The Mother
with Letters on the Mother

Pressure of the Descending Force

This is the meaning of your experiences:

(1) The power of the Divine Mother from above is descending upon you and the pressure you feel on your head and the workings of which you are aware are hers.

Put yourself completely into her hands, have entire confidence, observe carefully and accurately all that happens and write that here. There is no need of special instructions since what is needed is being done for you.

(2) The first pressure was on your mind. The centres of the mind are (a) the head and above it, (b) the centre of the forehead between the eyes, (c) the throat and the vital mental (emotional) and sensational mind centres from the breast downward. It is this latter which is the first prāṇa of which you became aware. The action of the Power was to widen these two parts of you and raise them up towards the lowest centre of the higher consciousness above your head, so that hereafter they might both be consciously governed from there and that these might both move in a wide universal consciousness not limited by the body..

(3) The other prāṇa, the restless one of which you became aware, is the vital being, the being of desire and life-movement. The work of the Power has been directed towards quieting the restless movements and making it wide in consciousness as with the Mind. The large body you felt was the vital body, not the physical, sthūla śatīra.

(4) The basis of your Sadhana must be silence and quiet, śānti, nīravatā.

You must remain and grow always more and more deeply quiet and still both in yourself and in your attitude to the world around you. If you can do this, the sadhana is likely to go on progressing and enlarging itself with a minimum of trouble and disturbance.

Never mind your family difficulties and say nothing to your people. Go on quietly trusting to the Power that is at work in you.

8 September 1927

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It is the pressure of Mother's force. If you keep quiet and don't resist, then instead of being uneasy, it will make you happy.

11 August 1932

From time to time there is a feeling of pressure and heaviness in different parts of the body as the pressure comes down. When it passes, the mind is at peace, the heart free, the body light and easy.

The pressure is that of the Mother's force. When there is a resistance, you feel the pressure. When the resistance is cleared away, there is the lightness and ease.

4 October 1932

Nowadays in the evening I try to remain calm and pray for half an hour. Then I feel a weight or pressure on my head. It is so calm and cool, yet has such force and fire. Then I am disturbed by nothing whatever. Formerly I also felt this on certain days, but then I lost it due to some disorder of the consciousness.

This weight or pressure on the head is always the sign that the Mother's Force is in contact with you and pressing from above to envelop your being and enter the Adhar and pervade it—usually passing by degrees through the centres on its way downward. Sometimes it comes first as Peace, sometimes as Force, sometimes as the Mother's consciousness and her presence, sometimes as Ananda.

When you lost it before, it must have been due either to some uprising of vital imperfections in yourself or an attack from outside. Of course the pressure need not always be there, but if things take the ordinary course, it usually recurs or else continues until the Adhar is open and there is no further obstacle to the descent of the higher consciousness.

18 September 1933

From time to time, I feel a pressure above my head and also in my head and forehead. For the last few days, when I sit for

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meditation, there is a feeling as though ants were crawling at the top of my neck and in the spinal cord. Does this have any value?

You can write to him¹ that the pressure he feels on his head is the pressure of the Mother's force (the force of the higher consciousness) preparing an opening through the three upper centres (brahmarandhra, base of sahasradala; inner mind centre in the forehead; and the heart or psychic-emotional centre). The feeling in the spine is due to a very slight flow of the current of the Shakti from above—the spine being the base of all the centres and the channel through which the Force tends most easily to flow from one centre to another (Sahasradala = the centre where the human or mental and the higher or spiritual consciousness meet).

15 September 1935

If the term "pressure" is a wrong one to describe the Mother's recent dealings with me,² what is the sense in which it is used in The Mother—she "puts on them the required pressure" [p. 18] and "the vehemence of her pressure"? [p. 20]

I was speaking of your case only—it was not my intention to say that the Mother never uses pressure. But pressure also can be of various kinds. There is the pressure of the Force when it is entering the mind or vital or body—a pressure to go faster, a pressure to build or form, a pressure to break and many more. In your case if there is any pressure it is that of help or support or removal of an attack, but it does not seem to me that that can properly be called pressure.

In the same book you say "her hands are outstretched to strike and to succour". [p. 19] What do you mean by "strike" here?

It expresses her general action in the world. She strikes at the Asuras, she strikes also at everything that has to be got rid of

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or destroyed, at the obstacles to the sadhana etc. I may say that the Mother never uses the Mahakali power in your case nor the Mahakali pressure.

5 June 1936

The suggestion that the pressure of sadhana is unbearable has got fixed in my mind, particularly after reading in two places that those whose nerves are weak are better off living outside the Ashram. One place is in one of your letters, and another in the Conversations, where the Mother says: "You must have a strong body and strong nerves.... If you have to bear the pressure of the Divine Descent, you must be very strong and powerful, otherwise you would be shaken to pieces."³ Are these things applicable to me?

These things refer to beginners who are not open and have not a fit Adhar, yet want to do the sadhana.

Your body is not weak and you have considerable vital strength. Moreover you have the openness to the Force and the habit of receiving it, and there is no reason why there should be any upsetting by the Force. It is not the Force, but the suggestion of these vital Forces that produces the upsetting.

7 September 1936

The feeling of the vibration of the Mother's force around the head is more than a mental idea or even a mental realisation, it is an experience. This vibration is indeed the action of the Mother's Force which is first felt above the head or around it, then afterwards within the head. The pressure means that it is working to open the mind and its centres so that it may enter. The mind-centres are in the head, one at the top and above it, another between the eyes, a third in the throat. That is why you feel the vibration around the head and sometimes up to the neck, but not below. It is so usually, for it is only after enveloping and entering the mind that it goes below to the emotional and

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vital parts (heart, navel, etc.)—though sometimes it is more enveloping before it enters the body.

24 March 1937