  Perhaps you hear in your mind the words, “I must do that, I must do that,” until you leave everything and do what you have “thought”.


The Mother: Well, that is the mind’s power of action. Before you get it, you must learn to organise, harmonise and control your mind. But when you have that power, you can begin to act purposefully, whereas most people are tossed about by thoughts whose formation they were not even aware of.  There are many people whose thoughts come from outside, who have not taken the care to organise their mind, which is a sort of public square. So all the thoughts coming from outside meet there; sometimes there are clashes: you don’t know what to do, you can’t see anything clearly, etc.


The Mother: There are also people who live in a more or less neutral mental state. Suddenly, they ﬁnd themselves with someone whose mind is well organised and they begin to think clearly — about things that they knew nothing of a minute ago. There are others, on the other hand, who normally think very clearly and know exactly what is going on in their minds. But they come into contact with certain people and everything gets confused, vague and muddled. They lose the thread of their thoughts and forget what they wanted to  say.


The Mother: This is an effect of contagion and this mental contagion is constant. There are very few people who do not receive thoughts from outside. I have known people — many people — who, for example, had a very strong faith, who could see very clearly into themselves, who knew very well what they wanted to do, etc. But when they were with other people and tried to grasp all that, to express it, they could no longer ﬁnd it; instead, there was something that moved in a sort of semi-obscure confusion and they felt incapable of formulating their thought, which before had been quite clear.  There is another phenomenon which is considered spiritual, but which is spiritual only indirectly: it is when you ﬁnd yourself near someone who has controlled his thought and achieved mental silence.


The Mother: You suddenly feel this silence coming down into yourself and something which was impossible for you half an hour earlier suddenly becomes a reality. This is a rather unusual phenomenon.  I said this mainly for men of action whose thinking is direct and formative, very active and dynamic. They see things in a linear way which is necessary for action; they can see that a thing must be done in such and such a way. Another person may have a thought which is equally dynamic and say, “No, it ought to be done like this.”


The Mother: So they quarrel, they are unable to reach an  agreement. But one can keep quiet for a minute and look at the thing calmly. The other person is not necessarily showing ill will, his point of view may be true or partially true. The question is to ﬁnd out why he thinks like that. So you stop to think it over and try to identify yourself with the other’s point of view, to put yourself in his place and tell yourself, “He may have a reason for thinking as he does, and it may be better than mine.”


The Mother: And in this way, you must try to ﬁnd the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties. This is very important when dealing with material things. Naturally, each one sees only his own point of view and his own point of view is always selﬁsh. It is very hard to admit another point of view, for this point of view may be “detrimental” to you. This is an absolute truth where nations are concerned.


The Mother: If nations, instead of being in perpetual argument about straightforward things and defending their own interests and seeing only their personal viewpoint, that is, the viewpoint of their national personality, if instead of doing all that, they attempted to understand that each nation has a right to live on earth and that it is not a matter of depriving them of this right, but of ﬁnding a compromise that would satisfy everyone. There is always a solution, but on condition, not in order to ﬁnd the solution but to implement it: individuals and nations must have goodwill.  If they have no goodwill, if they know perfectly well that they are in the wrong but don’t care, if they insist on their own interests even when they are absolutely wrong, then there is nothing to be done — you can only leave people to their ﬁghting and mutual destruction. But if, on the contrary, there is mutual goodwill, there is always a good solution.  It is an intermediate solution.


The Mother: It is not always the golden mean.  A kind of harmonisation must be found.  I will tell you another story, the story of a merchant who set  out on a journey saying to his neighbour, “I am going away, I don’t know when I shall be back. Keep this big jar for me, I shall take it back when I return.” Some time later, the neighbour was tempted to open the jar.


The Mother: He did so and found, under a thick layer of dust... some gold coins! This was a great temptation for him and he began to think, “Perhaps my friend has died, perhaps he won’t return. What is the use of keeping all this money inside here? And I am so much in need of money!” So he took a few coins, a few more, many more, until all the gold in the jar had gone.


The Mother: The olives that concealed the gold had gone bad and so he threw them away.  One day the merchant returned and said to his neighbour, “Give me back my jar.” A few days later, the neighbour returned the jar all coated with dust, as it was before. The merchant opened the jar and found only some fresh olives. All the gold had gone.


The Mother: He went to the judge and explained what had happened. But the judge said, “How can I be sure you are telling the truth? Perhaps your neighbour is telling the truth.” They argued and were unable to ﬁnd a solution. The merchant, who had a headache, thought, “I shall go for a walk in the city tonight.”


The Mother: So he strolled through the city and suddenly he saw some children playing. They had a jar, and also a merchant, a neighbour and a judge! The judge was telling the neighbour, “Open up this jar. But I see only fresh olives! How long has it been since the merchant went away?”


The Mother: “Two and a half years.” “Really? So you were able to keep these olives fresh for so long? Didn’t you by any chance remove what was in the jar and put in some fresh olives?” The neighbour ran away.


The Mother: The merchant thought, “Well, these children are far more intelligent than I am, they found the solution at once.” So he went back to his neighbour and asked him the same questions; and of course the neighbour had nothing further to say and was forced to admit the truth.   It comes from the word “decree”. It is a law, it is something which is... It is decreed that such and such a thing will be done in such and such a way, for example.


The Mother: Governments pronounce decrees on what ought and ought not to be done. They are ofﬁcial orders. So, in this case, it is an order from the Supreme, it is an inevitable order.  It is the same way. From the moment you are surrounded by  the divine grace and are in a ﬁt state to receive the divine grace, your way and hers have become one and the same.


The Mother: That is a formidable question!  You have heard and read that we are made up of various states of being: physical, vital, mental, psychic, spiritual, etc. Well, all these inner states of being correspond to invisible worlds. There is a physical world, a vital world, a mental world, a psychic world, and many spiritual worlds, a whole range of more and more subtle worlds approaching nearer and nearer to the Supreme. So, since you carry within yourself a corresponding range, by studying and becoming aware of your inner being you gradually make yourself capable of becoming aware also of these invisible worlds.


The Mother: For example, the mind: if the mind is conscious, coordinated, well controlled, it can move about it in the mental world just as the body does in the physical world and see what this mental world is like, what is going on there, what are its characteristics and so on. These things are not invisible in themselves — they are invisible to the physical consciousness and the physical senses, but not to the corresponding inner states of consciousness or the corresponding inner senses. For, by a systematic development one can acquire senses in these worlds and one can then live a similar life with different characteristics.  I mean that one can live an objective life in these worlds if one is sufﬁciently developed oneself. Otherwise, they wouldn’t exist for us.


The Mother: If we did not carry in ourselves something corresponding to all that exists in the universe, this universe wouldn’t exist for us. And it is only a matter of systematic and methodical development. Some people have it spontaneously for various reasons, usually as a result of a long preparation in previous lives, sometimes because of specially favourable circumstances — they are born in a certain environment, of parents who had developed these faculties, and they were helped to develop them  from childhood. Other people have to acquire them systematically by inner discipline; it takes time, a long time, but after all it doesn’t take much longer than for the brain of a child to grasp abstract mathematics. That takes years.


The Mother: They form part of the universe, of course. Yes, one can say that they exist in a ﬁxed place. But to understand that, to understand these things requires a mind capable of understanding that there are other dimensions than the purely material dimensions. For when you are told that your psychic being is in your body, that doesn’t mean that if you open up your body you will ﬁnd your psychic being inside. You will ﬁnd your heart, your stomach and the rest, but not your psychic being.


The Mother: And yet it is correct to say that it is within you. It extends beyond you too, but it is in another dimension. And one can say that there are as many dimensions as there are different worlds. Certainly all these invisible worlds — so-called invisible worlds — are contained, so to say, in the material universe. But they don’t occupy the place of other things.


The Mother: To make an imperfect comparison — it is valid only as a comparison — you can hold countless ideas in your brain and you certainly don’t have the feeling that you have to drive one out so that another one can come in, do you? They don’t occupy any space in that sense.  They are innumerable and vary with the person and the circumstances. But, ultimately, they can be reduced to what he said in the beginning or a little further on, I forget... Here:  “faith, sincerity and surrender”.


The Mother: These are the required conditions. And afterwards, he describes what kind of faith, what kind of sincerity and what kind of surrender. These are the required conditions so that her victory may be won over the hostile forces — the conditions on your side. Her conditions — I suppose she fulﬁls them spontaneously — are to respond to the aspiration, to have power, clearsightedness, knowledge and will.  That is obvious.


The Mother: So, one has to give her a ﬁeld for her work and conditions under which she may work. And these conditions are: faith, sincerity and surrender — a pure, unmixed faith, a perfect, integral sincerity and an unconditional surrender. This is what he has described for you.  Limited? Or unlimited?


The Mother: What are you asking? How many dimensions? Ah, should we ask the mathematicians or the occultists?  The occultist!


The Mother: Well, in a certain way the number is limited, but since in each dimension there is another limited number of subdivisions and since in these subdivisions there is again a considerable number of subdivisions, we can say that it is unlimited — and yet limited.  So, if you understand anything, you are lucky!  Twelve.  He has described it very well: “tainted by ambition”, etc. I  ﬁnd that if you put it differently, it is much more true.


The Mother: Is there any faith which doesn’t have a little of all that? For it is said, it has been repeated that faith, if it is pure, is capable of... nothing can resist it. This means that if one were to have an absolutely pure faith, untainted by all these things, a true faith, let’s say true faith, well, nothing would be impossible.  One could be transformed overnight, one could bring down the Supermind in a moment, one could... do anything, one could do anything if one had faith.


The Mother: But it must be a pure faith, it should not be mixed with any personal reactions or any personal will.  A pure faith is something all-powerful and irresistible. One doesn’t often ﬁnd a faith that is all-powerful and irresistible, and this shows that it is not quite pure. The question should be put like this: each one of us has a faith, for example, a faith in something, say a faith in the divine Presence within us. If our faith were pure, we would at once be aware of this divine Presence within us.


The Mother: This example is very easy to understand.  You have faith, it is there, but you don’t have the experience.   Why? Because the faith is not pure.


The Mother: If the faith were quite pure, immediately, the thing would be done. This is very true. So, when you become aware that the thing is not realised at once, you can begin to look: “But why isn’t it realised? What is there in my faith?” And if you go on looking with the same sincerity, you will ﬁnd that there are many little things in it, so many little things — not big, as big as this — which are repulsive.


The Mother: Little things. So many times a little conceit comes in, and then a desire, not a very violent one — it doesn’t show itself very much. The importance it gives you, the power it will give you and the satisfaction it will give you...  We have to agree on what dreams are! There are dreams where  you see things so precisely, so concretely that the material world seems rather unreal in comparison.


The Mother: There are dreams like that where things are so intense, so precise, so concrete, so objective and leave you with such a vivid impression that the material world seems rather misty, not very clear, not very distinct. So, if it is a dream like that, yes. But if it is a dream where things clash incoherently, inconsistently with one another, no.  The ﬁrst step: you must be able to discern the various inner states of being and know for sure: this belongs to the vital, this belongs to the mind, this belongs to the psychic, this belongs to matter. And as I said earlier, there are subdegrees in all that.


The Mother: There is a material vital, a vital vital, a mental vital, a vital under the psychic inﬂuence. You must be able to classify things very clearly and not allow any mixtures, any vague confusions in yourself: “Oh, where does this movement come from? What is it?” — indistinct impressions. That is the ﬁrst step.  Second step: you learn to concentrate in one of these inner states.


The Mother: You choose the one which you feel to be the most alive, the most developed in yourself and you learn to concentrate there. And then you do the same exercises... I wonder whether you remember the exercises you used to do when you were very young in order to walk, to drink, to talk, to hear, to feel. You used to do many exercises. All children do exercises without knowing it, but they do them.


The Mother: So you have to do something on the same lines. You must build up senses and develop them, make them conscious, independent and precise in their perceptions. That is the second stage. It may take time, it may come quickly, it depends on the degree of development of your inner being.  After that — this is only a beginning — after that, you must learn to isolate yourself from all the other parts of the being, to concentrate on the one where you want to have the experience and concentrate in such a way that you come into contact with the corresponding outer world.


The Mother: I don’t mean that it is an exteriorisation that leaves your body in a state of coma. No, a very intense concentration is enough, a power to isolate yourself  from everything except the place where you are concentrating.   And then you come into contact with the corresponding world.  You must want that and little by little you learn how to do it.


The Mother: And there you have the exercise required to improve the senses you have gradually developed and give them a ﬁeld of action.  At ﬁrst, you may be rather lost in this outer world, you won’t feel quite at ease. But little by little you will get used to it and start moving about there in the way that is appropriate to each of these worlds.   But if you know beforehand what they are like — the mind is such a magniﬁcent instrument of formation that it can build up a whole experience for you, and unfortunately, it will never be the genuine experience — it will be merely a mental construction.


The Mother: So, normally, when you want to instruct someone about these occult matters, you never tell him what is going to happen, in the beginning. The only thing is that if something happens to him, if he says, “This is what happened to me,” you tell him, “Yes, this is correct” or “No, that is not correct.” You can help him. But you don’t tell him beforehand, “You will go to such and such a place. It will be like that.


The Mother: You will have such and such an experience,” etc., for then all these things may happen only because of a well-built mental construction in which you move about with ease. In that case it is really a dream!  There too it depends on the case. It may occur; it is not always like that, but it may occur. It may happen that the divine grace is given to someone without his knowing anything about it.


The Mother: This even happens more often than one thinks.  It depends on the emotion and it also depends on what you  call an emotion. For example, there is a state where, if you ﬁnd yourself in the presence of a very precise, very clear psychic movement, a distinctly psychic movement — this happens quite often — the emotion is so powerful that tears come to your eyes.  You are not sad, you are not happy, neither one nor the other; it doesn’t correspond to any particular feeling, but it is an intensity of emotion which comes from something that is clearly, precisely psychic. It may be in yourself, but it is even more often in someone else.


The Mother: When you are in contact with an act, a movement, a manifestation which belongs to the psychic, then, all of a sudden, the eyes are ﬁlled with tears. If you call that an emotion... obviously it is an emotion. But usually, it comes from one thing: the physical being has a not very conscious but very intense longing for a contact with the psychic life. It feels poor, destitute, isolated and abandoned when it is not in contact with the psychic being. Not one physical being in a million is aware of this.


The Mother: But this kind of impression of being lost, left hanging, without protection, without support, of lacking something and not knowing what it is, something you don’t understand but which you lack, an emptiness somewhere: well, this comes more often than one thinks — people have no idea what it is. But then, when for some reason or other this consciousness suddenly comes into contact with a clearly psychic phenomenon, with psychic forces, psychic vibrations, the feeling is so strong, so strong that certainly, most often, the body can hardly hold it.  It is like a joy that is too great, that overﬂows on all sides, that you can’t contain, can’t hold in yourself. It is like that. There is suddenly a sort of revelation, not very conscious, not clearly expressed, the revelation of...


The Mother: this is it, this is what I must have.  And it is so powerful, so powerful that it gives you an emotion, which is made up of so many things that you can hardly say what it is. These are emotions that are not vital.  Vital emotions are of an altogether different nature — they are very clear, very precise, you can express them very distinctly; they are violent, they usually ﬁll you with an intensity,  a restlessness, sometimes a great satisfaction. And then the opposite comes with the same force.


The Mother: And so people, many people think — we have mentioned this several times already — some people imagine they experience love only when it is like that, when love is in the vital, when it comes with all the movements of the vital, all this intensity, this violence, this precision, this glamour, this brightness. And when that is absent they say, “Oh, this is not love.”  And yet that is exactly how love gets distorted: already it is no longer love, it is beginning to be passion. And this is an almost universal error among human beings.  Some people are full of a very pure, very high, very selﬂess psychic love and yet they know nothing about it and think they are cold, dry and without love because this admixture of vital vibration is absent.


The Mother: For them love begins and ends with this vibration.  And as it is something highly unstable which has movements and reactions and violences of all kinds, in depression as in satisfaction, love is something very ephemeral for these people: they have minutes of love in their lives. It may last a few hours and then it becomes dull and ﬂat again and they imagine that love has deserted them.  As I said, some people are quite beyond that, they have been able to control it in such a way that it does not get mixed up with anything else; they have in themselves this psychic love which is full of self-forgetfulness, of self-giving, compassion, generosity, nobility of life, and is a great power of identiﬁcation. So most of these people think they are cold or indifferent — they are very nice people, you see, but they do not love — and sometimes they themselves do not know.


The Mother: I have known people who thought they had no love because they didn’t have this vital vibration.  Usually, when people speak of emotions, they are speaking of vital emotions. But there is another kind of emotion which is of an inﬁnitely higher order and doesn’t express itself in the same way, which has just as much intensity, but an intensity that is  under control, contained, condensed, concentrated, and is an extraordinary dynamic power.  True love can achieve extraordinary things, but it is rare.  All kinds of miracles can be done out of love for the person one loves — not for everyone, but for the people or the person one loves.


The Mother: But it has to be a love free from all vital mixture, an absolutely pure and selﬂess love which demands nothing in return, which expects nothing in return.   In order to remember something, you must ﬁrst of all be conscious of it.  It is almost an experience — more than a dream.  There are places one goes to periodically in dreams. One can continue with the same dream, sometimes after a lapse of several months.


The Mother: There are also dreams of warning, which often repeat the same thing so as to compel you to concentrate your attention on it.  What is a person? When you are in a body you always see the body and think it is the person. But in this body there is now the whole being, now part of the being, with the rest somewhere else. Sometimes it is one activity of the being that comes forward, sometimes another.


The Mother: Because you have a body which you continue to see, you think that the being you see is always the same, but that is not true. The centre of the being, the psychic being, rarely takes on the appearance of the manifested being. The psychic being has passed through innumerable bodies and even if it did keep an imprint of all these bodies, the result would be unrecognisable, wouldn’t it? Most often it is a thought of the person who has gone which assumes a form, either in your atmosphere or in your own thought. So a sort of emanation  comes.


The Mother: It is there, and depending on your own condition you see it more or less clearly. But the form you give it is your own creation; it conforms to this person’s physical form as you know it. I don’t say this is an absolute rule, but nine times out of ten it is like that.  And I can give you a very clear example of this. When you see someone you did not see at the time of his death, you don’t see the form he had at that time but the form he had the last time you saw him.


The Mother: Therefore you give the form yourself. I don’t say this is something absolute. It may happen differently, but that is so rare that it is better not to speak of it. Only one person in a million can be objective enough not to add anything to his vision. So it is better not to speak about it, except as an ideal to aspire for.


The Mother: In everything you see, in sleep as well as in visions in the waking state, there are always a considerable number of subjective details. If you do not see the person as he was when you saw him last, the difference always comes from your own thought. If you think that the person must be older, you will see him looking older; if you think that he must look ill, you will see him looking ill, and so on. An absolutely objective vision, which conforms wholly to the reality, is very rare. The dream you mentioned simply means that you have kept a tender, affectionate relationship with her, and so one part of her being has remained close to you and for some reason you became aware of it in your dream.


The Mother: This comes from the subconscious.  As I told you, I have studied this subject of dreams in great depth. Unless you concentrate in a very special way you always dream of things you have experienced or felt or been aware of some time before; but you don’t dream of the things that belong to your present life. You may think of them, you may remember  them, but you don’t dream of them. Except in a few very rare instances, a dream is the awakening of something recorded in the subconscious.


The Mother: This recording is made gradually; some kind of assimilation is needed before the thing can manifest of itself, and this assimilation may take time. You dream of things — and people — that you knew a very long time ago; when a v


The Mother: ery long time has elapsed, it is usually for some special reason. Some things come back at regular intervals and you have a kind of cycle of movements in your dream. If you can ﬁnd a point at which things that are present have struck you at a previous time in your life, then you can see them both at the same time.  Very few dreams have a meaning, an instructive value, but all dreams can show you what your present state of consciousness is and how things are combined in the subconscious, what the terrestrial inﬂuences are, what traces they leave and how they are combined. This is a very interesting subject of study.


The Mother: Not always. I have known many people who were far more active in their dreams than in their waking life and who would do things which they would have been incapable of doing in their waking life. For example, I have known people who used to be petriﬁed with fear in their waking life but would express indomitable courage and accomplish truly heroic deeds in their dreams. Sometimes too, if you dream of something unpleasant, instead of having a reaction, you say, “All this is only a dream, it is not true, it is impossible,” etc., and in this way the dream assumes another form.


The Mother: Of course, you must be aware that you are dreaming for this to happen. It is a tremendous ﬁeld of observation — there is no end to the discoveries you can make in your dreams. But there is one important point: you must not go to sleep when you are very tired, for if you do, you fall into a sort of unconsciousness in which dreams do whatever they like  with you, and you have no reaction. Just as I said that you should not eat without having taken rest, I would advise everyone to rest before going to sleep. And for that, you must know how to rest.


The Mother: Now I will tell you a very recent dream of mine which I had just a few days ago. It wasn’t exactly a dream, it was very conscious. (I am not one of those people who dream of things that occurred a very long time ago; I know what to do to avoid that.) I went to a place in the vital world where I knew that many of our boys go to rest — at least, in their physical sleep, they look as if they are resting. But since they don’t really know how to rest, instead of accumulating energy, they lose it.


The Mother: Some of them lose a tremendous amount of energy: instead of recovering their energy, they waste it. So I went there and saw many rows in which there were things that looked like beds but weren’t really beds. I walked about in the room and saw them resting, trying to rest, but since they didn’t know how to do it, they couldn’t.  They were all more or less sprawled out, their eyes were open — they weren’t asleep, it wasn’t sleep, it was a state of rest; the vital wasn’t active but in a state of semi-awareness. I got them to understand that I could show them how to rest in such a way as to recover their energy instead of wasting it.


The Mother: And would you believe it, only one of them was willing to learn! The others said, “No, we are quite all right as we are, we don’t want to learn anything else!”  There are many different places, many. It may be in the subtle physical, for all of you live in my physical atmosphere and so it is in the subtle physical that you see me most often. And there you feel that what you see is almost material, but with a slight distortion.


The Mother: Because it is the subtle physical, you can quite easily remember what you have  seen. Very often, in the middle of the night, I take care of you (I don’t want to boast about it!) and I remember many things that are of some importance — I don’t remember everything because it is not worth burdening the memory with a lot of useless things. And I have noticed that several of you are able to remember, but the thing takes place in your consciousness with a slight distortion — it wasn’t exactly the same.  Some people can see me vitally, some people can see me psychically (this is quite rare), some people can see me mentally and some people can see me in the subconscious and, in certain conditions, in the unconscious; but that is rare.  Others may have a revelation about me and see me as I am, but not many can do that.


The Mother: There are many methods, but I will give you one. First, your body must be comfortable, on a bed, in an easy-chair — anywhere so long as it is comfortable. Then you learn how to relax your nerves one after the other, until you achieve complete relaxation. You should relax all your nerves — you can relax them all together, but perhaps it is easier to relax them one after the other, and this becomes very interesting. And when that is done, you must make your brain quiet and silent and at the same time keep your body like a rag on the bed.


The Mother: You must make the brain so still and absolutely quiet that it is not aware of itself. And then, don’t to sleep, but pass very gently from this state into sleep without being aware of it. When you wake up the next morning you will be full of energy. But if you go to bed very tired and without even trying to relax, to calm down, you will fall into a heavy, dull and unconscious sleep and the vital will lose all its energy. Perhaps this won’t have any immediate effect, but it is better to try it than to plunge into sleep when you are very tired.


The Mother: If you relax very gently before going to sleep, you will feel great pleasure in going to sleep. If you manage to relax the nerves, even of only one arm or leg, you will see how pleasant it is. If you go to sleep with your nerves tense, you will have a very restless sleep and change position very often during the night.  That kind of rest is no good.


The Mother: No, not necessarily. There is no rule. If you think it is like that, it will be like that!  Yes, this can be done and it means that you are partially conscious of your night activities.  It sometimes happens that when you go out of your body, when you exteriorise yourself during sleep and are conscious in the vital world, you can live a vital life that is just as conscious as the physical life.


The Mother: I have known people — not many have this capacity of going out of their body — but I have known people who had such a strong interest in their experiences in the vital world that in the end they refused to return to their body, they went on sleeping almost indeﬁnitely.  If you are conscious and self-controlled in the vital world and have a certain power there, the things that happen are wonderful, inﬁnitely more varied and magniﬁcent than in the  physical world. It is true that some regions in the vital world are wonderful.  Now I will tell you how this happens. When you are very tired and in need of rest and if you know how to exteriorise yourself, if you go out of your body and enter consciously into the vital world, there are regions there, in the vital world, which are like a marvellous virgin forest, with all the splendour of a rich and harmonious vegetation, and beautiful, mirror-like pools.


The Mother: And the atmosphere is ﬁlled with the living vitality of plants, with every shade of green reﬂected in the water... And there you feel so much life, so much beauty, so much richness and plenitude that you wake up full of energy. And all this is so objective! I have been able to take people there, without telling them anything at all about how it would be, and they were able to describe the place exactly as I can myself, and they had exactly the same experience. They were absolutely exhausted before going to sleep and they woke up with an absolutely marvellous feeling of plenitude, of force and energy.


The Mother: They had stayed there only a few minutes.  There are regions like that — not many, but they exist. On the other hand, there are many unpleasant places in the vital world and it is better not to go there. Leaving aside those who are so attached, so rivetted to their bodies that they don’t even want to leave them, those who can easily learn to go out of their bodies ought to do so with great care. I haven’t been able to teach this to many people, for that would mean exposing them, sometimes without protection — when they do it alone, without my presence — to experiences which can be extremely harmful to them.


The Mother: The vital world is a world of extremes. If, for example, you eat a bunch of grapes in the vital world, you can go for thirtysix hours without feeling hungry — fully nourished. But you can meet with certain things, enter certain places that drain all your energy in a trice, and sometimes leave you with illnesses and after-effects that belong to the vital world.   I used to know a woman who was absolutely wonderful from the occult point of view. She was absolutely conscious of herself, of all the regions of her being; she could go from one region to another — in short, she was marvellous.


The Mother: Well, she had an accident in the vital world. She was ﬁghting some beings from the vital world in order to save someone whom she was very fond of, and she got a blow on the eye. And when I met her, she had lost an eye. Many people have these accidents in the vital world, and they keep traces of these accidents for hours after they wake up. That is why you can’t tell just anyone, “Learn to go out of your body”, for there are many requirements before you can do it safely.


The Mother: If you have any afﬁnities with the forces of falsehood and violence, it is better to stay in your physical body.   THE STEPS OF THE SOUL  The human individual is a very complex being: he is composed of innumerable elements, each one of which is an independent entity and has almost a personality. Not only so, the most contradictory elements are housed together. If there is a particular quality or capacity present, the very opposite of it, annulling it, as it were, will also be found along with it and embracing it.


The Mother: I have seen a man brave, courageous, heroic to the extreme, ﬂinching from no danger, facing unperturbed the utmost peril, truly the bravest of the brave; and yet I have seen the same man cowering in abject terror, like the last of poltroons, in the presence of certain circumstances. I have seen a most generous man giving things away largely, freely, not counting any expenditure or sacriﬁce, without the least care or reservation; the same person I have also found to be the vilest of misers with respect to certain other considerations. Again, I have seen the most intelligent person, with a clear mind, full of light and understanding, easily comprehending the logic and implication of a topic; and yet I have seen him betraying the utmost stupidity of which even an ordinary man without education or intelligence would be incapable. These are not theoretical examples: I have come across such persons actually in life.


The Mother: The complexity arises not only in extension but also in depth. Man does not live on a single plane but on many planes at the same time. There is a scale of gradation in human consciousness: the higher one rises in the scale the greater the number of elements or personalities that one possesses. Whether one lives mostly or mainly on the physical or vital or mental plane or on any particular section of these planes or on the planes above and beyond them, there will be, accordingly, differences  in the constitution or psycho-physical make-up of the individual personality.


The Mother: The higher one stands, the richer the personality, because it lives not only on its own normal level but also on all the levels that are below it and which it has transcended.  The complete or integral man, some occultists say, possesses three hundred and sixty-ﬁve personalities; indeed it may be much more. The Vedas speak of the three and thirty-three and thirty-three hundred and thirty-three thousand gods that may be housed in the human vehicle — the basic three being evidently the triple status or world of Body, Life and Mind.  What is the meaning of this self-contradiction, this division in man? To understand that, we must know and remember that each person represents a certain quality or capacity, a particular achievement to be embodied.


The Mother: How best can it be done? What is the way by which one can acquire a quality at its purest, highest and most perfect? It is by setting an opposition to it.  That is how a power is increased and strengthened — by ﬁghting against and overcoming all that weakens and contradicts it. The deﬁciencies with respect to a particular quality show you where you have to mend and reinforce it and in what way to improve it in order to make it perfectly perfect.


The Mother: It is the hammer that beats the weak and soft iron to transform it into hard steel.  The preliminary discord is useful and needs to be utilised for a higher harmony. This is the secret of self-conﬂict in man. You are weakest precisely in that element which is destined to be your greatest asset.  Each man has then a mission to fulﬁl, a role to play in the universe, a part he has been given to learn and take up in the cosmic Purpose, a part which he alone is capable of executing and none other.


The Mother: This he has to learn and acquire through life-experiences, that is to say, not in one life but in life after life. In fact, that is the meaning of the chain of lives that the individual has to pass through, namely, to acquire experiences and to gather from them the thread — the skein of qualities and attributes, powers and capacities — for the pattern of life he has  to weave. Now, the inmost being, the true personality, the central consciousness of the evolving individual is his psychic being. It is, as it were, a very tiny spark of light lying in normal people far behind the life-experiences. In grown-up souls this psychic consciousness has an increased light — increased in intensity, volume and richness.


The Mother: Thus there are old souls and new souls.  Old and ancient are those that have reached or are about to reach the fullness of perfection; they have passed through a long history of innumerable lives and developed the most complex and yet the most integrated personality. New souls are those that have just emerged or are now emerging out of the mere physico-vital existence; they are like simple organisms, made of fewer constituents related mostly to the bodily life, with just a modicum of the mental. It is the soul, however, that grows with experiences and it is the soul that builds and enriches the personality. Whatever portion of the outer life, whatever element in the mind or vital or body succeeds in coming into contact with the psychic consciousness — that is to say, is able to come under its inﬂuence — is taken up and lodged there: it remains in the psychic being as its living memory and permanent possession.


The Mother: It is such elements that form the basis, the groundwork upon which the structure of the integral and true personality is raised.  The ﬁrst thing to do then is to ﬁnd out what it is that you are meant to realise, what is the role you have to play, your particular mission, and the capacity or quality you have to express. You have to discover that and also the thing or things that oppose and do not allow it to ﬂower or come to full manifestation. In other words, you have to know yourself, recognise your soul or psychic being.  For that you must be absolutely sincere and impartial.


The Mother: You must observe yourself as if you were observing and criticising a third person. You must not start with an idea that this is your life’s mission, this is your particular capacity, this you are to do or that you are to do, in this lies your talent or genius, etc. That will carry you away from the right track. It is not the liking or  disliking of your external being, your mental or vital or physical choice that determines the true line of your growth. Nor should you take up the opposite attitude and say, “I am good for nothing in this matter, I am useless in that one; it is not for me.”


The Mother: Neither vanity and arrogance nor self-depreciation and false modesty should move you. As I said, you must be absolutely impartial and unconcerned. You should be like a mirror that reﬂects the truth and does not judge.  If you are able to keep such an attitude, if you have this repose and quiet trust in your being and wait for what may be revealed to you, then something like this happens: you are, as it were, in a wood, dark and noiseless; you see in front of you merely a sheet of water, dark and still, hardly visible — a bit of a pond imbedded in the obscurity; and slowly upon it a moonbeam is cast and in the cool dim light emerges the calm liquid surface. That is how your secret truth of being will appear and present itself to you at your ﬁrst contact with it: there you will see gradually reﬂected the true qualities of your being, the traits of your divine personality, what you really are and what you are meant to be.


The Mother: One who has thus known himself and possessed himself.  conquering all opposition within himself, has by that very fact extended himself and his conquest, making it easier for others to make the same or a similar conquest.


The Mother: These are the pioneers or the elite who by a victorious campaign within themselves help others towards their victory.   The problem is not as simple as all that. The causes of suffering are innumerable and its quality also varies a great deal, although the origin of suffering is one and the same and comes from the initial action of an anti-divine will. To make this easier to understand, one can divide suffering into two distinct categories, although in practice they are very often mixed.  The ﬁrst is purely egoistic and comes from a feeling that one’s rights have been violated, that one has been deprived of one’s needs, offended, despoiled, betrayed, injured, etc.


The Mother: This whole category of suffering is clearly the result of hostile action and it not only opens the door in the consciousness to the inﬂuence of the adversary but is also one of his most powerful ways of acting in the world, the most powerful of all if in addition there comes its natural and spontaneous consequence: hatred and the desire for revenge in the strong, despair and the wish to die in the weak.  The other category of suffering, whose initial is the pain of separation created by the adversary, is totally opposite in nature: it is the suffering that comes from divine compassion, the suffering of love that feels compassion for the world’s misery, whatever its origin, cause or effect. But this suffering, which is of a purely psychic character, contains no egoism, no self-pity; it is full of peace and strength and power of action, of faith in the future and the will for victory; it does not pity but consoles, it does not identify itself with the ignorant movement in others but cures and illumines it.  It is obvious that in the purity of its essence, only that which is can feel that suffering; but partially, momentarily, like ﬂashes of lightning behind the dark clouds of egoism,  it appears in all who have a vast and generous heart. However, most often, in the individual consciousness it is mixed with that mean and petty self-pity which is the cause of depression and weakness.


The Mother: Nevertheless, when one is vigilant enough to refuse this mixture or at least to reduce it to a minimum, one soon realises that this divine compassion is based on a sublime and eternal joy which alone has the strength and the power to deliver the world from its ignorance and misery.  And this suffering too will disappear from the universe only with the total disappearance of the adversary and all the effects of his action.   MEMORY OF PAST LIVES  If one were to say things truly, one would have to say everything, in full detail. For among the innumerable experiences that I have had in the course of eighty years, many were of such a variety and apparently so contradictory that one might say: after all, everything is possible.


The Mother: So then, if I tell you something about past lives without presenting the thread running through everything, that would be opening the door to dogmatism. You will say one day, “Mother has said this, Mother has said that.” And that is how dogmas, alas, are made.  Given then the multitude of experiences and the impossibility that I should pass my life in talking and writing, you must tell yourself that everything is possible and not be dogmatic. I may, however, give a few general indications.


The Mother: Only when one is consciously identiﬁed with one’s divine origin, can one in truth speak of a memory of past lives. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the progressive manifestation of the Spirit in the forms in which it dwells. When one reaches the summit of this manifestation, one has a vision that plunges down upon the way traversed and one remembers.  But this memory is not a thing of the mental kind. Those who claim to have been such a baron of the Middle Ages or such a person who lived at such a place and such a time, are fanciful, they are simply victims of their own mental imagination.


The Mother: In fact, what remains of past lives are not beautiful pictures in which you appear as a mighty lord in a castle or a victorious general at the head of an army — that is only romance. What remains is the memory of those instants when the psychic being emerged from the depths of your being and revealed itself to you — that is to say, the memory of those instants when you  were wholly conscious . That growth of consciousness is progressively effectuated in the course of evolution, and the memory of past lives is generally limited to the critical moments of evolution, to the decisive turns that marked the progress of your consciousness.  At the time when you live such moments of your life, you do not care at all about remembering that you were Mr. X, such a person, living at such a place and in such an epoch; it is not the memory of your civic status that remains.


The Mother: On the contrary, you lose all consciousness of these petty external things, accessories and perishables, so that you may be wholly in the ﬂare of the soul revelation or of the divine contact. When you remember such instants of your past lives, the memory is so intense that it seems to be still very close, still living, and much more living than most of the ordinary memories of our present life. At times, in dreams, when you come into contact with certain planes of consciousness, you may have memories of such intensity, such vibrant colour, so to say, even more intense than the colours and things of the physical world. For these are the moments of true consciousness, and everything then puts on an extraordinary brilliance, everything is vibrant, everything is imbued with a quality that escapes the ordinary eye.  These minutes of contact with the soul are often those that mark a decisive turn of our life, a forward step, a progress in consciousness, and that frequently corresponds with a crisis, an extremely intense situation when there comes a call in the whole being, a call so strong that the inner consciousness pierces the layers of unconsciousness covering it and is revealed all luminous on the surface.


The Mother: This call of the being, when very strong, can also bring about the descent of a divine emanation, an individuality, a divine aspect which joins with your individuality at a given moment in order to do a given work, win a battle, express one thing or another. The work done, the emanation very often withdraws. Then one may retain the memory of the circumstances that were around those minutes of revelation or inspiration: one  sees again the scenery, the colour of the dress that one had put on, the colour of one’s own skin, the things about you at that time — all that is ﬁxed indelibly with an extraordinary intensity, because the things of the ordinary life revealed themselves then in their true intensity and their true colour. The consciousness that reveals itself in you , reveals at the same time the consciousness that is in things.


The Mother: At times, with the help of these details you may reconstitute the age in which you lived or the action that you did, ﬁnd out the country where you were; but it is very easy also to make a romance and take imagination for reality.  Yet you must not believe that all memories of past lives are those of moments of great crisis, of important mission or of revelation. Some times they are moments very simple, transparent, when an integral, a perfect harmony of the being was expressed.  And that may correspond to altogether insigniﬁcant external situations.  Apart from the things that were in your immediate surrounding at that moment, apart from that moment of contact with your psychic being, nothing remains.


The Mother: Once the privileged moment passes, the psychic being plunges into an inner somnolence and the whole outer life melts into a grey monotony which does not leave any trace. Besides, it is almost the same phenomenon as what happens in the course of the life that you lead at present: apart from those exceptional moments when you are at the summit of your being, mental or vital or even physical, the rest of your life seems to melt into a kind of neutral colour which has no great interest, when it matters little whether you were at such a place instead of being at another, whether you did this thing or that. If you try to look at your life all at once, in order to gather, as it were, its essence, the twenty or thirty or forty years behind you, you will see rise up spontaneously two or three images which were the true moments of your life; the rest is effaced. A kind of spontaneous choice works in your consciousness and there is a tremendous elimination. This will give you a little idea of what happens in regard to past lives: the  choice of a few select moments and an immense elimination.


The Mother: It is very true that the earliest lives are very rudimentary; very few things subsist out of that, scattered memories few and far between. But the more one progresses in consciousness, the more the psychic being is consciously associated with the outer activities; the memories grow in number and become more coherent and precise. But still, here also, the memory that remains is that of the contact with the soul and at times that of things which were associated with the psychic revelation — not the civic status or the changing scenes around. And this will explain to you why the so-called memories of past animal lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the outer life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one’s divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives.


The Mother: INNER REALISATION IS THE KEY TO OUTER REALISATION  When the adverse forces want to attack those who are around me and when they do not succeed in making them openly hostile to Sri Aurobindo’s work or in turning them against me personally, they proceed in the matter always in the same way, with the same argument: “You may have all the inner realisations you like,” they say, “the most beautiful experiences possible within the four walls of the Ashram, but on the outer plane your life is spoiled, wasted. There is an abyss that you will never ﬁll between the inner experience and the concrete realisation in the world.”  This is the number one argument of the adverse forces.  I know it.


The Mother: For millions of years I have heard the same thing repeated and each time I have unmasked it. It is a falsehood — it is falsehood. Everything that tends to establish a divorce between earth and the Spirit, is good for them, everything that separates the inner experience from the divine realisation in the world. But it is the contrary that is true: it is the inner realisation that is the key to the outer realisation. How can you expect to know the true thing which you have to realise in the world so long as you do not possess the truth of your being?


The Mother: THE ANTI -DIVINE  I have noticed one thing, that in at least ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this [attack by adverse forces] is an excuse which people give to themselves. I have seen that practically almost all who write to me: “I am violently attacked by adverse forces”, give this as an excuse. It is because there are many things in their nature which do not want to surrender, so they put all the blame on the adverse forces.


The Mother: In reality I am turning more and more towards something where the role of the adverse forces will be reduced to that of an examiner; that is to say, they are there to test the sincerity of your spiritual seeking. These things have their reality in the action and for the work — and it is a great reality — but when you have gone beyond a certain region, all that reaches a point where it is no longer so distinct and clearcut. In the occult world, or rather, if you look at the world from the occult point of view, these adverse forces are very real, their action is very real, completely concrete, and their attitude towards the divine realisation is positively hostile.  But as soon as you pass beyond this domain and enter into the spiritual world where there is nothing other than the Divine, who is everything, and where there is nothing that is not divine, these “adverse forces” become a part of the total play and they can no longer be called adverse forces.  It is only a posture that they have taken; to speak more exactly, it is only a posture that the Divine has taken in his play.


The Mother: This also forms part of the dualities of which Sri Aurobindo speaks in, the dualities that are reabsorbed. I do not know if he has spoken of this particular one  — I do not think so — but it is the same thing; it is just a way of seeing. He has spoken of the dualities Personal-Impersonal, Ishwara-Shakti, Purusha-Prakriti. There is one more: the Divine and the Anti-Divine.   EATING THE FRUIT


The Mother: A peach should ripen on the tree; it is a fruit that is to be plucked when the sun is there upon it. At the time when the sun falls upon it, you come, pluck it and bite into it. Then it is absolutely heavenly!  There are two fruits like this: the peach and the golden greengage.


The Mother: It is the same for both: you must take them warm from the tree, bite them, and you are ﬁlled with an Edenic taste.  Each fruit should be eaten in a special way.  Fundamentally, this is the symbol of earthly Paradise and of the tree of Knowledge: in eating of the fruit of Knowledge, you lose your spontaneity of movement and you begin to objectify, to learn, to discuss; thus, when they had eaten of the fruit they became full of sin.  I say each fruit should be eaten in its own way.


The Mother: A being living according to its own nature, its own truth, should spontaneously discover its own way of using things. When you live according to the truth of your being, you have no need to learn things, you do them spontaneously, according to the inner law. When you follow your nature spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine.  As soon as you think, see yourself doing and begin to discuss, you are full of sin.  It is man’s mental consciousness that has ﬁlled all Nature with the idea of sin and all the misery which it brings!


The Mother: Animals are not unhappy in the way we are, not at all, not at all, except, as Sri Aurobindo says, those that have been corrupted. The corrupted ones are those that live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt. It is because their whole aspiration is to become like man — man is god — and then, dissimulation,  falsehood. Dogs do lie.


The Mother: Men admire that; they say, “Oh! How intelligent they are!”  They have lost their divinity.  The human species, in the spiral ascent, is truly at a point which is not pretty.  To be conscious is not the point.


The Mother: Man is more evolved than the tiger, there is not the shadow of a doubt, but the tiger is more divine than man. You must not confuse things: the two things are quite different.  You see, the Divine is everywhere, in everything. You should never forget that, not for a second should you forget it. He is everywhere, in everything; and unconsciously, but spontaneously and therefore sincerely, everything that is below the mental manifestation is divine without mixture, that is to say, spontaneously, by its very nature.


The Mother: It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally he is much more conscious! That is not to be disputed, it is well understood, because what we call consciousness (what “we” call, that is to say, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and mentalise things. It is not the true consciousness, but it is what men call consciousness.  So in this human way, it is understood that man is much more conscious than the animal.


The Mother: But with man comes sin and perversion, which do not exist outside the state that we call “conscious”, but which is not truly conscious, which simply consists in mentalising things, in having the capacity to objectify them.  It is a curve of ascent, but that curve moves away from the Divine, and one must rise much higher to ﬁnd again, naturally, a higher Divine, for it is a conscious Divine, whereas the others are  divine without being conscious, spontaneously and instinctively.  And our whole moral notion of good and bad, we have thrown all that upon the creation with our deformed and perverted consciousness. It is we who have invented it.  We are the deforming intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the gods.


The Mother: DO NOT WASTE ENERGY  Human beings do not know how to preserve energy. When something happens, an accident or an illness, they ask for help and a double or triple dose of energy is administered. They feel that they are receptive and they receive it. This energy is given for two reasons: to repair the disorder caused by the accident or illness, and to give a power for transformation in order to mend, to change what was the true cause of the illness or accident.


The Mother: Instead of utilising energy in that way, immediately, immediately they throw it out. They begin to move about, they begin to be active, they begin to work, they begin to speak, they begin... they feel themselves full of energy and throw everything out! They can keep nothing.


The Mother: Then naturally, since the energy was not meant to be wasted like that, but for an inner use, they fall quite ﬂat. And this is universal. They do not know, they do not know how to make this movement: to go within, to utilise the energy — not to keep it, it cannot be kept — to utilise it to mend the damage done to the body and to go deep down to ﬁnd out the reason for the accident or the malady, and there, to change that into an aspiration, an inner transformation. Instead of this, people begin immediately to chatter, to move about, to act, to do this, to do that!  Indeed, the great majority of human beings feel that they are alive only when they waste energy; otherwise it does not look like life.


The Mother: Not to waste energy means to utilise it for the purposes for which it was given. If the energy is given for transformation, for the sublimation of the being, it must be used for that; if the energy is given to set right something that has been disorganised in the body, it must be used for that.   Naturally, if someone is given a special work and if he is given the energy to do that work, it is all right, it is used for its own purposes, and it was given for that.  As soon as a man feels energetic, he rushes immediately into action. Or else, those who have not got the sense to do something useful, gossip.


The Mother: Worse still, those who have no control over themselves become intolerant and begin to dispute! If their will is contradicted, they feel themselves full of energy and take it as holy wrath!   If, for example, you want to get rid of a wrong movement and, as the result of a grace, the force is sent out for this purpose, this force begins to act on the consciousness. Then, if you draw it towards you, so to speak, in order to formulate it, naturally you decentralise it, disperse and dissipate it.  But this is not all: the simple fact of speaking to another person opens you automatically to whatever may come from him; an interchange always occurs.


The Mother: In this way his curiosity, his obscurity, his good-will and also at times his ill-will intervenes, modiﬁes, deforms.  On the other hand, if you want to speak of your experience to your Guru and he agrees to listen to you, it means that he adds his force, his knowledge and his experience to the working of the force and he helps to bring about the result.  Yes, but he repairs it.   THE SENSE OF BEAUTY  To do this yoga, one must have, at least a little, the sense of beauty.


The Mother: If one does not, one misses one of the most important aspects of the physical world.  There is this beauty, this dignity of soul — a thing about which I am very sensitive. It is a thing that moves me and evokes in me a great respect always.  Yes, this beauty of soul that is visible in the face, this kind of dignity, this harmony of integral realisation. When the soul becomes visible in the physical, it gives this dignity, this beauty, this majesty, the majesty that comes from one’s being the Tabernacle.


The Mother: Then, even things that have no particular beauty put on a sense of eternal beauty, of eternal beauty.  I have seen in this way faces that pass from one extreme to the other in a ﬂash. Someone has this kind of beauty and harmony, this sense of divine dignity in the body; then suddenly there comes the perception of an obstacle, a difﬁculty, and the sense of fault, of indignity — and then, a sudden deformation in the appearance, a kind of decomposition of the features! And yet it is the same face. It was like a ﬂash of lightning, and it was frightful.


The Mother: That kind of hideousness of torment and degradation — what has been translated in religions as “the torment of sin” — that gives you a face indeed! Even features that are beautiful in themselves become horrible. And it was the same features, the same person.  Then I saw how horrible the sense of sin is, how much it belongs to the world of falsehood.   THE WORSHIP OF THE SUPREME IN MATTER


The Mother: In all religious and particularly in occult initiations, the ritual of the different ceremonies is prescribed in every detail; each word uttered, each gesture made has its importance and the least infraction of the rule, the least mistake committed can have disastrous consequences. It is the same with the material life, and if one were initiated into the true way of living, one would be able to transform physical existence.  If the body is considered as the tabernacle of the Lord, then medical science, for example, becomes the initiatory ritual for service of the temple and doctors of all categories are the priests who ofﬁciate in the different rituals of the worship. Thus, medicine is truly a priesthood and should be treated as such.  The same thing may be said of physical culture and of all the sciences dealing with the body and its working.


The Mother: And if the material universe is regarded as the external robe and manifestation of the Supreme, then it can be said, generally, that all the physical sciences are rituals of worship.  So we always come back to the same thing: the absolute necessity of a perfect sincerity, a perfect honesty, and a sense of the dignity of what one does, so that one does it as it should be done.  If one could know all the details truly, perfectly, all the details of the ceremony of life, of the worship of the Lord in physical life, it would be wonderful — to know and not to make more mistakes, never make any more mistakes. One performs the ceremony with the perfection of an initiation.   Between the gods of the Puranas and the gods of Greek and Egyptian mythology, all kinds of similarities are found; it could be an interesting subject for study.


The Mother: To the modern Western world, all these divinities — the Greek gods and other “pagan” gods, as they call them — are simply a product of human imagination and correspond to nothing real in the universe. But this is a gross error.  To understand the mechanism of universal life, even that of terrestrial life, one has indeed to know that all these are real and living beings, each in its own realm, and have an independent reality. They would exist even if men did not exist. The majority of these gods existed before man existed.


The Mother: In a very old tradition, probably dating before the Chaldean and Vedic traditions, which are its two branches, the history of creation is narrated not from the metaphysical or psychological point of view, but from an objective point of view, and this history is as real as our history of historical epochs. Of course, this is not the only way of looking at the thing, but it is quite as legitimate as any other; and in any case it recognises the concrete reality of these divine beings.  These are beings who belong to the progressive creation of the universe and have themselves presided over its formation, from the most ethereal or subtle to the most material regions; it is a descent of the divine creative Spirit. And they descended progressively, through realities more and more — one cannot say dense, because it is not dense, one cannot even say material, because matter as we know it does not exist on those planes — through realities more and more concrete.   According to traditions and occult schools, all these zones of realities, these planes of realities have got different names; they have been classiﬁed in a different way, but there is an essential analogy, and if you go back far enough into the traditions, you see only the words changing according to the country and the language.


The Mother: Even now, the experiences of Western occultists and those of Eastern occultists offer great similarities. All who set out on the discovery of these invisible worlds and make a report of what they saw, give a very similar description, whether they be from here or there; they use different words, but the experience is very similar and the handling of forces is the same.  This knowledge of the occult worlds is based on the existence of subtle bodies and of subtle worlds corresponding to those bodies. They are what the psychological method calls “states of consciousness”, but these states of consciousness really correspond to worlds. The occult procedure consists then in being aware of these various inner states of being or subtle bodies and in becoming sufﬁciently a master of them so as to be able to go out of them successively, one after another.


The Mother: There is indeed a whole scale of subtleties, increasing or decreasing according to the direction in which you go, and the occult procedure consists in going out of a denser body into a subtler body and so on again, up to the most ethereal regions. You go, by successive exteriorisations, into bodies or worlds more and more subtle. It is somewhat as if every time you passed into another dimension. The fourth dimension of the physicists is nothing but the scientiﬁc transcription of an occult knowledge.  To give another image, one can say that the physical body is at the centre — it is the most material, the densest and also the smallest — and the inner bodies, more subtle, overﬂow more and more the central physical body; they pass through it, extending themselves farther and farther, like water evaporating from a porous vase and forming a kind of steam all around.


The Mother: And the greater the subtlety, the more the extension tends to unite with that of the universe: one ends by universalising oneself. And it is  altogether a concrete process which gives an objective experience of invisible worlds and even enables one to act in these worlds.  There are, then, only a very small number of people in the West who know that these gods are not merely subjective and imaginary — more or less wildly imaginary — but that they correspond to a universal truth.  All these regions, all these domains are ﬁlled with beings who exist, each in its own domain, and


The Mother: if you are awake and conscious on a particular plane — for instance, if on going out of a more material body you awake on some higher plane, you have the same relation with the things and people of that plane as you had with the things and people of the material world. That is to say, there exists an entirely objective relation that has nothing to do with the idea you may have of these things. Naturally, the resemblance is greater and greater as you approach the physical world, the material world, and there even comes a time when the one region has a direct action upon the other. In any case, in what Sri Aurobindo calls the overmental worlds, you will ﬁnd a concrete reality absolutely independent of your personal experience; you go back there and again ﬁnd the same things, with the differences that have occurred during your absence.  And you have relations with those beings that are identical with the relations you have with physical beings, with this difference that the relation is more plastic, supple and direct — for example, there is the capacity to change the external form, the visible form, according to the inner state you are in.


The Mother: But you can make an appointment with someone and be at the appointed place and ﬁnd the same being again, with certain differences that have come about during your absence; it is entirely concrete with results entirely concrete.  One must have at least a little of this experience in order to understand these things. Otherwise, those who are convinced that all this is mere human imagination and mental formation, who believe that these gods have such and such a form because men have thought them to be like that, and that they have certain  defects and certain qualities because men have thought them to be like that — all those who say that God is made in the image of man and that he exists only in human thought, all these will not understand; to them this will appear absolutely ridiculous, madness. One must have lived a little, touched the subject a little, to know how very concrete the thing is.  Naturally, children know a good deal if they have not been spoilt.


The Mother: There are so many children who return every night to the same place and continue to live the life they have begun there.  When these faculties are not spoilt with age, you can keep them with you. At a time when I was especially interested in dreams, I could return exactly to a place and continue a work that I had begun: supervise something, for example, set something in order, a work of organisation or of discovery, of exploration. You go until you reach a certain spot, as you would go in life, then you take a rest, then you return and begin again — you begin the work at the place where you left off and you continue it. And you perceive that there are things which are quite independent of you, in the sense that changes of which you are not at all the author, have taken place automatically during your absence.


The Mother: But for this, you must these experiences yourself, you must see them yourself, live them with sufﬁcient sincerity and spontaneity in order to see that they are independent of any mental formation. For you can do the opposite also, and deepen the study of the action of mental formation upon events. This is very interesting, but it is another domain. And this study makes you very careful, very prudent, because you become aware of how far you can delude yourself. So you must study both, the dream and the occult reality, in order to see what is the difference between the two.


The Mother: The one depends upon us; the other exists in itself; entirely independent of the thought that we have of it.  When you have worked in that domain, you recognise in fact that once a subject has been studied and something has been learnt mentally, it gives a special colour to the experience; the  experience may be quite spontaneous and sincere, but the simple fact that the subject was known and studied lends a particular quality. Whereas if you had learnt nothing about the question, if you knew nothing at all, the transcription would be completely spontaneous and sincere when the experience came; it would be more or less adequate, but it would not be the outcome of a previous mental formation.  Naturally, this occult knowledge or this experience is not very frequent in the world, because in those who do not have a developed inner life, there are veritable gaps between the external consciousness and the inmost consciousness; the linking states of being are missing and they have to be constructed. So when people enter there for the ﬁrst time, they are bewildered, they have the impression they have fallen into the night, into nothingness, into non-being!


The Mother: I had a Danish friend, a painter, who was like that. He wanted me to teach him how to go out of the body; he used to have interesting dreams and thought that it would be worth the trouble to go there consciously. So I made him “go out” — but it was a frightful thing! When he was dreaming, a part of his mind still remained conscious, active, and a kind of link existed between this active part and his external being; then he remembered some of his dreams, but it was a very partial phenomenon.  And to go out of one’s body means to pass gradually through  the states of being, if one does the thing systematically.


The Mother: Well, already in the subtle physical, one is almost de-individualised, and when one goes farther, there remains nothing, for nothing is formed or individualised.  Thus, when people are asked to meditate or told to go within, to enter into themselves, they are in agony — naturally!  They have the impression that they are vanishing. And with reason: there is nothing, no consciousness!  These things that appear to us quite natural and evident, are, for people who know nothing, wild imagination.


The Mother: If, for example, you transplant these experiences or this knowledge to  the West, well, unless you have been frequenting the circles of occultists, they stare at you with open eyes. And when you have turned your back, they hasten to say, “These people are cranks!”  Now to come back to the gods and conclude. It must be said that all those beings who have never had an earthly existence — gods or demons, invisible beings and powers — do not possess what the Divine has put into man: the psychic being. And this psychic being gives to man true love, charity, compassion, a deep kindness, which compensate for all his external defects.


The Mother: In the gods there is no fault because they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint: as gods, it is their manner of being. But if you take a higher point of view, if you have a higher vision, a vision of the whole, you see that they lack certain qualities that are exclusively human.  By his capacity of love and self-giving, man can have as much power as the gods and even more, when he is not egoistic, when he has surmounted his egoism.  If he fulﬁls the required condition, man is nearer to the Supreme than the gods are. He can be nearer.


The Mother: He is not so automatically, but he has the power to be so, the potentiality.  If human love manifested itself without mixture, it would be all-powerful. Unfortunately, in human love there is as much love of oneself as of the one loved; it is not a love that makes you forget yourself.   EXPERIENCE OF 5 NOVEMBER 1958  Here is the origin of this message:


The Mother: Last evening in the class, I noticed that the children, who had a whole week to prepare questions on the text we are reading, did not ﬁnd a single one. A terrible somnolence! A total lack of interest! When I had ﬁnished my reading, I said to myself, “But what is there in these brains that does not take interest in anything but their small personal affairs? After all, what is happening inside there, behind these forms?”


The Mother: Then during the meditation, I began going down into the mental atmosphere of the people around me, in order to ﬁnd there the small light, the thing that responds. And I was literally dragged down to the bottom, as if into a hole.  In this hole I saw what I am still seeing. I went down into a ﬁssure, as it were, between two steep rocks, rocks made of something harder than basalt, black, metallic at the same time, with edges so sharp that you had the impression that were you simply to touch them, you would be ﬂayed. It was something that seemed to have no bottom and no end, and it became narrower and narrower like a funnel, so narrow that there was almost no room left even for the consciousness to pass.


The Mother: The bottom  was invisible, a black hole, and that went down and down and down, without air, without light, only a kind of glimmer, like a reﬂection at the peak of the rocks, a glimmer that came from beyond, from something that could be the heavens, but something invisible. I continued to slide down the ﬁssure and I saw the edges, the black rocks, cut with scissors, as it were, shining like a fresh cut, the edges so sharp that they were like knives. Here was one, there another, there another, everywhere, all around.  And I was dragged, dragged, dragged down, — I went down, down, down and there was no end to it, it became more and more oppressive, stiﬂing, suffocating.  Physically, the body followed, it participated in the experience.


The Mother: The hand that was on the arm of the chair slipped down, then the other hand, then the head bent down in an irresistible movement. Then I said to myself, “But this must stop, for if it continues, my head will be down on the ground!” (The consciousness was elsewhere, but I was looking at my body from outside.) And I asked myself, “But what is there at the bottom of this hole?”  Hardly had I formulated the question when it was as if I had touched a spring that was there at the very bottom of the hole, a spring I had not noticed yet, which acted at once with a tremendous force and at one bound shot me up straight into the air; I was cast out of the ﬁssure into a limitless, formless vast which was inﬁnitely comfortable — not exactly warm, but it gave a comfortable impression of inner warmth.


The Mother: After this painful enough descent, it was a kind of super-comfort, an ease, an ease at its maximum. And my body immediately followed the movement, the head at once became straight again. And I lived all this without objectifying it at all; I was not taking stock of what it was, I did not look for any explanation of what was happening; it was what it was, I lived it and that was all. The experience was absolutely spontaneous.  It was all-powerful, inﬁnitely rich; it had no form at all, no limit — naturally I was identiﬁed with it and that is why I  knew that it had neither limit nor form.


The Mother: It was as if — I say “as if” because it could not be seen — as if this vast was made up of countless imperceptible points, points that did not occupy any place in space (there was no space, you see), points that were a deep warm gold; but this was only an impression, a translation. And all that was absolutely, living with a power that seemed inﬁnite. And yet it was immobile, with an immobility so perfect that it gave a feeling of eternity, but with an unbelievable inner intensity of movement and life — it was inner, self-contained — and immobile, immobile in relation to the outside, if there was an outside. And it had a boundless life — it may be spoken of as inﬁnite only by way of image — and an intensity, a strength, a force, a peace, the peace of eternity, a silence, a calm, a power capable of everything.  And I did not think it, I did not objectify it, I lived it comfortably, very comfortably.


The Mother: This lasted for a very long time — for the rest of the meditation.  It was as if that contained all the wealth of possibilities. And all that though it had no form, had the power to become forms.  After a moment I asked myself, “What is this, to what does it correspond?” Naturally I found out afterwards, and ﬁnally this morning I told myself, “Well, it is just to give me my message for the coming year.”


The Mother: Then I transcribed it — naturally, you cannot make a description, it is indescribable. It was a psychological phenomenon and the forms were nothing but a way of describing the psychological state to oneself. And this is what I noted, obviously in a mental way. I have described nothing, I have only stated a fact:  Generally the inconscience gives the impression of something  amorphous, inert, formless, neutral and grey — formerly, when I entered into the zones of inconscience, that was the ﬁrst thing that I met; but in my experience yesterday, it was an inconscience hard, rigid, coagulated, as if coagulated for a resistance.


The Mother: It was a mental inconscience; all efforts make no impression on it, nothing can penetrate it. And this inconscience is much worse than a purely material inconscience. It was not the original inconscient; it was, if one may say so, a mentalised inconscient.  All this rigidity, hardness, narrowness, ﬁxity, opposition come from a mental presence in the creation: this is what the mind has brought into the inconscient. When the mind had not manifested, the inconscient was not like that: it was formless and had the plasticity of formless things.


The Mother: That plasticity has disappeared.  The beginning of the experience is a very expressive image of the action of mind in the inconscient; it has made the inconscient aggressive — it was not like that before — aggressive, resisting, obstinate. That was precisely the starting-point of my experience. I was in fact trying to look into the mental inconscience of people, and this mental inconscience to change, while the other did not; the purely material inconscience has no mode of being, it does not exist, it is not organised in any way. While this one is an organised inconscience, organised through the beginning of a mental inﬂuence — and it is a hundred times worse!


The Mother: It has now become a much greater obstacle than before.  Before, it did not even have the power to resist, it had nothing, it was truly inconscient. Now it is an inconscience organised in its refusal to change! So I wrote, “most hard and rigid and narrow” — the idea is of something which presses you, presses you — “most stiﬂing”.  Then I wrote, “I struck upon an almighty spring.”


The Mother: That means precisely this: in the deepest depths of the inconscient, there is a supreme spring that enables us to touch the Supreme.  Because at the very bottom of the inconscience there is the Supreme. It is the Supreme who enables us to touch the Supreme.  This is the “almighty spring”.   It is always the same idea that the highest height touches the deepest depth.


The Mother: The universe is like a circle; it is represented by a serpent that bites its own tail. That means that the supreme height touches the most material matter without any intermediary. I have said this many times, but here it was an experience of the thing as I had it.  Finally I said, “a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world”. This does not refer to the primordial creation, but to the supramental creation; so this experience does not correspond to a return to the supreme origin of all.


The Mother: I had altogether the impression that I was projected into the origin of the supramental creation: it is something of the Supreme that has already been objectiﬁed precisely for the sake of the supramental creation.   There was in fact this entire impression of power, of warmth and of gold. It was not ﬂuid, but like a powdery mist. And each one of these things (they cannot be called particles or fragments or even points, unless point is taken in the mathematical sense, a point that does not occupy any place in space) was like living gold, a powdery mist of warm gold — one cannot call it bright, nor can one call it dark; neither was it light: a multitude of small points of gold, nothing but that.


The Mother: One could say that they touched my eyes, my face... and with a tremendous force! At the same time, there was the feeling of a plenitude, of an allpowerful peace — it was rich, it was full. It was movement at its maximum, inﬁnitely more swift than anything that one can imagine, and at the same time it was absolute peace, perfect stillness.   And this almighty spring was a perfect image of what happens, is bound to happen and will happen: all at once you shoot up into the vast.


The Mother: The experience that I have just described was followed by another which was also noted down at the time.   EXPERIENCE OF 13 NOVEMBER 1958  To tell the truth, you are never freed from hostile forces until you come out for good into the Light, above the lower hemisphere.   And there the phrase “hostile forces” loses its meaning; only the forces of progress are there in order to compel you to progress.


The Mother: But you must come out of the lower hemisphere in order to see things in that way; because below, they are very real in their opposition to the divine plan.  It was said in the old traditions that one could not live more than twenty days in that higher state without leaving one’s body and returning to the supreme origin. Now that is no longer true.  It is precisely this state of perfect harmony, beyond all attacks, that will become possible with the supramental realisation. It is that which will be realised for all who are destined for the supramental transformation.


The Mother: The adverse forces know quite well that in the supramental world they will automatically disappear: having no more use, they will be dissolved without the need to do anything, simply through the presence of the supramental force. That is why they rush about in a rage, negating everything, everything.  But the link between the two worlds has not yet been built — it is in the course of being built. That was the meaning of the experience of February third, namely, to establish a link between the two worlds. For the two worlds are there in fact — not one above the other: one within the other, in two different dimensions — but there is no communication between the two.


The Mother: They overlap each other without being joined together. In the experience of February third, I saw some of those from here and  elsewhere who already belong to the supramental world in one part of their being; but there is no connection, no junction. The moment has come just now in the history of the universe when that link must be established.  The experience of November ﬁfth was a new step in the construction of the link between the two worlds. I was indeed projected into the very origin of the supramental creation: all that warm gold, that living tremendous power, that sovereign peace.


The Mother: I saw once again that the values which govern in this supramental world have nothing to do with our values here below, even the values of the wisest, even those values which we consider most divine at the time we live constantly in the divine Presence. It is altogether different.  Not only in our state of worship and surrender to the Lord, but even in our state of identiﬁcation, the quality of the identiﬁcation is different depending on whether we are on this side, progressing in this hemisphere below, or have passed over to the other and emerged into the other world, the other hemisphere, the higher hemisphere.  The quality or the kind of relation that I had with the Supreme at that moment was quite different from that which we have here, and even the identiﬁcation had a different quality. With regard to the lower movements one understands very well that they are different, but that was the summit of our experience here, that identiﬁcation by which it is the Supreme who rules and lives.


The Mother: Well! He rules and lives quite differently when we are in this lower hemisphere and when we are in the supramental life. And at that moment what gave intensity to the experience was that I came to perceive, vaguely, these two states of consciousness at the same time. It is almost as if the Supreme himself is different, that is to say, the experience we have of him. And yet in both cases there was contact with the Supreme.


The Mother: Well, probably what differs is what we perceive of  him or the way in which we translate it; but the quality of the experience is different.  There is in the other hemisphere an intensity and a plenitude which expresses itself through a power different from the one here. How to explain it? You cannot. The quality of the consciousness itself seems to change.


The Mother: It is not something higher than the summit to which we can rise here, it is not one step: here, we are at the end, at the summit. It is the quality that is different, the quality, in the sense that there is a plenitude, a richness, a power. This is a translation, in our manner, but there is something that escapes us — it is truly a new reversal of consciousness.  When we begin to live the spiritual life, a reversal of consciousness takes place which is for us the proof that we have entered the spiritual life; well, another reversal of consciousness occurs when one enters the supramental world.  Besides, perhaps each time that a new world opens up, there will again be a new reversal of this kind.


The Mother: Thus even our spiritual life — which is such a total reversal in relation to ordinary life — is and appears to be, in relation to the supramental consciousness, the supramental realisation, something so totally different that the values of the two are almost opposite.  One can put it in this way (but this is very imprecise, more than diminished — deformed): it is as if our entire spiritual life were made of silver whereas the supramental is made of gold, as if the whole spiritual life here below were a vibration of silver, not lustreless, but merely a light, a light that goes up to the summit, a light quite pure, pure and intense; but in the other life, the supramental life, there is a richness and a power that makes all the difference. This whole spiritual life of our psychic being and our present consciousness, which appears so warm, so full, so wonderful, so sparkling to the ordinary consciousness, well, all this splendour appears poor in relation to the splendour of the new world.   The phenomenon can be very well explained in this way: a series of reversals bringing about, step by step, an ever new richness of creation so that whatever has preceded it appears poor in comparison. What for us, in relation to our ordinary life, is a supreme richness, appears a poverty in relation to this new reversal of consciousness.


The Mother: This was my experience.  Last night when I tried to understand what was lacking so that I might be able to bring you completely, truly out of your difﬁculties, the effort reminded me of what I told you the other day about the Power, the power of transformation, the true power of realisation, the supramental power. Once you enter there, rise into that state, then you see that it is truly the AllPower in relation to what we are here. So once more I perceived, I felt the two states at the same time.  But as long as this realisation is not an accomplished fact, it will still be a progression — a progression, an ascension: you gain, you gain ground, you climb up and up; as long as it is not the new reversal, it is as if everything needed to be done over again.


The Mother: It is the repetition of the experience here below — it is reproduced up there.  And each time, you have the impression that you have lived on the surface of things. It is an impression that is repeated and repeated. At each new conquest you have the impression: “Until now I had lived only on the surface of things — on the surface of things — on the surface of realisation, the surface of surrender, the surface of power — it was merely the surface of things, the surface of experience.” Behind the surface there is a depth, and it is only when you enter into the depth that you touch the true thing.