May 24, 1967
Yesterday, someone wrote to me and asked:
“In the end, what is the Divine?”
I answered.
I told him that I gave one answer to help him, but that a hundred could be given, each as good as any other:
“The Divine can be lived, but not defined….
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Here, I added, “But anyway, since you ask me the question, I will answer you.”
"The Divine is an absolute of perfection,
eternal source of all that exists, whom we
grow progressively conscious of, while being
Him from all eternity."
Once, Amrita also told me that for him, the Divine was something simply unthinkable. So I answered him, “No! That way, it won’t help you. Just think that the Divine is everything (to the fullest possible extent, of course), everything we want to become in our highest, most enlightened aspiration. All that we want to become – that’s what the Divine is.” He was so happy! He told me, “Oh, that way it becomes easy!”
But when you look at it – when you emerge from mental activity and look at the experience you have, you wonder, “How to say it? How to explain it?…” The nearest, most accessible, is this: into that “something” we aspire to become, we instinctively, spontaneously put everything we want to exist, all the most marvelous things we can imagine, all the objects of an intense (and ignorant) aspiration, all of that. And with all that, you draw near “something” and … Ultimately, you don’t get the contact through thought; you get the contact through something IDENTICAL in your being, which is awakened through the intensity of your aspiration. So, as soon as you have got for yourself, be it for one second, this contact – this fusion – there’s no more need to explain: it’s something that imposes itself in an absolute way, outside and beyond all explanation.
But to go there, everyone puts into it all that makes it easier to lead him there.
And when you have the experience, at the time of this fusion, this junction, to the consciousness it’s obvious that the identical alone can know the identical, and that, therefore, it’s proof that That is here (Mother points to the heart center). It’s a proof that That is here. And through the effort of aspiration, It awakens.
When I was given the question, it was just as if that person were saying to me, “Yes, yes, that’s all very fine, but after all, what IS the Divine!” So I read his letter, and there was that total silence of everything, and a sort of SINGLE gaze – a single gaze encompassing everything – which wanted to see … I remained like that, gazing, until the words came. Then I wrote: “Here is ONE answer” – there could be a hundred … which would be just as good.
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And at the same time, when there was that gaze at the “something” which had to be defined, there was a great silence everywhere and a great aspiration (gesture like a rising flame), and all the forms that that aspiration has taken. It was very interesting…. The story of the aspiration of the earth … towards the marvelous Unknown we want to become.
And everyone – everyone who was destined to effect the junction – thinks in his simplicity that the bridge he has walked is the only one. The result: religions, philosophies, dogmas, creeds – battle.
Seen as a whole, it’s very interesting, very charming, with a Smile that looks. Oh, that Smile … looking on. It seems to be saying, that Smile, “How complicated you make it! While it could be so simple.”
To put it in a literary way, we could say, “So much complication for something so simple: being what one is.”
(silence)
And what do YOU think the Divine is?
I don’t know, I never ask myself that sort of question.
Neither do I! I’ve never asked myself that question. Because, spontaneously, as soon as there was a need to know, there was an answer. And not an answer with words that can be argued … like that, a something: a vibration. It’s something almost constant now.
Naturally, men make it difficult (I think they must love difficulties, because …), with everything, the SMALLEST thing, there’s always a world of difficulties. So you spend your time saying, “Quiet, quiet, quiet – be quiet.” Even the body lives in difficulties (it too seems to love them!), but all of a sudden the cells chant their OM … spontaneously. Then there is a sort of childlike joy in all those cells, they say (in a tone of wonder), “Oh, really, we can do that? We are allowed to do that?!” It’s touching.
And the result is immediate: that great, peaceful, all-powerful Vibration.
But as for me, if I weren’t under the constant pressure of all the wills around, I would say, “But why do you want to know what the Divine is? What does it matter to you! – Just become the Divine!” But they don’t know a joke when they see one.
“I want to know what the Divine is.”
“But no! It’s perfectly useless.”
“Oh?” they answer with a shocked look, “Oh, it’s not interesting?!”
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“You don’t need to know what the Divine is: you must BECOME it.”
For them, I mean the vast intellectual majority, doing or being something without knowing what it is is inconceivable.
We could also say this, if we liked joking: “You are the most divine when you don’t know you are.”
***
(Soon afterwards, Mother reads a letter by Sri Aurobindo, dated
January 25, 1935, on Russian Communism and spirituality.)
“I know it is the Russian explanation of the recent trend to spirituality and mysticism that it is a phenomenon of capitalist society in its decadence. But to read an economic cause, conscious or unconscious, into all phenomena of man’s history is part of the Bolshevik gospel born of the fallacy of Karl Marx. Man’s nature is not so simple and one-chorded as all that – it has many lines and each line produces a need of his life. The spiritual or mystic line is one of them and man tries to satisfy it in various ways, by superstitions of all kinds, by ignorant religionism, by spiritism, demonism and what not, in his more enlightened parts by spiritual philosophy, the higher occultism and the rest, at his highest by the union with the All, the Eternal or the Divine. The tendency towards the search of spirituality began in Europe with a recoil from the nineteenth century’s scientific materialism, a dissatisfaction with the pretended all-sufficiency of the reason and the intellect and a feeling out for something deeper. That was a pre-war phenomenon, and began when there was no menace of Communism and the capitalistic world was at its height of insolent success and triumph, and it came rather as a revolt against the materialistic bourgeois life and its ideals, not as an attempt to serve or sanctify it. It has been at once served and opposed by the post-war disillusionment – opposed because the post-war world has fallen back either on cynicism and the life of the senses or on movements like Fascism and Communism; served because with the deeper minds the dissatisfaction with the ideals of the past or the present, with all mental or vital or material solutions of the problem of life has increased and only the spiritual path is left. It is true that the European mind having little light on these things dallies with vital will-o-the-wisps like spiritism or
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theosophy or falls back upon the old religionism; but the deeper minds of which I speak either pass by them or pass through them in search of a greater Light. I have had contact with many and the above tendencies are very clear. They come from all countries and it was only a minority who hailed from England or America. Russia is different – unlike the others it has lingered in mediaeval religionism and not passed through any period of revolt – so when the revolt came it was naturally anti-religious and atheistic. It is only when this phase is exhausted that Russian mysticism can revive and take not a narrow religious but the spiritual direction. It is true that mysticism d revere, turned upside down, has made Bolshevism and its endeavour a creed rather than a political theme and a search for the paradisal secret millennium on earth rather than the building of a purely social structure. But for the most part Russia is trying to do on the communistic basis all that nineteenth-century idealism hoped to get at – and failed – in the midst of or against an industrial competitive environment. Whether it will really succeed any better is for the future to decide – for at present it only keeps what it has got by a tension and violent control which is not over.”
Sri Aurobindo
January 25, 1935
What marvelous clarity of vision! And so total, isn’t it, forgetting nothing.
Every word is full of meaning.
Things are moving fast at present. He saw clearly: things are moving on as he said, now they are going at a gallop.
And the Americans! … They claim they want to launch a “disarmament campaign,” but they themselves don’t feel the possibility of it: they are full of fear and distrust; so their “solution” is to sell arms to everyone! (Mother laughs) With the idea, first, of making money, and then of making countries “equal”!
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