Works of Sri Aurobindo

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-50_June 18_1968.htm

June 18, 1968

(Regarding an unpublished letter of Sri Aurobindo.)

K. asks me if this is correct.

(Question) One thing is strange. One never feels sex-

vibrations when touching Europeans while one can

 hardly touch Orientals without feeling it either at

 the time or by memory afterwards. Does this means

 that the Europeans are purer than Orientals?

(Sri Aurobindo) “No they are not purer, but they live more in the mental and less in the vital …

Well, not anymore! Since the war everything has changed.

"… Therefore sex is with most of them, less pas

sionate and preoccupying than with most Indians.

This is at least true of the English and Americans,

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 not perhaps quite so true of the southern peoples.

But still it is a fact that one can meet Europeans

 more easily in a purely mental way. Vivekananda

 had noticed this about American women and writes

 of it in one of his letters."

Not since the war.

Yes, on the contrary, my impression was that it was far more

 predominant in Europeans than in Indians.

So I felt, too.

Even when I lived there [in the West], everything seemed to me to revolve around that. You couldn’t meet people without …

It may be different with the English, I don’t’ know – I have always felt the English to be wooden!

* * *

Soon afterwards

Have we finished the Bulletin?… There are still texts by Sri Aurobindo to translate.

Would you like me to do it at home?

I am afraid of being lazy, you know! You have a lot to do.

No, no, Mother! I’m here to do the work.

Obviously, it would go faster.

I am getting more and more lazy!

Of course not! You have more important things to do.

I have the impression of a very continuous work. Nights too are very active.

I am getting lazy …

Oh, listen!

It’s strange, it imposes itself like that: I’ll be following a movement, and then … I’ll go off in trance. It happens at any time. I’ll

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 be eating: in the middle of the meal, something comes like that, I follow the movement and I remain absorbed; then afterwards, I see all the people waiting! (Mother laughs)

It’s been like that for several months.

Has it?

Yes, I’ve noticed. You seem to be far more … interiorized.

Interiorized, yes.

I hear myself speak, you understand…. The consciousness is deeper down. I hear myself speak. Sometimes even, I don’t recognize my voice; well, things of that sort.

Yes, sometimes I’ve even had the impression … I thought,

 ’Mother is drawing away." A drawing away.

No …

I am WITHIN, far more within than before – not within here [in Mother], but within all things…. Extremely sensitive to all the movements of those around me: inner movements.

For instance, time goes by … times goes by with, you know, lightning speed! Nights and days and weeks follow each other with dizzy speed. When a Sunday comes, I feel as if the previous Sunday was the day before. Everything is going very, very fast.

(long silence)

Yes, I understand what you mean: the relationship with external things is no longer the same.

We’ll see! (Mother laughs)

Does human matter respond a little, does it follow?

That I don’t know. But what I know is that the action on human matter is far greater than before – the action. For instance, the possibility of taking a pain away, of changing a vibration – all that increases a lot. With results that are sometimes very interesting.

The other day (I think it was yesterday), the memory suddenly came back to me (I know why things come now: it’s always when someone calls or when there is a work to be done), and for some reason I remembered that story about Christ, an old saying:

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Christ was healing the sick and so on, even bringing a dead man back to life, when he was brought an idiot and asked to give him intelligence…. Then, the story goes, Christ ran away! (Mother laughs) Later he was asked, “Why did you run away?” – “It’s the only thing I can’t do!” …

But why did it come? (Because it just comes like that, all of a sudden.) So I looked, and then I said, “But no! Why did he run away? He just had to do this (Mother slightly rotates her hand, shaping something), and the child would have become intelligent.”

When I go off like that, within, I always seem to … to be shaping vibrations. And when that memory came, it was so clear, I said, “But no! One just has to go like this … (same gesture of the hand), and he will receive the light and become intelligent….” You understand, when I go within, it’s always to work on vibrations. And afterwards (the next day, or later in the day) I’ll learn that something has happened to someone, he called me and asked me that. It’s always a call. And it’s a response.

But as the mind is very still, I don’t “know” in the mental form: it’s in a very … very simple form, very objective (gesture of looking at a picture): all of a sudden came Christ running away because he was brought an idiot – “But no!” And there was the movement of turning vibrations (same gesture as before), receiving the light, and he becomes intelligent – like that.

In fact, it’s with things of this sort that I spend my time. I don’t note them down, because … there would be too many of them to begin with.

Someone … (most of the time I know who it is, but sometimes I don’t) … something has happened to him, something has got twisted; so one works on it, one sets it straight again, puts the light, the good vibration back on it, and then … later in the day, or the next day, I’ll receive a line, “I was in a lot of pain” or “I called you.” Like that.

But free from the whole mental notation – that doesn’t exist: very still.

So there! (Mother laughs)

So you’ll have a little more work.

But it’s nothing, Mother!

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