WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Relationships
30 November 1955

Mother reads from The Synthesis of Yoga, "The Four Aids".

How is Time a friend?

It depends on how you look at it. Everything depends on the relation you have with it. If you take it as a friend, it becomes a friend. If you consider it as an enemy, it becomes your enemy.

But that's not what you are asking. What you are asking is how one feels when it is an enemy and how when it is a friend. Well, when you become impatient and tell yourself, "Oh, I must succeed in doing this and why don't I succeed in doing it?" and when you don't succeed immediately in doing it and fall into despair, then it is your enemy. But when you tell yourself, "It is all right, I didn't succeed this time, I shall succeed next time, and I am sure one day or another I shall do it", then it becomes your friend.

Is time only subjective or it is something concrete like a personality?

Perhaps this also depends on how you consider it. All forces are personal; all things in Nature are personal. But if we consider them as impersonal things, our relation with them is impersonal.

Take for instance what has just happened. If you are a meteorologist and have calculated all the wind-currents and all that, and say, "Given that this has happened, that will happen, and there will be so many days of rain, and all that." So this is a force for you, which we are compelled to call a force of Nature, and you can do nothing about it except look on quietly and wait for the number of days to pass. But if it happens that you have this personal relation with the little conscious entities which are behind the wind, behind the storm, behind the rain, the thunder, behind all these so-called forces of Nature, which are forces and personal forces, if you have a personal relation with them and can create a kind of friendship through this relation, instead of considering them as enemies and inexorable mechanisms which you have to put up with without being able to do anything, perhaps you could manage to establish a slightly more friendly relation and have an influence over them and ask them: "Why do you feel like blowing and making the rain fall, why don't you do it elsewhere?"

And with my own eyes I have seen... I have seen this here, seen it in France, seen it in Algeria... the rain falling at a particular, altogether fixed place, and it was exactly a place where it absolutely needed to rain, because it was dry and there was a field which needed watering, and at another place there was... at a distance from here to the end of the hall, at the other place there was a small sunlit spot, everything was dry, because to have the sun there was necessary. Naturally, if you seek the scientific point of view, they will explain this to you very scientifically. But I indeed have seen it as the result of an intervention... someone who knew how to ask it and obtained it.

In Algeria I saw not a few things like that, very interesting ones. And there, just because there was a certain atmosphere of a little more real knowledge it could be said, there were little entities, as for example entities which handled snow, you see, which produced snow, and which could come, enter a room and tell someone, "Now snow should fall here!" (It had never snowed in that country, never.) "Snow! You are joking. So near the Sahara it is going to snow?" "It must, because they have planted fir trees on the mountain, and when we see fir trees, we come. The fir trees are there to call us; so we come." And so, you see, there was a discussion, and the little being went away with the permission to bring snow, and when it had gone, there was a little pool of snow water on the floor, melted snow which had turned into water. It was physical... and the mountain was covered with snow. In Algeria! It is very near the Sahara, you go down a few kilometres and you are at the Sahara. Someone had playfully covered all the hills with fir trees. "The fir tree belongs to cold countries. Why do you call us? We are coming." All this is a true story, it is not an invention.

All depends on your relation. This too, it is quite possible the meteorologist scholars would have been able to explain, I know nothing about it, they explain everything one wants.