The Mother: It is only when the mind is mingled with the vital that the notion of time is introduced; and if they go down into the physical, before a mental conception can be realised a whole process is necessary. You do not have a direct mental action on matter. For instance, if you think of someone who lives in Calcutta, well, physically you have to take a plane and some hours must pass before you can be there; while mentally if you are here and think of someone in Calcutta, instantaneously you are there with him. Instantaneously, you see. But if you go out in the vital from your body and want to go somewhere, well, you have the feeling of moving, and of the time it takes you to reach  the place you are going to.


The Mother: But it is incomparably fast in relation to the physical, to the time necessary to do things physically.  Only right at the top of the ladder, when one reaches what could be called the centre of the universe, the centre and origin of the universe, everything is instantaneous. The past, present and future are all contained in a total and simultaneous consciousness, that is, what has always been and what will be are as though united in a single instant, a single beat of the universe, and it is only there that one goes out of Time and Space.   Yes.


The Mother: Yes, but only that part of the thought, not your body. That’s just what I said. In the mental domain it is like that; if one concentrates on the Divine and thinks of the Divine, the part... I don’t say the whole thought, because thought is multiple and divided, but the part which is sincerely concentrated on the Divine is with Him. It does some good but not very much when this part is mixed with all the others which think of hundreds of different things at the same time, or when it goes down into the body, is all tied up precisely to that frightful slowness of material things, and when we have to take so many steps only to go from here to the door.


The Mother: In the vital with a leap one can be there; mentally there is no need even of a leap.    In the psychic? Yes, you have even the consciousness of all the lives you have lived. When you enter into contact with the psychic you become conscious of all the lives you have lived, it keeps the absolutely living memory of all the events in which the psychic took part — not the whole life, not that one can tell little stories to oneself: that ﬁrst one was a monkey and then later something a little higher, and so on, the cave-man...


The Mother: no, no stories like that. But all the events of former lives in which the psychic participated are preserved, and when one enters into conscious contact with his psychic being this can be called up like a sort of cinema. But it has no continuity except in lives in which the psychic is absolutely conscious, active, permanently active, that is, constantly associated with the consciousness; so naturally, being constantly associated with the consciousness, it consciously remembers everything that has happened in the real life of the person, and the memories — when one follows these things — the memories of his psychic being are more and more coordinated and closer and closer to what could be a physical memory if there were one, in any case of all the intellectual and emotional elements of life, and of some physical events when it was possible for this being to manifest in the outer consciousness; then, at these moments, the whole set of physical circumstances in which one was is kept absolutely intact in the consciousness.  Well, yes, the psychic is behind the whole organisation, this triple organisation of human life and consciousness, the psychic is behind and supports it by its consciousness which is an immortal one. It is because of the psychic that we have so clear a sense of continuity.


The Mother: Otherwise if you compare what you now are with what you were when you were three, obviously you couldn’t recognise yourself in any way, either physically or vitally or mentally. There is no resemblance of any kind. But behind there  is the psychic which supports the development, the growth of the being and gives this continuity of consciousness, makes one feel that he is the same being even while being absolutely different, absolutely different. If later one observes himself sufﬁciently, he can see that the things he understood and could do at that time are things which seem to him absolutely inconceivable now, and that he could never do a similar thing because he is no longer that person at all. And yet, because within there was the psychic consciousness which is immortal, one has the feeling that it is always the same being which was there and continues to be there and will continue to be there with more or less progressive and more or less conscious changes.


The Mother: Yes. Absolutely unconsciously for the individual, most of the time; but it is the psychic which organises his existence — only in what may be called the main lines, because for intervening in the details there would have to be a conscious union between the outer being, that is, the vital and physical being, and the psychic being, but usually this does not exist. So externally, in the details... for example, there was someone who in deep perplexity said to me, “Well, if it is the psychic being or rather the Divine in the psychic who directs our life, is it He who decides the number of pieces of sugar I put in my tea-cup?” That was the question, verbatim.


The Mother: So the answer had to be, “No, because it is not a detailed intervention of this kind.”  It is as when you push your ﬁst into a heap of iron ﬁlings or saw-dust, all the inﬁnitesimal little elements of the iron ﬁlings or saw-dust are organised to take on the form of your ﬁst, but they do not do this either deliberately or consciously. It is through the work of the consciousness which pushes that this kind of thing happens. There is no decision that each element is going to be exactly in this place, like that; it is the effect of  the energy which has pushed the ﬁst that organises the elements.  But that’s how it is.


The Mother: There is the psychic consciousness at work in life, organising all the circumstances of your life but not with a deliberate choice of the details; and in fact very few things are deliberate and conscious in the organisation of the physical life of human beings. Most of the time that’s what happens. If you ask someone, “Why have you done this?” — “That’s how it happened.” It is always like that: “That’s how it happened.” At least seventy-ﬁve times out of a hundred.


The Mother: Only, one is so used to going, moving, and doing things like that that one doesn’t even notice it. But if one begins to observe himself, he sees that it is true. There are very few things which were the result of a clear and willed decision, very few, only what one considers important things, and even here there is a wide margin. The amount of inconscience that’s mixed with the physical consciousness is tremendous, but because we are used to it we do not notice it.  But as soon as you begin to analyse, look, study, you are terriﬁed.


The Mother: How many times you are just faced with a question. You see, you do things automatically, by habit, perhaps sometimes by choice — sometimes, but suddenly you ﬁnd yourself facing an absolutely insigniﬁcant detail: “Should I do this or should I do that?” Simply this. You can take very small things like... you are in the course of eating, and you ask yourself, “Should I continue eating or should I stop?”


The Mother: How many times can you take a motivated and conscious decision? And you suddenly realise, “Why, I know nothing about it”, and “I don’t know; I can do this, I can do that; I can do that and that and that. But what will choose in me?” Unless you have mental constructions. But then if you have mental constructions ruling your life, you don’t even ask yourself these questions, you live like an automaton, in a habitual routine you have made for yourself.


The Mother: But it’s not just once, it happens a thousand times daily.  For example, you are in contact with someone, you have very good feelings for this person; you ﬁnd yourself in a slightly difﬁcult circumstance and want to do the best possible. If you act  spontaneously, there is no problem before you because you act like that, one thing trailing another, and without reﬂecting. And you consciously want to do the best... On what will you base your judgment?


The Mother: What knowledge will allow you to decide: “I must do this or I must do that, I must say this or I must say that or I must not say anything” — all the countless possibilities which come before you? And on what will you base your judgment? If you look at it sincerely, you will ﬁnd out that at each step you do not know.  It is only if you have been in the habit of going within yourself, of referring to the inner psychic consciousness and letting it decide in yourself what you want to do, that you do it with certitude, without hesitation, without a question, nothing.  You know that this is what must be done and there is no question about it; but that’s the only case.


The Mother: Therefore it is only when you let your psychic guide you consciously, constantly, that you are able to do consciously and constantly the right thing; but that’s the only case.  In the other case, if you have made it a habit to study and observe, you have before you all the little things of life which recur constantly. You don’t want to live mechanically by a kind of habit, you want to live consciously, making use of your will. Well, at every minute you are facing a problem which you can’t solve, I mean purely physically. Take a certain difﬁculty you have in your body — what we call a disorder — which is expressed by an uneasiness or an indisposition; it is not an illness, it is an indisposition, it is an uneasiness, there is something that’s not working very well.


The Mother: Then if you don’t have the psychic knowledge which makes you directly do the thing which ought to be done and without any argument, if you want to refer the thing to your mind and to what you consider to be the knowledge you have, then... Take a case which lies in the ﬁeld of medicine, that is, “Should I do this or that, take this medicine or that, change the diet, take this food or that?”... Then you look. If you have never known more than a certain number  of very primary principles, your choice is very easy, but if by chance you have studied a little and know if it be only the different medical systems of treatment... there are the systems of different countries, the different systems of medicines, there are, you know, allopathy, homeopathy, this one and that; so one tells you one thing, another tells you another.


The Mother: You know people who have told you, “Don’t do this, do that”, others who say, “Above all don’t do this, do that”, and so on, and so you ﬁnd yourself facing the problem and ask yourself, “Well, with all that, what do I know myself, what am I going to decide? I know nothing.”  There is only one thing which knows in you, that’s your psychic; makes no mistake, it will immediately, instantaneously tell you, if you obey it without a word and without your ideas and arguments, it will make you do the right thing. But all the rest... you are lost.


The Mother: And for everything: what are you going to study, what are you not going to study, what work are you going to do, what path are you going to take? But then there are all the possibilities which come in, all that you have either studied or met in life, all the suggestions you have received from all sides, which are there, like that, dancing around you. And with what will you decide? I am speaking of people who are absolutely sincere and have no preconceived ideas, prejudices, established rules which they follow in a mechanical routine, without endeavouring to know the truth at all, and for whom their mental construction is the truth. Then it is so simple, one goes straight on his path, bumps his nose against the wall but doesn’t notice it until the nose is smashed.


The Mother: But otherwise it is terribly difﬁcult.  This was what Sri Aurobindo meant when he said that one lived constantly in ignorance and that unless the mind of ignorance is replaced by the mind of light one could not follow the true path, and that this was the indispensable preparation before any integral transformation could take place .  That’s all? (


The Mother: ) You have something to say? No?  Well then, it is very late.   This depends absolutely on the different instances.


The Mother: We said that the central being and the psychic being are the same thing but the part which stays and is in the Divine stays and is in the Divine.  The psychic is the delegate of this Divine in the earth life, for the growth on earth. But the part of the central being which is identiﬁed with the Divine remains identiﬁed with the Divine and does not change. Even during life it is identiﬁed with the Divine, and after death it remains what it was in life, for it this makes no difference. It is the psychic being which has alternations of experience and assimilation, experience and assimilation.


The Mother: But the Jivatman is in the Divine and remains in the Divine, and doesn’t move from there; and it is not progressive. It is in the Divine, it is identiﬁed with the Divine, it remains identiﬁed with the Divine, not separated. It makes no difference to it, whether there is an earthly body or not.  No, for we are told that it is identiﬁed in multiplicity. It is the eternal truth of each being.


The Mother: From one point of view they are identical, from another they are multiple; because the truth of each being is an individual truth, but it is identiﬁed with the  Divine. It is outside the manifestation but it is the origin of the manifestation. It is a unity which is not a uniformity.  It is indeed the same thing that I was explaining last time; each one is different and yet each one is identical. If you approach the Divine from various angles, He seems to you different, because of the angle from which you approach Him.


The Mother: It is the same thing for the Manifested. But in this angle it is all the same, if I may say so, the complete unity of the Divine which one attains. It is the meeting point which is different but beyond the meeting point it is a single totality.  It is very difﬁcult to put it in words. But it is an experience which one can have.


The Mother: It is as though there were innumerable doors or paths by which one could reach the Divine. So when one approaches he does so from a certain angle, he enters by a certain door, but as soon as he has gone right in, he realises that it is a single oneness, it is only the path leading to it or the particular approach which is different.  That’s exactly what I have just said. I am not going to begin all over again.  What?


The Mother: It could very well be his mind. It could very well be the mind because he had uniﬁed his mind around his psychic being. Therefore his mind could continue to exist indeﬁnitely. It partakes of the immortality of the psychic being. It could very well be his mind.


The Mother: That’s what Sri Aurobindo says. He says that the ego survives the physical life, the bodily life; this is perfectly correct. There is a vital ego and a mental ego which can continue to exist for quite a long time. But one can have experiences without the ego being dissolved. Otherwise who would have experiences?


The Mother: How many people are there who have dissolved their ego? There can’t be very many, I think.  When one has an experience it is as though one went through his ego to have his experience, and one can, if he continues, end up by diminishing the hardness — the obscurity and hardness — of the ego, making it more and more plastic and permeable by multiplying the experiences. That’s something one feels very clearly, that one passes through something like a hard shell which prevents him from having the experience; one passes through, has the experience, and when he comes back, he again has the impression of going through a shell which shuts him in, imprisons him for a long time. That’s how it is.


The Mother: But those who have succeeded in entering consciously into contact with their psychic being can keep this contact...  To pass completely to the other side of the ego so that it no longer intervenes, a fairly long time is needed, it doesn’t happen at all immediately. And then you feel that thing which, seen from within, suffocates you; and seen from outside it has an insigniﬁcant consistency, but it prevents the being from feeling integrally the intensity of the experience; it is like a layer which diminishes the intensity of the vibrations and the intensity of the  consciousness, and you feel that. You feel it as something very ﬁxed and very opaque. Many people certainly have experiences but they don’t remember them; that’s because when they pass through this layer of the ego, they forget everything, they lose everything, lose the memory of their experience.


The Mother: But when one has formed the habit, perhaps the memory is a little dimmed, hasn’t the intensity and exactness, but it remains.  Is that all? Nothing else?   Yes.


The Mother: Thought is only conscious of thought in the mental world. So you can become very conscious of the mental atmosphere of Calcutta, of the thought of the person to whom you go, but of nothing else, absolutely nothing that has to do with the vital and physical.  To be conscious of the vital you must go there in the vital, and this is already an exteriorisation which leaves the body at least more than three-fourths in trance. And if you want to see things physically, you must go out in your most material subtle physical and then here you leave your body in a cataleptic state; and these things are not to be done without someone being with you who understands them and can guard you.  But the mental exteriorisation occurs constantly.


The Mother: It puts you in contact only with the mental world. Perhaps if you are very conscious and the person you go to see is very conscious, and if at that moment he has formed opinions or ideas about something  happening in Calcutta, then you can become conscious of the ideas of this person on what is happening — indirectly — but you are not directly conscious of the thing.  When you imagine something, it means that you make a mental formation which may be close to the truth or far from the truth — it also depends upon the quality of your formation. You make a mental formation and there are people who have such a power of formation that they succeed in making what they imagine real.  There are not many of these but there are some.


The Mother: They imagine something and their formation is so well made and so powerful that it succeeds in being realised. These are creators; there are not many of them but there are some.   Ah! What do you mean?


The Mother: What have you just said? Someone who doesn’t exist or someone who is dead? These are two absolutely different things.  Someone who is dead!  If this person has remained in the mental domain, you can ﬁnd him immediately.


The Mother: Naturally if he is no longer in the mental domain, if he is in the psychic domain, to think of him is not enough. You must know how to go into the psychic domain to ﬁnd him. But if he has remained in the mental domain and you think of him, you can ﬁnd him immediately, and not only that, but you can have a mental contact with him and a kind of mental vision of his existence.  The mind has a capacity of vision of its own and it is not the  same vision as with these eyes, but it is a vision, it is a perception in forms. But this is not imagination.


The Mother: It has nothing to do with imagination.  Imagination, for instance, is when you begin to picture to yourself an ideal being to whom you apply all your conceptions, and when you tell yourself, “Why, it should be like this, like that, its form should be like this, its thought like that, its character like that,” when you see all the details and build up the being.  Now, writers do this all the time because when they write a novel, they imagine. There are those who take things from life but there are those who are imaginative, creators; they create a character, a personage and then put him in their book later. This is to imagine.


The Mother: To imagine, for example, a whole concurrence of circumstances, a set of events, this is what I call telling a story to oneself. But it can be put down on paper, and then one becomes a novelist. There are very different kinds of writers. Some imagine everything, some gather all sorts of observations from life and construct their book with them. There are a hundred ways of writing a book.


The Mother: But indeed some writers imagine everything from beginning to end. It all comes out of their head and they construct even their whole story without any support in things physically observed. This truly is imagination. But as I say, if they are very powerful and have a considerable capacity for creation, it is possible that one day or other there will be a physical human being who realises their creation. This too is true.


The Mother: What do you suppose imagination is, eh? Have you never imagined anything, you?  And what happens?  You mean that you imagine something and it happens like that, eh? Or it is in a dream...


The Mother: If one knows how to use it, as I said, one can create for oneself his own inner and outer life; one can build his own existence with his imagination, if one knows how to use it and has a power. In fact it is an elementary way of creating, of forming things in the world. I have always felt that if one didn’t have the capacity of imagination he would not make any progress. Your imagination always goes ahead of your life. When you think of yourself, usually you imagine what you want to be, don’t you, and this goes ahead, then you follow, then it continues to go ahead and you follow.


The Mother: Imagination opens for you the path of realisation. People who are not imaginative — it is very difﬁcult to make them move; they see just what is there before their nose, they feel just what they are moment by moment and they cannot go forward because they are clamped by the immediate thing. It depends a good deal on what one calls imagination. However...  A lot.


The Mother: Otherwise they would never discover anything. In fact, what is called imagination is a capacity to project oneself outside realised things and towards things realisable, and then to draw them by the projection. One can obviously have progressive and regressive imaginations. There are people who always imagine all the catastrophes possible, and unfortunately they also have the power of making them come. It’s like the antennae going into a world that’s not yet realised, catching something there and drawing it here.


The Mother: Then naturally it is an addition to the earth atmosphere and these things tend towards manifestation. It is an instrument which can be disciplined, can be used at will; one can discipline it, direct it, orientate it. It is one of the faculties one can develop in himself and render serviceable, that is, use it for deﬁnite purposes.   Certainly if you succeed in imagining the Divine you have the contact, and you can have the contact with what you imagine, in any case. In fact it is absolutely impossible to imagine something which doesn’t exist somewhere.


The Mother: You cannot imagine anything at all which doesn’t exist somewhere. It is possible that it doesn’t exist on the earth, it is possible that it’s elsewhere, but it is impossible for you to imagine something which is not already contained in principle in the universe; otherwise it could not occur.   In the created universe? Yes.


The Mother: The universe is progressive; we said that constantly things manifest, more and more. But for your imagination to be able to go and seek beyond the manifestation something which will be manifested, well, it may happen, in fact it does — I was going to tell you that it is in this way that some beings can cause considerable progress to be made in the world, because they have the capacity of imagining something that’s not yet manifested. But there are not many. One must ﬁrst be capable of going beyond the manifested universe to be able to imagine something which is not there. There are already many things which can be imagined.


The Mother: What is our terrestrial world in the universe? A very small thing. Simply to have the capacity of imagining something which does not exist in the terrestrial manifestation is already very difﬁcult, very difﬁcult. For how many billions of years hasn’t it existed, this little earth? And there have been no two identical things.


The Mother: That’s much. It is very difﬁcult to go out from the earth atmosphere with one’s mind; one can, but it is very difﬁcult. And then if one wants to go out, not only from the earth atmosphere but from the universal life!   To be able simply to enter into contact with the life of the earth in its totality from the formation of the earth until now, what can this mean?


The Mother: And then to go beyond this and enter into  contact with universal life from its beginnings up to now... and then again to be able to bring something new into the universe, one must go still farther beyond.  Not easy!  That’s all?  () Convinced?   Now then!


The Mother: Universal. Cosmic is the synonym of universal.  Cosmic spirit? It is the cosmic spirit, it is the universal spirit, it is the spirit that’s in the whole universe. There is a universe.


The Mother: You know what the universe is? Well, this universe has a spirit, and this spirit is the cosmic spirit; this universe has a consciousness and its consciousness is the cosmic, universal consciousness.  One may very well imagine that the universe is only an entity in something which is still vaster, as the individual is only an entity in a much vaster totality. Now, each unit has its consciousness and its own spirit which contains all the others, as a group consciousness is made up of all the individual consciousnesses which constitute it and as a national consciousness is made up of all the individual consciousnesses which constitute it, and something more. The individual is only an element in the whole, even as the earth is a part of the solar system, and the solar system makes a part of all the systems of the universe.


The Mother: So just as there is an individual consciousness, there is a group consciousness and a consciousness of the system, a universal consciousness which is made up of the set of all the consciousnesses composing it,  plus something, something — something more subtle. Just like you: you have lots of cells in your body; each cell has its own consciousness and you have a consciousness which is the consciousness of your total individuality, though made up of all these small cellular consciousnesses.  Get rid of the ignorance, enter the knowledge.  First of all you must know what I have just told you, that you are a part of the whole, that this whole is a part of a greater whole, and that this greater whole is a part of a still greater whole, right up to its forming one single totality. Once you know that, you begin to become aware that in reality there cannot be any separation between you and something greater than you of which you are a part.


The Mother: This is the beginning. Now, you must come to the point not only of thinking this but of feeling it and even living it, and then the wall of ignorance tumbles: one feels this unity everywhere and realises that he is only a more or less fragmentary part of a whole much vaster than he, which is the universe. Then one begins to have a more universal consciousness.   (


The Mother: )  That’s all?  You don’t know? What do you think, that it is you who possess the Divine or the Divine who possesses you?   It means that the Divine enters into you and governs you, becomes the master of your consciousness and movements.


The Mother: This indeed is called being possessed by the Divine.  Why did they separate? ( )  Probably they had no moral notions! ()


The Mother: ()  It is probable that if they had not separated, there would have been no universe as we have it. It was perhaps a necessity. But what you are asking is how it was not foreseen that it would happen in this way. Perhaps it was foreseen.


The Mother: It could have turned out well, it turned out badly. There! There are accidents.  You know, so long as you want to apply your mental, moral notions to the creation of the universe, you will never understand anything about it, never. Because from all sides and in all ways it goes beyond these conceptions — conceptions of good and evil, and these things.


The Mother: All the mental, moral conceptions we have cannot explain the universe. And for this part of ourselves which indeed lives in a total ignorance, all that can be said is: “Things are like that because they are like that”, one can’t explain them, because the explanations one gives are those of ignorance and explain nothing at all.  The mind explains one thing by another, this other which needs to be explained is explained by another still, and that other which needs explanation is explained by another, and if you continue in this way you can go all round the universe and return to the starting-point without having explained anything  at all. ( )


The Mother: So you have to pierce a hole, rise in the air and see things in another way. Then like that one can begin to understand.  How to do it? ()  Aspiration is like an arrow, like this (). So you aspire, want earnestly to understand, know, enter into the truth.


The Mother: Yes? And then with that aspiration you do this (). Your aspiration rises, rises, rises, rises straight up, very strong and then it strikes against a kind of... how to put it?... lid which is there, hard like iron and extremely thick, and it does not pass through. And then you say, “See, what’s the use of aspiring? It brings nothing at all.


The Mother: I meet with something hard and cannot pass!” But you know about the drop of water which falls on the rock, it ends up by making a chasm: it cuts the rock from top to bottom. Your aspiration is a drop of water which, instead of falling, rises. So, by dint of rising, it beats, beats, beats, and one day it makes a hole, by dint of rising; and when it makes the hole suddenly it springs out from this lid and enters an immensity of light, and you say, “Ah, now I understand.”  It’s like that.


The Mother: So one must be very persistent, very stubborn and have an aspiration which rises straight upwards, that is, which does not go roaming around here and there, seeking all kinds of things.  Only this: to understand, understand, understand, to learn to know, to be.  When one reaches the very top, there is nothing more to understand, nothing more to learn, one, and it’s when one that one understands and knows.   It’s the like that knows the like. So it is only because you carry the thing in yourself that you discover it.


The Mother: Because you understand very well that my story is an image, don’t you, that all this is an image; it corresponds quite well with something, but it’s an image all the same, because one can ﬁnd it as well within as above, you see. It’s only because we have physical notions about the different material planes, material dimensions; because when we understand, it is in another order of dimensions, absolutely. Now this other dimensional order does not correspond to space.  But you cannot understand and be something unless it is in you in some way or other or you are in it — it’s the same thing, isn’t it? However, to make you understand more easily, I can say it’s because it is in you, because it’s a part of your consciousness, somewhere, otherwise you could never become aware of it.


The Mother: If one did not carry the Divine within oneself, in the essence of one’s being, one could never become aware of the Divine; it would be an impossible venture. And then if you reverse the problem, the moment you conceive and feel in some way or other, or even, to begin with, admit that the Divine is in you, as well as you are in the Divine, then already this opens the door to realisation, just a little, not much — slightly ajar. Then if later the aspiration comes, the intense need to know and to be, then that intense need widens the opening until one can creep in. Then when one has crept in, one becomes aware of what he is. And that’s exactly what Sri Aurobindo says, that one has forgotten, that due to this separation of Sat, Chit, Ananda, forgetfulness comes, forgetfulness of what one is; one thinks oneself to be somebody, you see, anyone at all, a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, a dog, a horse, anything at all, a stone, the sea, the sun; one believes oneself to be all this, instead of thinking oneself the One Divine — because, in fact, if one had continued thinking oneself the One Divine, there would have been no universe at all.


The Mother: That was what I wanted to tell him (), that this phenomenon of separation seems to be indispensable  for a universe to be there, otherwise it would always have remained as it was. But if we re-establish the unity, after having made it pass through this curve, you see, if we re-establish the unity, having beneﬁted from the multiplicity, the division, then we have a unity of a higher quality, a unity which knows itself instead of the unity which doesn’t have to know itself, for there’s nothing which may know the other. When the Oneness is absolute, who can know the Oneness? We must at least be able to have an image, an appearance of something which is not it in order to understand what it is. I believe that this is the secret of the universe.


The Mother: Perhaps the Divine wanted really to know Himself, so He threw Himself out and then looked at Himself, and now He wants to enjoy this possibility of being Himself with the full knowledge of Himself. This becomes much more interesting.  So there we are. Another question?


The Mother: Yes.  That means? What exactly do you want to say? Imagining that the desire is realised and in this way help its realisation?  Certainly, quite certainly.


The Mother: Only usually, yes, almost totally what people don’t have at their disposal is the time it takes. But for instance, if you have a very  powerful imagination and build up the realisation of your desire, build it up well with all its details and everything, like an admirably made formation existing in itself, totally, you see... well, you may be sure that if you live long enough the thing will be realised. It can be realised the next day, it can be realised the next minute, it can take years, it can take centuries. But it is sure to be realised. And then, if to this imaginative power you add a kind of creative vital strength, you make a very living force of it; and as all living forces tend towards realisation, it will put a pressure upon terrestrial events in order to be able to realise itself sooner, and it is realised.


The Mother: Only, as I said, there are two things. First, as regards desires, personal circumstances, one is not very... persistent or very steady, and after some time what interested you very strongly doesn’t interest you any longer. You think of something else, have another desire, and make another formation. But now the ﬁrst thing one imagined is very well formed; after following its curve in space it is realised. But by then the person has started another construction because for some reason or other the thing doesn’t interest him any more, and he is face to face with the realisation of his ﬁrst desire, while having already embarked upon the second, the third or the fourth.


The Mother: So he is absolutely annoyed: “But why, I don’t want this any longer, why does it come?” without his being conscious that quite simply it is the result of a previous deed. If, however, instead of being desires they are aspirations for spiritual things and one continues his line with a regular progress, then one is absolutely sure to obtain one day what he has imagined. The day may be slightly far-off if there are many obstacles on the path, for example if the formation that you have made is still very alien to the state of the earth atmosphere; well, it takes some time to prepare the conditions for its advent. But if it is something which has already been realised several times on earth and does not imply too categorical a transformation, you may have it quite quickly, provided that you follow the same line persistently. And if you  add to this the ardour of a faith and trust in the divine Grace and that kind of self-giving to the Grace which makes you expect everything from It, then it can become tremendous; you can see things being realised more and more, and the most surprising ones can be realised one after another.


The Mother: But for this there are conditions to be fulﬁlled.  One must have a great purity and a great intensity in one’s self-giving, and that absolute trust in the supreme wisdom of the divine Grace, that It knows better than we do what is good for us, and all that. Then if one offers one’s aspiration to It, truly gives it with enough intensity, the results are marvellous. But one must know how to see them, for when things are realised most people ﬁnd it absolutely natural, they don’t even see why and how it has happened, and they tell themselves, “Yes, naturally it had to be like that.” So they lose the joy of... the joy of gratitude, because, in the last analysis, if one can be ﬁlled with gratitude and thanksgiving for the divine Grace, it puts the ﬁnishing touch, and at each step one comes to see that things are exactly what they had to be and the best that could be.


The Mother: There.  And so Sat-Chit-Ananda begins to come together, to form its unity once more.  There we are, my children. That’s all?  Finished.


The Mother: Oh! It’s very much in fashion in the West, my child. All those who are tired or disgusted with the God taught by the Chaldean religions, and especially by the Christian religion — a single God, jealous, severe, despotic and so much in the image of man that one wonders if it is not a demiurge as Anatole France said — these people when they want to lead a spiritual life no longer want the personal God, because they are too frightened lest the personal God resemble the one they have been taught about; they want an impersonal Godhead, something that doesn’t  resemble — or as little as possible — the human being; that’s what they want.  But Sri Aurobindo says — something he has always said — that there are the godheads of the Overmind who indeed are very similar — we have said this several times — very similar to human beings, inﬁnitely greater and more powerful but with resemblances which are a little too striking.


The Mother: Beyond these there is the impersonal Godhead, the impersonal Divine; but beyond the impersonal Divine there is the Divine who is the Person himself; and we must go through the Impersonal to reach the Supreme Divine who is beyond.  Only it is good, as I said, for those who have been put by education into contact with too individual, too personal a God, to seek the impersonal Divine, because this liberates them from many superstitions. After that if they are capable they will go farther and have once again a personal contact with a Divine who indeed is beyond all these other godheads.  So that’s it.   By concentrating more and more totally and completely on the Divine.


The Mother: If you aspire with all your ardour, if you want to receive only the divine inﬂuence, if all the time you pull back towards yourself what is taken, caught by other inﬂuences and with your will put it under the divine inﬂuence, you succeed in doing it.  It’s a work that can’t be done in a day, in a minute; you must be vigilant for a very long time, for years; but one can succeed.  First of all you must will it.  For all things, ﬁrst you must understand, will, and then begin to practise — begin by just a very little. When you catch yourself in the act of doing something because someone else wanted it or because you are not very sure of what you want to do and are in the habit of doing what this one or that one or tradition or customs make you do — because, among the inﬂuences under which you live, there are collective suggestions, social traditions, many!...


The Mother: Social habits are something terrible; your consciousness is stuffed with them from the time you are quite small; when a baby you are already told: “This should be done, that should not be done, you must do this in this way, you must not do it in that way”, and all that; these are ideas which usually parents or teachers have received in the same way when they were very young and to which they are accustomed and submit by habit; these are the most dangerous inﬂuences because they are subtle, they are not expressed outwardly by words; your head was stuffed with them and your feelings and reactions, when you were very small, and it is only later, much later, when you begin to reﬂect and try to know what the truth is... as soon as you understand that there is something which must be put above all the rest, that there is something which can truly teach you to live, which must form your character, rule your movements... when you understand that, you can look at yourself doing, objectivise  yourself, laugh a little at all those multiple small bondages of habit, traditions, the education you have received, and then put the light, consciousness, aspiration for surrender to the Divine on these things, and try to receive the divine inspiration to do things as it’s necessary, not according to habits, not according to one’s vital impulses, not according to all the vital impulses and personal wills which one receives from others and which push him to do things which perhaps he would not have done without all that.  One must observe all these things, look at them attentively and put them one after another in front of the divine Truth as one can receive it — it is progressive, one receives it purer and purer, stronger and stronger, more and more clear-sightedly — put all these things before it and with an absolute sincerity will that may guide you and nothing else. You do this once, a hundred times, a thousand times, millions of times and after years of sustained effort you can gradually become aware that at last you are a free being — because this is what’s remarkable: that when one is perfectly surrendered to the Divine one is perfectly free, and the absolute condition for freedom, to belong to the Divine alone; you are free from the whole world because you belong only to Him. And this surrender is the supreme liberation, you are also free from your little personal ego and of all things this is the most difﬁcult — and the happiest too, the only thing that can give you a constant peace, an uninterrupted joy and the feeling of an freedom from all that afﬂicts you, dwarfs, diminishes, impoverishes you, and from all that can create the least anxiety in you, the least fear.


The Mother: You are no longer afraid of anything, you no longer fear anything, you are the supreme master of your destiny because it is the Divine who wills in you and guides everything. But this does not happen overnight: a little time and a of ardour in the will, not fearing to make any effort and not losing heart when one doesn’t succeed, knowing that the victory is certain and that one must last out until it comes. There you are.   It means exactly this: that the more you give yourself the more you have the experience — it is not just a feeling or impression or sensation, it is a total experience — that the more you give yourself to the Divine the more He is with you, totally, constantly, at every minute, in all your thoughts, all your needs, and that there’s no aspiration which does not receive an immediate answer; and you have the sense of a complete, constant intimacy, of a total nearness. It is as though you carried... as though the Divine were all the time with you; you walk and He walks with you, you sleep and He sleeps with you, you eat and He eats with you, you think and He thinks with you, you love and He is the love you have.


The Mother: But for this one must give himself entirely, totally, exclusively, reserve nothing, keep nothing for himself and not keep back anything, not disperse anything also: the least little thing in your being which is not given to the Divine is a waste; it is the wasting of your joy, something that lessens your happiness by that much, and all that you don’t give to the Divine is as though you were holding it in the way of the possibility of the Divine’s giving Himself to you. You don’t feel Him close to yourself, constantly with you, because you don’t belong to Him, because you belong to hundreds of other things and people; in your thought, your action, your feelings, impulses... there are millions of things which you do not give Him, and that is why you don’t feel Him always with you, because all these things are so many screens and walls between Him and you. But if you give Him everything, if you keep back nothing, He will be constantly and totally with you in all that you do, in all that you think, all that you feel, always, at each moment. But for this you must give yourself absolutely, keep back nothing; each little thing that you hold back is a stone you put down to build up a wall between the Divine and yourself.


The Mother: And then later you complain: “Oh, I don’t feel Him!” What would be surprising is that you could feel Him.   That’s all?  It’s what is called in some philosophies and religions the Formless; something that’s beyond all form, even the forms of thought, you see, not necessarily physical forms: forms of thought, forms of movement. It is the conception of something which is beyond not only what can be thought or conceived or seen even with the most subtle eyes, but all that has any kind of perceptible form whatever, even vibrations more subtle than those which inﬁnitely overpass all human perceptions, even in the highest states of being, something which is beyond all manifestation of any order whatever — usually that’s how we deﬁne the impersonal God.


The Mother: He has nothing, none of the qualities we can conceive of, He is beyond all qualiﬁcation. It is obviously the quest of something which is the opposite of the creation, and that is why some religions have introduced the idea of what they call Nirvana, that is, of something which is nothing; it is the same quest, the same attempt to ﬁnd something which would be the opposite of all that we can conceive. So ﬁnally we deﬁne It, because how can we speak of It? But in experience one tries to go beyond all that belongs to the manifested world, and that is what we call the impersonal Divine.  Well, it happens — and this is very interesting — that there is a region like that, a region which... how to put it?... which is the negation of all that exists.


The Mother: Behind all the planes of being, even behind the physical, there is a Nirvana. We use the word Nirvana because it is easier, but we can say, “There is an impersonal Divine behind the physical, behind the mind, behind the vital, behind all the regions of being; behind, beyond.” (We are obliged to express ourselves in some sort of way.) It is not necessarily more subtle, it’s something else, something absolutely different; that is, in a meditation, for example, if you meditate on Nirvana you can remain in a region of your mind and by a certain  concentration produce a kind of reversal of your consciousness and ﬁnd yourself suddenly in something which is Nirvana, nonexistence; and yet in the ascent of your consciousness you have not gone beyond the mind.  One can have a little understanding of these things if one knows the multiplicity of dimensions, if one has understood this principle.


The Mother: First of all you are taught the fourth dimension. If you have understood that principle, of the dimensions, you can understand this. For example, as I said, you don’t need to exteriorise yourself to go from one plane to another, when going to the most subtle planes to pass from the last most subtle plane to what we call Nirvana — to express it somehow. It is not necessary.  You can, through a kind of interiorisation and by passing into another dimension or other dimensions...


The Mother: you can ﬁnd in any domain whatever of your being this non-existence. And truly, one can understand a little bit of this without experiencing it. It is very difﬁcult, but still, even without the experience one can understand just a little, if one understands this, this principle of the inner dimensions.  ( )


The Mother: It can be put like this (you see, it’s one way of saying it) that you carry within yourself both existence and non-existence at the same time, the personal and the impersonal, and... yes... the manifest and unmanifest... the ﬁnite and the inﬁnite... time and eternity. And all that is in this tiny little body.  There are people who go beyond — even mentally, you see... their mental atmosphere goes beyond their body, even their vital atmosphere goes beyond their body — there are people whose consciousness is vast enough to extend over continents and even over other earths and other worlds, but this is a spatial concept. Yet by an interiorisation in other dimensions, the fourth and more, you can ﬁnd all this in yourself, in one point... the inﬁnite.


The Mother: Oh, no! That’s the indeﬁnite, not the inﬁnite.  The inﬁnite is the opposite of the ﬁnite. One can contain in himself the most ﬁnite ﬁnite and the most inﬁnite inﬁnite; in fact one does contain them, perhaps even in each one of the cells of the brain.


The Mother: ( )  (Long silence) Yes, there is a difference.  ()


The Mother: There would not be a difference, perhaps, if the goal to be reached was the impersonal Divine and if one wanted to be identiﬁed and united with the impersonal Divine and dissolve in that. I think that in this case there wouldn’t be any difference. But if the aspiration is to realise what is beyond, we said, what Sri Aurobindo has called the supramental Reality, then here there’s a difference, not only a difference in the path, for that’s quite evident (it depends on different temperaments, besides), but if someone can truly know what surrender is and total trust, then it is easier, three-fourths of the worry and difﬁculties are over.  Now it is true that it can be said that one may ﬁnd a very special difﬁculty in this surrender. This is true, that’s why I said that it depends absolutely on the temperament.


The Mother: But it’s not only that. If you like it may be compared to the difference between  something linear which terminates in a point and a spherical path which terminates in a totality; a totality, that is, nothing would be excluded from the totality. Each one, individually, can reach the Origin and the utmost of his being; the origin and the utmost of his being are one with the Eternal, Inﬁnite and Supreme. Therefore, if you reach this origin, you reach the Supreme. But you reach there by a line (don’t take my words for an adequate description, you know, it’s only to make myself understood).


The Mother: It is a linear realisation which ends in a point, and this point is united with the Supreme — your utmost possibility.  By the other path it is a realisation which may be called spherical, because that gives best the idea of something containing all, and the realisation is no longer a point but a totality from which nothing is excluded.  I can’t speak of the “whole” and the “part”, because there’s no division any longer. It’s not like that, it’s not that. But it is the quality of the approach, so to say, which is different.


The Mother: It is like saying that a perfect identiﬁcation with one drop of water would make you know what the ocean is and what a perfect identiﬁcation not only with the ocean but with all possible oceans.  And yet with a perfect identiﬁcation with one drop of water one could know the ocean in its essence, and in the other way one could know the ocean not only in its essence but in its totality.   Something like that... I am trying to express it...


The Mother: It is very difﬁcult but it’s like that, there is something, there is a difference... It could be said that all that was individualised preserves at once the virtue of individuality and what might be called in a certain sense the limitations necessary to this individuality, when one relies only on his personal strength. In the other case one can beneﬁt by the virtues of individuality without being under its limitations. This is almost philosophy, so it’s no longer very clear. But () that’s all I can say.


The Mother: Nothing else? No?  I think that’s enough!   He has said everything, I have nothing to add.  Yes, very different.


The Mother: Only it is always said: “Concentrate here, on the solar plexus, the centre, here, because it’s here that one can most easily ﬁnd the psychic, enter into contact with the psychic.  That’s why. That’s what it means.  Above the head, above the mind. What Sri Aurobindo means is: Unless one has gone beyond the mind and into altogether higher regions, so long as one remains in the human consciousness, the mental, vital, physical consciousness, one must concentrate in order to ﬁnd the psychic.


The Mother: It is only if you have soared up out of the human consciousness and entered consciously the higher regions above the mind, far above the mind, that you no longer need to concentrate in the psychic because you will naturally ﬁnd it.  But to rise above the mental consciousness, not into a higher speculative mind, but far beyond all mental movements is not an easy thing. To begin with, the mind must be absolutely silent and quiet, otherwise one can’t do it. It is only when the mind enters into a complete silence, a perfect quietude, that it becomes just a mirror for reﬂecting what is above; then one can rise above.  But so long as goes on, there’s no hope.


The Mother: Yet you must not mistake the feelings for the psychic, you understand! — these two are absolutely different things. People always think that when they have emotions, feelings, they are entering the psychic. These things have nothing to do with the psychic, they are purely vital. They are the most subtle part of the vital, if you like, but they are vital.


The Mother: It’s not through the feelings that one goes to the psychic, it is through a very intense aspiration and a self-detachment.  To dry up the heart! People say that your heart is dried up when you no longer have any vital sentimentality. That’s what they call having a dried up heart, when one no longer has any vital sentimentality. A really dried up heart is a being who... who would be incapable of any goodness, any generosity, any goodwill; but happily this is very rare.


The Mother: There are some rare individuals, born without a psychic being who are wicked; but they are very rare. For everyone there is always hope; even those who imagine that they are very strong in being wicked, even for them, there is a hope; it can awaken suddenly. But that’s not what people think. What people think is what I tell you; it’s when you have no sentimental weakness and vital emotion that people tell you, “You have a dried up heart.” But that’s their opinion, it’s not a truth.


The Mother: A dried up heart would be someone incapable of having any compassion; it is very rare. Even in people who had the reputation of being the most wicked there was always a small corner of their being open to compassion. At times it was ridiculously small, but it was there.  The consciousness, not the mind, the consciousness!   I don’t say think in the heart, I say concentrate, concentrate the energy, concentrate the consciousness, concentrate the aspiration, concentrate the will.


The Mother: One can have an extremely intense concentration without a single thought, and in fact it is usually much more intense when one doesn’t think.   ( ) It’s one of the most indispensable things to do if one wants to succeed in having self-control and even a limited selfknowledge: to be able to localise one’s consciousness and move it about in the different parts of one’s being, in such a way as to distinguish between one’s consciousness and one’s thought, feelings, impulses, become aware of what the consciousness is in itself.


The Mother: And in this way one can learn how to shift it: one can put one’s consciousness in the body, put it in the vital, put it in the psychic (that’s the best place to put it in); one can put one’s consciousness in the mind, can raise it above the mind, and with one’s consciousness one can go into all the regions of the universe.   But ﬁrst of all one must know what one’s consciousness is, that is, become conscious of one’s consciousness, localise it.


The Mother: And for this there are many exercises. But one of them is very well known, it is to observe oneself and watch oneself living, and then see whether it is really the body which is the consciousness of the being, what one calls “myself”; and then when one has realised that it is not at all the body, that the body expresses something else, then one searches in his impulses, emotions, to see whether it’s that, and again one ﬁnds out that it is not that; and then one seeks in his thoughts, whether the thought is truly himself, what he calls “myself”, and at the end of a very short time one becomes aware: “No, I am thinking, therefore ‘myself’ is different from my thoughts.” And so, by progressive eliminations one succeeds in entering into contact with something, something which gives you the impression of being — “Yes, that’s ‘myself’.  And this something I can move around, I can move it from my body to my vital, to my mind, I can even, if I am very... how to put it?... very practised in moving it, I can move it into other people,  and it’s in this way that I can identify myself with things and  people.


The Mother: I can with the help of my aspiration make it come out of my human form, rise above towards regions which are no longer this little body at all and what it contains.” And so one begins to understand what one’s consciousness is; and it’s after that that one can say, “Good, I shall unite my consciousness with my psychic being and shall leave it there, so that it may be in harmony with the Divine and be able to surrender entirely to the Divine.”  Or else, “If by this exercise of rising above my faculties of thinking and my intellect I can enter a region of pure light, pure knowledge... ” then one can put his consciousness there and live like that, in a luminous splendour which is above the physical form.  But ﬁrst this consciousness must be mobile, and one must know how to distinguish it from the other parts of the being which in fact are its instruments, its modes of expression. The consciousness must make use of these things, and not you mistake these things for the consciousness.


The Mother: You put the consciousness in these things, so you become conscious of your body, conscious of your vital, conscious of your mind, conscious of all your activities through your will for identiﬁcation; but for this, ﬁrst your consciousness must not be completely entangled, mingled, joined, so to say, with all these things; it must not take them for itself, must not be deceived.  When one thinks of himself (obviously out of millions of men perhaps there are not ten who do otherwise) he thinks “Myself... that’s my body, that’s what I call ‘myself’, what’s like this. And so, I am like that; and then my neighbour, he also is the body. When I speak of another person, I speak of his body.”


The Mother: And so, as long as one is in this state he is the plaything of all possible movements and has no self-control.  The body is the last instrument and yet it’s this which one calls “myself” most of the time, unless one has begun to reﬂect.  Questions? No questions?   Yes, that’s a very frequent state: dispersed in all one’s thoughts, in all one’s desires, all one’s activities; that makes lots and lots of dispersion.


The Mother: And so one is pulled from all sides and has no coordination in his life.   Periods of assimilation? Dispersed?  Not necessarily!


The Mother: Not necessarily. There are people who, on the contrary, are extremely concentrated during periods of assimilation, shut up in themselves... Not necessarily! Usually one is more dispersed in periods of activity — not in periods of aspiration — I am speaking of ordinary activity.  One is always identiﬁed more or less with all that one does and all the things with which one is in contact.


The Mother: The ordinary state of people is to be in everything that they do, all that they see, all whom they frequently meet. They are like that.  There is something in them which in fact is very vague and very inconsistent, and which moves around everywhere. And if they simply want to know a little what they are, they are obliged to pull back towards them a heap of things which are scattered everywhere. There is a kind of unconscious ﬂuidity between people, I have told you this I don’t know how many times; it produces a mixture, all that, as soon as it is no longer altogether material...


The Mother: It’s because you have a skin that you don’t enter into one another like that; otherwise even the subtle physical, you see... like a kind of almost perceptible vapour which goes out from bodies, which is the subtle physical, it intermingles terribly, and it produces all kinds of reactions, constantly, of one person upon another.  One may without knowing why, without having the least idea of the cause, pass precisely from a harmony of good health to a disequilibrium and a great uneasiness! One doesn’t know why, there is no outer cause, suddenly it happens; one may have been peaceful, content, in at least a pleasant, tolerable condition,  then all of a sudden to become furious, discontented, uneasy!  One doesn’t know why, there is no reason. One may have been full of joy, gaiety, enthusiasm, and then, without any apparent reason, one is sad, morose, depressed, discouraged!


The Mother: It happens sometimes that one is in a state of depression, and then one passes on somewhere and everything is lit up: a light, a joy — why, one becomes suddenly optimistic! This of course is rare — it can also happen, it is the same thing, it is also contagious; but still one risks much more catching destructive rather than constructive things.  There are very few people who carry with them an atmosphere which irradiates joy, peace, conﬁdence; it is very rare. But these are truly benefactors of humanity. They don’t need to open their mouth.


The Mother: () That’s all?  The most indispensable thing in every case is receptivity.   At the Balcony, for example. When I come on the Balcony I make a special concentration, you notice that I look at everybody, don’t you; I look, see, pass my eyes over every one, I know all who are there, and where they are, and I give each one exactly what he needs; I see his condition and give him what is necessary.


The Mother: It can go fast, because otherwise I would keep you  there for half an hour, but I do it, that’s what I do. That’s the only reason why I come out, because otherwise I carry you in my consciousness. I carry you in my consciousness always, without seeing you, I do what is necessary. But here it is a moment when I can do it by touching the physical directly, you see; otherwise it is through the mind that it acts, the mind or the vital. But here I touch the physical directly through the sight, the contact of sight; and that’s what I do — each time.


The Mother: So if each one who comes, comes with a kind of trust, of inner opening, and is ready to receive what is given, and naturally is not dispersed... there are people there who pass their time looking at what is happening, what the others are doing; and in this way they don’t have much chance to receive anything very much... but if one comes concentrated on what he can receive and is as quiet as possible, and as though he were open to receive something, as though he were opening his consciousness, like this () to receive something — if one has a particular difﬁculty or problem, one can put it in an aspiration, but it is not very necessary, because usually between what people think about themselves and the condition in which they are, there is always a little difference, in the sense that it’s not quite the thing; their way of feeling or seeing the thing creates a little deformation, so I am obliged to cross over their deformation; whereas if they don’t think about anything, if they are simply like this (), open and awaiting the Force — I go straight in and what has to be done I do.


The Mother: And that’s the moment when I know exactly, you see, I do this (), quite slowly — from above I see, — exactly the condition in which each one is. That’s the morning’s work.  The “Concentration” is something absolutely different. I try, ﬁrst, to make the atmosphere as calm, quiet, uniﬁed as possible, as though I were spreading the consciousness out wide, like this (); and then from far above I bring down the Force as much as I can and put it upon you as strongly as I can. So this depends exclusively on whether one is quite tranquil and  well concentrated; here one must be concentrated, one must not be dispersed, one must be concentrated, but very... how to put it?...


The Mother: plain, very horizontal. Like this (). Then the Force puts a pressure. And it’s above all for unifying, penetrating the whole and endeavouring to make of it something cohesive which can express collectively the Force from above.  In the morning it is an individual work, in the evening it is a collective work.


The Mother: But naturally, within that, each one can feel individually, but you see, it is a work of uniﬁcation which I do in the evening. Each one receives according to his receptivity and the state in which he is.  That, the March Past, it is... it is more a physical action — preparing oneself for the physical action. It is more a way of opening oneself to the energy, the universal energy, to prepare for the action.


The Mother: It is a contact with the energy, the universal energy which is there, it is to help the body to participate in the work.  At that moment it is something very physical. This is truly the basis of physical culture: to prepare the body for the action and the receptivity of energies to accomplish the work. And also the Marching, even when I am not there. But the March Past is for stimulating the receptivity of the body to the energies for realisation.


The Mother: It is based upon something which is expressed in all kinds of ways; but it is a kind of admiration... how to put it?... a spontaneous and also charming admiration for heroism, which is in the most material physical consciousness.  And this is a tremendous power for overcoming tamas and physical inertia. Besides it is upon this that all the ﬁghting capacities of armies in the wars are founded. If human beings did not have this, well, one could never make them go to ﬁght one another, stupidly, for things which they don’t even know.


The Mother: And it is because this is there in the being that these great masses of men can be utilised, employed and put in motion.   There were examples of this, absolutely marvellous ones, in the First World War, which was much harder for the individual than the Second. It was a terrible war because men had dug trenches and were obliged to lie sunk in the earth like worms, under the perpetual danger of a bombardment against which they could do nothing but protect themselves as well as possible; and they remained at times shut in there for days. Sometimes it happened that they were shut in for more than ﬁfteen days in one trench, for there was no means of changing them; that is, it was a mole’s life under a perpetual danger, and with nothing to do about it. Of all things it was the most horrible.


The Mother: It was a horrible war. Well, there were troops which had been left like that, for nothing more could be done because of the bombardments and all that, they could not be relieved any more. It was called “relieving”, relieving the troops, bringing new troops and taking away the others to give them rest. There were some who remained in this way for days. There were some who remained ten days, twelve days.


The Mother: There was cause enough to go mad, for anyone at all. Well, among these people there were some who related their life, related what happened.  I have read books about this, not novels, reports noted from day to day of what was happening. There is one — by the way it is a great writer who wrote his memories of the War, and he related that they had held on like that under the bombardment for ten days. (Naturally there were many who were ﬁnished off there.)


The Mother: And then they were made to come back behind and were replaced by others, new ones arrived, the old ones returned.  And naturally when they returned — you see, they had eaten poorly, had slept badly, had lived in dark holes, indeed it was a dreadful life — when they had come back, some of them could not even take off their shoes any more because the feet were so swollen inside that they couldn’t pull them off. These are unthinkable physical horrors. Well, these people (you see, at that time mechanical transports were not as common as in this last war), so they came back on foot, like that, broken, half-dead.   They had stuck.


The Mother: That was one of the most beautiful things in the war from the point of view of courage: because they had held on, the enemy could not take the trenches and was not able to advance.  Naturally the news spread and then they came to a village and all the people of the village came out to receive them and lined the road with ﬂowers and shouts of enthusiasm. All those men who could no longer even drag themselves along, you see, who were like this (), suddenly all of them were seen drawing themselves up erect, holding up their heads, ﬁlled with energy, and all together they began to sing and went through the whole village singing. It seemed like a resurrection.  Well, it is about this kind of thing I am speaking.


The Mother: It is something so beautiful, which is in the most material physical consciousness! You see, all of a sudden, they had the feeling that they were heroes, that they had done something heroic, and so they didn’t want to look like people completely ﬂattened out, no longer good for anything. “We are ready to go back to the ﬁght if necessary!” Like that. And they went by in this way.


The Mother: It seems it was marvellous; I am sure of it, that it was marvellous.  Well, that’s what you are developing with the March Past now.  There we are.   It is to express the Divine. That is the very reason of existence and life, its truth and its sole true activity.


The Mother: Nothing is impossible in principle. But if one refuses to do what is necessary, obviously one cannot succeed.  In the material world there are conditions, otherwise it would not be what it is. If there were no conditions and processes, everything could be transformed and done miraculously.  But evidently it is not in this way that it was decided, because things don’t happen miraculously — in any case, not miracles as the human mind conceives of them, that is, constant arbitrary decisions.


The Mother: It is obvious that in the world there are no arbitrary decisions.  Sri Aurobindo says: In order to do such and such a thing, these are the conditions. If you refuse to fulﬁl these conditions you won’t do that particular thing, you will do something else; that, evidently, is not the only thing possible. But if that’s the thing one wants to do, one must fulﬁl the conditions... One can do something else!


The Mother: I believe that if you take the world in its totality, in Time and Space, it is obvious that you can say, “Nothing is impossible”, and that probably everything will be; but that’s in the totality, and in Time and Space, that is, through eternities of time and inﬁnities of space all is possible. But at a given moment, at a  given point, there is a certain number of “possibles”, and all are not there, and certain conditions have to be fulﬁlled for these possibilities to be realised. The world is constructed like that. We can do nothing about it. I mean it is useless to say, “It ought to be otherwise.”


The Mother: It is like that, we must take it as it is, endeavour to make the best possible out of it.  It is because this inmost soul, that is, the central psychic being, inﬂuences the superﬁcial parts of the consciousness (superﬁcial in comparison with it: mental parts, vital parts). The purest mind, the highest vital, the emotive being — the soul inﬂuences them, inﬂuences them to an extent where one has the impression of entering into contact with it through these parts of the being.  So people take these parts for the soul and that is why he says “the inmost soul”, that is, the central soul, the real soul.  For very often, when one touches certain parts of the mind which are under the psychic inﬂuence and full of light and the joy of that light, or when one touches certain very pure and very high parts of the emotive being which has the most generous, most unselﬁsh emotions, one also has the impression of being in contact with one’s soul.


The Mother: But this is not the true soul, it is not the soul in its very essence. These are parts of the being under its inﬂuence and manifesting something of it. So, very often people enter into contact with these parts and this gives them illuminations, great joy, revelations, and they feel they have found their soul. But it is only the part of the being under its inﬂuence, one part or another, for... Exactly what happens is that one touches these things, has experiences, and then it gets veiled, and one wonders, “How is it that I touched my soul and now  have fallen back into this state of ignorance and inconscience!”


The Mother: But that’s because one had not touched one’s soul, one had touched those parts of the being which are under the inﬂuence of the soul and manifest something of it, but are not it.  I have already said many times that when one enters consciously into contact with one’s soul and the union is established, it is over, it can no longer be undone, it is something permanent, constant, which resists everything, and which, at any moment whatever, if referred to can be found; whereas the other things — one can have very ﬁne experiences, and then it gets veiled again, and one tells oneself, “How does that happen? I saw my soul and now I don’t ﬁnd it any more!” It was not the soul one had seen. And these things are very beautiful and give you very impressive experiences, but this is not the contact with the psychic being itself.


The Mother: The contact with the psychic being is deﬁnitive, and it is about this that I say, when people ask, “Do I have a contact with my psychic being?”, “Your question itself proves that you don’t have it!”  That’s all, my children?  What sort of magicians are you speaking about? Any kind?  Those who have occult powers and use them for their personal interest?


The Mother: You mean these?  I don’t know whether they suffer after their death or lose their consciousness, but in any case, obviously they are not in any state of peace or happiness, that’s absolutely certain. For it is a kind of absolute rule from the spiritual point of view: it is by  an inner discipline and by consecration to the Divine that the powers come to you. But if with your aspiration, your discipline and consecration, an ambition is mixed up, that is, an intention to obtain powers , then if they come to you it is almost like a curse.


The Mother: Usually they don’t come to you, but something vital which tries to imitate them comes to you with adverse inﬂuences which put you entirely under the domination of beings who give you powers simply with the intention of making use of you, using you to do all the work they have the intention of doing, and to create all the disorder they want to create. And when they ﬁnd that you have served them enough and are no longer good for anything, they just destroy you. They may not be able to destroy you physically because they don’t always have the power to do it, but they destroy you mentally, vitally and in your consciousness, and after that you are good for nothing, even before dying. And after death, as you are entirely under their inﬂuence, the ﬁrst thing they do is to swallow you up, because this is their way of making use of people — to swallow them. So it cannot be a very pleasant experience.


The Mother: It is a very, very, very dangerous game.  But everywhere, in all the teachings, in all the disciplines, in all ages, the same thing has been repeated: that one must never intermingle ambition and personal interest with the sadhana, otherwise he is inviting trouble. So it is not only a particular case, it is all the instances of this kind which have fatal consequences.  You mean magical rites? Because, you see, you must not mix up magic with occultism.


The Mother: Occultism is a science and it is the knowledge of invisible forces and the capacity to handle them, as one has the capacity of handling material forces if one has studied them scientiﬁcally.  Magic: these are different kinds of processes which were ﬁxed probably by people who had a certain knowledge, and  still more a certain power of vital formation. These things can be learnt without having any special capacity, that is, someone who has no inner power can learn this as he learns chemistry, for example, or mathematics. It is one of the things which are learnt like that, it is not a thing one acquires. So it doesn’t itself carry any special virtues except the same kind of qualities as those one learns through chemical manipulations.


The Mother: You may  reproduce these manipulations, but if you are an intelligent and capable being, you can by the help of these manipulations obtain an interesting and useful result, and in any case, be sheltered from all danger; whereas if you are an idiot, misfortunes may come to you. It is something similar.  With the help of magical formulas one may produce a certain result, but this result is necessarily limited and has no particular interest for those who, through their inner development, spontaneously receive powers of which they have a higher knowledge, not a mechanical one. It is not for someone who is truly a yogi; it has no interest except that of curiosity.


The Mother: It is interesting only for people who are precisely not yogis and who want to have certain powers which, in fact, they have in a very limited way — it is always limited.  What is special about it is that it has a direct action upon matter; while usually, apart from some rare exceptions, with people who have spiritual powers, yogic powers, it acts through the intermediary of the mental forces usually — either spiritual or mental forces — sometimes of the vital forces (more rarely), but not directly upon matter, except naturally with those who have done yoga in matter, but these are exceptional cases of which one doesn’t speak. These things put into motion certain small entities which are usually the result of the decomposition of human beings and yet have a sufﬁcient contact with the material world to be able to act there. But anyhow, if the action is of a lower order, the power is of a lower order, and it is something almost repugnant for one who is truly in relation with the higher forces.


The Mother: To act in order to accomplish a work with the spontaneous powers of spiritual realisation, that is well understood. But one may say that everybody does that, because just the fact of thinking means that you are acting invisibly; and according to the power of your thought your action is more or less widespread. But to use small magical formulas to obtain a result is something that has no true relation with the spiritual life. From the spiritual point of view it appears even surprising that these things can always prove effective, because for each case the need is different; and how putting together certain words and making certain signs can always have an effect seems surprising.


The Mother: When one wants to act spiritually and for some reason or other it is necessary, for example, to formulate words, the words come spontaneously and are exactly the words needed for the particular occasion. But things written beforehand which one repeats mechanically most of the time, without even knowing what one is saying and why one is saying it — it is difﬁcult to see how this can always work. There is bound to be a great imprecision in the action. And one thing is certain, that this same formula cannot have exactly the same effect, and that one factor is indispensable for it to take effect: fear. The ﬁrst thing is a kind of fear, a fright created in the person against whom the magic is done; for if he has no fear I am quite sure that it cannot have any effect or has so ridiculously small an effect that it’s not worth speaking about it.


The Mother: What opens the door to the action of these forces is fear, a kind of apprehension, the feeling that something is going to happen; and it is these vibrations of fear which put out certain forces from you, forces which give these entities the power to act.  Not necessarily ill. It depends on the kind of hypnotism and  hypnotiser. Not necessarily ill. One thing is certain, that this person loses his personal will, that the hypnotiser’s will takes the place of the personal will, otherwise it would not work.


The Mother: But not necessarily ill, terribly dependent! It creates almost a kind of slavery.  ( )  It is very difﬁcult to say, because it depends entirely on the hypnotiser and the hypnotised, and how it is done.


The Mother: In its ordinary outer form it is something that can cause much disturbance.  But there can be a spontaneous hypnotism which may be the expression of a divine force, but then that does not work in the ordinary way.  I think there are as many cases as people. It’s like every other thing. If you put scientiﬁc knowledge in the hands of ignorant and stupid people, it can produce catastrophes.


The Mother: And if to this is added the fact that they are people with ill-will or those who have personal motives, then the results are as bad as can be. It’s the same with hypnotism. It depends exclusively upon the one practising it and how he practises it.  It’s not something genuine; like all so-called human knowledge, it is not true, but the deformation of something.  It could be said that if the divine Will works in you, you can call it hypnotism, if you like, and yet it is the supreme Good, you see.


The Mother: But what is usually called hypnotism is a completely blind and ignorant action: the use of the power of a force which one doesn’t even know very well. So naturally it has unfortunate results; and then, as I say, if it falls into the hands of someone who is unscrupulous or has bad intentions, it becomes altogether disastrous.   Here we are. Nothing to ask? Nobody has anything to say?


The Mother: ( )  We can meditate for ﬁve minutes. Let us try collective meditation, shall we? It’s going to be a little difﬁcult.


The Mother: We can try.  You would like to try on what we have read?  Do not think, just concentrate like this: let what we have read enter into you, and try to experience it; try.  Don’t try to think, to turn over ideas, have answers to questions, nothing of all that. Just remain like this (), open.


The Mother: It was about opening, right through. You should let what was read enter into you, and then, in this way, do its work inside you. You must remain as silent and quiet as possible.  We shall see what is going to happen.  ()


The Mother: Something to say? No? Good!  But it was not bad for a beginning. It is quite good.


The Mother: Is that all? We don’t go farther? Nobody has anything to say?  Then it’s better to stop.


The Mother: You see, one always has the feeling either of a vertical ascent to the heights of the Supreme Consciousness or a kind of... how to put it?... horizontal widening into a universal consciousness.  A universal consciousness means becoming aware of the forces which manifest in the universe and in all that is manifested. For example, just this: there are many people here; well, let us take these people as representing the universe. Now, if you want to unite with them, you have a movement of consciousness spreading above them all and uniting with all, like this ().  It is a movement which spreads horizontally.


The Mother: But if you want to unite with the supramental Force which wants to come down, you have the feeling of gathering all your aspiration and making it rise up in a vertical ascent to the higher forces which have to descend. It is just a question of movement, you see, it is a movement of widening or a movement of concentration and ascent.  Because one has the feeling — this is a feeling one very often has in the beginning of the sadhana — that the psychic being is as though shut up in a kind of hard shell, a prison, and that this is what prevents it from manifesting outwardly and entering into a conscious and constant relation with the outer consciousness, the outer being. One has altogether the feeling that it is as though enclosed in a box or in a prison with walls  which must be broken or a door which must be forced in order to be able to enter. So naturally if one can break the walls, open the door, it liberates the psychic being which was shut in and which can now manifest externally.


The Mother: All these are images. But each person, naturally, has his own personal image, his personal method, with small modiﬁcations.  Some of these images are very common to all those who have had the experience. For example, when one goes down into the depths of one’s being to ﬁnd the psychic right at the bottom of one’s consciousness, there is this image of descending into a deep well, going down deeper and deeper, descending, and it is as though one were truly sinking into a well.  Naturally all these are analogies; but they are associations with the experience of impressions which give a great deal of force and concrete reality to the experience.


The Mother: As when one goes on the discovery of one’s inner being, of all the different parts of one’s being, one very often has the feeling that one is entering deep into a hall or room, and according to the colour, the atmosphere, the things it contains, one has a very clear perception of the part of the being one is visiting.  And then, one can go from one room to another, open doors and go into deeper and deeper rooms each of which has its own character. And often, these inner visits can be made during the night. Then it takes a still more concrete form, like a dream, and one feels that he is entering a house, and that this house is very familiar to him. And according to the time, the periods, it is internally different, and sometimes it may be in a state of very great disorder, very great confusion, where everything is mixed up; sometimes there are even broken things; it is quite a chaos.


The Mother: At other times these things are organised, put in their place; it is as though one had arranged the household, one cleans up, puts it in order, and it is always the same house. This house is the image, a kind of objective image, of your inner being. And in accordance with what you see there or do there, you have a symbolic representation of your psychological work. It is very  useful for concretising. It depends on people.


The Mother: Some people are just intellectuals; for them everything is expressed by ideas and not by images. But if they were to go down into a more material domain, well, they risk not touching things in their concrete reality and remaining only in the domain of ideas, remaining in the mind and remaining there indeﬁnitely.  Then one thinks one is making progress, and mentally one has done so, though it is something altogether indeﬁnite.  The mind’s progress may take thousands of years, for it is a very vast and very indeﬁnite ﬁeld, which is constantly renewed.  But if one wants to progress in the vital and physical, well, this imaged representation becomes very useful for ﬁxing the action, making it more concrete.


The Mother: Naturally it doesn’t happen completely at will; it depends on each one’s nature. But those who have the power of concentrating with images, well, they have one more facility.  To sit in meditation before a closed door, as though it were a heavy door of bronze — and one sits in front of it with the will that it may open — and to pass to the other side; and so the whole concentration, the whole aspiration is gathered into a beam and pushes, pushes, pushes against this door, and pushes more and more with an increasing energy until all of a sudden it bursts open and one enters. It makes a very powerful impression. And so one is as though plunged into the light and then one has the full enjoyment of a sudden and radical change of consciousness, with an illumination that captures one entirely, and the feeling that one is becoming another person.


The Mother: And this is a very concrete and very powerful way of entering into contact with one’s psychic being.   Ordinarily means in the ordinary life? A relation between the psychic being...  It is almost, almost totally unconscious.  In the ordinary life there’s not one person in a million who has a conscious contact with his psychic being, even momentarily.


The Mother: The psychic being may work from within, but so invisibly and unconsciously for the outer being that it is as though it did not exist. And in most cases, the immense majority, almost the totality of cases, it’s as though it were asleep, not at all active, in a kind of torpor.  It is only with the sadhana and a very persistent effort that one succeeds in having a conscious contact with his psychic being. Naturally, it is possible that there are exceptional cases — but this is truly exceptional, and they are so few that they could be counted — where the psychic being is an entirely formed, liberated being, master of itself, which has chosen to return to earth in a human body in order to do its work. And in this case, even if the person doesn’t do the sadhana consciously, it is possible that the psychic being is powerful enough to establish a more or less conscious relation.


The Mother: But these cases are, so to say, unique and are exceptions which conﬁrm the rule.  In almost, almost all cases, a very, very sustained effort is needed to become aware of one’s psychic being. Usually it is considered that if one can do it in thirty years one is very lucky — thirty years of sustained effort, I say. It may happen that it’s quicker. But this is so rare that immediately one says, “This is not an ordinary human being.”


The Mother: That’s the case of people who have been considered more or less divine beings and who were great yogis, great initiates.   ( )  Do you want a concentration, a meditation?  I suggest that the lights may be turned off... this light here above my head, because there are so many insects.


The Mother: ()  So?  If you do it purposely, yes, of course. If you choose this photo for a particular reason or that other one for another reason, surely.  It has an effect. It is as though you were choosing to concentrate on one aspect of the Mother rather than another; for example, if you choose to concentrate on Mahakali or Mahalakshmi or on Maheshwari, the results will be different.


The Mother: That part of you which answers to these qualities will awaken and become receptive.  So, it is the same thing. But somebody who has only one photo, whichever it may be, and concentrates, without choosing this one or that, because he has only one, then it is of no importance which one it is. For the fact of concentrating on the photograph puts one in contact with the Force, and that is what is necessary in the case of everyone who responds automatically.  It is only when the person who concentrates puts a special will, with a special relation, into his concentration that it has an effect.


The Mother: Otherwise the relation is more general, and it is always the expression of the need or the aspiration of the person who concentrates. If he is absolutely neutral, if he does not choose, does not aspire for any particular thing, if he comes like this, like a white page and absolutely neutral, then it is the forces and aspects he needs which will answer to the concentration and perhaps even the person himself will not know what particular  things he needs, because very few people are conscious of themselves. They live in a vague feeling, they have a vague aspiration and it is almost unseizable; it is not something organised, coordinated and willed, with a clear vision, for example, of the difﬁculties one wants to overcome or the capacities one wants to acquire; this, usually, is already the result of a fairly advanced discipline. One must have reﬂected much, observed much, studied much in order to be able to know exactly what he needs.  Otherwise it is something hazy, this impression: one tries to catch it and it escapes...


The Mother: Isn’t that so?  Is that all?  (Another child)  It’s not I who have said it! ()


The Mother: Good. So? The difference between meditating and concentrating?  Meditation!  There are all kinds of different meditations!


The Mother: What people usually call meditation is, for example, choosing a subject or an idea and following its development or trying to understand what it means. There is a concentration but not as complete a concentration as in concentration proper, where nothing should exist except the point on which one concentrates. Meditation is a more relaxed movement, less tense than concentration.  When one is trying to understand a problem which comes up, a psychological problem or a circumstantial one, and he sits down and looks at and sees all the possibilities, compares them, studies them, this is a form of meditation; and one does  it spontaneously when the thing comes up. When one is facing a decision to be taken, for instance, and doesn’t know which one to take, well, ordinarily one reﬂects, consults his reason, compares all the possibilities and makes his choice... more or less.


The Mother: Well, this is a form of meditation.  Now, there is the form of meditation which consists in a concentration on an idea and concentrating one’s attention upon it to the extent that that alone exists; then this is the equivalent of a concentration, but instead of being total it is only mental.  Total concentration implies a concentration also of all the movements of the vital and physical. The method of gazing at a point is a very well-known one. So it is even physical, you see, one’s eyes are ﬁxed on this point, and one does not move any more... nothing more...


The Mother: one sees nothing, doesn’t move his sight from that point, and the result usually is that one ends up by becoming that point. And I knew someone who used to say that one had to pass beyond the point, become this point, to the extent of passing to the other side, crossing the point, and that then one opened to higher regions. But it is true that if one succeeds in concentrating totally on a point, there is a moment when the identiﬁcation is absolute, and there is no more any separation between the one who is concentrating and the thing upon which he is concentrated. There is a complete identiﬁcation. One can’t distinguish between himself and the point.


The Mother: This is a total concentration, while meditation is a particular concentration of the thought, a partial one.  Not thinking at all is not easy; but if one wants a perfect concentration it is essential that there are no thoughts any more.   There can always be a relation between everything, but usually one means by contemplation a kind of opening upwards.  It is rather a state of passive opening upwards. It is a fairly passive form of aspiration.


The Mother: One makes this movement rather like something opening, opening in an aspiration; but if the contemplation is sufﬁciently total, it becomes a concentration.  Yet it is not necessarily a concentration.  A concentration is essentially a limiting. One can’t concentrate on several points at once, it is no longer a concentration.  No, you just said that it is a limited concentration; a concentration is necessarily limited.


The Mother: Bulletin   What does it mean?... It’s because poetry is related to the forms and images of ideas: forms, images, sensations, impressions, emotions of ideas, all this is the sensuous side of things. All the relation with forms and sensations, images, impressions, all that is the sensuousness of things.


The Mother: And poetry is this side of thought; it is this way of approaching the world, approaching the world of thought, by the images of these thoughts, the forms, appearances, emotions and sensations and the play of these things, the play of appearances, of ideas. It is not at all like philosophy or metaphysics, which seek the heart of the idea, the principle of the idea. Poetry is not poetic unless it evokes. It is the world of form and sensation. So we just take an expression that’s a little... how to put it?... epigrammatic, and we may say, “It is the  sensuousness of the spirit” — just as those who are exclusively busy with the sensations of all that the material world expresses through its forms, and the whole side of the forms of sensations of the physical life, are men who live in their senses; and when they enjoy all these things, well, we call them sensuous.


The Mother: Here, instead of being applied to the outer physical life, it is applied to the life of the spirit, to ideas and what is beyond ideas. And all that world, seen under the aspect of the beauty of its form — this is poetry. It expresses the beauty of ideas, the harmony of thoughts, and gives to it all a form which becomes concrete, images, the play of images, the play of sounds, the play of words.  So, instead of being the sensuousness of matter it is the sensuousness of the spirit. It is not taken in a pejorative sense nor a moral one — not at all, it is simply descriptive.


The Mother: But that’s what I said. It is not pejorative, I did not say that it prevents you from seeing the truth of things. It is the way, the manner of approaching the subject. Certainly, if I had to choose between reading a beautiful poem and a book of metaphysics, I would prefer to read the poem; it would be less tiring. It is not pejorative, it is descriptive.