The Mother
Agenda
Volume 5
August 5, 1964
(D., a disciple, sent Mother an eighteenth-century account by a Japanese monk of the Zen Buddhist sect describing a method called “Introspection,” which enables one to overcome cold and hunger and attain physical immortality.1 Mother reads a few pages, then gives up.)
It's better to work out your OWN system – if you want to work one out at all.
That's what people have always reproached Sri Aurobindo for, because he doesn't tell you, “Do this in this way and that in that way....” And that's precisely what made me feel that there was the Truth.
People cannot live without reducing things to a mental system.
They need a mechanism.
Yes, but as soon as there's a mechanism, it's finished.
The mechanism may well be very good for the person who found it: it's HIS mechanism. But it's good only for him.
As for me, I prefer not to have any mechanism!
The temptation comes sometimes, but... It's far more difficult without, but infinitely more living. All this [the Zen account] seems to me... I immediately feel something that's becoming dead and dry – dry, lifeless.
They replace life with a mechanism. And then it's finished.
(silence)
The mistake everyone makes is to consider – to believe – the goal to be immortality. Whereas immortality is just ONE of the consequences. In that Zen story, the goal is immortality, so THE WAY has to be found – hence all those methods. But immortality isn't a goal: it's just a natural consequence – if you live the true life.
You see, I am sure that D. (she doesn't say so, but I am sure of it) imagines that my goal is immortality! At any rate, it's the goal of many people here (!)... Actually, it's something secondary. It's ONE 
of the consequences, it's the sign (it can be regarded as a sign) that you are living the Truth, that's all. Though that's not even certain!
Immortality in this bag of bones, that's no fun!
(Mother laughs) Oh, indeed!... First it would have to be changed.
It wouldn't be worthwhile.
1 Hermes magazine, Spring 1963.