September 15, 1962
(Satprem reads a passage from his manuscript in which he mentions the difference in luminosity of the various planes of consciousness. Mother interrupts him to add.)
Somewhere in the overmind (beyond the higher mind and from the overmind onwards), things are luminous IN THEMSELVES. Light doesn’t have to strike them: things themselves are luminous. And this makes a considerable difference in vision. Things are no longer lit from outside, they are luminous in themselves. This is the main difference in the quality of the light.
It has even come to the point where things lit from outside seem artificial to me. They have lost their light.
There may be a very dim and subdued light – not bright, I mean – but it’s self-luminous. And so the higher you rise, the more brilliant and uniform light becomes.
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A little later:
People are getting restless, they want to publish a complete collection of my talks – in English. “Calm down!” I told them. “I don’t want any of this; we will publish a French edition later, when it’s ready.”
I don’t want English. I don’t want English! And more and more, I don’t want English. For instance, the English translation of Prayers and Meditations is out of print and they wanted to reprint it. I said no: “If you want, you can reprint what Sri Aurobindo HIMSELF translated (there’s not much, just a thin volume). That, yes, because Sri Aurobindo translated it.” But even at that, it’s not the same thing as my text – it’s Sri Aurobindo’s, not mine.
Prayers and Meditations came to me, you know – it was dictated each time. I would write at the end of my concentration, and it didn’t pass through the mind, it just came – and it obviously came from someone interested in beautiful form. I used to keep it under lock and key so nobody would see it. But when I came here Sri Aurobindo asked about it, so I showed him a few pages and then he wanted to see the rest. Otherwise I would have always kept it locked away. I destroyed whatever was left – there were five thick volumes in which I had written every single day (there was some repetition, of course): the outcome of my concentrations. So I chose which parts would be published (Sri Aurobindo helped in the choice), copied them out, and then I cut the pages up and had the rest burned.
That’s a shame!
There are a few original fragments left from what was published – I distributed almost all of them; the ink has faded, it’s practically white. I burned everything.
It’s really a shame.
It wasn’t written for anyone and wasn’t meant to be read. I showed it to Sri Aurobindo because he was speaking of certain things and I said, “Ah, yes, that’s the experience I had in….” Then I showed him my notebook for that date (there was something written for each day).
Five thick notebooks, year after year…. Even here I kept on writing for a while.
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I wrote a lot in Japan.
Anyway, everything of general interest was kept. But that’s why there are gaps in the dates, otherwise it would be continuous – it was monumental, you know!
It’s only here that people started wanting to keep and keep and keep. (Mother makes a gesture of throwing everything over her shoulder.) The world is moving fast, the world is moving fast, fast, fast – why keep anything?
(silence)
So I’ve said that if people want to read what I have written (of course I have written certain things in English, like Conversations with the Mother, which I later rewrote in French – not exactly in the same way, but nearly; so that’s all right, it’s written in English) … but those who want to read me, well, let them learn French, it won’t do them any harm!
French gives a precision to thought like no other language.
You should obviously be read in French.
Because it’s something else altogether. Untranslatable, not the same mentality! Like French humor and English humor – they’re far, far apart … so far apart that they’re usually impervious to each other!
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