Mother's Chronicles (Book 2)

8

The Guardian of the Treasure

The Morissets were not terribly rich, rather the opposite. As Mother said in 1958: "When I was young, I was very hard up, as stony-broke as can be! As an artist, I was sometimes obliged to go out in society — artists are obliged to. I had patent leather ankle-boots which were cracked . . . and I painted them so that it wouldn't show! That's telling you," Mother said to Satprem, "the condition we were in —stony-broke. Well, one day, in a shop window. ..." She interrupted herself to explain. "The fashion of the day was a long skirt trailing on the ground, and I didn't have a petticoat to go with such things; I didn't care a halfpenny, it was perfectly immaterial to me. But as Nature had told me that I would always have whatever I needed, I wanted to make an experiment." She resumed her story: "I saw in a shop's window a very pretty petticoat, much in fashion in those days —with laces, ribbons,

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etc. So I said, 'Well, I'd very much like to have a petticoat to go with those gowns.' I got five!" Mother exclaimed, "They came from all sides!" Truly speaking, she had noticed that "For me personally Nature always gives me everything in profusion."

Mother had related this incident to Satprem with these opening words: "I asked myself the question this morning: Is money truly controlled by Nature?"

Now, several years before, a young girl had put a question to Mother. (When this girl ran across the tennis court chasing a ball, she looked exactly like a gazelle in motion!) To the girlish question: "It is often said in fairy tales that treasure is guarded by serpents. Is it true?" Mother had replied: "Yes, but it is not a physical serpent, it's a vital serpent. The key to treasures is found in the vital world and is guarded by a huge, black serpent, it is colossal —ten times, fifty times bigger than an ordinary serpent. He guards the doors to the treasure. He is black, magnificent, always erect and vigilant." She then told us the story of her own encounter with the serpent. "Once it so happened that I found myself in front of him. Those beings usually obey me when I give them an order. I

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said to him, 'Let me pass.' He replied, 'I would willingly let you pass, but if I were to let you pass, they would kill me. So I cannot let you enter.'

What made Mother meet the serpent? As always, she was more explicit when speaking with Satprem. "When I first came here, I discussed with Sri Aurobindo about what should be done for the Work; he told me (he wrote it to me also) that three powers were needed to be certain of the realization of the Work. One was the power over health; the second was the power over government; and the third was the power over money." After dealing with the first two points, she continued: "As for the last, money, he told me, 'I don't yet know on what exactly it depends.' So one day I entered into trance with this idea; then after a certain journey, I reached a spot like an underground cavern, which was the source, the place of money, and the power over money. I was about to step into this cavern —a kind of internal cave —when I saw before me an immense serpent, coiled and erect, like a completely black python, colossal, big as a seven-storey house, who told me:

'You cannot pass!'

'Why not? Let me pass.'

'I would let you pass, but were I to do so, "they"

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would destroy me immediately.' 'Who are "they"?'

'They are the asuric forces who reign over money. They have put me here to guard the entrance, precisely so that you may not enter.'

'And what should be done to obtain the power?'

So he told me something to this effect:

'I have heard it said' (that is, he himself had no direct knowledge, but it was something he had heard from his masters, those who ruled over him), 'I heard it said that the person having a complete power over human sexual impulses' (not merely in himself but a universal power, which means he will be able to control these everywhere, in all men), 'that person will have the right of entry.' In other words, these forces cannot prevent him from entering."

Mother said ponderingly: "If what the serpent said was right, if this is truly what will overcome the adverse forces that rule over money, well then, the condition has not been fulfilled."

She remarked: "It's an affair between the Asuras and the human species." Rather an insoluble affair, we may say!

But Mother did give a solution: "The only solution

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left to the species is to transform itself, thereby stripping the asuric forces of the power of ruling over it."

Alas for the human species! Alas for its freedom! Alas for the unfulfilled condition! Perhaps never before since Man has walked the earth has the species as a whole been such a total slave to the asuric forces and their perversity. Everything is now raked out into the light of common day. Nobody can remain blind to the havoc wrought by the misuse of money power.

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