February 23, 1963The Mother
Agenda
Volume 4
February 23, 1963
(Regarding a dream, or rather an experience of Sujata, the notation of which unfortunately was not kept.)
She went to Sri Aurobindo's home in the subtle physical – the thing is true, real, concrete, as concrete as here.
As soon as I got her letter, I saw: that's where she went. Besides, I knew she had gone there. Plenty of people go there and are unaware of it! They forget. But she had a nice memory.
She goes there very often at night, very often, but generally people forget.
Simply for want of training. If you train yourself, you remember quite well. There are small holes in the consciousness, gaps, and when you go through such a gap you forget. You may suddenly get a fleeting impression of something, and then it eludes you – oh, it's gone! Only, it takes a long time to train yourself; you shouldn't be in a hurry or too busy. I went through it at a time when I was bedridden for five months. I had nothing to do. (You can't keep reading all the time – during those five months I read some eight hundred books... no, nine hundred and fifty! But it tires the eyes.) So the rest of the time (you can't sleep too much either when you're in bed all the time), I trained myself: that was when I learned to have completely conscious nights. But it's a discipline. When you wake up, either in the middle of the night or in the morning, don't budge, stay absolutely still, concentrated, very silent,
and PULL the memory back. For one month, two months, you seem to get nowhere; after six months it begins to work; and eventually you remember everything. At the end, you do the opposite movement, in the sense that whenever you have an interesting dream, you wake up: you learn to wake up in the middle of the night every time you have a vision or a dream, or some activity (there are various cases), so that you can remember, and then you repeat it to your consciousness (once you're awake, you repeat it to yourself two or three or ten times, till you're certain not to forget), and then off you go again.
But you can't do that if, when morning comes, you have to leap out of your bed and attend to fifty thousand pressing matters. It isn't indispensable for the yoga, not at all. It's a hobby, rather, something to amuse yourself with.
(Satprem protests)
Well, it gives you the pleasure of knowing what's going on – which isn't necessary. Now I know, I don't care one way or the other! When I go to bed, at least eight times out of ten, when I am in bed, I ask, “O Lord, grant me a silent night,” which is very selfish of me – He keeps me working every night! And sometimes, you get tired of working and feel like being blissful. A blissful silence. Then I ask Him, “Let me be blissful.”
It works fairly well. But it's one night out of five or six.
Otherwise, the entire night is conscious, and you cannot imagine the multitude of things that can be done in a night!
Anyhow, it's good, I am very glad for her [Sujata], it's a very good sign.
*
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A little later
We have a great mathematician here who comes from Madras regularly, Dr. V. (you know him, don't you?), and for my birthday,1 he played around with the figures of my date of birth and made up with them a square with small compartments (what a painstaking work it must be!): any way you read it, it always adds up to the same figure. Admirable. The figure is 116. Heavenly mathematics, all that (!) and it is supposed to be my number of years. But I find
it a little on the short side. Because if the present pace is any indication, 116 doesn't leave me many years, thirty years or so... yes, some thirty years, that's all. What can you achieve in thirty years?! The way things are moving, oh!... When Sri Aurobindo said three hundred years, I think he gave the minimum figure.
We'll see.
(silence)
In the body consciousness, there are two attitudes which are both... No, one is becoming much more natural: it is a sort of... (what's the word in French?) everlasting attitude, everlasting, there is no reason why it shouldn't continue. The cells feel themselves everlasting, with a certain state of harmonious inner peace which partakes of eternity, that is to say, free from the kind of disorder and friction that causes aging and disintegration (it's a kind of grating in the gears that causes it). People's ordinary consciousness (it's not a question of ideas, concepts or anything of that kind: it's the body's consciousness, the consciousness of the body's cells), the ordinary, NATURAL, NORMAL consciousness is a consciousness full of grating and friction, in perpetual disorder, and that's the cause of aging. Well, this is beginning to fade away.
It is rarely felt, except when the pressure from outside is too great. When there is a huge accumulation of scores of small... you can't call them “wills,” but impulses coming from things (from things or people or circumstances) that want to be fulfilled, attended to – as long as it's within a certain limit you receive it with a smile and it doesn't have any effect, but when the dose is exceeded, suddenly something says, “Oh, no! Enough is enough!” At that point, the consciousness is hopeless. It falls back into the old rhythm, and consequently that must cause wear and tear. But the other way is a sort of harmonious, undulating movement (Mother draws big waves in the air), ALMOST beyond time, not quite: there is some sort of time sense, but secondary, somewhat in the distance. And this movement (gesture of waves) gives a sense of eternity – of everlastingness, at any rate – there is no reason for it to cease. There is no friction, no conflict, no wear and tear, it can go on indefinitely.
It is beginning to be that way.
But not these last few days.2
Yesterday evening (was it yesterday?... No, the day before),
when I went out on the balcony-terrace,3 the difference in perception between the consciousness I have now and the one I had before felt enormous! Before, as I have always said, I would stay there, call the Lord, be in His presence, and only when He withdrew would I come in again – that's how it was. And I had a certain relationship with people, things, the outside world (“outside,” well, not outside – anyway, the world). The day before yesterday, when I went to the balcony, I wasn't thinking of anything or observing anything, I simply went – I didn't want to know what was going on, it didn't interest me, I wasn't observing.... The other experience [of the previous balcony, one year ago] seemed to go back centuries! It was so much OTHER! And so spontaneous, so natural, and so immense too!... The earth was tiny. Yet it was very much here: I wasn't “over there,” the BODY itself was feeling that way. And at the same time (I was two floors above people), every time I looked, I recognized scores and scores of people, they seemed to leap to my eyes – a crystal clear vision, much sharper (the vision I had before was always a bit hazy because what I saw wasn't entirely physical: I saw the movement of forces), and yesterday, it was as if... as if I had risen above the very possibility of haziness! It was far less physical – FAR MORE accurate.4
Formerly too, I used to sense the Force, the Consciousness, the Power concentrated in a particular point and then spreading out. While here, there was an IMMENSITY of Power, of Light, of Consciousness, of perception, concentrated in a tiny point: the people gathered there.
So colossal a difference that I didn't expect it – I wasn't thinking about it nor was I expecting it. I stayed there as long as it lasted, then at a certain point someone said, “That's enough, they are getting tired.” (It wasn't I who said it.) “Enough, they can't take any more.” So I came back inside. That's what made me come inside. It lasted five minutes. In five minutes, they were full to bursting.
I think this body has become another person, it's not the same any more. It's no longer what it used to be. Yet the memory of its earthly existence hasn't gone, it isn't another body. Yet it is another person. I am referring here only to the material consciousness (Mother touches her body). The other thing up there (gesture above) is all very easy to explain, the work was done long
ago, that's not what I mean – no, it's here. The change is HERE.
It's odd.
There, petit.
*
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(Soon afterwards, Mother talks about her secretaries, who don't do what she tells them to and take too much of her time:)
They take absolutely no notice of what I say.
What?!
Oh, yes, that's the way things are. I tell them, “I must be finished by such and such time.” “Yes, yes,” they say – and nobody moves. I can't start.... I am stuck there with my legs under the table, so it's difficult.... Unless I make a scene.
Sometimes I do, I tell them, “Ah, enough! Good-bye,” and I push back my chair. I get up and push back my chair. But that's... only in case of absolute necessity.5 All in all, I am rarely nasty! (Laughter)
Though it does happen. It happened this morning. Some people had left their daughter here; she has been here for the last four or five years, and all the while they didn't bother about her at all. She was in Ml's dormitory – M. has been a real mother to her, she looked after her dresses and everything, her parents did nothing (I think they were sending their hundred rupees regularly, that was all, they didn't have a thought for their daughter). This little girl's home was here. Then her parents came for the Darshan, they found their daughter not warm enough, not loving enough, that she far too much loved being here – conclusion: they're taking her away. I found that... so shameful! Shameful, so stupidly selfish.
I tried to intervene in several ways. They had taken the little thing with them – she cried day and night, nonstop. Won't eat, cries all the time. And she says, “I want to go back, I want to go back.... I want to stay here, I don't want to go away.”
“Ah, so that's how you are! Very well, we're taking you away.”
What cruelty! One of the ugliest things you can imagine.
Yesterday I tried once again (they're leaving today, I believe), I
had something conveyed to them, the answer was, “The father finds his daughter has forgotten him and no longer loves him, so he doesn't want to leave her here and will take her away.” I replied, “Does he think by bullying her he can force her to love him?” The fool just won't understand, nothing sinks in.
I didn't see the gentleman.
But then, they had brought a four-year-old with them. Today was his birthday. They sent me some money for the child and asked for a card of blessings. I refused to give the card and threw the money back at them – quite bluntly. I said, “Tell these people that they are selfish and stupid, and I want nothing from them.” And I banged on the table.... Oh, oh!... Everyone was petrified. (Mother laughs) The doctor was there, and Nolini, Champaklal, Amrita.... Something in me was laughing a lot! Oh, they thought I was in a terrible fit: “They'll see what will happen to them!...” And you know, those vibrations are familiar to me – they're terrifying, mon petit. Not human. When it comes, it's fearsome, people are in a cold sweat. And I watch it all like a spectator!
Fairly often, it's Sri Aurobindo. But this time it was entirely impersonal. It was something that WILL NO LONGER tolerate in the world a certain kind of selfish stupidity – to trample this child's finer feelings just because she isn't stupidly attached to her family (who didn't even give her a single thought all the time she was here, she didn't exist for them).
If you want your children to love you, you should at least love them a little, care for them a little, no? It's elementary, you don't have to be very bright to understand that – but they won't understand: “It is a child's DUTY to love his parents”!! And if you don't fulfill your duty, you're put in jail.
All right.
But those people will live to regret it.
The little girl struggled as if she were drowning, you know. She went everywhere – took refuge at the School, took refuge in Pavitra's room, begged G. in tears to intervene. M. was absolutely desperate. Everybody is trying to dissuade them, everybody is scandalized – it's their “right”! Brandishing their right, they grab the girl and squeeze her: “You'll love us, or else!”
And they think they will succeed!
Unfortunately, it is always the best who suffer. Some were taken away like that, and they fell so gravely ill that once they recovered sufficiently, the doctors said to send them back here. It has happened at least a dozen times. Those who have an inner life
feel at home here.
Well...
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(Just before the end, Mother comes back to her experience at the balcony:)
The balcony is quite interesting. Because it suddenly made me notice a change I was unaware of. Like a rapid rise I had been completely unaware of. My only awareness is that at EVERY moment, if I stop talking or listening or working, at every moment, it's like... great beatific wings, as vast as the world, beating slowly, like that.
A feeling of immense wings – not two: all around and stretching out everywhere.
Constantly, night and day. I participate in it only when I am tranquil.
But it never leaves me.
The wings of the Lord.
1 Mother was eighty-five on February 21.
2 Mother refers to the February 21 darshan.
3 For the first time in a year, Mother appeared on the new balcony above all the assembled disciples.
4 This far less physical vision was more accurate IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD.
5 Gradually Mother will stop struggling and intrusion will become the rule. As a result, these conversations will suffer greatly.