September 22, 1962

The Mother

Agenda

(Mother makes this brief remark about someone who practices traditional yoga and is constantly ill:)

...That's the essential failing of the old yogic system: things go quite nicely on the level where they practice yoga, but as soon as they descend, they're worse than everyone else!

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(After listening to a passage in Satprem's manuscript on nonviolence and Gandhi, Mother makes another brief remark:)

They're really smacking their lips over their ahimsa¹ – it's disgusting!

ADDENDUM

(Short extract from the passage in The Adventure of Consciousness that Satprem just read to Mother:)

... In the middle of the First World War, Sri Aurobindo noted with prophetic force: The defeat of Germany... could not of itself kill the spirit then incarnate in Germany; it may well lead merely to a new incarnation of it, perhaps in some other race or empire, and the whole battle would then have to be fought over again. So long as the old gods are alive, the breaking or depression of the body which they animate is a small matter, for they know well how to transmigrate. Germany overthrew the Napoleonic spirit in France in 1813 and broke the remnants of her European leadership in 1870; the same Germany became the incarnation of that which it had overthrown. The phenomenon is easily capable of renewal on a more formidable scale.² Today we are finding that the old gods know how to transmigrate. Gandhi himself, seeing all those years of nonviolence culminate in the terrible violence that marked India's partition in 1947, ruefully observed shortly before his death: “The attitude of violence which we have secretly harboured now recoils on us, and makes us fly at each other's throats when the question of distribution of power arises.... Now that the burden of subjection is lifted, all the forces of evil have come to the surface.” For neither nonviolence nor violence touch upon the root of Evil....

¹ Ahimsa: nonviolence.

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² The Ideal of Human Unity, Cent. Ed., XV. 320.

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