(Mother had wanted this personal conversation to be erased and remain untranscribed, but considering its importance, we thought it better to preserve it.)The Mother
Agenda
Volume 1
November 26, 1960
(Mother had wanted this personal conversation to be erased and remain untranscribed, but considering its importance, we thought it better to preserve it.)
Your force cured me in one hour in a spectacular way. I would understand if you had merely cured my flu, for that's something more general, and with a good general vibration it can be removed; but the force acted with an astonishing precision and accuracy: first it wiped out my flu, then it touched a toothache that's been hurting for the last three days, and in five minutes that was gone. Finally, I had a pulled ligament which for three or four years now has periodically given me pain (a thigh ligament where it joins the pelvis, to be precise), and this last week it was hurting so much that I found it difficult to sit cross-legged for meditation. And then I felt the force come and touch just there, exactly at this point, and the pain vanished. And yet the problem was of an organic nature, not some general illness!...
(Mother remains silent a moment, then says:)
Not last night but the night before, I touched at least one of the causes (at that time it felt like THE cause) of a certain powerlessness to act directly on Matter... You see, when the Will and the Power come, they are extremely effective everywhere UP TO A CERTAIN REGION (in other words, whether people are receptive or not, open or not, makes no difference – when the Will is applied it is all-powerful UP TO a certain region) but once it arrives here, at the most material material, its efficacy depends on many things – and a power which depends on something is no power! For a long, long time I have been searching for the reasons behind this powerlessness. I've located a few, one after another, and upon these points there was an immediate effect. But some things resisted (oh, quite a number, in a number of ways); for example, it had difficulty acting on illnesses, on the cells, on doubt (not mental doubt, but rather the doubt of the physical consciousness which can't accept certain things that seem impossible to it
– what Sri Aurobindo calls disbelief,1 not a mental doubt, but the disbelief of the physical consciousness which can't accept what is contrary to its own nature and its own working). And as for illnesses, sometimes it has an immediate effect, but sometimes it drags on and has to follow its so-called normal course. On all these three points, I clearly felt that something was hampering it. These are the Enemy's strongholds; all that doesn't want the Divine seizes upon it and even the working of the Power coming from above is obstructed, for when it must work here in the body, it is stopped or deformed or altered or diminished.
All this goes on in the subconscient; these are things that were pushed out of the physical consciousness down into the subconscient, so they're there and they come back up whenever they please.
Two nights ago (no, three – the night before Darshan), I had one of those experiences that... that leaves you pensive the whole day...
(silence)
It was still there when I went down for Darshan, and in spite of all my will to be friendly and pleasant, I was like a rock, looking at that... I can't speak of it now, for it's the key to SOMETHING VERY GREAT.
(silence)
It's the very point where Nature (I mean the passive side of the force of manifestation) is a slave to the hostile forces. There is a point where She is dominated by them. And this must be cured before the Power from above, the Power of the Shakti, can pass through everything, dominate everything, and be infallible...
I saw the thing, the experience took place, but sometimes it takes long for all the consequences to be... worked out.2
But immediately, the following day – Darshan day – as the thing developed (you see, something was working inside), I could again turn my attention to the people who were there. And oddly enough, just when you came, there was suddenly a kind of little shock, like an electric shock, and a spark leapt out. And at that moment the Power acted for perhaps a split second... You see, there has been this bad karma, this old formation around you for a very long time, and it hadn't... I recall telling you several years
ago, “I shall be able to cure such cases as yours only when the Supramental descends.” And this feeling of incapacity, of something resisting, was still present, still alive – of not having the right power to dominate it. But just as you went by, for a second, there was this flash of... like a spark when two electric wires touch. It was a golden spark, a resplendent light – zzzt! And it leapt out. “Ah!” I thought; “it's good.”
That was it.
Then afterwards, when you wrote that you were sick, I thought, “Well, well! What does it mean?” I didn't answer, I didn't say a thing, but when I went back upstairs and started walking for my japa, I brought back this experience of the Darshan – this moment during the Darshan – and I felt that it had left something behind (the effect was not total or absolute, but something had been left), and I decided that through this I would try to make you feel better.
I felt your intervention very clearly. I was really in a bad way, but when I came out of the japa, I knew it was cured. There is still something in the leg that pulls a little, but it has practically disappeared.
It's the memory, the memory in the cells.
Good; it's good. I'm happy. It's the first such experience.
Before I fell sick, I had a peculiar dream. I was here in the corridor, and someone quite dark came to tell me that Mother wanted me to change my work. And I recall trying with all my might to ask him, “But why, why?” Finally you arrived. You were there at a table with some others. I was quite annoyed because all these people upset me, they were hindering me from being with you. And you said to me very clearly, “It's time this gentleman goes.” Perhaps this gentleman represented a part of my being which had to disappear or change, but anyway you asked me to do something extremely difficult – I felt a very great difficulty doing it. I even remember, in my dream, having left you for an instant, as if I wanted to leave the Ashram, then I must have walked up and down for a while. Finally, I must have made an enormous effort to come back and sit next to you on a bench which symbolically was very hard... The next morning I woke up with the flu.
So, it's very simple. The sickness was due to one part of your being going faster than the rest. A part of the physical consciousness probably remained behind, and that created this imbalance and triggered the sickness.
It took a huge effort in my dream.
Yes, it's good. It's working as it should. It may not be very nice to tell someone it's good he was sick, but it's good!
(silence)
You see, I'm doing the sadhana really along a... a path that has never been trod by anyone. Sri Aurobindo did it... in principle. But he gave the charge of doing it in the body to me.
That was the wonderful thing when we were together and all these hostile forces were fighting... (they tried to kill me any number of times. He always saved me in an absolutely miraculous and marvelous way). But you see, this seemed to create very great BODILY difficulties for him. We discussed this a great deal, and I told him, “If one of us must go, I want that it should be me.”
“It can't be you,” he replied, because you alone can do the material thing.”3
And that was all.
He said nothing more. He forbade me to leave my body. That's all. It is absolutely forbidden. he said. You can't, you must remain.”4
After that (this took place early in 1950), he gradually... You see, he let himself fall ill. For he knew quite well that should he say I must go,”5 I would not have obeyed him, and I would have gone. For according to the way I felt, he was much more indispensable than I. But he saw the matter from the other side. And he knew that I had the power to leave my body at will. So he didn't say a thing, he didn't say a thing right to the very last minute...
(silence)
Once or twice I “heard” certain things about him and I told him (for I told him all I saw or heard), and I said that I was... that these suggestions were coming from the Enemy and that I was violently fighting against them. Then he looked at me – twice – he
looked at me, nodded his head and smiled. And that's all. Nothing more was said. “How strange!” I thought. And that's all. Then I myself must have forgotten. You see, he wanted me to forget.
I only remembered afterwards.
(silence)
But...
(silence)
This path is very hard.
(silence)
And then things don't happen at all as they do in ordinary life... for three or four minutes, sometimes five or ten minutes, I'm a-bo-minably sick, with every sign that it's all over.
(silence)
But it's only to make me find the... to make me go through the experience and to find the strength. And also to give the body this absolute faith in its Divine Reality – to show it that the Divine is there and that He wants to be there and that He shall be there. And it's only at such “moments” as these – when logically, according to the ordinary physical logic, it's all over – that you can seize the key.
You have to go right through everything without flinching.
I haven't told this to anyone until now, especially not to those who take care and watch over me, for I don't want to... terrify them. Besides, I'm not so sure of their reactions – you understand, if they started getting frightened, it would be terrible. So I don't tell them. But it has happened at least five or six times, usually in the morning before going down to the balcony, just when I don't have the time... And it has to be done quickly, for I have to be ready on time!
It's very, very interesting. But then, you see, at such moments the... concreteness of the Presence6 – concrete to the touch, really to the material touch – is extraordinary!
How many more such experiences will be necessary? I don't know, you see, I'm only building the path.
(silence)
Don't write all this down, erase it, because... I'll speak of it later – once it's over, when I've reached the end. I don't want it to fall into anyone's hands by accident. And for you, keep it in your consciousness.
(silence)
I'm telling you all this because of what happened the other day. It's with such experiences that the... the true Power is acquired.
And then, at the same time, some rather interesting things are happening. Imagine, X is starting to understand certain things – that is, in his own way he is discovering the progress I am making; he's discovering it as a received teaching [through subtle channels]. He wrote a letter to Amrita two or three days ago in which he translates in his own language, with his own words and his own way of speaking, exactly my most recent experiences – things that I have conquered in a general way.
This interests me, for these things do not at all enter through the mind (he doesn't receive a thing there, he's closed there). So in his letter he says that this thing or that is necessary (he describes it in his own words), and he adds, “This is why we must be so grateful to have among us the... the great Mother7 (as he puts it), the great Mother who knows these things.” – “Good!” I said to myself. (It had to do with something specific concerning the capacity for discrimination in the outside world, the different qualities and different functions of different beings, all of which depends on one's inner construction, as it were.) So I see that even this, even these physical experiences, is received (and yet I hadn't tried, I had never tried to make him receive it); it merely works like this, you see (gesture of a widespread diffusion), and the experience is very – how should I say? – drastic, with a kind of... [power of radiation]. Imperative.
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