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!
Page 201
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 innumerable communications pouring into this silence)
There are stories of countries, stories of governments; I don't know the result there - maybe we'll see after some time.
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
Page 202
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.
(Laughing) The image was pretty (I have just seen it again), the image was very pretty.
Very well.
Aren't there too many repetitions? The same thing recurs four or five times.
No, no, every time you add an element. It flows along quite well.
So you don't have anything that can be used for "Notes on the Way"?
Maybe. I'll have to look again. But I don't think so.
You see, it sounds like a child's prattling, because ... The expression of these present experiences isn't an intellectual expression at all, and to those who don't understand that it's the experience
Page 203
of the physical substance, of the cells, the most material form, it quite simply sounds like a child's prattling. It's an experience as a child might have, without the complications and explanations supplied by intellectual development.
And this simplicity, this lack of complication and sophistication, is what gives these things great value, in the sense that it gives them perfect sincerity and simplicity. In anything expressed mentally, vitally, intellectually, there is always MORE in the form, in the word, in the expression, MORE than in the experience - it gets enlarged and rounded out (!) What is said is more than what is meant to be said. While here, it's the perfectly pure experience, which feels the words as a sort of shrinking, a diminishing, and at the same time as bringing in a complication that doesn't exist in the experience - the experience is very simple, very simple: it is truly pure. And anything one says is like adding something that lessens its purity and simplicity.
So, saying these things is good for oneself, it's good for someone who is in the same "state of heart," but for the public ... (Mother shakes her head) it's doomed to incomprehension.
There.
Page 204