9 July 1958 “Religion has opened itself to denial by its claim to determine the truth by divine authority, by inspiration, by a sacrosanct and infallible sovereignty given to it from on high; it has sought to impose itself on human thought, feeling, conduct without discussion or ques- tion. This is an excessive and premature claim, although imposed in a way on the religious idea by the imperative and absolute character of the inspira- tions and illuminations which are its warrant and justi- fication and by the necessity of faith as an occult light and power from the soul amidst the mind’s ignorance, doubts, weakness, incertitudes. Faith is

6 February 1957                                                               “Death is the question Nature puts continually to Life and her reminder to it that it has not yet found itself. If there  were no siege of death, the creature would be bound forever in the form of an imperfect living. Pur- sued by death he awakes to the idea of perfect life and seeks out its means and its possibility.” Thoughts and Glimpses, Cent. Vol. 16, p. 386 * There seems to be matter enough here for us not to need to go any further. This is a question which every person whose consciousness is awakened a little has asked himself at least once in his life. Th

1 May 1957 “In the admission of an activity such as sports and physical exercises into the life of the Ashram it is evi- dent that the methods and the first objects to be attained must belong to what we have called the lower end of the being. Originally they have been introduced for the physical education and bodily development of the children of the Ashram School and these are too young for a strictly spiritual aim or practice to enter into their activities.…Yet what can be attained within the human boundaries can be something very consi- derable and sometimes immense: what we call genius is part of the development of the human range

7 August 1957 Sri Aurobindo has written: “The descent of the Super- mind will bring to one who receives it and is fulfilled in the truth-consciousness all the possibilities of the divine life. It will take up not only the whole charac- teristic experience which we recognise already as con- stituting the spiritual life but also all which we now exclude from that category....” The Supramental Manifestation, p. 47 * So, what are you asking? What is excluded? What do we exclude!…It depends on the person. But what are you asking, really?    I don’t see what we are excluding. Ah! that’s sensible. Here we profess we are exclud

3 July 1957 I have been asked if we are doing a collective yoga and what the conditions for the collective yoga are.       I might tell you first of all that to do a collective yoga we must be a collectivity (!) and then speak to you about the different conditions required for being a collectivity. But last night (smiling) I had a symbolic vision of our collectivity.       I had this vision in the early part of the night, and it made me wake up with a rather unpleasant impression. Then I went back to sleep and had forgotten it, and just now when I thought of the question I have been asked, the vision suddenly came back. It returned with a great intensity and so imperativ

Questions And Answers 1957-58 2 January 1957 “If Brahman were only an impersonal abstraction eternally contradicting the apparent fact of our con- crete existence, cessation would be the right end of the matter; but love and delight and self-awareness have also to be reckoned. “The universe is not merely a mathematical for- mula for working out the relation of certain mental abstractions called numbers and principles to arrive in the end at a zero or a void unit, neither is it merely a physical operation embodying a certain equation of forces. It is the delight of a Self-lover, the play of a Child, the endle

4 December 1957 “In fact we see that the principles of creation are permanent and unchanging: each type of being re- mains itself and does not try nor has any need to become other than itself; granting that some types of existence disappear and others come into being, it is because the Consciousness-Force in the universe with- draws its life-delight from those that perish and turns to create others for its pleasure. But each type of life, while it lasts, has its own pattern and remains faith- ful with whatever minor variations to that pattern: it is bound to its own consciousness and cannot get away from it into other-consciousness; lim

5 June 1957 Do you have any questions? No  Sweet Mother, should one ask questions which don’t come spontaneously? What do you mean by a question that doesn’t come spontaneously?   For, usually, in class, we often feel that if we don’t ask questions you won’t tell us anything, so we think and think, and we have to ask questions! It depends on what you find! If the question is interesting…Because you make an effort to find it, it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily bad.           Do you have a question of this kind? No. Then…                                                                                (Long silence) In

7 May 1958 “In the earliest stages of evolutionary Nature we are met by the dumb secrecy of her inconscience; there is no revelation of any significance or purpose in her works, no hint of any other principles of being than that first formulation which is her immediate preoccu- pation and seems to be for ever her only business: for in her primal works Matter alone appears, the sole dumb and stark cosmic reality. A Witness of creation, if there had been one conscious but uninstructed, would only have seen appearing out of a vast abyss of an apparent non-existence an Energy busy with the creation of Matter, a material world and material ob-

6 August 1958 Sweet Mother, what is the effect and value of collective prayer? We have already spoken about this, about collective prayers, the use that has been made of them. I believe that it has even been published in the Bulletin. Besides, there are different kinds of collective prayer, just as there are different kinds of collectivities. There is the anonymous mass, the crowd, formed by chance circumstances, without any inner coordination, impelled by the force of circumstance, as for instance when a king or a person who attracts public attention is in a critical situation, either ill or the victim of an accident, and the people gather to obtain news and