February 19, 1963
(An experience Mother had the day after the last conversation, on February 16:)
It was really very interesting. Afterwards it’s just a memory, no longer the thing…. It concerned the creation of the material world, the material universe, in the light of the conception of the Supreme in love with His emanation. But the vision was all-embracing, as if I were on the other side – the side of the Supreme, not of the creation – and saw the creation as a whole, with the true sense of progress, the true sense of advance, of movement, and the true way in which all that doesn’t belong to the future creation will disappear in a kind of pralaya [[Pralaya: end of a world, apocalypse. ]] (it can’t really “disappear” but
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it will be withdrawn from the Manifestation). And it was very interesting: all that doesn’t collaborate (in the sense that it is a sufficient experience, an experience that has come to its end) was reabsorbed. It was like the true vision of what was rendered as the Last Judgment. It is something going on constantly, that mighty “gust” of manifestation, and there are things that have been, according to our vision of time, but that live on, that continue to exist in the future; there are things that exhaust themselves (that’s in the present), and there are things that have no more purpose, that cannot keep pace with the movement (I don’t know how to explain this) and enter the Non-Being – the pralaya, the Non-Being, the unmanifest – of course, not in their forms but in their essence; that is to say, the Supreme in them remains the Supreme but unmanifest.
But it was all a living, palpable experience which lasted for a day and a half. The entire universal movement was LIVED and sensed. Not merely seen but lived – and in what light! What stupendous power! With that kind of certitude at the core of everything – something very odd. It’s very difficult to express. But the experience lasted so long that it became perfectly familiar. To translate it into words I might say: it is the Supreme’s way of seeing – of feeling, of living. I was living things the way He does. And it gives a power of certitude of realization. In the sense that what we are heading for is already here; the road we look back on, the road we have traveled and the road yet to travel, it all lives simultaneously. And with such logic! An eternal, wonderful superlogic which makes it obviousness itself – everything is obviousness itself. Struggle, effort, fear, all of that, oh, absolutely, absolutely nonexistent. And together with this, the explanation of the feeling we have of not wanting certain things any more: they leave the Manifest. You see, it’s like a sieve into which everything is thrown and where He … to Him, everything, but everything is the same, but there is the vision of what He wants, and also of what is useless for what He wants or would prevent the fullness and totality of what He wants (contradictions of sorts, I don’t know how to explain it) – so with that He just goes this way (gesture of reswallowing) and it goes out of the Manifestation.
At the time I could have said it in a more understandable language, while now …
But can these useless things be withdrawn from the Manifestation without causing any catastrophes?
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I don’t know how to explain it…. Putting it like this implies an arbitrary fiat, but there’s no such thing: it isn’t a “gentleman” who decides to withdraw certain things he no longer likes! It’s not that way. They are things which, owing to their own propensity (what we might call their essential truth), had at a given moment their place in the Manifestation, and which, once they have lost their purpose, quite naturally leave the Manifestation – I could put it in fifty different ways just as poorly, I can’t see how to explain it properly. But the fact was evident. It was part of such a wonderfully complete and harmonious Whole – that Harmony is beyond us, we cannot understand it, caught as we are in the sensation of opposites. But there, “opposites” do not exist, there are only things that … Like the fact of the Supreme seemingly dominated by His creation, wholly obedient to His creation – as though He had no power, no knowledge, no vision, so things follow their course in the chaos we know. Well, when we put it like this, there is something unbelievable and shocking about it, yet it was so very natural, so very true, and part of such a perfect whole!
Only, you cannot see it unless you see the whole. At the time, everything was preexistent, although unfolding in time for the Manifestation. But it was preexistent. Not preexistent as we understand it, not everything “at a given moment”…. Oh, how impossible! It’s impossible to express it. I still feel what I could call the “warmth” of the experience – the reality, the life, the warmth of the experience are there. You know, I have lived in a Light! A Light which isn’t our light, which has nothing to do with what we call light, a Light so warm and powerful! A creative Light. So powerful! … Everything was so perfectly harmonious: everything, everything without exception, even the things that appear to be the very negation of divinity. And a rhythm! (gesture as of great waves) A harmony, so wonderful a TOTALITY, where the sense of sequence … Sequence doesn’t mean things being like this (chopping gesture), one being abolished by the next, it is … At the time I might have been able to find or invent the words, I don’t know, now … now, it’s only the memory of it. The memory, not the presence itself.
The experience lasted long. It started in the night, lasted through the whole day, and last night there was still something of it lingering, but then … (laughing) I seemed to be told, “So then, aren’t you going to move on? Are you going to stay with this experience, are you stuck there?!” It is so true: things move fast, fast, fast, and run as you may, you’re still not going fast enough.
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Last night or the night before, I was in Sri Aurobindo’s house and he was telling me, “Some things are going wrong.” And he showed me around his house. There were some pipes – big pipes – that had burst. “You see,” he told me, “people have been careless.” In some places they had taken away all the furniture and were cleaning up in a stupid way: “See,” he said, “they don’t do things the proper way.” Then I understood it was the reflection of the way things happen here. And he was … (not angry, he is never angry), but people gave him a lot of bother, they were preventing him from doing his work: I would come in a room and try to arrange a corner because he wanted to write, but it was impossible, the whole setup made it impossible for him to have even a decent corner where he could write – then at other times, it would be quite fine. Because it changes continuously. The layout of rooms has an inner meaning – it MEANS something – so it always stays the same as if the setting stayed unchanged (because it’s not a house built from an architect’s plan! It’s his own house, which he has arranged according to his taste, so it stays that way). But people seem to have unrestricted entry there, and everyone wants to do something, to make himself “useful,” (laughing) so it’s terrible! This is what erased my experience or pushed it back into the realm of memories. As though he were saying, “Don’t be too concerned with universal things, because over here (laughing) things aren’t too smooth!”
***
(A little later)
The last twenty days I have felt troubled.
And I am, of course, harassed – people’s idea of celebrating my birthday!
After this experience, I was expecting to see some truly exceptional things these last few days, because really … this Presence is so concrete, so concrete! But compared to that “concrete,” our concreteness is so thin and lifeless – what we call “life” is some sort of … of mushy thing!
(silence)
I am not given the time for experiences. It was like that the other night, as if Sri Aurobindo were telling me, “See, you see what they do when you are not here.” But then I waste all my time!
I wanted the book [The Adventure of Consciousness] to come out
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for February 21, 1964. That doesn’t leave too much time, because … That’s another marvel, it must have been one of the things Sri Aurobindo was showing me: at the [Ashram] Press, they’re behind schedule for everything – and they work night and day! They have never worked so hard! Very clearly, seen from above, it’s a lack of organization; for something requiring an ounce of force they have to put in ten pounds, and still it doesn’t work.
It grinds and grates.
Lack of organization. But all, all of life – all of life is that way!
EVERYTHING.
To make some decision or organize something (I am referring to practical examples – I have four, five, ten of them every day), all it would take is a few minutes of clear and quiet, but TOTAL vision, and things would work out perfectly well. But then there are four or five of them to make a decision. Each one brings in his own idea, his own viewpoint, his own little angle. They throw it all together, jabber away for two hours … and nothing gets done.
So the conclusion is that I shall have to start again…. I had stopped long ago taking care of everything – long before I came upstairs, I told people, “See to your business yourselves.” And what chaos it has become! … That, too, made worse by the fact that they stopped seeing me physically. The physical presence was simply keeping a rein on them.
It’s unthinkable now.
But I must say it isn’t confined to the Ashram: it’s the same all over the world – especially in India … the government has gone completely crazy. They bombard people with papers and forms and regulations and prohibitions….
A third of my letters are either censored or lost.
Yes, exactly. More than half of my correspondence doesn’t arrive. But do you know why? It’s not at all that they find it suspicious or anything, it’s that they are snowed under with work, tired, on edge: so instead of opening a letter carefully and making it possible to close it again, they tear it open in such a way that they can’t decently pass it on! It’s nothing but that. It’s the same with parcels, you can’t imagine! The way they open parcels … a child would do it better! It’s disgusting. They break things, spoil everything, spill bottles…. Then, of course, what can they do about it? Sometimes they can’t even forward the parcel, it’s too damaged.
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Now, I must say that whenever people complain I tell them, “Well, imagine for a minute you had to do this idiotic work (it is an idiotic work) and that day after day, hour after hour, all day long, with too few people (or half of them twiddling their thumbs), you were forced to do this work – after a while you would end up botching it the same way.”
That’s what I always tell those who criticize the government: “You deserve to be put in the place of the Prime Minister, or any other minister, with decisions to make; and with the responsibility placed on you, suppose you suddenly had to decide on things of which you know nothing – you’d soon see what fun it is!” You see, to govern properly, you have to be … you have to be a sage! You should have a universal vision and be above all personal questions…. There is not one – not one.
Some are sluggish (they’re the best, because I can make them do what I want them to do); they’re like automatons, so you can get something out of them. But unfortunately they think they are … they have the sense of their responsibility, so they think they are very superior – then it’s terrible!
Anyway …
They sent some papers to the Ashram, asking whether we had gold objects other than jewels! So, (laughing) I could just see a scene in the palaces of old: gold candelabra, the throne! …
So ridiculous!
What can we do?… Endure.
***
Then Mother speaks of her translation of “Savitri”
I do it exclusively for the joy of being in a world … a world of overmental expression (I don’t say supramental, I say overmental), a luminous, marvelous expression through which you can catch the Truth.
And it teaches me English without books! Now, whenever I have to write a letter, all the words come by themselves: the CONTENT of the word (just as I told you for moment and instant), now it works the same way with all words! Yesterday I wrote something in English for a doctor here (Mother looks for a paper): The world progresses so rapidly that we must be ready at any moment to over pass what we knew in order to know better. And you know, I never
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think: it just comes, either the sound or the written word (it depends on the case: now I’ll see the written words, now I’ll hear the sound). For instance, the word advance came first, and with it came quick, quickly, repeatedly ["the world advances so quickly"]. Then came progress, and quickly was out of the picture; and suddenly rapidly came forward. So I understood how it worked, how it works for all words! I understood: progress (the idea or inner meaning of progress) calls for rapidly; and advance calls for quickly. Putting it like this sounds like splitting hairs, but when I saw it, it was positively irrefutable! The word was alive, its content was alive, and along with it was its friend, the word that went with it; and the word that wasn’t its friend was not to be seen, it wasn’t in the mood! Oh, it was so funny! For that alone it is worth the trouble.
I have made some experiments with French too. I wrote something: Pour chacun, le plus important est de savoir si on appartient au passe qui se perpetue, au present qui s’epuise, à l’avenir qui veut naître. ["The most important point for everyone is to know whether he belongs to the past perpetuating itself, to the present exhausting itself, or to the future trying to be born."] I gave it to Z – he didn’t understand. So I told him, “It doesn’t mean ‘our’ past, ‘our’ present or ‘our’ future….” I wrote this when I was in that state [the experience Mother told at the beginning of this conversation], and it was in connection with a very sweet old lady who has just left her body. This is what I said to her. Everybody had been expecting her departure for more than a month or two, but I said, “You will see, she is going to last; she will last for at least another month or two.” Because she knows how to live within, outside her body, and the body lives on out of habit, without jerks and jolts. That was her condition, and it could last a very long time. They had announced she would leave within two days, but I said, “It’s not true.” I know her well, in the sense that she had come out of her body and there was a link with me. And I said to her, “What do you care!” (though she wasn’t at all worried, she was staying peacefully with me), “The whole point is to know whether one belongs to the past perpetuating itself, to the present exhausting itself, or to the future trying to be born.” Sometimes what WE call the past is right here, it’s the future trying to be born; sometimes what WE call the present is something in advance, something that came ahead of time; but sometimes also it’s something that came late, that is still part of all that is to disappear – I saw it all: people, things, circumstances, everything through
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that perception, the vibration that would go on transforming itself, the vibration that would exhaust itself and disappear, the vibration that, though manifested for a long time, would be entitled to continue, to persist – that changes all notions! It was so interesting! So I wrote it down as it was – without any explanations (you don’t feel much like explaining in such a case, the thing is so self-evident!). Poor Z, he stared at me – all at sea! So I told him, “Don’t try to understand. I am not speaking of the past, present and future as we know them, it’s something else.” (Mother laughs)
But it’s amusing because I had never paid much attention to that [the questions of language], the experience is novel, almost the discovery of the truth behind expression. Before, my concern was to be as clear, exact and precise as possible; to say exactly what I meant and put each word in its proper place. But that’s not it! Each word has its own life! Some are drawn together by affinity, others repel each other … it’s very funny!
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