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The Mother: Instead of utilising energy in that way, immediately, immediately they throw it out. They begin to move about, they begin to be active, they begin to work, they begin to speak, they begin... they feel themselves full of energy and throw everything out! They can keep nothing.
The Mother: Then naturally, since the energy was not meant to be wasted like that, but for an inner use, they fall quite ﬂat. And this is universal. They do not know, they do not know how to make this movement: to go within, to utilise the energy — not to keep it, it cannot be kept — to utilise it to mend the damage done to the body and to go deep down to ﬁnd out the reason for the accident or the malady, and there, to change that into an aspiration, an inner transformation. Instead of this, people begin immediately to chatter, to move about, to act, to do this, to do that! Indeed, the great majority of human beings feel that they are alive only when they waste energy; otherwise it does not look like life.
The Mother: Not to waste energy means to utilise it for the purposes for which it was given. If the energy is given for transformation, for the sublimation of the being, it must be used for that; if the energy is given to set right something that has been disorganised in the body, it must be used for that. Naturally, if someone is given a special work and if he is given the energy to do that work, it is all right, it is used for its own purposes, and it was given for that. As soon as a man feels energetic, he rushes immediately into action. Or else, those who have not got the sense to do something useful, gossip.
The Mother: Worse still, those who have no control over themselves become intolerant and begin to dispute! If their will is contradicted, they feel themselves full of energy and take it as holy wrath! If, for example, you want to get rid of a wrong movement and, as the result of a grace, the force is sent out for this purpose, this force begins to act on the consciousness. Then, if you draw it towards you, so to speak, in order to formulate it, naturally you decentralise it, disperse and dissipate it. But this is not all: the simple fact of speaking to another person opens you automatically to whatever may come from him; an interchange always occurs.
The Mother: In this way his curiosity, his obscurity, his good-will and also at times his ill-will intervenes, modiﬁes, deforms. On the other hand, if you want to speak of your experience to your Guru and he agrees to listen to you, it means that he adds his force, his knowledge and his experience to the working of the force and he helps to bring about the result. Yes, but he repairs it. THE SENSE OF BEAUTY To do this yoga, one must have, at least a little, the sense of beauty.
The Mother: If one does not, one misses one of the most important aspects of the physical world. There is this beauty, this dignity of soul — a thing about which I am very sensitive. It is a thing that moves me and evokes in me a great respect always. Yes, this beauty of soul that is visible in the face, this kind of dignity, this harmony of integral realisation. When the soul becomes visible in the physical, it gives this dignity, this beauty, this majesty, the majesty that comes from one’s being the Tabernacle.
The Mother: Then, even things that have no particular beauty put on a sense of eternal beauty, of eternal beauty. I have seen in this way faces that pass from one extreme to the other in a ﬂash. Someone has this kind of beauty and harmony, this sense of divine dignity in the body; then suddenly there comes the perception of an obstacle, a difﬁculty, and the sense of fault, of indignity — and then, a sudden deformation in the appearance, a kind of decomposition of the features! And yet it is the same face. It was like a ﬂash of lightning, and it was frightful.
The Mother: That kind of hideousness of torment and degradation — what has been translated in religions as “the torment of sin” — that gives you a face indeed! Even features that are beautiful in themselves become horrible. And it was the same features, the same person. Then I saw how horrible the sense of sin is, how much it belongs to the world of falsehood. THE WORSHIP OF THE SUPREME IN MATTER
The Mother: In all religious and particularly in occult initiations, the ritual of the different ceremonies is prescribed in every detail; each word uttered, each gesture made has its importance and the least infraction of the rule, the least mistake committed can have disastrous consequences. It is the same with the material life, and if one were initiated into the true way of living, one would be able to transform physical existence. If the body is considered as the tabernacle of the Lord, then medical science, for example, becomes the initiatory ritual for service of the temple and doctors of all categories are the priests who ofﬁciate in the different rituals of the worship. Thus, medicine is truly a priesthood and should be treated as such. The same thing may be said of physical culture and of all the sciences dealing with the body and its working.
The Mother: And if the material universe is regarded as the external robe and manifestation of the Supreme, then it can be said, generally, that all the physical sciences are rituals of worship. So we always come back to the same thing: the absolute necessity of a perfect sincerity, a perfect honesty, and a sense of the dignity of what one does, so that one does it as it should be done. If one could know all the details truly, perfectly, all the details of the ceremony of life, of the worship of the Lord in physical life, it would be wonderful — to know and not to make more mistakes, never make any more mistakes. One performs the ceremony with the perfection of an initiation. Between the gods of the Puranas and the gods of Greek and Egyptian mythology, all kinds of similarities are found; it could be an interesting subject for study.
The Mother: To the modern Western world, all these divinities — the Greek gods and other “pagan” gods, as they call them — are simply a product of human imagination and correspond to nothing real in the universe. But this is a gross error. To understand the mechanism of universal life, even that of terrestrial life, one has indeed to know that all these are real and living beings, each in its own realm, and have an independent reality. They would exist even if men did not exist. The majority of these gods existed before man existed.
The Mother: In a very old tradition, probably dating before the Chaldean and Vedic traditions, which are its two branches, the history of creation is narrated not from the metaphysical or psychological point of view, but from an objective point of view, and this history is as real as our history of historical epochs. Of course, this is not the only way of looking at the thing, but it is quite as legitimate as any other; and in any case it recognises the concrete reality of these divine beings. These are beings who belong to the progressive creation of the universe and have themselves presided over its formation, from the most ethereal or subtle to the most material regions; it is a descent of the divine creative Spirit. And they descended progressively, through realities more and more — one cannot say dense, because it is not dense, one cannot even say material, because matter as we know it does not exist on those planes — through realities more and more concrete. According to traditions and occult schools, all these zones of realities, these planes of realities have got different names; they have been classiﬁed in a different way, but there is an essential analogy, and if you go back far enough into the traditions, you see only the words changing according to the country and the language.
The Mother: Even now, the experiences of Western occultists and those of Eastern occultists offer great similarities. All who set out on the discovery of these invisible worlds and make a report of what they saw, give a very similar description, whether they be from here or there; they use different words, but the experience is very similar and the handling of forces is the same. This knowledge of the occult worlds is based on the existence of subtle bodies and of subtle worlds corresponding to those bodies. They are what the psychological method calls “states of consciousness”, but these states of consciousness really correspond to worlds. The occult procedure consists then in being aware of these various inner states of being or subtle bodies and in becoming sufﬁciently a master of them so as to be able to go out of them successively, one after another.
The Mother: There is indeed a whole scale of subtleties, increasing or decreasing according to the direction in which you go, and the occult procedure consists in going out of a denser body into a subtler body and so on again, up to the most ethereal regions. You go, by successive exteriorisations, into bodies or worlds more and more subtle. It is somewhat as if every time you passed into another dimension. The fourth dimension of the physicists is nothing but the scientiﬁc transcription of an occult knowledge. To give another image, one can say that the physical body is at the centre — it is the most material, the densest and also the smallest — and the inner bodies, more subtle, overﬂow more and more the central physical body; they pass through it, extending themselves farther and farther, like water evaporating from a porous vase and forming a kind of steam all around.
The Mother: And the greater the subtlety, the more the extension tends to unite with that of the universe: one ends by universalising oneself. And it is altogether a concrete process which gives an objective experience of invisible worlds and even enables one to act in these worlds. There are, then, only a very small number of people in the West who know that these gods are not merely subjective and imaginary — more or less wildly imaginary — but that they correspond to a universal truth. All these regions, all these domains are ﬁlled with beings who exist, each in its own domain, and
The Mother: if you are awake and conscious on a particular plane — for instance, if on going out of a more material body you awake on some higher plane, you have the same relation with the things and people of that plane as you had with the things and people of the material world. That is to say, there exists an entirely objective relation that has nothing to do with the idea you may have of these things. Naturally, the resemblance is greater and greater as you approach the physical world, the material world, and there even comes a time when the one region has a direct action upon the other. In any case, in what Sri Aurobindo calls the overmental worlds, you will ﬁnd a concrete reality absolutely independent of your personal experience; you go back there and again ﬁnd the same things, with the differences that have occurred during your absence. And you have relations with those beings that are identical with the relations you have with physical beings, with this difference that the relation is more plastic, supple and direct — for example, there is the capacity to change the external form, the visible form, according to the inner state you are in.
The Mother: But you can make an appointment with someone and be at the appointed place and ﬁnd the same being again, with certain differences that have come about during your absence; it is entirely concrete with results entirely concrete. One must have at least a little of this experience in order to understand these things. Otherwise, those who are convinced that all this is mere human imagination and mental formation, who believe that these gods have such and such a form because men have thought them to be like that, and that they have certain defects and certain qualities because men have thought them to be like that — all those who say that God is made in the image of man and that he exists only in human thought, all these will not understand; to them this will appear absolutely ridiculous, madness. One must have lived a little, touched the subject a little, to know how very concrete the thing is. Naturally, children know a good deal if they have not been spoilt.
The Mother: There are so many children who return every night to the same place and continue to live the life they have begun there. When these faculties are not spoilt with age, you can keep them with you. At a time when I was especially interested in dreams, I could return exactly to a place and continue a work that I had begun: supervise something, for example, set something in order, a work of organisation or of discovery, of exploration. You go until you reach a certain spot, as you would go in life, then you take a rest, then you return and begin again — you begin the work at the place where you left off and you continue it. And you perceive that there are things which are quite independent of you, in the sense that changes of which you are not at all the author, have taken place automatically during your absence.
The Mother: But for this, you must these experiences yourself, you must see them yourself, live them with sufﬁcient sincerity and spontaneity in order to see that they are independent of any mental formation. For you can do the opposite also, and deepen the study of the action of mental formation upon events. This is very interesting, but it is another domain. And this study makes you very careful, very prudent, because you become aware of how far you can delude yourself. So you must study both, the dream and the occult reality, in order to see what is the difference between the two.
The Mother: The one depends upon us; the other exists in itself; entirely independent of the thought that we have of it. When you have worked in that domain, you recognise in fact that once a subject has been studied and something has been learnt mentally, it gives a special colour to the experience; the experience may be quite spontaneous and sincere, but the simple fact that the subject was known and studied lends a particular quality. Whereas if you had learnt nothing about the question, if you knew nothing at all, the transcription would be completely spontaneous and sincere when the experience came; it would be more or less adequate, but it would not be the outcome of a previous mental formation. Naturally, this occult knowledge or this experience is not very frequent in the world, because in those who do not have a developed inner life, there are veritable gaps between the external consciousness and the inmost consciousness; the linking states of being are missing and they have to be constructed. So when people enter there for the ﬁrst time, they are bewildered, they have the impression they have fallen into the night, into nothingness, into non-being!
The Mother: I had a Danish friend, a painter, who was like that. He wanted me to teach him how to go out of the body; he used to have interesting dreams and thought that it would be worth the trouble to go there consciously. So I made him “go out” — but it was a frightful thing! When he was dreaming, a part of his mind still remained conscious, active, and a kind of link existed between this active part and his external being; then he remembered some of his dreams, but it was a very partial phenomenon. And to go out of one’s body means to pass gradually through the states of being, if one does the thing systematically.
The Mother: Well, already in the subtle physical, one is almost de-individualised, and when one goes farther, there remains nothing, for nothing is formed or individualised. Thus, when people are asked to meditate or told to go within, to enter into themselves, they are in agony — naturally! They have the impression that they are vanishing. And with reason: there is nothing, no consciousness! These things that appear to us quite natural and evident, are, for people who know nothing, wild imagination.
The Mother: If, for example, you transplant these experiences or this knowledge to the West, well, unless you have been frequenting the circles of occultists, they stare at you with open eyes. And when you have turned your back, they hasten to say, “These people are cranks!” Now to come back to the gods and conclude. It must be said that all those beings who have never had an earthly existence — gods or demons, invisible beings and powers — do not possess what the Divine has put into man: the psychic being. And this psychic being gives to man true love, charity, compassion, a deep kindness, which compensate for all his external defects.
The Mother: In the gods there is no fault because they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint: as gods, it is their manner of being. But if you take a higher point of view, if you have a higher vision, a vision of the whole, you see that they lack certain qualities that are exclusively human. By his capacity of love and self-giving, man can have as much power as the gods and even more, when he is not egoistic, when he has surmounted his egoism. If he fulﬁls the required condition, man is nearer to the Supreme than the gods are. He can be nearer.
The Mother: He is not so automatically, but he has the power to be so, the potentiality. If human love manifested itself without mixture, it would be all-powerful. Unfortunately, in human love there is as much love of oneself as of the one loved; it is not a love that makes you forget yourself. EXPERIENCE OF 5 NOVEMBER 1958 Here is the origin of this message:
The Mother: Last evening in the class, I noticed that the children, who had a whole week to prepare questions on the text we are reading, did not ﬁnd a single one. A terrible somnolence! A total lack of interest! When I had ﬁnished my reading, I said to myself, “But what is there in these brains that does not take interest in anything but their small personal affairs? After all, what is happening inside there, behind these forms?”
The Mother: Then during the meditation, I began going down into the mental atmosphere of the people around me, in order to ﬁnd there the small light, the thing that responds. And I was literally dragged down to the bottom, as if into a hole. In this hole I saw what I am still seeing. I went down into a ﬁssure, as it were, between two steep rocks, rocks made of something harder than basalt, black, metallic at the same time, with edges so sharp that you had the impression that were you simply to touch them, you would be ﬂayed. It was something that seemed to have no bottom and no end, and it became narrower and narrower like a funnel, so narrow that there was almost no room left even for the consciousness to pass.
The Mother: The bottom was invisible, a black hole, and that went down and down and down, without air, without light, only a kind of glimmer, like a reﬂection at the peak of the rocks, a glimmer that came from beyond, from something that could be the heavens, but something invisible. I continued to slide down the ﬁssure and I saw the edges, the black rocks, cut with scissors, as it were, shining like a fresh cut, the edges so sharp that they were like knives. Here was one, there another, there another, everywhere, all around. And I was dragged, dragged, dragged down, — I went down, down, down and there was no end to it, it became more and more oppressive, stiﬂing, suffocating. Physically, the body followed, it participated in the experience.
The Mother: The hand that was on the arm of the chair slipped down, then the other hand, then the head bent down in an irresistible movement. Then I said to myself, “But this must stop, for if it continues, my head will be down on the ground!” (The consciousness was elsewhere, but I was looking at my body from outside.) And I asked myself, “But what is there at the bottom of this hole?” Hardly had I formulated the question when it was as if I had touched a spring that was there at the very bottom of the hole, a spring I had not noticed yet, which acted at once with a tremendous force and at one bound shot me up straight into the air; I was cast out of the ﬁssure into a limitless, formless vast which was inﬁnitely comfortable — not exactly warm, but it gave a comfortable impression of inner warmth.
The Mother: After this painful enough descent, it was a kind of super-comfort, an ease, an ease at its maximum. And my body immediately followed the movement, the head at once became straight again. And I lived all this without objectifying it at all; I was not taking stock of what it was, I did not look for any explanation of what was happening; it was what it was, I lived it and that was all. The experience was absolutely spontaneous. It was all-powerful, inﬁnitely rich; it had no form at all, no limit — naturally I was identiﬁed with it and that is why I knew that it had neither limit nor form.
The Mother: It was as if — I say “as if” because it could not be seen — as if this vast was made up of countless imperceptible points, points that did not occupy any place in space (there was no space, you see), points that were a deep warm gold; but this was only an impression, a translation. And all that was absolutely, living with a power that seemed inﬁnite. And yet it was immobile, with an immobility so perfect that it gave a feeling of eternity, but with an unbelievable inner intensity of movement and life — it was inner, self-contained — and immobile, immobile in relation to the outside, if there was an outside. And it had a boundless life — it may be spoken of as inﬁnite only by way of image — and an intensity, a strength, a force, a peace, the peace of eternity, a silence, a calm, a power capable of everything. And I did not think it, I did not objectify it, I lived it comfortably, very comfortably.
The Mother: This lasted for a very long time — for the rest of the meditation. It was as if that contained all the wealth of possibilities. And all that though it had no form, had the power to become forms. After a moment I asked myself, “What is this, to what does it correspond?” Naturally I found out afterwards, and ﬁnally this morning I told myself, “Well, it is just to give me my message for the coming year.”
The Mother: Then I transcribed it — naturally, you cannot make a description, it is indescribable. It was a psychological phenomenon and the forms were nothing but a way of describing the psychological state to oneself. And this is what I noted, obviously in a mental way. I have described nothing, I have only stated a fact: Generally the inconscience gives the impression of something amorphous, inert, formless, neutral and grey — formerly, when I entered into the zones of inconscience, that was the ﬁrst thing that I met; but in my experience yesterday, it was an inconscience hard, rigid, coagulated, as if coagulated for a resistance.
The Mother: It was a mental inconscience; all efforts make no impression on it, nothing can penetrate it. And this inconscience is much worse than a purely material inconscience. It was not the original inconscient; it was, if one may say so, a mentalised inconscient. All this rigidity, hardness, narrowness, ﬁxity, opposition come from a mental presence in the creation: this is what the mind has brought into the inconscient. When the mind had not manifested, the inconscient was not like that: it was formless and had the plasticity of formless things.
The Mother: That plasticity has disappeared. The beginning of the experience is a very expressive image of the action of mind in the inconscient; it has made the inconscient aggressive — it was not like that before — aggressive, resisting, obstinate. That was precisely the starting-point of my experience. I was in fact trying to look into the mental inconscience of people, and this mental inconscience to change, while the other did not; the purely material inconscience has no mode of being, it does not exist, it is not organised in any way. While this one is an organised inconscience, organised through the beginning of a mental inﬂuence — and it is a hundred times worse!
The Mother: It has now become a much greater obstacle than before. Before, it did not even have the power to resist, it had nothing, it was truly inconscient. Now it is an inconscience organised in its refusal to change! So I wrote, “most hard and rigid and narrow” — the idea is of something which presses you, presses you — “most stiﬂing”. Then I wrote, “I struck upon an almighty spring.”
The Mother: That means precisely this: in the deepest depths of the inconscient, there is a supreme spring that enables us to touch the Supreme. Because at the very bottom of the inconscience there is the Supreme. It is the Supreme who enables us to touch the Supreme. This is the “almighty spring”. It is always the same idea that the highest height touches the deepest depth.
The Mother: The universe is like a circle; it is represented by a serpent that bites its own tail. That means that the supreme height touches the most material matter without any intermediary. I have said this many times, but here it was an experience of the thing as I had it. Finally I said, “a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world”. This does not refer to the primordial creation, but to the supramental creation; so this experience does not correspond to a return to the supreme origin of all.
The Mother: I had altogether the impression that I was projected into the origin of the supramental creation: it is something of the Supreme that has already been objectiﬁed precisely for the sake of the supramental creation. There was in fact this entire impression of power, of warmth and of gold. It was not ﬂuid, but like a powdery mist. And each one of these things (they cannot be called particles or fragments or even points, unless point is taken in the mathematical sense, a point that does not occupy any place in space) was like living gold, a powdery mist of warm gold — one cannot call it bright, nor can one call it dark; neither was it light: a multitude of small points of gold, nothing but that.
The Mother: One could say that they touched my eyes, my face... and with a tremendous force! At the same time, there was the feeling of a plenitude, of an allpowerful peace — it was rich, it was full. It was movement at its maximum, inﬁnitely more swift than anything that one can imagine, and at the same time it was absolute peace, perfect stillness. And this almighty spring was a perfect image of what happens, is bound to happen and will happen: all at once you shoot up into the vast.
The Mother: The experience that I have just described was followed by another which was also noted down at the time. EXPERIENCE OF 13 NOVEMBER 1958 To tell the truth, you are never freed from hostile forces until you come out for good into the Light, above the lower hemisphere. And there the phrase “hostile forces” loses its meaning; only the forces of progress are there in order to compel you to progress.
The Mother: But you must come out of the lower hemisphere in order to see things in that way; because below, they are very real in their opposition to the divine plan. It was said in the old traditions that one could not live more than twenty days in that higher state without leaving one’s body and returning to the supreme origin. Now that is no longer true. It is precisely this state of perfect harmony, beyond all attacks, that will become possible with the supramental realisation. It is that which will be realised for all who are destined for the supramental transformation.
The Mother: The adverse forces know quite well that in the supramental world they will automatically disappear: having no more use, they will be dissolved without the need to do anything, simply through the presence of the supramental force. That is why they rush about in a rage, negating everything, everything. But the link between the two worlds has not yet been built — it is in the course of being built. That was the meaning of the experience of February third, namely, to establish a link between the two worlds. For the two worlds are there in fact — not one above the other: one within the other, in two different dimensions — but there is no communication between the two.
The Mother: They overlap each other without being joined together. In the experience of February third, I saw some of those from here and elsewhere who already belong to the supramental world in one part of their being; but there is no connection, no junction. The moment has come just now in the history of the universe when that link must be established. The experience of November ﬁfth was a new step in the construction of the link between the two worlds. I was indeed projected into the very origin of the supramental creation: all that warm gold, that living tremendous power, that sovereign peace.
The Mother: I saw once again that the values which govern in this supramental world have nothing to do with our values here below, even the values of the wisest, even those values which we consider most divine at the time we live constantly in the divine Presence. It is altogether different. Not only in our state of worship and surrender to the Lord, but even in our state of identiﬁcation, the quality of the identiﬁcation is different depending on whether we are on this side, progressing in this hemisphere below, or have passed over to the other and emerged into the other world, the other hemisphere, the higher hemisphere. The quality or the kind of relation that I had with the Supreme at that moment was quite different from that which we have here, and even the identiﬁcation had a different quality. With regard to the lower movements one understands very well that they are different, but that was the summit of our experience here, that identiﬁcation by which it is the Supreme who rules and lives.
The Mother: Well! He rules and lives quite differently when we are in this lower hemisphere and when we are in the supramental life. And at that moment what gave intensity to the experience was that I came to perceive, vaguely, these two states of consciousness at the same time. It is almost as if the Supreme himself is different, that is to say, the experience we have of him. And yet in both cases there was contact with the Supreme.
The Mother: Well, probably what differs is what we perceive of him or the way in which we translate it; but the quality of the experience is different. There is in the other hemisphere an intensity and a plenitude which expresses itself through a power different from the one here. How to explain it? You cannot. The quality of the consciousness itself seems to change.
The Mother: It is not something higher than the summit to which we can rise here, it is not one step: here, we are at the end, at the summit. It is the quality that is different, the quality, in the sense that there is a plenitude, a richness, a power. This is a translation, in our manner, but there is something that escapes us — it is truly a new reversal of consciousness. When we begin to live the spiritual life, a reversal of consciousness takes place which is for us the proof that we have entered the spiritual life; well, another reversal of consciousness occurs when one enters the supramental world. Besides, perhaps each time that a new world opens up, there will again be a new reversal of this kind.
The Mother: Thus even our spiritual life — which is such a total reversal in relation to ordinary life — is and appears to be, in relation to the supramental consciousness, the supramental realisation, something so totally different that the values of the two are almost opposite. One can put it in this way (but this is very imprecise, more than diminished — deformed): it is as if our entire spiritual life were made of silver whereas the supramental is made of gold, as if the whole spiritual life here below were a vibration of silver, not lustreless, but merely a light, a light that goes up to the summit, a light quite pure, pure and intense; but in the other life, the supramental life, there is a richness and a power that makes all the difference. This whole spiritual life of our psychic being and our present consciousness, which appears so warm, so full, so wonderful, so sparkling to the ordinary consciousness, well, all this splendour appears poor in relation to the splendour of the new world. The phenomenon can be very well explained in this way: a series of reversals bringing about, step by step, an ever new richness of creation so that whatever has preceded it appears poor in comparison. What for us, in relation to our ordinary life, is a supreme richness, appears a poverty in relation to this new reversal of consciousness.
The Mother: This was my experience. Last night when I tried to understand what was lacking so that I might be able to bring you completely, truly out of your difﬁculties, the effort reminded me of what I told you the other day about the Power, the power of transformation, the true power of realisation, the supramental power. Once you enter there, rise into that state, then you see that it is truly the AllPower in relation to what we are here. So once more I perceived, I felt the two states at the same time. But as long as this realisation is not an accomplished fact, it will still be a progression — a progression, an ascension: you gain, you gain ground, you climb up and up; as long as it is not the new reversal, it is as if everything needed to be done over again.
The Mother: It is the repetition of the experience here below — it is reproduced up there. And each time, you have the impression that you have lived on the surface of things. It is an impression that is repeated and repeated. At each new conquest you have the impression: “Until now I had lived only on the surface of things — on the surface of things — on the surface of realisation, the surface of surrender, the surface of power — it was merely the surface of things, the surface of experience.” Behind the surface there is a depth, and it is only when you enter into the depth that you touch the true thing.
The Mother: And each time it is the same experience: what appeared as a depth becomes a surface, a surface with all that it means, something inaccurate, artiﬁcial, an artiﬁcial transcription, something that gives one the impression that it is not truly living: it is a copy, an imitation — it is an image, a reﬂection, not the thing itself. You pass into another zone and you have the impression that you have discovered the Source and the Power, the Truth of things; and then, this source, this power and this truth become in their turn an appearance, an imitation, a transcription in relation to the new realisation. Meanwhile, we must indeed recognise that we have not got the key yet; it is not within our hands. Or rather we know quite well where it is, and we have only one thing to do: the perfect surrender of which Sri Aurobindo speaks, the total self-giving to the Divine Will, whatever happens, even in the midst of the night. There is the night and there is the sun, the night and the sun, again the night, many nights; but one must cling to this will to surrender, cling to it as in a tempest, and give up everything into the hands of the Supreme Lord, until the day when the Sun will come for ever, the total victory.
The Mother: KARMA This sort of fatality that one sometimes feels weighing heavy on one’s life, which is called Karma in India, is the result of past lives; indeed, it is something that has to be exhausted, something that weighs on one’s consciousness. This is how things happen: the psychic being passes from one life to another, each life on earth being the occasion and means for a further progress, for a further growth. But it can happen that the psychic takes birth with the intention of going through a certain experience, of learning a certain thing, of developing a certain faculty through a deﬁnite experience.
The Mother: Then, in that life, in the life in which that experience has to be gone through, for one reason or another — there may be several — the soul does not fall exactly on the spot where it should: a displacement of some kind can occur, a set of contrary circumstances — it can happen — and in that case the incarnation miscarries totally and the soul goes away to wait for a better occasion. But in other cases, the soul simply does not ﬁnd it possible to do exactly what it wants and ﬁnds itself dragged into untoward circumstances — untoward not merely from the objective point of view, but untoward for its own growth. And that makes it necessary to begin the experience again, often under much more difﬁcult conditions. And if — anything can happen, you see — if this second attempt is also a failure, if conditions make it impossible once again for what the psychic wants to do, if, for example, it is in a body with an inadequate will or a deformation in the thought or too tough an egoism and the attempt ends in suicide, then it is something frightful.
The Mother: I have seen it many times; it creates a dreadful Karma which may repeat itself life after life before the soul becomes capable of conquering and doing what it wants to do. And each time the conditions become more and more difﬁcult, each time a considerably greater effort is demanded. It has sometimes been said that one cannot get out of it. Indeed, the subconscious memory of the past creates a sort of irresistible desire to avoid the difﬁculty and one begins again the same stupidity or an even greater stupidity, and to the difﬁculty already so great is added yet another. Also, there are moments — moments or circumstances — when nobody is there to help you, to instruct you, to guide you.
The Mother: You are all alone, not knowing what to hang on to. The situation then becomes so terrible, the circumstances are so abominable. But if only once the soul has made an appeal, if once it has made contact with the Grace, then in the following life, one immediately ﬁnds oneself in conditions where everything can be swept away at one stroke. At that moment you need to have a great courage, a great endurance, though at times a true love is sufﬁcient.
The Mother: And if there is faith — a little, a very very little is enough — then everything is swept away. But in most cases what you need is a great stoic courage, a capacity to endure and to hold out: the resistance, especially in the case of a previous suicide, resistance to the temptation to again begin this foolishness — because it makes a terrible formation. There is also this habit of not looking the difﬁculty straight in the face, which is translated by taking ﬂight. When suffering comes, ﬂy, ﬂy, instead of absorbing the difﬁculty, instead of holding tight, that is to say, not stirring within, not yielding, yes, above all, not yielding when you feel within: “I cannot bear it any longer.” Hold your head as quiet as possible, do not follow the movement, do not obey the vibration.
The Mother: That is what is needed, just that: faith in the Grace, perception of the Grace, or else, intensity of call, or better still, the response, the response, the knot opening, breaking, the response to this wonderful love of the Grace. It is difﬁcult without a strong will, and above all, above all, the capacity to resist the temptation which has been the fatal temptation through all the lives because of its accumulated power. Each defeat gives fresh force to it. A small victory can dissolve it. The most terrible thing is when you do not have the strength, the courage, something indomitable.
The Moth/home/jaredquek/Python/axolotl/src/axolotl/promptersBU.pyer: How often they come and tell me: “I want to die, I want to run away, I want to die.” They get the answer: “Well, then, die to yourself! You are not asked to let your ego survive! Die to yourself since you want to die! Have that courage, the true courage to die to your egoism.”
The Mother: But because it is a Karma, you have to do something yourself. Karma is a construction of the ego; the ego must do something, everything cannot be done for it. The truth is this: Karma is the result of the actions of the ego, and it is only when the ego abdicates that Karma is dissolved. You can aid the ego, you can assist it, you can give it force and infuse it with courage, but it must use them. There is such a gulf between what we truly are and what we are at present that it turns your head giddy at times.
The Mother: You must not yield to the giddiness. Do not move. Be still like a stone until the thing passes away. Generally, when the time has come for a Karma to be conquered and absorbed by the Grace, there also comes the image or the knowledge or the experience of the exact facts that are the cause of the Karma, and then at that moment you can start the cleaning.
The Mother: But it is just at the most painful point, there where the suggestions are the strongest, that you must bear the blow. Otherwise you will always have to start over again, always start over again. One day a moment comes when the thing has to be done, when one must make the true inner gesture that liberates. To tell the truth, just now there is upon earth an opportunity which presents itself only after thousands of years, a conscious help with the necessary power. It was once believed that nothing had the power to wipe away the consequences of a Karma, that it was only by exhausting it through a series of puriﬁcatory acts that the consequences could be transformed, exhausted, effaced.
The Mother: But with the supramental power, this can be done without the need of going through all the steps of the process of liberation. Everything is possible, it could have happened, but I do not believe it did. We cannot always believe what is said in books. Nor is there a necessary connection between such phenomena and sainthood. Some “mediums”, as they are called, have an unusual capacity.
The Mother: They are put in a chair, tied to it, guarded by people, and the room is locked securely from outside. Then darkness is created in the room. After some time — longer or shorter according to the medium’s power — the knots are found untied, the chair is seen empty: the occupant has disappeared. Then, in an adjoining room, the person is found lying down in a deep trance. Through closed doors and thick walls the medium has passed.
The Mother: It is by a power of deconcentration and reconcentration of the physical substance. Phenomena like these have taken place under the strictest scientiﬁc control. So they do genuinely occur in rare instances, but they are no sign of sanctity. There is nothing spiritual about them. What is at work is purely a capacity of the vital being.
The Mother: And often the mediums are people of very low character, with not a trace of anything saintly. But to come back to the point. In connection with great or holy men all sorts of stories get started. When Sri Aurobindo had not left his body, there was circulated a story that he used to go out of the roof of his room — yes, physically — and move about in all kinds of places. It is even written down in a book.
The Mother: He told me about it himself. Don’t other books tell other stories? There you are! THE TRUE REASON Those who want to follow the true path will naturally be exposed to the attacks of all the forces of ill-will, which not only do not understand but generally hate what they do not understand.
The Mother: If you are troubled, vexed, even discouraged by all the spiteful stupidities that people may say about you, you will not be able to advance much on the way. And these things come to you not because you are unlucky or because your lot is not a happy one, but because on the contrary the divine Consciousness and Grace take your resolution seriously and allow circumstances to become the touchstones on the way, to see if your resolution is sincere and you are strong enough to face the difﬁculties. Therefore, if someone laughs at you, or says something which is not kind, the ﬁrst thing to do is to look within yourself and see what is the weakness or imperfection which has allowed such a thing to happen, and not to be disconsolate or indignant or sad because people do not appreciate you for what you consider to be your proper value ; on the contrary, you should thank the divine Grace for having pointed out to you the weakness or imperfection or deformation that you have to rectify. So instead of being unhappy, you can be fully satisﬁed and take advantage, a great advantage, of the harm that someone wanted to do to you
The Mother: . Besides, if you truly wish to follow the path and to do the yoga, you should not do it so that people will appreciate and honour you; you should do it because it is an imperative need of your being and because you can be happy only in that way. Whether people appreciate you or do not appreciate you has absolutely no importance whatever. You can tell yourself beforehand that the farther you are from the ordinary man, the more foreign to the way of the ordinary creature, the less you will be appreciated — quite naturally, for they will not understand you. And I repeat that this has no importance whatever.
The Mother: True sincerity consists in following the way because you cannot do otherwise, in consecrating yourself to the divine life because you cannot do otherwise, in endeavouring to transform your being and emerge into the Light because you cannot do otherwise, because it is the very reason for which you live. When it is like that, you can be sure that you are on the right path. If you wake up tired in the morning, it is because of tamas, nothing else, a formidable mass of tamas; I myself noticed it when I began to do the yoga of the body. It is inevitable so long as the body is not transformed.
The Mother: You must lie ﬂat on your back and relax all the muscles and all the nerves — it is an easy thing to learn — to be like what I call a rag on a bed: nothing else remains. And if you can do that with the mind also, you get rid of all those stupid dreams that make you more tired when you get up than when you went to bed. It is the cellular activity of the brain that continues without control, and that tires one much. So, a total relaxation, a sort of complete calm, without tension, in which everything is stopped. But this is only the beginning.
The Mother: Afterwards, you make a self-giving as total as possible, of everything, from top to bottom, from outside to inside, and an eradication, as total as possible, of all the resistance of the ego. And you begin repeating your mantra — your mantra, if you have one, or any word which has a power for you, a word leaping forth from the heart spontaneously, like a prayer, a word which sums up your aspiration. After repeating it a certain number of times, if you are accustomed to do so, you enter into trance. And from that trance you pass into sleep. The trance lasts as long as it should and quite naturally, spontaneously, you pass into sleep.
The Mother: But when you come back from this sleep, you remember everything; the sleep was like a continuation of the trance. Fundamentally, the sole purpose of sleep is to enable the body to assimilate the effect of the trance so that the effect may be received everywhere, and to enable the body to do its natural nocturnal function of eliminating toxins. And when you wake up, there is not that trace of heaviness which comes from sleep: the effect of the trance continues. Even for those who have never been in trance, it is good to repeat a mantra, a word, a prayer before going into sleep. But there must be a life in the words; I do not mean an intellectual signiﬁcance, nothing of that kind, but a vibration.
The Mother: And its effect on the body is extraordinary: it begins to vibrate, vibrate, vibrate... and quietly you let yourself go, as though you wanted to go to sleep. The body vibrates more and more, more and more, more and more, and away you go. That is the cure for tamas. It is tamas which causes bad sleep.
The Mother: There are two kinds of bad sleep: the sleep that makes you heavy, dull, as if you lost all the effect of the effort you put in during the preceding day; and the sleep that exhausts you as if you had passed your time in ﬁghting. I have noticed that if you cut your sleep into slices (it is a habit one can form), the nights become better. That is to say, you must be able to come back to your normal consciousness and normal aspiration at ﬁxed intervals — come back at the call of the consciousness. But for that you must not use an alarm-clock! When you are in trance, it is not good to be shaken out of it.
The Mother: When you are about to go to sleep, you can make a formation; say: “I shall wake up at such an hour” (you do that very well when you are a child). For the ﬁrst stretch of sleep you must count at least three hours; for the last, one hour is sufﬁcient. But the ﬁrst one must be three hours at the minimum. On the whole, you have to remain in bed at least seven hours; in six hours you do not have time enough to do much (naturally I am looking at it from the point of view of sadhana) to make the nights useful. To make use of the nights is an excellent thing.
The Mother: It has a double effect: a negative effect, it prevents you from falling backward, losing what you have gained — that is indeed painful — and a positive effect, you make some progress, you continue your progress. You make use of the night, so there is no trace of fatigue any more. Two things you must eliminate: falling into the stupor of the inconscience, with all the things of the subconscient and inconscient that rise up, invade you, enter you; and a vital and mental superactivity where you pass your time in ﬁghting, literally, terrible battles. People come out of that state bruised, as if they had received blows. And they did receive them — it is not “as if”!
The Mother: And I see only one way out: to change the nature of sleep. Naturally, dates are put on these old talks, but nobody pays any attention to the dates. How can they be mixed up with the things of today, which are on an entirely different plane? There is an experience where you are altogether outside time, that is to say, in front, behind, above, below, it is all the same. In this identiﬁcation, at the moment of identiﬁcation, there is no more past or present or future.
The Mother: And in truth, this is the only way of knowing. As the experiences develop, these old talks give me the impression of someone who walks all around a garden telling about what is there within it. But there comes a time when you enter into the garden and then you know a little better what is there. And I am beginning to enter. I am beginning.
The Mother: Drive out? But will it “drive out” anything? If we accept Sri Aurobindo’s idea, it will put each thing in its place, that’s all. One thing must necessarily cease, and that is the distortion, that is to say, the veil of falsehood upon Truth, because that is what is responsible for everything we see here. If this is removed, things will be completely different, completely.
The Mother: They will be what we feel them to be when we come out of this consciousness. When one comes out of this consciousness and enters into the Truth-consciousness, the difference is such that one wonders how there can be anything like suffering and misery and death and all that. There is a kind of astonishment in the sense that one does not understand how it can happen — when one has really tipped over to the other side. But this experience is usually associated with the experience of the unreality of the world as we know it, whereas Sri Aurobindo says that this perception of the unreality of the world is not necessary in order to live in the supramental consciousness — it is only the unreality of Falsehood, not the unreality of the world. That is to say, the world has a reality of its own, independent of Falsehood.
The Mother: I suppose that is the ﬁrst effect of the Supermind — the ﬁrst effect in the individual, because it will begin with the individual. It is probable that this state of new consciousness will have to become a constant state. But then a problem arises: how can one remain in contact with the world as it is in its deformation? Because I have noticed one thing: when this state is very strong in me, very strong, so strong that it is able to resist anything that comes to bombard it from outside, then when I say something, people do not understand at all, not at all; so this state inevitably does away with a useful contact. Taking only the earth, for example, how could there be a little supramental creation, a nucleus of supramental action and radiation upon earth?
The Mother: Is it possible? One can conceive very well of a nucleus of superhuman creation and of supermen, that is to say, men who were men and who through evolution and transformation (in the true sense of the word) have succeeded in manifesting the supramental forces; but their origin is human and since their origin is human there is necessarily a contact; even if everything is transformed, even if the organs are transformed into centres of force, there remains nonetheless something human, like a colouring. It is these beings, according to the traditions, who will discover the secret of direct supramental creation, without passing through the process of ordinary Nature, and it is through them that the truly supramental beings will take birth, the ones who must necessarily live in a supramental world. But then how would the contact be made between these beings and the ordinary world? How is one to conceive of the transformation of Nature, a transformation sufﬁcient to bring about the supramental creation upon earth?
The Mother: I do not know. Naturally, for such a thing to happen, a considerably long time is needed, this we know; and there will probably be stages, steps, things which will appear, things which for the moment we do not know or do not conceive, and they will change the conditions of the earth — but that means seeing some thousands of years ahead. There remains the problem: is it possible to make use of this notion of space, I mean the space on the terrestrial globe?
The Mother: Is it possible to ﬁnd a spot where one could create the embryo or seed of the future supramental world? The plan came in all the details, but it is a plan which in its spirit and consciousness does not at all conform to what is possible on earth at present; yet in its most material manifestation, it was based on terrestrial conditions. It is the concept of an ideal town which would be the nucleus of an ideal country, a town which would have contacts, purely superﬁcial and extremely limited in their effect, with the outside world. One would therefore already have to conceive — but this is possible — of a power sufﬁciently strong to be at the same time a protection against aggression or ill-will (this would not be the most difﬁcult protection to obtain) and against inﬁltration and admixtures. But if necessary, one can conceive of that.
The Mother: From the social point of view, from the point of view of organisation, from the point of view of the inner life, these are not problems. The problem is the relation with what is not supramentalised, to prevent the inﬁltration, the admixture: that is to say, to prevent the nucleus from falling back into an inferior creation — it is a problem about the period of transition. All those who have given thought to the problem have always imagined something unknown to the rest of humanity, like a gorge in the Himalayas, for example, a place unknown to the rest of the world. But this is not a solution; it is not a solution at all. No, the only solution is an occult power, but this already implies that before anything can be done, a certain number of individuals must have reached a great perfection of realisation.
The Mother: But one can conceive that if this can be done, one can have a spot which is in the midst of the outside world and yet isolated (without any contacts, you see), a spot where everything would be exactly in its place — as an example. Each thing is exactly in its place, each person exactly in his place, each movement exactly in its place — and in its place in an ascending progressive movement, without any relapse, that is to say, quite the contrary to what happens in ordinary life. Naturally, this presupposes a kind of perfection, this presupposes a kind of unity, this presupposes that the different aspects of the Supreme can be manifested and, of course, an exceptional beauty, a total harmony and a power strong enough to command obedience from the forces of Nature. For example, even if this spot were surrounded by forces of destruction, they would not have the power to act; the protection would be sufﬁcient. All this requires the utmost perfection in the individuals who would be the organisers of such a thing.
The Mother: ( ) Indeed, nobody knows how the ﬁrst men were formed, the ﬁrst mental realisation. One does not know whether they were isolated individuals or groups, whether this happened in the midst of others or in isolation. I do not know.
The Mother: But there may be an analogy with the future case of the supramental creation. It is not difﬁcult to conceive that in the solitude of the Himalayas or in the solitude of a virgin forest an individual would begin to create around him his little supramental world. It is easy to conceive. But the same thing would be necessary: he would have to have reached such a perfection that his power would act automatically to prevent intrusion, so that automatically his world would be protected; that is to say, all contrary or foreign elements would be prevented from approaching. Stories of the kind have been told, of people who lived in an ideal solitude.
The Mother: It is not impossible at all to conceive that. When one is in contact with this Power, at the moment it is in you, you see quite well that it is child’s play; it is even possible to change certain things, to exert an inﬂuence on surrounding vibrations and forms, which automatically begin to be supramentalised. All that is possible, but it is on an individual scale. Whereas, take the example of what is happening here, the individual dwelling at the very centre of all this chaos: there lies the difﬁculty! Does it not follow from this very fact that it is impossible to reach a kind of perfection in the realisation?
The Mother: But then too, the other example, that of the solitary in the forest, does not at all prove that the rest of mankind will be able to follow; whereas what is happening here is already a much more radiating action. This is what must happen at a given moment, this must happen inevitably. But the problem remains: can this happen at the same time or before the other thing is realised — at the same time or before the individual, the one individual is supramentalised? Evidently, the realisation under the conditions of community or the group is much more complete, integral, total and probably more perfect than any individual realisation, which is always, , on the external, material plane, absolutely limited, because it is only one mode of being, one mode of manifestation, one microscopic set of vibrations that is touched. But from the point of view of the easiness of the work, I believe there is no comparison.
The Mother: () The problem remains. All people like Buddha and the others, had realised and then entered into contact with the world: well, this is very simple. But with regard to what I have in view, is it not an indispensable condition, for the realisation to be total, that one remains in the world?
The Mother: Just between 11:00 and 12:00 last night, I had an experience by which I discovered that there is a group of people — purposely their identity was not revealed to me — who want to create a kind of religion based on the revelation of Sri Aurobindo. But they have taken only the side of power and force, a certain kind of knowledge and all that could be utilised by Asuric forces. There is a big Asuric being that has succeeded in taking the appearance of Sri Aurobindo. There is only an appearance. This appearance of Sri Aurobindo has declared to me that the work I am doing is not his.
The Mother: It has declared that I have been a traitor to him and to his work and has refused to have anything to do with me. There is in that group a man whom I must have seen once or twice, who is not with them in spirit, but only in appearance. But he is without knowledge, he does not know what kind of being is there. And he always hopes to make this being accept me, believing it is truly Sri Aurobindo. This being I saw last night.
The Mother: I won’t tell all the details of the vision — it is not necessary. But I must say that I was fully conscious, aware of everything, knowing that an Asuric force was there — but not rejecting it because of the inﬁnity of Sri Aurobindo. I knew that everything is part of him and I do not want to reject anything. I met this being last night three times, even apologised for sins that I have not committed and in full love and surrender. I woke at 12:00, remembering everything.
The Mother: Between 12:15 and 2:00 I was with the true Sri Aurobindo in the fullest and sweetest relation — there also in perfect consciousness, awareness, calm and equanimity. At 2:00 I woke and noted just before that Sri Aurobindo himself had shown me that still he was not completely master of the physical realm. I woke up at 2:00 and noticed that the heart had been affected by the attack of this group that wants to take my life away from this body, because they know that so long as I am in a body upon earth their purpose cannot succeed. Their ﬁrst attack was many years ago in vision and action.
The Mother: I had it in the night and spoke of it to nobody. I noted down the date, and if I can come out of this crisis, I will ﬁnd it and give it out. They would have liked me dead years ago. It is they who are responsible for these attacks on my life. Up till now I am alive because the Lord wanted me to be alive, otherwise I would have gone long ago.
The Mother: I am no more in my body. I have left it for the Lord to take care of it, to decide if it is to have the Supramental or not. I know and I have said also that now is the last ﬁght. If the purpose for which this body is alive is to be fulﬁlled, that is to say, the ﬁrst steps taken towards the Supramental transformation, then it will continue today. This is the Lord’s decision.
The Mother: I am not even asking what he has decided. If the body is incapable of bearing the ﬁght, if it has to be dissolved, then humanity will pass through a critical time. What the Asuric Force that has succeeded in taking the appearance of Sri Aurobindo will create, is a new religion or thought, perhaps cruel and merciless, in the name of the Supramental Realisation. But everybody must know that it is not true, it is not Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, not the truth of his teaching. The truth of Sri Aurobindo is a truth of love and light and mercy.
The Mother: He is good and great and compassionate and Divine. And it is He who will have the ﬁnal victory. Now, individually, if you want to help, you have only to pray. What the Lord wants will be done. Whatever He wills, He will do with this body, which is a poor thing.