Chapter 62December 13, 1957

being sinks back into its inner somnolence and the whole outer life fades into a monotonous gray which leaves no trace. In fact, something of the same phenomenon occurs in the course of your present life: apart from those exceptional moments when you are at the summit of your mental, vital or even physical being, the rest of your existence seems to fade into an uninteresting, dull tonality, and it matters very little whether you have been at this place or some other or whether you have done this thing rather than another. If suddenly you try to look at your life in order to gather its essence – to peer twenty or thirty or forty years behind you – you will see two or three images spontaneously leap before you, and they are the true minutes of your life, but all the rest fades away. A spontaneous choice and a tremendous elimination thus take place in your consciousness. This gives you an idea of what happens in regard to past lives: a choice of a few special moments, and an immense elimination.

Of course, one’s early lives are quite rudimentary and little remains of them, a few scattered memories. But the more you progress in consciousness and the more the psychic being consciously associates itself with the outer activities, the more abundant, coherent and precise do the memories become – yet here too the memory that remains is that of the contact with the soul, and sometimes of the things associated with the psychic revelation – not your civil status nor the ever-changing setting. And this explains why these so-called memories of animal lives partake of the highest fantasies; in animals, the divine spark is too deeply buried to come to the surface consciously and be associated with the outer life. One must become a totally conscious being, in all the parts of the being, and be totally united with one’s divine origin before one can truly say that one recalls his past lives.

(Letter to Mother from Satprem)

Pondicherry, December 13, 1957 Sweet Mother, this is what is rising from my soul: I feel in me something unemployed, something seeking to express itself in life. I want to be like a knight, your knight, and go off in search of a treasure that I could bring back to you. The world has lost all sense of the wonderful, all beauty of Adventure, this quest known to the knights of the Middle Ages. It is this that calls so relentlessly within me, this need for a quest in the world and for a beautiful Adventure which at the same time would be an adventure of the soul. How I wish that the two things, inner and outer, be JOINED, that the joy of action, of the open road and the quest help the soul’s blossoming, that they be like a prayer of the soul expressed in life. The knights of the Middle Ages knew this. Perhaps it is all childish and absurd in the midst of this 20th century, but this is what I feel, this that is summoning me to leave – not anything base, not anything mediocre, only a need for something in me to be