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influences, all contradictory currents. All the mental constructions one makes carry their
own contradiction with them. One can try to overrule it or make it as harmless as possible,
but it exists, it is there, and at the slightest weakness or lack of vigilance or inadvertance,
it enters, and destroys all the work. Mentally, one arrives at very few results, and they are
always mixed. Something else is needed. One must pass from the mind into the domain of
faith or of a higher consciousness, to be able to act with safety.

It is quite obvious that one of the most powerful means for acting on the body is faith.
People who have a simple heart, not a very complicated mind — simple people, you see
— who don’t have a very great, very complicated mental development but have a very
deep faith, have a great power of action over their bodies, very great. That is why one is
quite surprised at times: “Here’s a man with a great realisation, an exceptional person, and he
is a slave of all the smallest physical things, while this man, well, he is so simple and looks so
uncouth, but he has a great faith and goes through difficulties and obstacles like a conqueror!”

I don’t say that a highly cultured man can’t have faith, but it is more difficult, for there
is always this mental element which contradicts, discusses, tries to understand, which is
difficult to convince, which wants proofs. His faith is less pure. It is necessary, then, to
pass on to a higher degree in the evolutionary spiral, pass from the mental to the spiritual;
then, naturally, faith takes on a quality of a very high order. But I mean that in daily life,
ordinary life, a very simple man who has a very ardent faith can have a mastery over his
body without it being truly a “mastery”; it is simply a spontaneous movement — a control
over his body far greater than somebody who has reached a much higher development.

— The Mother*

*The Mother. Collected Works of the Mother, Volume 9. Cent ed. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo
Ashram Trust; 1977, pp. 123-26.

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