There is a tendency for the mind to take a saying of The Mother – on Auroville’s organization, economy, the international pavilions etc. – and interpret it in a certain way. Then this becomes something we must all sign up to because ‘Mother said it’.

Somehow, even while we do it, we are aware of the danger. In the early years of Auroville, there was a lot of emphasis upon ‘spontaneity’ and an associated distrust of anything too fixed, too ‘mental’. This was also a distortion – the spontaneity was often an expression of the lower vital rather than of anything higher. Nevertheless, it reflected an intuition that the mind alone, which seeks clarity through fixity, is an insufficient compass on this voyage.

In fact, what is striking as you read through The Agenda  is how Mother keeps moving forwards, refusing to take a stand on any kind of dogmatic statement and often rejecting what was seen by others (and even, sometimes, by herself) as the ‘truths’ she may have uttered some years before.

As she put it in December, 1966, Truth is a living, changing thing, which expresses itself every second and is ONE way of approaching the Supreme. And she added,  Truth cannot be formulated, it cannot be defined, but it can be LIVED. And one who has completely dedicated himself to the Truth, who wants to live the Truth and serve the Truth, will know EVERY MINUTE what he has to do…

Finally, she stripped away everything to one essential. Get in contact with THAT, the ultimate, irreducible That. It doesn’t matter how, she said, just do it. Because once you are THAT, everything changes. Everything that before you thought important, everything you thought you or others should do, all your favourite projects, all your beliefs, even those involving The Mother herself, now become froth, merely the mind keeping itself busy with…the mind.

From this perspective, all the rest is …noise.