April 8, 1961
After more than a month I have resumed my translation [of The Synthesis of Yoga], and I fell exactly – it’s splendid! – exactly on the passage that helped me understand what has happened, why there are all these difficulties. And the Synthesis and the Veda go hand in hand, so reading that passage brought some improvement; it’s like being able to shift position, you know, so that now it’s a bit better. Anyway….
*
(Then Mother listens to a reading from the 1960 ‘Agenda.’ At the end, Satprem remarks, as though to excuse himself for noting some apparently irrelevant details.)
All these things are interwoven, you see – each time, you seem to be adding a touch. Even a detail that doesn’t seem ‘relevant’ by itself becomes part of a gradually emerging picture when seen with the whole.
Yes, of course. But it’s basically a description of my sadhana, that’s all, and I always say that it will be interesting only if I go through to the end.
Bah!
When I reach the end or when something truly concrete is realized, then it will become interesting, but not before.
But still, the story of the journey is interesting!
Until something is realized, it’s nothing at all.
It will make it easier to understand …
Oh, mon petit! As if anyone ever understands anything about anything! Anyway…. We’d better go back to work.
*
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(Later, concerning the disciple’s very traditionalist guru who falls ill each time he comes to the Ashram:)
He seems to understand better. In his own way, he is ‘progressive’ – unfortunately, it always makes him sick! The Force is too great for his body to bear.
He is used to maintaining a kind of poise, the poise of the traditional attitude of indifference towards everything material: ‘It’s an illusion, it has no importance, there’s no need to be concerned with it. Nature is acting, not 1; Nature is acting and Nature is built like that, so why bother about it, why worry.’ That’s how he lived until he came here, and it’s why he had this attitude of indifference. But here it began to change. And of course his body isn’t used to it; it has difficulty keeping up, it lacks plasticity.
The first thing he did was to go see the Doctor and ask him to heal his ear, heal his stomach, heal…. So the Doctor told him, ‘But why do you eat just anything at any time of day? Naturally you’re sick….’ And then he was constantly running up against our ways of organizing material things here – people like him don’t organize, they don’t care, they just let things drift. Regarding his son, for instance, the Doctor told him, ‘It’s because you don’t look after him. If you did, this wouldn’t happen.’ And X very bluntly replied, ‘But why!?..
There’s a gap.
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