India - the Mother

November 13, 1968

Lots of people from the United States are coming here at the moment, and they bring news of an appalling crisis over there, a crisis of discouraged pessimism.... The whole youth seems to be in a woeful state of depression and discouragement.

They've discovered all that was hollow, false, unreal in the old way of seeing life, and they haven't found anything to replace it with.... A few rare individuals (we get their letters, or they come here) say that they came across Sri Aurobindo's teaching and found it to be the salvation. But they are very few. And the majority of people don't understand—they don't have the intelligence needed to understand.

So everywhere they're sinking back; there has been an effort to emerge from that exclusive search for personal satisfaction, and it has led to extravagances; but now the very absurdity of those extravagances has become apparent, so they're sinking back very low, and they haven't found—they haven't found the true path. Because it's not a mental path.

Everywhere there is still the cult of the mind, that's the terrible thing.

Mother's Agenda: November 13, 1960