Contents

Questions and Answers 1953

Rare significant moments: contact with the psychic

Families of beings: why people meet to collaborate

Visitor to the Ashram: external motives are pretexts for the psychic

Using the Divine as a cloak to hide desires

Sincerity: difficult but effective

Ambition: a canker

Different personalities in our being

Signpost or psychic mirror

Service to humanity and giving to the Divine

What do I call “myself”?

Desires and their formations

The power of thought, of prayer

Win your small victories

Pulling the divine forces

Insincerity, its own punishment

Basis of equanimity

Sleep and dreams: quietening the mind

Organising one’s dream

Wounds in the vital being and illness

Symbolism of dreams

Personal dream-imagery

Foolishness and vanity

Religions, truth, consciousness

Rebirth: stories

Automatic writing, spirit-communication

Contact with the Divine: the key to everything

Pseudo-meditation

Escapism and changing the nature

True meditation, true humility

Will, concentration, effort; active surrender

Being perfect instruments; progress

Offering and surrender

Mistakes and insincerity

The flame of aspiration, self-giving

The physical being as a tool of another Power

Story of a Sufi mystic, a musician

Transformation of the body: three hundred years

Replacing body-organs by centres of energy

Collaboration in the Divine’s work

Living in the true consciousness; stepping back

Appendix: a talk of Sri Aurobindo

Music: its origin and type

Inspiration and technique

Individualisation, separation, inconscience

The remedy: to become conscious again

All touch the same Thing

Understanding others: beyond words

Sources of music; genius

Indian and European music

Perceiving the Divine in everything

Explaining things: the entire universe needed

The Divine is the only existence

Work and realisation

Determinism and freedom

Formations from different planes

Prayer changes the determined course of things

Devices Nature uses to make us act

The Divine Grace and Karma

Aspiration and prayer have a magical power

Attacks of adverse forces and man’s response

Cases of possession; refusal to change

The asura of falsehood: “Lord of the Nations”

Beings of the vital plane

Man will transform his earth

True function of the mind and vital

How to discern hostile attacks

Learning and understanding

Teaching: preparing courses

Function of the intellect

Growth in perfection

Power of the vital

Cause and cure of fear

Body’s instinct

On laziness and work

Illness, its causes and cure

Concentrating to gain time

Work at school: organising the mind

Science and art

Paradise, purgatory, eternal hell

Imagination, a form-maker

Power of good formations; healing

After death, where? Unifying the being

Spirits of death and of fire

Consenting to die

Prayer and aspiration

Ill-will: a bad thought is a bad act

Cause and remedy of evil

Animals; vital origin of the insect species

Desire to devour, an expression of “love”

Instinct; the consciousness in Nature

Widening the consciousness

Religious rules and hygiene

Discerning attacks by adverse forces

Sincere aspiration and trials

Mental conceptions imposed on the Divine

Hold of hostile forces upon money-power

Giving money for the Divine’s work

God and His creation

Events on different planes

“India is free”: Mother’s pre-vision

Events can be changed; a premonitory dream

Degrees of change possible; intervention

To understand truly

Individual initiative

Project yourself on a screen, then observe

Know thyself; learning, self-discovery

The very reason for existence

Progress of the psychic being; rebirth

Progress of those not conscious of their psychic

Manifestation and progress

Inspiration; receptivity; exchange

Progress of mind, vital, physical

Mind justifies everything; the psychic knows

Will and impulse; “The last time I am doing it”

Impulse and its expression in action

Incarnation of the psychic being

Psychic growth; Karma

Knowing people through self-identification

Methods of knowledge; concentration

Widening the consciousness; progress

Self-identification; Paris theatre story

Knowing the Divine by identification

Concentration, one-pointedness

In Nature all possibilities exist

Aspiration in trees and animals

The Presence in all things

Stones can accumulate forces; their use

Exchange: giving and taking

The more one gives, the more one grows

Instinct to destroy and spoil: adverse forces

Being a true hero

Faith in the Grace and return to the Light

True love and its deformations

Love of animals for men

Intelligence and psychic consciousness

Love in flowers, crystals, animals

2 September 1953

Religion and the spiritual life

Evolutionary movement; old civilisations

Nature’s play; her collaboration required

9 September 1953

Divine Force chooses its instrument

Progress of the mind and vital

Converting the vital

Contact with the psychic; heroes

The vital, an all-powerful instrument

Depression; the vital as source of troubles

The vital’s power

16 September 1953

Receptivity of the body

Fixity in physical world

After death: a musician’s hands

The psychic being and rebirth

Progress and battle; Titanic forces

Yogic force prevents rigidity of the body

Growth of consciousness: rebirth

Consciousness and memory

Resistance and receptivity

You are all in a sea of tremendous vibrations

23 September 1953

Physical world: symbol of universal movements

Illness in animals

The universe: a serpent biting its tail

The earth: symbol of the universe

The “Evil Persona”

Mother’s experience of the luminous earth

30 September 1953

The rule of the Overmind and the Supermind

Sri Aurobindo’s yoga begins where others end

Men with realisation often fixed and unplastic

Children as malleable stuff for transformation

To be a child all one’s life

Children and other people in the Ashram

Remembrance and memory

Consciousness of a complete cure

Mental, vital, physical, spiritual aspiration

Body-consciousness

Body’s sure instinct

Why are some children here in the Ashram

Learning to know others by identity

Responsible people: governments, teachers

Supermind’s action: transformation

To know oneself: one’s field of work

Solidarity; individual and collective progress

Descent of hostile vital forces and its effect

14 October 1953

“Formateurs” or form-makers

Intermediary beings, evil and disorder

Why wickedness if “All is He”?

Identification with the Divine: no problems

Collective suggestions; the fear of death

Remedies for the fear of death

The psychic being, immortality and death

Fear attracts the thing feared

Fear is contagious; the mystic’s remedy

21 October 1953

Artists; stained-glass windows

Expressing the Divine in art

Relation with the Divine

On the Ramayana and Mahabharata

Japanese gardens

Buddhism of the South and the North

Ravana and Sita; the Asura’s choice

Sense of beauty; artistic taste varies

To know true beauty rise above all form

28 October 1953

True art; realisation of divine beauty

Evolution moves in spirals; modern art

Universal progress; spherical spirals

Nature’s plan

Art and commercialism; fatuity

The “mushroom species” and true art

Nature’s huge cauldron

4 November 1953

On the “sphere with spirals”

Feeling the Divine Presence

Man is a moralist, not the Divine

Bargaining and sacrifice

True {\it raison d’être} of life

11 November 1953

The aim to be achieved

The seventh creation: that of Equilibrium

The eternal word

Generosity and avarice

Money: a force; the middle path

18 November 1953

Rebirth and the psychic being

Nature’s progress: constant and slow changes

Justice, determinism, and Divine Grace

Man learns through past experiments

Grace and faith

The idea of indispensable needs

25 November 1953

Smiling at an enemy

Trust and receptivity; bargaining

Sincerity and the Divine’s help

The story of creation

World of freedom of choice

The Asuras; their conversion

Stalin and Hitler

Ravana; dissolution of the Asuras

9 December 1953

Entities behind the forces of Nature

Radha’s prayer; all is divine

Suffering and bliss; vibrations and reactions

One is surrounded by what one thinks about

The sacrifice of the Divine Mother

Questions on {\it Savitri}

16 December 1953

Methods of identification and self-finding

The psychic guides, organises circumstances

Rest in action; quiet faith

Knowing how to wait

23 December 1953

Knowledge and the mind

Concentration; its power

Uneducated people with gift of vision

Illness: disequilibrium

Mind and body; mental formations that cure

Accidents: there is a moment of choice

Character and averting danger

Grace and accidents

Bringers of bad luck

30 December 1953

Destructiveness in children

Psychic being choosing its next birth

Wickedness in children

Consciousness of parents at the moment of conception

Tamas and the need of excitement

Education in the Ashram school

Ashram children

“Let your acts speak for you.”

Note on the Text