Mental Development

How is thought itself to become quiescent?

By the descent of silence in the whole mind down to the physical.

When an impulse comes, the mind feels perplexed and the heart is anguished. They cannot exercise control over it.

The mind and the heart would do better to remain quiet and wait on a higher Force than theirs to do what is necessary.

Should I not persist in making my mind surrender all its workings to the Mother?

A persistent but quiet aspiration for the surrender of the physical mind and vital is the best way.

The mind does not remain now in my control or think properly. It feels pressed down under the Force from above.

The best way to meet that is for the mind to be silent and only aspire for the true open and plastic condition.

I have not much knowledge of experience or descent; so I am unable to get the full value out of them. Could you kindly say something in general about the psychic and spiritual experience and the descent from above?

You have to learn by experience. Mental information (badly understood, as it always is without experience) might rather hamper than help. In fact there is no fixed mental knowledge for these things, which vary infinitely. You must learn to go beyond the hankering for mental information and open to the true way of knowledge.

Is it not better to keep giving mental knowledge until the experiences come in plenty? As you were giving it in the past, even when there were small experiences, the habit persists, though I don’t want to stick to it.

There is something in you that does want to stick to the habit of mentalising about everything. So long as you were not having real experiences it did not matter. But once real experiences begin you have to learn to approach them in the right way.

For the last few days, the mind seems to be losing its power of direction and my being is driven by all sorts of undesirable impulses and doing things suggested by the ordinary forces.

It is probably due to the mental control being removed — what is acting in the things you mention is not the mind but the vital and physical consciousness.

What should take the place of the removed mental control?

The psychic or spiritual control.

What is meant by the spiritual control?

The control from the higher Consciousness above the ordinary mental.

When the mental consciousness finds that what it had accepted was not true, should it not reject it and accept what was true?

It should do so, but it is not always so easy as that. There is much unwillingness and resistance.

Since the higher consciousness is active now, I don’t feel like doing the mental thinking and perceiving or reading — unless you want me to do it.

What mental thinking and perceiving? Reading? It is not necessary — especially if it disturbs the higher working.

Why do some people here consider you as greater than the Mother? Are not both of you from the same plane? Is it not a veil over the human vision that makes such a distinction?

It is the minds that see surface things only and cannot see what is behind them.

Our correspondence is a great help and enlightenment on the path. But we should not push such a need too far. For, if we depend on your mental help (through questions-answers) too much, the inner guidance or higher knowledge will find it difficult to manifest in us, or at least it will be delayed.

The outer guidance is meant only as an aid to the inner working, especially for the correction of any erroneous movement and sometimes in order to point out the right road. It is not meant except at a very early stage to satisfy mental questionings or to stimulate a mental activity.

A seeker of this Yoga must guard himself against a rigid, dry and self-assertive mind. A wrongly developed intellect realises its own truth in its crooked ways. It builds a world out of itself and believes that to be a unique creation of all-truth! Then of course it becomes as difficult for him as well as for the Divine to pull him out of that grip of falsehood.

The intellect can be as great an obstacle as the vital when it chooses to prefer its own constructions to the Truth.

What is the subtle meaning of our asking you questions about the Yoga and does it help to surrender?

Questions are meant for getting light on the things that are going on in one. It is the statement of what is going on that helps to surrender.

My mind does not remain as concentrated with open eyes as with closed. Why still the difference?

It is a usual difference for most, until the whole consciousness is unified.

What about reading newspapers? Is it not a vice?

It is only the attachment and diffusion of mind that are objectionable. It is not a vice. One can read if there is no attachment and no diffusion.

Is it possible to remain conscious of the Mother in the midst of intellectual pursuits?

It can be done when you become the witness detached from the mental action and not involved in them, not absorbed in them as the mental doer or thinker.

When there is much tamas it fatigues the mind and this affects my concentration. I ought to disregard all such reactions and go forward.

If the mind gets tired, naturally it is difficult to concentrate — unless you have become separated from the mind.

How to “become separated from the mind”?

You have to feel yourself even in the mental, vital, physical levels (not only above) a consciousness that is neither mind, life nor body.

Up to the last year the Mother’s Force had to continue its pressure on my lower nature to change. But now a mutual understanding seems strangely to emerge between the higher and the lower. Through my mental Purusha the higher consciousness points out to my lower being its obscurity and also shows the right movements in place of the habitual wrong ones. For example, while passing by a woman, the usual reaction was an automatic sex imagination and sensation in my subtle physical. But under the present cooperation the higher asks the lower, “What is the use of all such stupid sensations, you get nothing out of them. Instead, if you open yourself to the Mother you get her love and joy which is wholesome and lasting.”

That kind of direct mental enlightenment of the lower parts is very necessary at a certain stage.

I feel nowadays that it is through the silence that I write all my letters to you. That is, I do not need to use my mind for it except when I ask you some mental questions. I would, however, like to ascertain the truth of this fact from you.

It is probably correct — when there is the silence, then it is natural that the writing etc. should come out of the silence — or through it. That may very well have begun.

My inner absorption is deepened to such an extent that it has become difficult to come out to the mind, even for reporting to you my inner experiences.

Yet to write is necessary.