The Mother's brief written statements on various aspects of spiritual life including some spoken comments.
This volume consists primarily of brief written statements by the Mother on various aspects of spiritual life. Written between the late 1920s and the early 1970s, the statements have been compiled from her public messages, private notes, and correspondence with disciples. About two-thirds of them were written in English; the rest were written in French and appear here in English translation. The volume also contains a small number of spoken comments, most of them in English. Some are tape-recorded messages; others are reports by disciples that were later approved by the Mother for publication.
Suffering inflicted on others is not a good base on which to build spiritual realisation.
To advance alone on the path can be a form of egoism. One can liberate oneself alone only if the others refuse to follow. One must therefore first offer to lead them along. And if this burdens the advance and increases the difficulties, one should take it as the effect of a special Grace that tests the sincerity of the consecration in this way. The capacity to receive the divine help is in proportion to this sincerity.
7 June 1958
To help others is the best way of helping oneself. For, if you are sincere, you will soon discover that all their difficulties and all their failures are the sure signs of the same corresponding deficiency in you. Indeed, they prove that something in you is not perfect enough to be all-powerful.
We find in others what is in us. If we always find mud around us, it proves that there is mud somewhere in us.
It is only egoism that is shocked to find egoism in others.
Each of those who are around us can be for us, provided we are attentive, a mirror in which one or more aspects of our being are reflected. If we know how to profit by it, it is a powerful help for our progress. And when the mirror is sincere and of goodwill, the value of the help becomes considerable.
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If you have sympathy for them and a true understanding of their difficulty, you can always help them.
You bring help to him who knows how to use it.
Humanity is a sick child always wanting what is bad for him. Philanthropy is like a mother who, in order to satisfy her child's demands, would give him the very thing that will make him worse.
It is a mistake to consider service to humanity as the highest expression of service to the Divine. To do so is to remain far too confined within the limits of an exclusive human consciousness.
The best way of helping others is to transform oneself. Be perfect and you will be in a position to bring perfection to the world.
Rise to a higher consciousness for the world to be saved.
Change your consciousness for the world to be saved.
Change yourself if you wish to change the world. Prove by your inner transformation that a truth-consciousness can take possession of the material world and that the Divine Unity can be manifested upon earth.
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Organisations, however vast and complete they may be, can achieve nothing permanent unless a new force, more divine and all-powerful, expresses itself through a perfected human instrument.
23 August 1952
No material organisation, whatever its degree of preparation, is capable of bringing a solution to the miseries of man.
Man must rise to a higher level of consciousness and get rid of his ignorance, limitation and selfishness in order to get rid also of his sufferings.
21 February 1955
The best way to help the world is to transform oneself by an integral and intensive yoga.
July 1965
The world will be made better only in proportion as we make ourselves better. The Vedantic truth that the world is only a projection—a function—of our consciousness is as pragmatically true as it is spiritually true. The ills that humanity suffers from—collectively and individually—stem from the errors that lie at the roots of our ignorant nature. We must be cleansed of these evils—individually first of all—if we ever hope to see a clean world outside. A yoga of self-purification is the condition precedent to a yoga of perfection.
But, in the end, a Higher Destiny leans over earth's children and its ways are beyond calculation.
16 August 1967
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So long as you do not have the power to change the world, it is useless to say that the world is wrong. And if you abolish in yourself the things that are wrong in the world, you will see that the world will no longer be wrong.
When you are truly changed, everything around you will also be changed.
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