I have a question, Mother, a practical question.
Practical?
It seems very difficult to be able to want to achieve any specific aim and at the same time to love everyone. When we begin to want something and try to act with a particular result in mind, immediately we cut ourselves off from everyone who does not agree with that. In practice, how can we do both at the same time?
You cut yourself off from people who do not think as you do?
Really… all the time….
But not a single person thinks as you do!
Of course.
So how can you love anyone?
As long as I don’t want anything, it is all right.
Oh! (Mother concentrates for two or three minutes)
It is because when you want something, it is the ego that wants. So, the ego… must be ignored. The first thing to do is not to act for yourself but to act in obedience to the Divine, to express the divine Will. For your part, you have no orders to give. As long as it is a personal will, a personal desire, it is not the true thing, and you cannot… Not only is it not the true thing, but you cannot know the true thing! That must be (gesture of rejecting something forcefully)… that must be expelled! That is why alone, we are nothing at all. This is life. We do not act for ourselves. We do not act from our personal will and for a personal result. We act only by the divine Will and for the divine Will. So much so, that effortlessly, spontaneously, we can feel the greatest tenderness for our physical enemy. When you have felt that, you will understand. That is the whole limitation, the whole limitation.
When conflicts arise, and they arise all the time, for all of us—immediately it is as if one were drawing back into one’s own skin. For that is what happens: each one draws back inside himself. But the difficulty is that even when one has relatively little personal will, if the person next to you expresses a personal will, it is exactly…. First of all it creates a reaction and then too, if you are more or less in agreement with it, you take this will, you see, and you begin to reflect it all around. So you can see what happens. And that is going on all the time. First one person has a will, and then another, and so on, endlessly. That is happening everywhere; the strongest will prevails. It is worthless, worthless.
When we say, “We are at the service of the Divine”, it is not just words. It is He who should act through us, not we ourselves.
The greatest objection is: How can we know the divine Will? But as a matter of fact, I tell you: if you sincerely renounce your personal will, you will know. That’s it. [CWM 13:331-34]
[1] Between March and August of 1970, Mother met weekly in her room a small number of Aurovilians, many from Aspiration community—hence the name “Aspiration Talks”. After an offering of flowers and the introduction of new persons, there was usually a period of conversation, though sometimes only what Mother called a “bath of silence”.
