Questions and Answers (1957-1958)

2 January 1957

"If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction eternally contradicting the apparent fact of our concrete existence, cessation would be the right end of the matter; but love and delight and self-awareness have also to be reckoned.

"The universe is not merely a mathematical formula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endless self-multiplication of a Poet intoxicated with the rapture of His own power of endless creation.

"We may speak of the Supreme as if He were a mathematician working out a cosmic sum in numbers or a thinker resolving by experiment a problem in relations of principles and the balance of forces: but also we should speak of Him as if He were a lover, a musician of universal and particular harmonies, a child, a poet. The side of thought is not enough; the side of delight too must be entirely grasped: Ideas, Forces, Existences, Principles are hollow moulds unless they are filled with the breath of God's delight.

"These things are images, but all is an image. Abstractions give us the pure conception of God's truths; images give us their living reality.

"If Idea embracing Force begot the worlds, Delight of Being begot the Idea. Because the Infinite conceived an innumerable delight in itself, therefore worlds and universes came into existence.

"Consciousness of being and Delight of being are

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the first parents. Also, they are the last transcendences. Unconsciousness is only an intermediate swoon of the conscious or its obscure sleep; pain and self-extinction are only delight of being running away from itself in order to find itself elsewhere or otherwise.

"Delight of being is not limited in Time; it is without end or beginning. God comes out from one form of things only to enter into another.

"What is God after all? An eternal child playing an eternal game in an eternal garden."

Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 380-81

Sweet Mother, can one go out of Time and Space?

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If one goes out of the manifestation.

It is the fact of objectivisation, of manifestation which has created time and space. To go out of it one must return to the origin, that is, go out of the manifestation. Otherwise from the very first objectivisation time and space were created.

There is a feeling or a perception or an experience of eternity and infinity in which one has the impression of going out of time and space.... It is only an impression.

One must pass beyond all forms, even the most subtle forms of consciousness, far beyond the forms of thought, the forms of consciousness, to be able to have this impression of being outside space and time. This is what generally happens to people who enter into samadhi—the true samadhi—and when they come back to their normal consciousness, they don't remember anything, for, in fact, there was nothing they could remember. This is what Sri Aurobindo says here: If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction, the one reasonable end would be annihilation. For it is obvious that if one goes out of time and space, all separate existence automatically ceases.

There, now. So one can, without much result!

Is that all? Have you tried to go out of time and space?

(The child shakes his head vigorously.)

Mother will you explain the New Year Message? What is the meaning of: "It is not a crucified but a glorified body that will save the world?"¹

I am going to tell you something, you will understand.

One day, I don't know when exactly, I suddenly remembered that I had to give a message for the year. Usually these messages reveal what is going to happen during the year, and as I had nothing to say, for certain reasons, I asked myself, or rather I asked whether I might receive a clear indication of what was to be said. I asked exactly this: what was the best state in the world, and the thing which could help these people or this state of consciousness to draw a little closer to the truth?

What was the best state?

A few hours later I had a booklet in my hands which had come from America and had been published as a kind of account of a photographic exhibition entitled "The Family of Man". There were quotations in this booklet and the reproduction of a number of photographs, classified according to the subject, and all for the purpose of trying to awaken the true sense of fraternity in men. The whole thing represented a sort of effort—immense, pathetic—to prevent a possible war. The quotations had been chosen by a woman-reporter who had come here and whom I had seen. And so, all this came expressing in a really touching way, the best human will which can manifest on earth at present, from the collective point of view. I am not saying that some individuals have not risen much higher and understand much better, but they are individual cases and not a collective attempt to do something for humanity. I was moved.

And then I came to the end of their booklet and to the remedy they in their ignorant goodwill suggested to prevent men

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from killing one another.... It was so poor, so weak, so ignorant, so ineffective, that I was truly moved and—I had a dream, that this exhibition would come here, to Pondicherry, that we could show it and add a concluding fascicule to their booklet in which the true remedy would be revealed to them. And all that took shape very concretely, with the kind of photographs which would be necessary, the quotations that should be put, and then, quite decisively, like something welling up from the depths of consciousness, came this sentence. I wrote it down, and as soon as it was written I said to myself: "Why, this is my message." And it was decided it would be this. So there it is.

This means that it is just the thing which can make the goodwill of mankind, the best being expressed on earth today, progress. It has taken a rather special form because this goodwill came from a Christian country and naturally there was quite a special Christian influence, but this is an attitude which is found everywhere in the world, differently expressed according to the country and the religion, and it was as a reaction against the ignorance of this attitude that I wrote this. Naturally, there is the same idea in India, this idea of the complete renunciation of all physical reality, the profound contempt for the material world which is considered an illusion and a falsehood, that leaves, as Sri Aurobindo used to say, the field free to the sovereign sway of the adverse forces. If you escape from the concrete reality to seek a distant and abstract one, you leave the whole field of concrete realisation at the full disposal of the adverse forces—which have taken hold of it and more or less govern it now—in order to go away yourself to realise what Sri Aurobindo calls here a zero or a void unit—to become the sovereign of a nought. It is the return into Nirvana. This idea is everywhere in the world but expresses itself in different forms.

Because until now evil has been opposed by weakness, by a spiritual force without any power for transformation in the material world, this tremendous effort of goodwill has ended only in deplorable failure and left the world in the same state

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of misery and corruption and falsehood. It is on the same plane as the one where the adverse forces are ruling that one must have a greater power than theirs, a power which can conquer them totally in that very domain. To put it otherwise, a spiritual force which would be capable of transforming both the consciousness and the material world. This force is the supramental force. What is necessary is to be receptive to its action on the physical plane, and not to run away into a distant Nirvana leaving the enemy with full power over what one abandons.

It is neither sacrifice nor renunciation nor weakness which can bring the victory. It is only Delight, a delight which is strength, endurance, supreme courage. The delight brought by the supramental force. It is much more difficult than giving everything up and running away, it demands an infinitely greater heroism—but that is the only way to conquer.

Nothing else? I have some questions here, but now it is rather late.

Mother, this new force which is going to act, will it act through individual effort or independently of it?

Why this opposition? It acts independently of all individual effort, as if automatically in the world, but it creates individual effort and makes use of it. Individual effort is one of its means of action, and perhaps the most powerful. If one thinks that individual effort is due to the individual, it is an illusion, but if the individual under the pretext that there is a universal action independent of himself refuses to make an individual effort, he refuses to give his collaboration. The Force wants to use, and does in fact use individual effort as one of the most powerful means at its disposal. It is the Force itself, it is this Power which is your individual effort.

And so, you see, the first movement of vital self-conceit when it is told, "You don't exist in yourself", naturally it says,

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"All right, I won't do anything any more! I am not the one who works, so I won't work any longer" and "Very good, the Divine can do everything, it is his business, I won't stir any more. If the credit does not go to me"—it comes to that—"I won't do anything any more." Well! But indeed there's no word for such things. This is something I constantly hear, it is simply a way of venting one's offended self-conceit, that's all. But the true reaction, the pure reaction is an enthusiastic impulse of collaboration, to play the game with all the energy, the will-power at the disposal of one's consciousness, in the state one is in, with the feeling of being supported, carried by something infinitely greater than oneself, which makes no mistakes, something which protects you and at the same time gives you all the necessary strength and uses you as the best instrument. And one feels that, and one feels one is working in security, that one can no longer make any mistakes, that what one does is done with the utmost result and—in delight. That is the true movement; to feel that one's will is intensified to the utmost because it is no longer a tiny little microscopic person in infinity but an infinite universal Power which makes you act: the Force of Truth. This is the only true reaction.

The other one—miserable. "Ah! I am not the one who is doing things, ah! it is not my will being expressed, ah! it is not my power that is working... so I lie down flat, stretch myself out in inert passivity and I won't move." "Very well, then," one tells the Divine, "do whatever you like, I don't exist any longer." That is poor indeed! There.

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