WRITINGS BY THE MOTHER
© Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust

Knowledge by Identification

Sweet Mother,

I heard that one can know all the qualities of any material by identification of consciousness. Is this true? Is it possible? For example, if there are cracks in a roof, I want to know the exact cause. How can I identify myself with the roof? Is there a definite method? Is this method easier and more certain than the mental process of reasoning which is based on acquired experience?

In theory, it is true that everything can be known by identification, but in practice it is rather difficult to apply. The whole process is based on the power of concentration. One has to concentrate on the object to be known (in this case the roof) until all the rest of the world disappears and the object alone exists; then, by a slight movement of will, one can succeed at identification. But it is not very easy to do and there are other means of knowing besides reasoning--intuition, for example--which are also effective.

November 1934

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Sweet Mother,

How can one enter into the feelings of a piece of music played by someone else?

In the same way that one can share the emotions of another person--by sympathy, spontaneously, by an affinity more or less deep, or else by an effort of concentration which ends in identification. It is this latter process that we adopt when we listen to music with an intense and concentrated attention, to the point of stopping all other noise in the head and obtaining a complete silence into which fall, drop by drop, the notes of the music whose sound alone remains; and with the sound all the feelings, all the movements of emotion can be captured, experienced, re-felt as if they were produced in ourselves.

20 October 1959

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