The Mother

The Mother's Regard for Truth

Mother heard that X had objected to your working in her room, but she brushed it aside at once saying that that could have no

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importance. It has nothing to do with her decision which was made on other grounds quite independently of it.

P.S. A lie is a lie whoever speaks it. If you give credit to what someone or another thinks or says as Mother's motive in an action, take her statement of her motive as untrue and somebody else's who cannot know as sound and true and on that challenge Mother for want of frankness, is the resulting upset our fault? It is a question of greater confidence in the Mother than in the statements or interpretations of Sadhaks or the hasty assumptions or inferences of your mind or the feelings of your vital made without having the needed information. If you could get rid of that movement, things would be easier.

15-5-1936

Q: How can the maxim "a lie is a lie" apply to all? It can apply only to those who are bound by moral and social codes, or as a principle only if the intention behind is wrong. If a higher motive demands a concealing or misrepresenting something by words I would hardly call it a lie. The motive, the basis, are all superhuman and cannot fall in the same category. I think Krishna did not always speak the exact truth and his half-lies always provoke an understanding smile in all who listen to his stories.

A: If the Mother did a thing for one reason and said that she did it for quite another she did not have, I fail to see how it can be anything but a falsehood. No superhuman motive can make a falsehood not a falsehood. Moreover, if you really believe that the Divine can speak what is not true without being untrue and that that is a part of divinity, why do you resent when you think the Mother has done it and grow sorrowful and indignant over her supposed unfair and uncandid treatment of you and cry she ought to have been frank, etc.? You ought rather to think she is acting from superhuman motives and accept gladly whatever

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she does. At least that seems to be the logic of such a position.

You base yourself evidently on the position that the Divine Consciousness is above good and evil. But that does not mean that it does evil and good impartially. It can only mean that it acts from a light that is beyond that level of human consciousness which makes the human standard of these things. It acts for and from a greater good than the apparent good men follow after. It acts also according to a greater truth than men conceive. It is for this reason that the human mind cannot understand the divine action and its motives―he must first rise into a higher consciousness and be in spiritual contact or union with the Divine. But if anyone recognises that, he can no longer judge the divine action with his human mind and from his human point of view. The two things would be quite incompatible.

But this does not fall under any such explanation. To allege a false motive cannot be a movement of a greater Truth and consciousness. To keep silence and not reveal one's motive is one thing―to say I did not act from that motive when I actually did so, is not silence, it is falsehood. It is a matter not of moral, but spiritual importance. The Mother cares for the Truth and she has always said that lying and falsehood create a serious obstacle to realisation. How then can she herself do that?

I do not remember any lies or half-lies told by Krishna, so I can say nothing on that point. But if he did according to the Mahabharata or the Bhagawata, we are not bound either by that record or by that example. I think Rama and Buddha told none.

17-5-1936

It is good if you have freed yourself from this bondage. Love of Truth is divine, but this kind of truth is a very mixed product accompanied as it is by hardness or a fierce anger. Truth does not insist on a blind adherence to the spoken word―as for instance, if a man says that he will kill another under the impression that that other has done him a grievous wrong and afterwards carries out his word even when he has found out that the other was innocent

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and no wrong done. That is what literal adhesion to the spoken word would come to, if scrupulously held as a principle. Truth, on the contrary, demands that a man shall cleave to the principle of Truth in things only, and in the case above the principle of Truth would demand that he should break his vow and not keep it. If a man pledges himself to something that is against the principle of Love and Compassion, or against that of obedience and surrender to the Divine, it is not Truth to keep that pledge―for it would be a pledge to follow falsehood―and how can Truth be held in allegiance to falsehood? That would be an Asuric, not a divine Truthfulness.

As for the Mother, one will not find in her this blind adherence to an arrangement once made. If, for instance, she told someone, next time you yield to sex-passion in any way, you will have to leave the Ashram, and if the man did it and repented, she too might relent and not insist in following out her menace. These matters or interviews are not promises, contracts or engagements,―they are arrangements only and can be altered. If she has arranged for half an hour she can make it instead three-quarters of an hour―or diminish it to twenty minutes. There is a plasticity needed in the movement of time and the habit of life cannot afford to be rigid in its movements, otherwise life would either be turned into a mere mechanism or break to pieces. But in this case there was no intention; it was a pure accident; by some oversight your name had not been written in the morning list and Mother came to the door when those on the list were finished. She could not go back because it was extremely late and it had been a long and exhausting morning spent in a continual struggle with adverse forces and she had to come in, do what still she had to do and come to me to report what had happened.

But even if she had intended it for some reason not known to you, your reaction was not the right one. For the basis you have taken for your Yoga is to obey the Will whatever it may be. These things―seemingly accidental―happen when they are predestined and they come in as an ordeal for something in the vital which has by this painful process to accept change.

28-9-1933

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