Page 16 - All India Magazine Feb-2026

and influences acting and reacting upon you, it is like a gas in
the atmosphere, and unless you are quite awake, these things
enter into you, and it is only when they have gone well in and
come out as if they came from you, that you become aware of
them. How many times people meet those who are nervous,
angry, in a bad mood, and themselves become nervous, an-
gry, moody, just like that, without quite knowing why. Why
is it that when you play against certain people you play very
well, but when you play against others you cannot play? And
those very quiet people, not at all wicked, who suddenly be-
come furious when they are in a furious crowd! And no one
knows who has started it: it is something that went past and
swept off the consciousness. There are people who can let
out vibrations like this and others respond without knowing
why. Everything is like that, from the smallest to the biggest
things.
To be individualised in a collectivity, one must be absolute-
ly conscious of oneself. And of which self? — the Self which is
above all intermixture, that is, what I call the Truth of your be-
ing. And as long as you are not conscious of the Truth of your
being, you are moved by all kinds of things, without taking any
note of it at all. Collective thought, collective suggestions
are a formidable influence which act constantly on individual
thought. And what is extraordinary is that one does not notice
it. One believes that one thinks “like that”, but in truth it is
the collectivity which thinks “like that”. The mass is always
inferior to the individual. Take individuals with similar quali-
ties, of similar categories,well, when they are alone these in-
dividuals are at least two degrees better than people of the
same category in a crowd. There is a mixture of obscurities,
a mixture of unconsciousness, and inevitably you slip into this
unconsciousness. To escape this there is but one means: to

16 All India Magazine, February 2026