Chapter 2December 14, 1966

That’s how it is. So you really wonder: Has the time come to tell things? What’s the use?... They think they’ve understood; not only do they think they’ve understood, but they are enthusiastic, which means it has made them make some progress – so where were they before!? And it’s nothing, what they’ve understood is nothing, it has become a caricature of the thing.

I realize that words in themselves are nothing; there, there was a power... a power that words are incapable of holding! So unless one receives directly, one receives nothing. One does receive, yes, but it’s something like an onion skin.

(silence)

Basically, when we have reached the end (the "end" which is the beginning of something else), the end of this work of transformation, when it really is the transformation and we are settled in it, maybe we’ll remember and derive a special pleasure from remembering having gone through this?... In the "higher spheres" it has always been said that those who have the courage to come for the preparation will have, when it’s done, superior assets and of a more intimate and deeper quality than those who will have quietly waited for others to do the work for them.

It may be so. At any rate, because of the immensity of the work to be done, from an outward standpoint it looks like a quite thankless task. But that’s only a purely superficial vision. Waves come to me like that from the world, from a whole class of the manifestation, saying, "Ah, no! I don’t want to bother about that, I just want to live peacefully, as well as I can. We’ll see once the world has been transformed, then we can start bothering about it." And that’s among the most developed classes, the most intellectual, they are like that: "Oh, very well, we’ll see when it’s done." Which means they don’t have the spirit of sacrifice. That’s what Sri Aurobindo says (I keep coming across quotations from Sri Aurobindo all the time), he says that to do the Work one must have the spirit of sacrifice.

But it’s true that, for instance, those few seconds (which come to me now and then and with increasing frequency), if you look at those few seconds calmly, well, they’re worth a great deal of effort. Having that is worth quite a few years of struggle and effort, because that... is beyond anything perceptible, comprehensible, even beyond anything possible for life as it is now. It’s... it’s unimaginable.

And there is a real grace there, it’s that it keeps you in a certain state as a result of which life as it is, things as they are, do not appear worse after those few seconds. There isn’t, after them, that sort of horror of falling back into an abyss: there isn’t that, you don’t have that feeling. The memory is only a sort of dazzling burst of light.