The Mother's answers to questions on books by Sri Aurobindo: 'Thoughts and Glimpses', 'The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth' and 'The Life Divine'.
Ce volume comporte les réponses de la Mère aux questions des enfants de l’Ashram et des disciples, et ses commentaires sur deux œuvres de Sri Aurobindo, Aperçus et Pensées et La Manifestation supramentale sur la Terre, et sur les six derniers chapitres de La Vie Divine.
This volume contains the conversations of the Mother in 1957 and 1958 with the members of her Wednesday evening French class, held at the Ashram Playground. The class was composed of sadhaks of the Ashram and students of the Ashram’s school. The Mother usually began by reading out a passage from a French translation of one of Sri Aurobindo’s writings; she then commented on it or invited questions. For most of 1957 the Mother discussed the second part of 'Thoughts and Glimpses' and the essays in 'The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth'. From October 1957 to November 1958 she took up two of the final chapters of 'The Life Divine'. These conversations comprise the last of the Mother’s 'Wednesday classes', which began in 1950.
"The delight of victory is sometimes less than the attraction of struggle and suffering; nevertheless the laurel and not the cross should be the aim of the conquering human soul. "Souls that do not aspire are God's failures; but Nature is pleased and loves to multiply them because they assure her of stability and prolong her empire. "Those who are poor, ignorant, ill-born or ill-bred are not the common herd; the common herd are all who are satisfied with pettiness and an average humanity. "Help men, but do not pauperise them of their energy; lead and instruct men, but see that their initiative and originally remain intact; take others into thyself, but give them in return the full godhead of their nature. He who can do this is the leader and the guru. "God has made the world a field of battle and filled it with the trampling of combatants and the cries of a great wrestle and struggle. Would you filch His peace without paying the price He has fixed for it? "Distrust a perfect-seeming success, but when having succeeded thou findest still much to do, rejoice and go forward; for the labour is long before the real perfection. "There is no more benumbing error than to mistake a stage for the goal or to linger too long in a resting place." Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 391-92
"The delight of victory is sometimes less than the attraction of struggle and suffering; nevertheless the laurel and not the cross should be the aim of the conquering human soul.
"Souls that do not aspire are God's failures; but Nature is pleased and loves to multiply them because they assure her of stability and prolong her empire.
"Those who are poor, ignorant, ill-born or ill-bred are not the common herd; the common herd are all who are satisfied with pettiness and an average humanity.
"Help men, but do not pauperise them of their energy; lead and instruct men, but see that their initiative and originally remain intact; take others into thyself, but give them in return the full godhead of their nature. He who can do this is the leader and the guru.
"God has made the world a field of battle and filled it with the trampling of combatants and the cries of a great wrestle and struggle. Would you filch His peace without paying the price He has fixed for it?
"Distrust a perfect-seeming success, but when having succeeded thou findest still much to do, rejoice and go forward; for the labour is long before the real perfection.
"There is no more benumbing error than to mistake a stage for the goal or to linger too long in a resting place."
Thoughts and Glimpses, SABCL, Vol. 16, pp. 391-92
All that Sri Aurobindo says here is aimed at fighting against human nature with its inertia, its heaviness, laziness, easy satisfactions, hostility to all effort. How many times in life does one meet people who become pacifists because they are afraid
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to fight, who long for rest before they have earned it, who are satisfied with a little progress and in their imagination and desires make it into a marvellous realisation so as to justify their stopping half-way.
In ordinary life, already, this happens so much. Indeed, this is the bourgeois ideal, which has deadened mankind and made man into what he is now: "Work while you are young, accumulate wealth, honour, position; be provident, have a little foresight, put something by, lay up a capital, become an official—so that later when you are forty you "can sit down", enjoy your income and later your pension and, as they say, enjoy a well-earned rest."—To sit down, to stop on the way, not to move forward, to go to sleep, to go downhill towards the grave before one's time, cease to live the purpose of life—to sit down!
The minute one stops going forward, one falls back. The moment one is satisfied and no longer aspires, one begins to die. Life is movement, it is effort, it is a march forward, the scaling of a mountain, the climb towards new revelations, towards future realisations. Nothing is more dangerous than wanting to rest. It is in action, in effort, in the march forward that repose must be found, the true repose of complete trust in the divine Grace, of the absence of desires, of victory over egoism.
True repose comes from the widening, the universalisation of the consciousness. Become as vast as the world and you will always be at rest. In the thick of action, in the very midst of the battle, the effort, you will know the repose of infinity and eternity.
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