Page 29 - All India Magazine Feb-2025

the gradations: Théon had explained it all in the simplest terms,
so you didn't need to be, as I said, a genius to understand. He had
made a quadruple division, and each of them was divided into four,
and then again into four, making innumerable divisions of the be-
ing; but with that mental simplification you could make in-depth
psychological studies of your own being. And so by observation
and elimination I eventually discovered that between this and that
(gesture indicating two levels of Mother's consciousness), there was
an undeveloped layer — it wasn't conscious. So I worked for ten
months on nothing but that: absolutely no results. I didn't care,
I kept right on, telling myself, "Well, it may take me fifty years to
get anywhere, who knows." And then I left for the country (I was
living in Paris at the time). I lay down on the grass, and all at once,
with the contact of earth and grass, poof! There was a sort of in-
ner explosion — the link was established, and full consciousness
came, along with all the ensuing experiences. "Well," I said to my-
self, "it was worth all the trouble!"
The Mother: Conversation with a Disciple, September 5, 1962

Surrounded with ingratitude
From my earliest childhood (when I was five, my memories at
five) and for more than eighty years, I have always been surround-
ed with people who brought me an abundance of revolt, discon-
tent, and then, more and more so, cases (certain cases have been
very acute and still are) of sheer ingratitude — not towards me,
that doesn't matter at all: towards the Divine. Ingratitude... that
is something I have often found very, very painful — that it should
exist. It's one of the things I have seen in my life that seemed to
me the most... the most intolerable — that sort of acid bitterness
against the Divine, because things are as they are, because all that
suffering was permitted. It takes on more or less ignorant, more or
less intellectual forms... but it's a kind of bitterness. It takes some-

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