Our Many Selves

What One Calls “Myself”

Sweet Mother, when you say, “Concentrate in the heart”, does it mean concentrate with the mind?

The consciousness, not the mind, the consciousness!

I don’t say think in the heart, I say concentrate, concentrate the energy, concentrate the consciousness, concentrate the aspiration, concentrate the will. Concentrate. One can have an extremely intense concentration without a single thought, and in fact it is usually much more intense when one doesn’t think. (Silence) It’s one of the most indispensable things to do if one wants to succeed in having self-control and even a limited self-knowledge: to be able to localise one’s consciousness and move it about in the different parts of one’s being, in such a way as to distinguish between one’s consciousness and one’s thought, feelings, impulses, become aware of what the consciousness is in itself. And in this way one can learn how to shift it: one can put one’s consciousness in the body, put it in the vital, put it in the psychic (that’s the best place to put it in); one can put one’s consciousness in the mind, can raise it above the mind, and with one’s consciousness one can go into all the regions of the universe.

But first of all one must know what one’s consciousness is, that is, become conscious of one’s consciousness, localise it. And for this there are many exercises. But one of them is very well known, it is to observe oneself and watch oneself living, and then see whether it is really the body which is the consciousness of the being, what one calls “myself”; and then when one has realised that it is not at all the body, that the body expresses something else, then one searches in his impulses, emotions, to see whether it’s that, and again one finds out that it is not that; and then one seeks in his thoughts, whether the thought is truly himself, what he calls “myself”, and at the end of a very short time one becomes aware: “No, I am thinking, therefore ‘myself’ is different from my thoughts.” And so, by progressive eliminations one succeeds in entering into contact with something, something which gives you the impression of being—“Yes, that’s ‘myself’. And this something I can move around, I can move it from my body to my vital, to my mind, I can even, if I am very… how to put it?… very practised in moving it, I can move it into other people, and it’s in this way that I can identify myself with things and people. I can with the help of my aspiration make it come out of my human form, rise above towards regions which are no longer this little body at all and what it contains.” And so one begins to understand what one’s consciousness is; and it’s after that that one can say, “Good, I shall unite my consciousness with my psychic being and shall leave it there, so that it may be in harmony with the Divine and be able to surrender entirely to the Divine.” Or else, “If by this exercise of rising above my faculties of thinking and my intellect I can enter a region of pure light, pure knowledge… “ then one can put his consciousness there and live like that, in a luminous splendour which is above the physical form.

But first this consciousness must be mobile, and one must know how to distinguish it from the other parts of the being which in fact are its instruments, its modes of expression. The consciousness must make use of these things, and not you mistake these things for the consciousness. You put the consciousness in these things, so you become conscious of your body, conscious of your vital, conscious of your mind, conscious of all your activities through your will for identification; but for this, first your consciousness must not be completely entangled, mingled, joined, so to say, with all these things; it must not take them for itself, must not be deceived.

When one thinks of himself (obviously out of millions of men perhaps there are not ten who do otherwise) he thinks “Myself… that’s my body, that’s what I call ‘myself’, what’s like this. And so, I am like that; and then my neighbour, he also is the body. When I speak of another person, I speak of his body.” And so, as long as one is in this state he is the plaything of all possible movements and has no self-control.

The body is the last instrument and yet it’s this which one calls “myself” most of the time, unless one has begun to reflect.

The Mother
Questions and Answers (1955): 27 July 1955