Chapter 908 November 1958

experience may be quite spontaneous and sincere, but the simple fact that the subject was known and studied lends a particular quality. Whereas if you had learnt nothing about the question, if you knew nothing at all, the transcription would be completely spontaneous and sincere when the experience came; it would be more or less adequate, but it would not be the outcome of a previous mental formation.

Naturally, this occult knowledge or this experience is not very frequent in the world, because in those who do not have a developed inner life, there are veritable gaps between the external consciousness and the inmost consciousness; the linking states of being are missing and they have to be constructed. So when people enter there for the first time, they are bewildered, they have the impression they have fallen into the night, into nothingness, into non-being!

I had a Danish friend, a painter, who was like that. He wanted me to teach him how to go out of the body; he used to have interesting dreams and thought that it would be worth the trouble to go there consciously. So I made him “go out” — but it was a frightful thing! When he was dreaming, a part of his mind still remained conscious, active, and a kind of link existed between this active part and his external being; then he remem-bered some of his dreams, but it was a very partial phenomenon. And to go out of one’s body means to pass gradually through all the states of being, if one does the thing systematically. Well, already in the subtle physical, one is almost de-individualised, and when one goes farther, there remains nothing, for nothing is formed or individualised.

Thus, when people are asked to meditate or told to go within, to enter into themselves, they are in agony — naturally! They have the impression that they are vanishing. And with reason: there is nothing, no consciousness!

These things that appear to us quite natural and evident, are, for people who know nothing, wild imagination. If, for example, you transplant these experiences or this knowledge to the West, well, unless you have been frequenting the circles of occultists, they stare at you with open eyes. And when you have turned your back, they hasten to say, “These people are cranks!”

Now to come back to the gods and conclude. It must be said that all those beings who have never had an earthly existence — gods or demons, invisible beings and powers — do not possess what the Divine has put into man: the psychic being. And this psychic being gives to man true love, charity, compassion, a deep kindness, which compensate for all his external defects.

In the gods there is no fault because they live according to their own nature, spontaneously and without constraint: as gods, it is their manner of being. But if you take a higher point of view, if you have a higher vision, a vision of the whole, you see that they lack certain qualities that are exclusively human. By his capacity of love and self-giving, man can have as much power as the gods and even more, when he is not egoistic, when he has surmounted his egoism.

If he fulfils the required condition, man is nearer to the Supreme than the gods are. He can be nearer. He is not so automatically, but he has the power to be so, the potentiality.

If human love manifested itself without mixture, it would be all-powerful. Unfortunately, in human love there is as much love of oneself as of the one loved; it is not a love that makes you forget yourself.

EXPERIENCE OF 5 NOVEMBER 1958

New Year Message for 1959 At the very bottom of the inconscience most hard and rigid and narrow and stifling I struck upon an almighty spring that cast me up forthwith into a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world.

Here is the origin of this message:

Last evening in the class,1 I noticed that the children, who had a whole week to prepare questions on the text we are reading, did not find a single one. A terrible somnolence! A total lack of interest! When I had finished my reading, I said to myself, “But what is there in these brains that does not take interest in anything but their small personal affairs? After all, what is happening inside there, behind these forms?”

Then during the meditation, I began going down into the mental atmosphere of the people around me, in order to find there the small light, the thing that responds. And I was literally dragged down to the bottom, as if into a hole.

In this hole I saw what I am still seeing. I went down into a fissure, as it were, between two steep rocks, rocks made of something harder than basalt, black, metallic at the same time, with edges so sharp that you had the impression that were you simply to touch them, you would be flayed. It was something that seemed to have no bottom and no end, and it became narrower and narrower like a funnel, so narrow that there was almost no room left even for the consciousness to pass. The bottom 1 Mother’s weekly “Wednesday class”, held at the Ashram Playground.

was invisible, a black hole, and that went down and down and down, without air, without light, only a kind of glimmer, like a reflection at the peak of the rocks, a glimmer that came from beyond, from something that could be the heavens, but something invisible. I continued to slide down the fissure and I saw the edges, the black rocks, cut with scissors, as it were, shining like a fresh cut, the edges so sharp that they were like knives. Here was one, there another, there another, everywhere, all around. And I was dragged, dragged, dragged down, — I went down, down, down and there was no end to it, it became more and more oppressive, stifling, suffocating.

Physically, the body followed, it participated in the experience. The hand that was on the arm of the chair slipped down, then the other hand, then the head bent down in an irresistible movement. Then I said to myself, “But this must stop, for if it continues, my head will be down on the ground!” (The consciousness was elsewhere, but I was looking at my body from outside.) And I asked myself, “But what is there at the bottom of this hole?”

Hardly had I formulated the question when it was as if I had touched a spring that was there at the very bottom of the hole, a spring I had not noticed yet, which acted at once with a tremendous force and at one bound shot me up straight into the air; I was cast out of the fissure into a limitless, formless vast which was infinitely comfortable — not exactly warm, but it gave a comfortable impression of inner warmth. After this painful enough descent, it was a kind of super-comfort, an ease, an ease at its maximum. And my body immediately followed the movement, the head at once became straight again. And I lived all this without objectifying it at all; I was not taking stock of what it was, I did not look for any explanation of what was happening; it was what it was, I lived it and that was all. The experience was absolutely spontaneous.

It was all-powerful, infinitely rich; it had no form at all, no limit — naturally I was identified with it and that is why I knew that it had neither limit nor form. It was as if — I say “as if” because it could not be seen — as if this vast was made up of countless imperceptible points, points that did not occupy any place in space (there was no space, you see), points that were a deep warm gold; but this was only an impression, a translation. And all that was absolutely living, living with a power that seemed infinite. And yet it was immobile, with an immobility so perfect that it gave a feeling of eternity, but with an unbelievable inner intensity of movement and life — it was inner, self-contained — and immobile, immobile in relation to the outside, if there was an outside. And it had a boundless life — it may be spoken of as infinite only by way of image — and an intensity, a strength, a force, a peace, the peace of eternity, a silence, a calm, a power capable of everything.

And I did not think it, I did not objectify it, I lived it comfortably, very comfortably. This lasted for a very long time — for the rest of the meditation.

It was as if that contained all the wealth of possibilities. And all that though it had no form, had the power to become forms.

After a moment I asked myself, “What is this, to what does it correspond?” Naturally I found out afterwards, and finally this morning I told myself, “Well, it is just to give me my message for the coming year.” Then I transcribed it — naturally, you cannot make a description, it is indescribable. It was a psychological phenomenon and the forms were nothing but a way of describ-ing the psychological state to oneself. And this is what I noted, obviously in a mental way. I have described nothing, I have only stated a fact:

“At the very bottom of the inconscience most hard and rigid and narrow and stifling I struck upon an almighty spring that cast me up forthwith into a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world.”

Generally the inconscience gives the impression of something