August 21, 1965
(Regarding a Playground Talk of March 17, 1951, published in the latest “Bulletin,” in which Mother says that when she returned from Japan in 1920, she felt Sri Aurobindo’s atmosphere two nautical miles away from Pondicherry:)
It appears that in 1958 we said one thing and that this time we said another, so they ask me which is correct. It’s about Sri Aurobindo’s atmosphere which I felt at sea. So in 1958 (I probably remembered more precisely then) I said ten nautical miles (I remember having asked on the ship, just so I would know), and it appears that this time I said two miles. So they tell me …
What does it matter!
That’s how they are, they are stupid.
Yes.
It’s enough to crush you. So I answered …
You answered it was nine point eight hundred and seventy-five miles?!
(Mother laughs) Exactly! I didn’t tell them that, I simply said (because that I remember) that the shore couldn’t be seen. But now, it’s like a previous life for me….
But what does it matter?!
Absolutely! They’re stupid.
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That’s how they read what I write. They take a magnifying glass and notice an error here, an error there….
(Mother gives Satprem a flower: a rose)
It’s beautiful. Far lovelier than human beings.
Oh, yes, that’s for sure!
(Mother holds out another flower called “Prayer”) Here, a prayer that they may change.
No, we should never give details, that way they wouldn’t be able to fling them back at us.
But I find it so stupid!
Yes, but they ARE stupid – that’s not their fault.
And if we told them it didn’t matter, they’d say, “Ah, that’s to cover up her error”….
***
Mother looks tired. She goes into a long contemplation, then starts speaking:
On the 15th, at the balcony, Sri Aurobindo was there. He had come and he went out on the balcony with me. I didn’t say anything to anybody, not to anybody at all. And there is a little girl, about fifteen years old now, who is considered here as a bad pupil, erratic, fanciful (they had even talked of sending her away), but once I asked her to come for her birthday, and as for me, I found her a fine girl (!) And she wrote to me two or three days ago that on the 15th, at the Darshan, she saw Sri Aurobindo on my right. And she asked (laughing), “Is it true?”
It quite amused me. I said to myself, “So much for their moral judgments on the pupils here! That’s how it is.”
But nowadays I don’t see the children anymore; formerly I used to see them every day, or at any rate once a month regularly I would see them. When I went to the Playground, I saw them every day. But now I no longer do, except a few on their birthdays.
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But I found this interesting. Maybe some others saw him too, but didn’t tell me. But she wrote to me, “Well, I saw Sri Aurobindo standing beside you, is it true?”
(silence)
Since the 15th, there has been a whole work of preparation for the transformation …. What could I call it? … A transfer of power.
The cells, the whole material consciousness, used to obey the inner individual consciousness – the psychic consciousness most of the time, or the mental (but the mind had been silent for a long time). But now this material mind is organizing itself like the other one, or the other ones, rather, like the mind of all the states of being – do you know, it is educating itself. It is learning things and organizing the ordinary science of the material world. When I write, for instance, I have noticed that it takes great care not to make spelling errors; and it doesn’t know, so it inquires, it learns, it looks up in the dictionary or it asks. That’s very interesting. It wants to know. You see, all the memory that came from mental knowledge went away a long, long time ago, and I used to receive indications only like this (gesture from above). But now it’s a sort of memory being built from below, and with the care of a little child who educates himself but who wants to know, who doesn’t want to make errors – who is perfectly conscious of his ignorance, and who wants to know. And the truly interesting thing is that it knows this knowledge to be quite … more than relative, simply conventional, but it is like an instrument that would like to be free of defects, like a machine that would like to be perfect.
It is a rather recent awakening. There has been a sort of reversal of consciousness.
And at night it corresponds to thoroughly strange activities: a completely new way of seeing, feeling and observing people and things. Last night, for example, for over two hours there was a clear vision – an active vision (through action, that is) – of the way in which human consciousnesses make the most simple things complicated and difficult. It was fantastic – fantastic. And then, this consciousness was spontaneously impelled by the divine Presence, but it followed the others’ human movements with the clear perception of the simple thing and of the way in which it becomes complicated. It was symbolic, with images; an activity in images in the sense that it wasn’t purely material, physical as we know it here, but in a symbolic, imaged physical (in which the material world is seen as clay). It was very interesting.
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Only, there was a very great intensity of transformation, and (how can I explain?) … It’s like a shift in the directing will. And then, there was materially, physically, a sort of surprise, and a need to identify with the new direction – it’s a little difficult. It’s difficult to explain, too…. It’s no longer the same thing that makes you act – “act” or anything, of course: move, walk, anything. It isn’t the same center any longer. And then if, by habit, you try to reconnect with the old center, oh, that creates a great disorder, and you must be very careful not to let habit, the old habit, express itself and manifest.
It’s hard to express it. It is still too much just an action.
***
(Mother takes up the translation of “Savitri.” Once or twice when Satprem speaks to her, she remarks that she cannot hear a thing.)
… It’s a very bizarre phenomenon. At certain times I see with a far greater precision than ordinary precision, as I have never seen; at other times I have the feeling of a blanket of fog between me and the world. I can see (I KNOW things rather than see them), but it’s a vision through a veil.
For hearing, it’s the same thing. At times the slightest, faintest sound is distinct; but the sound isn’t here anymore (in the ear), it is … somewhere (gesture around or above the head). At other times I can’t hear a thing anymore. For a long time it was a question of people, of hours, of places – with you, for instance, I heard you very clearly. But now it’s no longer like that, it’s … I woke up with, yes, like a blanket of fog between me and the world when I got up this morning, when I emerged from all that – oh, two hours of frightful, frightful activity (and so interesting at the same time, there were lots of people and fantastic things).
The night before, I had spent more than two hours with Sri Aurobindo…. We were sitting without being seated (it’s a strange thing, but so concrete), and correcting sentences (!), that is, making expressions more precise. [[Let us recall the last conversation (of August 18) in which Mother spoke of those glass halls as vast as the earth. Strangely, for several weeks, Satprem on his part has been immersed in the correction of sentences with the revision of the French translation of The Synthesis of Yoga. ]] He even had (I had asked him a question), he held his pencil or pen between his lips, like a child, almost with a child’s face, and after a while he told me, No, you
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put it like that…. Afterwards, I wondered, “By the way, how were we seated?” There were no seats and we weren’t standing, yet we were very comfortable!
Thought, here in this brain, has difficulty adapting.
Because for two days (I mean two days without stop), there was a constant aspiration: “How will this new world be when it becomes material here? How will this new world be?…” And that put me so deep “inside” that I was … I wasn’t far away, but there was that blanket of fog between me and the world as it is.
It was still here today.
(silence)
This morning, for example, several times for a certain length of time (I don’t know how long, but not a very short time: a quarter of an hour, half an hour, I don’t know), the body’s cells, that is, the body’s form had the experience that staying together or dissolving depends on a certain attitude – an attitude or a will; something that has to do with will and attitude. And with the perception (sometimes simultaneously an almost double perception, one being more a memory and the other a lived thing) of what makes you move, act, know; the old way like a memory, and the new way in which, obviously, there is no reason at all to dissolve, except if you choose to do so – it’s meaningless, it’s something meaningless: why dissolve?
That was there yesterday a little, and very much there this morning.
And if, when you fall back … That’s not exactly the point: when the old consciousness comes back to the surface, if you aren’t very attentive, naturally it results in fainting.
For … oh, a long time, for the whole time between 5 o’clock and quarter to six, that’s how it was.
It gives, AT THE SAME TIME, a sense of the unreality of life and of a reality that we could call eternal [[Mother hesitated: she was going to use the word "immortal" and not "eternal" - an "immortal reality" (see later on, conversation of August 28). ]]: the meaning of death does not exist, it’s meaningless. It is only a choice. And dislocation has no meaning, no raison d’être: it’s an extravagance.
And then the entire old way of seeing, feeling, perceiving, is behind a sort of blanket – a blanket of fog – which makes the contact . woolly, imprecise.
Now, of course, I have recovered the ordinary consciousness, so I can express that; otherwise it was hard to express. And the contrast or the opposition is difficult, painful; both ways of being are
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complaining: the other way feels as if it is fainting, and the new one as if it isn’t left in peace. When you are in one or in the other, it’s all right, but when both are there together … it’s not very pleasant. And there is a sort of sense of uncertainty: you don’t very well know where you are, whether you are here or whether you are there; you don’t very well know.
Well.
And then, the stupidity of people and things becomes cruel, because even in the ordinary consciousness, for me all those things are meaningless; but then with that need to keep two almost contradictory states together (a transitional period, of course), if you add to it a truckload of nonsense, it’s not pleasant.
It’s like this “gentleman” [Death in Savitri], all the rubbish he says!
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