The Mother

Agenda

Volume 8

January 25, 1967

(Nolini reads out to Mother his translation into English of the conversation of January 11 for the Ashram Bulletin. Mother remarks that she used the French word “injure” [=insult   where she meant a blow or a scratch, because she heard the English word “injury.”)

I so often hear Sri Aurobindo speak, and I say it in French, but I use the English word because I hear him speak.

Often the thought alone comes, but quite often it's the exact words; and then, while speaking in French I tend to use the English words. While I take my bath, for instance, he always speaks to me and tells me the things I have to write or say; so afterwards, when I come out of the bathroom, I very often have to ask for a piece of paper and a pen, and I write.

It's constantly, constantly like that.

I remember, some time ago, at night, I said to him (I see him almost every night, but for a few days I hadn't seen him, then I met him at night... because he is always there [Mother makes a gesture enveloping her], but at night, in that subtle physical world, I see him objectively, as if I were meeting him), and I said to him, “I haven't seen you for a few days,” like that, in jest. Then he put on his most serious air, but with all his irony: “Oh, I am very busy these days.” And... (laughing) the next day I learned they were shooting a film on Sri Aurobindo's life!¹ So I thought he must have been busy sending them good suggestions. But it was so comical! With straight-faced seriousness: “Oh, I am very busy.” (Mother laughs)

That's how “injury” came.

(Satprem:) In the text of those “Instructions” [in the event of cataleptic trance], you also use the word “injure”; you say that in that trance state, your body will have to be kept “a l'abri de toute injure” [sheltered from all injuries]. But I deliberately left the word, because in the original sense of the French word we speak of the “injures du temps” [the injury or assault of time]. Is that what you'd like to keep in those Instructions?

That day he told me (it was he who told me to say that), “The bites of insects, the bad contacts, things like that.” He said, “All injuries, poisoning by an insect, etc.”

(Then Mother listens to the English translation of the conversation of September 30, 1966, for the “Notes on the Way.” The subject wa   the disappearance of the bone structure in the new being and the need for intermediary stages. Mother, speaking in English, turns to Nolini:)

Do you think people will understand?... Not much?

(Nolini:) Some will understand.

Some!... a few.

And yet, for me, it is already far behind. It's funny, when you were reading the translation, I had the impression of something that was pulling me back in a condition that is no more mine.

Things are going quick, quick, quick.

I am just living the thing, so it is difficult to describe... But it is quite a new condition. After some time I will be able to say... (Mother remains silent for a long while) what is meant exactly by the irreality of this apparent matter.

It is just in the experiencing, I can't yet describe it. It takes some time.

There, in this “talk” [about the disappearance of the bone structure], I have the impression of having still one foot here, one foot there.

*
*   *

After Nolini has left

So, what's new?

What about you?

You know, I have the impression, exactly an impression (it's a transcription), the impression of being on the verge of finding a key – a key or a “trick”... a procedure (I don't know how to put it: all this is popularization), but something which, if you got hold of it without being wholly on the true side... in one second you could be the cause of a frightful catastrophe. That's why the integral preparation of the consciousness must go side by side with the perception of the Power. And then, there are such subtle differences that for the understanding (I am not referring to the ordinary understanding, but even for a quite spiritualized and prepared state of consciousness, which is not THE consciousness), an insignificant, almost imperceptible tiny little movement could bring about catastrophe.

What catastrophe? I don't know.... Something like a dissolution of the world.²

So you stand there (Mother makes a gesture to indicate a very narrow ridge), as if on an invisible borderline, with an extraordinary, almighty Power which, at the same time, makes you know and prevents you from knowing, with extraordinary tiny subtleties of movement so nothing may happen too soon, that is, before everything is ready.

(long silence)

That would amount to saying that falling ill (from falling ill to dying) is caused by the incapacity to maintain the necessary tension to go from one state to another without falling back again, without the slackening of unconsciousness. Illness is always a fall back into unconsciousness out of incapacity to sustain the movement of transformation. And death is the same thing – the same thing, somewhat more complete.

¹ In Bengal, a film on Sri Aurobindo's “political life.”

Back

² Could it be the dissolution of the “web”?

Back