On Himself

Law of Dealing with Sadhaks

The Mother and myself deal with all according to the law of the Divine. We receive alike rich and poor, those who are high­born or low-born according to human standards, and extend to them an equal love and protection. Their progress in Sadhana is our main concern—for they have come here for that, not to satisfy their palates or their bellies, not to make ordinary vital demands or to quarrel about position or place or comforts. That progress depends on how they answer to the Mother's love or protection—whether they receive the forces she pours on all alike, whether they use or misuse what she gives them. But the

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Mother has no intention or obligation to deal with all outwardly in the same way—the demand that she should do so is absurd and imbecile—and if she did it, she would prove false to the truth of things and the law of the Divine. Each Sadhak has to be dealt with according to his nature, his capacities, his real needs (not his claims or desires) and according to what is best for his spiritual welfare. As to how it is to be done, we refuse to be dictated to by the ignorance of those of the Sadhaks who consider that the Mother must act according to their standards or their ideas of equality or justice or the demands of their vital or the notions they have brought with them from the outside world. We act according to the Light within us and for the Truth that we are striving to establish in this earthly Nature.

11-12-1933

Each one has his own way of doing Sadhana and his own approach to the Divine and need not trouble himself about how the others do it; their success or unsuccess, their difficulties, their delusions, their egoism and vanity are in her care; she has an infinite patience, but that does not mean that she approves of their defects or supports them in all they say or do. The Mother takes no sides in any quarrel or antagonism or dispute, but her silence does not mean that she approves what they may say or do when it is improper. The Ashram or the spiritual life is not a stage in which some are to be prominent or take a leading part or a field of competition in which one has a claim or can rightly consider himself superior to others. These things are the inventions of the ordinary human attitude to the world and the tendency is to carry it over into the life of Sadhana, but that is not the spiritual truth of things. The Mother tolerates all; she does not forbid any criticism of the Sadhaks by each other nor does she give these criticisms any value. It is only when the Sadhaks see the futility of all these things from the spiritual level that there can be any hope that they will cease.

In all these things there is nothing that ought to drive a man from the spiritual life or make him go away from his Guru. It seems to me that it is only the Guru who can decide whether one

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is fit or not; to accept the adverse opinion of someone else on that point seems to me absurd and to act on it an offence against one's own soul; to judge oneself unfit and act on that is most perilous, for this judgment may be merely a fit of depression or a vital disturbance raising the self-depreciation of the tamasic ego. If I did not see that you could progress in the Sadhana or had not seen any progress, I would not have persistently asked you to continue nor would I be now writing to you letter after letter (I write to no one else) to meet your difficulties.

P.S. As for your other bête noire, for the dislike of whom you want to leave the Ashram, do you think the Mother is so dull, unseeing as to take people and their Sadhana at their own valuation? that she cannot see their defects as well as whatever merits they have? that she is ignorant of the movements of their lower nature? or that they can dupe and influence and lead her?