WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Faith that cures

19 June 1957

It is quite obvious that one of the most powerful means for acting on the body is faith. People who have a simple heart, not a very complicated mind--simple people, you see--who don't have a very great, very complicated mental development but have a very deep faith, have a great power of action over their bodies, very great. That is why one is quite surprised at times: "Here's a man with a great realisation, an exceptional person, and he is a slave of all the smallest physical things, while this man, well, he is so simple and looks so uncouth, but he has a great faith and goes through difficulties and obstacles like a conqueror!"

I don't say that a highly cultured man can't have faith, but it is more difficult, for there is always this mental element which contradicts, discusses, tries to understand, which is difficult to convince, which wants proofs. His faith is less pure. It is necessary, then, to pass on to a higher degree in the evolutionary spiral, pass from the mental to the spiritual; then, naturally, faith takes on a quality of a very high order. But I mean that in daily life, ordinary life, a very simple man who has a very ardent faith can have a mastery over his body--without it being truly a [old p. 126]"mastery"; it is simply a spontaneous movement--a control over his body far greater than somebody who has reached a much higher development.

Collected Works of The Mother, First Edition, Volume 09, pp. 125-26