The Mother: And if one takes it a little further...  In fact, the value of an experience or a discovery could perhaps be proved by the power it gives, the power to change these appearances and transform things, circumstances and the world as it appears to us, in accordance with the will that manifests through that experience. It seems to me that the most universal proof of the validity of an individual or collective experience would be its power to make things — these appearances that we call the world — different from what they are. From the subjective point of view, the effect of the experience on an individual consciousness is an undeniable proof; for one who attains bliss, sovereign peace, unchanging delight, the profound knowledge of things, it is more than proved. The effects on the outer form depend on many other things besides the experience itself — depend perhaps on the ﬁrst cause of these experiences — but out of all this, thing seems to be a proof which is accessible to other people as well as to the one who has the experience; it is the power over other people and things — which for the ordinary consciousness is “objective”.


The Mother: For instance, if a person who has attained the state of consciousness I am speaking about, had the power of communicating it to others, it would be partially — only partially — a proof of the reality of his experiences; but further, if the state of consciousness in which he is — for instance, a state of perfect harmony — could create this harmony in the outer world, in what apparently is not harmony, it would be, I think, the proof most readily accepted, even by the materialist scientiﬁc mind. If these illusory appearances could be changed into something more beautiful, more harmonious, happier than the world we live in now, this would perhaps be an undeniable proof. And if we take it a little farther, if, as Sri Aurobindo promises us, the supramental force, consciousness and light transform this world and create a new race, then, just as the apes and animals — if they could speak — could not deny the existence of man, so too man would not be able to deny the  existence of these new beings — provided that they are different enough from the human race for this difference to be perceptible even to the deceptive organs of man.  From these deductions it would seem that the most conclusive and obvious aspect and the one which will probably be the ﬁrst to manifest — probably — will be the aspect of Power, rather than the aspect of Joy or of Truth. For a new race to be founded on earth, it would necessarily have to be protected from other earthly elements in order to be able to survive; and power is protection — not an artiﬁcial power, external and false, but the true strength, the triumphant Will.


The Mother: It is therefore not impossible to think that the supramental action, even before being an action of harmonisation, illumination, joy and beauty, might be an action of power, to serve as a protection. Naturally, for this action of power to be truly effective, it would have to be founded on Knowledge and Truth and Love and Harmony; but these things could manifest, visibly, little by little, when the ground, so to say, has been prepared by the action of a sovereign Will and Power.  But for the least of these things to be possible, there must ﬁrst be a basis of balance, the balance given by a total absence of egoism, a perfect surrender to the Supreme, the true purity: identiﬁcation with the Supreme. Without this basis of perfect balance, the supramental power is dangerous, and one must seek it or want to pull it down, for even in an inﬁnitesimal quantity it is so powerful and so formidable that it can unbalance the entire system.  Since I am speaking to you about it, I would like to recommend something to you.


The Mother: In your desire for progress and your aspiration for realisation, take great care not to attempt to pull the forces towards you. Give yourself, open yourself with as much disinterestedness as you can attain through a constant self-forgetfulness, increase your receptivity to the utmost, but   try to the Force towards you, for wanting to pull is already a dangerous egoism. You may aspire, you may open  yourself, you may give yourself, but never seek to take. When things go wrong, people blame the Force, but it is not the Force that is responsible: it is ambition, egoism, ignorance and the weakness of the vessel.


The Mother: Give yourself generously and with a perfect disinterestedness and from the deeper point of view nothing bad will ever happen to you. Try to take and you will be on the brink of the abyss.      It is already written! The explanation has already been written, it is ready for the of February 21.


The Mother: There is nothing to explain. It is an experience, something that happened, and when it happened I noted it down, and as it turned out, it occurred just at the moment when I remembered that I had to write something for the year — which was next year at that time, that is, the year which begins today. When I remembered that I had to write something — not because of that, but simultaneously — this experience came, and when I noted it down, I realised that it was... it was the message for this year!   (


The Mother: )  I will tell you only one thing: you should not misinterpret the meaning of this experience and imagine that from now on everything is going to take place without any difﬁculties and always in a manner that favours our personal desires. It is not on this plane. It does not mean that when we do not want it to rain, it will not rain! that when we want something to happen in the world, it will happen immediately; that all difﬁculties will be  done away with and everything will be as it is in fairy-tales.


The Mother: It is not that. It is something much deeper: Nature, in her play of forces, has accepted the new Force which has manifested and included it in her movements. And as always, the movements of Nature are on a scale which is inﬁnitely beyond the human scale and not visible to an ordinary human consciousness. It is an inner, psychological possibility which has come into the world rather than a spectacular change in earthly events.  I am saying this because you might be tempted to believe that fairy-tales were going to be realised on earth.


The Mother: It is not yet time for that.  ( )  One must have much patience and a very wide and very complex vision to understand how things happen.  (


The Mother: )  The miracles which take place are not what could be called story-book miracles, in the sense that they don’t happen as in stories. They are visible only to a very deep vision of things — very deep, very comprehensive, very vast.  ( )


The Mother: One must already be capable of following the methods and ways of the Grace in order to recognise its action. One must already be capable of not being blinded by appearances in order to see the deeper truth of things.  We could usefully, this evening, just take this resolution: to try throughout the year to do our best, so that the time may not pass in vain.   In the course of one of our classes I spoke of the limitless abundance of Nature, the inexhaustible creatrix who takes the multitude of forms and mixes them together, separates them again and remoulds them, unmakes and destroys them, to move on to ever new combinations. It is a huge cauldron, I said: she stirs things inside and brings out something; it’s no good, she throws it in again and takes something else....


The Mother: One or two forms or a hundred have no importance for her, there are thousands and thousands of forms, and then as for years, a hundred years, a thousand, millions of years, it is of no importance, you have eternity before you! It is quite obvious that Nature enjoys all this and that she is not in a hurry. If she is told to rush rapidly through and ﬁnish this or that part of her work quickly, the reply is always the same: “But why should I do so, why? Doesn’t it amuse you?”  The evening I told you about these things, I identiﬁed myself totally with Nature, I joined in her game.


The Mother: And this movement of identiﬁcation provoked a response, a sort of new intimacy between Nature and myself, a long movement of a growing closeness which culminated in an experience which came on the eighth of November.  Suddenly Nature understood. She understood that this new Consciousness which has just been born does not seek to reject her but wants to embrace her entirely, she understood that this new spirituality does not turn away from life, does not recoil in fear before the formidable amplitude of her movement, but wants on the contrary to integrate all its facets. She understood  that the supramental consciousness is here not to diminish but to complete her.  Then from the supreme Reality came this order, “Awake, O Nature, to the joy of collaboration.”


The Mother: And the whole of Nature suddenly rushed forward in a great surge of joy, saying, “I accept, I shall collaborate.” And at the same time, there came a calm, an absolute tranquillity so that the bodily vessel could receive and contain, without breaking, without losing anything, the mighty ﬂood of this Joy of Nature which rushed forward as in a movement of gratitude. She accepted, she saw with all eternity before her that this supramental consciousness was going to fulﬁl her more perfectly, give a still greater strength to her movement, a greater amplitude, more possibilities to her play.  And suddenly I heard, as if they came from all the corners of the earth, those great notes one sometimes hears in the subtle physical, a little like those of Beethoven’s Concerto in D-major, which come in moments of great progress, as though ﬁfty orchestras had burst forth all in unison, without a single false note, to express the joy of this new communion between Nature and Spirit, the meeting of old friends who come together again after having been separated for so long.  Then these words came, “O Nature, Material Mother, thou hast said that thou wilt collaborate and there is no limit to the splendour of this collaboration.”


The Mother: And the radiant felicity of this splendour was sensed in perfect peace.  That is how the message for the new year was born.   We have decided to read paragraph by paragraph so that we can go into certain detailed explanations, but this method has one drawback : as I have already told you, it is that Sri Aurobindo takes up all the theories and expounds them in all their details, with all their arguments, in order to show later what their defects are and their inability to solve the problem, and to present his own solution; but (), when we stop in the middle of an argument and take a single paragraph, if we read this paragraph without going on to the very end, we may very well imagine or believe that he is giving his own opinion.


The Mother: In fact there are some unscrupulous people who have done that, and when they wanted to prove that their own theories were correct, they quoted paragraphs from Sri Aurobindo without saying what went before or what came after, in support of their own theory. They said, “You see, Sri Aurobindo in  has written that.” He has written that, but that does not mean that it was his own way of seeing. And now we are facing the same difﬁculty. For the last two lessons, I think, I have been reading the detailed demonstration of one of the modern theories of life, evolution, the purpose of existence — or the purposelessness of existence — and Sri Aurobindo presents this in quite a... conclusive way, as if it were his own theory and own way of seeing.


The Mother: We stop in the middle and are left with a kind of uneasiness and the feeling, “But that is not what he told us!  How is it that he is expounding that to us now?...” It is quite a big drawback. But if I were to read to you the whole argument, when we came to the end you wouldn’t remember the beginning and you wouldn’t be able to follow! So the best thing is to go on quietly, one paragraph at a time, trying to understand what  he is saying, but without thinking that he wants to prove to us that it is true.


The Mother: He simply wants to expound the theories with everything that supports them, without telling us that this is the best way of seeing things.  In reality, you should take this reading as an opportunity to develop the philosophical mind in yourself and the capacity to arrange ideas in a logical order and establish an argument on a sound basis. You must take this like dumb-bell exercises for developing muscles: these are dumb-bell exercises for the mind to develop one’s brain. And you must not jump to hasty conclusions. If we wait with patience, at the end of the chapter he will tell us — and tell us on a basis of irrefutable argument — why he has come to the conclusion he arrives at.


The Mother: Now, if there is anything that gives rise to a question...  Something else? What?  Where do they come from?


The Mother: — From the mental atmosphere.  Why do they come?... Perhaps you meet them on your way as one meets a passer-by in a public square. Most often it is that; you are on a road where ideas are moving about and it so happens that you meet this particular one and it passes through your head. Obviously, those who are in the habit of meditating, of concentrating, and for whom intellectual problems have a very concrete and tangible reality, by concentrating their minds they attract associated ideas, and a “company of ideas” is formed which they organise so as to solve a problem or clarify the question they are considering.


The Mother: But for this, one must have the habit of mental concentration and precisely that philosophical mind I was speaking about, for which ideas are living entities with their  own life, which are organised on the mental chess-board like pawns in a game of chess: one takes them, moves them, places them, organises them, one makes a coherent whole out of these ideas, which are individual, independent entities with afﬁnities among themselves, and which organise themselves according to inner laws. But for this, one must also have the habit of meditation, reﬂection, analysis, deduction, mental organisation.  Otherwise, if one is just “like that”, if one lives life as it comes, then it is exactly like a public square: there are roads and on the roads people pass by, and then you ﬁnd yourself at crossroads and it all passes through your head — sometimes even ideas without any connection between them, so much so that if you were to write down what passes through your head, it would make a string of admirable nonsense!  We once said that we could usefully try out a little game: to ask somebody suddenly, “What are you thinking about?” Well, it is not often that he can answer you clearly, “Ah!


The Mother: I was just thinking of that particular thing. ” If he says that, you may infer that he is a thoughtful person. Otherwise, the usual spontaneous reply is, “Oh! I don’t know.”  You see, all those who have done ordered and organised physical exercises, have the knowledge, for instance, of the various muscles which must be moved to obtain a particular movement, and the best way to move them and how to obtain the maximum result with the minimum loss of energy.


The Mother: Well, it is the same thing with thought. When you train yourself methodically, there comes a time when you can follow a train of reasoning quite objectively, as you would project a picture on a screen — you can follow the logical deduction of one idea from another, and the normal, logical, organised movement, with the minimum loss of time, from a proposition to its conclusion.  Once you have acquired the habit of doing that, just as you have the habit of methodically moving the muscles which must be moved to obtain a certain result, your thought becomes clear.  Otherwise, movements of thought, intellectual movements, are  vague, imprecise, elusive; all of a sudden something rises up, one doesn’t know why, and something else comes to contradict it, one doesn’t know why either. And if one tries to organise this clearly in order to become aware of the exact relation between ideas, the ﬁrst few times one does it, one gets a ﬁne headache!


The Mother: And one has the feeling of trying to ﬁnd one’s way in a very dark virgin forest.  The speculative mind needs discipline for its development.   If it is not disciplined methodically, one is always in a sort of a cloud. The vast majority of human beings can harbour the most contradictory ideas in their brains without being in the least troubled by them.


The Mother: Well, until you try to organise your mind clearly, you risk at the very least having no control over what you think. And very often, you must come down to action before you begin to realise the value of what you think! Or, if not as far as action, at least as far as the feelings: suddenly you become aware that you have feelings which are not very desirable; then you realise you have not controlled your way of thinking at all.  Bad thoughts?.... There can be several reasons for that.


The Mother: In fact there are several reasons. It may be due to a bad nature — if people have nasty feelings, these nasty feelings can be the cause of nasty thoughts. It may be the opposite. Perhaps they are wide open to all sorts of suggestions from outside and, as I said, these suggestions enter them and gradually create nasty feelings.  It may be due to subconscious inﬂuences which are conﬂicting precisely because they are uncontrolled.


The Mother: When these inﬂuences rise to the surface, instead of being controlled and those which are undesirable refused, everything is allowed to enter as it likes, the doors are open.  You are in all kinds of things — good, bad, neutral,  luminous, dark; it’s all there, and each one’s consciousness should, in principle, act as a ﬁlter. You should receive only what you want to receive, you should think only what you want to think; and then, you should not allow these thoughts to be changed into feelings and actions without formal authorisation.  In fact, this is the very purpose of physical existence. Each person is an instrument for controlling a certain set of vibrations which represent his particular ﬁeld of work; each one must receive only the ones which are in conformity with the divine plan and refuse the rest.


The Mother: But not one in a thousand does that. You do it a little, half consciously, due to the friction of circumstances and surroundings, but as for doing it deliberately, surely there are very few human beings who do it deliberately; and even when it’s done deliberately, to do it in the true way and with the true knowledge, that indeed is still more exceptional.  Thought-control! Who can control his thoughts? Only those who have trained themselves to it, who have tried hard since their childhood.


The Mother: There is the whole range, you see, from total lack of control, which for most people comes to this: it is their thoughts which rule them and not they their thoughts. The vast majority of people are troubled by thoughts they cannot get rid of, which literally possess them, and they don’t have the power to close the door of their active consciousness to these thoughts. Their thoughts govern them, rule them. You hear people saying every day, “Oh! That thought, all the time it comes back to me, again and again, and I can’t get rid of it!” So they are assailed by all kinds of things, from anxiety to ill-will and fear.


The Mother: Thoughts which express dread are extremely troublesome; you try to send them away, they return like a rubber band and fall back on you. Who has control? It requires years of labour and such a long practice.   And so, to come to something which is not complete control but anyway already represents a stage: to have the ability to do this in your head (), to annul  all the movements, to stop the vibrations.


The Mother: And the mental surface becomes smooth. Everything stops, as when you open a book at a blank page — but almost materially, you understand... blank!  Try a little when you are at home, you will see, it is very interesting.  And so, one follows the place in one’s head where the little point is dancing. I have seen — I have seen Sri Aurobindo doing this in somebody’s head, somebody who used to complain of being troubled by thoughts.


The Mother: It was as if his hand reached out and took hold of the little black dancing point and then did this (), as when one picks up an insect, and he threw it far away. And that was all. All still, quiet, luminous.... It was clearly visible like this, you know, he took it out without saying anything — and it was over.  And things are very closely interdependent: I also saw the case when someone came to him with an acute pain somewhere: “Oh, it hurts here!


The Mother: Oh, it hurts! Oh!...” He said nothing, he remained calm, he looked at the person, and I saw, I saw something like a subtle physical hand which came and took hold of the little point dancing about in disorder and confusion, and he took it like this () and there, everything had gone.  “Oh, oh! Look my pain has gone.”


The Mother: There.   If all these arguments were true and there were to be no higher realisation... there would be nothing left to do. But fortunately this is not true.  Only, Sri Aurobindo has said many times that there will be no irrefutable proof of the truth of what he has said and predicted until it is accomplished; only when everything is accomplished will those who refuse to believe be obliged to recognise their mistake — but perhaps they won’t be there to do it!


The Mother: So there is only one thing to do: to proceed on one’s way keeping one’s own faith and certitude, and to pay no heed to contradictions and denials.  There are people who need the support and trust and certitude of others to feel comfortable and to be at ease — they are always unhappy because, of course, they will always come across people who do not believe, and so they will be upset and it will trouble them. One must ﬁnd one’s certitude within oneself, keep it in spite of everything and go one’s way whatever the cost, to the very end. The Victory is for the most enduring.  To maintain one’s endurance in spite of all oppositions, the support must be unshakable, and support is unshakable, that of the Reality, the Supreme Truth.


The Mother: It is useless to look for any other. This is the only one that never fails.   Next time we begin the argument. All these arguments take place in a ﬁeld where you don’t usually go, do you? It is a domain which is unfamiliar to you.


The Mother: In fact it is a very special domain, far removed from action or any practical realisation. It has always seemed to me that one could take up any idea at all and use it as the startingpoint for an argument and through intellectual logic succeed in proving that this idea is altogether true, simply by the power of argumentation.   It is quite remarkable that these are two ﬁelds of human activity — action and speculation — which usually ﬁnd it difﬁcult to be together at the same time in the consciousness; and it is even unusual that a man with a highly developed speculative mind should ever be a man of action, and on the other hand, that a man of action should ever feel at ease in the speculative intellect.  When one has an essentially practical bent for accomplishing things, one always feels that all these speculations, arguments, deductions are a more or less interesting occupation for idle people.


The Mother: But... I dare not say this too loud, for it is not appreciated by intellectuals, this has always seemed to me a gymnastic exercise that’s very interesting from the point of view of mental development, but without much practical result. Now, if you listen to people with an abstract turn of mind, they will tell you that physical gymnastics are a thoroughly futile occupation without any practical result: “What’s the use of doing gymnastics? It is simply to exercise your muscles. And why should we  not exercise our mental muscles as you exercise the muscles of your body?”


The Mother: And both arguments are of equal value.  For me the solution lies elsewhere.  ()  As soon as one is convinced that there is a living and real Truth seeking to express itself in an objective universe, the only thing that seems to have any importance or value is to come into contact with this Truth, to identify oneself with it as perfectly as possible, and to no longer be anything but a means of expressing it, making it more and more living and tangible so that it may be manifested more and more perfectly. All theories, all principles, all methods are more or less good according to their capacity to express that Truth; and as one goes forward on this path, if one goes beyond all the limits of the Ignorance, one becomes aware that the of this manifestation, its wholeness, its integrality is necessary for the expression of that Truth, that  can be left out, and perhaps that there is nothing more important or less important.


The Mother: The one thing that seems necessary is a harmonisation of everything which puts each thing in its place, in its true relation with all the rest, so that the total Unity may manifest harmoniously.  If one comes down from this level, according to me one no longer understands anything and all arguments are of equal worth in the narrowness and limitation which take away all their real value.  Each thing in its place, in harmony with all the rest, and then one can begin to understand and to live.  ( ) One feels that a single movement, however small it may be, however insigniﬁcant it may seem, which is in harmony with that Truth, is of more value than the most wonderful arguments.


The Mother: Let one single drop of light shine in you and it will be more effective in dissolving the darkness than the most beautiful speeches in the world on what light is or on what it can do.   What don’t you understand? He says that evolution is the result of the inevitable fulﬁlment of the Truth of Being which is the essential reality of the universe. The fulﬁlment of this Truth, the fulﬁlment of the Truth of Being, is the fundamental fact of evolution, that is, it is the cause and principle of the evolution; but naturally, if this Truth of Being is inevitably fulﬁlled, it must be by means of a will and a purpose. There has to be an aim and the will to fulﬁl that aim.


The Mother: To fulﬁl itself this truth must contain a will to fulﬁlment and an aim, a purpose, a project it wants to fulﬁl. In order to accomplish something, one must have the will to do it, and to have the will to do it, one must know what one wants to do. If one doesn’t know what one wants to do, one can’t do it. First one must, have a plan, a purpose, a programme if you like; one must know what one wants to do, and then one must  to do it, and then one can do it.   You see, he says: the universe is the evolutionary fulﬁlment of the truth of the universal Being.


The Mother: The deploying of the universe is the progressive, evolutionary fulﬁlment of the truth of the universal Being, but for this truth to be fulﬁlled it must necessarily contain a plan, that is, it must know what it wants to do and must have the will to do it.  When you do something you know what you want to do, don’t you? And then you will to do it, otherwise you couldn’t.  But it is the same thing, this is what he says.  It must necessarily be admitted that there is a plan in the universe, that it is not something that comes about by chance, and that there is a Will to fulﬁl this plan, otherwise nothing could happen.


The Mother: You see, Sri Aurobindo contradicts those who say that the universe has no plan and no will. But the minute we admit that there is a consciousness — a conscious existence — behind the universe, we admit at the same time, automatically, that there is a plan in this universe and a will to fulﬁl this plan.  That is all he says. It is simple, isn’t it?  You only have to reduce this to the individual scale.


The Mother: When someone is conscious and does something consciously, he necessarily does it knowing what he wants to do, with a plan. For instance, when you prepare a programme for the anniversary of your “boarding”, you have a purpose, don’t you? — you want to make a programme for the anniversary, and so you have a plan, you choose what you are going to enact and how it is going to be enacted, and at the same time you to do it, otherwise you would not do it — so, Sri Aurobindo says just that. That is, that if the universe is a conscious entity, if there is a Consciousness which expresses itself, it necessarily expresses itself in accordance with a plan and with a will to express itself — it is quite simple.  Have you understood?


The Mother: ... A little!  Don’t you know this, that in order to do something one must know what one wants to do and then one must do it, have the will to do it? Even if you decide to walk from here to there,  you must decide that you want to walk from here to there, and afterwards you must have the will to walk, otherwise you would not move. No?


The Mother: Ah! it is nothing but that, it is as simple as that.  ()  People usually do things so automatically and spontaneously, without watching themselves doing them, that if they were to ask themselves how it comes about, they would require some time before the process becomes conscious to them.


The Mother: You are so used to living that you don’t even know how it happens.  All the gestures and movements of life are made spontaneously, automatically, almost unconsciously, in a semi-conscious state, and one doesn’t even realise this very simple fact that in order to do something, one must ﬁrst know what one is going to do and then must want to do it. It is only when something goes wrong with one of these elements — for instance, the ability to make a plan in one’s mind and the ability to carry out this plan — when these two begin to go wrong, one starts worrying about whether one’s being is in good order. For example, if one morning on waking up in bed you did not know or remember that you had to get up, wash and dress, have your breakfast, do this and that, you would say to yourself, “Why, what’s the matter? Something is wrong — I don’t know what I ought to do any more; something must be out of order.”


The Mother: And if, later, knowing what you have to do — you must get up, go for your bath, dress — you know you have to do it but you can’t do it: there is something, the stimulus of the will, which is no longer working, has no effect on the body; then once again you begin to feel anxious, you say, “Well, well, could I be ill by any chance?”   Otherwise you are not even aware that the whole of life is like that. It seems quite natural to you, it is “like that”. That means that you act in a way which is hardly semi-conscious; it is automatic, it is a kind of spontaneous habit and you don’t watch what you are doing. And so, if you want to have some control over your movements, the ﬁrst thing is to know what is happening.


The Mother: And in fact, this perhaps is the reason why things don’t always go well. For if they went according to a normal, usual rhythm, one would never be conscious of what one is doing; one would do it by habit, automatically, spontaneously, without thinking, and would not watch what one is doing, and so one would never be able to acquire self-mastery. It would be “something”, a vague consciousness in the background expressing itself without your even watching what you are doing, and which would make you act; and then if there came along some strange or unknown current of force, it could make you do anything at all, without your even noticing the process by which it makes you act. And in fact that is what does happen.  It is only when one is fully conscious of the process, when one knows how life works, the movement of life and the process of life, that one can begin to have control; otherwise at ﬁrst one doesn’t even think at all of having any control; but if unpleasant things occur, if, for instance, you do something which has unfortunate consequences and you tell yourself, “Oh! But I should stop doing that”, then, at that moment, you realise that there is a whole technique of “how to live” which is necessary to be able to control your life!


The Mother: Otherwise one is a kind of more or less coordinated medley of actions and reactions, of movements and impulses, and one doesn’t know at all how things happen.  This is what is developed in the being by shocks, frictions, all the apparent disorders of life, and what forms the consciousness in very small children. A small child is altogether unconscious, and only gradually, very gradually, does he begin to grow aware of things. But unless they take special care, people live almost  their whole life without even knowing how they do it! They are not aware of it.


The Mother: So anything at all can happen .  But that is the towards becoming conscious of oneself in the material world.  You have vague thoughts and feelings, don’t you, which develop more or less logically in the being — rather less than more — then you have a faint impression of that; and again, when you get burnt, you realise that something is wrong, when you fall and hurt yourself, you realise that something is wrong: it begins to make you reﬂect that you must pay attention to this and that, so as not to fall, not to burn yourself, not to cut yourself.... It dawns on you gradually with external experience, external contacts.


The Mother: But otherwise one is a half-conscious mass which moves without even knowing why or how.  This is the very small beginning of the emergence from the primary state of unconsciousness.    If one wants to state the problem in a way that’s more easily accessible to ordinary practical thinking, one could conceive that everything exists from all eternity, and therefore simultaneously, but that this total, simultaneous, eternal existence is like the property, the possession of a Consciousness which would take pleasure in travelling through its domains, ﬁnd its joy in an almost inﬁnite or anyway indeﬁnite journey throughout all its domains, and would go like this from discovery to discovery of things which already exist, which have always existed... but which the Supreme had never visited. And the path he follows in his discovery could be an entirely free, unexpected, unforeseen path according to his choice of the moment, so that, although his whole domain is there from all eternity, existing for ever, he could visit it in an altogether unexpected, unpredictable way, and so open the door to all relationships and possibilities.  And it is also his own self-discovery, for this domain is  himself; and a discovery which could be made according to immediate decisions, without a preconceived plan such as would be mentally thought out, with all the delight of complete freedom and of the unexpectedness of every second — an eternal journey within his own being.


The Mother: Everything is absolutely determined, for everything from all eternity, and yet the path traversed has a freedom and unpredictability which is also absolute.  And this is how there can exist simultaneously worlds which have no apparent relationship with each other, and which nevertheless coexist, but are discovered gradually and so give the impression of a new creation.... Seeing things in this way, one could easily understand that simultaneously with this physical world as we know it with all its imperfections, all its limitations, all its ignorance, there are one or several other worlds which exist in their own zones and are so different in nature from ours here, that for us they are as if non-existent, for we have no relation with them. But the moment the great eternal Voyage passes from this world to that, by the very fact of this passage of the eternal Consciousness, the link will necessarily be created, and the two worlds will gradually enter into relation with each other.  Truly speaking this is what is actually happening, and we can say with certainty that the supramental world already exists, but the time has come for it to become the object of the journey of the supreme Consciousness, and then, gradually, a conscious link will be formed between this world and that, and they will have a new relation as a result of this new orientation of the journey.


The Mother: This explanation is as good as any other and perhaps it is easier to understand for people who are not metaphysicians.... At least, I like it!   I told you just a moment ago that the Great Traveller chooses at each instant the course of his journey, therefore it is an absolute freedom of choice, and this is what gives the universal unfolding that unpredictable air and that possibility of change, for the Supreme is entirely free to change his course if he wants to do so. On the contrary, this is absolute freedom.


The Mother: But everything is there, and since everything is there, everything is absolutely determined — it has always existed but it is discovered in an altogether unforeseen way. And in this discovery lies freedom.  You are taking a walk and, suddenly, well, you feel like going this way instead of that, so the course you take is completely new, but in the places you are going to, the things were already there, they existed and were therefore determined — but not your discovery.  Surely only a consciousness identiﬁed with the supreme Consciousness can have this feeling of absolute freedom. So long as you are not one with the supreme Consciousness, you necessarily have the impression or the feeling or idea that you are subject to the law of a higher Will, but the moment you are identiﬁed with this Will you are perfectly free.


The Mother: This amounts to saying what Sri Aurobindo has always said: in union with the Supreme true freedom is realised.   That depends on people!  It is not the mind and vital which develop and progress from life to life — except in altogether exceptional cases and at a very advanced stage of evolution — it is the psychic. So, this is what happens: the psychic has alternate periods of activity and rest; it has a life of progress resulting from experiences of the physical life, of active life in a physical body, with all the experiences of the body, the vital and the mind; then, normally, the psychic goes into a kind of rest for assimilation where the result of the progress accomplished during its active existence is worked out, and when this assimilation is ﬁnished, when it has absorbed the progress it had prepared in its active life on earth, it comes down again in a new body bringing with it the result of all its progress


The Mother: and , at an advanced stage, it even chooses the environment and the kind of body and the kind of life in which it will live to complete its experience concerning one point or another. In some very advanced cases the psychic can, before leaving the body, decide what kind of life it will have in its next incarnation.  When it has become an almost completely formed and already very conscious being, it presides over the formation of the new body, and usually through an inner inﬂuence it chooses the elements and the substance which will form its body in such a way that the body is adapted to the needs of its new experience.  But this is at a rather advanced stage.


The Mother: And later, when it is fully formed and returns to earth with the idea of service, of collective  help and participation in the divine Work, then it is able to bring to the body in formation certain elements of the mind and vital from previous lives which, having been organised and impregnated with psychic forces in previous lives, could be preserved and, consequently, can participate in the general progress. But  this is at a very, very advanced stage.  When the psychic is fully developed and very conscious, when it becomes a conscious instrument of the divine Will, it organises the vital and the mind in such a way that they too participate in the general harmony and can be preserved.  A high degree of development allows at least some parts of the mental and vital beings to be preserved in spite of the dissolution of the body.


The Mother: If, for instance, some parts — mental or vital — of the human activity have been particularly developed, these elements of the mind and vital are maintained even “in their form” — in the form of the activity which has been fully organised — as, for example, in highly intellectual people who have particularly developed their brains, the mental part of their being keeps this structure and is preserved in the form of an organised brain which has its own life and can be kept unchanged until a future life so as to participate in it with all its gains.  In artists, as for instance in certain musicians who have used their hands in a particularly conscious way, the vital and mental substance is preserved in the form of hands, and these hands remain fully conscious, they can even use the body of living people if there is a special afﬁnity — and so on.  Otherwise, in ordinary people in whom the psychic form is not fully developed and organised, when the psychic leaves the body, the mental and vital forms may persist for a certain time if the death has been particularly peaceful and concentrated, but if a man dies suddenly and in a state of passion, with numerous attachments, well, the different parts of the being are dispersed and live for a shorter or longer time their own life in their own domain, then disappear.  The centre of organisation and transformation is always  the presence of the psychic in the body. Therefore, it is a very big mistake to believe that the progress continues or even, as some believe, that it is more complete and rapid in the periods of transition between two physical lives; in general, there is no progress at all, for the psychic enters into a state of rest and the other parts, after a more or less ephemeral life in their own domain, are dissolved.


The Mother: Earthly life is the place for progress. It is here, on earth, that progress is possible, during the period of earthly existence. And it is the psychic which carries the progress over from one life to another, by organising its own evolution and development itself.   Between the beings of the supramental world and men, almost the same separation exists as between men and animals. Some time ago I had the experience of identiﬁcation with animal life, and it is a fact that animals do not understand us; their consciousness is so constructed that we elude them almost entirely.


The Mother: And yet I have known pet animals — cats and dogs, but especially cats — that used to make an almost yogic effort of consciousness to reach us. But usually, when they see us as we live and act, they do not understand, they do not us as we are and they suffer because of us. We are a constant enigma to them. Only a very tiny part of their consciousness has a link with us. And it is the same thing for us when we try to look at the supramental world.


The Mother: Only when the link of consciousness is established shall we see it — and even then only the part of our being which has undergone transformation in this way will be able to see it as it is — otherwise the two worlds would remain apart like the animal and human worlds.  The experience I had on the third of February is a proof of this. Before that I had had an individual subjective contact with the supramental world, whereas on the third of February I moved in it concretely, as concretely as I once used to walk in Paris, in a world, outside all subjectivity.  It is like a bridge being thrown between the two worlds.  Here is the experience as I dictated it immediately afterwards:


The Mother: ( )  The supramental world exists permanently and I am there  permanently in a supramental body. I had the proof of this even today when my earth-consciousness went there and remained there consciously between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. Now, I know that what is lacking for the two worlds to unite in a constant and conscious relation, is an intermediate zone between the physical world as it is and the supramental world as it is.


The Mother: This zone remains to be built, both in the individual consciousness and the objective world, and it is being built.  When I used to speak of the new world which is being created, it was of this intermediary zone that I was speaking. And similarly, when I am on this side, that is, in the ﬁeld of the physical consciousness, and I see the supramental power, the supramental light and substance constantly penetrating matter, it is the construction of this zone which I see and in which I participate.  I was on a huge boat which was a symbolic representation of the place where this work is going on. This boat, as large as a city, is fully organised, and it had certainly already been functioning for some time, for its organisation was complete.


The Mother: It is the place where people who are destined for the supramental life are trained. These people — or at least a part of their being — had already undergone a supramental transformation, for the boat itself and everything on board was neither material nor subtle-physical nor vital nor mental — it was a supramental substance. This substance was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance which is closest to the physical world, the ﬁrst to manifest. The light was a mixture of gold and red, forming a uniform substance of a luminous orange. Everything was like that — the light was like that, the people were like that — everything had that colour, although with various shades which made it possible to distinguish things from each other.


The Mother: The general impression was of a world without shadows; there were shades but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order; everything went on regularly and in silence. And at the same time one could see all the details of an education, a training in all ﬁelds, by which the people on board were being prepared.   This immense ship had just reached the shore of the supramental world and a ﬁrst group of people who were destined to become the future inhabitants of this supramental world were to disembark. Everything had been arranged for this ﬁrst landing.


The Mother: At the wharf several very tall beings were posted. They were not human beings, they had never been men before. Nor were they the permanent inhabitants of the supramental world. They had been delegated from above and posted there to control and supervise the landing. I was in charge of the whole thing from the beginning and all the time.


The Mother: I had prepared all the groups myself. I stood on the boat at the head of the gangway, calling the groups one by one and sending them down to the shore.  The tall beings who were posted there were inspecting, so to say, those who were landing, authorising those who were ready and sending back those who were not and who had to continue their training on board the ship. While I was there looking at everybody, the part of my consciousness which came from here became extremely interested; it wanted to see and recognise all the people, see how they had changed and check which ones were taken immediately and which ones had to remain to continue their training. After a while, as I stood there observing, I began to feel that I was being pulled back so that my body might wake up — a consciousness or a person here — and in my consciousness I protested, “No, no, not yet, not yet!


The Mother: I want to see the people!” I was seeing and noting everything with intense interest.... Things continued in this way until suddenly the clock here began to strike three, and this brought me back violently. There was a sensation of suddenly falling into my body. I came back with a shock because I had been called back very suddenly, but with all my memory.


The Mother: I remained quiet, without moving, until I could recollect the whole experience and keep it.  On the boat the nature of objects was not the one we know on earth; for instance, clothes were not made of cloth and what looked like cloth was not manufactured: it formed a part of the body, it was made of the same substance which took different  forms. It had a kind of plasticity. When a change had to be made, it took place, not by any artiﬁcial and external means but by an inner operation, an operation of consciousness which gave form or appearance to the substance. Life created its own forms.


The Mother: There was substance in everything; it changed the quality of its vibration according to need and use.  Those who were sent back for fresh training were not of a uniform colour, it was as if their body had greyish, opaque patches of a substance resembling earthly substance; they were dull, as if they had not been entirely permeated with light, not transformed. They were not like that everywhere, only in places.  The tall beings on the shore were not of the same colour, at least they did not have that orange tint; they were paler, more transparent. Except for one part of their body, one could only see the outline of their form.


The Mother: They were very tall, they seemed not to have any bones and could take any form according to their need. Only from the waist down had they a permanent density, which was not perceptible in the rest of their body. Their colour was much lighter, with very little red, it was more golden or even white. The parts of whitish light were translucent; they were not positively transparent but less dense, more subtle than the orange substance.  When I was called back and while I was saying “Not yet”, each time I had a brief glimpse of myself, that is, of my form in the supramental world.


The Mother: I was a mixture of the tall beings and the beings aboard the ship. My upper part, particularly the head, was only a silhouette whose contents were white with an orange fringe. Going down towards the feet, the colour became more like that of the people on the boat, that is, orange; going upwards, it was more translucent and white and the red grew less. The head was only a silhouette with a sun shining within it; rays of light came from it which were the action of the will.  As for the people I saw on board the ship, I recognised them all.


The Mother: Some were from here, from the Ashram, some came from elsewhere, but I know them too. I saw everybody but as  I knew that I would not remember them all when I returned, I decided not to give any names. Besides, it is not necessary. Three or four faces were very clearly visible, and when I saw them, I understood the feeling I had here on earth when looking into their eyes: there was such an extraordinary joy.... People were mostly young, there were very few children and they were about fourteen or ﬁfteen, certainly not below ten or twelve — I did not remain long enough to see all the details.


The Mother: There weren’t any very old people, apart from a few exceptions. Most of the people who went ashore were middle-aged, except a few. Already, before this experience, some individual cases had been examined several times at a place where people capable of being supramentalised were examined; I had a few surprises and noted them; I even told some people about it. But the ones whom I put ashore today, I saw very distinctly; they were middle-aged, neither young children nor old people, apart from a few rare exceptions, and that corresponded fairly well with what I expected.


The Mother: I decided not to say anything, not to give any names. As I did not remain until the end, it was not possible for me to get an exact picture; the picture was not absolutely clear or complete. I do not want to say things to some and not to others.  What I can say is that the point of view, the judgment, was based on the substance of which the people were made, that is, whether they belonged completely to the supramental world, whether they were made of that very special substance. The standpoint taken is neither moral nor psychological.


The Mother: It is probable that the substance their bodies were made of was the result of an inner law or inner movement which at that time was not in question. At least it is quite clear that the values are different.  When I came back, simultaneously with the recollection of the experience I knew that the supramental world is permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and that only a missing link was necessary for the connection to be made in the consciousness and the substance, and it is this link which is now being forged. I  had the impression — an impression which remained for quite a long time, almost a whole day — of an extreme relativity — no, not exactly that: the impression that the relation between this world and the other completely changed the standpoint from which things should be evaluated or appraised. This standpoint had nothing mental about it and it gave a strange inner feeling that lots of things we consider good or bad are not really so.


The Mother: It was very clear that everything depended on the capacity of things, on their aptitude in expressing the supramental world or being in relation with it. It was so completely different, sometimes even altogether contrary to our ordinary appraisal.  I recollect one little thing which we usually consider to be bad; how strange it was to see that in truth it was something excellent! And other things we consider to be important have in fact absolutely no importance at all: whether a thing is like this or like that is not at all important. What is very obvious is that our appraisal of what is divine or undivine is not right.


The Mother: I even laughed to see certain things.... Our usual feeling of what is antidivine seems artiﬁcial, seems based on something that’s not true, not living — besides, what we call life here did not seem living to me compared with that world — anyway, this feeling should be founded on our relation between the two worlds and on how things make the relation between them easier or more difﬁcult.  This would make a great difference in our appraisal of what brings us nearer to the Divine or what separates us from Him.  In people too I saw that what helps them to become supramental or hinders them from it, is very different from what our usual moral notions imagine. I felt how... ridiculous we are.


The Mother: ( )  (:) There is a continuation of this, a kind of consequence in my consciousness of the experience of third February, but it seemed a little premature to read it now.  It will appear later in the April issue, following this.   One thing — I must insist on this — seems to me at the moment to be the most essential difference between our world and the supramental world — and it is only after having gone there consciously, with the consciousness which normally operates here, that this difference has become apparent to me in all its enormity, so to say —


The Mother: everything here, except what goes on within, very deep within, seemed to me absolutely artiﬁcial.  None of the values of the ordinary physical life are based on truth. And just as to clothe ourselves we have to obtain some cloth and sew clothes to put on when we want to wear them, so too to feed ourselves we need to take things from outside and put them inside our bodies in order to be nourished. In everything our life is artiﬁcial.  A true, sincere, spontaneous life like the one in the supramental world, is a springing forth of things from the action of the conscious will, a power over substance which makes it harmonise with what we decide should be.


The Mother: And one who has the power and the knowledge can obtain what he wants, whereas one who does not have them has no artiﬁcial means of getting what he desires.  In ordinary life, is artiﬁcial. According to the chance of birth or circumstance, you have a higher or lower position or a more or less comfortable life, not because it is the spontaneous, natural, sincere expression of your way of being and your inner need, but because chance circumstances in life have brought you in contact with these things. An absolutely worthless man may be in a very high position and a man with a marvellous ability to create and organise may ﬁnd himself toiling in an absolutely limited and inferior situation, whereas he would be a completely useful person if the world were sincere.  This artiﬁciality, this insincerity, this complete lack of truth became so shockingly apparent to me that...


The Mother: one wonders how, in so false a world, we can have any true evaluations.  But instead of making you sad, morose, rebellious, dissatisﬁed, there is rather the feeling of what I was saying at the  end, of something so laughably ridiculous that for several days I was seized with uncontrollable laughter when I saw things and people! — an uncontrollable laughter, absolutely inexplicable except to myself, at the ridiculousness of things.  When I invited you to a journey into the unknown, a journey of adventure, I did not know I was so close to the truth, and I can promise those who are ready to attempt the adventure that they will make very interesting discoveries.    Each person carries with himself in his atmosphere what Sri Aurobindo calls the “Censors”; they are in a way permanent delegates of the adverse forces.


The Mother: Their role is to criticise mercilessly every act, every thought, the slightest movement of the consciousness, and to bring you face to face with the most hidden springs of your actions, to bring to light the slightest vibration of a lower kind accompanying what seem to be your purest and highest thoughts and acts.  This is not a question of morality. These gentlemen are not moralising agents although they know very well how to make use of morality! And when they are dealing with a scrupulous conscience, they can harass it without mercy, whispering to it at every minute, “You should not have done this, you should not have done that, you should have done this thing instead, said that thing; now you have spoilt everything, committed an irreparable mistake; see how everything is irretrievably lost now through your fault.” They may even take possession of some people’s consciousness: you chase away the thought, and there!


The Mother: it comes back two minutes later; you chase it away again and it is still there, all the time hammering away at you.  Every time I meet these gentlemen I welcome them, for they compel you to be absolutely sincere, they track down the most subtle hypocrisy and make you at every moment face your most secret vibrations. And they are intelligent! — their intelligence inﬁnitely surpasses ours: they know everything, they know how to turn against you the least thought, the least argument, the least action, with a truly wonderful subtlety. Nothing escapes  them.


The Mother: But what gives a hostile tinge to these beings is the fact that they are ﬁrst and foremost defeatists. They always paint the picture for you in the darkest colours; if need be they distort your own intentions. They are truly instruments of sincerity. But they always forget one thing, deliberately, something that they cast far behind as if it did not exist: the divine Grace. They forget prayer, that spontaneous prayer which suddenly springs up from the depths of the being like an intense call, and brings down the Grace and changes the course of things.


The Mother: And each time you have made some progress, have passed on to a higher level, they make you face once again all the acts of your past life, and in a few months, a few days or a few minutes , they make you go through all your exams once again at a higher level. And it is not enough to brush the thought aside and say, “Oh! I know”, and throw a little cloak over it so as not to see. You must face it and conquer, keep your consciousness full of light, without the least tremor, without a word, without the slightest vibration in the cells of the body — and then the attack melts away.  But our ideas of good and evil are so ridiculous!


The Mother: So ridiculous is our notion of what is close to the Divine or far from the Divine! The experience I had the other day, on the third of February, was for me revelatory, I came out of it completely changed. I suddenly understood very many things from the past, actions, parts of my life which had remained inexplicable — in truth, the shortest way from one point to another is not the straight line that men imagine it is!  And all the time the experience lasted, one hour — one hour of that time is long — I was in a state of extraordinary joyfulness, almost in an intoxicated state.... The difference between the two states of consciousness is so great that when you are in one, the other seems unreal, like a dream.


The Mother: When I came back what struck me ﬁrst of all was the futility of life here; our little conceptions down here seem so laughable, so comical.... We say that some people are mad, but their madness is perhaps a great wisdom,  from the supramental point of view, and their behaviour is perhaps nearer to the truth of things — I am not speaking of the obscure mad men whose brains have been damaged, but of many other incomprehensible mad men, the luminous mad: they have wanted to cross the border too quickly and the rest has not followed.  When one looks at the world of men from the supramental consciousness, the predominant feature is a feeling of strangeness, of artiﬁciality — of a world that is absurd because it is artiﬁcial. This world is false because its material appearance does not at all express the deeper truth of things. There is a kind of disconnection between the appearance and what is within.


The Mother: In this way, a man with a divine power in the depths of his being may ﬁnd himself in the position of a slave on the external plane.  It is absurd! In the supramental world, on the other hand, it is the will which acts directly on the substance and the substance is obedient to this will. You want to cover yourself: the substance you live in immediately takes the form of a garment to cover you. You want to go from one place to another: your will is enough to transport you without needing any conveyance, any artiﬁcial device.


The Mother: Thus, the boat in my experience had no need of any mechanism to move it; it was the will which modiﬁed the substance according to its needs. When it was time to land, the wharf took shape of itself. When I wanted to send the groups ashore, those who were to land knew it automatically without my having to say a word, and they came up in turn.  Everything went on in silence, there was no need to speak to make oneself understood; but the silence itself on board the ship did not give that impression of artiﬁciality it does here. Here, when one wants silence, one must stop talking; silence is the opposite of sound.


The Mother: There the silence was vibrant, living, active and comprehensive, comprehensible.  The absurd thing here is all the artiﬁcial means one must use.  Any idiot at all has more power if he has more means to acquire the necessary artiﬁces; whereas in the supramental world, the  more conscious one is and the more in touch with the truth of things, the more authority does the will have over substance.  The authority is a true authority. If you want a garment you must have the power to make it, a real power.


The Mother: If you do not have this power, well, you remain naked. No device is there to make up for the lack of power. Here, not once in a million times is authority an expression of something true. Everything is formidably stupid.  When I came down again — “came down”, it’s a way of speaking, for it is neither above nor below, neither inside nor outside; it is... somewhere — it took me some time to readjust myself.


The Mother: I even remember saying to someone, “Now we are going to fall back into our usual stupidity.” But I have understood many things and come back from there with a deﬁnitive force.  Now I know that our way of evaluating things down here, our petty morality, has no relation with the values of the supramental world.     These surface things have nothing dramatic about them. They seem to me more and more like soap-bubbles, especially since the third of February.


The Mother: There are people who come to me in despair, in tears, in what they call terrible psychological suffering; when I see them like this, I slightly shift the needle in my consciousness which contains you all, and when they go away they are completely comforted. It is just like a compass needle; one shifts the needle a little in the consciousness and it is all over. Of course, it comes back later, out of habit. They are nothing but soap-bubbles.  I have known suffering also, but there was always a part of myself which knew how to stand behind, apart.


The Mother: The only thing in the world which still seems intolerable to me now, is all the physical deterioration, the physical suffering, the ugliness, the inability to express that capacity for beauty  which is in every being. But that too will be conquered one day.  There too the power will come one day to shift the needle a little. Only, we must rise higher in consciousness: the deeper one wants to go down into matter, the higher is it necessary to rise in consciousness. That will take time.


The Mother: Sri Aurobindo was surely right when he spoke of a few centuries.   From what point of view? Symbolically?  That depends on the schools of thought, the periods, the countries.... In a general way, the moon is associated with spiritual force, spiritual progress, spiritual aspiration.


The Mother: The waxing moon used to be considered as the symbol of spiritual aspiration for transformation, and spiritual plenitude was symbolised by the full moon. Moonlight has always been considered to be very favourable to visions, to poetic inspiration and all other-worldly activity. There are all kinds of stories and legends about the stars — stars which appeared on the day a divine being was born.... But all that is a rather literary kind of symbolism.


The Mother: There is a fairly widespread belief that stars have a special inﬂuence on the destiny of men, to the extent that an entire system of knowledge is founded on this and, according to the different positions of the stars in the sky, it makes quite complete predictions about what will happen in your lifetime.  At an elementary stage of thought, this is expressed by saying that the stars have an inﬂuence on our lives. It seems more logical and true to think that it is a sort of notation or recording of the destiny of an individual, for, in the universal unity, everything is interrelated and, if you know how to read the relations between the individual and the universal, you may ﬁnd in the universal positions of the stars a kind of diagram  representing symbolically the life of one individual or another.  Experience proves that this notation which is called in astrology a horoscope is not something absolute and that this destiny is not inevitable, for by taking up yoga and developing spiritually, one escapes from the absolute law of these horoscopes.


The Mother: This would be a kind of notation on the material plane of the relations between universal and individual life, and these relations can be altered by the introduction of a higher plane of consciousness into the material plane of consciousness.  All this is what might be called a half-knowledge, which is a kind of very primitive attempt to grasp the links of interdependence between universal and individual existence. And all these things are much more like languages which enable us to ﬁx a certain half-elaborated knowledge rather than absolute rules or the notation of indisputable facts. They are attempts, endeavours to understand things as they are, but very incomplete attempts — which have a certain attraction for some minds but which are after all only very rough approximations to the truth of things.  If we go deep enough into mental human knowledge, we realise that all this knowledge as we have it externally in the mental consciousness is scarcely anything more than a language — a fairly complicated one — making it possible for us to understand each other but corresponding only very remotely to the truth of things.


The Mother: There is a direct approach by identity which is much more effective and, so to say, gives you the concrete key to the whole machinery of things, a direct key that needs no complicated science to express itself — something that corresponds to movements of consciousness and will, which would not need all the mental complications to express themselves. Then the universal reality in its totality becomes a symbol and can be directly perceived in its essence.   A reversal?  That is a way of speaking. It doesn’t mean that you should walk on your head!...


The Mother: It is an image.  So, if the image leads you to some kind of perception, it is good, but it is not with this () that you can understand. If it gives you an impression which explains things to you or makes you understand them better, it is all right, but  it is not with many words and by going through the brain that you will understand them better.  It is this kind of sensation one has of seeing things in an altogether different way — then one speaks of reversal. It is like...


The Mother: it is always compared with a prism: if you look at it from one side, the light is white, and if you turn it over, it splits up into all its elements. This is something similar.  Words are not good and useful unless through a special grace they put you into contact with the Thing, but in themselves they have no value.  In fact, the ideal condition — which has already been partially realised by some people — is to transmit the essential idea and even something that is higher than the idea: the state — the state of consciousness, of knowledge, of perception — directly through the vibration. When you think, the mental substance vibrates in a certain way in accordance with the form your consciousness gives to your thought, and it is this vibration which should be perceived by the other mind if it is well attuned.


The Mother: Indeed, words serve only to draw the attention of the other consciousness or the other centre of consciousness, so that it may be attentive to the vibration and receive it; but if it is not attentive and doesn’t have the capacity to receive in comparative silence, you may pour out miles of words without making yourself understood in the least. And there comes a time when the brain, which is very active in emanating certain vibrations, can only receive vibrations which are clear and precise, otherwise it is a kind of vague mixture of something confused, imprecise, which gives the impression of a cloudy, woolly mass and doesn’t evoke any idea. So one speaks, the sound is clearly heard, but it conveys nothing — it is not a question of sound, it is a matter of precision in the vibrations.  If you can emanate your thought in a very precise way, if it is something living and emanating from your consciousness and going to meet the other consciousness, if, so to speak, you know what you want to say, then it arrives  with the same precision, it awakens the corresponding vibration and with the corresponding vibration comes the corresponding thought or idea or state of consciousness, and you understand each other; but if what is emanated is woolly, imprecise, if you do not know very well what you want to say, if you yourself are trying to understand what you want to say, and if, on the other hand, the attention of the hearer is not alert enough or he is busy and active somewhere else, well then, you may talk to each other for hours, you will not understand each other at all!


The Mother: And in fact this is what happens most often. When you are able to see in the consciousness of others the result of what you have tried to communicate, it always gives you the feeling of... you know what distorting mirrors are? Have you never seen distorting mirrors? Mirrors which make you look taller or fatter, which enlarge one part and reduce another, you are faced with a grotesque caricature of yourself — well, this is exactly what happens: in the other person’s consciousness you have an altogether grotesque caricature of what you have said. And people imagine that they have understood each other because they have heard the sound of words, but they haven’t communicated.


The Mother: So, if you want to exercise the least effect on the mental substance, the ﬁrst thing is to learn how to think clearly, and not a verbal thought which depends on words but a thought which can dispense with words, which can be understood in itself without words, which corresponds to a, the fact of a state of consciousness or a fact of knowledge. Just try to think without words, you will see where you stand.  Have you never tried it? Well then, try.  You have an absolutely clear and precise understanding of what you want to communicate to others — it vibrates in a special way, it has the power to give a form to the mental substance;


The Mother: and then,, as a concession to human habits you organise a certain number of words around it to try — there, much lower down — to give a verbal form to the vibration of consciousness. But the verbal form is entirely secondary. It is a  kind of covering, a rather crude one, for the power of thought.   Ah, no!


The Mother: Think clearly, I don’t understand you. It is coming like that, like whirls of cotton-wool, and it makes no sense to me.   Exactly!  The illustration of this power of thinking is what used to be called the gift of tongues.


The Mother: And in fact this phenomenon did take place and can still do so. You think — that is to say, what  call thinking — quite independently of words, with the clear vision of things and the power to communicate this vision, this phenomenon of consciousness which can be transmitted; now, you are with a large number of people or with a few people, who speak different languages and are used to thinking only in one particular language, for they have been brought up like that; but you project the vibration of your vision, of your understanding, of your experience of things. To attract the attention of the audience you pronounce some words — any language at all, the one most familiar to you, that’s of no importance — but your vision and your emanation are precise enough to be transmitted directly to the brain of the others, and in their brain to be automatically translated into their own language. So, outwardly, you are speaking in French or in English, but each one understands in his own language. People think this is a legend — it is not a legend.


The Mother: And it is quite understandable, it is something almost elementary when one goes into the region which I call the region of thought. I am not speaking of supramental things, mind you; it is not a supramental power, it is simply the true realm of thought. That is, you begin to think.  And if you had an audience which also thinks, the phenomenon would take place automatically; only there are very  few people who really think. But when they do it powerfully enough, it breaks down the obstacle in the altogether superﬁcial and down-to-earth perception, it rises up like this ( ), it goes up into a higher region of perception, and then, in each one, it falls back into the domain of his own language.


The Mother: And each one says with all the sincerity of his experience, “Oh! This person is speaking this language”, and another says, “Excuse me, he is speaking that one!” and the third one says, “No, no! He is speaking that other one....” And in fact each one is telling the truth; he probably does not speak any of them except the one he normally uses, or one or two others.... But, it’s that, it does this () and then falls back... like radio-waves.  There, we are going to try.


The Mother: I am going to tell you something, we shall see if you understand.  ( )    The difﬁculty of the problem is that only a mental being could take an interest in this process of transformation and creation, and that the mental consciousness in the animal species was not sufﬁcient for it to take an interest in this process.   Animals had no means of noting what was happening, of taking it into consideration and remembering it.


The Mother: And that is why this part of the earth’s history has almost disappeared. A mental capacity like man’s must intervene to make it possible to follow the course of this transformation and retain a memory of it.... In fact, more is imagined than remembered. It is quite obvious that the psychic being has gone through all that, but it has not kept a mental memory of it. The memory of the psychic being is a psychic memory which is of an altogether different kind; it is not historical like mental memory which can keep a precise record of what takes place.


The Mother: But now that we are on the threshold of the new transformation, the new emergence as it is called here, and now that we are going to witness the process of transformation between the human mental being and the supramental being, we shall proﬁt by this historical ability of the mind which will follow what happens and take note of it . So, from that point of view also, the phenomenon which is taking place now is absolutely unique in the history of the earth, and probably — almost certainly — when we have followed the process of this transformation to the very end, we shall have the key to all the former transformations; that is, everything that we are trying to understand at present, we shall know for certain when the process is repeated, this time between the mental and the supramental being.  You are therefore invited to a very special development of the capacity for observation, so that all this may not take place in a half-dream and you awaken to a new life without even knowing how things have happened.  One must be very vigilant, wide awake, and instead of being interested in little inner psychological phenomena which are... quite antiquated — they belong to an entire period of human history which anyway has lost all its novelty — it would be better to be more attentive to things of greater general import, things more subtle, more impersonal which would put  you in the midst of new discoveries of a very special interest.


The Mother: Open the eyes of the subtle intelligence, and without prejudice or preference, without egoism and without attachment, look at what is happening day by day.    One thing seems obvious, humanity has reached a certain state of general tension — tension in effort, in action, even in daily life — with such an excessive hyperactivity, so widespread a trepidation, that mankind as a whole seems to have come to a point where it must either break through the resistance and emerge into a new consciousness or else fall back into an abyss of darkness and inertia.   This tension is so complete and so widespread that something obviously has to break. It cannot go on in this way.


The Mother: We may take it as a sure sign of the infusion into matter of a new principle of force, consciousness, power, which by its very pressure is producing this acute state. Outwardly, we could expect the old methods used by Nature when she wants to bring about an upheaval; but there is a new characteristic, which of course is only visible in an, but even this is fairly widespread — it is not localised at one point, at one place in the world; we ﬁnd traces of it in all countries, all over the world: the will to ﬁnd a new, higher, progressive solution, an effort to rise towards a vaster, more comprehensive perfection.  Certain ideas of a more general nature, of a wider, perhaps more “collective” kind, are being worked out and are acting in the world. And both things go together: a possibility of a greater and more total destruction, a reckless inventiveness which increases the possibility of catastrophe, a castastrophe which would be on a far greater scale than it has ever been; and, at the same time, the birth or rather the manifestation of much higher and more comprehensive ideas and acts of will which, when they are heard, will bring a wider, vaster, more complete, more perfect remedy than before.  This struggle, this conﬂict between the constructive forces of the ascending evolution of a more and more perfect and divine realisation, and the more and more destructive, powerfully destructive forces — forces that are mad beyond all control — is more and more obvious, marked, visible,


The Mother: and it is a kind of race or struggle as to which will reach the goal ﬁrst. It would seem that all the adverse, anti-divine forces, the forces of the vital world, have descended on the earth, are making use of it as their ﬁeld of action, and that at the same time a new, higher, more powerful spiritual force has also descended on earth to bring it a new life. This makes the struggle more acute, more violent, more visible, but it seems also more deﬁnitive, and that is why we can hope to reach an early solution.   There was a time, not so long ago, when the spiritual aspiration of man was turned towards a silent, inactive peace, detached from all worldly things, a ﬂight from life, precisely to avoid battle, to rise above the struggle, escape all effort; it was a spiritual peace in which, along with the cessation of all tension, struggle, effort, there ceased also suffering in all its forms, and this was considered to be the true and only expression of a spiritual and divine life.


The Mother: It was considered to be the divine grace, the divine help, the divine intervention. And even now, in this age of anguish, tension, hypertension, this sovereign peace is the best received aid of all, the most welcome, the solace people ask and hope for. For many it is still the true sign of a divine intervention, of divine grace.  In fact, no matter what one wants to realise, one must begin by establishing this perfect and immutable peace; it is the basis from which one must work; but unless one is dreaming of an exclusive, personal and egoistic liberation, one cannot stop there.  There is another aspect of the divine grace, the aspect of progress which will be victorious over all obstacles, the aspect which will propel humanity to a new realisation, which will open the doors of a new world and make it possible not only for a chosen few to beneﬁt by the divine realisation but for their inﬂuence, their example, their power to bring to the rest of mankind new and better conditions.


The Mother: This opens up roads of realisation into the future, possibilities which are already foreseen, when an entire part of humanity, the one which has opened consciously or unconsciously to the new forces, is lifted up, as it were, into a higher, more harmonious, more perfect life.... Even if individual transformation is not always permissible or possible, there will be a kind of general uplifting, a harmonisation of the whole, which will make it possible for a new order, a new harmony to be established and for the anguish of the present disorder and struggle to disappear and be replaced by an order which will allow a harmonious functioning of the whole.   There will be other consequences which will tend to eliminate in an opposite way what the intervention of the mind in life has created, the perversions, the ugliness, the whole mass of distortions which have increased suffering, misery, moral poverty, an entire area of sordid and repulsive misery which makes a whole part of human life into something so frightful.  That must disappear. This is what makes humanity in so many ways inﬁnitely worse than animal life in its simplicity and the natural spontaneity and harmony that it has in spite of everything.


The Mother: Suffering in animals is never so miserable and sordid as it is in an entire section of humanity which has been perverted by the use of a mentality exclusively at the service of egoistic needs.  We must rise above, spring up into Light and Harmony or fall back, down into the simplicity of a healthy unperverted animal life.  But those who cannot be lifted up, those who refuse to progress, will automatically lose the use of the mental consciousness and will fall back to a sub-human level.  I shall tell you about an experience I had which will help you to understand better. It was shortly after the supramental experience of the third of February, and I was still in the state in which things of the physical world seemed so far off, so absurd.


The Mother: A group of visitors had asked permission to come to me and one evening they came to the Playground. They were rich people, that is, they had more money than they needed to live on. Among them there was a woman in a sari; she was very fat, her sari was arranged so as to hide her body. As she was bending down to receive my blessings, one corner of the sari came open, uncovering a part of her body, a naked belly  — an enormous one. I felt a real shock....


The Mother: There are corpulent people who have nothing repugnant about them, but I suddenly saw the perversion, the rottenness that this belly concealed, it was like a huge abscess, expressing greed, vice, depraved taste, sordid desire, which ﬁnds its satisfaction as no animal would, in grossness and especially in perversity. I saw the perversion of a depraved mind at the service of the lowest appetites. Then, all of a sudden, something sprang up from me, a prayer, like a Veda: “O Lord, this is what must disappear!”  One understands very well that physical misery, the unequal distribution of the goods of this world could be changed, one can imagine economic and social solutions which could remedy this, but it is that misery, the mental misery, the vital perversion, it is that which cannot change, doesn’t want to change. And those who belong to this type of humanity are condemned in advance to disintegration.


The Mother: That is the meaning of original sin: the perversion which began with the mind.  That part of humanity, of human consciousness, which is capable of uniting with the supermind and liberating itself, will be completely transformed — it is advancing towards a future reality which is not yet expressed in its outer form; the part which is closest to Nature, to animal simplicity, will be reabsorbed into Nature and thoroughly assimilated. But the corrupted part of human consciousness which allows perversion through its misuse of the mind will be abolished.  This type of humanity is part of an unfruitful attempt — which must be eliminated — just as there have been other abortive species which have disappeared in the course of universal history.  Certain prophets in the past have had this apocalyptic vision but, as usual, things were mixed, and they did not have together with their vision of the apocalypse the vision of the supramental world which will come to raise up the part of humanity which consents and to transform this physical world.


The Mother: So, to give hope  to those who have been born into it, into this perverted part of human consciousness, they have taught redemption through faith: those who have faith in the sacriﬁce of the Divine in Matter will be automatically saved, in another world — by faith alone, without understanding, without intelligence. They have not seen the supramental world nor that the great Sacriﬁce of the Divine in Matter is the sacriﬁce of involution which must culminate in the total revelation of the Divine in Matter itself.    It is obvious that what especially characterises man is this mental capacity of watching himself live. The animal lives spontaneously, automatically, and if it watches itself live, it must be to a very minute and insigniﬁcant degree, and that is why it is peaceful and does not worry. Even if an animal is suffering because of an accident or an illness, this suffering is reduced to a minimum by the fact that it does not observe it, does not project it in its consciousness and into the future, does not imagine things about its illness or its accident.


The Mother: With man there has begun this perpetual worrying about what is going to happen, and this worry is the principal, if not the sole cause of his torment. With this objectivising consciousness there has begun anxiety, painful imaginations, worry, torment, anticipation of future catastrophes, with the result that most men — and not the least conscious, the most conscious — live in perpetual torment. Man is too conscious to be indifferent, he is not conscious enough to know what will happen. Truly it could be said without fear of making a mistake that of all earth’s creatures he is the most miserable. The human being is used to being like that because it is an atavistic state which he has inherited from his ancestors, but it is truly a miserable condition.


The Mother: And it is only with this spiritual capacity of rising to a higher level and replacing the animal’s unconsciousness by a spiritual super-consciousness that there comes into the being not only the capacity to see the goal of existence and to foresee  the culmination of the effort but also a clear-sighted trust in a higher spiritual power to which one can surrender one’s whole being, entrust oneself, give the responsibility for one’s life and future and so abandon all worries.  Of course, it is impossible for man to fall back to the level of the animal and lose the consciousness he has acquired; therefore, for him there is only one means, one way to get out of this condition he is in, which I call a miserable one, and to emerge into a higher state where worry is replaced by a trusting surrender and the certitude of a luminous culmination — this way is to change the consciousness.  Truly speaking there is no condition more miserable than being responsible for an existence to which one doesn’t have the key, that is, of which one doesn’t have the threads that can guide and solve the problems. The animal sets itself no problems: it just lives. Its instinct drives it, it relies on a collective consciousness which has an innate knowledge and is higher than itself, but it is automatic, spontaneous, it has no need to will something and make an effort to bring it about, it is quite naturally like that, and as it is not responsible for its life, it does not worry.


The Mother: With man is born the sense of having to depend on himself, and as he does not have the necessary knowledge the result is a perpetual torment. This torment can come to an end only with a total surrender to a higher consciousness than his own to which he can totally entrust himself, hand over his worries and leave the care of guiding his life and organising everything.  How can a problem be solved when one doesn’t have the necessary knowledge? And the unfortunate thing is that man believes that he has to resolve all the problems of his life, and he does not have the knowledge needed to do it. That is the source, the origin of all his troubles — that perpetual question, “What should I do?...” which is followed by another one still more acute, “What is going to happen?” and at the same time, more or less, the inability to answer.


The Mother: That is why all spiritual disciplines begin with the necessity  of surrendering all responsibility and relying on a higher principle. Otherwise peace is impossible.  And yet, consciousness has been given to man so that he can progress, can discover what he doesn’t know, develop into what he has not yet become; and so it may be said that there is a higher state than that of an immobile and static peace : it is a trust total enough for one to keep the will to progress, to preserve the effort for progress while ridding it of all anxiety, all care for results and consequences. This is one step ahead of the methods which may be called “quietist”, which are founded on the rejection of all activity and a plunging into an immobility and inner silence, which forsake all life because it has been suddenly felt that without peace one can’t have any inner realisation and, quite naturally, one thought that one couldn’t have peace so long as one was living in outer conditions, in the state of anxiety in which problems are set and cannot be solved, for one does not have the knowledge to do so.


The Mother: The next step is to face the problem, but with the calm and certitude of an absolute trust in the supreme Power which knows, and can make you act. And then, instead of abandoning action, one can act in a higher peace that is strong and dynamic.  This is what could be called a new aspect of the divine intervention in life, a new form of intervention of the divine forces in existence, a new aspect of spiritual realisation.


The Mother: When you make a mistake because you don’t know that it is a mistake, through ignorance, it is obvious that when you learn that it is a mistake, when the ignorance has gone and you have goodwill, you don’t make the mistake any more, and so you come out of the condition in which you could make it. But if you know it is a mistake and make it, this means that there is something perverse in you which has deliberately chosen to be on the side of confusion or bad will or even the anti-divine forces.  And it is quite obvious that if one chooses to be on the side of the anti-divine forces or is so weak and inconsistent that one can’t resist the temptation to be on their side, it is inﬁnitely more serious from the psychological point of view. This means that somewhere something has been corrupted: either an adverse force is already established in you or else you have an innate sympathy for these forces. And it is much more difﬁcult to correct that than to correct an ignorance.


The Mother: Correcting an ignorance is like eliminating darkness: you light a lamp, the darkness disappears. But to make a mistake once again when you know it is a mistake, is as if someone lighted a lamp and you deliberately put it out.... That corresponds exactly to bringing the darkness back deliberately. For the argument of weakness does not hold. The divine Grace is  there to help those who have decided to correct themselves, and they cannot say, “I am too weak to correct myself.”


The Mother: They can say that they still haven’t taken the resolution to correct themselves, that somewhere in the being there is something that has to do it, and that is what is serious.   The argument of weakness is an excuse. The Grace is there to give the supreme strength to whoever takes the resolution.  That means an insincerity, it does not mean a weakness.  And insincerity is always an open door for the adversary.


The Mother: That means there is some secret sympathy with what is perverse. And that is what is serious.   In the case of ignorance which is to be enlightened, it is enough, as I said, to light the lamp. In the case of conscious relapse, what is necessary is a cauterisation.


The Mother: Things are not so clear-cut and separate as they are in speaking; that is just why it is quite difﬁcult to see very distinctly and clearly in oneself the different parts of the being, unless one has had a very long training and a long discipline of study and observation. There are no watertight compartments between the soul and the mind, the vital and even the physical. There is an inﬁltration of the soul into the mind. In some people it is even quite considerable, it is perceptible. So, the part of the mind which has a kind of sensibility, of subtle contact with the psychic being, is capable of feeling the presence of the soul in others.


The Mother: Those who have the ability to enter to a certain extent into the consciousness of others to the point of being able to see or feel directly their thought, their mental activity, who can enter the mental atmosphere of others without needing to use words to make themselves understood, can easily differentiate between someone whose soul is active and someone whose soul is asleep.  The activity of the soul gives a special colouring to the mental activity — it is lighter, more comprehensive and luminous — so that can be felt. For instance, by looking into someone’s eyes you can say with some certainty that this person has a living soul or that you don’t see his soul in his eyes. Many people can feel — “many”, I mean among evolved people — can say that. But naturally, to know exactly how far somebody’s soul is awake and active, how far it rules the being, is the master, one must have the psychic consciousness oneself, for that alone can judge deﬁnitively.


The Mother: But it is not altogether impossible to have that sort of inner vibration which makes you say, “Oh! This person has a soul.”   Now, obviously, most often what people — unless they are initiated — call “soul” is the vital activity. If someone has a strong, active, obstinate vital which rules the body’s activities, which has a very living or intense contact with people and things and events, if he has a marked taste for art, for all expressions of beauty, we are generally tempted to say and believe, “Oh! He has a living soul”; but it is not his soul, it is his vital being which is alive and dominates the activities of the body. That is the ﬁrst difference between someone who is beginning to be developed and those who are still in the inertia and of the purely material life. This gives, ﬁrst to the appearance and also to the activity, a kind of vibration, of intensity of vibration, which often creates the impression that this person has a living soul; but it is not that, it is his vital which is developed, which has a special capacity, is stronger than the physical inertia and gives an intensity of vibration and life and action that those whose vital being is not developed do not possess.


The Mother: This confusion between the vital activity and the soul is a very frequent one.... The vital vibration is much more easily perceptible to the human consciousness than the vibration of the soul.  To perceive the soul in someone, as a rule the mind must be very quiet — very quiet, for when it is active, vibrations are seen, not the vibration of the soul.  And then, when you look at someone who is conscious of his soul, and lives in his soul, if you look like this, the impression you have is of descending, of entering deep, deep, deep into the person, far, far, far, far within; while usually when you look into someone’s eyes, you very soon come to a surface which vibrates and answers your look, but you don’t have that feeling of going down, down, down, down, going deep as into a hole and very far, very, very, very far within, so you have... a small, very quiet response. Otherwise, usually you enter — there are eyes you cannot enter, they are closed like a door; but still there are eyes which are open — you enter and then, quite close behind, you come to something vibrating there, like this, shining at times,  vibrating.