MAHASARASWATI

MAHASARASWATI is the Mother’s Power of Work and her
spirit of perfection and order. The youngest of the Four, she is
the most skilful in executive faculty and the nearest to physical
Nature. Maheshwari lays down the large lines of the worldforces,
Mahakali drives their energy and impetus,Mahalakshmi
discovers their rhythms and measures, but Mahasaraswati presides
over their detail of organisation and execution, relation of
parts and effective combination of forces and unfailing exactitude
of result and fulfilment. The science and craft and technique
of things are Mahasaraswati’s province. Always she holds in
her nature and can give to those whom she has chosen the
intimate and precise knowledge, the subtlety and patience, the
accuracy of intuitive mind and conscious hand and discerning
eye of the perfect worker. This Power is the strong, the tireless,
the careful and efficient builder, organiser, administrator, technician,
artisan and classifier of the worlds. When she takes up
the transformation and new-building of the nature, her action
is laborious and minute and often seems to our impatience slow
and interminable, but it is persistent, integral and flawless. For
the will in her works is scrupulous, unsleeping, indefatigable;
leaning over us she notes and touches every little detail, finds out
every minute defect, gap, twist or incompleteness, considers and
weighs accurately all that has been done and all that remains still
to be done hereafter. Nothing is too small or apparently trivial
for her attention; nothing however impalpable or disguised or
latent can escape her. Moulding and remoulding she labours
each part till it has attained its true form, is put in its exact place
in the whole and fulfils its precise purpose. In her constant and
diligent arrangement and rearrangement of things her eye is on
all needs at once and the way to meet them and her intuition
knows what is to be chosen and what rejected and successfully
determines the right instrument, the right time, the right conditions
and the right process. Carelessness and negligence and
indolence she abhors; all scamped and hasty and shuffling work,
all clumsiness and `a peu pr`es and misfire, all false adaptation
and misuse of instruments and faculties and leaving of things
undone or half done is offensive and foreign to her temper.
When her work is finished, nothing has been forgotten, no part
has been misplaced or omitted or left in a faulty condition; all is
solid, accurate, complete, admirable. Nothing short of a perfect
perfection satisfies her and she is ready to face an eternity of toil
if that is needed for the fullness of her creation. Therefore of all
theMother’s powers she is themost long-suffering with man and
his thousand imperfections. Kind, smiling, close and helpful, not
easily turned away or discouraged, insistent even after repeated
failure, her hand sustains our every step on condition that we are
single in our will and straightforward and sincere; for a double
mind she will not tolerate and her revealing irony is merciless to
drama and histrionics and self-deceit and pretence. A mother to
our wants, a friend in our difficulties, a persistent and tranquil
counsellor and mentor, chasing away with her radiant smile
the clouds of gloom and fretfulness and depression, reminding
always of the ever-present help, pointing to the eternal sunshine,
she is firm, quiet and persevering in the deep and continuous urge
that drives us towards the integrality of the higher nature. All
the work of the other Powers leans on her for its completeness;
for she assures the material foundation, elaborates the stuff of
detail and erects and rivets the armour of the structure.-THE MOTHER-SRI AUROBINDO.

Everything is Brahman

DR. MANILAL: What happens when the human consciousness is replaced by the divine consciousness?

SRI AUROBINDO: One feels a perpetual calm , a perpetual strength, one is aware of Infinity and live not only In Infinity but also in Eternity. One feels Immortality and does not care about the death of the body. And then one has the consciousness of the One in all. Everything becomes the manifestation of the Brahman. For instance. As I look round this room, I see everything as the Brahman. No, it is not mere thinking, it is a concrete experience. Even the wall, the books are the Brahman. I see you no more as Dr. Manilal but as the Divine living in the Divine. It is a wonderful experience.

TALK WITH SRI AUROBINDO
VOL. 1 BY NIRODBARAN
(Page no.19)

🌻 Graveyard 🌻

🌻 Graveyard 🌻

                As usual when I went to see The Mother, She started saying:  " You see, I get scores of letters from people saying that, 'I am seventy, ' I am past seventy -five', 'I am nearing eighty'.
'I am now free from all encumbrances. 'My wife has passed away. 'My sons are well-settled. 'My  daughter are married and are settled in their homes. I now wish to Join the Ashram and serve the Divine."

                   I said, "Mother, what reply do you give to such applicants ?"

                   Mother said, "I write to them that you have applied to the wrong place. You should have applied to the Graveyard authorities."

                   I laughed and laughed and thought how true it was.

MY MOTHER BY SURENDRA NATH JAUHAR.

Tobacco and Alcohol

💎 Why do tobacco and alcohol destroy the memory and will?

Why? Because they do so. There is no moral reason. It is a fact. There is a poison in alcohol, there is a poison in tobacco; and this poison goes into the cells and damages them. Alcohol is never expelled, so to say; it accumulates in a certain part of the brain, and then, after the accumulation, these cells no longer function at all — some people even go mad because of it, that is what is called delirium tremens, the result of having swallowed too much alcohol which is not absorbed but remains in this way concentrated in the brain. And it is so radical even that... There is a province in France, for instance, which produces wine, a wine with a very low percentage of alcohol: I believe it is four or five per cent, a very low percentage, you understand; and these people, because they make it, drink wine as one drinks water. They drink it neat, and after some time they become ill. They have cerebral disorders. I knew people of this kind, the brain was disordered, didn’t function any more. And tobacco — nicotine is a very serious poison. It is a poison that destroys the cells. I have said that it is a slow poison because one doesn’t feel it immediately except when one smokes for the first time and it makes one very ill. And this should make you understand that it ought not to be done. Only, people are so stupid that they think it is a weakness and so continue until they get used to the poison. And the body no longer reacts, it allows itself to be destroyed without reacting: you get rid of the reaction.

It is the same thing physically as morally. When you do something you ought not to do and your psychic tells you in its still small voice not to do it, then if you do it in spite of that, after a while it will no longer tell you anything, and you will no longer have any inner reactions at all to your bad actions, because you have refused to listen to the voice when it spoke to you. And then, naturally, you go from bad to worse and tumble into the hole. Well, for tobacco it is the same thing: the first time the body reacts violently, it vomits, it tells you, “I don’t want it at any cost.” You compel it with your mental and vital stupidity, you force it to do so; it doesn’t react any longer and so lets itself be poisoned gradually until it decomposes. The functioning deteriorates; it is the nerves that are affected; they no longer transmit the will because they are affected, they are poisoned. They no longer have the strength to transmit the will. And finally people begin to tremble, they have nervous movements. There are quite a few, one doesn’t need to go very far to find them. And they are like that only because they have committed excesses: they drank and smoked. And when they lift an object, their hands shake (gesture.) That’s what one gets by doing this.

🌸 The Mother ( Question and Answers, Volume-6, page no.74-76)

Psychic Presence and Psychic Being – Real Origin of Race Superiority

🌸 Psychic Presence and Psychic Being – Real Origin of Race Superiority

The Mother: With regard to the evolution upwards, it is more correct to speak of the psychic presence than the psychic being. For it is the psychic presence which little by little becomes the psychic being. In each evolving form there is this presence, but it is not individualised. It is something which is capable of growth and follows the movement of the evolution. It is not a descent of the involution from above. It is formed progressively round the spark of Divine Consciousness which is meant to be the centre of a growing being which becomes the psychic being when it is at last individualised. It is this spark that is permanent and gathers round itself all sorts of elements for the formation of that individuality; the true psychic being is formed only when the psychic personality is fully grown, fully built up, round the eternal divine spark; it attains its culmination, its total fulfilment if and when it unites with a being or personality from above.

Below the human level there is, ordinarily, hardly any in- dividual formation — there is only this presence, more or less. But when, by the growth of the body round the spark of Divine Consciousness, humanity began upon the earth, certain human organisms became in the course of this progressive growth suf- ficiently perfected, and by their opening and receptivity allowed a junction with certain beings descending from above. This gave rise to a kind of divine humanity, what may be called a race of the e ́lite. If only they had remained by themselves, these people would have continued as a race unique and superhuman. Indeed many races have made claims to be that: the Aryan, the Semitic and the Japanese have all in turn considered themselves the chosen race. But in fact there has been a general levelling of humanity, a lot of intermixture. For there arose the necessity  of prolongation of the superior race, which drove it to intermix with the rest of humanity — with animal humanity, that is to say. Thus its value was degraded and led to that great Fall which is spoken of in the world’s scriptures, the coming out of Paradise, the end of the Golden Age. Indeed it was a loss from the point of view of consciousness, but not from that of material strength, since it was a tremendous gain to ordinary humanity. There were, certainly, some beings who had a very strong will not to mix, who resented losing their superiority; and it is just this that is the real origin of race-pride, race-exclusiveness, and a special caste distinction like that cherished by the Brahmins in India. But at present it cannot be said that there is any portion of mankind which is purely animal: all the races have been touched by the descent from above, and owing to the extensive intermixture the result of the Involution was more widely spread.

Of course one cannot say that every man has got a psychic being, just as one cannot refuse to grant it to every animal. Many animals that have lived near man have some beginnings of it, while so often one comes across people who do not seem to be anything else than brutes. Here, too, there has been a good deal of levelling. But on the whole, the psychic in the true sense starts at the human stage: that is also why the Catholic religion declares that only man has a soul. In man alone there is the possibility of the psychic being growing to its full stature even so far as to be able in the end to join and unite with a descending being, a godhead from above.

🌸 The Mother (Questions and Answers, book-3, page no.150-151)

Animal Sacrifice in Religion

🐢 In the temples people offer animals to the Divine. In this case can it be called cruelty?

This comes much closer to ignorance and unconsciousness than to cruelty. They don’t do it because they are cruel — there are exceptions — but still, generally speaking, it is not that they feel a special pleasure in killing but they are afraid of a particular god and think that by such killing they will win his favour.

Close by here, near the seashore, there is a fishermen’s temple—Virampatnam, I think; when you go as far as Ari- ancouppam and from there turn to the left and go towards the sea, at the end of the road there is a temple. It is the temple of a strange godhead... it is one of the Kalis. Well, extraordinary stories are told about this Kali, but in any case, the custom is to kill a fairly large number of chickens every year in her honour. I happened to go down there — I believe it was the day after the festival had been celebrated: one could still see all the feathers scattered on the sands — and, above all, there was in that place an atmosphere of creepy dread and total ignorance, and also (I don’t know the practice — who eats the chickens? whether it is the one who kills them or the priests — but here truly there were too many! If the priests ate all that they would be quite sick! So it must probably have been also the people who had killed the chickens), there was that atmosphere of greed, not only greed but of gluttony, of people who think about eating. And there was that Kali who was particularly satisfied with all the vital forces of all those poor little chickens; they had been killed off by hundreds and each one had a little vital force which escaped when its throat was cut, and so that Kali was feeding upon all that: she was very happy. And there was evidently — I don’t know if it could be called cruelty, it was rather greed, — greed of vital forces, of a very unconscious vital force, for these poor chickens don’t have anything very conscious. And the whole thing created a very low, very heavy, very unconscious and painful atmosphere, yet not of the intensity of cruelty. So it can’t be said that this practice is due to cruelty, I don’t think so. Perhaps some of these people, had they to sacrifice a little kid, a little lamb they loved, perhaps they would even find this a little sad. It is rather a great unconsciousness and a great fear. Oh, fear! In religions there is so much fear! Fear: “If I don’t do this or that, if I don’t cut the throat of a dozen chickens, disastrous things will happen to me all my life through or at least the whole of this year. My children will be ill, I shall lose my job, I won’t be able to earn my living; very, very unpleasant things will happen to me.”... And so, let us sacrifice the dozen chickens. But it is not from the desire to kill. It can’t be said that it’s through cruelty: it’s through unconsciousness.

🌸 The Mother ( Question and Answers, Volume-6, page no.65-66)