Datasets:
Jaredquek
/
AuroMiraWorks

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
1
text
stringlengths
12
3.06k
The Mother: If you feel no true urge to paint, I see no necessity of your painting. Blessings. Your way of approaching art is the right one and if you continue, keeping an absolute sincerity in your attitude and your attempt, you are bound to succeed. There is something correct in your appreciation of oriental art, but it is incomplete.
The Mother: However we shall leave the subject for the moment, for I have no time to explain all that just now. As for L´eonard de Vinci, Michel Ange and Raphael, I cannot put them on the same level. The two first are far greater than the last. They both belong to the world of creative force, L´eonard with more subtlety and quiet, deep vision and purity, Michel Ange with more force and power especially in his sculptures which are incomparably magnificent.
The Mother: Raphael is more mental and superficial. I agree that one person alone must design the whole thing, the others can join in the execution only. I have no subject or scheme. I only wish that the decoration should be from the point of view of colour and also of composition.
The Mother: Do some sketches and projects, and send them to me. Blessings. TRANSCRIPTS OF EXPERIENCES Compassion and gratitude are essentially psychic virtues.
The Mother: They appear in the consciousness only when the psychic being takes part in active life. The vital and the physical experience them as weaknesses, for they curb the free expression of their impulses, which are based on the power of strength. As always, the mind, when insufficiently educated, is the accomplice of the vital being and the slave of the physical nature, whose laws, so overpowering in their half-conscious mechanism, it does not fully understand. When the mind awakens to the awareness of the first psychic movements, it distorts them in its ignorance and changes compassion into pity or at best into charity, and gratitude into the wish to repay, followed, little by little, by the capacity to recognise and admire. It is only when the psychic consciousness is all-powerful in the being that compassion for all that needs help, in whatever domain, and gratitude for all that manifests the divine presence and grace, in whatever form, are expressed in all their original and luminous purity, without mixing compassion with any trace of condescension or gratitude with any sense of inferiority.
The Mother: The Divine is everywhere and in all, He is all. Yes, in His essence and His supreme reality. But in the world of progressive material manifestation, one must identify not with the Divine as He is, but with the Divine as He will be.
The Mother: SOME EXPERIENCES OF THE BODY CONSCIOUSNESS One can say with equal exactitude that all is divine and that nothing is divine. Everything depends upon the angle from which one looks at the problem. Similarly one can say that the Divine is perpetually becoming and also that he is immutable for all eternity. To deny and to affirm the existence of God are both equally true; but each is true only partially. It is by rising above both affirmation and negation that one can approach the truth.
The Mother: One can say further that whatever happens in the world is the result of the divine will and also that this will has to be expressed and manifested in a world that contradicts or deforms it. In practice, these two attitudes lead in the one case to peaceful submission to whatever happens, and in the other, on the contrary, to a ceaseless struggle to bring about the victory of what should be. In order to live the truth, one must know how to rise above the two attitudes and combine them. Keep your conviction if it helps you to build your life, but know also that it is only one conviction and that others are as good and true as yours.
The Mother: Tolerance is full of a sense of superiority; it should be replaced by a total understanding. The Truth is not linear but global; it is not successive but simultaneous. Therefore it cannot be expressed in words: it has to be lived.
The Mother: To acquire a perfect and total consciousness of the world as it is in all its details, one must have, at the outset, no personal reaction to any of these details, no spiritual preference even as to what they ought to be. In other words, a total acceptance with a perfect indifference and neutrality is the indispensable condition for a knowledge by integral identity. If there be a single detail, however small, which escapes the neutrality, that detail escapes also the identification. Therefore, the absence of all personal reaction, for whatever end it may be, even the most exalted, is a primary necessity for a total knowledge. One can thus say, paradoxically, that we can know a thing only when we are not interested in it, or rather, more exactly, when we are not personally concerned with it.
The Mother: Every time a god has taken a body, it has always been with the intention of transforming the earth and creating a new world. But till today, he has always had to give up his body without completing his work. And it has always been said that the earth was not ready and that men had not fulfilled the conditions necessary for the work to be achieved. But it is the imperfection of the incarnate god that makes the perfection of those around him indispensable. If the incarnate god embodied the perfection necessary for the required progress, then this progress would not be conditioned by the state of the surrounding material world.
The Mother: And yet without any doubt, interdependence is absolute in this world of extreme objectification; therefore a certain degree of perfection in the manifestation as a whole is indispensable for a higher degree of perfection to be realised in the incarnate divine being. It is the necessity of a certain perfection in the environment that compels human beings to progress; it is the inadequacy of this progress, whatever it may be, that drives the divine being to intensify his endeavour for progress in his body. Thus the two movements of progress are simultaneous and complete each other. NEW EXPERIENCES OF THE BODY CONSCIOUSNESS
The Mother: When one looks back on one’s life, one almost always has the feeling that in such and such a circumstance, one could have done better, even though at every minute one was acting as dictated by the inner truth. This is because the universe is perpetually in motion and what was perfectly true before is only partially true today. Or to speak more exactly, the action that was necessary at the moment it was done would no longer be necessary now: another action would be more useful in its place. When we speak of transformation, the word still has for us a vague meaning.
The Mother: It gives us the impression that something is going to happen and all will be well as a consequence. The notion reduces itself almost to this: if we have difficulties, the difficulties will disappear; those who are ill will be cured of their illness; if the body is infirm and incapable, the infirmities and incapacities will be removed; and so on. But as I have said, it is all very vague, it is only an impression. Now a remarkable thing about the body consciousness is that it is unable to know a thing with precision and in full detail except when it is on the point of accomplishing it. So, when the process of transformation becomes clear, when one is able to know through what sequence of movements and changes the total transformation will take place — in what order, in what way, so to speak: which things will come first, which things will follow — when everything will be known in full detail, that will be a sure indication that the hour of realisation is near.
The Mother: Because each time you perceive a detail with exactness, it means that you are ready to accomplish it. For the moment, one can have a vision of the whole. For example, it is entirely certain that under the influence of the supramental light, the transformation of the body consciousness will take place first; then will follow a progress in the mastery and control of all the movements and functions of all the organs of the body; afterwards this mastery will change little by little into a sort of radical modification of the movement and then of the constitution of the organs themselves. All that is certain, although the perception of it is not precise enough. But what will finally take place — when the various organs have been replaced by centres of concentration of different forces, qualities and natures, each of which will act according to its own special mode — all this is still merely a conception and the body does not comprehend it very well, because it is still far from realisation and the body can truly comprehend only that which it is on the point of being able to do.
The Mother: The supramental body will be unsexed, since the need for animal procreation will no longer exist. The human form will retain only its symbolic beauty, and one can foresee even now the disappearance of certain ungainly protuberances, such as the genital organs of man and the mammary glands of woman. It is only in its external form, its most superficial appearance — which is as illusive to the latest discoveries of the Science of today as to the experience of the spirituality of the past — that the body is not divine. O Supreme Reality, O Supramental Truth, this body is totally vibrant with an intense gratitude.
The Mother: Thou hast given to it, one after another, all the experiences that can lead it most certainly towards Thee. It has come to the point where identification with Thee is not merely the one thing desirable, but the only thing possible and natural. How am I to describe these experiences that are at two opposite extremes? From one end I would say: “Lord, to be truly near Thee, to be truly worthy of Thee, one must drink to the dregs the cup of humiliation and yet not feel humiliated. The contempt of man makes one truly free and ready to belong to Thee alone.”
The Mother: And from the other end I would say: “Lord, to be truly near Thee, to be truly worthy of Thee, one must be lifted to the peak of human appreciation and yet not feel glorified. It is when men call one divine that one feels one’s inadequacy and the need to be truly and totally identified with Thee.” The two experiences are simultaneous: the one does not blot out the other; on the contrary, they seem to complete each other and thereby become more intense. In this intensity the aspiration grows formidable, and in answer to it Thy Presence becomes evident in the cells themselves, giving to the body the appearance of a multicoloured kaleidoscope in which innumerable luminous particles in constant motion are sovereignly reorganised by an invisible and all-powerful Hand.
The Mother: Foresight means seeing beforehand; but can you tell me what is going to happen tomorrow? I don’t think you can. Of course you can say, we shall sleep, eat, etc. — general things. But you can’t say whether something unexpected is going to happen.
The Mother: Why? Someone has said, “For this a special eye is needed.” It is possible to foresee without receiving images: there is a mental knowledge without images. Seers are usually able to foresee — not always, but often. I don’t suppose you were thinking of an extra eye in the middle of the forehead like the Cyclops!
The Mother: No, you mean an inner eye belonging to another world. One doesn’t normally see material things with this eye, or if one does, it is from a very special angle. There are people who can see at a distance what is going on in another country or in a place that is far away from them. No, the psychic vision doesn’t usually deal with material things. It could be, but then what you receive is the thoughts of the people in the place you see, because these people are focusing their on what is going on there.
The Mother: Usually, “determinism” is taken to mean a logical chain of cause and effect; if you do one thing, a certain result will follow. For instance, if you eat a certain kind of food you will fall ill, if you swallow some poison you will die, and so on . But it often happens that the effects of certain determinisms cancel out the effects of other determinisms. There are people whose destiny is very complex, giving the impression that the things which happen to them are quite unexpected and unforeseeable, unless one can “see” by some means other than the ordinary.
The Mother: An “entity” is a personality or an individuality. There are many such “personalities” in each one of us. If these personalities agree and are complementary with one another, they make up a human being, a rich and complex “person”. But that is not what usually happens. These personalities do not agree with one another.
The Mother: For example, one of them might wish to make some progress, to become more and more perfect, to get a deeper knowledge of things, to realise more and more, to proceed towards the perfection of the being, while another one may simply want to have fun and enjoy itself as much as it can; one day it will do this, the next day something else, etc. If the personalities do not agree, this person’s life will be incoherent, and that is not unusual: in fact, these cases are very common. A person may have a great many personalities within him — ten or twenty, for example — and each one has its own destiny. In the physical world, an individuality means a human body; so, in a human body there are many individualities, each one with its own destiny. What happens then?
The Mother: Conflicts, friction, inner disorder created by these individualities which are unable to get on with one another. The strongest one gets the upper hand; it is not only dominant over the others but curbs them to stop them from rebelling. So, in the end, the unlucky ones, the repressed ones, go to sleep. They bide their time, and when that time comes, they suddenly jump up and turn everything upside down. If that happens very often, that person’s life will be a very disorderly one.
The Mother: He will take up one thing today and go on with another tomorrow and so on. I don’t think it is true to say that a person is “harmonious” if he has no inner complexity. People who have this kind of illusory harmony are usually deeply immersed in material life, so that the slightest unpleasantness upsets them completely, because they have nothing else. No, a truly harmonious personality implies a conscious arrangement of the inner individualities. This arrangement may be effected spontaneously before birth, but that is rare.
The Mother: The arrangement is achieved later, by means of a discipline, a proper education. But to succeed in this one must consciously take the psychic being as the centre and arrange, harmonise the various individualities around it. True harmony, inner organisation is the result of such a persistent effort. In mathematics, one sometimes takes a great many numbers to try and find all the possible combinations of them. At once one finds that it becomes impossible, for there are many numbers that are beyond expression.
The Mother: Similarly, if you have a great many destinies that come together in you and occur in various combinations, depending on the part of the being that predominates at the time, if you try to foresee what is going to happen, it is extremely difficult. It is the same thing with states of consciousness. A destiny represents an individual; they all react on one another and the number of things that may happen is frightening! So how will you foresee that? The “laws” of the universe always work independently, and that is the “secret” of the composition of the universe.
The Mother: I shall give you an example of how consciousness, a higher consciousness, intervenes. A man steps out of his house to go to his office. He goes a certain way. Suddenly he remembers that he has left something behind. He steps back to go and get it and just then, in the place where he would have been if he had stepped forward, a lead pipe falls.
The Mother: Something in this man’s consciousness, by telling him to go back, has saved his life. That is what we mean when we say that an intervention of consciousness can change destiny. In this man there were two destinies — among others, probably, — one which wanted him to die and one which wanted him to live. No, because chance is something quite incoherent, something that occurs for no reason, and if you believe that life is something incoherent, you still have much to learn.
The Mother: On the contrary, it is quite coherent, each little thing is exactly determined and if something makes you feel that it is “chance” it is because you know nothing about the determinisms. They are completely beyond you, because there are innumerable interweaving laws and you know nothing about them. So if something happens according to these laws you say it is a “miracle” or “chance”! Pavitra has said: “In mathematics it has been shown that if the number of intervening factors is very high, and if they act independently, the result appears to be what is called ‘chance’.”
The Mother: I have just explained that this is only an “appearance”. People who make an effort to progress and grow in consciousness, realise that what at one time in their lives they took to be a disaster or a calamity may appear fifteen years later like a blessing, an effect of Grace, some highest good. From a higher standpoint, it is quite obvious that if you bring your highest consciousness down into your ordinary life, it will bring the greatest good into your life. People who have made some progress always have this experience. They see clearly that the so-called “disaster” was in fact the starting-point of their ascension, an ascension which could not have taken place without it.
The Mother: If someone has the inner vision and is able to enter his higher consciousness at will, he will see that it is the greatest good that happens to him when he is in contact with his highest consciousness. But, to be able to understand this, there are two conditions. You must make an effort for progress and be utterly sincere, for if you are not sincere, you will never have any insight into your own life. You must be able to look at yourself and say, “How tiny I am.” I shall give you a simple example — but it may occur in any state of consciousness.
The Mother: A stone falls. If it fulfils its destiny, it will fall to the ground, won’t it? But you are there and you have a vital or a mental will — one or the other — and you catch the stone in your hand. You have changed the destiny of the stone. A leaf falls — onto the ground if it follows its normal destiny.
The Mother: You have a vital will, you take the leaf in your hand. You have changed the destiny of the leaf. This happens millions of times in the universe and nobody notices it because it is so common. But imagine that you have a very high range of consciousness. If into the determinism down here you can bring, by aspiration, an urge, a prayer, a higher consciousness, if you can get hold of your higher consciousness, so to say, and bring it into the material destiny, everything would immediately be changed.
The Mother: But because you do not see or do not understand what is happening, you say that it is chance or a miracle. Not every destiny is active in a material destiny, and if you want to change this material destiny, you must be able to bring down another one from above. In this way, something new will enter into it — these “descents” of the higher consciousness take place all the time, but because we do not understand them, this “something new” that comes is turned by ordinary people into a “miracle”. This is precisely what we want to do by bringing down into the physical and material world the supramental force and consciousness
The Mother: . At first it works by diffusion, not directly. Its working is more or less veiled, more veiled and distorted as it descends into the physical world, until it becomes almost imperceptible. If it could work here directly, without this distortion and this veiling, it would change everything in an absolutely unexpected way. I hope you will get this concrete example one day!
The Mother: Why do I make a distinction between the integral transformation and the transformation of consciousness which I mentioned earlier? What is the connection between consciousness and the other parts of the being? What are these other parts? This transformation of consciousness is something that comes to all who have practised a yogic discipline and become aware of the divine Presence or the Truth of their being. I don’t say that “many” people have realised this, but at least quite a few.
The Mother: What is the difference between this experience and the integral transformation? Yes, but there is something which remains unchanged unless you take care and persist in your effort. What is it? The body consciousness. What is the body consciousness?
The Mother: The vital consciousness, of course — the physical consciousness as a whole. But then, in this physical consciousness as a whole, there is the physical mind — a mind that is occupied with all the ordinary things and responds to everything around you. There is also the vital consciousness, which is the awareness of sensations, impulses, enthusiasms and desires. Finally, there is the physical consciousness itself, the material consciousness, the body consciousness, and that is the one which has so far never been entirely transformed. The global, overall consciousness of the body has been transformed, that is, one can throw off the bondage of thought, of habits that one no longer considers inevitable.
The Mother: That can change, it has been changed. But what remains to be changed is the consciousness of the cells. There is a consciousness in the cells: it is what we call the “body consciousness” and it is wholly bound up with the body. This consciousness has much difficulty in changing, because it is under the influence of the collective suggestion which is absolutely opposed to the transformation. So one has to struggle with this collective suggestion, not only with the collective suggestion of the present, but with the collective suggestion which belongs to the earth-consciousness as a whole, the terrestrial human consciousness which goes back to the earliest formation of man.
The Mother: That has to be overcome before the cells can be spontaneously aware of the Truth, of the Eternity of matter. Of course, until now, those who have achieved this conscious transformation, who are aware of the eternal and infinite life within themselves, in the depths of their being, must, in order to preserve this consciousness, constantly refer back to their inner experience, return to their inner contemplation, live in a sort of more or less constant meditation. And when they come out of meditation, their outer nature is pretty much what it was before, and their way of thinking and reacting is not very different — unless they give up action altogether. But in that case the inner realisation, this transformation of the consciousness, is helpful only for the person who has achieved it, but it doesn’t change the condition of matter or earthly life in the least. For this transformation to succeed, all human beings — even all living beings as well as their material environment — must be transformed.
The Mother: Otherwise things will remain as they are: an individual experience cannot change terrestrial life. This is the essential difference between the old idea of transformation — that is, the becoming conscious with the psychic being and the inner life — and transformation as we conceive it and speak of it. Not only an individual or a group of individuals or even all individuals, but life, the overall consciousness of this more or less developed material life, have to be transformed. Without such a transformation we shall have the same misery, the same calamities and the same atrocities in the world. A few individuals will escape from it by their psychic development, but the general mass will remain in the same state of misery.
The Mother: Yes, of course. That is the essential difference between our yoga and the old yogic disciplines which dealt only with the inner consciousness. The old beliefs used to say — and some people interpret the Bhagavat Gita in this way — that there is no fire without smoke, no life without ignorance in life. That is the common experience, but it is not our idea, is it? We know by experience that if we go down into the subconscient, lower than the physical consciousness, into the subconscient and even lower still into the inconscient, we can find in ourselves the origin of atavism, of what comes from our early education and the environment in which we lived.
The Mother: And this gives a kind of special characteristic to the individual, to his outer nature, and it is generally believed that we are born like that and we will stay like that. But by going down into the subconscient, into the inconscient, one can trace the origin of this formation and undo what has been done, change the movements and reactions of the ordinary nature by a conscious and deliberate action and thus really transform one’s character. This is not a common achievement, but it has been done. So one may assert not only that it can be done, but that it has been done. It is the first step towards the integral transformation, but after that, there remains the transformation of the cells which I mentioned earlier.
The Mother: There is an article by Sri Aurobindo in one of the which describes the various stages through which the entire physical being can be changed. And this is what so far has never been done. The inconscient is not individualised and when you go down into the inconscient in yourself, it is the inconscient of matter. One can’t say that each individual has his own inconscient, for that would already be a beginning of individualisation, and when you go down into the inconscient, it is perhaps not the universal but at least the terrestrial inconscient. The light, the consciousness that comes down into this inconscient in order to transform it must necessarily be a consciousness that is close enough to be able to touch it.
The Mother: It is not possible to conceive of a light — the supramental light, for example — that would have the power to individualise the inconscient. But, through a conscious, individualised being, this light can be brought down into the inconscient and gradually make it conscious. First of all, it is the subconscient that has to become conscious, and indeed the main difficulty of the integral transformation is that things are constantly rising up from the subconscient. You think you have got a certain movement under control — anger, for example. You try very hard to control your anger and succeed to some extent, then suddenly it rises up again for some reason unknown to you, as if you hadn’t done anything at all, and you have to start all over again.
The Mother: If it were the transformed part of the being going back to its old ways, it would be most depressing, but it is not like that. It is the material part, the material life which is sustained, supported, so to say, by a subconscient life. And this subconscient is beginning to get individualised around some people; it has certain affinities with a kind of subconscient somewhat like our own, and that is where the things you have repressed or thrown out of your nature go to — and one fine day they rise up again. But if you are able to bring the light into the subconscient and make it conscious, this will no longer happen. There are two main reasons for this.
The Mother: In such a case, you may suddenly become receptive, and in this state of receptivity you receive the help that is needed to remove the defect and the help becomes effective. The other reason is that, while trying with patience and perseverance, you have — perhaps unknowingly — hit upon the origin of the difficulty in the subconscient. And once that is done, it is easy to transform whatever you wanted to transform in yourself. But this transformation may seem to you to come “from outside”, because you were not aware of what was going on. It does not come from outside, it is outside your active consciousness, and you are aware only of the “result” of your action.
The Mother: It may be one of these two things or both together. “W C S A R ” Why do I insist on absolute sincerity? Perhaps the younger children don’t understand what sincerity is, but the older ones surely ought to know! You have all passed through childhood and you probably remember what you were taught, what you were told when you were young.
The Mother: Parents nearly always tell their children, “You must not lie, it is very bad to tell a lie.” But the unfortunate thing is that they lie in your presence and then you wonder why they want you to do something which they don’t do themselves. But, apart from that, why do I insist on the fact that children should be told from a very early age that it is absolutely necessary to be sincere? I am not addressing those who were brought up here, but those who were brought up in an ordinary family, with ordinary ideas. Children are very often taught how to outsmart others, how to dissimulate so as to appear good in others’ eyes.
The Mother: Some parents try to control children through fear, and that is the worst possible method of education, for it is an incentive to lying, deceit, hypocrisy and all the rest. But if you repeatedly explain to children something of this kind: If you are not absolutely sincere, not only with others but also with yourself, if at any time you try to cover up your imperfections and failings, you will never make any progress, you will always remain what you are throughout all your life, without ever making any progress. So, even if you only want to grow out of this primitive unconscious state into a progressive consciousness, the most important thing, the one absolutely important thing is sincerity. If you have done something which you ought not to have done, you must admit it to yourself; if a less-than-admirable movement has occurred in yourself, you must look it in the face and tell yourself, “It was not good,” or “It was disgusting,” or even “It was wicked.” And don’t think that there are people to whom this rule does not apply, for you cannot live in the physical world without having a share in the physical nature, and physical nature is essentially a mixture.
The Mother: You will see, when you become absolutely sincere, that there is nothing in yourself that is absolutely unmixed. But it is only when you look yourself in the face, in the light of your highest consciousness, that whatever you want to eliminate from your nature will disappear. Without this striving for absolute sincerity, the defect, the little shadow, will stay in a corner biding its time to come out. I am not speaking of the vital, which is hypocritical, I am merely speaking of the mind. If you have a small, disagreeable sensation, a slight uneasiness, see how quickly the mind gives you a favourable explanation!
The Mother: It lays the blame on someone else or on the circumstances, it says that what you did was right and that you are not responsible, and so on. If you look carefully into yourself, you will see that it is like that and you will find it most amusing too! If a child starts examining himself carefully very early, observing himself honestly so as not to deceive himself or deceive others, it will become a habit and spare him much struggling later on. Now I am addressing parents and teachers, for it is very important to teach children that it is absolutely useless to “look” as if they were good, to “look” as if they were obedient, to “look” as if they were studying well, etc. Very often, the course parents and teachers adopt with their children is to encourage them to “look as if”.
The Mother: It often happens that if a child spontaneously confesses his mistake, he is given a scolding. This is one of the greatest mistakes of parents. You must have sufficient control over yourself never to scold a child, even if he has broken a very valuable and cherished object. You should simply ask him, “How did you do that?” “What happened?”
The Mother: For the child ought to see why it happened, so that he can be more careful next time. But that is all. In this way you will get the child to be sincere with you instead of trying to deceive you.
The Mother: The greatest obstacle to the transformation of one’s own character is hypocrisy. If you always keep this in mind when dealing with a child, you can do him a lot of good. Of course, you must not sermonise or lecture him, etc. You should simply make him understand that there is a nobility in the being, a great purity, a great love of beauty, which is so powerful that even the most wicked and criminal people are forced to acknowledge a truly beautiful or heroic or selfless act. For, in human beings, there is a presence, the most marvellous Presence on earth, and except in a few very rare cases which I need not mention here, this presence lies asleep in the heart — not the physical heart but the psychic centre — of all beings.
The Mother: And when this Splendour is manifested with enough purity, it will awaken in all beings the echo of this Presence. Because society is obsessed with success. There is always a difference between two different things. Of course, it is very difficult, I suppose, to be loyal without being sincere, and vice versa. But I have known people who were loyal and yet lacked a certain kind of sincerity.
The Mother: The opposite is not unusual. The one doesn’t automatically follow from the other, but it is obvious that honesty, straightforwardness, loyalty and sincerity are closely related. I think that it is extremely difficult for someone to be perfectly sincere without being loyal and honest, but of course this demands the utmost. Yes, it is. Loyalty implies some kind of hierarchical relationship, so to say, with someone or something.
The Mother: There is a sort of interdependence. The usual idea is that loyalty means keeping one’s word, doing one’s duty scrupulously, etc. Someone who lives all alone in a forest can practise total sincerity, but you can only practise loyalty in social life, in relation to other people. A person who is entirely consecrated in an act of inner devotion to the divine Presence, can be loyal to this Presence. This implies a relationship with something in front of you, or a relationship with the universal.
The Mother: This is a very complex problem. They might have been sincere in relation to their own ideal. You do not know. I have known beings who were the most active instruments against the divine life, against the divine realisation. Well, to some extent, they were loyal to their own ideal and very sincere in their...
The Mother: These beings are called Asuras, but as I have just said, they were sincere in relation to their own ideal. I didn’t say they had an absolute sincerity. I simply said that they were very sincere. Perhaps, in some part of their being, there was something that did not try to know any more than it knew. It is quite probable.
The Mother: If you are you have achieved absolute sincerity, you can be sure that you are immersed in falsehood! The psychic being is formed by the inner Truth and organised around it. The vital is the dynamism of action. It is the seat of the will, of impulses, desires, revolts, etc.
The Mother: The physical is the concrete domain that crystallises and defines the thoughts, the movements of the vital, etc. It is a solid foundation for action. Finding one’s psychic being implies a kind of conviction, a faith in the existence of this psychic being. One must become aware of it and then allow it to take up the direction of life and action; one must refer to it and make it one’s guide.
The Mother: One becomes aware of the movements of one’s being by referring more and more to the psychic being. Having an aim is not sufficient.
The Mother: One must have the will to attain it by trying always to trace all one’s movements back to their origin. Self-mastery means being conscious of oneself and one’s movements, doing what one has decided to do and not what others want one to do.
The Mother: What is the difference between mechanical, religious and psychological methods? Religious methods are those adopted by the various religions. Not many religions speak of the inner Truth; for them, it is more a matter of coming into contact with their God.
The Mother: Heaven and hell: this is a roundabout way of saying... Psychological methods are those that deal with states of consciousness, that try to realise the inner self by withdrawing from all activity and attempting to create the conscious inner conditions of detachment, self-abstraction, concentration, higher Reality, renunciation of all the outer movements, etc. A psychological method is one which acts on the thoughts, feelings and actions. Mechanical methods are those which are based on purely mechanical means — one can benefit from them by using them in a certain way. Take breath-control, for example: it acts more or less mechanically, but it is sometimes recommended to add to this a concentration of one’s thought, to repeat a word, as in Vivekananda’s teaching.
The Mother: This works up to a certain point, but then it fades away. These human attempts in various times and places have been more or less successful individually but they have never given a collective result. The psychological method is far more difficult but far more effective: through your actions, to be in a state of inner will to express nothing in yourself but the Truth of your being, and to make everything dependent on that Truth. Of course, if you do nothing, it is easier, but it is also easier to deceive yourself. When you sit down in isolation, in complete silence and far away from everybody, and examine yourself with more or less indulgent eyes, you may imagine that you are realising something wonderful.
The Mother: But when you are put to the test at every minute of your life, when you have the occasion to become aware of your imperfections, your infirmities, your little movements of bad will a hundred times a day, you soon lose the illusion of being... and so your efforts are more sincere. That is why, instead of deciding that we would have an Ashram in a solitary forest where everything is very beautiful, very restful, instead of being aloof from the world and attending only to our own little selves, we are trying on the contrary to take up all the activities of life and make them as conscious as we can, and, in our contacts with other people, to become more clearly aware of all the inner movements. Running away from difficulties is never a way of surmounting or overcoming them. If you flee from the enemy you won’t be able to defeat him and he has every chance of defeating you.
The Mother: That is why we are here in Pondicherry and not on some Himalayan peak. Although I admit that a Himalayan peak would be delightful — but perhaps not so effective. Next time I shall speak about mental discipline, for I have quite a lot of things to say on this subject. It is a terrible stumbling-block: people think they have a superior intellect and on that basis judge things which they know nothing about.
The Mother: This is, if not the greatest, at least one of the greatest obstacles for mankind. For it so happens that mankind is, of all animals — pardon me, but we are still animals! — the only one who can make use of articulate language and turn out pages and pages of... He thinks he is so superior because he can write down and make others read what he thinks and feels. And from this eminence of mental greatness, of mental nobility, he dismisses as so much childishness things that are infinitely superior to him. It organises itself around it and enters into contact with it.
The Mother: The psychic is moved by the Truth. The Truth is something eternally self-existent and dependent on nothing in time or space, whereas the psychic being is a being that grows, takes form, progresses, individualises itself more and more. In this way it becomes more and more capable of manifesting this Truth, the eternal Truth that is one and permanent. The psychic being is a progressive being, which means that the relation between the psychic being and the Truth is a progressive one. It is not possible to become aware of one’s psychic being without becoming aware at the same time of the inner Truth.
The Mother: All those who have had this experience — not a mental experience but an integral experience of contact with the psychic being, not a contact with the idea they have constructed of it, but a truly concrete contact — all say the same thing: from the very minute this contact takes place, one is absolutely conscious of the eternal Truth within oneself and one sees that it is the purpose of life and the guide of the world. One can’t have one without the other; in fact, it is this that makes you realise that you are in contact with your psychic being. It may not be a conscious contact, but something that governs your life. Some people say there is something outside their own will that organises their whole life, that puts them in the required condition, that attracts favourable circumstances or people, that arranges everything outside them, so to say. In their outer consciousness, perhaps they wanted something and worked for it, but something else came.
The Mother: Well, after some years, they realise that this is what really had to happen. You may know nothing of the existence of a psychic being within you and yet be guided by it. For, in order to become aware of something, you must first of all admit that this thing exists. Some people don’t. I have
The Mother: known people who had a genuine contact with their psychic being without knowing at all what it was, because there was nothing in them that corresponded to the knowledge of this contact. Some beings in the universe may have this direct contact with the eternal Truth without any contact with the psychic being, because they don’t have any psychic being. But in man there is always a psychic being, and it is always through it that he comes into contact with the eternal Truth. And this contact with the psychic being is usually disclosed to him in the same way, for it carries with it its own grace, its own splendour and beatitude.
The Mother: The psychic being is characteristic of man, and if one goes to the bottom of the matter, perhaps this is what gives man his superiority. Many of the old philosophies did not have a complete knowledge of the classification of the being — the psychic being, the inner Truth were not known to them. These systems had very simplistic notions, such as the outer and the inner consciousness, the waking and the sleep consciousness. They had no detailed knowledge of human psychology, or if they had one, they did not think it advisable to impart it to everybody. In former times, knowledge was not given to just anyone.
The Mother: A person first had to demonstrate his goodwill very clearly; he had to show sufficient capacities, a sufficient degree of development before he was taught certain kinds of knowledge. But now, in modern life, this knowledge is printed and anyone can buy books and read them. And of course you meet hundreds of people who have learned a lot of words without knowing anything of what they mean. At one time we had people here who claimed to have realised the Supermind, but did not even know what it was. With the democratic organisation of things, this popularisation of knowledge is inevitable.
The Mother: Perhaps there are other methods of selection, more concealed, less obvious, but more effective. The mind is “an instrument of formation, of organisation and action”. Why? The mind gives a form to the thoughts. This power of formation forms mental entities whose life is independent of the mind that has formed them — they act as beings that are at least semi-independent.
The Mother: One can form a thought which then travels, goes out to someone, spreads the idea it contains. There is a mental substance just as there is a physical substance, and on this plane the mind can emanate innumerable forms. These forms can be objectivised and seen, and that is one of the most common explanations for dreams. For while you are active and while the physical eyes can see physically, some people can see mentally at the same time. But when you are asleep, your eyes are closed, the physical is asleep and the mind and vital become active.
The Mother: On the mental plane all the formations made by the mind — the actual “forms” that it gives to the thoughts — return and appear to you as if they were coming from outside and give you dreams. Most dreams are like that. Some people have a very conscious mental life and are able to enter the mental plane and move about in it with the same independence they have in physical life; these people have mentally objective nights. But most people are incapable of doing this: it is their mental activity going on during sleep and assuming forms, and these forms give them what they call dreams.
The Mother: There is a very common example — it is amusing because it is rather vivid. If you have quarrelled with someone during the day, you may wish to hit him, to say very unpleasant things to him. You control yourself, you don’t do it, but your thought, your mind is at work and in your sleep you suddenly have a terrible dream. Someone approaches you with a stick and you hit each other and have a real fight. And when you wake up, if you don’t know, if you don’t understand what has happened, you say to yourself, “What an unpleasant dream I had!”
The Mother: But in fact it is your own thought which came back to you, like that. So be on your guard when you dream that someone is unkind to you! First of all, you should ask yourself, “But didn’t I have a bad thought against him?”. Thoughts are real entities which usually last until they are realised. Some people are obsessed by their own thoughts.
The Mother: They think of something and the thought returns and goes round and round in their heads as if it were something from outside. But it is their own formations returning again and again and striking the mind that has formed them. That is one aspect of the matter. Did you ever have the experience of a thought taking the form of words or a sentence in your mind and returning over and over again? But if you are clever enough to take a piece of paper and a pencil and write it down — that is the end of it, it won’t return any more, you have thrown it out of yourself.
The Mother: The thing has had its little satisfaction, it has manifested itself sufficiently and it won’t return. And there is something more interesting still: if you have a bad thought that annoys and disturbs you, write it down very attentively, very carefully, putting as much consciousness and will as you can. Then take the piece of paper and, with concentration, tear it up with the will that the thought will be torn up in the same way. That is how you will get rid of it. The mind is an instrument of organisation.
The Mother: On the outer plane, some people have an organised mind. They have organised their own ideas — note that this is not a very common occurrence! — their own thoughts. But if you look inside yourself, you will see that you have the most contradictory thoughts and if you have not taken care to organise them, they dwell side by side in your head, so to say, and create utter disorder. For instance, I used to know someone who was able to hold the most mystical ideas in his mind together with the most positivist ideas, that is, the most materialistic ideas, the negation of everything that is not purely matter. It was all unorganised and this person was constantly tossed this way and that in a perpetual confusion.
The Mother: Note that I don’t disapprove of your having all these ideas: it is good to be able to look at things from all sides at once and, as we were saying the other day, there is a way to reconcile the most contrary ideas. But you must take the trouble to do it, you have to organise them in your mind, otherwise you live in a chaos. I have noticed something else: people whose minds are in disorder keep their rooms and their belongings in a similar state of disorder. I have seen people who had no order in their minds and if you open their chest of drawers or their cupboards, you will find an awful mess — everything is in a jumble. There are people who are intelligent and have slips of paper on which they jot things down — authors, for example — but if by chance they need one of these notes, they have to spend an hour hunting it out and turning everything upside down!
The Mother: They either find the paper in the waste-paper basket or in the drawer where they put their handkerchiefs. Well, that’s how it is, isn’t it? There are people who may not be very intelligent, but who have taken the trouble to put some order among the few ideas they have. If you open their cupboard, you will find that they have very few things, but these things are neatly and tidily arranged, because they have organised material things in the same way as they have organised their thoughts. The mind is therefore an instrument of organisation.
The Mother: People who have some power of organisation may start by organising their little personal belongings, then their lives and the events in their lives. They may be in charge of a certain number of people — they can organise a business, a school, anything. Or else if they have the power to govern, they are able to organise a country. Some people have this power of organisation and others don’t. I shall give you an example of someone who had this gift of organisation.
The Mother: It is an old story, but one can always tell old stories. I used to know Sir Akbar Hydari, who was Finance Minister and then Prime Minister of Hyderabad. Before his time, the Hyderabad finances were in the state of chaos I have just mentioned and the Government was always short of money. It was a rich area which ought not to have been in that position. Then came Sir Akbar.
The Mother: He became Finance Minister and from the very first year, they had a few lakhs of revenue and everything was so wonderfully organised that it was perhaps one of the only places in the world where people had no taxes to pay. They had no taxes or duties to pay and the State was never short of money and this went on throughout his whole ministry. But he fell ill and had to leave; in the end, he died. He was replaced by someone who did not have his gift of organisation and immediately, from the very first year, again they were short of 17,000 lakhs!
The Mother: It was the same province, with the same revenue, the same people, but Sir Akbar’s marvellous gift of organisation was no longer there. That is a true story. Very few people have this gift. It is as if you had a large number of miscellaneous things in front of you: it would take a century to make all the possible combinations of them. Some people don’t need to do that — they have the vision, they immediately know where to put things and establish an organised relation between them so as to form something orderly and organised
The Mother: . This capacity for organisation is indispensable in life, and if you want to learn to organise, begin by organising your own drawer and you will end up by organising your own head! Some people should do both these things. You must first the ideas in your mind before you can organise them — at least you can see your handkerchiefs and clothes! But you will find that a certain care is needed to achieve an intelligent arrangement — don’t put the things you use every day beneath the things you use once a month!
The Mother: The mind is also an instrument of action. The thoughts form plans. The mind forms a plan of action and with this formation of independent and active entities which I mentioned earlier, it stirs the other parts of the being — the vital and physical — and impels them to action. It often happens that you think of some action or other — you don’t do it immediately, but the thought that wants to manifest in this action returns again and again. Perhaps you hear in your mind the words, “I must do that, I must do that,” until you leave everything and do what you have “thought”.
The Mother: Well, that is the mind’s power of action. Before you get it, you must learn to organise, harmonise and control your mind. But when you have that power, you can begin to act purposefully, whereas most people are tossed about by thoughts whose formation they were not even aware of. There are many people whose thoughts come from outside, who have not taken the care to organise their mind, which is a sort of public square. So all the thoughts coming from outside meet there; sometimes there are clashes: you don’t know what to do, you can’t see anything clearly, etc.
The Mother: There are also people who live in a more or less neutral mental state. Suddenly, they find themselves with someone whose mind is well organised and they begin to think clearly — about things that they knew nothing of a minute ago. There are others, on the other hand, who normally think very clearly and know exactly what is going on in their minds. But they come into contact with certain people and everything gets confused, vague and muddled. They lose the thread of their thoughts and forget what they wanted to say.
The Mother: This is an effect of contagion and this mental contagion is constant. There are very few people who do not receive thoughts from outside. I have known people — many people — who, for example, had a very strong faith, who could see very clearly into themselves, who knew very well what they wanted to do, etc. But when they were with other people and tried to grasp all that, to express it, they could no longer find it; instead, there was something that moved in a sort of semi-obscure confusion and they felt incapable of formulating their thought, which before had been quite clear. There is another phenomenon which is considered spiritual, but which is spiritual only indirectly: it is when you find yourself near someone who has controlled his thought and achieved mental silence.
The Mother: You suddenly feel this silence coming down into yourself and something which was impossible for you half an hour earlier suddenly becomes a reality. This is a rather unusual phenomenon. I said this mainly for men of action whose thinking is direct and formative, very active and dynamic. They see things in a linear way which is necessary for action; they can see that a thing must be done in such and such a way. Another person may have a thought which is equally dynamic and say, “No, it ought to be done like this.”
The Mother: So they quarrel, they are unable to reach an agreement. But one can keep quiet for a minute and look at the thing calmly. The other person is not necessarily showing ill will, his point of view may be true or partially true. The question is to find out why he thinks like that. So you stop to think it over and try to identify yourself with the other’s point of view, to put yourself in his place and tell yourself, “He may have a reason for thinking as he does, and it may be better than mine.”
The Mother: And in this way, you must try to find the solution which can reasonably satisfy both parties. This is very important when dealing with material things. Naturally, each one sees only his own point of view and his own point of view is always selfish. It is very hard to admit another point of view, for this point of view may be “detrimental” to you. This is an absolute truth where nations are concerned.