Chapter 3June 9, 1962

* * * (A little later, towards the end of the conversation:)

Petit, before you go to sleep, when you get into bed, simply think of me a little, with the will to receive what I send you – just for the space of a few seconds before you go to sleep, that's all. Don't try to concentrate and keep yourself awake, just formulate it, then go to sleep. Because I am really trying!

Of course, I know you're trying! I'm not accusing anyone – I'm the one that's blocked.

But it's neither you nor me nor Tom, Dick or Harry nor the Lord – that's just the way it is. There's a reason behind it we're too obtuse to understand.

Yes, but it's getting to be a pretty long reason. I have the feeling it's all going to crack one day.

Yes!

Yes, but maybe it won't crack in the right way.... One day I'm just going to say the hell with it.

No, that's just the obstacle, that hardening in you. Oh, mon petit, if you knew how hard some things become in the being! Oh, how much I've had to struggle and struggle and struggle.... This experience [of April 13] did the job, but otherwise it was a minute-to-minute struggle. Life turns you into something hard as iron (Mother makes a fist).

And that's what has happened. That's what has happened. Anyway, we can still try! (Mother laughs.)

Au revoir, mon petit.

(In the course of the preceding conversation, Satprem had thought that rather than a subjective change, a change in one's attitude towards things, there should be an objective change, a power capable of changing the very substance of things: their property of hardness, for instance. Here Mother elucidates her previous statement that "if matter were changeable, it would have changed long

ago," a statement that, at first glance, seemed to shatter all hope of transformation.)

As an analogy, look at what science has discovered about the so-called composition of matter at the atomic level – there's nothing to change. Nothing to change! The constituent element doesn't change, the relations between things are what change.

Everything has one and the same constituent element, you see; and everything lies IN the interrelations.100 Well, it's exactly the same for the transformation.

So you speak of "power," but in fact....

(long silence)

The notion of "subjective" and "objective" STILL belongs to the old world and to the three, or at most four, dimensions.... It is one and the same Power that changes the interrelations within one and the same element; to put things simply, the Power that gives the subjective experience AND the objective realization is the same; it is only a matter of a greater or lesser totality of experience, as it were. And if the experience were total it would be the experience of the Supreme, and it would be universal.

Does what I am saying make any sense?... It all practically comes down to a capacity to spread the experience, or to INCLUDE things in the experience (it's the same thing). You really have to forget this business of one person and then another, one thing and then another.... Even if you can't realize it concretely, at least imagine that there is but ONE thing, excessively complex, and (depending on the case) one experience taking place in one spot, or spreading out like oil on water, or embracing everything. This is all very approximate, but it's the only way the thing can be understood. And the sole explanation for "contagion" is in that Oneness.

And power is what makes the difference. The greater the power, you might say (these words are all very clumsy), the farther the experience spreads. How great the power is depends on its starting point. If its starting point is the Origin, the power is... let's say universal (we won't consider more than one universe for the moment); it is universal. As this Power manifests from plane to plane, it becomes more concrete and limited; on each plane, the field of action becomes more limited. If your power is vital (or "pranic," as it's called here in India), the field of action is terrestrial, and sometimes limited to just a few individuals, sometimes it's a power capable of acting on just one small being. But originally it's the SAME power, acting on the SAME substance... I can't express it, words are impossible; but I sense very clearly what I mean.

I can affirm that this notion of "subjective" and "objective" still belongs to the world of illusion. The CONTENT of the experience is what may be either microscopic or universal, depending on the specific quality of the power being expressed, or its field of action. The limitation of power can be voluntary and deliberate; it can be a willed, and not an imposed limitation, which means that the Will- Force may come from the Origin but deliberately limit itself, limit its field of action. But it is the same power and the same substance.

Ultimately there is but one power and one substance. There are varying modalities – countless modalities – of power and substance, but there is but ONE power and ONE substance, as there is but 100In fact, physicists today unanimously admit that the mathematical "models" explaining the corpuscular structure of matter have become excessively complex: "There are too many kinds of quarks [theoretical elementary particles and 'ultimate' constituents of matter] and far too many of their aspects are unobservable." There is a call for a simpler working hypothesis, a new idea, simplifying and unifying, that would explain matter without recourse to "unobservables."

And it may well be that the seed of this "idea" is concealed in Mother's simple but enigmatic words: "Everything has one