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The Mother: If nations, instead of being in perpetual argument about straightforward things and defending their own interests and seeing only their personal viewpoint, that is, the viewpoint of their national personality, if instead of doing all that, they attempted to understand that each nation has a right to live on earth and that it is not a matter of depriving them of this right, but of ﬁnding a compromise that would satisfy everyone. There is always a solution, but on condition, not in order to ﬁnd the solution but to implement it: individuals and nations must have goodwill. If they have no goodwill, if they know perfectly well that they are in the wrong but don’t care, if they insist on their own interests even when they are absolutely wrong, then there is nothing to be done — you can only leave people to their ﬁghting and mutual destruction. But if, on the contrary, there is mutual goodwill, there is always a good solution. It is an intermediate solution.
The Mother: It is not always the golden mean. A kind of harmonisation must be found. I will tell you another story, the story of a merchant who set out on a journey saying to his neighbour, “I am going away, I don’t know when I shall be back. Keep this big jar for me, I shall take it back when I return.” Some time later, the neighbour was tempted to open the jar.
The Mother: He did so and found, under a thick layer of dust... some gold coins! This was a great temptation for him and he began to think, “Perhaps my friend has died, perhaps he won’t return. What is the use of keeping all this money inside here? And I am so much in need of money!” So he took a few coins, a few more, many more, until all the gold in the jar had gone.
The Mother: The olives that concealed the gold had gone bad and so he threw them away. One day the merchant returned and said to his neighbour, “Give me back my jar.” A few days later, the neighbour returned the jar all coated with dust, as it was before. The merchant opened the jar and found only some fresh olives. All the gold had gone.
The Mother: He went to the judge and explained what had happened. But the judge said, “How can I be sure you are telling the truth? Perhaps your neighbour is telling the truth.” They argued and were unable to ﬁnd a solution. The merchant, who had a headache, thought, “I shall go for a walk in the city tonight.”
The Mother: So he strolled through the city and suddenly he saw some children playing. They had a jar, and also a merchant, a neighbour and a judge! The judge was telling the neighbour, “Open up this jar. But I see only fresh olives! How long has it been since the merchant went away?”
The Mother: “Two and a half years.” “Really? So you were able to keep these olives fresh for so long? Didn’t you by any chance remove what was in the jar and put in some fresh olives?” The neighbour ran away.
The Mother: The merchant thought, “Well, these children are far more intelligent than I am, they found the solution at once.” So he went back to his neighbour and asked him the same questions; and of course the neighbour had nothing further to say and was forced to admit the truth. It comes from the word “decree”. It is a law, it is something which is... It is decreed that such and such a thing will be done in such and such a way, for example.
The Mother: Governments pronounce decrees on what ought and ought not to be done. They are ofﬁcial orders. So, in this case, it is an order from the Supreme, it is an inevitable order. It is the same way. From the moment you are surrounded by the divine grace and are in a ﬁt state to receive the divine grace, your way and hers have become one and the same.
The Mother: That is a formidable question! You have heard and read that we are made up of various states of being: physical, vital, mental, psychic, spiritual, etc. Well, all these inner states of being correspond to invisible worlds. There is a physical world, a vital world, a mental world, a psychic world, and many spiritual worlds, a whole range of more and more subtle worlds approaching nearer and nearer to the Supreme. So, since you carry within yourself a corresponding range, by studying and becoming aware of your inner being you gradually make yourself capable of becoming aware also of these invisible worlds.
The Mother: For example, the mind: if the mind is conscious, coordinated, well controlled, it can move about it in the mental world just as the body does in the physical world and see what this mental world is like, what is going on there, what are its characteristics and so on. These things are not invisible in themselves — they are invisible to the physical consciousness and the physical senses, but not to the corresponding inner states of consciousness or the corresponding inner senses. For, by a systematic development one can acquire senses in these worlds and one can then live a similar life with different characteristics. I mean that one can live an objective life in these worlds if one is sufﬁciently developed oneself. Otherwise, they wouldn’t exist for us.
The Mother: If we did not carry in ourselves something corresponding to all that exists in the universe, this universe wouldn’t exist for us. And it is only a matter of systematic and methodical development. Some people have it spontaneously for various reasons, usually as a result of a long preparation in previous lives, sometimes because of specially favourable circumstances — they are born in a certain environment, of parents who had developed these faculties, and they were helped to develop them from childhood. Other people have to acquire them systematically by inner discipline; it takes time, a long time, but after all it doesn’t take much longer than for the brain of a child to grasp abstract mathematics. That takes years.
The Mother: They form part of the universe, of course. Yes, one can say that they exist in a ﬁxed place. But to understand that, to understand these things requires a mind capable of understanding that there are other dimensions than the purely material dimensions. For when you are told that your psychic being is in your body, that doesn’t mean that if you open up your body you will ﬁnd your psychic being inside. You will ﬁnd your heart, your stomach and the rest, but not your psychic being.
The Mother: And yet it is correct to say that it is within you. It extends beyond you too, but it is in another dimension. And one can say that there are as many dimensions as there are different worlds. Certainly all these invisible worlds — so-called invisible worlds — are contained, so to say, in the material universe. But they don’t occupy the place of other things.
The Mother: To make an imperfect comparison — it is valid only as a comparison — you can hold countless ideas in your brain and you certainly don’t have the feeling that you have to drive one out so that another one can come in, do you? They don’t occupy any space in that sense. They are innumerable and vary with the person and the circumstances. But, ultimately, they can be reduced to what he said in the beginning or a little further on, I forget... Here: “faith, sincerity and surrender”.
The Mother: These are the required conditions. And afterwards, he describes what kind of faith, what kind of sincerity and what kind of surrender. These are the required conditions so that her victory may be won over the hostile forces — the conditions on your side. Her conditions — I suppose she fulﬁls them spontaneously — are to respond to the aspiration, to have power, clearsightedness, knowledge and will. That is obvious.
The Mother: So, one has to give her a ﬁeld for her work and conditions under which she may work. And these conditions are: faith, sincerity and surrender — a pure, unmixed faith, a perfect, integral sincerity and an unconditional surrender. This is what he has described for you. Limited? Or unlimited?
The Mother: What are you asking? How many dimensions? Ah, should we ask the mathematicians or the occultists? The occultist!
The Mother: Well, in a certain way the number is limited, but since in each dimension there is another limited number of subdivisions and since in these subdivisions there is again a considerable number of subdivisions, we can say that it is unlimited — and yet limited. So, if you understand anything, you are lucky! Twelve. He has described it very well: “tainted by ambition”, etc. I ﬁnd that if you put it differently, it is much more true.
The Mother: Is there any faith which doesn’t have a little of all that? For it is said, it has been repeated that faith, if it is pure, is capable of... nothing can resist it. This means that if one were to have an absolutely pure faith, untainted by all these things, a true faith, let’s say true faith, well, nothing would be impossible. One could be transformed overnight, one could bring down the Supermind in a moment, one could... do anything, one could do anything if one had faith.
The Mother: But it must be a pure faith, it should not be mixed with any personal reactions or any personal will. A pure faith is something all-powerful and irresistible. One doesn’t often ﬁnd a faith that is all-powerful and irresistible, and this shows that it is not quite pure. The question should be put like this: each one of us has a faith, for example, a faith in something, say a faith in the divine Presence within us. If our faith were pure, we would at once be aware of this divine Presence within us.
The Mother: This example is very easy to understand. You have faith, it is there, but you don’t have the experience. Why? Because the faith is not pure.
The Mother: If the faith were quite pure, immediately, the thing would be done. This is very true. So, when you become aware that the thing is not realised at once, you can begin to look: “But why isn’t it realised? What is there in my faith?” And if you go on looking with the same sincerity, you will ﬁnd that there are many little things in it, so many little things — not big, as big as this — which are repulsive.
The Mother: Little things. So many times a little conceit comes in, and then a desire, not a very violent one — it doesn’t show itself very much. The importance it gives you, the power it will give you and the satisfaction it will give you... We have to agree on what dreams are! There are dreams where you see things so precisely, so concretely that the material world seems rather unreal in comparison.
The Mother: There are dreams like that where things are so intense, so precise, so concrete, so objective and leave you with such a vivid impression that the material world seems rather misty, not very clear, not very distinct. So, if it is a dream like that, yes. But if it is a dream where things clash incoherently, inconsistently with one another, no. The ﬁrst step: you must be able to discern the various inner states of being and know for sure: this belongs to the vital, this belongs to the mind, this belongs to the psychic, this belongs to matter. And as I said earlier, there are subdegrees in all that.
The Mother: There is a material vital, a vital vital, a mental vital, a vital under the psychic inﬂuence. You must be able to classify things very clearly and not allow any mixtures, any vague confusions in yourself: “Oh, where does this movement come from? What is it?” — indistinct impressions. That is the ﬁrst step. Second step: you learn to concentrate in one of these inner states.
The Mother: You choose the one which you feel to be the most alive, the most developed in yourself and you learn to concentrate there. And then you do the same exercises... I wonder whether you remember the exercises you used to do when you were very young in order to walk, to drink, to talk, to hear, to feel. You used to do many exercises. All children do exercises without knowing it, but they do them.
The Mother: So you have to do something on the same lines. You must build up senses and develop them, make them conscious, independent and precise in their perceptions. That is the second stage. It may take time, it may come quickly, it depends on the degree of development of your inner being. After that — this is only a beginning — after that, you must learn to isolate yourself from all the other parts of the being, to concentrate on the one where you want to have the experience and concentrate in such a way that you come into contact with the corresponding outer world.
The Mother: I don’t mean that it is an exteriorisation that leaves your body in a state of coma. No, a very intense concentration is enough, a power to isolate yourself from everything except the place where you are concentrating. And then you come into contact with the corresponding world. You must want that and little by little you learn how to do it.
The Mother: And there you have the exercise required to improve the senses you have gradually developed and give them a ﬁeld of action. At ﬁrst, you may be rather lost in this outer world, you won’t feel quite at ease. But little by little you will get used to it and start moving about there in the way that is appropriate to each of these worlds. But if you know beforehand what they are like — the mind is such a magniﬁcent instrument of formation that it can build up a whole experience for you, and unfortunately, it will never be the genuine experience — it will be merely a mental construction.
The Mother: So, normally, when you want to instruct someone about these occult matters, you never tell him what is going to happen, in the beginning. The only thing is that if something happens to him, if he says, “This is what happened to me,” you tell him, “Yes, this is correct” or “No, that is not correct.” You can help him. But you don’t tell him beforehand, “You will go to such and such a place. It will be like that.
The Mother: You will have such and such an experience,” etc., for then all these things may happen only because of a well-built mental construction in which you move about with ease. In that case it is really a dream! There too it depends on the case. It may occur; it is not always like that, but it may occur. It may happen that the divine grace is given to someone without his knowing anything about it.
The Mother: This even happens more often than one thinks. It depends on the emotion and it also depends on what you call an emotion. For example, there is a state where, if you ﬁnd yourself in the presence of a very precise, very clear psychic movement, a distinctly psychic movement — this happens quite often — the emotion is so powerful that tears come to your eyes. You are not sad, you are not happy, neither one nor the other; it doesn’t correspond to any particular feeling, but it is an intensity of emotion which comes from something that is clearly, precisely psychic. It may be in yourself, but it is even more often in someone else.
The Mother: When you are in contact with an act, a movement, a manifestation which belongs to the psychic, then, all of a sudden, the eyes are ﬁlled with tears. If you call that an emotion... obviously it is an emotion. But usually, it comes from one thing: the physical being has a not very conscious but very intense longing for a contact with the psychic life. It feels poor, destitute, isolated and abandoned when it is not in contact with the psychic being. Not one physical being in a million is aware of this.
The Mother: But this kind of impression of being lost, left hanging, without protection, without support, of lacking something and not knowing what it is, something you don’t understand but which you lack, an emptiness somewhere: well, this comes more often than one thinks — people have no idea what it is. But then, when for some reason or other this consciousness suddenly comes into contact with a clearly psychic phenomenon, with psychic forces, psychic vibrations, the feeling is so strong, so strong that certainly, most often, the body can hardly hold it. It is like a joy that is too great, that overﬂows on all sides, that you can’t contain, can’t hold in yourself. It is like that. There is suddenly a sort of revelation, not very conscious, not clearly expressed, the revelation of...
The Mother: this is it, this is what I must have. And it is so powerful, so powerful that it gives you an emotion, which is made up of so many things that you can hardly say what it is. These are emotions that are not vital. Vital emotions are of an altogether different nature — they are very clear, very precise, you can express them very distinctly; they are violent, they usually ﬁll you with an intensity, a restlessness, sometimes a great satisfaction. And then the opposite comes with the same force.
The Mother: And so people, many people think — we have mentioned this several times already — some people imagine they experience love only when it is like that, when love is in the vital, when it comes with all the movements of the vital, all this intensity, this violence, this precision, this glamour, this brightness. And when that is absent they say, “Oh, this is not love.” And yet that is exactly how love gets distorted: already it is no longer love, it is beginning to be passion. And this is an almost universal error among human beings. Some people are full of a very pure, very high, very selﬂess psychic love and yet they know nothing about it and think they are cold, dry and without love because this admixture of vital vibration is absent.
The Mother: For them love begins and ends with this vibration. And as it is something highly unstable which has movements and reactions and violences of all kinds, in depression as in satisfaction, love is something very ephemeral for these people: they have minutes of love in their lives. It may last a few hours and then it becomes dull and ﬂat again and they imagine that love has deserted them. As I said, some people are quite beyond that, they have been able to control it in such a way that it does not get mixed up with anything else; they have in themselves this psychic love which is full of self-forgetfulness, of self-giving, compassion, generosity, nobility of life, and is a great power of identiﬁcation. So most of these people think they are cold or indifferent — they are very nice people, you see, but they do not love — and sometimes they themselves do not know.
The Mother: I have known people who thought they had no love because they didn’t have this vital vibration. Usually, when people speak of emotions, they are speaking of vital emotions. But there is another kind of emotion which is of an inﬁnitely higher order and doesn’t express itself in the same way, which has just as much intensity, but an intensity that is under control, contained, condensed, concentrated, and is an extraordinary dynamic power. True love can achieve extraordinary things, but it is rare. All kinds of miracles can be done out of love for the person one loves — not for everyone, but for the people or the person one loves.
The Mother: But it has to be a love free from all vital mixture, an absolutely pure and selﬂess love which demands nothing in return, which expects nothing in return. In order to remember something, you must ﬁrst of all be conscious of it. It is almost an experience — more than a dream. There are places one goes to periodically in dreams. One can continue with the same dream, sometimes after a lapse of several months.
The Mother: There are also dreams of warning, which often repeat the same thing so as to compel you to concentrate your attention on it. What is a person? When you are in a body you always see the body and think it is the person. But in this body there is now the whole being, now part of the being, with the rest somewhere else. Sometimes it is one activity of the being that comes forward, sometimes another.
The Mother: Because you have a body which you continue to see, you think that the being you see is always the same, but that is not true. The centre of the being, the psychic being, rarely takes on the appearance of the manifested being. The psychic being has passed through innumerable bodies and even if it did keep an imprint of all these bodies, the result would be unrecognisable, wouldn’t it? Most often it is a thought of the person who has gone which assumes a form, either in your atmosphere or in your own thought. So a sort of emanation comes.
The Mother: It is there, and depending on your own condition you see it more or less clearly. But the form you give it is your own creation; it conforms to this person’s physical form as you know it. I don’t say this is an absolute rule, but nine times out of ten it is like that. And I can give you a very clear example of this. When you see someone you did not see at the time of his death, you don’t see the form he had at that time but the form he had the last time you saw him.
The Mother: Therefore you give the form yourself. I don’t say this is something absolute. It may happen differently, but that is so rare that it is better not to speak of it. Only one person in a million can be objective enough not to add anything to his vision. So it is better not to speak about it, except as an ideal to aspire for.
The Mother: In everything you see, in sleep as well as in visions in the waking state, there are always a considerable number of subjective details. If you do not see the person as he was when you saw him last, the difference always comes from your own thought. If you think that the person must be older, you will see him looking older; if you think that he must look ill, you will see him looking ill, and so on. An absolutely objective vision, which conforms wholly to the reality, is very rare. The dream you mentioned simply means that you have kept a tender, affectionate relationship with her, and so one part of her being has remained close to you and for some reason you became aware of it in your dream.
The Mother: This comes from the subconscious. As I told you, I have studied this subject of dreams in great depth. Unless you concentrate in a very special way you always dream of things you have experienced or felt or been aware of some time before; but you don’t dream of the things that belong to your present life. You may think of them, you may remember them, but you don’t dream of them. Except in a few very rare instances, a dream is the awakening of something recorded in the subconscious.
The Mother: This recording is made gradually; some kind of assimilation is needed before the thing can manifest of itself, and this assimilation may take time. You dream of things — and people — that you knew a very long time ago; when a v
The Mother: ery long time has elapsed, it is usually for some special reason. Some things come back at regular intervals and you have a kind of cycle of movements in your dream. If you can ﬁnd a point at which things that are present have struck you at a previous time in your life, then you can see them both at the same time. Very few dreams have a meaning, an instructive value, but all dreams can show you what your present state of consciousness is and how things are combined in the subconscious, what the terrestrial inﬂuences are, what traces they leave and how they are combined. This is a very interesting subject of study.
The Mother: Not always. I have known many people who were far more active in their dreams than in their waking life and who would do things which they would have been incapable of doing in their waking life. For example, I have known people who used to be petriﬁed with fear in their waking life but would express indomitable courage and accomplish truly heroic deeds in their dreams. Sometimes too, if you dream of something unpleasant, instead of having a reaction, you say, “All this is only a dream, it is not true, it is impossible,” etc., and in this way the dream assumes another form.
The Mother: Of course, you must be aware that you are dreaming for this to happen. It is a tremendous ﬁeld of observation — there is no end to the discoveries you can make in your dreams. But there is one important point: you must not go to sleep when you are very tired, for if you do, you fall into a sort of unconsciousness in which dreams do whatever they like with you, and you have no reaction. Just as I said that you should not eat without having taken rest, I would advise everyone to rest before going to sleep. And for that, you must know how to rest.
The Mother: Now I will tell you a very recent dream of mine which I had just a few days ago. It wasn’t exactly a dream, it was very conscious. (I am not one of those people who dream of things that occurred a very long time ago; I know what to do to avoid that.) I went to a place in the vital world where I knew that many of our boys go to rest — at least, in their physical sleep, they look as if they are resting. But since they don’t really know how to rest, instead of accumulating energy, they lose it.
The Mother: Some of them lose a tremendous amount of energy: instead of recovering their energy, they waste it. So I went there and saw many rows in which there were things that looked like beds but weren’t really beds. I walked about in the room and saw them resting, trying to rest, but since they didn’t know how to do it, they couldn’t. They were all more or less sprawled out, their eyes were open — they weren’t asleep, it wasn’t sleep, it was a state of rest; the vital wasn’t active but in a state of semi-awareness. I got them to understand that I could show them how to rest in such a way as to recover their energy instead of wasting it.
The Mother: And would you believe it, only one of them was willing to learn! The others said, “No, we are quite all right as we are, we don’t want to learn anything else!” There are many different places, many. It may be in the subtle physical, for all of you live in my physical atmosphere and so it is in the subtle physical that you see me most often. And there you feel that what you see is almost material, but with a slight distortion.
The Mother: Because it is the subtle physical, you can quite easily remember what you have seen. Very often, in the middle of the night, I take care of you (I don’t want to boast about it!) and I remember many things that are of some importance — I don’t remember everything because it is not worth burdening the memory with a lot of useless things. And I have noticed that several of you are able to remember, but the thing takes place in your consciousness with a slight distortion — it wasn’t exactly the same. Some people can see me vitally, some people can see me psychically (this is quite rare), some people can see me mentally and some people can see me in the subconscious and, in certain conditions, in the unconscious; but that is rare. Others may have a revelation about me and see me as I am, but not many can do that.
The Mother: There are many methods, but I will give you one. First, your body must be comfortable, on a bed, in an easy-chair — anywhere so long as it is comfortable. Then you learn how to relax your nerves one after the other, until you achieve complete relaxation. You should relax all your nerves — you can relax them all together, but perhaps it is easier to relax them one after the other, and this becomes very interesting. And when that is done, you must make your brain quiet and silent and at the same time keep your body like a rag on the bed.
The Mother: You must make the brain so still and absolutely quiet that it is not aware of itself. And then, don’t to sleep, but pass very gently from this state into sleep without being aware of it. When you wake up the next morning you will be full of energy. But if you go to bed very tired and without even trying to relax, to calm down, you will fall into a heavy, dull and unconscious sleep and the vital will lose all its energy. Perhaps this won’t have any immediate effect, but it is better to try it than to plunge into sleep when you are very tired.
The Mother: If you relax very gently before going to sleep, you will feel great pleasure in going to sleep. If you manage to relax the nerves, even of only one arm or leg, you will see how pleasant it is. If you go to sleep with your nerves tense, you will have a very restless sleep and change position very often during the night. That kind of rest is no good.
The Mother: No, not necessarily. There is no rule. If you think it is like that, it will be like that! Yes, this can be done and it means that you are partially conscious of your night activities. It sometimes happens that when you go out of your body, when you exteriorise yourself during sleep and are conscious in the vital world, you can live a vital life that is just as conscious as the physical life.
The Mother: I have known people — not many have this capacity of going out of their body — but I have known people who had such a strong interest in their experiences in the vital world that in the end they refused to return to their body, they went on sleeping almost indeﬁnitely. If you are conscious and self-controlled in the vital world and have a certain power there, the things that happen are wonderful, inﬁnitely more varied and magniﬁcent than in the physical world. It is true that some regions in the vital world are wonderful. Now I will tell you how this happens. When you are very tired and in need of rest and if you know how to exteriorise yourself, if you go out of your body and enter consciously into the vital world, there are regions there, in the vital world, which are like a marvellous virgin forest, with all the splendour of a rich and harmonious vegetation, and beautiful, mirror-like pools.
The Mother: And the atmosphere is ﬁlled with the living vitality of plants, with every shade of green reﬂected in the water... And there you feel so much life, so much beauty, so much richness and plenitude that you wake up full of energy. And all this is so objective! I have been able to take people there, without telling them anything at all about how it would be, and they were able to describe the place exactly as I can myself, and they had exactly the same experience. They were absolutely exhausted before going to sleep and they woke up with an absolutely marvellous feeling of plenitude, of force and energy.
The Mother: They had stayed there only a few minutes. There are regions like that — not many, but they exist. On the other hand, there are many unpleasant places in the vital world and it is better not to go there. Leaving aside those who are so attached, so rivetted to their bodies that they don’t even want to leave them, those who can easily learn to go out of their bodies ought to do so with great care. I haven’t been able to teach this to many people, for that would mean exposing them, sometimes without protection — when they do it alone, without my presence — to experiences which can be extremely harmful to them.
The Mother: The vital world is a world of extremes. If, for example, you eat a bunch of grapes in the vital world, you can go for thirtysix hours without feeling hungry — fully nourished. But you can meet with certain things, enter certain places that drain all your energy in a trice, and sometimes leave you with illnesses and after-effects that belong to the vital world. I used to know a woman who was absolutely wonderful from the occult point of view. She was absolutely conscious of herself, of all the regions of her being; she could go from one region to another — in short, she was marvellous.
The Mother: Well, she had an accident in the vital world. She was ﬁghting some beings from the vital world in order to save someone whom she was very fond of, and she got a blow on the eye. And when I met her, she had lost an eye. Many people have these accidents in the vital world, and they keep traces of these accidents for hours after they wake up. That is why you can’t tell just anyone, “Learn to go out of your body”, for there are many requirements before you can do it safely.
The Mother: If you have any afﬁnities with the forces of falsehood and violence, it is better to stay in your physical body. THE STEPS OF THE SOUL The human individual is a very complex being: he is composed of innumerable elements, each one of which is an independent entity and has almost a personality. Not only so, the most contradictory elements are housed together. If there is a particular quality or capacity present, the very opposite of it, annulling it, as it were, will also be found along with it and embracing it.
The Mother: I have seen a man brave, courageous, heroic to the extreme, ﬂinching from no danger, facing unperturbed the utmost peril, truly the bravest of the brave; and yet I have seen the same man cowering in abject terror, like the last of poltroons, in the presence of certain circumstances. I have seen a most generous man giving things away largely, freely, not counting any expenditure or sacriﬁce, without the least care or reservation; the same person I have also found to be the vilest of misers with respect to certain other considerations. Again, I have seen the most intelligent person, with a clear mind, full of light and understanding, easily comprehending the logic and implication of a topic; and yet I have seen him betraying the utmost stupidity of which even an ordinary man without education or intelligence would be incapable. These are not theoretical examples: I have come across such persons actually in life.
The Mother: The complexity arises not only in extension but also in depth. Man does not live on a single plane but on many planes at the same time. There is a scale of gradation in human consciousness: the higher one rises in the scale the greater the number of elements or personalities that one possesses. Whether one lives mostly or mainly on the physical or vital or mental plane or on any particular section of these planes or on the planes above and beyond them, there will be, accordingly, differences in the constitution or psycho-physical make-up of the individual personality.
The Mother: The higher one stands, the richer the personality, because it lives not only on its own normal level but also on all the levels that are below it and which it has transcended. The complete or integral man, some occultists say, possesses three hundred and sixty-ﬁve personalities; indeed it may be much more. The Vedas speak of the three and thirty-three and thirty-three hundred and thirty-three thousand gods that may be housed in the human vehicle — the basic three being evidently the triple status or world of Body, Life and Mind. What is the meaning of this self-contradiction, this division in man? To understand that, we must know and remember that each person represents a certain quality or capacity, a particular achievement to be embodied.
The Mother: How best can it be done? What is the way by which one can acquire a quality at its purest, highest and most perfect? It is by setting an opposition to it. That is how a power is increased and strengthened — by ﬁghting against and overcoming all that weakens and contradicts it. The deﬁciencies with respect to a particular quality show you where you have to mend and reinforce it and in what way to improve it in order to make it perfectly perfect.
The Mother: It is the hammer that beats the weak and soft iron to transform it into hard steel. The preliminary discord is useful and needs to be utilised for a higher harmony. This is the secret of self-conﬂict in man. You are weakest precisely in that element which is destined to be your greatest asset. Each man has then a mission to fulﬁl, a role to play in the universe, a part he has been given to learn and take up in the cosmic Purpose, a part which he alone is capable of executing and none other.
The Mother: This he has to learn and acquire through life-experiences, that is to say, not in one life but in life after life. In fact, that is the meaning of the chain of lives that the individual has to pass through, namely, to acquire experiences and to gather from them the thread — the skein of qualities and attributes, powers and capacities — for the pattern of life he has to weave. Now, the inmost being, the true personality, the central consciousness of the evolving individual is his psychic being. It is, as it were, a very tiny spark of light lying in normal people far behind the life-experiences. In grown-up souls this psychic consciousness has an increased light — increased in intensity, volume and richness.
The Mother: Thus there are old souls and new souls. Old and ancient are those that have reached or are about to reach the fullness of perfection; they have passed through a long history of innumerable lives and developed the most complex and yet the most integrated personality. New souls are those that have just emerged or are now emerging out of the mere physico-vital existence; they are like simple organisms, made of fewer constituents related mostly to the bodily life, with just a modicum of the mental. It is the soul, however, that grows with experiences and it is the soul that builds and enriches the personality. Whatever portion of the outer life, whatever element in the mind or vital or body succeeds in coming into contact with the psychic consciousness — that is to say, is able to come under its inﬂuence — is taken up and lodged there: it remains in the psychic being as its living memory and permanent possession.
The Mother: It is such elements that form the basis, the groundwork upon which the structure of the integral and true personality is raised. The ﬁrst thing to do then is to ﬁnd out what it is that you are meant to realise, what is the role you have to play, your particular mission, and the capacity or quality you have to express. You have to discover that and also the thing or things that oppose and do not allow it to ﬂower or come to full manifestation. In other words, you have to know yourself, recognise your soul or psychic being. For that you must be absolutely sincere and impartial.
The Mother: You must observe yourself as if you were observing and criticising a third person. You must not start with an idea that this is your life’s mission, this is your particular capacity, this you are to do or that you are to do, in this lies your talent or genius, etc. That will carry you away from the right track. It is not the liking or disliking of your external being, your mental or vital or physical choice that determines the true line of your growth. Nor should you take up the opposite attitude and say, “I am good for nothing in this matter, I am useless in that one; it is not for me.”
The Mother: Neither vanity and arrogance nor self-depreciation and false modesty should move you. As I said, you must be absolutely impartial and unconcerned. You should be like a mirror that reﬂects the truth and does not judge. If you are able to keep such an attitude, if you have this repose and quiet trust in your being and wait for what may be revealed to you, then something like this happens: you are, as it were, in a wood, dark and noiseless; you see in front of you merely a sheet of water, dark and still, hardly visible — a bit of a pond imbedded in the obscurity; and slowly upon it a moonbeam is cast and in the cool dim light emerges the calm liquid surface. That is how your secret truth of being will appear and present itself to you at your ﬁrst contact with it: there you will see gradually reﬂected the true qualities of your being, the traits of your divine personality, what you really are and what you are meant to be.
The Mother: One who has thus known himself and possessed himself. conquering all opposition within himself, has by that very fact extended himself and his conquest, making it easier for others to make the same or a similar conquest.
The Mother: These are the pioneers or the elite who by a victorious campaign within themselves help others towards their victory. The problem is not as simple as all that. The causes of suffering are innumerable and its quality also varies a great deal, although the origin of suffering is one and the same and comes from the initial action of an anti-divine will. To make this easier to understand, one can divide suffering into two distinct categories, although in practice they are very often mixed. The ﬁrst is purely egoistic and comes from a feeling that one’s rights have been violated, that one has been deprived of one’s needs, offended, despoiled, betrayed, injured, etc.
The Mother: This whole category of suffering is clearly the result of hostile action and it not only opens the door in the consciousness to the inﬂuence of the adversary but is also one of his most powerful ways of acting in the world, the most powerful of all if in addition there comes its natural and spontaneous consequence: hatred and the desire for revenge in the strong, despair and the wish to die in the weak. The other category of suffering, whose initial is the pain of separation created by the adversary, is totally opposite in nature: it is the suffering that comes from divine compassion, the suffering of love that feels compassion for the world’s misery, whatever its origin, cause or effect. But this suffering, which is of a purely psychic character, contains no egoism, no self-pity; it is full of peace and strength and power of action, of faith in the future and the will for victory; it does not pity but consoles, it does not identify itself with the ignorant movement in others but cures and illumines it. It is obvious that in the purity of its essence, only that which is can feel that suffering; but partially, momentarily, like ﬂashes of lightning behind the dark clouds of egoism, it appears in all who have a vast and generous heart. However, most often, in the individual consciousness it is mixed with that mean and petty self-pity which is the cause of depression and weakness.
The Mother: Nevertheless, when one is vigilant enough to refuse this mixture or at least to reduce it to a minimum, one soon realises that this divine compassion is based on a sublime and eternal joy which alone has the strength and the power to deliver the world from its ignorance and misery. And this suffering too will disappear from the universe only with the total disappearance of the adversary and all the effects of his action. MEMORY OF PAST LIVES If one were to say things truly, one would have to say everything, in full detail. For among the innumerable experiences that I have had in the course of eighty years, many were of such a variety and apparently so contradictory that one might say: after all, everything is possible.
The Mother: So then, if I tell you something about past lives without presenting the thread running through everything, that would be opening the door to dogmatism. You will say one day, “Mother has said this, Mother has said that.” And that is how dogmas, alas, are made. Given then the multitude of experiences and the impossibility that I should pass my life in talking and writing, you must tell yourself that everything is possible and not be dogmatic. I may, however, give a few general indications.
The Mother: Only when one is consciously identiﬁed with one’s divine origin, can one in truth speak of a memory of past lives. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the progressive manifestation of the Spirit in the forms in which it dwells. When one reaches the summit of this manifestation, one has a vision that plunges down upon the way traversed and one remembers. But this memory is not a thing of the mental kind. Those who claim to have been such a baron of the Middle Ages or such a person who lived at such a place and such a time, are fanciful, they are simply victims of their own mental imagination.
The Mother: In fact, what remains of past lives are not beautiful pictures in which you appear as a mighty lord in a castle or a victorious general at the head of an army — that is only romance. What remains is the memory of those instants when the psychic being emerged from the depths of your being and revealed itself to you — that is to say, the memory of those instants when you were wholly conscious . That growth of consciousness is progressively effectuated in the course of evolution, and the memory of past lives is generally limited to the critical moments of evolution, to the decisive turns that marked the progress of your consciousness. At the time when you live such moments of your life, you do not care at all about remembering that you were Mr. X, such a person, living at such a place and in such an epoch; it is not the memory of your civic status that remains.
The Mother: On the contrary, you lose all consciousness of these petty external things, accessories and perishables, so that you may be wholly in the ﬂare of the soul revelation or of the divine contact. When you remember such instants of your past lives, the memory is so intense that it seems to be still very close, still living, and much more living than most of the ordinary memories of our present life. At times, in dreams, when you come into contact with certain planes of consciousness, you may have memories of such intensity, such vibrant colour, so to say, even more intense than the colours and things of the physical world. For these are the moments of true consciousness, and everything then puts on an extraordinary brilliance, everything is vibrant, everything is imbued with a quality that escapes the ordinary eye. These minutes of contact with the soul are often those that mark a decisive turn of our life, a forward step, a progress in consciousness, and that frequently corresponds with a crisis, an extremely intense situation when there comes a call in the whole being, a call so strong that the inner consciousness pierces the layers of unconsciousness covering it and is revealed all luminous on the surface.
The Mother: This call of the being, when very strong, can also bring about the descent of a divine emanation, an individuality, a divine aspect which joins with your individuality at a given moment in order to do a given work, win a battle, express one thing or another. The work done, the emanation very often withdraws. Then one may retain the memory of the circumstances that were around those minutes of revelation or inspiration: one sees again the scenery, the colour of the dress that one had put on, the colour of one’s own skin, the things about you at that time — all that is ﬁxed indelibly with an extraordinary intensity, because the things of the ordinary life revealed themselves then in their true intensity and their true colour. The consciousness that reveals itself in you , reveals at the same time the consciousness that is in things.
The Mother: At times, with the help of these details you may reconstitute the age in which you lived or the action that you did, ﬁnd out the country where you were; but it is very easy also to make a romance and take imagination for reality. Yet you must not believe that all memories of past lives are those of moments of great crisis, of important mission or of revelation. Some times they are moments very simple, transparent, when an integral, a perfect harmony of the being was expressed. And that may correspond to altogether insigniﬁcant external situations. Apart from the things that were in your immediate surrounding at that moment, apart from that moment of contact with your psychic being, nothing remains.
The Mother: Once the privileged moment passes, the psychic being plunges into an inner somnolence and the whole outer life melts into a grey monotony which does not leave any trace. Besides, it is almost the same phenomenon as what happens in the course of the life that you lead at present: apart from those exceptional moments when you are at the summit of your being, mental or vital or even physical, the rest of your life seems to melt into a kind of neutral colour which has no great interest, when it matters little whether you were at such a place instead of being at another, whether you did this thing or that. If you try to look at your life all at once, in order to gather, as it were, its essence, the twenty or thirty or forty years behind you, you will see rise up spontaneously two or three images which were the true moments of your life; the rest is effaced. A kind of spontaneous choice works in your consciousness and there is a tremendous elimination. This will give you a little idea of what happens in regard to past lives: the choice of a few select moments and an immense elimination.
The Mother: It is very true that the earliest lives are very rudimentary; very few things subsist out of that, scattered memories few and far between. But the more one progresses in consciousness, the more the psychic being is consciously associated with the outer activities; the memories grow in number and become more coherent and precise. But still, here also, the memory that remains is that of the contact with the soul and at times that of things which were associated with the psychic revelation — not the civic status or the changing scenes around. And this will explain to you why the so-called memories of past animal lives are the most fantastic: the divine spark in them is buried much too deep down to be able to come up consciously to the surface and be associated with the outer life. One must become a wholly conscious being, conscious in all its parts, totally united with one’s divine origin before one can truly say that one remembers his past lives.
The Mother: INNER REALISATION IS THE KEY TO OUTER REALISATION When the adverse forces want to attack those who are around me and when they do not succeed in making them openly hostile to Sri Aurobindo’s work or in turning them against me personally, they proceed in the matter always in the same way, with the same argument: “You may have all the inner realisations you like,” they say, “the most beautiful experiences possible within the four walls of the Ashram, but on the outer plane your life is spoiled, wasted. There is an abyss that you will never ﬁll between the inner experience and the concrete realisation in the world.” This is the number one argument of the adverse forces. I know it.
The Mother: For millions of years I have heard the same thing repeated and each time I have unmasked it. It is a falsehood — it is falsehood. Everything that tends to establish a divorce between earth and the Spirit, is good for them, everything that separates the inner experience from the divine realisation in the world. But it is the contrary that is true: it is the inner realisation that is the key to the outer realisation. How can you expect to know the true thing which you have to realise in the world so long as you do not possess the truth of your being?
The Mother: THE ANTI -DIVINE I have noticed one thing, that in at least ninety-nine cases out of a hundred this [attack by adverse forces] is an excuse which people give to themselves. I have seen that practically almost all who write to me: “I am violently attacked by adverse forces”, give this as an excuse. It is because there are many things in their nature which do not want to surrender, so they put all the blame on the adverse forces.
The Mother: In reality I am turning more and more towards something where the role of the adverse forces will be reduced to that of an examiner; that is to say, they are there to test the sincerity of your spiritual seeking. These things have their reality in the action and for the work — and it is a great reality — but when you have gone beyond a certain region, all that reaches a point where it is no longer so distinct and clearcut. In the occult world, or rather, if you look at the world from the occult point of view, these adverse forces are very real, their action is very real, completely concrete, and their attitude towards the divine realisation is positively hostile. But as soon as you pass beyond this domain and enter into the spiritual world where there is nothing other than the Divine, who is everything, and where there is nothing that is not divine, these “adverse forces” become a part of the total play and they can no longer be called adverse forces. It is only a posture that they have taken; to speak more exactly, it is only a posture that the Divine has taken in his play.
The Mother: This also forms part of the dualities of which Sri Aurobindo speaks in, the dualities that are reabsorbed. I do not know if he has spoken of this particular one — I do not think so — but it is the same thing; it is just a way of seeing. He has spoken of the dualities Personal-Impersonal, Ishwara-Shakti, Purusha-Prakriti. There is one more: the Divine and the Anti-Divine. EATING THE FRUIT
The Mother: A peach should ripen on the tree; it is a fruit that is to be plucked when the sun is there upon it. At the time when the sun falls upon it, you come, pluck it and bite into it. Then it is absolutely heavenly! There are two fruits like this: the peach and the golden greengage.
The Mother: It is the same for both: you must take them warm from the tree, bite them, and you are ﬁlled with an Edenic taste. Each fruit should be eaten in a special way. Fundamentally, this is the symbol of earthly Paradise and of the tree of Knowledge: in eating of the fruit of Knowledge, you lose your spontaneity of movement and you begin to objectify, to learn, to discuss; thus, when they had eaten of the fruit they became full of sin. I say each fruit should be eaten in its own way.
The Mother: A being living according to its own nature, its own truth, should spontaneously discover its own way of using things. When you live according to the truth of your being, you have no need to learn things, you do them spontaneously, according to the inner law. When you follow your nature spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine. As soon as you think, see yourself doing and begin to discuss, you are full of sin. It is man’s mental consciousness that has ﬁlled all Nature with the idea of sin and all the misery which it brings!
The Mother: Animals are not unhappy in the way we are, not at all, not at all, except, as Sri Aurobindo says, those that have been corrupted. The corrupted ones are those that live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt. It is because their whole aspiration is to become like man — man is god — and then, dissimulation, falsehood. Dogs do lie.
The Mother: Men admire that; they say, “Oh! How intelligent they are!” They have lost their divinity. The human species, in the spiral ascent, is truly at a point which is not pretty. To be conscious is not the point.
The Mother: Man is more evolved than the tiger, there is not the shadow of a doubt, but the tiger is more divine than man. You must not confuse things: the two things are quite different. You see, the Divine is everywhere, in everything. You should never forget that, not for a second should you forget it. He is everywhere, in everything; and unconsciously, but spontaneously and therefore sincerely, everything that is below the mental manifestation is divine without mixture, that is to say, spontaneously, by its very nature.
The Mother: It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally he is much more conscious! That is not to be disputed, it is well understood, because what we call consciousness (what “we” call, that is to say, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and mentalise things. It is not the true consciousness, but it is what men call consciousness. So in this human way, it is understood that man is much more conscious than the animal.
The Mother: But with man comes sin and perversion, which do not exist outside the state that we call “conscious”, but which is not truly conscious, which simply consists in mentalising things, in having the capacity to objectify them. It is a curve of ascent, but that curve moves away from the Divine, and one must rise much higher to ﬁnd again, naturally, a higher Divine, for it is a conscious Divine, whereas the others are divine without being conscious, spontaneously and instinctively. And our whole moral notion of good and bad, we have thrown all that upon the creation with our deformed and perverted consciousness. It is we who have invented it. We are the deforming intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the gods.
The Mother: DO NOT WASTE ENERGY Human beings do not know how to preserve energy. When something happens, an accident or an illness, they ask for help and a double or triple dose of energy is administered. They feel that they are receptive and they receive it. This energy is given for two reasons: to repair the disorder caused by the accident or illness, and to give a power for transformation in order to mend, to change what was the true cause of the illness or accident.