The Mother's Answers on Love-I

There is a pure affection for the Divine and a pure love for the Divine. What is the difference?
That depends upon the meaning you give to your words. It depends upon what you call affection. I don't know, but generally affection means something personal and external and a little superficial; it depends altogether on the meaning you give to your words. Usually, when someone says, "Oh! I have much affection for him", this means that one has good feelings, a sort of friendliness but it is nothing very deep; but one may also use the word in a deeper sense. It is very difficult to distinguish between words unless one has already defined one's whole vocabulary quite precisely. It is at the moment of speaking, when one wants to say something, if one puts a kind of intensity of thought, perception, knowledge into the words used, then it can carry that state—that soul state—with the words. But if words are used altogether intellectually and, so to say, arbitrarily, before using them one should say, "When I say this..." and give a long explanation, a definition.

What does "psychic vision" mean?
Vision? You know what physical vision is, don't you?—physical, do you know it? Well, the same thing happens in the psychic. That is to say, instead of seeing with physical organs, you see with psychic organs. You have these eyes, here, don't you? Well, there are eyes in the psychic which see psychically. It does not depend upon the quality of the vision, it depends upon the state of being which sees, the organs which see. A psychic sight sees what goes on in the psychic, either in the psychic state or the psychic domains or the psychic being. A mental sight sees what goes on in the mind: it sees. It is a seeing like a physical sight, truly physical.

With your physical eyes you cannot have a psychic vision only your psychic being can have psychic sight. You may have a sufficiently close relation with your psychic being to remember what it has seen, to be conscious of what it saw, but it is not your physical being which sees, it is your psychic being. It is not your physical being seeing in a different way, it is your psychic which sees.

Mother, here it is written: "The intensity of divine Love never creates a disturbance anywhere in the being."
Yes.

But if someone has a weak body, doesn't the intensity of divine Love create a disturbance?
In the body? Why should divine Love create a disturbance in body?

But it can not bear the intensity?
That is perhaps not divine Love, then; I don't understand. Automatically one receives only what one can bear, when it is a question of divine Love.

Divine Love is there always in all its intensity, a formidable power. But most people—ninety-nine per cent— do not feel anything at all! What they feel of it is exclusively in proportion to what they are, to their capacity of receiving. Imagine, for instance, that you are bathing in an atmosphere all vibrant with divine Love—you are not at all aware of it. Sometimes, very rarely, for a few seconds there is suddenly the feeling of "something". Then you say, "Oh, divine Love came to me!" What a joke! It is just that you were simply, for some reason or other, a wee bit open, so you felt it. But it is there, always, like the divine Consciousness. It is the same thing, it is there, all the time, in its full intensity; but one is not even aware of it; or else in this way, spasmodically: suddenly one is in a good state, so one feels something and says, "Oh, the divine Consciousness, divine Love have turned tome, have come to me!" It is not at all like that. One has just a tiny little opening, very tiny, at times like a pinhead, and naturally that force rushes in. For it is like an active atmosphere; as soon as there is a possibility of being received, it is received. But this is so for all divine things. They are there, only one does not receive them, for one is closed up, blocked, one is busy with other things most of the time. Most of the time one is full of oneself. So, as one is full of oneself, there is no place for anything else. One is very actively (laughing) busy with other things. One is filled with things, there is no place for the Divine.

But He is there.
It is like all the wonders that are there around you; you do not see them. Do you see them?... No. Sometimes, one moment when you are just a tiny bit more receptive, or else when in sleep you are less exclusively busy with you small affairs, you have a gleam of something and see, feel something. But usually, as soon as you are awake again, all this is obliterated—first, as you know, by the formidable ego which is full of itself, and the whole universe moves in accordance with this ego: you are at the centre, and the universe turns round you. If you look at yourself attentively, you will see it is like that. Your vision of the universe—that's you at the centre and the universe all around. So there is no place for anything else. It is not the universe you see: it is yourself you see in the universe.

So, at first, to begin with, one must be able to get out of the ego. Afterwards, it has to be, you understand, in a certain state of inexistence. Then you begin to perceive things as they are, from a little higher up. But if you want to know things as they really are, you must be absolutely like a mirror; silent, peaceful, immobile, impartial, without preferences and in a state of total receptivity. And if you are like that, you will begin to see that there are many things you are not aware of, but which are there, and which will start becoming active in you.

Then you will be able to be in these things instead of being exclusively enclosed within the little point you are in the universe.

There are all kinds of ways of getting out of yourself. But it is indispensable if you want to begin to know things as they are and not in terms of yourself.

21 April 1954
- The Mother