The Mother: The theme is essentially very musical: and then it is developed with variations, innumerable variations, and it is always the same theme which is developed in one way or another. In Europe there were musicians who were truly musicians and they too had the thing: Bach had it, he used to do the same sort of thing, Mozart had it, his music was purely musical, he had no intention of expressing any other thing, it was music for music’s sake. But this manner of taking a certain number of notes in a certain relation (they are like almost inﬁnite variations), personally I ﬁnd it wonderful to put you in repose, and you enter deep within yourself. And then, if you are ready, it gives you the psychic consciousness: something that makes you withdraw from the external consciousness, which makes you enter elsewhere, enter within.  But that depends upon the musician.


The Mother: This is just what I was saying. For example, here in India, the science of harmony does  not exist much, so the thing is translated by melody. As soon as the vital intervenes, there comes a kind of harmonic complexity in the music. That gives it a richness, a plenitude which it did not have.  No, it is the music, and music is not necessarily melody.


The Mother: It is a relation of sounds which is not necessarily melodic. Melody is a part of this relation of sounds.   Oh! that is, you expect to see a divine form in everything!...


The Mother: I do not know, that may happen. But I have the feeling that a great deal of imagination enters into it, for it is not like that. You change consciousness, you change the state of consciousness and change the states of perception.  If I understand well what you mean, you expect to see a form, like the form of Krishna for example, or the form of Christ, of Buddha, in every person? That seems to me childishness.


The Mother: But still I do not say that it cannot happen; I think it may happen. But there is in it much human consciousness added to the perception, for that would no longer be exactly  what I have just told you: for those who have the consciousness of the Divine, when they are in contact with the Divine, whoever they may be, whatever age, whatever country they may belong to, the experience is the same. Whereas if it were as you say, then Indians would see one of their divinities, Europeans one of theirs, the Japanese one of their own, and so on.  Then it would no longer be a pure perception, there would already be an addition of their own mental formation. It is no longer the Thing in its essence and purity, which is beyond all form.


The Mother: But one may have a perception, and a very concrete perception of the Divine Presence, yes. One may have a very personal contact with the Divine, yes. But not in this way. And it is inexpressible, except for those who have had the experience.  If you do not have an experience, I could speak to you for hours about it, you would understand nothing; it escapes all explanation.


The Mother: It is only when one has the experience that one can understand. And what do you expect? When you speak or write about things, there is necessarily a mental addition, otherwise you would not be able to speak, you would not be able to write.  Well, it is this mental addition that has made people try to give an explanation of their experience, and then they have said or written things like this: “I see images of God.” These are ways of speaking.


The Mother: It is possible that the thing you are speaking about may happen: to be suddenly in a particular state and see a Divine Presence and this Presence taking a form that’s familiar to you — one is accustomed to associate certain forms with the Divine, due to one’s education, tradition, and that takes an external form.  But it is not the supreme essence of the experience, it is the form, and this gives a sort of limitation to the experience, it must take away from it its universality and a great deal of its power.   That is not what I have said. If you want an explanation of something, it is the universe that explains this something. And each thing is explained by everything; and you can explain nothing except by the whole universe and the entire universe is explained by everything....


The Mother: Just see: if you read all the explanations given in all the sciences, all the branches of human knowledge, always one thing is explained by another, and if you want to explain this other you explain it by yet another and if you want to explain this other one too, you explain it by yet another. So you continue in this way and go round the universe in order to explain one thing. Only, usually people get tired after a time, they accept the last explanation and stick to it. Otherwise, if they continued to ﬁnd an explanation, they would have to make the full round of all things and would come back always to the same point.  Things are so because they are so, because they had to be so, otherwise they would not be.


The Mother: Things are so, because they are as they are. There’s no doubt about it. And that indeed is supreme wisdom.   Find it out, I shall be very glad.  Yes, if it moves in a very deﬁnite direction, if it progresses sufﬁciently, if it does not stop on the way, scientists will ﬁnd the same thing the mystics have found, and all religious people, everybody, because there is only one thing to ﬁnd, there are not two.


The Mother: There is only one. So one can go a long way, one can turn round and round and round, and if one turns and turns long enough without stopping, one is bound to come to the same spot. Once there, one feels as though there is nothing at all to ﬁnd. As I have just told you, there is nothing to ﬁnd. It is That, the Power.


The Mother: It is That, that is all. It is so. Still another question?  That is an impossibility. Because if the Divine withdrew from a thing, immediately it would collapse, for it would not exist.


The Mother: To put it more clearly: The Divine is the only existence.   If the Divine withdrew, it would mean that He would withdraw from the universe; there would no longer be any universe (this is an image to make you understand the thing, I speak of an impossibility). Human beings may withdraw from the Divine and they do it very often. But the Divine withdrawing from human beings, that’s an impossibility.  Who has told you that?


The Mother: Do you know all that is happening in you? Don’t you think that there are many people who have realised the Divine, who have never said anything about it, known nothing about it? There are people who have spoken about it — philosophers, whose very profession necessarily is to express what happened to them. But there are people who have had experiences but never said anything. And I know there are artists who purely by their art attained the divine realisation.


The Mother: As for transformation, I would be glad if you could show me an instance; I would be glad to see it. example. Whatever the way one follows, whether it be the religious way, the philosophical way, the yogic ways, the mystic way, no one has realised transformation.  But who has ever reached there till now, will you tell me? Neither philosophy, nor religion, nor yoga.


The Mother: If you put the value in realisation and in the transformation of the world, for example one  single individual transformation, admitting that it is possible, and I do not believe it, then nothing has any value, because nothing has ever reached there till today. Don’t you understand?  Then why do you suddenly say that art has no value? Nothing has any value, because nothing has led to that? But everything helps.


The Mother: The whole universe is helping the transformation.  Why? For the transformation of his life? Who has told you that?  If you were doing manual work, there are any number of artisans who have had a wonderful conversion.


The Mother: There is the example of a shoe-maker who became one of the greatest Yogis of the world.  It does not depend on what one does, happily! You have to sit in meditation, like that, with an orange robe on, under a tree, to be able to realise the Divine?  So I do not understand anything of what you say.  But by any path whatever, if you follow it sincerely enough and fairly constantly you arrive, by any path whatsoever — I tell you, you may make shoes and ﬁnd the Divine.


The Mother: There are illuminating examples that are indisputable. It matters little what one does. There are numerous examples of people who were doing gardening, or cultivating, and who found the Divine even while they were working physically; they had no need to stop their  work to do this. You do not understand? You believe one must have what? — a philosophical knowledge?


The Mother: No, I understand very well what you mean to say, but, excuse me, it is something foolish.   But I have explained it later on. All that follows is the explanation.  I have already spoken to you of the different planes of consciousness. Well, on the material plane, purely material (when separated from the vital plane), it is an absolute mechanism where consequently all things are linked together; and as I was saying the other day, if you want to ﬁnd the cause of one thing or what is the result of a thing, you will ﬁnd another and yet another and you will make an entire tour round the universe.


The Mother: And it is like that, everything is absolutely mechanised. Only, in this purely material plane, there can intervene the vital plane, and it already does intervene in the vegetable kingdom. The vital plane has an altogether different determinism, its own particular determinism. But when you introduce the vital determinism into the determinism of the physical, that produces a kind of combination that changes everything. And above the vital plane there is the mental plane.


The Mother: The mental plane also has its own determinism where all things are linked together rigorously.  But that is the movement which could be called “horizontal”. If you take a vertical movement, the mind descending into the vital and the vital descending into the physical, you have there three determinisms that intervene and naturally produce something altogether different. And where the mind has intervened the determinism will necessarily be different from the one where it does not intervene; that is, in the higher animal life  there is already a mental determinism which intervenes that is altogether different from the determinism of the vegetable plane.  Above these planes there are others — above each plane there are others, following one another right up to the highest plane.


The Mother: The highest plane is the plane of absolute freedom. If in your consciousness you are capable of passing through all these planes, so to say in a vertical line, and reaching the highest plane and, by means of this connection, of bringing down this plane of perfect freedom into the material determinisms, you change everything. And all the intermediaries change everything. Then because of the very changes from level to level, it gives altogether the appearance of complete freedom; for the intervention or descent of one plane into another has unforeseen consequences for the other plane, the lower plane. The higher plane can foresee, but the lower ones cannot.


The Mother: So, as these consequences are unforeseen, that gives altogether the impression of the unexpected and of freedom. And it is only if you remain consciously and constantly on the highest level, that is, in the supreme Consciousness, that there you can see that, at the same time, all is absolutely determined but also, because of the complexity of the interlinking of these determinisms, all is absolutely free. It is the Plane where there are no more contradictions, where all things  and are in harmony without contradicting one another.  That depends. On certain planes there are consciousnesses that form, that make formations and try to send them down to earth and manifest them.


The Mother: These are planes where the great forces are at play, forces struggling with each other to organise things in one way or another. On these planes all the possibilities are there, all the possibilities that present themselves but have not yet come to a decision as to which will come down.... Suppose a plane full of the imaginations of people who want certain things  to be realised upon earth — they invent a novel, narrate stories, produce all kinds of phenomena; it amuses them very much. It is a plane of form-makers and they are there imagining all kinds of circumstances and events; they play with the forces; they are like the authors of a drama and they prepare everything there and see what is going to happen. All these formations are facing each other; and it is those which are the strongest, the most successful or the most persistent or those that have the advantage of a favourable set of circumstances which dominate.


The Mother: They meet and out of the conﬂict yet another thing results: you lose one thing and take up another, you make a new combination; and then all of a sudden, you ﬁnd, pluff! it is coming down. Now, if it comes down with a sufﬁcient force, it sets moving the earth atmosphere and things combine; as for instance, when with your ﬁst you thump the saw-dust, you know surely what happens, don’t you? You lift your hand, give a formidable blow: all the dust gets organised around your ﬁst. Well, it is like that.


The Mother: These formations come down into matter with that force, and everything organises itself automatically, mechanically as around the striking ﬁst. And there’s your wished object about to be realised, sometimes with small deformations because of the resistance, but it will be realised ﬁnally, even as the person narrating the story up above wanted it more or less to be realised. If then you are for some reason or other in the secret of the person who has constructed the story and if you follow the way in which he creates his path to reach down to the earth and if you see how a blow with the ﬁst acts on earthly matter, then you are able to tell what is going to happen, because you have seen it in the world above, and as it takes some time to make the whole journey, you see in advance. And the higher you rise, the more you foresee in advance what is going to happen. And if you pass far beyond, go still farther, then everything is possible.


The Mother: It is an unfolding that follows a wide road which is for you unknowable; for all will be unfolded in the universe, but in what order and in what way? There are decisions that are taken  up there which escape our ordinary consciousness, and so it is very difﬁcult to foresee. But there also, if you enter consciously and if you can be present up there... How shall I explain that to you? All is there, absolute, static, eternal: but all that will be unfolded in the material world, naturally more or less one thing after another; for in the static existence all can be there, but in the becoming all becomes in time, that is, one thing after another.


The Mother: Well, what path will the unfolding follow? Up there is the domain of absolute freedom.... Who says that a sufﬁciently sincere aspiration, a sufﬁciently intense prayer is not capable of changing the path of the unfolding?  This means that all is possible.  Now, one must have a sufﬁcient aspiration and a prayer that’s sufﬁciently intense.


The Mother: But that has been given to human nature. It is one of the marvellous gifts of grace given to human nature; only, one does not know how to make use of it.  This comes to saying that in spite of the most absolute determinisms in the horizontal line, if one knows how to cross all these horizontal lines and reach the highest Point of consciousness, one is able to make things change, things apparently absolutely determined. So you may call it by any name you like, but it is a kind of combination of an absolute determinism with an absolute freedom. You may pull yourself out of it in any way you like, but it is like that.


The Mother: I forgot to say in that book (perhaps I did not forget but just felt that it was useless to say it) that all these theories are only theories, that is, mental conceptions which are merely more or less imaged representations of the reality; but it is not the reality at all. When you say “determinism” and when you say “freedom”, you say only words and all that is only a very incomplete, very approximate and very weak description of what is in reality within you, around you and everywhere; and to be able to begin to understand what the universe is, you must come out of your mental formulas, otherwise you will never understand anything.  To tell the truth, if you live only a moment, just a tiny  moment, of this absolutely sincere aspiration or this sufﬁciently intense prayer, you will know more things than by meditating for hours.  These “things in him”, that is in the individual, are: the sense of freedom, independence and initiative. You know what independence is?


The Mother: It is precisely the freedom of choice. Independence means the freedom of choice and initiative means the fact of choosing. First of all, one feels that one is free; and then one feels that no one can prevent him from choosing; and ﬁnally one uses his freedom to choose and one decides. These are the three stages. So these three stages: the feeling that you are free, the idea that you are going to use your freedom for choosing and then the choice — these three things I call the pragmatic tools and devices.


The Mother: I am sorry, my children, all this is said in a form a little too philosophical which I do not now approve of very much. I was obliged to speak a language which now appears to me a little too complicated. But what is to be done, it was like that. I was saying that these three things, the feeling of freedom, the will to choose and the choice made are the devices that Nature uses in us to make us act, otherwise we would not move.  If we did not have this illusion that we are free, this second illusion that we can use our freedom for choosing and the third illusion of choosing, well, we would not move.


The Mother: So Nature gives us these three illusions and makes us move, for she requires us to move.   She, with a capital S, I said it was the Supreme Consciousness, but in fact it is Nature and it is the trick of Nature ; for the Supreme Consciousness has no tricks, it is Nature that has tricks.  The Supreme Consciousness quite simply enters into all things with all her consciousness, because it is consciousness: and with that She tries to make all this inconscience move towards consciousness, simply, without any tricks. She has no need of tricks, She is everywhere.


The Mother: She is at work everywhere and She puts consciousness into the inconscience. When you light a lamp in a dark room, as soon as you turn on the electricity, the room is no longer dark. As soon as you put consciousness in, there is no longer any unconsciousness. So that is what She does. Wherever She sees unconsciousness, She tries to enter.


The Mother: Sometimes the doors are locked, then it takes a little more time, but sometimes the doors open , then She rushes in immediately, the unconsciousness disappears and consciousness comes — without needing any tricks or any intermediaries. She becomes conscious. But material Nature, physical Nature is not like that, she is full of tricks; she makes you move all the time, she pulls the puppet strings; for her you are so many little dolls: she pulls the strings and makes them move. She puts all kinds of illusions in your head so that you may do the things she wants, without even your wanting it.


The Mother: She does not require that you should want it: she pulls the thread and you do it.  That is why we quarrel at times, but don’t tell anyone!  Completely, the Divine Grace completely contradicts Karma; you know, It makes it melt away like butter that’s put in the sun.  That is what I was saying just now. What you have just told me is another way of speaking.


The Mother: I was putting myself in your place and asking: There you are, if you have an aspiration that’s  sincere enough or a prayer that’s intense enough, you can bring down in you Something that will change everything, everything — truly it changes everything. An example may be given that is extremely limited, very small, but which makes you understand things very well: a stone falls quite mechanically; say, a tile falls; if it gets loose, it will fall, won’t it? But if there comes, for example, a vital or mental determinism from someone who passes by and does not want it to fall and puts his hand out, it will fall on his hand, but it will not fall on the ground. So he has changed the destiny of this stone or tile. It is another determinism that has come in, and instead of the stone falling on the head of someone, it falls upon the hand and it will not kill anybody.


The Mother: This is an intervention from another plane, from a conscious will that enters into the more or less unconscious mechanism.   No, not at all. In all religions there are people who have said that, who have given such absolute rules, but I believe it was in order to substitute themselves for Nature and pull the strings. There is always this kind of instinct that wants to take the place of Nature and pull the strings of people.


The Mother: So they are told: “There is an absolute consequence of all that you do....” It is a concept necessary at a given moment of evolution to prevent people from being in a completely unconscious egoism, in a total unconsciousness of the consequences of what they do. There is no lack of people who are still like that, I believe it is the majority; they follow their impulses and do not even ask themselves whether what they have done is going to have any consequences for them and for others. So it is good that someone tells you straight, with a severe look: “Take care, that has consequences which will last for a very long time!” And then there are others who come and tell you: “You will pay for it in another life.”


The Mother: That, however, is one of those fantastic stories.... But it does not matter: this also  can be for the good of people. There are other religions which tell you: “Oh! If you commit that sin, you will go to hell for eternity.” You can imagine!...


The Mother: So people have such a fright that it stops them a little, it gives them just a moment for reﬂection before obeying an impulse — and not always; sometimes the reﬂection comes afterwards, a little late.  It is not absolute. These are still mental constructions, more or less sincere, which cut things into small bits like that, quite neatly cut, and tell you: “Do this or do that. If it is not this, it will be that.” Oh!


The Mother: what a nuisance is this kind of life. And so people go mad, they are frightened! “Is it like that or rather this?” And they want it to be neither this nor that, what should they do? — They have only to climb to a higher storey.


The Mother: They must be given the key to open the door. There is a door to the staircase, a key is needed. The key, as I told you just now, is the sufﬁciently sincere aspiration or the sufﬁciently intense prayer. I said “or”, but I do not think it is “or”. There are people who like one better and others, the other.


The Mother: But in both there is a magical power, you must know how to make use of it.  There is something very beautiful in both, I shall speak to you about it one day, I shall tell you what there is in aspiration and what in prayer and why both of them are beautiful.... Some dislike prayer; if they entered deep into their heart, they would ﬁnd it was pride — worse than that, vanity. And then there are those who have no aspiration, they try and they cannot aspire; it is because they do not have the ﬂame of the will, it is because they do not have the ﬂame of humility.  Both are needed.


The Mother: There must be a very great humility and a very great will to change one’s Karma.  ,, my children.   Because something was left inside. We have said that the force can attack only when there is something which responds in the nature — however slight it may be. There is a kind of afﬁnity, something corresponding, there is a disorder or an imperfection which attracts the adverse force by responding to it.


The Mother: So, if the attack comes, you must keep perfectly quiet and send it back, but it does not necessarily follow that you have got rid of that small part in you which allows the attack to come.  You have something in you which attracts this force; take, for example (it is one of the most frequent things), the force of depression, that kind of attack of a wave of depression that falls upon you: you lose conﬁdence, you lose hope, you have the  feeling you will never be able to do anything, you are cast down.  It means there is in your vital being something which is naturally egoistic, surely a little vain, which needs encouragement to remain in a good state. So it is like a little signal for those forces which intimates to them: “You can come, the door is open.” But there is another part in the being that was watching when these forces arrived; instead of allowing them to enter, the part which sees clearly, which knows, which has power, which resists, says: “No, I do not want that, it is not true, I do not want it”, and sends them back.


The Mother: But you have not necessarily been cured of the little thing within you which permitted them to come. You must go very deep within, work within you persistently to be able to efface all possibility of calling. And so long as you have not completely effaced it, the attack will recur almost unexpectedly.  You push it back — it is like a ball you throw against the wall, back it returns; you push it back once again and again it returns — until the moment there is no longer anything to attract it.  Then it does not return again.


The Mother: Therefore, the most important thing to do when you are attacked by an adverse force, is to say to yourself: “Yes, the force comes from outside and the attack is there, but there must certainly be a correspondence in my nature, otherwise it could not have attacked me. Well, I am going to look and ﬁnd within me what allows this force to come and I am going to send it back or transform it or put the light of consciousness upon it so that it may be converted, or drive it away so that it remains no longer within me....” There is a way, you see? When the force comes, the adverse force, when it attacks, the part which corresponds rushes out to meet it, it goes forward. A kind of meeting takes place.


The Mother: If at that time, instead of being altogether overwhelmed or taken by surprise and off your guard, you observe very closely what it was within you that vibrated (it makes the sound tat, tat, tat: another thing has entered), then you can catch it. At that moment, you catch it and say to it: “Get out with your friends, I don’t want you any longer!” You send away the two together,  the part that attracted and the thing it attracted; they are sent away and you are absolutely clear.  For that, you must be very vigilant and have a little courage, in the sense that at times you have to grip it hard and then pull it out — it hurts a little — and then you throw it out along with the forces you send away. After that, it is ﬁnished.


The Mother: And so long as this is not done, it comes back and back again; and then if one is not in oneself sufﬁciently courageous or vigilant or persevering, the fourth or ﬁfth time one falls ﬂat and says: “That’s too much, I have had enough!” So the force installs itself, contented, satisﬁed with its work; and then you can see it laughing, it enjoys itself immensely, it got what it wanted. Now to send it back again means a very considerable work. But if you follow the other method, if you look closely this way: “Well, I am going to catch the thing that has allowed it to come”, you see somewhere within you something rising, wriggling, coming up in response to the evil force which is approaching. That is the moment to seize it and throw it out with all the rest.


The Mother: Exactly. It remains in the world and it will surely go elsewhere — until it meets someone who has sufﬁcient spiritual and occult power to dissolve it, and that is very difﬁcult.... One must be very strong, possess a very great knowledge and power to dissolve a movement that has (this can be said at least) its reason for existence in the world — I do not say it is legitimate, but still it has its reason for existence. There are things which can be dissolved; but if somewhere in the world it exists in someone, he can reconstitute it. It is the same thing when people are attacked by small beings of the vital world, hostile beings who attack them, install themselves in their atmosphere, trying to possess them, that is, enter into them and use their body and all the rest.


The Mother: These beings — it is very difﬁcult for the individual to get  rid of them: that needs a very, very hard yoga. But one who has the knowledge and the power and who sees them can very well get them out of the atmosphere and destroy them. But if one who is attacked keeps within himself this little afﬁnity which allowed the thing to enter, then he will recall it. I have had several examples of the kind, several.  I had the example of a person who was three-fourths possessed and at the moment manifested a kind of power, a force that was not very good, but all the same it gave the impression of a force, a power, a capacity.


The Mother: Only he recognised that it was bad and was for evil, and prayed to be relieved of it. The opportunity comes: the being shows itself separately from the person it possesses, it can be seized, pulled out and dissolved. Then the one who had been possessed suddenly feels that he is becoming as commonplace as anybody else. That feeling of power he had is now lost and he feels he is becoming quite ordinary and says: “I have no special faculties, I have no special value, I have no special capacity, I am quite an ordinary person and less than ordinary, of a sickening commonness!” Now what does he do?


The Mother: He prays to have his possession back again. And so a few days later, I ﬁnd him as possessed as ever.  Well, here it is truly not worth the trouble. One has only to leave them to their fate. This has happened many a time.


The Mother: In such people, you know, it is a kind of vanity which generally opens the door to those forces; they wished to be big, powerful, to play an important role, to be somebody; that attracts the force and so they become like that, possessed. The thing is taken away from them: all their remarkable capacity disappears at the same time and their self-satisﬁed vanity as well. They have the feeling they have become something quite ordinary and a tiny little thing within them says: “Oh! it was better before....” For one that is destroyed, there are always ten ready to come in. That’s how it is, it is a strange task!


The Mother: You know the story of Durga, don’t you? Durga who every year has to destroy her asura; and always she is compelled to  begin again. It goes on in this way till the end of the reign allotted to the titans. When they will be banished from this world, it will not be thus any longer. But till then, that is as long as they are useful (as I have said in this book) for intensifying the aspiration, clarifying the consciousness, for putting to the test the sincerity of people, they will be there.


The Mother: The day the test will not be needed, the day the sincerity will be pure and selfexistent they will disappear. Then that day, Durga will no longer need to begin her battle over again every year.   Ah! my child, certainly it would be better, much better.


The Mother: But then...  It is a domain of which I have a thorough experience. After forty years of sustained effort I have found out that it is absolutely impossible to change anyone unless in truth he wants it sincerely. If he does not set himself to the task with an absolute sincerity, well — I have tried for forty years, one can try it for a hundred and forty years, it will be the same thing — he won’t stir. It is the very character of these beings to be perfectly satisﬁed with themselves, and they do not desire, they have not the least intention to change!


The Mother: Even now, among the beings who are concerned with the earth, the asuric beings, the greatest of the asuras who is still busy with the earth at present, who is the asura of falsehood and calls himself the “Lord of the Nations” — he has taken a beautiful name, he is Lord of the Nations — it is he, wherever there is something going wrong, you may be sure it is he or a representative of his who is there. It is also perfectly sure that very soon his hour will come and all will be over for him, that he will have to disappear. And he absolutely refuses to change. He has no intention to do it, for immediately he will lose all his power. It is impossible.


The Mother: And he knows that he will disappear. But he proclaims categorically that before disappearing he will destroy all he can.... At heart, he would  not consent to disappear unless everything disappeared at the same time as he. Unfortunately for him, this is not possible. But he will do all that lies in his power to destroy, demolish, ruin, corrupt as many things as he can.


The Mother: That is certain. Afterwards it is the downfall. He accepts the downfall on this condition. It has never crossed his mind that he might be converted. It would no longer be he, don’t you see, he would no longer be himself.


The Mother: There is a great difference between a human being and these beings of the vital plane. I have told you this many times, I am going to repeat it: In a human being, there is the divine Presence and the psychic being — at the beginning embryonic, but in the end a being wholly formed, conscious, independent, individualised.  That does not exist in the vital world. It is a special grace given to human beings dwelling in matter and upon earth.


The Mother: And because of this, there is no human being who cannot be converted, if he wants it; that is, there is a possibility of his wanting it and the moment he wants it, he can do it. He is sure to succeed the moment he wants it, whereas those beings of the vital do not have a psychic being in them, they do not have the direct divine Presence (naturally, at the Origin, they descended directly from the Divine, but that was at the Origin, that is very far away).  They are not in direct contact with the Divine within them, they have no psychic being. And if they were converted, there would remain nothing of them! For they are made up entirely of the opposite movement: they are entirely made up of personal selfassertion, despotic authority, separation from the Origin, and, of a great disdain for all that is pure, beautiful and noble.


The Mother: They do not have within them this psychic element which in man, even in the most debased, makes him respect what is beautiful and pure; even the basest man, in spite of himself, against his own will, respects what is pure, noble and beautiful. But those beings do not have that. They are wholly on the other side, totally on the other side. It disgusts them in every way. It is for them something which should not be touched, because it destroys; it is  the thing that makes them disappear.


The Mother: Goodwill, sincerity, purity and beauty are things which make them disappear. So they hate these things.  Now I do not know on what grounds one could convert them. What would be the point of support? I do not ﬁnd it.


The Mother: Even in the greatest. That is, some of these beings will not disappear until hatred disappears from the earth.... One might put it the other way round. One might say that hatred will disappear from the earth when those beings disappear; but, for the reason I have just given, the power to make light spring forth in the place of darkness, beauty in the place of ugliness, goodness instead of evil, that power man possesses, the Asura does not. Therefore it is man who will do that work, it is he who will change, it is he who will transform his earth and it is he who will compel the Asura to ﬂee into other worlds or to dissolve.


The Mother: After that, all will be quiet. There you are.  Any questions?  I use the word “sphere” in the sense of the place and the role one has to play. Each part of the being has its place in the whole and a deﬁnite role to play.


The Mother: If instead of playing that role, it wishes to play another, naturally it loses the qualities necessary for it to  play its true role, and it cannot take up any others because they are foreign to it. So necessarily it gets deformed and perverted.  For example, we say here that the true role of the mind is a formative role in relation to action. An idea enters the mind, the mind seizes it and gives it a form to realise it, changes it into a motive of action and sends it out towards the material ﬁeld. The mind organises the idea so that it may be realised in action.


The Mother: This is its true role, and so long as it does that and does it with care, it fulﬁls its role, it abides in its place and is quite useful. But if the mind imagines that it knows, that it has no need of receiving knowledge and ideas from another part of the being — a higher part — if it imagines that it knows and, by the association of inner movements, believes it has found some knowledge, which can never be but a reﬂection of something else, and if it wants to impose this knowledge upon the physical life, then it leaves its role and becomes a tyrant — this happens quite often to it, it is then completely perverted and instead of helping the sadhana, it brings it down. You can easily make this observation. Naturally, one must be able to follow the true working, the activities within oneself.  It is the same thing with the vital.


The Mother: The vital is meant to put in the drive, the realising force, the enthusiasm, the energy necessary for the idea formed by the mind to be transmitted to the body and realised in action. Well, so long as the vital limits itself to this activity, that is, sets all its energy, enthusiasm, strength to work in order to collaborate with the idea, it is very good. But if instead of that, all of a sudden, it is seized by a desire — and this happens to it quite often — and it uses all its qualities to realise, not the higher idea which wanted to manifest, but its own desire, then it steps beyond its zone of action, it gets perverted, it deforms everything and succeeds in creating catastrophes.   You do not notice it! That happens when you are not alert, when you are not attentive, when you are busy with altogether external things, the tiny little things of daily practical life.


The Mother: Then the forces can attack you, enter into you, install themselves without even your noticing it. Most often, they do not attack you directly thus, because if they attack you directly, there is a chance of your feeling it (you may feel uneasy suddenly, that may awaken your attention). They go down into the inconscient and then come up, like that, quietly from below. So you do not know at all what is happening to you. When you are aware of it, it is already there, thoroughly installed, quite comfortably.


The Mother: That happens when one is quite unconscious.  There are only two cases when this is possible: you are either very unconscious of the movements of your being — you have not studied, you have not observed, you do not know what is happening within you — or you are absolutely insincere, that is, you play the ostrich in order not to see the reality of things: you hide your head, you hide your observation, your knowledge and you say, “It is not there.” But indeed the latter I hope is not in question here. Hence it is simply because one has not the habit of observing oneself that one is so unconscious of what is happening within.


The Mother: Have you ever practised distinguishing what comes from your mind, what comes from your vital, what comes from your physical?... For it is mixed up; it is mixed up in the outward appearance. If you do not take care to distinguish, it makes a kind of soup, all that together. So it is indistinct and difﬁcult to discover. But if you observe yourself, after some time you see certain things, you feel them to be there, like that, as though they were in your skin; for some other things you feel you would have to go within yourself to ﬁnd out from where they come;  for other things, you have to go still further inside, or otherwise you have to rise up a little: it comes from unconsciousness.


The Mother: And there are others; then you must go very deep, very deep to ﬁnd out from where they come. This is just a beginning.   Simply observe. You are in a certain condition, a certain undeﬁnable condition.


The Mother: Then look: “What! how is it I am like that?” You try to see ﬁrst if you have fever or some other illness; but it is all right, everything is all right, there’s neither headache nor fever, the stomach is not protesting, the heart is functioning as it should, indeed, all’s well, you are normal. “Why then am I feeling so uneasy?”... So you go a little further within. It depends on cases.


The Mother: Sometimes you ﬁnd out immediately: yes, there was a little incident which wasn’t pleasant, someone said a word that was not happy or one had failed in his task or perhaps did not know one’s lesson very well, the teacher had made a remark.   At the time, one did not pay attention properly, but later on, it begins to work, leaves a painful impression. That is the second stage. Afterwards, if nothing happened: “All’s well, everything is normal, everything usual, I have nothing to note down, nothing has happened: why then do I feel like that?”


The Mother: Now it begins to be interesting, because one must enter much more deeply within oneself. And then it can be all sorts of things: it may be precisely the expression of an attack that is preparing; it may be a little inner anxiety seeking the progress that has to be made; it may be a premonition that there is somewhere in contact with oneself something not altogether harmonious which one has to change: something one must see, discover, change, on which light is to be put, something that is still there, deep down, and which should no longer be there. Then if you look at yourself very carefully, you ﬁnd out: “There! I am still like that; in that little corner, there is still something of that kind, not clear: a little selﬁshness, a little ill-will, something refusing to change.” So you see it, you take it by the tip of its nose or by the ear and hold it up in full light: “So, you were hiding!


The Mother: you are hiding? But I don’t want you any longer.” And then it has to go away.   This is a great progress.  That happens to you in the class?


The Mother: It means you do not listen to your teacher, otherwise it would not happen. If you were very attentive in your class and paid attention to your lesson, that could not happen to you. When you came out of it, then you would feel that, but not in the class. This means that you were dreaming or living within you or following your imagination, but you were not listening to your lessons.... But it is this that’s wonderful, my children: when you are learning something, when you are studying, when you are concentrated on your lesson, these things never happen to you.


The Mother: They may happen before, they may happen afterwards; but they won’t happen at that time. For if you are quite concentrated, all your energies are concentrated on your study and there is nothing unpleasant there. You understand what you learn and you are interested in what you learn.  If truly you can’t, then you have only to spend your time in seeking within yourself for the reason why it is so! Then if the teacher asks you a question, you have to tell him: “I am sorry, I was not listening.”


The Mother: You don’t like to learn?  Then how can this happen?  Then in some classes, you do not like to learn! You can say  generally, “Yes, yes, I like to learn!” but if one really likes to learn, there isn’t a class in which one could not learn. Surely, whatever the class, there is always something one does not know, one can always learn.


The Mother: You are not a living encyclopaedia! Even if you go over the same book again (this happens, I believe, in some classes), and you may say: “Oh! I have already gone through this book, this is boring”, but that’s simply because you do not want to learn: because certainly if you repeat the same book, it means that you have not learnt it properly the ﬁrst time and you must take particular care to learn what you have not learnt. Even a book of grammar! I do not say that books of grammar are very exciting, but even a grammar-book becomes interesting if you set out to learn it — even the most abstract rules of grammar. You cannot imagine how amusing it is when you truly want to learn, when you want to understand why it is so; instead of just committing to memory, learning by heart, if you want to understand: what are these words put there?


The Mother: For what idea, what real knowledge are they put there? What do they represent?... Any rule whatsoever is simply a human mental formula of something that exists in itself. Take any rule at all, it shows simply that a few heads have made an effort to formulate in the way most clear to them, most condensed, something which exists in itself. So if one goes behind the words and begins searching for this something — the thing existing in itself, which is there, behind the words — how interesting it becomes!


The Mother: It is throbbing, thrilling! It is like passing through a jungle to discover a new country, like going on an exploration to the North Pole! So, if you do that with the laws of grammar, I assure you nothing in the world can bore you afterwards.   Understand instead of learning.


The Mother: I admit this asks for a very great concentration. It demands a concentration capable of penetrating, digging a hole into the mental shell and passing through to the other side. And afterwards, it becomes worth the trouble.... You have been pushed against something cold, rigid, hard, unelastic. Then you concen104


The Mother: trate , concentrate, concentrate sufﬁciently until... suddenly you are on the other side, and then you emerge into the light and you understand: “Ah! that’s wonderful! Now I understand.”


The Mother: A very tiny thing gives you a great joy.  You see it is possible not to get bored at school.  There, my child, I fully agree with you, it is not quite right.  But we shall try to change all that; because after all I don’t see why one has to ﬁnish a book in a year. It is quite arbitrary.


The Mother: One should not leave a chapter until it has been fully grasped; only then take up the next one and so on. And if a chapter is ﬁnished, it is ﬁnished: and if it is not ﬁnished it is not ﬁnished .   The truth is that the teacher, instead of basing his course on a text-book, should take the trouble of preparing the course himself.


The Mother: He must know enough and take sufﬁcient pains to prepare his course from day to day, and in this way he will close a subject only when — I do not say when everyone has understood, for that is impossible — but at least when those whom he considers the interesting elements of his class have understood. Then the next subject is taken up. And if that continues, if a particular type of subject extends over two years instead of one or for a year and a half instead of two, it matters little; because it is his own production, his own course written by him and he writes according to the need of his class. That is my conception of teaching. Now, it has indeed its difﬁculties.


The Mother: But that is the true way of working, because by taking a book and following it, particularly a book which may very well be not at all suited to the students.... I do not say that a particular course could suit all, it is impossible to satisfy everybody. But there are those who want to make an effort; it is these that you must consider. Those  who are lazy, somnolent or indolent — well, you must leave them to their laziness or somnolence or indolence. If they want to sleep all their lives, let them sleep until something shakes them up sufﬁciently and awakens them!


The Mother: But what is interesting in a class is the section that wishes to learn, those who really want to learn and it is for them that the class should be taken. Don’t you see, the present method of education is a kind of levelling; everyone must be at the same stage. So those who have their heads higher up have them cut off, and those who are too small are pushed up from below. But that doesn’t do any good. One must be concerned only with those who come up, the others will take what they can.


The Mother: And indeed I do not see any necessity for everybody knowing the same thing — for that is not normal. But those who want to know and who can know, those who must work, these should be given all possible means for working, must be pushed up as much as possible, must always be given new food. They are the hungry ones, they must be fed.... Ah! If I had the time I would take a class.


The Mother: That would interest me much, to show how it must be done. Only one cannot be everywhere at the same time!  There you are, my children, now it is very late. Good night.   What exactly do you understand by intellect?


The Mother: Is it a function of the mind or is it a part of the human being? How do you understand it?  A function of the mind? Then it is that part of the mind which deals with ideas; is that what you mean?  Not ideas?


The Mother: What else, then?  There is a part of the mind which receives ideas, ideas that are formed in a higher mind. Still, I don’t know, it is a question of deﬁnition and one must know what exactly you mean to say.  It is intellect that puts ideas in the form of thoughts, gathering and organising the thoughts at the same time. There are great ideas which lie beyond the ordinary human mentality, which can put on all possible forms.


The Mother: These great ideas tend to descend, they want to manifest themselves in precise forms. These precise forms are the thoughts; and generally it is this, I believe, that is meant by intellect: it is this that gives thought-form to the ideas.   And then, there is also the organisation of the thoughts among themselves. All that has to be put in a certain order, otherwise one becomes incoherent. And after that, there is the putting of these thoughts to use for action; that is still another movement.


The Mother: To be able to say what the true movement is, one must know ﬁrst of all which movement is being spoken about. You have a body, well, you don’t expect your body to walk on its head or its hands nor to crawl ﬂat on its belly nor indeed that the head should be down and the legs up in the air. You give to each limb a particular occupation which is its own. This appears to you quite natural because that is the habit; otherwise, the very little ones do not know what to do, neither with their legs nor with their hands nor with their heads; it is only little by little that they learn that. Well, it is the same thing with the mind’s functions.


The Mother: You must know which part of the mind you are speaking about, what its own function is, and then only can you say what its true movement is and what is not its true movement. For example, for the part which has to receive the master ideas and change them into thought, its true movement is to be open to the master ideas, receive them and change them into as exact, as precise, as expressive a thought as possible. For the part of the mind which has the charge of organising all these thoughts among themselves so that they might form a coherent and classiﬁed whole, not a chaos, the true movement is just to make the classiﬁcation according to a higher logic and in a thoroughly clear, precise and expressive order which may be serviceable each time a thought is referred to, so that one may know where to look for it and not put quite contradictory things together. There are people whose mind does not work like that; all the ideas that come into it, without their being even aware of what the idea is, are translated into confused thoughts which remain in a kind of inner chaos. I have known people who, from the philosophical point of view — although there is nothing philosophical in it — could put side by side the most contradictory things, like ideas  of hierarchic order and at the same time ideas of the absolute independence of the individual and of anarchism, and both were accepted with equal sympathy, knocked against each other in the head in the midst of a wild disorder, and these people were not even aware of it!...


The Mother: You know the saying: “A question well put is three-fourths solved.” So now, put your question. What do you want to speak about? I am stretching out a helping hand, you have only to catch it. What is it you are speaking about, what is it that you call intellect?


The Mother: Do you know the difference between an idea and a thought?   Ah! That is the ﬁrst hurdle. Can anybody here tell me?


The Mother: ( ) You, do you know the difference between an idea and a thought?  No, it is not a question of a vague thought in a vague mind or a clear thought when the mind is clear. It is not like that.  Yes, but how do they come from above?


The Mother: Yes, but could you give me an idea and the thoughts in which it can be expressed? That is what I am asking. Can anyone give me an example? ( )


The Mother: He is longing to speak.  Tell us something, we shall see.   Ah, you are a monist? If I am not mistaken, this is the principle of monism.


The Mother: It is a thought of God that has made the universe, but now instead of a thought, we say an idea.  Has anyone something interesting to say?  (A teacher)  Now, have you understood the difference between idea and thought? It is clear.


The Mother: The idea is translated into all kinds of thoughts. They may be the most contradictory thoughts and the whole thing is to organise them in a coherent way. I think I have told you many times that contradictory thoughts may be found in union if one rises high enough, climbs towards the idea.... One could perhaps play at this little game, it would be very interesting. We have a thesis, we are going to ﬁnd an antithesis, and then we shall ﬁnd the synthesis.


The Mother: Who will propose the thesis?... Ah! I am going to propose this immediately: “Man is mortal.” The antithesis is: “Man is immortal.” Now ﬁnd the place where the two agree: the synthesis.


The Mother: It is a rather vague way of putting the thing. One could say it more intellectually. One could say: in his reality, man is immortal; and because of ignorance or of unconsciousness, he has become mortal. That’s better? And then one can go a little further: Why is he immortal?


The Mother: Why is he mortal? And how being mortal can he become immortal?   Whatever the part of the being, whether it be the intellect or any other part, whether it is in the mind or the vital or anywhere else, the true movement is a double movement: ﬁrst, it must not intercept the divine Truth in its manifestation, and secondly, it must help in its manifestation. A negative side, consisting in not being a screen, not intercepting anything, not blocking the passage of the divine force seeking to express itself; on the other side, to be sufﬁciently clear and pure to be able to help this manifestation.  One can apply this everywhere, it is very convenient..


The Mother: Now, any other question?   Ah! No. You are looking from the wrong side.


The Mother: They could escape dying only if their body did not decay. It is just because their body decays that they die. It is because their body becomes useless that they die. If they are not to die, their body should not become useless. This is just the contrary.


The Mother: It is precisely because the body decays, declines and ends in a complete degradation that death becomes necessary. But if the body followed the progressive movement of the inner being, if it had the same sense of progress and perfection as the psychic being, there would be no necessity for it to die. One year added to another need not bring a deterioration. It is only a habit of Nature. It is only a habit of what is happening at moment.


The Mother: And that is exactly the cause of death. One can foresee quite well, on the contrary, that the movement for perfection which is at the beginning of life might continue under another form. I have already told you that one does not foresee an uninterrupted growth, for that would need changing the height of the houses after some time! But this growth in height may be changed into a growth in perfection: the perfection of the form. All the imperfections of the form may be gradually corrected, all the weaknesses replaced by strength,  all the incapacities by skill.


The Mother: Why should it not be like this? You do not think in that way because you have the habit of seeing things otherwise. But there is no reason why this should not happen.  Have you ever seen a tree growing, a palm tree? There is one in the Ashram courtyard, in the Samadhi courtyard, quite close to the door by which you come up every day, have you never seen how it grows?


The Mother: This tree, you know, is some forty, fortyﬁve or ﬁfty years old perhaps. You see how small it is. These trees can become even much taller than the building. They can live several hundred years, easily, in their natural state, if there is no accident. Have you never seen what it does?


The Mother: I see it from above. It is quite pretty. It happens once a year. At ﬁrst, you see a kind of small brown ball. Then this small brown ball begins to grow and becomes slightly lighter in colour, less deep.


The Mother: Little by little, you see that it is made of a mass of somewhat complex small lines, with their tips bent inward, as though turned back upon themselves; and that begins to grow, it comes out, becomes more and more limpid, until it begins to turn green, a little pale yellowish green and it takes the form of the bishop’s cross. Then you see it multiplying and separating; it is yet a little brown, a little queer (almost like you), something like a caterpillar. And suddenly, it is as though it sprang out, it leaps forth. It is pale green; it is frail. It has a delightful colour.


The Mother: It lengthens out. This lasts for a day or two; and then on the following day there are leaves. These leaves I have never counted, I do not know how many they are. Every time there is a new range of leaves.  They remain very pale; they are exquisite.


The Mother: They are like a little child, with that something tender, pretty and graceful a child has. And you have still the feeling that it is fragile; and indeed, if it receives a blow, it is spoilt for life. It is very frail, but it is delightfully tender. It has its charm and you say: “But why does not Nature remain like that?” The following morning... pluff!


The Mother: they are separated, they are bright green, they look wonderful with all the strength and force of youth, a magniﬁcent brilliant  green. It should stop there — not at all. It continues. Then comes the dust, the deterioration from people who pass by. So it begins to fall, to become yellowish, another kind of yellow, the yellow of dryness until it is completely withered and falls away.


The Mother: It is replaced by the trunk. Every year the trunk increases a little.  And it will take several hundred years to reach the end. But every year, it repeats the same thing, passes through all the stages of beauty, charm, attractiveness and you say: “But why does it not stop there?” And the next minute, it is something else.


The Mother: You cannot say it is better, but it is different. And so it passes from one thing to another through all the stages of ﬂowering. Then the accidents begin; with the accidents comes deterioration, and with deterioration there is death.  It is like that. But accidents are not indispensable.


The Mother: And even what looks like death helps in the growth of the tree. One sheds off something, but it’s in order to grow again and have something more. One must be able to keep the harmony and the beauty till the end. There is no reason why one should have a body which has no longer any purpose in being, in existing; because it would no longer be good for anything. To be no longer good for anything, that is exactly what makes it disappear.


The Mother: One could have a body that grows from perfection to perfection. There are many things in the body that make you say: “Ah, if it were like that! Ah, I would like it to be thus!”  (I am not speaking of your character, for there are so many things that need changing; I am speaking only of your physical appearance). You see some disharmony somewhere and you say: “If this disharmony disappeared, how much better would it be!”... But why don’t you think that it could be done?


The Mother: If you look at yourself in quite an objective way — not with that sort of attachment one has for one’s little person, but quite objectively, — you look at yourself as you would look at another person and tell yourself: “But this thing is not altogether in harmony with that”, and if you look yet more closely, it becomes very interesting: you discover that this disharmony is the expression  of a defect in your character. It is because in your character there is something a bit twisted, not quite harmonious, and in your body this is reproduced somewhere. You try to arrange it in your body and you ﬁnd out that to get back to the source of this physical disharmony, you have to ﬁnd out the defect in your inner being. And then you begin to work and the result is obtained.  You don’t know to what an extent the body is plastic!


The Mother: From another standpoint, I would say it is terribly rigid and that is why the body deteriorates. But that is because we do not know how to make use of it. We do not know, when we are still fresh like little leaves, how to will for a luxuriant, magniﬁcent, faultless ﬂowering. And instead of telling oneself with a somewhat miserable look: “It is a pity my arms are too thin or my legs are too long or my back is not straight or my head is not quite harmonious”, if one said: “It must be otherwise, my arms must be proportionate, my body harmonious, every form in me must express a higher beauty”, then one will succeed. And you will succeed if you know how to do it with the true will that is persistent, tranquil, that is not impatient, does not care for appearances of defeat, continues its work quietly, very quietly, continues to will that it be so, to look for the inner reason, to discover it, to work with energy.


The Mother: Immediately, as soon as you see a little black worm somewhere, which does not look pretty and makes a small rather unpleasant, disgusting stain, you pick it up, pull it out and throw it away and put a lovely light in its place. And after a time you discover: “Why! that disharmony I had in my face is disappearing; that sign of brutality, unconsciousness which was in my expression, it is going away.” And then ten years later you don’t recognise yourself any longer.  You are all, here, youthful matter; you must know how to proﬁt by it — and not for petty, selﬁsh and stupid reasons but for the love of beauty, for the need of harmony.  If the body is to last, it must not deteriorate.


The Mother: There must not  be any decay. It must win on one side: it must be a transformation, it must not be a decay. With decay there is no possibility of immortality.  Ah, my child, you need a book! It is not one question!


The Mother: Well, it will be for next time. Besides, I believe there is a chapter which speaks about it, if I remember well. We shall have occasion to speak about it.... I shall tell you one thing immediately: when you are born upon earth, do you know where you are going?  And all the people on earth, do they all go to the same place?


The Mother: Tell me that!  Everyone follows his way. Everyone has a different destiny.  Why should it be the same for all when they are dead?


The Mother: For each one it is a different thing.   Good night.   The power that the vital has over Matter. And, in fact, you can do nothing without the vital power.


The Mother: If there were no vital power, Matter would be inert and unconscious. The vital power is what men usually call “power” in short.   No. The vital must be transformed.


The Mother: I have always said that nothing can be done without the vital, but the vital must be converted; that is, instead of being an instrument of those beings, it should become an instrument of the divine will. One can do nothing in the physical world without the vital. It is exactly here that the error of the ascetics lies; as they know it is  a power full of desires and indeed full of the need of realising itself, they abolish it, so deaden it that it exists no longer. All ascetic methods are invented for abolishing and deadening the vital. For that evidently is the most convenient way of cutting off all connection with material life: one becomes worse than a vegetative kind of being.


The Mother: What is needed is that the vital, instead of serving its own ends or being an instrument of anti-divine forces, should become an instrument of the Divine and put all its force at the service of the Divine. This is quite possible.   Yes, my child. Fear is the prettiest gift these beings have given to the world.


The Mother: It is their ﬁrst present, and the most powerful. It is through fear that they hold human beings. First of all, they create a movement of fear; the movement of fear weakens you, then hands you over little by little into their power. And it is not even a reasonable fear; it is a kind of fear which seizes you, you don’t know why, something that makes you tremble, gives you anxiety. You do not know why, it has no apparent reason.


The Mother: It is their action.  That depends upon who you are. There are many ways of curing oneself of fear.  If you have some contact with your psychic being, you must call it immediately and in the psychic light put things back in order. This is the most powerful way.


The Mother: When one does not have this psychic contact, but is still a reasonable being, that is, when one has a free movement of the reasoning mind, one can use it to reason with, to speak to oneself as one would to a child, explaining that this fear is a bad thing  in itself and, even if there is a danger, to face the danger with fear is the greatest stupidity. If there is a real danger, it is only with the power of courage that you have a chance of coming out of it; if you have the least fear, you are done for. So with that kind of reasoning, manage to convince the part that fears that it must stop being afraid.  If you have faith and are consecrated to the Divine, there is a very simple way, it is to say: “Let Your will be done.


The Mother: Nothing can frighten me because it is You who are guiding my life. I belong to You and You are guiding my life.” That acts immediately. Of all the means this is the most effective: indeed, it is. That is, one must be truly consecrated to the Divine.


The Mother: If one has that, it acts immediately; all fear vanishes immediately like a dream. And the being with the bad inﬂuence also disappears like a dream along with the fear. You should see it running away at full speed, prrt! .  Now, there are people having a strong vital power in them and they are ﬁghters who immediately lift up their heads and say: “Ah! an enemy is here, we are going to knock him down.”  But for that one must have the knowledge and a very great vital power.


The Mother: One must be vitally a giant. That does not happen to everyone.  So there are many different ways. They are all good, if you know how to make use of the one that suits your own nature.


The Mother: Ah! there, my children, it depends.... You must distinguish two very different things and you must deal with them very differently.  If it is a vital fear, you must reason with yourself and go about it all the same. But if it is a physical instinct (that is possible, it happens very often that there is a kind of physical instinct), in that case you must listen to it, for the instinct of the  body is a very sure thing, if it is not disturbed by thought or vital will.


The Mother: The body left to itself knows very well what it can and what it cannot do. And not only that but even a thing that one can do and does usually, if one day you feel a sort of repulsion, as if you were shrinking back, you must deﬁnitely not do it; it is an indication that for some reason or other — a purely material reason of a disorder in the functioning of the body — you are not ﬁt to do the thing at that time. Then you must not do it. In that case, it is not even a fear, it is something that shrinks, that withdraws, there is nothing in the head, it does not correspond to any kind of thought like: “What is going to happen?” When the head starts working and you say: “What is going to happen?”, you must sweep it away because it is worth nothing; you must use all the means of reason and good sense you have to drive that away.


The Mother: But if it is a purely physical sensation, as though something were contracting, a kind of physical repugnance, if the body itself is refusing, so to say, you should never force it, never, because it is usually when you force it that there’s an accident. That may very well be a kind of premonition that there’s going to be an accident, that if you do the thing, you will not go far. And in such a case you must not do it. You must not put into it the least. You must realise: “Today I am not in a good condition.”


The Mother: But if it is a vital fear, if for example you have a competition or a tournament, and you felt this kind of fear and then: “What is going to happen?”, you must sweep it away quickly, it means nothing.   Ah! if you are tamasic, that is yet something else. If you have a tamasic nature, you must use another procedure.


The Mother: You must exert your consciousness, your will, your force, gather your energy, shake yourself a little and whip yourself and say: “Hup! hup!  forward, march.” If it is laziness that keeps you back from, say, doing the vaulting, you must immediately do something much more tiring and say: “Well, you don’t want to do that? All right, you are going to do 1500 metres running!” Or else: “I don’t want to do the weight-lifting today, I don’t feel like doing it: good, I shall do skipping 4000 times at a stretch.”  Yes, exactly.


The Mother: If you don’t feel like learning your lesson, you take a book ten times more tiring, something dry and compel yourself to read it with attention. There are books of this kind, so dry, of such an arid kind of knowledge... Well, if you don’t feel like reading your book of history or geography, which are after all very easy and very entertaining, instead of that take one of those books that are given to you () — I do not dare to say anything, because your teacher is there! — extremely arid, and compel yourself to study at least half the book. Afterwards, everything else appears charming to you.  That depends on the work; there we enter another domain.


The Mother: If it is a work that you are doing for the collectivity and not for yourself personally, then you must do it, whatever happens.   It is an elementary discipline. You have undertaken to do this work or have been given the work and have taken it up, therefore you have accepted it, and in that case you must do it. At all times, unless you are absolutely ill, ill in the last degree and unable to move, you must do it.


The Mother: Even if you are rather ill, you must do it. An unselﬁsh work always cures you of your petty personal maladies. Naturally, if you are really compelled to be in bed without being able to move, with a terrible fever or a very serious illness, then that’s quite different. But otherwise, if  you are just a little indisposed: “I am not feeling quite well, I have a little headache or I have indigestion, or I have a bad cold, I am coughing”, things like that — then doing your work, not thinking of yourself, thinking of the work, doing it as well as you can, that puts you right immediately.  In reality illness is only a disequilibrium; if then you are able to establish another equilibrium, this disequilibrium disappears.


The Mother: An illness is simply, always, in every case, even when the doctors say that there are microbes — in every case, a disequilibrium in the being: a disequilibrium among the various functions, a disequilibrium among the forces.  This is not to say that there are no microbes: there are, there are many more microbes than are known now. But it is not because of that you are ill, for they are always there. It happens that they are always there and for days they do nothing to you and then all of a sudden, one day, one of them gets hold of you and makes you ill — why? Simply because the resistance was not as it used to be habitually, because there was some disequilibrium in some part, the functioning was not normal.


The Mother: But if, by an inner power, you can re-establish the equilibrium, then that’s the end, there is no more difﬁculty, the disequilibrium disappears.  There is no other way of curing people. It is simply when one sees the disequilibrium and is capable of re-establishing the equilibrium that one is cured. Only there are two very different categories you come across... Some hold on to their disequilibrium — they hold on to it, cling to it, don’t want to let it go.


The Mother: Then you may try as hard as you will, even if you re-establish the equilibrium the next minute they get into disequilibrium once again, because they love that. They say: “Oh no! I don’t want to be ill”, but within them there is something which holds ﬁrmly to some disequilibrium, which does not want to let it go. There are other people, on the contrary, who sincerely love equilibrium, and directly you give them the power to get back their equilibrium, the equilibrium is re- established and in a few minutes they are  cured.


The Mother: Their knowledge was not sufﬁcient or their power was not sufﬁcient to re-establish order — disequilibrium is a disorder.  But if you intervene, if you have the knowledge and re-establish the equilibrium, quite naturally the illness will disappear; and those who allow you to do it get cured. Only those who do not let you do it are not cured and this is visible, they do not allow you to act, they cling to the illness. I tell them: “Ah! you are not cured? Go to the doctor then.”


The Mother: And the funniest part of the thing is that most often they believe in the doctors, although the working remains the same! Every doctor who is something of a philosopher will tell you: “It is like that; we doctors give only the occasion, but it is the body that cures itself. When the body wants to be cured, it is cured.” Well, there are bodies that do not allow equilibrium to be re-established unless they are made to absorb some medicine or something very deﬁnite which gives them the feeling that they are being truly looked after. But if you give them a very precise, very exact treatment that is sometimes very difﬁcult to follow, they begin to be convinced that there is nothing better to do than to regain the equilibrium and they get back the equilibrium!


The Mother: I knew a doctor who was a neurologist and treated illnesses of the stomach. He used to say that all illnesses of the stomach came from a more or less bad nervous state. He was a doctor for the rich and it was the rich and unoccupied people who went to him. So they used to come and tell him: “I have a pain in the stomach, I cannot digest”, and this and that. They had terrible pains, they had headache, they had, well, all the symptoms!


The Mother: He used to listen to them very seriously. I knew a lady who went to him and to whom he said: “Ah! your case is very serious.  But on which ﬂoor do you live? On the groundﬂoor?


The Mother: All right.  This is what you have to do to cure your illness of the stomach.  Take a bunch of fully ripe grapes (do not take your breakfast, for breakfast upsets your stomach), take a bunch of grapes; hold it in your hand, like this, very carefully. Then prepare to go out — not by your door, never go out by your door! You must go  out by the window.


The Mother: Get a stool. And go out by the window.   Go out in the street, and there you must walk while eating one grape every two steps — not more, yes, not more! You will have stomach-ache!


The Mother: One single grape every two steps. You must take two steps, then eat one single grape and you should continue till there are no more grapes. Do not turn back, go straight on till there are no more grapes. You must take a big bunch. And when you have ﬁnished, you may return quietly.


The Mother: But do not take a conveyance! Come back on foot, otherwise the whole trouble will return. Come back quietly and I give you the guarantee that if you do that every day, at the end of three days you will be cured.” And in fact this lady was cured!  (A child)


The Mother: A lot of work... Truly a lot of work?  What do you do the whole day, from morning till evening? How much time do you devote to your toilet, to take your bath, to dress? Approximately, not exactly to a minute.


The Mother: How much time do you take for eating?  Every time? How many times per day? Four?


The Mother: All right. How much time do you spend in gossiping?... That you don’t know!   You don’t gossip! You are a marvel, indeed.


The Mother: I shall put you on a pedestal. You don’t gossip?   Yes. And how many hours per day do you need to work to be able to do your tasks?


The Mother: To do your home-work? You are still half asleep, aren’t you, at half-past four? Are you quite awake?... No! Ah!


The Mother: And then, you start working immediately?  Because I am leading exactly towards that... When you work, if you are able to concentrate, you can do absolutely in ten minutes what would otherwise take you one hour. If you want to gain time, learn to concentrate. It is through attention that one can do things quickly and one does them much better.


The Mother: If you have a task that should take you half an hour — I don’t say if you have to write for half an hour of course — but if you have to think and your mind is ﬂoating about, if you are thinking not only of what you are doing but also of what you have done and of what you will have to do and of your other subjects, all that makes you lose thrice as much time as you need to do your task. When you have too much to do, you must learn how to concentrate exclusively on what you are doing, with an intensity in your attention, and you can do in ten minutes what would otherwise take you one hour.  So I do not know, I cannot decide without full knowledge of the matter, if you have too much work, unless you bring me  all the work you have to do; but I do not believe that you are overburdened with work. I say I do not believe it. Now, I do not assert this because I do not know what all the teachers do.


The Mother: But in any case, if you have much to do, you must learn how to concentrate much, all the more, and when you are doing a thing, to think of that only, and focus all your energy upon what you do. You gain at least half the time. So if you tell me: “I have too much work”, I answer: “You do not concentrate enough.”  (Another child)  Yes, it is exactly that: it depends on the degree of concentration.


The Mother: If you observe yourself, you will notice this quite well: when it does not come, it is because of a kind of haziness in the brain, something cloudy, like a fog somewhere, and then you are there as in a dream. You push forward trying to ﬁnd it, and it is as though you were pushing into cotton-wool, you do not see clearly there; and so nothing comes. You may remain in that state for hours.  Concentration consists precisely in removing the cloud. You gather together all the elements of your intelligence and ﬁx them on one point, and then you do not even try actively to ﬁnd the thing.


The Mother: All that you do is to concentrate in such a way as to see only the problem — but seeing not only its surface, seeing it in its depth, what it conceals. If you are able to gather together all your mental energies, bringing them to a point which is ﬁxed on the enunciation of the problem, and you stay there, ﬁxed, as though you were about to drill a hole in the wall, all of a sudden it will come. And this is the only way. If you try: Is it this, is it that, is it this, is it that?... You will never ﬁnd anything or else you will need hours.


The Mother: You must get your mental forces to a point with strength enough to pierce through the words and strike upon the thing that is behind. There is a thing to be found — ﬁnd it.   And it is always the days you are a little hazy that it becomes difﬁcult. You are hazy: as though there is something you seem to catch and which escapes you.  Naturally, if it is materially impossible — you do not have to deal with monsters!


The Mother: I believe your teachers are reasonable enough and if you go to them and say, “Well, I could not do it, I had no time, I did what I could, I did not have the time”, they won’t scold you, I don’t think so. But here ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it is a kind of half-inertia of the mind which makes you think that you have too much work. If you observe yourself, you will ﬁnd out that there is always something which pulls this way, something which pulls that way and then this kind of haziness as though you were living in cottonwool, in the clouds: nothing is clear.  The usefulness of work is nothing else but that: to crystallise this mental power. For, what you learn (unless you put it in practice by some work or deeper studies), half of what you learn, at least, will vanish, disappear with time.


The Mother: But it will leave behind one thing: the capacity of crystallising your thought, making something clear out of it, something precise, exact and organised. And that is the true usefulness of work: to organise your cerebral capacity. If you remain in your hazy movement in that kind of cloudy ﬂuidity, you may labour for years, it will be quite useless to you; you will not come out of it more intelligent than when you entered it. But if you are able, even for half an hour, to concentrate your attention on things that seem to you of very little interest, like a rule of grammar, for example (the rules of grammar are some of the dry things I was speaking about, there are other things much more arid, but indeed the rules of grammar are sufﬁciently arid), if you take one of them and try to understand it — not learn it by heart and apply mechanically what you have learnt by heart, that will be of no use — but try to understand the thought behind the words: “Why was this rule formulated in this way?” and try to ﬁnd out your own formula for the thing; that is so interesting. “Why has this gentleman  who wrote this rule written it in this way?


The Mother: But I am studying, trying to understand why. Why has he put this word after that and that word after that other, and why has he stated the rule in this way? It is because he thought that it was the most complete and the most clear way of expressing the thing.” And so that’s the thing you must ﬁnd. And when you ﬁnd it, you suddenly exclaim: “That is what it means!


The Mother: It must be seen in this way, then it becomes very clear.”  I am going to explain it to you: when you have understood, it forms a little crystal in you, like a little shining point. And when you have put in many, many, many of these, then you will begin to be intelligent. That is the utility of work, not simply to stuff the head with a heap of things that take you nowhere.


The Mother: Not necessarily.  They do not belong to the same domain. It is exactly as though you had what is called “a torchlight”, a small beacon-light in your head at the place of observation. Scientists who want to do a certain work turn the beacon in a particular way, they always put it there and the beacon remains thus: they turn it towards matter, towards the details of matter. But people with imagination turn it upward, because up above there is everything, you know, all inspirations of artistic and literary things: this comes from another domain.


The Mother: It comes from a much more subtle domain, much less material. So these turn upward and want to receive the light from above. But it is the same instrument. The others turn it downwards, and it is just a lack of gymnastic skill.  It is the same instrument.


The Mother: It is the same power of a luminous ray  upon something. But as one has made it a habit of concentrating it in a certain direction, one is no longer supple, one loses the habit of doing things otherwise.  But you can at any time do both the things. When you are doing science, you turn it in one direction and when you do literature and art, you turn it in the other direction; but it is the same instrument: all depends on the orientation.


The Mother: If you have concentration, you can move this power of concentration from one place to another and in every way it will be effective. If you are occupied with science, you use it in a scientiﬁc way, and if you want to do art, you use it in an artistic way. But it is the same instrument and it is the same power of concentration.  It is simply because people do not know this that they limit themselves. So the hinges get rusty, they do not turn any more.


The Mother: Otherwise, if one keeps the habit of turning them, they continue to turn. Moreover, even from the ordinary point of view, it is not rare to ﬁnd a scientist having as his hobby some artistic occupation — and the reverse also. It is because they have found that the one was not harmful to the other and that it was the same faculty which could be utilised in both.  Essentially, from the general point of view, particularly from the intellectual viewpoint, the most important thing is the capacity of attention and concentration, it is that which one must work at and develop. From the point of view of action (physical action), it is the will: you must work and build up an unshakable will.


The Mother: From the intellectual point of view, you must work and build up a power of concentration which nothing can shake.  And if you have both, concentration and will, you will be a genius and nothing will resist you.   (A child)  Where is your paradise? Who has taught you that?


The Mother: They have spoken to you of heaven and hell and purgatory?... No? Not  of all that? From where did you gather your idea of paradise?


The Mother: From which book?  But from whom?   It is generally what religious priests say to the faithful to encourage them to do good. For it is a notorious fact that life is not more easy for the good than for the wicked; usually it is the contrary: the wicked succeed better than the good!


The Mother: So people who are not very spiritual say to themselves: “Why should I take the trouble of being good? It is better to be wicked and have an easy life.” It is very difﬁcult to make them understand that there are many kinds of good and that sometimes it is worth the trouble perhaps to make an effort to be good. So to make this intelligible to the least intelligent, they are told: “There, it is very simple. If you are quite obedient, quite nice, quite unselﬁsh, if you always do good deeds, and if you believe in the dogmas we teach, well, when you die, God will send you to Paradise.


The Mother: If you have sometimes good will, sometimes bad, if, sometimes you do good, sometimes you don’t and if you think very much of yourself and very little of others, then when you die, you will be sent to Purgatory for another experience. And then if you are thoroughly wicked, if you are always doing harm to others, doing all kinds of bad things and you do not care about the good of anyone and particularly if you do not believe in the dogma that we teach you, then you will go straight to Hell and for eternity.”  This is one of the prettiest inventions I have ever heard of: they have invented. That is to say, once you are in hell, it is for eternity.... You understand what that means, for eternity?


The Mother: You will be tortured and burnt (in the hot countries  you are burnt, in the cold countries you are frozen), and that for eternity. That is it. So I do not know who taught you those pretty things; but they are simply inventions to make people obey, to keep them under control.  There are teachings which are not like that. There are religions which are not like that.


The Mother: But still one can, in a poetic, picturesque, descriptive manner speak of a paradise; because this paradise means a wonderful place where there is utmost joy and happiness and comfort.... And yet that depends upon the religion to which you belong. For there are heavens where you pass your time singing praises to God, you do nothing else — but in the end that must be somewhat wearisome; however, there you pass your time playing music and singing the praises of God. There are other heavens, on the contrary, where you enjoy all possible pleasures, all that you desired to have during your life, you have in heaven. There are heavens where you are constantly in blissful meditation — but for people who are not keen on meditating, that must be rather tiresome.


The Mother: However, that depends, you know: they have invented all kinds of things so that people may really want to be wise and obey the laws given to them.  And man’s imagination is so creative, such a form-maker, that there really are in the world places like these heavens. There are places also like these hells and there are places like these purgatories. Man creates out of nothing the things he imagines.  If your consciousness is enlightened, then you can be pulled out of these places; otherwise you are shut up, imprisoned there by the very belief you had when alive.


The Mother: You will tell me that it is equal to a life, but it is an altogether illusory and extremely limited existence. It is real only for those who think like that.  As soon as you think differently, it does not exist for you any longer; you can come out of it. You can pull a person out of these places, and immediately he perceives that he was imprisoned in his own formation.  Man has an extraordinary power of creation.


The Mother: He has created  a whole set of godheads in his own image, having the same faults as himself, doing on a bigger scale, with greater power whatever he does. These beings have a relative existence, but still it is an independent existence, just like your thought. When you have a thought, a well-made mental formation which goes out of you, it becomes an independent entity and continues on its way and it does that for which it was made. It continues to act independently of you. That is why you must be on your guard.


The Mother: If you have made such a formation and it has gone out, it has gone out to do its work; and after a time you ﬁnd out that it was perhaps not a very happy thing to have a thought like that, that this formation was not very beneﬁcial; now that it has gone out, it is very difﬁcult for you to get hold of it again. You must have considerable occult knowledge. It has gone out and is moving on its way.... Supposing in a moment of great anger (I do not say that you do so, but still) when you were in quite a rage against someone, you said: “Ah! couldn’t some misfortune befall him?”


The Mother: Your formation has gone on its way. It has gone out and you have no longer any control over it; and it goes and organises some misfortune or other: it is going to do its work. And after sometime the misfortune arrives. Happily, you do not usually have sufﬁcient knowledge to tell yourself: “Oh! It is I who am responsible”, but that is the truth.


The Mother: Note that this power of formation has a great advantage, if one knows how to use it. You can make good formations and if you make them properly, they will act in the same way as the others. You can do a lot of good to people just by sitting quietly in your room, perhaps even more good than by undergoing a lot of trouble externally. If you know how to think correctly, with force and intelligence and kindness, if you love someone and wish him well very sincerely, deeply, with all your heart, that does him much good, much more certainly than you think.


The Mother: I have said this often; for example, to those who are here, who learn that someone in their family is very ill and feel that childish impulse of wanting to rush immediately to the spot to attend to  the sick person. I tell you, unless it is an exceptional case and there is nobody to attend on the sick person (and at times even in such a case), if you know how to keep the right attitude and concentrate with affection and good will upon the sick person, if you know how to pray for him and make helpful formations, you will do him much more good than if you go to nurse him, feed him, help him wash himself, indeed all that everybody can do. Anybody can nurse a person. But not everybody can make good formations and send out forces that act for healing.  In any case, to come back to our paradise, it is a childish deformation — ignorant or political — of something which is true in a sense but not quite like that....


The Mother: I have told you many times and I could not repeat it too often, that one is not built up of one single piece. We have within us many states of being and each state of being has its own life. All this is put together in one single body, so long as you have a body, and acts through that single body; so that gives you the feeling that it is one single person, a single being. But there are many beings and particularly there are concentrations on different levels: just as you have a physical being, you have a vital being, you have a mental being, you have a psychic being, you have many others and all possible intermediaries. But it is a little complicated, you might not understand.


The Mother: Suppose you were living a life of desire, passion and impulse: you live with your vital being dominant in you; but if you live with spiritual effort, with great good will, the desire to do things well and an unselﬁshness, a will for progress, you live with the psychic being dominant in you. Then, when you are about to leave your body, all these beings start to disperse. Only if you are a very advanced yogi and have been able to unify your being around the divine centre, do these beings remain bound together. If you have not known how to unify yourself, then at the time of death all that is dispersed: each one returns to its domain. For example, with regard to the vital being, all your different desires will be separated and each one run towards its own realisation, quite independently, for the physical being will  no longer be there to hold them together.


The Mother: But if you have united your consciousness with the psychic consciousness, when you die you remain conscious of your psychic being and the psychic being returns to the psychic world which is a world of bliss and delight and peace and tranquillity and of a growing knowledge.  So, if you like to call that a paradise, it is all right; because in fact, to the extent to which you are identiﬁed with your psychic being, you remain conscious of it, you are one with it, and it is immortal and goes to its immortal domain to enjoy a perfectly happy life or rest. If you like to call that paradise, call it paradise.   If you are good, if you have become conscious of your psychic and live in it, well, when your body dies, you will go with your psychic being to take rest in the psychic world, in a blissful state.


The Mother: But if you have lived in your vital with all its impulses, each impulse will try to realise itself here and there... For example, a miser who is concentrated upon his money, when he dies, the part of the vital that was interested in his money will be stuck there and will continue to watch over the money so that nobody may take it. People do not see him, but he is there all the same, and is very unhappy if something happens to his precious money.  I knew quite well a lady who had a good amount of money and children; she had ﬁve children who were all prodigals each one more than the other. The same amount of care she had taken in amassing the money, they seemed to take in squandering it; they spent it at random.


The Mother: So when the poor old lady died, she came to see me and told me: “Ah, now they are going to squander my money!” And she was extremely unhappy. I consoled her a little, but I had a good deal of difﬁculty in persuading her not to keep watching over her money so that it might not be wasted.   Now, if you live exclusively in your physical consciousness (it is difﬁcult, for you have, after all, thoughts and feelings, but if you live exclusively in your physical), when the physical being disappears, you disappear at the same time, it is ﬁnished....


The Mother: There is a spirit of the form: your form has a spirit which persists for seven days after your death. The doctors have declared that you  are dead, but the spirit of your form lives, and not only does it live but it is conscious in most of the cases. But that lasts for seven or eight days and afterwards it is dissolved. I am not speaking of yogis; I am speaking of ordinary people. Yogis have no laws, it is quite different; for them the world is different.


The Mother: I am speaking to you of ordinary men living an ordinary life; for these it is like that.  So the conclusion is that if you want to preserve your consciousness, it would be better to centralise it on a part of your being that is immortal; otherwise it will vanish like a ﬂame in the air. And it is very fortunate, for if it were otherwise, there would be perhaps gods or types of superior men who would create hells and heavens as they do in their material imagination, where they would imprison you; you would be imprisoned in heaven or in hell according as you pleased or displeased them. It would be a very critical situation and happily it is not like that.


The Mother: Yes, I call it the spirit of Death. I know it very well. And that is an extraordinary organisation. You do not know to what an extent it is organised.  I believe there are many of these spirits of death, I believe there are hundreds.