Questions and Answers What is the significance of this message for 1957 that you have given us : ''A power greater than that of Evil can alone win the victory. It is not a crucified but a glorified body that will save the world.''  THIS message, if it is understood, is just that which can lead to its goal the best human good will showing itself at present upon earth. I wrote it in answer to an immense, pathetic, collective effort to awaken in men the true sense of brotherhood and to prevent all future war.       The message has taken a somewhat especial form, because the goodwill proceeded from a Christian country and I answered to a Christian conception,

  THE MOTHER   Questions and Answers               Reprinted from The Bulletin of S. A. I. C. of Education November,1959 Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry.           Sutras (i) Have no ambition, above all, pretend nothing, but be at each instant the utmost that you can be. (2) As for your place in the universal manifestation, the Supreme alone will fix it for you. (3) The Supreme Lord has decreed inviolably the place that you occupy in the world concert, but whatever be that place, you have the same right as all others equally to climb the supreme heights up

  THE MOTHER Questions and Answers           Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry  February, i960 Questions and Answers I Delight the Creator In order to make a true self-giving should not one arrive at a rather high degree of spiritual growth ? For, if one leads a life, more or less unconscious, the self-giving can be only more or less mental and it cannot be very real. How has one got to do it ? Is it possible from the very beginning to start with self-giving ? THAT depends on people. In some the psychic movement, the emotional impulse is stronger than the intellectual understanding. They feel an irres

THE MOTHER Questions and Answers           Sri Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry April, 1962 Questions and Answers I Sri Aurobindo writes, "The Supreme has laid his luminous hand upon a chosen human vessel of his miraculous Light and Power and Ananda" ("The Synthesis of Yoga", p. 100) IT is as you like. One does not know who has begun ! But the two happen generally at the same time.      If you want an order of priority, it is evident that the Divine exists before the individual, then it is the Divine who must have chosen the first time. But it is a choice made before the terrestria

THE MOTHER QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS             SRI AUROBINDO ASHRAM PONDICHERRY 1957 Questions and Answers       "Wherefore God hammers so fiercely at his world, tramples and kneads it like dough, casts it so often into the blood-bath and the red hell-heat of the furnace? Because humanity in the mass is still a hard, crude and vile ore which will not otherwise be smelted and shaped..." Sri Aurobindo — Thoughts and Glimpses AFTER all, the whole problem is to know whether humanity has reached that state of pure gold in which the ways of violence and destr

     THE MOTHER Questions and Answers           Questions and Answers   The Real Hell (Commentary on the Dhammapada) A S in all these teachings, there are several ways of under-standing. The external way is quite common. In all moral principles, always the same thing is said. This Niraya, for example, of which the Dhammapada speaks, which is taken by some as a kind of hell where you are punished for your sins, has another meaning also. The true meaning of Niraya is that special kind of atmosphere which you create around you when you act in contradiction not with external moral rules or social principles, but

  THE MOTHER   Questions and Answers             Questions and Answers       The Supramental is not be mentalised As it was foreseen, I have received a shower of questions meant to oblige me to explain mentally my supramental experience of February 3.     You want me to speak of the experience, mentalise it to such an extent as to establish a new system so that you may be able to sit down comfortably in your new mental construction.     I regret that I have to disappoint you, for it is absolutely impossible. If you wish to understand what I have written, well, try and get a supramental consciousness.

THE MOTHER Questions and Answers           Ski Aurobindo Ashram Pondicherry April, Questions and Answers I A stag passes through a forest to drink water, but what is there to prove that he has done so? Most people will see no sign of the thing, perhaps even they do not know what a stag is, and even those who know will not be able to say that he passed that way. But one who has made a special study of hunting, a tracker, will find evident signs and will be able to say not only what type of stag has passed, but also his size, age, sex, etc. Similarly there must be people who have a spiritual knowledge

  Questions and Answers Why is not the universe a place of perfect bliss ? IF the Divine had not conceived His creation as a progressive state, one could have been, from the beginning, in an immobile and immutable bliss. But by the very fact that the universe is made to be progressive, the perfect identity, the bliss of this identity, the full consciousness of this identity had necessarily to be veiled, otherwise nothing would have moved.     One can conceive of a static universe, something which would be all together and at the same time a kind of space or objectivisation, not a progressive manifestation of things, one after another, in accordance with a spe

  THE MOTHER Questions and Answers             Questions and Answers The Supreme Poise       It is generally thought that when a creation reaches the maximum of its possibilities, that is the perfection. But it is precisely against this idea that I rise. Perfection is not a summit, it is not an extreme. There is no extreme : whatsover you do there is always the possibility of something better and exactly this possibility of something better is the very meaning of progress.      Nature, in whatever she does, goes to extremes, and when she sees that she can advance no longer, she pulls down everything and begins