Mother’s Agenda Volume 5

“You see, to be free from all attachments doesn’t mean to run away from opportunities for attachment. All those people who assert their asceticism not only run away, but warn others that they shouldn’t try!

All that eliminates and diminishes or lessens doesn’t free. Freedom must be experienced in the totality of life and sensations.

In this connection, there has been a whole period of study of this subject, on the purely physical level…. To rise above all possibility of error, you tend to eliminate the opportunities for error; for instance, if you don’t want to utter unnecessary words, you stop speaking. People who make a vow of silence imagine it gives a control over speech – that’s not true! It only eliminates the opportunities to speak, and therefore of saying unnecessary things. For food, it’s the same problem: how to eat only just what is needed?… In the transitional state we find ourselves in, we no longer want to live that wholly animal life based on material exchanges and food, but it would be folly to think we have reached the state in which the body can live on without any food at all (still, there is already a big difference, since they are trying to find the nutritional essence in foods in order to reduce their volume); but the natural tendency is fasting – which is a mistake!

For fear of acting wrongly, we stop doing anything; for fear of speaking wrongly, we stop saying anything; for fear of eating for the pleasure of eating, we stop eating anything – that’s not freedom, it’s simply reducing the manifestation to its minimum. And the natural outcome is Nirvana. But if the Lord wanted only Nirvana, there would be only Nirvana! He obviously conceives the coexistence of all opposites and that, to Him, must be the beginning of a totality. So, of course, you may, if you feel that you are meant for that, choose only one of His manifestations, that is to say, the absence of manifestation. But that’s still a limitation. And it’s not the only way of finding Him, far from it!

it’s a very widespread tendency, which probably comes from an old suggestion, or perhaps from a poverty, an incapacity: to reduce and reduce – reduce one’s needs, reduce one’s activities, reduce one’s words, reduce one’s food, reduce one’s active life, and it all becomes so cramped! In the aspiration not to make any mistakes, you eliminate the opportunities of making them – that’s no cure.

But the other path is far, far more difficult.”

– The Mother, from The Mother’s Agenda, Vol. 5, September 16, 1964