Letters 1935

Could you kindly say something in general about the psychic and spiritual experience and the descent from above?

You have to learn by experience. Mental information (badly understood, as it always is without experience) might rather hamper than help. In fact there is no fixed mental knowledge for these things, which vary infinitely....

Would you kindly define the nature of Ananda?

Ananda is a thing to be felt — it cannot be defined except negatively that it is not mere joy, but something much more deep and essential.

Even the higher or deeper experiences do not seem to be of much value if one cannot love the Mother with the true heart.

It is a mistake to think like that. The experiences prepare the different parts of the being for loving in the right way, so that it is not the soul alone that loves. So long as they are open to ignorance and ego they cannot receive and hold the love rightly.

There is a psychic sorrow which usually comes when the soul feels how strong is the resistance in the vital and how much the Forces in it rage against the Mother, or when some similar feeling is in or behind the consciousness.

After death when the soul returns for a new birth, who moulds the mind, vital and physical?

It is done by Nature under the influence of the soul. In a certain sense it may be said that the soul does it, because what it sees as needed is drawn in as material and shaped.

This is my appeal to the Mother: Either give me the psychic love or death. Let no third thing come to me — a final resolution.

That is altogether the wrong attitude. It is once more the vital coming in — it is not a psychic attitude.

I would like to know what that sweet flow is and from where it comes into my mouth.

It is a form of the flow of Ananda from above — when it takes a quite physical form the Yogins call it Amrita.

A subtle sound like a peal of bells is heard constantly and loudly. What does it denote?

That is considered to be a sound closely connected with the sadhana.