The Mother

Agenda

Volume 8

April 22, 1967

(Mother gives Satprem a letter and newspaper cutting she has just received from America about LSD. There is also the photo of a poster inviting people on a “trip.”)

They look half mad – a bit more than half!

Would you like to publish in the next Bulletin what you said about LSD?

No, I think that would be giving them far too much importance.

In America, it has become rather frightening.... There are a considerable number of people who take this drug.

I don't think it's possible to stop them – they'll go on taking it till serious accidents happen, and then... then the government will intervene and will add another blunder to this one.

(silence)

That there is a very great Pressure, a sort of intensity of pressure, is indisputable – everywhere, just everywhere. And, naturally, the reaction of Ignorance.

Nature, basically, had arranged things, and as she had no limitation of time, they were arranged so as to last millennia and millennia and millennia – she went along at a leisurely pace, having fun on the way; she invented everything that could be invented and had fun. But things didn't move along very fast. And she has arranged them in such a way that if you exert a pressure to move faster, oh, it causes catastrophes.

On the immense mass, the mass still plunged in Ignorance, it creates a sort of excitement that tends to become unhealthy. Those who are settled in a certain equilibrium protest; I have often heard them say, “But we aren't in a hurry, things are all right as they are! Why do you want to change them so fast, that will happen in its own time!” That's the attitude of those who have found a sufficiently harmonious equilibrium in life: “Oh, what a hurry, why do you want to upset everything? Let things just carry on on their own. It will happen in its own time” – like that. All those who are in a somewhat “sattvic” poise are in some such equilibrium. Then, among those who aspire, a small number are sincere, serious, level-headed, ready for anything: ready to go slowly, to go fast, to do much, to do little – but they are regular and quiet. And finally, a band of people like imbalance and, for them, it's an opportunity for all kinds of crazy things. But the Pressure of the Force is clearly making itself felt everywhere.

Sri Aurobindo always said that the most important, but also the most difficult thing, is to learn to keep one's BALANCE IN INTENSITY. To have the intensity of aspiration, the intensity of effort, the intensity of the march forward, while at the same time keeping one's balance – the balance of perfect peace. That's the ideal condition. But it's difficult.

(silence)

And for the cells of the body, the transition from the tranquillity of “tamasic” origin (the calm that was, in the distant past, the outcome of Inertia, and what still remains of that tendency for inertia), for this calm to stop being inert and, on the contrary, to belong to the calm of All-Powerfulness, there is a difficult transition. For the cells it's difficult.

These last few days, oh... It's this transition that's being worked out in the details, and it's not easy.

It's like that habit of the cells of drawing the force from below (through food and so on): when you try to transform that into a constant habit of drawing the force from above, every instant, in every small detail, there's a difficult moment.... (“From above” is a manner of speaking, because if you think about it, it may also be from the depths: there's no sense of direction, high or low or anything of the sort.) But it's no longer leaning on the surface for support – for standing, walking, sitting, moving about....

There is also the pressure of external agitation (the world lives in ceaseless agitation), the external agitation: everything and everyone is rushing towards... one really doesn't know towards what. They want to squeeze in ten times more things in a space of time than can be normally done, so it goes like this (gesture of tremor). And to have the strength to remain calm and steady in the middle of it, in that whirl...

It's very interesting, really.

What people generally call force (in the English sense of the word strength) is something very heavy and tamasic. The true force is a movement of fantastic speed but... in perfect calm. There is no agitation; the movement is fantastically faster, but without agitation, in such calm!... They generally don't even feel that Force, yet it is the one that makes – that will make – the transformation possible.

The difficulty is always the transition. You see, the body acts (it is carried, so to speak: things are done without the sense of resistance or fatigue, nothing of the sort, that doesn't exist), and then, if for some reason or other (generally some influence or some thought coming from someone else), if the memory of the other method (the ordinary method, the universal method of all human beings) comes back, the body suddenly seems... (it's very strange), it seems to become incapable of doing ANYTHING, absolutely as if it were about to faint. Then, there immediately comes the reaction, and the other movement gets the upper hand again. But that makes for a difficult time. When these relapses become impossible, there will be security. But as it is now, it's difficult.

Only, now (in the past there used to be a dangerous moment), now there is immediately in the cells that movement of adoration, which calls, “You, You, You...” Then it's all right.