July 22, 1967
I told you there is someone here learning French (and learning it very well, I must say) whom I answered with a joke to see if he had a sense of humor. And the next day he, in turn, sent me a joke!
"In the work of transformation, who is slower in
doing his work, man or God?"
My answer:
"To man, God is too slow in answering his prayer.
" To God, man is too slow in opening to His influence.
" But to the Truth-Consciousness, everything is going
as it should!"
(Mother laughs)
Then I have something else. I have been asked questions about music: “What is it we should attend to in music? How to judge the quality of a piece of music? What do you think of light music (cinema, jazz, etc.), which our children like very much?”
I replied this (it was yesterday):
"The role of music lies in helping the conscious
ness to uplift itself towards the spiritual heights.
"All that lowers the consciousness, encourages
desires and excites the passions runs counter to the
true goal of music and ought to be avoided.
"It is not a question of designation but of inspi
ration …
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Yes, because he says “light music,” but I’ve heard light music that I found exceedingly lovely! Even some pieces of film music that were magnificent, and on the other hand some “classical” pieces, oh, how boring! So …
"… and the spiritual consciousness alone can judge
there."
Because at the School they play music every Saturday, and they’ve begun quarreling about the kind of music that should be played; then one boy said, “As for me, I LOVE light music, I find it VERY amusing.” (Mother laughs) So they looked down on him scornfully! And they wrote to ask me. So that’s what I replied!
“Light” music! Of course, jazz music … but even there, there are very nice passages, one can’t say.
One can’t say.
Ultimately, it doesn’t at all depend on the musician’s intention: it depends on the STATE he himself was in. If you feel very joyful and suddenly hear sounds expressing a very light, very free joy, and put it into music, it’s marvelous. While if you are grave, serious, see all the human misery, and put it into thick, ponderous sounds, and, oh, if it’s made into orchestral music that bores you stiff … (Mother laughs)
Wait, there’s something else again…. Oh, poor K., he conducted examinations (they’re out of their minds with their exams!), he conducted examinations on a text or a subject he had dictated to the students in his class. In other words, they had the answer quite ready. Two of the boys (one of whom K. finds very intelligent – he is, moreover – and has a liking for, while he doesn’t like the other) were late, and K. asked the boy he doesn’t like to bring him at home the result of their work. He brought it. K. read it, and to one of the questions, the two boys’ answers were not quite identical but extremely similar. That was precisely the. subject K. had dictated to the students, so it was natural enough that the answers should be similar. K. “felt” right away that the boy had copied from the other, and told him so! The boy lost his temper and spoke to him rather rudely. So K. writes to tell me the whole story, in his own way, and the boy writes to tell me the whole story, in his own way, moreover expressing regret that he was rude to his teacher. But K. remains convinced that he copied. So, a flood of letters … Finally I wrote K., “Send me the two texts, I will see” (not “see” with my eyes, but like that, “feeling” the thing). The boy did NOT
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copy. But to me, it’s far worse, because it means K. made a mental formation with words – words put in a certain order – and stuffed it into their brains. And they repeat it parrot fashion – naturally, it bears an extraordinary similarity to his teaching. Finally, K. told me, “If I accept that the boy didn’t copy, I am obliged to give him a very good mark, which I can’t do!” (Mother laughs) And he asks me, “What should I do?” I replied yesterday evening: “There is a very simple way out: cancel the test. Take all the papers, tie them into a bundle, put them away in your cupboard, and pretend it never existed – and in future, no more exams! At the end of the year, when you have to give marks to the students, well, instead of using such an artificial method, you will be obliged to observe attentively, follow the child’s inner development, have a deeper contact with him (Mother laughs mockingly), and know if he has really understood or not! Then you will be able to give marks, instead of basing yourself on the parrotlike repetition of something they learned without understanding.” And I sent that. So now, they’re in a fix! (Mother laughs) I find it so funny, it’s great fun!
They had to hold a “teachers’ meeting” to face up to my answer! (Mother laughs) I upset the whole School!
One of the teachers has already answered me, “It’s impossible to know the students’ progress unless tests are taken.” To this I didn’t exactly reply what I thought, but I thought: of course, if the teacher is an idiot, he can’t judge the students’ progress unless he makes them take tests, but if he is an intelligent man with a psychic sense, there are a thousand ways to find out if a student has understood.
So they’ve had their meeting.
But in the technical field, it’s more difficult to judge progress.
Ah, yes, that’s what they base themselves on. But it makes no difference! Two of the teachers of technology have shown how, in the purely technical field, it was possible to judge without the need for exams. No, you see, I know, I did my studies there, in France, there were lots of exams and I know how it is. I attended (I was young at the time, but that makes no difference), I attended exams like the ones taken for certificates, I saw the pupils who were there, I saw how they answered…. It’s one of my very concrete experiences: the ones that pass are NOT AT ALL the more intelligent ones! Never. They are the ones that repeat parrot fashion. They repeat very nicely. They have no understanding of what they say.
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Anyhow, I think we’ll get somewhere.
But yesterday evening, with this poor K., what fun I had! … I said, take it or leave it – either the teachers stop writing to me and asking me anything (which would give me time: I am overburdened with letters), or if they write to me, well, too bad, they’ve got to take it. I can’t tell them what will please them.
Our School professes to follow a “new method” – the very least it could do would be to follow it!
(Mother gives Satprem the text of the three letters
she sent to the teacher on the question of
examinations at the School:)
(The teacher’s question:)
“About this cheating in exams, what am I to do?
Should we, as is done outside, keep three teachers in the
room to watch vigilantly? – The teachers don’t like that
way of doing things here in the Ashram.
“Or should we abolish tests? This proposal seems to
me doubtful, for exercises and essays amount to the
same thing.
“The problem is there, at any rate, and to solve it truly
we should understand why the children behave that way.
"Please tell me the cause of this perversion and the
solution to the problem."
(Mother’s reply:)
“It is quite simple. The majority of children study because they are forced to by family, habit, current ideas, not because they want to learn and know. Until the motive for their studies is rectified, until they learn because they want to know, they will use all kinds of tricks to make their work easier and get results with the least effort.”
(July 13, 1967)
(A few days later, Mother sent the following letter, in English:)
"The only solution is to annul this test and all that are
to come. Keep all the papers with you in a closed
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bundle – as something that has not been – and continue
quietly your classes.
“At the end of the year you will give notes to the
students, not based on written test-papers, but on their
behaviour, their concentration, their regularity, their
promptness to understand and their openness of intelli
gence.
"For yourself you will take it as a discipline to rely
more on inner contact, keen observation, and impartial
outlook.
"For the students it will be the necessity of under
standing truly what they learn and not to repeat as a
parrot what they have not fully understood.
"And thus a true progress will have been made in the
teaching."
(July 21, 1967)
(Then, the next day, Mother sent this third note:)
"I find tests an obsolete and ineffective way of know
ing if the students are intelligent, willing and attentive.
"A silly, mechanical mind can very well answer a test
if the memory is good and these are certainly not the
qualities required for a man of the future.
"It is by tolerance for the old habits that I consented
that those who want tests can have them. But I hope
that in future this concession will not be necessary.
"To know if a student is good needs, if the tests are
abolished, a little more inner contact and psychological
knowledge for the teacher. But our teachers are expected
to do Yoga, so this ought not to be difficult for them."
(July 22, 1967)
***
Soon afterwards, regarding
a letter of Sri Aurobindo’s:
“… But in physics you are in the very domain of the mechanical law where process is everything and the
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driving consciousness has chosen to conceal itself with
the greatest thoroughness – so that, ‘scientifically speak
ing’, it does not exist there. One can discover it there by
occultism and yoga, but the methods of occult science
and of yoga are not measurable or followable by the
means of physical science – so the gulf remains in exis
tence. It may be bridged one day, but the physicist is
not likely to be the bridge-builder, so it is no use asking
him to try what is beyond his province."
November 5, 1934
(XXII.201)
That’s just the big quarrel with the Government! … The Government says, “We can’t recognize you as a “research School’ because the progress of yoga can’t be measured.” Exactly what Sri Aurobindo says! If we published this letter, it would give the Government full ammunition!
You remember, in America a society or university or whatever opened a kind of competition to “prove life after death,”[[It was in fact an American miner who left a will promising a certain number of thousands of dollars to anyone who could supply the required proof (see Agenda VII of November 3, 1966). ]] and they gave two or three questions to be resolved. And I was asked, “Why don’t you answer?” I said, the questions are not properly formulated, they’re asked by ignorant people, so how can one answer? (I told you that long ago, I think.) Well, it’s the same thing here. What they ask is ignorant, it isn’t properly formulated; it’s formulated by people who don’t understand anything, so how can we answer them!
***
Mother turns to other tasks
In a magazine (I think it’s Life, an American magazine), they published the story of a man (who is in fact one of the editors or administrators of the magazine), a man who was given an injection of penicillin but was allergic to penicillin. And lo and behold, all his cells begin to dissolve, while he, entirely conscious and as if concentrated in his brain, watches the dissolution. When it reached up to the heart, the doctors declared him dead…. The impression it had on him was that the cells had a kind of expanding movement,
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then burst and dissolved one after another: feet, legs, abdomen, everything. And when it reached the heart, the doctor said, “He’s dead.” But he had taken refuge in his brain and thought, “I must hold out; if I can hold out here, concentrate and resist here, all will be well.” And that’s what he did. Then he felt all at once a power, he says, something so luminous, so beautiful, so gentle, so … so much more full of love than anything else in the world, such a marvelous sensation … that he let himself melt into it, and after some time, order returned everywhere and he came back to life! He describes that. He describes it (with sentences: it’s in a magazine, so he makes sentences), but his experience is really interesting. You see, because of that will to concentrate in what he conceived to be the essential part of his being, the center of his life, he suddenly found himself in the presence of that “power”…. He said he tried to recapture it afterwards, but “I forget what it was, I no longer remember, except for that sensation, more marvelous than anything one can conceive.”[[Here is the person’s description: “External awareness had slipped away – I heard, saw nothing. I sagged forward as my wife held my head to keep me from pitching from the chair. To the Doctor I had reached clinical death. But for me there was a surge of inner awareness – magnified, finely focused, brilliant. It is a progressive thing, this death. You feel the toes going first, then the feet, cell by cell, death churning them like waves washing the sands. Now the legs, the cells winking out. Closer now, and the visibility is better. Hands, arms, abdomen and chest, each cell flaring into a supernova, then gone. There is order and system in death, as in all that is life. I must try to control the progression, to save the brain for last so that it may know. Now the neck. The lower jaw. The teeth. How strange to feel one’s teeth die, one by one, cell igniting cell, galaxies of cells dying in brilliance. Now, in retrospect, I grope for this other thing. There was something else, something that I felt or experienced or beheld at the very last instant. What was it? I knew it so well when it was there, opening before me, something more beautiful, more gentle, more loving than the mind or imagination of living creature could ever conceive. But it is gone.” David Snell, Life Senior Editor (extract from Life; May 29, 1967). ]]
I found that interesting.
And that brought him back to life.
(silence)
I took it as one of the signs that the Force is really at work. Because I don’t think that man had done any yoga, he knew nothing about those things; he is just a gentleman-who’s-had-an-injection-of-penicillin which he can’t tolerate (those accidents happen often enough), nothing else. There was just this idea that the brain is the conscious part of the being, and if he concentrated there … His idea was, "I want to know what’s happening, I want to be conscious
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of what’s happening, I want to see what’s happening." So that’s what pulled the Force. A simple thing.
It seems to me there is a progress in human consciousness – that’s my impression.
An awakening.
***
Then Mother goes into
a long concentration
I have seen something…. In its totality, it is luminous, but not radiant, it’s extremely peaceful, and as if golden, but not dazzling (I don’t know how to explain …), like a creamy and golden light. Very, very peaceful. But in it there were patches (as they say in English) of three VERY bright colors that were grouped together, as it were, and as though organized. There was a dazzling red, ruby red; a bluish white, almost pearl-gray, very luminous, too; and … (Mother tries to remember) It’s gone, I don’t remember if it was…. Yes, it was green, but an emerald green that was also luminous – luminous and transparent. They were like demarcated zones, but their positions were changing (Mother makes a rotating gesture, like the lights in a kaleidoscope). They were almost like entities. And it was in your atmosphere. Like formations moving about and organizing (same gesture), made up of those three colors….
The gray is the gray of spiritual light, spiritual aspiration; the red is the ruby red of the physical; and that emerald green …[[According to Sri Aurobindo, the green light is a dynamic force of the vital which has the power to purify, harmonize or heal. ]]
The shapes were demarcated, but not fixed. They were like clearly demarcated groups of light, but not fixed (they were plastic), and organizing like this (same gesture in kaleidoscope).
When I started talking, I almost stopped seeing…. I was in an inner vision, very deep inside. A very special consciousness.
It was moving about and organizing with great suppleness (same gesture)
And the whole thing was like a nimbus, like the haloes they paint, you know? It all was a nimbus of golden light, not bright but golden.
Did you feel anything special?
Yes, the Force – massive.
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Powerful?
Yes.
Yes, they were things organizing in your being – your inner being – but powerfully.
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