Chapter 9May 30, 1970

breathed the smell of flowers, for instance, or as Madame Theon used to do when she put a fruit (I forget which) on her chest.

A grapefruit!... Oh, I saw that, it was extraordinary! She would put the fruit on her chest and... it would dry out! She would simply put it there and... she would keep it for a few hours, and when she removed it, it was all flabby, there was nothing left!

But I often thought it should be possible for you to feed on air.

Ah no, the air is disgusting! It’s full of everybody’s breathing. That’s the problem, it’s disgusting. Something else is needed.

Because I experienced the fact that if I go in the mountains, I hardly need to eat at all. I feel air nourishes me – but THERE, not here. Here, it’s disgusting.

So that complicates matters.

We might conceive having “balloons of food”! (laughter)

Bowlfuls of fresh air!

Or else, as an intermediary, a system to purify air: instead of lungs, something that purifies air, as you purify food.

Ah, what time is it?

(Mother looks absorbed)

I didn’t remember this book [Thoughts and Aphorisms] at all. Have you seen the latest ones?

(Satprem reads)

529 – Indiscriminate compassion is the noblest gift of temperament, not to do even the least hurt to one living thing is the highest of all human virtues; but God practises neither. Is man therefore nobler and better than the All-loving?

528 – Human pity is born of ignorance and weakness; it is the slave of emotional impressions. Divine compassion understands, discerns and saves.

“To understand the divine intention and to work towards its accomplishment, is that not the surest way to help humanity?”

I always wonder when he wrote that....

It seems it was at the beginning.

He was still... (gesture between two worlds). He said to Pavitra somewhere that he had changed his conception of the universe four times.59

Have you also changed since?

Yes, and he has changed.

You mean that “up there,” he has changed too?

(Mother laughs long silence)

Did you see this? (Mother gives the printed text of her note on quarrels at the Ashram.) It was specially for people at the Press; so I gave it for them to print, I found that amusing!... But naturally, everyone took it to apply to his neighbor, not to himself!

Do you have something?

To understand the “divine intention” you speak of, when one connects all the way up, to try and understand, one feels one almost always meets a sort immutable neutrality?

(Mother goes into a contemplation)

(With her head Mother asks Satprem if he has anything. With his head Satprem asks Mother if she has

anything. Laughter.)

(Mother plunges in again)

Nothing to say? Nothing to ask? Nothing to read?...

Are we moving ahead?

(Mother plunges in again,

then speaks in English)

59See Conversations with Pavitra of 11 January 1926: “In spiritual life, one should always be ready to reject every system and every construction. Any one form is helpful, then becomes harmful. In my spiritual life, since the age of forty, three or indefinitely.

(Mother plunges in again)

What time is it?

Five to eleven, Mother.

If you don’t mind being like that...

Oh, listen!... It does a lot of good!

Very well, then...

(Mother plunges in again)