The Mother: If you are able to establish not only silence in your head but also repose in your vital, the stoppage of all the activities of your  being, and if coming out of the domain of forms you enter into what is called Sachchidananda, the supreme consciousness, then with three minutes of that state you can have more rest than in eight hours of sleep. It is not very easy, no.... It is the consciousness absolutely conscious but completely still, in the full original Light. If you get that, if you are able to immobilise everything in you, then your whole being participates in this supreme consciousness and I have well observed that as regards rest (and I mean by rest bodily rest, the repose of the muscles) three minutes of that state were equivalent to eight hours of ordinary sleep.


The Mother: Yes. The vital body surrounds the physical body with a kind of envelope which has almost the same density as the vibrations of heat observable when the day is very hot. And it is this which is the intermediary between the subtle body and the most material vital body. It is this which protects the body from all contagion, fatigue, exhaustion and even from accidents. Therefore if this envelope is wholly intact, it protects you from everything, but a little too strong an emotion, a little fatigue, some dissatisfaction or any shock whatsoever is sufﬁcient to scratch it as it were


The Mother: and the slightest scratch allows any kind of intrusion. Medical science also now recognises that if you are in perfect vital equilibrium, you do not catch illness or in any case you have a kind of immunity from contagion. If you have this equilibrium, this inner harmony which keeps the envelope intact, it protects you from everything. There are people who lead quite an ordinary life, who know how to sleep as one should, eat as one should, and their nervous envelope is so intact that they pass through all dangers as though unconcerned. It is a capacity one can cultivate in oneself.


The Mother: If one becomes aware of the weak spot in one’s envelope, a few minutes’ concentration, a call to the force, an inner peace is sufﬁcient for it to be all right, get cured, and for the untoward thing to vanish.   The main trouble is that you think with words, but these words are empty of meaning; most of the time they are mere words — you talk of the Divine, you talk of the Supreme, you talk of Yoga, you say many things, but does all that correspond in your head to something concrete, to a thought, a feeling, a clear idea, an experience? Or are they simply words?  It is said that Yoga is the “ﬁnal goal of life”, but what do you expect from this ﬁnal goal? Some say it means to know oneself; that is the personal and individual aspect.


The Mother: If it is pushed a little farther it means to be conscious of the truth of one’s being: why are you born and what should you do? And if it is pushed still farther, you may become conscious of your relations with other human beings; and a little farther yet, you may ask what is the role, the aim of humanity in the world? And yet again, what is the condition of the earth from the psychological standpoint?  What is the universe, what is its goal, its role? In this way, you move from stage to stage and ﬁnally you see the problem in its totality.


The Mother: You must see the thing, the experience behind the words. Here we speak of Yoga but elsewhere one would speak differently; some would say, “I am seeking my”, and so on. Those who have a religious bent will say, “I want to ﬁnd the divine Presence.” There are ﬁfty ways of saying the thing but it is the which is important; you must feel it in your head, in your heart, everywhere. It must be concrete, living, otherwise you cannot advance.


The Mother: You must come out of words and  get into action — get into the experience, get into life. ( ) Do you intend to do Yoga?  Why do you want to do Yoga?  And you?  And you, why does Yoga interest you?


The Mother: And you?  And you, are you doing Yoga?  You are honest, but why at times?...  ( ) Do you have any idea as to what Yoga is?  What is there at the end of the way?


The Mother: ( ) In Yoga what is it that interests you most?  It is a good symbol.


The Mother: Anyway, happily nobody has said that he desired Yoga to obtain power. There are countries and people who know vaguely that there is something called yoga, and they begin it with the idea that they will become superior to others, will get a greater power than others and consequently will be able to dominate others — this is the worst reason, the most selﬁsh, that which brings the most harmful consequences. Others who are greatly troubled, who have a very difﬁcult life, who have worries, sorrows, many cares, say, “Oh, I shall ﬁnd something that will give me peace, tranquillity, and I shall be able to get a little rest.”  And they rush into Yoga thinking they are going to be quite happy and satisﬁed. Unfortunately, it is not altogether like that.


The Mother: When you begin the Yoga for reasons of this kind, you are sure to meet great difﬁculties on the way. And then there is this great virtue in men’s eyes: “philanthropy”, “love of humanity”; so many people say, “I am going to do Yoga to be able to serve humanity, make the unhappy happy, organise the world in the happiest way for everybody.” I say this is not sufﬁcient — I do not say that this is bad in itself, although I have heard an old occultist say wittily: “It won’t be so very soon that there will be no more misery in the world, because there are too many people who are happy to live on this misery.” It was a witticism but it is not altogether wrong. If there were no misery to soothe, the philanthropist would no longer have any reason for his existence — he is so satisﬁed with himself, he has so strong an impression that he is not selﬁsh!


The Mother: I knew such people who would be very  unhappy if there were no more misery upon earth! What would they do if there were no longer any misery to relieve, what would be their activity and what their gloriﬁcation? How would they be able to show people “I am not selﬁsh!”, and that they are generous, full of kindness?  The ﬁrst movement of aspiration is this: you have a kind of vague sensation that behind the universe there is something which is worth knowing, which is probably (for you do not yet know it) the only thing worth living for, which can connect you with the Truth; something on which the universe depends but which does not depend upon the universe, something which still escapes your comprehension but which seems to you to be behind all things.... I have said here much more than the majority of people feel about the thing, but this is the beginning of the ﬁrst aspiration — to know that, not to live in this perpetual falsehood where things are so perverted and artiﬁcial, this would be something pleasant; to ﬁnd something that is worth living for.


The Mother: Instead of telling yourself once in a while, “Oh, yes! I am thinking of ﬁnding the Divine”, just when there is something unpleasant, when you are a little disgusted because you feel tired — indeed, there are very many ﬂimsy reasons — all of a sudden you remember that there is such a thing as yoga, something like  the Divine to know who can get you out of this ﬂatness of life.  This is the second step. That is to say, you begin wanting to ﬁnd and know the Divine and live it. You must feel at the same time that the thing is so precious, so important that your entire life is not sufﬁcient for acquiring it. Then, the ﬁrst movement is a selfgiving; you tell yourself, “I do not want any longer to belong to myself, for the sake of my little personal satisfaction, I wish to belong to this marvellous thing which one must ﬁnd, must know, must live and for which I aspire.”


The Mother: Naturally, when I speak of the heart, I do not mean the physical organ, the viscera, but the psychological or psychic centre of the being.  I replied to the person who put this question to me: “Become conscious ﬁrst of all.” So the person tried to become conscious and a few months later came and told me, “Oh, what a nasty present you gave me! Formerly, in my relations with people,  they all used to seem so nice; I had goodwill, they were so nice towards me, and now, since becoming conscious, I see all kinds of things in myself that are not quite pretty, and at the same time I see in others things that are not at all beautiful!” I answered her, “Quite possible!


The Mother: If you do not want trouble, it is better not to come out of your ignorance.”  The ﬁrst step therefore is to ﬁnd out whether one wants to see and know the truth or wants to remain comfortably in one’s ignorance.  This means very clearly that so long as you remain in your small individual egoism, you will never be ready to make the gesture, to take the plunge, which will enable you to identify yourself with the Divine.  In this connection I could tell you something: long ago there were people who came here because they thought that joining the Ashram was sufﬁcient to make one immortal. And they aspired much for immortality.


The Mother: Naturally, they were old people who did not see a very long road before them and desired to extend it indeﬁnitely — for that is what men understand by “immortality”, an indeﬁnite prolongation of what they are. So, to the ﬁrst person who made this remark, I replied, “I do not know if everyone can become immortal — probably not — but even among those who have the capacity of becoming immortal, how many are ready to pay the price for it?” Because the number of things which have to be left behind is so considerable that perhaps half-way they would say, “Ah, no, the price is too much.” I remember a painter with whom I had a talk about the possibility of immortality and  who asked me what a new world would be like. I told him things would be, for instance, luminous in themselves and there would no longer be this kind of reﬂected light which comes here upon earth from the sun.


The Mother: And as I was speaking I saw his face becoming longer, more and more grave; ﬁnally he said, “But then how can one do painting without the shadow which brings out the light of things?...” I told him, “You have given exactly the key to the problem.”  There were many people, a very large number, who asked me what the new life would be like and to whom I said, “There will be an interchange of forces, a circulating energy; the structure of the body will be quite different, all these ungainly organs will disappear and be replaced by psychological functions; and the necessity of eating, always eating, will disappear.” Once again I saw faces getting longer and longer!


The Mother: People said, “Oh! And all the good things we eat, all that will go?”  These are small instances, there are many others, things more important. The most important, the most difﬁcult thing is to renounce one’s ego, for to somebody who is not ready, to renounce his ego is like dying and dying much more than a physical death, for to him the death of the ego is like a dissolution of the being — this is not correct but it begins by giving this sort of impression.


The Mother: To be immortal one must renounce all limitations and the ego is the greatest of limitations; hence if “I” am not immortal, what is the good of that?  It can be said that it is chance or that it is because we have always been together, and both are equally true. As this lady  liked occultism I told her also, “We have met in a previous life” and that is true, isn’t it? But it is a way of seeing things. Also, “We all belong to the same family”, this too is true but not in the way in which human beings look at it.


The Mother: I also said, “We have worked together through the ages for the victory of the Divine and His manifestation upon earth.”  This is quite evident, for the universe has been created for that  and therefore every part of the universe, whatever it be, works for it, knowingly or unknowingly, but works for it all the same.    tapasy¯a


The Mother: What is surrender?  Yes, and then what happens? If you give yourself entirely to the Divine, it is He who does the Yoga, it is no longer you; hence this is not very difﬁcult; while if you do tapasya, it is you yourself who do the yoga and you carry its whole responsibility — it is there the danger lies. But there are people who prefer to have the whole responsibility, with its dangers, because they have a very independent spirit. They are not perhaps in a great hurry — if they need several lives to succeed, it does not matter to them.


The Mother: But there are others who want to go quicker and be more sure of reaching the goal; well, these give over the whole responsibility to the Divine.   This is much more difﬁcult than to sit upon a difﬁculty! It is much more difﬁcult to stand back from the difﬁculty, to look at it as something which does not concern you, which does not interest you, does not belong to you, which belongs to the world and not to you — but it is only by doing this that you can succeed. This demands a kind of liberation of spirit and a conﬁdence in your inner being: you must believe that if you take the right attitude, it is the best that will happen to you; but if you are afraid when something unpleasant happens to you, then you can do nothing. You must have this conﬁdence within you, whatever the difﬁculty, whatever the obstacle.


The Mother: Most of the time, when something unpleasant happens, you say, “Is it going to increase? What other accident is yet going to happen!” and so on. You must tell yourself, “These things are not mine; they belong to the subconscious world; naturally I have nothing to do with them and if they come again to seize me, I am going to give a ﬁght.” Naturally you will answer that this is easy to say but difﬁcult to do. But if truly you take this attitude of conﬁdence, there is no difﬁculty that you will not be able to conquer. Anxiety makes the difﬁculty greater.


The Mother: Evidently there is one difﬁculty: in your conscious being something does not want the difﬁculty, wishes sincerely to overcome it, but there are numberless movements in other parts of your consciousness of which you are not conscious. You say,“I want to be cured of that”; unfortunately it is not sufﬁcient to say “I want”, there are other parts of the consciousness which hide themselves so that you may not be busy with them, and when your attention is turned away these parts try to assert themselves.  That is why I say and shall always repeat, Be perfectly sincere; do not try to deceive yourself, do not say, “I have done all that I could.” If you do not succeed, it means that you do not do  all that you can. For, if you truly do “all” that you can, you will surely succeed.


The Mother: If you have any defect which you want to get rid of and which still persists, and you say, “I have done all that I could”, you may be sure that you have not done all that you should have. If you had, you would have triumphed, for the difﬁculties that come to you are exactly in proportion to your strength — nothing can happen to you which does not belong to your consciousness, and all that belongs to your consciousness you are able to master. Even the things and suggestions that come from outside can touch you only in proportion to the consent of your consciousness, and you are made to be the master of your consciousness. If you say, “I have done all that I could and in spite of everything the thing continues, so I give up”, you may be already sure that you have not done what you could. When an error persists “in spite of everything” it means that something hidden in your being springs up suddenly like a Jack-in-the-box and takes the helm of your life.


The Mother: Hence, there is only one thing to do, it is to go hunting for all the little dark corners which lie hidden in you and, if you put just a tiny spark of goodwill on this darkness, it will yield, will vanish, and what appeared to you impossible will become not only possible, practicable, but. You can in this way in one minute get rid of a difﬁculty which would have harassed you for years.  I absolutely assure you of it. That depends only on one thing: that you truly, sincerely, want to get rid of it. And it is the same for everything, from physical illnesses up to the highest mental difﬁculties.


The Mother: One part of the consciousness says, “I don’t want it”, but behind there hides a heap of things which say nothing, do not show themselves, and which just want that things continue as they are — generally out of ignorance; they do not believe that it is necessary to be cured, they believe that everything is for the best in the best of worlds. As the lady with whom I had those conversations used to say, “The trouble begins as soon as you want to change.” A great French writer has repeated this and has made out of it his pet theory: “Misery begins when you want to  perfect yourself; if you do not wish to perfect yourself, you won’t have any misery!” I may tell you that this is absolutely wrong, but there are, all the same, things in you that want absolutely to be left alone, not to be disturbed in any way: “Oh! What a nuisance you are, leave us alone!”


The Mother: To try to solve this problem ascetics used to go away into forests and sit under a tree; there, of course, they had not to fear any contagion from other human beings. But it is very difﬁcult to go to the very end of this resolution, for it quickly gets known that a saint is sitting under a tree in meditation, and immediately everybody rushes there! Not only does he not escape from the difﬁculty, but he increases it, for there is not a thing more dangerous than to teach others. You know just a little and you begin to teach others, and you are immediately compelled to say more than you know, because people put questions to you which you cannot answer, unless you are a hero of silence. In the world, those who want to pass themselves off as spiritual teachers — when people come and ask them something they do not know, they invent it.


The Mother: Therefore, if in your inner discipline you begin to pretend, you may be sure of falling into the worst hole — of all things pretence is the most ruinous. In the world you may perhaps pass for what you are not, for people allow themselves  to be easily deceived, and that will not lead you to a catastrophe (although if you exaggerate, it always leads to a catastrophe), but in the spiritual world, you don’t have to deal with human beings, you have to deal with the Divine; it is impossible for you to pretend that you are this or that, for the Divine knows better than you, doesn’t He? He knows what you are and it is not what you will say which will inﬂuence Him.  In all spiritual disciplines the ﬁrst thing that you are taught is not to narrate your experiences to others. If you need to clarify your mind, tell your experiences to your spiritual teacher and to no one else, and even before your spiritual teacher you must be very careful.


The Mother: When you present or explain to him what has happened in you, if you observe yourself closely, you will see that there are things in you of which you are not wholly aware; in your experiences often there are gaps, interruptions in the continuity (it is extremely difﬁcult to get at the continuity of consciousness and to follow the movement to the end); then, if you narrate your experience without wanting to add anything whatsoever, without failing in sincerity, even so you put in what is not there. When people come and tell me something, an inner event, they ﬁnd me at times inattentive, not attaching much importance to what I am being told — it is not that, it is that I listen to what is within, I see what is perfectly exact and the little facts that have been added. And it is because of this that generally I do not encourage these things. I know that people may feel relieved, comforted, if they can tell me what has happened, but then one must come with a wonderfully scientiﬁc spirit. A scientist would never tell you, “It is this”, “It is that”, unless he has made all the possible experiments to have the proof of what he says.


The Mother: And for spiritual things one must follow the same method. Instead of saying, “I did that, things happened like that”, one must say, “I had the impression that... things seemed to be like this” and “It looked as if there was a connection between this and that...” and not only as a conversational phrase, but as something which expresses truly a mental state. If you seek for a clariﬁcation, you  yourself must not explain the thing in advance, for once you have given me the explanation, I have no longer any explanation to give you! You bring me ﬂowers, for instance, ﬂowers of all kinds, but you do not arrange them, you tell me, “Here I bring you some ﬂowers, it is for you to make a bouquet out of them.”  In this way, it is much more easy for me, isn’t it?


The Mother: I can take those that I need and give you the explanation of what’s happened! But if you bring me a ready-made bouquet where I see ﬂowers which are not ﬂowers, which are imitations, I have nothing to tell you, for I need solely things which are so to say “pure”. Therefore, remember this advice: I am always ready to listen to you but do not bring to me ready-made things. Give me the exact record of what has happened and even so you may be sure that as soon as there is a mental transcription, the mind always knows how to ﬁll up the holes — it likes things to be logical, continuous; and without your knowing it, quite spontaneously it supplies elements which were missing in your experience. I do not blame anyone, I know that it is a spontaneous phenomenon.


The Mother: One must be extremely attentive in order to be quite exact and precise.  Yes, evidently, if you say, “I can do nothing, that belongs to Nature, the movement has to follow its natural course”, you do exactly what I have told you not to do, you make use of the Divine as a ﬁne cloak to cover the satisfaction of your desires.  But the opposite movement, “I am good for nothing because such an idea has crossed my mind” is equally wrong, isn’t it?  Naturally, if an impulse happens to come to you which you do not want, the ﬁrst thing to do is to will that it does not come again; but if, on the contrary, you do not sincerely want it to disappear, then keep it, but do not try to do yoga. You should not take the path unless you have resolved beforehand to overcome all difﬁculties.


The Mother: The decision must be sincere and complete. You  will notice, besides, as you gradually advance, that what you believed to be complete is not so, what you considered to be sincere is not so, and then you will progress little by little; but to succeed you must have as total a will for progress as possible.  If you have this will and if an impulse seizes you with violence, keep the will ﬁrm, your being must not vacillate; you must expect these things to come, but when they come, tell yourself, “Well, they come from below, I do not want them to recur, they are not mine.” This is not the same thing as saying, “Let it go, since it is Nature.”  There must already be a beginning of realisation in the vital for it to revolt against the impulses that come to it.


The Mother: Most human beings and even those who expect to do yoga say, as soon as the impulse comes, “It is quite all right, there is nothing to do, it is all right.” Then, if something in you revolts, if something says, “I don’t want it”, that is the higher part of your being. What takes the resolution to do yoga is not your body or your vital, not even your mind, it is the higher part of your mind or it is your psychic being. It is that alone which can take the resolution — your body does not know very well what it is all about, your vital looks at the beginning of transformation with some anxiety, the mind with its ideas declares, “This can be done in that way, can be explained like this”, and so on. So if you have made a resolution, it comes from the higher part of your being, and it is upon this that you have to take your support, not upon anything else — that is the “I”.


The Mother: And it must understand in the end that it is not a personal “I”, but universal and divine.  I may assure you that the vital, left to itself, will never take the decision to be transformed — it is quite satisﬁed with itself and,  over and above this, being an accomplice of the mind, the mind will furnish it with all possible explanations for whatever it does.   People who live in their vital consciousness are, even when they do not say so, always very satisﬁed with themselves. They are also very satisﬁed with all that happens to them and they always say of their impulses, “How interesting it is, how interesting!”


The Mother: So, if you wait for the vital to take the decision, you may have to wait for a long time!  You must teach your vital that it must obey. Before feeling any satisfaction, it must understand that it has nothing else to do but obey. That is why I say that it is not very easy to begin the yoga; if you are not sincere, do not begin.  The body is very obedient; truly it tries to do its best, but it does not know whom to obey, for generally it is not in direct contact with the higher being or the psychic.


The Mother: Impulses come to it directly from the mind or from the mind clothed with the vital, and it does what they desire. Before the vital takes a decision (and I have told you, it is not very easy for it to take a decision), a light must begin to dawn in the highest part of the mind, a light which puts you in touch with a higher consciousness or with your psychic, and it is upon this light that you must take your support to explain things to the mind, to the vital and ﬁnally to the body.   Have you ever thought of unifying your being? Have you been disturbed, sometimes, to see that now you are one person, at other times another, at one time you want to do one thing, at another time you cannot do it, that you ﬁnd yourself facing an individuality which you can call and yet at the same time there are many parts of this individuality which escape you?  Have you never thought that your judgment of what is “good” and “bad” was a purely human judgment?


The Mother: And that it might not necessarily tally with the judgment of the divine Presence within you? The “bad” things you could not get rid of were probably things not in their place, things not properly balanced, and it would be a great pity if they were eliminated because, perhaps, a part of your energy and of your divine Presence would disappear at the same time. People who do not do yoga under the direction  of a guide follow ordinary moral notions and at times they feel very perplexed because with all their goodwill they do not get the expected result ; that happens because generally they wish to approve of their being instead of transforming it and because moral notions are very bad. In the work of uniﬁcation of the being, you must needs have imagination enough to be able to put the movements you have, the movements you wish to keep, to put them before what you are capable of imagining as most akin to the divine Presence; naturally, at ﬁrst it is only an imagination quite far from the truth, but it would help you to get out a little from moral narrowness and also from the limitations of your consciousness.


The Mother: For example, you have the idea of putting what you are and what you do before a consciousness which is at once inﬁnite and eternal. These two words do not perhaps make much sense at the beginning, but they compel you to break the limits and to put yourself in front of something which surpasses you so much on every side that its judgment cannot be the same as that of a human mentality. One must begin absolutely like that.  If you try to analyse yourself according to moral principles, you may be sure of going contrary to the divine plan. Not that the Divine is amoral, mark that, but this is not a kind of morality that mankind understands at all, it is not the same.


The Mother: This is a temptation that every teacher meets at each step, for the very simple reason that ordinary humanity, in a general way, not being in personal contact with the divine powers, understands nothing of what an illumined consciousness may be and asks for material proofs. It is on this demand that most religions are established and, for reasons which I may very frankly call “political”, they have put at the origin of their religion a more or less considerable number of miracles as having been performed by the founders, and they have thus more or less crudely encouraged among ignorant people the taste, the necessity for seeing what they call “miracles” in order to believe in the divine power of a person. This is an extraordinary ignorance, because it is not at all necessary to have a divine power or consciousness to perform miracles. It is inﬁnitely more easy to perform miracles with the help of small entities of the vital world who are material enough to be in touch with the physical world and act upon it, than to live in the consciousness of the higher regions and to work upon Nature only through the intermediary of all the other domains. It has been repeated over and over again to all human intellects that the proof of a being’s divinity is that he can raise the dead, cure maladies, and do many other things of the same kind (except making a fool wise).


The Mother: Well, I guarantee that  this is not a proof; it proves only one thing, that these “Masters” are in contact with the powers of the vital world and that with the help of those beings they can perform these miracles, that’s all. If one relies upon that to recognise the superiority of a man, one would make a glaring mistake. Naturally, there are other religions which are established on revelations made to their founders. These revelations are more or less happy mental transcriptions of the knowledge they received. This is already of a higher order but it is not yet a proof.


The Mother: And I would ﬁnally say, the human demand for proofs is not at all favourable to one’s development. Because the true divine power has organised the world according to a certain plan and in this plan there was no question of things happening in an illogical way; otherwise from the very beginning the world would have been illogical and it is not so. Men imagine for the most part one of two things, either that there is a material world to which they belong, that all comes from there, all returns there and all ends there — these are the unbelievers — or, the believers, most of them, that there is something which they call “God” and then the physical world, and that this physical world is the creation of that God who knows what he is doing or does what he wants; and the confusion lies in saying that everything happens by a kind of arbitrariness, natural or supernatural. There are very few people who know that there exists in the universe an inﬁnite number of gradations and that each one of these gradations has its own reality, its own life, its own law, its own determinism, and that the creation did not come about “like that”, by an arbitrary will, in an arbitrary way but is a deploying of consciousness and each thing has evolved as a logical result of the preceding one. I am telling you all this as simply as I can, you see, it is a very incomplete expression, but if I wanted to tell you the story exactly as it is, it would be a little difﬁcult to make you understand.


The Mother: Only I would like you to know my conclusion (I have already spoken about it several times, more or less in detail), it is this: each one of these numberless regions has its own very logical determinism  — everything proceeds from cause to effect; but these worlds, although differentiated, are not separate from each other and, by numerous processes which we may study, the inner or higher worlds are in constant contact with the lower or external worlds and act upon these, so that the determinism of one changes the determinism of the other. If you take the purely material domain, for instance, and if you notice that the material laws, the purely material laws are altered by something all of a sudden, you ought to say that it was a “miracle”, because there is a rupture of the determinism of one plane through the intervention of another, but usually we do not call this a miracle. For example, when the human will intervenes and changes something, that seems to you quite natural, because you have been accustomed to it from your childhood; you remember, don’t you, the example I gave you the other day: a stone falls according to the law of its own determinism, but you wish to interrupt its fall and you stretch out your hand and catch it; well you ought to call this a “miracle”, but you don’t because you are used to it (but a rat or a dog would perhaps call it a miracle if they could speak). And note that it is the same for what people call a “miracle”; they speak of a “miracle” because they are absolutely ignorant, unaware of the gradations between the will which wants to express itself and the plane on which it expresses itself. When they have a mental or a vital will, the thing seems quite natural to them, but when it is a question of the will of a higher world — the world of the gods or of a higher entity — which all of a sudden upsets all your little organisation, that seems to you a miracle.


The Mother: But it is a miracle simply because you are unable to follow the gradations by which the phenomenon took place. Therefore, the Supreme Will, that which comes from the very highest region, if you saw it in its logical action, if you were aware of it continually, it would seem to you altogether natural. You can express this in two ways: either say, “It is quite natural, it is like this that things must happen, it is only an expression of the divine Will”, or, each time you see on the material plane an intervention coming  from another plane, you ought to say, “It is miraculous!” So I may say with certainty that people who want to see miracles are people who cherish their ignorance! You understand my logic, don’t you?


The Mother: These people love their ignorance, they insist upon seeing miracles and being astounded! And that is why people who have done yoga seriously consider it altogether fatal to encourage this tendency; hence it is forbidden.  There is a “miracle” because you do not give people time to see the procedure by which you do things, you do not show them the stages. Thus, some men have reached higher mental regions and do not need to follow step by step all the gradations of thought; they can jump from one idea to a far distant conclusion without the intermediary links; this is usually called intuition (it is not altogether an “intuition”; it is that the idea, to begin with, is at a great height and from there these people can see while descending the whole totality of things and consequences without passing through all the gradations as ordinary human thought is obliged to do). It is an experience I have had; when I used to speak with Sri Aurobindo, we never had the need to go through intermediary ideas; he said one thing and I saw the far off result; we used to talk always like that, and if a person had happened to be present at our conversations he would have said, “What are they talking about!”


The Mother: But for us, you know, it was as clear as a continuous sentence. You could call that a mental miracle — it was not a miracle, it was simply that Sri Aurobindo had the vision of the totality of mental phenomena and hence we had no need to waste a good deal of time in going through all the gradations. For any person capable of following the line, the thing would have been quite natural and logical; for ignorant people it was a “miracle”.   If you use power to show that you possess it, it becomes so full of falsehood and untruth that ﬁnally it disappears. But it is not always thus, because, as I said at the beginning, when it concerns a power like the power of healing or the power of changing an altogether external thing — of making an unfavourable circumstance favourable, of ﬁnding lost objects, all these countless little “miracles” which are found in all religions — it is much more easy and even more effective to do these “miracles” with the help of the entities of the vital world which are not always recommendable, far from it; and then these beings make fun of you.


The Mother: This begins very well, very brilliantly, and usually ﬁnishes very badly.  I know the story of a man who had a few small powers and indulged in all kinds of so-called “spiritualist” practices, and through repeated exercises he had succeeded in coming into conscious contact with what he called a “spirit”. This man was doing business; he was a ﬁnancier and was even a speculator.  His relations with his “spirit” were of a very practical kind!  This spirit used to tell him when the stocks and shares would go up and when they would come down; it told him, “Sell this”, “Buy that” — it gave him very precise ﬁnancial particulars.


The Mother: For years he had been listening to his “spirit” and had followed it, and was fantastically successful; he became tremendously rich and naturally boasted a lot about the spirit which “guided” him. He used to tell everybody, “You see, it is really worthwhile learning how to put oneself in contact with these spirits.”  But one day he met a man who was a little wiser, who told him, “Take care.” He did not listen to him, he was swollen with his power and ambition. And it was then that his “spirit” gave him a last advice, “Now you can become the richest man in the world.


The Mother: Your ambition will be fulﬁlled. You have only to follow my direction. Do this: put all that you have into this transaction and you will become the richest man in the world.” The stupid fool did not even realise the trap laid for him: for years he had followed his “guide” and succeeded, so  he followed the last direction; and he lost everything, to the last penny.  So you see, these are small entities who make fun of you, and to make sure of you they work these little miracles to encourage you, and when they feel that you are well trapped, they play a ﬁne trick upon you and it is all over with you.


The Mother: We have said that there is only one safety, never to act except in harmony with the divine Will. There is one question: how to know that it is the divine Will which makes you act? I replied to the person who put to me this question (although this person did not agree with me) that it is not difﬁcult to distinguish the voice of the Divine: one cannot make a mistake. You need not be very far on the path to be able to recognise it; you must listen to the still, small peaceful voice which speaks in the silence of your heart.  I forgot one thing: to hear it you must be absolutely sincere, for if you are not sincere, you will begin by deceiving yourself and you will hear nothing at all except the voice of your ego and then you will commit with assurance (thinking that it is the real small voice) the most awful stupidities.


The Mother: But if you are sincere, the way is sure. It is not even a voice, not even a sensation, it is something extremely subtle — a slight indication. When everything goes well, that is, when you do nothing contrary to the divine Will, you will not perhaps have any deﬁnite impression, everything will seem to you normal. Of course, you should be eager to know whether you are acting in accordance with the divine Will, that is the ﬁrst point, naturally, without which you can know nothing at all. But once you are eager and you pay attention, everything seems to you normal, natural, then all of a sudden, you feel a little uneasiness somewhere in the head, in the heart or even in the stomach — generally one doesn’t give it a thought; you may feel it several times in the day but you reject it without giving it any attention; but it is no longer quite the same; then, at that moment, you must stop, no matter what you may be doing, and look, and  if you are sincere, you will notice a small black spot (a tiny wicked idea, a tiny false movement, a small arbitrary decision) and that’s the source of the uneasiness.


The Mother: You will notice then that the little black spot comes from the ego which is full of preferences; generally it does what it likes; the things it likes are called good and those it does not are called bad — this clouds your judgment. It is difﬁcult to judge under these conditions.   If you truly want to know, you must draw back a step and look, and you will know then that it is this small movement of the ego which is the cause of the uneasiness. You will see that it is a tiny thing curled back upon itself; you will have the impression of being in front of something hard which resists or is black.


The Mother: Then with patience, from the height of your consciousness, you must explain to this thing its mistake, and in the end it will disappear. I do not say that you will succeed all at once the very ﬁrst day, but if you try sincerely, you will always end with success. And if you persevere, you will see that all of a sudden you are relieved of a mass of meanness and ugliness and obscurity which was preventing you from ﬂowering in the light. It is those things which make you shrivel up, prevent you from widening yourself, opening out in a light where you have the impression of being very comfortable. If you make this effort, you will see ﬁnally that you are very far from the point where you had begun, the things you did not feel, did not understand, have become clear.


The Mother: If you are resolved, you are sure to succeed.  This is the ﬁrst step towards unifying yourself, becoming a conscious being who has a central will and acts only according to this will, which will be a constant expression of the divine Will. It is worth trying.  And I may tell you from my personal experience that there is nothing in the world more interesting. If you begin making this effort you will ﬁnd that your life is full of interest — you know, of the ordinary life of people at least a third is a kind of dull boredom (I say a third, but for some two-thirds of the day is a  dull boredom), and all that gets volatilised!


The Mother: Everything becomes so interesting, the least little thing, the least casual meeting, the least word exchanged, the least thing displaced — everything is full of life and interest.   I would like someone to tell me what he understands by “be absolutely free”, for it is a very important question. I shall tell you why.  Most people confuse liberty with licence. For the ordinary mind, to be free is to have the chance of committing every stupidity that one likes, without anybody intervening.


The Mother: I say one must be “absolutely free”, but it is a very dangerous advice unless one understands the meaning of the words. Free from what? — free from attachments, evidently. It is exactly that. It is the story of the Buddha who answers the young man expert in all the arts, “I am an expert in the art of self-control. If men congratulate me or praise me, it leaves me tranquil and indifferent.


The Mother: If they blame me, that leaves me equally tranquil and indifferent.”   Try then to question yourself to see to what extent you are above all blame and praise. Not that you must feel so superior to others that what they say seems to you of no importance, it is not that. It is that you have become aware of the general state of ignorance, including yours, and when others believe that something is good, you know “It is not so good as that”, and  when they believe it is bad you can say, “It is not so bad as that.”


The Mother: Everything is completely mixed up and ﬁnally nobody can judge anybody. Therefore you are completely indifferent to all praise and all blame. And the conclusion would be: so long as the divine consciousness in me or in one whom I have chosen as my Guru does not tell me “This is to be done”, “This is not to be done”, I am indifferent to what others may tell me. For I think that the divine presence in the one in whom I have put my trust is capable of knowing what is good and what is bad, what is to be done and what is not to be done.  And that is the best way of being free.


The Mother: Let your surrender to the Divine be entire and you will become completely free.  The only way of being truly free is to make your surrender to the Divine entire, without reservation, because then all that binds you, ties you down, chains you, falls away naturally from you and has no longer any importance. If someone comes and blames you, you may say, “On what authority does he blame me, does he know the supreme will?” And the same thing when you are congratulated. This is not to advise you not to proﬁt by what comes to you from others — I have learnt throughout my life that even a little child can give you a lesson.


The Mother: Not that he is less ignorant than you but he is like a mirror which reﬂects the image of what you are; he may tell you something which is not true but also may show you something that you did not know.  You can hence proﬁt a great deal by it if you receive the lesson without any undesirable reaction.  Every hour of my life I have learnt that one can learn something; but I have never felt bound by the opinion of others, for I consider that there is only one truth in the world which can know something, and this is the Supreme Truth. Then one is quite free. And it is this freedom that I want of you — free from all attachment, all ignorance, all reaction; free from everything except a total surrender to the Divine.


The Mother: This is the way out from all responsibility towards the world. The Divine alone is responsible.    Generally, no. It needs time.


The Mother: But there are instantaneous conversions; to explain all that to you in detail would take too much time. You know perhaps that in all schools of initiation it used to be said that it takes thirty-ﬁve years to change one’s character! So you must not expect the thing to be done in a minute.  You do not expect a schoolboy to be a yogi, do you? I have just said that it takes thirty-ﬁve years to attain that and to change one’s character.


The Mother: You see, individual, human authority, like the authority of a father of the family, of a teacher, of the head of a state, is a symbolic thing. They have no real authority but authority is given to them to enable them to fulﬁl a role in social life as it now is, that is to say, a social life founded upon falsehood and not at all on truth, for truth means unity and society is founded on division. There are people who work out their role, their function, their symbol more or less well — nobody is faultless, all is mixed in this world. But he who takes his role seriously, tries to ﬁll it as honestly as possible, may receive inspirations which enable him to play his part a little more truly than an ordinary man. If the teacher who gives marks kept in mind that he was the representative of the divine truth, if he constantly took sufﬁcient trouble to be in tune with the divine Will as much as this is possible for him, well, that could be very useful; for the ordinary teacher acts according to his personal preferences — what he does not like, what he likes, etc. — and he belongs to the general falsehood, but if at the time of giving marks, the teacher tries sincerely to put himself  in harmony with a truth deeper than his small narrow consciousness, he may serve as an intermediary of this truth and, as such, help his students to become conscious of this truth within themselves.


The Mother: This is precisely one of the things that I wanted to tell you.  Education is a sacerdocy, teaching is a sacerdocy, and to be at the head of a State is a sacerdocy. Then, if the person who fulﬁls this role aspires to fulﬁl it in the highest and the most true way, the general condition of the world can become much better.  Unfortunately, most people never think about this at all, they ﬁll their role somehow — not to speak of the innumerable people who work only to earn money, but in this case their activity is altogether rotten, naturally. That was my very ﬁrst basis in forming the Ashram: that the work done here be an offering to the Divine.


The Mother: Instead of letting oneself go in the stream of one’s nature, of one’s mood, one must constantly keep in mind this kind of feeling that one is a representative of the Supreme Knowledge, the Supreme Truth, the Supreme Law, and that one must apply it in the most honest, the most sincere way one can; then one makes great progress oneself and can make others also progress. And besides, one will be respected, there will be no more indiscipline in the class, for there is in every human being something that recognises and bows down before true greatness; even the worst criminals are capable of admiring a noble and disinterested act. Therefore when children feel in a teacher, in a school master, this deep aspiration to act according to the truth, they listen to you with an obedience which you would not get if one day you were in a good mood and the next day you were not, which is disastrous for everybody.   It may go quicker, you know! All depends on the way that one follows.


The Mother: You remember, we spoke once of the attitude of the baby cat and that of the baby monkey. If you agree to be like a docile baby cat (there are also baby cats which are very undisciplined, I have seen them), like a docile little child , this may go very fast. Note that it is very easy to say, “Choose the attitude of the baby cat”, but it is not so easy to do. You must not believe that adopting the attitude of the baby cat lets you off from all personal effort.


The Mother: Because you are not a baby cat, human beings are not baby cats! There are in you innumerable elements which are accustomed to trusting only themselves, which want to do their own work, and it is much more difﬁcult to control all these elements than to let oneself go in all circumstances. It is very difﬁcult. First of all, there is always that wonderful work of the mind which likes so very much to observe, criticise, analyse, doubt, try to solve the problem, say, “Is it good thus?”, “Would it not be better like that?”, and so on. So that goes on and on, and where is the baby cat?...


The Mother: For the baby cat does not think! It is free from all this and hence it is much easier for it!  Whatever be the way you follow, personal effort is always necessary till the moment of identiﬁcation. At that moment all effort drops from you like a worn-out robe, you are another person: what was impossible for you becomes not only possible but indispensable, you cannot do otherwise.  You must be attentive, silent, must await the inner inspiration, not do anything from external reactions, you must be moved by the light that comes from above, constantly, regularly, must act only under the inspiration of that light and nothing else. Never to think, never to question, never to ask “Should I do this or that?”, but to know, to see, to hear.


The Mother: To act with  an inner certitude without questioning and without doubting, because the decision does not come from you, it comes from above. Well, this may come very soon or one may have to wait perhaps a long time — that depends upon one’s previous preparation, upon many things. Till then you must will and will with persistence, and above all never lose patience or courage.  If necessary, repeat the same thing a thousand times, knowing that perhaps the thousandth time you will realise the result.


The Mother: You are not all of a single piece. Your present body is often an accident. If you have within you a conscious soul which has inﬂuenced the formation of your body, you are inﬁnitely better prepared than someone, a soul, which falls headﬁrst into a body without knowing where it is going; in this latter case much hard work is needed to lift up the consciousness which has thus fallen into obscurity. The inner preparation may come from previous lives or from the present life; or you have reached a turningpoint in your integral growth and are in just the right relation with the circumstances necessary for the last step to be taken.  But this does not mean that you have not lived a thousand times before reaching this turning-point.


The Mother: Because it is too strong for them. It is as though you were in the midst of a big cyclone. It happens at times that the wind is so violent that you are not able to stand — you have to lie down and wait till it blows over. Now, the divine forces are a thousand times stronger than a cyclonic wind. If you do not have in you a very wide receptivity, an extremely solid basis of calmness, of equality of soul and inner peace, they come and carry you away like a hurricane and you cannot resist them.


The Mother: It is the same thing with light; some people get a pain in the eyes when they look at the sun and are obliged to put on dark glasses because sunlight is too strong for them. But this is merely sunlight. When you are able to look at the supramental light, it appears to you so brilliant that sunlight seems like a black stain in comparison. One must have strong eyes and a solid brain to  bear that, one must be well prepared, established in something extremely calm and vast — it is as though one had such a strong basis of tranquillity that when the storm passes, when the light comes with a great intensity, one is able to remain immobile and receive what one can without being knocked over. But there is not one being in a million who can do it.


The Mother: Only those who have had a foretaste of inner experience can know what this means.  But even if you enter consciously into the psychic, it is dazzling; and it is within your reach because it is your own psychic being,  and yet it is so different from your external consciousness that the ﬁrst time you enter it consciously, it seems to you truly dazzling, something inﬁnitely more brilliant than the most brilliant sunlight.  The psychic is what may be called “the Divine within the reach of man”.  Yes, the most important indication is a perfect equality of soul in all circumstances.


The Mother: It is an absolutely indispensable basis; something very quiet, calm, peaceful, the feeling of a great force.  Not the quietness that comes from inertia but the sensation of a concentrated power which keeps you always steady, whatever happens, even in circumstances which may appear to you the most terrible in your life. That is the ﬁrst sign.  A second sign: you feel completely imprisoned in your ordinary normal consciousness, as in something extremely hard, something suffocating and intolerable, as though you had to pierce a hole in a brass wall. And the torture becomes almost unbearable, it is stiﬂing; there is an inner effort to break through and you cannot manage to break through.


The Mother: This also is one of the ﬁrst signs. It means that your inner consciousness has reached a point where its outer mould is much too small for it — the mould of ordinary life, of ordinary activities, ordinary relations,  all that becomes so small, so petty; you feel within you a force to break all that.  There is yet another sign: when you concentrate and have an aspiration, you feel something coming down into you, you receive an answer; you feel a light, a peace, a force coming down; and almost immediately — you need not wait or spend a very long time — nothing but an inner aspiration, a call, and the answer comes. This also means that the relation has been well established.


The Mother: How can you force it? It escapes through your ﬁngers, so to say.  Your will thinks it has caught it, and it eludes you. It is difﬁcult to control. And force it to what?


The Mother: To be ready?... All that you will be able to get from it is that it will become inert, that is, it will hide in a corner, not stir any longer, and let the storm pass!  Because for it the contact with the divine forces is like a storm.  And when it sees that the crisis is over, it will react: “Here we are! Now, it is my turn!”


The Mother: If you are upset, it means that you have still much work to do upon your vital before it can be ready, it means there is a weakness somewhere. For some, the weakness is in the mind. I knew a boy in France who was a ﬁne musician, he used to play the violin admirably. But his brain was not very big, it was just big enough to help him in his music, nothing more. He used to come to our spiritual meetings and, all of a sudden, he had the experience of the inﬁnite in the ﬁnite; it was an absolutely true experience; in the ﬁnite individual came the experience of the inﬁnite.


The Mother: But this upset the boy so much that he could make nothing at all of it! He could not even play his music any longer.  The experience had to be stopped because it was too powerful for him. This is an instance where the mind was too weak.   He had the experience, truly, not the idea (ideas are generally something foreign to all men).


The Mother: One must have the experience before the idea; for most men think only with words — if you put two contradictory ideas together, they no longer understand, while the experience is quite possible. So the mind must be a little wide, a little supple and quiet, and instead of feeling immediately that everything you were thinking of is now escaping you, you wait very quietly for something in your head to begin to understand the content of the experience.  There are people — many — who are weak in their vital being. When they have this sensation of inﬁnity, eternity, in their very small person, in their very little strength, it is so different from the impression they have constantly, that they understand nothing whatever. Then they fall sick or they begin to talk deliriously or to shout and dance.


The Mother: But if you are absolutely sincere and look at yourself clearsightedly, this cannot happen to you, for an experience which comes inopportunely like that is always the result of some pride or ambition or some lack of balance within, due to having neglected one part of the being for the beneﬁt of another.   Those who think they can advance in yoga by leaving their body completely inert, their vital asleep and their mind in a kind of stupefaction (for often, what they call “silence” is just stupefaction), get completely upset, you may be sure, when an experience comes to them. They lose their head, they do extravagant things or otherwise something very unfortunate happens to them.... One must have a solid well-balanced body, a wellcontrolled vital and a mind organised, supple, logical; then, if you are in a state of aspiration and you receive an answer, all your being will feel enriched, enlarged, splendid, and you will be perfectly happy and you will not spill your cup because it is too full, like a clumsy fellow who does not know how to hold a full tumbler.


The Mother: It is like that, you see, it is as if you had a small vase there, quite small, which will remain small if you do not take care to make it bigger; then if all of a sudden  it is ﬁlled up with something which is too strong, everything overﬂows!  You must particularly not be violent, for if you are violent, you will come out of it tired, exhausted, without any result. You must concentrate all the forces of aspiration. If you are conscious of the inner ﬂame, you should put into this ﬂame all that you ﬁnd strongest in you by way of aspiration, of a call, and hold yourself as quiet as you can, calling, with a deep reliance that the answer will come; and when you are in this state, with your aspiration and concentrated force, with your inner ﬂame, press gently upon this kind of outer crust, without violence, but with insistence, as long as you can, without getting agitated, irritated or excited.  You must be perfectly quiet, must call and push.


The Mother: It will not succeed the ﬁrst time. You must begin again as many times as is necessary, but suddenly, one day... you are on the other side! Then you emerge in an ocean of light.  If you ﬁght, if you are restless, if you struggle, you will get nothing at all; and if you become irritable you will only get a headache, that is all.


The Mother: Yes, it is that. To gather together all your power of aspiration, make of it something intensely concentrated, in an absolute tranquillity, to be conscious of your inner ﬂame and throw into it all you can that it may burn ever higher and higher, and then call with your consciousness and, slowly, push. You are sure to succeed one day.   We enter here into a big problem.... The notion of what is good for a being and what isn’t is not the same to his evolved consciousness as to the divine consciousness.


The Mother: What appears to you good, favourable, is not always what’s best for you from a spiritual point of view. It is this which must be learnt from the beginning, that the divine perception of what will lead you fastest to the goal is absolutely different from yours, and that you cannot understand it. That is why you must say to yourself from the beginning, “It is all right. I shall accept everything and I shall understand later on.”  So often you come across persons who, before they began yoga, had a relatively easy life, and as soon as they come to yoga, all the circumstances to which they were particularly attached break away from them more or less brutally.


The Mother: Then they are troubled; they do not perhaps have the frankness to admit it to themselves, they perhaps take recourse to other thoughts and other words, but it comes to this: “How is it? I am good and I am not treated kindly!”  The entire human notion of justice is there. “You try to become good and what cataclysms befall you! All the things you loved are taken away from you, all the pleasures you have had are taken away from you, all the people whom you loved leave you; it is indeed not worth the trouble to be good and to have made an effort.”


The Mother: And if you follow your reasoning far enough, all of a sudden you come upon the canker — so, you wanted to do yoga out of self-interest, you wanted to be good out of selfinterest, you thought your situation would be better and you would be given a bonbon for your wisdom! And that does not happen!... Well, this refusal is the best lesson that could ever be given to you. For as long as your aspiration hides a desire and as long as in your heart there is the spirit of bargaining with the  Divine, things will come and give you blows till you wake up to the true consciousness within you which makes no conditions, no bargains. That’s all.


The Mother: Perhaps your aspiration was truly sincere and disinterested. In such a case, things must happen like that.  Everything depends upon the form the reversal, the inner conversion has taken. If the change is sudden, yes, one can immediately become conscious of the small voice, but if it is gradual, the best effects will also be gradual. It depends absolutely on each case, one cannot tell.


The Mother: If a kind of tearing, an illumination takes place, then yes, one has immediately the inner indication. It can even be retrospective. That is, while thinking of certain past acts, one may get a clear vision of what one was compared with what one now is. Besides, each time there is a true change in the being, each time one overcomes a fault, one has the clear vision of a whole set of things which seemed quite natural and which now pass across the screen like a dark spot; you see the origin, the causes and the effects. If you have a precise, exact memory and have for a certain length of time, say a period of ten years, made sincere efforts to transform yourself, to consecrate yourself more and more, and if you could recollect what you were before, you would say, “It is not possible, I was not like that!”


The Mother: And yet you were indeed like that. There is such a distance between what one was before, what seemed quite natural to you before and what seems to you natural now, that you cannot believe you are the  same person. This is the surest indication that you have truly progressed.  The ﬁrst sign (it is not the same for everybody) but in a chronological order, I believe, is that everything else appears to you absolutely without importance. Your entire life, all your activities, all your movements continue, if circumstances so arrange things, but they all seem to you utterly unimportant, this is no longer the meaning of your existence.


The Mother: I believe this is the ﬁrst sign.  There may be another; for example, the feeling that everything is different, of living differently, of a light in the mind which was not there before, of a peace in the heart which was not there before. That does make a change; but the positive change usually comes later, very rarely does it come at ﬁrst except in a ﬂash at the time of conversion when one has decided to take up the spiritual life. Sometimes, it begins like a great illumination, a deep joy enters into you; but generally, afterwards this goes into the background, for there are too many imperfections still persisting in you.... It is not disgust, it is not contempt, but everything appears to you so uninteresting that it is truly not worth the trouble of attending to it.


The Mother: For instance, when you are in the midst of certain physical conditions, pleasant or unpleasant (the two extremes meet), you say to yourself, “It was so important to me, all that? But it has no importance at all!” You have the impression that you have truly turned over to the other side.  Some imagine that the sign of spiritual life is the capacity to sit in a corner and meditate! That is a very, very common idea.


The Mother: I do not want to be severe, but most people who make much of their capacity for meditation — I do not think they meditate even for one minute out of one hour. Those who meditate truly never speak about it; for them it is quite a natural thing. When  it has become a natural thing, without any glory about it, you may begin to tell yourself that you are making progress. Those who talk about it and think that this gives them a superiority over other human beings, you may be sure, are most of the time in a state of complete inertia.  It is very difﬁcult to meditate.


The Mother: There are all kinds of meditations.... You may take an idea and follow it to arrive at a given result — this is an active meditation; people who want to solve a problem or to write, meditate in this way without knowing that they are meditating. Others sit down and try to concentrate on something without following an idea — simply to concentrate on a point in order to intensify one’s power of concentration; and this brings about what usually happens when you concentrate upon a point: if you succeed in gathering your capacity for concentration sufﬁciently upon a point whether mental, vital or physical, at a given moment you pass through and enter into another consciousness. Others still try to drive out from their head all movements, ideas, reﬂexes, reactions and to arrive at a truly silent tranquillity. This is extremely difﬁcult; there are people who have tried for twenty-ﬁve years and not succeeded, for it is somewhat like taking a bull by the horns.


The Mother: There is another kind of meditation which consists in being as quiet as one can be but without trying to stop all thoughts, for there are thoughts which are purely mechanical and if you try to stop these you will need years, and moreover you will not be sure of the result ; instead of that you gather together all your consciousness and remain as quiet and peaceful as possible, you detach yourself from external things as though they do not interest you at all, and all of a sudden, you brighten the ﬂame of aspiration and throw into it everything that comes to you so that the ﬂame may rise higher and higher, higher and higher; you identify yourself with it and you go up to the extreme point of your consciousness and aspiration, thinking of nothing else — simply, an aspiration which mounts, mounts, mounts, without thinking a minute of the result, of what may happen  and especially of what may not, and above all without desiring that something may come — simply, the joy of an aspiration which mounts and mounts and mounts, intensifying itself more and more in a constant concentration. And there I may assure you that what happens is the best that can happen. That is, it is the maximum of your possibilities which is realised when you do this. These possibilities may be very different according to individuals.


The Mother: But then all these worries about trying to be silent, going behind appearances, calling a force which answers, waiting for an answer to your questions, all that vanishes like an unreal vapour. And if you succeed in living consciously in this ﬂame, in this column of mounting aspiration, you will see that even if you do not have an immediate result, after a time something will happen.  Can anyone tell me what this concentration is and why we have it? It is a very interesting question, it concerns everybody. Can anyone tell me the difference between this concentration and a so-called “ordinary” meditation?


The Mother: Why do we do it and what happens there?  Yes, this is the individual side. And collectively, what is this concentration for? (He is on the way, note, he has taken half the ﬁrst step).   That is also an individual aspect.


The Mother: In the meditations we formerly used to have there [ ], when we had a morning or evening meditation, my work was to unify the consciousness of everyone and lift it as high as I could towards the Divine. Those who were able to feel the movement followed it. This was ordinary meditation with an aspiration and ascent towards the Divine. Here, at the Playground, the work is to unify all who are here, make them open and the divine force into them. It is the opposite movement and that is why this concentration cannot replace the other, even as the other cannot replace this one.


The Mother: What happens here is exceptional — in the other meditation [] I gathered together the consciousness of all who were present and, with the power of aspiration, lifted it towards the Divine, that is, made each one of you progress a little. Here, on the other hand, I take you as you are; each one of you comes saying, “Here we are with our whole day’s activities, we were busy with our body, here it is, we offer to you all our movements, just as they were, just as we are.” And my work is to unify all that, make of it a homogeneous mass and, in answer to this offering (which each one can make in his own way), to open every consciousness, widen the receptivity, make a unity of this receptivity and bring down the Force. So at that moment each one of you, if you are very quiet and attentive, will surely receive something. You will not always be aware of it, but you will receive something.


The Mother: I hope people have made some progress and do not need the physical presence to feel the Help and the Force.   It is quite symbolical!  The train, the ship, and I suppose the aeroplane also are for those who do yoga, symbols of the way and of the Force that leads you — if you lose your time or if you have too much luggage or if you think of it too late, well, you miss the way and you must run hard to catch up.   There are lots of dreams like that which give a very precise indication of the state you are in.


The Mother: Dreams are very interesting, specially if one knows how to use them.   If one succeeds in making the mind and vital silent, and in keeping the body well asleep, one can have a very still and quiet sleep, and then, if one can manage to get out of these forms and enter the higher worlds, one may reach the true repose of Sachchidananda.  There are many possibilities. But most often, it is that a communication has been established either on the mental or the vital plane or even on the subtle physical plane and it is this communication which brings about the meeting later — your dream is not only a premonition but also a condition; there is an inner relation close enough to enable you to come into contact in sleep, and circumstances so arrange themselves that you meet physically afterwards. Sometimes it is only a premonition, but then the dream has a special quality — you see someone coming and he does come physically a little later.


The Mother: Generally it is an already established relation; it is someone whom you meet, whom you frequent, whom you speak to, with whom you live some hours of the night. Then afterwards when you both meet you have the impression that you know each other very well. That’s a fact, you already know each other, before having met physically.  If you narrate something you have not seen, evidently that is a false vision! Also if you embellish, rearrange, change your vision when you report it, this too becomes a false vision.


The Mother: But if you tell in all simplicity what you have seen, what can there be false about it? Your interpretation may be false — you may say, “That means this” and you make a big blunder, but what you  have seen, you have seen, and what you have not seen, you have not seen! This is something which always astounds me!... Have you seen it? If so, then you have!


The Mother: The explanation of what you have seen is another matter, but if you have seen something, you have seen it!   This question generally comes from those who have the habit of rearranging a little what they see. They see a tiny thing, perhaps, in a ﬂash, and then willingly or unwillingly, consciously or unconsciously they arrange things, they add a little bit, add to it another, they give a little explanation, make the thing coherent and when it has become something that can stand on its own legs, they say, “I had this vision”, but it is not at all what they saw.... This is a kind of mental insincerity.


The Mother: It is spontaneous — when the mind sees one thing here, another thing there, yet a third elsewhere, this is very unpleasant for it. It ﬁlls up the holes, it says, “This leads to that”, “That is the cause of this”, and so on, and the mind is very happy because this is logical. What the mind adds in between the points of the vision may happen, by chance, to be true, but it may also be false.   Ask yourself rather whether you have a mind which keeps quiet, which is wholly sincere and objective, which says exactly what it has seen or whether you have one of those minds bubbling with activity which, as soon as it has seen something, adds to it its grain of salt, automatically, and makes out of it a big story; and so you are quite convinced that you have seen all that, but in fact you have not seen it at all.


The Mother: It is in this that one can say that visions are not sincere. But that is not the fault of the vision! What you have seen, you have seen; it is the fault of the interpretation or simply of the narration which was embellished. I have had admirable examples! — of people who had seen truly revealing things, but who understood nothing about them. On the spur of the moment they recounted spontaneously what they had seen — in half an hour the story had become a little different, all the “holes” were ﬁlled up and ﬁnally the story stood well on its legs!


The Mother: The story was idiotic, it made  no sense, whilst the few points they had seen were magniﬁcent revelations.   ( )  The capacity for visions, when it is sincere and spontaneous, can put you in touch with events which you are not capable of knowing in your outer consciousness....


The Mother: There is a very interesting fact, it is that somewhere in the terrestrial mind, somewhere in the terrestrial vital, somewhere in the subtle physical, one can ﬁnd an exact, perfect, automatic recording of everything that happens. It is the most formidable memory one could imagine, which misses nothing, forgets nothing, records all. And if you are able to enter into it, you can go backward, you can go forward, and in all directions, and you will have the “memory” of all things — not only of things of the past, but of things to come.  For everything is recorded there.  In the mental world, for instance, there is a domain of the physical mind which is related to physical things and keeps the memory of physical happenings upon earth.


The Mother: It is as though you were entering into innumerable vaults, one following another indeﬁnitely, and these vaults are ﬁlled with small pigeon-holes, one above another, one above another, with tiny doors. Then if you want to know something and if you are conscious, you look, and you see something like a small point — a shining point; you ﬁnd that this is what you wish to know and you have only to concentrate there and it opens; and when it opens, there is a sort of an unrolling of something like extremely subtle manuscripts, but if your concentration is sufﬁciently strong you begin to read as though from a book. And you have the whole story in all its details. There are thousands of these little holes, you know; when you go for a walk there, it is as though you were walking in inﬁnity. And in this way you can ﬁnd the exact facts about whatever you want to know.


The Mother: But I must tell you that what you ﬁnd is never what has been reported in history  — histories are always planned out; I have never come across a single “historical” fact which is like history. This is not to discourage you from learning history, but things are like that.  Events have been quite different from the way in which they have been reported, and for a very simple reason: the human brain is not capable of recording things with exactitude; history is built upon memories and memories are always vague. If you take, for example, written memories, he who writes chooses the events which have interested him, what he has seen, noticed or known, and that is always only a very small portion of the whole. When the historian narrates, the same thing happens as with dreams where you take one point, then another, then another, and at last you can have an almost exact vision of what has taken place and with a little imagination you ﬁll up the gaps; but historians relate a continuous story; between the events or moments there are gaps which they ﬁll up as best they can or rather as they wish, according to their mental, vital and other preferences.


The Mother: And that comprises the history you are made to learn. The same story, narrated in one language and in another, in one country or in another, you cannot imagine how comic it is! This is particularly true if one of the countries is interested because of its vanity, its prestige. And ﬁnally the two pictures presented to you are so different that you could believe that two different things were being spoken about. It is unbelievable.


The Mother: But I have noticed that even for altogether external, concrete facts where there is no question of evaluation, it is still the same thing. No human brain is capable of understanding a thing in its totality; even the most scholarly, the most learned, even the most sincere person does not see a subject — and especially many subjects — totally. He will say what he knows, what he understands, and all that he does not know, all that he does not understand is not there, and this absolutely changes everything.   But if you can acquire this capability of entering into the terrestrial memory, I assure you it is worth the trouble.


The Mother: It is  quite different from Yoga; it is not necessary to have a spiritual life for that, you must have a special ability.  For everything — I would repeat it to you eternally if I had the time — for everything, one must be absolutely sincere. If you are not sincere, you will begin by deceiving yourself and all your experiences will be worth nothing at all. But if you are sincere and by discipline (for it is not easy) you succeed in entering this mental memory of the world, you will make discoveries which are really worth the trouble.   I don’t think it is this that people mean when they speak of “false visions”.


The Mother: They say “false visions” when they have seen something which they believe does not exist; and the reply I always give them is, “Had you already thought of what you saw? Had you made an effort to see it? Was it in your imagination or your wish? If so, it must be false.” What you are now asking is something else: these spirits who pretend to be what they are not in reality, if you believe them, it does not mean that your vision is false, but that the interpretation of your vision is false, that you do not have the necessary discernment to perceive the deception.


The Mother: I had with me for a long time people who said they had seen me (seen me with quite absurd consequences; all sorts of disastrous things happened to them); it was certain forces trying to make them believe it was I. I gave them a very simple means of putting an end to this comedy.  There is also something else: I am called and I answer; but what people see afterwards, the result, is almost always the product of their own mental formation. They want me to do a certain thing and that is what happens. And I verify this, you see, when they come and tell me, “Tonight you came”; as a matter of fact, they had called me and I had gone there, but I compare what really happened with what they saw, and very often there is a very big difference, which comes precisely from the desire they have mixed up with their perception.


The Mother: Then I could say, “Your  vision is partly false; the fact that I came is true, but what you made me do, it is you who made me do it!”  How can one make an offering of one’s will?... Some people, when they offer their will, stop willing! This is more convenient, but evidently this is not the right way.  How to offer one’s will to the Divine when one does not know what the divine Will is?


The Mother: This is a very interesting problem.   Yes, unfortunately. But all that they do is to accept the collective will or that of the strongest.  Perhaps you could ﬁrst silence your will and wait for the inner voice before acting!


The Mother: That would be wiser.  You see, we have already found many ways of offering our will to the Divine: ﬁrst, not to will any longer! Second, do what everybody wants except oneself! Third, want no matter what and do no matter what, then, afterwards, offer to the Divine what one has done!  But one can also formulate to oneself one’s will and try to pass it before the screen of one’s higher ideal, and see what it looks like in front of this ideal, whether it cuts a ﬁne ﬁgure or not.


The Mother: If it vacillates, you may be sure there is something there to  check up. If, on the other hand, it passes very quietly and without protest, you may risk doing what you wanted and see the result.  But here too we are before a very difﬁcult problem.... Those who wish to remain in an inner peace say that everything that happens is the will of God — this is very convenient for being quiet, it is the best way, there is no better; if there is a better way, it is much more difﬁcult. So, if your will is contradicted, you say it is the will of God; you are quiet, you have done what you could and the result is different from what you expected, and you are in peace.


The Mother: (Note that this is not very easy; it is quite good already, but this is not all.) But it may also be quite possible that your will was contradicted by circumstances and yet it was right. Then the solution is much more difﬁcult. First, how to know that it was right?... If you are quite impartial, quiet, peaceful, and as little egoistic as possible, if you look straight in the face at what has happened and see a sort of contradiction, the impression that a light has gone out and you are in the presence of a falsehood, you remain quite calm, but you see and understand that your will has been contradicted for some unknown reason, though in itself it was not false, that what you had seen was the truth but it did not manifest itself for some reason or other.


The Mother: So you must start on the adventure of discovering the reason why your truth did not manifest itself.  This is a problem a little more difﬁcult... but if you expand your vision sufﬁciently, both in height and wideness, you can immediately see the consequences your will would have had if it had been realised, and the consequences of what would have happened; and if you ﬂing your view far enough, you will be able to see that your will, however true it was, was a partial truth — it was not a collective, general truth, and still less a universal one — and, consequently, if this truth had been realised at that moment, it would have dislocated a certain and many things which form a part of the divine Work (for everything, in fact, is a part of the divine Work, the entire creation, the entire universe): one part of the whole would have been left behind.   People always ask, “But if the Divine is all-powerful, why is it that things have not yet changed?” This is the reason why.


The Mother: And mark that your idea of what ought to be is so inﬁnitely far off from what will be, that, by this very fact, even if you try to see in the most complete way possible, you will leave behind such a large portion of the universe that it will be almost a linear realisation, and in any case so small, so narrow, that the greater part of the universe will remain unchanged. And even if you have a very vast view of the whole, even if you can conceive of something more total and you go ahead on the path which is ready — for it is with paths as it is with beings, some are ready — without having the patience to wait for others, that is, if you wish to realise something very close to the true Truth in comparison with the present state of the world, what will happen? — the dislocation of a certain unity, a rupture not only of harmony but of equilibrium, for there will be an entire part of the creation which will not be able to follow. And instead of a complete realisation of the Divine, you will have a small localised realisation, inﬁnitesimal, and nothing will be done of what ﬁnally ought to be done.  Consequently, you should not be impatient, should not be disappointed, depressed, discouraged if the truth you have seen is not immediately realised. Naturally, it is not a question of being down-hearted or grieved or in despair if you have made a mistake, for every mistake can be corrected; from the moment you have found it is a mistake, there is an opportunity to work within you, to make progress and be very happy!


The Mother: But the situation is much more serious and more difﬁcult to overcome when you have seen something true, absolutely, essentially true, and the state of the universe is such that this truth is not yet ripe for realisation. I do not say this happens to many people, but perhaps it may happen to you, and it is then you have to have a great patience, a great understanding, and say to yourself, “It was true, but it was not completely true”, that is, it was not a truth in harmony with all the other truths and, above all, not  in keeping with the present possibilities; so we tried to realise it too quickly, and because we tried to be too quick it was belied.  But do not say it was false because it was belied; say it was premature, that is all you can say — what you saw was true, but it was premature, and you must, with much patience and perseverance, keep your little truth intact for the moment when it will be possible to realise it .


The Mother: The ﬁnal victory is for the most patient.  And it is there we have the solution of the problem. You can at every minute make the gift of your will in an aspiration — and an aspiration which formulates itself very simply, not just “Lord, Thy will be done”, but “Grant that I may do as well as I can the best thing to do.”  You may not know at every moment what is the best thing to do or how to do it, but you can place your will at the disposal of the Divine to do the best possible, the best thing possible.  You will see it will have marvellous results.


The Mother: Do this with consciousness, sincerity and perseverance, and you will ﬁnd yourself getting along with gigantic strides. It is like that, isn’t it? One must do things with all the ardour of one’s soul, with all the strength of one’s will; do at every moment the best possible, the best thing possible. What others do is not your concern — this is something I shall never be able to repeat to you often enough.  Never say, “So-and-so does not do this”, “So-and-so does something else”, “That one does what he should not do” — all this is not your concern.


The Mother: You have been put upon earth, in a physical body, with a deﬁnite aim, which is to make this  body as conscious as possible, make it the most perfect and most conscious instrument of the Divine. He has given you a certain amount of substance and of matter in all the domains — mental, vital and physical — in proportion to what He expects from you, and all the circumstances around you are also in proportion to what He expects of you, and those who tell you, “My life is terrible, I lead the most miserable life in the world” , are donkeys! Everyone has a life appropriate to his total development, everyone has experiences which help him in his total development, and everyone has difﬁculties which help him in his total realisation.  If you look at yourself carefully, you will see that one always carries in oneself the opposite of the virtue one has to realise (I use “virtue” in its widest and highest sense).


The Mother: You have a special aim, a special mission, a special realisation which is your very own, each one individually, and you carry in yourself all the obstacles necessary to make your realisation perfect. Always you will see that within you the shadow and the light are equal: you have an ability, you have also the negation of this ability.  But if you discover a very black hole, a thick shadow, be sure there is somewhere in you a great light. It is up to you to know how to use the one to realise the other.  This is a fact very little spoken about, but one of capital importance.


The Mother: And if you observe carefully you will see that it is always thus with everyone. This leads us to statements which are paradoxical but absolutely true; for instance, that the greatest thief can be the most honest man (this is not to encourage you to steal, of course!) and the greatest liar can be the most truthful person. So, do not despair if you ﬁnd in yourself the greatest weakness, for perhaps it is the sign of the greatest divine strength. Do not say, “I am like that, I can’t be otherwise.” It is not true.


The Mother: You are “like that” because, precisely, you ought to be the opposite. And all your difﬁculties are there just so that you may learn to transform them into the truth they are hiding.  Once you have understood this, many worries come to an  end and you are very happy, very happy.


The Mother: If one ﬁnds one has very black holes, one says, “This shows I can rise very high”, if the abyss is very deep, “I can climb very high.” It is the same from the universal point of view; to use the Hindu terminology so familiar to you, it is the greatest Asuras who are the greatest beings of Light. And the day these Asuras are converted, they will be the supreme beings of the creation. This is not to encourage you to be asuric, you know, but it is like that — this will widen your minds a little and help you to free yourself from those ideas of opposing good and evil, for if you abide in that category, there is no hope.  If the world was not essentially the opposite of what it has become, there would be no hope.


The Mother: For the hole is so black and so deep, and the inconscience so complete, that if this were not the sign of the total consciousness, well, there would be nothing more to do but pack up one’s kit and go away. Men like Shankara, who did not see much further than the end of their nose, said that the world was not worth the trouble of living in, for it was impossible, that it was better to treat it as an illusion and go away, there was nothing to be done with it. I tell you, on the contrary, that it is because the world is very bad, very dark, very ugly, very unconscious, full of misery and suffering, that it can become the supreme Beauty, the supreme Light, the supreme Consciousness and supreme Felicity.  When I told you just a while ago that you must aspire with a great ardour to do the best possible, at every moment the best thing possible, you could have asked me, “That is all very well.  But how to know?”


The Mother: Well, it is not necessary to know! If you take this attitude with sincerity, you will know at each moment what  you have to do, and it is this which is so wonderful! According to your sincerity, the inspiration is more and more precise, more and more exact.  It is always the same thing, this is our screen before which we must pass everything to know whether one may accept it or whether one is told not to.  That is, instead of being in a state of tension, instead of making a tremendous effort to silence the inner machine and be able to concentrate your thought upon what you want, when you do it quite simply, naturally, without effort, automatically, and you decide to meditate for some reason or other, what you want to see, learn or know remains in your consciousness and all the rest disappears as by a miracle;


The Mother: everything falls quiet in  you, all your being becomes silent, your nerves are altogether soothed, your consciousness is wholly concentrated — naturally, spontaneously — and you enter with an intense delight into a yet more intense contemplation.  This is the sign that you have succeeded; otherwise it is not the thing.  How I wish this would become true for everybody!  You may be engaged in the most active action, for example, in playing basketball, which needs a great deal of movement, and yet not lose the attitude of inner meditation and concentration upon the Divine. And when you get that, you will see that all you do changes its quality; not only will you do it better, but you will do it with an altogether unexpected strength, and at the same time keep your consciousness so high and so pure that nothing will be able to touch you any longer.


The Mother: And note that this can go so far that even if an accident occurs, it will not hurt you.  Naturally, this is a peak, but it is a peak to which one can aspire.  Do not fall into the very common error of believing that you must sit in an absolutely quiet corner where nobody passes by, where you are in a classical position and altogether immobile, in order to be able to meditate — it is not true. What is needed is to succeed in meditating under all circumstances, and I call “meditating” not emptying your head but concentrating yourself in a contemplation of the Divine; and if you keep this contemplation within you, all that you do will change its quality — not its appearance, for apparently it will be the same thing, but its quality. And life will change its quality, and you, you will feel a little different from what you were, with a peace, a  certitude, an inner calm, an unchanging force, something which never gives way.


The Mother: In that state it will be difﬁcult to do you harm — the forces always try, this world is so full of adverse forces which seek to upset everything... but they succeed in a very small measure, only in the measure necessary to force you to make a new progress.  Each time you receive a blow from life, tell yourself immediately, “Ah, I have to make a progress”; then the blow becomes a blessing. Instead of tucking your head between your shoulders, you lift it up with joy and you say, “What is it I have to learn?  I want to know.


The Mother: What is it I have to change? I want to know.”  This is what you should do.  No, I told you this the other day, the concentration we have now is the opposite of meditation. In the common meditation we used to have, I tried to unify the consciousness of all who were present and to lift it in an aspiration towards higher regions; it was a movement of ascent, of aspiration — whereas what we do here, in concentration, is a movement of descent.


The Mother: Instead of an aspiration which rises up, what is required is a receptivity which opens so that the Force may enter into you. There are many ways of doing this; each one according to his particular nature should ﬁnd out the best method. What is asked here is a receptive offering, not of the body or the mind or the vital, of a piece of your being, but of your entire being. No other thing is asked of you, only to yourself; the rest of the work I undertake.  In the meditation there I wanted each one to kindle in himself a ﬂame of aspiration and to rise up as high as possible.


The Mother: Naturally, both are necessary; but the morning meditation, all who had a goodwill could join it at any stage of their development, while here the rule is that only those who really want the perfection of their physical body can come, not those who want to escape from life, escape from themselves, escape from their body to enter into the heights. That is why in the beginning the selection was very strict — it is widening little by little, with proﬁt, I hope. We wanted only those who had truly taken it into their head that they wished to perfect their physical body, who understood that their body had its own value and who sought to perfect it, who wanted to try to make it a receptacle of a higher truth, not an old rag one throws aside saying, “Do not bother me!” On the contrary, to take it up and make of it the best possible instrument, to make it grow, to perfect it as much as it will lend itself to the process.  No, if there is a contradiction, it is that the concentration is not done in the right way.


The Mother: Indeed the world is in this state of falsehood in which one cannot concentrate within oneself on the divine Presence without losing contact with the external being.  I do not say that it is very easy, I have given you this as a somewhat far ideal, but it is quite possible and it has been done, I may assure you, and it takes away nothing from the capacity of not breaking one’s neck while running!   A discipline much more difﬁcult than the discipline of yoga! It is an occult discipline.  First of all, one must learn to go out of one’s body consciously and to enter into another more subtle body; to use one’s will to go where one wants to go, never to fear and sometimes to face unexpected and even terrible things; to remain calm, to develop the mind’s visual sense, to accustom one’s mind to be altogether peaceful and quiet....


The Mother: You know, the list is long and I could continue like this for hours!  Who among you has had the experience of going out of the body — going out and knowing about it? I do not even speak of doing it at will, for that is another stage.  You did not take the opportunity of going for a little walk, did you? Well, you are not inquisitive!