Reading

“While reading Mother’s Prières I feel as if I am not reading the words or thoughts but contacting something quiet, pleasant and formless behind them.

(Sri Aurobindo:) Yes, it is so. The words are only a vehicle. When the consciousness opens one feels all that is behind the words.”

(Mother:) “You know, when I was young, very small, about five or six years old, I was capable of guiding myself. I knew what was pleasing and good for me, and what was not.
         When I was a child, I loved these fairy tales very much. I passed hours reading these tales, truly I enjoyed them, but only the fairy tales full of sweetness, of harmony, with pleasing and beautiful events, nice things, and which showed the good side of life; but never the tales which described the bad, the pain, the bad qualities or the characters that degenerate – all that I never read. I had a spontaneous horror for these tales. I did not like those bizarre and petty tales. But the beautiful stories, I had a great liking for them. And I remember that in my imagination, I would enter into the skies, the clouds, the heavens, and all that was beautiful in the tales, the wonders, the palaces and the peaceful and joyous places. All that pleased me very much. And I entered these places in my imagination. I did all this by myself.
         I knew how to choose the good from the bad.”

“There is a condition in which your minds are so well attuned and harmonised together that one perceives the thought of the other without any necessity of words. But if there is not this attunement, there will always be some deformation of your meaning, because to what you speak the other mind supplies its own significance. I use a word in a certain sense or shade of its sense; you are accustomed to put into it another sense or shade. Then, evidently, you will understand, not my exact meaning in it, but what the word means to you. This is true not of speech only, but of reading also. If you want to understand a book with a deep teaching in it, you must be able to read it in the mind’s silence; you must wait and let the expression go deep inside you into the region where words are no more and from there come slowly back to your exterior consciousness and its surface understanding. But if you let the words jump at your external mind and try to adapt and adjust the two, you will have entirely missed their real sense and power. There can be no perfect understanding unless you are in union with the unexpressed mind that is behind the centre of expression.””

(M.P. Pandit:) “Reading is meant to enlighten the mind, culture the mind, bathe the mind in the vibrations of great thoughts, higher truths and create in you the aspiration, the zeal to acquire the same experience. It is meant to inspire you, prod you, to educate you. But reading by itself has no spiritual value. What you read has to be lived. What you study is to be translated into practice. Philosophy, metaphysics are not spirituality. I may know in great detail the argument in The Life Divine; another person who may not know English may be more advanced spiritually than I am, because I am lost in the academic knowledge. I have a complacency that I have read The Life Divine, maybe ten times, twelve times. But there is no gainsaying that it is only an intellectual acquisition and that too, provided I have really understood what Sri Aurobindo has written, and made it a part of my mental equipment. Well, it is a learning. It is what is called knowing the Shastra, but unless it is communicated to the various parts of my being and moulds their movements, it has no direct significance, it has not spiritual value.”

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See also

• Literature
• Letters
• =1 "Behold! Man has become as of one of us"