The Mother

Vital Bargaining and True Self-Giving

What you have felt is a revival or return on you of the lower vital with its demands and desires. Its suggestion is, "I am doing the Yoga, but for a price. I have abandoned the life of vital desire and satisfaction but in order to get intimacy with the Mother―instead of satisfying myself with the world, to satisfy myself and get my desires fulfilled by the Divine. If I do not get the intimacy of the Mother and immediately and as I want it, why should I give up the old things?" And as a natural result the old things start again―"X and Y and Y and X and the wrongs of Z". You must see this machinery of the lower vital and dismiss it.

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It is only by the full psychic relation of self-giving that unity and closeness with the Divine can be maintained―the other is part of the vital ego movement and can only bring a fall of the consciousness and disturbance.

20-6-1933

You are concerned only with yourself and the Divine. In your relations with the Divine you are concerned not with the Divine's satisfaction of your personal desires, but with being pulled out of these things and raised to your highest spiritual possibilities, so that you may become united with the Mother within and as a result in the outer being also. That cannot be done by satisfying your vital desires―to do so would only increase them and give you into the hands of the ignorance and restless confusion of the ordinary Nature. It can be done only by your inner trust and surrender and by the pressure of the Mother's peace and Force working from within and changing your vital nature. It is when you forget this that you go wrong and suffer; when you remember it you progress and the difficulties become less and less insistent.

13-9-1933

If it is the same part of the vital that was on the right side and has now turned against the Mother, the explanation is very obvious. It gave its adhesion formerly because it thought that by its adhesion it could make her satisfy its desires; finding its desires not indulged, it turns against her. That is the usual vital movement in ordinary man and in ordinary life, and it has no true place in Yoga. It was just the introduction of this attitude into Yoga by the Sadhaks and its persistence which has at last made it necessary for the Mother to draw back as she has done. What you have to do is to get these lower parts to understand that they exist not for themselves but for the Divine and to give their adhesion, without claim or arrière-pensée or subterfuge. It is the whole issue at the present moment in the Sadhana; for it is only

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if this is done that the physical consciousness can change and become fit for the descent. Otherwise there will always be these ups and downs in some part of the being―at least, delay, confusion and disorder. This is the only true basis for fixity in the true consciousness and for a smooth course in the Sadhana.

14-12-1931