The World Tragedy SHAKESPEARE in giving expression to a most poignant experience of human life says – we all know the most familiar and famous lines – in a most poignant manner: The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! – ¹ The poignancy comes not so much from the fact that this is a "naughty world," a cruel world, an unending sea of troubles which you have to brave and bear and fight constantly against: it is not merely that the world is painful and dolorous and even wicked but that it wants to remain so; even if you want to lift it up, out of its maladies, it sinks down back again into its familiar mud, and brings d

Spirits in Trees You told us the other day that there are spirits who remain bound to trees. How are they to get free? WHY should they get free? You told us how the spirits in the trees got freed when someone was kind to them and prayed on their behalf..... Yes, but that was in the story. It was a Christian legend and put in that way to illustrate a lesson. It was to show that if you are wicked you suffer even after death, that it is a virtuous life that saves you from misery. In reality, however, there is no question here of sin and punishment, it is not that spirits get attached to trees in order to be punished. When a person dies, his vital being leaves the

To Melt into the Divine How to melt into the Divine? That is to say, how to get dissolved in the Divine, lose one's ego? FIRST of all, one must wish for it, will for it, aspire for it with perseverance. Every time the ego shows itself, you must give it a blow on the nose, until it receives so much of it that it gets tired and gives up. Generally, however, one does not administer the blow but cherishes the miscreant, justifies its presence. When it shows itself one says, "After all it is right"; although in most cases, one does not even know it is the ego, one takes it for one's self. The first condition then is to consider it essential that one should have

Faith and Progress When one makes an effort, makes a little progress, one gets satisfied and is proud of it. That spoils everything. How to get rid of this fault? IT is because one looks at oneself while doing a thing. It is the habit of constantly observing oneself as one works or lives. Certainly you must observe yourself; but more than that you must be sincere and spontaneous – spontaneous in what you do and not turning towards yourself all the while, judging, criticising, sometimes even severely. That is often as bad as patting oneself with satisfaction. You must be sincere in your aspiration, you need not even know that you are aspiring: you should become t

Sadhana Must be Done in the Body THERE are people who are disgusted with life. They want to go away in the hope that it will be better the next time. But we tell you: It is no use running away from your body, it will not be easier without a body. On the contrary, it will be much more difficult. The body is meant for you to do Yoga. We are upon earth here and it is precisely during the period of our life upon earth that we can make progress. You cannot progress outside the life on earth. The terrestrial life, the material life is essentially the life for progress. It is here that we develop and advance. Outside the earthly life you take rest, or else you r

Thought the Creator HUMAN thought always creates forms in the mental world. It is a creative force. You are creating thought-forms constantly and sending them out into the atmosphere around; they go abroad to do their work. You are yourself surrounded always by such formations. No doubt there are people who cannot think clearly; they form around them only a kind of whirl. But they who think clearly and strongly create thought-forms that go out to accomplish their task and return to the source. There are cases of people who are troubled by their own formations that return to them or upon them as if to possess them and which they cannot get rid of; they do not know how

Beyond Love and Hate THE MOTHER says Love and Hate are at bottom the same thing. At the centre there is the same substance in both, it is the obverse and reverse of the same stuff. It is a vibration, it is a unique vibration, a vibration of extreme intensity, of extreme intimacy. At the centre there is this one single movement although at the periphery it becomes different, even contradictory. As the movement starts from the centre, and proceeds outward it differentiates itself, becomes more and more different, contrary, even contradictory to what it was at its origin. Hatred with all its most ugly features appears in the place of what was once a smiling beauty. Indeed,

Night and Day THE night is the background to the day or otherwise the day is the stage and the night the green room, that is to say, what­ever is expressed in the day, all your activities physical or mental, are in a large part determined or coloured by your activities at night in sleep. The day represents your conscious activities, products of choice and the exercise of conscious will, but of the night we are wholly unconscious and we have no control over its hidden activities. Even so, it exercises a tremendous influence on the life of the day. The mood, the rhythm in the sleep-state colours, as I say, very much the mood and rhythm of the active life of the day. The contrary a

Sleep and Pain How would one be able to sleep when one has extreme bodily pain? THAT requires some kind of yogic power. The best way, the absolute one, is to get out of the body. When the body suffers, when you have high fever, for example, when you are sick, sick to the last degree, the only thing to do then is to come out of the body, come out with your vital being. If you are a yogi and have the knowledge, you remain outside the body but just above it so that you are able to look at it. You can see your own body if the vital form in which you go out is sufficiently materialised. You see your body and with the consciousness and the power which you have then, y

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 Presenc