25 March 1953 You have said: “You must be vigilant and see that you do not use the Divine as a cloak for the satisfaction of your desires.” Questions and Answers 1929 (14 April) * Many people accept certain theories, some of which are very convenient, and they say, “Everything is the result of the divine Will”; others say, “The Divine is everywhere and in everything and does everything”; yet others say, “My will is one with the divine Will, it is He who inspires me.” Indeed, there are many theories and they say that. Naturally, their ego is as alive. They do all that they want to do, saying, “It is the Divine who is doing it in me.” Whatever is supplied by

14 October 1953 Q. “If the Divine that is all love is the source of the creation, whence have come all the evils abounding upon earth?” “All is from the Divine; but the One Consciousness, the Supreme has not created the world directly out of itself; a Power has gone out of it and has descended through many gradations of its workings and passed through many agents. There are many creators or rather ‘formateurs’, form-makers, who have presided over the creation of the world. They are intermediary agents and I prefer to call them ‘Formateurs’ and not ‘Creators’; for what they have done is to give the form and turn and nature to matter. There have been many,

30 September 1953 “There is a plane in the mind where the memory of everything is stored and remains always in existence. All mental movements that belong to the life of the earth are memorised and registered in this plane. Those who are capable of going there and care to take the trouble, can read in it and learn anything they choose. But this region must not be mistaken for the supra- mental levels. And yet to reach even there you must be able to silence the movements of the material or physical mind; you must be able to leave aside all your sensations and put a stop to your ordinary men- tal movements, whatever th

7 October 1953 “The method by which you will be most successful depends on the consciousness you have developed and the character of the forces you are able to bring into play. You can live in the consciousness of the com- pleted cure or change and by the force of your inner formation slowly bring about the outward change. Or if you know and have the vision of the force that is able to effect these things and if you have the skill to handle it, you can call it down and apply it in the parts where its action is needed, and it will work out the change. Or, again, you can present your difficulty to the Divine and ask of It

29 April 1953 Sweet Mother, you have said that one can exercise one’s conscious will and change the course of one’s dreams. Ah, yes, I have already told you that once. If you are in the middle of a dream and something happens which you don’t like (for instance, somebody shouts that he wants to kill you), you say: “That won’t do at all, I don’t want my dream to be like that”, and you can change the action or the ending. You can organise your dream as you want. One can arrange one’s dreams. But for this you must be conscious that you are dreaming, you must know you are dreaming. But these dreams are not of much importance, are they? Yes, they are,

3 June 1953 “Freedom and fatality, liberty and determinism are truths that obtain on different levels of consciousness.” Questions and Answers 1929 (28 April) * What are these different levels of consciousness? But I have explained it later on. All that follows is the explanation. I have already spoken to you of the different planes of consciousness. Well, on the material plane, purely material (when separated from the vital plane), it is an absolute mechanism where consequently all things are linked together; and as I was saying the other day, if you want to find the cause of one thing or what is the result of a thing, you will find another and y

6 May 1953 “People often meet in these planes, before they meet upon earth. They may join there, speak to each other and have all the relations you can have upon earth. Some know of these relationships, some do not know. Some, as are indeed most, are unconscious of the inner being and the inner intercourse, and yet it happens that when they meet the new face in the outer world, they find it very familiar, quite well known.” Questions and Answers (1929 21 April) * That depends very much upon the level of consciousness in one’s inner being. For most people, all that is a mixture in the mental, vital and physical planes; they are not at al

28 October 1953 “True art is a whole and an ensemble; it is one and of one piece with life. You see something of this inti- mate wholeness in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt; for there pictures and statues and all objects of art were made and arranged as part of the architectural plan of a building, each detail a portion of the whole. It is like that in Japan, or at least it was so till the other day before the invasion of a utilitarian and prac- tical modernism. A Japanese house is a wonderful artistic whole; always the right thing is there in the right place, nothing wrongly set, nothing too much, nothing too lit

4 November 1953 Before beginning the class Mother spoke for a few minutes about the “sphere with spirals” which the children had constructed to give an idea of what She had explained the preceding week: .. The sphere is touched only by a part of the curve, the rest is evolved inside. It cannot be made. This one is opaque. But it was.. there was at the centre of the sphere an intersection of all the spirals. What you have done there makes it flat, the way it is done. It is flat. As I saw it, the edge was touched by a section of the curve. Each curve has one part of the edge as section. And the colours were seen distinctly and one could see right throu

13 October 1954 This talk is based upon Sri Aurobindo's Bases of Yoga, Chapter 1, “Calm – Peace – Equality”. Sweet Mother, what does “the reduction of the men- tal being to the position of a witness” mean? Have you never felt this? As though you were a little behind or above things, and were looking at them taking place but were not doing anything yourself? Witness means an observer, someone who looks on and does not act himself. So, when the mind is very quiet, one can withdraw a little in this way from circumstances and look at things as though he were a witness, a spectator, and not participating in the action himself. This gives you a great detachm