Letters on Himself
and the Ashram

The Ashram and Its Atmosphere

The Ashram Precincts

X told me that Y has said that there is a very strong circle of Mother's protection around the main Ashram house, and a less strong one in the other houses.

It is not the house, it is the inner nearness that matters.

What is true is that there is a strong force going out from here and it is naturally strongest at the centre. But how it affects there, depends on how one receives it. If it is received with simple trust, faith, openness, confidence, then it works as a complete protection. But it can so work too at a distance.

16 January 1933

Mother said once that all the houses were sanctified by her presence and there were no houses more favoured than others. This appeals to me. For if it was otherwise I would of course try to get into a room within the Asram precincts, as people often say that there the atmosphere is ever so much better.

The atmosphere of the houses as houses is pretty much the same in all the Asram. But people make their own atmosphere as well; a number of people living together may create one that is agreeable to this person and disagreeable to another. A single man also may leave a vital atmosphere in a house which is felt by others who follow him or, even if they do not feel it, they may be influenced by it for a time—that I have observed often enough. The surroundings also have sometimes an effect. But all that is very secondary—one ought to create one's own atmosphere (of course of the right kind) and keep it, then other vibrations will fall away from it.

What are the Asram precincts? Every house in which the

Page 630

sadhaks of the Asram live is in the Asram precincts. People have a queer way of talking of the houses in this compound as the Asram—it has no meaning. Or do they think the Mother's influence or mine is shut up in a compound?

12 January 1935

The Atmosphere of the Ashram

When I sit on the staircase to your room, I feel something very special there. But now I find that wrong things are coming in when I sit there. I hope I am not disturbing the atmosphere.

The force is there in the atmosphere, but you must receive it in the right way—in the spirit of self-giving, openness, confidence. All the rest depends on that.

16 January 1933

I was surprised to learn that X and Y are staying in the town. How, after being in the Ashram for two years, can they bear the outside atmosphere? Z, who just returned from a visit home, tells me he could not endure the atmosphere over there.

It is certainly strange. Most people after the atmosphere here cannot tolerate the ordinary atmosphere. If they go outside, they are restless until they return. Even A's aunt who was here only for a few months writes in the same way. But probably when people get into the control of a falsehood as X and Y did, they are projected into the unregenerated vital nature and no longer feel the difference of the atmosphere.

30 May 1933

It is easier to feel the presence in the atmosphere of the Asram than outside it. But that is only an initial difficulty which one can overcome by a steadiness in the call and a constant opening of oneself to the influence.

16 August 1934

Page 631

I have translated the first four pieces of Maurice Magre's "L'Ashram de Pondichéry"¹ into Gujarati. There are some exaggerations in his perceptions: "les hommes les plus sages de la terre" and "Ce sont des Parfaits entre les hommes". This is too much to say about us sadhaks. I find it almost impossible to put such sentiments in Gujarati, as people there would find them overblown.

Magre like many others got an immediate strong impression of the atmosphere of the Asram—most feel it as an atmosphere of calm and peace, something quite apart from that of the ordinary world. He thought it was the atmosphere of the people. Besides, of the few who saw him, he saw only the best. Also many here if not most have something in their appearance different from people outside, something a little luminous, which a man of sensitive perceptions like Magre could feel. The other side becomes apparent only if one stays long and mixes in the ordinary life of the Asram or hears the gossip of the Sadhaks. People from this country, Gujaratis or others, more easily see or feel this side and do not feel the rest because they enter at once into relation with the exterior life of the Asram.

4 February 1937

There are two atmospheres in the Asram, ours and that of the sadhaks. When people with a little perceptiveness come from outside, they are struck by the deep calm and peace in the atmosphere and it is only when they mix much with the sadhaks that this perception and influence fade away. The other atmosphere of dullness or unrest is created by the sadhaks themselves—if they were opened to the Mother as they should be, they would live in the calm and peace and not in unrest or dullness.

15 March 1937

Page 632

The Ashram's Physical Expansion

Is having more houses a sign of progress?

It is a sign of physical expansion. The progress depends upon what is behind; if the inner progress is not there, the physical expansion is of no great use.

7 July 1933

If the Asram expands very much and there are no houses avail able in Pondicherry, naturally the extension will be somewhere in the villages nearby?

There was some idea of that years ago, but circumstances took another turn and it did not materialise.

14 April 1935

Page 633