Mother's Chronicles (Book 1)

6

Taste and Distaste

Little Mirra was a difficult child in more ways than one. "I was apparently like any other child, you see," Mother was telling Satprem one day, "except that it seems I was difficult. Difficult in the sense that I had no interest in food, no interest in ordinary games, no liking for going to my playmates' parties because eating cakes wasn't the least bit interesting! Also, impossible to punish, for I didn't care a fig —to be deprived of dessert was rather a relief to me!"

Yes, the simple act of eating was disagreeable to Mirra. And when it came to eating meat . . . whew! "When I was six to eight years old, I ate with my brother. And in order to make ourselves eat we were obliged to tell each other stories. We were given meat, you see, beefsteak —a nightmare! So my trick

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was to tell my brother, T am an ogre . . . before me is half an ox,' and with each slash of knife I would carve my ox! I would tell myself a story and end up swallowing my beefsteak!"

"But Satprem never tells me any stories," I complained.

"She wants me to write tales," Satprem said, "fairy tales."

"Do you know fairy tales?" Mother asked him.

"I'll invent some."

"Yes, of course! I used to invent an enormous lot of tales! Real fairy tales, in which everything is so pretty, everything falls so nicely into place —not a single misery. Nothing but beautiful things!"

Anyway, as soon as she could, Mirra became a vegetarian. "I myself was vegetarian by taste —everything by taste, not by principle. I became vegetarian at the beginning of the century, a long, long time ago," said Mother in 1965. "Yes, it's at least sixty years ago. Because in my childhood I was forced to eat meat, which disgusted me —not the idea: I didn't like the taste, it disgusted me!"

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But Mirra had inherited from her grandmother a profound distaste for any kind of limit or limitation. "But, my child," Mother expostulated with me one day when I pulled a long face at her attempt to give me a cosmopolitan taste in food, "my child, food has never interested me! I never liked eating. When I was small, all sorts of tricks had to be conjured up to make me eat; of all things it seemed to me the most absurd and the least interesting. Well," Mother stated, "I know the food of every country, and I made a comparative study of all the cuisines. I can be anywhere without it disturbing my body."

Her inherent taste for freedom and her distaste for slavery to any habit made her try all sorts of experiments. "I had a go at everything, you know, from total fasting to meat diet, everything, everything."

Only, more often than not, she practically lived on air. "There were long periods when I ate so little that it was almost nothing. Then one day I said to myself: why waste so much time over this? The reply came, 'Not yet, wait; this is not your concern.' "

"After which," her eyes twinkling, Mother said

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to Satprem, "I decided to encourage everybody to eat!" And she heaped foodstuffs on him: cheese and soup, biscuits and chocolate, comfit and caviar. . . . With what loving care Mother tried to put some flesh on Satprem's bony body!

But what happens when one fasts? "When I fasted for ten days —totally, not even taking a drop of water— without thinking once about food (I had no time to eat), there was no struggle: it was a decision. A faculty in me then developed bit by bit: for instance, when I breathed in the fragrance of a flower, it nourished me. I saw that one is nourished in a subtler way. Only, the body is not ready." Mother repeated, "The body isn't ready, it deteriorates, I mean, it eats itself up."

In any event, Mathilde tackled her difficult daughter in the only way she knew. "As a child, whenever I complained to my mother about food or some similar petty things, she always told me to go do my work or go on with my studies instead of giving importance to futilities. She would ask me," Mother said to some young men who gave a great deal of

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importance to futilities, "whether I had the illusion of thinking that I was born for my own pleasure. 'You are born to realize the highest Ideal,' she would say and send me packing."

But what Mirra heartily detested was to be like a "public place," to be at the mercy of every passing breeze. Mother put it squarely to us, the Ashram boys and girls, men and women: "At any rate, I find it preferable to be the master than the slave. To feel oneself pulled by strings is a pretty unpleasant sensation. It's very annoying. Well, I don't know, but I, for one, found it very annoying even when I was a child. At the age of five it began to seem absolutely intolerable to me. And I sought a way for it to be otherwise — without anyone to tell me anything. For I knew none who could help me. I didn't have your luck, to have someone who can tell you, 'Here, this is what you have to do!' I had no one to tell me. I had to find out all by myself. I found it. I began at the age of five. While you, it is long since you crossed five." Mother was really disgusted. But she was not one to give up so easily. She tried again and again. But even through

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her legendary patience, sometimes despair would peep out. "Oh, I am posing very difficult problems, aren't I! But, my children, this preoccupied me when I was five years old! ... So I thought you would have been preoccupied with this for a long time now."

Yes, Mirra always preferred "to be the master," she was not one to let even a single vibration enter her at its own sweet will, she would always pick and choose —an ever alert consciousness was the sentinel.

Once, Mathilde took her very small daughter to a funeral. Mirra was not particularly well acquainted with the deceased. But there, in that house full of people lamenting the departed soul, she was suddenly in the grip of a great emotion —a great sorrow, a great grief seized hold of her. "I was very small when I had this experience," Mother told us, young and not so young people of the Ashram. "I was not yet doing a conscious yoga —perhaps I was doing yoga, but not consciously. I observed very, very clearly. I told myself: 'Surely, it is their grief I am feeling, for I don't have any reason to be particularly affected by the death of this person.' All of a sudden, tears prick at my eyes, I

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feel all upset, I have a lump in my throat, I feel like weeping, as if I had a terrible sorrow. I was but a little child —I understood immediately: 'Well! It is their grief that has come inside me.' " Mother put it in a nutshell: "Quite simply vibrations have entered you, nothing else."

Yes, Mirra was an observant child; she would minutely study whatever crossed her field of observation. Study? Hmmm. We may perhaps sympathize a little with Mathilde, for Mirra was a stubborn child, as stubborn as they come. As Mother said, "I flatly refused to read, to learn to read, refused to learn."

If, instead of her rough and ready methods, Mathilde had tried to arouse her small daughter's interest in "learning," she would have been quite surprised at the quick result, I dare say. Because, as it happened, once Mirra got interested, she learned to read in three days flat.

"I learned to read out of curiosity. It fell out this way. Did I tell you?" Mother asked Satprem. "I was around seven, a little less than seven; my brother was eighteen months older than I. He was just back

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from school, and had brought along some of those big pictures they still make (you know, those drawings for children with short lettering at the bottom), and he gave me one. I asked him, 'What's written here?' He told me, 'Read.' 'Don't know how,' I replied. 'Learn!' Upon which I said, 'All right, give me the letters.' He brought me a book in which were letters to learn the alphabet. In two days I knew it, the third day I started to read. That's how I learned. 'Oh, this child,' they used to tell me, 'is retarded. Seven years old, and she doesn't yet know how to read. Disgusting.' The whole family used to lament, you know. But it so happened that what would have taken me years to learn, I knew within eight days." Mother chuckled, "That gave them something to ponder on."

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