Chapter 5February 14, 1961

very high, very high, to the highest, to that which is supreme Freedom. And then, if you are absolutely silent, you will have, not a thought or a word, but a kind of feeling, and you will know.

For me, at the moment, your dream does not correspond to a precise fact. So good-bye, mon petit.

(Mother gets up to leave when suddenly, turning upon the threshold, She looks at Satprem with her eyes like diamonds and, in a tone of voice he has never heard before, as if it were a Command from

above, says:)

In any case, one thing: never forget that what we have to do, we shall do; and we shall do it together because we have to do it together, that is all – like this, like that, in this way, in that way (Mother tilts her hand from right to left as though to indicate this side of the world or the other, ‘life’ or ‘death’), it has no importance. But this is the true fact.

There, petit.

Sri Aurobindo speaks here of the ‘higher soul.’53 Yet we can’t translate it by ‘âme supérieure,’ as if there were an ‘inferior soul,’ can we?

Sri Aurobindo wants to make the distinction between the progressive soul (the soul which has experiences and progresses from life to life), what can be called the ‘lower soul,’ and the higher soul, that is, the eternal, immutable and divine soul – essentially divine. He wrote this when he was in contact with certain Theosophical writings, before I introduced Theon’s vocabulary to him. For Theon, there is the ‘divine center’ which is the eternal soul, and the ‘psychic being’; similarly, to avoid using the same word in both cases, Sri Aurobindo speaks in later writings of the ‘psychic being’ and of the divine center or ‘central being’ – the essential soul.

What if we translate it ‘la partie supérieure de l’âme,’ [the higher part of the soul], rather than ‘âme supérieure?’

Then the soul would appear to be divided!

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