October 30, 1964
I feel we are turning a corner.
It’s very narrow. Do you know mountain roads?… All of a sudden, you come to a corner, a sharp turn, and you can’t see the other side – below is a precipice, behind is the rock – and the path … it would seem to have grown narrower in order to turn the corner, it’s become quite narrow. I’ve encountered that in the mountains – often. And now, I feel we are turning the corner; but we are beginning to turn it, in the sense that we are beginning to see the other side, and the consciousness (always the body consciousness) is on the verge of a bedazzlement, like the first glimpses of something marvelous – not positively unexpected because that is what we wanted, but truly marvelous. And at the same time, there is that old habit of meeting difficulties at every step, of receiving blows at every step, the habit of a painful labor, which takes away the spontaneousness of an unalloyed joy; it gives a sort of … not a doubt that things will be that way, but you wonder, “Has it already come? Have we reached the end?” and you don’t dare think you have reached the end. That attitude, naturally, isn’t favorable, it still belongs to the domain of the old reason; but it receives support from the usual recommendations: “You shouldn’t give free rein to wild imaginings and hopes, you should be very level-headed, very patient, very slow to get carried away.” So there is an alternation of a sort of crouching, timorously moving forward step by step in order not to slide down into the hole, and a glorious sense of wonder: “Oh, are things really that way?!”
This has been the body’s feeling for three or four days.
But it keeps increasing, and that sort of “crouching” is greatly lessened by the knowledge and experience that if you are per-fect-ly calm, all goes well – always, even in the worst difficulties…. Very recently, the day before yesterday, there was (always on the physical level; it can’t be called “health,” but it’s the body’s functioning) a rather serious attack, which found expression in a rather unpleasant pain; it came with unusual brutality. Then, immediately, the body remembered and said, “Peace, peace … Lord, Your Peace, Lord, Your Peace …” and it relaxed in Peace. And in an objectively perceptible way, the pain went away.
It tried to come back and then went away, tried to come back and went away…. The process lasted the whole night.
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But it was extraordinarily obvious! The physical conditions were absolutely the same, and one minute earlier, there was an almost intolerable pain, which went away like that, in the Lord’s Peace.
It’s already two days since it went away, and it hasn’t come back. I don’t know if it will come back.
But then, the body is learning one thing, and learning it not as an effort that has to be made, but as a spontaneous condition: it’s that ALL that happens is for progress. All that happens is for reaching the true state, the one that is expected of the cells so that the Realization may be accomplished – even the blows, even the pains, even apparent disorganizations, all that is on purpose. And it’s only when the body takes it in the wrong way, like a fool, that it gets worse and insists; whereas if the body immediately says, “Very well, Lord, what do I have to learn?” and responds with calm, calm, the relaxation of calm, immediately the difficulty becomes tolerable, and after a moment, it gets better.
(silence)
If the work were limited to a single body, a single mass or quantity, a single aggregate of cells, it would be very easy by comparison, but the interchange, the union, the reciprocity is automatic and spontaneous, and constant. You feel that the effect going on here [in Mother's body] naturally, necessarily and spontaneously has its consequences very far and wide; only, it makes difficulties worse, and that’s why it takes a lot of time. There is a correspondence, you see: something new occurs in the body, a new pain, a new disorganization, something unexpected, and after some time, I learn that this person or that person has the very same thing!
That, too, the body knows, and it doesn’t protest – that goes without saying, it’s the way things are. But it prolongs the work considerably…. Probably there will be a corresponding endurance. Because there is neither regret nor revolt nor fatigue; really, the body is ready to be very happy, all it wants is to be very happy – it dare not be yet, that’s the only point. It’s something it dare not be: “Are things … are they really as good as that!” It dare not. But it’s very happy: “I have no cause for complaint, everything is fine; there are difficulties, but without difficulties there is no progress.”
Yes, what it still has is the fear of joy – not positively “fear,” but … a timidity in the face of joy. Sometimes waves of an intense
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Bliss come to it, waves of Ananda, in which all the cells begin to swell with a joyous golden light, and then … it’s as if one dared not – one dare not. That’s the difficulty.
The people around me don’t help. Those immediately around me have no faith.
So that doesn’t help, because the mental atmosphere isn’t favorable. Mentally, you look at it and smile; but the body feels it a little bit, it feels a little the pressure of defeatist formations around. But it knows why those around are like that – from the material point of view, those around are just what is needed, just what is needed; the body needs such an atmosphere so that material difficulties aren’t made worse. So it’s perfectly happy, only it dare not be joyous; it immediately says, “Oh, it’s still too beautiful a thing for life as it is!”
I don’t know how long it will last.
(silence)
Now and then, when I am perfectly at rest and perfectly quiet (when I know, for instance, that I have half an hour of perfect quiet and no one will disturb me), at such time, the Lord becomes very close, very close, and often I feel Him saying (not with words), saying to my body, “Let yourself go, let yourself go; be joyous, be joyous, let yourself go, relax,” and the immediate result is that it completely relaxes, and I go into a bliss – but I no longer have any contact with the outside! The body goes into a deep trance, I think, and it loses all contact; for instance, the clock strikes, but I don’t hear it.
One should be able to keep that bliss while being quite active and hard at work. I am not referring to the inner joy, not at all, there’s no question of that, it’s out of the question, it’s immutably established: I am referring to that Joy IN THE BODY ITSELF.
That sort of quiet satisfaction which it feels, now it feels it even when there are sharp pains, with the trusting feeling that it’s all with a view to transformation and progress and the future Realization. It no longer worries – it no longer worries at all, it no longer frets at all, it no longer even has the sense of the effort to be made in order to endure: there’s a smile.
But the glimpses of the True Thing, all of a sudden, are so wonderful that … Only, the gap between the present state and THAT is still wide, and it seems that for THAT to settle in once and for all, It must become natural.
Voilà.
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Now what about you? Has anything happened to you these last few days?
When?… Forty-one years ago!
That’s just a way of keeping count!
Today?
What has happened to you since the last time I saw you?
Nothing?
But with regard to health, are you better? Or aren’t you?
I’m all right…. But I have a very strong feeling of being surrounded by threats.
Threats? All the time?
Yes, like that.
You told me this once.
It’s superficial, because as soon as I stand back, nothing matters anymore – it goes to Muttialpeth [the cremation ground] and it doesn’t matter. But when I am in this body, I don’t have a sense of quietness at all. I don’t know why.
You told me this already, and I looked a great deal…. It strikes me as a formation (which may go back a rather long time), which you must have accepted at a particular moment, I don’t know why, and which has remained around you. But it doesn’t seem to me to correspond to a truth. I looked at it a good deal, often, and I never saw that it was the expression of a truth. I saw that it’s what we could call an “adverse formation,” not necessarily hostile, but adverse in the sense that it isn’t beneficial. But it isn’t the expression of something true. And that might well be the point: if you could experience its unreality, that is, its false character, that would help a great deal.
But it’s something that’s all the way down, that doesn’t depend on a reasonable consciousness. Because, otherwise, it doesn’t bother me, I am above all that. It’s only there, on the material level.
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Don’t you know how long it has been there?
I think I lived for years in drama, tragedy, accidents, so there’s an old habit: “It’s going to come back again.” The feeling that things can’t happen without a drama, a tragedy, without something terrible.
Yes, it must be that.
For instance, I very strongly feel the need … Yes, something MUST happen – something must happen, change, open up; well, at the same time, I immediately have the feeling that there has to be a tragedy for it to open up, that nothing can happen without…
That’s not true. That’s precisely what this body also feels, as if it couldn’t progress without suffering.
That’s it.
But that’s not true, it’s not true!
Yes, it’s the taste for drama, which is justified by the fact that one took part in the drama. But now I am beginning to see clearly: that participation is the result of a tacit consent, and that tacit consent is what gives that inner conviction, and then all that creates the atmosphere in which the drama takes place.
But you know, for hours, sometimes for hours something becomes fixed, really concentrated (in the true sense of the word) on the relationship between Eternity and the Unfolding. More and more, what comes is a vision, a certainty that it’s only ONE way of seeing, adapted to our humanized consciousness, and there is a kind of unmoving perception (which has more to do with sensation than with thought), a perception that what is – what truly is – is something else altogether: neither the Unfolding as we conceive of it and perceive it, nor Eternity (coexistent Eternity, one might say) as we can understand it. And it’s because of our incapacity to truly grasp the Thing that we are like this, having difficulty combining these two things properly.
I am putting it into words very poorly, but it isn’t a vision, in the sense that it isn’t an objective perception: it is a vibration, a way of being that you BECOME for a few seconds, and then you understand, but you can’t put it into words.
It’s odd; from the point of view of Truth, this is the problem
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that’s being worked out. And when the concentration becomes very acute and very intense, something seems to burst inside the consciousness, and then spreads – spreads out – in the intensity of a Love. And then it is like an answer, not to a question because it isn’t formulated, but to the will to be.
(long silence)
Love is the single, supreme means of manifestation.
And Manifestation automatically implies unfolding. And this conception (because ail this is the way in which the human consciousness is able to approach things), this conception of an eternal simultaneousness – an eternal, coexistent simultaneousness – is a very clumsy and human translation of the state of nonmanifestation. Because Manifestation automatically implies unfolding: without unfolding there is no Manifestation. But human thought, even speculative thought, is so clumsy and childish; it always confuses the two notions: the notion of unfolding and the notion of the unforeseen or unexpected; the notion of unfolding and the notion of the “new” creation, of something that is created and was not – all this is so … (Mother knocks her papers across the table). You see (laughing), my things are protesting!
It’s in this “problem” that I have been living these past few days. And mark you, it isn’t at all the speculation of a higher being or a being who belongs to other worlds: it’s the substance of physical life that wants to know its own inner, deeper law.
(silence)
It’s amusing: all the mental constructions men have tried to live and realize on earth come to me, like this, from every side, to be ordered, clarified, put in their own place, arranged, organized, synthesized. So all those supposedly “great” problems come to me, and immediately there is an indulgent smile, as at a child’s fumblings; but not at all with a sense of superiority, nothing like that, there’s only the feeling that an instrument is used that cannot solve the problem. And a kind of certainty, deep down in Matter, that the solution lies THERE – this is very strong, very strong. Oh, what fuss, what fuss, how vainly you have tried! – go deep enough within, stay quiet enough, and then THAT will be. And you cannot understand it: it only has to BE.
You cannot understand it, because you are using instruments that cannot understand. But it cannot be understood: it has to BE.
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When you are that, then you will be it, that’s all, there won’t be any more problem.
And all this is down there, at ground level.
But all the great Schools, the great Ideas, the great Realizations, the great … and then the religions – that’s still lower down; all of it, oh, what childishness!
And that wisdom! … It’s an almost cellular wisdom (it’s odd). For instance, I was looking at the relationship I had with all those great beings of the Overmind and higher, the perfectly objective and very familiar relationship I had with all those beings and the inner perception of being the eternal Mother – all that is very well, but for me it’s almost ancient history! The me that exists now is HERE, it’s at ground level, in the body; it’s the body, it’s Matter; it’s at ground level; and to tell the truth, it doesn’t care much about the intervention of all those beings … who ultimately know nothing at all! They don’t know the true problem: they live in a place where there are no problems. They don’t know the true problem – the true problem is here.
It’s an amused way of looking at religions and all the gods the way you would look at … they are like theater performances. They’re pastimes; but that’s not what can teach you to know yourself, not at all, not at all! You must go right down to the bottom.
And it is this, this descent to the very bottom, in search of … but it isn’t an unknown, it isn’t an unknown – a bursting (it really is like a bursting), that marvelous bursting of the Vibration of Love; that is … it is the memory. And the effort is to turn it into an active reality.
(silence)
Maybe that feeling of threat is the expression of the resistance and ill will of all that doesn’t want to change – it’s possible. It’s possible. There is everything that doesn’t want to change, all that exists only through and for the Falsehood, and doesn’t want things to change. It’s like those sudden pains in the body, if you look at them, you always see something black, a sort of black thread or black dot – it’s something that is unwilling: “I don’t want any of it! I don’t want things to change, I am ATTACHED to my Falsehood.” So the threat may be from everything that doesn’t want to change.
Ultimately, we just have to smile. And one day, it will have to change anyway – we’ll have given it enough time, we have given it enough rein, no?
Voilà, mon petit, so have a happy year!
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We shouldn’t take them seriously: they may shout, they may protest, they may grumble, they may threaten, they may play all sorts of nasty tricks on us – they last only a time, and when their time is up, it’ll be over, that’s all. We only have to last longer than they do, that’s all. And it’s very easy to last if we hold on tight to that which is Eternal: it doesn’t even require an effort. And it allows us to look at everything with a smile.
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November