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WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

19 July 1958

Eating the fruit

A peach should ripen on the tree; it is a fruit that is to be plucked when the sun is there upon it. At the time when the sun falls upon it, you come, pluck it and bite into it. Then it is absolutely heavenly!

There are two fruits like this: the peach and the golden greengage. It is the same for both: you must take them warm from the tree, bite them, and you are filled with an Edenic taste.

Each fruit should be eaten in a special way.

Fundamentally, this is the symbol of earthly Paradise and of the tree of Knowledge: in eating of the fruit of Knowledge, you lose your spontaneity of movement and you begin to objectify, to learn, to discuss; thus, when they had eaten of the fruit they became full of sin.

I say each fruit should be eaten in its own way. A being living according to its own nature, its own truth, should spontaneously discover its own way of using things. When you live according to the truth of your being, you have no need to learn things, you do them spontaneously, according to the inner law. When you follow your nature spontaneously and sincerely, you are divine. As soon as you think, see yourself doing and begin to discuss, you are full of sin.

It is man's mental consciousness that has filled all Nature with the idea of sin and all the misery which it brings! Animals are not unhappy in the way we are, not at all, not at all, except, as Sri Aurobindo says, those that have been corrupted. The corrupted ones are those that live with men. Dogs have the sense of sin and guilt. It is because their whole aspiration is to become like man--man is god--and then, dissimulation, [new p. 348]falsehood. Dogs do lie. Men admire that; they say, "Oh! How intelligent they are!" [old p. 368]

They have lost their divinity.

The human species, in the spiral ascent, is truly at a point which is not pretty.

But isn't a dog more conscious than a tiger, more evolved, and higher in the spiral, that is to say, nearer to the Divine?

To be conscious is not the point. Man is more evolved than the tiger, there is not the shadow of a doubt, but the tiger is more divine than man. You must not confuse things: the two things are quite different.

You see, the Divine is everywhere, in everything. You should never forget that, not for a second should you forget it. He is everywhere, in everything; and unconsciously, but spontaneously and therefore sincerely, everything that is below the mental manifestation is divine without mixture, that is to say, spontaneously, by its very nature. It is man with his mind who has introduced the idea of guilt. Naturally he is much more conscious! That is not to be disputed, it is well understood, because what we call consciousness (what "we" call, that is to say, what man calls consciousness) is the power to objectify and mentalise things. It is not the true consciousness, but it is what men call consciousness. So in this human way, it is understood that man is much more conscious than the animal. But with man comes sin and perversion, which do not exist outside the state that we call "conscious", but which is not truly conscious, which simply consists in mentalising things, in having the capacity to objectify them.

It is a curve of ascent, but that curve moves away from the Divine, and one must rise much higher to find again, naturally, a higher Divine, for it is a conscious Divine, whereas the others are [new p. 349]divine without being conscious, spontaneously and instinctively. And our whole moral notion of good and bad, we have [old p. 369]thrown all that upon the creation with our deformed and perverted consciousness. It is we who have invented it.

We are the deforming intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the gods.

Collected Works of The Mother, First Edition, Volume 15, pp. 367-369