India - the Mother

August 7, 1957

These two points [politics and finance] are the most recalcitrant part. In the human consciousness, it's still the most subjected to the forces of ignorance, unconsciousness, and I must say in a general way, bad will. It's what most refuses any progress towards the truth.... To try to take up these things and transform them is really a heroic action. Well, that too is being tried, for unless it is done, it will be impossible to change the conditions of the earth....

Goodness knows for what reason (except that the worse always precedes the better), instead of taking the path of simplification, we have taken the path of complication.... Things have grown considerably worse since the last war, and are growing still worse from one year to the next.... We are so stuck in prohibitions, impossibilities, interdictions, rules and regulations, complications of every second, that we feel stifled, and there is that really wonderful idea that if we demolish everything, things may be better afterwards! It's floating in the air. And all governments have put themselves in such impossible conditions, they have tied themselves up so tightly that they think they will have to break everything to move on. (After a silence) Unfortunately, it's a little more than a possibility, it's a very serious danger. And it's not quite sure that life won't be made still more impossible by a perceived inability to emerge from the chaos—chaos of complication—in which humanity has put itself. It is like the shadow—unfortunate a very active shadow—of the new Hope that has germinated in human consciousness, a hope and a need for something more harmonious. And the need grows all the more acute as life as it is now organized increasingly becomes its opposite. The two opposites face each other with such intensity that we can expect something like an explosion....

Questions and Answers (1957 - 1958): 7 August 1957