Chapter 61Undated 1957

THE MOTHER’S SUTRAS45

1) Be ambitious for nothing, above all pretend nothing, but be at each instant the utmost of what you can be.46

2) As for your place in the universal manifestation, only the Supreme can assign it to you.

3) It is the Supreme Lord who has ineluctably decreed the place you occupy in the universal concert, but whatever be this place, you have equally the same right as all others to ascend the supreme summits right to the supramental realization.

4) What you are in the truth of your being is decreed in an irrevocable way, and nothing nor anyone can stop you from being it; but the path you take to get there is left to your own free choice.

5) On the road of the ascending evolution, every one is free to choose the direction he will take: the swift and steep climb towards the summits of Truth, to the supreme realization, or turning his back to the peaks, the easy descent to the interminable meanderings of endless incarnations.

6) In the course of time and even in the course of your present life, you can make your choice once and for all, irrevocably, and then you have only to confirm it with every new occasion; or else if you do not take a definite decision from the beginning, you will have to choose anew at each moment between the falsehood and the Truth.

7) But even in the event you have not made the irrevocable decision at the outset, should you have the good fortune to live during one of these unimaginable hours of universal history when the Grace is present, embodied upon earth, It will offer you, at certain exceptional moments, the renewed possibility of making a final choice that will lead you straight to the goal.

(On past lives)

If we are to speak of these things truly, we must speak of everything, in all details, for among the innumerable experiences I have had for nearly eighty years, many were of such variety and apparently so contradictory that in truth it can be said that all is possible. Therefore, to say something about past lives without retrieving the thread that runs through all the elements is to open 45Sutra: aphorism, in Sanskrit.

So given the multiplicity of experiences and the impossibility of spending my life speaking and writing, you must clearly understand that everything is possible and not be dogmatic. Nevertheless,

It is only when one is consciously identified with his divine Origin that he can speak with complete truthfulness of a memory of past lives. Sri Aurobindo speaks of a progressive manifestation of the Spirit in the forms it inhabits. When one reaches the summit of this manifestation, one has a plunging view of the path already traversed, and one remembers.

But that does not mean remembering in a mental way. Those who claim to have been this or that baron in the Middle Ages or such and such a person who lived at such and such a place during such and such a time are fantasizing; they are simply victims of their own mental fancies. For what remains of past lives are not beautiful illustrated classics in which you see yourself as a great lord in a castle or a victorious general at the head of his army – all that is fiction. What remains is the memory of the INSTANTS when the psychic being emerged from the depths of your being and revealed itself to you, or in other words, the memory of those moments when you were fully conscious. The growth of the consciousness is effected progressively through evolution, and the memory of past lives is generally limited to the critical moments of this evolution, to the great, decisive turning points that have marked some progress in your consciousness.

While living such minutes of your life, you do not at all care about remembering whether you were Lord so and so who lived at such and such a place during such and such a time – it is not the memory of your civil status that remains. On the contrary, you lose sight of these petty external things, these minor perishable details, so as to be fully ablaze in this revelation of the soul or this divine contact. And when you recall these minutes of your past lives, the memory is so intense that it seems very near, still living – much more living than most of the ordinary memories of your present life. At times, in dreams, when you enter into contact with certain planes of consciousness, you may also have memories with this same intensity, this vibrant hue, as it were, so much more intense than the colors and things of the physical world. These being the moments of true consciousness, all assumes an extraordinary radiance, everything is vibrant, everything is charged with a quality that eludes our ordinary vision.

These minutes of contact with the soul are often those that mark a decisive turning point in one’s life, a step forward; a progress in consciousness, and they frequently result from a crisis, a situation of extreme intensity, when a call surges forth from the whole being, a call so strong that the inner consciousness pierces through the unconscious layers that envelop it and is revealed fully luminous upon the surface. This very strong call of the being can also call forth the descent of a divine emanation, an individuality, a divine aspect that unites with your own individuality at a given moment to do a given work, to win a particular battle, to express this thing or that. Then, when the work is accomplished, this emanation most often withdraws. So it may be that one retains the memory of the circumstances surrounding these minutes of revelation or inspiration, one sees again a landscape, the color of a garment one was wearing, the shade of one’s skin, things that were around you at that particular moment – all this is imprinted in an indelible way, with an extraordinary intensity, for the details of ordinary life are then also revealed in their true intensity, their true tonality. The consciousness that reveals itself in you reveals at the same time the consciousness in things. These details can sometimes help you reconstitute the period in which you lived or the deeds that were accomplished, surmise the country where you lived, but it is quite easy, too, to fantasize and mistake one’s imaginings for reality.

You should not conclude, however, that all memories of past lives refer to moments of great crisis, important missions or revelations. Sometimes these are very simple, transparent minutes when a perfect and integral harmony of the being is expressed. And these may correspond to