Someone wrote to me from France that he had tried everything, that everything had failed, that he is quite desperate and… So I answered this:
It is when all appears to be lost that all can be saved. When one has lost trust
in one’s personal power, one must have faith in the Divine Grace.
It’s useful for many.
It has been said I don’t know how many times, but it always seems necessary to repeat it.
(silence)
So the old system of personal property is collapsing in the world. Only, as usual, it collapses in a disgusting manner…. Here, they’ve set up a spying system all over the country, a repugnant espionage, for people who send money from one place to another so as to make more money. Me, I don’t care, because I don’t do anything, but I know that some people here do it. And I wouldn’t want us to get into trouble.
S. was denounced because she has money (I don’t know what precisely, I don’t even understand this business), anyhow that money went to a friend in America, who sent it to her so she could have it. Then some people came to ask her for explanations. But everything look place quite decently…. Anyway, I mean that even the Ashram is under suspicion.
So if someone ever confides something in you, tell him to be careful.
The people who came to see S. told her they were from the [All India] Radio, can you imagine! (Despicable little fibs of the sort, full of lies.) They came and told her they were from the Radio; naturally, she received them, answered them, and then they asked some questions: “Did you receive money? From whom? How?…” So of course, she answered the truth. Then she wrote to me. I gave her letter over to C. and told him, “What on earth is all this about?” He said that a few people here have been troubled like that…. And they have a spying system everywhere so as to catch people who do that.
I just can’t understand it, besides. What harm there can be in receiving money from here rather than from there, I don’t know! What can be wrong in that I just don’t understand.
But in India’s constitution there was an article stating that personal property could in no way be taken away, in other words affirming the right to personal property. Now they’ll remove it, they will say that “in certain cases” it can be taken away. So you understand…
It’s obvious, I know it: it’s past, it will go—personal property is the past. Only… You see, the Russians said it was the State that replaced the person, and then (laughing) what happened with the State?—It’s the State that has grown rich at the expense of everybody else. Now they are back-pedaling. But the other countries, without having the common sense of benefiting from the experience, want to follow the same blunder….
But no one has yet dared to say: money is a force and belongs to nobody, but it must be used by the most disinterested and clearsighted person (or persons) in the country.
We haven’t come to that point yet.
Far from it!
It will lake a few hundred years—maybe not so much.
(silence)
It’s very simple, they dare not tell you, “You have no money anymore, it’s not yours,” but they prevent you from spending it as you wish, where you wish—you no longer have that right. You no longer have the right to use it as you like; it’s not taken away from you, but you can’t use it. So what use is it?
(silence)
But there is an EXTRAORDINARY satisfaction, really a tremendous satisfaction in being able to say, “Me, I have nothing—nothing.” (Mother laughs)…. Once someone (Sri Aurobindo was still here) complained about the “luxury” I lived in, and Sri Aurobindo replied: “The Mother does not regard the dresses she wears to be her personal property, but they are lent to her so we may have a pleasant-looking Mother (!) and if she were to leave her post, she would leave her dresses too!” (Mother laughs a lot)
Life is fun, let me assure you!
(long silence)
Do you have news of your book?1
No, Mother.
That person who was supposed to look after it hasn’t sent any news?
No, no news…. I don’t quite know what attitude I should have with regard to this book. Not that I worry, but… I think about it. I wonder whether it’s guided?
You know, mon petit, MORE AND MORE and in an ABSOLUTE way, I SEE—I see, I feel that EVERYTHING is decided.
Everything is decided.
And each thing has a raison d’être—which eludes us because our vision isn’t wide enough.
You understand, if it were otherwise, life, existence, anyway the world, would have no meaning.
Yes.
It’s… it’s a sort of absolute conviction. And I SEE it, you know, it’s something I see. How could I put it?… That conviction, I am now paying for it! The body, in its transfer of authority (what I call the transfer) goes through difficult moments, really difficult, and then, seen with the ordinary vision, it would make no sense because difficulties appear to increase with what we might call the “conversion,” but… to the true vision (when you are IN the true vision) it’s what is left of Falsehood that is the cause of all unpleasantness (what’s still mixed). Even quite materially (morally, it’s been conquered for a long time: with the disappearance of desire, ALL torments disappear and are replaced by a perpetual smile, absolutely sincere—not willed, but effortless, natural and spontaneous), but what I mean is PHYSICALLY, materially: discomforts and difficulties and all that. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing, but… one is less ready, you understand; matter is slower to be transformed, so there is more resistance.
The only solution, every minute and in every case, is… (gesture of surrender): “What You will.” In other words, the abolition of preference and desire. Even the preference not to suffer.
But what’s hard to understand is that this Consciousness …I can understand that it guides everything in the immensity and eternity, but does it guide everything down to the smallest detail? That’s the…
In the microscopic.
In the microscopic.
That’s just what I was seeing, I understand why. This morning the problem was there: the individual consciousness, even very vast, cannot realize, that is to say, cannot concretely understand the possibility of being conscious of everything at the same time. Because that’s not the way it is. So it finds it difficult to understand that THE Consciousness is conscious of EVERYTHING at the same time: in the whole, in the totality as well as in the smallest detail. That…
Yes, it’s difficult…. But it’s comforting!
Ah, that makes you very peaceful, very peaceful…. The other day I told you that the body had had the experience of dying without dying, and it was useful in that the body said, “Well… it’s all right.” Accept without… (what’s the word?) without effort—ADHERE. Then it’s over. The entire old illusion of disappearing with the body’s dissolution, it’s a long time since it went away, of course, and now the body itself is quite convinced that even if it were scattered like that [in “death”], that would widen its field of consciousness…. I don’t even know how to explain because for the consciousness, this sense of the personal and the need of the personal has vanished.
I clearly see, the body clearly realizes that it’s only its own resistance—its resistance to the Truth—that makes it possible for it to suffer. Wherever there is complete adherence, suffering disappears instantly.
(silence)
But it’s the same thing for countries and nations: it’s the same change of authority. Instead of personal authorities, there will be a divine authority, and the same change of authority causes the unspeakable chaos we live in—because of the resistance.
(long silence)
The nearer a part of the being (any part) draws to the moment of the transition, that is, the more ready it is for that transition, the more sensitive it becomes. And then, when you reach the point where you can go beyond the stage of problems and see with the universal vision, problems take on, to the personal sensitiveness, a most intense acuteness. I had noticed it before, and now it’s recurring for the body. It’s acquiring a… terrifying sensitiveness, you understand. People who don’t know why things are like that really get terrified…. The possibility of discomfort, of… It’s the same thing with problems. Only, for those who KNOW and who have understood, it’s the opportunity of making the last progress, of doing this (Mother opens her hands upward).
Basically, what still has the illusion of being something separate must dissolve. It must say to itself, “Its not my business, I don’t exist.” That’s the best attitude it can take. Then… it goes into the great Universal Rhythm.
(meditation)
By the Body of the Earth or the Sannyasin, which has been waiting in Paris for a year. Curiously, the day before, Satprem wrote a line to Mother to ask her, "Is the fate of The Sannyasin guided by Sri Aurobindo?..." But he did not send his letter to Mother and simply took it with him in his file, without saying a word about it. ↩
***
January 28, 1970
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