The Mother
Agenda
Volume 11
February 18, 1970
(Since early February Mother has been coughing a lot. On the 14th, Mother was unwell and could not see Satprem. The following conversation is very important as it marks the visible beginning of a conflict that might be called “medical” and was going to assume acute proportions with every passing year.)
I've never had such a cold in my whole life! Last night I had a kind of physical nightmare!... Never in my life have I had such things.... I can't say I was quite asleep, but... How can I explain? It's a mixture between something that tries to find its true inner remedy, and the Doctor who says that if I don't take medicines it'll go on “for months”!
Yes, they always say that.
So...
Oh, but it would take hours to tell it all. It's certainly in the material world. So then (laughing), last night, suddenly I saw two tall figures with human shapes, but all gray and you couldn't make out eyes or nose and so on. They had a human shape and all gray; they were the two “doctors” (what doctors I don't know), and they were discussing. My body was on the bed (though I think I wasn't sitting, yet I wasn't standing!), and they were discussing together but without words. It looked like kinds of beings in a lower vital world, huge, tall beings – tall, strong, formidable. Then one of them, in his demonstration, pointed to my heart with his finger, and his finger touched – I let out a scream! A physical scream!
I wasn't happy.
Never, never, never touched, never. Once, I had a very high fever, 108#0fb, it was tremendous (it didn't last long, a few hours); I had caught that when I went to a gathering of workers doing a puja or
something.1 I had caught a fever. But Sri Aurobindo was there. And I saw, I saw all the beings of the most material vital charging (gesture of onslaught on the body). I remember that, it was in Sri
Aurobindo's time (quite a long time ago). I saw them, and I said to Sri
Aurobindo, “So that's what gives people dreadful nightmares.” They would draw
near (they would try to), and on touching Sri Aurobindo's presence around me
they would draw back, then they
would come back again and would be repulsed – it
lasted the whole night. But last night, it wasn't that.... Naturally, Sri
Aurobindo wasn't there physically, and... I saw those beings. The main thing is
that when that being in his demonstration touched me with his finger, it made me
scream – I screamed materially.
Yes, he touched you.
Ah, yes – he was ABLE to touch me.
All that because of the “doctors.”
Yes, they pretended to be doctors.
Ah, materially one isn't well protected, otherwise things wouldn't be like that.... Materially I am protected only when I am not asleep, wholly concentrated and absolutely still, without speaking to anyone, in contact with nothing around and only wrapped, as it were, in the divine Presence. Then it's fine. But things are far from being like that! (Mother coughs)
(silence)
You can put it in the Agenda, but we shouldn't speak about it.
In the Agenda, yes, but not otherwise.
(long silence)
But you know, Mother, several times I had that sort of “medical dream” in winch a kind of doctor comes under the pretext of curing you and hurts you terribly, or else tries to operate on you, wants to torture the body in order to operate on you. So in the beginning you are quite submissive, you say, “All right, I have to be operated on,” and then finally the consciousness returns and you reject that so-called doctor. It's happened often to me. A being who claims he comes to cure you: a “doctor.”
I think that's it, I think there are beings from the vital who use... who use what's left of unconsciousness in doctors.
(silence)
But once it happened to Sri Aurobindo: at night – once at night – he screamed. And afterwards he said it was in the material world: beings from the most material vital, but which are in the earth atmosphere, not in the vital atmosphere.
It may be vital entities that are the residues of dead people – it's possible. But it may also be kinds of half materializations of beings from the vital itself: beings from the vital.
But my whole life I've had that sort of white light – not transparent white, white like... like WHITENESS, you understand. That light, which is extremely intense. Never, never did they come near – they couldn't come near that. There was only that night when I had a fever (it was... I think it was in 1918, something like that... no, in 1920),2 but then, I had caught the fever with people. Otherwise, never, never could they come near.
1 Ayudh puja or “festival of arms.” On a similar occasion, when Mother was seriously attacked, Sri Aurobindo had to write the disciples a letter in which he said, “The Mother has had a very severe attack and she must absolutely husband her forces.... It is quite out of the question for her to begin seeing everybody and receiving them – a single morning of that kind of thing would exhaust her altogether. You must remember that for her a physical contact of this kind with others is not a mere social or domestic meeting with a few superficial movements which make no great difference one way or the other. It means for her an interchange, a pouring out of her forces and a receiving of things good, bad and mixed from them which often involves a great labour of adjustment and elimination and in many cases, though not in all, a severe strain on the body” (November 12, 1931, Cent. Ed., 25.315)
2 Mother may be thinking of the epidemic in Japan in January 1919, during which she very nearly died, while the fever caught during the festival of arms was in 1931.