On The Mother

-23_Words of the Mother.htm

CHAPTER 20

Words of the Mother

I

The series of fifteen Sunday morning Conversations beginning on 7 April 1929 constitutes the bulk of Words of the Mother (third edition, 1946) -178 out of its 214 pages.* The question-answer pattern gives the talks a homeliness and naturalness that is unfading, and involves the hearers (and the readers) in an intimacy of immediate action. One question leads to another, often in a collateral region, and the replies are full, frank and breathe an infinite freedom. In the result, the Conversations cover a wide expanse: what is Yoga for, and what is the needed preparation for Yoga; tapasyā and surrender (prapatti); union with the Divine, and service to humanity; equanimity, perfect calm and peace; visions true and false; visions and spirituality; Jeanne d'Arc's visions; meditation and surrender; freedom and karmic fatalism; what books to read, and how; function of the intellect; hostile forces; reason and faith; cause of natural disasters; vampires, what they are; money power, its true role and its current misuse; diseases, microbes and sanitary arrangements; universal will and individual initiative; love human and divine; the nature of religion; mental aberrations and physical ailments; Yogic consciousness; Yoga and Art; repulsion towards snakes and scorpions; surrender and sacrifice; and so on. Informative, friendly and revelatory, these intimate talks gently and irresistibly wind their meaning into our hearts and sensibilities - to rest there forever and inspire our action and behaviour. If the Mother's Prayers and Meditations is a guide to Jnana and Yoga, if it throws open the doors of the occult and the spiritual, if her periodic dialogues with the Divine give us tremors of mystic recognition and moments of ecstatic adoration, her Words of the Mother makes us a participant in the Divine's commerce with average humanity, and we are at once edified by her wisdom and experience, reassured by her motherly concern and consideration, and sustained and fulfilled by her all-understanding love. The Divine - the Mother as the mediatrix - aspirant Humanity: such is the sequence, such is the three-in-one mystic relationship. The Mother shows her human side to the Divine in Prayers and Meditations, and her Divine side to us in Words of the Mother. Together, these two spiritual classics make a double testament of lasting significance.

Like Prayers and Meditations, the Words too has been basic reading for the sadhaks of the Integral Yoga for the last several decades. When first printed as Conversations with the Mother in 1931, the book was not put up

*These fifteen Conversations are to be found in volume 3 of the Mother's Collected .1977, pp.l to 120.

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for sale but the Mother gave copies to such of the sadhaks and aspirants that she thought were likely to benefit by reading it. It was only when it. reappeared in 1940 with the title Words of the Mother that it became available for the general public. Twenty-five years after the talks were first given, some of the Mother's remarks used to come up for discussion with the children of the Centre of Education, and the Mother would offer further elucidations. For example, in the course of Conversation XI the Mother had said in 1929, concerning the origin of illnesses (here echoing e the convictions of Dr. Kobayashi, to which a reference has been made in an earlier chapter):

Each spot of the body is symbolical of an inner movement; there is there a world of subtle correspondences.... The particular place in the body affected by an illness is an index to the nature of the inner disharmony that has taken place.¹

This came up for discussion on 23 September 1953, and the Mother offered a long explication regarding the symbolical or imagist character of the human body. Why is each spot of the body "symbolical of an inner movement"? The Mother answers:

Because the whole physical world is the symbol of universal movements ....

.. .It is as though you viewed the whole universe as a movement of force and this movement of force were projected till it met a screen and on the screen it made an image, and this image on the screen is the physical world .... The physical world which everyone takes as the only reality is simply an image. It is the image of all that happens in what we call the invisible. It becomes visible to us because there is a screen which intervenes and stops the vibrations and that produces an image. If there were no such screen the vibrations would move on and nothing would be seen. And yet all the movements would exist ....

... So, our body represents a small fragment in this set of images that is projected and it is a fragment which expresses exactly all the vibrations of the inner state corresponding to this little point that is the body.²

As regards some local internal disharmony being the real cause of an illness, Dr. Kobayashi used the methods of concentration and 'still-Sitting' meditation to cure such diseases, and the Mother was well acquainted with his views and his work when she was in Japan.

II

In her Conversation XII, the Mother had said that "there is a plane in the mind where the memory of everything is stored and remains always in existence," and it is as though all earth-history is infallibly registered there:

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Thus, if you go deep into silence, you can reach a level of consciousness on which it is not impossible for you to receive answers to all your questions. And if there is one who is consciously open to the plenary truth of the supermind, in constant contact with it, he can certainly answer any question that is worth an answer from the supramental Light.³

When this passage came up for elucidation on 30 September 1953, the Mother elaborated the idea with a touch of the picturesque:

It is like a very big library with many many small compartments. So you find the compartment corresponding to the information you wish to have. You press a button and it opens. And inside it you find a scroll as it were, a mental formation which unrolls before you like a parchment, and then you read. then you make a note of what you have read and afterwards return quietly into your body with the new knowledge, and you may transcribe physically, if you can, what you have found, and then you get up and start your life as before. ⁴

But, then, to be able to dig out that infallible knowledge, "you must be able to completely silence the mind"; and one must not go with a plausible solution already in the head. "You must become absolutely like a blank paper, with nothing on it."⁵ But the Mother conceded that there were "very many conditions to fulfil: it is not so easy as taking a book in the library and reading it! This is within the reach of everybody. That is a little more difficult to accomplish,"⁶

Again, when a passage from Conversation XIII on the play of evil in the world in spite of its Divine origin⁷was read on 14 October 1953, the Mother explained the role of the complicating intermediaries, and concluded with the affirmation:

There is only one single solution to the problem - not to make any distinction between God and the universe at the origin. The universe is the Divine projected in space, and God is the universe at its origin. It is the same thing under one aspect or another. And you cannot divide them ... the fact is that when you succeed in uniting your consciousness with the divine consciousness, there is no problem left. Everything appears quite natural and simple and all right and exactly what it had to be. But when you cut yourself off from the origin and stand over against Him, then truly everything goes wrong, nothing can go right!⁸

Correct knowledge can come only through identification, not through separativity, division and false inquisition.

The filiations between Yoga and Art were first discussed in 1929 in Conversation XIV, and the main thrust of the Mother's exposition was that Art, in its fundamental truth, was nothing less than "the aspect of beauty

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of the Divine manifestation". The artist too is like a Yogi who goes within seeking the right inspiration:

A man like Leonardo da Vinci was a Yogi and nothing else ....

Music too is an essentially spiritual art and has always been associated with religious feeling and an inner life....

... Beethoven, when he composed the Ninth Symphony, had the vision of an opening into a higher world and of the descent of a higher world into this earthly plane ....

There is a domain far above the mind which we could call the world of Harmony ....

If by Yoga you are capable of reaching this source of all art, then you are master, if you will, of all the arts.⁹

When this subject came up for discussion again on 28 October 1953, the Mother made the point that, in India, the majority of artistic creations - the paintings in the caves, for example, and the statues in the temples ­ were not signed:

In those days the artist did what he had to do without caring whether his name would go down to posterity or not. All was done in a movement of aspiration to express a higher beauty, and above all with the idea of giving an appropriate abode to the godhead who was evoked.¹⁰

Similarly, the subject "Spirituality and Morality" discussed in Conversation XV was reopened on 4 November 1953. The Mother had said in 1929 that morality was not Divine or of the Divine; it was a human creation or fabrication, reared on the base of a more or less arbitrary division of things into the good and the bad. ¹¹In 1953, the Mother was even more forthright:

We have had frequent instances of people who used to lead a more than doubtful life and who had revelations .... If it happens that, just then, at that moment, there is a concurrence of events and perhaps an opening in the being, the Divine, who is always present, manifests himself. On the other hand, for the sage or the saint who is quite infatuated with his own importance and his own worth, and full of pride and vanity, there is not much chance that the Divine will manifest in him ....

... The greatest obstacle to the contact with the Divine is pride ....

... the one truly important thing is the intensity of the aspiration. And this intensity of aspiration comes in all kinds of circumstances. ¹²

The Divine is no moralist; it is man who dons the moralist's mantle and tries to legislate and decide in terms of black and white!

While there was an interval of about twenty-five years between her conversations of 1929 and her readings and elucidations in the Playground in 1953, what is remarkable is the embracing identity of opinion and even verbal expression; there are reiterations, elaborations, fresh affirmations.

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but there is no actual resilement from the earlier positions, no recantations of any kind. This gives the whole conspectus of the Mother's thought a rounded fullness and sufficiency, partaking of the character of overhead knowledge, a stream of illumination pouring from Above. Words of the Mother can thus still be read with profit, although more than half a century has elapsed since the words were spoken on Sunday mornings redolent of 'the holy hush of ancient sacrifice' before less than a dozen attentive listeners in a quiet room in remote Pondicherry. The Socratic dialogues in ancient Greece had a like seminal quality, but there the accent was on enlightened reason, whereas with the Mother the inspiration was spiritual. Again, at Pondicherry, it was a select but representative group comprising Indian, British, American and French, men as well as women, and divers backgrounds and aptitudes. And the Mother beyonded both Space and Time.

III

The fifteen Conversations, although they have a seeming casualness about them, and give a first impression of haphazard discontinuity, will be seen on closer scrutiny to bear a distinct organic interdependence and unity, making the whole series little less than a Handbook of Yoga, as necessary for the practising sadhak as Sri Aurobindo's The Synthesis of Yoga is to the more intellectual disciple. Was it mere chance that those few had met on a Sunday morning, and would be meeting again and again on the coming Sundays, to exchange thoughts on Yoga and other matters of concern? "We have all met in previous lives," the Mother assures her hearers; "we are of one family and have worked through ages for the victory of the Divine and its manifestation upon earth."¹³

First, then, about the motivation for doing Yoga. Not for any kind of self-interest nor even for service to humanity; for the Mother, the only valid aim is the Divine. Seeking and finding and serving the Divine, one may incidentally benefit humanity, or promote social service, but that is not the basic aim of the Yoga; the aim is the Divine, a steady aspiration, a sheer hunger, for the Divine. And the Divine is not so far off, after all:

Concentrate in the heart. Enter into it; go within and, deep and far, as far as you can. Gather all the strings of your consciousness that are spread abroad, roll them up and take a plunge and sink down.

A fire is burning there, in the deep quietude of the heart. It is the divinity in you - your true being. Hear its voice, follow its dictates.¹⁴

How easy it all sounds! But how exactly shall we do it? Again, the answer sounds easy: Be conscious! For it is our unconsciousness - or deceptive or flawed Consciousness - that "keeps us down to our unregenerate nature

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and prevents change and transformation in it". It is unconsciousness that permits the entry of the adverse forces into our domain, and winks at the processes of inner erosion and corruption. On the other hand, to grow conscious is to acquire right discrimination, or viveka as we might put it: to be able to sift things and know the true from the false, and avoid wrong constructions.

The second Conversation begins with a reference to the two classic paths to Realisation: the arduous way of tapasya (discipline) and the safe and sure way of prapatti (surrender), either like the baby monkey or the baby cat:

The baby monkey holds to its mother in order to be carried about and it must hold firm, otherwise if it loses its grip, it falls. On the other hand, the baby cat does not hold to its mother, but is held by the mother and has no fear nor responsibility; it has nothing to do but to let the mother hold it.¹⁵

But without true sincerity nothing can be done - nothing can even be begun in Yoga. Besides sincerity, the sadhak's needs are patience, perseverance and a sleepless vigilance. In the path of surrender, the normal mental control is withdrawn; but unless it is replaced by Divine control, all the irrational may erupt, the lusts may want to have a free hand, and one may be purblindly lured towards the undivine. But if one becomes verily like a child and gives oneself up to the Mother to be carried by her, all will be well. Surrender is indeed the key-word, the king-action, but while it is infallible, it is not all that easy to opt for. The baby monkey's hands may lose their grip in a sudden impulse to seize a fruit, the baby cat itself may momentarily struggle to escape from the security of the mother's grip, and of course the average human being is too much a slave to his own petty contrivances and calculations to follow unquestioningly either the baby monkey or the baby cat way of surrender. There are evasions, there are wrong attachments, there are fateful perversions. "The whole world is full of the poison," says the Mother. "You take it in with every breath." One has to be very wary, one has need of total trust in the security of the Mother's arms, and one has to wake up the psychic being, the divine witness and guide within, and make it the controlling and radiating centre of all faculties, all thoughts, all actions, all delights:

In the depths of your consciousness is the psychic being, the temple of the Divine within you. This is the centre round which should come about the unification of all these divergent parts, all these contradictory movements of your being .... Once you have turned to the Divine, saying, "I want to be yours", and the Divine has said, "Yes", the whole world cannot keep you from it. .. then it is as though a bridge has been built and little by little the crust becomes thinner and thinner until the two parts are wholly joined and the inner and the outer become one.¹⁶

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As the Mother said some years later:

The centre of the human being is the psychic which is the dwelling-place of the immanent Divine. Unification means organisation and harmonisation of all the parts of the being (mental, vital and physical) around this centre, so that all the activities of the being may be the correct expression of the will of the Divine Presence.¹⁷

But how are we to know that it is the psychic being, the Divine spark within, that speaks to us, and not some hostile force that has somehow made a surreptitious entry? The Mother gives an unmistakable clue:

You can easily know when a thing comes from the Divine. You feel free, you are at ease, you are in peace .... Equanimity is the essential condition of union and communion with the Divine.¹⁸

Anything that sparks off excitement, egoistic exultation or even a frenzy of Bacchus exhilaration, may be deemed to come, if not always from the undivine, at least from brazen vitalistic impulses.

IV

It is a fact of common experience that in sleep we are often as active as in the waking state. In that sleep of apparent inactivity what dreams do come! Also, in the waking state itself, one may at unpredictable moments be surprised by visions. What is the role of such dreams and visions in life, especially in spiritual life? The problem bristles with so much complexity that, in Conversation III, the Mother declines to give a rough and ready answer. Visions and dreams may occur in different planes, from the most material and physical to the highest spiritual. Some are clearly personal, some may have a local or a credal significance, and some few are universal. The problem is one of clear recapitulation and correct interpretation. Only far too often do visions and dreams fade away, and leave not a rack behind! Unless one can recall all the lineaments of the visions, all the details of a dream, how is one to understand them and infer their relevance to one's spiritual life?

The Mother's first exhortation is: "Be conscious of the night as well as of the day." Know your dreams! Let them not sweep the firmament of our sleeping hours like mere straws in the wayward wind. Let us first keep track of our dreams, - and then try to control them. Consciousness and control! Some dreams that are an overflow of the activities of the daytime not be very important, except that they at least signify a conservation, not a dissipation; our superficial as also the deeper parts have been fully engaged in the work in progress. But visions like Jeanne d'Arc's certainly come from the overmental Gods or "formateurs", form-makers, and one should learn to be sensitive to their communications and their implications.

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There is, however, the danger of mistaking false gods for the true, of misinterpreting the dreams and the visions, and of hugging false security (as, for example, literature's tragic heroes - a Macbeth, a Captain Ahab - do), and coming to grief.

But of course the few minutes of "dreamless sleep" during the night are much more restful and refreshing than hours of so-called sleep, for those minutes of absolute silence are the termless time of the Sachchidananda consciousness, when the soul bathes in the waters of immortality and ineffable bliss.

Just as visions and dreams as such are not necessarily a sign of spirituality, the hours spent in meditation and the external draperies of the exercise are also no proof of spiritual progress:

It is a proof of your progress when you no longer have to make an effort to meditate. Then you have rather to make an effort to stop meditating: it becomes difficult to stop meditation, difficult to stop thinking of the Divine, difficult to come down to the ordinary consciousness.¹⁹

Discipline too, while it is necessary, may be overdone and may lead to false notions of success. Mere body-control as in Hatha Yoga or mind-control as in Raja Yoga, or the two together, cannot be equated with spirituality, which alone is the aim of Integral Yoga. For this one has boldly to take the decisive plunge; and even this is but the beginning, for having taken the plunge one has to learn to live in the Divine.²⁰This sort of definitive call can come with irresistible force, even as it came to the Gopis, to Sri Chaitanya, or to Mirabai. There can indeed be no mistaking the authenticity of the call. First comes the awakening of the consciousness by a touch of the psychic being from behind. This is like the taste of a drop from the divine nectar of spirituality. Equally there is the growing allergy to the pressures - the false lures, the deceptive lights, the ugly compulsions - of the outside world. Between the call for the higher life and the repulsion for the lower or ordinary life is hatched the decision to take the plunge, the irrevocable plunge into the Divine:

Take the whole and entire plunge, and you will be free from this outer confusion and get the true experience of the spiritual life.²¹

V

The Yoga is for union with the Divine, and for this one has to plunge into the Divine, offer everything to the Divine. This means that one should constantly recognise the fact that, since everything - including our faculties, our aspirations, our doings, our triumphs and even our failures - since

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everything comes from the Divine, it is but natural that we should return or offer them back to the source with our love and gratitude:

Live constantly in the presence of the Divine; live in the feeling that it is this presence which moves you and is doing everything you do²²

Remember and offer is one of the Mother's mahāvākyas; in other words, remembering the Divine origin of everything, everything should be offered back to the Divine.

The personal problem ay be solved if through knowledge, works or love, a union is effected with the Divine, but the Integral Yoga alms at integral union or the divinisation of mind, vital and body as well. The ultimate goal is to grow in the perfection of consciousness that makes it impossible to act otherwise than as a pure instrument of the Divine. Once the egoistic mentalised consciousness is transcended and this Divine consciousness takes root, there will be experienced a new freedom, equality and puissance. The traditional dichotomies will disappear, and one will know that "there is nothing in the world which has not its ultimate truth and support in the Divine", and if one is in touch "with the Spirit, the Divine Soul in things", one will be able to pierce through the crust of the discordant and the painful, and reach the beauty and the delight. Nay more: one is also emancipated from the burden of the past, and even from the adamantine law of karmic predestination:

This precisely is the aim of Yoga, - to get out of the cycle of Karma into a divine movement. By Yoga you leave the mechanical round of Nature in which you are an ignorant slave, a helpless and miserable tool, and rise into another plane where you become a conscious participant and a dynamic agent in the working out of a Higher Destiny.²³

VI

In Sri Aurobindo's Yoga, the aim is to exceed the mental consciousness and attain in the overhead levels up to the supramental. This does not mean that mind, reason, intellect are entirely useless, or necessarily inimical to Yoga. Everything in its own place, confining itself to its own proper function: there can be no objection to this. It is when anything - force, faculty or institution - opts for a wrong movement that difficulties arise. "Reason was the helper, reason is the bar": in other words, for conceptual analysis, for system-building and organisation, reason could be a marvellous helper, but for invading the Invisible, for exploring the mystical, for plunging into the Divine, reason can definitely be a hindrance. On 5 May, 1929, the Mother enunciated this simple criterion:

A power has the right movement when it is set into activity for the divine'spurpose;

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it has the wrong movement when it is set into activity for its own satisfaction.²⁴

The intellect isn't tabooed in Yoga, certainly not in the Integral Yoga; only, it has to be kept in its own proper place.

Now, how about the adverse forces? What are they? How does one identify them? Some years later, in the mid-thirties the Mother was to specify these marks of identification of an adverse force:

1st sign: One feels far away from Sri Aurobindo and me.

2nd: One loses confidence, begins to criticise, is not satisfied.

3rd: One revolts and sinks into falsehood.²⁵

Again, how are we to grapple with such adverse forces, and throw them out? Evil suggestions come to Macbeth from the Witches, then from Lady Macbeth, and finally in the form of a dagger:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation,

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? ...

Thou marshall'st me the way that I was going.

The difference between the outside and the inside is obliterated; suggestion feeds the wish, and the wish is father to the thought, and the thought precipitates the action.

The evil suggestions from the adverse forces certainly come from without; but they could, if not decisively thrown out, colonise a place within and operate securely from there. Even the lower mind - or the physical mind which is in alliance with the lower vital consciousness and its movements - can be infected by the hostile forces and degraded to their level of perversity and evil. What is our armour against such forces and their cancerous insinuations? The Mother's advice is severely practical:

... keep as quiet and peaceful as possible. If the attack takes the form of adverse suggestions try quietly to push them away, as you would some material object. The quieter you are, the stronger you become. That firm basis of all spiritual power is equanimity. You must not allow anything to disturb your poise: you can then resist every kind of attack....

... A quiet call, a conviction that in this ascension towards the realisation. you are never walking all alone and a faith that whenever help is needed it is there, will lead you through, easily and securely.²⁶

How are we to mobilise the strength, the vigilance, the poise, and throw

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back the unceasing barrage of sly, perverse or wicked suggestions to which we are subject? The inner strength must come from Faith in the Divine, and in the Divine within ourselves; not mental faith alone, but faith reaching down to the most subconscious, the very cells of the body. While the unity and interdependence of the different elements in man (body, vital, mind, soul) and of man and Nature provide the basis of a universal harmony, this is often upset and Nature is 'ridden with calamities' and humanity has become a byword for disharmony. While a higher consciousness is pressing down for manifestation, it is also meeting with stubborn resistance:

All the disorder and disharmony that we see upon earth is the result of this resistance. Calamity and catastrophe, conflict and violence, obscurity and ignorance - all ills come from the same source.²⁷

The remedy, then, is to increase the receptivity below to the downpour of the new consciousness from above. Great messiahs in the past have tried to hew new paths to freedom, peace and harmony, and this in spite of much contemporary resistance. Some inner progress has surely been achieved as a result of the labours of the great pathfinders of the past, but much yet remains to be done - especially, the radical integral transformation of Man and Earth still awaits its hour.

It is also good to remember that, in the Divine scheme of things, the . action of the hostile forces is used only as "a testing process, so that nothing may be forgotten, nothing left out in the work of transformation. They will allow no mistake". But when the goal has been reached, the handicaps in the race will not be needed. Taking a long view, the hostile forces are allowed to exist "because they are necessary in the Great Work; once they are no more indispensable, they will either change or go". ²⁸ Hostile forces are thus meant, in the cosmic scheme, to put man's sincerity to the severest test, and the day man becomes "integrally sincere", they will disappear, for they will have no further cause for their existence.

VII

In Conversation VI, the Mother takes us to what is for us the uncharted world of the bodiless vital beings, and explains the dangers of our inadvertent or imprudent exposure to it. But sometimes such vital beings also inhabit human forms that have come to be known as vampires. Romen Palit writes that the Mother once warned him against someone who was such a vampire; and a few minutes' association with that person used to leave Romen "dejected and tired". ²⁹According to the Mother, vampires are not human though they may deceptively sport a human body:

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Their method is to try first to cast their influence upon a man; then they enter slowly into his atmosphere and in the end may get complete possession of him, driving out entirely the real human soul and personality .... If they come into your atmosphere, you suddenly feel depressed: and exhausted; if you are near them for some time you fall sick; if you live with one of them, it may kill you.³⁰

Better avoid vampires at the first suspicion caused by the symptoms of depression and exhaustion; cut off all connection with them!

Although vampires, when in a human body, may not be altogether conscious of their parasitical or blood-sucking nature, their influence is malignant all the same. Like the motiveless malignity of an Iago! Evil-doing is the svabhāva of a vampire, just as, for Satan, "Evil! be thou my good!" is the natural affirmation. One of the tragedies of organised human life is that only such people seem to control most of the money-resources of the world, and hence industry, business and commerce as well. While these possessed vampires readily respond to vitalistic pulls like sex, power, politics, fame, gambling, gluttony, drunkenness and luxurious living, they are insensitive to good causes and allergic to the intimations of the Spirit:

In those who are slaves of vital beings, the desire for truth and light and spiritual achievement, even if it at all touches them, cannot balance the desire for money. ³¹

In our fight against the hostile forces of the vital world, - the creatures of falsehood, the agents of evil, the children of darkness, - the human body, with its layers of density and grooves of resistance, is a natural fortress of protection. The Yoga has to be done while in the body, as in a tabernacle, and there is always the infinite reserve power of the Mother to bale us out of our difficulties:

No attachments, no desires, no impulses, no preferences; perfect equanimity, unchanging peace and absolute faith in the Divine protection: with that you are safe, without it you are in peril. And as long as you are not safe, it is better to do like little chickens that take shelter under the mother's wings.³²

VIII

For the seventh Conversation, the leading question related to the power of Thought, and to what extent one created one's own world. If, according to Shakespeare's Hotspur, "thought's the slave of life, and life's time's fool", and according to Milton's Satan,

The mind is its own place, and in itself

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Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n,

for Aurobindo Thought is the paraclete mediating between Here and Eternity, the lower and higher hemispheres of omnipresent Reality. There are thus apparently different ways of understanding the function and power of Thought. In the life of Yoga, the central limitation of Thought (or mind) is seen to be that it is "an instrument of action and formation and not an instrument of knowledge". ³³ Thought is most often imperfect, incomplete or perverse knowledge, and no wonder it causes perplexity and confusion. Much better would it be to silence Thought and listen in Silence:

If you listen in silence, you will hear rightly and understand rightly.³⁴

In the pursuit of the Divine, one has to abandon all mental conceptions and transcend Thought; and one of the common mental conceptions is that microbes cause illnesses. But there is also the inner condition of the body, for any disharmony within - in the physical, vital or mental - can equally father ailments. This problem was to come up again for discussion on 22 July 1953, when the Mother went into considerable detail. Normally we are under Divine protection, but when we permit doubt to infiltrate into our consciousness and open the way to fear - mental, vital, physical- then we fall ill, or meet with an accident. While there are both internal and external causes of illnesses, the former are the more crucial:

... all illnesses, all, whatever they may be (I would add even accidents) come from a break in equilibrium ....

... you must have a triple equilibrium - mental, vital, physical- and not only in each of the parts, but also in the three parts in their mutual relations.³⁵

The origin of an illness being so complex, it is not enough to look for the microbes alone. "And to discover the disorder, you must have an extensive occult knowledge and also a deep knowledge of all the inner workings of each one."³⁶ Actually, an illness invades and takes root because the protective outer cover - the etheric body, the nervous envelope - has been pierced.. It is this subtle yet invisible body that must be made truly impregnable, and for this peace and equanimity and confidence, faith in health and an unruffled and cheerful disposition are needed. After all, microbes and germs of all kinds are swarming about everywhere and all the time. But suddenly the body's defences seem to crumble, and the microbes invade and undermine the system. But whence this "depression of the vital force"? The Mother offers a convincing reply:

It comes from some disharmony in the being, from a lack of receptivity to the divine forces. When you cut yourself off from the energy and light that sustain you, then there is this depression, there is created what medical

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science calls a "favourable ground" and something takes advantage of it. It is doubt, gloominess, lack of confidence, a selfish turning back upon yourself that cuts you off from the light and divine energy and gives the attack this advantage. It is this that is the cause of your falling ill and not microbes.³⁷

Alas, normalcy for man is a condition of all-round fear; and this is the breeding-ground of diseases. To rest in the Divine is the only infallible remedy. It may also be added that, ultimately, only when man is established permanently in the supramental Truth-Consciousness that his body will be automatically protected from all inner disharmony and attacks from outside.

IX

Another question is the place for individual initiative in a world under the grip of the universal Will. If 'fixed fate' is the adamantine law, what's the scope for free will? Now such sharp oppositions - exercises in 'Either Or'­ are foreign to the structure of Reality which is a unity of linked-up relativities, a ladder of divers inter-connected planes of consciousness. And Man himself: isn't he a composite entity - so far as the evolutionary scene is concerned - made up of a psychic being, a mental being, a vital being and a physical being? And men differ widely, in the degree of their self-awakening, in the energy of their faculties, in their assumption of responsibility. A simple law will not therefore cover all cases:

In the universal play there are some, the majority, who are ignorant instruments; they are actors who are moved about like puppets, knowing nothing. There are others who are conscious, and these act their part, knowing that it is a play. And there are some who have the full knowledge of the universal movement and are identified with it and with the one Divine Consciousness and yet consent to act as though they were something separate, a division of the whole. There are many intermediary stages between that ignorance and this full knowledge, many ways of participating in the play. ³⁸

The essential thing, then, is to be united with the Divine Consciousness. First an opening up of the lines of communication with the psychic being which is one's eternal self, and then its linking up (which is a matter of course) with the Divine everywhere:

In the psychic consciousness there is not that sense of division between the individual and the universal consciousness which affects the other parts of your nature. You are conscious there that your individuality is your own line of expression, but at the same time you know too that it is an

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expression objectifying the one universal consciousness.³⁹

The spiritual or the divine consciousness is not antagonistic to the psychic; it is but the static poise behind the foreground play of the psychic manifestation. They are as it were the two sides of the same arc, but innately the same.

X

Like the issue between universal Will and individual initiative, that between Divine and human love is largely verbal shadow-boxing. But it is lucky that, on a June Sunday morning in 1929, somebody - Perhaps Miss Maitland? - put a series of questions to the Mother as a provocation for a memorable pronouncement, recalling almost Socrates' celebrated rhapsody on Love in Plato's Symposium. Of the Mother's many Aspects, Powers and Personalities, the face of Love was the most significant and nectarean, and it was as the Mother of Love that she manifested a power of 'the The Divine Shakti not hitherto witnessed - or witnessed to an equal degree - in the world.

The symphonic Divina Commedia of Dante concludes with a peal in of praise of "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars". Love is indeed the heart-beat that sustains and gives rapture to the phenomenal world. "Love," says the Mother, "is one of the great universal forces;" it is also a "supremely conscious Power". Love at first sight - people say, but what is it except "a wave from the everlasting sea of universal love"? At the dawn of first love, as when a Romeo sights a Juliet, "for a moment its divine touch awakens and magnifies all that is fine and beautiful". Nevertheless, ordinary human love is usually a prisoner of the ego, a distorted personal thing that is wayward and whimsical, and leaps at passion, possession, perversity, jealousy and satiety. Although human beings have thus turned love into "an ugly and repulsive thing" , something "low, brutal, selfish, violent, ugly", true love is "universal and eternal... a Divine Force". ⁴⁰The Mother's view of Love is not different from Savitri's, who limns its contours (in Sri Aurobindo's epic, Savitri) for the benefit of Death who is confronting her:

My love is not a hunger of the heart,

My love is not a craving of the flesh;

It came to me from God, to God returns.

Even in all that life and man have marred,

A whisper of divinity still is heard,

A breath is felt from the eternal spheres.

Allowed by Heaven and wonderful to man

A Sweet fire-rhythm of passion chants to love.⁴¹

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At its highest peaks of manifestation, this Love Divine coalesces and unites with Divine Knowledge:

Even the seekers through knowledge come to a point beyond which if they want to go farther, they are bound to find themselves entering at the same time into love and to feel the two as one, knowledge the light of the divine union, love the very heart of knowledge. There is a place in the soul's progress where they meet and you cannot distinguish one from the other. The division, the distinction between the two that you make in the beginning are a creation of the mind: once you rise to a higher level, they disappear. ⁴²

Nay more: there is a Beauty and the Beast mystery of alchemic transformation about the great holocaust of the Divine in an act of self-giving. " Through the power of Love, Beauty awakens the veiled beauty in the Beast. So too -

The Perfect Consciousness accepted to be merged and absorbed into the unconsciousness of matter, so that consciousness might be awakened in the depths of its obscurity and little by little a Divine Power might rise in it and make the whole of this manifested universe a highest expression of the Divine Consciousness and the Divine love. This was the supreme love... And yet none perhaps would call it love; for it does not clothe itself in a superficial sentiment, it makes no demand in exchange for what it has done, no show of its sacrifice.⁴³

Aren't all the million manifestations of human love but the result of the "impulse given by a Divine love behind the human longing and seeking"? The Mother goes further, and infers in all Earth and Nature the reign of Love. When night falls, for example, from the very roots of trees and plants rises "the aspiration of an intense love and longing", a craving for the return of the joy of light:

There is a yearning so pure and intense that if you can feel the movement in the trees, your own being too will go up in an ardent prayer for the peace and light and love that are unmanifested here. Once you have come in contact with this large, pure and true Divine love, if you have felt it even for a short time, you will realise what an abject thing human desire has made of it.⁴⁴

It is not that human love, in its aspiration to be transformed into Divine Love, should withdraw from the physical or the vital, and confine itself to the psychic realm alone. "It is only through the vital," says the Mother,. "that matter can be touched by the transforming power of the Spirit." Divine Love, being integral love, knows no exclusions; it is from the human end that the distortions and perversions erupt, and these have to be eschewed. Then comes the climactic revelation:

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Love is a supreme force which the Eternal Consciousness sent down from itself into an obscure and darkened world that it might bring back that world and its beings to the Divine. The material world in its darkness and ignorance had forgotten the Divine. Love came into the darkness; it awakened all that lay there asleep; it whispered, opening the ears that were sealed, "There is something that is worth waking to, worth living for, and it is love!" And with the awakening to love there entered into the world the possibility of coming back to the Divine. The creation moves upward through love towards the Divine and in answer there leans downward to meet the creation the Divine Love and Grace.⁴⁵

What was this world but insentient matter, till the Divine Love came down and stirred it into life? Love has so far flowered in a million imperfect ways, the noblest of them all being a mother's love for her child. But the ascent of Love towards the Divine summits hasn't been halted, and it may. be that man's consciousness will now wake up to "the Divine love, pure, independent of all manifestation in human forms". Love must one day return to the source itself, the Divine:

The circle of the movement turns back upon itself and the ends meet; there is the joining of the extremes, supreme Spirit and manifesting Matter, and their divine union becomes constant and complete.⁴⁶

XI

In Conversation X, the issue is between Spirituality and Religion. Certainly, all religions had their beginnings in a seminal mystical or "The spiritual experience, some revelation from "what one could call a Divine Being ... bringing down with him from a higher plane a certain Knowledge and Truth for the earth".⁴⁷ Mahavira, the Buddha, the Christ, the Prophet Mahomet, Guru Nanak were all historical personalities, and were also divine-human persons who originated the several religions that still claim millions of followers today. But aside from the initial inspiration (which was basically a spiritual experience), what makes a particular religion distinctive are its dogmas, its theology, its body of ritual, its buttressing philosophy and ethics, its organised church and the rest of its institutional apparatus, all of which are man-made with the inevitable egoistic distortions . And so the uniting fount of the Spirit flows in different directions as so many religions, and each religion pools itself into so many creeds, sects and schools. The spirit is thus dead or asleep in its encrustations of dogma, ritual, superstition, custom and blind observance:

All religions have each the same story to tell. The occasion for its birth is the coming of a great Teacher of the world. He comes and reveals and is

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the incarnation of a Divine Truth. But men seize upon it, trade make an almost political organisation out of it.⁴⁸

The result is that each religionist begins shouting: "Mine is the supreme, the only truth, all others are falsehood or inferior." It is just this blatantly egoistic attitude that makes almost every religion stand in the way of true spiritual life. It is true all religions have thrown up giants and paragons of shining spirituality, but this is, as it were, in spite - not because­ of the religions. But the normal attitude is to make the accident of one's birth in a particular religion determine one's adhesion to it irrespective whether or not it answers one's soul's needs. Hence the Mother's exhortation:

If your aim is to be free, in the freedom of the Spirit, you must get rid of all the ties that are not the inner truth of your being, but come from subconscious habits....

All your relations must be newly built upon an inner freedom of choice ....

When you come to the Yoga, you must be ready to have all your mental buildings and all your vital scaffolding shattered to pieces .... Think not of what you were, but of what you aspire to be; be altogether in what you want to realise. Turn from your dead past and look straight towards the future. Your religion, country, family lie there; it is the DIVINE.⁴⁹

Not just the tolerance of other religions, not only the friendly co-existence of religions, not even merely the mutual understanding and appreciation of the divers reigning religions. One must dare farther still: Beyond the Religions! Beyond all religionism! Forward to spirituality, to the Sole Truth, to the DIVINE - for that would be the 'religion' of "The Next Future", the age when the Gods of the religions would be transcended by the one universally experienced Divine.

The Mother's morning Conversations of 1929 with her few selected disciples have since been read and commented upon and re-read times without number. For all their seeming informality and casualness, they have a range of coverage, a weight of thought and a tone of intimate urgency that give them a special place in the Aurobindonian Yoga-literature. The Mother no doubt speaks out of her manifold experience of this and the divers occult worlds, but what gives the talks their stamp of authenticity and authority is the sanction from Above, for it is clear she speaks generally from an overhead level of direct understanding. Life, art and Yoga, morality, religion and spirituality, free will, destiny and Grace, all are set forth at once in their integral unity and in their proper inter-relationships. And the mahāvākyas - Be conscious! Remember and offer! Plunge into the Divine! - stand out like high-power lamp-posts lighting up the way - all the way - to "The Next Future".

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