Our Many Selves

Becoming an Individual

Mother, you said one day that before being able to identify oneself with the Divine, one must first become an individual.

Yes, well, that’s it, exactly. You are in the period of becoming an individual. And so long as one is in this period of becoming an individual, well, one must wait until this period passes, that is, till you have become a conscious individual. Perfectly. It is that.

Mother, you said there are very few, one in a million perhaps, who are really conscious.

Oh, if you take humanity at large, certainly! And the great mass of mankind will never become individuals, it will always be an amorphous mass, all intermingled, like that (gesture). To become an individual is what Sri Aurobindo calls becoming truly a mental man. Well, if you have read The Human Cycle, you will see that already it is not so easy to become a truly mental man who thinks by himself, is free from all outer influences, who has an individuality, who exists, has his reality; even that is not so easy.

But, by a kind of Grace, it can happen that before becoming an individual, if someone has within himself an aspiration, if he feels the need to awaken to something which would want more, want something better, which feels how very small it is to be an individual, something which really seeks beyond the ordinary limits, well, even before becoming an individual, he may suddenly have the experience of a contact with his psychic which opens all the doors for him. They close again later, but once they have opened you never forget it. The remembrance remains very vividly…

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1954): 22 September 1954

Sweet Mother, why are we so attached to our ego?

As I said just now, probably because you still need it very much, isn’t that so? In order to become a conscious, individualised being, one needs his ego; that is why it is there. It is only when one has realised his own individuality sufficiently, has become a conscious, independent being with its own reality, that he no longer needs the ego. And at that time one can make an effort to get rid of it. Unfortunately most people, as soon as they become real individuals, have such a see of their importance and their ability that they no longer even think at all of getting rid of their ego. But that of course is something else.

Here I don’t let you go to sleep. I remind you from time to time of the true thing. But you are all very young, you see, and a certain number of years are needed, years of intensive inner formation, to become a being who thinks for himself, is conscious of his own will, and conscious of his own nature, his purpose of existence, independent of the human mass. A certain time is necessary. Some children begin when very small. If one begins very early, when one is twenty he can be quite formed. But you must begin when very small, and consciously, very consciously; you must begin with a see of observation of all the movements in yourself, of their relation with others, of—precisely, of your degree of independence, real individuality, of knowing where impulses come from, where other movements come from: whether it is contagion from outside or something that arises from within yourself. A very profound study of all the movements in oneself is necessary in order to succeed simply in crystallising a being who is a little conscious, a little conscious. But when you live fluidly, so to say, when you don’t even know what goes on inside you, have some sort of vague impressions, if you questions yourself, at least ninety-nine times out of a hundred, if you ask yourself, “Why did I think like that? Why did I feel like that?”, even “Why did I do that?”, then the reply is almost always the same: “I don’t know. It came like that, that’s all.” That is to say, one is not at all conscious.

Are you able to know, when you are with others, what comes from you and what from the others? To what extent their way of being, their particular vibrations act upon you? You are not aware of this at all. You live in a kind of “approximate” consciousness, half-awake, half-asleep, in something very vague, where you have to grope like this in order to catch things. But do you have a precise, clear, exact notion of what goes on in you, why it goes on in you? And then, this: the vibrations, which come to you from outside and those which come from within you? And then, again, what can come from others, changing all this, giving another orientation? You live in a kind of hazy fluidity, certain small things suddenly crystallise in your consciousness, you have just caught them for a moment; and it is just clear enough like that, as though there was a projector, just something passing on the screen and becoming clear for a second: the next minute everything has become vague, imprecise, but you are not aware of this because you have not even asked yourself the questions, because you live in this way. It stops here, begins here, ends here. That’s all. You do from day to day, minute to minute, things which you do, like that… it happen to be like that.

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1954): 22 September 1954

Ego means what?

I think it is the ego that makes each one a separate being, in all possible ways. It is the ego which gives the sense of being a person separate from others. It is certainly the ego which gives you the sense of the “I”, “I am”, “I want”, “I do”, “I exist”, even the very famous “I think therefore I am” which is… I am sorry but I think it is a stupidity—but still it is a celebrated stupidity—well, this too is the ego. What gives you the impression that you are Manoj is the ego, and that you are altogether different from this one and that one; and what prevents your body from melting away like that, dissolving in a common mass of physical vibrations, is the ego; what gives you a definite form, a definite character, a separate consciousness, the sense that you exist in yourself, independently of all others, indeed, something like that; if one does not reflect, spontaneously one has the sense that even if the world disappeared, one would be there, one would remain what one is. This of course is the super-ego.

Certainly, if one were to lose one’s ego too soon, from the vital and mental point of view one would again become an amorphous mass. The ego is surely the instrument for individualisation, that is, until one is an individualised being, constituted in himself, the ego is an absolutely necessary factor. If one had the power of abolishing the ego ahead of time, one would lose one’s individuality. But once the individuality has been formed, the ego becomes not only useless but harmful. And only then comes the time when it must be abolished. But naturally, as it has taken so much trouble to build you, it does not give up its work so easily, and it asks for the reward of its efforts, that is, to enjoy the individuality.

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1955): 12 January 1955

So there is a long, long, long way to go before merging one’s ego in the Divine.

Merge one’s ego in the Divine! But first, one can’t merge one’s ego in the Divine before becoming completely individualised. Do you know what it means to be completely individualised? Capable of resisting all outer influences?

Some days ago I received a letter from someone who told me that he was very hesitant about reading books of ordinary literatures, for example, novels or dramas, because his nature had an almost insuperable tendency to receive imprints of the characters in these books and to begin living the feelings and thoughts of these characters, the nature of these persons. There are many more people than one would think who are like that. They read a book and while they are reading it they feel within themselves all kinds of emotions, thoughts, desires, intentions, plans, even ideals. They are simply just absorbed in the reading of the book. They are not even aware of it, because at least ninety-nine parts of an individual’s character are made of soft butter—inedible of course… but on which if one presses one’s thumb, an imprint is made.

Now, everything is a “thumb”: an expressed thought, a sentence read, an object looked at, an observation of what someone else does, and of one’s neighbour’s will. And all these wills… you know, when one sees them they are all there, like this, intermingled (Mother inter-crosses her fingers), each one trying to get the uppermost and causing a kind of perpetual conflict within, outside… It goes in and out of people like that, you see, like electric currents. One is not at all aware of all this, and it is a perpetual conflict of all the wills which are trying to express themselves; and the strongest one will succeed. But as there are many of these and as one has to fight alone against a great number, it is not easy.

So one is tossed like a cork on the waves of the sea…. One day one wants this, the next day one wants that, at one moment one is pushed from this side, at another from that, now one lifts one’s face to the sky (Mother makes the movement), now one is sunk deep in a hole. And so this is the existence one has!

First one must become a conscious, well-knit, individualised being, who exists in himself, by himself, independently of all his surroundings, who can hear anything, read anything, see anything without changing. He receives from outside only what he wants to receive; he automatically refuses all that is not in conformity with his plan and nothing can leave an imprint on him unless he agrees to receive the imprint. Then one begins to become an individuality! When one is an individuality, one can make an offering of it.

For, unless one possesses something, one cannot give it. First, one must be, and then afterwards one can give oneself.

So long as one does not exist, one can give nothing. And for the separative ego to disappear, as you say, one must be able to give oneself entirely, totally without reservation. And to be able to give oneself, one must first exist. And to exist one must be individualised.

If your body were not made in the rigid form it is—for it is terribly rigid, isn’t it?—well, if all that were not so fixed, if you had no skin, here, like this, solid, if externally you were the reflection of what you are in the vital and mental fields, it would be worse than being a jelly-fish! Everything would fuse into everything else, like this… Oh, what a mess it would be! That is why it was at first necessary to give a very rigid form. Afterwards we complain about it. We say, “The physical is fixed, it is a nuisance; it lacks plasticity, it lacks suppleness, it hasn’t that fluidity which can enable us to merge into the Divine.” But this was absolutely necessary, for without this… if you simply went out of your body (most of you can’t do it because the vital being is hardly more individualised than the physical), if you came out of your body and went into the vital world, you would see that all things there intermingle, they are mixed, they divide; all kinds of vibrations, currents of forces come and go, struggle, try to destroy one another, take possession of each other, absorb each other, throw each other out… and so it goes on! But it is very difficult to find a real personality in all this. These are forces, movements, desires, vibrations.

There are individualities, there are personalities! But these are powers. People who are individualised in that world are either heroes or devils!

And now, in the mind… (Silence) If only you become conscious of your physical mind in itself…. Some people have called it a public square, because everything comes there, goes across, passes, comes back…. All ideas go there, they enter at one place, leave by another, some are here, some there, and it is a public square, not very well organised, for usually ideas meet and knock into one another, there are accidents of all kinds. But then one becomes aware: “What can I call my mind?“ or “What is my mind?“

One needs years of very attentive, very careful, very reasonable, very coherent work, organisation, selection, constructions, in order to succeed simply in forming, oh, simply this little thing, one’s own way of thinking!

One believes he has his own way of thinking. Not at all. It depends totally upon the people one speaks with or the books he has read or on the mood he is in. It depends also on whether you have a good or bad digestion, it depends on whether you are shut up in a room without proper ventilation or whether you are in the open air; it depends on whether you have a beautiful landscape before you; it depends on whether there is sunshine or drain! You are not aware of it, but you think all kinds of things, completely different according to a heap of things which have nothing to do with you!

And for this to become a coordinated, coherent, logical thought, a long thorough work is necessary. And then, the best of the business is that when you have succeeded in making a beautiful, well-formed, very strong, very powerful mental constructions, the first thing you will be told is, “You must break this so that you can unite with the Divine!” But so long as you haven’t made it, you cannot unite with the Divine because you have nothing to give to the Divine except a mass of things which are not yourself! One must first exist in order to be able to give oneself. I am repeating what I said a while ago.

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1954): 28 July 1954

All this… it is not in order to swamp you that I tell you all this. It is only in order to tell you that before speaking of merging one’s ego in the Divine, one must first know a little what one is. The ego is there. Its necessity is that you become conscious, independent beings, individualised—I mean in the see of independent—that you may not be the public square where everything goes criss-cross! That you may exist in yourselves. That is why there is an ego. It is like that; that is why also there is a skin, like that… though truly, even physical forces pass through the skin. There is a vibrations which goes a certain distance. But still, it’s the skin that prevents us from blending into one another. But everything else must be like that too.

(After a silence) And then, later, one offers all this to the Divine. Years of work are needed. You must not only…(silence)… become conscious of yourself, conscious in all details, but you must organise what you call “yourself” around the psychic centre, the divine centre of your being, so that it would make a single, coherent, fully conscious being. And as this divine centre is itself already consecrated (Mother makes a gesture of offering) entirely to the Divine, if everything is organised harmoniously around it, everything is consecrated to the Divine. And so, when the Divine thinks it proper, when the time has come, when the work of individualisation is complete, then the Divine gives you permission to let your ego merge in Him, to live henceforward only for the Divine.

But it is the Divine who takes this decision. You must first have done all this work, become a conscious being, solely and exclusively centred around the Divine and governed by Him. And after all that, there is still an ego; because it is the ego which serves to make you an individual. But once this work is perfect, fully accomplished, then, at that moment, you may tell the Divine, “Here I am, I am ready. Do you want me?” And the Divine usually says, “Yes.” All is over, everything is accomplished. And you become a real instrument for the Divine’s work. But first the instrument must be constructed.

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1954): 28 July 1954

Sweet Mother, when does the ego become an instrument?

When it is ready to become it.

How does that happen?

How does it happen?… In each one, I believe, it happens in a different way. It may happen suddenly, in the space of a moment, by a kind of inner reversal; it may take years; it may take centuries; it may take several lives. For each one there is a moment when it happens: when he is ready.

And I think he is ready when he is completely formed. The purpose of existence of the ego is the formation of the individual. When the individual is ready the ego can disappear. But before that it does not disappear because it has still some work to do.

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1955): 9 November 1955