Some Answers from the Mother (CWM Vol.16)

Some Answers from the Mother

Collected Works of the Mother Volume 16

This volume contains the Mother’s correspondence with fourteen persons; all but one of them were members of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. The material covers a forty-five year period, from 1927 to 1972. The earliest items are letters of the Mother to her son; the latest are brief thoughts and prayers written in a young disciple’s notebook. Each of the correspondences is presented in chronological order, with the exception of Series Six, which is arranged by theme. Two correspondences were written in English; twelve were written wholly or partly in French and appear here in translation. Further information is provided in the Note on the Texts.

Book Details

Author: The Mother

Print Length: 455 pages

Publisher: Sri Aurobindo Ashram

Book format: PDF, ePub, Kindle

Language: English

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Series One (1927 – 1938) Letters from the Mother to Her Son
Series Two (1931 – 1940) To the sadhak in charge of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Building Department during the 1930s and early 1940s.
Series Three (1931 – 1949) To “My little smile” who worked for many years embroidering clothes for the Mother and later became one of her personal attendants.
Series Four (1932 – 1934) To the sadhak in charge of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram’s cows, bullocks and carts during the 1930s.
Series Five (1932 – 1937) To a young sadhak who in his youth learned music, painting and poetry, and later became a teacher in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.
Series Six (1933 – 1949) To a young sadhak who became a teacher in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.
Series Seven (1935 – 1940) To the sadhak who was the dentist at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram during the 1930s and then served as one of Sri Aurobindo’s personal attendants.
Series Eight (1959 – 1960) To a young captain in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Department of Physical Education.
Series Nine (1960 – 1963) To a young teacher in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.
Series Ten (1961 – 1970) To a young captain in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Department of Physical Education.
Series Eleven (1966 – 1969) To a sadhak of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.
Series Twelve (1969 – 1970) To a student in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.
Series Thirteen (1969 – 1970) To a student in the Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.
Series Fourteen (1971 – 1972) To a sadhak of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

Book Sample

Some Answers from the Mother

Series One

Letters from the Mother to Her Son

Our community is growing more and more; we are nearly thirty (not counting those who are scattered all over India); and I have become responsible for all this; I am at the centre of the organisation, on the material as well as the spiritual side, and you can easily imagine what it means. We already occupy five houses, one of which is our property; others will follow. New recruits are coming from all parts of the world. With this expansion, new activities are being created, new needs are arising which require new skills.

16 January 1927

*I think I told you about our five houses; four of them are joined in a single square block which is surrounded on all sides by streets and contains several buildings with courtyards and gardens. We have just bought, repaired and comfortably furnished one of these houses and then, just recently, we have settled there, Sri Aurobindo and myself, as well as five of the closest disciples.

We have joined the houses together with openings in some of the outer walls and outbuildings, so that I may walk freely in our little realm without having to go out into the street — this is rather nice. But I am busier than ever now, and I can say that at the moment I am writing to you in a hurry.

16 February 1927

*It is true that for a long time I have not slept in the usual sense of the word. That is to say, at no time do I fall into the inconscience which is the sign of ordinary sleep. But I do give my body the rest it needs, that is, two or three hours of lying down in a condition of absolute immobility in which the whole being, mental, psychic, vital and physical, enters into a complete state of rest made of perfect peace, absolute silence and total immobility, while the consciousness remains perfectly awake; or else I enter into an internal activity of one or more states of being, an activity which constitutes the occult work and which, needless to say, is also perfectly conscious. So I can say, in all truth, that I never lose consciousness throughout the twenty-four hours, which thus form an unbroken sequence, and that I no longer experience ordinary sleep, while still giving my body the rest that it needs.

3 July 1927

*In this letter I am sending you a few photographs of the Ashram which will no doubt interest you since they will give you an idea, however incomplete and imprecise, of the surroundings in which I live; in any case they will give a very limited impression, for the Ashram at present consists of seventeen houses inhabited by eighty-five or ninety people (the number varies as people come and go).

I am also sending you conversations 14 and 15. I hope that you have received, in several instalments, the complete series of the first thirteen; I had them mailed to you as they were published.

25 August 1929

*I shall not endeavour to reply to your opinion on the “conversations” although there are certain points which you do not seem to have fully grasped; but I suppose that a second reading later on, at your leisure, will enable you to understand those parts which eluded you at first glance. Moreover, these “conversations” make no claim to exhaust their subjects or even to deal with them thoroughly. Rather they are hints whose purpose is more pragmatic than didactic; they are a kind of moral stimulus meant to goad and spur on those who are on the way. It is true that in my answers many aspects of the question have been neglected which could have been examined with interest — that will be for another time.

21 October 1929

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