WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

The Divine Delight
13 March 1968

In her talk of 27 May 1953, Mother gave the following answer to the question of a disciple:

"Can the Divine withdraw from us?" `That is an impossibility. Because if the Divine withdrew from something, immediately it would collapse, for it would not exist. To put it more clearly: The Divine is the only existence."

Now I would have answered: it is as though you asked whether the Divine could withdraw from Himself! (Mother laughs.) That is the trouble: when one says "Divine", they understand "God".... There is only That: That alone exists. That, what is it? That alone exists!

Even this morning, I was looking, seeing, and it was as though I was saying to the Divine, "Why do You take pleasure in denying Yourself?"... Is it not to satisfy our logic that we say: All that is obscure, all that is ugly, all that is not living, all that is not harmonious, all that is not divine--but how is it possible?... It is only an attitude for action. Then by placing myself in the consciousness of the action, I said, "But why do You take pleasure in being like that!" (Mother laughs.)

It was a very concrete experience of the cells, and with the feeling (not feeling: neither feeling nor sensation), a kind of perception that you are just, just on the border of the great secret.... All of a sudden a whole set of cells or a certain bodily function takes the fancy of going wrong--why? What meaning is there in that? And the response was... it was as though all that helped to break the limits.

But why, how?...

You can explain everything mentally, but that signifies nothing at all: for the body, for the material consciousness it is abstract. The material consciousness, when it seizes something, it knows the thing a hundred times better than one can know it mentally. And when it knows, it has power: this gives the power. And it is this that is worked out slowly, slowly--and for the ignorant consciousness, slowly and painfully. But for the true consciousness, it is not so: pain, delight, all this is a way... so absurd a way of seeing things--of feeling them, seeing them.

There is a perception more and more concrete that everything... that there is nothing that does not contain the delight of being, because it is the way of being: without the delight of being, there is no being. But it is not what we understand mentally by the delight of being. It is... something that is difficult to say. And this perception of suffering and delight, almost of evil and good, all this, these are necessities for the work, to allow the work to be done in a certain field of inconscience. Because the true consciousness is something altogether, altogether different. And this, it is this which this consciousness of the cells is now learning, and learning through a concrete experience, and all these evaluations of what is good and what is bad, of what is suffering and what is delight, all this appears vague. But still the Thing--the Truth--the concrete Thing is not yet seized. It is on the way, one feels that it is on the way, but it is not yet that. If one had it... one would be the omnipotent master. And it is possible that one can get it only when the entire world or a sufficient part of it will be ready for transformation.

This is a speculation, one might call it an inspiration, but it belongs yet to the domain high above.

From time to time, it is as though one just touched upon the perception of the all-power: one is just on the point, ah! (Mother makes a gesture of catching the thing)... but off it goes.

When one will have that, the world will be able to change. And when I say "one", I do not speak of a person.... There is perhaps something which is equivalent to the Person, but that... that also, I am not sure if it is not a projection of our consciousness upon something which escapes us.

Sri Aurobindo used to say always that if one went far enough, beyond the Impersonal, if one went further beyond, one would find something that we could call "Person", but which corresponded to nothing that we conceive of as "Person".

So then there, there is only That; and it is That which has Power. But even when we say, "There is only That" (Mother laughs), we place it in some other thing!... Words, languages are unfit to express something that is beyond consciousness; as soon as you formulate, it sinks down.