Chapter 1September 3, 1966

Sujata would need to be protected a little. She has been getting knocks continually for the past six months.

(Turning to Sujata) Who’s been hitting you?

She has got at least four on her hands and she can’t type anymore.

Who from?

She knocks herself, or else at basketball.

You knock yourself or you get knocked?

Both.

We’ll protect that... (Mother draws a circle around Sujata’s hands three times), like this. That too is a habit. It’s nothing but habits: forces playing in Nature. So it takes an inner movement (Mother makes a tiny gesture of disjunction) to break the habit.

At times you feel as if a small force is following you.

Yes, that’s right.

* * *

(Soon afterwards, about an old Playground Talk of April 28, 1951, in which Mother speaks of awakening the body not through coercion by the vital, but through collaboration from the body itself,

and of the need for physical plasticity so as to be able to undergo all kinds of change.)

I’ve had several hours of this very experience: how the body is automatically attached to its precise way of doing things, and how it must receive the light in order to be ready for anything. It must be able to say spontaneously and sincerely, "Your Will, Lord, nothing but Your Will...." But it accepts this from no one else or nowhere else than the Lord. Otherwise, nothing doing.

To me it’s very interesting. Once again I note that I always experience what I am going to hear or to be read.

It’s curious. Like an inner preparation.

* * *