August 14, 1965
About the Ashram’s secretaries:
… I scold him everyday and tell him he is wasting my time. And he looks surprised!
Yesterday again, a matter had been fully put in order: I had answered in two words (you see, for me it takes a second to decide; I told him, “This and that must be done – that’s all,” and it was all), and he goes on reading me all the arguments from everyone’s letters! I told him, “But why are you wasting all my time!” So he looked quite bewildered, as if I had told him something that had never occurred to him.
With him, anything simple becomes complicated.
I thought that was my own particular experience reserved for me! … I thought he had scruples and wanted me to know everything people write – but that’s absurd!
When someone reads me a letter, you understand, I make contact, I catch a few words, and then it’s all settled. And the decision comes or doesn’t come from here – it comes. And once I have announced the decision, it’s settled. But they all go on reading the letter! I say, “Good Lord! What’s the use? It’s all words and sentences.”
For him, things have to follow their full course, point by point, and he adds to it!
But the world will never be changed!
For years now, every time I go near him and I am put in
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contact with things of this sort, I get dreadfully tired.
He tires me dreadfully, but I thought that was particular to me.
No, no!
When I had my eyes, I had no secretaries, I didn’t let anyone touch my things, but the work was done in a minute. With a letter, for example, I would look just there (Mother shows little flashes of light at different spots in the letter), and I knew I had to read there, I had to read here, I had to read there. That way it’s fine. I would read the whole letter only if it was someone with a concise and clear mind and who really had something to say. But otherwise, when you see it’s chatter, what’s the use?
For me the work has become perhaps a hundred times more difficult since I stopped seeing by myself. And, of course, what they read to me goes through the thought of the one who reads – which generally shrouds it in fog and prevents me from seeing it. When someone reads Sri Aurobindo to me, even someone who understands him, there is always a cloud. So sometimes I lose patience, I take a magnifying glass and read, and as soon as I read, I see (gesture of something leaping to the eyes): “Ah, here it is!” I see the thing immediately, and it’s luminous, it’s clear.
It must have been a great punishment – I don’t know who punished me! (Laughing) Probably myself, because I have put too much strain on my eyes. But the work takes me at least ten times longer.
(silence)
… It’s a bit stupefying.
No, I have noticed, the only thing that tires is time. Which means that if one could work while keeping one’s eternal rhythm, that would be perfect – whether one does one thing or another (one always does something) doesn’t matter at all; but the horrible thing is to be hurried all the time – people hurry you, time hurries you; so you are forced to do more things than you should in a given time, and that’s very tiring. I don’t know…. It’s difficult.
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