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Jnana (Knowledge)

Second Period of Commentaries (1960–1961)

13—They told me, “These things are hallucinations.” I inquired what was a hallucination and found that it meant a subjective or psychical experience which corresponds to no objective or no physical reality. Then I sat and wondered at the miracles of the human reason.

In this aphorism, by “they” Sri Aurobindo means the materialists, the scientists and, in a general way, all those who only believe in physical reality and consider human reason to be the one infallible judge. Furthermore, the “things” he speaks of here are all the perceptions that belong to worlds other than the material, all that one can see with eyes other than the physical, all the experiences that one can have in subtle domains from the sense perceptions of the vital world to the bliss of the Divine Presence.

It was while discussing these and other similar “things” that Sri Aurobindo was told that they were “hallucinations”. When you look up the word “hallucination” in the dictionary, you find this definition: “Morbid sensation not produced by any real object. Objectless perception.” Sri Aurobindo interprets this or puts it more precisely: “A subjective or psychical experience which corresponds to no objective or no physical reality.” There could be no better definition of these phenomena of the inner consciousness, which are most precious to man and make him something more than a mere thinking animal. Human reason is so limited, so down to earth, so arrogantly ignorant that it wants to discredit by a pejorative word the very faculties which open 40the gates of a higher and more marvellous life to man.… In the face of this obstinate incomprehension Sri Aurobindo wonders ironically at “the miracles of the human reason”. For the power to change truth into falsehood to such a degree is certainly a miracle.

5 January 1960 fnIt should be noted that for the most part the dates in this section are those of the written questions. The Mother sometimes answered long after the question was submitted to her, without dating her reply. Some of the questions and answers towards the end of this section were oral.

14—Hallucination is the term of Science for those irregular glimpses we still have of truths shut out from us by our preoccupation with matter; coincidence for the curious touches of artist in the work of that supreme and universal Intelligence which in its conscious being, as on a canvas, has planned and executed the world.

Here Sri Aurobindo compares the work of the Supreme Lord, creator of the universe, to the work of an artist painting in his conscious being, with sweeping brush-strokes, as on a canvas, the picture of the world. And when by “curious touches” he paints one stroke over another, we have a “coincidence”.

Usually the word “coincidence” suggests unconscious, meaningless chance. Sri Aurobindo wants to make us understand that chance and unconsciousness have nothing to do with this phenomenon; on the contrary, it is the result of a refinement of taste and consciousness of the kind that artists possess, and it can reveal a deep intention.

12 January 1960

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15—That which men term a hallucination is the reflection in the mind and senses of that which is beyond our ordinary mental and sensory perceptions. Superstition arises from the mind’s wrong understanding of these reflections. There is no other hallucination.

A vision is a perception, by the visual organs, of phenomena that really exist in a world corresponding to the organ which sees.

For example, to the individual vital plane there corresponds a cosmic vital world. When a human being is sufficiently developed he possesses an individualised vital being with organs of sight, hearing, smell, etc. So a person who has a well-developed vital being can see in the vital world with his vital sight, consciously and with the memory of what he has seen. This is what makes a vision.

It is the same for all the subtle worlds—vital, mental, overmental, supramental—and for all the intermediate worlds and planes of the being. In this way one can have visions that are vital, mental, overmental, supramental, etc.

On the other hand, Sri Aurobindo tells us that what is termed a hallucination is the reflection in the mind or the physical senses of that which is beyond our mind and our ordinary senses; it is therefore not a direct vision, but a reflected image which is usually not understood or explained. This character of uncertainty produces an impression of unreality and gives rise to all kinds of superstition. This is also why “serious” people, or people who think themselves serious, do not accord any value to these phenomena and call them hallucinations. And yet, in those who are interested in occult phenomena, this type of perception often precedes the emergence of the capacity of vision which may be in course of formation. But you must guard against mistaking this for true vision. For, I repeat, these phenomena occur most often in a state of almost complete ignorance and 42are too frequently accompanied by much error and wrong interpretation; not to mention the cases of unscrupulous people, who introduce into the account they give of their experiences many details and particulars not actually there, thus justifying the discredit with which these phenomena are received by rational and thoughtful people.

So we shall reserve the word “vision” for experiences that occur in awareness and sincerity. Nevertheless, in both cases, in “hallucination” as well as in vision, what is seen does correspond to something quite real, although it is sometimes much deformed in the transcription.

20 January 1960

16—Do not like so many modern disputants smother thought under polysyllables or charm inquiry to sleep by the spell of formulas and cant words. Search always; find out the reason for things which seem to the hasty glance to be mere chance or illusion.

There are many planes or zones of the mind, from the plane of the physical mind, the lower zone of ordinary thoughts, full of error and ignorance and falsehood, to the plane of the higher mind which receives, in the form of intuitions, the rays of the supramental truth. Between these two extremes there is a gradation of countless intermediate planes that are superimposed one upon another and which influence each other. In one of the lower zones lies the practical reason, the common sense of which man is so proud and which, for ordinary minds, appears to be the expression of wisdom, although it still works wholly in the field of ignorance. To this region of practical reason belong 43the “polysyllables” of which Sri Aurobindo speaks, the commonplaces and clichés, all the ready-made phrases which run about in the mental atmosphere from one brain to another and which people repeat when they want to appear knowledgeable, or when they think themselves wise.

Sri Aurobindo puts us on our guard against this trite and inferior way of thinking when we are faced with a new or unexpected phenomenon and try to explain it. He tells us to search always, untiringly, using our highest intelligence, the intelligence which thirsts to know the true cause of things, and to go on searching without being satisfied by facile and popular explanations, until we have discovered a more subtle and truer truth. Then at the same time we shall find that behind everything, even what seems to be chance and illusion, there is a conscious will at work to express the Supreme Vision.

27 January 1960

17—Someone was laying down that God must be this or that or He would not be God. But it seemed to me that I can only know what God is and I do not see how I can tell Him what He ought to be. For what is the standard by which we can judge Him? These judgments are the follies of our egoism.

After consciously identifying itself with the Divine, the entire being even in its external parts—mental, vital and physical—undergoes the consequences of this identification, and a change occurs which is sometimes even perceptible in the physical appearance. An influence is at work on the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations and even the actions. Sometimes, in all 44its movements, the being has a concrete and constant impression of the Divine Presence and its action through the outer instrument. But one cannot say that the physical mind knows God, for the very way of knowing that is characteristic of the mind is foreign to the Divine; one could even say that it is contrary to it. The physical mind itself can receive the divine influence and be transformed by it, but so long as it remains the physical mind, it can neither understand nor explain God, much less know Him; for to know God one must be identified with Him and for that the physical mind must cease to be what it is now, and consequently cease to be the physical mind.

The capacity to know God can be achieved in the lower triplicity—the mind, the vital and the physical—only with the supramental transformation, and this comes only just before the ultimate realisation which consists in becoming divine.

3 February 1960

18—Chance is not in this universe; the idea of illusion is itself an illusion. There was never illusion yet in the human mind that was not the concealing and disfigurement of a truth.

We live in an illusion; no thoughtful person can deny this. But according to some people, behind the illusion that we see and live there exists nothing; there is nothingness, emptiness. Whereas others tell us that what we see and feel, the life we live, is a deceptive and illusory appearance behind which, beyond which, within which, there is a Reality, an eternal Truth which we do not see in our present state, but which we can experience, if we take the trouble and follow the appropriate methods.

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In this aphorism, by “the idea of illusion”, Sri Aurobindo means the philosophical theory which states that the material world has no real existence: it is merely an appearance created by an aberration of the ego and the senses, and when this aberration disappears the world will disappear at the same time.

Sri Aurobindo affirms, on the contrary, that behind all appearances, even the most illusory, there is a truth, a conscious will that presides over the unfolding of the universe. In this unfolding, each thing, each event, each circumstance is both the result of what has gone before and the cause of what is to follow. Chance and incoherence are only a deceptive appearance as seen by the human consciousness which is too partial and limited to see the truth of things. But this tangible and real truth exists behind all appearances and their illusory incoherence.

What Sri Aurobindo tells us is: The world is real, it is only our perception of it that is false.

10 February 1960

19—When I had the dividing reason, I shrank from many things; after I had lost it in sight, I hunted through the world for the ugly and the repellent, but I could no longer find them.

To understand truly what Sri Aurobindo means here, you must yourself have had the experience of transcending reason and establishing your consciousness in a world higher than the mental intelligence. For from up there you can see, firstly, that everything that exists in the universe is an expression of Sachchidananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss) and therefore behind any appearance whatever, if you go deeply enough, you can perceive Sachchidananda, which is the principle of Supreme Beauty. 46Secondly, you see that everything in the manifested universe is relative, so much so that there is no beauty which may not appear ugly in comparison with a greater beauty, no ugliness which may not appear beautiful in comparison with a yet uglier ugliness.

When you can see and feel in this way, you immediately become aware of the extreme relativity of these impressions and their unreality from the absolute point of view. However, so long as we dwell in the rational consciousness, it is, in a way, natural that everything that offends our aspiration for perfection, our will for progress, everything we seek to transcend and surmount, should seem ugly and repellent to us, since we are in search of a greater ideal and we want to rise higher.

And yet it is still only a half-wisdom which is very far from the true wisdom, a wisdom that appears wise only in the midst of ignorance and unconsciousness.

In the Truth everything is different, and the Divine shines in all things.

17 February 1960

20—God had opened my eyes; for I saw the nobility of the vulgar, the attractiveness of the repellent, the perfection of the maimed and the beauty of the hideous.

This aphorism is the complement and almost an explanation of the previous one.

Once again, Sri Aurobindo tells us clearly that behind the appearances there is a sublime Reality which is, one may say, the luminous opposite of all external deformations. Thus, when the inner eyes are open to this divine Reality, it is seen with such power that it is able to dissolve all that normally veils it to the ordinary vision.

24 February 1960

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21—Forgiveness is praised by the Christian and the Vaishnava, but for me, I ask, “What have I to forgive and whom?”

Sri Aurobindo himself gives us the Divine’s answer: “Forgive whom and what?” The Lord knows that all is Himself and therefore that all actions are His and all things are Himself. To forgive, one must be other than the one who is forgiven and the thing to be forgiven must have been done by someone other than oneself.

The truth is that when you ask forgiveness you hope that the dire consequences of what you have done will be wiped away. But that is possible only if the causes of the error you have committed have themselves disappeared. If you have made a mistake through ignorance, the ignorance must disappear. If you have made a mistake through bad will, the bad will must disappear and be replaced by goodwill. Mere regret will not do, it must be accompanied by a step forward.

For the universe is constantly evolving; nothing is at a standstill. Everything is perpetually changing, moving forward or backward. Things or acts that set us back seem bad to us, and cause confusion and disorder. The only remedy for them is a radical forward movement, a progress. This new orientation alone can annul the consequences of the backward movement.

Therefore it is not a vague and abstract forgiveness that one should ask of the Divine, but the power to make the necessary progress. For only an inner transformation can wipe out the consequences of the act.

2 March 1960

22—God struck me with a human hand; shall I say then, “I pardon Thee thy insolence, O God”?

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23—God gave me good in a blow. Shall I say, “I forgive thee, O Almighty One, the harm and the cruelty, but do it not again”?

These two aphorisms are illustrations of the affirmation of the Divine Presence in all things and all beings, and they also develop the idea which has already been touched on, that there is nothing and no one to forgive, since the Divine is the originator of all things.

This is how this sentence, “God struck me with a human hand”, should be read and understood. If you see nothing but the appearances, it is only one man hitting another. But for one who sees and knows the Truth, it is the supreme Lord who gives the blow through that human hand, and the blow necessarily does good to the one who receives it, that is to say, brings about a progress in his consciousness, for the ultimate aim of creation is to awaken all beings to the consciousness of the Divine.

Once you have understood that, the rest of the two aphorisms is easily explained.

Are we to forgive the Lord for the good He does us, while, at the same time, asking Him not to do it again?

The self-contradiction and stupidity of such a formula are obvious.

9 March 1960

24—When I pine at misfortune and call it evil, or am jealous and disappointed, then I know that there is awake in me again the eternal fool.

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If you act in order to obtain a result and if the result obtained is not the one you expected, you call this a misfortune. As a general rule, any event that is unexpected or feared is considered by ordinary minds to be a misfortune. Why does this misfortune come? In each case the reason is different; or rather, it is only after the event that the need to explain things makes us look for reasons. But most often our evaluation of circumstances is blind and mistaken. We judge in ignorance. It is only later on, sometimes very much later on, when we have the necessary perspective and view the train of events and the overall results, that we see things as they really were. Then we perceive that what seemed bad to us was in truth very useful and helped us to make the necessary progress.

Sri Aurobindo describes the state of one who is sunk in ignorance and desire and who judges everything from the point of view of his narrow and limited ego as that of “eternal fool”. To be able to understand and feel things correctly one must have a universal vision and be conscious of the Divine Presence and Will in all things and in all circumstances.

Then we know that whatever happens to us is always for our good, if we take the point of view of the spirit in the unfolding of time.

16 March 1960

25—When I see others suffer, I feel that I am unfortunate, but the wisdom that is not mine, sees the good that is coming and approves.

It is the supreme wisdom, the wisdom of the Supreme. By this wisdom the present, the past and the future are all seen equally. It knows the causes of all effects and the effects of all causes. The sum total of all circumstances, perceived simultaneously 50in their entirety, is seen by it as Nature’s sublime effort to express the Divine progressively, her ascending march towards divine perfection. That is “the good that is coming”, everything tends towards that; and that is why the true wisdom approves.

For it is only our shortsightedness, our too limited perception and our misguided sensations that, for us, change into suffering what is a possibility and an opportunity for progress.

And this is proved by the fact that as soon as we understand and collaborate, suffering disappears.

23 March 1960

26—Sir Philip Sidney said of the criminal led out to be hanged, “There, but for the grace of God, goes Sir Philip Sidney.” Wiser, had he said, “There, by the grace of God, goes Sir Philip Sidney.”

Sir Philip Sidney was a statesman and a poet, but in spite of his success in life, he retained his humble nature. Seeing a criminal being taken to the gallows, he is supposed to have said the famous words which Sri Aurobindo quotes in his aphorism and which could be paraphrased like this, “That could have happened to me too, but for the Grace of God.” Sri Aurobindo remarks that had Sir Philip Sidney been wiser he would have said, “That could have happened to me too, by the Grace of God.” For the divine Grace is everywhere, always, behind everything and every event, whatever our reaction to that thing or event may be, whether it appears good or bad, catastrophic or beneficial.

And if Sir Philip had been a Yogi, he would have had the experience of human unity and he would have felt concretely that it was himself or a part of himself which was being led to 51the gallows and he would have known at the same time that everything that happens happens by the Grace of the Lord.

30 March 1960

27—God is a great and cruel Torturer because He loves. You do not understand this, because you have not seen and played with Krishna.

Krishna is the immanent Divine, the Divine Presence in everyone and in all things. He is also, sovereignly, the aspect of Delight and Love of the Supreme; he is the smiling tenderness and the playful gaiety; he is at once the player, the play and all his playmates. And as both the game and its results are wholly known, conceived, willed, organised and played consciously in their entirety, there can be room for nothing but the delight of the play. Thus to see Krishna means to find the inner Godhead, to play with Krishna means to be identified with the inner Godhead and to share in his consciousness. When you achieve this state, you enter immediately into the bliss of the divine play; and the more complete the identification, the more perfect the state.

But if some corner of the consciousness keeps the ordinary perception, the ordinary understanding, the ordinary sensation, then you see the suffering of others, you find the play that causes so much suffering very cruel and you conclude that the God who takes pleasure in such a play must be a terrible Torturer; but on the other hand, when you have had the experience of identification with the Divine, you cannot forget the immense, the wonderful love which he puts into his play, and you understand that it is the limitation of our vision that makes us judge in this way, and that far from being a voluntary Torturer, he is 52the great beneficent love that guides the world and men, by the quickest routes, in their progressive march towards perfection, a perfection which, moreover, is always relative and is always being surpassed.

But a day will come when this apparent suffering will no longer be required to stimulate the advance and when progress can be made more and more in harmony and delight.

6 April 1960

28—One called Napoleon a tyrant and imperial cutthroat; but I saw God armed striding through Europe.

At a certain stage of human development, wars are inevitable. In prehistoric times the whole of life was a war; and to the present day human history has been one long history of wars. Wars are the natural result of a state of consciousness dominated by the struggle for life and egoistic aggressiveness. And at the present time, in spite of some human efforts towards peace, there is, as yet, nothing to assure us that war is no longer an inevitable calamity. Indeed, does not a state of war, open or otherwise, exist at this moment in many parts of the world?

Besides, everything that happens on earth necessarily leads to its progress. Thus wars are schools of courage, endurance, fearlessness; they may serve to destroy a past which refuses to disappear although its time is over, and they make room for new things. Wars can, like Kurukshetra,fnIn the Bhagavad Gita, the legendary battle-field where the Pandavas, led by Sri Krishna, and the Kauravas confronted each other. be a way to rid the earth of a domineering or destructive race so that justice and right may reign. They can, through the presence of danger, 53shake the apathy of a too tamasicfnGoverned by tamas, the principle of inertia and obscurity. consciousness and awaken dormant energies. Finally they can, by contrast, and because of the horrors that accompany and follow them, drive men to seek an effective way to make such a barbarous and violent form of transformation unnecessary.

For everything that is unnecessary to the evolution of the earth automatically ceases to exist.

13 April 1960

All will depend on the receptivity of nations. If they open widely and quickly to the influence of the new forces and if they change rapidly enough in their conceptions and actions, war may be avoided. But it is always threatening and always in abeyance; every error, every darkening of the consciousness increases this threat.

And yet in the last analysis everything really depends on the Divine Grace and we should look towards the future with confidence and serenity, at the same time progressing as fast as we can.

15 April 1960

29—I have forgotten what vice is and what virtue; I can only see God, His play in the world and His will in humanity.

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In the universe and more particularly upon earth everything is part of the divine plan executed by Nature and everything is necessary for its fulfilment. Personal will is one of Nature’s means of action and indispensable for her working. So personal will is in a way part of God’s will.

However, to understand properly, we must first agree on the meaning that is given to the word “will”.

Will, as it is usually conceived, is the elaboration of a thought, to which is added a force, a power of fulfilment accompanied by an impulse to carry it out. That is the description of human will. Divine will is quite another thing. It is a vision united with a power of realisation. Divine will is omniscient and omnipotent, it is irresistible and immediate in its execution.

Human will is uncertain, often wavering, always in conflict with opposing wills. It is effective only when for some reason or other it is in accord with the will of Nature—itself a transcription of the divine will—or with the divine will itself, as a result of Grace or Yoga.

So one can say that personal will is one of the means that God uses to bring us back to Him.

20 April 1960

30—I saw a child wallowing in the dirt and the same child cleaned by his mother and resplendent, but each time I trembled before his utter purity.

In theory, it is not impossible, and some people born away from cities, civilisations and cultures may maintain throughout the 55life of their earthly body this spontaneous purity, a purity of the soul that is not obscured by the mind’s working.

For the purity of which Sri Aurobindo speaks here is the purity of instinct, that obeys Nature’s impulses spontaneously, never calculating, never questioning, never asking whether it is good or bad, whether what one does is right or wrong, whether it is a virtue or a sin, whether the outcome will be favourable or unfavourable. All these notions come into play when the mental ego makes its appearance and begins to take a dominant position in the consciousness and to veil the spontaneity of the soul.

In modern “civilised” life, parents and teachers, by their practical and rational “good advice”, lose no time in covering up this spontaneity which they call unconsciousness, and substituting for it a very small, very narrow, limited mental ego, withdrawn into itself, crammed with notions of misbehaviour and sin and punishment or of personal interest, calculation and profit; all of which has the inevitable result of increasing vital desires through repression, fear or self-justification.

And yet for the sake of completeness it should be added that because man is a mental being, he must necessarily in the course of his evolution leave behind this unconscious and spontaneous purity, which is very similar to the purity of the animal, and after passing through an unavoidable period of mental perversion and impurity, rise beyond the mind into the higher and luminous purity of the divine consciousness.

27 April 1960

31—What I wished or thought to be the right thing does not come about; therefore it is clear that there is no All-Wise one who guides the world but only blind Chance or a brute Causality.

Despair is never a necessity for progress, it is always a sign of weakness and tamas; it often indicates the presence of an adverse force, that is to say, a force that is purposely acting against sadhana.fnThe practice of Yoga.

So, in all circumstances of life you must always be very careful to guard against despair. Besides, this habit of being sombre, morose, of despairing, does not truly depend on events, but on a lack of faith in the nature. One who has faith, even if only in himself, can face all difficulties, all circumstances, even the most adverse, without discouragement or despair. He fights like a man to the end. Natures that lack faith also lack endurance and courage.

Sri Aurobindo tells us that for human beings the degree of success in physical life depends on the degree of harmony between the individual and universal physical Nature. Some people have a will which is spontaneously in tune with the will of Nature, and they succeed in everything they undertake; others, on the contrary, have a will which is more or less totally out of tune with the will of cosmic Nature and they fail in everything they do or try to do.

As for the question of what is necessary for progress, in an evolving world everything is necessarily a help to progress; but individual progress extends over a considerable number of lives and through innumerable experiences. It cannot be judged on the basis of a single life between birth and death. On the whole, it is certain that the experience of a life of failure and defeat is just as useful to the soul’s growth as the experience of a life of success and victory; even more so, no doubt, than the experience of an uneventful life, as human existence usually is, in which success and failure, satisfaction and disappointment, pleasure and pain mingle and follow one another—a life that 57seems “natural” and does not require any great effort.

4 May 1960

32—The Atheist is God playing at hide and seek with Himself; but is the Theist any other? Well, perhaps; for he has seen the shadow of God and clutched at it.

In the game of hide and seek, one person hides and the other seeks. So God hides from the atheist who says, “God? I do not see him, I do not know where he is; therefore he does not exist.” But the atheist does not know that God is also in him; and therefore it is God who is denying his own existence. Isn’t that a game? And yet a day will come when he will be brought face to face with himself and will be obliged to recognise that he exists.

The believer thinks himself very superior to the atheist, but all that he has been able to seize of God is His shadow and he clings to this shadow imagining that it is God himself. For if he truly knew God, he would know that God is all things and in everything; then he would cease to think himself superior to anybody.

11 May 1960

33—O Thou that lovest, strike! If Thou strike me not now, I shall know that Thou lovest me not.

All who aspire for the divine perfection know that the blows which the Lord deals us in His infinite love and grace are the surest and quickest way to make us progress. And the harder the blows the more they feel the greatness of the divine Love.

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Ordinary men, on the contrary, always ask God to give them an easy, pleasant and successful life. In every personal satisfaction they see a sign of divine mercy; but if on the contrary they meet with unhappiness and misfortune in life, they complain and say to God, “You do not love me.”

In opposition to this crude and ignorant attitude, Sri Aurobindo says to the divine Beloved, “Strike, strike hard, let me feel the intensity of Thy love for me.”

18 May 1960

34—O Misfortune, blessed be thou; for through thee I have seen the face of my Lover.

Obviously, far from being a misfortune, it is a blessing. And this is precisely what Sri Aurobindo means.

When things happen which are not what we expect, what we hope for, what we want, which are contrary to our desires, in our ignorance we call them misfortunes and lament. But if we were to become a little wiser and observe the deeper consequences of these very same events, we would find that they are leading us rapidly towards the Divine, the Beloved; whereas easy and pleasant circumstances encourage us to dally on the path, to stop along the way to pluck the flowers of pleasure which present themselves to us and which we are too weak or not sincere enough to reject resolutely, so that our march forward is not delayed.

One must already be very strong, very far along the way, to be able to face success and the little enjoyments it brings without giving way. Those who can do this, those who are strong, do not run after success; they do not seek it, and accept it with indifference. For they know and appreciate the value of the 59lashes given by unhappiness and misfortune.

But ultimately the true attitude, the sign and proof that we are near the goal, is a perfect equality which enables us to accept success and failure, fortune and misfortune, happiness and sorrow with the same tranquil joy; for all these things become marvellous gifts that the Lord in his infinite solicitude showers upon us.

25 May 1960

35—Men are still in love with grief; when they see one who is too high for grief or joy, they curse him and cry, “O thou insensible!” Therefore Christ still hangs on the cross in Jerusalem.

36—Men are in love with sin; when they see one who is too high for vice or virtue, they curse him and cry, “O thou breaker of bonds, thou wicked and immoral one!” Therefore Sri Krishna does not live as yet in Brindavan.fnThe village where Sri Krishna spent his childhood, and where he danced with Radha and the other Gopis.

When Christ came upon earth, he brought a message of brotherhood, love and peace. But he had to die in pain, on the cross, so that his message might be heard. For men cherish suffering and hatred and want their God to suffer with them. They wanted this when Christ came and, in spite of his teaching and sacrifice, they still want it; and they are so attached to their pain that, symbolically, Christ is still bound to his cross, suffering perpetually for the salvation of men.

As for Krishna, he came upon earth to bring freedom and delight. He came to announce to men, enslaved to Nature, to 60their passions and errors, that if they took refuge in the Supreme Lord they would be free from all bondage and sin. But men are very attached to their vices and virtues (for without vice there would be no virtue); they are in love with their sins and cannot tolerate anyone being free and above all error.

That is why Krishna, although immortal, is not present at Brindavan in a body at this moment.

3 June 1960

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37—Some say Krishna never lived, he is a myth. They mean on earth; for if Brindavan existed nowhere, the BhagavatfnThe story of Krishna, as related in the Bhagavat Purana. could not have been written.

The whole earth and everything it contains is a kind of concentration, a condensation of something which exists in other worlds invisible to the material eye. Each thing manifested here has its principle, idea or essence somewhere in the subtler regions. This is an indispensable condition for the manifestation. And the importance of the manifestation will always depend on the origin of the thing manifested.

In the world of the gods there is an ideal and harmonious Brindavan of which the earthly Brindavan is but a deformation and a caricature.

Those who are developed inwardly, either in their senses or in their minds, perceive these realities which are invisible (to the ordinary man) and receive their inspiration from them.

So the writer or writers of the Bhagavat were certainly in contact with a whole inner world that is well and truly real and existent, where they saw and experienced everything they have described or revealed.

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Whether Krishna existed or not in a human form, living on earth, is only of very secondary importance (except perhaps from an exclusively historical point of view), for Krishna is a real, living and active being; and his influence has been one of the great factors in the progress and transformation of the earth.

8 June 1960

38—Strange! The Germans have disproved the existence of Christ; yet his crucifixion remains still a greater historic fact than the death of Caesar.

In the Essays on the Gita Sri Aurobindo mentions the names of three Avatars, and Christ is one of them. An Avatar is an emanation of the Supreme Lord who assumes a human body on earth. I heard Sri Aurobindo himself say that Christ was an emanation of the Lord’s aspect of love.

The death of Caesar marked a decisive change in the history of Rome and the countries dependent on her. It was therefore an important event in the history of Europe.

But the death of Christ was the starting-point of a new stage in the evolution of human civilisation. This is why Sri Aurobindo tells us that the death of Christ was of greater historical significance, that is to say, it has had greater historical consequences than the death of Caesar. The story of Christ, as it has been told, is the concrete and dramatic enactment of the divine sacrifice: the Supreme Lord, who is All-Light, All-Knowledge, All-Power, All-Beauty, All-Love, All-Bliss, accepting to assume human ignorance and suffering in matter, in order to help men to emerge from the falsehood in which they live and because of which they die.

16 June 1960

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39—Sometimes one is led to think that only those things really matter which have never happened; for beside them most historic achievements seem almost pale and ineffective.

Sri Aurobindo, who had made a thorough study of history, knew how uncertain are the data which have been used to write it. Most often the accuracy of the documents is doubtful, and the information they supply is poor, incomplete, trivial and frequently distorted. As a whole, the official version of human history is nothing but a long, almost unbroken record of violent aggressions: wars, revolutions, murders or colonisations. True, some of these aggressions and massacres have been adorned with flattering terms and epithets; they have been called religious wars, holy wars, civilising campaigns; but they nonetheless remain acts of greed or vengeance.

Rarely in history do we find the description of a cultural, artistic or philosophical outflowering.

That is why, as Sri Aurobindo says, all this makes a rather dismal picture without any deep significance. On the other hand, in the legendary accounts of things which may never have existed on earth, of events which have not been declared authentic by “official” knowledge, of wonderful individuals whose existence is doubted by the scholars in their dried-up wisdom, we find the crystallisation of all the hopes and aspirations of man, his love of the marvellous, the heroic and the sublime, the description of everything he would like to be and strives to become.

That, more or less, is what Sri Aurobindo means in his aphorism.

22 June 1960

40—There are four very great events in history, the siege 63of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindavan and the colloquy with Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in BrindavanfnThe child Krishna had to take refuge at Brindavan in order to escape his uncle Kansa, the tyrant king of Mathura. created devotional religion (for before there was only meditation and worship), Christ from his cross humanised Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity. Yet it is said that none of these four events ever happened.

(1) In ancient times, as in our own day, each religion had its own particular kind of meditation and worship. And yet everywhere, always, meditation is a special mode of mental activity and concentration, only the details of the practice vary. Worship is a series of ceremonies and rites that are scrupulously and exactly performed in honour of a deity.

Here Sri Aurobindo refers to the worship and meditation of ancient India, in Vedic and Vedantic times.

(2) The colloquy at Kurukshetra is the Bhagavad Gita.

Sri Aurobindo considers the message of the Gita to be the basis of the great spiritual movement which has led and will lead humanity more and more to its liberation, that is to say, to its escape from falsehood and ignorance, towards the truth.

From the time of its first appearance, the Gita has had an immense spiritual action; but with the new interpretation that Sri Aurobindo has given to it, its influence has increased considerably and has become decisive.

29 June 1960

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41—They say that the gospels are forgeries and Krishna a creation of the poets. Thank God then for the forgeries and bow down before the inventors.

The Gospels were the starting-point of the Christian religion. To say what they have brought to the world it would be necessary to give a historical and psychological account of the development of the life of Christianity and the action of the Christian religion upon earth. That would take a long time and be somewhat out of place here.

I can only say that the writers of the Gospels have tried to reproduce exactly what Christ taught and that they have in a certain measure succeeded in transmitting his message. It is a message of peace, brotherhood and love.

But it is better to keep silent about what men have done with this message.

6 July 1960

42—If God assigns to me my place in Hell, I do not know why I should aspire to Heaven. He knows best what is for my welfare.

Heaven and Hell are at once real and unreal. They both exist and do not exist.

Human thought is creative; it gives more or less lasting forms to mental, vital and even subtle physical substance. These forms are appearances rather than realities; but for those whose thoughts they are, and still more for those who believe in them, they have a concrete enough existence to give them an illusion of reality. Thus, for the believers of religions which assert the 65existence of a hell, a paradise, or various heavens, these places do exist objectively, and when they die they can go there for a longer or shorter period. But still these things are only impermanent mental formations; they carry no eternal truth in themselves.

I have seen the heavens and hells where some people have gone after death, and it is very difficult to make them understand that there is no truth in them. Once it took me more than a year to convince someone that his so-called hell was not hell and to get him out of it.

The hell which Sri Aurobindo speaks of here is more a state of consciousness than a place, it is a psychological condition that one creates for oneself.

Just as you can carry within you a heaven of blissful communion with the Divine, you can, if you do not take care to master the asuricfnOf the Asuras, hostile beings of the mentalised vital plane. tendencies in your nature, also carry in your consciousness a hell of misery and desolation.

There are moments in life when everything around you, people and circumstances, is so obscure, so adverse, so ugly that all hope of a higher realisation seems to vanish. The world seems irremediably doomed to a night of cruel hatred, unconscious and obstinate ignorance and intractable bad will. Then one may say with Sri Aurobindo, “God has assigned to me a place in hell”; and, with him too, in all circumstances, however terrible they may seem, one should dwell in the peaceful joy of total surrender to the Divine and say to the Lord in all sincerity, “Let Thy will be done.”

13 July 1960

43—If God draw me towards Heaven, then, even if His other hand strive to keep me in Hell, yet must I struggle upwards.

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God knows perfectly well what He wants for us. He wants to bring us all back to Him in a perfect union. The goal is one, the same for all; but the means, the methods and the procedures for reaching it are innumerable. There are just as many as there are beings on earth; and each one of these means is an exact expression of the will of the Supreme Lord, who, in his integral vision and perfect wisdom, does what is needful for each person.

So if someone needs a contradiction, an inner opposition to intensify his aspiration and effort, the Lord, in His infinite Grace, even while drawing this being upward and giving him the power to rise, will at the same time hold him down to create in him the resistance needed to intensify his aspiration and effort.

And if, like Sri Aurobindo, you can see that both movements have the same divine origin, then, instead of lamenting and being alarmed, you rejoice and keep a firm and luminous faith.

19 July 1960

44—Only those thoughts are true the opposite of which is also true in its own time and application; indisputable dogmas are the most dangerous kind of falsehoods.

The absolute, infinite, eternal Truth is unthinkable for the mind, which can conceive only what is spatial, temporal, fragmentary and limited.

Thus, on the mental plane the absolute Truth is divided into innumerable fragmentary and contradictory truths which, in their entirety, strive to reproduce, insofar as possible, the original Truth.

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If one element of this totality is taken separately and affirmed as the only true one, however central or comprehensive it may be, it necessarily becomes a falsehood, since it denies all the rest of the Total Truth.

This is precisely how indisputable dogmas are created and this is why they are the most dangerous kind of falsehood—because each one asserts that it is the sole truth to the exclusion of all other truths which, in their innumerable and complementary totality, express progressively, in the becoming, the infinite, eternal, absolute Truth.

27 August 1960

45—Logic is the worst enemy of Truth, as self-righteousness is the worst enemy of virtue; for the one cannot see its own errors nor the other its own imperfections.

The best answer I can give to your question is this quotation from The Synthesis of Yoga: “The characteristic power of the reason in its fullness is a logical movement assuring itself first of all available materials and data by observation and arrangement, then acting upon them for a resultant knowledge gained, assured and enlarged by a first use of the reflective powers, and lastly assuring itself of the correctness of its results by a more careful and formal action, more vigilant, deliberate, severely logical which tests, rejects or confirms them according to certain secure standards and processes developed by reflection and experience. The first business of the logical reason is therefore a right, careful and complete observation of its available material and data.”fnThe Synthesis of Yoga, Cent. Vol. 21, p. 820.

But in this aphorism Sri Aurobindo does not speak of reason. He speaks of logic, which is the partner and instrument of reason.

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Logic is the art of correctly deducing one idea from another and inferring from a fact all its consequences. But logic does not itself possess the capacity to discern the truth. So your logic may be indisputable, but if your starting-point is wrong, your conclusions will also be wrong, in spite of the correctness of your logic, or rather, because of it. The same holds true for self-righteousness, which is a feeling of virtuous superiority. Your virtue makes you disdainful of others, and this pride—which fills you with disdain for those who, according to you, are less virtuous than you are—makes your virtue completely worthless.

That is why Sri Aurobindo tells us in his aphorism that logic is the worst enemy of Truth, just as the feeling of virtuous superiority is the worst enemy of virtue.

24 August 1960

46—When I was asleep in the Ignorance, I came to a place of meditation full of holy men and I found their company wearisome and the place a prison; when I awoke, God took me to a prison and turned it into a place of meditation and His trysting-ground.

Yes. Sri Aurobindo is referring here to his experience in Alipore jail.

But what is interesting in this aphorism is the contrast he points out between the material prison where only his body was confined, while his spirit, unfettered by social conventions and prejudice, free from all preconceived ideas and all doctrinaire limitations, had a direct and conscious contact with the Divine and a first revelation of the integral Yoga; and, on the other hand, the mental prison of narrow rules which excludes life 69and within which people often confine themselves when they renounce ordinary existence in order to devote themselves to a spiritual life based on traditional dogmatic ideas.

So Sri Aurobindo is here, as always, the champion of the real freedom beyond all rules and limitations, the total freedom of perfect union with the supreme and eternal Truth.

24 October 1960

47—When I read a wearisome book through and with pleasure, yet perceived all the perfection of its wearisomeness, then I knew that my mind was conquered.

It is possible when your pleasure no longer depends on what you do or what happens to you, when your pleasure is the spontaneous outward expression of the unchanging joy which you carry within yourself with the Divine Presence. Then it is a constant state of consciousness in all activities and in all circumstances. And, as of all wearisome things one of the most wearisome is a wearisome book, Sri Aurobindo gives us this example as an irrefutable proof of the conquest and transformation of the mind.

10 November 1960

48—I knew my mind to be conquered when it admired the beauty of the hideous, yet felt perfectly why other men shrank back or hated.

It is always the same realisation presented from different angles, expressed through various experiences: the realisation that 70everything is a manifestation of the Supreme, the Eternal, the Infinite, immutable in his total perfection and in his absolute reality. That is why, by conquering our mind and its ignorant and false perceptions we can, through all things, enter into contact with this Supreme Truth which is also the Supreme Beauty and the Supreme Love, beyond all our mental and vital notions of beauty and ugliness, the good and the bad.

Even when we say “Supreme Truth, Supreme Beauty, Supreme Love”, we should give to these words a meaning other than the one which is attributed to them by our intellect. It is to emphasise this fact that Sri Aurobindo writes, paradoxically, “the beauty of the hideous”.

14 November 1960

I meant that we cannot conceive the Divine intellectually. It is only when we leave the mental world and enter into the spiritual world, and, instead of thinking things, we live them and become them, that we can truly understand them. But even then, when we want to express our experience we have only those words that express our mental experiences, and in spite of all our efforts these words are inapt to convey what we want to express.

That is why Sri Aurobindo so often uses paradoxes to lift the mind out of the rut of ordinary thinking and, behind the apparent absurdity of what is said, to make us see the light of what is felt and perceived.

26 November 1960

49—To feel and love the God of beauty and good in the ugly and the evil, and still yearn in utter love to heal it of its ugliness and its evil, this is real virtue and morality.

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How can one help to cure evil and ugliness?… One may say that there is a kind of hierarchy of collaboration or action: there is a negative help and a positive help.

To begin with, there is a way that might be called negative, the way provided by Buddhism and kindred religions: not to see. First of all, to be in such a state of purity and beauty that you do not perceive ugliness and evil—it is like something that does not touch you because it does not exist in you.

That is the perfection of the negative method. It is quite elementary: never to notice evil, never to speak of the evil in others, not to perpetuate these vibrations by observation, by criticism, by insistence on what is bad. That is what the Buddha taught: each time you speak of an evil, you help to spread it.

This barely touches the problem.

Yet it should be a very general rule. But people who criticise have an answer for that; they say, “If you do not see the evil, you will never be able to cure it. If you leave someone in his ugliness, he will never get out of it.” This is not true, but that is how they justify their behaviour. So in this aphorism Sri Aurobindo forestalls these objections: it is not because of ignorance or unconsciousness or indifference that you do not see the evil—you are quite capable of seeing it, even of feeling it, but you refuse to help to spread it by giving it the force of your attention and the support of your consciousness. And for that you must yourself be above this perception and feeling; you must be able to see the evil or the ugliness without suffering from it, without being shocked or disturbed by it. You see it from a height where these things do not exist, but you have the conscious perception 72of it, you are not affected by it, you are free. This is the first step.

The second step is to be positively conscious of the supreme Good and supreme Beauty behind all things, which sustains all things and enables them to exist. When you see Him, you are able to perceive Him behind this mask and this distortion; even this ugliness, this wickedness, this evil is a disguise of Something which is essentially beautiful or good, luminous, pure.

Then comes the true collaboration, for when you have this vision, this perception, when you live in this consciousness, it also gives you the power to draw That down into the manifestation, to the earth, and to bring It into contact with what now distorts and disguises, so that little by little this distortion and this disguise are transformed by the influence of the Truth that is behind.

Here we are at the very summit of the scale of collaboration.

In this way it is not necessary to introduce the principle of love into the explanation. But if you want to know or understand the nature of the Force or the Power that enables or brings about this transformation—particularly where evil is concerned, but also with ugliness to a certain extent—you see that love is obviously the most potent and integral of all powers—integral in the sense that it applies in all cases. It is even more powerful than the power of purification which dissolves all bad will and which is, as it were, the master of the adverse forces, but which has not the direct power of transformation. The power of purification first dissolves in order to allow the transformation afterwards. It destroys one form in order to be able to create a better one, whereas love need not dissolve in order to transform; it possesses the direct power of transformation. Love is like a flame that changes what is hard into something malleable and even sublimates this malleable thing into a kind of purified vapour—it does not destroy, it transforms.

In its essence, in its origin, love is like a flame, a white flame which overcomes all resistances. You can experience this yourself: whatever the difficulty in your being, whatever 73the burden of accumulated error, ignorance, incapacity and bad will, a single second of this pure, essential, supreme love dissolves it as in an all-powerful flame; a single moment and a whole past can disappear; a single instant in which you touch it in its essence and a whole burden is consumed.

And it is very easy to explain how a person who has this experience can spread it, can act on others; because to have the experience you must touch the one, supreme Essence of the whole manifestation, the Origin and the Essence, the Source and the Reality of all that is; and at once you enter the realm of Unity—there is no longer any separation of individuals, there is only one single vibration that can be repeated indefinitely in external form.fnLater the disciple asked Mother: “Is it one single vibration which can be repeated indefinitely or which is repeated indefinitely?” Mother answered: “I meant several things at the same time. This single vibration is static everywhere, but when one realises it consciously, one has the power of making it active wherever one directs it; that is to say, one doesn’t move anything, but the stress of the consciousness makes it active wherever one directs one’s consciousness.”

If you rise high enough, you find yourself at the heart of all things. And what is manifest in this heart can manifest in all things. That is the great secret, the secret of the divine incarnation in an individual form, because in the normal course of things what manifests at the centre is realised in the external form only with the awakening and the response of the will in the individual form. Whereas if the central Will is represented constantly and permanently in an individual being, this individual being can serve as an intermediary between this Will and all beings, and will for them. Everything this individual being perceives and offers in his consciousness to the supreme Will is answered as if it came from each individual being. And if for any reason the individual elements have a more or less conscious and voluntary relation with that representative being, their relation increases the efficacy, the effectiveness of the representative individual; and thus the supreme Action can act 74in Matter in a much more concrete and permanent manner. That is the reason for these descents of consciousness—which we may describe as “polarised”, for they always come to earth with a definite purpose and for a special realisation, with a mission—a mission which is decided upon, determined before the incarnation. These are the great stages of the supreme incarnations on earth.

And when the day comes for the manifestation of supreme love, for the crystallised, concentrated descent of supreme love, that will truly be the hour of transformation. For nothing will be able to resist That.

But since it is all-powerful, some receptivity must be prepared on earth so that the effects are not shattering. Sri Aurobindo has explained this in one of his letters. Someone asked him, “Why does it not come immediately?” He answered something like this: if divine love were to manifest in its essence upon earth, it would be like a bombshell; because the earth is neither supple nor receptive enough to be able to widen itself to the dimensions of this love. It not only needs to open, but to widen itself and to become more supple—Matter is still too rigid. And even the substance of the physical consciousness—not only the most material Matter, but the substance of the physical consciousness—is too rigid.

January 1961

50—To hate the sinner is the worst sin, for it is hating God; yet he who commits it glories in his superior virtue.

There is not a single sin that is not our sin.… You have this experience when for some reason or other—depending on the case—you come into contact with the universal state of consciousness—not in its limitless essence, but on any level of Matter. There is an atomic consciousness; there is a purely material consciousness; and there is, even more, a general psychological consciousness. When by going within, by a kind of withdrawal from the ego, you come into contact with this zone of consciousness, let us say, a terrestrial or collective human psychological zone—there is a difference, “collective human” is restrictive, whereas “terrestrial” includes many animal movements, even plant movements; but as in the present case the moral notion of guilt, sin, evil belongs exclusively to the human consciousness, we will say simply the collective human psychological consciousness—when you come into contact with that through this identification, naturally you feel or see or know that you are capable of any human movement anywhere. It is to some extent a truth-consciousness—this egoistic sense of what belongs and does not belong to you, of what you can do and cannot do, disappears at that time; you become aware that the fundamental structure of the human consciousness is such that any human being is capable of doing anything at all. And since you are in a truth-consciousness, at the same time you have the feeling that judgments or aversions, or rejection, are absurd. Everything is potentially there. And if certain currents of force—which you usually cannot trace; you see them come and go, but as a rule their origin and direction are unknown—if any one of these currents enters into you, it can make you do anything.

If you could always remain in this state of consciousness, after some time—provided you maintained within you the flame 76of Agni, the flame of purification and progress—you would be able not only to prevent these movements from taking an active form in you and expressing themselves materially, but also to act on the very nature of the movement and transform it. But, of course, unless you have attained a very high degree of realisation, it will be practically impossible to maintain this state of consciousness for long. Almost immediately you fall back into the egoistic consciousness of the separate self. And then all the difficulties come back: the disgust, the revolt against certain things, the horror they arouse in you, etc.

It is probable—it is even certain—that until you are yourself completely transformed, these movements of disgust and revolt are needed so that you can do in yourself what has to be done to shut the door. For after all, the problem is not to allow them to manifest themselves.

In another aphorism Sri Aurobindo says—I no longer remember his exact words—that sin is merely something which is not in its right place. In this perpetual Becoming nothing ever repeats itself, and there are things that disappear, so to speak, into the past; and when their disappearance becomes necessary these things become, for our very limited consciousness, bad and repulsive. And we revolt against them because their time is over. But if we had the overall view, if we could contain within ourselves the past, the present and the future all at once—as it is somewhere above—we would see the relativity of these things and that it is above all the progressive Force of evolution that gives us the will to reject; and that wherever they are in their right place, they are quite acceptable. Only, it is practically impossible to have this experience unless you have the total vision, that is to say, the vision that belongs to the Supreme alone! Therefore you must first of all identify yourself with the Supreme; then, afterwards, with this identification, you can return to a sufficiently exteriorised consciousness and see things as they are. But that is the principle, and to the extent that you are capable of realising it, you reach a state of consciousness where you can 77look at everything with a smile of total certitude that everything is as it should be.

Naturally, people who do not think deeply enough will say, “Ah, but if we saw that everything is as it should be, nothing would move!” No, you cannot prevent things from moving! Even for a fraction of a second they do not stop moving. It is a continuous, total transformation, a movement that never ceases. And because it is difficult for us to feel like this, it is possible for us to imagine that if we were to enter into certain states of consciousness, things would not change. But even if we were to enter into an apparently total inertia, things would continue to change and so would we!

Basically, disgust, revolt, anger, all these movements of violence are necessarily movements of ignorance and limitation, with all the weakness that limitation represents. Revolt is a weakness—it is the feeling of an impotent will. You will—or you think you will—you feel, you see that things are not as they should be and you revolt against whatever does not agree with what you see. But if you were all-powerful, if your will and your vision were all-powerful, there would be no occasion for you to revolt, you would always see that all things are as they should be. If we go to the highest level and unite with the consciousness of the supreme Will, we see, at every second, at every moment of the universe, that all is exactly as it should be, exactly as the Supreme wills it. That is omnipotence. And all movements of violence become not only unnecessary but utterly ridiculous.

Therefore there is only one solution: to unite ourselves by aspiration, concentration, interiorisation and identification with the supreme Will. And that is both omnipotence and perfect freedom at the same time. And that is the only omnipotence and the only freedom; everything else is an approximation. You may be on the way, but it is not the entire thing. So if you experience this, you realise that with this supreme freedom and supreme power there is also a total peace and a serenity that never fails. Therefore, if you feel something which is not that, a revolt, a 78disgust, something which you cannot accept, it means that in you there is a part which has not been touched by the transformation, something which has kept the old consciousness, something which is still on the path—that is all.

It is the same problem seen from another angle. But the solution is the same.

But in reality, what you hate in them is their complacency, it is only that. Because after all they are right not to do evil—you cannot blame them for that! But because of that they think themselves superior. And that is what is so difficult to tolerate: their feeling of superiority, the way in which they look down from their heights on all these poor devils—who are no worse than they are!

Oh, I have seen such marvellous examples of this!

Take, for example, a person who has friends, whose friends are very fond of her because they see special capacities in her, because it is pleasant to be in her company, one can always learn from her. Then all of a sudden, by a concurrence of circumstances, this person is shunned by society because she has been with another man or because she is living with someone else without being officially married, in short, because of all these social things which have no value in themselves. And all her friends—I am not speaking of those who truly loved her—all her acquaintances, all those who received her kindly, who welcomed her and greeted her with a warm smile when 79they met her in the street, now turn their heads the other way and walk right past her without a glance—this has happened even here in the Ashram! I do not want to give any details, but anyway, several times something happened which contravened accepted social laws, and people who had shown so much affection and sympathy—oh, they would sometimes say, “This person is lost!”

When such things happen in the world at large, I find it quite natural, but when it happens here, I always get a little shock, in the sense that I say to myself: “Well, well, they haven’t gone beyond that!”

Even people who profess to be broad-minded, to be above all these “conventions”, fall straight into the trap, immediately. Then to protect their conscience, they say: “Mother does not allow it. Mother does not permit it. Mother does not tolerate it!”—adding one more stupidity to all the others.

It is very difficult to get out of this state. This is truly self-righteousness, this sense of social dignity. But it is narrow-mindedness, because a person with a little intelligence is not going to be caught out by something like that. For example, people who have travelled the world and seen that all these social rules depend entirely on climate, race, custom, and even more on time and period, can smile at all that. But right-minded people—phew!

It is an elementary stage. Until you come out of this state you are unfit for yoga. Because, truly, you are not ready for yoga when you are in that state. It is a rudimentary state.

January 1961

51—When I hear of a righteous wrath, I wonder at man’s capacity for self-deception.

I feel like asking you a question myself! Because your question can be understood in two ways. One can take it in the same spirit of irony and humour that Sri Aurobindo has put in his aphorism, when he marvels at man’s capacity for self-deception. That is to say, you are putting yourself in the place of someone who is deceiving himself and you say, “But I am acting in good faith! I always want the good of others, etc.—the welfare of humanity, to serve the Divine, that goes without saying! And how can I be deceiving myself?”

But actually there are two ways of deceiving oneself, which are very different. For example, you may very well be shocked by certain things, not for personal reasons, but precisely in your goodwill and eagerness to serve the Divine, when you see people behaving badly, being selfish, unfaithful and treacherous. There is a stage where you have overcome these things and no longer allow them to manifest in yourself, but to the extent that you are linked to the ordinary consciousness, the ordinary point of view, the ordinary life, the ordinary way of thinking, they are still possible, they exist latently because they are the reverse of the qualities that you are striving to attain. And this opposition still exists—until you rise above it and no longer have either the quality or the defect. So long as you have the virtue, its opposite is always latent in you; it is only when you are above both the virtue and the defect that it disappears.

So this kind of indignation that you feel comes from the fact that you are not altogether above it; you are at the stage where you thoroughly disapprove and could not do it yourself. Up to that point there is nothing to say, unless you give a violent outer expression to your indignation. If anger intervenes, it is because there is a complete contradiction between the feeling you want 81to have and how you react to others. Because anger is a deformation of the vital power, an obscure and wholly unregenerated vital, a vital that is still subject to all the ordinary actions and reactions. When this vital power is used by an ignorant and egoistic individual will and this will meets with opposition from other individual wills around it, this power, under the pressure of opposition, changes into anger and tries to obtain by violence what cannot be achieved solely by the pressure of the force itself.

Besides, anger, like every other kind of violence, is always a sign of weakness, impotence and incapacity.

And here self-deception comes solely from the approval given to it or the flattering epithet attached to it—because anger can only be something blind, ignorant and asuric, that is to say, contrary to the light.

But this is still the best case.

There is another one. There are people who without knowing it—or because they want to ignore it—always follow their personal interest, their preferences, their attachments, their conceptions; people who are not wholly consecrated to the Divine and who make use of moral and yogic ideas to conceal their personal impulses. But these people are deceiving themselves doubly; not only do they deceive themselves in their external activities, in their relation with others, but they also deceive themselves in their own personal movement; instead of serving the Divine, they serve their own egoism. And this happens constantly, constantly! They serve their own personality, their own egoism, while pretending to serve God. Then it is no longer even self-deception, it is hypocrisy.

This mental habit of always endowing everything with a very favourable appearance, of giving a favourable explanation to all movements—sometimes it is rather subtle, but sometimes it is so crude that nobody is deceived except oneself. It is a habit of excusing oneself, the habit of giving a favourable mental excuse, a favourable mental explanation to everything one does, to everything one says, to everything one feels. For example, 82those who have no self-control and slap someone’s face in great indignation would call that an almost divine wrath!

It is amazing, amazing—this power of self-deception, the mind’s skill in finding an admirable justification for any ignorance, any stupidity whatsoever.

This is not an experience that comes only now and then. It is something which you can observe from minute to minute. And you usually see it much more easily in others! But if you look at yourself closely, you catch yourself a thousand times a day, looking at yourself just a little indulgently: “Oh! But it is not the same thing.” Besides, it is never the same for you as it is for your neighbour!

January 1961

52—This is a miracle that men can love God, yet fail to love humanity. With whom are they in love then?

It depends on what you mean by philanthropy. Normally, we call philanthropists those who do charitable works.

Here Sri Aurobindo does not use the word philanthropy, for, as it is usually understood, philanthropy is a social and conventional attitude, a kind of magnified egoism which is not love but a condescending pity which assumes a patronising air.

In this aphorism Sri Aurobindo refers to those who follow the ascetic path in solitary search of a solitary God, by trying to cut themselves off completely from the world and men.

But for Sri Aurobindo men form part of the Divine; and if you truly love the Divine, how can you not love men, since they are an aspect of Himself?

18 January 1961

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53—The quarrels of religious sects are like the disputing of pots, which shall be alone allowed to hold the immortalising nectar. Let them dispute, but the thing for us is to get at the nectar in whatever pot and attain immortality.

54—You say that the flavour of the pot alters the liquor. That is taste; but what can deprive it of its immortalising faculty?

The immortalising nectar is the supreme Truth, the supreme Knowledge, the Union with the Supreme which gives the consciousness of immortality.

Each religious sect has its own way of approaching the Divine and this is why Sri Aurobindo compares them to different pots. But he says: No matter which path you follow, the goal alone is important, and the goal is the same whatever the path you follow. The nectar is the same in whichever pot it is contained.

Some say that the flavour of the pot, the path you follow changes the taste of the nectar, that is to say, affects your union with the Divine. Sri Aurobindo answers: The approach may be different, each one chooses the one he prefers or which most suits his taste, but the nectar itself, the union with the Divine, always keeps its power of immortality.

Now when we say that by union with the Divine we gain the consciousness of immortality, it means that the consciousness in us unites with what is immortal and therefore feels itself to be 84immortal. We become conscious of the domains where immortality exists. But this does not imply that our physical substance is transformed and becomes immortal. For that quite another procedure has to be followed. You must not only first obtain this consciousness, but bring it down into the material world and let it work not only on the transformation of the physical consciousness, but also on the transformation of the physical substance, which is quite a considerable task.

Finally, you must not confuse personal realisation with the realisation of humanity as a whole. When we have found the nectar we are above all religious sects; they no longer have any meaning or use for us. But in a general way, for men in general, these things continue to have their value and usefulness as a path, until they achieve realisation.

28 January 1961

55—Be wide in me, O Varuna; be mighty in me, O Indra; O Sun, be very bright and luminous; O Moon, be full of charm and sweetness. Be fierce and terrible, O Rudra; be impetuous and swift, O Maruts; be strong and bold, O Aryama; be voluptuous and pleasurable, O Bhaga; be tender and kind and loving and passionate, O Mitra. Be bright and revealing, O Dawn; O Night, be solemn and pregnant. O Life, be full, ready and buoyant; O Death, lead my steps from mansion to mansion. Harmonise all these, O Brahmanaspati. Let me not be subject to these gods, O Kali.

It is good and necessary to possess all the divine qualities that these gods represent and symbolise; that is why Sri Aurobindo invokes them and asks them to take possession of his nature. But for one who wants union with the Supreme, for one who 85aspires for the supreme Realisation, this cannot be sufficient. This is why at the end he calls upon Kali to give him the power to go beyond them all.

For Kali is the most powerful aspect of the universal Mother and her power is greater than that of all the gods in her creation. To unite with her means therefore to become more vast, more complete, more powerful than all the gods together and that is why Sri Aurobindo places union with her above and beyond all the others.

2 February 1961

56—When, O eager disputant, thou hast prevailed in a debate, then art thou greatly to be pitied; for thou hast lost a chance of widening knowledge.

In general, those who like to discuss things are those who need the stimulant of contradiction to clarify their ideas.

It is obviously the sign of an elementary intellectual stage.

But if you can “attend” a discussion as an impartial spectator—even while you are taking part in it and while the other person is talking with you—you can always benefit from this opportunity to consider a question or a problem from several points of view; and by attempting to reconcile opposite views, you can widen your ideas and rise to a more comprehensive synthesis.

As for the best way of proving to others what one feels to be true, one must live it—there is no other way.

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A debate is never anything but a conflict of opinions; and opinions are nothing but very fragmentary aspects of the truth. Even if you were able to put together and synthesise all opinions on a given subject, you still would not achieve anything but a very imperfect expression of the truth.

If you prevail in a debate, it means that your opinion has prevailed over the opinion of another, not necessarily because yours was truer than his, but because you were better at wielding the arguments or because you were a more stubborn debater. And you come out of the discussion convinced that you are right in what you assert; and so you lose a chance to see a view of the question other than your own and to add an aspect of the truth to the one or the ones you already possess. You remain imprisoned in your own thought and refuse to widen it.

17 March 1961

57—Because the tiger acts according to his nature and knows not anything else, therefore he is divine and there is no evil in him. If he questioned himself, then he would be a criminal.

On earthfnMother added: “This precise detail is not superfluous; I said ‘on earth’ meaning that man does not belong merely to earth: in essence man is a universal being, but he has a special manifestation on earth.” man is a transitional being. Therefore, in the course of his evolution, he has had several natures in succession, which 87have followed an ascending curve and will continue to follow it until he reaches the threshold of the supramental nature and is transformed into the superman. This curve is the spiral of mental development.

We tend to call “natural” any spontaneous manifestation which is not the result of a choice or a preconceived decision, that is to say, without the intrusion of any mental activity. This is why when a man has a vital spontaneity which is very little mentalised, he seems more “natural” in his simplicity. But this naturalness is very much like that of the animal and is at the very bottom of the human evolutionary scale. He will only regain this spontaneity free from mental intrusion when he attains to the supramental stage, that is to say, when he transcends mind and emerges into the higher Truth.

Until then all his behaviour is, naturally, natural! But with the mind evolution has become, one cannot say twisted, but distorted, because by its very nature the mind was open to perversion and almost from the beginning it became perverted, or, to be more precise, it was perverted by the Asuric forces. And this state of perversion gives us the impression that it is unnatural.

Why does he question himself? Simply because this is the nature of the mind!

With the mind individualisation began and a very acute feeling of separation, and also a kind of impression, more or less precise, of freedom of choice—all that, all these psychological states are the natural consequences of mental life and they open the door to everything we see now, from aberrations to the most rigorous principles. Mind has the impression that it can choose between one thing and another, but this impression is the distortion of a true principle which would be completely realisable only when the soul or psychic being appears in the consciousness and if the soul were to take up the governance of the being. Then man’s life would truly become the manifestation of the supreme Will expressing itself individually, consciously. But in the normal human state this is something extremely exceptional which to 88the ordinary human consciousness does not seem at all natural—it seems almost supernatural!

Man questions himself because the mental instrument is intended to see all possibilities. And the immediate consequence of this is the concept of good and evil, or of what is right and what is wrong, and all the miseries that follow from that. One cannot say that it is a bad thing; it is an intermediate stage—not a very pleasant one, but still… one which was certainly inevitable for the complete development of the mind.

17 March 1961

58—The animal, before he is corrupted, has not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; the god has abandoned it for the tree of eternal life; man stands between the upper heaven and the lower nature.

From the historical point of view (I am not speaking from the psychological but from the historical point of view), if I base myself on my memories—only I cannot prove it; nothing can be proved, and I do not think there is any truly historical proof, that is to say, one which has been preserved, or at any rate none has yet been found—but according to what I remember, there was certainly a moment in earth’s history when there existed a kind of earthly paradise, in the sense that it was a perfectly harmonious and natural life; that is to say, the manifestation of the mind was in accord, was still in complete accord with the ascending march of Nature and totally harmonious, without perversion or distortion. This was the first stage of mind’s manifestation in material forms.

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How long did it last? It is difficult to say. But for man it was a life that was like a kind of outflowering of animal life. I have a memory of a life in which the body was perfectly adapted to its natural environment and the climate adapted to the needs of the body, the body to the needs of the climate. Life was wholly spontaneous and natural, just as a more luminous and more conscious animal life would be; but there were none of the complications and distortions that the mind brought in later in the course of its development. I have the memory of that life—I had it, I relived it when I became conscious of the life of the earth as a whole. But I cannot say how long it lasted nor what area it covered. I do not know. I can only remember the condition, the state, what material Nature was like, what the human form and the human consciousness were like at that time and this kind of harmony with all the other elements on earth—harmony with animal life, and such a great harmony with plant life. There was a kind of spontaneous knowledge of how to use the things of Nature, of the properties of plants, of fruits and everything vegetable Nature could provide. No aggressiveness, no fear, no contradictions nor frictions and no perversions at all—the mind was pure, simple, luminous, uncomplicated.

It is only with the progress of evolution, the march of evolution, when the mind began to develop in itself, for itself, that all the complications and distortions began. So that the story of Genesis which seems so childish contains some truth. In the old traditions like that of Genesis, each letterfnOf the Hebrew alphabet. stood for a specific knowledge, it was a graphic summary of the traditional knowledge of that time. But apart from that, even the symbolic story had a reality in the sense that there truly was a period of life on earth—the first manifestation of mentalised matter in human forms—which was still in complete harmony with all that preceded it. It was only later…

And the symbol of the tree of knowledge represents the kind 90of knowledge which is no longer divine, the material knowledge that comes from the sense of division and which started spoiling everything. How long did this period last? Because in my memory too it was like an almost immortal life, and it seems that it was an accident of evolution that made it necessary for forms to disintegrate… for progress. So I cannot say how long it lasted. And where? According to certain impressions—but they are only impressions—it would seem that it was in the vicinity of… I do not know exactly whether it was on this side of Ceylon and India or on the other [Mother points to the Indian Ocean, first to the west of Ceylon and India and then to the east, between Ceylon and Java], but it was certainly a place which no longer exists, which has probably been swallowed up by the sea. I have a very clear vision of this place and a very clear awareness of this life and its forms, but I cannot give any material details. To tell the truth, when I relived these moments I was not curious about details. One is in a different state of mind and one has no curiosity about these material details; everything changes into psychological factors. And it was… it was something so simple, so luminous, so harmonious, beyond all our preoccupations—precisely beyond all these preoccupations with time and place. It was a spontaneous, extremely beautiful life, and so close to Nature, like a natural flowering of the animal life. And there were no oppositions, no contradictions, or anything like that—everything happened in the best way possible.

[Silence]

Repeatedly, in different circumstances, several times, I have had the same memory. It was not exactly the same scene or the same images, because it was not something that I saw, it was a life that I was living. For some time, by night or by day, in a certain state of trance I went back to a life that I had lived and had the full consciousness that it was the outflowering of the human form on earth—the first human forms capable of embodying 91the divine Being. It was that. It was the first time I could manifest in an earthly form, in a particular form, in an individual form—not a “general” life but an individual form—that is to say, the first time that the Being above and the being below were joined by the mentalisation of this material substance. I lived this several times, but always in similar surroundings and with a very similar feeling of such joyful simplicity, without complexity, without problems, without all these questions; there was nothing, absolutely nothing of the kind! It was an outflowering of the joy of living, simply that, in universal love and harmony—flowers, minerals, animals: all were in harmony.

It was only long afterwards—but this is a personal impression—long afterwards that things went wrong. Probably because some mental crystallisations were necessary, inevitable for the general evolution, so that the mind might be prepared to move on to something else. This is where… Faugh! It is like falling into a hole, into ugliness, into obscurity; everything becomes so dark afterwards, so ugly, so difficult, so painful, it is really—it really feels like a fall.

[Silence]

I knew an occultist who used to say that it was not—how to put it?—inevitable. In the total freedom of the manifestation it is the deliberate separation from the Origin that is the cause of all disorder. But how to explain it? Our words are so poor that we cannot speak of these things. We can say that it was “inevitable” because it happened; but if we go outside the creation, we can conceive—or we could have conceived—of a creation in which this disorder would not have happened. Sri Aurobindo also said practically the same thing, that it was a kind of “accident”, if you like, but an “accident” which has given the manifestation a much greater and much more complete perfection than if it had never occurred. But this still belongs to the realm of speculation and these speculations are useless, to say the least. In any case, 92the experience, the feeling is this: a… [Mother indicates an abrupt fall] oh! all of a sudden.

For the earth it probably happened like that, all of a sudden: a kind of ascent, then a fall. But the earth is only a very small point of concentration. For the universe it is something else.

[Silence]

So the memory of that time is preserved somewhere, in the earth’s memory, in the region where all the memories of the earth are recorded, and those who are able to communicate with this memory can say that the earthly paradise still exists somewhere; but I know nothing about it, I do not see.

The Christians say that it is the spirit of Evil.

[Silence]

But all this is a misunderstanding.

The occultist I spoke of used to say that the true interpretation of the Bible story about Paradise and the serpent is that man wanted to rise from a state of animal divinity—like the animals—to a state of conscious divinity through the development of the mind—and that is what the symbol means when it is said that they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And the serpent—he always used to say that it was iridescent, that is to say, it was all the colours of the rainbow—it was not at all the spirit of Evil, it was the evolutionary force, the force, the power of evolution, and of course it was the power of evolution that had made them taste of the fruit of knowledge.

And so, according to him, Jehovah was the chief of the Asuras, the supreme Asura, the egoistic god who wanted to 93dominate everything and have everything under his control. And once he had taken the position of supreme lord in relation to earthly realisation, of course he was not pleased that man should make this mental progress, for it would bring him a knowledge that enabled him not to obey any longer! This made him furious! For it would enable man to become a god by the evolutionary power of consciousness. And that is why they were driven out of Paradise.

There is a good deal of truth in that, a good deal.

And Sri Aurobindo fully agreed. He said the same thing. It is the evolutionary power—the power of the mind—that led man towards knowledge, a separative knowledge. And it is a fact that man became conscious of himself with the sense of good and evil. But, of course, that spoiled everything and he could not stay there. He was driven out by his own consciousness. He could no longer stay there.

It is just two different ways of saying the same thing.

According to me, all these old Scriptures and these old traditions have different levels of meaning [Mother makes a gesture to show the different levels]; and according to the period, the people, the needs, one symbol or another has been selected and used. But there comes a time—when you transcend all these things and see them from what Sri Aurobindo calls “the other hemisphere”—when you become aware that these are merely ways of speaking to establish a contact—a kind of bridge or link between the lower way of seeing and the higher way of knowing.

And people who argue and say, “Oh, no! it is like this; it is like that”—there comes a time when it seems so funny, so funny! And just that, the spontaneous retort of so many people, “Oh, that is impossible”—the word itself is so funny! For the 94slightest, I might even say, the most elementary intellectual development enables you to realise that you could not even think of it if it were not possible.

[Silence]

Oh! If we could only find that again, but how?

Really, they have spoilt the earth, they have spoilt it—they have spoilt the atmosphere, they have spoilt everything! And now, for the atmosphere to come back to what it should be—oh! we have a long way to go, and above all psychologically. But even the very structure of matter [Mother feels the air around her], with their bombs and experiments, oh, they have made a mess of it all!… They have really made a mess of matter.

Probably—no, not probably—it is quite certain that it was necessary to knead it, to churn it, to prepare it so that it can receive this, the new thing which is not yet manifested.

It was very simple, very harmonious, very luminous, but not complex enough. And this complexity has spoilt everything, but it will bring a realisation that is infinitely more conscious—infinitely. And so when the earth again becomes so harmonious, simple, luminous, pure—simple, pure, purely divine—and with this complexity, then we shall be able to do something.

There were so many flowers just like this in the landscape of the earthly paradise, red, so beautiful.

11 March 1961

59—One of the greatest comforts of religion is that you can get hold of God sometimes and give him a satisfactory beating. People mock at the folly of savages who beat 95their gods when their prayers are not answered; but it is the mockers who are the fools and the savages.

Religion always tends to make God in the image of man, a magnified and aggrandised image, but in the end it is always a god with human qualities. This is what makes it possible for people to treat him as they would treat a human enemy. In some countries, when their god does not do what they want, they take him and throw him into the river!

Whatever the image—what we disdainfully call an idol—whatever the external form of the deity, even if to our physical eye it appears ugly or commonplace or horrible, a caricature, there is always within it the presence of the thing it represents. And there is always someone, a priest or an initiate, or a sadhu, a sannyasin, who has the power and who draws—this is usually the work of the priests—who draws the force, the presence within. And it is real: it is quite true that the force, the presence is there; and it is that, not the form of wood or stone or metal, which people worship—it is the presence.

But people in Europe do not have this inner sense, not at all. For them everything is like a surface—not even that, just a thin outer film with nothing behind—so they cannot feel it. And yet it is a fact that the presence is there; it is an absolutely real fact, I guarantee it.

People who say that are fools who don’t even know what they are talking about. You only have to read all that Sri Aurobindo has written to know that it is impossible to base a religion on his works, because he presents each problem, each question in all its aspects, showing the truth contained in each way of seeing things, and he explains that in order to attain the Truth you must realise a synthesis which goes beyond all mental notions and emerge into a transcendence beyond thought.

So the second part of your question is meaningless. Besides, if you had read what was published in the last Bulletin,fn“What Sri Aurobindo represents in the world’s history is not a teaching, not even a revelation; it is a decisive action direct from the Supreme.”
Bulletin of Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education, April 1961, p. 169
you could not have asked this question.

I repeat that when we speak of Sri Aurobindo there can be no question of a teaching nor even of a revelation, but of an action from the Supreme; no religion can be founded on that.

But men are so foolish that they can change anything into a religion, so great is their need of a fixed framework for their narrow thought and limited action. They do not feel secure unless they can assert this is true and that is not; but such an assertion becomes impossible for anyone who has read and understood what Sri Aurobindo has written. Religion and Yoga do not belong to the same plane of being and spiritual life can exist in all its purity only when it is free from all mental dogma.

26 April 1961

60—There is no mortality. It is only the Immortal who can die; the mortal could neither be born nor perish.

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Each case is different. It all depends on the degree of the individual’s development in his different parts and on how well these parts are organised around the psychic centre. The more organised the being, the more consciously lasting it becomes. We can say in a general way that each person brings into his present life the consequences of his previous lives, without, however, preserving the memory of these lives. Apart from a few very rare exceptions, only when you are united with your psychic being and become fully conscious of it do you obtain, at the same time, the memory of past lives, which the psychic preserves in its consciousness.

Otherwise, even in those who are most sensitive, these memories are fragmentary, uncertain and intermittent. Most often they are hardly recognisable and seem to be nothing more than indefinable impressions. And yet a person who knows how to see through appearances will be able to perceive a kind of similarity in the sequence of events in his life.

4 May 1961

61—There is nothing finite. It is only the Infinite who can create for Himself limits. The finite can have no beginning nor end, for the very act of conceiving its beginning and end declares its infinity.

The only way is to come out of the consciousness of the finite.

It is in the hope of achieving this that all yogic disciplines have been developed and undertaken from time immemorial until now. Much has been written on the subject, but little has been done. Only a very small number of individuals have so far 98succeeded in escaping from the finite to plunge into the Infinite.

And yet, as Sri Aurobindo has written, the Infinite alone exists; only the falsehood of our superficial perception makes us believe in the existence of the finite.

20 May 1961

62—I heard a fool discoursing utter folly and wondered what God meant by it; then I considered and saw a distorted mask of truth and wisdom.

It is the very definition of folly that Sri Aurobindo gives here. A mask is something that conceals, that makes invisible what it covers. And if the mask is distorted, it not only renders invisible what it conceals but also totally changes its nature. So, according to this definition, folly is something that veils and distorts beyond all recognition the Truth which is at the origin of all things.

23 June 1961

There can be no absolute untruth. In actual fact it is not possible, because the Divine is behind all things.

It is like people who ask whether certain elements will disappear from the universe. What could “the destruction of a universe” mean? If we come out of our folly, what can we call “destruction”? Only the form, the appearance is destroyed—and indeed, all appearances are destroyed, one after another. It is also said—it is written everywhere, so many things are 99said—that the adverse forces will either be converted, that is to say, they will become conscious of the Divinity within them and become divine, or they will be destroyed. But what does “destroyed” mean? Their form? Their form of consciousness can be dissolved, but that “something” which makes them exist, which makes all things exist—how could that be destroyed? The universe is an objectivisation, an objective self-discovery of That which is from all eternity. So? How can the All cease to be? The infinite and eternal All, that is to say, That which has no limits of any kind—what can go outside That? There is no place to go! Go where? There is nothing but That.

Furthermore, when we say, “There is only That”, we are locating it somewhere, which is absolutely stupid. So, what can be taken away from there?

One can conceive of a universe being projected outside the present manifestation. One can conceive of universes having succeeded each other and that which was in the earlier ones would no longer be in the later ones—that is even obvious. One can conceive that a whole mass of falsehood and untruth—things which are falsehood and untruth for us now—will no longer belong to the world as it will be in its unfolding; all this one can understand—but “destroy”? Where can it go to be destroyed? When we speak of destroying, we think only of the destruction of a form—it may be a form of consciousness or a material form, but it is always a form. But how could what is without form be destroyed?

So to speak of an absolute falsehood that will disappear would simply mean that a whole set of things will live eternally in the past but will not belong to future manifestations, that is all.

One cannot go outside That!

We are told that there is a state of consciousness, when we rise 100above, when we are able to go beyond both the aspect of Nothingness or Nirvana and the aspect of Existence—there is the Nirvana aspect and the Existence aspect, the two simultaneous and complementary aspects of the Supreme—where all things exist eternally and simultaneously; so one can conceive—God knows! This may well be another stupidity—one can conceive of a certain number of things passing into Non-Being, and that to our consciousness would be a disappearance or a destruction.

Is that possible? I do not know. You would have to ask the Lord, but usually He does not answer such questions. He smiles!

There comes a time when really one can no longer say anything: one has the feeling that whatever one says, even if it isn’t absolutely inane, is not far short of it, and that it would actually be better to keep quiet. That is the difficulty. In some of these aphorisms you feel that he has suddenly caught hold of something above and beyond everything that can be thought—so what can one say?

[Silence]

Naturally, when one comes down here again, one can—oh, one can say many things!

As a joke—one can always joke, but one hesitates to do so because people take your jokes so seriously—one could very well say, without being completely wrong, that one sometimes learns much more by listening to a madman or a fool than by listening to a reasonable man. I am quite sure of it. There is nothing that withers you more than reasonable people.

27 June 1961

63—God is great, says the Mahomedan. Yes, He is so great that He can afford to be weak, whenever that too is necessary.

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64—God often fails in His workings; it is the sign of His illimitable godhead.

65—Because God is invincibly great, He can afford to be weak; because He is immutably pure, He can indulge with impunity in sin; He knows eternally all delight, therefore He tastes also the delight of pain; He is inalienably wise, therefore He has not debarred Himself from folly.

Sri Aurobindo does not say that God has any need of weakness. He says that in any particular whole, for the perfection of the play of forces, a moment of weakness may be just as necessary as a display of strength. And he adds, somewhat ironically, that since God is almighty force, He can at the same time afford to be weak, if necessary.

This is to widen the outlook of certain moralists who attribute definite qualities to God and will not permit Him to be otherwise.

Strength as we see it and weakness as we see it are both an equally distorted expression of the Divine Truth which is secretly present behind all physical manifestations.

30 June 1961

It is not like that! That is precisely the distortion in the Western attitude as opposed to the attitude of the Gita. It is extremely difficult for the Western mind to understand in a living and concrete manner that everything is the Divine.

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People are so deeply imbued with the Christian idea of “God the Creator”—the creation on one side and God on the other. When you think about it you reject it, but it has penetrated into the sensations and feelings; so, spontaneously, instinctively, almost subconsciously, you attribute to God everything you consider to be best and most beautiful and, above all, everything you want to attain, to realise. Naturally, each one changes the content of his God according to his own consciousness, but it is always what he considers to be best. And that is also why instinctively and spontaneously, subconsciously, you are shocked by the idea that God can be things that you do not like, that you do not approve of or do not think best.

I put that rather childishly, on purpose, so that you can understand it properly. But it is like that—I am sure, because I observed it in myself for a very long time, because of the subconscious formation of childhood, environment, education, etc. You must be able to press into this body the consciousness of Oneness, the absolute exclusive Oneness of the Divine—exclusive in the sense that nothing exists except in this Oneness, even the things we find most repulsive.

And this is what Sri Aurobindo is fighting, for he too had this Christian education, he too had to struggle; and these aphorisms are the result—the flowering, as it were—of this necessity of fighting a subconscious formation. For that is what makes you ask such questions: “How can God be weak? How can God be foolish? How… ?” But there is nothing other than God, only He exists, there is nothing outside Him. And if something seems ugly to us, it is simply because He no longer wants it to exist. He is preparing the world so that this thing may no longer be manifested, so that the manifestation can move from that state to something else. So naturally, within us, we violently repulse everything that is about to go out of the active manifestation—there is a movement of rejection.

But it is Him. There is nothing but Him. This is what we should repeat to ourselves from morning to evening and from 103evening to morning, because we forget it at each moment.

There is only Him. There is nothing but Him—He alone exists, there is no existence without Him, there is only Him!

So, to ask a question like this is still to react like those who make a distinction between what is and what is not Divine or rather between what is and what is not God. “How can He be weak?” It is a question I cannot ask.

Yes, yes, He is! He is totally in it. He himself is the Play.

We speak of God, but we should remember that there are all these gradations of consciousness; and when we speak of God and His Play, we mean God in His transcendent state, beyond all the levels of matter, and when we speak of the Play we speak of God in his material state. So we say: Transcendent God is watching and playing—in Himself, by Himself, with Himself—His material game.

But all language is a language of ignorance. Our entire way of expressing ourselves, everything we say and the way in which we say it, is necessarily ignorance. And that is why it is so difficult to express something which is concretely true; this would require explanations which would themselves be full of falsehood, of course, or else extremely long. This is why Sri Aurobindo’s sentences are sometimes very long, precisely because he strives to escape from this ignorant language.

Our very way of thinking is wrong. The believers, the faithful, all of them—particularly in the West—when they speak of God, think of Him as “something else”, they think that He cannot be weak, ugly or imperfect—they think wrongly, they divide, they separate. It is subconscious, unreflecting thought; they are in the habit of thinking like this instinctively; they do not watch themselves thinking. For example, when they speak of 104“perfection” in a general way, they see or feel or postulate precisely the sum-total of everything they consider to be virtuous, divine, beautiful, admirable—but it is not that at all! Perfection is something which lacks nothing. The divine perfection is the Divine in His entirety, which lacks nothing. The divine perfection is the Divine as a whole, from whom nothing has been taken away—so it is just the opposite! For the moralists divine perfection means all the virtues that they represent.

From the true point of view, perfection is the whole [Mother makes a global gesture], and it is precisely the fact that there can be nothing outside the whole. It is impossible that anything should be missing, because it is impossible for anything not to form part of the whole. There can be nothing which is not in the whole. Let me explain. A given universe may not contain everything, for a universe is a mode of manifestation; but there is every possible kind of universe. So I always come back to the same thing: there can be nothing which does not form part of the whole.

Therefore one can say that each thing is in its place, exactly as it should be, and that relations between things are exactly as they should be.

But perfection is only one special way of approaching the Divine; it is one side, and in the same way there are innumerable sides, angles or aspects, innumerable ways of approaching the Divine, for example: will, truth, purity, perfection, unity, immortality, eternity, infinity, silence, peace, existence, consciousness, etc. The number of approaches is almost unlimited. With each one you approach or draw near or enter into contact with the Divine through one aspect and if you really do it, you find that the difference is merely in the most external form, but the contact is identical. It is as if you were turning around a centre, a globe, and seeing it from many different angles as in a kaleidoscope; but once the contact is made, it is the same thing.

Perfection is therefore a global way of approaching the Divine: everything is there and everything is as it should be 105—“should be”, that is to say, a perfect expression of the Divine; one cannot even say of His Will, for if you say “His Will” it is still something outside Him.

One can also say—but this is far, far below it—that He is what He is and exactly as He wants to be—with this “exactly as He wants to be”, one has come down by a considerable number of steps! But this is to give you the point of view of perfection.

Besides, divine perfection implies infinity and eternity; that is to say, everything coexists outside time and space.

It is like the word “purity”; one could hold forth interminably on the difference between divine purity and what people call purity. The divine purity, at the lowest, allows no influence other than the divine influence—at the lowest. But that is already very much distorted; the divine purity means that there is only the Divine, nothing else—it is perfectly pure, there is only the Divine, there is nothing other than Him.

And so on.

7 July 1961

66—Sin is that which was once in its place, persisting now it is out of place; there is no other sinfulness.

This very question of yours came to my vision, since I receive in my consciousness all the questions people ask.

To kill out of cruelty? To make others suffer out of cruelty? And yet it is an expression of the Divine—we always come back to the same thing—but an expression which is distorted in its appearance. Can you tell me what lies behind it?

Cruelty was one of the things that was most repugnant to Sri Aurobindo, but he always said that it was the distortion of 106an intensity, one could almost say the distortion of an intensity of love, something which is not satisfied with a middle course, which wants extremes—and that is justifiable.

I had always known that cruelty, like sadism, is a need for violent, extremely strong sensation, to penetrate a thick layer of tamas that feels nothing—tamas needs something extreme in order to be able to feel. The explanation may lie in this direction.

But at the origin there is still the problem that has never been solved: “Why has it become like this? Why this distortion? Why has it all been perverted?” Behind, there are beautiful things, very intense, infinitely more powerful than what we can even bear, wonderful things, but why has all that become so frightful here? This is what came to me immediately when I read this aphorism.

The concept of sin is something that I do not understand and have never understood; original sin seems to me one of the most monstrous ideas that man could ever have—sin and I don’t go together! So naturally, I fully agree with Sri Aurobindo that there is no sin, this is understood, but…

Certain things, like cruelty, could be called “sin”, but I can only see this explanation, that it is a distortion of the taste or need for an extremely strong sensation. I have observed in cruel people that they feel Ananda at that moment; they find an intense joy in it. So that is its justification, only it is in such a state of distortion that it is repugnant.

As for the idea that things are not in their place, I understood it even when I was a child. It was only later that I was given the explanation by the person who taught me occultism, for, in his cosmogonic system, he explained the successive pralayasfnPralaya: the end or destruction of a universe. of the various universes by saying that with each universe an aspect of the Supreme would manifest itself, that each universe was built on one aspect of the Supreme and that one after another they had all returned into the Supreme. He enumerated all the 107aspects that were manifested successively and with what logic! It was extraordinary—I have kept it somewhere, I forget where. And he said that this time, it was—I do not remember exactly what number in the series—but it would be the universe which would not be withdrawn again, which would follow a progressive course of becoming that would be, so to say, indefinite. And this universe represented equilibrium, not static but progressive equilibrium, that is to say, each thing in its place, exactly, each vibration, each movement in its place. The further down one goes, the more each form, each activity, each thing is exactly in its place in relation to the whole.

I was extremely interested, because later Sri Aurobindo said the same thing, that nothing is bad, it is just that things are not in their place—their place not only in space but also in time; their place in the universe, beginning with the worlds, the stars, etc., each thing exactly in its place. And so, when each thing is exactly in its place, from the most stupendous to the most microscopic, the whole will express the Supreme progressively, without any need of being withdrawn to be emanated again. On this Sri Aurobindo based the fact that in this creation, in this universe, the perfection of a divine world—what Sri Aurobindo calls the Supermind—will be able to manifest. Equilibrium is the essential law of this creation and this is why perfection can be realised in the manifestation.

Drive out? But will it “drive out” anything? If we accept Sri Aurobindo’s idea, it will put each thing in its place, that’s all.

One thing must necessarily cease, and that is the distortion, that is to say, the veil of falsehood upon Truth, because that is what is responsible for everything we see here. If this is removed, 108things will be completely different, completely. They will be what we feel them to be when we come out of this consciousness. When one comes out of this consciousness and enters into the Truth-consciousness; the difference is such that one wonders how there can be anything like suffering and misery and death and all that. There is a kind of astonishment in the sense that one does not understand how it can happen—when one has really tipped over to the other side. But this experience is usually associated with the experience of the unreality of the world as we know it, whereas Sri Aurobindo says that this perception of the unreality of the world is not necessary to live in the supramental consciousness—it is only the unreality of Falsehood, not the unreality of the world. That is to say, the world has a reality of its own, independent of Falsehood.

I suppose that is the first effect of the Supermind—the first effect in the individual, because it will begin with the individual.

18 July 1961

67—There is no sin in man, but a great deal of disease, ignorance and misapplication.

68—The sense of sin was necessary in order that man might become disgusted with his own imperfections. It was God’s corrective for egoism. But man’s egoism meets God’s device by being very dully alive to its own sins and very keenly alive to the sins of others.

When egoism will no longer be necessary to make man a conscious individuality.

27 July 1961