Letters 1936-37

After stopping tea my mind seems to become dull. It has become difficult to attend my classes.

All that is evidently due to the vital-physical becoming tamasic because you refuse it its small desires. You should throw it away altogether and call down into the vital-physical the Mother’s Force.

At this stage of the sadhana, should I try to divide my mental consciousness into two, one part doing mental work, the other part doing the sadhana?

It usually comes of itself, not by trying.

You said, “What I write usually helps only the mind and that too very little, for people really do not understand what I write.”

It is because the mind by itself cannot understand things that are beyond it [...] Each mind puts its own ideas in place of the Truth.

Would a developed mind help the sadhana?

It may or may not — if it is too intellectually developed on certain rationalistic lines, it may hinder.

Does not the Yoga mean to keep the mind quiet and turn it always to the Divine?

Do you mean to say that in order to have quietness of the mind one must do nothing? Then neither the Mother nor I nor anyone else here has a quiet mind. Doing nothing with the mind is not quietude or silence.

How to stop the physical mental from that activity before it takes deep root?

What do you mean? Activity of the physical mind is not a new thing that needs to take root. It has been there very well rooted since you began your human evolution in the primaeval forests.

Why does my mind chew and re-chew what I hear from others?

It is a movement in every mind; you probably did not notice it before when the mind was not accustomed to silence. For everybody whatever takes hold of the mind tends to be ruminated like that.

X used to press the hands or shoulders of some of his friends [...] we did feel some sensations of love and thrills.

There was no descent; but he felt the universal love and tried to express it in action instead of holding it in himself — so inevitably the vital took hold of it, as he had not yet the purification and the peace.

"Love and devotion depend on the opening of the psychic and for that the desires must go. The vital love offered by many to the Mother instead of the psychic love brings more disturbance than anything else because it is coupled with desire."