Chapter 2January 9, 1963

My year is off to a dreadful start. And I am afraid it may go on like that.

Some new difficulties?

No, it's just that everybody wants to see me!

They tire me – they wear me out.

While I would need... Oh, at times I withdraw from action altogether – by "action," I mean talking and above all receiving swarms of vibrations... terrible, terrible vibrations!

I feel the work is going fairly fast inside, there are some interesting things (what shall I say?)... like promises. But the [body's] sensitivity and the possibility of imbalance have heightened, in the sense that a mere trifle, which in other circumstances would have been totally unimportant and would have just gone by smoothly, throws the body off balance – the body has grown terribly sensitive. For example, a wrong reaction in someone, a tension or some reaction of a quite ordinary order, causes a sudden weariness in my body, as if it were exhausted. Then I have to collect myself and plunge back into the Source so that...

These are difficult days. There's also that awful habit people have, you know, that democratic spirit: if I do something for one, why shouldn't I do it for another? They would readily accept that I was ill and unable to see anyone (!), they'd say, "Poor Mother, we should be really nice to her and leave her alone"; but that I am a force and don't give this person what I give that one and that other one, that they won't accept! Egalitarianism is in vogue nowadays; hierarchy, or even simply dealing with each case differently – that's all outmoded.

Anyway, I don't want to start explaining all this, I will do it some other time. But we have a few tough days ahead to get through.

You shouldn't let yourself be swamped.

No.

I don't LET them, but...

Isn't that so?

* * * (Mother refers to the "Bulletin" and in particular to the Talk of July 3, 1957, in which she narrated her

symbolic vision of the "Big Hotel" in perpetual demolition1 :)

But all this seems to me on the outside. I understand it may interest people, but it's still one of the things that make me smile. That's how I see it. Even this vision.

I have three or four of them every night, great visions, with all the complications, 2 all the symbols, all the explanations. And I meet people... who are not as they think they are.

But it's tremendous! Tremendous how much you can do in a few hours at night....

(silence)

All that there is to know which we do not know... (I don't mean outer things).

(long silence)

But it's very hard for the body to change. Because it lives only from its habit of living. And every time something of the true way of living filters in, then without thinking, without reasoning or anything like an idea, practically without sensation, almost automatically, the cells panic at the newness of it. So, you understand, EVERYTHING has to be changed. It's no longer the heart that has to pump blood and receive the Force, no longer the stomach that has to digest, it's not any of that any more – it all functions in another way. The base must be shifted, the functioning completely changed – but then all those cells are so anxious to see that everything goes ACCORDING TO HABIT....

(silence)

Terrible. A strange difficulty.

If the inner being – the true being – is the ruler, the power of the true being makes the body act automatically; but then it doesn't grow conscious of its own change, it doesn't collaborate in its change, so for the change to happen it would take... maybe millennia. The true being has to be like this (gesture to the background, standing back) and the body has to do everything BY ITSELF, in other words, contain the Lord, receive the Lord, give itself to the Lord, BE the Lord. It does aspire – oh, it's intense, aflame – that's very good. But the Lord (smiling) doesn't conform to the ordinary habit! So all the habits, the minute He just tries to take possession of one function or another, even partially (not totally), all the interrelationships, all the movements are changed instantly – panic. Panic at the particular spot. And the result: you faint, or you are just about to faint, or you have an excruciating pain, or anyway something APPARENTLY breaks down completely. So what's to be done?... Wait patiently until that small number or large number of cells, that little spot of consciousness, has learned 1See Agenda I, p. 104.