(A few days after the experience of February 3, Mother
had other experiences that seemed a continuation of it)
Everyone carries with him, in his atmosphere, what Sri Aurobindo calls the 'Censors'; in a way, they are the permanent delegates of the hostile forces. Their role is to criticize mercilessly each act, each thought, the least movement of the consciousness, and to place you before the most hidden motives of your behavior, to expose the least lower vibration accompanying your apparently purest or highest thoughts or acts.
It is not here a question of morality. These gentlemen are not moralizing agents, although they know very well how to make use of morality! And when they are dealing with a scrupulous conscience, they can harass it pitilessly, whisper to it at every minute, 'You should not have done this, you should not have done that, you should have done such and such, said such and such; now you have ruined everything, you have made an irreparable mistake, just see how everything is irremediably lost now because of the mistake you made.' They can even possess the consciousness of some people: you chase the thought away and vrrm! - two minutes later, back it comes! You chase it away again, but there it is still hammering away at you.
1. See Questions and Answers (July lo, 1957).
Each time I meet these gentlemen, I give them a hearty welcome, for they force you to be absolutely sincere, they unearth the subtlest hypocrisy and at each moment place you before your most secret vibrations. And they are intelligent, with an intelligence infinitely surpassing our own! They know everything, they know how to set your least thought against you, your least
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argument or action, with a really wonderful subtlety. Nothing escapes them. But what gives a hostile shading to these beings is that, first and foremost, they are defeatists. They always present you with the darkest side of the picture and if necessary distort your own intentions. They are truly instruments of sincerity. Yet they always overlook one thing, deliberately, something they reject and cast far behind, as if it didn't exist - the divine Grace. They overlook prayer, this spontaneous prayer that suddenly surges up from the depths of your being like an intense call and makes the Grace descend and changes the course of things.
And each time that you have made some progress or passed to a higher level, they put you back in the presence of all the actions of your past and in a few months, a few days or a few minutes make you pass all the tests again, at a higher level. And it does not help to brush aside the thought, saying, 'Oh, I know!' and throw a little cloak over it so as not to see. You have to face and conquer, keep your consciousness filled with light, be unwavering, uncomplaining, without a single vibration in the cells of the body, and then the attack dissolves.
The other day, too, in your supramental experience, you said
that moral values had lost all their meaning.
But our conceptions of Good and Evil are so ridiculous! Our ideas of what is near to the Divine or far from the Divine are so absurd! The experience of the other day [February 3] was quite a revelation to me, and I came out of it utterly changed. I suddenly understood a great many things from the past - certain actions parts of my life that had remained inexplicable - in truth, the shortest path from one point to another is not the straight line we imagine!
And the whole time this experience lasted, one hour (an hour of THAT time is long!), I was in an extraordinarily mirthful, almost inebriated state ... The difference between the two consciousnesses is such that when you are in one, the other seems unreal like a dream. When I came back, I was at first struck by the futility of life here; our petty conceptions seem so comical, so laughable ... We say that certain people are mad, but their madness is perhaps a great wisdom from the supramental point of view, and their behavior is perhaps very near the truth of things - I am not speaking of the obscure insane who have had some brain disorder, but of many other incomprehensible mad
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people, the luminous mad: they have wanted to leap across the border too quickly, and the rest did not follow.
When one looks at the world of men from the supramental consciousness, the dominant characteristic is a feeling of oddity, of artificiality - a world that is absurd because it is artificial. This world is false because its material appearance does not at all express the profound truth of things. There is as if a discrepancy between the appearance and what lies within. Thus, a man with a divine power deep within him may, on the outer plane, find himself in the situation of a slave. It's preposterous! Whereas in the supramental world, the will acts directly upon the substance, and the substance is obedient to this will. When you want to clothe yourself, the substance you are living in immediately assumes the form of clothing to cover you. When you want to move from one place to another, your will is sufficient to carry you without your needing any kind of vehicle or artificial means. Thus, for example, the ship in my experience had no need of any mechanism whatsoever in order to move; it was the will that shaped the substance according to its needs. When it was necessary to disembark, the wharf formed by itself. When I wanted the groups to go ashore, those who had to do so automatically knew it, without my having to say a word, and they came in the right order. Everything took place in silence, there was no need to speak to be understood; but aboard the ship, the silence itself did not give this artificial impression it gives here. Here, when we want silence, we have to keep our mouths shut: silence is the opposite of noise. There, the silence was vibrant, living, active and comprehensive, comprehensible.
The absurdity here consists of all the artificial means that have to be used. Any imbecile has more power if he has more means by which to acquire the necessary artifice. Whereas in the supramental world, the more one is conscious and in contact with the truth of things, the more authority has the will over the substance. The authority is a true authority. If you want clothes, you have to have the power to make them, a real power. If you do not have this power, well then, you remain naked. There are no artificial means to compensate for this lack of power. Here, not once in a million times is authority the expression of something true. Everything is colossally stupid.
When I came back down ('came back down' is a manner of speaking, for it is neither high nor low, nor within nor without, it is ... somewhere), it took me a while to readjust. I even recall
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having said to someone, 'Now we are going to regress into our usual stupidity.' But I understood a lot of things, and I came back from there with a decisive force. Now I know that our way of seeing things here, our petty moral values, have nothing to do with the values of the supramental world.
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