WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

The true life-activity

3 August 1955

Mother reads from Lights on Yoga, "Surrender and Opening".

What is "the true life-activity"?

It is to express the Divine. That is the very reason of existence and life, its truth and its sole true activity.

Sweet Mother, here Sri Aurobindo has said "It is impossible." Why? For you have said that nothing is impossible!

Nothing is impossible in principle. But if one refuses to do what is necessary, obviously one cannot succeed.

In the material world there are conditions, otherwise it would not be what it is. If there were no conditions and processes, everything could be transformed and done miraculously. But evidently it is not in this way that it was decided, because things don't happen miraculously--in any case, not miracles as the human mind conceives of them, that is, constant arbitrary decisions. It is obvious that in the world there are no arbitrary decisions.

Sri Aurobindo says: In order to do such and such a thing, these are the conditions. If you refuse to fulfil these conditions you won't do that particular thing, you will do something else; that, evidently, is not the only thing possible. But if that's the thing one wants to do, one must fulfil the conditions... One can do something else!

I believe that if you take the world in its totality, in Time and Space, it is obvious that you can say, "Nothing is impossible", and that probably everything will be; but that's in the totality, and in Time and Space, that is, through eternities of time and infinities of space all is possible. But at a given moment, [old p. 263]at a [new p. 259]given point, there is a certain number of "possibles", and all are not there, and certain conditions have to be fulfilled for these possibilities to be realised. The world is constructed like that. We can do nothing about it. I mean it is useless to say, "It ought to be otherwise." It is like that, we must take it as it is, endeavour to make the best possible out of it.