The Mother
with Letters on the Mother

Misinterpreting Their Words

These doctrines still sound strange to me. I should also be very glad to know of the swift and easy method of Yoga by which all that can be done in a few years—or else not at all, for that seems to be your alternative. What I see in this Asram is that people catch hold of something said or written by the Mother, give it an interpretation other than or far beyond its true meaning and deduce from it a crudely extreme logical conclusion which is quite contrary to our knowledge and experience. If we protest against these crude ideas being put upon us, the "disciples" cling to their own deductions and delusions and push aside our protests as inconsistent with what we have once said, insincere or unintelligible. The Mother has long ago given up trying to correct these things, for she finds that they do not listen to

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her but to something in their own minds which they follow and announce as hers. I still sometimes try, but with no great success. As for the logical conclusion drawn—well! It is natural, I suppose, and part of the game. It is so much easier to come to vehement simple logical conclusions than to look at the truth as it is, many-sided and whole.

16 April 1935

I have always told you that you should not take what any sadhak says or thinks as authoritative or coming from me or the Mother. Even when they say that it is from me or her, it cannot be accepted, for it is often an idea of their own minds which they "think" to be ours also or a onesided misunderstanding of what we may have said in a particular connection but which their minds apply to something with which it was not connected or to all things in general. But when they simply write to you their own ideas without referring to us at all, why on earth should you suppose or imagine that it comes from us? I know nothing of what X wrote to you, except from your own letter. What X writes is X's, we must not be held responsible for it. For that matter no sadhak, whoever he or she may be, can stand for us in our place or speak for us. Each must be taken as speaking on his own account his own thought or feeling.

3 June 1937