5 March 1958 Mother, won’t you please speak to us about the “reversal” you have already mentioned to us several times? You said that a reversal was necessary to obtain the new consciousness. A reversal? What kind of reversal do we need, now? You said “a reversal of consciousness”. That is a way of speaking. It doesn’t mean that you should walk on your head!…It is an image. Yes, Sri Aurobindo has said this too,¹  so…   So, if the image leads you to some kind of perception, it is good, but it is not with this (Mother points to the head) that you can understand. If it gives you an impression which explains things to you

1 October 1958 Sweet Mother, what is an ideal of moral perfection? There are thousands of moral perfections. Everyone has his own ideal of moral perfection. What is usually called moral perfection is to have all the qualities that are considered moral: to have no defects, never to make a mistake, never to err, to be always what one conceives to be the best, to have all the virtues – that is, to realise the highest mental conception: to take all the qualities – there are many, aren’t there? – all the virtues, all that man has conceived to be the most beautiful, most noble, most true, and to live that integrally, to let all one’s actions be guided by that, all the movem

5 February 1958 “The metaphysical objection [to a teleological cosmos] is more serious; for it seems self-evident that the Abso- lute can have no purpose in manifestation except the delight of manifestation itself: an evolutionary move- ment in Matter as part of the manifestation must fall within this universal statement; it can be there only for the delight of the unfolding, the progressive execution, the objectless seried self-revelation. A universal total- ity may also be considered as something complete in itself; as a totality, it has nothing to gain or to add to its fullness of being. But here the material world is not an integra

13 November 1957 I have a question about the first page where Sri Aurobindo says, “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 terrestrial existence.”  The Life Divine, p. 824 * So, from the point of view of form, in what way is man superior to other animals? I think this is quite easy to find. Sri Aurobindo speaks of the form that is capable of manifesting the Spirit. The very nature of the manifestation of the Spirit is consciousness, understanding

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