Chapter 1August 3, 1968

(Mother remains very tired. She nevertheless listens to a long paper on Auroville, which she rejects,

and prepares with Satprem a note summing up the ideal of this future city:)

"For millennia, we have been developing outer means, outer instruments, outer techniques of living – and finally those means and techniques are crushing us. The sign of the new humanity is a reversal in the standpoint, and the understanding that inner knowledge and inner technique can change the world and master it without crushing it.

"Auroville is the place where this new way of living is being worked out, it is a center of accelerated evolution where man must begin to change his world through the power of the inner spirit."

* * * Then Mother goes into a long contemplation:

It seems to be accelerated transformation, it’s a little crushing.

We’ll see.

(As Satprem goes upstairs to see Mother, he meets the doctor coming downstairs, who informs him that Mother has chest pain and her heart is in poor condition. Mother is sitting on her couch, very pale.)

We have to do the translation of the message for the 15th of August.

I chose this (Mother holds out a paper to Satprem):

"One needs to have a calm heart, a settled will, entire self-abnegation and the eyes constantly fixed on the beyond to live undiscouraged in times like these which are truly a