The Mother:   O Marvellous Grace, let our aspiration be always more intense, our faith always more vibrant, our trust always more absolute.  Thou art the All-Victorious!


The Mother: Supreme Lord, teach us to be silent so that in silence we may receive Thy force and understand Thy will.   Teach us to be really sincere in our effort towards the Truth.   Lord, Supreme Truth, We aspire to know Thee and to serve Thee.  Help us to become children worthy of Thee.  And for this, make us conscious of Thy constant gifts so that gratitude may ﬁll our hearts and govern our lives.


The Mother:   Lord, Thy Love is so great, so noble and so pure that it is beyond our comprehension. It is immeasurable and inﬁnite: on bended knees we must receive it, and yet Thou hast made it so sweet that even the weakest among us, even a child, can approach Thee.


The Mother:   With a calm and pure devotion we salute Thee and recognise Thee as the only reality of our being.    Lord, God of Beauty and Harmony,  Grant that we may become instruments worthy of manifesting Thy supreme beauty in the world.  This is our prayer and our aspiration.


The Mother:   O Supreme Reality, grant that we may live integrally the marvellous secret that is now revealed to us.


The Mother: Sweet Mother, grant that we may simply be, now and for ever, Thy little children.


The Mother:    Here, each one represents an impossibility to be solved; but since for Thy Divine Grace, O Lord, all is possible, will not Thy work be, in the detail as in the whole, the accomplishment of all these impossibilities transformed into divine Realisations?


The Mother:   O my sweet Master, Thou art the conqueror and the conquest, the victor and the victory!


The Mother: Thy heart is the supreme haven where every care is soothed. Oh, let this heart be wide open, so that all who are in torment may ﬁnd there a sovereign refuge.   Quiet all violence, let Thy love reign.    O Lord, let Thy will be done.


The Mother: Thou art the supreme and perfect protection.    O my Lord, with your help and grace what is there to fear!   You are the supreme protection that defeats all the enemies.


The Mother:  O my Lord, Thy protection is all powerful. It defeats every enemy.   To see Thy Victory in all circumstances is certainly the best way of helping It to come.    Addressed to the One Supreme Lord There is no other sin, no other vice than to be far from Thee.


The Mother:   Lord, without Thee life is a monstrosity. Without Thy Light, Thy Consciousness, Thy Beauty and Thy Force, all existence is a sinister and grotesque comedy.    O Lord, in the depths of all that is, of all that shall be, is Thy divine and unvarying smile.


The Mother:      Prayer for Rain Rain, Rain, Rain, we want the Rain.  Rain, Rain, Rain, we ask for Rain.  Rain, Rain, Rain, we need the Rain.  Rain, Rain, Rain, we pray for Rain.


The Mother:   Prayer to the Sun O Sun! our friend, Disperse the clouds, Absorb the rain.  We want your rays, We want your light, O Sun!


The Mother: our friend.    In the name of my Lord, for the sake of my Lord, with the will of my Lord, by the power of my Lord, stop immediately harassing us.


The Mother: ( )   — collecting from all sides and concentrating in a religious way. In this prayer, at ﬁrst the thought is in full peace and the heart is collected and concentrated in adoration, and the next time it is the head that is full of adoration and the heart is silent and full of peace.


The Mother:   ()  In this prayer it is the Universal Mother in the form of material, terrestrial Nature who is speaking. The meal is the world that she has brought out of the Inconscient by the process of evolution.  She wanted to make man the summit of this evolution, the ruler of this world. Throughout the ages she has waited, hoping that man would become ﬁt to fulﬁl his role and give the divine realisation to the world.


The Mother: But man was so unﬁt that he was not even willing to submit to the conditions needed to prepare himself for the task, and material Nature, ﬁnally convinced that she was on the wrong track, turned directly to the Divine and asked Him to take possession of this world that had been prepared for the divine realisation.  With this key, the rest is self-explanatory.    ()  In short I might say that “” for the individual means identiﬁcation with the Divine and for the collectivity upon earth the advent of the Supramental, the new creation.


The Mother: Do not treat this as a dogma, as an explanation and “” is the Supreme Power of realisation, the doer and the act.   YOUR LIFE...  I am asking only for the sacriﬁce of ignorance, unconsciousness and the limits of the ego — but for what a marvellous and incomparable gain!    Let your life be useful.


The Mother:  Let your life be a constant search for the Truth and it will be worth living.   Let all your life be entirely and exclusively governed by the Supreme.


The Mother: Let your highest aspiration organise your life.   Keep your aspiration ardent and sincere and never forget that you are the child of the Divine; it will prevent you from doing anything unworthy of the Divine children.


The Mother:   All depends on the attitude of each one and on the sincerity of his approach.   All depends on an inner attitude.


The Mother:   CHANGE  To rectify and to efface: both are possible, but in both cases, though in varying degrees, a transformation of the nature, of the character, is needed. What is wrongly done must be changed in oneself ﬁrst, before one can hope to change the consequence of one’s action.


The Mother: It is only when people truly want their consciousness to be changed that their actions also can be changed.    A change of consciousness and when our consciousness will change we will know what the change is.    Change...


The Mother: 1. Hatred into harmony 2. Jealousy into generosity  3 . Ignorance into knowledge 4. Darkness into light 5. Falsehood into truth 6. Wickedness into goodness  7. War into peace 8. Fear into fearlessness 9. Uncertainty into certainty 10. Doubt into faith 11. Confusion into order 12. Defeat into victory


The Mother:   Liberty and order Fraternity and independence Equality and hierarchy Unity and diversity Abundance and scarcity Effort and repose Power and compassion Discernment and benevolence Generosity and economy Wastage and avarice   Conversion: the starting-point of realisation.   Conversion: the turning of all the movements of the being towards the Divine.    Resurrection: the falling off of the old consciousness, followed by the awakening of the true being out of it.


The Mother:   New birth: birth of the true consciousness, that of the Divine Presence in us.


The Mother: Realisation: the goal of our efforts.     Realisation — that is what we aspire for and for which we shall strive unceasingly however long it may take.   Power of realisation: with the realisation all obstacles will be overcome.


The Mother:   DO THE RIGHT THING  If you want to be respected, always be respectable.


The Mother: Do you wish for kindness? Be kind.  Do you ask for Truth? Be true.


The Mother:    Try to do the good and never forget that God sees you everywhere.


The Mother: A good deed is sweeter to the heart than a sweet in the mouth.  A day spent without doing a good deed is a day without a soul.   Do good for the love of good and not in hope of a reward. Be good for the joy of being good and not for the gratefulness of others.


The Mother:  In nice there is pleasantness, but good is good and can be without pleasantness.     There is only one way of being right, but there are many ways of being wrong.    All will be all right when you are all right.


The Mother: Let the consciousness work in you and through you and everything will become all right.


The Mother: Pray to the Divine Grace to make you do always the right thing in the right way.      Always do what you know to be the best even if it is the most difﬁcult thing to do.


The Mother:    Which is the easiest way to forget oneself? Always do the right thing in the right way and at the right moment.


The Mother:   Every day, at each moment, we shall aspire to do the right thing in the right way, always.


The Mother: It is only when we are not disturbed that we can always do the right thing at the right time and in the right way.


The Mother: It is always the right thing when it is done in the right spirit.    Whatever comes to you, if you take it in the right spirit, will turn for the best.    Correct movement: all movements under the right inspiration.   Turning of wrong movements into right: an extreme goodwill always ready to be transformed.


The Mother:  There is a moment when the right attitude comes spontaneously and without effort.     Aspiration for the right attitude: energetic, willing, determined.


The Mother:    Right attitude: simple and open, it is without any complications.


The Mother:    SOAR HIGH   Our consciousness is like a young bird, it must learn to use its wings.


The Mother:  Take your ﬂight towards the heights.    Soar very high and you will discover the great depths.


The Mother: The day comes when all barriers have fallen, within and around us and we can feel like the bird that opens its wings for an unopposed soar.    A being free from all bondages, ﬂying from height to height in a happy seeking for divine transformation.    A resplendent sun rises above the horizon.


The Mother: It is your Lord that comes to you.  The whole world awakes and stretches in delight at the contact of His glory.   As the earth that heaves and opens, as the tree that grows, as the ﬂower that blossoms, as the bird that sings, as the man that loves, let His light permeate you and radiate in an everincreasing and widening happiness, a happiness steadily moving onward as the stars move in heaven.


The Mother:  Spiritual atmosphere: light, ﬂuid, clear and transparent and so clean!   THE DIVINE’S HELP TO MAN  Our thoughts are still ignorant, they must be enlightened.  Our aspiration is still imperfect, it must be puriﬁed.  Our action is still powerless, it must become effective.


The Mother:   Listen silently to the order which comes from the Supreme Lord and you will have the capacity to carry it out.    Know what the Divine wants and you will have mastery.   The inner command is more sure than the mental conception.   The reign of reason should not end until the coming of the psychic law which manifests the Divine Will.


The Mother:  Power to reject adverse suggestions: the power which comes from the conscious union with the Divine.     Wisdom cannot be acquired except through union with the Divine Consciousness.


The Mother:   Integral wisdom: that obtained by union with the Divine.


The Mother: Like everything that belongs to creation, wisdom is progressive.     A bit of wisdom is welcome.


The Mother:


The Mother: In the depths of the Inconscient, there also shines the Divine Consciousness resplendent and eternal.      The Divine Will acting in the inconscient is all-powerful even when we do not know it.


The Mother:   Indeed, I am convinced that when the Inconscient is conquered no more conditions will be required; all will be a free decision of the divine Grace.


The Mother:     The Greeks had a keen and exceptional sense of beauty, of eurythmy, of harmony in forms and things.


The Mother: But at the same time they had an equally keen sense of men’s impotence in face of an implacable Fate which none could escape. They were haunted by the inﬂexibility of this Fate, and even their gods seem to have been subject to it. In their mythology and in their legends, one ﬁnds little trace of the divine compassion and grace.  This notion of compassion and grace made its appearance in Europe later with the Christian religion — whereas in Asia and especially in India it had long before been the very essence of Buddha’s teaching.  So in all the Greek stories, legends and tragedies we ﬁnd this inexorable cruelty of the decrees of a Fate that nothing can deﬂect.


The Mother:   The faith that goes to the Cosmic Divine is limited in the power of its action by the necessities of the play.  To get entirely free from these limitations one must reach the Transcendent Divine.


The Mother:    The only hope is in the capacity of the invisible Power!    Only the supreme consciousness can have an effect on your Karma and this consciousness is independent, above all human consciousness.


The Mother:   The Supreme Power is taking up all the movements. It will turn them into the Truth. No effort is needed, no aid from the mind or any of the instruments, even the individual consent is no longer needed.


The Mother:  Those who are predestined receive the help of an Inner Guide.     Divine solicitude: always active, even when we do not perceive it.   Let us understand and receive with gratitude this Divine Solicitude, so often not understood.


The Mother: Integral solace: that which one can receive only from the Divine.    Solace: the blessings the Divine grants us.    BEAUTY  Artistic taste is pleased with beautiful things and is itself beautiful.


The Mother:  Artistic sensibility: a powerful aid to ﬁght ugliness.    Artistic works: all work at the service of beauty.   All and everything can be artistic if it is done in an artistic spirit.


The Mother:   Beauty is a great power.   Spiritual beauty has a contagious power.


The Mother:  Beauty does not get its full power except when it is surrendered to the Divine.   The beauty of tomorrow: beauty which will express the Divine Power.    The beauty of tomorrow manifesting the Divine: a beauty that exists only by the Divine and for the Divine.


The Mother: Beauty is not sufﬁcient in itself, it wants to become divine.     Pure sense of beauty can be acquired only through a great puriﬁcation.


The Mother:   The ideal of Beauty moves towards its inﬁnite goal.    Among the most precious things in life are those you do not see with physical eyes.


The Mother:    GENERAL  Optimism: more helpful than its opposite.


The Mother:   Curiosity: if we want to be exceptional, may it be our attributes that make us so.     Mental curiosity must be seriously controlled for it not to be dangerous.


The Mother:    Physical curiosity


The Mother: takes its value from its purpose.    Chastity: a little austere and proud, it is very reserved.     An attempt is a small thing but it can be a promise for the future.


The Mother:   Inventions have no use except when they are controlled by the Divine.


The Mother: Gold should not be used except in the service of the Divine.   Charity: simple and sweet, attentive to the needs of all.     Unselﬁshness: deeply open so as not to refuse anything.


The Mother: SHORT REPLIES  Yes, they are absurd — shake it off.   With my blessings.


The Mother:   Do not worry, remain quiet, keep your faith intact. It will pass.


The Mother: Yes, they belong to the unregenerate universal Nature. But to the extent that we ourselves are transformed, we can keep them at a distance and they no longer trouble us.   Always to prefer what belongs to others is a vital movement. Do not pay any attention to it.


The Mother:   Do you mean that only your mind is open to my action? That would not be correct, because I act on you through the heart much more than through the mind.


The Mother: Yes, the movements of the being are always very complex.   You know very well that I am always with you and in you, in the physical consciousness as in the others.    Yes, the outer nature must become calm and quiet and turn towards the Divine.    Why should it not be at once?


The Mother: With good will and faith nothing is impossible.     Certainly you understand and you act better and better, with a consciousness that is progressing towards a total light.   It all depends on how you look at it and the spirit in which it is done.


The Mother:   Yes, you are right, and besides the fan is not unattractive, it has a charm of its own.     I do not know who has spread this rumour, but I can assure you that I know it is not true. So, do not worry and let peace settle in your heart with my blessings.


The Mother:    What you seek is always there ready for you. Let the psychic turn grow complete and it will of itself bring you to that for which you aspire.


The Mother: My love and blessings.    T D.  Nothing of the kind. Each one has his difﬁculties and I am here to help him out of them.  My love and blessings.


The Mother:  This is always dangerous. One must learn to serve the Divine  but in the Divine’s way.  Blessings.    This is indeed the true way and ought to be used in all cases.


The Mother:   This is the right thing and the very best.    My dear child, you have indeed passed from one life to another; but it is in your body that this new birth took place, and now the road is wide open before you for a new progress.


The Mother: With my love and blessings.    Call the Lord to catch the robbers.


The Mother: But the very fact of living upon earth means that we are “using the available conditions”, otherwise it would be impossible to live.  Blessings.     Surely, let me know, so that I can help.  Love.


The Mother:   If you were to do some work?...  Blessings.


The Mother:   This is quite a good resolution. The push is and will be given.   Now, do not resist.


The Mother: Love and blessings.  Start.  Blessings.


The Mother: What revolted in you when you were in front of me is exactly what prevents you from leading a spiritual life. Now that you are conscious of the enemy you can throw him out of you if so you decide.


The Mother: This kind of thing has happened hundreds of times and is happening more and more — but to me it seems quite “natural”, although I am unwilling to explain.    Sri Aurobindo and I always put a force into the photographs we sign. In the present case Sri Aurobindo had also looked at the frame and admired it.


The Mother: ()  Be and it will be all right.    Go on writing. How do you know if the is not ready, waiting to come to you?


The Mother: Inspiration brings its manifold gifts to the one who knows how to receive them.    The Life Divine  (1) (2)  (3) You are in conscious connection with Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, which is universal and immortal, in the higher mental world.  The more you are silently attentive, the more clearly you will receive it.  Blessings.


The Mother: ( :)  Anything that is done can contribute to the progress of humanity, but all depends on the way of doing it.  My blessings are with you and your project.   LONGER LETTERS


The Mother: Your letter has been communicated to me and the questions you ask in it were for me, at a certain state of my development, of such intense interest that I shall take great pleasure in replying to them. Nevertheless, a reply which is formulated mentally, however complete it may be, can never be, the one which silences every doubt and quietens the mind. Certitude can only come with spiritual experience, and the most beautiful philosophical works can never equal or replace a few minutes of Knowledge that is lived.  You say: “Should a man of average development, who is no longer tormented by earthly desires and who is linked to the world only by his affections, renounce the hope of not reincarnating? Is there not, beyond the human state, a less material state where one goes when one is no longer recalled by desire into the human state?


The Mother: This seems strictly logical to me. Man cannot be at the summit of the scale. The animals are very near to him; is he not very near to the following state?”  First of all, what maintains the relation with the earth is not only vital desire but any speciﬁcally human movement, and affections certainly form part of this. One is bound to the necessity of reincarnation as much by one’s affections, by one’s feelings,  as by one’s desires.


The Mother: However, in the matter of reincarnation as in all things, each case has its own solution, and it is certain that a constant aspiration for liberation from rebirth, together with a sustained effort towards the elevation and sublimation of the consciousness, should have the result of severing the chain of earthly existences, although it does not for all that put an end to individual existence, which is prolonged in another world.  But why think that his existence in another, more ethereal world should be the “following state” which, relative to man, would be what man is to the animal? It seems to me more logical to think (and a deeper knowledge conﬁrms this certitude) that the following state too will be a physical one, although we may conceive of this physical as magniﬁed, transﬁgured by the descent, the infusion of Light and Truth. All the ages and millennia of human life that have elapsed so far have prepared the advent of this, and now the time has come for its concrete and tangible realisation. That is the very essence of Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, the aim of the group he has allowed to form around him, the purpose of his Ashram.


The Mother: For your second question, I intended to send you the translation of a few extracts from Sri Aurobindo’s works. But when I told him that I wanted to translate some passages from  to send to you, he told me that I would have to translate no less than two chapters if I wanted to convey a fairly complete reply to you. Seeing my perplexity, he of himself decided to write some new pages on this subject; he gave them to me very recently and I immediately began the translation.   I do not wish to spoil the freshness of the beautiful pages that I shall have the privilege of translating, but in the meanwhile, until I am able to send them to you, I shall give you, if I may, my too simple and succinct view of the problem.  It seems beyond question to me that the universe in which we live is not one of the most successful, particularly in its outermost expression; but it is also beyond question that we are part of it and that consequently, the only logical and wise thing for us to do is to set to work to perfect it, to extract the best from the worst and to make it into the most marvellous possible universe.


The Mother: For, I would add, not only is this transﬁguration possible, but it is certain. May the peace and joy of Knowledge be with you.     Friend, sister of former days and always, In your letter of the 9th June which has just arrived, you write that the Buddha “is smiling with gentle irony”, but the Buddha’s smile can only be a smile of perfect understanding before a luminous accomplishment.


The Mother: And in this state in which physical life has already lost for you so much of its concrete reality, whether you are in the solitude of the Himalayas or in the solitude of a house on the road to N, it should be equally easy to live in the deep peace of the immense Buddhist compassion.     Well, I suppose I shall be the ﬁrst person to tell you that I do not ﬁnd you so different from the others; of course I mean in a way — for each one is different in a way from all the others, but it is certainly not of that difference that you are speaking.  I suppose also that the impression of being “different” which you gave to your people and generally to those with whom you lived comes from the fact that you are.


The Mother: This is  generally considered as the sign of a great “difference” in the nature and temperament. It is only the sign that one has reached a certain inner freedom which liberates you — at least partially — from the collective suggestion and the social rules — and that inner freedom is one of the signs of a grown-up psychic being.  But to have a grown-up psychic being is not, after all, something so very exceptional among the people who are upon earth  It seems to me that you received from us your share of encouragements like the others, but you have perhaps overlooked it as it might have been not exactly what you expected or wished for.  There was certainly an egocentric pride that had to be broken before any good spiritual progress could be made.


The Mother: But now the thing has been mostly done there is no need of being anxious for the future.  This is all I can say for the moment.  My help, love and blessings are always with you.    Dear Madam, Your letter has just reached me and I hasten to answer.


The Mother: Here are the replies to your questions.  The acute stage of your sister’s illness was very brief and she did not suffer very much. For the last days she was saying that all the time she was feeling a great light and force upon her and the end was very tranquil. She did not know that she was going to die, we ourselves were ﬁghting to the last to keep her and nothing was told to her of the greatness of the danger. Only once she had the impression that she was going to pass away, and then she wanted to write to you telling her will about her material affairs, money, property, etc.


The Mother: She informed me of what she wanted to write, but when it came to the actual writing she felt too weak and gave it up. At that moment she worried very much about you and wondered what you would do without her   — several times


The Mother: before she expressed the wish that you should come and live with her here — more than once she asked that my force and protection should be with you and I promised her that whenever you wished for them they would be there.  We would have been very pleased to erect the grave-stone at our own expense, but I understand your feeling about it and it shall be as you wish. For the plan I had been relying on our architect; he and your sister had been close friends and she loved his work very much. But he has received a commission in the army in India and is now far away and too busy to make the plan. To save time I thought that you might yourself arrange for the design and send it to me for execution; only it must be very simple, otherwise it would be difﬁcult to have it made here.


The Mother: I may say that she would not have liked to have a cross on her tombstone. I propose to put an inscription (in French, as it is a French graveyard): Ci-gˆit la depouille mortelle de X (Here lie the mortal remains of X)  (Date of birth — Date of death)  We intend to erect the memorial stone as close as possible to the anniversary of her passing away, so I need the design as soon as possible. You will ﬁnd enclosed a note giving the measurement of the ground — the monument must be smaller than the ground.


The Mother: Faithfully yours.      ( )


The Mother: I have read your letter to X and I am sorry I had not the opportunity of reading the one you wrote to Y.  The very fact that you wanted to despatch these letters without showing them to me ought to have put you on your guard  concerning the origin of the impulse which you were obeying, as obviously it could not be a divine origin.  This said, I must add that there is nothing essentially wrong in the letter itself. What you say is correct, but surely it is not meant for the person to whom you wanted to send it, nor to any similar person, that is to say, someone in a prominent political position. Statesmen believe only in their own knowledge and power and, moreover, they receive hundreds of letters from people who think they have found a solution to the world situation, and, as in general these political leaders have no power of discernment, they cannot distinguish between what is true and what is false — and they believe that such letters are the product of the heated brain of religious fanatics.


The Mother: We cannot allow ourselves to be mixed up with them and for that it is better to keep a digniﬁed silence.  In any case there is more than a ninety-nine per cent chance that your letter would never reach its destination and might fall into undesirable hands.     Certainly to do the right thing is not cruel or selﬁsh.


The Mother: What is cruel and selﬁsh is to follow blindly one’s weakness and thus to drag another with oneself into a pit from which it is always difﬁcult to come out and never without losing much of one’s time and energy, if not much more and much worse. So do not worry; try now seriously to ﬁnd out the meaning and the aim of your life and prepare yourself to carry it out thoroughly and sincerely.     Do not worry.


The Mother: It will pass.  It is the vital’s that has received a ﬁne knock on the face; it is vexed and has gone on strike. When it starts understanding that this is foolishness and that it leads to nothing,  it will become reasonable again and listen once again to the wise advice of the psychic which tells it to be quiet and do its work well, that nothing of true value is lost, that true love is always there, immutable, and that only those movements which were not in conformity with the Divine Work have been destroyed.  For it is to the Divine Work that one must exclusively belong because it alone can, in our life, give us true happiness.


The Mother:   What has happened was more or less expected. Each one in life  acts according to his own nature, and those who are not steady in their faith cannot be steady in their love either.  Surely I am not angry with you and my help is always there whenever you want it.


The Mother: As for doing anything wrong, all human beings do wrong things so long as they live in this world of ignorance, because even if they wish to do right, they do not know what is the right thing to do until their consciousness is transformed, and for transformation the ﬁrst thing needed is complete sincerity; not only to speak the truth (this, it goes without saying, is an indispensable elementary condition) but to be always true to oneself and the Divine.    The whole thing is so powerfully symbolical and expresses so clearly how dangerous it is to be under the leading of an arrogant and ignorant human mind which relies on its own power alone and refuses the help of the Divine’s Grace.  I do not need to enter into any detailed explanations; for with this clue you can easily understand the whole affair. Do you remember that I was asking you with some insistence was driving the car and when you told me it was your driver, I felt relieved.


The Mother: But it was your driver who held the steering wheel and the poor fellow suffered for the change.  What makes the whole thing much more striking is just the conversation I had with X. I asked him if he was interested in  yoga. He said it interested him as philosophical speculation, but not as a thing to be lived. On my remark that it might come to him later on, he said, “Oh no!


The Mother: I am an atheist, you see, I do not believe in God. ” I asked smilingly, “Then how do you arrange  universe?” He felt the irony and replied: “I have taken a scientiﬁc attitude: I deny nothing but I believe in nothing.” I felt the danger for Y and said with some force: “But, I suppose, you do not interfere with the beliefs of others and you will leave Y free to think and feel as she likes.”


The Mother: “Certainly,” was his answer, but I did not believe him.   Tell Y to keep her faith intact, whatever pressure may be put upon her to change her mind and attitude. She may have to meet some difﬁculties, but she must never forget to call on the Divine’s Grace with conﬁdence and the protection and help will surely be with her.  As for yourself, do not worry or apprehend dangers for Y.


The Mother: Her difﬁculties — and life is never without them — are not likely to be of the more external kind, and the others she can, by keeping her faith, meet and overcome.     Tell your mother to go deep inside her heart and she will feel that the Divine Grace is with her. I am sending her a card with my blessings.


The Mother: You can translate for her what is written upon it. You can tell her also that the consciousness of your father had left his body at the time of the accident. That is why he did not move or speak, there is nothing astonishing in that and no reason to be especially sorry about it.   I did not reply because her mind was in such a confusion as a result of her desires, that she would not have been able to understand what I would have written. Since then, I have tried to work on her mental and vital being to make it a little more open and receptive, so that she may understand that  love for children and the growing hope for the future that they represent in the creation, does not mean that each and everybody must have children.


The Mother: To each one I disclose what is the best for him or her according to their nature and their spiritual need. But surely it is not always in keeping with the desires.   X is a very reﬁned girl, and she is extremely sensitive, easily hurt. Never scold her or speak harshly to her or force her to do anything. I ﬁnd her very nice.


The Mother: But she looked so frightened — I don’t know who could have told her about me that she should feel like that. Tell her that I found her very nice. She is very reﬁned but somehow she has been living all tightened up. Let her feel quite free, don’t try to put any ring around her. Let her feel completely relaxed and free here, and tell her that she should relax and just feel as if she were all the time in sunshine.


The Mother: It is always the same old story of “selling the birthright for a mess of pottage” (I understand the “birthright” as the possibility or capacity to be the ﬁrst to reach the Divine Realisation).    An evil that ought to be forgotten by everybody.


The Mother: By what right do you want your will to inﬂuence others? Each one should be free. It is only the guru who has the right to impose his will on the will of the disciple who has chosen him.


The Mother: It is with the actual need that comes the true solution.   Let us be always very careful to avoid all that might encourage in us the spirit of display.


The Mother: The more unimportant people are, the more seriously they take themselves.    Titles give no value to a man unless he has acquired them in the service of the Divine.


The Mother: An utterance must be judged on its own value, not on the value of the signature over which it stands.      A saying is good only if it is good without a signature.


The Mother:   One does not become wise by talking much; one is called wise if one is forbearing, without fear or foe.    Nothing is easier than to speak holy words to those who expect them from you.


The Mother: But it is more difﬁcult to ﬁnd people who want to hear holy words.    I did not feel the necessity of informing Sri Aurobindo’s disciples that the Ashram is not a place to follow the silly habit of fooling people on the ﬁrst of April.  But now I see that some of the inmates have taken advantage of my silence to indulge in such stupidities, and I am sorry for it.


The Mother:  Do not try to hide things; whatever you want to conceal becomes all the more visible.    Only those who are capable of transmitting, along with a written word, the Divine force and consciousness, ought to give their autograph.   Let us hope that the inner realisation will prove equal to the outer one.


The Mother: Better not count upon man.     It is not in man’s nature to be faithful.


The Mother: In the hope of having one good one.     And yet the Divine is everywhere, in the ignorant man as well as in the sage.


The Mother:   With man’s appearance on earth ﬁrst came the power of controlling ﬁre. Among earthly creatures man was the ﬁrst to kindle a warming ﬂame in the hearth, to set an illumining light shining in the darkness. Mastery over ﬁre is the clear indication of man’s superiority over the animal.    One thing alone, the privilege of man if he is truly a man: moral and physical cleanliness.


The Mother:   How can you hope to make any spiritual progress so long as you remain shut up in such a bargaining and calculating spirit?    There is only one apology that I can accept; it is this: “I will never do it again”, and keep your promise.


The Mother: All the rest is pretence.    It is very easy a thing. You must never again go to the cinema in town, never, and the fault will be wiped away.  The heart belongs to the terrestrial human world; the soul belongs to the universal spiritual world.


The Mother: Blessings.     It is clumsy and unbecoming enough to kiss a girl when she likes it; but to kiss a girl when she does not want it, is a coarse and imbecile act.    Psychedelic Review ( )


The Mother: I have read the passage marked in the magazine. One thing is sure — these experiences are not spiritual and to give them  that name is a proof of complete ignorance of what is really a spiritual experience.  The effect of the drug must be either an erratic wandering in the vital or the waking up of some subconscient notation gone asleep in the subconscient part of the being.  No time to say any more on such a futile subject.


The Mother:  To seek for pleasure is to ask for pain, for they are the obverse and reverse of the same thing.     All that is conducive to the keeping of one’s consciousness in the most material planes of the being would be criminal.


The Mother:   Prizes belong to a rather low standard of life — but if we are still there...    ()


The Mother: Do you want to go from one place to another without getting tired and without spending much time on the way, or do you want to be smart and look like an important man?    Shrinking is as bad as desire — so have the fan and let the Divine’s will be done, for — after all — it is always His will that prevails!    One must be without preferences and without desire to know the Divine’s will.


The Mother:   Superﬁcial reactions are not desirable.     A company that has no name, no business and no money, is a company; it is a.


The Mother:    Honest business is getting more and more risky.   The will not to cheat but also that of not being cheated.


The Mother: All this must stop at once and for all. It is and the people who do forgery ought to go to prison or, at least, not be allowed to go about spreading their falsehood and duping credulous people. Her ﬁrst. These fail in the same way, and those who believe are simply fooled.


The Mother: ( )  He must have a fear (perhaps subconscious) of the consequences of having rejected the Sannyasi’s robe and this fear translates by the attacks of snakes, etc. You can tell him not to fear, that I am informed and nobody will hurt him.   Let him try again to meditate with the conﬁdence that he is protected — but he must not try in public ﬁrst. If his meditation becomes quiet he can once more meditate with the others.


The Mother:   He pushed on the table before me a scrap of paper which seemed to have been torn from an exercise-book, without any letterhead or anything ofﬁcial, on which he had written for me in a clumsy hand that I was promising to pay for the extra stamps if they were necessary.  I felt like a poor traveller accosted in the corner of a wood by a band of brigands, pistols in hand, asking you to empty your pockets before letting you pass. I hesitated for a moment, but I am a sport and I signed, thinking, “We shall see how far they dare to go.”  In this world one pays dearly for wanting to be unselﬁsh!


The Mother:   ( :) The same story, with small differences in the setting, could be told so many, many times!   And what about the stories of the efﬁciency of the Divine Grace?


The Mother: They are less in number perhaps, but so much more comforting!     When you speak of sacriﬁcing everything for the Divine, it means that you are very greatly attached to those things, you have a  great value for them and still you are ready to leave them for the sake of the Divine.  Actually you should not be attached to anything or anybody except the Divine, and apart from Him nothing should have any value for you.


The Mother: And in that case you cannot speak of your sacriﬁcing for the Divine.     Everything is contagious. Every good thing and every bad thing has its vibrations.


The Mother: If you catch those vibrations, you get that thing. The true Yogi knows these vibrations and can handle them; that is how he can give you peace, etc. Even so-called accidents are contagious. You catch others’ sorrow and then feel sorrowful in the same way.


The Mother:   From the aesthetic point of view I can say that the brown colour is better than the white, but it is quite absurd and foolish to think that anybody is better or worse simply because of his colour. The African negro thinks that his colour is the most beautiful of all. The Japanese thinks that his colour is superior to any other. Colour prejudice is a very low thing.


The Mother: It indicates a very low state of consciousness — a consciousness just emerging from the inconscient. It is not an idea, it is not a feeling, it is something still lower than that. When you think in terms of colour prejudice, your own psychic laughs at your foolishness; it knows that it has lived in white, brown, yellow, red, black and all sorts of bodies. When you get this sort of prejudice, bring it before your consciousness and it will disappear.


The Mother: There are people who can stand on their own legs. They do a thing because they ﬁnd that it is good to do it. They offer themselves freely to the guru and take his guidance. But all the  time it is a free movement. There are others who are slaves.


The Mother: They always want to have a social or ofﬁcial recognition for what they do. They can have self-conﬁdence only if some authority recognises them. This is the slave mentality.   GENERAL  Under no pretext should the cycles be left outside in the sun.


The Mother:    Do not worry about the French; you will learn it little by little.


The Mother:   You might prescribe it and later, when X is better, replace the Peroxide by Potassium Chlorate.   The trees planted in the Subbu house do not belong to us but to the and they cannot be cut without the  permission.  Any other action than the above one could lead us to great trouble.


The Mother:    As you are ordering the tweezers, it might be better to order at the same time the few things you require. The need for them can come suddenly and then there is no time to order. By buying like that little by little, we will one day be properly equipped.


The Mother: Blessings.    I do not see much necessity of your learning sitar — but if it amuses you, you can continue.   With my blessings.


The Mother:  As the house has been thoroughly cleaned and disinfected, there is no danger at all. People need not fear.   My blessings.


The Mother:    If the pains do not disappear tonight, it would be better to take rest tomorrow.  My love and blessings.


The Mother:    Your questions are impossible to answer in brief.   I know no books that say anything of value on the subject.


The Mother: My love and blessings.    ( ) At one time I knew their legend, but now I have forgotten it, so I can say nothing about it, except this general statement — that man can imagine nothing that has not happened at least once; so there is always a truth behind the statement. The mistake is to generalise and make a rule of it.


The Mother:   You can keep a few rupees as pocket money.  My love and blessings.


The Mother: When you say “” to someone, you are wishing him a   If you do it consciously, thinking about what you are saying, the word” takes on a great force and helps to make the day a good one.     ( :) You can always write to him about this — and wait with a quiet faith for the which is — “bien entendu” — in the hands of the Lord.


The Mother: With love and blessings.     I am quite sure that if you have frosted glasses everywhere, the room will be so dark that it will be impossible to work in it.  That is why I did not answer to X on the subject.


The Mother: But now I must tell you frankly what I see. In any case, it might be wiser to have the glasses sprayed lightly, so that if it is found too dark, the spray can be removed.  Blessings.    From the beginning I had said to put a commode and a zinc tub in your second room for your personal use, so that you could be quite independent of everybody.


The Mother: I know that the water arrangement is made. How is it that the commode and the tub are not there?  The downstairs arrangement belongs to the downstairs accommodation, and it is the full right of the people living there to keep it locked.  Blessings.


The Mother: I ask you to move at once, but for a short time only, to one of the places put at your disposal.  Your refusal would put me in an awkward position as I have given my word.  Blessings.     These proofs are.


The Mother: Why do you want them to do some more? They are simply spoiling the work and it is a big loss of time and money. Almost all of these pictures are unusable as they are and have to be remade.  I cannot agree to your giving them any more work to do.  Blessings.


The Mother:   If you have the capacity to do both well, do both. If one alone sufﬁces to take your energies, concentrate on Ehny House.  Blessings.


The Mother: I see no need for any message. Messages only convince those who are already convinced.  It would be better to learn Sanskrit and try to make it a truly living language.  Blessings.    It is primitive and undeveloped natures that like noise.


The Mother: As for explosives, they are always dangerous; all this cannot be an object of curiosity.    You should not use paper and envelopes with a printed letterhead to write to me — it is a waste.   Inform the school.


The Mother:  You must ﬁnd out where they are coming from, which hole they are coming out of, and put a little pile of sugar near the hole.  They will keep themselves busy carrying it away and will not bother you any more.


The Mother: I don’t think that the bees will sting you if you do not disturb them. But if you are afraid...      COOKING


The Mother: AND EATING  When you want to add wheat ﬂour to the vegetables, it is better to mix it ﬁrst in a separate sauce-pan with a small quantity of water or, better, of vegetable soup. You give it a ﬁrst boiling in this sauce-pan, stirring it all the time, very carefully, with a circular movement. After it has reached the boiling point you can safely add it to the vegetables, it will no more stick to the bottom of the pan.


The Mother:   Too strong a ﬁre burns the food, spoils the vessel and wastes the fuel. A slow ﬁre means a little longer time for the cooking but also a nicer result in cooking.  Hurried work is always bad work; time must be given if you want good result.


The Mother:  To say that your cooking is bad would not be fair. At most what I can say is that it is not always equally good, but bad it is not, and some dishes are. It may be that a period of inner difﬁculty has passed over you, but you are bound to come out of it stronger than before. When


The Mother: the inner difﬁculty is removed, the cooking will be as regularly good as it was before.     I have heard so many contradictory reports on the effects of food, spices, etc. that logically I have come to the conclusion that it must be — like all the rest — a personal affair and consequently no general rule can be made and, still less, enforced.  This is the cause of my leniency.


The Mother:   Nothing was told to me about the aluminium vessels of which I do not approve because aluminium is good for cooking . I am speaking of my own experience.


The Mother:  You know that I am not enthusiastic about servants handling the food — but many people seem to like it, through laziness I suppose!!     In the kitchen, is indispensable thing.  To avoid hair falling in the cooking, it is better to cover the head while cooking.


The Mother: Special care must be taken to prevent insects from falling into the pans.     If you do not like the atmosphere created by taking food with others I do not see why you should do it.


The Mother:   From the physical point of view, it is obviously better to eat quietly and without hurry, and I am quite sure that most often one can manage to get time for it. It is all a question of organisation.    All quarrels in the place where food is prepared make food indigestible.


The Mother: The cooking must be done in silence and harmony.    Yes, but they do not about it as we do.     BORROWING BOOKS FROM THE ASHRAM LIBRARY Bread you can receive freely unless you want an unusual quantity.


The Mother: As for the books, we have been obliged to stop lending them because too big a number of them had disappeared — but if you keep them only for a and promise to be extra careful, I can give the permission.   Blessings.


The Mother:  You may borrow books if you take great care of them and follow the library rules.  Blessings.


The Mother: Yes, on loan and with care.     If Y [the head librarian] agrees, and if you take scrupulous care of them.


The Mother:   Very well.   P.S. Of course they must take great care of these books and return them clean and in good condition before the new term begins.


The Mother:    ( )


The Mother: Z would like to borrow some books from the library. He says he will take of them. Are you willing to lend them to him?     PAINTING


The Mother: It seems to me that a few sketches from nature would be useful, especially from the point of view of the proportion of legs and arms and the harmony of form.    ()  The design is very pretty indeed and will surely make a very successful crown.


The Mother: This idea of fresco seems to be a very good one and the wall of A’s room on B’s terrace quite an ideal place. There is only one point: will the lime hold on that wall which is now painted? This is to be asked of C.  It would be very nice to have a sea view there.   (A ) The cards are all very nice, some extremely pretty.


The Mother: I am sending them back for distribution except one that D has chosen and kept with great pleasure.  All the names are all right.     ( )  Yes, it is all right.


The Mother: When the sketches are ready they will have to be shown to the Mayor and the Governor and this will take some time. That is to say between the sketches and the actual beginning of the painting there will be plenty of time for the exhibition and the Darshan.


The Mother: As I told you, it would be good to show the sketches to the Governor on the 10th of this month or about — because the “Conseil G´en´eral” is sitting just now and the ﬁnal decision has to be taken by this “Conseil”. Four sketches and the elevation of the room will be sufﬁcient.   () They are truly very ﬁne. I see no change to suggest.


The Mother:   ( ) I forgot to tell you that the two pictures for the Governor have to be signed before they are framed. Will you inform E of this?  The exhibition seems to have been a great success.


The Mother: With our blessings.      ( )  The pictures by C´ezanne and Van Gogh in the books you have sent are very beautiful (especially those of C´ezanne). I shall return the books in one or two days — I want to look at them carefully.


The Mother:  If you feel no true urge to paint, I see no necessity of your painting.  Blessings.    Your way of approaching art is the right one and if you continue, keeping an absolute sincerity in your attitude and your attempt, you are bound to succeed.  There is something correct in your appreciation of oriental art, but it is incomplete.


The Mother: However we shall leave the subject for the moment, for I have no time to explain all that just now. As  for L´eonard de Vinci, Michel Ange and Raphael, I cannot put them on the same level. The two ﬁrst are far greater than the last. They both belong to the world of creative force, L´eonard with more subtlety and quiet, deep vision and purity, Michel Ange with more force and power especially in his sculptures which are incomparably magniﬁcent.


The Mother: Raphael is more mental and superﬁcial.    I agree that one person alone must design the whole thing, the others can join in the execution only.  I have no subject or scheme. I only wish that the decoration should be from the point of view of colour and also of composition.


The Mother: Do some sketches and projects, and send them to me.  Blessings.    TRANSCRIPTS OF EXPERIENCES  Compassion and gratitude are essentially psychic virtues.


The Mother: They appear in the consciousness only when the psychic being takes part in active life.  The vital and the physical experience them as weaknesses, for they curb the free expression of their impulses, which are based on the power of strength.  As always, the mind, when insufﬁciently educated, is the accomplice of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature, whose laws, so overpowering in their half-conscious mechanism, it does not fully understand. When the mind awakens to the awareness of the ﬁrst psychic movements, it distorts them in its ignorance and changes compassion into pity or at best into charity, and gratitude into the wish to repay, followed, little by little, by the capacity to recognise and admire.  It is only when the psychic consciousness is all-powerful in the being that compassion for all that needs help, in whatever domain, and gratitude for all that manifests the divine presence and grace, in whatever form, are expressed in all their original and luminous purity, without mixing compassion with any trace of condescension or gratitude with any sense of inferiority.


The Mother:   The Divine is everywhere and in all, He is all. Yes, in His essence and His supreme reality. But in the world of progressive material manifestation, one must identify not with the Divine as He is, but with the Divine as He will be.


The Mother:   SOME EXPERIENCES OF THE BODY CONSCIOUSNESS One can say with equal exactitude that all is divine and that nothing is divine. Everything depends upon the angle from which one looks at the problem.  Similarly one can say that the Divine is perpetually becoming and also that he is immutable for all eternity.  To deny and to afﬁrm the existence of God are both equally true; but each is true only partially. It is by rising above both afﬁrmation and negation that one can approach the truth.


The Mother: One can say further that whatever happens in the world is the result of the divine will and also that this will has to be expressed and manifested in a world that contradicts or deforms it. In practice, these two attitudes lead in the one case to peaceful submission to whatever happens, and in the other, on the contrary, to a ceaseless struggle to bring about the victory of what should be. In order to live the truth, one must know how to rise above the two attitudes and combine them.   Keep your conviction if it helps you to build your life, but know also that it is only one conviction and that others are as good and true as yours.


The Mother:   Tolerance is full of a sense of superiority; it should be replaced by a total understanding.    The Truth is not linear but global; it is not successive but simultaneous. Therefore it cannot be expressed in words: it has to be lived.


The Mother: To acquire a perfect and total consciousness of the world as it is in all its details, one must have, at the outset, no personal reaction to any of these details, no spiritual preference even as to what they ought to be. In other words, a total acceptance with a perfect indifference and neutrality is the indispensable condition for a knowledge by integral identity. If there be a single detail, however small, which escapes the neutrality, that detail escapes also the identiﬁcation. Therefore, the absence of all personal reaction, for whatever end it may be, even the most exalted, is a primary necessity for a total knowledge.  One can thus say, paradoxically, that we can know a thing only when we are not interested in it, or rather, more exactly, when we are not personally concerned with it.


The Mother:  Every time a god has taken a body, it has always been with the intention of transforming the earth and creating a new world.  But till today, he has always had to give up his body without completing his work. And it has always been said that the earth was not ready and that men had not fulﬁlled the conditions necessary for the work to be achieved.  But it is the imperfection of the incarnate god that makes the perfection of those around him indispensable. If the incarnate god embodied the perfection necessary for the required progress, then this progress would not be conditioned by the state of the surrounding material world.


The Mother: And yet without any doubt, interdependence is absolute in this world of extreme objectiﬁcation; therefore a certain degree of perfection in the manifestation as  a whole is indispensable for a higher degree of perfection to be realised in the incarnate divine being. It is the necessity of a certain perfection in the environment that compels human beings to progress; it is the inadequacy of this progress, whatever it may be, that drives the divine being to intensify his endeavour for progress in his body. Thus the two movements of progress are simultaneous and complete each other.    NEW EXPERIENCES OF THE BODY CONSCIOUSNESS


The Mother: When one looks back on one’s life, one almost always has the feeling that in such and such a circumstance, one could have done better, even though at every minute one was acting as dictated by the inner truth. This is because the universe is perpetually in motion and what was perfectly true before is only partially true today. Or to speak more exactly, the action that was necessary at the moment it was done would no longer be necessary now: another action would be more useful in its place.    When we speak of transformation, the word still has for us a vague meaning.


The Mother: It gives us the impression that something is going to happen and all will be well as a consequence. The notion reduces itself almost to this: if we have difﬁculties, the difﬁculties will disappear; those who are ill will be cured of their illness; if the body is inﬁrm and incapable, the inﬁrmities and incapacities will be removed; and so on. But as I have said, it is all very vague, it is only an impression. Now a remarkable thing about the body consciousness is that it is unable to know a thing with precision and in full detail except when it is on the point  of accomplishing it. So, when the process of transformation becomes clear, when one is able to know through what sequence of movements and changes the total transformation will take place — in what order, in what way, so to speak: which things will come ﬁrst, which things will follow — when everything will be known in full detail, that will be a sure indication that the hour of realisation is near.


The Mother: Because each time you perceive a detail with exactness, it means that you are ready to accomplish it.  For the moment, one can have a vision of the whole. For example, it is entirely certain that under the inﬂuence of the supramental light, the transformation of the body consciousness will take place ﬁrst; then will follow a progress in the mastery and control of all the movements and functions of all the organs of the body; afterwards this mastery will change little by little into a sort of radical modiﬁcation of the movement and then of the constitution of the organs themselves. All that is certain, although the perception of it is not precise enough. But what will ﬁnally take place — when the various organs have been replaced by centres of concentration of different forces, qualities and natures, each of which will act according to its own special mode — all this is still merely a conception and the body does not comprehend it very well, because it is still far from realisation and the body can truly comprehend only that which it is on the point of being able to do.


The Mother:  The supramental body will be unsexed, since the need for animal procreation will no longer exist.  The human form will retain only its symbolic beauty, and one can foresee even now the disappearance of certain ungainly protuberances, such as the genital organs of man and the mammary glands of woman.    It is only in its external form, its most superﬁcial appearance — which is as illusive to the latest discoveries of the Science of today as to the experience of the spirituality of the past — that the body is not divine.   O Supreme Reality, O Supramental Truth, this body is totally vibrant with an intense gratitude.


The Mother: Thou hast given to it, one after another, all the experiences that can lead it most certainly towards Thee. It has come to the point where identiﬁcation with Thee is not merely the one thing desirable, but the only thing possible and natural.  How am I to describe these experiences that are at two opposite extremes? From one end I would say: “Lord, to be truly near Thee, to be truly worthy of Thee, one must drink to the dregs the cup of humiliation and yet not feel humiliated. The contempt of man makes one truly free and ready to belong to Thee alone.”


The Mother: And from the other end I would say: “Lord, to be truly near Thee, to be truly worthy of Thee, one must be lifted to the peak of human appreciation and yet not feel gloriﬁed. It is when men call one divine that one feels one’s inadequacy and the need to be truly and totally identiﬁed with Thee.”  The two experiences are simultaneous: the one does not blot out the other; on the contrary, they seem to complete each other and thereby become more intense. In this intensity the aspiration grows formidable, and in answer to it Thy Presence becomes evident in the cells themselves, giving to the body the appearance of a multicoloured kaleidoscope in which innumerable luminous particles in constant motion are sovereignly reorganised by an invisible and all-powerful Hand.


The Mother: Foresight means seeing beforehand; but can you tell me what is going to happen tomorrow? I don’t think you can. Of course you can say, we shall sleep, eat, etc. — general things. But you can’t say whether something unexpected is going to happen.


The Mother: Why? Someone has said, “For this a special eye is needed.” It is possible to foresee without receiving images: there is a mental knowledge without images. Seers are usually able to foresee — not always, but often. I don’t suppose you were thinking of an extra eye in the middle of the forehead like the Cyclops!


The Mother: No, you mean an inner eye belonging to another world. One doesn’t normally see material things with this eye, or if one does, it is from a very special angle. There are people who can see at a distance what is going on in another country or in a place that is far away from them.  No, the psychic vision doesn’t usually deal with material things.   It could be, but then what you receive is the thoughts of the people in the place you see, because these people are focusing their on what is going on there.


The Mother: Usually, “determinism” is taken to mean a logical chain of cause and effect; if you do one thing, a certain result will follow.  For instance, if you eat a certain kind of food you will fall ill, if you swallow some poison you will die, and so on . But it often happens that the effects of certain determinisms cancel out the effects of other determinisms.  There are people whose destiny is very complex, giving the impression that the things which happen to them are quite unexpected and unforeseeable, unless one can “see” by some means other than the ordinary.


The Mother: An “entity” is a personality or an individuality. There are many such “personalities” in each one of us. If these personalities agree  and are complementary with one another, they make up a human being, a rich and complex “person”. But that is not what usually happens. These personalities do not agree with one another.


The Mother: For example, one of them might wish to make some progress, to become more and more perfect, to get a deeper knowledge of things, to realise more and more, to proceed towards the perfection of the being, while another one may simply want to have fun and enjoy itself as much as it can; one day it will do this, the next day something else, etc. If the personalities do not agree, this person’s life will be incoherent, and that is not unusual: in fact, these cases are very common.  A person may have a great many personalities within him — ten or twenty, for example — and each one has its own destiny.  In the physical world, an individuality means a human body; so, in a human body there are many individualities, each one with its own destiny. What happens then?


The Mother: Conﬂicts, friction, inner disorder created by these individualities which are unable to get on with one another. The strongest one gets the upper hand; it is not only dominant over the others but curbs them to stop them from rebelling. So, in the end, the unlucky ones, the repressed ones, go to sleep. They bide their time, and when that time comes, they suddenly jump up and turn everything upside down. If that happens very often, that person’s life will be a very disorderly one.


The Mother: He will take up one thing today and go on with another tomorrow and so on.  I don’t think it is true to say that a person is “harmonious” if he has no inner complexity. People who have this kind of illusory harmony are usually deeply immersed in material life, so  that the slightest unpleasantness upsets them completely, because they have nothing else. No, a truly harmonious personality implies a conscious arrangement of the inner individualities. This arrangement may be effected spontaneously before birth, but that is rare.


The Mother: The arrangement is achieved later, by means of a discipline, a proper education. But to succeed in this one must consciously take the psychic being as the centre and arrange, harmonise the various individualities around it. True harmony, inner organisation is the result of such a persistent effort.  In mathematics, one sometimes takes a great many numbers to try and ﬁnd all the possible combinations of them. At once one ﬁnds that it becomes impossible, for there are many numbers that are beyond expression.


The Mother: Similarly, if you have a great many destinies that come together in you and occur in various combinations, depending on the part of the being that predominates at the time, if you try to foresee what is going to happen, it is extremely difﬁcult. It is the same thing with states of consciousness.  A destiny represents an individual; they all react on one another and the number of things that may happen is frightening! So how will you foresee that? The “laws” of the universe always work independently, and that is the “secret” of the composition of the universe.


The Mother: I shall give you an example of how consciousness, a higher consciousness, intervenes.  A man steps out of his house to go to his ofﬁce. He goes a certain way. Suddenly he remembers that he has left something behind. He steps back to go and get it and just then, in the place where he would have been if he had stepped forward, a lead pipe falls.


The Mother: Something in this man’s consciousness, by telling him to go back, has saved his life. That is what we mean when we say that an intervention of consciousness can change destiny. In this man there were two destinies — among others, probably, — one which wanted him to die and one which wanted him to live.   No, because chance is something quite incoherent, something that occurs for no reason, and if you believe that life is something incoherent, you still have much to learn.


The Mother: On the contrary, it is quite coherent, each little thing is exactly determined and if something makes you feel that it is “chance” it is because you know nothing about the determinisms. They are completely beyond you, because there are innumerable interweaving laws and you know nothing about them. So if something happens  according to these laws you say it is a “miracle” or “chance”!   Pavitra has said: “In mathematics it has been shown that if the number of intervening factors is very high, and if they act independently, the result appears to be what is called ‘chance’.”


The Mother: I have just explained that this is only an “appearance”.  People who make an effort to progress and grow in consciousness, realise that what at one time in their lives they took to be a disaster or a calamity may appear ﬁfteen years later like a blessing, an effect of Grace, some highest good. From a higher standpoint, it is quite obvious that if you bring your highest consciousness down into your ordinary life, it will bring the greatest good into your life.  People who have made some progress always have this experience. They see clearly that the so-called “disaster” was in fact the starting-point of their ascension, an ascension which could not have taken place without it.


The Mother: If someone has the inner vision and is able to enter his higher consciousness at will, he will see that it is the greatest good that happens to him when he is in contact with his highest consciousness.  But, to be able to understand this, there are two conditions.  You must make an effort for progress and be utterly sincere, for if you are not sincere, you will never have any insight into your own life. You must be able to look at yourself and say, “How tiny I am.”  I shall give you a simple example — but it may occur in any state of consciousness.


The Mother: A stone falls. If it fulﬁls its destiny, it will fall to the ground, won’t it? But you are there and you have a vital or a mental will — one or the other — and you catch the stone in your hand.  You have changed the destiny of the stone. A leaf falls — onto the ground if it follows its normal destiny.


The Mother: You have a vital will,  you take the leaf in your hand. You have changed the destiny of the leaf. This happens millions of times in the universe and nobody notices it because it is so common.  But imagine that you have a very high range of consciousness. If into the determinism down here you can bring, by aspiration, an urge, a prayer, a higher consciousness, if you can get hold of your higher consciousness, so to say, and bring it into the material destiny, everything would immediately be changed.


The Mother: But because you do not see or do not understand what is happening, you say that it is chance or a miracle.   Not every destiny is active in a material destiny, and if you want to change this material destiny, you must be able to bring down another one from above. In this way, something new will enter into it — these “descents” of the higher consciousness take place all the time, but because we do not understand them, this “something new” that comes is turned by ordinary people into a “miracle”.  This is precisely what we want to do by bringing down into the physical and material world the supramental force and consciousness


The Mother: . At ﬁrst it works by diffusion, not directly. Its working is more or less veiled, more veiled and distorted as it descends into the physical world, until it becomes almost imperceptible.  If it could work here directly, without this distortion and this veiling, it would change everything in an absolutely unexpected way.  I hope you will get this concrete example one day!


The Mother: Why do I make a distinction between the integral transformation and the transformation of consciousness which I mentioned earlier? What is the connection between consciousness and the other parts of the being? What are these other parts?  This transformation of consciousness is something that comes to all who have practised a yogic discipline and become aware of the divine Presence or the Truth of their being. I don’t say that “many” people have realised this, but at least quite a few.


The Mother: What is the difference between this experience and the integral transformation?  Yes, but there is something which remains unchanged unless you take care and persist in your effort. What is it? The body  consciousness. What is the body consciousness?


The Mother: The vital consciousness, of course — the physical consciousness as a whole.  But then, in this physical consciousness as a whole, there is the physical mind — a mind that is occupied with all the ordinary things and responds to everything around you. There is also the vital consciousness, which is the awareness of sensations, impulses, enthusiasms and desires. Finally, there is the physical consciousness itself, the material consciousness, the body consciousness, and that is the one which has so far never been entirely transformed. The global, overall consciousness of the body has been transformed, that is, one can throw off the bondage of thought, of habits that one no longer considers inevitable.


The Mother: That can change, it has been changed. But what remains to be changed is the consciousness of the cells.  There is a consciousness in the cells: it is what we call the “body consciousness” and it is wholly bound up with the body.  This consciousness has much difﬁculty in changing, because it is under the inﬂuence of the collective suggestion which is absolutely opposed to the transformation. So one has to struggle with this collective suggestion, not only with the collective suggestion of the present, but with the collective suggestion which belongs to the earth-consciousness as a whole, the terrestrial human consciousness which goes back to the earliest formation of man.


The Mother: That has to be overcome before the cells can be spontaneously aware of the Truth, of the Eternity of matter.  Of course, until now, those who have achieved this conscious transformation, who are aware of the eternal and inﬁnite life within themselves, in the depths of their being, must, in order to preserve this consciousness, constantly refer back to their inner experience, return to their inner contemplation, live in a sort of more or less constant meditation. And when they come out of meditation, their outer nature is pretty much what it was before, and their way of thinking and reacting is not very different — unless they give up action altogether. But in that case the inner realisation, this transformation of the consciousness,  is helpful only for the person who has achieved it, but it doesn’t change the condition of matter or earthly life in the least.  For this transformation to succeed, all human beings — even all living beings as well as their material environment — must be transformed.


The Mother: Otherwise things will remain as they are: an individual experience cannot change terrestrial life. This is the essential difference between the old idea of transformation — that is, the becoming conscious with the psychic being and the inner life — and transformation as we conceive it and speak of it. Not only an individual or a group of individuals or even all individuals, but life, the overall consciousness of this more or less developed material life, have to be transformed. Without such a transformation we shall have the same misery, the same calamities and the same atrocities in the world. A few individuals will escape from it by their psychic development, but the general mass will remain in the same state of misery.


The Mother: Yes, of course. That is the essential difference between our yoga and the old yogic disciplines which dealt only with the inner consciousness. The old beliefs used to say — and some people interpret the Bhagavat Gita in this way — that there is no ﬁre without smoke, no life without ignorance in life. That is the common experience, but it is not our idea, is it?  We know by experience that if we go down into the subconscient, lower than the physical consciousness, into the subconscient and even lower still into the inconscient, we can ﬁnd in ourselves the origin of atavism, of what comes from our early education and the environment in which we lived.


The Mother: And this gives a kind of special characteristic to the individual, to his outer nature, and it is generally believed that we are born like that and we will stay like that. But by going down into the subconscient, into the inconscient, one can trace the origin  of this formation and undo what has been done, change the movements and reactions of the ordinary nature by a conscious and deliberate action and thus really transform one’s character.  This is not a common achievement, but it has been done. So one may assert not only that it can be done, but that it has been done. It is the ﬁrst step towards the integral transformation, but after that, there remains the transformation of the cells which I mentioned earlier.


The Mother: There is an article by Sri Aurobindo in one of the which describes the various stages through which the entire physical being can be changed. And this is what so far has never been done.  The inconscient is not individualised and when you go down into the inconscient in yourself, it is the inconscient of matter. One can’t say that each individual has his own inconscient, for that would already be a beginning of individualisation, and when you go down into the inconscient, it is perhaps not the universal but at least the terrestrial inconscient.  The light, the consciousness that comes down into this inconscient in order to transform it must necessarily be a consciousness that is close enough to be able to touch it.


The Mother: It is not possible to conceive of a light — the supramental light, for example — that would have the power to individualise the inconscient. But, through a conscious, individualised being, this light can be brought down into the inconscient and gradually make it conscious.  First of all, it is the subconscient that has to become conscious, and indeed the main difﬁculty of the integral transformation is that things are constantly rising up from the subconscient.  You think you have got a certain movement under control — anger, for example. You try very hard to control your anger  and succeed to some extent, then suddenly it rises up again for some reason unknown to you, as if you hadn’t done anything at all, and you have to start all over again.


The Mother: If it were the transformed part of the being going back to its old ways, it would be most depressing, but it is not like that. It is the material part, the material life which is sustained, supported, so to say, by a subconscient life. And this subconscient is beginning to get individualised around some people; it has certain afﬁnities with a kind of subconscient somewhat like our own, and that is where the things you have repressed or thrown out of your nature go to — and one ﬁne day they rise up again. But if you are able to bring the light into the subconscient and make it conscious, this will no longer happen.  There are two main reasons for this.


The Mother: In such a case, you may suddenly become receptive, and in this state of receptivity you receive the help that is needed to remove the defect and the help becomes effective. The other reason is that, while trying with patience and perseverance, you have — perhaps unknowingly — hit upon the origin of the difﬁculty in the subconscient. And once that is done, it is easy to transform whatever you wanted to transform in yourself. But this transformation may seem to you to come “from outside”, because you were not aware of what was going on. It does not come from outside, it is outside your active consciousness, and you are aware only of the “result” of your action.


The Mother: It may be one of these two things or both together.      “W C S A R ”  Why do I insist on absolute sincerity? Perhaps the younger children don’t understand what sincerity is, but the older ones surely ought to know! You have all passed through childhood and you probably remember what you were taught, what you were told when you were young.


The Mother: Parents nearly always tell their children, “You must not lie, it is very bad to tell a lie.” But the unfortunate thing is that they lie in your presence and then you wonder why they want you to do something which they don’t do themselves.  But, apart from that, why do I insist on the fact that children should be told from a very early age that it is absolutely necessary to be sincere? I am not addressing those who were brought up here, but those who were brought up in an ordinary family, with ordinary ideas. Children are very often taught how to outsmart others, how to dissimulate so as to appear good in others’ eyes.


The Mother: Some parents try to control children through fear, and that is the worst possible method of education, for it is an incentive to lying, deceit, hypocrisy and all the rest. But if you repeatedly explain to children something of this kind: If you are not absolutely sincere, not only with others but also with yourself, if at any time you try to cover up your imperfections and failings, you will never make any progress, you will always remain what you are throughout all your life, without ever making any progress. So, even if you only want to grow out of this primitive unconscious state into a progressive consciousness, the most important thing, the one absolutely important thing is sincerity. If you have done something which you ought not to have done, you must admit it to yourself; if a less-than-admirable movement has occurred in yourself, you must look it in the face  and tell yourself, “It was not good,” or “It was disgusting,” or even “It was wicked.”  And don’t think that there are people to whom this rule does not apply, for you cannot live in the physical world without having a share in the physical nature, and physical nature is essentially a mixture.


The Mother: You will see, when you become absolutely sincere, that there is nothing in yourself that is absolutely unmixed. But it is only when you look yourself in the face, in the light of your highest consciousness, that whatever you want to eliminate from your nature will disappear. Without this striving for absolute sincerity, the defect, the little shadow, will stay in a corner biding its time to come out.  I am not speaking of the vital, which is hypocritical, I am merely speaking of the mind. If you have a small, disagreeable sensation, a slight uneasiness, see how quickly the mind gives you a favourable explanation!


The Mother: It lays the blame on someone else or on the circumstances, it says that what you did was right and that you are not responsible, and so on. If you look carefully into yourself, you will see that it is like that and you will ﬁnd it most amusing too! If a child starts examining himself carefully very early, observing himself honestly so as not to deceive himself or deceive others, it will become a habit and spare him much struggling later on.  Now I am addressing parents and teachers, for it is very important to teach children that it is absolutely useless to “look” as if they were good, to “look” as if they were obedient, to “look” as if they were studying well, etc. Very often, the course parents and teachers adopt with their children is to encourage them to “look as if”.


The Mother: It often happens that if a child spontaneously confesses his mistake, he is given a scolding. This is one of the greatest mistakes of parents. You must have sufﬁcient control over yourself never to scold a child, even if he has broken a very valuable and cherished object. You should simply ask him, “How did you do that?” “What happened?”


The Mother: For the child ought to see why it happened, so that he can be  more careful next time. But that is all. In this way you will get the child to be sincere with you instead of trying to deceive you.


The Mother: The greatest obstacle to the transformation of one’s own character is hypocrisy. If you always keep this in mind when dealing with a child, you can do him a lot of good. Of course, you must not sermonise or lecture him, etc. You should simply make him understand that there is a nobility in the being, a great purity, a great love of beauty, which is so powerful that even the most wicked and criminal people are forced to acknowledge a truly beautiful or heroic or selﬂess act.  For, in human beings, there is a presence, the most marvellous Presence on earth, and except in a few very rare cases which I need not mention here, this presence lies asleep in the heart — not the physical heart but the psychic centre — of all beings.


The Mother: And when this Splendour is manifested with enough purity, it will awaken in all beings the echo of this Presence.  Because society is obsessed with success.  There is always a difference between two different things. Of course, it is very difﬁcult, I suppose, to be loyal without being sincere, and vice versa. But I have known people who were loyal and yet lacked a certain kind of sincerity.


The Mother: The opposite is not unusual. The one doesn’t automatically follow from the other, but it is obvious that honesty, straightforwardness, loyalty and sincerity are closely related. I think that it is extremely difﬁcult for someone to be perfectly sincere without being loyal and honest, but of course this demands the utmost.   Yes, it is. Loyalty implies some kind of hierarchical relationship, so to say, with someone or something.


The Mother: There is a sort of interdependence. The usual idea is that loyalty means keeping one’s word, doing one’s duty scrupulously, etc.  Someone who lives all alone in a forest can practise total sincerity, but you can only practise loyalty in social life, in relation to other people. A person who is entirely consecrated in an act of inner devotion to the divine Presence, can be loyal to this Presence. This implies a relationship with something in front of you, or a relationship with the universal.


The Mother: This is a very complex problem. They might have been sincere in relation to their own ideal. You do not know.  I have known beings who were the most active instruments against the divine life, against the divine realisation. Well, to some extent, they were loyal to their own ideal and very sincere in their...


The Mother: These beings are called Asuras, but as I have just said, they were sincere in relation to their own ideal.  I didn’t say they had an absolute sincerity. I simply said that they were very sincere. Perhaps, in some part of their being, there was something that did not try to know any more than it knew. It is quite probable.


The Mother: If you are you have achieved absolute sincerity, you can be sure that you are immersed in falsehood!   The psychic being is formed by the inner Truth and organised around it.    The vital is the dynamism of action. It is the seat of the will, of impulses, desires, revolts, etc.


The Mother:  The physical is the concrete domain that crystallises and deﬁnes the thoughts, the movements of the vital, etc. It is a solid foundation for action.    Finding one’s psychic being implies a kind of conviction, a faith in the existence of this psychic being. One must become aware of it and then allow it to take up the direction of life and action; one must refer to it and make it one’s guide.


The Mother: One becomes aware of the movements of one’s being by referring more and more to the psychic being.      Having an aim is not sufﬁcient.


The Mother: One must have the will to attain it by trying always to trace all one’s movements back to their origin.    Self-mastery means being conscious of oneself and one’s movements, doing what one has decided to do and not what others want one to do.


The Mother:    What is the difference between mechanical, religious and psychological methods? Religious methods are those adopted by the various religions. Not many religions speak of the inner Truth; for them, it is more a matter of coming into contact with their God.


The Mother: Heaven and hell: this is a roundabout way of saying...  Psychological methods are those that deal with states of consciousness, that try to realise the inner self by withdrawing from all activity and attempting to create the conscious inner conditions of detachment, self-abstraction, concentration, higher Reality, renunciation of all the outer movements, etc. A psychological method is one which acts on the thoughts, feelings and actions.  Mechanical methods are those which are based on purely mechanical means — one can beneﬁt from them by using them  in a certain way. Take breath-control, for example: it acts more or less mechanically, but it is sometimes recommended to add to this a concentration of one’s thought, to repeat a word, as in Vivekananda’s teaching.


The Mother: This works up to a certain point, but then it fades away. These human attempts in various times and places have been more or less successful individually but they have never given a collective result.  The psychological method is far more difﬁcult but far more effective: through your actions, to be in a state of inner will to express nothing in yourself but the Truth of your being, and to make everything dependent on that Truth. Of course, if you do nothing, it is easier, but it is also easier to deceive yourself. When you sit down in isolation, in complete silence and far away from everybody, and examine yourself with more or less indulgent eyes, you may imagine that you are realising something wonderful.


The Mother: But when you are put to the test at every minute of your life, when you have the occasion to become aware of your imperfections, your inﬁrmities, your little movements of bad will a hundred times a day, you soon lose the illusion of being... and so your efforts are more sincere.  That is why, instead of deciding that we would have an Ashram in a solitary forest where everything is very beautiful, very restful, instead of being aloof from the world and attending only to our own little selves, we are trying on the contrary to take up all the activities of life and make them as conscious as we can, and, in our contacts with other people, to become more clearly aware of all the inner movements.  Running away from difﬁculties is never a way of surmounting or overcoming them. If you ﬂee from the enemy you won’t be able to defeat him and he has every chance of defeating you.


The Mother: That is why we are here in Pondicherry and not on some Himalayan peak. Although I admit that a  Himalayan peak would be delightful — but perhaps not so effective.   Next time I shall speak about mental discipline, for I have quite a lot of things to say on this subject. It is a terrible stumbling-block: people think they have a superior intellect and on that basis judge things which they know nothing about.


The Mother: This is, if not the greatest, at least one of the greatest obstacles for mankind. For it so happens that mankind is, of all animals — pardon me, but we are still animals! — the only one who can make use of articulate language and turn out pages and pages of... He thinks he is so superior because he can write down and make others read what he thinks and feels. And from this eminence of mental greatness, of mental nobility, he dismisses as so much childishness things that are inﬁnitely superior to him.  It organises itself around it and enters into contact with it.


The Mother: The psychic is moved by the Truth. The Truth is something eternally self-existent and dependent on nothing in time or space, whereas the psychic being is a being that grows, takes form, progresses, individualises itself more and more. In this way it becomes more and more capable of manifesting this Truth, the eternal Truth that is one and permanent. The psychic being is a progressive being, which means that the relation between the psychic being and the Truth is a progressive one. It is not possible to become aware of one’s psychic being without becoming aware at the same time of the inner Truth.


The Mother: All those who have had this experience — not a mental experience but an integral experience of contact with the psychic being, not a contact with the idea they have constructed of it, but a truly concrete contact — all say the same thing: from the very minute this contact takes place, one is absolutely conscious of the eternal Truth within oneself and one sees that it is the purpose of life and the guide of the world. One  can’t have one without the other; in fact, it is this that makes you realise that you are in contact with your psychic being. It may not be a conscious contact, but something that governs your life.  Some people say there is something outside their own will that organises their whole life, that puts them in the required condition, that attracts favourable circumstances or people, that arranges everything outside them, so to say. In their outer consciousness, perhaps they wanted something and worked for it, but something else came.


The Mother: Well, after some years, they realise that this is what really had to happen. You may know nothing of the existence of a psychic being within you and yet be guided by it. For, in order to become aware of something, you must ﬁrst of all admit that this thing exists. Some people don’t. I have


The Mother: known people who had a genuine contact with their psychic being without knowing at all what it was, because there was nothing in them that corresponded to the knowledge of this contact.  Some beings in the universe may have this direct contact with the eternal Truth without any contact with the psychic being, because they don’t have any psychic being. But in man there is always a psychic being, and it is always through it that he comes into contact with the eternal Truth. And this contact with the psychic being is usually disclosed to him in the same way, for it carries with it its own grace, its own splendour and beatitude.


The Mother: The psychic being is characteristic of man, and if one goes to the bottom of the matter, perhaps this is what gives man his superiority.  Many of the old philosophies did not have a complete knowledge of the classiﬁcation of the being — the psychic being, the inner Truth were not known to them. These systems had very simplistic notions, such as the outer and the inner consciousness,  the waking and the sleep consciousness. They had no detailed knowledge of human psychology, or if they had one, they did not think it advisable to impart it to everybody. In former times, knowledge was not given to just anyone.


The Mother: A person ﬁrst had to demonstrate his goodwill very clearly; he had to show sufﬁcient capacities, a sufﬁcient degree of development before he was taught certain kinds of knowledge. But now, in modern life, this knowledge is printed and anyone can buy books and read them.  And of course you meet hundreds of people who have learned a lot of words without knowing anything of what they mean. At one time we had people here who claimed to have realised the Supermind, but did not even know what it was.  With the democratic organisation of things, this popularisation of knowledge is inevitable.


The Mother: Perhaps there are other methods of selection, more concealed, less obvious, but more effective.   The mind is “an instrument of formation, of organisation and action”. Why? The mind gives a form to the thoughts. This power of formation forms mental entities whose life is independent of the mind that has formed them — they act as beings that are at least semi-independent.


The Mother: One can form a thought which then travels, goes out to someone, spreads the idea it contains.  There is a mental substance just as there is a physical substance, and on this plane the mind can emanate innumerable forms.  These forms can be objectivised and seen, and that is one of the most common explanations for dreams. For while you are active and while the physical eyes can see physically, some people can see mentally at the same time. But when you are asleep, your eyes are closed, the physical is asleep and the mind and vital become active.


The Mother: On the mental plane all the formations made by the mind — the actual “forms” that it gives to the thoughts — return and appear to you as if they were coming from outside and give you dreams. Most dreams are like that. Some people have a  very conscious mental life and are able to enter the mental plane and move about in it with the same independence they have in physical life; these people have mentally objective nights. But most people are incapable of doing this: it is their mental activity going on during sleep and assuming forms, and these forms give them what they call dreams.


The Mother: There is a very common example — it is amusing because it is rather vivid. If you have quarrelled with someone during the day, you may wish to hit him, to say very unpleasant things to him. You control yourself, you don’t do it, but your thought, your mind is at work and in your sleep you suddenly have a terrible dream. Someone approaches you with a stick and you hit each other and have a real ﬁght. And when you wake up, if you don’t know, if you don’t understand what has happened, you say to yourself, “What an unpleasant dream I had!”


The Mother: But in fact it is your own thought which came back to you, like that.  So be on your guard when you dream that someone is unkind to you! First of all, you should ask yourself, “But didn’t I have a bad thought against him?”.  Thoughts are real entities which usually last until they are realised. Some people are obsessed by their own thoughts.


The Mother: They think of something and the thought returns and goes round and round in their heads as if it were something from outside. But it is their own formations returning again and again and striking the mind that has formed them. That is one aspect of the matter.  Did you ever have the experience of a thought taking the form of words or a sentence in your mind and returning over and over again? But if you are clever enough to take a piece of paper and a pencil and write it down — that is the end of it, it won’t return any more, you have thrown it out of yourself.


The Mother: The thing has had its little satisfaction, it has manifested itself sufﬁciently and it won’t return.  And there is something more interesting still: if you have a bad thought that annoys and disturbs you, write it down very attentively, very carefully, putting as much consciousness  and will as you can. Then take the piece of paper and, with concentration, tear it up with the will that the thought will be torn up in the same way. That is how you will get rid of it.  The mind is an instrument of organisation.


The Mother: On the outer plane, some people have an organised mind. They have organised their own ideas — note that this is not a very common occurrence! — their own thoughts. But if you look inside yourself, you will see that you have the most contradictory thoughts and if you have not taken care to organise them, they dwell side by side in your head, so to say, and create utter disorder.  For instance, I used to know someone who was able to hold the most mystical ideas in his mind together with the most positivist ideas, that is, the most materialistic ideas, the negation of everything that is not purely matter. It was all unorganised and this person was constantly tossed this way and that in a perpetual confusion.