THE MOTHER

Questions and Answers

Questions and Answers

The Supreme Poise

      It is generally thought that when a creation reaches the maximum of its possibilities, that is the perfection. But it is precisely against this idea that I rise. Perfection is not a summit, it is not an extreme. There is no extreme : whatsover you do there is always the possibility of something better and exactly this possibility of something better is the very meaning of progress.

     Nature, in whatever she does, goes to extremes, and when she sees that she can advance no longer, she pulls down everything and begins again. You cannot call that a perfection, for perfection cannot be pulled down. Perfection will exist only when Nature will no longer be able to undo what she has begun. But for the moment there is no instance of her not having undone, in the process, what she has undertaken, when she judges that it is not sufficient or not that which she wanted to do. So it cannot be said that she has reached perfection in her creation.

     Thus the human being, as he is now, cannot progress indefinitely, cannot attain perfection unless he comes out of himself. He must pass into a higher species or must give up this species to create another. Man is a transitional being. You can say in ordinary language, "oh, he is a perfect man", but it is a literary figure of speech. The maximum that a human being can reach now, is perhaps a static poise; but what is static can be broken, because of lack of progress.

     Perfection is not a static state, it is a poise and a dynamic poise.

     You can move from perfection to perfection. You can conceive of a state in which it is not necessary, as in Nature's march today, to descend to a lower rung in order to be able to advance. In the new state, one can always go forward without stopping

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anywhere, instead of being compelled to turn back in order to start again.

      Perfection will be reached in the individual, in the collectivity, upon earth and in the universe, when, at every moment, the receptivity will be equal in quality and quantity to the force that seeks to manifest.

     That will be the supreme poise between what comes from above and what spreads below, a realisation in constant progress.

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Eating the fruit

      A peach should ripen on the tree; it is a fruit that is to be plucked when the sun is there up on it. At the time when the sun falls upon it, you come, pluck it and bite into it. It is then absolutely heavenly !

     There are two fruits like that : peach and greengage, green or golden. It is the same, these must be taken warm from the tree, bitten into and you are filled with an Edenic savour.

     Each fruit should be eaten in a special way.

    At bottom, that is the symbol of the earthly Paradise and the tree of Knowledge : in eating of the fruit of Knowledge, you lose the spontaneity of the movement, you begin to objectify, to learn, to discuss : and "when they took of the fruit there they became full of *sins."

    I say each fruit has to be eaten in its own way. A being living by its own nature, its own truth should spontaneously discover its own way of using things. When you five by the truth of your being, you have no need to learn things, you do them spontaneously, by the inner law. When you follow your nature spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine. As soon as you think, see yourself doing the thing, begin to discuss, you are full of sins.

    It is man's mental consciousness that has filled all Nature with the idea of sin, and all the misery which it brings ! Animals

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are not unhappy in our way, not at all, not at all, except, as Sri Aurobindo says, those who have been corrupted. The corrupted are those who live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt. It is because their whole aspiration is to become like man, man is god; and then dissimulation, falsehood : dogs do lie. Men admire that, they say "Oh ! how intelligent they are !"

       They have lost their divinity.

      The human species, in the spiral ascent, is truly at a point which is not pretty.

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But is not the dog more conscious than a tiger, more evolved, and higher in the spiral, is to say, nearer to the divine ?

     To be conscious is not the point. Man is more evolved than the tiger, there is no shadow of doubt, but the tiger is more divine than man. You must not confuse things: the two things are quite different.

    The Divine is everywhere, in every thing, is it not ? You must never forget that, not for a second you are to forget it: he is everywhere, in everything; and unconsciously, but spontaneously and therefore sincerely all that is below the mental manifestations is divine without mixture, that is to say, spontaneously, by its very nature. It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally he is much more conscious ! That is riot to be disputed, it is well understood, because what we call consciousness (what "we" call, that is to say, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and mentalise things. It is not the true consciousness, but it is that that men call consciousness. So in the human way, it is understood that man is much more conscious than the animal, but with man comes sin and perversion which do not exist outside the state that we call conscious and which is not truly conscious, which simply consists in mentalising things, having the capacity to objectify them.

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     It is a curve of ascent, but that curve moves away from the Divine, and one must rise very very high to find again, naturally, a higher Divine, for it is a conscious Divine, while the others are without being conscious of it, spontaneously and instinctively. And all our moral notion of good, of bad, is all that we have thrown upon the creation with our deformed and perverted consciousness. It is we who have invented it.

    We are the deforming intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the gods.

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Do the gods of the Puranas and the gods of Greek and Egyptian Mythology have any real existence ?

     Between the gods of the Puranas and the gods of Grecian and Egyptian mythology, all kinds of similarities are found; it could be an interesting subject for study. To the modern Western world, all these divinities—the Greek gods and other "pagan" gods, as they call them—are simply a product of human imagination and correspond to nothing real in the universe; but this is a gross error.

    To understand the mechanism of the universal life, even that of the terrestrial life, one has indeed to know that all these are real and living beings, each one in his own realm, and have an independent reality. They would exist even if men did not exist. The majority of these gods existed before men existed.

    In a very old tradition, antecedent probably to the Chaldean and Vedic traditions which are its two branches, the history of creation is narrated not from the metaphysical or psychological point of view, but from an objective point of view, and this history is as real as our story of historical epochs. Of course, it is not the only way of looking at the thing, but it is quite as legitimate as any other; in any case it recognises the concrete reality of these divine beings.

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      They are beings' who belong to the progressive creation of the universe and have themselves presided over its formation, from the most ethereal or subtle to the most material regions; it is a descent of the divine creative Spirit. And they descended progressively, through realities more and more—one cannot say dense, because it is not dense, one cannot say even material for matter as we know does not exist on those planes—through realities more and more concrete.

     According to traditions and occult schools, all these zones of realities, these planes of realities have got different names; they are classified in a different way, but there is an essential analogy, and if you go back sufficiently far into the traditions, you see only the names changing according to the country and the language. Even now, the experiences of Western occultists and those of Eastern occultists offer great similarities. All who set out on the discovery of these invisible worlds and make a report of what they saw give a very similar description; whether they be of here or there : they use different words, but the experience is very much alike and the handling of the forces is the same.

     This knowledge of the occult worlds is based on the existence of subtle bodies and of subtle worlds corresponding to those bodies; they are what the psychological method calls "states of consciousness", but these states of consciousness really correspond to worlds. The occult procedure thus consists in being aware of these various inner states of being or subtle bodies and in being sufficiently master of them so as to be able to disclose them successively one after another. There is indeed a whole scale of increasing or decreasing subtlety, according to the direction in which you go; and the occult procedure consists in bringing out of a denser body, a subtler body and so on up to the most ethereal regions. You move on bys uccessive exteriorisations into bodies or worlds more and more subtle. It is somewhat as if everytime you passed into another dimension. The fourth dimension of the physicists is nothing else but a mere scientific transcription of an occult knowledge. To give another image, one can say that the physical body is in the centre —it is the most material, the densest and also the smallest— and the more subtle inner bodies overflow more and more the

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central physical body; they pass through, stretching themselves farther and farther, like water evaporating from a porous vase and forming a kind of steam all around. And the greater the subtlety, the larger the extension, tending to attain to that of the universe; one ends by universalising oneself. And it is a quite concrete process, that gives an objective experience of invisible worlds, enabling one even to act in these worlds.

     There is therefore a very small number of people in the West who know that these gods are not merely subjective and imaginary—more or less wildly imaginary—but they correspond to an universal truth.

    All these regions, all these domains are filled with beings who exist, each in his domain, and if you are awake and conscious in a particular plane—for instance, if on coming out of a more material body you awake on some higher plane, you have the same relation with the things and people of that plane as you had with the things and people of the material world; that is to say there exists a thoroughly objective relation that has nothing to do with the idea you may have of these things. Naturally, the resemblance is greater and greater as you approach the physical, the material world; even there comes a time when one region has a direct action upon another. In any case, in what Sri Aurobindo calls over mental worlds, you will find a concrete reality, absolutely independent of your personal experience; you go back there and find again the same things, with the differences that have occurred during your absence. And you have relations with those beings that are identical with the relations with physical beings, with this difference that the relation is more plastic, supple and direct —for example, there is the capacity to change the external form, the visible form, following the inner state in which you are; but you can give someone an appointment and you can be at the appointed place and find the same being again with certain differences that have come about in your absence; it is quite concrete with results quite concrete.

     One must have at least a little of this experience in order to understand these things. Otherwise, those who are convinced that all this is mere human imagination and mental formations, who

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believe that these gods have such and such form, because men have thought them to be like that and that they have these defects and these qualities because men have thought them like that —all people who say that God is made in the image of man and that he exists only in human thought,—all these will not understand, to them it will appear absolutely ridiculous, madness. One must have lived a little, touched a little the subject to know how much concrete the thing is.

     Naturally children know a good deal, if they are not spoilt. There are so many children who come every night to the same place and continue to live a life they have begun there. When these faculties are not spoilt by age, you can keep them with you. At a time when I was especially interested in dreams, I could return exactly at one place and continue a work that I had begun, visit something, for example, arrange something, a work of organisation, discovery or exploration : you go up to a certain spot, as one would go in life, then you take rest, then you return and begin again —you begin again the work at the place where you had left it and you continue. And you perceive that there are things which are quite independent of you, in the sense that changes, of which you are not at all the author, have taken place automatically during your absence.

     But for that you must live yourself those experiences, you must see them yourself, live them with sufficient sincerity and spontaneity in order to see that they are independent of any mental formation. For one can do the opposite also, a deep study of the action of mental formation upon events—that is very interesting, but it is another domain. And this study makes you very careful, very prudent, because you become aware how far one can delude oneself. So you must study both, the dream and the occult reality in order to see what the essential difference is. One depends upon us, the other exists in itself absolutely independent of the thought that we have of it.

    When you have worked in that domain, you recognise in fact that once a subject has been studied, something has been learnt, has been learnt mentally, that gives a special colour to the experience; the experience may be quite spontaneous and sincere, but

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the simple fact that the subject was known and studied lends a particular quality, while if you had learnt nothing on the question, if you knew nothing at all, the transcription would be quite spontaneous and sincere when the experience came; it may be more or less adequate, but it is not the outcome of an antecedent mental formation.

      Naturally this occult knowledge or this experience is not very frequent in the world, because, there are, in those who have not a developed inner life, veritable gaps between the external consciousness and the inmost consciousness; the linking states of being are missing and they have to be constructed. So when people enter there for the first time they are bewildered, they have the impression they have fallen into the night, into nothingness, into non-being.

     I had a Danish friend, a painter, who was like that. He wanted me to teach him how to come out of the body; he used to have interesting dreams and thought that it was worth the trouble to go there consciously. So I made him "come out"—but it was a frightful thing !. . .When he was dreaming, a part of his mind still remained conscious, active and a kind of link existed between this active part and his external being, then he remembered some of his dreams, but it was a very partial phenomenon. And to come out of one's body means to pass gradually through all the states of being, if one does the thing systematically. Well, even on the subtle physical one is almost de-individualised, and when one goes farther, there remains nothing, for nothing is formed or individualised.

    Thus when people are asked to meditate or told to go within, enter into their inner selves, they are in agony—naturally ! They have the impression that they are vanishing, and with reason : there is nothing, no consciousness !

    These things that appear to us quite natural and evident, are for people who know nothing wild imagination. If, for example, you transplant these experiences or this knowledge to the West, then, unless you were frequenting the circles of occultists, they stare at you with eyes. . .and when you have turned your back on them, they hasten to say : "these people are cranks !"

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      Now to come back to the gods and conclude, it must be said that all beings who have never had an earthly existence—gods or demons, invisible beings and powers—do not possess what the Divine has put into man : the psychic being. And this psychic being gives man true love, charity, compassion, a deep kindness which compensate for all his external defects.

      In the gods there is no fault, because they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without restraint : it is their way of godhood. But if you stand on a higher point of view, if you have a higher vision, a vision of the whole, you see them lacking certain qualities that are exclusively human. By his capacity of love and self-giving, man can have as much power as the gods and even more, when he is not egoistic, when he has surmounted his selfishness.

     If he fulfils the required condition, man is nearer the Supreme than the gods; he can be nearer. He is not that automatically, but he has the power to be so, the potentiality.

     If human love manifested without mixture, it would become all-powerful. Unfortunately, there is in human love as much love of oneself as of the one loved, it is not a love that makes you forget yourself.

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If one has little spiritual capacity,' can one increase

it?

     I do not know whether it can be said that one has much or little spiritual capacity. It is not like that.

    To five the spiritual life what is needed is a reversal of the consciousness. It cannot be compared in any way with the various faculties or possibilities that one has in the mental domain. You can speak of someone that he has not much mental or vital or material capacity and that his possibilities are very limited, and in that case it may be asked what are the means for developing

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his capacities, that is to say, for acquiring new ones, which is sufficiently difficult. But to live the spiritual life means to open oneself to another world within oneself. It is so to say reversing one's consciousness. The ordinary human consciousness, even in the most developped, even in persons of great talent and realisation, is a movement turned towards the outside. All the energies are moved towards the outside, the whole consciousness is spread outside; and if anything is turned inward, it is very little, very rare, very fragmentary. And that too happens under the pressure of very special circumstances, violent shocks, shocks precisely given by life with the will to reverse a little the extrovert movement.

      But all who have lived a spiritual life have had the same experience : all on a sudden, something in their being is reversed, is turned abruptly and sometimes totally inward, at once inward and upward, from the inward to the upward; but it is not external "upward", it is internal and profound, something other than the heights that one conceives physically.

     Something has literally turned round. There has been a decisive experience, and the point of view that one has had of life, the way of looking at life, the position that one has with regard to life has suddenly changed and in certain cases in a manner quite definitive and irrevocable.

     And once you are turned to the spiritual life and reality, you touch the Infinite, the Eternal and there is no longer any question of more or less capacity or possibility. To say that one has a greater or less capacity to live spiritually is a mental way of conceiving the spiritual life, but it is not at all a proper expression. What one can say is that one is more or less ready for a total and decisive reversal.

    At bottom, it is the mental capacity of withdrawing from ordinary activities and of going in search of the spiritual life that can be measured. But as long as you are in the mental domain, in this state, on this plane of consciousness, you cannot do much for others, neither for the life in general nor for individuals in particular, because you yourself have not the certitude, you do not have the definitive experience, your consciousness is not established in the spiritual world, and all your efforts end in mental

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activities which have their good side and bad side, but which have not much power; in any case, have not much power of spiritual contagion which alone is truly effective.

      The only thing that has truly an effect, is the possibility of transferring to others a state of consciousness in which you live yourself; but this power you cannot invent nor can you imitate, nor can you appear to have it; it comes spontaneously only when you are established in that state, when you live in it and not try to live in it, when you are there in it. And that is why all those who have truly a spiritual life cannot be deceived.

     An imitation of spiritual life can delude people who are still in the mind, but they who have realised in themselves this reversal of the consciousness, who have a wholly different relation with the external being, cannot be duped and cannot dupe themselves.

      It is these people that the mental being does not understand. So long as you are in the mental consciousness, even the highest, and see the spiritual life from outside, you are judging with your mental faculties, with this habit of seeking, making mistakes, correcting, progressing, searching again, and you imagine that they who are in the spiritual life suffer from the same incapacity, but it is a very gross error.

     When the reversal of the being has taken place, all that is finished. You search no more, you see. You deduce no more, you know. You grope no more, you march straight to the goal. And when you have gone farther—a little farther only—you know, you feel, you live this supreme truth that the Supreme Truth alone acts, that the supreme Lord alone wills, knows and does through the human beings. How can there be errors at all possible ? What He does He does because He wills it. He does it because he wills to do it.

      To our erring vision these are perhaps incomprehensible actions, but they have a sense and a goal and they lead where they should lead.

      If you wish sincerely to help others and the world, the best thing you can do is to become yourself what you want others to become—not merely as an example, but because you become a

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centre of radiating power, that by the simple fact of its existence compels the rest of the world to transform itself.

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What is an "ideal of moral perfection" ?

       There are thousands of moral perfections. Everybody has his own ideal of moral perfection.

       What is usually called a moral perfection is to have all the qualities that are considered moral qualities : no more to have faults, never to make a mistake, never to commit errors, to be always like what is conceived as the best, to possess all the virtues; that is to say, to realise the highest mental conception. To get all the qualities—there are many, are there not ?—all the virtues, all that man has conceived to be the most beautiful, the most noble, the most true, and to live that integrally, so that all actions are guided by that, all movements, all reactions, all feelings, everything; that is living a moral ideal of perfection. That is the summit of the evolution of the mental man.

      There are not many who do that, but after all there were and there are some. Generally it is that which men take for the spiritual life. When you meet a person like that, you say : "Oh ! he is a great spiritual being". But no. He may be a great sage, he may perhaps be a great saint, but he is not the spiritual being.

      It is besides very good meanwhile and very difficult to realise. And there is a time in inner evolution when it is very necessary to try to realise it. Evidently that is much higher than one who is still directed by his impulses, his ignorant and external reactions. It is already in some way to be master of one's nature. And one has to go through this stage, because it is the stage when one begins to be master of one's ego, when one is ready to let it drop off. The thing is still there, but sufficiently weakened to be near its end. It is the last stage before passing over to the other side. And certainly if you imagine that you can pass over to the other

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side without having gone through this stage, you run the risk of making a gross mistake, taking perfect freedom as perfect weakness in respect of your lower nature.

      It is almost impossible to pass from the mental being, even the most perfect and the most remarkable, to the true spiritual life without having during a certain time, however short, realised this ideal of moral perfection. There are many who try to shorten the way and want to assert their inner freedom without having overcome all the weakness of the external nature—they run a great risk of deceiving themselves. The true spiritual life, the total freedom is something much higher than the highest moral realisations, but you must beware lest the pretended freedom be complacency and a disregard for all rules.

      You must be more, even more and more high; not less than what the highest humanity has achieved.

     You must be able spontaneously to become what humanity has conceived as the highest, the most beautiful, the most perfect, the most unselfish, the most comprehensive and the best before you open your spiritual wings and look at these things from above as things still belonging to the individual self and before you enter the true spirituality, that which has no limit, which fives integrally the Infinite and the Eternal.

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How can one develop the faculty of Intuition ?

     There are different kinds of intuition and these capacities you carry in yourself. They are always somewhat active, but we do not distinguish them, because we do not pay sufficient attention to what happens in us.

     Behind the emotions, deep within the being, in a consciousness which is there almost at the height of the solar plexus, there is a kind of fore-knowledge, like a capacity of prevision, but which is not expressed in the form of ideas, which is expressed rather in

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the form of feelings; it is almost a perception of sensations. For example, when you are going to decide about doing something, there is at times a sort of uneasiness or inner refusal and generally if you listen to this inmost indication you find out that it was a right thing.

      In other cases there is as if something that pushes, indicates, insists—I do not speak—it is understood—of impulses which are all movements coming from the vital and even from much below—but indications that are behind the feelings, coming from the affective side of the being; there also you can get a sufficiently sure sign of the thing to be done. These are forms of intuition or forms of a higher instinct which are cultivable by observation and also by a study of the results. Naturally the thing must be done in a way sincere, objective and without partiality. If you want to see things in a certain way and if you introduce this preference of yours, all becomes useless. You must proceed as if you were looking at something happening outside yourself, in another person.

     That is a form of intuition, perhaps the first form, that which manifests generally. There is another, but there are many difficulties in the way of observing it, because, when you have the habit of thinking and acting not through impulse but through reason, of reflecting before doing anything, there is there an extremely quick process from cause to effect in your half-conscious thought, so much so that you do not see the entire line of reasoning, and that is sufficiently deceiving. You have the impression that it is an intuition but it is not an intuition; it is an extremely swift subconscious reasoning that seizes a problem and goes straight to the result. You must not confuse this with intuition.

     In ordinary cerebral functioning intuition is something that drops all on a sudden like a particle of light.

    If you have the capacity, a beginning of the capacity of mental vision, you have the impression of something coming from outside or from above and which is like a little shock in the brain, a drop of light and it is absolutely independent of all reasoning.

     When you have a question to solve, whatever it may be, generally you concentrate your attention here, between the eye-

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brows, in the centre just above the eyes, the centre of conscious-will. But if you do that you cannot be in relation with intuition. You may be in relation with the source of will, effort, even a certain kind of knowledge, but in the external, almost material domain; whereas if you want to be in contact with intuition, you must as much as possible silence your mind, hold it immobile, attentive; your entire mental faculty must form at the crown of the head, or a little above it, if you can, a kind of mirror, very quiet, very immobile, turned upward in a very concentrated silent attention. That also one can learn how to do. You must learn to do it, it is a necessary discipline. If you succeed, then you can, perhaps not immediately, have a perception of these drops of light falling on the mirror from a still unknown region and which are translated by a conscious thought that has no relation with the rest of your thought, for you have been keeping it silent. That is the real beginning of intellectual intuition.

     It is a discipline that has to be followed up. For a long time you may be trying and not succeeding, but once you succeed in making the mirror immobile and attentive, you always get some result, which does not necessarily come in the form of a precise thought but always with the sensation of a light coming from above. And when you can receive this light without entering immediately into feverish activity, receive it in calm and silence and let it enter deep into the being, then after a time, it is translated by a luminous thought or otherwise by a very precise indication here in the heart-centre.

     Naturally, first you have to develop these two capacities, then, when you get a result, you must study it, see the consequences, observe very attentively what has gained entrance, what may have deformed, the more or less conscious reasoning that has been added, the lower will, more or less conscious also, that you have allowed to intervene; and it is by a thorough study, in fact almost by a study of every moment, at any rate a daily and very frequent study that one can succeed in developing one's intuition. It is long, very long, and there are ambushes; you can deceive yourself; you can take for intuitions some movements of the subconscious will that try to manifest themselves, certain indications given by

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impulses that you have refused to receive openly; in fact all kinds of difficulties; you must be ready for that.

      And yet, if you persist, you are sure to succeed; and there comes a time when you feel a kind of inner directive, something which very perceptively guides you in everything that you do. But to make this directive reach its maximum power, you must naturally add to it your conscious submission, you must be sincerely decided to follow the indication given by the higher force. If you do that, then you jump over years of study, you may get results quite rapidly; but you must do the thing with sincerity and a kind of inner spontaneity. If you want to do it, without making the surrender, you may also succeed, with perseverance and obstinacy, as one succeeds in developing one's personal will and make of it a considerable power, but that takes a long time, a great labour and you meet a great many obstacles and the result is very uncertain.

      Make your surrender in a sincere complete self-giving and you will leap over these steps, go much quicker; but do not do it with calculation, for that spoils everything.

Besides, whatever you want to do in life, one thing is absolutely indispensable and at the root of all, it is the power of concentrating your attention. If you can gather all the rays of your attention and consciousness on one point, and if you are capable of maintaining that concentration with a persistent will, there is nothing that can resist, nothing from the most material physical development to the highest spiritual development. But this discipline must be followed up in a constant and so to say imperturbable manner. I do not mean to say that you must concentrate always on the same thing, I mean you must learn how to concentrate.

     And materially, for study, for sports, for all physical and mental development, that is absolutely necessary. The value of the individual is in proportion to his capacity for attention.

From the spiritual point of view it is even more important. There is no spiritual obstacle that can resist the power of intensive concentration. For example, the discovery of the psychic being, union with the inner Divine, opening to higher spheres,

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everything can be got by an intense and obstinate power of concentration. Only you must learn how to do it.

      There is no human or even superhuman domain whose key is not the power of concentration.

      You may be the best athlete, you may be the best student, you may be an artistic, literary or scientific genius, you may be the greatest saint, if you have that faculty,—and everyone possesses in himself a little beginning of that; it is given to everybody, but it is not cultivated.

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Do not waste energy

     Human beings do not know how to preserve energy. When something happens, an accident or an illness, help is asked for and a double or triple dose of energy is administered. They feel themselves to be receptive and they receive it. This energy is given for two reasons : to repair the disorder caused by the accident or illness and to give the strength for transformation, to mend, to change what was the true cause of the illness or accident.

    Instead of utilising energy in that way, immediately, forthwith they throw it outside. They begin to move about, to be active, to work. They begin to say peak, they begin to say they feel themselves full of energy and throw everything outside ! They can keep nothing. Then naturally, as the energy was not meant to be wasted like that, but for an inner use, they fall quite flat. And this is universal. They do not know, they do not know how to make that movement : to go within, utilise the energy—not keep it, it cannot be kept—utilise to mend the damage done to the body and to go deep down to find out the reason of the accident or the malady, and there to change that into an aspiration, an inner transformation. Instead of this, people begin immediately to prattle, to move about, to work, to do this, to do that !

    Indeed the great majority of human beings feel that they are

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alive only when they waste energy, otherwise it does not look like

     Not to waste energy means to utilise it for purposes for which it was given. If the energy is given for transformation, for the sublimation of the being, it must be used for that; if the energy is given to set right something that has been disorganised in the body, it must be used for that.

     Naturally, if someone is given a special work and if he is given the energy to do that work, it is all right, it is used for its purposes, but it was given for that.

    As soon as man feels energetic, he rushes forthwith into action. Or otherwise, those who have not got got the sense of any useful thing, they gossip. Worse still, they who have no control upon themselves become intolerant and begin to dispute ! If their will is contradicted, they feel themselves full of energy and take that as holy wrath !

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Reprinted from The Bulletin of S. A. I. C. of Education

August,1959

Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry.

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