The Mother: Whenever you are engaged in something which does not demand the whole of your attention, use it as an opportunity to develop your faculty of observation and you will see that you will make interesting discoveries. To help you to understand what I mean, I shall give you two examples. They are two brief moments in life which are insigniﬁcant in themselves, but still leave a deep and lasting impression.  The ﬁrst example takes place in Paris. You have to go out into this immense city; here all is noise, apparent confusion, bewildering activity.


The Mother: Suddenly you see a woman walking in front of you; she is like most other women, her dress has nothing striking about it, but her gait is remarkable, supple, rhythmic, elegant, harmonious. It catches your attention and you are full of wonder. Then, this body moving along so gracefully reminds you of all the splendours of ancient Greece and the unparalleled lesson in beauty which its culture gave to the whole world, and you live an unforgettable moment — all that just because of a woman who knows how to walk!   The second example is from the other end of the world,  from Japan.


The Mother: You have just arrived in this beautiful country for a long stay and very soon you ﬁnd out that unless you have at least a minimum knowledge of the language, it will be very difﬁcult for you to get along. So you begin to study Japanese and in order to become familiar with the language you do not miss a single opportunity to hear people talking, you listen to them carefully, you try to understand what they are saying; and then, beside you, in a tram where you have just taken your seat, there is a small child of four or ﬁve years with his mother. The child begins to talk in a clear and pure voice and listening to him you have the remarkable experience that he knows spontaneously what you have to learn with so much effort, and that as far as Japanese is concerned he could be your teacher in spite of his youth.  In this way life becomes full of wonder and gives you a lesson at each step. Looked at from this angle, it is truly worth living.


The Mother: O FORESEE destiny! How many have attempted it, how many systems have been elaborated, how many sciences of divination have been created and developed only to perish under the charge of charlatanism or superstition. And why is destiny always so unforeseeable? Since it has been proved that everything is ineluctably determined, how is it that one cannot succeed in knowing this determinism with any certainty?  Here again the solution is to be found in Yoga.


The Mother: And by yogic discipline one can not only foresee destiny but modify it and change it almost totally. First of all, Yoga teaches us that we are not a single being, a simple entity which necessarily has a single destiny that is simple and logical. Rather we have to acknowledge that the destiny of most men is complex, often to the point of incoherence. Is it not this very complexity which gives us the impression of unexpectedness, of indeterminacy and consequently of unpredictability?  To solve the problem one must know that, to begin with, all living creatures, and more especially human beings, are made up of a combination of several entities that come together, interpenetrate, sometimes organising themselves and completing each other, sometimes opposing and contradicting one another.


The Mother: Each one of these beings or states of being belongs to a world of its own and carries within it its own destiny, its own determinism. And it is the combination of all these determinisms, which is sometimes very heterogeneous, that results in the destiny of the individual. But as the organisation and relationship of all these entities can be altered by personal discipline and effort of will, as these various determinisms act on each other in different ways according to the concentration of the consciousness, their combination is nearly always variable and therefore unforeseeable.   For example, the physical or material destiny of a being comes from his paternal and maternal forebears, from the physical conditions and circumstances in which he is born; one should be able to foresee the events of his physical life, his state of health and approximately how long his body will last. But then there comes into play the formation of his vital being (the being of desires and passions, but also of impulsive energy and active will) which brings with it its own destiny.


The Mother: This destiny affects the physical destiny and can alter it completely and often even change it for the worse. For example, if a man born with a very good physical balance, who ought to live in very good health, is driven by his vital to all kinds of excesses, bad habits and even vices, he can in this way partly destroy his good physical destiny and lose the harmony of health and strength which would have been his but for this unfortunate interference. This is only one example. But the problem is much more complex, for, to the physical and vital destinies, there must be added the mental destiny, the psychic destiny, and many others besides.  In fact, the higher a being stands on the human scale, the more complex is his being, the more numerous are his destinies and


The Mother: the more unforeseeable his fate seems to be as a consequence. This is however only an appearance. The knowledge of these various states of being and their corresponding inner worlds gives at the same time the capacity to discern the various destinies, their interpenetration and their combined or dominant action. Higher destinies are quite obviously the closest to the central truth of the universe, and if they are allowed to intervene, their action is necessarily beneﬁcent. The art of living would then consist in maintaining oneself in one’s highest state of consciousness and thus allowing one’s highest destiny to dominate the others in life and action.


The Mother: So one can say without any fear of making a mistake: be always at the summit of your consciousness and the best will always happen to you. But that is a maximum which is not easy to reach. If this ideal condition turns out to be unrealisable, the individual can at least, when he  is confronted by a danger or a critical situation, call upon his highest destiny by aspiration, prayer and trustful surrender to the divine will. Then, in proportion to the sincerity of his call, this higher destiny intervenes favourably in the normal destiny of the being and changes the course of events insofar as they concern him personally. It is events of this kind that appear to the outer consciousness as miracles, as divine interventions.


The Mother: E WANT an integral transformation, the transformation of the body and all its activities. But there is an absolutely indispensable ﬁrst step that must be accomplished before anything else can be undertaken: the transformation of the consciousness. The starting-point is of course the aspiration for this transformation and the will to realise it; without that nothing can be done. But if in addition to the aspiration there is an inner opening, a kind of receptivity, then one can enter into this transformed consciousness at a single stroke and maintain oneself there. This change of consciousness is abrupt, so to say; when it occurs, it occurs all of a sudden, although the preparation for it may have been long and slow.


The Mother: I am not speaking here of a mere change in mental outlook, but of a change in the consciousness itself. It is a complete and absolute change, a revolution in the basic poise; the movement is like turning a ball inside out. To the transformed consciousness everything appears not only new and different, but almost the reverse of what it seemed to the ordinary consciousness. In the ordinary consciousness you advance slowly, by successive experiences, from ignorance to a very distant and often doubtful knowledge.  In the transformed consciousness your starting-point is knowledge and you proceed from knowledge to knowledge.


The Mother: However, this is only a beginning; for the outer consciousness, the various planes and parts of the outer active being are transformed only slowly and gradually as a result of the inner transformation.  There is a partial change of consciousness which makes you lose all interest in things that you once found desirable; but it is only a change of consciousness and not what we call the transformation. For the transformation is fundamental and absolute; it is not merely a change, but a reversal of consciousness: the being turns inside out, as it were, and takes a completely different  position. In this reversed consciousness the being stands above life and things and deals with them from there; it is at the centre of everything and directs its action outwards from there.  Whereas in the ordinary consciousness the being stands outside and below: from outside it strives to reach the centre; from below, crushed by the weight of its own ignorance and blindness, it struggles desperately to rise above them.


The Mother: The ordinary consciousness is ignorant of what things are in reality; it sees only their shell. But the true consciousness is at the centre, at the heart of reality and has the direct vision of the origin of all movements. Seated within and above, it knows the source, the cause and effect of all things and forces.  I repeat, this reversal is sudden. Something opens within you and all at once you ﬁnd yourself in a new world.


The Mother: The change may not be ﬁnal and deﬁnitive to begin with; it sometimes requires time to settle permanently and become your normal nature. But once the change has taken place, it is there, in principle, once and for all; and then what is needed is to express it gradually in the details of practical life. The ﬁrst manifestation of the transformed consciousness always seems to be abrupt. You do not feel that you are changing slowly and gradually from one state into another; you feel that you are suddenly awakened or newly born. No effort of the mind can lead you to this state, for with the mind you cannot imagine what it is and no mental description can be adequate.


The Mother: Such is the starting-point of all integral transformation.   ENERALLY speaking, perhaps the greatest obstacle in the way of man’s progress is fear, a fear that is manysided, multiform, self-contradictory, illogical, unreasoning and often unreasonable. Of all fears the most subtle and the most tenacious is the fear of death. It is deeply rooted in the subconscient and it is not easy to dislodge. It is obviously made up of several interwoven elements: the spirit of conservatism and the concern for self-preservation so as to ensure the continuity of consciousness, the recoil before the unknown, the uneasiness caused by the unexpected and the unforeseeable, and perhaps, behind all that, hidden in the depths of the cells, the instinct that death is not inevitable and that, if certain conditions are fulﬁlled, it can be conquered; although, as a matter of fact, fear in itself is one of the greatest obstacles to that conquest.


The Mother: For one cannot conquer what one fears, and one who fears death has already been conquered by it.  How can one overcome this fear? Several methods can be used for this purpose. But ﬁrst of all, a few fundamental notions are needed to help us in our endeavour. The ﬁrst and most important


The Mother: point is to know that life is one and immortal. Only the forms are countless, ﬂeeting and brittle. This knowledge must be securely and permanently established in the mind and one must identify one’s consciousness as far as possible with the eternal life that is independent of every form, but which manifests in all forms. This gives the indispensable psychological basis with which to confront the problem, for the problem remains. Even if the inner being is enlightened enough to be above all fear, the fear still remains hidden in the cells of the body, obscure, spontaneous, beyond the reach of reason, usually almost unconscious.


The Mother: It is in these obscure depths that one must ﬁnd it  out, seize hold of it and cast upon it the light of knowledge and certitude.  Thus life does not die, but the form is dissolved, and it is this dissolution that the physical consciousness dreads. And yet the form is constantly changing and in essence there is nothing to prevent this change from being progressive. Only this progressive change could make death no longer inevitable, but it is very difﬁcult to achieve and demands conditions that very few people are able to fulﬁl. Thus the method to be followed in order to overcome the fear of death will differ according to the nature of the case and the state of the consciousness.


The Mother: These methods can be classiﬁed into four principal kinds, although each one includes a large number of varieties; in fact, each individual must develop his own system.   The ﬁrst method appeals to the reason. One can say that in the present state of the world, death is inevitable; a body that has taken birth will necessarily die one day or another, and in almost every case death comes when it must: one can neither hasten nor delay its hour. Someone who craves for it may have to wait very long to obtain it and someone who dreads it may suddenly be struck down in spite of all the precautions he has taken.


The Mother: The hour of death seems therefore to be inexorably ﬁxed, except for a very few individuals who possess powers that the human race in general does not command. Reason teaches us that it is absurd to fear something that one cannot avoid. The only thing to do is to accept the idea of death and quietly do the best one can from day to day, from hour to hour, without worrying about what is going to happen. This process is very effective when it is used by intellectuals who are accustomed to act according to the laws of reason; but it would be less successful for emotional people who live in their feelings and let themselves be ruled by them. No doubt, these people should have recourse to the second method, the method of inner seeking.


The Mother: Beyond all the emotions, in the silent and tranquil depths of our being, there is a light shining constantly, the light of the psychic consciousness. Go in  search of this light, concentrate on it; it is within you. With a persevering will you are sure to ﬁnd it and as soon as you enter into it, you awake to the sense of immortality. You have always lived, you will always live; you become wholly independent of your body; your conscious existence does not depend on it; and this body is only one of the transient forms through which you have manifested. Death is no longer an extinction, it is only a transition.


The Mother: All fear instantly vanishes and you walk through life with the calm certitude of a free man.  The third method is for those who have faith in a God, their God, and who have given themselves to him. They belong to him integrally; all the events of their lives are an expression of the divine will and they accept them not merely with calm submission but with gratitude, for they are convinced that whatever happens to them is always for their own good. They have a mystic trust in their God and in their personal relationship with him. They have made an absolute surrender of their will to his and feel his unvarying love and protection, wholly independent of the accidents of life and death.


The Mother: They have the constant experience of lying at the feet of their Beloved in an absolute selfsurrender or of being cradled in his arms and enjoying a perfect security. There is no longer any room in their consciousness for fear, anxiety or torment; all that has been replaced by a calm and delightful bliss.  But not everyone has the good fortune of being a mystic.  Finally there are those who are born warriors. They cannot accept life as it is and they feel pulsating within them their right to immortality, an integral and earthly immortality.


The Mother: They possess a kind of intuitive knowledge that death is nothing but a bad habit; they seem to be born with the resolution to conquer it. But this conquest entails a desperate combat against an army of ﬁerce and subtle assailants, a combat that has to be fought constantly, almost at every minute. Only one who has an indomitable spirit should attempt it. The battle has many fronts; it is waged on several planes that intermingle and complement each other.   The ﬁrst battle to be fought is already formidable: it is the mental battle against a collective suggestion that is massive, overwhelming, compelling, a suggestion based on thousands of years of experience, on a law of Nature that does not yet seem to have had any exception.


The Mother: It translates itself into this stubborn assertion: it has always been so, it cannot be any different; death is inevitable and it is madness to hope that it can be anything else.  The concert is unanimous and till now even the most advanced scientist has hardly dared to sound a discordant note, a hope for the future. As for the religions, most of them have based their power of action on the fact of death and they assert that God wanted man to die since he created him mortal. Many of them make death a deliverance, a liberation, sometimes even a reward.  Their injunction is: submit to the will of the Highest, accept without revolt the idea of death and you shall have peace and happiness.


The Mother: In spite of all this, the mind must remain unshakable in its conviction and sustain an unbending will. But for one who has resolved to conquer death, all these suggestions have no effect and cannot affect his certitude which is based on a profound revelation.  The second battle is the battle of the feelings, the ﬁght against attachment to everything one has created, everything one has loved. By assiduous labour, sometimes at the cost of great efforts, you have built up a home, a career, a social, literary, artistic, scientiﬁc or political work, you have formed an environment with yourself at the centre and you depend on it at least as much as it depends on you. You are surrounded by a group of people, relatives, friends, helpers, and when you think of your life, they occupy almost as great a place as yourself in your thought, so much so that if they were to be suddenly taken away from you, you would feel lost, as if a very important part of your being had disappeared.


The Mother: It is not a matter of giving up all these things, since they make up, at least to a great extent, the aim and purpose of your existence. But you must give up all attachment to these things,  so that you may feel capable of living without them, or rather so that you may be ready, if they leave you, to rebuild a new life for yourself, in new circumstances, and to do this indeﬁnitely, for such is the consequence of immortality. This state may be deﬁned in this way: to be able to organise and carry out everything with utmost care and attention and yet remain free from all desire and attachment , for if you wish to escape death, you must not be bound by anything that will perish.  After the feelings come the sensations.


The Mother: Here the ﬁght is pitiless and the adversaries formidable. They can sense the slightest weakness and strike where you are defenceless. The victories you win are only ﬂeeting and the same battles are repeated indeﬁnitely. The enemy whom you thought you had defeated rises up again and again to strike you. You must have a strongly tempered character, an untiring endurance to be able to withstand every defeat, every rebuff, every denial, every discouragement and the immense weariness of ﬁnding yourself always in contradiction with daily experience and earthly events.


The Mother: We come now to the most terrible battle of all, the physical battle which is fought in the body; for it goes on without respite or truce. It begins at birth and can end only with the defeat of one of the two combatants: the force of transformation and the force of disintegration. I say at birth, for in fact the two movements are in conﬂict from the very moment one comes into the world, although the conﬂict becomes conscious and deliberate only much later. For every indisposition, every illness, every malformation, even accidents, are the result of the action of the force of disintegration, just as growth, harmonious development, resistance to attack, recovery from illness, every return to the normal functioning, every progressive improvement, are due to the action of the force of transformation. Later on, with the development of the consciousness, when the ﬁght becomes deliberate, it changes into a frantic race between the two opposite and rival movements, a race to see which one will reach its goal ﬁrst, transformation or death.


The Mother: This means a ceaseless effort,  a constant concentration to call down the regenerating force and to increase the receptivity of the cells to this force, to ﬁght step by step, from point to point against the devastating action of the forces of destruction and decline, to tear out of its grasp everything that is capable of responding to the ascending urge, to enlighten, purify and stabilise. It is an obscure and obstinate struggle, most often without any apparent result or any external sign of the partial victories that have been won and are ever uncertain — for the work that has been done always seems to need to be redone; each step forward is most often made at the cost of a setback elsewhere and what has been done one day can be undone the next. Indeed, the victory can be sure and lasting only when it is total. And all that takes time, much time, and the years pass by inexorably, increasing the strength of the adverse forces.  All this time the consciousness stands like a sentinel in a trench: you must hold on, hold on at all costs, without a quiver of fear or a slackening of vigilance, keeping an unshakable faith in the mission to be accomplished and in the help from above which inspires and sustains you.


The Mother: For the victory will go to the most enduring.  There is yet another way to conquer the fear of death, but it is within the reach of so few that it is mentioned here only as a matter of information. It is to enter into the domain of death deliberately and consciously while one is still alive, and then to return from this region and re-enter the physical body, resuming the course of material existence with full knowledge. But for that one must be an initiate.


The Mother: REPLY TO QUESTIONS  All these questions can be reduced to a single one: what is this knowledge or discipline which gives the capacity to face death without fear?  Until now, nothing has been said here about this method of knowledge, which is also a method of action, because the study and practice of this science cannot be put into the hands of one and all. To talk about occult things is of little value; one must gain experience of them. And this experimentation demands not only special capacities that very few men possess but also a psychological development that very few people can achieve.


The Mother: In the modern world, this knowledge is hardly recognised as scientiﬁc, and yet it is so, for it fulﬁls the conditions usually required for a science. It is a system of knowledge organised according to certain principles; it follows precise processes, and by reproducing exactly the same conditions, one obtains the same results. It is also a progressive knowledge; one can devote oneself to studying it and develop it in a regular and logical way, just like any other recognised science of today. But this study deals with realities which do not belong to the most material world. In order to take it up, one must possess special senses, for the domain in which it moves lies beyond our ordinary senses.


The Mother: These special senses are latent in men. Just as we have a physical body, so too we have other more subtle bodies with their own senses; these senses are much more reﬁned and precise, much more powerful than our physical senses. But of course, as education does not usually deal with this domain, these senses are not normally developed and the worlds in which they function elude our ordinary knowledge. And yet children spontaneously live a great deal in this domain. They see all kinds of things that are as real for them as physical objects.


The Mother: When they speak about them, most often they are told that they are stupid or  liars, because they mention phenomena of which others have no experience, but which for them are as true, as tangible, as real as what everyone can see. The dreams that children so often have either in sleep or while they are awake are extremely vivid and have a great importance in their lives. Only with intensive mental development do these capacities fade away in children and even sometimes disappear in the end. Yet there are people who have the good fortune to be born with spontaneously developed inner senses and nothing can prevent these senses from remaining awake and even developing. If these people, before it is too late, meet someone who has the knowledge and can help them in the methodical education of the subtle senses, they will become very interesting instruments of research and discovery in the occult worlds.


The Mother: In all ages, there have been isolated individuals or small groups on earth who were the guardians of a very ancient tradition, corroborated by their own experiences, and who practised this type of science. They sought out especially gifted individuals and gave them the necessary training. Usually these groups lived more or less in secret or in hiding, because ordinary men are very intolerant of this kind of capacity and activity, which is beyond them and frightens them. But there have been great periods in human history when recognised schools of initiation were established and were highly esteemed and respected, as in ancient Egypt, ancient Chaldea, ancient India, and even to some extent in Greece and Rome. Even in Europe, in the Middle Ages, there were institutions that taught occult science, but they had to conceal themselves very carefully, for they were pursued and persecuted by the ofﬁcial Christian religion.


The Mother: And if by chance it was discovered that a man or a woman practised this occult science, they were burnt alive at the stake as sorcerers. Now this knowledge is almost lost; very few people possess it. But with the knowledge, the intolerance has gone too. In our times, it is true, most educated people prefer to deny the existence of this science or to dub it imagination or even fraud in order  to hide from themselves their own ignorance and the uneasiness they would feel if they had to recognise the reality of a power over which they have no control. And even among those who do not deny it, most of them are not very fond of these things; they are disturbed and troubled by them.


The Mother: However, they are obliged to admit that it is not a crime. And people who practise occultism are no longer burnt at the stake or thrown into prison. Only, since it is no longer necessary to hide, many people claim to have the knowledge, but very few of them really know anything. Some unscrupulous and ambitious people take advantage of the mystery which formerly used to shroud occult science and use it as a means of mystiﬁcation and deceit.


The Mother: But it is not by these people that we should judge the knowledge which they wrongly claim to possess. In every domain of human activity, there are charlatans and imposters, but we should not allow their tricks to throw discredit upon a true science which they falsely claim to possess. That is why, during the great periods when this science was ﬂourishing, when there were recognised schools where it could be practised, before anyone was allowed to undertake this study, he had to undergo for a very long time, sometimes for many years, a very strict twofold discipline of self-development and self-mastery. On one hand, the sincerity and disinterestedness of the aspirant’s intentions, the purity of his motives, of his capacity for self-forgetfulness and self-abnegation, his sense of sacriﬁce and unselﬁshness were ascertained, as far as possible. In this way the loftiness and nobility of the candidate’s aspiration were proved, while on the other hand he was subjected to a series of ordeals intended to show that his capacities were adequate and that he could without danger practise the science to which he wished to devote himself.


The Mother: These ordeals laid a special emphasis on the mastery of passions and desires, on the establishment of an unshakable calm, and above all on the absence of all fear, for in this endeavour an unﬂinching fearlessness is an essential condition of safety.   In one of its aspects, occult science is like a kind of chemistry applied to the play of forces and the structure of the worlds and individual forms of the inner dimensions. Just as in the chemistry of Matter the manipulation of certain substances is not without danger, so too in the occult worlds the wielding of certain forces and contact with them involve risks which only a great self-control and an unshakable calm can render innocuous.  In another of its aspects, occult science is, for the individual seeker, like the discovery and exploration of unknown countries whose laws and customs one often learns at one’s own cost.  Some of these realms are even rather terrifying for the beginner, who ﬁnds himself surrounded by new and unexpected perils.


The Mother: However, most of these dangers are more imaginary than real, and if one faces them without fear they lose the greater part of their reality.  In any case, at all times it has been recommended that one should take up these studies only under a very reliable guide who can point out the paths to follow, put you on guard against dangers, whether illusory or not, and give protection when needed.  Thus it is difﬁcult to give more details here about the science itself, except to say that the indispensable basis of occult studies is a recognition of the concrete and objective reality of the many states of being and the inner worlds, which is a psychological application of the theory of four-dimensional or multi-dimensional space.  Occult science could thus be deﬁned as a concrete objectiﬁcation, in the world of forms, of what spiritual disciplines teach from the purely psychological point of view. The two should complement each other for the perfection of self-development and integral action.


The Mother: Occult knowledge without spiritual discipline is a dangerous instrument, for the one who uses it as for others, if it falls into impure hands. Spiritual knowledge without occult science lacks precision and certainty in its objective  results; it is all-powerful only in the subjective world. The two, when combined in inner or outer action, are irresistible and are ﬁt instruments for the manifestation of the supramental power.   HERE should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own, where all human beings of goodwill who have a sincere aspiration could live freely as citizens of the world and obey one single authority, that of the supreme truth; a place of peace, concord and harmony where all the ﬁghting instincts of man would be used exclusively to conquer the causes of his sufferings and miseries, to surmount his weaknesses and ignorance, to triumph over his limitations and incapacities; a place where the needs of the spirit and the concern for progress would take precedence over the satisfaction of desires and passions, the search for pleasure and material enjoyment. In this place, children would be able to grow and develop integrally without losing contact with their souls; education would be given not for passing examinations or obtaining certiﬁcates and posts but to enrich existing faculties and bring forth new ones.


The Mother: In this place, titles and positions would be replaced by opportunities to serve and organise; the bodily needs of each one would be equally provided for, and intellectual, moral and spiritual superiority would be expressed in the general organisation not by an increase in the pleasures and powers of life but by increased duties and responsibilities. Beauty in all its artistic forms, painting, sculpture, music, literature, would be equally accessible to all; the ability to share in the joy it brings would be limited only by the capacities of each one and not by social or ﬁnancial position. For in this ideal place money would no longer be the sovereign lord; individual worth would have a far greater importance than that of material wealth and social standing. There, work would not be a way to earn one’s living but a way to express oneself and to develop one’s capacities and possibilities while being of service to the community as a whole, which, for its own part, would provide for each individual’s  subsistence and sphere of action. In short, it would be a place where human relationships, which are normally based almost exclusively on competition and strife, would be replaced by relationships of emulation in doing well, of collaboration and real brotherhood.


The Mother: The earth is certainly not ready to realise such an ideal, for mankind does not yet possess sufﬁcient knowledge to understand and adopt it nor the conscious force that is indispensable in order to execute it; that is why I call it a dream.  And yet this dream is in the course of becoming a reality; that is what we are striving for in Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram, on a very small scale, in proportion to our limited means. The realisation is certainly far from perfect, but it is progressive; little by little we are advancing towards our goal which we hope we may one day be able to present to the world as a practical and effective way to emerge from the present chaos, to be born into a new life that is more harmonious and true.   OR THOSE who practise the integral Yoga, the welfare of humanity can be only a consequence and a result, it cannot be the aim.


The Mother: And if all the efforts to improve human conditions have miserably failed in the end in spite of all the ardour and enthusiasm and self-consecration they have inspired at ﬁrst, it is precisely because the transformation of the conditions of human life can only be achieved by another preliminary transformation, the transformation of the human consciousness or at least of a few exceptional individuals capable of laying the foundations for a more widespread transformation.  But we shall return to this subject later on; it will form our conclusion. First of all, I want to tell you about two striking examples chosen from among the adepts of true philanthropy.  Two outstanding beings at the two extremes of thought and action, two of the ﬁnest human souls expressing themselves in sensitive and compassionate hearts, received the same psychic shock when they came into contact with the misery of men. Both devoted their whole lives to ﬁnding the remedy for the suffering of their fellow-men, and both believed they had found it.


The Mother: But because their solutions, which may be described as contraries, were each in its own domain incomplete and partial, both of them failed to relieve the suffering of humanity.   One in the East, Prince Siddhartha, later known as the Buddha, and the other in the West, Monsieur Vincent, who came to be called Saint Vincent de Paul after his death, stood, so to say, at the two poles of human consciousness, and their methods of assistance were diametrically opposite. Yet both believed in salvation through the spirit, through the Absolute, unknowable to thought, which one called God and the other Nirvana.  Vincent de Paul had an ardent faith and preached to his ﬂock that one must save one’s soul.


The Mother: But on coming into contact with  human misery, he soon discovered that in order to ﬁnd one’s soul one must have time to look for it. And when do those who labour from morning till night and often from night till morning to eke out a living really have time to think of their souls? So in the simplicity of his charitable heart he concluded that if the poor were at least assured of the barest necessities by those who possess more than they need, these unfortunate people would have enough leisure to lead a better life. He believed in the virtue and efﬁcacy of social work, of active and material charity.  He believed that misery could be cured by the multiplication of individual cures, by bringing relief to a greater number, to a very large number of individuals.


The Mother: But this is only a palliative, not a cure. The fullness of consecration, self-abnegation and courage with which he carried on his work has made of him one of the most beautiful and touching ﬁgures in human history. And yet his endeavour seems to have rather multiplied than diminished the number of the destitute and the helpless. Certainly the most positive result of his apostleship was to create an appreciable sense of charity in the mentality of a certain section of the wellto-do. And because of this, the work was truly more useful to those who were giving charity than to those who were the object of this charity.


The Mother: At the other extreme of consciousness stands the Buddha with his pure and sublime compassion. For him the suffering arising out of life could only be abolished by the abolition of life; for life and the world are the outcome of the desire to be, the fruit of ignorance. Abolish desire, eliminate ignorance, and the world will disappear and with it all suffering and misery.   In a great effort of spiritual aspiration and silent concentration he elaborated his discipline, one of the most uplifting and the most effective disciplines ever given to those who are eager for liberation.


The Mother: Millions have believed in his doctrine, although the number of individuals capable of putting it into practice has been very small. But the condition of the earth has remained practically  the same and there has been no appreciable diminution in the mass of human suffering.  However, men have canonised the ﬁrst and deiﬁed the second in their attempt to express their gratitude and admiration.  But very few have sincerely tried to put into practice the lesson and example that were given to them, although that is truly the only effective way of showing one’s gratitude. And yet, even if that had been done, the conditions of human life would not have been perceptibly improved.


The Mother: For to help is not the same as to cure, nor is escaping the same as conquering. Indeed, to alleviate physical hardships, the solution proposed by Vincent de Paul can in no way be enough to cure humanity of its misery and suffering, for not all human sufferings come from physical destitution and can be cured by material means — far from it. Bodily wellbeing does not inevitably bring peace and joy; and poverty is not necessarily a cause of misery, as is shown by the voluntary poverty of the ascetics of all countries and all ages, who found in their destitution the source and condition of a perfect peace and happiness. Whereas on the contrary, the enjoyment of worldly possessions, of all that material wealth can provide in the way of comfort and pleasure and external satisfaction is powerless to prevent one who possesses these things from suffering pain and sorrow.  Neither can the other solution, escape, the solution of the Buddha, present a practical remedy to the problem.


The Mother: For even if we suppose that a very large number of individuals are capable of practising the discipline and achieving the ﬁnal liberation, this can in no way abolish suffering from earth and cure others of it, all the others who are still incapable of following the path that leads to Nirvana.  Indeed, true happiness is the happiness one can feel in any circumstances whatsoever, because it comes from regions which cannot be affected by any external circumstances. But this happiness is accessible only to a very few individuals, and most of the human race is still subject to terrestrial conditions. So we  can say on one hand that a change in the human consciousness is absolutely indispensable and, on the other, that without an integral transformation of the terrestrial atmosphere, the conditions of human life cannot be effectively changed. In either case, the remedy is the same: a new consciousness must manifest on earth and in man.


The Mother: Only the appearance of a new force and light and power accompanying the descent of the supramental consciousness into this world can raise man out of the anguish and pain and misery in which he is submerged. For only the supramental consciousness bringing down upon earth a higher poise and a purer and truer light can achieve the great miracle of transformation.  Nature is striving towards this new manifestation. But her ways are tortuous and her march is uncertain, full of halts and regressions, so much so that it is difﬁcult to perceive her true plan. However, it is becoming more and more clear that she wants to bring forth a new species out of the human species, a supramental race that will be to man what man is to the animal.


The Mother: But the advent of this transformation, this creation of a new race which Nature would take centuries of groping attempts to bring about, can be effected by the intelligent will of man, not only in a much shorter time but also with much less waste and loss.  Here the integral Yoga has its rightful place and utility.  For Yoga is meant to overcome, by the intensity of its concentration and effort, the delay that time imposes on all radical transformation, on all new creation.   The integral Yoga is not an escape from the physical world which leaves it irrevocably to its fate, nor is it an acceptance of material life as it is without any hope of decisive change, or of the world as the ﬁnal expression of the Divine Will.


The Mother: The integral Yoga aims at scaling all the degrees of consciousness from the ordinary mental consciousness to a supramental and divine consciousness, and when the ascent is completed, to return to the material world and infuse it with the  supramental force and consciousness that have been won, so that this earth may be gradually transformed into a supramental and divine world.  The integral Yoga is especially intended for those who have realised in themselves all that man can realise and yet are not satisﬁed, for they demand from life what it cannot give. Those who yearn for the unknown and aspire for perfection, who ask themselves agonising questions and have not found any deﬁnitive answers to them, they are the ones who are ready for the integral Yoga.  For there is a series of fundamental questions which those who are concerned about the fate of mankind and are not satisﬁed with current formulas inevitably ask themselves.


The Mother: They can be formulated approximately as follows: Why is one born if only to die?  Why does one live if only to suffer?  Why does one love if only to be separated?  Why does one think if only to err?


The Mother: Why does one act if only to make mistakes?   The sole acceptable answer is that things are not what they ought to be and that these contradictions are not only not inevitable but they are rectiﬁable and will one day disappear.  For the world is not irremediably what it is. The earth is in a period of transition that certainly seems long to the brief human consciousness, but which is inﬁnitesimal for the eternal consciousness.


The Mother: And this period will come to an end with the appearance of the supramental consciousness. The contradictions will then be replaced by harmonies and the oppositions by syntheses.  This new creation, the appearance of a superhuman race, has already been the object of much speculation and controversy.  It pleases man’s imagination to draw more or less ﬂattering portraits of what the superman will be like. But only like can know like, and it is only by becoming conscious of the divine nature in its essence that one will be able to have a conception  of what the divine nature will be in the manifestation.


The Mother: Yet those who have realised this consciousness in themselves are usually more anxious to become the superman than to give a description of him.  However, it may be useful to say what the superman will certainly not be, so as to clear away certain misunderstandings.  For example, I have read somewhere that the superhuman race would be fundamentally cruel and insensitive; since it is above suffering, it will attach no importance to the suffering of others and will take it as a sign of their imperfection and inferiority.  No doubt, those who think in this way are judging the relations between superman and man from the manner in which man behaves towards his lesser brethren, the animals. But such behaviour, far from being a proof of superiority, is a sure sign of unconsciousness and stupidity.


The Mother: This is shown by the fact that as soon as man rises to a little higher level, he begins to feel compassion towards animals and seeks to improve their lot. Yet there is an element of truth in the conception of the unfeeling superman: it is this, that the higher race will not feel the kind of egoistic, weak and sentimental pity which men call charity.  This pity, which does more harm than good, will be replaced by a strong and enlightened compassion whose only purpose will be to provide a true remedy to suffering, not to perpetuate it.  On the other hand, this conception describes fairly well what the reign of a race of vital beings upon earth would be like. They are immortal in their nature and much more powerful than man in their capacities, but they are also incurably anti-divine in their will, and their mission in the universe seems to be to delay the divine realisation until the instruments of this realisation, that is to say, men, become pure and strong and perfect enough to overcome all obstacles.


The Mother: It might not perhaps be useless to put the poor afﬂicted earth on guard against the possibility of such an evil domination.  Until the superman can come in person to show man what his true nature is, it might be wise for every human being of  goodwill to become conscious of what he can conceive as the most beautiful, the most noble, the truest and purest, the most luminous and best, and to aspire that this conception may be realised in himself for the greatest good of the world and men.   WISH to speak to you about the problem of woman, a problem as old as mankind in appearance, but inﬁnitely older in origin. For if we want to ﬁnd the law that governs and solves it, we must go back to the origin of the universe, even beyond the creation.  Some of the most ancient traditions, perhaps even the most ancient, ascribed the cause of the creation of the universe to the will of a Supreme Absolute to manifest by his own selfobjectiﬁcation; and the ﬁrst act of this objectiﬁcation was said to be the emanation of the creative Consciousness.


The Mother: Now, these ancient traditions usually speak of the Absolute in the masculine gender and of the Consciousness in the feminine, thus making this primordial gesture the origin of the differentiation between man and woman and at the same time giving a kind of priority to the masculine over the feminine. In fact, although they are one, identical and coexistent before the manifestation, the masculine took the original decision and emanated the feminine to carry it out, which amounts to saying that while there is no creation without the feminine, neither is there any feminine manifestation without the previous decision of the masculine.  We could certainly ask whether this explanation is not a little too human. But, to tell the truth, all the explanations that men can give must always necessarily be human, at least in their formulation. For, in their spiritual ascent towards the Unknowable and Unthinkable, certain exceptional individuals have been able to transcend human nature and identify themselves with the object of their seeking in a sublime and, in a way, unformulable experience.


The Mother: But as soon as they sought to share the beneﬁt of their discovery with others, they had to formulate it, and in order to be comprehensible their formula had, of necessity, to be human and symbolic.   We could also ask whether these experiences and their disclosure are responsible for the sense of superiority which man nearly always feels towards woman, or whether, on the contrary, it is this widespread sense of superiority that is responsible for the form given to the experiences....  In any case, the indisputable fact remains: man feels superior and wants to dominate, woman feels oppressed and revolts, openly or secretly; and the eternal quarrel between the sexes is perpetuated from age to age, identical in essence, innumerable in its forms and hues.  Of course man throws the whole blame on woman, just as woman throws the entire blame on man. In truth the blame should be equally distributed between the two and neither can boast of being superior to the other.


The Mother: Moreover, until this notion of superiority and inferiority is eliminated, nothing and no one can put an end to the misunderstanding that divides the human species into two opposite camps, and the problem will not be solved.  So many things have been said and written on this problem, it has been approached from so many angles, that a whole volume would not be enough to expound all its aspects. Generally speaking, the theories are excellent, or, in any case, all have their own virtues; but the practice has proved less successful and I do not know whether from the point of view of realisation we have made any headway since the Stone Age. For in their mutual relationships, man and woman are at once rather despotic masters and somewhat pitiable slaves to each other.  Yes, slaves; for so long as one has desires, preferences and attachments, one is a slave of these things and of the people on whom one is dependent for their satisfaction.


The Mother: Thus woman is enslaved to man because of the attraction she feels for the male and his strength, because of the desire for a home and the security it brings, and lastly because of the attachment to motherhood. Man too on his side is enslaved to woman, because of his possessiveness, his thirst for power  and domination, because of his desire for sexual relations and because of his attachment to the little comforts and conveniences of married life.  That is why no law can liberate women unless they liberate themselves; likewise, men too, in spite of all their habits of domination, will cease to be slaves only when they have freed themselves from all inner enslavement.  And this state of veiled struggle, often unavowed but always present in the subconscient even in the best cases, seems unavoidable, unless human beings rise above their ordinary consciousness to identify themselves with the perfect consciousness and unite with the Supreme Reality. For as soon as one attains this higher consciousness one realises that the difference between man and woman reduces itself to a purely physical difference.


The Mother: As a matter of fact, there may have been on earth in the beginning a pure masculine type and a pure feminine type, each with its own special and clearly differentiated characteristics; but in course of time, the inevitable mixture, heredity, all the sons that looked like their mothers, all the daughters that looked like their fathers, social progress, similar occupations — all this has made it impossible today to discover one of these pure types: all men are feminine in many respects and all women are masculine in many traits, especially in modern societies. But unfortunately, because of the physical appearance, the habit of quarrelling is perpetuated, perhaps even aggravated by a spirit of rivalry.  In their best moments, both man and woman can forget their difference of sex, but it reappears at the slightest provocation; the woman feels she is a woman, the man knows he is a man and the quarrel is revived indeﬁnitely in one form or another, open or veiled, and perhaps all the more bitter the less it is admitted. And one wonders whether it will not be so until there are no longer any men or women, but living souls expressing their identical origin in sexless bodies.   For one dreams of a world in which all these oppositions will at last disappear and where a being will be able to live and prosper who will be the harmonious synthesis of all that is best in the human race, uniting conception and execution, vision and creation in one single consciousness and action.


The Mother: Until such a happy and radical solution is reached, India remains, on this point as on many others, the land of violent and conﬂicting contrasts, which can nevertheless be resolved by a very wide and comprehensive synthesis.  Indeed, is it not in India that we ﬁnd the most intense adoration, the most complete veneration of the Supreme Mother, creatrix of the universe, conqueror of all enemies, mother of all the gods and all the worlds, dispenser of all boons?  And is it not in India too that we ﬁnd the most radical condemnation, the uttermost contempt for the feminine principle, Prakriti, Maya, corrupting illusion, cause of every fall and every misery, Nature that deceives and deﬁles and lures away from the Divine?  The whole life of India is shot through with this contradiction; she suffers from it in both mind and heart.


The Mother: Everywhere feminine deities are erected on her altars; the children of India await salvation and liberation from their Mother Durga.  And yet is it not one of her children who said that the Avatar would never incarnate in the body of a woman, because no rightminded Hindu would recognise him! Fortunately, the Divine is not affected by such a narrow sectarian spirit or moved by such petty considerations. And when it pleases him to manifest in a terrestrial body, he cares very little whether or not he is recognised by men. Besides, in all his incarnations, he seems always to have preferred children and simple hearts to the learned.


The Mother: In any case, until the manifestation of a new conception and consciousness compels Nature to create a new species which would no longer have to yield to the necessity of animal procreation and thus be under the obligation of dividing into two complementary sexes, the best that can be done for the progress  of the present human race is to treat both sexes on a footing of perfect equality, to give them the same education and training and to teach them to ﬁnd, through a constant contact with a Divine Reality that is above all sexual differentiation, the source of all possibilities and harmonies.  And it may be that India, the land of contrasts, will also be the land of new realisations, even as she was the cradle of their conception.       facsimile S S S A I C E    One of the most recent forms under which Sri Aurobindo conceived of the development of his work was to establish at Pondicherry an International University Centre open to students from all over the world.


The Mother: It is considered that the most fitting memorial to his name would be to found this University now so as to give concrete expression to the fact that his work continues with unabated vigour.    I M S A M C Sri Aurobindo is present in our midst, and with all the power of his creative genius he presides over the formation of the University Centre which for years he considered as one of the best means of preparing the future humanity to receive the supramental light that will transform the ´elite of today into a new race manifesting upon earth the new light and force and life.  In his name I open today this convention meeting here with the purpose of realising one of his most cherished ideals.   S’ P Make of us the hero warriors we aspire to become. May we ﬁght successfully the great battle of the future that is to be born, against the past that seeks to endure; so that the new things may manifest and we may be ready to receive them.


The Mother:   I am perfectly sure, I am quite conﬁdent, there is not the slightest doubt in my mind, that this University, which is being established here, will be the greatest seat of knowledge upon earth.  It may take ﬁfty years, it may take a hundred years, and you may doubt about my being there; I may be there or not, but these children of mine will be there to carry out my work.  And those who collaborate in this divine work today will have the joy and pride of having participated in such an exceptional achievement.


The Mother:   We are not here to do (only a little better) what the others do.  We are here to do what the others because they do not have the idea that it can be done.  We are here to open the way of the Future to children who belong to the Future.  Anything else is not worth the trouble and not worthy of Sri Aurobindo’s help.


The Mother:  M A RC  Another year has passed, leaving behind it its burden of lessons, some hard, some even painful.  Now, a new year begins, bringing possibilities of progress and of realisation. But to take full advantage of these possibilities, we must understand the previous lessons.  It is more important to know that all accidents are the effect of unconsciousness.


The Mother: However, externally, one of their chief causes is a spirit of indiscipline, a kind of contempt for discipline.  It is left to us to prove, by a sustained and disciplined effort, that we are sincere in our aspiration for a life more conscious and more true.    Let the Truth be your master and your guide.  We aspire for the Truth and its triumph in our being and our activities.


The Mother: Let the aspiration for the Truth be the dynamism of our efforts.  O Truth! We want to be guided by Thee. May Thy reign come upon earth.


The Mother:   When one lives in the truth, one is above all contradictions.    You must have lived what you want to teach.  To speak of the new consciousness, let it penetrate you and reveal to you its secrets. For only then can you speak with any competence.


The Mother: To rise into the new consciousness, the ﬁrst condition is to have enough modesty of mind to be convinced that all that you think you know is nothing in comparison to what yet remains to be learnt.  All that you have learnt outwardly must be just a step allowing you to rise towards a higher knowledge.    It is only in the calm that one can know and do. All that is done in agitation and violence is an aberration and a folly.


The Mother: The ﬁrst sign of the divine presence in the being is peace.  We are here to do better than elsewhere and to prepare ourselves for a supramental future. This should never be forgotten.  I appeal to the sincere goodwill of all so that our ideal may be realised.


The Mother:    M   T


The Mother: M ’ I S, D   A new Light has appeared upon earth.


The Mother: Let this new School opened today be guided by it.  Blessings.    Teach us to be really sincere in our effort towards the Truth.   Let yesterday’s realisation be a springboard for tomorrow’s achievement.


The Mother:   Let us prepare ourselves for the new life that is manifesting upon earth.     The best students are those who want to know, not those who want to show.


The Mother:   The Mother’s School. Sincerity.


The Mother: The measure of the sincerity is the measure of the success.     The Future is full of promise. Prepare yourself for it.


The Mother: Blessings.      M


The Mother: I  S M H S, A   Faith and Sincerity are the twin agents of success.  Blessings.


The Mother: There is an ascending evolution in nature which goes from the stone to the plant, from the plant to the animal, from the animal to man. Because man is, for the moment, the last rung at the summit of the ascending evolution, he considers himself as the ﬁnal stage in this ascension and believes there can be nothing on earth superior to him. In that he is mistaken. In his physical nature he is yet almost wholly an animal, a thinking and speaking animal, but still an animal in his material habits and instincts.  Undoubtedly, nature cannot be satisﬁed with such an imperfect result; she endeavours to bring out a being who will be to man what man is to the animal, a being who will remain a man in its external form, and yet whose consciousness will rise far above the mental and its slavery to ignorance.


The Mother: Sri Aurobindo came upon earth to teach this truth to men.  He told them that man is only a transitional being living in a mental consciousness, but with the possibility of acquiring a new consciousness, the Truth-consciousness, and capable of living a life perfectly harmonious, good and beautiful, happy and fully conscious. During the whole of his life upon earth, Sri Aurobindo gave all his time to establish in himself this consciousness he called supramental, and to help those gathered around him to realise it.  You have the immense privilege of having come quite young to the Ashram, that is to say, still plastic and capable of being moulded according to this new ideal and thus become the representatives of the new race. Here, in the Ashram, you are in the most favourable conditions with regard to the environment, the inﬂuence, the teaching and the example, to awaken in you this supramental consciousness and to grow according to its law.


The Mother: Now, all depends on your will and your sincerity. If you have the will no more to belong to ordinary humanity, no more to be merely evolved animals; if your will is to become men of the new race realising Sri Aurobindo’s supramental ideal, living a new and higher life upon a new earth, you will ﬁnd here all the necessary help to achieve your purpose; you will proﬁt fully by your stay in the Ashram and eventually become living examples for the world.     It is not a question of preparing to read these works or other works.


The Mother: It is a question of pulling all those who are capable to do so, out of the general human routine of thought, feeling and action; it is to give all opportunities to those who are here to cast off from them the slavery to the human way of thinking and doing; it is to teach all those who want to listen that there is another and truer way of living, that Sri Aurobindo has taught us how to live and become a — and that the aim of the education here is to prepare the children and make them ﬁt for.   For all the rest, the human ways of thinking and living, the world is vast and there is place out there for everybody.  It is not a number that we want — it is a selection; it is not brilliant students that we want, it is living souls.  facsimile   It should be known and we should not hesitate to say openly that the purpose of our school is to discover and encourage those in whom the need for progress has become conscious enough to orient their life.


The Mother:   From the worldly standpoint, from the point of view of result achieved certainly things can be done better. But I am speaking of the effort put in, effort in the deepest sense of the word. Work is prayer done with the body. With that effort in your work the Divine is satisfied; the eye of the Consciousness that has viewed it is indeed pleased.


The Mother: Not that from the human standpoint one cannot do better. For us, however, this particular endeavour is one among many; it is only one movement in our Sadhana. We are engaged in many other things. To bring one particular item of work to something like perfection requires time and means  and resources which are not at our disposal. But we do not seek perfection in one thing, our aim is an integral achievement.


The Mother: An outside view may ﬁnd many things to criticise and criticise much, but from the inner view what has been done has been done well. In an outside view, you come with all kinds of mental, intellectual formations and ﬁnd there is nothing uncommon in what is done here. But thereby you miss what is behind: the Sadhana. A deeper consciousness would see the march towards a realisation that surpasses all.


The Mother: The outside view does not see the spiritual life; it judges by its own smallness.  There are people who write wanting to join our University and they ask what kind of diploma or degree we prepare for, the career we open out. To them I say: go elsewhere, please, if you want that; there are many other places, very much better than ours, even in India, in that respect. We do not have their equipment or magniﬁcence. You will get there the kind of success you look for.


The Mother: We do not compete with them. We move in a different sphere, on a different level.  But this does not mean that I ask you to feel superior to others. The true consciousness is incapable of feeling superior. It is only the small consciousness that seeks to show its superiority.


The Mother: Even a child is superior to such a being: for it is spontaneous in its movements. Rise above all that. Do not be interested in anything other than your relation with the Divine, what you wish to do for Him. That is the only thing interesting.§


The Mother: We are not here to lead an easy and comfortable life. We are here to ﬁnd the Divine, to become divine, to manifest the Divine.  What happens to us is the Divine’s affair, not ours.   §


The Mother: The Divine knows better than we do what is good for the world’s progress and for our own.      To


The Mother: develop the spirit of service is part of the training here and it completes the other studies.     You must not confuse a religious teaching with a spiritual one.  Religious teaching belongs to the past and halts progress.


The Mother: Spiritual teaching is the teaching of the future — it illumines the consciousness and prepares it for the future realisation.  Spiritual teaching is above religions and strives towards a global Truth.  It teaches us to enter into direct relations with the Divine.


The Mother: The aim of education is not to prepare a man to succeed in life and society, but to increase his perfectibility to its utmost.     Do not aim at success. Our aim is perfection.


The Mother: Remember you are on the threshold of, participating in its birth and instrumental in its creation. There is nothing more important than the transformation. There is no interest more worthwhile.   In a general way, education, culture, reﬁnement of the senses are the means of curing movements of crude instinct and desire and passion. To obliterate them is not curing them; instead they should be cultivated, intellectualised, reﬁned.


The Mother: That is the  surest way of curing them. To give them their maximum growth in view of the progress and development of consciousness, so that one may attain to a sense of harmony and exactitude of perception is a part of culture and education for the human being.   You who are young, are the hope of the country. Prepare yourselves to be worthy of this expectation.  Blessings.


The Mother:   Of one thing you can be sure —.  You will become the man you and the higher your ideal and your aspiration, the higher will be your realisation, but you must keep a ﬁrm resolution and never forget your true aim in life.


The Mother:  To be young is to live in the future.  To be young is to be always ready to give up what we are in order to become what we must be.  To be young is never to accept the irreparable.    Only those years that are passed uselessly make you grow old.


The Mother: A year spent uselessly is a year during which no progress has been accomplished, no growth in consciousness has been achieved, no further step has been taken towards perfection.   Consecrate your life to the realisation of something higher and broader than yourself and you will never feel the weight of the passing years.     It is not the number of years you have lived that makes you grow old.


The Mother: You become old when you stop progressing.   As soon as you feel you have done what you had to do, as soon as you think you know what you ought to know, as soon as you want to sit and enjoy the results of your effort, with the feeling you have worked enough in life, then at once you become old and begin to decline.  When, on the contrary, you are convinced that what you know is nothing compared to all which remains to be known, when you feel that what you have done is just the starting-point of what remains to be done, when you see the future like an attractive sun shining with the innumerable possibilities yet to be achieved, then you are young, however many are the years you have passed upon earth, young and rich with all the realisations of tomorrow.  And if you do not want your body to fail you, avoid wasting your energies in useless agitation.


The Mother: Whatever you do, do it in a quiet and composed poise. In peace and silence is the greatest strength.   For a happy and effective life, the essentials are sincerity, humility, perseverance and an insatiable thirst for progress.  Above all, one must be convinced of a limitless possibility of progress. Progress is youth; at a hundred years of age one can be young.


The Mother:   If the growth of consciousness were considered as the principal goal of life, many difﬁculties would ﬁnd their solution.  The best way of not becoming old is to make progress the goal of our life.    To know how to be reborn into a new life at every moment is the secret of eternal youth.


The Mother:   One must learn always not only intellectually but also psychologically, one must progress in regard to character, one must cultivate the qualities and correct the defects; everything should be made an occasion to cure ourselves of ignorance and incapacity; life becomes then tremendously interesting and worth the trouble of living it.


The Mother: The child does not worry about his growth, he simply grows.     There is a great power in the simple conﬁdence of a child.


The Mother:   When a child lives in normal conditions, it has a spontaneous conﬁdence that all it needs will be given to it.  This conﬁdence should persist, unshaken, throughout life; but the limited idea, ignorant and superﬁcial, of its needs which a child has, must be replaced progressively by a wider, deeper and truer conception which culminates in the perfect conception of needs in accordance with the supreme wisdom, until we realise that the Divine alone knows what our true needs are and rely upon Him for everything.


The Mother: The most important condition is trust, a child-like trust, the candid feeling that knows that needed things will come, that there is no question about it. When the child has need of anything he is certain that it is coming. This kind of simple trust or reliance is the most important condition.    Why do children have fear?


The Mother: Because they are weak.  Physically they are weaker than the grown-ups around them and, generally, they are also weaker vitally and mentally.  Fear stems from a sense of inferiority.  However, there is a way to be free from it: it is to have faith in the Divine Grace and to rely on It to protect you in all circumstances.  The more you grow up, the more will you get over your fear if you let the contact with your soul develop in you — that is to say, with the truth of your being — and if you always strive that all you think, all you speak, all you do should be more and more the expression of this deep truth.


The Mother: When you will consciously live in it, you will fear nothing any longer, in any domain of your being, because you will be united with the universal Truth which governs the world.     You must ﬁnd it out yourself, but not with your mind.  It is only the psychic that can tell you.


The Mother:   You can know the truth only when you are conscious of the Divine.    By knowing what is true.


The Mother: Lord, we pray to Thee: May we understand better why we are here, May we do better what we have to do here, May we be what we ought to become here, So that Thy will may be fulﬁlled harmoniously.    Let our effort of every day and all time be to know You better and to serve You better.    Permit, Sweet Mother, that we be, Now and for ever more, Thy simple children, loving thee More and still more.


The Mother:   I have a sweet little mother sitting close in my heart.  We are so happy together; never will we part.   My dear child, Be sure that I hear you each time you call and my help and force go straight to you.


The Mother: With my blessings.    Bonne Fˆete.  I embrace you with all my heart and give you my blessings for the fulﬁlment of your highest aspiration.


The Mother: With my love.      Bonne Fˆete.


The Mother: With a whole bunch of roses (surrender) so that your aspiration may be fulﬁlled and you become my ideal child aware of your soul and the true goal of your life.   With my blessings and my love.   M S B H  We all want to be the true children of our Divine Mother.


The Mother: But for that, sweet Mother, give us patience and courage, obedience, goodwill, generosity and unselﬁshness, and all the necessary virtues.   This is our prayer and aspiration.   May this day be for you the beginning of a new life in which you will strive to understand better and better why you are here and what is expected of you.   Live always in the aspiration of realising your most complete and most true perfection.


The Mother: And for a beginning take care to be honest, sincere, straightforward, noble and pure in a rigorous discipline that you will impose on yourselves.  I shall always be present to help you and to guide you.  My blessings.    Today, we who are united in a common remembrance aspire that this intensity may be the symbol of a true oneness based on a common effort towards ever truer and more perfect realisations.


The Mother:  Young Man’s Boarding Be always faithful to your Ideal and sincere in your action.    STUDY  My dear child, The true wisdom is to be ready to learn from whatever source the knowledge can come.  We can learn things from a ﬂower, an animal, a child, if we are eager to know always more, because there is only One Teacher in the world — the Supreme Lord, and He manifests through everything.


The Mother: With all my love.    To do good work one must have good taste.  Taste can be educated by study and the help of those who have good taste.  To learn, it is necessary to feel ﬁrst that one does not know.


The Mother:  When you feel that you know nothing then you are ready to learn.   The whole question is to know whether the students go to school to increase their knowledge and to learn what is needed to know how to live well — or whether they go to school to and to have good marks which they can boast about.  Before the Eternal Consciousness, one drop of sincerity has more value than an ocean of pretence and hypocrisy.    You see, my child, the unfortunate thing is that you are too busy with yourself. At your age I was exclusively occupied with my studies — informing myself, learning, understanding, knowing.


The Mother: That was my interest, even my passion. My mother, who loved us — my brother and myself — very much, never allowed us to be bad-tempered or dissatisﬁed or lazy. If we went and complained to her about something or other and told her that we were not satisﬁed, she would laugh at us and scold us and say to us, “What is this foolishness? Don’t be ridiculous, off you go and work, and don’t take any notice of your good or bad moods!  That is not interesting at all.”


The Mother: My mother was perfectly right and I have always been very grateful to her for having taught me discipline and the necessity of self-forgetfulness in concentration on what one is doing.  I have told you this because the anxiety you speak of comes from the fact that you are far too busy with yourself. It would be far better for you to attend more to what you are doing (painting or music), to develop your mind which is still very uncultivated and to learn the elements of knowledge which are indispensable to a man if he does not want to be ignorant and uncultured.  If you worked regularly eight to nine hours a day, you would be hungry and you would eat well and sleep peacefully, and you would have no time to wonder whether you are in a good or a bad mood.  I am telling you these things with all my affection, and I hope that you will understand them.


The Mother: Your mother who loves you.     Then quickly leave the path you have taken — don’t waste your time wandering about and talking to girls. Start working in  earnest again, study, educate yourself, occupy your mind with interesting and useful things and not with futile chatter, and do not give false excuses for your vital attractions.


The Mother: If your wish is truly sincere you can be sure that you will have my force to help you conquer.    What do you mean by process? It is not a process; the disappearance of the bad feeling is the very natural result of concentrating the mind on study, which on the one hand provides it with a healthy activity, and on the other draws its attention away from this morbid contemplation of the little physical ego.


The Mother:   It all depends on the effect it has on you. If you come away feeling more peaceful and content, it is all right. If, on the contrary, it makes you feel melancholy and dissatisﬁed it would be better not to go there. You can simply observe and see how it affects you and decide accordingly.


The Mother:   Yes, in fact last night I asked you why you had not studied, and I told you that to yield like that to the impulses of the  vital was certainly not the way to control it. You must create a discipline for yourself and impose it on yourself at all costs if you want to put an end to vital bad will and mental depressions.  Without discipline one cannot do anything in life and all yoga is impossible.


The Mother:   What a funny idea you have! To punish your body for a fault the vital has committed! It is not fair.


The Mother:   This will not do.     Force yourself to study and your depression will go away.


The Mother: Can you imagine a student in school coming and telling his teacher, “Sir, I did not do my homework today because I felt depressed”?  The teacher would certainly punish him very severely.    Studies strengthen the mind and turn its concentration away from the impulses and desires of the vital. Concentrating on study is one of the most powerful ways of controlling the mind and the vital; that is why it is so important to study.


The Mother:  One does not study for the sake of pleasure — one studies to learn and to develop one’s brain.      If you do not study the inertia will go on increasing.


The Mother:   Study, that is the best way to understand.    You do not give enough time to study, that is why it does not interest you. Everything one does with care necessarily becomes interesting.


The Mother:  Do what I explained to you yesterday — make your brain work by studying regularly and systematically; then during the hours when you are not studying, your brain, having worked enough, will be able to rest and it will be possible for you to concentrate in the depths of your heart and ﬁnd there the psychic source; with it you will become conscious of both gratitude and true happiness.     I have told you that it is that you can overcome the depression.


The Mother:   For children there should be a time for work and study and a time for play.    Regular study certainly cannot fail to develop it.


The Mother:    It is all right; study can become part of the sadhana.


The Mother: Without concentration one cannot achieve anything.    No, it comes from.    ( ) Continue to be patient — it is some kind of mental tamas; one day they will wake up.


The Mother:   One must have a lot of patience with young children, and repeat the same thing to them several times, explaining it to them in various ways. It is only gradually that it enters their mind.     Intelligence and capacity of understanding are surely more important than regularity in work.


The Mother: Steadiness may be acquired later on.    Laziness comes from weakness, or from lack of interest. For curing the ﬁrst — one must become strong.  For curing the second — one must do something interesting.


The Mother:  First you must want it integrally and then you must do what is needed.     The cure is not in trying to wake up the mind but in turning it, immobile and silent, upward towards the region of intuitive light, in a steady and quiet aspiration, and to wait in silence, for the light to come down and ﬂood your brain which will, little by  little, wake up to this inﬂuence and become capable of receiving and expressing the intuition.


The Mother: Love and blessings.    Crying does not help at all.  You must have the will and make the necessary effort.   To educate it, to exercise it as one exercises the muscles by using them.


The Mother:    Concentration and


The Mother: will can be developed as well as muscles; they grow by regular training and exercise.    By exercise.    It takes more than a few months to learn something.


The Mother: One must work assiduously to make progress.      So long as you need to form yourself, to build your brain, you will feel this strong urge to study; but when the brain is well formed, the taste for studies will gradually die away.


The Mother:   Without reason, human life would be incoherent and unregulated; we would be like impulsive animals or unbalanced madmen.   Knowledge and intelligence are precisely the qualities of the higher mind in man which differentiate him from the animal.  Without knowledge and intelligence, one is not a man but an animal in human form.


The Mother: Blessings.    Conversations   Intellectual culture is indispensable for preparing a good mental instrument, large, supple and rich, but its action stops there.  In rising above the mind, it is more often a hindrance than a help, for, in general, a reﬁned and educated mind ﬁnds its satisfaction in itself and rarely seeks to silence itself so as to be surpassed.


The Mother:  All that you know, however ﬁne it may be, is nothing in comparison with what you can know, if you are able to use other methods.   The best way to understand is always to rise high enough in the consciousness to be able to unite all contradictory ideas in a harmonious synthesis.  And for the correct attitude, to know how to pass ﬂexibly from one position to another without ever losing sight even for a moment of the one goal of self-consecration to the Divine and identiﬁcation with Him.    The important point is to know that the mind is incapable of understanding the One Supreme — that is why all that is said and thought about it is a travesty and an approximation and is necessarily full of irreconcilable contradictions.


The Mother: That is also why it has always been taught that mental silence is indispensable in order to have true knowledge.    A very, very quiet head is indispensable for a clear understanding and vision and a right action.   The mind must be quiet and silent before you can receive an inspiration from above.   The mind must remain quiet to let the Force ﬂow through it for an integral manifestation.


The Mother:    Mental capacity is developed in silent meditation.   Calm the vital.


The Mother: Silence the mind.  Keep the brain silent and still like an even surface turned upwards and attentive.  And wait....


The Mother: It is not by mental activity that you can quiet your mind, it is from a higher or deeper level that you can receive the help you need. And both can be reached in silence only.    The ﬁrst condition is to talk as little as possible.  The second is to think just of what you are doing at the moment and not of what you have to do or of what you have done before.


The Mother: Never regret what is past or imagine what will be.  Check pessimism in your thoughts as much as you can and become a voluntary optimist.     It comes progressively.


The Mother: Do not strain.  Be calm and conﬁdent.    Now, what the intellect has understood let the whole being realise. Mental knowledge must be replaced by the ﬂaming power of progress.


The Mother:    READING


The Mother: You must read with great attention and concentration, not novels or dramas, but books that make you think. You must meditate on what you have read, reﬂect on a thought until you have  understood it. Talk little, remain quiet and concentrated and speak only when it is indispensable.


The Mother: If you don’t want to learn a thing thoroughly, conscientiously and in all its details, it is better not to take it up at all. It is a great mistake to think that a little superﬁcial and incomplete knowledge of things can be of any use whatsoever; it is good for nothing except making people conceited, for they imagine they know and in fact know nothing.   Read carefully whatever you read, and read it again a second time if you have not understood it properly.   Y has just written to me about the great number of novels that you read. I do not think that this kind of reading is good for you — and if it is to study style, as you told me, an attentive study of one good book by a good author, done with care, teaches much more than this hasty and superﬁcial reading.


The Mother: In order to learn you must read very carefully and choose with care what you read.    It all depends on the effect this literature has on your imagination. If it ﬁlls your head with undesirable ideas and your vital with desires, it is certainly better to stop reading this kind of book.


The Mother: Reading novels is never beneﬁcial.    In the mind also there are perversions. It is a very poor and unreﬁned vital which can take pleasure in such things!


The Mother:   In unformed minds what they read sinks in without any regard to its value and imprints itself as truth. It is advisable therefore to be careful about what one gives them to read and to see that only what is true and useful for their formation gets a place.


The Mother: I do not approve of these literature classes in which, ostensibly for the sake of knowledge, they ﬂounder in the mud of a state of mind which is out of place here and which cannot in any way help to build up the consciousness of tomorrow. I repeated this to X yesterday in connection with your letter, and I explained brieﬂy to him how I saw the transition period between what was and what will be.   If we could discover, either here or there, the expression of a sincere and luminous aspiration, it could be made into an opportunity for study and become an interesting development.  Examine the matter together and let me know what you decide.  In any case: no more


The Mother: “literature classes”.§    It depends on what you want to be or do. If you want to be a litt´erateur, you must read a lot of literature. Then you will know what has been written and you won’t repeat old things.


The Mother: You have to keep an alert mind and know how to say things in a striking manner.  But if you want real knowledge, you can’t ﬁnd it in literature.  To me, literature as such is on a pretty low level — it is mostly a work of the creative vital, and the highest it reaches is up to the throat centre, the external expressive mind. This mind puts one in relation with outside things. And, in its activity, literature is all a game of ﬁtting ideas to ideas and words to ideas and words to one another.


The Mother: It can develop a certain skill in the mind, some capacity for discussion, description, amusement and wit.  I haven’t read much of English literature — I have gone through only a few hundred books. But I know French literature very well — I have read a whole library of it. And I can say that it has no great value in terms of Truth. Real knowledge comes from above the mind.


The Mother: What literature gives is the play of a lot of common or petty ideas. Only on a rare occasion does some ray from above come in. If you look into thousands and thousands of books, you will ﬁnd just one small intuition here and there .  The rest is nothing.


The Mother: I can’t say that the reading of literature equips one better to understand Sri Aurobindo. On the contrary, it can be a  hindrance. For, the same words are used and the purpose for which they are used is so different from the purpose for which  Sri Aurobindo has made use of them, the manner in which they have been put together to express things is so different from Sri Aurobindo’s that these words tend to put one off from the light which Sri Aurobindo wants to convey to us through them. To get to Sri Aurobindo’s light we must empty our minds of all that literature has said and done.


The Mother: We must go inward and stay in a receptive silence and turn it upward. Then alone we get something in the right way. At the worst, I have seen that the study of literature makes one silly and perverse enough to sit in judgment on Sri Aurobindo’s English and ﬁnd fault with his grammar!  But, of course, I am not discouraging the teaching of literature altogether. Many of our children are in a crude state and literature can help to give their minds some shape, some suppleness.


The Mother: They need a good deal of carving in many places.  They have to be enlarged, made active and agile. Literature can serve as a sort of gymnastics and stir up and awaken the young intelligence.  I may add that the whole controversy that has gone on among the teachers recently on the value of literature is a storm in a tea-cup. It is really part of a problem which concerns the whole basis of education.


The Mother: All that has been going on in every department of our School is to me one single problem at bottom.  When I look at the education everywhere, I feel like the Yogi who was told to sit and meditate in front of a wall. I ﬁnd myself facing a wall. It is a greyish wall, with some streaks of blue running across it — these are the efforts of the teachers to do something worthwhile — but everything goes on superﬁcially and behind it all is like this wall here on which I am striking my hand now. It is hard and impenetrable, it shuts out the true light.


The Mother: There is no door — one can’t enter through it and pass into that light.   When the young students come to me and tell me about their work, each time I want to say something useful I ﬁnd the same solid wall blocking me.   I have the intention of taking in hand the problem of education. I am preparing myself for it.


The Mother: It may take two years. But I have warned Pavitra that when I intervene and remould things, it may seem like a cyclone. People may feel that they can no longer stand on their legs! So many matters will get upset. There will be all-round bewilderment at ﬁrst.


The Mother: But, as a result of the cyclone, the wall will break down and the true light burst in.  I thought it fair to say beforehand that there would be a radical change. This way the teachers can be prepared for it .  I do not wish to doubt or ignore the goodwill among the teachers of literature.


The Mother: And there are some old teachers who are sincerely doing their best. I appreciate all this. And in my decision on the alternatives set before me by the School I have taken everything into consideration. But the whole discussion, I repeat, has been a lot of unnecessary excitement — what could be called a quarrel among ants or, as one says in French, “Il n’y a pas de quoi fouetter un chat.”§   There is a subtle world where you can see all possible subjects for paintings, novels, plays of all kinds, even the cinema.


The Mother: It is from there that most authors receive their inspiration.     ( ) It is not so much a question of subject-matter but of vulgarity of mind and narrowness and selﬁsh common-sense in the conception of life, expressed in a form devoid of art, greatness or reﬁnement, which must be carefully removed from the  reading-matter of children both big and small. All that lowers and degrades the consciousness must be excluded.


The Mother:   One is never too careful with books which have the most pernicious effect.  Blessings.


The Mother:   Not at all — it is the attitude that is important. The past must be a spring-board towards the future, not a chain preventing from advancing. As I said, all depends on the attitude towards the past.


The Mother:   I always considered it as an incapacity of ﬁnding the true words and the correct language.    Stop reading all this nonsense. The occultism that can be found in books is vital and most dangerous.


The Mother:   If you want to know what is really happening in the world, you should not read newspapers of any sort, for they are full of lies.  To read a newspaper is to take part in the great collective falsehoods.    I did not say that you must not read papers.


The Mother: I said that you must not blindly believe in all that you read, you must know that truth is quite another thing.  Blessings.    It is difﬁcult to keep one’s mind always ﬁxed on the same thing, and if it is not given enough work to occupy it, it begins to become restless. So I think it is better to choose one’s books carefully rather than stop reading altogether.


The Mother:   ( Pri`eres et M´editations de la M`ere)  Do not read this book unless you have the intention of putting it into practice.    A library should be an intellectual sanctuary where one comes to ﬁnd light and progress.   CONDUCT W C S A R


The Mother: The necessity of an absolute sincerity.   The certitude of Truth’s ﬁnal victory.  The possibility of constant progress with the will to achieve.   A I C


The Mother: He does not become angry when things seem to go against him or decisions are not in his favour.  Whatever he does he does it to the best of his capacity and keeps on doing in the face of almost certain failure. He always thinks straight and acts straight.   He never fears to say the truth whatever may be the consequences.  He does not get disheartened if he has to wait a long time to see the results of his efforts.


The Mother: He faces the inevitable difﬁculties and sufferings without grumbling.  He never slackens his effort however long it has to last.  He keeps equanimity in success as well as in failure.  He always goes on ﬁghting for the ﬁnal victory though he may meet with many defeats.  He knows how to smile and keep a happy heart in all circumstances.


The Mother: He does not become conceited over his success, neither does he feel himself superior to his comrades.   He appreciates the merits of others and is always ready to help another to succeed.  He observes the discipline and is always honest.    .


The Mother: He understands everything he is told, he knows his lesson before he has learnt it and answers every question he is asked.   He has faith in the future which is rich with all the realisations that are to come, full of beauty and light.  Childhood is the symbol of the future and the Hope of all the victories to come.   T I C ... likes to study when he is at school, ... he likes to play when he is in the playground, ...


The Mother: he likes to eat at meal-time, ... he likes to sleep at bed-time, ... and always he is full of love for all those around him, ... full of conﬁdence in the divine Grace, ... full of deep respect for the Divine.    The things to be taught to a child 1) The necessity of absolute sincerity.  2) The certitude of the ﬁnal victory of Truth.  3) The possibility and the will to progress.


The Mother: Good temper, fair-play, truthfulness.  Patience, endurance, perseverance.   Equanimity, courage, cheerfulness.


The Mother:   The most important thing to teach them is the absolute necessity of being sincere.  All untruth, however slight, should be refused.  They should also be taught to progress constantly, for as soon as one stops making any progress, one falls back and that is the beginning of decay.


The Mother:   According to what I see and know, as a general rule, children over 14 should be allowed their independence and should be given advice only if and when they ask for it.  They should know that they are responsible for managing their own existence.    I am very pleased to hear the ideas and sentiments you have expressed just now and I give you my blessings.


The Mother: Only I wish that your ideas did not remain as mere ideals, but became realities. That should be your vow, to materialise the ideal in your life and character. I take this occasion, however, to tell you something that I have wanted to tell you for a long time.  It is with regard to your studies. Naturally there are exceptions,  but it is the exceptions that give force to the rule.


The Mother: For instance, you asked for leave today. I did not think you required more relaxation. Your life here is organised on a routine of almost constant relaxation. However, I agreed to your request. But the way in which you received the “good news” pained me.


The Mother: Some of you even seemed to consider it a victory. But I ask, victory of what, against what? The victory of inconscience against the joy of learning and knowing more and more? The victory of unruliness against order and rule? The victory of the ignorant and superﬁcial will over the endeavour towards progress and self-conquest?


The Mother: This is, you must know, the very ordinary movement of those who live in the ordinary condition of life and education.  But as for you, if you wish to realise the great ideal that is our goal, you must not remain content with the ordinary and futile reactions of ordinary people who live in the blind and ignorant conditions of ordinary life.  It looks as if I were very conservative when I say so, still I must tell you that you should be very careful about outside inﬂuences and ordinary habits. You must not allow them to shape your feelings and ways of life. Whatever comes from an outside and foreign atmosphere should not be permitted to jump into you — all that is mediocre and ignorant.


The Mother: If you wish to belong to the family of the new man, do not imitate pitifully the children of today and yesterday. Be ﬁrm and strong and full of faith; ﬁght in order to win, as you say, the great victory. I have trust in you and I count upon you.  Until now I have not published what I told you on the anniversary day of the University. I hoped you would proﬁt by the lesson and mend your ways, but to my great regret I am compelled to note that the situation has not improved: it seems some students have chosen the time when they are in the class to bring out the worst they have in them, they behave like street urchins; they not only take no advantage of the teacher given  to them, but seem to take a mischievous pleasure in preventing others from beneﬁting by the lessons.


The Mother: We want to show to the world what must be the new man of tomorrow. Is this the example that we will set before them?§   ()  I insist on the necessity of having good manners. I do not see anything grand in the manners of a gutter-snipe.


The Mother:  True strength and protection come from the Divine Presence in the heart.  If you want to keep this Presence constantly in you, avoid carefully all vulgarity in speech, behaviour and acts.  Do not mistake liberty for license and freedom for bad manners: the thoughts must be pure and the aspiration ardent.