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

4 December 1957 “In fact we see that the principles of creation are permanent and unchanging: each type of being re- mains itself and does not try nor has any need to become other than itself; granting that some types of existence disappear and others come into being, it is because the Consciousness-Force in the universe with- draws its life-delight from those that perish and turns to create others for its pleasure. But each type of life, while it lasts, has its own pattern and remains faith- ful with whatever minor variations to that pattern: it is bound to its own consciousness and cannot get away from it into other-consciousness; lim

5 June 1957 Do you have any questions? No  Sweet Mother, should one ask questions which don’t come spontaneously? What do you mean by a question that doesn’t come spontaneously?   For, usually, in class, we often feel that if we don’t ask questions you won’t tell us anything, so we think and think, and we have to ask questions! It depends on what you find! If the question is interesting…Because you make an effort to find it, it doesn’t mean that it is necessarily bad.           Do you have a question of this kind? No. Then…                                                                                (Long silence) In

7 May 1958 “In the earliest stages of evolutionary Nature we are met by the dumb secrecy of her inconscience; there is no revelation of any significance or purpose in her works, no hint of any other principles of being than that first formulation which is her immediate preoccu- pation and seems to be for ever her only business: for in her primal works Matter alone appears, the sole dumb and stark cosmic reality. A Witness of creation, if there had been one conscious but uninstructed, would only have seen appearing out of a vast abyss of an apparent non-existence an Energy busy with the creation of Matter, a material world and material ob-

6 August 1958 Sweet Mother, what is the effect and value of collective prayer? We have already spoken about this, about collective prayers, the use that has been made of them. I believe that it has even been published in the Bulletin. Besides, there are different kinds of collective prayer, just as there are different kinds of collectivities. There is the anonymous mass, the crowd, formed by chance circumstances, without any inner coordination, impelled by the force of circumstance, as for instance when a king or a person who attracts public attention is in a critical situation, either ill or the victim of an accident, and the people gather to obtain news and

1 January 1958 O Nature, material Mother,  Thou hast said that thou wilt collaborate  and there is no limit  to the splendour of this collaboration. New Year Message, 1 January 1958   * Sweet Mother, will you explain the message for this year? It is already written! The explanation has already been written, it is ready for the Bulletin of February 21. ¹ There is nothing to explain. It is an experience, something that happened, and when it happened I noted it down, and as it turned out, it occurred just at the moment when I remembered that I had to write something for the year – which was next year at that time, that is, the year which

4 September 1957  Today I received a question about a phrase I used on the fourteenth of August, the eve of Sri Aurobindo’s birthday. And this question seemed interesting to me because it was about one of those rather cryptic phrases, that are almost ambiguous through simplification, and which was intended to be like that, so that each one might understand it according to his own plane of consciousness. I have already spoken to you several times of this possibility of understanding the same words on different planes; and these words were intentionally expressed with a simplification, a deliberate vagueness, precisely so that they would serve as a vehicle for the complexity o

17 July 1957 Has no one any questions on the text?…I have nothing special to tell you this evening, and if you are not curious to know what the new perfections of the body could be…           Mother, in the physical education we practise here our aim is a greater and greater control over the body, isn’t it? So, as Sri Aurobindo has said in what we read last time, that the Hatha-yoga and Tantric methods give a very great control over the body,¹ Why don’t we introduce these methods into our system? These are occult processes for acting on the body – the Tantric ones, at any rate – while the modern methods of development follow the ordinary physical