The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 9

Publishers' Note

The writings included in this volume are based on talks given by the Mother. They originally appeared in the Ashram Journals during the years 1957-1958.

Section One

PRAYER AND ASPIRATION

(I)

Prayers are of many kinds. There is a prayer, purely mechanical and physical, that is to say, merely words learnt by rote and repeated machine-like. It does not mean much and generally has only one effect, making the person calm who prays; if you repeat a prayer several times, it calms you in the end.

There is a prayer which is a formula welling out spontaneously in order to give expression to something very precise which you ask for. You may pray for something, for some person; you may pray even for certain circumstances; you may pray for yourself also.

Or you may pray to express your gratitude to the Divine for what He has done for you, for what you see in Him, for what you wish to do to Him in thankfulness. Evidently it is the highest kind of prayer, for it is not exclusively concerned with one's own self. It is of a great order, this prayer of thanksgiving.

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It is the meeting ground of prayer and aspiration. Such prayers are the spontaneous formulation of an experience that has been lived; it pours out from within the being, as the expression of a deep realisation, a yearning to sing praises for this experience that has been granted, a desire that the experience may continue or be explained. All this is very near to aspiration.

Again there is a prayer, spontaneous and disinterested, a great call as it were, a call for divine intercession. It is a very powerful thing. I have had innumerable examples of things being fulfilled instantaneously by prayers of this kind. It means a great faith, a great fervour, a great sincerity, also a great simplicity of heart — something that does not calculate, that does not arrange, that does not bargain, that does not give with the idea of a return.

(2)

You can pray in all domains. A prayer belongs to the domain in which you pray.

Prayers may be purely physical, even material. They may be vital or mental or psychic or spiritual. Each one has its own character and its own value.

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Prayer is a thing much more external than aspiration. It concerns generally a definite object and it is always formulated, for it is the formula itself that is the prayer. One can have an aspiration and transcribe it in a prayer, but if it is formulated in words, it is almost a movement of invocation.

Aspiration goes beyond prayer on all sides. It is much more self-forgetful, living only in the thing that one wills to do or become, in the offering that one seeks to make to the Divine. Aspiration may come from any plane, but the centre lies in the psychic.

(3)

You aspire for a certain state of being. You have, for example, discovered within you something which does not agree with your ideal, a movement of obscurity or ignorance, even perhaps a bad will, something which goes against what you want to realise. You do not formulate a vow in words but something rises up in you like a flame, an offering made of a living experience which asks for a greater, larger being, a being more and more clear and precise. The thing can be reproduced in words later on, when

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one tries to remember and note down the experience.

Aspiration bursts forth like a mounting flame bearing in itself the thing that one desires to become, to do or to have. I said "desires", but "aspires" is the right word, for it has neither the quality nor the form of a desire. It is truly a great flame of purifying will and it bears in its core what seeks to realise itself.

(4)

You have, for example, done a thing which you regret to have done. That has unfortunate consequences and upsets things, involving also other persons. You do not know the reaction of others, but as for yourself you wish that what has been done should turn to good and if a fault has been committed it should be admitted and made an occasion for a greater progress, a greater discipline and a new ascent towards the Divine, for opening a door towards a future that you want to be clearer, more true and more intense.

Then, the thing gathers like a force and rushes forth, mounts like a great ascending movement, sometimes without being formulated in the least,

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without words, without expression, but like a flame.

That is true aspiration. That can happen a hundred times, a thousand times every day, if you are in the state when you want to progress constantly, become more true, more integrally in harmony with what the Divine Will wants of you.

(5)

It seems difficult to pray without praying to someone. There are people who have a conception of the universe from which they have driven out all notion of the Divine. There are many, I suppose, like that. It troubles them, the idea that there is something that knows all, is capable of all, and is superior to them in such a formidable manner that there is no comparison; it is troublesome to their self-love, so they try to make a world without the Divine. They certainly cannot pray. To whom would they pray—unless they pray to themselves, which is not the normal custom ? But one can aspire for something without having a faith in the Divine. One can have an aspiration for a condition, a knowledge, a realisation, a state of consciousness. You do aspire for something. There are people who have

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no faith in the existence of God, but they have faith in progress; they believe that the world is progressing constantly and this progress will go on indefinitely without stop towards a better that will be always greater than the preceding better. Such people may indeed have a great aspiration, they need have no notion of a divine existence for that.

Aspiration necessarily includes a faith, but it need not be a faith in the divine Being. Prayer, on the other hand, cannot exist unless it is addressed to a divine Being.

(6)

What to pray unless one prays to some person for something. You pray to someone who can listen to you. If there is none to listen to you, how can you pray ? Therefore, if you pray, it means, even in case you do not admit it, you have a faith in something which is infinitely greater and infinitely more powerful than you and which can change your destiny and change yourself, provided you pray in a way that the prayer is heard.

The intellectuals recognise aspiration and say that prayer is an inferior thing. The mystics

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tell you that aspiration is all right, but if you wish to be heard and wish the Divine to hear, you must pray—and pray with the simplicity of a child, with a perfect candour, that is to say, perfect trust. "I have need of this or that"— whether a moral or material need—"I ask it of you—give me."

"You gave me what I asked for. You have brought to my close touch experiences that were unknown and that are now wonders which I reach at will. I am infinitely grateful and I offer you this hymn of thanksgiving for your intervention."

(7)

Instead of lighting a lamp and kneeling before it with folded hands, light a flame within your heart and then have a great aspiration towards something more beautiful, more true, more noble, better than anything you know.

"I ask that tomorrow all the things that I do not know I may begin to know, all the things that I cannot do, I may begin to do, and every day more and more."

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And if you are put in the presence of much misery in the world, if you have friends who are unhappy and relatives who suffer, if you have difficulties or anything whatsoever, ask:

"May the entire consciousness altogether rise to that Perfection which shall manifest ! May all this ignorance that has made the world so unhappy change into an enlightened knowledge ! May this bad will be illumined and transformed into good will."

And in proportion to what you are able to do, what you are able to understand, you wish with all your heart that it may be like that. It may take the form of a prayer, and you can ask—ask of what or whom ? Ask of that which knows, ask of that which is capable, ask of all that is better and stronger than yourself to give the help that it may be so. And how beautiful such prayers would be !

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Meditation

Collective meditation, of which the most external form is collective prayer, has been practised from ancient times for different reasons, in different ways, and with different purposes. Groups of persons, whether belonging to the same Church or not, come together to express a common feeling; in certain cases, it is to sing together in praise of God, to chant a hymn of gratitude, expressing love, adoration, thankfulness. In other cases,—there are many historical examples of this—people gather together for a common invocation, to ask something from the Divine in the hope that a prayer done collectively will have more effect than an individual prayer. Thus, in Europe prophets announced that in the year one thousand of grace there would be the end of the world; everywhere crowds assembled to implore the divine protection and to pray that the catastrophe might be averted. More recently in modern times, when the king of England, George VI, had an attack of pneumonia and was almost on the point of death,

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the British people gathered not only in churches but even in the streets in front of the royal palace, to pray in common and to ask God to save their king. This is of course a most external form, I could say, a most worldly meditation in community. Besides, in all groups of Initiation, in all spiritual schools of ancient times and naturally in modern times also, meditation in community has always been practised; here the purpose is evidently very different. People gather together to make a collective progress, to open themselves to a force, a light and an influence; it is somewhat like that which we all try to do here. There are two ways to proceed, and both are excellent. For individual meditation, first of all, one must prepare to meditate, that is to say, after sitting down in a position, at the same time comfortable enough not to be too cramped,—and not too comfortable either lest you should fall asleep, one establishes the calm and the silence, not only externally but internally and then one gathers as far as possible one's consciousness which is generally dispersed in all kinds of thoughts and preoccupations. One brings back the consciousness as completely as one can, and concentrates it in the region of the heart, towards the solar-plexus, so that all the active energies which are

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in the head, all that make the brain active are turned and concentrated on this point. This may be done in a few seconds, or in a few minutes. It depends upon each one; when you have prepared yourself in this way, you have the choice between two attitudes : active and passive.

What I call an active attitude is to concentrate on the person who guides the meditation with the will to open yourself to receive what is being given to you or to the force with which you are put in contact. It is active, because here there is a will which acts and an active concentration to open yourself to someone or something.

The passive attitude is simply this : after having concentrated in the way I told you, to open yourself as one opens the door : imagine that in the centre of the heart there is a door, then you open the door and remain still and silent in expectation. Naturally, you may use any other similar image; for example, the image of a book that you open completely, a book with all the pages white, that is to say, very peaceful and then wait for what happens.

These two attitudes are equally effective; you may adopt one or the other, according to the day, according to the occasion, according to the mood you feel disposed to. Or you may

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adopt one and hold to it if it is easier for you and if it is more advantageous.

Now, in our special case, I will tell you what I am trying to do.

It is now nearly one year that we had one Wednesday the Manifestation of the Supramental Force. Since that moment the Power is working very actively, even if very few people are able to perceive it; and I think that the time has come now to help it as much as we can by making an effort towards collective receptivity. Of course, the Force is not only acting in the Ashram, it acts in the whole world and everywhere; wherever there is receptivity it is working; the Ashram has not the exclusive monopoly or receptivity in the world. But as we are all here, knowing more or less what has happened, we can collectively, —individually I hope everyone is doing his best to profit by the circumstances—facilitate its action by trying to unify the ground, produce a particularly fertile soil, so that the maximum of collective receptivity may be obtained and that there be the least possible wastage of time and energy.

Now that you are warned, it is for you to make an effort in this direction.

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THE PSYCHIC BEING

The psychic is like an electric wire that connects the generator with the lamp; the lamp being the body, the visible form. Its function is likewise, that is to say, if the psychic were not there in Matter, it could have no direct contact with the Divine. It is because of the psychic presence that there can be a direct contact between Matter and the Divine. And every human being can be told : "You carry the Divine within you, you have only to enter within yourself and you will find Him." It is a direct, special, transmuting infusion into the most inconscient and obscure Matter to awaken it once more step by step to the Divine Consciousness, the Divine Presence and finally the Divine Himself.

It is a thing characteristic of earthly creatures. It is a speciality of the earth. But only in the human being does the psychic become more conscious, more formed and also more independent; it is there individualised. It is the presence of the psychic that makes of man an exceptional being, so much so that beings of other domains in the Universe, those, for example,

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belonging to what Sri Aurobindo calls the Over-mind, the demi-gods and even the gods are very eager to take a physical body upon earth so that they can have the experience of the psychic. These beings possess certainly many qualities which men have not, but they lack this direct Divine Presence which is quite exceptional, which is a fact of the earth and is found nowhere else. All these inhabitants of the higher worlds, of Higher Mind and Overmind and other regions do not possess a psychic being.

Naturally, the beings of the vital world do not have it either. They do not regret it, they do not want it. In their origin, of course, they descended directly from the Divine, but that was only in their origin and it is so long ago. Now they have no direct contact with the Divine within them, they do not have the psychic being. If they had converted themselves under these conditions nothing would have remained of them. Because they are made wholly of the opposite movement. They are entirely made of self-assertion, despotic power, alienation from the origin and the utmost disdain for all that is pure and beautiful and noble. Those only, very rare, among them who wish to be converted do one thing immediately take a physical body. But

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others do not want it; that ties them, restricts them to a rule which they refuse.

⁂

It is a fact—I do not like to say it often to him, for he has such a high opinion of himself that he needs no encouragement, but it is a fact and hence I am obliged to state—that man has this exceptional virtue of having in him the psychic being. But to tell you the truth he does not seem to turn it to good account, he does not appear to consider it at all as a desirable thing, so far as one can judge from the manner in which he treats this Presence. He prefers to it his mental ideas, he prefers to it his vital desires, he prefers to it his bodily habits.

There is a story in the Bible which I always liked. Two brothers were there, Esau and Jacob. Esau returns home hungry and tells his brother Jacob that he is very hungry. He was so hungry that he proposed to his brother, "Listen, if you give me your plate of pottage—Jacob had prepared a dish of pottage—I will give over to you my birthright." One can understand the story in quite a superficial way. But it has a deeper meaning. The birthright is the right of being the son of

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God. And the man was ready to give up his divine right in order to eat because he was hungry. It is a very old story, but it is eternally true.

⁂

At its origin, the psychic begins by a kind of a divine spark within oneself, a spark of the divine consciousness. Out of this spark will slowly emerge an independent conscious being which will have its own action and its own will.

The progress of the psychic consists in its formation, building and organisation. It grows into a conscious individuality through successive lives; for there can be progress only upon earth, in the physical world; it is not possible everywhere. In the psychic world there is a kind of rest, full of beatitude. One remains there as one is, still, without moving.

The progress is like the progress of a child that grows. It is a continuous growing. For a long time, in most human beings the psychic is a continuously growing entity. It is not a fully individualised, fully conscious being and master of itself. It needs to be born in many lives one after another so that it may build itself and become fully conscious.

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But that has an end. There comes a moment when the being is fully built up, fully individualised, fully master of itself and its destiny. When one such psychic being incarnates in a human body, it makes a great difference. This human being is, so to say, born free; he is not bound to circumstances or surroundings or heredity like ordinary human beings. He comes into the world and he has the impression that he is come purposely to accomplish something, he has a work to do, a mission to fulfil.

⁂

From that point of view the progress of his growth has ended. That is to say, it is no longer necessary for him to be reborn in a body. Till then reincarnation was obligatory. For it is in the physical life and in the physical body that he grows little by little until he becomes a wholly conscious being. But once he is completely formed, he is free, in the sense that he can, at will, take a body or not take.

When a psychic being incarnates, it throws itself down into inconscience, because the physical world and even a human consciousness, whatever it may be, are very unconscious in comparison

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with the psychic consciousness. It is as if it fell on its head and it is stunned. Generally, but for some rare exceptions, for a long time it knows nothing; it does not know where it is, what it does, nor why it is there, nothing. It is in a great difficulty to express itself, especially in a baby who has not a brain but only the embryo of a brain. So it is very rare for a child to show that it contains within itself an exceptional being. That happens, but generally it takes time.

The psychic awakes slowly from its dazed condition and slowly it becomes aware that it is there for some reason and by choice. But the intensive mental education that one usually receives shuts out completely the psychic consciousness. Then a mass of circumstances, happenings of all kinds, emotions and sensations and various other things are needed to open the inner doors and to enable one to begin to remember—remember that one has come from another world, one has come for a very definite reason. If the psychic however had chanced to fall upon a little knowledge instead of falling into a world of ignorance, there could have been a quicker contact.

⁂

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There are not very many fully developed souls upon earth. Evidently those who have reached a certain culture, a certain growth, a certain individualisation have instinctively the tendency to come together and form groups. It is then that we come across in particular epochs and climes fully formed beings gathering together. But you must not believe that that gives in any way the exact measure of human culture and growth. That is only a spray of foam on the surface. Even among those who already form a selection, there is not perhaps one in a thousand who can be called truly an individual being, conscious of himself, united with his psychic being, governed by his inner law and therefore partially at least if not wholly free from external influences; because being a conscious entity when these influences come he sees them, those that seem to agree with his inner growth and normal development he accepts and those that contradict he rejects. And instead of being a chaos, or in any case a frightful mixture, he is an organised individual being, conscious of himself, moving in life knowing where he wants to go and how to go.

That is the best of mankind that Nature is capable of producing. They are men still, but the

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top of mankind. They are ready to become something else. But unless and until one becomes that, one remains in greater part an animal with only just a little beginning of manhood. It is only that that one can call Man. And I am saying this in the hope that you will become such a one.

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THE DIVINE GRACE (I)

When you are in a certain set of circumstances and when certain things happen, these things often go against your desire or against what appears to you best. And you regret and say: "Oh! How much better it would have been had it been otherwise !" It does not matter whether the thing concerned is small or big.

The years pass, events roll on. You progress, become more conscious, understand better. And when you look back, you discover, at first with surprise, later on with a smile, that the famous circumstances which once appeared to you disastrous or unfavourable were just the very best thing that could have happened for your needed progress. And if you were a little wise you would say, "truly, the Divine Grace is infinite !"

And when this happens to you a good number of times, you begin to understand that in spite of man's blindness and wrong appearances, the Grace is at work everywhere and because of the Grace it is the best possible that happens in the state where the world is at a given moment.

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It is because our vision is limited or because we are blinded by our preferences that we are unable to discover why things are as they are. But when one begins to see one enters into that state of wonder which nothing can describe. Behind the appearances one finds this infinite, wonderful, all-powerful Grace that knows everything, organises everything, arranges everything, and leads us, whether we want it or not, whether we know it or not, towards the supreme goal, the union with the Divine, the awareness of the Divine Consciousness and becoming one with it.

Thus living in the action and the presence of the Grace one lives a life full of delight and wonder, the sense of a marvellous power and at the same time, full of a quiet and complete trust which nothing can shake.

⁂

Whatever may be the faith and the trust you have in the Divine Grace, whatever your capacity of seeing it at work in all circumstances, at every moment and at all points of life, you can never fully understand the marvellous immensity of its action and the precision and the exactitude with which it works. Never shall one grasp in

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what degree the Grace does everything, is behind everything, organises everything in order that the advance towards the divine realisation may be as swift, as complete, as total as it can be under the given circumstances of the world.

As soon as you come in contact with it, you find that there is not a second in time, not a point in space which does not show in a signal manner this ceaseless work of the Grace, its constant intervention. And once you have seen that, you feel you are never up to the mark. For you must never forget that you must not have fear or anguish or regret or recoil or even suffering. If you were in union with this Grace, if you saw it everywhere, you would begin to live a life of exultation, all power and infinite happiness. And that would be the best possible collaboration in the Divine Work.

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THE DIVINE GRACE (2)

There is a time when one becomes conscious enough to see that things in themselves are neither good nor bad. What they are and what their effects are upon us depends entirely upon the attitude that we have towards them. The same thing, the same circumstance, identically the same, if taken as a gift from God, as a Divine Grace, as the effect of a total harmony, helps us to become more conscious, more strong and more true. On the other hand, taken as a blow given by Fate, as a bad force that seeks to hurt us it will serve only to diminish us, make us dull and heavy; it will take away our consciousness, our force and the harmony.

I wish you all to have this experience. For when you have it, you become master of yourself, not only master of yourself, but master of the circumstances of your life, at least so far as they concern you personally. And that depends exclusively on the attitude that you take. It is not an experience that passes through your head (it may begin there); it is an experience

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that may happen even in your body. Its completion however needs much labour for concentration, self-mastery, for driving the consciousness into Matter. The result of a shock received by the body from outside will vary according to the manner in which the body receives it. And the body can be so perfected in this line that you become master of accidents.

This power some of you have, fully developed and realised in the mind, the power, namely, to act upon the outer circumstances so that they are altogether changed when they act upon you. This power can come down into matter, into the physical substance itself, in the cells of the body and give to the body the same control over surrounding things. That is sure to come. This opens to you fresh horizons; it is one step on the way towards transformation.

⁂

If you are truly in a state of intense aspiration there is no circumstance that will not serve to help you in the realisation of your aspiration. All will come to help you, as if it were the perfect and absolute Consciousness that organised all things around you.

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And you in your external ignorance may not recognise it, may at first protest against the circumstances as they come to you, may complain and try even to change them. But after a time you will have become wiser, with a little distance put in between you and the event, you will find out that that was just the thing necessary for you to make the required progress. It is a Will, a supreme Good Will that arranges everything around you.

⁂

If you say to the Divine with conviction, "I want you alone", the Divine will arrange all circumstances in such a way as to oblige you to be sincere. Something in you says, "I want nothing but you", and then all the while you want a hundred different things. Usually it is one thing particularly that comes and troubles you and prevents you from realising your aspiration. Well, the Divine will come without showing himself, without even your suspecting it and He will arrange circumstances in such a way that whatever prevents you from being solely given to the Divine, will be inevitably removed

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from your path. And then when all such things are removed you begin to complain and shout. But subsequendy, if you are sincere, you remember that you said to the Divine that you belonged to Him alone. And then He will remain with you, all the rest will pass. That is the greater Grace.

Only you must say it with conviction—I do not mean that it has to be immediately integral, for if it is integral, the work is already done —but that the central will of the being must say with conviction, "I want nothing but you." Even once would be sufficient. That may take time more or less, sometimes it may extend to years, but you reach your goal. You are certain to reach.

⁂

If you want a precise thing, if you have a special reason for invoking the Grace, you must formulate your prayer exactly and clearly. Naturally, if you are in a state of complete surrender, if you are giving yourself, offering yourself wholly, simply to the Grace and you let it work as it wants, there is nothing to say, it is all right. But after a time you must not begin to question about what

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it has done, you must not say, "I did that with the idea of getting this". Indeed if you have in you the idea of getting something then it is better to formulate the thing sincerely and simply, just as you see it. Thereafter it is for the Grace to choose, whether it will do or not do as you want. In any case, you have clearly formulated your desire and there is nothing bad in that. It becomes bad only when it is not granted and you revolt. You must understand at that moment that the desire or the aspiration that one has may not be very enlightened and that one might ask for a thing that is not exactly good for oneself. So one must be wise and say, "Let Thy Will be done."

But so long as you have an inner perception and a choice of your own, there is no harm in formulating it. It is quite a natural movement. For example, if you have committed a fault and wish sincerely not to repeat it, I do not see any harm in asking for it. On the contrary, if you ask for it with a true inner sincerity, there is a great chance of its being granted. You must not believe that the Divine likes to contradict you. He is not at all particular about it. Only He may know better what exactly is good for you. He contradicts your aspiration only when it is absolutely

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indispensable. Otherwise he is always ready to give you what you want.

⁂

If you have a very strong imagination, and you build up a formation of your desire in all details and if the structure is well made, complete and existing by itself, then you may be sure that if you live long enough the thing will be realised. What is not given at the disposal of men is the time it takes : it may be tomorrow, it may be the next moment, or it may take years and even centuries, but it will be realised.

If to this power of imagination you can add a kind of creative power of the vital, then you raise a wholly living force. Like all living forces tending towards manifestation, this force too will exercise a pressure upon earthly events in order to realise itself and it will realise itself.

Only personal desires and personal circumstances are things that are not persistent or stable. After a time, a thing that interested you very much does not interest you any more: you think of another thing, you have another desire, you make another formation. But then if the earlier formation had been well thought out and built up,

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then after having followed its course in space it would realise itself. You are put in front of your first desire now realised while you have already embarked upon your second, or may be your third, or your fourth. You say then almost indignantly, "But I do not want that, why does it come to me ?"—without however taking into account the fact that it is the result of your previous action.

But if instead of being desires these are aspirations for things spiritual, and if you follow your line of regular progression, then it is absolutely certain that you will get one day what you have imagined. It may be sooner, or it may be later if there are very many obstacles on the way. For example, if you have made a formation that is still foreign to the earth's atmosphere, then it may take some time to prepare the conditions for its appearance. But if it is something already realised many times upon earth and not too radical a transformation, then you can have it quickly provided you follow the line with persistence.

And if to that now you add the ardour of faith and trust in the Divine Grace and that self-giving to the Grace which makes you await everything from the Divine, then it becomes a formidable

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matter. You can see before your eyes things happening more and more, the most wonderful things realised one after another.

But there are conditions to fulfil: a great purity must be there and a great intensity in the self-giving, and that absolute trust in the supreme wisdom of the Divine Grace which knows better than us what is truly good for ourselves. If the aspiration is offered to That and the offering is made truly and with enough intensity, the result will be marvellous.

But then you must be able to see. When things are realised, most often people find that quite natural; they do not care to see even why and how it has so happened; they simply say, "Yes, but of course it had to be so." And thus they lose the joy of gratefulness. After all, if one can be full of gratefulness and gratitude for the Divine Grace, then that is the last thing; you begin to see that at every step things are exactly what they should be and the very best that can be. It is then that Sachchidananda begins to gather Himself and refashion His Unity.

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The Story of Love

(I)

Love, in its essence, is the joy of identity. It finds its final expression in the felicity of union. Between the two there are all the phases that make up the universal manifestation.

Love comes from the very origin of the universe. Love in its essence, I say, that is, before the manifestation, is the delight of identity. Something there was which became conscious of the identity. And that is precisely Love. Afterwards comes the manifestation of Love. In its highest form, when it comes back to its origin across all its history of manifestation, it becomes the felicity of union. The sense of union comes as a consequence of the sense of separation. The passage through the whole manifested universe gives the sense of separation from the origin and the return to the origin is the felicity of reunion—union of two things which were separated and are united again. That is Love in its great circuit of manifestation.

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When it climbs back to its origin, it returns to the starting-point with something more than what it had before it started. It is the experience of the universe and universality. Fundamentally, that is the reason for the existence of creation. Consciousness would not be what it is had it not been expressed in a creation. There is an enrichment of consciousness through the experience gathered in an objective universe, a richness of content and a plenitude it would not have if there were not a manifested universe.

The return movement of creation is not a thing that happens in time. It is difficult to conceive, because for us things are successive. But if one could conceive a movement as a whole embracing everything, which would be at the same time the beginning and the end, and contain all, it would then be not a return in time, but a return in consciousness.

If there were not the circuit, there would never be the Ananda of union, there would be only the Ananda of identity. And it is precisely in order that this Ananda of identity may find its culmination and crowning in the Ananda of union that the whole circuit has been done.

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The very moment when the individual consciousness moved away from its divine origin and remained no longer identified with the movement of the divine consciousness, the sense of separation was created. The individual consciousness did not separate wilfully, but it remained no longer identified. Not being identified, the Divine Consciousness followed a certain movement and the individual consciousness followed another, and naturally they moved away from each other more and more. Let us say, as an image, that the Divine Consciousness advances at a certain speed and the individual consciousness, not having remained united with it, could not follow it and therefore fell back more and more, far behind. The Divine moves forward, the individual stops; when the individual moves, the Divine flies. When the individual takes one step, the Divine leaps. That increases the gap of separation more and more. It is this original separation that has produced others in its train and these separations all together have created the universal misery, at least the earthly misery as we know it.

It all began by a separation in the consciousness and it ended by a separation in respect of the worlds and their elements, by a division

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that we witness down to the material nature. The separation in consciousness has produced the separation of forms and the separation of forms has induced pain and suffering. Now therefore there are these countless objects that lie about divided and separated from one another. Since, however, the universe had to be a progressive thing, the bliss of identity, the full consciousness of this identity had necessarily to be veiled, otherwise nothing would have moved.

Evidently, if the sense of unity were reestablished, the miseries would disappear. But if you realised the perfect identity and the whole universe in its totality, realised this absolute unity in which there is no possibility of any distinction, then there would be no universe at all, it would be the return to Pralaya. The solution then is to find Ananda in the play of mutual exchange and union.

What has been projected into space and time must be brought back to itself, without thereby annulling the world so created. That is why Love burst forth as the irresistible power of Union. It soared over darkness and unconsciousness, it scattered itself, pulverised itself into the bosom of unfathomable night. It

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is from then that began the awakening and the ascension, the slow formation in and out of Matter and a progress without end.

(2)

There is a state of consciousness in which one experiences the Divine Love everywhere. One does not feel then a .great difference between one creature and another except in their physical appearance. Even in unconsciousness and immobility, the apparently complete inertia—of the stone, for example—can be found a dazzling light, the light of the divine Presence. There is much more aspiration than one thinks in objects that are usually called inanimate. In the stone precisely there is a spontaneous sense of what is there high above and although it cannot express it, it feels the thing and that affects it although in different ways. In the stone, in things and objects, there is a strange receptivity that comes from this Presence.

You can take what you call a precious stone and concentrate a force or forces in it. It retains them. These forces radiate afterwards very slowly, but increasingly, progressively. And if you know how to do it, you can accumulate a

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quantity of force to last almost indefinitely so to say. There are stones that serve as intermediaries of union, stones that serve as accumulators of energy and stones that may serve as foretellers of circumstances, they may carry messages. Therefore, as they can serve as accumulators, it means that they carry in themselves the source of the Force itself, otherwise they would not be receptive.

It is a force of this kind that is the origin of the phenomenon of crystallisation. Crystals gather together in matter, it is already a movement of love. Stones that crystallise, rock crystals, for example, form wonderful designs, so magnificent in their absolute harmony; that comes because of only one thing—the Force of Love.

You do not see the thing, because you have not the inner sensibility. But once you have the direct perception of the forces of love behind things you see that it is everywhere the same. And you can even come to understand what man-made manufactured things tell you.

The movement is quite perceptible in the vegetable kingdom, in the tree and the plant. These trees that rise up and up always, the small ones trying to catch up with the big ones, the big

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ones endeavouring to mount still further ! The plants always seek to find out a direction from where they can receive as much light as possible. It is the need to grow in order to get more light, more air, more space.

When you see a rose opening out to the sun, it is as it were for the need of giving away its beauty. For us it is unintelligible, for flowers do not think out what they do. A human being always associates with what he does the capacity to see what he does, to think what he does. But flowers are not, so to say, conscious at all, theirs is a spontaneous movement. It is a mighty Force that is at work through all this, the great universal Consciousness, the great force of universal Love that makes all things flower in beauty.

It is said the tiger's need to devour is one of the first expressions of love in the world. What is likely to prove that this is not quite false is that when a tiger or a serpent catches its victim, the victim usually gives himself up in a kind of delight of being eaten. A testimony comes in the experience of a man in the following true story. He happened to be in the midst of bushes with his comrades. He was a little behind, away from others and a tiger caught him. The others

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returned when they noticed that he had disappeared. They found and followed the traces and arrived just in time to save him from the jaws of the tiger. When he had recovered a little, he was told what a terrible experience he must have had ! He replied that it was nothing of the kind : "Just imagine, I don't know what happened to me, but as soon as the tiger seized me and began to drag me along the ground, I felt an intense love for him and a great desire that he should eat me". This is I say, a true story.

As a matter of fact, long before the tiger came on the scene, there must have been early creatures dwelling at the bottom of the sea that had only one function, the stomach. They existed only as stomachs and their only activity was to swallow. One may say that these are the first expressions of love seeping through matter. For, before that there was nothing, except perfect inconscience, complete immobility, nothing was moving. It is with love that movement began, consciousness awakened, transformation started. Love is the power of the world.

The need to swallow is a primitive way of uniting with things, but it is a very direct way, you swallow and you absorb the thing. The

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tiger takes a great joy in the thing; there is a joy and that is already a higher form of love.

If you want to know what love is, you must love the Divine. It is a very well-known fact that in the end you become similar to the thing you love. If you love the Divine, by the force of this love, little by little, you will become more and more like the Divine. And then one can identify oneself with the divine Love and know what it is, you cannot know it in any other way.

Necessarily, the love between two human beings is always made of ignorance, misunderstanding, weakness and a terrible sense of isolation. It would be as if you wanted to gain entrance into the presence of a unique Splendour and the first thing you do is to put a screen between yourself and this Splendour and you are very astonished at not having but a vague impression of it ! The first thing then to do is to do away with the screen, pass through and stand in the presence of the Splendour. Then you know what it is. But if you go on piling veil after veil between you and That, you will never see it. You may have just a vague impression, "there is something" and that is all.

One of the highest expressions of love in human beings is the giving of oneself entirely

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to the person loved. That is to say, to sacrifice oneself for the motherland, give one's life in defending another person etc. This may not be the very highest form, but it is already something. From there you have to climb very high up to arrive at the true expression which is on the summit of the ascent. The ultimate expression of love is in the felicity of union.

That brings us to the symbol of Krishna and Radha. Krishna is he of whom Sri Aurobindo speaks as the divine Flute-player, that is to say, the immanent and universal Divine who is the supreme power of attraction. Radha is the name given to the soul, the psychic personality responding to the call of the Flute-player.

Radha consciousness is essentially the way in which the individual answers to the divine call. Sri Aurobindo describes it as the capacity to find Ananda in all things through identification with the one divine Presence and through total self-giving to this Presence. That has the power of changing everything into perpetual ecstasy. Instead of seeing things in their apparent discord, you see the Presence alone, the Will and the Grace in all things. And every event, every element, every circumstance, every form changes into a way, a detail through which you can approach

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more intimately and more profoundly the Divine. The discordances disappear, the uglinesses vanish, there remains only the splendour of the divine presence in the Love that radiates in all things.

(3)

Love for the Divine means an exclusive attachment to the divine Reality. This concentration finds its culmination in an integral identification and is instrumental to the supramental realisation upon earth.

Love alone is capable of putting an end to the suffering of the world. Only the ineffable delight of Love in its essence can wipe out of the universe the burning pain of separation. For it is only in the ecstasy of the supreme union that creation will discover the reason of its existence and its fulfilment.

It is this marvellous state that we wish to realise upon earth. It is this that will be able to transform the world, make of it a dwelling place worthy of the divine Presence. And then only Love, true and pure, will incarnate in a body that will no longer be a disguise or a veil. That is why no effort is too arduous, no austerity too

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rigorous to illumine, perfect, transform the physical substance so that it no more hides the Divine, when the Divine takes an external form through Love. For, then there will be freely manifested in the world that marvellous divine Kindness that can change life into a paradise of the sweetest delight.

The Divine Love is there with all its intensity, with all its tremendous power. But most people do not feel anything. What they feel is exclusively proportionate to what they are and what they are capable of receiving.

Just imagine that you are bathed in an atmosphere wholly vibrant with divine love. But you perceive nothing of it. Sometimes, rarely, all on a sudden you get the impression of something. Then you say : "Oh ! Divine Love came to me !" It may seem to be an illusion, but the simple thing is that for some reason or other you were open just a little and you perceived the Thing. But it is always there.

The Divine Consciousness also means the same thing. This too is there in its full intensity. Yet people do not perceive it or perceive only spasmodically. But at one moment you happen to be in a good condition, you feel something and say : "Oh ! the Divine Consciousness appeared

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to me". But, as I said, it is not quite that. When you have a small opening, sometimes even like that of a pinhead, it rushes into you, for it is an active atmosphere. Whenever there is a possibility of its being received, it is received.

It is the same thing with regard to all divine things. They are all there.

Only you do not receive them, because you are closed up, blocked up. And you are very actively occupied with other things all the while. All the while you are full of yourself. As you are full of yourself, there is no place for the Divine. But He is there.

All wonderful things are there around you. You do not see them, or see them sometimes only, at a moment when you are a little more receptive, or perhaps in sleep, when you are less exclusively occupied with your little affairs. Then a light comes to you of something; you see, you feel something. But generally, as soon as you wake up, all that is obliterated by the formidable ego that is full of itself.

If you look at yourself closely you will see that it is always like that. Your vision of the universe is this that you are at the centre and the universe is around you. It is not the universe that you see.

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but you see yourself in the universe. So there is no room for any other thing.

The surest means of re-establishing the right perspective is to give yourself to the Divine. Then you are obliged to come out of yourself a little at least to begin with.

Generally, when people think of the Divine, the first thing they do is to pull as much as they can and they receive nothing. They tell you : "Oh, I have called, I have prayed and I have had no answer". If they are asked : "Have you offered yourself ?", they reply : "No, I have pulled". "But that is why you have not received." It is not that the answer did not come. But when you pull, you are so much shut up within your ego that you raise a wall between what is to be received and yourself. You confine yourself within a prison and you are astonished that in your prison you feel nothing.

Throw yourself out of yourself. Give yourself without holding back anything, simply for the joy of the self-giving. Then there is a chance of your feeling something.

When you do not ask whether you are loved or you are not loved, when you are absolutely indifferent to that, then only there is the beginning of true love.

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You love because you love, not because you receive an answer to your love, or because the other person loves you. You love because you cannot do otherwise than love. You do not pay any attention to what may happen. You are perfectly satisfied with your feeling of love. You love because you love. Everything else is bargaining, it is not love.

Besides, it is sure and certain that as soon as you are truly in love, you do not put the question any more. It is so childish, ridiculous and insignificant to put the question. As soon as you are truly in love, you have the entire plenitude of delight and realisation. You do not need any kind of answer. You are the Love. That is all. You have the full satisfaction of love. And there is no need of reciprocity.

(4)

"To become conscious of the Divine Love, you must abandon all other love". What is the best way of rejecting "the other love" which is so obstinate in its denial and which does not leave you easily ?

To pass through—yes, pass through and see what is behind, not to stop at the appearance, not to rest satisfied with the external form, but

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to look for the principle that is behind the love, not to be satisfied until you have found the source of the feeling in you. Then the external form will fall away of itself and you will be in contact with the Divine Love that is behind everything. That is the best way. To try to reject one to find the other is very difficult, almost impossible. Because human nature is so limited, so full of contradictions and so exclusive in its movements that if you want to reject love in its lower form, that is to say, human love as human beings feel it, if you force yourself towards rejecting that, then generally you reject even the capacity to feel love and you become as it were a stone. Then sometimes you have to wait years or even centuries for the capacity of receiving and manifesting love to reawaken in you.

Therefore the best means is, when love comes in any form whatsoever, to try to pierce through its external appearance, to find out the divine principle that is behind and that is the cause of its existence. Naturally it is full of snares and difficulties, but it is the most effective. In other words, instead of ceasing to love, because you love in the wrong way, you must cease to love in the wrong way and try to love in the right way. For example, the love between human

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creatures, in all its forms, the love of the parents for their children, of the children for their parents, the love between brothers, between lovers, all are tainted with ignorance and egoism and every other fault that is the common human fault. So, instead of ceasing altogether to love, which is besides very difficult, as it will simply dry up the heart and therefore serve no purpose, you must learn to love with devotion and self-giving and self-abnegation, you are to fight not against love itself but against its deformities. All forms of appropriation, the sense of possession, jealousy, all other feelings that accompany and support these root feelings are to be rejected. Instead you must not seek to possess, dominate,impose your will or caprice or desire, must not be eager to take and receive, but to give. Do not demand a return from the other, but be satisfied with your own love; do not seek your interest, your personal pleasure, the fulfilment of your own desire but rest content with your love and affection, do not ask for an answer, but remain happy with loving only, nothing more.

If you have done that, you have taken a big step, and then through that attitude, little by little you may progress more into the feeling itself, and you will find one day that love is not

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a personal thing, love is a divine universal feeling that manifests through you as well as it can, but it is in its essence a divine thing.

The first step then is to cease to be egoistic. It is the same rule for all, not only for those who want to do Yoga, but even in ordinary life, if you want to love truly, first of all you must not love yourself and particularly do not love in an egoistic way; you must give yourself to the object of your love without asking for anything in return. This is the very elementary discipline, if you are to transcend yourself, and live a life that is not wholly commonplace.

In Yoga, you add something more. It is, as I have said, the will to pierce through this limited and human form of love and discover the principle of Divine Love that is there behind; it is there then that you are sure to arrive at a result. That is better than drying up one's heart. It is more difficult perhaps, but it is the better in any way, because, by doing so, you do not make others suffer egoistically, you leave others to their own movements, you concern yourself with your own transformation, without imposing your will upon others and that, even in ordinary life, is a step towards something that is a little higher and more harmonious.

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HOW CAN TIME BE A FRIEND?

It depends on the way you look at it. It depends on the relation you have with it. If you take it as a friend, it becomes a friend, if you consider it as an enemy, it becomes an enemy.

But, perhaps, what you wanted to ask is how to feel when it is an enemy and when it is a friend. Well, when you are impatient and say, "Oh, I cannot get to the end of the thing, oh, when shall I finish it ?" and when you are not able to do the thing immediately and get desperate, then time is your enemy. But when you say, "Well and good, I have not done this time, I shall do it next time, and I am sure, one day or another, I shall do it", then it becomes your friend.

Is time merely subjective or is there something concrete, something like a personality in it ?

Perhaps this also depends on how you look at it. All forces are personal forces, all forces of Nature are also personal forces. But if we

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look at them as impersonal things, our relation with them becomes impersonal. Take for example what has happened just now. If you were a meteorologist, you would calculate the currents of the wind, the pressures of the atmosphere etc., etc. and conclude : "Given all that, what has happened had exactly to happen and there will be so many days of rain and so on". So it is for you a force which you are obliged to call a force of Nature and you can only look at it quietly and wait for the fixed number of rainy days to pass.

But it may happen also that you are in a sort of personal relation with the little conscious beings that are behind wind and storm and rain, behind thunder and lightning and the so-called forces of Nature, which are, however, personal forces; then through the relation you establish a kind of friendship with them. And instead of looking at them as enemies and mechanical inexorables that you have simply to bear without being able to do anything, you arrive at a cordial understanding with them, you succeed in having an influence over them and you may tell them : "But why, you want to blow and pour here, why don't you do it just by the side where there is a field ?"

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And I have seen with my own eyes, here and in France and Algeria, the rain falling on a very definite spot exactly where it should rain, because it was dry and there was a field that needed to be watered. And at another place, just a few yards away, it was all sunny and dry, because the place needed to be sunny and dry. Naturally, if you proceed very scientifically, they will explain the thing scientifically; but as for myself, I saw it happen as the result of an intervention from someone who asked for it and got it.

I have told you of my experiences in Algeria. Very many interesting things happened there. For a certain atmosphere was there, an atmosphere, one might say, of a little more real knowledge. There were certain small beings, those that controlled or produced snow. They could come and enter into a room and say : "Now, it must snow here"—"But there has been no snow in this country ! Snow ? You don't mean that ? Near the Sahara, it's going to snow ?" —"It must snow, because they have planted fir trees on the mountain and when we see fir trees we come. Fir trees mean we are called and so we come." Thus there was a little discussion and the little beings went away with the permission to snow. The mountain was covered

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with snow. And it was quite near the Sahara. You come down a few miles and you reach the Sahara.

Someone took the fancy of covering the hills with fir and fir is a tree of cold countries. The beings were called in and there they came. All that is true fact, it is not an invention.

Everything depends on your relation. It may be that the meteorologists could explain the thing, explain it away, I do not know—they explain all things in all ways.

Things are as you look at them. That is the truth. I have seen other things also, not so pleasant as the one I have just described. For since men have invented—not invented but discovered things they did not know of, atomic bombs and things worse than that and have begun to play with them like babies, it has thoroughly upset the little beings which lived according to their own rhythm of life and were accustomed to habits that answered to events they could foresee. Now all that is changed and they have suffered in consequence. They have lost their head and they do not know what they do.

There was a time, at the end of the war, when things over there became terribly chaotic and one lived in the absurd and as the unfortunate experience continues, the little beings have not

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yet been able to come out of their maddening confusion. Yes, they have become maddened. Men play with things of which they know only the exterior, that is to say, which they do not know at all. Anything may happen, including, alas ! catastrophes that have been foretold long long ago.

That may happen and may not. It depends on the thing that will intervene.

I had once spoken to you of all that, of wind and cloud and rain and I told you to pray if you wanted the weather to change, but I am afraid you thought I was joking.

One thing is certain. It is this. If you are able to see the deeper law of things and if you are in contact with a higher consciousness in order to realise something that is far beyond all human conceptions, why should you be concerned with any human opinion ? Ordinary men have no notion of what spiritual life or divine realisation may be like. Naturally, it is precisely because of their ignorance they come and judge those things quite nonchalantly and advise you as to how you should live and move and act and be. They know nothing, they see nothing. Your attitude towards them should be one of supreme indifference. And yet you should not feel superior

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to them. On the other hand, you should be kind and wish that they should be reborn in the Light. You should avoid discussing with such people and never try to convince them, that would be a vain attempt. You should be absolutely indifferent, indifferent to their criticisms and indifferent to their praise. You should know it is easier to be indifferent to criticism than to compliments. I tell you a story in this connection.

I have spoken to you more than once of Madame D.N. She was a militant personality and a great Buddhist luminary. When she came to India she wanted to see some of the great Indian sages, Gurus, that is to say, and she went to one of them —I do not give you his name—who looked at her and asked her, as the talk was about Yoga and personal effort and all that, whether she was indifferent to criticism. She answered him in the classical expression : "Does one mind the barking of a dog ?" She added, when she was narrating to me the story, with much humour : "Happily, he did not ask me whether I was indifferent to praise—for that is much more difficult !"

So, then, you should neither consider yourself superior to others and I shall tell you why; you must know that in a being, human or other, it is

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the consciousness that matters and you are either conscious or unconscious : you can consider yourself superior only when you are unconscious; the very moment you are conscious, truly conscious, you lose the sense of superiority or inferiority. In either case you must not feel superior, for it is smallness, pettiness; but you must be full of good will and sympathy and care little about what one says or does not say; however, be always polite, for it is always better to be polite than to be impolite. In that way you put yourself in relation with forces that are more harmonious and you can fight better against the forces of destruction and ugliness. But in reality you must rise above all that and feel yourself interested only in the Divine, in what He expects of you and in what you want to do for Him, for that is the only thing that counts. The rest has no importance.

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HOW TO BECOME INDIFFERENT TO CRITICISM ?

In one's own consciousness one must look at things from a wider, more general standpoint. If at any moment something holds you, holds you tight and you have to face it, if you are compelled to wrestle with a formidable obstacle and at that time you begin to feel that before this moment thousands and thousands of years passed and after the moment yet more thousands and thousands of years will pass, you immediately see the inconsequence of this little point of time; you need not enter into a high spiritual condition, you have simply to contact Time and Space, with all that is before and all that is after and all that is happening at the time, and if you are not an idiot you say immediately: "Ah, well, I am giving importance to something that has no importance."

Your little moment loses then and there all its mportance if you can visualise simply the immensity of the creation. I am not speaking of rising to spiritual heights, I speak only of the immensity of the creation in time and space and the small

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event on which you are concentrated as if it were of great consequence. All that dissolves immediately if you go about the thing in a sincere spirit. Naturally, there is a part in you that will protest and say, "But for me it has an importance." You have only to leave it aside and go on with the other part of light and consciousness. If you are sincere there, it is not difficult.

There are other procedures. A Chinese sage, I read out to you once, advises you to lie down on the flow of events as on a plank in the ocean, and imagine yourself to be on the vast immensity, drifting upon the waves, contemplating the sky above. In Chinese they call it Wu Wei. When you can do that all trouble disappears.

I knew one Irishman who used to lie on his back and look up to the sky in the night when there were stars. He looked, contemplated on the sky, imagined as if he was floating in this immensity studded with countless luminous points and immediately he felt all his troubles were gone. There are many such ways. What you have to do is to get the sense of relativity, your little person and the importance you attach to things concerning you as against the boundless infinity of the universe. Naturally, there is the other way of separating yourself from the earthly consciousness

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and rising into a higher consciousness, there earthly things take their true place, that is to say, they become small things.

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THE MODERN TASTE

From the standpoint of artistic and literary taste and culture, the present world is a thing of extremes. On one side, it is trying hard to discover something very noble, and on the other, it is sinking into a vulgarity which is infinitely greater than the vulgarity, say, of two or three centuries ago. In those times people who were not cultured were crude, but their crudeness resembled the crudeness of animals and had not much perversion in it—there was something certainly, for as soon as the mind appears, perversion also comes in. But in our days, what does not rise to the peak, remains on level earth, is a crudeness of the most perverted kind; that is to say, it is not only ignorant or stupid, it is ugly, dirty, repulsive, it is deformed, it is vile, it is extremely low. What makes it so is the wrong use of the mind. If there were no mind, this perversion would not exist. Now what is ugly is ugly from all points of view.

There are things that are considered beautiful these days. I have seen photographs and reproductions

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which arc frightfully vulgar in the perverted sense, and yet people are uproarious about them and find them pretty. That means there is something there which has not only no culture and development, but has developed in the wrong way, that is to say, is deformed, which is worse, for it is much more difficult to straighten a perverted and deformed object than to enlighten that which is merely ignorant or without education.

I believe there are certain things that have become great instruments of perversion and among them I name the Cinema. The Cinema could have been, and I hope one day it will be, an instrument of education and culture. But for the moment it is largely an instrument of perversion, a truly hideous perversion: perversion of taste, perversion of consciousness, a moral and even a physical ugliness. And yet it is something which can be serviceable for education, for progress, for artistic culture and growth. It can be made a means for the spread of the sense of the beautiful and the creation of things beautiful in a way much more general and accessible to all than it was possible in the older methods. But what could have been better, is not better but has become worse.

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As I said, we are in a period of excesses; we move from one excess to another. If it is not an excess of zeal towards perfection, we fall back into the opposite excess of perversion. As we live in the midst of such a world, if we carefully note we shall find that we automatically share in the universal vulgarism, unless we are watchful over ourselves and bring down into our being the light of our highest consciousness; at every step we run the risk of grave errors of taste, in matters spiritual also.

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The Origin

One has forgotten. From the fact of separation from Sat - Chit - Ananda comes forgetfulness of what one is. You believe you are, does not matter what, a boy, a girl, a man, a woman, a dog, a horse, any thing : a stone, the sea or the sun. You think you are all that, instead of thinking that you are the One Divine. Indeed, if you had continued to think that you are the One Divine, there would have been no universe at all. The phenomenon of separation seems to have been indispensable, otherwise it would have remained always as it was.

But once the curve has been followed up and the Unity re-established, having profited by the multiplicity and division, the Unity found is of a higher quality : a Unity that knows itself, instead of a unity that does not know itself, for there is nothing else there which knows the other. Where the Unity is absolute, who or what can know the Unity ? Hence the need of the appearance of something which is not that, in order to know what it is.

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I believe this is the secret of the universe. Perhaps the Divine truly wanted to know Himself, then He cast Himself out of Himself and looked at Himself. And now He wants to take the joy of this possibility of being Himself with the full knowledge of Himself. It becomes much more interesting.

⁂

All physical life has the vital as its origin. The vital has the mental reality as its origin. The mental itself has another origin. And so on.

Nothing can be manifested upon earth physically unless it has at its origin a higher truth. Otherwise the world would not exist. If it were something flat, having its origin in itself, it would very soon cease to exist. It is because there is a force, an energy that drives, behind the manifestation that life continues to exist. Otherwise it would quickly exhaust itself.

⁂

The original Will was towards forming individual beings that would be capable of becoming conscious again of their origin, although the

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procedure of individualisation compelled the individual to feel itself separate in order to be an individual. And the very moment it is separated, it is cut off from the original Consciousness, at least apparently, and falls into inconscience, for the only thing that is the Life of life is the Origin.

It is this inconscience that brings it about that you are not aware any longer of the Truth of your being. The secret of all deformation in the world is this inconscience which has been produced by the fact of separation from the Origin. And that explains why there are ugliness, wickedness, illness, suffering and death. It is because of this inconscience that although the Origin is there, it cannot manifest itself. It is there, therefore the world exists, but it is deformed in its expression, because it manifests itself through inconscience, ignorance and obscurity.

The only way to set everything right is to be conscious again and it is very simple.

There is only one Origin. This Origin is the Truth at its perfection, for it is the only thing that truly exists. It has exteriorised itself, projected itself, scattered itself, and by so doing has produced what we see, a mass of very fine, very brilliant brains in search of that which they have not yet found and which they find at last; for what

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they are in search of is within them. The remedy is within the heart of the Evil.

There is what we call the Truth, the foundation of all things, because if that was not there nothing would be. There is nothing which does not carry within it an eternal Truth, otherwise it would not be. The universe would not exist one-thousandth part of a second if it did not contain in itself a Truth.

And once you have found the truth, you find the Origin, you find out why things are what they are and the means of changing them. If you are in contact with the Divine, you have the key to everything. You know the how, the why, the process by which that may change. So there is somethig to be done. It is so interesting.

You represent a little mass of agglomerate substance that forms your self. Enter into that and find the key. You cannot say : "That is beyond me, that is too great for me.".Go within the little person and you will find the key that opens all the doors.

⁂

You are That, you are in That. To make you understand more easily, I may say, That is within us, That is part of our consciousness

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somewhere. Otherwise we would never be able to be conscious of it. If we did not carrythe Divine within ourselves, in the essence of our being, we would never be aware of Him, it would be an impossible task.

You can turn the problem the other way round. The very moment you conceive and feel in one way or another, or even, to begin with, you admit that the Divine is within you and you are also within the Divine, that itself pushes the door a little, half-opens it. And if subsequently a great aspiration comes and an intense need to know and to be, then you can glide in. When you have glided in, you become conscious of what one Is.

⁂

There is only one thing to be found, not two.

If Science moves forward in a definite direction, if it progresses sufficiently, if it does not stop on the way, it will find the same thing as what the mystics found.

If one goes round long enough one must come back to the same point. And once you come back, you have the impression that there was never anything to find outside. Yes, it is like that, there is nothing to find outside yourself.

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The Supramental Vision

In the supramental vision there is a direct, full and immediate knowledge of things, in the sense that you see all things at the same time totally, integrally; you see the truth of a thing in all its aspects simultaneously.

But as soon as you want to explain or describe it, you are obliged to come down to a lower level. Sri Aurobindo calls it the Mind of Light. Here things have to be said or even thought or expressed and realised in action one after another in a certain order, in a certain relation to each other. Therefore the simultaneity disappears; for, in the present condition of our way of expression it is impossible to say everything at once outright. We are obliged to veil a portion of what we see and know in order to bring it out little by little. Sri Aurobindo therefore calls it a transparent veil; for you see all, you know all at the same time, you have the entire or total knowledge of a thing, but you cannot express it whole and entire at one stroke.

There are no words, no possible modes of expression

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for the supramental vision, so long as we are what we are. We have to use an inferior procedure to express ourselves, and yet we possess at the same time the full knowledge. It is because of the necessity of transferring this knowledge into words that we are compelled, so to say, to hold back a part of what we know, letting it come out step by step in a succession. It is the veil of expression that suits our need both for utterance and understanding. The knowledge is there, really there, we have not got to search for it and we have not got to express it as we go on finding it; no, it is there in its totality, only the necessity of expression makes us say things one after another, and that naturally diminishes the omnipotence ascribed by Sri Aurobindo to the vision. For what is omnipotent is the total vision expressing itself totally. Omniscience is there, in principle, it is perceptible; but this omniscience cannot act in its full power, for it has to come down a step to be able to express itself.

To live totally in the supramental knowledge, one must have other means of expression than those available at present. New modes of expression have to be developed for expressing supramental things in a supramental way. At present we have to raise our mental faculty to its maximum,

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to a sort of frontier that is hardly visible and yet which exists; for our means of expression still belong to this mental world and they do not possess supramental power. We do not have the necessary organs. We must become beings of the supramental world, with a supramental substance, a supramental inner organisation, to express the supramental knowledge in a supramental way. Till now we could, in some part of our consciousness, come out wholly into the supramental vision and knowledge, but could not express it from there. We had to come, as I say, one plane lower down to be able to express ourselves.

That is how this veil is transparent to the consciousness, for the consciousness sees and knows things in a supramental way, but a part remains veiled and comes out only progressively, for it has not the means to do otherwise.

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THE SUPRAMENTAL MANIFESTATION AND WORLD-CHANGE

I have been asked what difference the presence of the Supermind will make, in what way it will change the trend of events and how, since the Supramental manifestation, life has to be reviewed. I am asked to give practical examples. I do not know what this means, but here is what I have seen in a somewhat mathematical mood. Although the mathematical language is quite foreign to me, still I may call it a mathematical mood, that is to say, a mathematical way of looking at the problem.

I believe you have done sufficient mathematics to know the complexity of combinations that arises when you take as your basis some elements out of a sum-total. To make it clearer I shall give you an example—but without using the terms you have been taught at school—from the letters of the alphabet. There are a certain number of letters. Now, if you want to calculate or know the number of combinations possible with these letters, taking all the letters together and organi-

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sing them in as many ways as you can, you find, as you have been taught, that it runs into a fantastic figure.

Similarly, take the material world and come down to the most minute particle—you know scientists have arrived at things that are absolutely invisible and incalculable—and take this particle as your basis and the material world as the total and, further, imagine a Consciousness or a Will playing with these particles, making all sorts of possible combinations, never repeating the same combination. Of course, mathematically they say that the number of particles is finite and therefore the number of combinations also is finite, but this is purely theoretical, and theory does not interest us. Coming to the practical, even if you suppose that these combinations follow each other in such a manner and at such a speed that the change from one to another is hardly perceptible, it is clear that the time needed for the working out of all these combinations would be, apparently, infinite. That is to say, the number of combinations would be so immense that practically no end could be assigned to it.

Now imagine, as I have just asked you to do, that really there exists a Consciousness, a Will manifesting these combinations successively and

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indefinitely, never repeating twice the same; then we must come to the conclusion that the universe is new at each moment of eternity, and if the universe is new at each moment of eternity we are forced to admit there is nothing absolutely impossible; even further, what we call logical is not necessarily the true, and the logic or what might almost be called the fancy of the Creator has no limit to it.

Therefore, if for some reason (which it is difficult to express) a combination is not followed up by that which is nearest to it, but another one freely chosen by the Supreme Freedom, all our external certainties and all our surface logic would fall to the ground.

For, the problem is much more complicated than you imagine. It is not merely on one plane, in one domain, that is to say, what may be called the surface of things, that there is this almost infinite quantity of elements allowing combinations eternally new. There is more than that, there is what may be termed depth, that is to say. other dimensions.

Creation is the result not only of combinations on the surface but also of combinations in the depths of this surface : in other words, there are psychological factors. But I am looking from

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the purely mathematical standpoint; although I do not speak the mathematical language, it is still a mathematical conception. Here is then the problem.

Each time a new element is introduced into the sum-total of possible combinations, it is as it were a tearing of its limits; the introduction of something that effaces the past limits, brings in new possibilities into play, multiplies indefinitely the old possibilities. You had, for example, a world, as the ancient knowledge found it, with twelve layers of depth or successive dimensions. Now suppose in this world of twelve dimensions suddenly other dimensions were precipitated; all the old formulas would be changed immediately and the whole possibility according to the old unfolding would be, one cannot say increased, but supplemented by an almost infinite number of new possibilities, and that in such a manner that all the old logic would become illogical in the presence of the new logic.

I do not speak at all of what the human mind has built up with the universe, because that is a reduction to its own dimension. I speak of the fact as it is, of the sum-total of combinations that realise themselves successively according to an order and a choice which evidently escape wholly

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the human consciousness, a sum-total to which man has somewhat adapted himself and has at last succeeded in giving an expression that links itself to something tangible, after a great effort of study made through the centuries.

It is evident that the modern scientific perception is much nearer to something that corresponds to the universal Reality than the perceptions, say, of the Stone Age; there is no shadow of a doubt about that. But even this will be completely transcended, surpassed and probably upset by the intrusion of something which was not in the universe and has not been studied so far.

This change, this sudden mutation in the universal elements will very certainly bring a kind of chaos in our perceptions, but out of it a new knowledge will arise. That, in a most general way, will be the result of the New Manifestation.

From a more restricted, external and limited point of view I shall speak now of things which are not within my own experience, but which I have heard being spoken about. It is said, for example, that one finds now a larger number of what they call child prodigies. Personally I have met none, so I cannot say what exactly is "prodigious" in these children. However, as the stories go, there is a new type or types of con-

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sciousness which appear surprising to the ordinary human consciousness. It is such examples, I suppose, that you would like to have in order to understand what is happening.

Indeed it is quite possible that things are happening now which people are not accustomed to meet with. But that is a question of interpretation. The only fact I am sure of is what I have just told you, that the quality, the quantity and the nature of the possible universal combinations are about to change to such an extent that it will stagger all those who deal with life. Let us wait and see.

I may add one word, a practical word, to what I have already said; it is an illustration of a detail, but it will be a kind of reply to some other questions put to me sometime ago about the so-called laws of Nature, causes and effects, inevitable consequences in the material world, more particularly from the point of view of health : we are told that if some precautions are not taken, if we do not eat as we should, if we do not follow certain rules, necessarily there will be consequences.

True. But if you look at the thing in the light of what I have told you—that there are no two universal combinations that are alike—then how can you establish laws and what is the absolute truth of such laws?

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There is no such truth. For, if you are logical, that is to say, with a little higher logic, how can you say that a thing repeats itself, since there are no two things, no two combinations, no two universal manifestations that are the same? The "sameness" could be only an appearance, not a fact. The mind sets up rigid laws, and when it does that, you do not cut yourself off from the apparent surface existence, for the surface, in a very obliging manner, seems to satisfy these laws. But that is an appearance, and it does cut you off from the creative Power of the Spirit, cut you off from the true Power of Grace. You can understand that if, by your aspiration and your attitude, you bring down a higher element, a new element —which now we may call the Supramental—into the existing combinations, you can all on a sudden change their nature and then all these so-called necessary and inexorable laws become absurdities. It is you, with your conception, your attitude, your acceptance of certain so-called principles, it is yourself who shut the door against the possibility of what you call miracles. They are not miracles, if you know how they come about, but evidently for your consciousness they have the look of the miraculous.

It is you who say with a logic that appears quite

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reasonable : "If I do this, necessarily this will happen", or "If I do not do this, this other thing will surely come about", and that is how you put, as it were, an iron curtain between yourself and the free action of the Grace.

How good would it be to imagine that the Supreme Consciousness, essentially free, that presides over the universal manifestation, is fanciful in its choice and that it makes things succeed each other, not according to a logic that is accessible to the human thought, but according to another kind of logic, the logic of the unforeseen !

Then there would be no limit to the possibilities, the unexpected and the wonderful. And one could hope for the most splendid, the most delightful things from this Will, sovereignly free, playing eternally with the elements, ceaselessly bringing forth a new world that would have logically nothing to do with the world that went before. Don't you think it would be the happiest of things? We have had enough of the world as it is.

All this I am telling you so that each one of you may put as few barriers as possible against future possibilities. And that is my conclusion.

I do not know if I have made myself understood or not, but I suppose a day will come when you will know what I have wanted to say.

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Section Two

To the Children of the Ashram

The True Teaching

You must have observed that my way of talking to you is not always the same. I don't know whether you are very sensitive to the difference, but for me it is considerable.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, because of something read or for another reason, there comes to me in the wake of a question what is called an experience but what is simply the fact of entering into a certain state of consciousness and, having entered into it, describing that very state. In such a case, the Force, the Consciousness that express themselves pass across the individual mind, use it like a store-house of words and draw from it by a sort of affinity the words necessary for the expression. This is the true teaching, the teaching that is difficult to find in books. It can be there, but one must be oneself in that state of consciousness to be able to discover it, whereas, with the spoken word, the sound-vibration transmits at least something of the experience and this can be contagious for all who are sensitive.

On other occasions, the questions posed and

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the subject chosen are conveyed by the mind to the higher Consciousness. The mind receives a response from that Consciousness and conveys it through the word. This is what generally happens in all teachings, provided that the one who teaches has the capacity to pass the question on to the higher Consciousness—a capacity not always present.

I should tell you that the second method does not interest me much. Very often, when the question or the subject fails to give me the possibility of entering into a state of consciousness that interests me, I far prefer to keep silent. And it is, as it were, a sense of duty that makes me talk.

I am informing you in advance, because in the past I have cut short the conversation and passed abruptly into meditation.

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On Teachers and Teaching

Mastery means to know how to deal with certain vibrations. If you have the knowledge and can deal with the vibrations, you have the mastery. The best field for such an experience and experiment is yourself. First, you must have mastery over yourself and when you have it, you can transmit its vibrations to others in so far as you are capable of identifying yourself with them. But if you cannot deal with the vibrations in yourself, how can you deal with them in others ? You can, by word or by influence, encourage people so that they do what is necessary to master themselves, but you cannot yourself have direct mastery over them.

To master something, a movement, for example, means, by your simple presence, without any word, any explanation, to replace a bad vibration by the true one. By means of the word, by means of explanation and discussion, even a certain emanation of force, you exert an influence upon another, but you do not master the movement. Mastery over a movement is the capacity to set

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against the vibration of the movement a stronger, truer vibration that can stop the other vibration. An example can be easily given.

Two persons are quarrelling in your presence; not only are they quarrelling, they are about to come to blows. Then you approach and explain to them that it is not the thing to do and you give good reasons so that they stop in the end. You exercise an influence over them in this way. But if, on the other hand, you simply stand before them, look at them and send out a vibration of peace and calm and quietness without uttering a word, without any explanation whatsoever, and if as a result the other vibration does not stand but falls off by itself, that is mastery.

It is the same with regard to curing ignorance. If words are necessary to explain a certain thing, then you have not the true knowledge. If I have to speak out all that I mean to say in order to make you understand, then I have not the mastery, simply I exercise an influence upon your intelligence and help you to understand, awaken in you the desire to know, to discipline yourself, etc., etc. But if I am not able, simply by looking at you, without saying anything, to make you enter into the light that will make you understand, well, I have not mastered the state of ignorance.

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Q. The problem of teachers is: how to control the classes, how to bring the students under discipline ?

How can you have control over your students or discipline them unless you have control over yourself ?

Q. But to learn to have control or mastery over oneself would take a whole lifetime !

It is a pity ! But how can you hope otherwise ? When you have an undisciplined, disobedient, insolent student, it means a certain vibration in the atmosphere which is unfortunately very contagious. If you do not have in yourself the contrary vibration, the vibration of discipline, order, humility, calmness, peace that nothing disturbs, how can you hope, I say, to have an influence ? You may tell the student that such a thing should not be done; but the result may be worse or he may mock at you. And if, on top of it, you do not know how to control yourself, but get into a temper, well, you may be done for, you may lose for your whole life all possibility of controlling your students.

Teachers who do not possess perfect calm, endurance

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that can stand all test, tranquillity that nothing shakes, who have not cast off their amour propre are not the kind that can ever succeed. You must be a saint, a hero in order to be a good teacher. You must be a great Yogi to be a good teacher. You must yourself have always the perfect attitude if you demand from your students a perfect attitude. You cannot ask of any person a thing which you cannot do yourself.

So then look within yourself at the difference there is between what is and what should be; that will give you the measure of your lack of success in the class.

Now I would like to add one word, since I have the occasion. We have asked many of our students, when they are grown up and know something, to teach others. There are some, I believe, who know the reason why; but there are others who think that it is because it is good to serve in some way or other, because teachers are needed after all and that we are glad to have them. But I tell you, for it is a fact, I have never asked any of those who were educated here to give lessons unless I saw that that was the best way for them to get self-discipline, to learn what they are to teach, to attain an inner perfection which they would not otherwise than by being teachers

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and having this opportunity, an exceptionally severe one for self-discipline.

They who are successful here as teachers,— I do not mean an external, artificial and superficial success,—they who become truly good teachers, are exactly those who are capable of making an inner progress towards impersonalisa-tion, capable of eliminating their egoism, becoming masters of their movements, possessing insight, comprehension of others and a patience, proof against all test and trial.

If you have passed through that discipline and succeeded, then you will not have wasted your time here. I ask every one who accepts the work of giving lessons to accept it in that spirit. It is all very nice to be obliging to give service, to be useful; it is a very good thing, certainly. But it is only one side, perhaps the most unimportant side of the question. The much greater, more important side is this, that you have been given the Grace so that you may arrive at mastering yourself, at an understanding of your subject and of other persons which you could not have done but for this opportunity. And if you have not profited during all these years that you have been teaching, well, it means you have wasted at least half of your time.

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Q. What about the organisation of studies at the Ashram school ? If the students are given full freedom, as it is supposed you have given them, that is to say, if they are permitted to come to the classes or go away from them as they like or learn or not learn their lessons according to their choice, then how can a system or organisation work?

But when did I say that a student is free to come and go as he likes ? You must not confuse matters. I said and I repeat that if a student feels that a particular subject is foreign to him, if, for example, he has a capacity for literature and poetry and a disgust or even dislike for mathematics, in that case, if the student comes and tells me, "I prefer not to follow the course of mathematics", I cannot answer him, "No, you must absolutely do it". But once a student has decided to follow a class, it is quite an elementary discipline for him to follow the class, to attend it regularly, to behave decently while he is there. Otherwise it is unworthy of him to go to school at all. I have never encouraged people to loiter about during class hours or to come one day and be absent the next day, never, for, to begin with, if you are not able to submit yourself to this very elementary discipline, you will never succeed in

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having the least control over yourself; you will be always the slave of every impulse and fancy of yours.

If you do not want to study a certain line of knowledge, it is all right, you are not obliged to do so. But if you decide to do a thing in life, whatever it is, you must do it honestly, in a disciplined, regular and methodical manner, without giving yourself to fancy. I have never approved that a person should be the plaything of his impulses and caprices. You can never get sanction for that out of me, for you are then no longer a human being but an animal.

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Education of Girls

The question is about our physical education and, in a general way, the psychological basis of our activities here. These things have, of course, been written about and spoken of by me and by Sri Aurobindo very often, but evidently the idea does not seem to have entered your consciousness.

I do not wish to wage a war against what you feel and do, but I would like you at least to understand why things are done here in the way they are being done instead of letting yourself go thoughtlessly in a retrograde movement towards all that is done elsewhere, under the plea that that is how your fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers and all the ancestors of yourself and of all your friends and relatives did in the past and considered it as the normal and natural way of doing things.

I do not contradict the fact, in the sense that humanity was created by Nature with special intentions and special purposes; it is in order to realise her ends that Nature fashioned her

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creatures and gave them special habits and functions. Therefore, if you speak of natural things, I cannot say that they are not natural, for it is Nature's way.

But all the same I have told you, I suppose, not once but many times, and Sri Aurobindo also has written, not once but more than once, that we are not here to recommence, perpetuate, continue what is done elsewhere. And we have given a concrete shape to this fact specially in our education. For, I must avow, without giving offence to anyone, that they who come here after having lived much and who carry a heavy load of the past upon their back find it difficult to change immediately their attitude and their point of view, but if you take the young ones, who are not spoilt yet—although they too get spoilt too easily— those who are not spoilt too much by the usual education, by family ideas, ancestral inclinations, you have just a chance of turning their consciousness to the true path and obtain somewhat tangible and concrete results.

To speak the truth, we have had nothing to complain; for we had absolutely clear proofs that what we wanted to do is quite possible, if one knows how to go about it.

This is then what we say : given similar conditions,

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the same education, identical possibilities, there is no reason to make a categorical, final and imperative distinction between what is called men and women. For us, human beings are the expression of one and the same soul; and if, as I already said in the beginning, Nature has made a differentiation in the expression with a view to satisfying her needs and realising her purposes, but if our needs and our purposes are different and we do not recognise the physical ends as conceived by Nature to be the final and absolute ends, then we can try and develop our consciousness along another line.

Unfortunately we have come to notice one thing. As years pass and small girls grow up, they suddenly begin to remember that they are girls and that they must live and move in a special manner, they must be pleasant, agreeable, pretty, etc., etc. So all our efforts seem to go in vain. Naturally, there are exceptions—there are always exceptions to the rule—but even among these, in the background of their consciousness there is this feeling of being not quite like the others, the satisfaction of having done better than the others, the conceit that they stand comparison with the others—the males !

I am told people have been remarking—people

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naturally not accustomed to our ways—people with their own old-world ideas—and asking why we have the same programme of physical education for both boys and girls, why the girls are not treated in a special way, quite differently from the boys—is it not a gross error even from the physical point of view to level them together ? Their crowning argument being, that is the way things are done everywhere else.

I say if that is the way things are done elsewhere, it is no use our repeating the same here. We cannot do it better than they. On the contrary, if things are done elsewhere in that way, it is just the reason why we should not do that way. What we want is precisely to bring into the world something which is not there. But if we keep to all the habits of the world, all its preferences and prejudices, all its constructions, how shall we come out of the rut and do something new ?

I have told you, my children, I have repeated in all kinds of tone and temper : if you wish truly to benefit by your stay here, try to look at things and understand them with a new eye and a new perception based on something higher, deeper, truer, something which is yet not there, but will be one day. And it is to build up this future that we have taken a special attitude.

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I tell you, we have had quite material proofs of the correctness and truth of our position. They do not last, however. Why? Because it is extremely easy to fall back into the ordinary consciousness, but there is nothing more difficult than to hold oneself high all the time on the top rung of the ladder and look at the world from up there.

But we will not obey Nature's orders, even if these orders have behind them thousands and thousands of years of habit. Yet one thing is certain : the argument that Nature puts forward against any change in things that they have been always as they are is not true. Whether she wants it or not, things do change and a day will come when people will say, "Ah yes, things were so in those days, but now it is all different !"

You may naturally complain that I am addressing myself only to the girls and that I am telling you all this in the presence of the "other sex". But I include them also in the ridiculousness of the whole thing. For if they did not think in the way they think, if they did not feel in the way they feel and if they did not behave in the way they behave, long long ago you would have been disgusted with these childish mannerisms of yours.

However, I ask you only to understand and

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admit this much for some time that we still belong to a period of faith and trust, that things are on the way to change, that we have reached a point of time when things are turning and taking a new direction. I ask of you a little more faith, a little more trust, just letting yourself be guided. Otherwise you lose the advantage of being here. That is all.

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How to Listen

I have begun to notice that many among you, perhaps a very large portion, do not listen to what I say. For not unoften you have put questions on a subject on which I talked in detail just a moment before, as if nothing was spoken. The fact is surely this : each one of you is shut up in his own thought, exactly as, I suppose, you do in the class also at school. You repeat to yourself your own lesson, thinking of what is expected of you—provided, of course, you are at all diligent and attentive—and do not listen to what your teacher asks and explains or what the other students answer. You miss in this way three-fourths of the advantage of being not all alone but in a group.

Here the matter is more serious. For I do not give an individual or personal answer, I answer in such a way that all may profit and if, instead of listening, you continue to think what you have in your own head, you lose the opportunity to learn anything.

That is the first point. If you are here, you

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must first of all, listen and not think of other things. But that is not sufficient, it is only the beginning. For there is a good way and there are many bad ways of listening. I do not know if any of you likes to hear music. But if you want to hear music, you must make an absolute silence in your head; you should not follow or accept any thought, you should be wholly concentrated, make yourself a kind of screen, noiseless and immobile. That is the only way of hearing and understanding music. If you allow the least movement or waywardness in your thought, the whole value of the music will escape you.

Now, to understand a teaching which is not altogether of a material kind, which implies an opening to things that are within, the necessity of silence is all the greater. But if instead of listening to what is said, you jumped about for an idea in order to put another question or if you started arguing about the things said under the specious pretext of understanding better, all you heard would pass like smoke without leaving an effect.

In the same way, when you have an experien e, as long as it lasts, do not try to understand what it means; if you do that, it vanishes, of you deform and disfigure it, taking away all its purity.

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In the same way also if you want a spiritual experience to enter into you, you must have a brain absolutely quiet and immobile, like a mirror which not only reflects but absorbs, allows the ray to enter and penetrate deep within so that out of the profundities of your consciousness it may rise up one day or other in the form of knowledge..

If you come here, come with the intention of listening in silence. What will happen you will recognise later on; the effect of this attitude of silence you will find out in course of time. But in the meanwhile the only thing to do is to be silent, still, attentive.

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Goal of Evolution

You say it is obvious that evolution has a goal and that it cannot stop here or now. It seems to you obvious because you have read Sri Aurobindo's books. But if you take anybody you meet in the street and ask him what is the purpose of the universe or of the evolution, you will see that he will answer by saying that he knows nothing about it. Even here there are many, perhaps hundreds, if you ask them individually not to repeat what they have read but to say what they feel and think by themselves about the question, what is the intention behind the universal evolution or if there is any intention at all, they will not be able to give a better answer. I do not think that there are many who will be able to tell you in all sincerity, "It is like this, it is like that, it is evident, etc., etc." A good number may be able to quote passages from Sri Aurobindo; otherwise, if you cease thinking, thinking with what you have read or heard, if you try to express your own personal experience, would you have any certitude to declare ? I do not

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speak of the result of what you have learnt, what you have read or heard about, I speak of your own personal experience, exclusively genuinely your own, something that is evident because it is your life and realisation. Are you capable of anything of that kind ?

If you have an experience of the kind, I shall be glad to congratulate you and say that you have , not wasted your time here.

Let us then look within ourselves.

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Section Three

Three To the Sadhaks of the Ash

Health in the Ashram

(I)

There are people who come to me and say that they would like to go home, for their health does not permit them to continue here; it gradually gets worse and worse and they ask for my permission.

I wonder at their ignorance. Perhaps I should not wonder; human nature is like that. These people do not know or see or feel in the least that they are here in the best of conditions for cure, nowhere else in the world would they get anything like the opportunity or the help that is here. Naturally, if one is to be here and derive the full benefit of his stay, one has to fulfil certain conditions or rather one condition. That one condition is to give up the ego, not to live the life of the ego, but to live the life of the soul, to dedicate oneself to the Divine. So it is evident that if this condition is not fu1filled, that is to say, being here you continue to live the life of your old self, your ego, if you

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refuse to change, naturally you do not get the benefit of the help that is given here. And when you refuse to go forward, not only do you halt where you are, you go backward. That is the meaning of one'-s health getting worse. Of course if you ask my permission to go away, you have it. The Grace is everywhere for all to the extent they can receive and allow it to come to them. But that is not what things would be if you were here and agreed to attempt to fulfil the conditions of the life here.

To be able to stay here one must have faith. But people's faith depends upon what the ego desires and seeks. "I believe in the Divine if I find Him doing or arranging things as I would like them to be. If things happen contrary to my notions and wishes, then I believe no more in the Divine." That is their attitude.

Now it is precisely this ego-view that vitiates one's approach to life and existence. In the true and the most ancient tradition of spirituality, the world was never looked upon as Maya or illusion, it was the ego that was considered as an illusion and the generator of illusions. It is the ego and ego's view that puts us in a wrong relation with the world and the consequences are all the falsehoods and miseries. Be egoless, do not

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contaminate your perception or your movement with the ego's touch, you will see the world changed and transformed.

If you had faith, if you had less of the egoistic demands and shrinkings, you would see how beautifully Nature collaborates with you.

The greatest thing that can ever be, the most marvellous thing since the beginning of creation, the miracle has happened. And that is the only thing that concerns us most intimately and the only thing we should be concerned with. A new world, yes a completely new world, is born and is here. Nothing can be more momentous. And yet, do you know, feel or perceive it? Unless things give a physical knock upon your nose, you do not believe in its reality. And yet it is there. You are blind and without sense because you are ego-bound. It is your I, My and Mine that has woven around you a web, a screen.

(2)

Wake up in yourself a will to conquer. Not a mere will in the mind but a will in the very cells of your body. Without that you can't do anything, e.g., you may take a hundred medicines

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but they won't cure you unless you have a will to overcome the physical illness.

I may destroy the adverse force that has possessed you. I may repeat the action a thousand times. But each time that a vacuum is created it will be filled up by one of the many forces that try to rush in. That is why, I say, wake up the will to conquer.

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Section Four

The Mother on Herself

The Mother on Herself

(I)

You must be very very persevering. I will tell you a story—my own story.

When I began to practise occultism, as I started working with my nights, making them conscious, I found that between the subtle-physical level and the most material vital there was a small region, very small indeed, that was not developed well enough to serve as a conscious link between the two. So what happened in the most material vital was not being accurately translated into the consciousness of the most subtle physical. Something was lost in the passage which was however not quite empty but only half-conscious, not adequately developed. I knew there was only one way, namely, to go on working for the development. I started working sometime in February, I suppose. One month, two months, three, four months passed with no result. I continued. Five months, six months. Then in July or August I left my home in Paris for the

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country-side. I came to a very small place near the sea-side and stayed with friends. There was a garden there. And in the garden a fine green turf and flowers and trees all round. It was a pretty little quiet place. It was very quiet, very silent. One day I lay myself down on the grass, flat on the face resting on my elbows (among the grass). Suddenly the whole life of this nature, the whole life of the intermediate region I am speaking of, which is most living in the plant and in physical nature, all this domain became all on a sudden, unexpectedly, without any transition, absolutely living, intense, conscious, wonderful. This was the result of the continuous activity of six months that did not give any result till then. I did not know it; just a little favourable condition and the result is there. It is like the chick in the egg. It is there for a long time but you do not see it. You ask doubtfully if there is any chick at all inside the egg. And then suddenly" a crack, a small hole—the egg bursts and the chick comes out, quite formed and whole and entire. It took all this time to form itself. So it is like this. When you wish to prepare something within you it is like the preparation of the chick inside the shell. It takes a long time and there is not the least result. But you must not be discouraged. You must

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continue your effort, as before, regularly as if the whole eternity were before you, thoroughly disinterested in the result. One day the result bursts upon you, the whole result of all your work.

(2)

When I look at people and when I am occupied with them, I have the will—I do not say it is always possible — anyhow, I have the will to see in them their psychic being, their ideal, what they want to do, what they want to become, to hold it and bring it out to the surface. That is all my work. What I see, I try to draw to the front. When I do this, apart from a very few instances when people are somewhat conscious, I am not always sure of the kind and degree of their external consciousness. And when I put questions to someone, it is to know the difference between what he is conscious of and what I see. I am doing this all the while. And that is why it seems as if I did not know.

There is a vast difference between what you know of yourself and what I know of you. What I know of you is evidently what you ought to become. Your external being one can see well.

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But between that and the inner being that I see there is the vital-mental region which is the most important thing from the human point of view; for what one has to become must be repeated there first, if it is to be materialised. But as I say, the gap is wide between what you know of yourself, what is actively conscious in you and what you are in the truth of your being. This intermediary region is somewhat difficult for me to be familiar with or comprehend : for it is a cloudy region for me, a domain of falsehood. You must note the distinction between a lie and a falsehood. A lie is that which is altogether unreal, which has not been, which is not there. A falsehood is that which is not true, in the sense that it is not the expression of your truth— not at all—and yet, it is that of which you are mostly externally conscious. Very very few are there who have the inner perception of what they want to become, what they want to do, what the truth of their being is. There are not many of that kind. For some, the thing comes and is then veiled —just a lightning flash for a moment and then all is dark. For me it is a perpetual question to know what is the state of the superficial consciousness which is for me so unreal, so untrue. There is such a contradiction between the

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brutal fact of the daily activity and this image I make to myself of what everyone of you should be: I keep this image always intact by all the power of my consciousness so that you may realise it. That is yourself, your own self. It is not this ignorant, stupid, insincere, dishonest being thatyou call yourself.

(3)

Once upon a time, long long ago, when I was in Paris, I used to see Madame D. N. almost daily. She was full of ideas and told me : "You should not think of action, it means attachment to action. When you want to do something it indicates that you are still tied to the things of the world". I answered : "No, nothing is more easy. You have only to imagine all that has been done before, all that will be done hereafter and all that is being done now, you will immediately perceive that your action is nothing but a breath, one second in eternity and you are no longer attached to it". I did not know the text of the Gita at that time. And I had not the complete text, the text that I am here putting somewhat in my own way: "And detached from the fruit of action, act". I did not know the Gita, but what I said

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was in effect what the Gita taught. You should act not because you believe in your action. You act because you should act. That is all. It is however a condition that may prove dangerous sometimes. For instead of willing with a sovereign will to action you simply look and let things happen.

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