The Mother: It is obvious that the most dominant characteristic of matter is inertia, and that, if there were not this violence, perhaps the individual consciousness would be so inert that rather than change it would accept to live in a perpetual imperfection.... That is possible. Anyway, this is how things are made, and for us who know a little more, there is only one thing that remains to be done, it is to change all this, as far as we have the means, by calling the Force, the Consciousness, the new Power which is capable of infusing into material substance the vibration which  can transform it, make it plastic, supple, progressive.  Obviously the greatest obstacle is the attachment to things as they are; but even Nature as a whole ﬁnds that those who have the deeper knowledge want to go too fast: she likes her meanderings, she likes her successive attempts, her failures, her fresh beginnings, her new inventions; she likes the fantasy of the path, the unexpectedness of the experience; one could almost say that for her the longer it takes, the more enjoyable it is.  But even of the best games one tires.


The Mother: There comes a time when one needs to change them and one could dream of a game in which it would no longer be necessary to destroy in order to progress, where the zeal for progress would be enough to ﬁnd new means, new expressions, where the would be ardent enough to overcome inertia, lassitude, lack of understanding, fatigue, indifference.  Why does this body, as soon as some progress has been made, feel the need to sit down? It is tired. It says, “Oh! you must wait.


The Mother: I must be given time to rest.” This is what leads it to death. If it felt within itself that ardour to do always better, become more transparent, more beautiful, more luminous, eternally young, one could escape from this macabre joke of Nature.  For her this is of no importance. She sees the whole, she sees the totality; she sees that nothing is lost, that it is only recombining quantities, numberless minute elements, without any importance, which are put back into a pot and mixed well — and something new comes out of it.


The Mother: But that game is not amusing for everybody. And if in one’s consciousness one could be as vast as she, more powerful than she, why shouldn’t one do the same thing in a better way?  This is the problem which confronts us now. With the addition, the new help of this Force which has descended, which is manifesting, working, why shouldn’t one take in hand this tremendous game and make it more beautiful, more harmonious, more true?   It only needs brains powerful enough to receive this Force and formulate the possible course of action.


The Mother: There must be conscious beings powerful enough to convince Nature that there are other methods than hers.... This looks like madness, but all new things have always seemed like madness before they became realities.   The hour has come for this madness to be realised. And since we are all here for reasons that are perhaps unknown to most of you, but are still very conscious reasons, we may set ourselves to fulﬁl that madness — at least it will be worthwhile living it.


The Mother: Before the meditation this evening I am going to say a few words to you, because several people have asked me the difference between a collective meditation and an individual meditation.  Individual meditation — I have already explained to you many times the different kinds of meditation that are possible and I won’t begin to speak to you about that again.  But collective meditations have been practised in all ages for different reasons, in different ways and with different motives.  What may be called a collective meditation is a group of people who gather together for a deﬁnite purpose; for example, in all ages it has been a practice to gather for prayers. Naturally in the Churches, it is a sort of collective meditation but even outside the Churches, some people have organised collective meditations for group prayer.


The Mother: These prayers are of two different kinds.  From the beginning of human history, it is known that certain groups of people would meet to express a certain common state of soul: some to sing together the praise of God, hymns, thanksgiving, to express adoration, thankfulness, gratitude, and to praise God; others — and there are historical examples of this — a certain number of people gathered together for a common invocation, for instance, to ask God for something, and this was done all together, united, in the hope that this invocation, this prayer, this asking would carry more weight. There have been some very famous instances. A very old one occurred in 1000 A.D. when some prophets had announced that it was the end of the world and everywhere people gathered together to offer common prayers and ask that the world may not come to an end (!) or anyway, for it to be protected. Much more  recently, in modern times, when King George of England was dying of pneumonia, people assembled in England, not only in the churches but even in the streets in front of the royal palace, to offer prayers and ask God to cure him.


The Mother: It so happened that he recovered, and they believed that it was their prayers.... That is, of course, the most external form, I could say the most worldly, of group meditation.  In all initiatory groups, in all the spiritual schools of ancient times, group meditation was always practised and in that case the motive was quite different. They assembled for a collective progress, to open together to a force, a light, an inﬂuence, and... this is more or less what we want to try to do.


The Mother: However, there are two methods, and this is what I am going to explain to you. In both cases, one must practise as one does in individual meditation, that is, sit in a position at once comfortable enough for one to be able to keep it and yet not too comfortable for one to fall asleep in it! And then you do what I had asked you to do while I used to go for the distribution over there, that is, prepare for the meditation, try to become calm and silent; not only to avoid chattering outwardly, but to try to silence your mind and gather your consciousness which is dispersed in all the thoughts you have and your preoccupations; to gather it, bring it back within yourself as completely as possible and concentrate it here, in the region of the heart, near the solar plexus, so that all the active energies in the head and all that keeps the brain running, may be brought back and concentrated here. This can be done in a few seconds, it can take a few minutes: that depends on each one. Well, this is a preparatory attitude.


The Mother: And then, once this is done — or done as well as you can do it — you may take two attitudes, that is, an active attitude or a passive attitude.   What I call an active attitude is to concentrate on — I shall put it in general terms — on the person who is directing the meditation, with the will to open and receive from him what he intends to give you or the force with which he wants to put you into contact. That is active, for here there is a will at work and an active concentration to open yourself to someone, a concentration on someone.  The other one, the passive one is simply this: to be concentrated as I have told you, then you open yourself as one opens a door; you see, you have a door here ( ) and once you are concentrated, you open the door and stay like this (). Or else, you may take another image, as if it were a book, and you open your book very wide with its pages completely blank, that is, quite silent, and you stay like that waiting for what is going to happen.


The Mother: These are the two attitudes. You may take one or the other, according to the day, the occasion, or you may adopt one of them, out of preference, if it helps you more. Both are effective and can have equally good results.  And so, now, for our special case, I shall tell you what I am trying to do.... It will soon be a year since, one Wednesday, we had the manifestation of the supramental force.


The Mother: Since then, it has been working very actively, even while very few people are aware of it! but still I thought the time had come for — how to put it? — for us to help it a little in its work by making an effort of receptivity.  Of course, it does not work only in the Ashram, it is working in the whole world and in all places where there is some receptivity this Force is at work, and I must say the Ashram hasn’t an exclusive receptivity in the world, the monopoly of receptivity. But since it so happens that all of us here more or less know what has taken place, well, I hope that individually each person is doing his best to beneﬁt by the occasion; but collectively we can do something, that is, try to unify a ground,  to produce a particularly fertile soil to obtain collectively the maximum receptivity and to have as little wastage as possible of time and energies.  So now, you have been told in a general way what we want to try to do and you have only to... to do it.


The Mother: Quite naturally we ask ourselves what this secret is, towards which pain leads us. For a superﬁcial and imperfect understanding, one could believe that it is pain which the soul is seeking.  Nothing of the kind. The very nature of the soul is divine Delight, constant, unvarying, unconditioned, ecstatic; but it is true that if one can face suffering with courage, endurance, an unshakable faith in the divine Grace, if one can, instead of shunning suffering when it comes, enter into it with this will, this aspiration to go through it and ﬁnd the luminous truth, the unvarying delight which is at the core of all things, the door of pain is often more direct, more immediate than that of satisfaction or contentment.  I am not speaking of pleasure because pleasure turns its back constantly and almost completely on this profound divine Delight.


The Mother: Pleasure is a deceptive and perverse disguise which turns us away from our goal and we certainly should not seek it if we are eager to ﬁnd the truth. Pleasure vaporises us; it deceives us, leads us astray. Pain brings us back to a deeper truth by obliging us to concentrate in order to be able to bear it, be able to face this thing that crushes us. It is in pain that one most easily ﬁnds the true strength again, when one is strong. It is in pain that  one most easily ﬁnds the true faith again, the faith in something which is above and beyond all pain.


The Mother: When one enjoys oneself and forgets, when one takes things as they come, tries to avoid being serious and looking life in the face, in a word when one seeks to forget, to forget that there is a problem to solve, that there is something to ﬁnd, that we have a reason for existence and living, that we are not here just to pass our time and go away without having learnt or done anything, then one really wastes one’s time, one misses the opportunity that has been given to us, this — I cannot say unique, but marvellous opportunity for an existence which is the ﬁeld of progress, which is the moment in eternity when you can discover the secret of life; for this physical, material existence is a wonderful opportunity, a possibility given to you to ﬁnd the purpose of life, to make you advance one step towards this deeper truth, to make you discover this secret which puts you into contact with the eternal rapture of the divine life.  () I have already told you many a time that to seek suffering and pain is a morbid attitude which must be avoided, but to run away from them through forgetfulness, through a superﬁcial, frivolous movement, through diversion, is cowardice. When pain comes, it comes to teach us something. The quicker we learn it, the more the need for pain diminishes, and when we know the secret, it will no longer be possible to suffer, for that secret reveals to us the reason, the cause, the origin of suffering, and the way to pass beyond it.


The Mother: The secret is to emerge from the ego, get out of its prison, unite ourselves with the Divine, merge into Him, not to allow anything to separate us from Him. Then, once one has discovered this secret and realises it in one’s being, pain loses its justiﬁcation and suffering disappears. It is an all-powerful remedy, not only in the deeper parts of the being, in the soul, in  the spiritual consciousness, but also in life and in the body.   There is no illness, no disorder which can resist the discovery of this secret and the putting of it into practice, not only in the higher parts of the being but in the cells of the body.


The Mother: If one knows how to teach the cells the splendour that lies within them, if one knows how to make them understand the reality which makes them exist, gives them being, then they too enter the total harmony, and the physical disorder which causes the illness vanishes as do all other disorders of the being.  But for that one must be neither cowardly nor fearful. When the physical disorder comes, one must not be afraid; one must not run away from it, must face it with courage, calmness, conﬁdence, with the certitude that illness is a and that if one turns entirely, in full conﬁdence, with a complete quietude to the divine Grace, It will settle in these cells as It is established in the depths of the being, and the cells themselves will share in the eternal Truth and Delight.


The Mother: If you did not have a body with a precise form, if you were not a formed individuality, fully conscious and having its own qualities, you would all be fused into one another and be indistinguishable. Even if we go only a little inwards, into the most material vital being, there is such a mixture between the vibrations of different people that it is very difﬁcult to distinguish any of you. And if you did not have a body, it would be a sort of inextricable pulp. Therefore, it is the form, this precise and apparently rigid form of the body, which distinguishes you one from another. So this form serves as a mould.


The Mother: ( ) Do you know what a mould is? — Yes! One pours something inside, in a liquid or semi-liquid form, and when it cools down one can break the mould and have the object in a precise form. Well, the form of the body serves as a mould in which the vital and mental forces can take a precise form, so that you can become an individual being separate from others.  It is only gradually, very slowly, through the movements of life and a more or less careful and thorough education that you begin to have sensations which are personal to you, feelings and ideas which are personal to you.


The Mother: An individualised mind is something extremely rare, which comes only after a long education;  otherwise it is a kind of thought-current passing through your brain and then through another’s and then through a multitude of other brains, and all this is in perpetual movement and has no individuality. One thinks what others are thinking, others think what still others are thinking, and everybody thinks like that in a great mixture, because these are currents, vibrations of thought passing from one to another. If you look at yourself attentively, you will very quickly become aware that very few thoughts in you are personal. Where do you draw them from?  — From what you have heard, from what you have read, what you have been taught, and how many of these thoughts you have are the result of your own experience, your own reﬂection, your purely personal observation?


The Mother: — Not many.  Only those who have an intense intellectual life, who are in the habit of reﬂecting, observing, putting ideas together, gradually form a mental individuality for themselves.  Most people — and not only those who are uneducated but even the well-read — can have the most contradictory, the most opposite ideas in their heads without even being aware of the contradictions. I have seen numerous examples like that, of people who cherished ideas and even had political, social, religious opinions on all the so-called higher ﬁelds of human intelligence, who had absolutely contradictory opinions on the same subject, and were not aware of it. And if you observe yourself, you will see that you have many ideas which ought to be linked by a sequence of intermediate ideas which are the result of a considerable widening of the thought if they are not to coexist in an absurd way.


The Mother: Therefore, before an individuality becomes truly individual and has its own qualities, it must be contained in a vessel, otherwise it would spread out like water and would no longer have any form at all. Some people, at a rather lower level, know themselves only by the name they bear. They would not be able to distinguish themselves from their neighbours except by their name. They are asked, “Who are you?” — “My name is this.”   A little later they tell you the name of their occupation or about their main characteristic.


The Mother: If they are asked, “Who are you?” — “I am a painter.”  But at a certain level the only answer is the name. And what is a name? It is nothing but a word, isn’t that so? And what is there behind?


The Mother: Nothing. It is a whole collection of vague things which do not at all represent a person as different from his neighbour. He is differentiated only because he has another name. If everybody bore the same name, it would be very difﬁcult to distinguish one person from another!  I read to you the other day from that book on aviation the story of the slave who, whenever he was asked a question, always answered by his name.


The Mother: But that was already a progress compared with all those who were given the name of slave — for all of them it was the same one — and they all accepted to have the same name, and therefore to be the same person. For they had no individuality at all, they only had an occupation; and that occupation being the same for a successive number of slaves, they all had the same name.  One lives by a kind of habit which is barely half-conscious — one lives, does not even objectify what one does, why one does it, how one does it. One does it by habit. All those who are born in a certain environment, a certain country, automatically take the habits of that environment, not only material habits but habits of thought, habits of feeling and habits of acting.


The Mother: They do it without watching themselves doing it, quite naturally, and if someone points this out to them they are astonished.  As a matter of fact, one has the habit of sleeping, speaking, eating, moving and one does all this as something quite natural, without wondering why or how.... And many other things. All the time one does things automatically, by force of habit, one does not watch oneself. And so, when one lives in a particular society, one automatically does what is normally done in that  society.


The Mother: And if somebody begins to watch himself acting, watch himself feeling and thinking, he looks like a kind of phenomenal monster compared with the environment he lives in.  Therefore, individuality is not at all the rule, it is an exception, and if you do not have that sort of bag, a particular form which is your outer body and your appearance, you could hardly be distinguished from one another.  Individuality is a conquest. And, as Sri Aurobindo says here, this ﬁrst conquest is only a ﬁrst stage, and once you have realised within you something like a personal independent and conscious being, then what you have to do is to break the form and go farther. For example, if you want to progress mentally, you must break all your mental forms, all your mental constructions to be able to make new ones.


The Mother: So, to begin with, a tremendous labour is required to individualise oneself, and afterwards one must demolish all that has been done in order to progress. But as you do not watch yourself doing things and as it is the custom — not everywhere, of course; let us say here — the custom to work, to read, to develop yourself, to try to do something, to form yourself a little, you do it quite naturally and without even watching yourself, as I said.  And only when these external forms come into a mutual friction you begin to feel that you are different from others.  Otherwise you are this person or that, according to the name you bear. It is only when there is a friction, when something does not go smoothly, that you become aware of a difference, then you see that you are different, otherwise you are not aware of it and you are not different.


The Mother: In fact, you are very, very little different from one another.  How many things in your life are done at least essentially in the same way as others. For instance, sleeping, moving and eating, and all sorts of things like that. Never have you asked yourselves why you do a thing in one way and not another. You wouldn’t be able to say.


The Mother: If I asked you, “Why do you act in this way and not that?” you wouldn’t know what to say. But it is  quite simply because you were born in certain conditions and it is the habit to be like that in these conditions. Otherwise, if you had been born in another age and other conditions, you would act altogether differently without even realising the difference, it would appear absolutely natural to you.... For instance — a very, very small instance — in most Western countries and even in some Eastern ones, people sew like this, from right to left; in Japan they sew from left to right. Well, it seems quite natural to you to sew from right to left, doesn’t it?


The Mother: That is how you have been taught and you don’t think about it, you sew in that way. If you go to Japan and they see you sewing, it makes them laugh, for they are in the habit of sewing differently. It is the same thing with writing. You write like this, from left to right, but there are people who write from top to bottom, and others who write from right to left, and they do it most naturally. I am not speaking of those who have studied, reﬂected, compared ways of writing, I am not speaking of more or less learned people, no, I am speaking of quite ordinary people, and above all of children who do what is done around them, quite spontaneously and without questioning.


The Mother: But then, when by chance or circumstance they are faced with a different way, it is a tremendous revelation for them that things can be done in a different way from theirs.  And these are quite simple things, I mean the ones which strike you, but this is true down to the smallest detail. You do things in this way because in the place and environment in which you live they are done in this way. And you do not watch yourself doing them.  Indeed, the source was One, you see, and creation had to be manifold.


The Mother: And it must have represented quite a considerable labour to make this multiplicity conscious of being multiple.  And if one observes very attentively, if creation had kept the memory of its origin, it would perhaps never have become a diverse multiplicity. There would have been at the centre of each being the sense of perfect unity, and the diversity would — perhaps — never have been expressed.   Through the loss of the memory of this unity began the possibility of becoming conscious of differences; and when one goes into the inconscient, at the other end, one falls back into a sort of unity that’s unconscious of itself, in which the diversity is as unexpressed as it is in the origin.  At both ends there is the same absence of diversity.


The Mother: In one case it is through a supreme consciousness of unity, in the other through a perfect unconsciousness of unity.  The ﬁxity of form is the means by which individuality can be formed.  That’s all, then.   My eye won’t allow me to read today. But I have been asked a question on what I read to you last week.


The Mother: I am going to reply to it this evening. Pavitra, will you read, please?  (Pavitra reads)  At a superﬁcial glance these two things appear absolutely contradictory and incompatible. Outwardly one cannot conceive how one can be at once in freedom and in servitude, but there is an attitude which reconciles the two and makes them one of the happiest states of material existence.


The Mother: Freedom is a sort of instinctive need, a necessity for the integral development of the being. In its essence it is a perfect realisation of the highest consciousness, it is the expression of Unity and of union with the Divine, it is the very sense of the Origin and the fulﬁlment. But because this Unity has manifested in the many — in the multiplicity — something had to serve as a link between the Origin and the manifestation, and the most perfect link one can conceive of is love. And what is the ﬁrst gesture of love? To give oneself, to serve.


The Mother: What is its spontaneous, immediate, inevitable movement? To serve. To serve in a joyous, complete, total self-giving.   So, in their purity, in their truth, these two things — freedom and service — far from being contradictory, are complementary.  It is in perfect union with the supreme Reality that perfect freedom is found, for all ignorance, all unconsciousness is a bondage which makes you inefﬁcient, limited, powerless.


The Mother: The least ignorance in oneself is a limitation, one is no longer free.   As long as there is an element of unconsciousness in the being, it is a limitation, a bondage. Only in perfect union with the supreme Reality can perfect freedom exist. And how to realise this union if not through a spontaneous self-giving: the gift of love.


The Mother: And as I said, the ﬁrst gesture, the ﬁrst expression of love is service.  So the two are closely united in the Truth. But here on earth, in this world of ignorance and inconscience, this service which should have been spontaneous, full of love, the very expression of love, has become something imposed, an inevitable necessity, performed only for the maintenance of life, for the continuation of existence, and thus it has become something ugly, miserable — humiliating. What should have been a ﬂowering, a joy, has become an ugliness, a weariness, a sordid obligation. And this sense, this need for freedom has also been deformed and has become that kind of thirst for independence which leads straight to revolt, to separation, isolation, the very opposite of true freedom.


The Mother: Independence!... I remember having heard an old occultist and sage give a beautiful reply to someone who said, “I want to be independent! I am an independent being! I exist only when I am independent!” And the other answered him with a smile, “Then that means that nobody will love you, because if someone loves you, you immediately become dependent on this love.”


The Mother: It is a beautiful reply, for it is indeed love which leads to Unity and it is Unity which is the true expression of freedom.  And so those who in the name of their right to freedom claim independence, turn their backs completely on this true freedom,  for they deny love.   The deformation comes from constraint.  One cannot love through compulsion, you cannot be compelled to love, it is no longer love.


The Mother: Therefore, as soon as compulsion intervenes, it becomes a falsehood. All the movements of the inner being must be spontaneous movements, with that spontaneity which comes from an inner harmony, an understanding — from a voluntary self-giving — from a return to the deeper truth, the reality of being, the Origin and the Goal.   As I am still unable to read to you this evening, I am going to tell you a story. It is a Buddhist story which perhaps you know, it is modern but has the merit of being authentic. I heard it from Madame Z who, as you probably know, is a well-known Buddhist, especially as she was the ﬁrst European woman to enter Lhasa.


The Mother: Her journey to Tibet was very perilous and thrilling and she narrated one of the incidents of this journey to me, which I am going to tell you this evening.  She was with a certain number of fellow travellers forming a sort of caravan, and as the approach to Tibet was relatively easier through Indo-China, they were going from that side. IndoChina is covered with large forests, and these forests are infested with tigers, some of which become man-eaters... and when that happens they are called: “Mr. Tiger.”  Late one evening, when they were in the thick of the forest — a forest they had to cross in order to be able to camp safely — Madame Z realised that it was her meditation hour.


The Mother: Now, she used to meditate at ﬁxed times, very regularly, without ever missing one and as it was time for her meditation she told her companions, “Continue the journey, I shall sit here and do my meditation, and when I have ﬁnished I shall join you; meanwhile, go on to the next stage and prepare the camp.” One of the coolies told her, “Oh! no, Madam, this is impossible, quite impossible” — he spoke in his own language, naturally, but I must tell you Madame Z knew Tibetan like a Tibetan — “it is quite impossible, Mr. Tiger is in the forest and now is just the  time for him to come and look for his dinner. We can’t leave you and you can’t stop here!” She answered that it did not bother her at all, that the meditation was much more important than safety, that they could all withdraw and that she would stay there alone.  Very reluctantly they started off, for it was impossible to reason with her — when she had decided to do something nothing could prevent her from doing it.


The Mother: They went away and she sat down comfortably at the foot of a tree and entered into meditation. After a while she felt a rather unpleasant presence.  She opened her eyes to see what it was... and three or four steps away, right in front of her was Mr. Tiger! — with eyes full of greed. So, like a good Buddhist, she said, “Well, if this is the way by which I shall attain Nirvana, very good.


The Mother: I have only to prepare to leave my body in a suitable way, in the proper spirit.” And without moving, without even the least quiver, she closed her eyes again and entered once more into meditation; a somewhat deeper, more intense meditation, detaching herself completely from the illusion of the world, ready to pass into Nirvana.... Five minutes went by, ten minutes, half an hour — nothing happened. Then as it was time for the meditation to be over , she opened her eyes...


The Mother: and there was no tiger! Undoubtedly, seeing such a motionless body it must have thought it was not ﬁt for eating! For tigers, like all wild animals, except the hyena, do not attack and eat a dead body. Impressed probably by this immobility — I dare not say by the intensity of the meditation!  — it had withdrawn and she found herself quite alone and out of danger.


The Mother: She calmly went her way and on reaching camp said, “Here I am.”  That’s my story. Now we are going to meditate like her, not to prepare ourselves for Nirvana (), but to heighten our consciousness!   This evening, once again, no reading. But someone has asked me a question on something I have written — Pavitra, do you have it?


The Mother: Read it.  (Pavitra reads)  I am asked to explain what this means. I have a good mind to tell you all sorts of paradoxical things! But still...


The Mother: Anyway, I wrote this with something in mind which one usually forgets: one asks one’s friends and those around one to be not what they are but what one would like them to be — one can form an ideal for oneself and want to apply it to everybody, but... This reminds me of Tolstoy’s son whom I met in Japan and who was going round the world in the hope of bringing about unity among men. His intentions were excellent, but his way of doing it seemed less happy! He said with an imperturbable seriousness that if everybody spoke the same language, if everybody dressed in the same way, ate in the same way and behaved in the same way, that would inevitably bring about unity! And when asked how he planned to realise this he said it would be enough to go from land to land preaching a new but universal language, a new but universal dress, and new but universal habits.


The Mother: That was all.... And that was what he intended to do!   ( )


The Mother: Well, everyone in his own little ﬁeld is like that.  He has an ideal, a conception of what is true and beautiful and noble, and even divine, and this conception of his he wants to impose on others. There are also many people who have a conception of the Divine and who try with all their might to  impose their conception on the Divine... and usually don’t lose heart until they have lost their life!  It is this and almost unconscious attitude I had in mind, for if I were to tell one of you, “There! that’s what you want to do”, he would protest very vehemently and say, “What! Never in my life!”


The Mother: But when one has opinions about people and especially reactions to their way of life, it is because one blames them for not being what one thinks they ought to be. If we never forget that there cannot be, should not be two things exactly alike in the universe, for the second would be useless since there would already be one of the same kind, and that the universe is constituted for the harmony of an inﬁnite multiplicity in which two movements — and even more, two consciousnesses — are never alike, then what right have we to intervene and want that somebody should conform to our own thought? ... For if you think in a particular way, it is certain that the other won’t be able to think in the same way. And if you are a person of a certain type, it is absolutely certain that the other cannot be of the same type.


The Mother: And what you ought to learn is to harmonise, synthesise, combine all the disparate things in the universe by putting each one Total harmony does not at all lie in an identity, but in a harmonisation which can come only by putting each thing in its place.  And this must be at the basis of the reaction that one has the right to expect from a true friend, who should wish not that his friend should be like him, but that he may be what he is.  Now, at the beginning of the sentence I said, “He loves you in the best part of yourself....” To put it a little more positively: Your friend is not one who encourages you to come down to your lowest level, encourages you to do foolish things along with him or fall into bad ways with him or one who commends you for all the nasty things you do, that’s quite clear. And yet, usually, very, very often, much too often, one makes friends with somebody with whom one doesn’t feel uneasy when one has sunk lower.


The Mother: One considers as one’s best friend somebody  who encourages one in one’s follies: one mixes with others to roam about instead of going to school, to go and steal fruit from gardens, to make fun of one’s teachers and for all kinds of things like that. I am not making any personal remarks, but indeed I could quote some examples, unhappily far too many. And perhaps this is why I said, “They are not your true friends.” But still, they are the most convenient friends, for they don’t make you feel that you are in the wrong; while to one who comes and tells you, “Now then, instead of roaming about and doing nothing or doing stupid things, if you came to the class, don’t you think it would be better!” usually one replies, “Don’t bother me!


The Mother: You are not my friend.” This is perhaps why I wrote this sentence. There you are. I repeat, I am not making any personal remarks, but still it is an opportunity to tell you something that unfortunately happens much too often.  There are children here who were full of promise, who were at the top of their class, who used to work seriously, from whom I expected much, and who have been completely ruined by this kind of friendship.


The Mother: Since we are speaking of this, I shall tell them today that I regret this very much and that I do not call such people friends but mortal enemies against whom one should protect oneself as one would against a contagious disease.  We don’t like the company of someone who has a contagious disease, and avoid him carefully; generally he is segregated so that it does not spread. But the contagion of vice and bad behaviour, the contagion of depravity, falsehood and what is base, is inﬁnitely more dangerous than the contagion of any disease, and this is what must be very carefully avoided. You must consider as your best friend the one who tells you that he does not wish to participate in any bad or ugly act, the one who gives you courage to resist low temptations; he is a friend. He is the one you must associate with and not someone with whom you have fun and who strengthens your evil propensities.


The Mother: That’s all.  Now, we won’t labour the point and I hope that those I have in mind will understand what I have said.   Indeed, you should choose as friends only those who are wiser than yourself, those whose company ennobles you and helps you to master yourself, to progress, to act in a better way and see more clearly. And ﬁnally, the best friend one can have — isn’t he the Divine, to whom one can say everything, reveal everything? For there indeed is the source of all compassion, of all power to efface every error when it is not repeated, to open the road to true realisation; it is he who can understand all, heal all, and always help on the path, help you not to fail, not to falter, not to fall, but to walk straight to the goal.


The Mother: He is the true friend, the friend of good and bad days, the one who can understand, can heal, and who is always there when you need him. When you call him sincerely, he is always there to guide and uphold you — and to love you in the true way.    Once again, this evening, I am not going to read, but I won’t tell you a story; I am going to tell you about Madame X.  Madame X was born on the Isle of Wight and she lived in Tlemcen with her husband who was a great occultist.


The Mother: Madame X herself was an occultist of great powers, a remarkable clairvoyant, and she had mediumistic qualities. Her powers were quite exceptional; she had received an extremely complete and rigorous training and she could exteriorise herself, that is, bring out of her material body a subtle body, in full consciousness, and do it twelve times in succession. That is, she could pass consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, and then again put that subtler body into trance, exteriorise herself from it, and so on twelve times successively, to the extreme limit of the world of forms.... I shall speak to you about that later, when you can understand better what I am talking about. But I am going to tell you about some small incidents I saw when I was in Tlemcen myself, and a story she told me I shall also tell you.


The Mother: The incidents are of a more external kind, but very funny.  She was almost always in trance and she had trained her body so well that even when she was in trance, that is, when one or more parts of her being were exteriorised, the body had a life of its own and she could walk about and even attend to some small material occupations.... She did a great deal of work, for  in her trances she could talk freely and she used to narrate what she saw, which was noted down and later formed a teaching — which has even been published. And because of all that and the occult work she was doing, she was often tired, in the sense that her body was tired and needed to recuperate its vitality in a very concrete way.


The Mother: Now, one day when she was particularly tired, she told me, “You will see how I am going to recover my strength.” She had plucked from her garden — it was not a garden, it was a vast estate with ancient olive trees, and ﬁg trees such as I have never seen anywhere else, it was a real marvel, on a mountainside, from the plain to almost half way up — and in this garden there were many lemon trees and orange trees... and grapefruit.  Grapefruit has ﬂowers which have an even better fragrance than orange blossoms — they are large ﬂowers and she knew how to make an essence from them herself, she had given me a bottle — well, she had plucked a huge grapefruit like this, () very large and ripe, and she lay down on her bed and put the grapefruit on her solar plexus, here, () like this, holding it with both hands. She lay down and rested. She did not sleep, she rested.


The Mother: She told me, “Come back in an hour.” An hour later I returned... and the grapefruit was as ﬂat as a pancake. That meant that she had such a power to absorb vitality that she had absorbed all the life from the fruit and it had become soft and completely ﬂat. And I saw that myself!


The Mother: You may try, you won’t succeed! ()  Another time — and this is even more amusing... But ﬁrst I shall tell you a little about Tlemcen, which you probably don’t know. Tlemcen is a small town in southern Algeria, almost on the borders of the Sahara. The town itself is built in the valley which is surrounded by a circle of mountains, not very high but nevertheless higher than hills.


The Mother: And the valley is very fertile, verdurous, magniﬁcent. The population there is mainly Arabs and rich merchants; indeed, the city is very prosperous — it, for I don’t know what it is like now; I am speaking to you about  things that happened at the beginning of this century — there were very prosperous merchants there and from time to time these Arabs came to pay a visit to Monsieur X. They knew nothing, understood nothing, but they were very interested.  One day, towards evening, one of these people arrived and started asking questions, ludicrous ones besides. Then Madame X said to me, “You will see, we are going to have a little fun.”


The Mother: In the verandah of the house there was a big dining-table, a very large table, like that, quite wide, with eight legs, four on each side. It was really massive, and heavy. Chairs had been arranged to receive this man, at a little distance from the table. He was at one end, Madame X at the other; I was seated on one side, Monsieur X also. All four of us were there.


The Mother: Nobody was near the table, all of us were at a distance from it. And so, he was asking questions, as I said rather ludicrous ones, on the powers one could have and what could be done with what he called “magic”.... She looked at me and said nothing but sat very still. Suddenly I heard a cry, a cry of terror. The table started moving and with an almost heroic gesture went to attack the poor man seated at the other end!


The Mother: It went and bumped against him.... Madame X had not touched it, nobody had touched it.  She had only concentrated on the table and by her vital power had made it move. At ﬁrst the table had wobbled a little, then had started moving slowly, then suddenly, as in one bound, it ﬂung itself on that man, who went away and never came back!  She also had the power to dematerialise and rematerialise things.


The Mother: And she never said anything, she did not boast, she did not say, “I am going to do something”, she did not speak of anything; she just did it quietly. She did not attach much importance to these things, she knew they were just a proof that there are other forces than purely material ones.  When I used to go out in the evenings — towards the end of the afternoon I used to go for a walk with Monsieur X to see the countryside, go walking in the mountains, the neighbouring villages — I used to lock my door; it was a habit with me, I  always locked my door. Madame X would rarely go out, for the reasons I have already mentioned, because she was in a trance most of the time and liked to stay at home. But when I returned from the walk and opened my door — which was locked, and therefore nobody could have entered — I would always ﬁnd a kind of little garland of ﬂowers on my pillow.


The Mother: They were ﬂowers which grew in the garden, they are called we have them here, they open in the evening and have a wonderful fragrance. There was a whole alley of them, with big bushes as high as this; they are remarkable ﬂowers — I believe it’s the same here — on the same bush there are different coloured ﬂowers: yellow, red, mixed, violet. They are tiny ﬂowers like... bluebells; no, rather like the convolvulus, but these grow on bushes — convolvulus is a creeper, these are bushes — we have some here in the garden. She always used to put some behind her ears, for they have a lovely smell, oh! delightfully beautiful.


The Mother: And so, she used to take a walk in the alley between these big bushes which were quite high, and she gathered ﬂowers, and — when I came back, these ﬂowers were in my room!... She never told me how she did it, but she certainly did not go in there. Once she said to me, “Were there no ﬂowers in your room?” — “Ah! yes, indeed,” I said. And that was all. Then I knew it was she who had put them there.


The Mother: I could tell you many stories, but I shall ﬁnish with this one she had told me, which I did not see myself.  As I was telling you, Tlemcen is very near the Sahara and it has a desert climate except that in the valley a river ﬂows which never dries up and makes the whole country very fertile. But the mountains were absolutely arid. Only in the part occupied by farmers did something grow. Now, Monsieur X’s park — a large estate — was, as I said, a marvellous place...


The Mother: everything grew there, everything one could imagine and to a magniﬁcent size.  Now, she told me — they had been there a very long time — that  about ﬁve or six years before, I think, they had felt that these barren mountains might one day cause the river to dry up and that it would be better to plant trees there; and the administrator of Tlemcen ordered trees to be planted on all the neighbouring hills; a wide amphitheatre, you know. He said that pine trees should be planted, for in Algeria the sea-pine grows very well.  And they wanted to try it. Well, for some reason or other — forgetfulness or fantasy, heaven knows! — instead of ordering pine trees they ordered ﬁr trees!


The Mother: Fir trees belong to Scandinavian countries, not at all to desert lands. And very conscientiously all these ﬁr trees were planted. Now Madame X saw this and I believe she felt like making an experiment. So it happened that four or ﬁve years later these ﬁr trees had not only grown but had become magniﬁcent and when I went to Tlemcen the mountains all around were absolutely green, magniﬁcent with trees. She said to me, “You see, these are not pine trees, they are ﬁr trees”, and indeed they were — you know ﬁr trees are Christmas trees, don’t you? — they were ﬁr trees.


The Mother: Then she told me how after three years when the ﬁr trees had grown, suddenly one day or rather one December night, as she had just gone to bed and put out her light, she was awakened by a tiny little noise — she was very sensitive to noise; she opened her eyes and saw something like a moonbeam — there was no moon that night — lighting up a corner of her room. And she noticed that a little gnome was there, like the ones you see in the fairy-tales of Norway and Sweden, Scandinavian fairy-tales. He was a tiny little fellow with a big head, a pointed cap, pointed shoes of dark green, a long white beard, and all covered with snow.  So she looked at him — her eyes were open — she looked at him and said, “But... Eh! what are you doing here?” — she was a little worried, for in the warmth of her room the snow was melting and making a little pool on the ﬂoor of her room.


The Mother: “But what are you doing here!”  Then he smiled at her, gave her his sweetest smile and said, “But we were called by the ﬁr trees! Fir trees call the snow. They  are trees of the snow countries. I am the Lord of the Snow, so I came to announce to you that... we are coming.


The Mother: We have been called, we are coming.”  “Snow?... But we are near the Sahara!”   “Ah!


The Mother: then you shouldn’t have planted ﬁr trees.”  Finally she told him, “Listen, I don’t know if what you tell me is true, but you are spoiling my ﬂoor. Go away!”  So he went away. The moonlight went with him.


The Mother: She lit a lamp — for there was no electricity — she lit a lamp and saw... a little pool of water in the place where he had stood. So it was not a dream, there really was a little being whose snow had melted in her room. And the next morning when the sun rose, it rose upon mountains covered with snow. It was the ﬁrst time, it had never been seen before in that country.  Since then, every winter — not for long, just for a little while — all the mountains are covered with snow.


The Mother: So that’s my story.   All that Sri Aurobindo says here is aimed at ﬁghting against human nature with its inertia, its heaviness, laziness, easy satisfactions, hostility to all effort. How many times in life does one meet people who become paciﬁsts because they are afraid  to ﬁght, who long for rest before they have earned it, who are satisﬁed with a little progress and in their imagination and desires make it into a marvellous realisation so as to justify their stopping half-way.  In ordinary life, already, this happens so much. Indeed, this is the bourgeois ideal, which has deadened mankind and made man into what he is now: “Work while you are young, accumulate wealth, honour, position; be provident, have a little foresight, put something by, lay up a capital, become an ofﬁcial — so that later when you are forty you “can sit down”, enjoy your income and later your pension and, as they say, enjoy a well-earned rest.”


The Mother: — To sit down, to stop on the way, not to move forward, to go to sleep, to go downhill towards the grave before one’s time, cease to live the purpose of life — to sit down!  The minute one stops going forward, one falls back. The moment one is satisﬁed and no longer aspires, one begins to die.  Life is movement, it is effort, it is a march forward, the scaling of a mountain, the climb towards new revelations, towards future realisations. Nothing is more dangerous than wanting to rest.


The Mother: It is in action, in effort, in the march forward that repose must be found, the true repose of complete trust in the divine Grace, of the absence of desires, of victory over egoism.  True repose comes from the widening, the universalisation of the consciousness. Become as vast as the world and you will always be at rest. In the thick of action, in the very midst of the battle, the effort, you will know the repose of inﬁnity and eternity.   This evening I am going to read to you a short story which seemed quite instructive to me.


The Mother: It is a tale of ancient times, of what used to happen before there were printing presses and books, of the days when only the Guru or the Initiate had the knowledge and gave it only to those he considered worthy of having it. And for him, usually, “to be worthy of having it” meant what one had learnt. He gave you a truth and expected you to practise it. And when you had put it into practice, he consented to give you another.  Now things happen quite differently.


The Mother: Everybody and anybody can have a book, read it right through and he is quite free to practise it or not as he pleases. This is all very well, but it creates a certain confusion in many minds, and people who have read many books think that it is enough and that all sorts of miraculous things must happen to them because they have read books, and that they don’t need to take the trouble of practising.  So they become impatient and say, “How is it that although I have read all this I am still just the same person, have the same difﬁculties, haven’t achieved any realisation?” I very often hear remarks of this kind.  They forget only one thing, that they have obtained the knowledge — intellectual, mental knowledge — before having deserved it, that is, before having put into practice what they have read, and that, naturally, there is discrepancy between their state of consciousness and the ideas, the knowledge they can speak about at length but which they haven’t practised.


The Mother: So it is for the impatient ones that I am going to read this story, to tell you how things happened in the days of old when one couldn’t simply have a book and read it, when one depended  on the Guru or the Initiate to obtain the knowledge which he alone had; he had received it from another Guru, another Initiate, and he transmitted it to you when he pleased, that is, when he found you worthy of having it.  So here’s my story (): A Story of Initiation ()  Once upon a time there was a Mahatma who was a great ascetic and a great pandit. He was honoured by all, full of years and wisdom. His name was Junun.


The Mother: Many young boys, many young men used to come to him to receive initiation. They stayed in his hermitage, became pandits themselves, then returned home after a long and studious retreat.  One day a young man came to him. His name was Yusuf Hussein. The Mahatma agreed to let him stay with him without even asking who he was.


The Mother: Four years went by, thus, until one morning Junun sent for Yusuf and, for the ﬁrst time, questioned him: “Why have you come here?” Without a second thought Yusuf answered: “To receive religious initiation.” Junun said nothing. He called a servant and asked him, “Have you prepared the box as I asked you?”


The Mother: “Yes, Master, it is there, quite ready.”  “Bring it without further delay,” said Junun.  With great care the servant placed the box before the Mahatma. He took it and gave it to Yusuf: “I have a friend who lives there on the banks of the river Neela. Go and take this box to him from me.


The Mother: But take good care, brother, don’t make any mistake on the way. Keep this box carefully with you and give it to the man whom it is for. When you come back I shall give you initiation.” Once again the Mahatma repeated his advice and described the route Yusuf had to follow to reach the river Neela. Yusuf bowed down at his Guru’s feet, took the box and started on his way.


The Mother: The retreat where the Mahatma’s friend lived was quite far away and in those days there were no cars or railways. So Yusuf walked. He walked the whole morning, then came the afternoon.  The heat was intense and radiated everywhere.


The Mother: He felt tired. So he sat down in the shade of an old tree by the roadside to rest a little. The box was very small. It was not locked. Besides, Yusuf had not even paid attention to it.


The Mother: His Guru had told him to carry a box, and he had started off without another word.  But now, during the afternoon rest, Yusuf began to think.  His mind was free to wander with nothing to occupy it.... It would be very rare indeed if on such occasions some foolish idea did not cross the mind.... Thus his eyes fell on the box.


The Mother: He began to look at it. “A pretty little box!... Why, it does not seem to be locked.... And how light it is! Is it possible that there is anything inside?


The Mother: So light.... Perhaps it is empty?” Yusuf stretched out his hand as though to open it. Suddenly he thought better of it: “But no.... Full or empty, whatever is in this box is not my concern.


The Mother: My Guru asked me to deliver it to his friend, nothing more. And that’s all that concerns me. I should not care about anything else.”  For some time Yusuf sat quietly. But his mind would not remain quiet.


The Mother: The box was still there before his eyes. A pretty little box. “It seems quite empty,” he thought, “what harm would there be in opening an empty box?... If it had been locked I would understand, that would be bad.... A box which is not even locked, it can’t be very serious.


The Mother: I’ll just open it for a moment and then shut it again.”  Yusuf’s thought turned round and round that box. It was impossible to detach himself from it, impossible to control this idea that had crept into him. “Let me see, only a quick glance, just a glance.” Once again he stretched out his hand, drew it back once more, then again sat still.


The Mother: All in vain. Finally Yusuf made up his mind and gently, very gently, he opened the box. Hardly had he opened it than pfft! a little mouse jumped out... and  disappeared. The poor mouse all stiﬂed in its box did not waste a second in leaping to freedom!


The Mother: Yusuf was bewildered. He opened his eyes wide and gazed and gazed. The box lay there empty. Then his heart started throbbing sadly: “So, the Mahatma had sent only a mouse, a tiny little mouse.... And I couldn’t even carry it safe and sound to the end.


The Mother: Indeed I have committed a serious fault. What shall I do now?”  Yusuf was full of regrets. But there was nothing more to do now. In vain he went round the tree, in vain he looked up and down the road.


The Mother: The little mouse had actually ﬂed.... With a trembling hand Yusuf closed the lid and in dismay resumed his journey.  When he reached the river Neela and the house of his Master’s friend, Yusuf handed the Mahatma’s present to him and waited silently in a corner because of the fault he had committed. This man was a great saint. He opened the box and immediately understood what had happened.


The Mother: “Well, Yusuf,” he said, turning to the young aspirant, “so you have lost that mouse.... Mahatma Junun won’t give you initiation, I am afraid, for in order to be worthy of the supreme Knowledge one must have a perfect mastery over one’s mind. Your Master clearly had some doubts about your will-power, that is why he resorted to this little trick, to put you to the test. And if you are not able to accomplish so insigniﬁcant a thing as to keep a little mouse in a box, how do you expect to keep great thoughts in your head, the true Knowledge in your heart? Nothing is insigniﬁcant, Yusuf.


The Mother: Return to your Master. Learn steadiness of character, perseverance. Be worthy of trust so as to become one day the true disciple of that great Soul.”  Crestfallen, Yusuf returned to the Mahatma and confessed his fault. “Yusuf,” he said, “you have lost a wonderful opportunity.


The Mother: I gave you a worthless mouse to take care of and you couldn’t do even that! How then do you expect to keep the most precious of all treasures, the divine Truth? For that you must  have self-control. Go and learn. Learn to be master of your mind, for without that nothing great can be accomplished.”


The Mother: Yusuf went away ashamed, head down, and from then on he had only one thought: to become master of himself.... For years and years he made tireless efforts, he underwent a hard and difﬁcult tapasya, and ﬁnally succeeded in becoming master of his nature. Then, full of conﬁdence Yusuf went back to his Master. The Mahatma was overjoyed to see him again and ﬁnd him ready. And this is how Yusuf received from Mahatma Junun the great initiation.


The Mother: Many, many years went by, Yusuf grew in wisdom and mastery. He became one of the greatest and most exceptional saints of Islam.  () So, this is to tell you that you must not be impatient, that you must understand that in order to really possess knowledge, whatever it may be, you must put it into practice, that is, master your nature so as to be able to express this knowledge in action.  All of you who have come here have been told many things; you have been put into contact with a world of truth, you live within it, the air you breathe is full of it; and yet how few of you know that these truths are valuable only if they are put into practice, and that it is useless to talk of consciousness, knowledge, equality of soul, universality, inﬁnity, eternity, supreme truth, the divine presence and... of all sorts of things like that, if you make no effort yourselves to these things and feel them concretely within you. And don’t tell yourselves, “Oh, I have been here so many years!


The Mother: Oh, I would very much like to have the result of my efforts!” You must know that very persistent efforts, a very steadfast endurance are necessary to master the least weakness, the least pettiness, the least meanness in one’s nature. What is the use of talking about divine Love if one can’t love without egoism? What is the use of talking about immortality if one is stubbornly attached to the past and the present and if one doesn’t want to give anything in order to receive everything?   You are still very young, but you must learn that to reach the goal you must know how to pay the price, and that to understand the supreme truths you must put them into practice in your daily life.


The Mother: That’s all.    After all, the whole problem is to know whether humanity has reached the state of pure gold or whether it still needs to be tested in the crucible.  One thing is evident, humanity has not become pure gold; that is visible and certain.  But something has happened in the world’s history which allows us to hope that a selected few in humanity, a small number of beings, perhaps, are ready to be transformed into pure gold and that they will be able to manifest strength without violence, heroism without destruction and courage without catastrophe.   But in the very next paragraph Sri Aurobindo gives the answer: “If man could once consent to be spiritualised.”


The Mother: If only the individual could to be spiritualised... could consent.  Something in him asks for it, aspires, and all the rest refuses, wants to continue to be what it is: the mixed ore which needs to be cast into the furnace.  At the moment we are at a decisive turning-point in the history of the earth, once again. From every side I am asked, “What is going to happen?” Everywhere there is anguish, expectation, fear.


The Mother: “What is going to happen?...” There is only one reply: “If only man could consent to be spiritualised.”  And perhaps it would be enough if some individuals became pure gold, for this would be enough to change the course of events.... We are faced with this necessity in a very urgent way.  This courage, this heroism which the Divine wants of us, why not use it to ﬁght against one’s own difﬁculties, one’s own imperfections, one’s own obscurities?


The Mother: Why not heroically face the furnace of inner puriﬁcation so that it does not become necessary to pass once more through one of those terrible, gigantic destructions which plunge an entire civilisation into darkness?  This is the problem before us. It is for each one to solve it in his own way.  This evening I am answering the questions I have been asked, and my reply is that of Sri Aurobindo: If man could once consent to be spiritualised....  And I add: Time presses... from the human point of view.


The Mother: It is not in the mental consciousness that these things can be harmonised and synthesised. For this it is necessary to rise above and ﬁnd the idea behind the thought. Sri Aurobindo shows here, for example, what each of these religions represents in human effort, aspiration and realisation. Instead of taking these religions in their outward forms which are precisely dogmas and intellectual conceptions, if we take them in their spirit, in the principle they represent, there is no difﬁculty in unifying them.  They are simply different aspects of human progress which complete each other perfectly well and should be united with many others yet to form a more total and more complete progress, a more perfect understanding of life, a more integral approach  to the Divine.


The Mother: And even this uniﬁcation which already demands a return to the Spirit behind things, is not enough; there must be added to it a vision of the future, the goal towards which humanity is moving, the future realisation of the world, that last “spiritual revolution” Sri Aurobindo speaks about, which will open a new age, that is, the supramental revolution.  In the supramental consciousness all these things are no longer contradictory or exclusive. They all become complementary. It is only the mental form which divides. What this mental form represents should be united to what all the other mental forms represent in order to make a harmonious whole.


The Mother: And that is the essential difference between a religion and the true spiritual life.  Religion exists almost exclusively in its forms, its cults, in a certain set of ideas, and it becomes great only through the spirituality of a few exceptional individuals, whereas true spiritual life, and above all what the supramental realisation will be, is independent of every precise, intellectual form, every limited form of life. It embraces all possibilities and manifestations and makes them the expression, the vehicle of a higher and more universal truth.  A new religion would not only be useless but very harmful.  It is a new which must be created; it is a new which must be expressed.


The Mother: This is something beyond intellectual limits and mental formulae. It is a living truth which must manifest.  Everything in its essence and its truth should be included in this realisation. This realisation must be an expression as total, as complete, as universal as possible of the divine reality. Only that can save humanity and the world.


The Mother: That is the great spiritual revolution of which Sri Aurobindo speaks. And this is what he wanted us to realise.  He has traced its broad outline in the very book we shall start reading next Wednesday:  And the ﬁrst sentence I read today remains the key of the  entire problem not only for the individual but also for the collectivity: I would like us to take this as the subject of our meditation.  (


The Mother: )   With children it is above all ignorance and bad example which cause the harm. So it would be good if, before they begin their games, all the group-leaders, the captains, call together all those they are in charge of and tell them, explain to them exactly what Sri Aurobindo says here, with detailed explanations like those we have given in the two little books and [or ]. These things must be repeated often to the children. And then, you must warn them against bad company, bad friends, as I told you in another class.  And above all, set them the right example....


The Mother: Be yourself what you would like them to be. Give them the example of disinterestedness, patience, self-control, constant good humour, the overcoming of one’s little personal dislikes, a sort of constant goodwill, an understanding of others’ difﬁculties; and that equality of temper which makes children free from fear, for what makes children deceitful and untruthful, and even cunning, is the fear of being punished. If they feel secure, they will hide nothing and you will then be able to help them to be loyal and honest. Of all things the most important is good example. Sri Aurobindo speaks of that, of the invariable good humour one must have in all circumstances, this self-forgetfulness: not to throw one’s own little troubles on others; when one is tired or uncomfortable, not to become unpleasant, impatient.


The Mother: This asks for quite some perfection, a self-control which is a great step on the path of realisation. If one fulﬁlled the conditions needed to be a true leader, even if only a leader of a small group of children, well, one would already be far advanced in the discipline needed for the accomplishment of the yoga.  It is from this aspect that the problem should be seen, the  aspect of self-mastery, of control, of the endurance which will not allow your personal condition to react on your group-work or collective action. To forget oneself is one of the most essential conditions for being a true leader: to have no selﬁsh interests, to want nothing for oneself, to consider only the good of the group, of the whole, the totality that depends on one; to act only with that aim in mind, without wanting any personal proﬁt from one’s action.  A leader of a small group can thus become a perfect leader for a large group, for a nation, and prepare himself for a collective role.


The Mother: It is a training-ground of great importance, and that is truly what we have attempted and are continuing to try out here: to give to everyone as soon as possible a responsibility, big or small, so that he learns to become a true leader.  To be a true leader one must be completely disinterested and efface from oneself as much as possible all self-regard and all selﬁsh movements. To be a leader one must master one’s ego, and to master one’s ego is the ﬁrst indispensable step for doing yoga. And this is what can make sports a powerful aid for the realisation of the Divine.  Very few people understand this, and generally those who are against this outer discipline of sports, this concentration on the material realisation,


The Mother: are people who lack control over their physical being. And to realise the integral yoga of Sri Aurobindo the control of one’s body is a ﬁrst step.  Those who despise physical activities are people who won’t be able to take a single step on the true path of integral yoga, unless they ﬁrst get rid of their contempt. Control of the body in all its forms is an indispensable basis. A body which dominates you is an enemy, it is a disorder you cannot accept.


The Mother: It is the enlightened will in the mind which should govern the body, and not the body which should impose its law on the mind. When one knows that a thing is bad, one must be capable of not doing it. When one wants something to be realised, one must be able to do it and not be stopped at every step by the body’s inability or ill-will or  lack of collaboration; and for that one must follow a physical discipline and become master in one’s own home.  It is very ﬁne to escape into meditation and from the height of one’s so-called grandeur look down on material things, but one who is not master in his own home is a slave.  (


The Mother: )  No questions over there? No?  That is quite wrong. In the very ﬁrst issue of the I explained this in full detail.


The Mother: It is altogether wrong. Indeed someone who has acquired control over himself and developed the power of concentration can apply this power of concentration to things that are apparently extremely different, even sometimes opposite, and he ought to be able to do them without one thing interfering with the other.  There is only the question of time to be considered, but this question may be resolved by two things: ﬁrst by an enlightened and methodical organisation of one’s life, then by doing away with the wastage of time which most people spend in useless activities — if these were to disappear it would be a blessing for everyone — and ﬁrst among them I put chattering, that is, speaking uselessly, among friends, colleagues... in all activities.  The time one can waste in talking is tremendous! When one word would be enough, one says ﬁfty.


The Mother: And that is not the only loss of time.... Actually, when one is short of time, it means one does not know how to organise one’s life. Of course, there are  people who do too many things, but that too shows a lack of organisation in life.  A true organisation gives a place to each thing to the extent that it is required. You all know very well that with ten to ﬁfteen minutes of well-coordinated exercises, you can give your body all the necessary training.


The Mother: This you have been taught here and it has been proved to you. For the balance of the body this is enough. Naturally there are all sorts of other qualities given by games, but you don’t play for more than an hour each day at the most, as far as I know, and that is not much time spent in the day.  It is an excuse! Organise your life and you will see that you have room for everything... even for being a good student.


The Mother: ´ Sar¯ıram khalu  dharmas¯adhanam


The Mother: Precisely by transformation. This implies a total transformation.  Sri Aurobindo speaks about it later in what follows.  For the moment, our body is simply a doubtful improvement on the animal body, for if we have gained from a certain point of view, we have lost from another. It is certain that from the point of view of purely physical capacities many animals are superior to us.


The Mother: Unless by a special culture and transformation  we succeed in really transforming our capacities, it could be said that from the point of view of strength and muscular power a tiger or a lion is far superior to us. From the point of view of agility a monkey is far superior to us; and, for instance, a bird can travel without needing any exterior mechanism or plane, which is not yet possible for us... and so on. And we are bound by the animal necessities of the functioning of our organs; so long as we depend, for instance, on material food, on absorbing matter in such a crude form, we shall be quite inferior animals.  Therefore, I don’t want to anticipate what we are going to read, but all this purely animal functioning of our body, all this part which is exactly the same as in animal life — that we depend for life on the circulation of the blood and to have blood we need to eat, and so on, and all that this implies — these are terrible limitations and bondages! As long as material life depends on that, it is obvious that we won’t be able to divinise our life.


The Mother: So, we must assume that animality in the human being should be replaced by another source of life, and this is quite conceivable — not only conceivable but partially realisable; and this is obviously the aim we ought to set before ourselves if we want to transform matter and make it capable of expressing divine qualities.  In the very, very old traditions — there was a tradition more ancient than the Vedic and the Chaldean which must have been the source of both — in that ancient tradition there is already mention of a “glorious body” which would be plastic enough to be transformed at every moment by the deeper consciousness: it would express that consciousness, it would have no ﬁxity of form. It mentioned luminosity: the constituent matter could become luminous at will. It mentioned a sort of possibility of weightlessness which would allow the body to move about in the air only by the action of will-power and by certain processes of control of the inner energy, and so on. Much has been said about these things.


The Mother: I don’t know if there ever were beings on earth who had partially realised this, but in a very small way there have been partial instances of one thing or another, examples which go to prove that it is possible. And following up this idea, one could go so far as to conceive of the replacement of material organs and their functioning as it now is, by centres of concentration of force and energy which would be receptive to the higher forces and which, by a kind of alchemy, would use them for the necessities of life and the body. We already speak of the different “centres” in the body — this knowledge is very widespread among people who have practised yoga — but these centres could be perfected to the point where they replace the different organs by a direct action of the higher energy and vibrations on matter. Those who have practised occultism well enough, in its most integral form, it could be said, know the process of materialisation of subtle energies and can put them in contact with physical vibrations.  Not only is it something that can be done, but it is something which done.


The Mother: And all that is a science, a science which must itself be perfected, completed, and which will obviously be used for the creation and setting in action of new bodies which will be able to manifest the supramental life in the material world.  But, as Sri Aurobindo says, before this can be done, it is good to utilise all that we have in order to increase and make more exact the control of physical activities. It is very obvious that those who practise physical culture scientiﬁcally and with coordination acquire a control over their bodies that’s unimaginable for ordinary people. When the Russian gymnasts came here, we saw with what ease they did exercises which for an ordinary man are impossible, and they did them as if it was the simplest thing in the world; there was not even the least sign of effort! Well, that mastery is already a great step towards the transformation of the body.


The Mother: And these people who, I could say, are materialists by profession, used no spiritual method in their education; it was solely by material means and an enlightened  use of human will that they had achieved this result. If they had added to this a spiritual knowledge and power, they could have achieved an almost miraculous result.... Because of the false ideas prevalent in the world, we don’t usually see the two things together, spiritual mastery and material mastery, and so one is always incomplete without the other; but this is exactly what we want to do and what Sri Aurobindo is going to explain: if the two are combined, the result can reach a perfection that’s unthinkable for the ordinary human mind, and this is what we want to attempt.  As he goes on to say — we shall probably read it next time — ﬁrst one has to ﬁght against a formidable mass of stupid prejudices which create an irreconcilable antagonism between material and spiritual life. And it is something so deep-rooted in human consciousness that it is very difﬁcult to eradicate it, even in those who think they have understood Sri Aurobindo’s teaching!


The Mother: And many people said, when for altogether different reasons I began to hold meditations again, “Ah! At last! We are returning to spiritual life....” This was indeed what prevented me from holding them for a long time. It was in order not to encourage this stupidity.


The Mother: But for other reasons it was necessary to do it and so I did. So long as this foolishness is not uprooted from human consciousness, the supramental force will always ﬁnd it considerably difﬁcult not to be engulfed in the obscurity of a human thought which understands nothing. That’s all. All the same, we shall succeed.  I chose this book,, in order to have the opportunity of putting you into contact with a truth expressed in an almost combative form, in order to ﬁght against this old division, this total lack of understanding of the eternal Truth.


The Mother: And perhaps, when we have ﬁnished reading it, I shall be able to tell you why we have started the meditations again — but certainly not “to return to spiritual life”!  And it is so deep-rooted. Oh! Even those who outwardly  profess to understand — when they think of the spiritual life, they immediately think of meditation.  There we are.


The Mother: Now, we shall have one all the same, but for another reason!  ( )   The higher perfection is the spiritual perfection, integral union with the Divine, identiﬁcation with the Divine, freedom from all the limitations of the lower world. That is spiritual perfection, the perfection that comes from yoga — quite independent of the body and the physical world — which, in ancient times, meant ﬁrst rejecting the body and the physical life so as to have a relation only with the higher world and ﬁnally with the Divine.  That is the higher perfection.


The Mother: And the lower perfection is to be able to make the human being in his present form and in his body, in his relation with all terrestrial things, do the utmost he can. This is the case of all great men of genius: artistic genius, literary genius, genius in organisation, the great rulers, those who have carried physical  capacities to their maximum perfection, human development to the limit of its possibilities; and, for instance, all those who have complete control over their bodies and succeed in doing miraculous things, as we saw, for example, during the war, with the airmen: they made their bodies do things which at ﬁrst sight seemed quite impossible, they obtained from them an endurance, a skill, a power which were almost unthinkable.  And from every point of view: from the point of view of physical strength, of intellectual realisation, of the physical qualities of energy and courage, of disinterestedness, goodness, charity; all human qualities carried to their utmost limits. That is the lower perfection.  The higher perfection is spiritual and super-human.


The Mother: The lower perfection is human perfection carried to its maximum limits, and this may be quite independent of all spiritual life, all spiritual aspiration. One can be a genius without having any spiritual aspiration. One can have all the most extraordinary moral qualities without having any spiritual life. And even, usually, those who have a very great power of human realisation are satisﬁed — more or less satisﬁed — with their condition. They feel they are self-sufﬁcient, that they carry in themselves the source of their realisation and their joy, and it is usually very difﬁcult to make them understand and feel that they are not the creators of their own creations, whatever they may be.


The Mother: Most of them, with very rare exceptions, if they were told, “You are not the originator of this work you are doing, it is a force higher than you and you are only its instrument”, they would dislike it very much — and they will send you about your business! Therefore, these two perfections are really divergent in ordinary life. It was said in the old yoga that the ﬁrst condition for doing yoga was to be disgusted with life. But those who have realised this human perfection are very rarely disgusted with life, unless they have met with personal difﬁculties such as the ingratitude of people around them, the lack of understanding of their genius which was not sufﬁciently appreciated — so all this disgusts them, but  otherwise, so long as they are in their period of success and creation, they are perfectly satisﬁed. So, as they are satisﬁed — above all, self-satisﬁed — they don’t need to seek anything else.


The Mother: It is not essentially true, but this is usually how things happen, and unless there is in this genius a soul which is perfectly conscious of itself and has come to accomplish a speciﬁc work on earth, he may very well be born, grow up and die without knowing that there is anything other than this earthly life. And above all it is this, you see, this feeling of having achieved the utmost realisation which gives a satisfaction that keeps one from needing anything else.... If they have a soul that’s fully conscious of itself and fully conscious of its purpose in the physical world, there could be a vague feeling that all this is pretty hollow, that all these achievements are a little too superﬁcial and that something is lacking; but that comes only to those who are predestined, and after all, in the mass of humanity, there are not very many of them.  Only those who are predestined can combine these two perfections and realise something integral.... This is quite rare.


The Mother: The great spiritual leaders have very rarely been great realisers in the physical world. It has happened, but it is very rare. Only those who are conscious incarnations of the Divine naturally carry in themselves the possibility of the two perfections, but this is exceptional. People who had a spiritual life, a great spiritual realisation, were able at certain exceptional moments to have a capacity for outward realisation; this also was exceptional, but it was intermittent and never had the integrality, the totality, the perfection of those who concentrated on material realisation.


The Mother: And this is why those who live only in the external consciousness, for whom the earthly material life is all that really exists, concrete and tangible, perceptible to all, always feel that spiritual life is something hazy, something almost mediocre from the material point of view.  I have met many people — “many”, well, quite a number  — who wanted to demonstrate that spiritual powers gave a great capacity for outer realisation and who tried, in certain exceptional spiritual states or conditions, to paint or to compose music or write poetry; well, everything that they produced was thoroughly second-rate and could not be compared with the works of the great geniuses who had mastered material nature — and this of course gave the materialists a good opening: “You see, your so-called power is nothing at all.” But this was because in their external life they were ordinary men; for the greatest spiritual power, if it enters material that’s not educated, will produce a result far superior to what that individual would have been able to achieve in his ordinary state, but far inferior to what a genius who has mastered matter can produce. It is not enough that “the Spirit bloweth”, the instrument must also be capable of manifesting it.


The Mother: I believe that is one of the things Sri Aurobindo is going to explain: why it is necessary to give to the physical, external being, its full development, the capacity of controlling matter directly; then you put at the disposal of the Spirit an instrument capable of manifesting it, otherwise... Yes, I knew several people who in their ordinary state could not write three lines without making a mistake, not only spelling mistakes but mistakes of language, that is, who could not express one thought clearly — well, in their moments of spiritual inspiration, they used to write very beautiful things, but all the same these very beautiful things were not so beautiful as the works of the greatest writers. These things seemed remarkable in comparison with what they could do in their ordinary state; it was true, their present possibilities were used to the maximum, it was something that gave a value to what otherwise would have had none at all. But supposing you take a real genius — a musician or artist or writer of genius — who has fully mastered his instrument, who can use it to produce works that express the utmost human possibility, if you add to this a spiritual consciousness, the supramental force, then you will have something truly divine.   And this is precisely the key to the effort Sri Aurobindo wanted us to make.


The Mother: And your body, if you draw from it all the possibilities it holds, if you educate it by the normal, well-known, scientiﬁc methods, if you make this instrument into something as perfect as possible, then, when the supramental truth manifests in that body, it will become without centuries of preparation — a marvellous instrument for the expression of the Spirit.  That is why Sri Aurobindo used to repeat and has always said: You must work from both ends, not let go of one for the other. And certainly, if you want to have a divine consciousness, you must not give up spiritual aspiration; but if you want to become an integral divine being on earth, take good care not to let go of the other end, and make your body the best possible instrument.   It is a disease of the ordinary human intellect — which comes, moreover, from separation, division — to make a thing always this that.


The Mother: If you choose this, you turn your back on that; if you choose that, you turn your back on this.  It is an impoverishment. One must know how to take up everything, combine everything, synthesise everything. And then one has an integral realisation.  () Do you have anything to say?


The Mother: It is much better to do than to say. Now I have given you some encouragement.    From the point of view of moral education they are rather essential, for if one can take part in them in the right spirit, it is a very good opportunity for mastering one’s ego. If one does it without trying to overcome one’s weaknesses and lower movements, one obviously doesn’t know how to proﬁt by them, and it does no good; but if one has the will to play in the right spirit, without any movement of a lower kind, without jealousy or ambition, keeping an attitude which could be called “fair play”, that is, doing one’s best and not caring about the result; if one can put in the utmost effort without being upset because one has not met with success or things have not turned out in one’s favour, then it is very useful. One can come out of all these competitions with a greater self-control and a detachment from results which are a great help to the formation of an exceptional character.


The Mother: Naturally, if you do it in the ordinary way and with all the ordinary reactions and ugly movements, it doesn’t help anything at all; but that holds good in no matter what one does; whether in the ﬁeld of sports or the intellectual ﬁeld, anywhere, if one acts in the ordinary way, well, one wastes one’s time. But if when playing or taking part in tournaments and competitions, you keep the right spirit, it is a very good education, for it compels you to  make a special effort and to exceed your ordinary limits a little.  It is certainly an opportunity to make conscious many of your movements which otherwise would always remain unconscious.  But naturally, you must not forget that this must be an opportunity and a means for progress. If you just let yourselves go and play in an altogether ordinary manner, you are wasting your time; but it is the same for everything, not only for this: for studies and for anything at all.


The Mother: Everything depends on the way in which things are done, not so much on what one does but on the spirit in which one does it.  If you were all yogis and did everything you do with your utmost effort and to your utmost possibilities, as well as you can do it and always with the idea of doing it better still, then, obviously, there would be no need of competitions, prizes, rewards; but, as Sri Aurobindo writes, little children cannot be expected to be yogis, and during the period of preparation a stimulus is necessary for the most material consciousness to make an effort for progress.... And this period of childhood may last for many years!  The ideal would be exactly what I have written in the last , I don’t know if you have read it, but I have written something like this: Have no ambition, above all pretend nothing, but be at every moment the utmost that you can be.  That is the ideal state in the integral life — whatever one does.


The Mother: And if one realises that, well, one is certainly very far on the path of perfection.... But it is obvious that a certain inner maturity is needed to do this in all sincerity. You may set this as a programme for yourselves.  If you like we shall take it as the subject of our meditation.  ()


The Mother: Because in the vast majority of cases, what gives interest is vital satisfaction. For you to be interested in training exercises which don’t have the stimulus of games, the reason must govern the being. In ordinary men reason is the summit of human consciousness, and this is the part of the being which must govern the rest, for it is orderly and reasonable, that is, it does things with a feeling for order, for goodness, usefulness, and in accordance with a plan, a speciﬁc plan, recognised and used by each one, whereas the vital part of the being likes excitement, the unexpected, adventure — all that makes games attractive — above all, competition, the effort to win, victory over the opponent, all these things; it is the vital impulse, and the vital in man being the seat of enthusiasm, ardour, normal energy, when the attraction of the unexpected, of struggle and victory is not there, it goes to sleep, unless it is in the habit of obeying, regularly and spontaneously, the will of the reason. And this is even one of the ﬁrst things for which all physical training is useful: the fact that it cannot be done really well unless the body is in the habit of obeying the reason rather than the vital impulse.


The Mother: For instance, the whole development of bodily perfection, of physical culture with dumb-bells and the exercises which have nothing particularly exciting and demand a discipline, habits which must be regular, reasonable, which give no scope to passion, desire, impulse — one must order one’s life according to a very strict and very regular discipline — well, in order to do them really well one must be in the habit of governing one’s life by the reason.   This is not very common. Usually, unless one has taken good care to make it otherwise, the impulses — the impulses of desire — all the enthusiasms and passions with all their reactions are the masters of human life. One must already be something of a sage to be able to undergo a rigorous discipline of the body and obtain from it the ordered, regular effort which can perfect it.  There is no longer any room there for all the fancies of desire.


The Mother: You see, as soon as one gives way to excesses, to immoderation of any kind and a disorderly life, it becomes quite impossible to control one’s body and develop it normally, not to mention that, naturally, one spoils one’s health and as a result the most important part of the ideal of a perfect body disappears; for with bad health, impaired health, one is not much good for anything.  And it is certainly the satisfaction of desires and impulses of the vital or the unreasonable demands of certain ambitions which make the body suffer and fall ill.  Naturally, there is all the ignorance of those who don’t even know the most elementary rules of life; but everybody knows one must learn how to live and, for instance, that ﬁre burns and water can drown! People don’t need to be told all that, it is something they learn fast as they grow up; but the fact that the control of reason over life is absolutely indispensable even for good health, is not always accepted by the inferior man for whom life has no savour unless he can live out his passions.  I remember a man who came here a very long time ago, to stand as a candidate for the government.


The Mother: It so happened that he was introduced to me because they wanted my opinion of him, and so he asked me questions about the Ashram and the life we lead here, and about what I considered to be an indispensable discipline for life. This man used to smoke the whole day and drank much more than was necessary, and so he complained, you see, that he was often tired and sometimes could not control himself. I told him, “You know, ﬁrst of all, you must stop smoking and you must stop drinking.” He looked at me with an unbelievable bewilderment and said, “But then, if  one doesn’t either smoke or drink, it is not worth living!” I told him, “If you are still at that stage, it is no use saying anything more.”


The Mother: And this is much more frequent than one thinks. To us it seems absurd, for we have something else which is of course more interesting than smoking and drinking, but for ordinary men the satisfaction of their desires is the very reason for existence. For them it seems to be an afﬁrmation of their independence and their purpose in life. And it is simply a perversion, a deformation which is a denial of the life-instinct, it is an unhealthy interference of thought and vital impulse in physical life. It is an unhealthy impulse which does not usually exist even in animals.


The Mother: In this case, instinct in animals is inﬁnitely more reasonable than human instinct — which, besides, doesn’t exist any more, which has been replaced by a very perverted impulse.  Perversion is a human disease, it occurs only very rarely in animals, and then only in animals which have come close to man and therefore have been contaminated by his perversion.   There is a story about some ofﬁcers in North Africa — in Algeria — who had adopted a monkey. The monkey lived with them and one day at dinner they had a grotesque idea and gave the monkey something to drink.


The Mother: They gave it alcohol. The monkey ﬁrst saw the others drink, this seemed to it something quite interesting, and it drank a glass, a full glass of wine. Afterwards it was ill, as ill as could be, it rolled under the table with all kinds of pains and was really in a very bad way, that is, it gave the men an example of the spontaneous effect of alcohol when the physical nature is not already perverted. It nearly died of poisoning. It recovered.


The Mother: And some time later it was again allowed to come for dinner as it was all right, and somebody placed a glass of wine in front of it. It picked it up in a terrible rage and ﬂung it at the head of the man who had given the glass to it.... By that it showed that it was much wiser than the men!  It is a good thing to begin to learn at an early age that to lead an efﬁcient life and obtain from one’s body the maximum it is  able to give, reason must be the master of the house. And it is not a question of yoga or higher realisation, it is something which should be taught everywhere, in every school, every family, every home:


The Mother: man was made to be a mental being, and merely to be a man — we are not speaking of anything else, we are speaking only of being a man — life must be dominated by reason and not by vital impulses. This should be taught to all children from their infancy. If one is not dominated by reason, one is a brute lower than the animal; for animals don’t have a mind or a reason to dominate them, but they obey the instinct of the species. There is an instinct of the species which is an extremely reasonable instinct that regulates all their activities for their own good, and automatically, without knowing it, they are subject to this instinct of the species which is altogether reasonable from the point of view of that species, of each species. And those animals which for some reason or other become free of it — as I was saying just a while ago, those which live near man and begin to obey man instead of obeying the instinct of the species — are perverted and lose the qualities of their species.


The Mother: But an animal left to its natural life and free from human inﬂuence is an extremely reasonable being from its own point of view, for it only does things which are in conformity with its nature and its own good. Naturally, it meets with disasters, for it is constantly at war with all the other species, but it does not itself act foolishly.  Stupidities and perversion begin with conscious mind and the human species. It is the wrong use man makes of his mental capacity. Perversion begins with humanity.


The Mother: It is a distortion of the progress of Nature which mental consciousness represents.  And, therefore, the ﬁrst thing which should be taught to every human being as soon as he is able to think, is that he should obey reason which is a super-instinct of the species. Reason is the master of the nature of mankind. One must obey reason and absolutely refuse to be the slave of instincts. And here I am not talking to you about yoga, I am not talking about spiritual life, not at all; it has nothing to do with that.


The Mother: It is the basic wisdom  of human life, purely human life: every human being who obeys anything other than reason is a kind of brute lower than the animal. That’s all. And this should be taught everywhere; it is the basic education which should be given to children.  The reign of reason must come to an end only with the advent of the psychic law which manifests the divine Will.   Since the beginning of which creation?


The Mother: Which creation are you speaking about?... Of the Earth?   First, this is not correct. There are species in which there is no difference; and in the beginning there wasn’t any — ﬁrst point.