30 August 1967         For the last several nights I have been passing almost the whole night, many hours, in a place which must certainly belong to the subtle physical and where the material life gets reorganised. It is vast - vast - the crowd is innumerable, but these are individualities, not a crowd; that is to say, I have to deal with each one of them. And then, it is as though at the same time there are documents and writing tables but no walls around ! It is a curious place, a very curious place.         I have asked myself many a time whether it was the memory of physical forms that made me see this world in that way or whether it is really like that. At times

How Religions Are Formed       Words of the Mother         Religion belongs to the higher mind of humanity. It is the effort of man's higher mind to approach, as far as lies in its power, something beyond it, something to which humanity gives the name God or Spirit or Truth or Faith or Knowledge or the Infinite, some kind of Absolute, which the human mind cannot reach and yet tries to reach. Religion may be divine in its ultimate origin; in its actual nature it is not divine but human. In truth we should speak rather of religions than of religion; for the religions made by man are many. These different religions, even when they had not the same origin, have

THE PSYCHIC BEING AND REBIRTH   SOME CLARIFICATIONS BY THE MOTHER         Q. You say that the psychic being is the same thing as the divine spark...         No, I never said that-it would be foolish ! The psychic being is organised around the divine spark. The divine spark is one, universal, the same everywhere and in everything, one and infinite, of the same kind in all. You cannot say that it is a being-it is "the being", if you like, but not a being. Naturally, if you go back to the origin, you may say that there is only one soul, for the origin of all souls is the same, as the origin of the whole universe is the same, as the origin of the ent

Creation and the Creator Are Not Separate         The Divine is all-powerful, he can do whatever he likes... And if you push your idea sufficiently far, you will see that if the Divine is truly all-powerful in this world and does always whatever he wants, well, I tell you, he is the greatest monster in the universe ! Because One who is all-powerful and makes the world such as it is, looking with a smile at people suffering and miserable, and finding that all right, I would call a monster. It was the kind of thing I used to think about when I was five. I used to tell myself: " It is not possible, what is taught there is not true !" Now, as you have a little

Purpose of the Mother's Embodiment   (Words of Sri Aurobindo)         There is one divine force which acts in the universe and in the individual and is also beyond the individual and the universe. The Mother stands for all these , but she is working here in the body to bring down something not yet expressed in this material world so as to transform life here - it is so that you should regard her as the Divine Shakti working here for that purpose. She is that in the body, but in her whole consciousness she is also identified with all the other aspects of the Divine. *       The Mother comes in order to bring down the Supramental and it is the desce

THE AVATAR   FROM A TALK BY THE MOTHER         Today I have been asked to speak to you about the Avatar.         The first thing I have to say is that Sri Aurobindo has written on this subject and the person who has asked me the question would do well to begin by reading what Sri Aurobindo has written.         I shall not speak to you about that, for it is better to read it for yourself.         But I could speak to you of a very old tradition, more ancient than the two known lines of spiritual and occult tradition, that is, the Vedic and Chaldean lines; a tradition which seems to have been at the origin of these two known traditions,

The Mother on Herself         (Statements made on different occasions)         When and how did I become conscious of a mission which I was to fulfil on earth ? And when and how I met Sri Aurobindo ?         These two questions you have asked me and I promised a short reply.         For the knowledge of the mission, it is difficult to say when it came to me. It is as though I were born with it, and following the growth of the mind and brain, the precision and completeness of this consciousness grew also.         Between 11 and 13 a series of psychic and spiritual experiences revealed to me not only the existence of God but man's possi

DEATH AND REBIRTH   FROM A TALK BY THE MOTHER         Someone has asked me a question about death: what happens after death and how one takes a new body.         Needless to say, it is a subject which could fill volumes, no two cases are alike: practically everything is possible on earth when one is in a physical body, and all statements when generalised become dogmatic. But still one may look at the problem in some detail, and sometimes one makes interesting discoveries.         The question is like this:         " When an especially developed soul leaves the body, does it take with it the subtle physical sheath ? When it reincarnates, how

WHEN LOVE COMES   GUIDANCE BY THE MOTHER         The best way when love comes, in whatever form it be, is to try and pierce through its outer appearance and find the divine principle which is behind and which gives it existence. Naturally, it is full of snares and difficulties, but it is more effective. That is to say, instead of ceasing from loving because one loves wrongly, one must cease loving wrongly and want to love well.         For instance, love between human beings, in all its forms, love of parents for their children, of children for parents, of brothers and sisters, of friends and lovers, is altogether tainted with ignorance, selfishness and

Power of mental formation         The imagination is really the power of mental formation.... There is, however, no such thing as an unreal formation, because every image is a reality on the mental plane. The plot of a novel, for instance, is all there on the mental plane existing independently of the physical. Each of us is a novelist to a certain extent and possesses the capacity to make forms on that plane; and, in fact, a good deal of our life embodies the products of our imagination. Every time you indulge your imagination in an unhealthy way, giving a form to your fears and anticipating accidents and misfortunes, you are undermining your own future. On t