The Mother: If you put the question to astrologers, they will explain this to you by the position of the stars; they will say that certain positions of the stars have a certain effect on the earth. But, as I have told you, all these things are “languages”, a way of expression, of making oneself understood; the truth is deeper, it is more complex, more complete.  There is an essential difference, but generally if he has not been contaminated by European materialism, when someone speaks to him about spiritual things, he has an opening, he understands.  In the countries of the West, if you are in touch with the average man and speak to him of spiritual things, he is absolutely closed up and, moreover, if you speak to him of a possibility of relation with higher states of consciousness, he looks at you as though you were mad! If someone renounces the ordinary life to live an ascetic life, they think he is out of his senses!


The Mother: There is a small minority among those who have kept the religious traditions, which understands, but understands only under the religious form. That is to say, if someone enters a monastery, they understand him more or less. But for the average man (I am not speaking of cultured people), if someone wants to lead a spiritual life independent of all religion, simply setting out in the personal quest of a higher truth, then surely he is ready to be put in a lunatic asylum! It would be better not to speak of it. There are those who have read a little, who are educated, who may think you a little eccentric, but still they understand what it means; but the ordinary man, no.


The Mother: I am speaking of ﬁfty years ago, of course; now, after the Second [World] War, I don’t know, I can’t say if this has begun to change. But evidently,  the educated classes of Europe are now in search of something higher because their life has been so tragic that they need to lean upon something else; and perhaps their effort is contagious, in a sense, and there are more people than one thinks who are seeking — it is possible. But ﬁfty years ago it was not like that.  While here, ordinary people, people of the “lower” classes don’t perhaps have any discernment, perhaps they cannot distinguish between the imposter and the sincere man, but it is understood that if somebody comes along in the yellow robe and with the beggar’s bowl, he will be given something, he won’t be kicked out. If a man did that in Europe (naturally there is no question of the yellow robe), but if he came in sordid clothes, he would be immediately taken to the ﬁrst police station and arrested for indigence.


The Mother: It is understood that in the so-called civilised countries, if you don’t have the minimum money in your pocket, you are a vagabond, and the vagabond has no right to be on the streets, he is put into prison for vagabondage. That is the difference.  This is more or less a mental gymnastic!  There are people who say that certain arts are physical. If you frequent artists, painters, they will tell you that sculpture, oh!


The Mother: it is laborious, because sculptors work with the very matter, and painting may be considered not much of an intellectual art by a musician. The truth is that in all arts everything depends upon the artist, and what he does depends upon the state of consciousness in which he is. A sculptor may be an extremely spiritual man and his production extremely spiritual also, if he knows how to express his experience. And a poet can be quite a commonplace materialist if he does not receive his inspiration from a higher state. It is the mind which makes little categories (this is more convenient for it), but that does not resemble the truth very much.


The Mother: This is an old tradition in Nordic countries. But in his story it  ends badly : the one who had to renounce the love of woman is drowned and it ends with the twilight of the gods.   Who is going to answer?


The Mother: What is the difference?  I congratulate those whose surrender is spontaneous! It is not so easy. No, that is not the difference.  That is true, but why?


The Mother: One thing is so, so simple — it is the very meaning of the word. To sacriﬁce means to give up something to which one clings. To sacriﬁce one’s life is to give up one’s life to which one clings; otherwise it would not be a sacriﬁce, it would be a gift. If you use the word “sacriﬁce”, it means it is something which makes you suffer when you give it up. The word “sacriﬁce” is used at random, that is understood, but I am speaking of the true sense.


The Mother: One can sacriﬁce only what one holds dear. If one does not cling to it, it is not a sacriﬁce, it is a gift with all the joy of the giving. Surrender has no value if it is painful, if it is a sacriﬁce. Surrender must be truly a joyous offering (I am using the word in the sense of surrender, but it is not quite surrender — surrender is between  and). One gives up something, surrenders oneself, but without sacriﬁce.


The Mother: Many religions are founded upon the idea of sacriﬁce; for instance, all the Chaldean religions. The reforms of the Muslim religion also had a very strong tendency towards sacriﬁce. All the ﬁrst adepts, the ﬁrst faithful, paid with their life for changing their religion. In Persia, they were persecuted beyond all telling.  There are even many writings in which the joys of sacriﬁce are praised highly — that is a Chaldean idea.


The Mother: But you should be on your guard; all depends upon the meaning given to the word. It is obvious that for him who sacriﬁces himself willingly, that is, who gives up his life voluntarily and with joy, it is no longer a sacriﬁce, by the very deﬁnition we have given to the word.  We also speak of the “sacriﬁce” of the Divine. But I have noticed that one calls it “sacriﬁce” when one understands that if obliged to do it oneself it would be very difﬁcult! It would give you much pain, it would be very hard () so one speaks of sacriﬁce, but it is probable that for the Divine it was not painful and he did it willingly, with all the joy of self-giving.


The Mother: I knew Abdul Baha very well, the successor of Baha Ullah, founder of the Bahai religion; Abdul Baha was his son. He was born in prison and lived in prison till he was forty, I believe.  When he came out of prison his father was dead and he began  to preach his father’s religion. He told me his story and what had happened in Persia at the beginning of the religion. And I remember him telling me with what intense joy, what a sense of the divine Presence, of the divine Force, these people went to the sacriﬁce — it can’t be called “sacriﬁce”, it was a very joyful gift of their life....


The Mother: He always spoke to me of someone who was, it appears, a very great poet and who had been arrested as a heretic because he followed the Bahai religion. They wanted to take him away to kill him — or burn him, hang him, crucify him, I don’t know what, the manner of death in vogue at the time —  and, because he expressed his faith and said he would be happy to suffer anything for his faith and his God, people devised the plan of ﬁxing small lighted candle-ends on his body, his arms, his shoulders. Naturally the candles melted with the hot wax all over, till the wick of the candle burnt the skin. It seems Abdul Baha was there when this man was tortured and as they came to the spot where he was to be killed, Abdul Baha went up to speak to him affectionately — and he was in an ecstasy of joy.


The Mother: Abdul Baha spoke to him of his sufferings; he replied, “Suffer!  It is one of the most beautiful hours of my life....” This cannot be called a sacriﬁce, can it?  Generally, all those who have suffered tortures for their faith, that is, for their highest thought, their most sublime ideal, have always felt a kind of divine grace helping them and keeping them from suffering. Of course, outsiders call this a “sacriﬁce”


The Mother: ( that is understandable, they have sacriﬁced their life), but one cannot use the word for what personally concerns them, because for them it was not a sacriﬁce, it was a joy. All depends on the inner attitude. Now, if for a single moment during the torture they had had the least idea, “Why am I being tortured?” they would have undergone unbearable suffering. A single passing thought sufﬁces.


The Mother: Almost all events — at least all the important circumstances of human life — may be looked at from two sides: from below or from above. If you see them from below, with the feelings of  the ordinary man, you are terriﬁed by the amount of suffering  of all those who have preached a new religion or wished to set an example to humanity — they have all suffered, that is, they have all been persecuted by men. Generally speaking, with a very few exceptions, men do not like what is superior to them, and when they meet someone who is far above them (I am saying, apart from some exceptions), that makes them furious.  They suffer an almost insurmountable annoyance in meeting something so inﬁnitely higher than what they are.


The Mother: They have only one idea, to destroy it, and in fact that is what they have done. Throughout human history it has been thus. Those who have come with special abilities, a special grace, and have tried to make men come out of their ordinary rut, have been more or less persecuted, martyred, burnt alive, put on the cross.... The situation now is apparently a little better because now slightly more plausible reasons than those of old are needed to burn men — the habit of doing so is no longer there — but the feelings are not very different. The human race, generally, has a sort of rancour against what surpasses it; it feels humiliated, and men do not like to be humiliated.


The Mother: It is because you have gone into the inconscient and lost all contact with the consciousness, and this takes a little time to be reestablished. Of course, it may happen that instead of going into the inconscient one goes into the superconscient, but this is not frequent. And the feeling is not the same because, instead of having this negative impression of not knowing who one is or where one is or what is what, one has a positive sensation of having risen into something other than one’s ordinary life, of no longer being the same person. But when one has altogether lost contact with one’s ordinary consciousness, generally it is that one has slept and been for a long time in the inconscient. Then  the being is scattered, it is absorbed by this inconscient and all the pieces have to be put together again.


The Mother: Naturally, this is done much more quickly than at the beginning of existence, but the conscious elements have to be gathered up again and a cohesion re-formed to begin to know once more who one is.  There may be many reasons for this. Perhaps it is an exteriorisation: one has come out of the body and gone for a stroll. They may be memories of former lives. Perhaps one has become identiﬁed with someone else’s consciousness and has the memories of this other person.


The Mother: Perhaps it is a premonition (this is the rarest case, but it may happen): one sees ahead what one will see later.  The other day I spoke to you about those landscapes of Japan; well, almost all — the most beautiful, the most striking ones — I had seen in vision in France; and yet I had not seen any pictures or photographs of Japan , I knew nothing of Japan.  And I had seen these landscapes without human beings, nothing but the landscape, quite pure, like that, and it had seemed to me they were visions of a world other than the physical; they seemed to me too beautiful for the physical world, too perfectly beautiful. Particularly I used to see very often those stairs rising straight up into the sky; in my vision there was the impression of climbing straight up, straight up, and as though one could go on climbing, climbing, climbing....


The Mother: It had struck me, and the ﬁrst time I saw this in Nature down there, I understood that I had already seen it in France before having known anything about Japan.  There are always many explanations possible and it is very difﬁcult to explain for someone else. For oneself, if one has studied very carefully one’s dreams and activities of the night, one can distinguish ﬁne nuances. I was saying I thought I had a vision of another world — I knew it was something which  existed, but I could not imagine there was a country where it existed; this seemed to me impossible, so very beautiful it was. It was the active mind which interfered.


The Mother: But I knew that what I was seeing truly existed, and it was only when I saw these landscapes physically that I realised in fact that I had seen something which existed, but I had seen it with inner eyes (it was the subtlephysical) before seeing it physically. Everyone has certain very small indications, but for that one must be very, very methodical, very scrupulous, very careful in one’s observation and not neglect the least signs, and above all not give favourable mental explanations to the experiences one has. For if one wants to explain to oneself (I don’t even speak of explaining to others), if one wants to explain the experience to oneself advantageously, to draw satisfaction, one does not understand anything any more.  That is, one may mix up the signs without even noticing that they are mixed up. For instance, when one sees somebody in a dream (I am not speaking of dreams in which you see somebody unknown, but of those where you see somebody you know, who comes to see you) there are all sorts of explanations possible.


The Mother: If it is someone living far away from you, in another country, perhaps that person has written a letter to you and the letter is on the way, so you see this person because he has put a formation of himself in his letter, a concentration; you see the person and the next morning you get the letter. This is a very frequent occurrence. If it is a person with a very strong thoughtpower, he may think of you from very far, from his own country and concentrate his thought, and this concentration takes the form of that person in your consciousness. Perhaps it is that this person is calling you intentionally; deliberately he comes to tell you something or give you a sign, if he is in danger, if he is sick.


The Mother: Suppose he has something important to tell you, he begins to concentrate (he knows how to do it, as everyone does not) and he enters your atmosphere, comes to tell you something special.  Now if you are passive and attentive, you receive the message.  And then, two more instances still: someone has exteriorised  himself more or less materially in his sleep and has come to see you. And you become conscious of this person because (almost by miracle) you are in a corresponding state of consciousness.  And ﬁnally, a last instance, this person may be dead and may come to see you after his death (one part of him or almost the whole of his being according to the relation you have with him).


The Mother: Consequently, for someone who is not very, very careful it is very difﬁcult to distinguish these nuances, very difﬁcult. On the other hand, quite often imaginative people will tell you, “Oh! I saw this person — he is dead.” I have heard that I don’t know how many times. These are people whose imagination runs freely.


The Mother: It is possible that the person is dead, but not because he has appeared to you!... One must pay great attention to the outer forms things take. There are shades very difﬁcult to distinguish, one must be very, very careful. For oneself, if one is in the habit of studying all this, one can become aware of the differences, but to interpret another’s experiences is very difﬁcult, unless he gives you in great detail all that surrounds the dream, the vision: the ideas he had before, the ideas he had later, the state of his health, the feelings he experienced when going to sleep, the activities of the preceding day, indeed, all sorts of things. People who tell you, “Oh! I had this vision, explain it to me!”, that is childishness — unless it is someone whom you have followed very carefully, whom you yourself have taught how to recognise the planes, and whose habits, whose reactions you know; otherwise it is impossible to explain, for there are innumerable explanations for one single thing.


The Mother: There are some very remarkable instances of exteriorisation.  I am going to tell you two incidents about cats which occurred quite a long time ago in France. One happened very long ago, long before the war even. We used to have small meetings every week — quite a small number of friends, three or four, who discussed philosophy, spiritual experiences, etc. There was a young boy, a poet, but one who was rather light-minded; he was very intelligent, he was a student in Paris.


The Mother: He used to come regularly  to these meetings (they took place on Wednesday evenings) and one evening he did not come. We were surprised; we had met him a few days before and he had said he would come — he did not come. We waited quite a long time, the meeting was over and at the time of leaving I opened the door to let people out (it was at my house that these meetings were held), I opened the door and there before it sat a big dark grey cat which rushed into the room like mad and jumped upon me, like this, mewing desperately. I looked into its eyes and told myself, “Well, these are so-and-so’s eyes” (the one who was to come). I said, “Surely something has happened to him.”


The Mother: And the next day we learnt that he had been assassinated that night; the next morning he had been found lying strangled on his bed. This is the ﬁrst story.  The other happened long afterwards, at the time of the war — the First [World] War, not the Second — the war of the trenches.  There was a young man I knew very well; he was a poet and artist (I have already spoken about him), who had gone to the war. He had enlisted, he was very young; he was an ofﬁcer.


The Mother: He had given me his photograph. (This boy was a student of Sanskrit and knew Sanskrit very well, he liked Buddhism very much; indeed he was much interested in things of the spirit, he was not an ordinary boy, far from it.) He had given me his photograph on which there was a sentence in Sanskrit written in his own hand, very well written. I had framed this photograph and put it above a sort of secretaire (a rather high desk with drawers); well, above it I had hung this photograph. And at that time it was very difﬁcult to receive news, one did not know very well what was happening.


The Mother: From time to time we used to receive letters from him, but for a long time there had been nothing, when, one day, I came into my room, and the moment I entered, without any apparent reason the photograph fell from the wall where it had been well ﬁxed, and the glass broke with a great clatter. I felt a little anxious, I said, “There is something wrong.”  But we had no news. Two or three days later (it was on the ﬁrst ﬂoor; I lived in a house with one room upstairs, all the rest on  the ground-ﬂoor, and there was a ﬂight of steps leading to the garden) I opened the entrance door and a big grey cat rushed in — light grey, this time — a magniﬁcent cat, and, just as the other one had done, it ﬂung itself upon me, like this, mewing.


The Mother: I looked into its eyes — it had the eyes of... that boy. And this cat, it turned and turned around me and all the time tugged at my dress and miaowed. I wanted to put it out, but it would not go, it settled down there and did not want to move. The next day it was announced in the papers that this boy had been found dead between two trenches, dead for three days. That is, at the time he must have died his photograph had fallen.


The Mother: The consciousness had left the body completely: he was there abandoned, because they did not always go to see what was happening between the trenches; they could not, you understand; he was found two or three days later; at that time probably he had gone out altogether from his body and wanted deﬁnitely to inform me about what had happened and he had found that cat. For cats live in the vital, they have a very developed vital consciousness and can easily be taken possession of by vital forces.  But these two examples are quite extraordinary, for they both came about almost in the same way, and in both instances the eyes of these cats had completely changed — they had become human eyes.   This is the very motive of the creation of the universe, that is to say, all are one, all is one in its origin, but each thing, each element, each being has as its mission the revealing of one part of this unity to itself, and it is this particularity which must be developed in everyone, while awakening at the same time the sense of the original unity. This is “to work for unity in diversity”.


The Mother: And the perfection in that diversity lies in everyone’s being perfectly what he ought to be.  You mean whether the protective envelope of which I spoke from a physical point of view can serve also from a moral, a psychological point of view? It is not the same envelope, it is another domain. A man may have this subtle-physical envelope  quite intact and it may work marvellously to protect him from all illnesses and accidents, and yet at the same time he may be full of desires, because desires belong to another sphere. Desire is not a physical thing, desire is something vital, and this envelope is more material than the vital: it cannot prevent the vital from entering into contact with the vital world and receiving from there all its impulsions.


The Mother: Naturally he who has mastered himself, who has found his psychic being, who lives constantly in the consciousness of this psychic being, who has established a perfect relation or at least a constant relation with the inner divine Presence is enveloped in an atmosphere of knowledge, light, beauty, purity, which is the best of all protections against desires, but all the same it is possible for desire to intrude if one is not always on one’s guard, because we say that it comes from outside. One may have overcome a desire within oneself, and yet it may come from outside as a contagion; but through this envelope of light, knowledge and purity, the desire loses its force and instead of coming like a movement which evokes a blind and immediate response, one perceives what is happening, becomes aware of the force which wants to enter and one can quietly — when it is not wanted — make an inner movement and reject the incoming desire. This is the only true defence: a wakeful consciousness, pure and alert, so to say, which does not sleep, does not let things enter without being aware of them. The worst thing is that people are quite unconscious and that it is only after the contagion has entered that they notice it, and it is a little late to react — it is not impossible, but it is more difﬁcult — while if one sees it coming, if in the surrounding atmosphere it comes making a kind of little black mark, one can chase it off as one would something disagreeable. But the protective envelope on the material plane has no effect in this instance.


The Mother: This is indeed something very interesting.... I have seen that material things are arranged in such a way at present that one could reach a high degree of perfection of the physical instrument in any ﬁeld whatever, no matter what may be the degree of  inner or psychic development. This was what I thought yesterday evening about the talkies. It is evidently a great progress in the cinematographic art and it can’t be called in itself bad or good.  It so happened that I had always seen only talkies of idiotic, vulgar, crude stories, indeed all the stupidities generally shown in cinemas, and this perfection of the instrument had made the crudity yet more crude, the stupidity yet more stupid, and this kind of impression of degradation yet more strong.


The Mother: But yesterday, when we saw that documentary with the beautiful birds singing.... Those who made this ﬁlm have taken great pains, one can’t imagine how much of effort and work it entails to ﬁlm birds in their nests without disturbing them, then to record the sound accurately enough to be able to amplify it and make it perceptible to all. It is a very big work they have done there. And it is the same perfecting of the same instrument which permitted the production of the lovely thing we saw yesterday evening and that ignoble thing we saw sometime ago.... This makes us reﬂect deeply on material things.


The Mother: Physical perfection does not at all prove, not in the least, that one has taken one step farther towards spirituality. Physical perfection means that the instrument the force will use — any force whatever — will be sufﬁciently perfected to be remarkably expressive. But the important point, the essential point is the force which will use the instrument, and it is there that the choice is necessary. If you perfect your body and make of it a remarkable instrument, you must not at all think that because of that you are nearer to the spiritual life. You prepare a remarkable instrument so that this spiritual life may manifest in it, if it manifests itself.


The Mother: But it is for you always to choose what will be manifested. There are people who perfect their body, who build a strong, solid, energetic, agile, capable body, and all this simply to be able to better afﬁrm their ego and the strength of their ego.  Others may prepare the body to be sure that when the spiritual light manifests, it will ﬁnd an instrument capable of doing all that is asked of it. Whatever the work required, the instrument  will be so perfected as to be able to do it without difﬁculty, spontaneously, immediately.... This is to arouse your attention to the most important fact which is the choice of the force you will allow to manifest in your body.


The Mother: Perfect your body, make it a remarkable instrument, but never forget that there is a choice to be made and that this choice ought to be made constantly — one doesn’t make it once for all, it must always be renewed. Because, before one reaches the total union, the total expression, there will always be this invasion of external things which will try to enter you and spoil all the work. So, the necessary, indispensable condition is a constant vigilance. Do not sleep with satisfaction under the pretext that you have once made your choice: “Oh!  Now it is all right, everything is all right.”


The Mother: In principle everything is all right; in the sincerity of your choice lies also the guarantee of its duration. But for the sincerity to be perfect and the choice unshakable, one must never sleep — I don’t mean you must not sleep physically, I mean the consciousness must not sleep! And this is an introduction to what I shall read to you next time, a letter Sri Aurobindo wrote quite a long time ago; if I remember rightly, it was in 1928, October 1928. You see, things do not change very quickly.  You must live it, that is to say, live according to the inner law, the truth of your being.


The Mother: I have explained this at some length in “The Science of Living”, I have said that this truth of the being is precisely the particularity of every one.  The law of each being is different, yes, otherwise how would a distinction be made? From top to bottom, the nature, appearance, actions, all would be the same. If there were only one law, there would be only one law and every one would repeat the  same thing. There would be no need at all to manifest a universe because it would be one single law.


The Mother: The very characteristic of the universe is an inﬁnite multiplicity of laws which altogether, in their totality, reproduce the One. And it is this which is particularly marvellous in the physical world (in man and in the physical world, for it is proper to the terrestrial being), that it can be one of the innumerable elements which in their totality reproduce the One, and yet at the same time have a personal relation with the One — that is to say, contain in itself the consciousness of the One and the relation with the One, and at the same time be an element of the whole. But if the fact of becoming conscious of the One and identifying oneself with it stopped one from being particular, one would cease existing as a personality. This is precisely what the Buddhists and the disciples of Shankara try to realise; they wish to abolish totally their personality, their individuality, abolish the truth of their being, the special law of their being. This is what they consider to be a fusion with the Divine.


The Mother: But this is the negation of this creation. And as I was saying, the miracle of this creation, as far as the terrestrial individuality goes, is that we may achieve this union, this complete identiﬁcation with the Supreme, the One, and at the same time keep the consciousness of our diversity, of the particular law we have to express. It is more difﬁcult but inﬁnitely more complete, and it is the very truth of this universe. The universe has not been made for anything else but that, to unite these two poles, the two extremes of consciousness. And when they are united, one understands that these two extremes are exactly the same thing — a whole, at once one and innumerable.


The Mother: Externally, this is evident.   No, the ignorance is to deny the essential identity, the one origin.  And I consider it an ignorant absurdity to want to deny the external differences of the manifestation. Why should there be a manifestation then? What purpose would it serve?


The Mother: This would mean there has been an absurdity at the beginning of creation.  If this had not been done on purpose, it would mean that things are not made on purpose or that He has made a mistake or even that He has not understood what He wanted to do! that He thought of doing one thing and did another! Besides, I hasten to tell you that if there were a universe in which all the elements were identical, truly one would immediately ask why it existed.  If all of you in front of me, all, were all the same, speaking in the same way, thinking in the same way, reacting in the same way, I believe I would immediately run away!


The Mother: Listen. Would you ask whether a fatal illness is favourable to health or not? It is exactly that. A civilisation, whatever it may be, is the result of very long efforts to become conscious of oneself, of Nature, and to master this Nature and draw the best possible advantage from it. We were saying a while ago that the training of the physical being consists in preparing an instrument so that the Divine may manifest Himself.


The Mother: A civilisation prepares an instrument so that the Divine may manifest in that instrument. The more slowly, carefully, minutely the civilisation is worked out, and succeeds in conquering the laws of Nature, the more favourable is the instrument to the manifestation of the Divine. That is why we also have this idea of the prolongation of life, it is to be able to perfect the instrument so as to manifest the divine Force which wants to manifest. Otherwise, it would evidently be much easier, as soon as the body became a little ill or a little old or incapable of reacting as it did when young, to  do what one does with an old torn dress — one throws it away and gets another. Unfortunately, it is not like that.


The Mother: All the fruit of the work, all the accumulated effort to become conscious is lost. If, for instance, this civilisation we have built, which in a way has so considerably mastered the forces of Nature, which has succeeded in understanding laws of an altogether unique order and has accumulated so many experiences of all kinds to reach self-understanding and self-expression, if all this disappeared, it would be necessary, naturally, to begin all over again.  And then, for a new-born child, how many years of slow and insipid education are needed for its brain to be ready to express even a simple general idea, for its movements to be conscious instead of being absolutely unconscious, how many years! For a civilisation, how many years would be necessary simply to get back all that is lost? There have been many civilisations on the earth, there are scientists trying to rediscover what has been, but nobody can say with certitude exactly what was there: the major part of these civilisations is completely lost (I am speaking of civilisations preceding this one which for us is historical) .


The Mother: Well, if thousands of years are yet needed to begin another, obviously.... In any case, for our external human consciousness, it is a loss of time. But we are told that the Work to be done, the promised Realisation is going to take place now. It is going to take place now because the framework of this civilisation seems to be favourable as a platform or a base for building up. But if this civilisation is destroyed, upon what are we going to build?


The Mother: First a foundation platform must be made in order to be able to build. If ﬁve or ten thousand years are still needed to make this platform, this proves that it is not now that things will be done — they will be done, that is well understood, they will be done, but... How many lives have you all had? What do you remember of your past lives? What is the good of all the efforts you have made in your past lives to perfect yourselves, to try to understand yourselves, to master yourselves a little, simply to make use of the instrument which has been given to you?


The Mother: What  remains to you of all that? Will you tell me? Who here can tell me that he is consciously proﬁting by the experiences of his past lives — unconsciously there is something which remains but not much — but consciously?... No one will answer?  Yes, exactly, it is just like that.


The Mother: This is because the farther one goes, the more does one realise that there is everything to understand and everything to learn. And consequently, if one has behind him some sixty years, it is nothing. One would like to have hundreds and hundreds of years behind oneself to be able to do the work. It is like that, you are all little children, you see, so the years seem to you long, because you have not lived much; but you will see, the more one advances, the more does one realise that there is a long road in front, long, very long, and one would not like to have to begin all over again, for it is so much more time lost.   Everybody knows this; those who do not want to change their way of doing things or their way of being always say, “Oh!


The Mother: What do you expect, it is human nature.” This is what is called a “wilful indulgence”. That is to say, instead of becoming conscious that these are weaknesses and difﬁculties on the way, one justiﬁes these things, saying, “Oh! It can’t be helped, it is human nature.” One wants to continue to do what one is doing, without changing, one is full of a wilful indulgence of one’s demands.


The Mother: For the lower nature of man always demands things; it says, “These are necessities, these are needs, I can’t do without them.” Then, the instincts — a sort of instinct for one’s own satisfaction — and pretensions: the lower being claims that it has a considerable importance and must be given what is necessary for it, otherwise it won’t be able to live; it asserts that it alone is important, and so on. It is all this which creates obstacles, all these obscure, ignorant movements, all these justiﬁcations of the old ways of being: those who ﬂy into a temper and say, “What do you expect,  it can’t be helped”, and everything one does saying, “Oh! It is human nature”, everything one justiﬁes saying, “What can be done, people are like that, there is nothing to be done about it. ”  It is the old idea that we are born with a particular nature and must get adjusted to it, for we cannot change it.


The Mother: So Sri Aurobindo tells us that if one cannot change the nature it is not worth the trouble of doing yoga, for yoga is done precisely in order to change the nature, otherwise it has no meaning.  But one can ﬁnd oneself in the Divine even before having completely abolished one’s little ego, for, to abolish one’s little ego is not a small matter!  How is it to be done? How to abolish the ego? — First of all, you must want to do it, and there are very few people who want to.


The Mother: And that is exactly what they say, it is this justiﬁcation of their way of being, “That is the way I am made, I can’t do otherwise.  And then, if I change this, if I change that or if I do without this thing or if I get rid of that other, I shall no longer exist!” And if one doesn’t say this openly, one thinks it. And all these little desires, these little satisfactions, these little reactions, all these small ways of being, one clings to them, clings hard — one sticks to them, one doesn’t want to let them go. I have seen hundreds of cases where someone’s difﬁculty had been removed (with a particular power a certain difﬁculty had been removed), but after a few days he brought it back with enthusiasm.


The Mother: He said, “But without that I do not exist any longer!” I have known people who had been given mental silence almost spontaneously and who, after a day or two, came back frightened: “Have I  become an idiot?” — for the mental machine was not working all the time.... You cannot imagine it, you don’t know how very difﬁcult it is to separate oneself from this little ego; how much it gets into the way though it is so small. It takes up so much room while being so microscopic. It is very difﬁcult.


The Mother: One pushes it away in certain very obvious things; for example, if there is something good and someone rushes forward to make sure of having it ﬁrst, even jostling his neighbour (this happens very frequently in ordinary life), then here one becomes quite aware that this is not very, very elegant, so one begins to suppress these crudities, one makes a big effort — and one becomes highly selfsatisﬁed: “I am not selﬁsh, I give what is good to others, I don’t keep it for myself”, and one begins to get puffed up. And so one is ﬁlled with a moral egoism which is much worse than physical egoism, for it is conscious of its superiority. And then there are those who have left everything, given up everything, who have left their families, distributed their belongings, gone into solitude, who live an ascetic life, and who are terribly conscious of their superiority, who look down at poor humanity from the height of their spiritual grandeur — and they have, these people, such a formidable ego that unless it is broken into small bits, never, never will they see the Divine. So it is not such an easy task. It takes a lot of time.


The Mother: And I must tell you that even when the work is done, it must always be begun again.  Physically, we depend upon food to live — unfortunately.  For with food, we daily and constantly take in a formidable amount of inconscience, of, heaviness, stupidity. One can’t do otherwise — unless constantly, without a break, we remain completely aware and, as soon as an element is introduced into our body, we immediately work upon it to extract from it only the light and reject all that may darken our consciousness. This is the origin and rational explanation of the religious practice of consecrating one’s food to God before taking it.


The Mother: When eating one aspires that this food may not be taken for the little human ego but as an offering to the divine consciousness within oneself.   In all yogas, all religions, this is encouraged. This is the origin of that practice, of contacting the consciousness behind, precisely to diminish as much as possible the absorption of an inconscience which increases daily, constantly, without one’s being aware of it.  Vitally, it is the same thing. You live vitally in the vital world with all the currents of vital force entering, going out, joining and opposing each other, quarrelling and intermingling in your consciousness, and even if you have made a personal effort to purify your vital consciousness, to master in it the desire-being and the little human ego, you are constantly under a sort of obligation to absorb all the contrary vibrations which come from those with whom you live.


The Mother: One can’t shut oneself up in an ivory tower, it is yet more difﬁcult vitally than physically, and one takes in all sorts of things; and unless one is constantly wide awake, constantly on one’s guard, and has quite an efﬁcient control over all that enters, so as not to admit in one’s consciousness unwanted elements, one catches the constant contagion of all desires, all the lower movements, all the small obscure reactions, all the unwanted vibrations which come to us from those around us.  Mentally, it is still worse. The human mind is a public place open on all sides, and in this public place, things come, go, cross from all directions; and some settle there and these are not always the best. And there, to obtain control over that multitude is the most difﬁcult of all controls. Try to control the thought coming into your mind, you will see.


The Mother: Simply, you will see to what a degree you have to be watchful, like a sentinel, with the eyes of the mind wide open, and then keep an extremely clear vision of the ideas which conform to your aspirations and those which do not. And you must police at every minute that public place where roads from all sides meet, so that all passers-by do not rush in. It is a big job. Then, don’t forget that even if you make sincere efforts, it is not in a day, not in a month, not in a year that you will reach the end of all these difﬁculties. When one begins, one must begin with an unshakable patience.


The Mother: One  must say, “Even if it takes ﬁfty years, even if it takes a hundred years, even if it takes several lives, what I want to accomplish, I shall accomplish.”  Once you have decided upon this, once you are quite conscious that it is so and that the goal is worth the trouble of a constant and sustained effort, you may begin. Otherwise, after a time you will fall ﬂat; you will get discouraged, you will tell yourself, “Oh! It is very difﬁcult — I do it and then it is undone, I do it again and it is once again undone, and then I do it again and it is perpetually undone.... Then what?


The Mother: When will I get there?”  One must have plenty of patience. The work may be undone a hundred times, you will do it again a hundred and one times; it may be undone a thousand times, you will re-do it a thousand and one times, until ﬁnally it is no longer undone. And ﬁnally it is no longer undone.  Only, you see, if one were made all of a piece, it would be very easy, but one is made of many pieces.


The Mother: Then, there is one piece which is ahead, which has worked hard, is very conscious, altogether awake, and when it is there, all goes well, one does not allow anything to enter, one is on one’s guard, and then... one goes to sleep and the next day when one gets up it is another part which is there and one tells oneself, “But where then is all the work I had done?...” And one must begin all over again.  Begin all over again until all the parts, one after another, enter the ﬁeld of consciousness and each one can be changed. And when you reach your limit, there is a change, you have made progress — afterwards, you must make another, but still that one is made.


The Mother: But it is completely made only when all the pieces of the being are brought like that, one after another, to the front, and upon all without exception you have applied the consciousness, the light, the will and the goal, in such a way that everything changes.  This is not to discourage you, but to warn you. I do not want you to say afterwards, “Oh! If I had known it was so difﬁcult, I would not have started. ”


The Mother: You must know that it is  excessively difﬁcult and begin with great ﬁrmness and continue to the end, even if the end is a very long way off — there are many things to do. Now, I may tell you that if you do it sincerely, with application and care, it is extremely interesting. Even those whose life is quite monotonous, without interest (there are, you know, poor people who have to do utterly uninteresting work and always the same thing, and always in the same conditions, and whose mind is not sufﬁciently awakened to be able to ﬁnd an interest in anything whatever), even those people, if they begin to do this little work upon themselves, of control, of elimination, that is to say, if each element which comes with its ignorance, its unconsciousness, its egoism, is put before the will to change and one remains awake, compares, observes, studies and slowly acts, that becomes inﬁnitely interesting, one makes marvellous and quite unexpected discoveries. One ﬁnds in oneself lots of small hidden folds, little things one had not seen at the beginning; one undertakes a sort of inner chase, goes hunting into small dark corners and tells oneself: “What, I was like that! This was there in me, I am harbouring this little thing!” — sometimes so sordid, so mean, so nasty.


The Mother: And once it has been discovered, how wonderful! One puts the light upon it and it disappears and you no longer have those reactions which made you so sad before, when you used to say, “Oh! I shall never get there.”  For instance, you take a very simple resolution (apparently very simple): “I shall never tell a lie again.” And suddenly, without your knowing why or how, the lie springs up all by itself and you notice it after you have uttered it: “But this is not correct — what I have just said; it was something else I meant to say.”


The Mother: So you search, search.... “How did it happen? How did I think like that and speak like that? Who spoke in me, who pushed me?...” You may give yourself quite a satisfactory explanation and say, “It came from outside” or “It was a moment of unconsciousness”, and not think any longer about it.


The Mother: And the next time, it begins again. Instead of that, you search: “What can be the motive of one who tells lies?...” and you push — you push and all of a  sudden you discover in a little corner something which wants to justify itself, thrust itself forward or assert its own way of seeing (no matter what, there are a number of reasons), show itself a little different from what it is so that people may have a good opinion of you and think you someone very remarkable.... It was that which spoke in you — not your active consciousness, but what was there and pushed the consciousness from behind.  When you were not quite on your guard, it made use of your mouth, your tongue, and then there you were!


The Mother: The lie came out.  I am giving you this example — there are a million others. And it is extremely interesting. And to the extent one discovers this within oneself and says sincerely, “It must change”, one ﬁnds that one acquires a sort of inner clear-sightedness, one gradually becomes aware of what goes on in others, and instead of getting angry when they are not quite what one would like them to be, one begins to understand how things happen, how it is that one is “like this”, how reactions are produced.... Then, with the indulgence of knowledge, one smiles.


The Mother: One no longer judges severely, one offers the difﬁculty in oneself or in others, whatever may be its centre of manifestation, to the divine Consciousness, asking for its transformation.  Precisely this is what I have been doing for the last two days. The last two days I have spent all my time seeing all this accumulation, oh! heaps of little sordid things which one lives constantly, very tiny sordid things. And so there is only one way — there is only one way, always the same: to offer.  It is almost as though this Supreme Consciousness were putting you in touch with things long forgotten, which belong to the past, which even are or were or seemed to be completely effaced, with which you no longer have any contact, all sorts  of little circumstances, which yet are seen in the new consciousness, in their true place, and make such a poor, miserable, mean, sordid whole of the entire life, the entire general human life.


The Mother: And so, it is a luminous joy of offering all this for transformation, for transﬁguration.  Now it has become the very movement of the cellular consciousness. All weaknesses, all responses to adverse suggestions (I mean the smallest things of every minute in the cells), are taken in the same movement of offering (and these come sometimes in waves, to such an extent that the body feels it will swoon before this assault), and then comes a light, so warm, so deep, so powerful, which puts everything back in order, in its place, and opens the way to transformation.  These periods are very difﬁcult periods of the bodily life; one feels that there is now only one thing which decides, the Supreme Will. There is no longer any support — any support, from the support of habit to the support of knowledge and of will, all the supports have vanished — there is only the Supreme.


The Mother: ()  Aspiration in the cellular consciousness for perfect sincerity of consecration.  And the lived experience — lived intensely — that it is only this absolute sincerity of consecration which allows existence.  The least pretension is an alliance with the forces of dissolution and of death.  Well, it is like a song of the cells — but they must not even have the insincerity of watching themselves do it — the song of the cells: “Thy Will, O Lord, Thy Will.”


The Mother: And the great habit of depending upon the will of others, the consciousness of others, the reactions of others (of others and of all things), this kind of universal comedy which all play with all and everything plays to everything, ought to be replaced by an absolute, spontaneous sincerity of consecration.   It is evident that this perfection of sincerity is possible only in the most material part of the consciousness.  It is there that one can succeed in being, existing, doing, without watching oneself being, watching oneself existing, watching oneself doing, with an absolute sincerity.   One precedes the other. First of all one must be conscious, then  control, and by continuing the mastery one changes one’s character.


The Mother: Changing the character is what comes last. One must control bad habits, the old habits, for a very long time for them to drop off and the character to change.  We may take the example of someone who has frequent depressions. When things are not exactly as he would like them to be, he becomes depressed. So, to begin with, he must become aware of his depression — not only of the depression but of the causes of depression, why he gets depressed so easily.


The Mother: Then, once he has become conscious, he must master the depressions, must stop being depressed even when the cause of depression is there — he must master his depression, stop it from coming. And ﬁnally, after this work has been done for a sufﬁciently long time, the nature loses the habit of having depressions and no longer reacts in the same way, the nature is changed.  The forces of the Ignorance in the present world always seek people who can express their ignorance in the world. This is not difﬁcult! There are many people ready to say ignorant things, that is, to deny all spiritual realisation, deny the capacity for progress, deny the possibility of realising another life than this existing one, deny that human nature can be changed, and so on; or if you like, ready to afﬁrm that it is impossible to escape from illness, that it is impossible to escape death, impossible to understand; ready to assert that never will the Light and Knowledge be attained, and so on.


The Mother: Those who say these things are the spokesmen of the Ignorance. Instead of expressing the forces of Light and Knowledge they serve to express the forces of the Ignorance — is it clear?   Yes, one cannot do the yoga if one does not take it seriously.  For one must be very serious to have a constant aspiration and do tapasya. If one is not serious, for ﬁve minutes one has an aspiration and for ten hours one hasn’t; for one day there is a great urge and for a month nothing, and so on.


The Mother: Well, one can’t do yoga in these conditions. It must be a continuous, constant thing which does not ﬂag. If one forgets or slackens, one cannot do yoga.  No, aspiration is a thing to be developed, educated, like all activities of the being. One may be born with a very slight aspiration and develop it so much that it becomes very great.


The Mother: One may be born with a very small will and develop it and make it strong. It is a ridiculous idea to believe that things come to you like that, through a sort of grace, that if you are not given aspiration, you don’t have it — this is not true. It is precisely upon this that Sri Aurobindo has insisted in his letter and in the passage I am going to read to you in a minute. He says you must choose, and the choice is constantly put before you and constantly you must choose, and if you do not choose, well, you will not be able to advance. You must choose; there is no “force like that” which chooses for you, or chance or luck or fate — this is not true.


The Mother: Your will is free, it is deliberately left free and you have to choose. It is you who decide whether to seek the Light or not, whether to be the servitor of the Truth or not — it is you. Or whether to have an aspiration or not, it is you who choose. And even when you are told, “Make your surrender total and the work will be done for you”, it is quite all right, but to make your surrender  total, every day and at every moment you must choose to make your surrender total, otherwise you will not do it, it will not get done by itself. It is you who must want to do it.


The Mother: When it is done, all goes well, when you have the Knowledge also, all goes well, and when you are identiﬁed with the Divine, all goes even better, but till then you must will, choose and decide. Don’t go to sleep lazily, saying, “Oh! The work will be done for me, I have nothing to do but let myself glide along with the stream.”  Besides, it is not true, the work is not done by itself, because if the least little thing thwarts your little will, it says, “No, not that!...” Then?


The Mother: One cannot at the outset, immediately, attain the supreme Truth.  There are things on the way which are more true than those you know but which are not Truth, and these things are like discoveries one makes: suddenly one has a kind of illumination, one discovers a law, ﬁnds a lever, sees a road opening before one; it is not the supreme Truth, not the supreme experience, it is not what comes when one is identiﬁed with the Divine, but it is like something which has fallen from there and entered you, and gives you a partial illumination. These partial illuminations are just what he calls “lesser truths”.  Tapasya is the discipline one imposes upon oneself to arrive at the discovery of the Divine.  No, you can’t do tapasya without aspiration.


The Mother: Aspiration is ﬁrst, the will to attain something. Tapasya is the process — there is indeed a process, a method.   Then, if it is logical and well-meaning, it ought to admit the presence of the Divine. You understand, it is a vicious circle; it does not want the Divine to be there and it denies Him because it is much troubled that there is this discipline which will oblige it to change, to master itself, check its desires, bow its head instead of always protesting , so it says violently, “There is no Divine.”


The Mother: But it may very well know, at the same time, that the work has begun and, consequently, have the proof that the Divine is there. But it will deny Him all the same, it is ill-willed, it uses this argument wilfully to avoid making an effort.  It is almost the same thing. Your body, for instance, has certain reactions to cold, heat, hunger, and you are in the habit of having these reactions, and this habit has made a kind of formation in your physical nature, that is, a crease, a ﬁxed crease of the body, and that’s how it is. Formations are the result of habits.


The Mother: Similarly, there are “formations” of character; for instance, if you are in the habit of getting angry when things do not please you, the habit makes a sort of inner crease in your nature, and every time a thing doesn’t please you, automatically, without any control, you will get angry. This is what is called a “formation”, they are habits which have become like a part of your character.  There is a limit to be kept!... But if one chooses one’s obsession well, it may be very useful because it is no longer quite an obsession. For example, one has decided to ﬁnd the Divine within oneself, and constantly, in every circumstance, whatever  happens or whatever one may do, one concentrates in order to enter into contact with the inner Divine.


The Mother: Naturally, ﬁrst one must have that little thing Sri Aurobindo speaks about, that “lesser truth” which consists in knowing that there is a Divine within one (this is a very good example of the “lesser truth”) and once one is sure of it and has the aspiration to ﬁnd it, if that aspiration becomes constant and the effort to realise it becomes constant, in the eyes of others it looks like an obsession, but this kind of obsession is not bad. It becomes bad only if one loses one’s balance. But it must be made quite clear that those who lose their balance with that obsession are only those who were quite ready to lose their balance; any circumstance whatever would have produced the same result and made them lose their balance — it is a defect in the mental structure, it is not the fault of the obsession. And naturally, he who changes a desire into an obsession would be sure to go straight towards imbalance.  That is why I say it is important to know the object of the obsession.


The Mother: If you concentrate on any idea with sufﬁcient obstinacy, you will “go through”, as the occultists say, and behind the idea upon which you concentrate, you will ﬁnd the light. But this is a bit risky.   Surely. That, surely.


The Mother: If one is capable of this kind of concentration, it is very good, but one must know upon what to concentrate. That is the important point.   This does not seem to me difﬁcult. One may try out a little exercise. One may say, “Let me see, I surrender to the Divine, I want Him to decide everything in my life.”


The Mother: This is your starting point. A little exercise: the Divine is going to decide that such and such a thing happens, precisely something in contradiction with your feeling. Then one tells oneself, “Well, and if the Divine tells me, ‘You are going to give that up’ ” — you will see quite easily, immediately, what the reaction is; if it causes a little prick like this, inside, you may tell yourself, “The surrender is not perfect” — it pricks, it pricks....   It is not absolutely ignorant. Things are not so absolute; it can feel there is something lacking.


The Mother: All depends upon that. Naturally, those who are quite satisﬁed with themselves as they are — it is not worth the trouble trying to change them, because they don’t want it. But in fact, even in the lower nature, it is possible to have a kind of feeling that things could be better. For example, take someone whose health is bad or who is weak, who has desires but is too weak to fulﬁl them, who has ambitions but no capacity; such a person will perhaps tell himself, “Oh! If I were better than I am, if I knew a little more, if I were a little stronger, if I understood a little what ought to be done...”


The Mother: Or suppose, for instance, in ordinary life, someone who needs to earn his living and must choose a job, and the job offered is not to his liking; he is caught in this dilemma: not to have anything to eat or to accept this unpleasant situation; he ﬁnds himself facing this problem and says, “What should I do?” He does not know, does not understand; but even in his stupidity he will have a sort of impression that it would be better if he could see a little more clearly, could know a little better, could have some elements of foresight. Then this awakens a slight aspiration for progress — it is the beginning of a choice. Someone has said that  if there were no ticks to bite the dogs, they would always be in a state of inertia, stretched out on the ground, motionless. Now, these trouble them, they begin to scratch, they move, and this awakens them a little from their tamas.


The Mother: For men, it is the same thing. When they have a small desire which they cannot satisfy, they are a little shaken up: they come out of their inertia and try to ﬁnd a solution to their problem. It is like that. There is no absolute unconsciousness — there is no absolute ignorance, no absolute night. Behind all unconsciousness, behind all ignorance, behind the night, there is always the supreme Light which is everywhere.


The Mother: The least little thing sufﬁces for a beginning of contact to be established.  It refers to all the Teachers who have come to the world. One has said, “I bring Love”, another “I bring Peace”, another “I bring Liberation”, and then, there has been a little change within, something has awakened in the depths of men’s consciousness, but externally everything has remained just the same. It is this which makes it a ﬁasco.  Not necessarily.


The Mother: They help only if one wants it; otherwise, on the contrary, one detaches oneself more and more from the outer nature. This is what happens to all those who seek, liberation; they reject their outer nature with its character and habits as something altogether contemptible with which one  should not busy oneself; they withdraw all their energies, all forces of consciousness towards the heights, and if they do it with sufﬁcient perfection, generally they leave their body once for all. But in the immense majority of instances, they do it only partially and, when they come out of their meditation, their contemplation, their trance or their, they are generally worse than others because they have left their outer nature aside without working on it at all. Even ordinary people, when their defects are a little too glaring, try to correct them or control them a little so as not to have too much trouble in life, while these people who think that the right attitude is to leave one’s body and one’s outer consciousness completely and withdraw entirely to the “spiritual heights” , treat that like an old coat one throws aside and does not mend — and when one takes it back it is full of holes and stains.


The Mother: That does not help. It helps only if one has the sincere will to change; if one sincerely has the will to change, it is a powerful help because it gives you the force to make the change, the fulcrum to make the change. But one must sincerely want to change.   In the last analysis, it is always the same summit — the divine oneness which is behind all things — but everyone will reach his own summit, that is, through his own nature and own way of manifesting the divine unity. This is what we were saying the other day: each one represents a special way of having a relation with the Divine and manifesting the Divine.


The Mother: You don’t need to follow another’s path! You must follow your own path and it is by this path that you will reach the summit, which is one, but found by your own route. The goal is beyond the summits — the goal is one and beyond the summits — but one may attain this summit each by his own road, climbing his own mountain, not the mountain of another.  This is to give you courage, courage to act. You must be vigilant and must keep your will, whatever happens.


The Mother: If you put the two things end to end, you have the complete thing.   One must be vigilant.  One can remain conscious in sleep, we have already explained that! One must work.  Not at all, one sleeps much better, one has a quiet sleep instead of a restless one.


The Mother: Most people do so many things in their sleep that they wake up more tired than before. We have already spoken about this once. Naturally, if you keep yourself from sleeping, you won’t sleep. I always tell those who complain of not being able to sleep, “Meditate then and you will end up by sleeping.”  It is better to fall asleep while concentrating than “like that”, scattered and strewn without knowing even where one is.


The Mother: To sleep well one must learn how to sleep.  If one is physically very tired, it is better not to go to sleep immediately, otherwise one falls into the inconscient. If one is very tired, one must stretch out on the bed, relax, loosen all the nerves one after another until one becomes like a rumpled cloth in one’s bed, as though one had neither bones nor muscles.  When one has done that, the same thing must be done in the mind. Relax, do not concentrate on any idea or try to solve a problem or ruminate on impressions, sensations or emotions you had during the day.


The Mother: All that must be allowed to drop off quietly: one gives oneself up, one is indeed like a rag. When you have succeeded in doing this, there is always a little ﬂame, there — that ﬂame never goes out and you become conscious of it when you have managed this relaxation. And all of a sudden this little ﬂame rises slowly into an aspiration for the divine life,  the truth, the consciousness of the Divine, the union with the inner being, it goes higher and higher, it rises, rises, like that, very gently. Then everything gathers there, and if at that moment you fall asleep, you have the best sleep you could possibly have. I guarantee that if you do this carefully, you are sure to sleep, and also sure that instead of falling into a dark hole you will sleep in light, and when you get up in the morning you will be fresh, ﬁt, content, happy and full of energy for the day.


The Mother: When does the brain ever sleep? When does it sleep? This is of all things the most difﬁcult. If you succeed in making your brain sleep, it would be wonderful.


The Mother: How it runs on! It is rambling. It is this I meant when I spoke of relaxation in the brain. If you do it really well, your brain enters a silent restfulness and that is wonderful; when you attain that, ﬁve minutes of that and you are quite fresh afterwards, you can solve a heap of problems.  Because you have not caught the consciousness at its work.


The Mother: And perhaps because if you remembered what was going on in your brain, you would be horriﬁed! It is really like a madhouse, all these ideas which clash, all dancing a saraband in the head! It is as if one were throwing balls in all directions at once. So, if you saw that, you would be a bit troubled.   One must go and ask them!


The Mother: But there is a conclusion, the last sentences give a very clear explanation. It is said: “Nay, then, is immortality a plaything to be given lightly to a child, or the divine life a prize without effort or the crown for a weakling?”  This comes back to the question why the adverse forces have the right to interfere, to harass you. But this is precisely the test necessary for your sincerity. If the way were very easy, everybody would start on the way, and if one could reach the goal without any obstacle and without any effort, everybody would reach the goal, and when one has come to the end, the situation would be the same as when one started, there would be no change.


The Mother: That is, the new world would be exactly what the old has been. It is truly not worth the trouble! Evidently a process of elimination is necessary so that only what is capable of manifesting the new life remains. This is the reason and there is no other, this is the best of reasons. And, you see, it is a tempering, it is the ordeal of ﬁre, only that which can stand it remains absolutely pure; when everything has burnt down, there remains only the little ingot of pure gold.


The Mother: And it is like that. What puts things out very much in all this is the religious idea of fault, sin, redemption. But there is no arbitrary decision! On the contrary, for each one it is the best and most favourable conditions which are given. We were saying the other day that it is only his friends whom God treats with severity; you thought it was a joke, but it is true.


The Mother: It is only to those who are full of hope, who will pass through this purifying ﬂame, that the conditions for attaining the maximum result are given. And the human mind is made in such a way that you may test this; when something extremely unpleasant happens to you, you may tell yourself, “Well, this proves I am worth the trouble of being given this difﬁculty, this proves there is something in me which can resist the difﬁculty”, and you will notice that instead of tormenting yourself, you rejoice — you will be so happy and so strong that even the most unpleasant things will seem to  you quite charming! This is a very easy experiment to make.  Whatever the circumstance, if your mind is accustomed to look at it as something favourable, it will no longer be unpleasant for you. This is quite well known; as long as the mind refuses to accept a thing, struggles against it, tries to obstruct it, there are torments, difﬁculties, storms, inner struggles and all suffering.


The Mother: But the minute the mind says, “Good, this is what has to come, it is thus that it must happen”, whatever happens, you are content.  There are people who have acquired such control of their mind over their body that they feel nothing; I told you this the other day about certain mystics: if they think the suffering inﬂicted upon them is going to help them cross the stages in a moment and give them a sort of stepping-stone to attain the Realisation, the goal they have put before them, union with the Divine, they no longer feel the suffering at all. Their body is as it were galvanised by the mental conception. This has happened very often, it is a very common experience among those who truly have enthusiasm. And after all, if one must for some reason or other leave one’s body and take a new one, is it not better to make of one’s death something magniﬁcent, joyful, enthusiastic, than to make it a disgusting defeat?


The Mother: Those who cling on, who try by every possible means to delay the end even by a minute or two, who give you an example of frightful anguish, show that they are not conscious of their soul.... After all, it is perhaps a means, isn’t it? One can change this accident into a means; if one is conscious one can make a beautiful thing of it, a very beautiful thing, as of everything. And note, those who do not fear it, who are not anxious, who can die without any sordidness are those who never think about it, who are not haunted all the time by this “horror” facing them which they must escape and which they try to push as far away from them as they can. These, when the occasion comes, can lift their head, smile and say, “Here I am.”


The Mother: It is they who have the will to make the best possible use of their life, it is they who say, “I shall remain here as long as it is  necessary, to the last second, and I shall not lose one moment to realise my goal”; these, when the necessity comes, put up the best show. Why? — It is very simple, because they live in their ideal, the truth of their ideal; because that is the real thing for them, the very reason of their being, and in all things they can see this ideal, this reason of existence, and never do they come down into the sordidness of material life.  So, the conclusion: One must never wish for death.  One must never will to die.


The Mother: One must never be afraid to die.  And in all circumstances one must will to exceed oneself.   The transformation is irrevocable when your consciousness is transformed in such a way that you can no longer go back to your old condition. There is a moment when the change is so complete that it is impossible to become once again what one was before.  The transformation may be partial.


The Mother: The transformation Sri Aurobindo speaks about here is a reversal of consciousness: instead of being egoistical and turned towards personal satisfactions, the consciousness is turned towards the Divine in surrender. And he has explained clearly that the surrender could be partial at ﬁrst — there are parts which surrender and parts which don’t. So it is only when the entire being, integrally, in all its movements, has made its surrender, that it is irrevocable. It is an irrevocable transformation of attitude.   The divine Power is only a part of the divine Shakti; the divine Power is an attribute of the divine Shakti.


The Mother: Sri Aurobindo uses the word divine Shakti, here, in the sense of, the creative power, the creative consciousness; consequently, the divine Power is only a part of the Shakti.  Do you know what it means to be glad? Do you know what it means to be strong? Do you know what it means to be helpful?  Well, the surrender, that is, the self-giving to the Divine, must be happy, joyful, made gladly; it must be strong, one must not give oneself through weakness and impotence but with an active and strong will.


The Mother: And then the surrender must not remain absolutely indolent: “I have made my surrender, I have nothing more to do in life, I have only to remain still, my surrender is made.” And it must be helpful, that is, it must be active — it must undertake the transformation of the being or do some useful work.  You may speak, for instance, of the surrender of your watch: you wind it up and it runs, but this is not a response of conscious collaboration.   That is well understood. It is not enough to have a positive movement, there must also be the negative movement of rejection.


The Mother: For you cannot attain a stable transformation as long as you harbour in your being elements which oppose it. If you keep obscurities within you, they may for a time remain silent and immobile, so well that you attach no importance to them, and one day they will wake up again and your transformation won’t be able to resist them. Not only is the positive movement of selfgiving necessary but also the negative movement of rejection of everything in you that opposes this giving. You must not leave things “like that”, buried somewhere, in such a way that at the ﬁrst opportunity they wake up and undo all your work. There are parts of the being which know very well how to do this, there are elements of the vital which are extraordinary from this point of view: they keep quiet, hide in a corner, remain so absolutely silent and motionless that you think they don’t exist; so you are no longer on your guard, you are satisﬁed with your transformation and your surrender, you think everything is going well, and then, suddenly, one ﬁne day, without warning, the thing jumps up like a jack-in-the-box and makes you commit all the stupidities in the world.


The Mother: And it is the stronger for having remained repressed — repressed and closed tight in a corner — it has remained as though buried so as not to draw your attention, it has kept very, very quiet, and the moment you are not expecting it, it springs up and you tell yourself, “Oh!  What was the good of all my transformation?” That thing was there, and so it happened. It is just like that, these things remain there and hide themselves so well, that if you do not go looking for them with a well-lit lantern, you will not know they are there till the day they come out and demolish all your work in one minute.   The aspiration must be very vigilant.


The Mother: I have known people (many, not only a few, I mean among those who do yoga), I have known many who, every time they had a ﬁne aspiration, and their aspiration was very strong and they received an answer to this aspiration, every time, the very same day or at the latest the next day, they had a complete setback of consciousness and were facing the exact opposite of their aspiration. Such things happen almost constantly. Well, these people have developed only the positive side. They make a kind of discipline of aspiration, they ask for help, they try to come into contact with higher forces, they succeed in this, they have experiences; but they have completely neglected cleaning their room; it has remained as dirty as ever, and so, naturally, when the experience has gone, this dirt becomes still more repulsive than before.  One must never neglect to clean one’s room, it is very important; inner cleanliness is at least as important as outer cleanliness.


The Mother: Vivekananda has written (I don’t know the original, I have only read the French translation): “One must every morning clean one’s soul and one’s body, but if you don’t have time for both, it is better to clean the soul than clean the body.”  One can always try little experiments. I have said that one must use a torch, a strong light; then one must take a round within one’s being. If one is very attentive, one can very easily ﬁnd these ugly corners. Suppose you have a beautiful experience, that suddenly in answer to your aspiration a great light comes; you feel all ﬂooded with joy, force, light, beauty, and have the impression that you are on the point of being transﬁgured...


The Mother: and then, it  passes away — it always passes away, doesn’t it? especially at the beginning — suddenly, it stops. Then you tell yourself, when you are not vigilant, “There, it came and it has gone! Poor me! It came and has gone, it just gave me a taste of the thing and then let me fall.”


The Mother: Well, that’s foolish. What you should tell yourself is, “Look, I was not able to keep it, and why was I not able to keep it?” So, you take your torch and go on a round within yourself trying to ﬁnd a very close relation between the change of consciousness and the movements accompanying the cessation of the experience. And if you are very, very attentive, and make your round very scrupulously, you will ﬁnd that suddenly some part of the vital or some part of the mind or of the body, something has not kept up, in this sense that mentally, instead of being immobile and attentive, something has begun to ask, “Wait a minute, what is this experience? What does it mean?”, begun to try to ﬁnd an explanation (what it calls an “understanding”).


The Mother: Or maybe in the vital something has begun to enjoy the experience: “How pleasant it is, how I would like it to grow, how good if it were constant, how...” Or something in the physical has said, “Oh! It is a bit hard to endure that, how long am I going to be able to keep it?” It is perhaps not as obvious as all this, but it is a wee bit hidden like this, somewhere. You will always ﬁnd one of these three things or others analogous.


The Mother: Then, it is there the lantern is needed: where is the weak point? where is the egoism? where is the desire? where is that old dirt we do not want any longer? where is that thing which turns back upon itself instead of giving itself, opening itself, losing itself?


The Mother: which turns back upon itself, tries to take advantage of what has happened, wants to appropriate to itself the fruit of the experience? Or rather which is too weak, too hard, too rigid to be able to follow the movement?... It is that, you are now on the track, you begin precisely to put the light you have just acquired upon it; it is that you must do, focus the light upon it, turn it in such a way that the thing cannot resist it.    You won’t be able to succeed the very ﬁrst day but you must do it persistently and little by little or perhaps suddenly one day it will vanish.


The Mother: Then you will ﬁnd out after a time that you are another person.  But if you take the attitude I have already spoken about and throw the blame upon the Grace and the Light, if you say to yourself, “There, it has gone and left me in the lurch”, you may be sure that even thirty, forty, ﬁfty years hence you will be still at the same place , you will not have changed. There will always be something which will rise suddenly and eat up your experience.  And then, instead of progressing, you will be stuck there marking time because you cannot advance.


The Mother: But if, immediately, you take the opportunity.... Note, sometimes it hurts a little; if you go and brutally put the light upon the thing which wants to enjoy the experience or wants to get knowledge or control the experience by a mental understanding or is too lazy to make the necessary effort to receive the experience and bear it or to change quickly enough, if you put the will with the light of consciousness upon this thing, with ﬁrmness, it may hurt just a little. And you say, “Oh! Not so fast! I need rest, I tired myself uselessly.”


The Mother: Then everything has to be begun all over again. Sometimes days, even months, sometimes years will pass without its coming back.  Sometimes, if you are a little more active and intense in your aspiration, it will return sooner. But if you commit the same stupidity again, the same thing will happen — while if, immediately, you are very vigilant and when the mind starts nosing around to understand what is happening you tell it, “Silence, keep quiet”, then the experience can continue. When the vital begins to say, “I want lots and lots, more and more”, you say, “Quiet, quiet, don’t move, calm yourself, don’t get excited.


The Mother: ” Or when the physical being, “Oh! I shall be crushed....” — “A little endurance, if you please; you are a coward, you don’t know how to stand the test.” If you manage to do this in time, with the necessary calmness, with the necessary determination and will, you will arrive at something. But if you are like that, passive,  indolent, fatalistic, and tell yourself, “Now I have surrendered myself, what will happen will happen, we shall see what is going to happen, that’s all”, then, you understand, I give you ﬁfty years not to change by half a step.  In the last lesson I told you it was not so easy....


The Mother: If you want to do it, you must do it properly, otherwise it is not worth the trouble; it is useless to do things by halves, one must do them well.  Of course, there are other roads. One may simply not try to perfect oneself. One may try to forget oneself in an ever more absorbing work, that is, do what one does as a consecration to the Divine, altogether disinterestedly, but with a plenitude, a self-giving, a total self-forgetfulness: no longer thinking about oneself but about what one is doing. You know this, I have already told you this: if you want to do something well, whatever it may be, any kind of work, the least thing, play a game, write a book, do painting or music or run a race, anything at all, if you want to do it well, you must what you are doing and not remain a small person looking at himself doing it; for if one looks at oneself acting, one is... one is still in complicity with the ego.


The Mother: If, in oneself, one succeeds in becoming what one does, it is a great progress. In the least little details, one must learn this. Take a very amusing instance: you want to ﬁll a bottle from another bottle; you concentrate (you may try it as a discipline, as a gymnastic); well, as long as you are the bottle to be ﬁlled, the bottle from which one pours, and the movement of pouring, as long as you are only this, all goes well. But if unfortunately you think at a given moment: “Ah! It is getting on well, I am managing well”, the next moment it spills over! It is the same for everything, for everything.


The Mother: That is why work is a good means of discipline, for if you want to do the work properly, you must the work instead of being someone who works, otherwise you will never do it well. If you remain “someone who works” and, besides, if your thoughts go vagabonding, then you may be sure that if you are  handling fragile things they will break, if you are cooking, you will burn something, or if you are playing a game, you will miss all the balls! It is here, in this, that work is a great discipline.  For if truly you want to do it well, this is the only way of doing it.  Take someone who is writing a book, for instance.


The Mother: If he looks at himself writing the book, you can’t imagine how dull the book will become; it smells immediately of the small human personality which is there and it loses all its value. When a painter paints a picture, if he observes himself painting the picture, the picture will never be good, it will always be a kind of projection of the painter’s personality; it will be without life, without force, without beauty. But if, all of a sudden, he becomes the thing he wants to express, if he becomes the brushes, the painting, the canvas, the subject, the image, the colours, the value, the whole thing, and is entirely inside it and lives it, he will make something magniﬁcent.  For everything, everything, it is the same. There is nothing which cannot be a yogic discipline if one does it properly.


The Mother: And if it is not done properly, even tapasya will be of no use and will lead you nowhere. For it is the same thing, if you do your tapasya, all the time observing yourself doing it and telling yourself, “Am I making any progress, is this going to be better, am I going to succeed?”, then it is your ego, you know, which becomes more and more enormous and occupies the whole place, and there is no room for anything else. And we said the other day that the spiritual ego is the worst of all, for it is altogether unconscious of its inferiority, it is convinced it is something very superior, if not absolutely divine!  There we are. When you are at school, you must become the concentration which tries to catch what the teacher is saying, or the thought which enters you or the knowledge you are given.


The Mother: That is what you must be. You must not think of yourself but only of what you want to learn. And you will see that your capacities will immediately be doubled.   What gives most the feeling of inferiority, of limitation, smallness, impotence, is always this turning back upon oneself, this shutting oneself up in the bounds of a microscopic ego.  One must widen oneself, open the doors.


The Mother: And the best way is to be able to concentrate upon what one is doing instead of concentrating upon oneself.   Outwardly, one believes in one’s own personality and one’s own effort. So long as you believe in personal effort, you must make a personal effort.   There is one part of the being which is not at all conscious of being a part of the Divine.


The Mother: The whole of the outer being is convinced that it is something separate, independent and related only to itself. This part of the being must necessarily make a personal effort. It can’t be told, “The Divine does the sadhana for you”, for it would never do anything, it would never be changed. When one speaks with somebody, one should use his language, shouldn’t one?  You don’t know that, you don’t?


The Mother: Then, congratulations! For instance, does it never happen to you that being seated you don’t want to get up, that having something to do you say, “Oh! I have to do all that!”?  Not quite. Of course, laziness is a kind of tamas, but in laziness  there is an ill-will, a refusal to make an effort — while tamas is inertia: one wants to do something, but one can’t.  I remember, a long time ago, having been among some young people, and they remarked that when I decided to get up I used to get up with a jump, without any difﬁculty.


The Mother: They asked me, “How do you do it? We, when we want to get up, have to make an effort of will to be able to do it.” They were so surprised! And  was surprised by the opposite. I used to tell myself, “How does it happen?


The Mother: When one has decided to get up, one gets up. ” No, the body was there, like that, and it was necessary to put a will into it, to push this body for it to get up and act. It is like that, this is tamas. Tamas is a purely material thing; it is very rare to have a vital or mental tamas (it may occur but through contagion), I believe it is more a tamas of the nerves or the brain than vital or mental tamas.


The Mother: But laziness is everywhere, in the physical, the vital, the mind. Generally lazy people are not always lazy, not in all things. If you propose something that pleases them, amuses them, they are quite ready to make an effort. There is much ill-will in laziness.  Because the physical consciousness and nature are closed up and rigid — they are shut up in their habits, they don’t want to change them, they accept only one regular routine.


The Mother: There is nothing more routine-bound than the body. If you change its habits in the least, it is quite bewildered, it doesn’t know any longer what to do, it says, “Excuse me, excuse me! but that’s not how one goes about living.”  Those whose vital being is very active and dominating may succeed in awakening the body, and if they have the spirit of  adventure (which happens very often, for the vital is an adventurous being), the physical obeys, it obeys the impulse, the inner order; then it consents to the change, the novelty, but it is an effort for it. But for the physical being and physical consciousness to be ready to receive the divine impulsion, they must be extremely plastic, because the vital uses coercion, it imposes its will, and the poor body has but to obey, while the Divine just shows the light, gives the consciousness, and so one must obey consciously and willingly — it is a question of collaboration, it is no longer a question of coercion.


The Mother: The physical being and physical consciousness must be very plastic to be able to lend themselves to all the necessary changes, so as to be of one kind one day and another the next, and so on.  Well, there is a static power. How to explain it to you? Look, there is the same difference between static power and dynamic power as between a game of defence and a game of attack; you understand? It is the same thing.


The Mother: Static power is something which can withstand everything, nothing can act upon it, nothing can touch it, nothing can shake it — it is immobile, but it is invincible. Dynamic power is something in action, which at times goes forth and may at times receive blows. That is to say, if you want your dynamic power to be always victorious, it must be supported by a considerable static power, an unshakable base.  I know what you want to say... that a human being becomes aware of power only when it is dynamic; a human being doesn’t consider it a power except when it acts; if it doesn’t act he does not even notice it, he does not realise the tremendous force which is behind this inaction — at times, even frequently, a force more formidable than the power which acts. But you  may try it out in yourself, you will see, it is much more difﬁcult to remain calm, immobile, unshakable before something very unpleasant — whether it be words or acts levelled against you — inﬁnitely more difﬁcult than to answer with the same violence.


The Mother: Suppose someone insults you; if in the face of these insults, you can remain immobile (not only outwardly, I mean integrally), without being shaken or touched in any way: you are there like a force against which one can do nothing and you do not reply, you do not make a gesture, you do not say a word, all the insults thrown at you leave you absolutely untouched, within and without ; you can keep your heart-beats absolutely quiet, you can keep the thoughts in your head quite immobile and calm without their being in the least disturbed, that is, your head does not answer immediately by similar vibrations and your nerves don’t feel clenched with the need to return a few blows to relieve themselves; if you can be like that, you have a static power, and it is inﬁnitely more powerful than if you had that kind of force which makes you answer insult by insult, blow by blow and agitation by agitation.  Do you mean whether one can get rid of stupidity? Yes, there is a way. It is not easy, but there is a way.


The Mother: I have known people who were extremely stupid, truly stupid; well, these people succeeded through aspiration — an aspiration which was not formulated, had not even the power to express itself in words — succeeded in coming into contact with their psychic being. It was not a constant contact, it was momentary, at times very fugitive. But while they were in contact with their psychic being, they became remarkably intelligent, they said wonderful things. I knew a girl  who had no education, nothing, truly stupid; people said, “There is nothing to be done about it, it is not possible.” Well, when she was in contact with her psychic being, she understood the profoundest things and made astounding remarks.


The Mother: But when the contact stopped she became stupid once again. It was not something permanent, it was only the contact that took away her stupidity. So, it is a difﬁcult cure, that is, one must establish the contact with one’s psychic being and keep it always.   There is a Muslim legend like that about Christ.


The Mother: You know the story: Christ healed the sick, made the lame walk, the blind see and even raised the dead. Seeing all these miracles, someone went up to Christ and said, “Oh! I have a very interesting case to put before you.... Yes, I have a son who is stupid.” Christ opened his eyes wide and ran away!


The Mother: It seems that was the only thing he could not do! This is a joke, of course, and the thing is difﬁcult, but it is possible.  Yes, he is veiled by the consciousness of material Nature. There is the consciousness in its origin which does not veil the Divine but expresses him. There is the consciousness in its outer form which veils him.


The Mother: Some say this is willed, that it is to allow the game to be played; that the Divine hides himself behind material Nature to compel all conscious beings to ﬁnd Him. That is an opinion... people say many things.  One of the great difﬁculties for most philosophies is that they have never recognised or studied the different planes of existence, the different regions of the being. They have the Supreme and then the Creation and then that’s all, nothing between the two.


The Mother: This makes explanations very difﬁcult.... All explanations, in the last analysis, are simply languages — there are languages  which make understanding easier and others which make it more difﬁcult. And some of these theories make the understanding of things very difﬁcult — while if you recognise and study and become aware of the different intermediary states between the most material Nature and the Supreme Origin, if you recognise and become conscious of all the intermediary regions, of all the inner states of being and all the outer regions, that can explain many problems. We have already studied this in connection with determinisms. If you say that the determinism is absolute and remain there, you understand nothing; it is quite obvious that all the events of life contradict this idea; or else the problem is so complicated that you can’t get hold of it.


The Mother: But if you understand that there are a large number of determinisms acting upon each other, interpenetrating, changing the action of one determinism by the action of another, then the problem becomes comprehensible. It is the same thing for explaining the action of the Divine in the universe. If you take a central creative Force or a central creative Consciousness or a central immobile Witness, and then the universe, only that, nothing between the two, you cannot understand. There are people who have used this in such a naive way! They have made a Creator God and then his creatures.


The Mother: So all the problems come up. He has made the world, with what? Some tell you it is from the dust, but what is it, this dust?  What was it doing before it was used to make a world?... Or from nothing!


The Mother: A universe was created out of nothing — that is foolish! It is very awkward for a logical mind. And over and above all that, you are told that He did this consciously, deliberately, and when he had ﬁnished he exclaimed, “Look, it is very good.” Then, those who are in the universe reply, “We don’t ﬁnd it so good. It is perhaps very good for you but not for us.”


The Mother: These are naive conceptions. They are simply ignorant and naive conceptions which make the problem of the universe absolutely incomprehensible. And all these explanations are inadmissible for a mind which is ever so slightly awakened. That is why you are told, “Don’t try to understand, you will never understand.”   But that is mental laziness, it is the mind’s bad will.


The Mother: You see, one feels within oneself that, because one has this kind of power of thought-activity, this aspiration to ﬁnd a light, a solution, it must correspond to something, otherwise... otherwise, truly (I think I have written this somewhere), if the universe were reduced to that simple notion, well, it would be the most sinister of farces and I should very well understand those who have declared, “Run away, get out of it as fast as possible.” Unfortunately, I don’t see how they would be able to get out of it, for there is nothing else — how can you get out of something which alone exists? So, one enters a vicious circle, one turns round and round  and this leads quite naturally to mental despair.


The Mother: But when one has the key — there are one or two keys, but there is one which opens all the doors — when one has the key, one follows one’s road and little by little understands Thing.   Tell me, is your body absolutely conscious, conscious of itself, conscious of its functioning? No, then what is it? It can only be physical Nature.


The Mother: And if there is a physical Nature which is not conscious, it means that physical Nature and consciousness are not the same thing. Physical Nature includes everything that is physical: your body belongs to physical Nature, mountains, stones, the sky, water, ﬁre... all this belongs to physical Nature.  But your physical Nature contains a consciousness, it is animated by a consciousness, though it is not entirely conscious. And precisely because it is not entirely conscious, it can be inert, tamasic, “unconscious”.


The Mother: Otherwise all would be conscious, stones also would be conscious (I don’t know how far they are so, but it is to a very small extent compared with human consciousness).   Work is a good discipline. But it is not this idea, it is not the idea of a passive, unconscious and almost involuntary submission. It is not that. It does not lie only in work.


The Mother: The most important surrender is the surrender of your character, your way of being, so that it may change. If you do not surrender your very own nature, never will this nature change.   It is this that is most important. You have certain ways of understanding, certain ways of reacting, certain ways of feeling, almost certain ways of progressing, and above all, a special way of looking at life and expecting from it certain things — well, it is this you must surrender.