WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

The Good and Wicked
26 August 1967

Mother begins by commenting upon a question written by a disciple.

"Sweet Mother, it is said that always the good and the true triumph, but we see that often in life it is otherwise. The wicked win, seem somehow to be protected from suffering."

(Mother laughs, then remains silent.) People always confuse two ideas. It is from the universal and spiritual point of view that, not positively the "good" as men understand it, but the True, the Truth, will have the last word; it goes without saying. That is to say, finally the Divine will be victorious. That is what is said, what all who have lived a spiritual life have said--it is an absolute fact. Men, in translating it, say, "I am a good boy, I live in accordance with what I think to be true, therefore, all existence should be good for me." (Mother laughs) First of all, one's own appreciation of oneself is always doubtful, and then, in the world as it is now, all is mixed, it is not the Law of Truth that openly manifests itself to the half-blind human consciousness--it will not even understand it. I mean, to be more exact, that it is the supreme vision that is realising itself constantly, but its realisation in the mixed material world does not appear to the ignorant human sight as the triumph of good, what men call good and true. But (to say it in a joking way) it is not the fault of the Lord, it is the fault of men! That is to say, the Lord knows what he is doing, and men do not understand it.

In a world of truth, all would be just as it is now perhaps, but it would be seen differently.

Both. There would be a difference. It is the present ignorance and obscurity in the world that give a deforming appearance to the divine Action; and that naturally must tend to disappear; but it is also true that there is a way of seeing things which... one might say, which gives another meaning to their appearance--the two are there, like this (gesture of intermixture).

You always come back to this, that man's judgment is wrong--wrong because his vision of things is wrong, is incomplete--and necessarily this judgment must have wrong results.

The world is perpetually changing, perpetually; not for a second is it like itself, and the general harmony expresses itself more and more perfectly; therefore nothing can remain as it is and in spite of all appearances to the contrary, the whole is always constantly progressing; the harmony is becoming more and more harmonious, the truth becoming more and more true in the Manifestation. But to see that, one must see the whole, and man sees only... not even the human domain, but only his personal domain, quite small, quite small, microscopic--he cannot understand.

It is a double thing that is going on completing itself (same gesture of intermixture) and with a mutual action: as the Manifestation becomes more conscious of itself, its expression perfects itself, becomes also more true. The two movements go together.

It was one of the things that was seen very clearly the other day, when there was this Consciousness of Knowledge: when the Manifestation will have sufficiently emerged out of the Inconscient so that all this necessity of struggle, created by the presence of the Inconscient, becomes progressively more and more useless, it will disappear quite naturally, and progress, instead of being made through effort and struggle, will begin to be made harmoniously. That is what the human consciousness foresees as a divine creation upon earth--it will still be only one step. But for the present step, it is a kind of harmonious attainment that will change the universal progress (which is ceaseless) into a progress through joy and harmony instead of a progress through struggle and suffering.... But what was seen is that this feeling of insufficiency, of something that is not complete and is not perfect, that, one must foresee, will exist for a very long time--if the notion of time remains the same, that I do not know. But all change implies time, does it not? It may not be translated by time as we conceive it, but it does imply a succession.

All these so-called problems--all the while one receives, in this way, questions and questions and problems of the mind (all problems in the Ignorance, is it not so?)--problems for the earth-worm. As soon as you emerge up there, such problems do not exist any more. There are no more contradictions. Contradictions always come from the inadequacy of vision and the incapacity to see a thing from all points of view at the same time.

In any case, to bring the question down to earth, no sage at any time, I think, has ever said: "Be good, and all will go well with you externally"--because it is a stupidity. In a world of disorder, in a world of falsehood, to hope for that is not reasonable. But you can have, if you are sufficiently sincere and whole and entire in your way of being, you can have the inner joy, the full satisfaction, whatever the circumstances, and that nobody and nothing has the power to touch.