Vertical time' - a sort of absoluteness in each second. As if Mother were experiencing her body at the level of subatomic physics. A new mode of life in matter.
The course of 1961, the year of the first American voyage in space, arrives at the heart of the great mystery– "It is double! It is the same world and yet it is.... what?" In one world, everything is harmonious, without the least possibility of illness, accident or death – "a miraculous harmony" – and in the other, everything goes wrong. Yet it is the same world of matter - separated by what? "More and more, I feel it’s a question of the vibration in matter." And then, what is this "vertical time" which suddenly opens up another way of living and being in the matter, in which causality ceases to exist – "A sort of absoluteness in each second"? A new world each second, ageless, leaving no trace or imprint. And this "massive immobility" in a lightning-fast movement, this "twinkling of vibrations," as if Mother were no longer experiencing her body at the macroscopic level, but at the level of subatomic physics. And sixty years of "spiritual life" crumble like a "far more serious illusion" before.... a new Divine... or a new mode of life in matter? The next mode? "I am in the midst of hewing a path through a virgin forest." Volume II records the opening up of this path.
(Mother gives Satprem a flower she has recently named 'Unostentatious Certitude': Platycodon grandiflorum)
This is the complete negation of 'bluff.' I find it very beautiful. When I saw this flower, it struck me as something very profound, very calm—absolutely sure, immobile. I don't know why, but the longer I looked at it, the more it gave that impression and when I was asked its significance, I said, 'Unostentatious Certitude.' It's what one might call a superlative good-taste in the realm of spiritual experience: something with greater content than it expresses.
(Following the letter Satprem had written to Mother the previous day regarding the book on Sri Aurobindo:)
I had a clear vision of the two kinds of opposites in nature (not only in nature but in life) which almost everyone carries within himself: one is the possibility of realization, the other is the
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path chosen to attain it. There is always (it's probably inevitable) the stormy path of struggle, and then there is the sunlit path. After much study and observation, I have had a sort of 'spiritual ambition' (if it can be called that) to bring to the world a sunlit path, to eliminate the necessity for struggle and suffering: something that aspires to replace this present phase of universal evolution with a less painful phase.
It greatly interested me when I read your letter. I was looking at why you have so many difficulties; twice in your note you wrote that it [writing] is a 'suffering.' You have very often written this word, very often spoken it, and it seems dominant in one aspect of your being—while in the other is the glory of a supreme joy, the very stuff of the future realization.
These are what could be called the two modes, not of your character, but of your soul.1
(silence)
Sri Aurobindo told me, He has all the necessary stuff.
This book is self-existent and you have only to follow it along, with simplicity, the way you would follow a path that has already been blazed that is already THERE, automatically brought into being by its own necessity. (For a long while Mother gazes in front of her)... Don't be alarmed, I'm just looking!
You don't need to suffer; it's not necessary.
That's what I want to tell you.
The difficulties all stem from the fact that you think they are there.
Good-bye, mon petit. Do you want to see me a day ahead of time?
I don't want to take up your time uselessly.
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Mon petit, I am doing absolutely nothing. I have an avalanche of letters, a pile this high (gesture) that I haven't answered; I haven't written a word—nothing. I'm not doing anything except seeing people, and that is neither important nor interesting.
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