July
July 4, 1961
(Mother remarks in passing that the inspiration coming to her from Sri Aurobindo when she writes is sometimes in French and sometimes in English, and adds:)
Sri Aurobindo told me he had been French in a previous life and that French flowed back to him like a spontaneous memory – he understood all the subtleties of French.
How is your work going?
Tomorrow I’ll begin on ‘Savitri.’
O lucky man! What joy!
You know, Savitri is an exact description – not literature, not poetry (although the form is very poetical) – an exact description, step by step, paragraph by paragraph, page by page; as I read, I relived it all. Besides, many of my own experiences that I recounted to Sri Aurobindo seem to have been incorporated into Savitri. He has included many of them – Nolini says so; he was familiar with the first version Sri Aurobindo wrote long ago, and he said that an enormous number of experiences were added when it was taken up again. This explained to me why … suddenly, as I read it, I live the experience – line by line, page by page. The realism of it is astounding.
As for me, I’m now on the second part of On Himself ; I am beginning to enjoy myself….
(silence)
Last night or the night before you were associated with an experience. Following my reading [On Himself] I had a sense of how very small we are and of how to expand. You were associated, very intimately associated with this expansion. Sri Aurobindo was there (you know he has adopted you as his biographer; I have told you this and I repeat it because I have evidence of it all the time), and he was giving a kind of practical demonstration – not intellectual, practical – of how to expand not only the consciousness but the whole being, down to its most material parts. You were there, associated with this, and he was showing you as well as me what had to be done. (Mother makes a gesture of breaking through limits.)
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