(Mother first reads out for All India Radio the message she intends to broadcast for February 21, 1968, on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday.) "It is not the number of years you have lived that makes you old. You become old when you stop progressing. As soon as you feel you have done what you had to do, as soon as you think you know what you ought to know, as soon as you want to sit and enjoy the results of your effort, with the feeling you have worked enough in life, then at once you become old and begin to decline. When, on the contrary, you are convinced that what you know is nothing compared to all that remains to be known, when you feel that what you have done is just the starting point of what remains to be done, when you see the future like an attractive sun shining with innumerable possibilities yet to be achieved, then you are young, howsoever many are the years you have passed upon earth, young and rich with all the realisations of tomorrow. And if you do not want your body to fail you, avoid wasting your energies in useless agitation. Whatever you do, do it in a quiet and composed poise. In peace and silence is the greatest strength."page 365 , Mother's Agenda , volume 8 , 8th Nov - 1967 |
Yesterday I got a letter from the director of the [All India] Radio, in which he said he wanted to make a "spectacular" broadcast on February 21; and at the end, to "crown" the thing, he asked me to give "reminiscences of my life in India"! (Mother laughs) So I've prepared my answer.... "The reminiscences will be short. I came to India to meet Sri Aurobindo, I remained in India to live with Sri Aurobindo, when he left his body I con tinued to live here in order to do his work which is by serving the Truth and enlightening humanity to hasten the rule of the Divine's Love upon earth." There, and that's that. Period. It came in English and afterwards I put it into French. It was Pavitra who read me the gentleman's letter yesterday evening, and while he was reading it, Sri Aurobindo came, and he started laughing! He laughed when the man asked for my reminiscences, and instantly - instantly - I got the answer, instantly. It came like that: "It's quite simple, there isn't much to tell...." But those people don't understand! And Sri Aurobindo told me, "It's high time they learned it." So it was over in five minutes. page 35 , Mother's Agenda , volume 9 , 27th Jan - 1968 |
The government (I don't know who) has asked the chief of the Radio here to ask me for a message on India's condition. At first I answered, "I don't deal with politics." Then he told me, "No, it's not from a political but from a spiritual standpoint." I said, "I don't know." But he insisted, he told me, "I've been asked by the government; if I can't give it to them, I'll be in trouble...." The poor man knew how to get round me! (Mother laughs) See, here's his letter (Satprem reads): "I pray the Mother to record a message for my radio on 'integration and unity of India'...." I said this: (Mother reads) "It is only India's soul who can unify the country. "Externally the provinces of India are very different in character, tendencies, culture, as well as in language,and any attempt to unify them artificially could only have disastrous results. "But her soul is one, intense in her aspiration towards the spiritual truth, the essential unity of the creation and the divine origin of life, and by uniting with this aspiration the whole country can recover a unity that has never ceased to exist for the superior mentality." page 189-90 , Mother's Agenda , volume 9 , 3rd July - 1968 |
(Mother records a message in French for All-India Radio.) We want to be messengers of light and truth. And first of all, a future of harmony is waitingto be announced to the world. The time has come for the old habit of ruling through fear to be replaced with the rule of love. page 267 - Mother's Agenda , volume 11 , 5th Nov - 1970 |
Yes, it was for the radio station here, they had asked me for it. (Satprem reads) "We want to be messengers of Light and Truth.Yes, that's good! They have broadcast it. (Laughing) The first thing they did was to send it to Delhi. Instead of broadcasting it here, they sent it to Delhi. They made such a fuss about it. But it's good, it gives people courage. page 27 - Mother's Agenda , volume 12 , 16th Jan - 1971 |
(Mother reads her message for Indian radio.) "True liberty is an ascending movement, not yielding to the lower instincts.True liberty is a divine manifestation. We want the true liberty for India so that she may be the right example for the world as the demonstration of what humanity must become." page 47 - Mother's Agenda , volume 12 , 13th Feb - 1971 |
Today is the first day of Sri Aurobindo's centenary year. Though he has left his body he is still with us, alive and active. Sri Aurobindo belongs to the future; he is the messenger of the future. He still shows us the way to follow in order to hasten the realisation of a glorious future fashioned by the Divine Will. All those who want to collaborate for the progress of humanity and for India's luminous destiny must unite in a clairvoyant aspiration and in an illumined work. page 211 - Mother's Agenda , volume 12 , 4th Aug - 1971 |
The radio station wants someone to speak on "Sri Aurobindoand brotherhood or human unity."Yes, that's what they said. Is that what you want?Yes.... It's not for Pondicherry. They're going to send it to Delhi, and Delhi is going to send it to all the French-speaking countries everywhere in the world. It will be a worldwide communication for Sri Aurobindo's centenary. They want to broadcast it everywhere -- wherever French is spoken. In that case, don't you think it would be more to the point to take a more general subject: to say what Sri Aurobindo represents? I think you can do that, they weren't very precise. Did they say how much time? Ten minutes.Ten minutes is nothing. It's long! Ten minutes is long!Yes, that's better, a theme that can interest the whole world. Basically what would be good is to say, "Sri Aurobindo came to tell the world the beauty of the future to come." And then, explain it. "He came to give -- not a hope: a certitude of the splendor towards which the world is moving...." That's exactly all the experiences I've had recently. And I see Sri Aurobindo's letters, that's what he says. "The world is not an unhappy accident, it is a marvel moving towards its expression." And then give all the quotations from Sri Aurobindo on the subject. I think that's what the world most needs now, a word that gives the sense of what is to be realized -- of what will be realized. And then, to awaken in each one the desire to collaborate. To understand oneself and transmit it to others. The world needs an assurance of beauty -- of the future beauty. And Sri Aurobindo gave the assurance. Along those lines. They had asked me that. So I looked and I saw only you could say it -- they want it to be spoken. Did you hear yourself when you spoke for me [the last message to the radio station]? page 310-11 - Mother's Agenda , volume 12 , 27th Nov - 1971 |
(Text for "All-India Radio" on the occasion of Sri Aurobindo's centenary.) SRI AUROBINDO AND THE EARTH'S FUTURE Sometimes a great wandering Thought sees the ages still unaccomplished, seizes the Force in its eternal flow and precipitates upon earth the powerful vision, which is like a power of realizing what it sees. The world is a vision becoming real. Indeed its past and its present are not the result of an obscure impulse coming from the womb of time, of a slow accumulation of sediments which little by little mold us -- and stifle us and imprison us. It is the powerful golden attraction of the future which draws us in spite of ourselves, as the sun draws the lotus from the mud, and forces us to a glory greater than any our mud or efforts or present triumphs could have foreseen or created. Sri Aurobindo is this vision and this power of precipitating the future into the present. What he saw in an instant the ages and millions of men will unwittingly accomplish. Unknowingly they will seek the new imperceptible quiver that has entered the earth's atmosphere. From age to age great beings come amongst us to hew a great opening of Truth in the sepulchre of the past. And in actuality, these beings are the great destroyers of the past. They come with the sword of Knowledge to shatter our fragile empires. This year, we are celebrating Sri Aurobindo's Birth Centenary. He is known to barely a handful of men and yet his name will resound when the great men of today or yesterday are buried under their own debris. His work is discussed by philosophers, praised by poets, people acclaim his sociological vision and his yoga -- but Sri Aurobindo is a living ACTION, a Word becoming real, and every day in the thousand circumstances that seem to want to rend the earth and topple its structures we can witness the first reflux of the Force he has set in motion. At the beginning of this century, when India was still struggling against British domination, Sri Aurobindo asserted: "It is not a revolt against the British Government [that is needed].... It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature."[[A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, p. 45. ]] For the problem is fundamental. It is not a question of bringing a new philosophy to the world or new ideas or illuminations, as they are called. The question is not of making the Prison of our lives more habitable, or of endowing man with ever more fantastic powers. Armed with his microscopes and telescopes, the human gnome remains a gnome, pain-ridden and helpless. We send rockets to the moon, but we know nothing of our own hearts. It is a question, says Sri Aurobindo, "of creating a new physical nature which is to be the habitation of the Supramental being in a new evolution."[[On Himself, XXVI.112 ]] For, in actuality, he says, "the imperfection of Man is not the last word of Nature, but his perfection too is not the last peak of the Spirit."[[The Life Divine, XIX.763. ]] Beyond the mental man we are, there exists the possibility of another being who will be the spearhead of evolution as man was once the spearhead of evolution among the great apes. "If," says Sri Aurobindo, "the animal is a living laboratory in which Nature has, it is said, worked out man, man himself may well be a thinking and living laboratory in whom and with whose conscious co-operation she wills to work out the superman, the god."[[The Life Divine, XVIII.3. ]] Sri Aurobindo has come to tell us how to create this other being, this supramental being, and not only to tell us but actually to create this other being and open the path of the future, to hasten upon earth the rhythm of evolution, the new vibration that will replace the mental vibration -- exactly as a thought one day disturbed the slow routine of the beasts -- and will give us the power to shatter the walls of our human prison. Indeed, the prison is already starting to collapse. "The end of a stage of evolution," announced by Sri Aurobindo, "is usually marked by a powerful recrudescence of all that has to go out of the evolution."[[The Ideal of the Karmayogin, III.347. ]] Everywhere about us we see this paroxysmal shattering of all the old forms: our borders, our churches, our laws, our morals are collapsing on all sides. They are not collapsing because we are bad, immoral, irreligious, or because we are not sufficiently rational, scientific or human, but because we have come to the end of the human! To the end of the old mechanism -- for we are on our way to SOMETHING ELSE. The world is not going through a moral crisis but through an "evolutionary crisis." We are not going towards a better world -- nor, for that matter, towards a worse one -- we are in the midst of a MUTATION to a radically different world, as different as the human world was from the ape world of the Tertiary Era. We are entering a new era, a supramental Quinary. We leave our countries, wander aimlessly, we go looking for drugs, for adventure, we go on strike here, enact reforms there, foment revolutions and counterrevolutions. But all this is only an appearance; in fact, unwittingly, we are looking for the new being. We are in the midst of human evolution. And Sri Aurobindo gives us the key. It may be that the sense of our own revolution escapes us because we try to prolong that which already exists, to refine it, improve it, sublimate it. But the ape may have made the same mistake amid its revolution that produced man; perhaps it sought to become a super-ape, better equipped to climb trees, hunt and run, a more agile and clever ape. With Nietzsche we too sought a "superman" who was nothing more than a colossalization of man, and with the spiritualists a super-saint more richly endowed with virtue and wisdom. But human virtue and wisdom are useless! Even when carried to their highest heights they are nothing more than the old poverties gilded over, the obverse of our tenacious misery. "Supermanhood," says Sri Aurobindo, "is not man climbed to his own natural zenith, not a superior degree of human greatness, knowledge, power, intelligence, will, ... genius, ... saintliness, love, purity or perfection."[[The Hour of God, XVII.7. ]] It is SOMETHING ELSE, another vibration of being, another consciousness. But if this new consciousness is not to be found on the peaks of the human, where then, are we to find it? Perhaps, quite simply in that which we have most neglected since we entered the mental cycle, in the body. The body is our base, our evolutionary foundation, the old stock to which we always return, and which painfully compels our attention by making us suffer, age and die. "In that imperfection," Sri Aurobindo assures us, "is the urge towards a higher and more many-sided perfection. It contains the last finite which yet yearns to the Supreme Infinite.... God is pent in the mire ... but the very fact imposes a necessity to break through that prison."[[Dilip K. Roy, Sri Aurobindo Came to Me, p. 415. ]] That is the old, uncured Illness, the unchanged root, the dark matrix of our misery, hardly different now from what it was in the time of Lemuria. It is this physical substance which we must transform, otherwise it will topple, one after another, all the human or superhuman devices we try to graft on it. This body, this physical cellular substance contains "almighty powers,"[[Savitri, IV.III.370. ]] a dumb consciousness that harbors all the lights and all the infinitudes, just as much as the mental and spiritual immensities do. For, in truth, all is Divine and unless the Lord of all the universe resides in a single little cell he resides nowhere. It is this original, dark cellular Prison which we must break open; for as long as we have not broken it, we will continue to turn vainly in the golden or iron circles of our mental prison. "These laws of Nature," says Sri Aurobindo, "that you call absolute ... merely mean an equilibrium established to work in order to produce certain results. But, if you change the consciousness, then the groove also is bound to change."[[A.B. Purani, Evening Talks, p. 92. ]] Such is the new adventure to which Sri Aurobindo invites us, an adventure into man's unknown. Whether we like it or not, the whole earth is moving into a new groove, but why shouldn't we like it? Why shouldn't we collaborate in this great, unprecedented adventure? Why shouldn't we collaborate in our own evolution, instead of repeating endlessly the same old story, instead of chasing hallucinatory paradises which will never quench our thirst or otherworldly paradises which leave the earth to rot along with our bodies? "Why be born if it is to get out at the end?" exclaims the Mother, who continues Sri Aurobindo's work. "What is the use of having struggled so much, suffered so much, of having created something which, in its outer appearance at least, is so tragic and dramatic, if it is only to learn how to get out of it -- it would have been better not to start at all.... Evolution is not a tortuous course that brings us back, somewhat battered, to the starting point. Quite the contrary, it is meant," says Mother, "to teach the whole of creation the joy of being, the beauty of being, the grandeur of being, the majesty of a sublime life, and the perpetual development, perpetually progressive, of this joy, this beauty, this grandeur. Then everything has a meaning."[[Questions and Answers, November 12, 1958. ]] This body, this obscure beast of burden we inhabit, is the experimental field of Sri Aurobindo's yoga -- which is a yoga of the whole earth, for one can easily understand that if a single being among our millions of sufferings succeeds in negotiating the evolutionary leap, the mutation of the next age, the face of the earth will be radically altered. Then all the so-called powers of which we boast today will seem like childish games before the radiance of this almighty embodied spirit. Sri Aurobindo tells us that it is possible -- not only possible but that it will be done. It is being done. And perhaps everything depends not so much on a sublime effort of humanity to transcend its limitations -- for that means still using our own human strength to free ourselves from human strength -- as on a call, a conscious cry of the earth to this new being which the earth already carries within itself. All is already there, within our hearts, the supreme Source which is the supreme Power -- only we must call it into our forest of cement, we must understand the meaning of man, the meaning of ourselves. The amplified cry of the earth, of its millions of men and women who cannot bear it anymore, who no longer accept their prison, must open a crack to let the new vibration in. Then all the apparently ineluctable laws that bind us in their hereditary and scientific groove will crumble before the Joy of the "sun-eyed children."[[Savitri, III.IV.343. ]] "Expect nothing from death," says Mother, "life is your salvation. It is in life that you must transform yourself. It is on earth that you progress and on earth that you realize. It is in the body that you win the Victory."[[On the Dhammapada. ]]"Nor let worldly prudence whisper too closely in thy ear," says Sri Aurobindo, "for it is the hour of the unexpected."[[The Hour of God, XVII.1. ]] Pondicherry, 9 December 1971 page 326-331 - Mother's Agenda , volume 12 , 11th Dec - 1971 |
There's also the message you gave All India Radio for August 15: "The message from Sri Aurobindo is a sunshineradiating over the future." And for the darshan here [of August 151, do you have a message? (after a silence) I could say:"Sri Aurobindo's message radiates over the futurelike an immortal sun."
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