Chapter 7July 24, 1963

Exactly, there's nothing to satisfy you one way or the other!

Yes, but if we were conscious, at least we would see that something is happening, but as we are unconscious, we aren't aware of anything.

But how can you say that something is "happening," mon petit!

We would see a work is being done.... As it is, we don't see anything.

But, no, you can't "see"! How can you?

(silence)

I have a kind of certitude (not quite formulated in words: a certitude in sensation, in feeling) that once this work is completed, the result will be... almost like a thunderbolt. Because the Power's action through the mind gets diluted, qualified, adapted, altered, and so on, and how much reaches down here? (gesture as of water disappearing into sand) While the day it acts through this matter (Mother touches her body), obviously it will be overwhelming. There isn't a shadow of doubt. But when will that be? After how long? I can't say. When you see the thing in detail, you know, it appears interminable.

I console myself with the thought that the ways of the Lord are unknown to us, and that the day it pleases Him to declare, "Here, now it's all changed," (Mother laughs) all we'll have to do is contemplate!

But when? I don't know. Voilà.

We must have endurance, patience, and trust too – to last and last and last. Because ultimately, whatever way you look at it, that's the only solution. All the roundabout routes people follow (zigzag gesture as if to show the spiritual disciplines and all the usual human quests) are simply to give you the illusion that you are doing something.

That's quite clear.

(silence)

All the same, I have some hope that in February next year85 something will be tangible. But... (laughing) Sri Aurobindo says that man lives on hope from the cradle to the grave! Anyhow, mine isn't the same kind of hope: it's a sort of sensation. Something may happen next February – we'll see.

"About the present civilisation, it is not this which has to be saved; it is the world that has to be saved and that will surely be done, though it may not be so easily or so soon as some wish or imagine or in the way that they imagine. The present must surely change, but whether by a destruction or a new construction on the basis of a greater Truth, is the issue. The Mother has left... (Mother laughs) this question hanging and I can only do the same."

(September 1945)

It's marvelous! (Mother laughs) Marvelous. And it was written in '45, that is to say during the war – the war hadn't ended yet.

It was the end.86 I intend to distribute this for August 15.

(Satprem, in English:) Is it still hanging?

(Mother laughs

and does not reply)

There are two other letters:

"To bring the Divine Love and Beauty and Ananda into the world is, indeed, the whole crown and essence of our yoga. But it has always seemed to me impossible unless there comes as its support and foundation and guard the Divine Truth – what I call the supramental – and its Divine Power...."

(XXIII.753)

Here it's clear: he says that what he calls the "Supramental" is the Divine Truth, and that it must come first, and the rest comes afterwards.

And yet, for some time now and increasingly, there has been an extremely concrete Response to a kind of aspiration (a call or prayer) in which I say to the Lord, "Supreme Lord, manifest Your Love." (It comes at the end of a long invocation in which I ask Him to manifest all His aspects one after another, one after another, and it ends like that.) But then, remarkably enough, at that moment there comes a Response which is growing clearer and clearer, stronger and stronger.... But Sri Aurobindo says that Truth should be established first, and that what he calls the Supramental is the supreme Truth, the Divine Truth. It corresponds to what I noticed while translating that last chapter on "the perfection of the being" in the "Yoga of Self-Perfection": I kept thinking, "But that's only the aspect of Truth; all that he expresses is the aspect of Truth; always and everywhere, it's the angle of Truth; and his supramental action is an action of Truth."

I didn't know he had said it, but it's written clearly here:

"... But it has always seemed to me impossible unless there comes as its support and foundation and guard the Divine Truth – what I call the supramental – and its Divine Power.

rapidly degenerating and lost in the frailty of man's inferior nature. But when it comes in the divine truth and power, Divine Love descends first as something transcendent and universal and out of that transcendence and universality it applies itself to persons according to the Divine Truth and Will, creating a vaster, greater, purer personal love than any the human mind or heart can now imagine. It is when one has felt this descent that one can be really an instrument for the birth and action of the Divine Love in the world."

(XXIII.753)

They don't give the date, but I find it most interesting.

And the last one:

"The importance of the body is obvious; it is because he has developed or been given a body and brain capable of receiving and serving a progressive mental illumination that man has risen above the animal. Equally, it can only be by developing a body or at least a functioning of the physical instrument capable of receiving and serving a still higher illumination that he will rise above himself and realise, not merely in thought and in his internal being but in life, a perfectly divine manhood. Otherwise either the promise of Life is cancelled, its meaning annulled and earthly being can only realise Sachchidananda by abolishing itself, by shedding from it mind, life and body and returning to the pure Infinite, or else man is not the divine instrument, there is a destined limit to the consciously progressive power which distinguishes him from all other terrestrial existences and as he has replaced them in the front of things, so another must eventually replace him and assume his heritage."

It's amusing.

(silence)

Aren't you replying to my question?

No! (laughter)

No, barely two or three days ago, someone asked me a similar question: "Will there be another great destruction or not?" Those are things one ought not to talk about.87

(silence)

You know that X ceaselessly repeats, "There will be war, there will be war, there will be war... even if I don't want it, there will be war"!! He had said war would come by April – it's now July.

87We find it worthwhile to publish here a letter Mother wrote (in English) to Prithwi Singh, Sujata's father, just a few days before Sri Aurobindo's letter published at the beginning of this conversation, on August 30, 1945: "I do not see that the Supramental will act in the way you expect from It. Its action will be to effectuate the Divine's Will upon earth whatever that may be. On men Its action will be to turn their will consciously or unconsciously on their part towards the way in which the Divine's Will wants them to go. But I cannot promise you that the Divine's will is to preserve the present human