The Mother
with Letters on the Mother

Their Help

Well, what an amazing mass of extraordinary mental constructions you have built up about the Mother and myself! The Mother is a great Yogi of a rather grave and impersonal type! I am Vedantic and vast and cosmic and impersonal and what not! What not indeed! Nothing is impossible after that!! However, I won't protest—for mental constructions are to the mind like his favourite productions to an author, the more you criticise them the more the mind clings to them. Let me point out however by example how they come unnecessarily in your way and how very unnecessarily you let them do that, so that my insistence—in The Mother or elsewhere—on getting rid of mental constructions is not so groundless after all. The Mother told you very simply that if you prayed to her (your prayers to Krishna having according to you no effect) you would have received quicker help. That was simply to help you—she is here close to you and the others and any number here have received help by calling to her simply and directly, of course without any questions or misgivings. Even now there are several who are emerging out of the same illness as yours, a habit of many years of long attacks of black despondency with the usual round of suggestions, "unfitness, this Yoga hopeless for me, no response, no experience, the Divine does not love me, Mother is distant and far, how long can I go on, how can anyone live like this, running away, suicide etc.," and they are emerging because they have suddenly managed to turn simply and directly towards her. So what the Mother said was not something unfounded and a mere idea of hers. But it was simply a suggestion to help you. How did your mind come to the conclusion that it was a command to be followed on pain of displeasure, spiritual hanging or rejection and exile? The habit of mental constructions, that is all. Fear?

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But the fear itself is a mental construction which could have no real foundation if you had remembered the constant indulgence and patience the Mother has always shown to you.

The doubt about the possibility of help is hardly a rational one, since all the evidence of life and of spiritual experience in the past and of the special experience of those, numerous enough, who have received help from the Mother and myself, is against the idea that no internal or spiritual help from one to another or from a Guru to his disciples or from myself to my disciples is possible. It is therefore not really a doubt arising from the reason but one that comes from the vital and physical mind that is troubling you. The physical mind doubts all that it has not itself experienced and even it doubts what it has itself experienced if that experience is no longer there or immediately palpable to it—the vital brings in the suggestions of despondency and despair to reinforce the doubt and prevent clear seeing. It is therefore a difficulty that cannot be effectively combated by the logical reason alone, but best by the clear perception that it is a self-created difficulty—a self-formed sanskara or mental formation which has become habitual and has to be broken up so that you may have a free mind and vital, free for experience.

As for the help, you expect a divine intervention to destroy the doubt, and the divine intervention is possible, but it comes usually only when the being is ready. You have indulged to a great extreme this habit of the recurrence of doubt, this mental formation or sanskara, and so the adverse force finds it easy to throw it upon you, to bring back the suggestion. You must have a steady working will to repel it whenever it comes and to refuse the tyranny of the sanskara of doubt—to annul the force of its recurrence. I think you have hardly done that in the past, you have rather supported the doubts when they came. So for some time at least you must do some hard work in the opposite direction. The help (I am not speaking of a divine intervention from above but of my help and the Mother's) will be there. It can be effective in spite of your physical mind, but it will be more

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effective if this steady working will of which I speak is there as its instrument. There are always two elements in spiritual success—one's own steady will and endeavour and the Power that in one way or another helps and gives the result of the endeavour.

I will do what is necessary to give the help you must receive. To say you cannot would not be true, for you have received times without number and it has helped you to recover.

26 January 1934

I don't feel any devotion at all. I think you know how much I suffer and how helpless I am to do anything. Have pity on me, cure me by your Grace. Help me out of this pit of darkness by your mercy.

I will try to do so.

But it is a pity you cannot form the habit and stabilise the power to reject this thing when it comes—for it would mean that the difficulty was practically over and the whole being under the right direction and on the right way. Other difficulties are of minor importance, it is this one thing that is standing obstinately in the way of the soul's deliverance.

I will put my force to pull you out—I hope I shall get the full response.

9 June 1934

Something in me is open to you and the Mother, for I can feel Peace coming into me. But I do not see how I can call for your help—selfishness, blindness and distrust of spiritual things are supreme in me.

I do not see why your having difficulties or the external consciousness denying the inner truth should prevent you from calling our help. At that rate hardly anybody could call for help. Almost everybody in the Asram except a few have this difficulty of the external consciousness denying or standing in the way of the inner experience and trying to cling to its old ways, ideas, habits and desires. This division in human nature is a universal fact and one should not make too much of it. Once the Peace

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and Power are there, it is best to trust to that to remove in time the opposition and enlighten and occupy the external nature.

19 July 1934

We are sorry that you have suffered so much. It was not to hurt you that the Mother put the pressure, but to liberate. It has always been with a deep affection and sympathy with you in your struggles that she has tried to help you. I trust you will recover soon your ease of mind and peace. I will try to give you all the help possible.

23 January 1935

The Mother and I will do all to get rid of the cloud which the physical mind presents against the permanent consciousness of your soul's connection with the Mother; but let your thinking mind be firm in its will to be rid of it and to call the aid of our Force.

6 February 1936

Last night I got stuck at every stanza and had to send you and Mother frequent S.O.S.'s to rescue me. Do you really receive these signals, or do your impersonal Forces intercept them and do the necessary?

As we receive some hundreds of such signals daily, we are obliged to be impersonal about it, otherwise we would have no time for anything else.

6 November 1938

It is very painful for us to see you in this condition and it makes us very sad and anxious. Will you not make an effort and throw off the cloud that has fallen upon you? There is surely something you are not telling us, for nothing has happened to our knowledge that could make you go so far as to refuse food and reject persistently the love and solicitude of the Mother. Will you not tell us what is your reason and relieve your mind of its burden?

You are our beloved child. Nothing should be able to

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throw a shadow between you and our love. Throw off whatever shadow there is. I ask you to take your food as usual. Speak to the Mother; turn to us once more; call back the happiness and the sunshine.