A child from the School asked me, “How can mathematics, history or sciences help me to find you?”
I found that quite amusing!
I answered:
“They can help in several ways:
(1) To be able to receive and bear the light of Truth, the mind must be strengthened, broadened and made supple. These studies are an excellent way to achieve this.
(2) Sciences, if you study them deeply enough, will teach you the unreality of appearances and will thus lead you to the spiritual reality.
(3) The study of all aspects and movements of physical Nature will bring you into contact with the universal Mother, and you will thus be nearer to me.”
I still remember my impression when I was quite small and was told that everything is “atoms” (that was the term they used in those days). They said to me, “You see this table? You think it’s a table, that it’s solid and it’s wood—well, it’s only atoms moving about.” I remember, the first time I was told that, it caused a kind of revolution in my head, bringing such a sense of the complete unreality of all appearances. All at once I said, “But if it’s like that, then nothing is true!” I couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen.
His question called this to mind. I said to myself, “It opens a door onto another reality.”
***
(Soon afterwards, about a child from the School who drowned during a picnic organized by the School group of his age.)
I’ve got V.’s notebook.1 He writes to me (rather bluntly, as they say in English), “When I learned that B. had drowned, it neither troubled nor affected me; I simply thought it wasn’t true.” And why? “Because you knew” (that’s what he writes me), “you knew we had all gone out for a picnic, and therefore nothing could happen.” (Mother laughs) I found this delightful—delightfully impertinent!2
But it’s nice, too!
Yes, but the accident did happen.
So I told him… Because I looked, I immediately looked at it from THAT angle…. For my part, I see things very differently, never in that way. I am always surprised at the way people see things. To me, it’s completely different, it’s… the Lord’s Vibration crystallizing. That’s all. And always, always—at all times. So there’s no “why,” no “how”—it’s very simple, elementary in its simplicity. But I couldn’t tell him that, he wouldn’t have understood. So I looked at it from his standpoint, and all of a sudden I saw; I said, “Yes indeed, how did this come about?” (Mother laughs) So I answered him (I don’t remember the words I used, but in substance): The protection acts on the entire group when it works in a coordinated and disciplined way, but if individuals in it have an action INDEPENDENT of the group, then they fall back into their own determinism, which means that the protection acts according to their personal faith, not at all as something collective: according to their personal state and faith, the action of the protection is greater or lesser.
I saw it was clearly that. I saw how it had happened (because his question made me look at it, so I saw). There is an interesting point, it’s that the mental initiative in swimming across that pond was P.’s and another’s—so, humanly speaking, they are the ones who are “responsible” (but that’s not true, it’s not like that!). But anyway, they were outside the group, it was an action that had nothing to do with the group, and they did it because they were to rejoin the group at a precise time and they were late. So it was clearly an individual outgrowth. Walking round the pond would have taken three hours while there were hardly two hours left before nightfall, and they were in a jungle, without any light or anything. That was another impossibility. So with his reason and human common sense, he said, “The best is to swim across.” But he hadn’t foreseen (that was the reckless part) that the water would be icy.
(Sujata:) But P. had already swum across the water once, because he wasn’t part of the group that had the accident: they called him from the camp, he came and swam through that water, and the accident took place on the way back. The others were on the other side.
He swam across twice, are you sure?
Yes, they called him; he had already swum across the water to come and meet them.
It was the second time…. Then it was still more reckless than I thought! He nearly met his end. Because as for me, I saw him, I knew before I got the news: I suddenly felt a great danger. But P. had faith and so he escaped, while the other one met his end.
It was quite reckless because here, the body isn’t accustomed to cold water, and when you are in water that’s too cold, you get cramps.
But P. was sufficiently protected to escape and be saved, while the other one met his end.
(Sujata:) It seems the three boys were calling you (there were four, you know), the three were calling you and the one who drowned was only calling P. to his aid. But the other three were strongly remembering you.
I know that very well! I always know it! I don’t need to be told, I know it very well. And I knew that that boy hadn’t called: he didn’t feel it could help him.
It’s not even a mental question: one should FEEL here (gesture to the heart), be convinced that “it” [Mother’s presence] is really active, that it’s something real, that it really does protect. Not a thought “just like that,” a metaphysical thought: a feeling. He didn’t have that.
If he had remained in the group, he would have shared in the protection over the group. Once he had a separate individual action, everything depended on his inner state—this is something they should all understand.
***
(Soon afterwards, regarding the floods in Florence. This conversation was noted down from memory.)
I’ve seen photographs of the floods in Florence…. It seems the water was rushing at forty-five miles an hour! Cars were washed away and dashed against houses. They say it was a tidal wave… yet the water was flowing towards the sea (or was it flowing back?). It’s very mysterious, at any rate.
The water was at head level. All the palaces and museums were flooded and they say they were full of grime. So the students are now working to scrape everything clean. They’re trying to dry the manuscripts. But lots of things have been definitively lost.
That was one of the prophecies of the beginning of the century—that Italy and England would go underwater.
A prophecy by whom?
By me.
But the strange thing is that Florence and Naples were affected, not Rome, which is in between….
But why Italy? If it were England alone, I wouldn’t mind at all, but Italy?
That was because of Mussolini.
But he’s dead.
Mussolini’s death might have mitigated things. But it’s not out of “punishment”: there’s never any punishment, never any “fault”—never the shadow of a “fault” anywhere! It’s purely a question of vibrations.
Why not Rome, then?
Oh, they won’t have the last laugh!
Naturally, they are puffing themselves up with conceit: “God” protected them….
V. is a young disciple who puts questions to Mother in his "notebook." ↩
The disciple's question was formulated thus: "When I heard in Gingy that B. had drowned in a pond, I was incapable of believing or being shocked by the news. The only question I asked in myself was, 'How could this have happened! Mother knew we were in Gingy, therefore Her protection was with each of us. So how could this have happened?'" ↩
***
December 14, 1966
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