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... , only one will moving in countless ways of being. 7 It did not at all please Mirra to be like a marketplace and let herself be invaded by the grief of others or by the anger of her brother Matteo: a terribly serious boy, and frightfully studious—oh, it was awful! But he also had a very strong character, a strong will, and there was something interesting about him. When he was studying to enter... He almost killed me three times, but when my mother told him, “Next time, you will kill her," he resolved that it wouldn’t happen again—and it never did. 8 A decidedly vigorous family. But when Matteo got angry, She clearly perceived that something started to quiver in a center in the lower abdomen; those centers were like quivering knots, which received and emitted in a serried or less serried... d instead of catching the vibration and starting, by contagion, to lose her own temper, She noticed that all she had to do was to switch off the current. No need to exert willpower or control like Matteo —you just switch off the current and it is all over. It is cut off. She was discovering the extraordinary "contagion” of vibrations: All vibrations are contagious, and there are so many of them! ...

... has not changed? How many tons of penicillin or institutions will ever cure that indigence? Or else how many tons of policemen, and more and more policemen? Sometimes She even criticized her brother Matteo, who, after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique, had become a governor; yet he, too, seemed to have special faculties, since he was able to have certain experiences—which he dismissed because... because he wanted to “help backward races to progress”—all that nonsense ! 29 Already, at the age of sixteen and a half ... Enough to send a few Nobel Prize laureates through the ceiling. And indeed, Matteo was regarded as a kind of Christ by the Congolese he governed; they had never seen such abnegation, according to the records. But we may wonder whether our Congolese broth­ers, who are no longer called ...

... scandal of all the proper-minded people, young Mathilde refused to bow to the khedive, probably finding it incompatible with human dignity. She had to pack her bags. She was twenty and had a young baby, Matteo (an Italian name in Alexandria?—one wonders why), who would be Mother's elder brother and intimate friend. Eigh­teen months separated them; he was born on July 13, 1876 in Alexandria. This is how Mathilde... longer so rich, in fact, since she was cursed with four sons, “each more extravagant than the other”) but for Mathilde's spartan dignity. So, no one stepped out of line at boulevard Haussmann; the son, Matteo, was even to graduate from Ecole Poly technique *Mother would have a solid and rigorous foundation from which fancies were banished as a waste of time, religions forbidden as "weakness and superstition ...

... grandmother. 1843 Marriage of Mira Pinto to Matteo Ismalun in Alexandria. July 5, Birth of Maurice Alfassa in Adrianople (Turkey). Mother's future father. 1857 December 18, birth of Mathilde Ismalun in Alexandria. Mother’s future mother. 1874 Marriage of Mathilde Ismalun to Maurice Alfassa in Alexandria. 1876 July 13, birth of Matteo Alfassa in Alexandria. Mother’s brother. ...

... had come to the end of her journey—the pupil of thundering Theon, the friend of Rouault, Rodin, Matisse, the patient student of all the mental and spiritual gymnastics, the mathematician sister of Matteo, the musician of a great blue note, was going to lay down her burden at Sri Auro­bindo’s feet to take on a still heavier burden—for the whole world is there, when there is no longer an “I”. In 1920 ...

... once there had only been useless dust. But Mother’s forest can also be held within a speck of dust ; it is a magical forest of all dimensions. A Doge in Dark Purple It was through a friend of Matteo’s that one day in 1904 Mirra was to meet a singular man who called himself Max Theon—The "Supreme God,” no less. He never said who he really was or where he was born, nor his age, nor anything. 1... Russian or Polish Jew, who was forced to leave his country for that reason. He published in Paris a magazine called La Tradition Cosmique through the agency of someone called Themanlys, a friend of Matteo’s. Mirra pounced on it like a starving lioness. It was the first time ever She had heard of something similar to her own expe­riences, albeit in a rather bizarre language. For her, it was a revelation; ...

... near the heart, and which caused a sort of harmonious, undulating movement... like a great movement of wings 6 —the very center from where She drew the Shakti whenever She wanted to shake off Matteo’s fits of anger or Mathilde’s rebukes— the same vibration. Perhaps there is another way of vibrating that eludes Newton and all our laws. But we must learn the law of the “great wings." But let ...

... forest. The little path that abruptly emerges here, that unexpected gesture in the midst of our routines, those surging words, the wave that seizes our human crowds and suddenly makes them move, like Matteo's tantrums or the hops of a little girl amid the orderly flower beds at the Tuileries —we do not know where they come from or what breath of air has just passed by. Outside, everything is crumbling; ...