(Regarding the English translation of the latest extracts from these conversations published in the Ashram's Bulletin under the title "À Propos.")
… What they especially lack is the sense of a FORCE in the language.
What makes things very difficult is that, in fact, there is no one who has the experience of what I say. That’s what is missing. You understand well only the things you have experienced. If you try to understand all that mentally, you can’t, it’s not possible; an acute way of feeling has gone.
I read this “À Propos” to A. and to Pavitra (you can’t find people better disposed and more eager to understand), but all the subtlety was gone!—they didn’t understand. They tried (they “understood,” they were very interested), but I know, I saw their state of consciousness: there was something completely closed, because there is no equivalent in them. But what can be done?… Oh, I gave up very long ago the idea of being really understood—in a few hundred years people will understand, perhaps.
It doesn’t matter.
***
(Then Mother shows two notes on Auroville.)
“At last a place where one will be able to think of nothing but the future.”
“Auroville is doing well and growing more and more real. But its realization is not progressing in the habitual human way, and it is more visible to the inner consciousness than to the outer vision.”
***
Soon afterwards
Something still rather indefinable is happening.
The body was in the habit of fulfilling its functions automatically, as something natural, which means that for it, the question of their importance or usefulness did not arise: it didn’t have that mental vision, for instance, or vital vision of things, of what’s “important” or “interesting” and what isn’t. That didn’t exist. But now that the cells are becoming conscious, they seem to step back (Mother makes a gesture of stepping back): they look at themselves, they begin to watch themselves act, and they very much wonder, “What’s the use of all this?” And then, an aspiration: “How? How should things truly be? What’s our function, our usefulness, our basis? Yes, what should be our basis and our ‘standard’ of life?” To express it mentally again, we could say, “How will we be when we are divine? What will be the difference? What’s the divine way of being?” And there, what speaks is that whole kind of physical base which is entirely made up of thousands of small things absolutely indifferent in themselves, whose raison d’être is only as a whole, as a totality, like a support to another action, but which in themselves seem devoid of any meaning. And then, it’s again the same thing: a sort of receptivity, of silent opening to let oneself be permeated, and a very subtle perception of a way of being that would be luminous, harmonious.
That way of being is still quite indefinable; but in this search there is a constant perception (which translates itself in vision) of a multicoloured light, of all the colours—all the colours not in layers but as though (stippling gesture) a combination of dots, of all the colours. Two years ago (a little more than two years, I don’t remember), when I met the Tantrics, when I came into contact with them, I started seeing that light, and I thought it was the “tantric light,” the tantric way of seeing the material world. But now, I see it constantly, associated with everything, and it seems to be what we might call a “perception of true Matter.” All possible colours are combined without being mixed together (same stippling gesture), and combined in luminous dots. Everything is as though made up of this. And it seems to be the true mode of being—I am not yet sure, but in any case it’s a far more conscious mode of being.
I see it all the time: with eyes open, eyes closed, all the time. And one has a strange perception (for the body), a strange perception of subtlety, permeability (if I may call it that), of suppleness of form, and not exactly an elimination but a considerable lessening of the rigidity of forms (the rigidity is eliminated, but not the forms: a suppleness in the forms). And for the body itself, the first few times it felt that in some part or the other, it had the impression of … being a bit lost, with the sense of something eluding it. But if one remains very quiet and waits quietly, it’s simply replaced by a sort of plasticity and fluidity that seems to be a new mode of the cells.
It would be probably what on the material level must take the place of the physical ego; that is to say, the rigidity of the form seems to have to give way to this new way of being. Of course, the first contact is always very … surprising. But the body is getting used to it little by little. What’s a little difficult is the moment of transition from one way to the other. It’s done very progressively, yet at the moment of transition there are a few seconds that are … the least we can say is “unexpected.”
In that way, all habits are undone. It’s the same with all the functionings: blood circulation, digestion, breathing—all the functions. And at the moment of transition, it’s not that one abruptly takes the place of the other, but there is a state of fluidity between the two which is … difficult. It’s only because of that great Faith, a perfectly still, luminous, constant, immutable faith in the real existence of the supreme Lord—in the SOLE real existence of the Supreme—that everything goes on apparently as it is.
There are as if great waves of all the ordinary movements, ordinary ways of being, ordinary habits, which are pushed back and which come back again, and try to engulf and are pushed back again. And I can see that for years the body and the whole body consciousness used to rush back into the old way to seek safety, as a measure of safety, in order to elude; but now, the body has been persuaded not to do it any more and on the contrary to accept, “Well, if it’s dissolution, let it be dissolution.” But it accepts what will be.
Mentally, when that happens in the physical mind (it was years ago, but I had observed that), it’s what gives people the feeling that they’re going insane, and they get frightened (and with fear things happen), so they rush back into ordinary common sense to escape it. It’s the equivalent—not the same thing, but the equivalent of what happens in the material: you feel all the usual stability is vanishing. Well, for a long time—a long time—there was that retreat into habit, and then you are quite at peace and you start all over again. But now, the cells no longer want that “Come what may, we’ll see!” The great adventure.
How will we be?—How will we be? How … You understand, it’s the cells asking, “How should we be? How will we be?”
It’s interesting.
***
January 18, 1967
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