India - the Mother

January 2, 1957

There is in India this idea of a complete renunciation of all physical reality, a deep contempt for the material world, which is made out to be an illusion and a falsehood, leaving a clear field, as Sri Aurobindo says, to the sovereign rule of the adverse forces. If you escape from concrete reality to seek an abstract and distant reality, you leave the whole field of that concrete reality at the full disposal of the adverse forces which have grabbed hold of it and more or less rule now—in order to go and realize for yourself what Sri Aurobindo calls "a zero or a void unit," to become the ruler of a nothingness. It's the return to Nirvana. That idea is there everywhere in the world, but with different forms in its expression.

Because so far evil has been confronted by a weakness, a spiritual force with no power of transformation in the material world, that effort of tremendous goodwill has only resulted in pitiful failure, and has left the world in the same state of corruption and falsehood. One must have, on the same plane where the adverse forces are sovereign, a power greater than theirs which will be capable of totally defeating them in that domain.

Questions and Answers (1957 - 1958): 2 January 1957