THE PSYCHIC BEING The psychic is like an electric wire that connects the generator with the lamp; the lamp being the body, the visible form. Its function is likewise, that is to say, if the psychic were not there in Matter, it could have no direct contact with the Divine. It is because of the psychic presence that there can be a direct contact between Matter and the Divine. And every human being can be told : "You carry the Divine within you, you have only to enter within yourself and you will find Him." It is a direct, special, transmuting infusion into the most inconscient and obscure Matter to awaken it once more step by step to the Divine Consciousness, the Divine

MEDITATION Collective meditation, of which the most external form is collective prayer, has been practised from ancient times for different reasons, in different ways, and with different purposes. Groups of persons, whether belonging to the same Church or not, come together to express a common feeling; in certain cases, it is to sing together in praise of God, to chant a hymn of gratitude, expressing love, adoration, thankfulness. In other cases,—there are many historical examples of this—people gather together for a common invocation, to ask something from the Divine in the hope that a prayer done collectively will have more effect than an individual prayer. Thus, in Eu

PUBLISHERS' NOTE The writings included in this volume are based on talks given by the Mother. They originally appeared in the Ashram Journals during the years 1957-1958.

THE SUPRAMENTAL VISION In the supramental vision there is a direct, full and immediate knowledge of things, in the sense that you see all things at the same time totally, integrally; you see the truth of a thing in all its aspects simultaneously. But as soon as you want to explain or describe it, you are obliged to come down to a lower level. Sri Aurobindo calls it the Mind of Light. Here things have to be said or even thought or expressed and realised in action one after another in a certain order, in a certain relation to each other. Therefore the simultaneity disappears; for, in the present condition of our way of expression it is impossible to sa

Section One PRAYER AND ASPIRATION (I) Prayers are of many kinds. There is a prayer, purely mechanical and physical, that is to say, merely words learnt by rote and repeated machine-like. It does not mean much and generally has only one effect, making the person calm who prays; if you repeat a prayer several times, it calms you in the end. There is a prayer which is a formula welling out spontaneously in order to give expression to something very precise which you ask for. You may pray for something, for some person; you may pray even for certain circumstances; you may pray for yourself also. Or you may pray to express your gratit

HOW TO LISTEN I have begun to notice that many among you, perhaps a very large portion, do not listen to what I say. For not unoften you have put questions on a subject on which I talked in detail just a moment before, as if nothing was spoken. The fact is surely this : each one of you is shut up in his own thought, exactly as, I suppose, you do in the class also at school. You repeat to yourself your own lesson, thinking of what is expected of you—provided, of course, you are at all diligent and attentive—and do not listen to what your teacher asks and explains or what the other students answer. You miss in this way three-fourths of the advantage of being not all alone but

Section Three Three To the Sadhaks of the Ash HEALTH IN THE ASHRAM (I) There are people who come to me and say that they would like to go home, for their health does not permit them to continue here; it gradually gets worse and worse and they ask for my permission. I wonder at their ignorance. Perhaps I should not wonder; human nature is like that. These people do not know or see or feel in the least that they are here in the best of conditions for cure, nowhere else in the world would they get anything like the opportunity or the help that is here. Naturally, if one is to be here and derive the full benefit of his stay, one has to fulfil

THE SUPRAMENTAL MANIFESTATION AND WORLD-CHANGE I have been asked what difference the presence of the Supermind will make, in what way it will change the trend of events and how, since the Supramental manifestation, life has to be reviewed. I am asked to give practical examples. I do not know what this means, but here is what I have seen in a somewhat mathematical mood. Although the mathematical language is quite foreign to me, still I may call it a mathematical mood, that is to say, a mathematical way of looking at the problem. I believe you have done sufficient mathematics to know the complexity of combinations that arises when y

THE MODERN TASTE From the standpoint of artistic and literary taste and culture, the present world is a thing of extremes. On one side, it is trying hard to discover something very noble, and on the other, it is sinking into a vulgarity which is infinitely greater than the vulgarity, say, of two or three centuries ago. In those times people who were not cultured were crude, but their crudeness resembled the crudeness of animals and had not much perversion in it—there was something certainly, for as soon as the mind appears, perversion also comes in. But in our days, what does not rise to the peak, remains on level earth, is a crudeness of the most perverted kind; that

Section Four The Mother on Herself THE MOTHER ON HERSELF (I) You must be very very persevering. I will tell you a story—my own story. When I began to practise occultism, as I started working with my nights, making them conscious, I found that between the subtle-physical level and the most material vital there was a small region, very small indeed, that was not developed well enough to serve as a conscious link between the two. So what happened in the most material vital was not being accurately translated into the consciousness of the most subtle physical. Something was lost in the passage which was however not quite empty but only half