WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

To increase one's understanding

28 March 1956

Sweet Mother, how can one increase one's understanding?

One's understanding? Well, by increasing one's consciousness, by going beyond the mind, by widening one's consciousness, deepening one's consciousness, by reaching regions beyond the mind.

I would add one thing now: experience. Changing knowledge into experience. And experience will automatically lead you to another experience.

But by "experience" I mean something quite different from what it is usually taken to mean. It is not to experience what one knows--that is of course obvious--but instead of knowing and understanding--even a knowledge much higher than mental knowledge, even a very integral knowledge--it is to become the Power which makes that be. Fundamentally, it is to become the Tapas of things--the Tapas of the universe.

It is always said that at the beginning of the Manifestation there is Sachchidananda, and it is put in this order: first, Sat, that is to say, pure Existence; then Chit, the self-awareness of this Existence; and Ananda, the delight of Existence which makes it continue. But between this Chit and Ananda, there is Tapas, that is to say, the self-realising Chit. And when one becomes this Tapas, the Tapas of things, one has the knowledge [old p. 102]which gives the power to change. The Tapas of things is what governs their existence in the Manifestation.

When one is there, one has the feeling of so tremendous a power!--It is the universal power. One has the feeling of a total mastery over the universe.

—Collected Works of The Mother, First Edition, Volume 08, pp.101-02