-00_Publisher^s Note.htm Publisher's Note This volume contains the talks given by Mother to the students, teachers and sadhaks of the Ashram in her "Wednesday classes" from the beginning of 1957 to the end of November 1958. These were the last of the talks given at the Playground. Mother generally began by reading from one of her French translations of Sri Aurobindo's works. From January to April 1957 the text was Thoughts and Glimpses, from April to October The Supramental Manifestation Upon Earth and from October 1957 to November 1958 the last six chapters of The Life Divine. After the reading, Mother commented on the text or answered questions.

3 April 1957 “All would change if man could once consent to be spiritualised; but his nature, mental and vital and phy- sical, is rebellious to the higher law. He loves his imperfection. “The Spirit is the truth of our being; mind and life and body in their imperfection are its masks, but in their perfection should be its moulds. To be spiritual only is not enough; that prepares a number of souls for heaven, but leaves the earth very much where it was. Neither is a compromise the way of salvation.        “The world knows three kinds of revolution. The material has strong results, the moral and intellectual are infinitely larger in

2 October 1957 “The essential character of Supermind is a Truth- Consciousness which knows by its own inherent right of nature, by its own light: it has not to arrive at knowledge but possesses it. It may indeed, especially in its evolutionary action, keep knowledge behind its apparent consciousness and bring it forward as if from behind the veil; but even then this veil is only an appearance and does not really exist: the knowledge was always there, the consciousness its possessor and present revealer.…In the Mind of Light when it be- comes full-orbed this character of the Truth reveals itself though in a garb that is transparent even whe

3 September 1958 Sweet Mother, the other day you told me that it was necessary to learn how to discipline the imagination. Yes. How is it done? Imagination is something very complex and manifold – what is vaguely called “imagination”. It can be the capacity for seeing and recording, noting the forms in some mental or other domain. There are artistic, literary, poetic domains, domains of action, scientific domains, all belonging to the mind – not a very high and abstract mind, a mind above the physical mind which, without our knowing it, pours out constantly through the individual and collective mind to manifest in action. Some people, thro

4 June 1958 “At first this truth of the spirit and of spirituality is not self-evident to the mind; man becomes mentally aware of his soul as something other than his body, superior to his normal mind and life, but he has no clear sense of it, only a feeling of some of its effects on his nature. As these effects take a mental form or a life-form, the difference is not firmly and trenchantly drawn, the soul-perception does not acquire a distinct and assured independence. Very commonly indeed, a complex of half-effects of the psychic pressure on the mental and vital parts, a formation mixed with men- tal aspiration and vital desires, is mi

23 October 1957 Mother begins the reading of the last six chap- ters of The Life Divine. “A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling Spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive of the terres- trial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Real- ity, in a dense material Inconscience; a veil of Incon- science, a veil of insensibility of Matter hides the uni- versal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that the Energy, which is the first form the Force of

23 January 1957 “The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the Divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity. “But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be its ending.” “Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God”. “What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer de- light of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it m

* The Mother - 1958

5 November 1958 “Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infi- nite diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach of the soul to a living reality, not to an abstraction or a constructed figure of things that can be petrified into a dead or stony formula. The hard logical and intel- lectual

6 March 1957 My eye won’t allow me to read today. ¹ But I have been asked a question on what I read to you last week. I am going to reply to it this evening. Pavitra, will you read, please? (Pavitra reads) What does this paragraph mean?: “Free- dom is the law of being in its illimitable unity, secret master of all Nature: servitude is the law of love in the being voluntarily giving itself to serve the play of its other selves in the multiplicity.” Thoughts and Glimpses, Cent. Vol. 16, p. 386 * At a superficial glance these two things appear absolutely contradictory and incompatible. Outwardly one cannot conceive how one can be at once in