Notes on the Way

16 March 1968

You have the feeling that all the time—all the time—you are on the way towards a great discovery, and then you do make the discovery, and you find out that it has always been made!... Only you look at it in another way.

This morning, an experience that seemed to be an unusual revelation and... it is a thing that was always known. Then you mentalise it; the very moment you mentalise it, it becomes clear, but it is no longer what it was. Well, one may say that this creation is the "creation of equilibrium",¹ and it is just the mental error which wants to choose one thing and reject another. All things have to be together: what you call good and what you call evil, what you call fair and what you call foul, what seems to you pleasant and what seems to you unpleasant, all this must be together. And this morning, it was the discovery of the Separation this Separation which has been described in all sorts of different ways, sometimes as a story, sometimes merely in an abstract manner, sometimes philosophically, sometimes... all this, these are only explanations, but there is something, which probably is simply the Objectivisation (Mother makes a gesture of pushing the universe out, out of the Non-manifest), but this also is a way of explaining. This so-called Separation, what is it exactly? One does not know. Or perhaps one knows, I don't know. It is just That which has created (let us put it in colour) the black and white, the night and day (this is already a more mixed thing, but black and white also are a mixed thing), but the tendency is to put up two poles: the pleasant thing, the good

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thing, and the unpleasant thing, the bad thing. But as soon as you seek to return to the Origin, the two tend to fuse into each other.

And it is in perfect equilibrium, that is to say, where no division is possible any more and where the one has no influence over the other, where the two are only one, that there is this famed Perfection which one is trying to reconquer.

The rejection of the one and the acceptance of the other is childishness. It is an ignorance. And all mental translations, like that of an Evil eternally evil, giving rise to the idea of Hell, and of a Good eternally good... all this, all, all are childishness.

(Silence)

It may be (it may be, because as soon as you want to formulate, you mentalise and as soon as you mentalise, it is reduced, diminished, limited, it loses the force of truth in the end) that in this universe as it is constituted, perfection is... (Mother remains absorbed for a long time). Words fail. One could say like this (it is dry and lifeless): It is the consciousness of the unity of the whole felt in the individual—felt, lived, realised. But that is nothing, these are nothing but words.... The universe seems to have been created to realise this paradox of the consciousness of the whole, living (not merely perceived but lived) in every part, in every element constituting the whole.

Then as to the formation of these elements, it began by the Separation and it is the Separation which gave birth to this division between that one calls the good and the bad; but from the point of view of sensation—sensation in the most material part—one can say it is suffering and Ananda. The movement then is to stop all separation and realise the total consciousness in every part—which is from the mental point of view an absurdity, but it is like that.

For my taste it is much too philosophical, it is not sufficiently concrete; but the experience of this morning was concrete, and

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it was concrete because it came out of extremely concrete sensations in the body, of the presence of this constant duality (in appearance), of an opposition (not merely opposition but the negation of the one by the other) between... we may take as a symbol suffering and Ananda. And the true state—which it seems impossible to formulate in words for the moment, but which was lived and felt—is a totality containing all, but instead of containing all as elements confronting one another, it is a harmony of all, an equilibrium of all. And when this equilibrium will be realised in the creation, this creation will be able to... (if words are spoken, it is no longer that) one could say: continue to progress without rupture (it is not that).

There was also seen in the present imperfect consciousness, these days, repeatedly (but all that, methodical and organised through an organisation of the whole infinitely superior to any we can imagine), a state which is the one determining the rupture of equilibrium, that is to say, the dissolution of the form, what is usually called "death", and this state up to its extreme limit, as a demonstration—along with, at the same time, the state (not the perception but the state) preventing this rupture of equilibrium and permitting the continuity of the progress without rupture. And this gives in the body consciousness the simultaneous (so to say, simultaneous) perception of what one might call the extreme agony of dissolution (although it is not quite that, but still) and then the extreme Ananda of union—the two simultaneous.

Thus, translated in ordinary words: extreme frailty—more than frailty—of the form, and the eternity of the form.

And it is not merely union, but the fusion, the identification of the two which is the Truth.

When it is mentalised, it becomes clear for everybody—it loses its essential quality, something that cannot be mentalised.

It is the consciousness of the two states that must be simultaneous?

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Not divided. It is the union of the two states which makes the true consciousness, the union of the two—"union" still implies division—the identification of the two which makes the true consciousness. And then one has the feeling that it is that, it is that consciousness, which is the supreme Power. Power is limited by oppositions and negations, is it not?—the most powerful power is the one that dominates most; but it is wholly an imperfection. There is, however, an all-powerful Power which is made of the fusion of the two. That is absolute Power. And if That was realised physically... probably it would be the end of the problem.

Indeed, during the few hours I lived like that this morning, the feeling was that everything has been mastered and everything understood—and "understood" in that way of comprehension which makes the power absolute. But naturally that cannot be said.

It is that which people who must have had the experience or a touch of the experience translated by saying that this world was the world of equilibrium: that is to say, it is the simultaneity, without division, of all contraries. As soon as there is some divergence—not even divergence, any difference—it is the beginning of division. And whatever is not that state cannot be eternal; it is that state alone which... not merely contains but expresses (or what?) the eternity.

There have been all kinds of philosophies that have tried to explain that, but it is up in the air, it is mental, it is speculative. But that, it is lived—"lived", I mean: to be that.

Is it the material equivalent of a psychological experience one has in which the perception of the evil disappears completely in the perception of an absolute Good, even in the evil?

Yes, that is it. One might say that instead of being just a mental conception, it is a concrete realisation of the fact.

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