The best way of facing hostile forces is always to aspire, always to remember the Divine. And never to fear.
The Mother – Questions and Answers : CWM, Vol.4, p169
Constantly thinking of the hostile forces and fearing them is a very dangerous weakness.
The Mother – Words of the Mother – III : CWM, Vol. 15, p21
The integral yoga is made up of an uninterrupted series of tests that you must pass through without any advance notice, thereby forcing you to be always vigilant and attentive.
Three groups of examiners conduct these tests. Apparently they have nothing in common and their methods are so different, at times even so seemingly contradictory, that they do not appear to work towards the same goal, and yet they complete one another, they work together for a common aim and each is indispensable for the integral result.
These three categories of tests are: those conducted by the forces of Nature, those conducted by the spiritual and divine forces, and those conducted by the hostile forces. This latter category is the most deceptive in its appearance, and a constant state of vigilance, sincerity and humility is required so as not to be caught by surprise or unprepared.
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The qualities more particularly required for the tests of physical Nature are endurance and plasticity, cheerfulness and fearlessness.
For the spiritual tests: aspiration, confidence, idealism, enthusiasm and generosity in self-giving.
For the tests stemming from the hostile forces: vigilance, sincerity and humility.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 1, pp114-15
It is precisely this state of perfect Harmony beyond all attacks that will become possible with the supramental realization. It is what all those who are destined for the supramental transformation will realize. The hostile forces know it well; in the supramental world, they will automatically disappear. Having no more utility, they will be dissolved without our having to do anything, simply through the presence of the supramental force. So now they are being unleashed with a fury in a negation of everything, everything.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 1, p235
How is one to meet adverse forces—forces that are invisible and yet quite living and tangible?
A great deal depends upon the stage of development of your consciousness. At the beginning, if you have no special occult knowledge and power, the best you can do is to keep as quiet and peaceful as possible. If the attack takes the form of adverse suggestions try quietly to push them away, as you would some material object. The quieter you are, the stronger you become. The firm basis of all spiritual power is equanimity. You must not allow anything to disturb your poise: you can then resist every kind of attack. If, besides, you possess sufficient discernment and can see and catch the evil suggestions as they come to you, it becomes all the more easy for you to push them away; but sometimes they come unnoticed, and then it is more difficult to fight them. When that happens, you must sit quiet and call down peace and a deep inner quietness. Hold yourself firm and call with confidence and faith: if your aspiration is pure and steady, you are sure to receive help.
Attacks from adverse forces are inevitable: you have to take them as tests on your way and go courageously through the ordeal. The struggle may be hard, but when you come out of it, you have gained something, you have advanced a step. There is even a necessity for the existence of the hostile forces. They make your determination stronger, your aspiration clearer.
It is true, however, that they exist because you gave them reason to exist. So long as there is something in you which answers to them, their intervention is perfectly legitimate. If nothing in you responded, if they had no hold upon any part of your nature, they would retire and leave you. In any case, they need not stop or hamper your spiritual progress.
The only way to fail in your battle with the hostile forces is not to have a true confidence in the divine help. Sincerity in the aspiration always brings down the required succour. A quiet call, a conviction that in this ascension towards the realisation you are never walking all alone and a faith that whenever help is needed it is there, will lead you through, easily and securely.
Do these hostile forces generally come from outside or inside?
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In any case, when an attack comes the wisest attitude is to consider that it comes from outside and to say, “This is not myself and I will have nothing to do with it.” You have to deal in the same way with all lower impulses and desires and all doubts and questionings in the mind. If you identify yourself with them, the difficulty in fighting them becomes all the greater; for then you have the feeling that you are facing the never easy task of overcoming your own nature. But once you are able to say, “No, this is not myself, I will have nothing to do with it”, it becomes much easier to disperse them.
The Mother – Questions and Answers : CWM, Vol.3, pp33-35
“Do the hostile forces generally come from outside or inside?”
They come from outside the consciousness or the being.
Where does the being stop?… What is the difference between outside and inside, if the consciousness is everywhere!
Seekers are always told, “If you want to get rid of something, say that it is outside.” This is only an impression, but it is easier to get rid of a difficulty if you have the impression that it is outside you. However, I have just told you the opposite, that if nothing “in you” answers to the hostile forces, they will never attack you. Therefore, what is inside is also outside and what is outside is also inside! The secret lies in knowing how to place it just where it is most convenient for the immediate action.
If you have a serious difficulty in your character, for example, the habit of losing your temper, and you decide: “I must not get angry again”, it is very difficult, but if on the other hand, you tell yourself: “Anger is something which circulates through the whole world, it is not in me, it belongs to everybody; it wanders about here and there and if I close my door, it will not enter”, it is much more easy. If you think: “It is my character, I am born like that”, it becomes almost impossible. It is true there is something in your character which answers to this force of anger. All movements, all vibrations are general—they enter, they go out, they move about—but they rush upon you and enter into you only to the extent you leave the door in you open. And if you have, besides, some affinity with these forces, you may get angry without even knowing why. Everything is everywhere and it is arbitrary to draw limits.
The Mother – Questions and Answers : CWM, Vol.4, pp160-70
Everyone carries with him, in his atmosphere, what Sri Aurobindo calls the ‘Censors’; in a way, they are the permanent delegates of the hostile forces. Their role is to criticize mercilessly each act, each thought, the least movement of the consciousness, and to place you before the most hidden motives of your behavior, to expose the least lower vibration accompanying your apparently purest or highest thoughts or acts.
It is not here a question of morality. These gentlemen are not moralizing agents, although they know very well how to make use of morality! And when they are dealing with a scrupulous conscience, they can harass it pitilessly, whisper to it at every minute, ‘You should not have done this, you should not have done that, you should have done such and such, said such and such; now you have ruined everything, you have made an irreparable mistake, just see how everything is irremediably lost now because of the mistake you made.’ They can even possess the consciousness of some people: you chase the thought away and vrrm!—two minutes later, back it comes! You chase it away again, but there it is still hammering away at you.
Each time I meet these gentlemen, I give them a hearty welcome, for they force you to be absolutely sincere, they unearth the subtlest hypocrisy and at each moment place you before your most secret vibrations. And they are intelligent, with an intelligence infinitely surpassing our own! They know everything, they know how to set your least thought against you, your least argument or action, with a really wonderful subtlety. Nothing escapes them. But what gives a hostile shading to these beings is that, first and foremost, they are defeatists. They always present you with the darkest side of the picture and if necessary distort your own intentions. They are truly instruments of sincerity. Yet they always overlook one thing, deliberately, something they reject and cast far behind, as if it didn’t exist—the divine Grace. They overlook prayer, this spontaneous prayer that suddenly surges up from the depths of your being like an intense call and makes the Grace descend and changes the course of things.
And each time that you have made some progress or passed to a higher level, they put you back in the presence of all the actions of your past and in a few months, a few days or a few minutes make you pass all the tests again, at a higher level. And it does not help to brush aside the thought, saying, ‘Oh, I know!’ and throw a little cloak over it so as not to see. You have to face and conquer, keep your consciousness filled with light, be unwavering, uncomplaining, without a single vibration in the cells of the body, and then the attack dissolves.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 1, pp143-44
Do not grieve. Always the same battle must be won several times, especially when it is waged against the hostile forces. That is why one must be armed with patience and keep faith in the final victory.
The Mother – Some Answers from the Mother: CWM, Vol.16, p184
I have noticed that in at least ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, it is an excuse people give to themselves. I have seen that practically, in the case of almost all the people who write to me saying, ‘I am being violently attacked by hostile forces,’ it’s an excuse they are giving. It means that certain things in their nature do not want to yield, so they put all the blame on the hostile forces.
As a matter of fact, my tendency is more and more towards something in which the role of these hostile forces will be reduced to that of an examiner—which means that they are there to test the sincerity of your spiritual quest. These elements have a reality in their action and for the work—this is their great reality—but when you go beyond a certain region, it all grows dim to such a degree that it is no longer so well defined, so distinct. In the occult world, or rather if you look at the world from the occult point of view, these hostile forces are very real, their action is very real, quite concrete, and their attitude towards the divine realization is positively hostile; but as soon as you go beyond this region and enter into the spiritual world where there is no longer anything but the Divine in all things, and where there is nothing undivine, then these ‘hostile forces’ become part of the total play and can no longer be called ‘hostile forces’: it is only an attitude that they have adopted—or more precisely, it is only an attitude adopted by the Divine in his play.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 1- p162
Mother, are the hostile forces conscious of the function assigned to them, that is…
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...whether the hostile forces were conscious of the function assigned to them. Because that would mean that the hostile forces help in the spiritual accomplishment.
There is nothing that finally does not help. If they did it deliberately, they would no longer be hostile forces, they would be collaborators. For you must take care of one thing, you must not speak of “hostile forces” when thinking of forces which are hostile to us. These forces are not hostile to human beings, to their quietude or happiness, they are hostile to the divine Work.
And usually I have heard many people speaking of “hostile forces”—for instance, “the hostile forces of illness which attack me”. This is too personal a point of view, it may not be the result of hostile forces; you call them hostile because they attack you. But in fact, when one speaks of hostile forces it means forces hostile to the divine Work or the divine Will. So, if they collaborated with this Work, they would no longer be hostile, you see. That’s quite peremptorily logical.
The Mother – Questions and Answers : CWM, Vol.7, pp16-17
It is jealousy, selfish dissatisfaction and hurt vanity that open the doors of the consciousness to the hostile attacks by pulling one out of the Divine’s protection.
It is only by refusing to allow these wrong movements to take place in oneself that one can hope to get rid of the adverse influence and its disastrous effects.
The Mother – Words of the Mother – III : CWM, Vol.15, p20
Hostile forces are tolerated in the world only because they put man’s sincerity to the test. The day that man becomes integrally sincere, they will pass away, for there will no longer be any reason for their existence.
The Mother – Words of the Mother – III : CWM, Vol.15, p21
Will a time come when the hostile forces will be there no longer?
When their presence in the world is no more of any use, they will disappear. Their action is used as a testing process, so that nothing may be forgotten, nothing left out in the work of transformation. They will allow no mistake. If you have overlooked in your own being even a single detail, they will come and put their touch upon that neglected spot and make it so painfully evident that you will be forced to change. When they will no longer be required for this process, their existence will become useless and they will vanish. They are suffered to exist here, because they are necessary in the Great Work; once they are no more indispensable, they will either change or go.
The Mother – Questions and Answers : CWM, Vol.3, p66
When a being is possessed by a hostile force, what becomes of his psychic?
It depends on the degree of the possession. Usually it is something progressive. First there is an influence under which one comes, and comes in a fragmentary way, not even totally in his being, but in certain parts and for a time. This is the first stage. The second: the influence becomes permanent and there is one part of the being which deteriorates, which is constantly under this influence and expresses it. After this, the being which has cast this influence tries to enter that part. Then, usually, this produces a conflict, a kind of inner battle. People have fits, sometimes even nervous morbid fits. In trying to resist, the two parts of the being come constantly into conflict, and this produces great imbalance, even physical imbalance. But if one doesn’t know how to resist and doesn’t succeed in shaking off the hold, then gradually the being that has seized upon a part of the person acts like an octopus and spreads its tentacles like that, slowly and everywhere; and finally it is a total possession. At the moment of the total possession, either the possessed person becomes completely unbalanced or he becomes a kind of monster and his psychic being leaves him.
These cases are extremely rare, fortunately. Usually, in the human being the psychic is strong enough to be able to resist, and the most frequent case is that of constant conflict between the two parts, until the psychic being, if it is strong enough and knows how to lean on a greater strength than its own, is capable of rejecting this influence and freeing itself….
The Mother – Questions and Answers : CWM, Vol.6, pp 434-35
Sweet Mother, how can the hostile forces be converted?
Well, if they want to, why can’t they? There is nothing in the universe which doesn’t have one single origin—that is, a supreme origin—the hostile forces like everything else; and if they give up their revolt and separation and aspire to return to their source, they can very well be converted. It may require much more effort from them than is necessary for a human being to change his defects, that of course is obvious. It is a much greater effort and, above all, much deeper, because the origin of their revolt is very deep; it is not superficial. But still, they can manage it. They have the power also; these are very powerful beings who, if they resolve to be converted, can do it; and then they become some of the most wonderful instruments for the divine work. The very ones who were some of the greatest adversaries.
The Mother – Questions and Answers : CWM, Vol.6, pp 436-37
The diamond light of Bliss has the power to melt all hostile forces. Nothing can resist it. No consciousness, no being, no hostile will can draw near it without immediately being dissolved, for it is the Divine light in its pure creative power.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 1, p135
Truly speaking, perhaps one is never rid of the hostile forces as long as one has not permanently emerged into the Light, above the lower hemisphere. There, the term ‘hostile forces’ loses its meaning; they become only forces of progress, they force you to progress. But to see things in this way, you have to get out of the lower hemisphere, for below, they are very real in their opposition to the divine plan.
The Mother – Agenda: Vol. 1, p 234
