India - the Mother

July 3, 1968

(All India Radio asked Mother for a message on India's condition.)

I said this

"It is only India's soul that can unify the country.

"Externally the provinces of India are very different in character, tendencies, culture, as well as in language, and any attempt to unify them artificially could only have disastrous results.

"But her soul is one, intense in her aspiration towards the spiritual truth, the essential unity of the creation and the divine origin of life, and by uniting with this aspiration the whole country can recover a unity that has never ceased to exist for the superior mentality."

I put, "the essential unity of the creation and the divine origin of life." That whole formula, I know, was an attempt to express the thing without using the word "God," because ... There was in my life a period of at least twenty years during which those words used to make me bristle, so I understand very well the feeling it evokes in people. Later, it was Sri Aurobindo who made me rise above all that; but it's because he pulled me very high up that I rose above all that, otherwise, on an intellectual level, it didn't do at all. It evokes the narrowest religiosity, and ... it won't do.

Mother's Agenda: July 3, 1968