Chapter 51Sadhana through Work for the Mother · Following the Mother’s Will

power working through it. A purely sedentary subjective reali-sation is only a half realisation.

23 January 1934

*

I pray that I may feel the Mother’s protection while working. I feel happy to work. I am not able to meditate every day, but as long as I am working I feel that the work itself is sadhana.

Work for the Mother done with the right concentration on her is as much a sadhana as meditation and inner experiences.

14 March 1934

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During physical pursuits, I find that the Mother’s Force takes them up. But when I am not working, what should I aspire for?

For the Mother’s power to work and bring down by the proper stages the higher consciousness. Also for the system to be more and more fit — quiet, egoless, surrendered.

5 June 1934

* It is not our experience that by meditation alone it is possible to change the nature, nor has retirement from outward activity and work much profited those who have tried it; in many cases it has been harmful. A certain amount of concentration, an inner needed. But without action, without work the nature does not really change; it is there and by contact with men that there is the test of the change in the nature. As for the work one does, there is no higher or lower work; all work is the same provided it is offered to the Mother and done for her and in her power.

You have probably taken too much work on yourself by adding to the rest accounts, etc. That was not necessary. There is no reason why you should not do a normal amount and have time and energy for meditation as well. If you wish, however, to change, Mother may consider it, though she does not just now see how to arrange.

6 October 1934

* This [experience of the true attitude] happens when the work is always associated with the Mother’s thought, done as an offering to her, with the call to do it through you. All ideas of ego, all association of egoistic feelings with the work must disappear. One begins to feel the Mother’s force doing the work; the psychic grows through a certain inner attitude behind the work and the adhar becomes open both to the psychic intuitions and influences from within and to the descent from above. Then the result of meditation can come through the work itself.

5 May 1936

* Just as you give yourself through work to the Mother doing all for her, so there is an inner giving or consecration. Ordinarily the mind and vital live for themselves, want this or that, seek after it and feel dissatisfied and unfulfilled if they do not get it. But when they give themselves, this ceases. Whatever the Mother does with them that they accept — ask for nothing, rely on her entirely, live for her will and not for their desires. Then they begin to be empty of their old selves and old movements, fill with the presence of the Mother, the will of the Mother, the workings of the Mother — that becomes all their life.

27 July 1936

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Once in an interview the Mother told me, “Why do you make any difference between me and work?” I am not sure if I have been able to reproduce the exact words, but they are almost like that. I pray to you to make the idea a little more explicit.

As it stands, it has no meaning. What Mother must have said is “Why do you make any separation between me and work?” It is she who is doing the work, she is there in it, so it is a mistake to make an opposition between concentration on her and the work. Her presence is there in both.

* This state of mind, described in your letter, must be due to a tension created by an urge in the psychic to make a complete