Page 30 - All India Magazine Feb-2025

times personal forms, which makes the struggle even more difficult
because you can't mix in questions of persons — it's not a personal
question, it's an error to think that there can be a single "personal"
movement in the world; it's man's ignorant consciousness which
makes it personal, but it isn't: it's all terrestrial attitudes.
The Mother: Conversation with a Disciple, December 21, 1963

The blows of life
I saw it in my own case. It was interesting enough, because
from my earliest childhood, I was in contact with the higher con-
sciousness (gesture above the head) and in a real stupefaction at
the state of the earth and people—when I was very little. I was
in a stunned amazement all the time. And the blows I received!...
Constantly. Each thing came to me as a stab or a punch or a ham-
mer blow, and I would say to myself, "What? How is this possible?"
You know, all the baseness, all the lies, all the hypocrisy, all that is
crooked, all that distorts and undoes the flow of the Force. And I
would see it in my parents, in circumstances, in friends, in every-
thing — a stupefaction. It wasn't translated intellectually: it was
translated by that stupefaction. And when I was very little, the
Force was already there (gesture above the head); I have a clear
memory from the age of five: I only had to sit down for a moment
to feel it, that Force which would come. And I went through the
whole of life, up to the age of twenty or twenty-one (when I began
to encounter Knowledge and someone who explained to me what
it all was) like that, in that stupefaction: "What — is this life? What
— is this what people are? What...?" And I was as though beaten
black and blue, mon petit!
Then, from the age of twenty or twenty-five, that habit of pes-
simism began. It took all that time, all those blows, for it to come.
But with regard to health, whenever I had an illness (for me it
was never an "illness," it was still part of the blows), I had a trust,

30 All India Magazine, February 2025