Chapter 19March 14, 1973

It’s funny, I constantly feel like a little baby curled up – curled up in... (what term to use?) an all-embracing divine Consciousness.

(Mother remains immobile)

And the slightest contradiction that enters the atmosphere causes me such discomfort, I feel I won’t be able to stand it.

There, that’s how it is. Just now I had gone off like that, you see, but I suddenly felt uncomfortable and that pulled me back. It isn’t expressed mentally, it is neither an idea nor even a sensation, it’s... I don’t know what it is. It is like a negation, a painful negation. Which really makes me feel an acute pain, and I am pulled back into this physical consciousness.

(Mother plunges in, then seems uncomfortable.

Champaklal comes and rings the bell)

(Extracts from a meeting with the schoolteachers. The subject is the school squabbles and rivalry

among groups of teachers.)

I can’t make head or tail of these things.... I can no longer be of any help, you see, because all these mental combinations don’t make any sense to me anymore.

A spirit of confusion has entered the school, I find.

They all mean the same thing, but they use different words, and the words... clash. Personally, I know they have very similar aspirations, but each one speaks in his own language, and the languages are at cross-purposes, so they quarrel over nothing. That’s the situation!

I think the best would be for everybody to keep quiet for a while.

I too never had any problems with the people around me, but now we seem to speak different languages.

(silence)

But the effect on me is odd: I have the impression that I am ill – there’s nothing wrong with me, I am in good health, yet I have a constant impression of being ill.