3 September 1958 Sweet Mother, the other day you told me that it was necessary to learn how to discipline the imagination. Yes. How is it done? Imagination is something very complex and manifold – what is vaguely called “imagination”. It can be the capacity for seeing and recording, noting the forms in some mental or other domain. There are artistic, literary, poetic domains, domains of action, scientific domains, all belonging to the mind – not a very high and abstract mind, a mind above the physical mind which, without our knowing it, pours out constantly through the individual and collective mind to manifest in action. Some people, thro

4 June 1958 “At first this truth of the spirit and of spirituality is not self-evident to the mind; man becomes mentally aware of his soul as something other than his body, superior to his normal mind and life, but he has no clear sense of it, only a feeling of some of its effects on his nature. As these effects take a mental form or a life-form, the difference is not firmly and trenchantly drawn, the soul-perception does not acquire a distinct and assured independence. Very commonly indeed, a complex of half-effects of the psychic pressure on the mental and vital parts, a formation mixed with men- tal aspiration and vital desires, is mi

23 October 1957 Mother begins the reading of the last six chap- ters of The Life Divine. “A spiritual evolution, an evolution of consciousness in Matter in a constant developing self-formation till the form can reveal the indwelling Spirit, is then the key-note, the central significant motive of the terres- trial existence. This significance is concealed at the outset by the involution of the Spirit, the Divine Real- ity, in a dense material Inconscience; a veil of Incon- science, a veil of insensibility of Matter hides the uni- versal Consciousness-Force which works within it, so that the Energy, which is the first form the Force of

23 January 1957 “The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the Divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity. “But that immergence is not in the nature of an annihilation. Extinction is not the fulfilment of all this search and passion, suffering and rapture. The game would never have been begun if that were to be its ending.” “Delight is the secret. Learn of pure delight and thou shalt learn of God”. “What then was the commencement of the whole matter? Existence that multiplied itself for sheer de- light of being and plunged into numberless trillions of forms so that it m

* The Mother - 1958

5 November 1958 “Spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit, not a truth of the intellect, not a mathematical theorem or a logical formula. It is a truth of the Infinite, one in an infi- nite diversity, and it can assume an infinite variety of aspects and formations: in the spiritual evolution it is inevitable that there should be a many-sided passage and reaching to the one Truth, a many-sided seizing of it; this many-sidedness is the sign of the approach of the soul to a living reality, not to an abstraction or a constructed figure of things that can be petrified into a dead or stony formula. The hard logical and intel- lectual

6 March 1957 My eye won’t allow me to read today. ¹ But I have been asked a question on what I read to you last week. I am going to reply to it this evening. Pavitra, will you read, please? (Pavitra reads) What does this paragraph mean?: “Free- dom is the law of being in its illimitable unity, secret master of all Nature: servitude is the law of love in the being voluntarily giving itself to serve the play of its other selves in the multiplicity.” Thoughts and Glimpses, Cent. Vol. 16, p. 386 * At a superficial glance these two things appear absolutely contradictory and incompatible. Outwardly one cannot conceive how one can be at once in

22 March 1957 The following story was told by Mother during a Friday class.   This evening I am going to read to you a short story which seemed quite instructive to me. It is a tale of ancient times, of what used to happen before there were printing presses and books, of the days when only the Guru or the Initiate had the knowledge and gave it only to those he considered worthy of having it. And for him, usually, “to be worthy of having it” meant putting into practice] what one had learnt. He gave you a truth and expected you to practise it. And when you had put it into practice, he consented to give you another. Now things happen quite differently. Everybody and

2 April 1958 Mother, you said that when one consciously makes a mistake it is much more serious than if one makes it unconsciously. When you make a mistake because you don’t know that it is a mistake, through ignorance, it is obvious that when you learn that it is a mistake, when the ignorance has gone and you have goodwill, you don’t make the mistake any more, and so you come out of the condition in which you could make it. But if you know it is a mistake and make it, this means that there is something perverse in you which has deliberately chosen to be on the side of confusion or bad will or even the anti-divine forces. And it is quite obvious that if one ch

26 June 1957 “But there is here still the necessity of a resort to the normal means of propagation and the gross method of physical Nature. A purely occult method, a resort to supraphysical processes acting by supraphysical means for a physical result would have to be possible if we are to avoid this necessity: the resort to the sex impulse and its animal process could not be trans- cended otherwise. If there is some reality in the phenomenon of materialisation and dematerialisation claimed to be possible by occultists and evidenced by occurrences many of us have witnessed,¹  a method of this kind would not be out of the range of possi-