September 7, 1968
Someone has sent me a quotation from Sri Aurobindo which seems very good for the November issue of the Bulletin, it’s from Thoughts and Glimpses:
"The changes we see in the world today are intellec
tual, moral, physical in their ideal and intention: the
spiritual revolution waits for its hour and throws up
meanwhile its waves here and there. Until it comes, the
sense of the others cannot be understood and till then
all interpretations of present happening and forecast of
man’s future are vain things. For its nature, power,
event are that which will determine the next cycle of
our humanity."
Sri Aurobindo
(1917)
The quotation of August, they dropped it, I didn’t even see it! I think Nolini didn’t like it.
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Yes, because you spoke of the “universal decomposition.”
Yes.
But this one is good, because he speaks of the spiritual revolution as if it’s going to happen soon.
“The spiritual revolution waits for its hour.”
Maybe it’s near?
I think it’s already started!
That’s right.
There should be a mention: “This text was written in …” such and such year [1917].
But it’s good to say that we’ll be able to understand the other revolutions only when this one takes place.
Yes, the others are the links.
In Europe, right now things are stirring a lot.
(silence)
Pavitra read the “Notes on the Way” [conversation of August 28], I think he hasn’t understood one bit of it! Because yesterday he told me he’d read it, and he very sweetly said he was “asking for understanding”….
* * *
(Then Satprem reads Mother an old Playground Talk of July 1,
1953, in which Mother speaks about death. Mother begins by
asking for the end to be cut….)
(text of the Talk)
“I have told you many times, and couldn’t repeat it too often, that we are not made of a piece. Within ourselves we have lots of states of being, and each state of being has its own life. All that is gathered together in a single body, as long as you have one, and acts through a single body; that’s what gives you
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the sense of a single person, a single being. But there are many of them, and there are in particular concentrations on different planes: just as you have a physical being, you have a vital being, a mental being, a psychic being, and many others with all possible intermediaries…. So when you leave your body, all those beings will scatter. It’s only if you are a very advanced yogi and have been capable of unifying your being around the divine center that those beings remain linked together. If you haven’t been able to unify yourself, then at the time of death, all that will scatter: every being will go back to its own region. With the vital being, for example, your various desires will separate and each of them will go and chase its realization quite independently, because there will no longer be a physical being to hold them together. While if you have united your consciousness to the psychic consciousness, when you die you will remain conscious of your psychic being, and the psychic being will return to the psychic world which is a world of bliss, joy, peace, tranquillity, and growing knowledge…. But if you have lived in your vital and all its impulses, each impulse will try to realize itself here and there…. For instance, for the miser who was concentrated on his money, when he dies the part of his vital that was concerned with his money will hook on there and will keep watching over the money so no one takes it. People won’t see him, but he is there nonetheless, and very unhappy if something happens to his dear money…. Now, if you live exclusively in your physical consciousness (which is difficult, because, after all, you have thoughts and feelings), if you live exclusively in your physical, when the physical being disappears, you disappear along with it, it’s over…. There is a spirit of the form: your form has a spirit that lives on for seven days after your death. The doctors have declared you dead, but the spirit of your form is alive, and not only alive but conscious in most cases. It lasts for seven to eight days, and after that, it too dissolves – I am not talking about yogis, I am talking about ordinary people. Yogis have no laws, it’s quite different; for them the world is different. I am talking about ordinary people living an ordinary life; for them it’s like that. So the conclusion is that if you want to preserve your consciousness, it would be better to center it on a part of your being which is immortal; otherwise it will evaporate like a flame into thin air. And happily so, because if it were otherwise, there might be gods or kinds of superior men who would
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create hells and heavens as they do in their material imagination, inside which they would shut you up."
(Question:) It is said that there is a god of death. Is it true?
“Yes. As for me, I call him a ‘genius of death.’ I know him very well. And it’s an extraordinary organization. You can’t imagine how organized it is! I think there are many of those genii of death, hundreds of them. I met at least two of them. One I met in France, the other in Japan, and they were very different. Which leads me to believe that depending on the mental culture, the education, the countries and beliefs, there must be different genii. But there are genii for all manifestations of Nature: there are genii of fire, genii of air, water, rain, wind; and there are genii of death. Any one genius of death is entitled to a certain number of dead every day. It’s truly a fantastic organization. It’s a sort of alliance between the vital forces and the forces of Nature. If, for example, he decided, ‘Here is the number of people I am entitled to,’ say four or five, or six, or one or two (it varies from day to day), if he decided so many people would die, he’ll go straight and set himself up near the person who’s going to die. But if you (not the person) happen to be conscious, if you see the genius going to the person but do not want him or her to die, then, if you have a certain occult power, you can tell him, ‘No, I forbid you to take this person.’ That’s something which happened, not once but several times, in Japan and here. It wasn’t the same genius. Which makes me say there must be many of them…. If you can tell him, ‘I forbid you to take this person’ and have the power to send him away, there’s nothing he can do but go away; but he won’t give up his due and will go elsewhere – there will be a death elsewhere….”
(Question:) Some people, when they are about to die, are aware of it. Why don’t they tell the genius to go away?
"Two things are needed. First, nothing in your being, no part of your being, should wish to die. That doesn’t often happen. You always have, somewhere in you, a defeatist: something tired or disgusted, which has had enough, something lazy or which doesn’t want to fight and says, ‘Ah, well, let it be over, so much the better.’ That’s enough – you’re dead. But it’s a fact: if nothing, absolutely nothing in you consents to die, you will not die. For someone to die, there is always a second, if a hundredth part of a second, when he consents. If there isn’t that second of consent, he will not die. But who is certain he doesn’t have within himself, somewhere,
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a tiny bit of a defeatist which just yields and says, ‘Oh well’? … Hence the need to unify oneself. Whatever the path we may follow, the subject we may study, we always reach the same result. The most important thing for an individual is to unify himself around his divine center; that way he becomes a real individual, master of himself and of his destiny. Otherwise, he is a plaything of the forces, which toss him about like a cork in a stream. He goes where he doesn’t want to, is made to do what he doesn’t want to, and finally he gets lost in a hole without any way to stop himself doing so. But if you are consciously organized, unified around the divine center, governed and led by it, you are the master of your destiny. It’s worth trying…. At any rate, I find it’s better to be the master rather than the slave. The feeling of being pulled by strings and being made to do things you may or may not want to do is a rather unpleasant sensation…. It’s quite irksome. Well, I don’t know, I, for one, found it quite irksome even when I was a small child. When I was five, I began finding it wholly intolerable, and I sought a way for it to be otherwise – without anyone being able to tell me anything. Because I knew no one capable of helping me, and I didn’t have the luck you have – someone who can tell you, ‘Here is what you must do.’ There was no one to tell me. I had to find it all by myself. I found it. I began at the age of five. And you, it’s a long time since you were five?…"
We’ll cut out the end.
But why!
It sounds very boasting.
No, no! One doesn’t get that impression at all. These children,
you’re prodding them a little!
(Mother seems to be more and more
speaking from afar)
All that seems to me … (Mother gestures behind her shoulder). That’s what people like. If I were to tell them what I know now, they wouldn’t be happy.
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There’s a vast difference between your perception at the time
and now.
Another world.
What I say there is the vision of the mechanism [the occult working of death], and it’s very true in the sense it was lived like that. But now I am on the other side. All that I say here is part of all the complications of the execution. [[Mother means the material execution of the divine Plane or Vision. ]]
Very well.
Now, for me, it’s like another person.
(silence)
Strangely, I had a very odd impression [while Satprem was reading], as if … you were reading here (gesture at ground level).
I know all that is correct, it happened the way it’s said and is quite correct. But now, it’s as if I were looking from above, like this (Mother bends down as if looking from a great height). And then, it becomes so simple…. Simply the Vision realizing itself (it’s not a vision, not a will, not a decision, but the nearest approximation is “vision”). A Vision realizing itself (gesture as if to show the Force of Vision coming down). Then, below, all that results in calls. From above, it’s like that, something descending; from above you see: there are, yes, points of consciousness that shine and call, and then there is Contact (gesture of junction between the Force above and the shining points below).
It’s very strange, I really feel as if I am somewhere above, seeing things from above.
A great mass of Power – Power-Consciousness-Vision – descending onto the world.
(long silence)
These last few days, when I apparently woke up (but it wasn’t “waking up,” it was the consciousness which, in its natural state, is spread out everywhere, and then concentrates inside the body), when it concentrates inside this, there is first the sense of a sort of fall (swooping gesture), then a curious sensation of restriction, which the first times was almost painful. (Now it’s become a sort of habit.) The consciousness concentrating inside this. So there is a brief moment of adaptation; at first there was a sense of discomfort, now it’s better. [[It seems Mother, of late, had bouts of nausea on "waking." ]] So then, it’s beginning to function again.
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Now I understand, because while you were reading I was there, above, looking like this (Mother bends down), as if from above. Even now, I am seeing from above.
All that I said there was the description of the working of death…. All those complications! Here it’s so simple (descending gesture of the Vision-Force expressing itself).
It’s strange…. I have my eyes closed, but I see. Only, I see … differently. It’s very SIMPLE. It’s forces … like a Pressure like this (same descending gesture).
Very strange.
Obviously the center of the consciousness is elsewhere.
(silence
Satprem prepares to leave)
Mother, I’d like to ask for your help.
What for?
I am now writing the last pages of my book ["The Sannyasin"].
Oh! … Very well.
If I take you where I am (Mother laughs), it will be interesting!
We’ll try.
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