The Mother
Agenda
Volume 7
August 6, 1966
V. is going to Calcutta “to learn mechanics.”1
Have you agreed?
My first reaction was to find it stupid. But he wrote to me again to tell me that people at the workshop were very enthusiastic and that he had been much encouraged to do it and that he was quite happy and that it would be an opportunity for him to learn all that he didn't know, and so forth. It was pages long. So I wrote to him, “You will go to Calcutta.”
You know, they all need a lesson in order to learn; they cannot learn without a lesson from life. I, for one, try, I try to spare them the lesson – if there were an inner opening, they would understand. But it's no use. They need the lesson, let them have it! It doesn't matter.
He will learn his lesson, he will see.
They have been here ever since they were quite small and they have been helped as much as possible. The week before, he had written to me to say, “How come we don't know how to benefit from the unique opportunity given us?” And then... (Mother laughs) three or four days later, he sends me this! It's hopeless. They are quite buried in Matter.
When people who know what life is come here, they are struck by the difference. But for those who have been here since they were quite small, it's perfectly natural, the state is perfectly natural, they only see the drawbacks of it. And they don't know what life is, they see it as a marvelous thing – let them go and see what it is!
It's too easy, so they fall asleep.
Yes, that's right, it's too easy.
But I have seen several of those boys who told me, “Ah, but you can see: people are becoming automatons, they do things mechanically, they lose their aspiration.”
Which means they are still too tamasic not to need the pressure of life and of life's difficulties. We want to give them a possibility – I know, that was the idea I had: to give those who have an aspiration the possibility to be concerned only with “that” – and they fall asleep.
But you noted the same fact for the body, too! You said that if there weren't illnesses, difficulties...
(Mother laughs) Yes, probably it's the same thing!
(Mother goes into a contemplation, oblivious of the time)
1 V. is a young disciple who came to the Ashram as a child and never left it.