Chapter 4September 17, 1966

It must be in a subtle physical, maybe a true physical. Sri Aurobindo said that the subtle physical was a much truer physical than ours. Things are like that there, with a very clear symbol.

And those birds (they were birds that weren’t birds, but they looked like birds), they came all luminous, luminous, with sometimes tiny darker traces here or there, but generally all luminous; their shape was very fluid. And the colors weren’t as we know them: it wasn’t white, it wasn’t pale blue, but as if the essence of white and blue, the essence of colors. I don’t know how to explain it. And they came like that, then he sent them down, and when they went through his hands and flew down towards the earth (laughing)... they became brown, blue, gray... all possible colors! But those were opinions. It’s amusing.

How is your book coming along?

Do you find it’s going too slow? Would you like it to go faster?

No, I am asking you because I was busy with it yesterday again, early in the night. That’s why I am asking you. At night I see, then hear sentences, see scenes, and then... So I say to myself that it must be getting along!

(silence)

There is a new activity.... At times I find myself (I catch myself doing something, to be precise) talking with people whom most of the time I don’t know, then describing a scene: they can get such and such a thing done, they can be advised to do this or that thing, and it will end with such and such a thing. They are kinds of scenes from a book or scenes from a movie. Then, the same day or the next, someone suddenly tells me, "I received a message from you and you told me to write to so-and-so and tell him such and such a thing"!... And I am not doing it mentally, it’s not that I think, "A letter must be sent to so-and-so and such and such a thing must be done," not at all: I live – I live a scene or narrate a scene, and it’s received by someone else (and I am not at all thinking of that someone else), it’s received by "someone," this or that or this person, as a message in which I tell him to do this or that thing. And it’s happening here, in France, in America, everywhere. It’s becoming amusing!

Someone writes to me, "You told me this," and it’s one of my "scenes"! One of the scenes I lived – not "lived," lived and created at the same time! I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like a work of... (Mother seems to feet an invisible substance between her fingers, as if fashioning it).

And it’s not me, of course! Here (Mother touches her forehead), Lord, thank God, I hope it will go on forever: quiet, calm, so calm, so tranquil, so peaceful. But it comes from every side! (gesture of

And in this type of activity, I have all kinds of knowledge that I don’t have! Sometimes even medical knowledge or technical knowledge that I don’t at all have – yet that I have, of course, since I say, "This is how it is, that is how it is...." It’s rather amusing.

And it’s not me! "Me," where is the me?... It’s not this, in any case (Mother pinches the skin of her hand), poor this – poor this! It keeps on with its aspiration, and it has the sense all at once of its incapacity, its misery, its powerlessness to express what it should express, and its unworthiness to be an instrument of the Divine. At the same time, it has, first, a sort of increasing certitude of... (how can I put it?) the magnanimity of the divine Presence, which is so marvelous in its effects in spite of the almost total imbecility of all this (Mother points to her own body); all this is really cast in, outwardly cast in stupidity, but with the ardor of such an intense and constant aspiration, with something touching in its humility and trust, and with the sense of its powerlessness and at the same time of this marvelous Presence there, ready and willing to act – if It is allowed to. All that is translated as a sort of film review of all of the body’s difficulties, all its powerlessness, all its incapacities, all its darknesses, it’s all shown as if on a screen, in order to be dissolved. And then one is a spectator of the dissolution by the Light. It’s fantastic.

And the feeling of hanging from such a slender thread, the thread... not of faith, it’s not faith: it’s a certitude, but at the same time an aspiration, and it feels – it feels there is something so new, so young, in an absolutely rotten atmosphere of disbelief, stupidity, bad will. So that’s how it is, a slender thread, and it’s a miracle if...

(silence)

Even those who think they have faith want everything to be done for them; they want the supreme Power, the Supreme, to do everything for them DESPITE their disbelief, their stupidity, their incapacity. And that’s what they call omnipotence. They don’t even understand that if this Vibration of Truth imposed itself, there would be the destruction of all that, which means the destruction of themselves! Of what they think to be themselves.

The wonder – the wonder – is this infinite Compassion thanks to which nothing is destroyed: it waits. It’s there, waiting with its full power, its full force, and... it simply asserts its presence without imposing it, so as to reduce... the damage to the minimum.

It’s a marvelous, marvelous Compassion!

And all those fools call it impotence!

* * *

(Soon afterwards, Satprem suggests the publication in the Ashram’s Bulletin of Mother’s recent comments on the Aphorisms, including the vision of the birds turning into human "opinions," omitting

only a few personal passages.)

People will say I am lapsing into second childhood!

But not at all!... It’s very expressive.