The Mother
Agenda
Volume 2
September 30, 1961
(Mother gives Satprem a flower she has recently named “Unostentatious Certitude”: Platycodon grandiflorum)
This is the complete negation of “bluff.” I find it very beautiful. When I saw this flower, it struck me as something very profound, very calm – absolutely sure, immobile. I don't know why, but the longer I looked at it, the more it gave that impression and when I was asked its significance, I said, “Unostentatious Certitude.” It's what one might call a superlative good-taste in the realm of spiritual experience: something with greater content than it expresses.
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(Following the letter Satprem had written to Mother the previous day regarding the book on Sri Aurobindo.)
I had a clear vision of the two kinds of opposites in nature (not only in nature but in life) which almost everyone carries within himself: one is the possibility of realization, the other is the path chosen to attain it.
There is always (it's probably inevitable) the stormy path of struggle, and then there is the sunlit path. After much study and observation, I have had a sort of “spiritual ambition” (if it can be called that) to bring to the world a sunlit path, to eliminate the necessity for struggle and suffering: something that aspires to replace this present phase of universal evolution with a less painful phase.
It greatly interested me when I read your letter. I was looking at why you have so many difficulties; twice in your note you wrote that it [writing] is a “suffering.” You have very often written this word, very often spoken it, and it seems dominant in one aspect of your being – while in the other is the glory of a supreme joy, the very stuff of the future realization.
These are what could be called the two modes, not of your character, but of your soul.1
(silence)
Sri Aurobindo told me, He has all the necessary stuff.
This book is self-existent and you have only to follow it along, with simplicity, the way you would follow a path that has already been blazed that is already THERE, automatically brought into being by its own necessity. (For a long while Mother gazes in front of her)... Don't be alarmed, I'm just looking!
You don't need to suffer; it's not necessary.
That's what I want to tell you.
The difficulties all stem from the fact that you think they are there.
Good-bye, mon petit. Do you want to see me a day ahead of time?
I don't want to take up your time uselessly.
Mon petit, I am doing absolutely nothing. I have an avalanche of letters, a pile this high (gesture) that I haven't answered; I haven't written a word – nothing. I'm not doing anything except seeing people, and that is neither important nor interesting.
1 This letter to Mother is, with a few others, the sole survivor of thirteen years of correspondence. All the rest, all Satprem's correspondence with Mother since 1960, was confiscated by the Ashram after the Mother's departure, for its own reasons. His letters of 1960, already published in Volume 1, escaped the destruction because Mother herself had kept them. It makes a big hole in this Agenda, not only for him – because he had poured out his heart, his questions and doubts and difficulties into these letters – but also from an historical point of view, for many of these conversations with Mother were invisibly oriented by his own condition. In fact, he was intimately linked with the flow of this Agenda, which thus stands mutilated. Need we add that we had to prepare the first two volumes as fugitives, and it required Mother's miraculous help to avert even more serious mutilations than the auto-da-fé of Satprem's correspondence.