A change must take place at the atomic level..to undo the power of death. A new perception of life emerges with 'true matter', the matter of the next species.
"The only hope for the future is a change in man's consciousness. It is left to men to decide if they will collaborate to this change or if it will have to be imposed upon them by the power of crushing circumstances." As the new post gradually infiltrates Mother's body it is the earth one wonders about. How is the earth going to absorb "this vibration as intense as a superior kind of fire"? "I see very few bodies around me capable of bearing it.... So what's going to happen?" It is the year of the first Chinese atomic bomb. Mother is 86. "A tiny, infinitesimal, stippled infiltration - the miracle of the earth!" A catastrophic miracle? Isn't that butterfly some sort of catastrophe to the caterpillar? "Death is no solution, so we are here seeking another solution - there must be another solution." Imperturbably, Mother descends deeper into the cellular consciousness and deeper still: "A kind of certainty, deep in matter that the solution lies there.... It is at the atomic level that a change must take place; the question concerns the state of infinitesimal vibrations in matter." Time veers into something else: "Perhaps it is into the past that I go, perhaps the future, perhaps the present?...." And even the laws of matter change: "As soon as you reach the domain of the cells, that sort of heaviness of matter disappears. It becomes fluid and vibrant again. Which would tend to show that happiness, thickness, inertia have been added on - it's false matter, the one we think or feel, but not matter as it really is." So what, then, would true matter be, the matter of the next species? "I am on the threshold of a new perception of life, as if certain parts of my consciousness were changing from the caterpillar state to the butterfly state...." And the earth groans and protests.... at what? "The whole youth seems to be seized by a strange vertigo...." Are we going to move on to a next species or not?
(Mother shows a sketch she has just drawn to illustrate the passage in "Savitri" in which Sri Aurobindo speaks of the "sardonic rictus on God's face.")
I wanted to see this "sardonic laugh" of the Lord! So I looked, and instead of a sardonic laugh, I saw a face... with such a deep sorrow—so deep, so grave—and full of such compassion.... It's after that that I said (you remember, it was over there,1 I was seeing that): "Falsehood is the sorrow of the Lord." It was naturally based on the experience that everything is the Lord—there is nothing that cannot be the Lord. So what is this "sardonic" smile?... I was looking at that, and then I saw this face.
So, as I am supposed to do sketches for H.'s paintings, I did the sketch: Falsehood is the sorrow of the Lord.
(Mother shows the sketch representing the Lord's sorrowful face. Long silence)
Sri Aurobindo had the feeling or the sensation that what was farthest from the Lord (I always base myself now on that experience, which is very concrete in its sensation, of the "nearness" or
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"farness"—it isn't a farness in feelings, not that, it's like a material fact; yet it isn't located in space), well, Sri Aurobindo, for his part, felt that the farthest was cruelty. That's what he felt farthest from; that vibration seemed to him the farthest from that of the Lord.
And yet, it sounds bizarre but in cruelty one can still feel, distorted, the vibration of Love; far behind or deep within that vibration of cruelty, there is still, distorted, the vibration of Love. And Falsehood—the real Falsehood that doesn't arise from fear or anything of the sort, that has no reason behind it—real Falsehood, the negation of Truth (the WILLED negation of Truth), is, to me, something completely black and inert. That's the feeling it gives me. It is black, blacker than the blackest coal, and inert—inert, without any response.
When I read that description in Savitri,2 I felt a sorrow which I thought I had been unable to feel for a long time—a long time. I thought I was (how shall I put it?) cured of that possibility. And last time, when I saw that, I saw it was still there; and while I was looking, I saw this same sorrow in the Lord, in His face, His expression.
The deliberate negation of all that is divine—of all that we call divine.
The Divine, for us, is always the perfection not yet manifested, all the marvels not yet manifested, and which must keep on growing, of course.
The far end of the Manifestation (assuming that there was a progressive descent... there may have been one, I don't know—there have been so many perceptions of what happened, sometimes contradictory, always incomplete and humanized), but if you consider the aspect of evolution, you tend to consider a far end from which you proceed to another far end (it's obviously childish, but anyway...), or an extreme way of being that grows towards the opposite Extreme Way of Being; well, what seems to me the blackest and most inert, the total negation of "that" to which we aspire, is what constitutes Falsehood.
In other words, this is perhaps what I call Falsehood; because falsehood in the human way is always mixed with all kinds of things—but Falsehood proper is this. It is the assertion that the Divine does not exist, Life does not exist, Light does not exist, Love
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does not exist, Progress does not exist—Light, Life, Love do not exist.3 A negative nothingness, a dark nothingness. And it may be this that clung to evolution and made Darkness, which denied Light, Death, which denied Life, and Hatred, Cruelty and all that, which denied Love—but this is already diluted, it's already in a diluted state, there has already been a mixture.
Oh, if we wanted to make poetry (it's no longer a philosophical or spiritual way of seeing, but a pictorial way), we could imagine a Lord who is a totality of all the possible and impossible possibilities, in quest of a Purity and Perfection that can never be reached and are ever progressive... and the Lord would get rid of all in the Manifestation that weighs down His unfolding—He would begin with the nastiest. You see it?... Total Night, total Unconsciousness, total Hatred (no, hatred still implies that Love exists), the incapacity to feel. Nothingness.
We're on the way. I still have a little bit of it [that total Unconsciousness] left.
Ah, let's get to work.
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