Things continue to be very difficult. They’re getting more and more complicated and difficult, and at the same time, the power is growing greater and greater, it’s even surprising.
But, for people who like peace and quiet (laughing), it’s troublesome!
Do you have something? Have you brought something? Nothing to say?
There’s a letter from the marquis, that friend of mine. He is asking for your help….
What for?
To change his life and get rid of all his material and financial problems there.
I thought he was very rich?
But he wants to get rid of everything.
Oh!… Let him give it to the Ashram! (Mother laughs)
He has a lot of money sunk in lands, castles and so on, and lie says, “I could leave all this in the hands of a financial organization and see what happens, or should I look after it myself, sell it all off, and then come to the Ashram?”
(after a silence)
If he comes, he must come with money, because the situation here is critical. We spend three times more than what we have, so… It’s a sort of constant miracle. And the expenses keep increasing. This morning, D.1 told me he cannot go on. That’s how it is. And then, the government is raising taxes in a proportion of one to ten—ten times more. So everything is like that. And we are faced with… a hole. So I can’t take new people anymore, except those who can not only meet their own needs but also help the Ashram a little.
Things are very, very, very difficult.
(long silence)
What we may call the “reign of money” is drawing to its close. But the; transitional period between the arrangement that has existed in the world till now and the one to come (in a hundred years, for instance), that period is going to be very difficult—it IS very difficult.
Industries were the great means of earning money—now that’s quite finished. All profits are taken by the government. Or else, we had here small industries which had been freed from taxes on condition that they give 75% of their profits to the Ashram—now they have changed their laws and it’s no longer 75%, it’s all of it.
“To the Ashram,” you mean to the State?
No, no! To the State they give everything; but earlier we had obtained that those at the Ashram would be freed from taxes on condition that they give 75% to the Ashram; now the 75% has been changed into all of it. Which means that all the industries here must give all their profits to the Ashram, or else they are taxed.
Well, that’s not so bad!
(Mother laughs) Yes, but it’s a sign of the times! For them it’s not so bad, because with me (laughing) there are always ways and means! But there are other organizations…. Most people start an industry to earn their livelihood—now they can’t. They can’t because personal expenses aren’t allowed.
But this fact of personal expenses “not allowed” has been there since the beginning. I remember, long ago, my mother had started… I forget if it was a henhouse or something of the sort, because she wanted to increase her income a bit, so… (that must have been some fifty or sixty years ago). She was very simple, not complicated; she opened her business and would sell her hens, her eggs and so on: she would spend the money personally and look after all her affairs…. Until one fine day (laughing) when she was asked to give accounts! She narrowly escaped a severe punishment because she had used that money for her personal expenses—she didn’t understand!… I found it very amusing. That was at least fifty years ago.
You understand, I find it an odd frame of mind. You work—what for? Normally, you work to earn your livelihood—it’s not legal. You must work, but the business isn’t personal at all! You have no right to draw your own expenses on the industry you yourself started!
The stupidity of the world is unrivaled. So naturally, this has to end, it cannot last.
How? What will it become? I don’t know. Naturally, their calculation (the government’s calculation) is completely wrong: they are ruining the country more and more! So they really are in a critical situation. But it’s a long time since people started discovering that all those taxes are simply the ruin of the country, nothing else…. Almost all the industries in the North [of India] are about to close, almost all of them. So…
They do many totally useless things. All that will disappear, but…
I am in contact with a bit of everything: people come and see me; everyone comes and complains, tells me about the miserable state of things: those in power, ordinary people, everyone. And I see, things are becoming… impossible. How are people to live? They don’t know. Because money was chosen to be the basis—money—so naturally, the attempt was to earn it. Now that doesn’t work any longer. You can no longer earn money, and you can’t have money constantly without earning it, so what do you do?—Everything needs to be changed.
In Russia they tried to make the government responsible, but that… (laughing) what happened was that those in the government filled their pockets and misery spread everywhere. So, as they don’t have much imagination, they want to go back to the old way of doing things. But that’s not it: they must go a little farther.
Either divide the earth into lots of small bits, each bit up against the other, or else… We need a world organization. But by whom? It should be by people who have at least a world consciousness! (Mother laughs) Otherwise it can’t work. So… there are going to be a hundred very difficult years, very difficult. Afterwards, maybe we’ll emerge towards something….
(silence)
What this man [the marquis] writes you here, lots of people are like that! Lots of them have written it, people from every country. They’re exasperated by the way things are. They say, “No more personal property!”, but as they don’t have much imagination, they haven’t found the way yet.
(silence)
A system of “coupons for hours of work,” and a scale of the quality or degree of the work done.
Where is that practiced?
I don’t know, in my imagination!
Oh, that’s you. Yes, of course, that’s very good!
Something based on the work.
Yes.
Coupons for hours of work. Then if a coolie’s coupon is worth one, an engineer’s may be said to be worth five, for instance. That’s all.
That would be a whole organization to be worked out. We’ll need… we’ll need something like that in Auroville.
Based on the work.
Yes, an activity. That work could be defined as an activity with a collective usefulness, not a selfish one.
(silence)
The difficulty is the appreciation of the value of things. You understand, that requires a very wide vision. Moneys convenience was that it became mechanical…. But this new system cannot become quite mechanical, so… For instance, the idea is that those who will live in Auroville will have no money—there is no circulation of money—but to eat, for instance, everyone has the right to eat, naturally, but… On quite a practical level, we had conceived the possibility of all types of food according to everyone’s tastes or needs (for example, vegetarian cooking, non-vegetarian cooking, diet cooking, etc.), and those who want to get food from there must do something in exchange—work, or… It’s hard to organize in practice, on a quite practical level…. You see, we had planned a lot of lands around the city for large-scale agriculture for the city’s consumption. But to cultivate those lands, for the moment we need money, or else materials. So… Now I have to face the whole problem in every detail, and it’s not easy!
There are some who understand.
You see, the idea is that there will be no customs in Auroville and no taxes, and Aurovilians will have no personal property. Like that on paper, it’s very fine, but when it comes to doing it in practice…
The problem is always the same: those given the responsibility should be people with a… universal consciousness, of course, otherwise… Wherever there is a personal consciousness, it means someone incapable of governing—we can see how governments are, it’s frightful!
(long silence)
There’s something very interesting on a psychological level: it’s that material needs decrease in proportion to the spiritual growth. Not (as Sri Aurobindo said), not through asceticism, but because the focus of attention and concentration of the being moves to a different domain…. The purely material being, quite conceivably, finds only material things pleasing; with all those who live in the emotive being and the outer mind, the interest of the being is turned to… for instance, things of beauty, as with those who want to live surrounded by beautiful things, who want to use nice things. Now that appears to be the human summit, but it’s quite… what we might call a “central region” (gesture hardly above ground level), it’s not at all a higher region. But the way the world is organized, people without aesthetic needs go back to a very primitive life—which is wrong. We need a place where life… where the very setting of life would be, not an individual thing, but a beauty that would be like the surroundings natural to a certain degree of development.
Now, as things are organized, to be surrounded by beautiful things you need to be rich, and that’s a source of imbalance, because wealth usually goes with quite an average degree of consciousness, even mediocre at times. So there’s everywhere an imbalance and a disorder. We would need… a place of beauty—a place of beauty in which people can live only if they have reached a certain degree of consciousness. And let it not be decided by other people, but quite spontaneously and naturally. So how to do that?…
Problems of that sort are beginning to come up at Auroville, and that makes the thing very interesting. Of course, the means are very limited, but that also is part of the problem to be solved.
(long silence)
The conditions to organize—to be an organizer (it’s not “to govern,” it’s to ORGANIZE)—the conditions to be an organizer should be these: no more desires, no more preferences, no more attractions, no more repulsions—a perfect equality for all things. Sincerity, of course, but that goes without saying: wherever insincerity enters, poison enters at the same time. And then, only those who are themselves in that condition can discern whether another is in it or not.
At present, all human organizations are based on: the visible fact (which is a falsehood), public opinion (another falsehood), and moral sense, which is a third falsehood! (Mother laughs) So…
(silence)
Ah! Have you read the latest answer to the Aphorisms?
Your experience of “God”?
Yes, I am not sure I was very clear…. I’m not yet convinced it can be published!
She asks, “What does Sri Aurobindo mean by ‘the joy of being God’s enemy‘?”2 So you reply:
“Here too, I am obliged to say that I do not exactly know because he never told me.
“But I can tell you about my own experience. Until the age of about twenty-five, I only knew the God of religions, God as men made him, and I did not want him at any cost. I denied his existence with the certitude that if such a God existed, I detested him.
“Around twenty-five, I found the inner God, and at the same time I learned that the God described by most Western religions was none other than the Great Adversary.
“When I came to India…
Oh, here we should say how long afterwards…. I was twenty-five, and I was born in 18… 78.
It was in 1903.
And I came to India in 1914. We should specify that. It’s around 1903 that I had the experience of the inner Divine.
“When I came to India in 1914 and I knew Sri Aurobindo’s teaching, everything became very clear.”
I don’t like to speak of myself. Only… (that’s something I don’t know: whether my body will be preserved or not—I have no idea and it doesn’t interest me), it seems to me that it could be useful only if this body is gone.
Oh, listen!
(silence)
Not gone—changed.
Oh, changed… is it possible?
Well, if it’s not possible in your body, how will it be possible in other bodies?
No… I don’t know. For man, it seems established that his progress is made from birth to birth, with very fleeting intermediary births, forms that aren’t perpetuated. So it may be that some people, with a body somewhat… (what shall I say?) developed or advanced, could now have children who would themselves have… like this (snowballing gesture), and then those intermediary stages would disappear.
I don’t know.
You see, there is this fact that existence itself needs to depend on something material, which naturally brings back every time an old recurring difficulty. That question of food… All that is under observation at the moment (a very minute observation, which I might almost call “scientific”), and, well, the cells are conscious of the divine Force and of the power that Force gives, but they are also conscious that in order to last as they are, even in a state of transformation, they still need this complement of something coming from outside—with that, every time you swallow a new difficulty…. All that I said on the [change of] functioning is increasingly proven, but there is this thing [food] that remains, and that means stomach and blood and all the rest… With that, can we conceive (I don’t know), can we conceive something that works in this way yet without deteriorating? Something capable of constant progression? (One can last only if the progression is constant.) Is this capable of progress?… For the moment, it’s like this… (gesture hanging in balance).
All that was automatic has almost disappeared—which has caused a great reduction from the standpoint of capacities; it’s replaced by a consciousness with a certain power, which didn’t exist previously: that’s an improvement. But all things considered, well, if I take the ordinary stand, I can no longer do what I used to do when I was twenty, quite obviously. Perhaps I know a hundred thousand times more than I knew, but… This body, the body itself knows: it feels, it’s capable of knowing all that it didn’t know then. But from a purely material standpoint… (Mother shakes her head, pointing to her body’s incapacity). Could it come back? I don’t know. There’s a question mark there. I don’t know…. And it could last only if the capacities came back; as Sri Aurobindo very wisely put it, who would want to go on in a body that keeps losing all its capacities?…3 You know, sight isn’t clear anymore, you don’t hear clearly anymore, can’t speak clearly anymorev anyway you can’t walk freely, you can no longer carry a weight—all kinds of things.
Would this, as it is, THIS (Mother pinches the skin of her hands), would it be capable of being transformed by the Force? Can it be done?—We’ll know when it’s done and not before!
As for me, I find it quite possible.
Obviously, logically you are right, because the healing capacity is there; so if one has the healing capacity, there is the capacity to remedy wear and tear. Obviously.
But all possibilities are there! It’s only the question of Matter having to adapt to the infiltration of another force.
Yes.
But the day it’s really adapted…
Well, yes, that’s the whole point!…
What’s the obstacle?
CAN Matter do it?
But of course, surely it can! Surely it can.
That’s the question.
If the Spirit wants, it can. If the Spirit sees the time has come, it can. There’s no reason why not.
That would be interesting to see! (Mother laughs)
Yes!
(Mother goes into a contemplation)
For the body consciousness that remains conscious when the body is asleep, the world as it is is dark and muddy—always. That is, it’s always a half-darkness—you can hardly see—and mud. And that isn’t an opinion or a thought: it’s a material FACT. Consequently, this [body] consciousness is already conscious of a world… that would no longer be subject to the same laws.
The cells are quite, absolutely convinced that… (I’ll put it in the simplest way) the Lord is all-powerful, you understand? Only, what they’re not convinced of is whether He WANTS (laughing) it to be this way or that, that is to say, whether He wants the transformation to be done in an already existing body, or in stages.
But then, in stages means centuries and centuries….
Yes, naturally!
But it seems that the TIME has come, doesn’t it?
There’s an absolute refusal to answer.
Oh, I very well know why! Because (how shall I put it?… I must put it in a quite childlike way) physical matter is lazy so… (laughing) if it were sure, it would let itself go!
But the one thing the body has conquered (almost totally I may say) is, no more desires, no more preferences (immutable gesture). It’s replaced by… “Only what You will.” Doesn’t choose, doesn’t say “This is better than that”—what You will.
That’s the natural and spontaneous state.
(silence)
Very well (laughing), we’ll see!
No, I don’t think so.
What?
I don’t think so. Because, otherwise, it would really need centuries and centuries and centuries.
Yes. But centuries, that’s nothing for the Supreme.
Yes, of course.
For him, it’s…
But still, the world has reached such an acute state of suffering and pain that…
Yes.
The time has come for ONE body to change itself sufficiently to give a concrete hope to humanity.
Yes, yes… Even if only, perhaps, as an example.
Yes, perhaps, but not only that, because the day that Power would have entered your matter so totally, you would have the possibility of passing it on to other bodies that were ready.
Ah, but the possibility already exists. I have constant proof of that—extraordinary proof…. You know, little miracles take place all the time, all the time.
(silence)
It’s clear that there will be ONE moment when the thing will occur.
D. looks after the dining room and provisions. ↩
Aphorism 417—"Thy soul has not tasted God's entire delight, if it has never had the joy of being His enemy, opposing His designs and engaging with Him in mortal combat." ↩
Aphorism 376—"...Who would care to wear one coat for a hundred years or be confined in one narrow and changeless lodging unto a long eternity?" ↩
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