Beyond Man

Chapter Twenty-eight: The Caterpillar and the Butterfly

‘Dying to death,’ in other words no longer being able to die because death has become unreal.¹

— The Mother

And death shall have no dominion.

— Dylan Thomas

The Mother laid down her material body on 17 November 1973.

A European sadhak remembers: ‘On 18 November, at about seven o’clock in the morning, my downstairs neighbour, a Tamil who had served in the French army and who had become like a brother to me, pounded nervously on my door and on my window. He shouted: “The Mother is dead! They say that the Mother is dead!” As I woke up, I slowly realized the significance of his words; I got out of my bed and simply knelt on the floor, a gesture of surrender with the words reminiscent of her fundamental surrender: “Your will be done.” I cycled through the park to the Ashram. It was a gloriously sunny day. I met other ashramites who were already coming back from the Ashram on foot or on cycle, and who looked at me with very serious faces to see if I was aware of the shocking news. A long queue was already winding around the central Ashram building consisting of Ashramites and townspeople of all kinds and standings. The first ones had been allowed into the building a little after four. There was whispering and crying, and the atmosphere was one of deep dejection. Order was maintained by boys and girls of the Ashram led by ‘captains’ of the physical education. It did not take long before I too could enter the building and then the meditation hall. There she lay under humming electric fans, the Mother, whom I last had seen six months ago. She appeared to be sitting rather than laying down. If I had not known that this was the Mother, I would not have recognized her, so much her face had changed.’

How had it happened? The best source of information about the last days and the departure of the Mother is the improvised talk Pranab Kumar Bhattacharya held for the Ashramites at the Playground on 4 December 1973. For years, night and day, he had been living in the company of the Mother, which means that he had not only seen what had happened from nearby, he had also been personally involved in it. He was the head of the department of physical education and some called him the ‘bodyguard’ of the Mother. When in the last years she could not walk that well anymore, she leaned on his arm to give darshan. He had a difficult character and Narayan Prasad calls him in one of his books ‘the most loved and the most hated man in the Ashram.’ There are many indications that the relation between the Mother and him was a very special one, important for her Work as a whole. In one of his birthday cards she wrote: ‘To thee whom my love selected when the time had come to start my work on the most material level.’²

The serious troubles with the Mother’s health, Pranab told, had started in the month of April 1973. Nonetheless she did not want to stop her daily task and went on receiving about a dozen persons per day, mainly the secretaries and heads of departments. On 20 May, the problems suddenly became very serious. ‘She said she didn’t have any control over her body. From then onwards, she completely stopped seeing people and almost all the time remained in bed with her eyes closed.’ Eating had been a problem for a long time; now it became worse. ‘All those who were in the courtyard below must have heard how we had to fight with her to make her eat a little.’ On 10 November she had her daily medical examination by doctor Prabhat Sanyal; he found that her blood pressure was very low and that her heart was very weak and missed several beats. ‘In fact, the heart started failing from that time.’ She now stayed in bed all the time. In the night of the 13th she asked Pranab to lift her shoulders from the bed, then her legs, then her whole body. It seemed to give her some relief. Her suffering, once again, must have been terrible. ‘I am nothing but a speck of dust, but a speck of dust that is suffering,’ she had once said. Her body started showing bedsores. That night, she asked every ten or fifteen minutes to be lifted from the bed, and Pranab and Champaklal did so till she fell asleep around four o’clock in the morning.

On 14 November she wanted to walk: ‘Make me walk!’ ‘We were hesitant,’ says Pranab, ‘but as she insisted, we lifted her up from the bed. She could not walk, staggered a little, almost collapsed. Seeing this, we put her back in bed. We saw that her face had become absolutely white and the lips blue. Then we decided that whatever she might say, we must not take her out from the bed again to walk. She took about twenty minutes to recover. She started saying: “Lift me up again, I shall walk.” We refused … Then we gave her Siquil as the doctor had prescribed. It took her about 45 minutes to become quiet and she slept from 2 to 4 o’clock, but after waking up she started saying: “Pranab, lift me up and make me walk. My legs are getting paralyzed; if you help me to walk again, they will become alright.” But we did not listen.’

15 November was a slightly better day. The Mother also ate a little more than on previous days. Then she asked again to be lifted from the bed and to walk. When her assistants refused, she did not insist any longer. ‘From that day she became absolutely obedient,’ says Pranab. Her whole life long she had drilled her body to go to the limit: ‘Va, continue, marche,’ come on, continue, keep walking! ‘There is one thing that is always necessary, and it is: never to give up the game,’³ was one of her mottoes. But now somewhere a limit had been reached.

André, her son, like on every other day, came to briefly meet her on the evening of the 17th. But Kumuda, her assistant, noticed that all at once the behaviour of the Mother was very unusual and had doctor Sanyal called. ‘Slowly everything stopped. The doctor gave an external heart massage to her. It had no effect. Then he declared that the Mother had left her body. This was at 7:25 p.m. … I was holding her when she left her body. It looked to me as if a candle was slowly extinguishing. She was very peaceful, extremely peaceful …’ Pranab says. Before, ‘her suffering had to be seen to be believed.’

The body was left untouched till 11 o’clock. Except for those present in the room nobody knew what had happened there on the second floor. At 11 o’clock her body was washed and dressed up. At 2 o’clock it was carried down the staircase and laid out in the meditation hall. Those responsible for maintaining the order, photographers and some prominent Ashramites were woken up. A message for All India Radio was drafted. At a quarter past four the doors of the central Ashram building swung open for a last darshan. During two days thousands passed by her from early morning till late in the evening.

‘And then, on 20 November, at a quarter past eight in the morning, they have put her in a coffin,’ Satprem writes. ‘We were standing to the right of the coffin. She was sitting more than she was laying down on those white cushions, with her hands on her knees. A ray of light touched her neck. Then the lid was closed — no ray any more, nothing any more.’⁴ The central Ashram building was full of people up to the rooftops. The body of the Mother was let down into the Samadhi, where it still is in a vault above the material remains of Sri Aurobindo — a vault which in accordance with the Mother’s will had been kept for her since 1950.

A Canadian Question

And so, what remained of the grandiose dream of a ‘life divine’ upon Earth, of the immortal superman who would create a new world order? Sri Aurobindo was dead, and now the Mother was dead too.

Their bodies were there in that tomb, under colourful layers of daily renewed flowers. The disciples sat around the tomb or leaned against it like ants around a drop of honey. What would become of the Ashram? What would become of them? It was normal that everybody turned for explanation and solace towards the most highly esteemed disciples, those who were supposed to know — especially to be reassured that there was a profound meaning to it all, that everything fitted into the right outline of things, and that despite all appearances the very best would be their part.

In the Indian family the eldest brother holds the highest position; he is the head of the family and takes all important decisions. The role of Eldest Brother in the Ashram was held by Nolini Kanta Gupta, whose life had been closely associated with that of Sri Aurobindo since their time in the prison of Alipore and who as a sadhak was considered a paragon of the Integral Yoga. Therefore it was to him that the disciples looked up for a message of hope and an explanation of the inexplicable with which they were confronted. In the very first days after the departure of the Mother, Nolini already had had a message posted: ‘The Mother’s body belonged to the old creation. It was meant to be the pedestal of the New Body. It served its purpose well. The New Body will come. This is a test, how far we are faithful to Her, true to Her consciousness. The revival of the body would have meant revival of the old troubles in the body. The body troubles were eliminated so far as could be done by Her while in the body — farther was not possible. For a new mutation, a new procedure was needed. “Death” was the first stage in this process.’⁵

In the issue of March 1974 of Mother India and simultaneously in the April issue of The Advent, another Ashram publication, a second text of Nolini appeared which would have far-reaching consequences. Somebody from Canada had sent him the following quotation from Sri Aurobindo: ‘The physical nearness to the Mother is indispensable for the fullness of the sadhana on the physical plane. Transformation of the physical and external being is not possible otherwise.’ Therefore the ‘Canadian question’ was formulated: ‘How are we to interpret these words in the light of the Mother’s recent passing? Does this mean that a full transformation is no longer possible to the aspirant? Or has discipleship on the material level in the path of the Integral Yoga come to an end?’ Put in whatever way, it was certainly a problem that bothered many.

Nolini’s answer: ‘Obviously, the immediate programme of a physical transformation is postponed — not cancelled. But what we have been given is not less of a miracle. Mother has prepared for us her new body in the inner world, in the subtle physical which is as living and tangible as her physical body even though not as concrete. In one of her last Notes [Notes on the Way] she refers to this new transformed body and she describes it as presented in her vision. That body she has built up in her long arduous labours, built up in a complete form and left with us and with humanity.

‘This new body of hers, prepared behind the material curtain, she sought to infuse into the material form, even press into it or force into it this new element; but Matter and man’s physical nature were not ready: Earth still considered it as an intrusion, as something foreign. The material casing broke down in consequence — perhaps not broke down, rather broke through; but that must be another story.

‘But it is there living and glorious in its beauty and power and is still at work within us, and around us in the world, incessantly, towards the final consummation of its material embodiment.’

From this text the following points can be filtered: 1. the Mother had a new body in the subtle physical; as Nolini refers to the Notes on the Way, in the previous chapter, he can only mean her supramental body, and when he writes ‘not as concrete,’ he intends to say: to us not as concrete as gross matter; 2. the Mother has tried to ‘infuse’ her supramental body ‘into the material form’; because gross matter was not yet ready, it has rejected the supramental body and the ‘material casing’ has broken down; what Nolini means with ‘perhaps broke through’ is not clear; 3. because the material, gross physical casing broke down ‘the immediate programme of a physical transformation is postponed — not cancelled.’

We find the opinion that the transformation process might have been postponed already in the talk of Pranab: ‘For the moment perhaps what has happened is just a postponement of the work that she was doing on her own body.’⁶ One gets the impression that ‘postponement’ had become, in those dramatic and traumatic days, the magical consoling word in the conversations among the prominent disciples. For those involved in the effort of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, it was taboo to talk about failure. ‘Postponement’ was a word which still allowed for some hope — especially after one had lived to see the passing of Sri Aurobindo and to what a miserable, pitiable shadow of her former self the Mother had been reduced, ‘a pitiful picture of helplessness, if not even of absurdity.’⁷ (K.D. Sethna) As the hearts and the faith were severely shaken, ‘postponement’ was a toffee on which the mind could suck and be appeased.

K.D. Sethna, as the editor of Mother India an important presence in the intellectual landscape of the Ashram, has accepted the postponement-thesis unconditionally and kept defending it through thick and thin. ‘Wide-eyed amazement, dim-eyed despondence, cold-eyed scepticism, sharp-eyed opposition as well as calm-eyed acceptance have met our reasoned presentations of Nolini’s brief pronouncement that the physical transformation, though not cancelled, has been postponed because of the Mother’s giving up of her body … The physical transformation can be considered either as a process or as an end-product. The end-product, the accomplishment of the body’s supramentalization, may legitimately be taken as delayed in the sense of being put off for a future time or being deferred. The process cannot be so regarded: the Mother, whether physically present or not is constantly at work on her followers as well as, in a lesser degree, on the rest of mankind, and the new power that has become a factor in evolution is also pressing on to produce an effect in the world’s surface-life. The process is postponed only in the sense of being retarded, slowed down.’⁸

And he writes: ‘I am afraid the logic of their revelations [of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother] can conduct us only to one conclusion: the Mother has first to come back in whatever manner and stand before us physically transformed before we can reach the last stage of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga of Supramental Descent and Transformation …’⁹ ‘The physical absence of the Gurus is bound to postpone the success of the disciples in this particular part of the Integral Yoga [i.e. the physical transformation]. The postponement will end not before one of the Gurus reappears in some fashion or the manifested Supermind and the Superman Consciousness start operating directly in the forefront of universal evolution.’¹⁰ In the last part of the sentence, Sethna seems to leave a door ajar.

A Unanimous Conviction

From all this we may conclude that, according to those who were supposed to know, the Work of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, because of the departure first of the one and then of the other, was not a failure although it looked like it; the last phase of the Work, the material supramentalization of the body of the Gurus, followed by that of the disciples, was only postponed … for reasons nobody knew. Especially on this point K.D. Sethna reverts to shrill rhetoric, using expressions like ‘the paradox of a victorious retreat,’ ‘her heroic fall,’ ‘conquering all while appearing to perish utterly,’ ‘a reculer pour mieux sauter,’ ‘a supreme strategic sacrifice,’ and so on. He even compares the passing of the Mother to the passing of Sri Aurobindo, as if in the twenty-three intermediate years of the avataric sadhana nothing worthwhile had happened.

We could put this way of seeing to the test with a simple question: who has ever heard of an Avatar who had to come back to finish his work? Sethna is so hopeful to write that we may expect the return of the Mother ‘perhaps even in one hundred years,’ without giving any ground for this time estimate, while in all known cases a lot more time has passed between the incarnations of the Avatars.

The basis of this way of seeing is the conviction that if not the body of Sri Aurobindo then surely the body of the Mother should have been visibly transformed, now, as the end-result of the ongoing process of transformation in them. The documents leave not the slightest doubt about this ingrained conviction of the disciples.

Consider Pranab again, for instance, in his talk of 4 December 1973: ‘I am absolutely sure that if she [the Mother] had not the conviction that she would bring the Supramental Transformation to her present body, she would not have been able to do all the Great Work that she has done.’¹¹

Then Sethna, in an article from November 1974: ‘It is extremely improbable, if not absolutely impossible, that those who lived in close contact with the Mother from 24 November 1926 onward should have hopefully but erroneously waited to see the Mother’s body completely transformed and that yet the Mother, knowing their minds, should not have unequivocally corrected their error but left it to them to discover it by studying her talks after she had left her body on 17 November 1973! There is not the slightest doubt that she allowed those [e.g. he himself] in close contact with her for forty-seven years to believe that she was striving with all her spiritual might to achieve complete transformation of her body.’¹²

Dyuman too expressed the same opinion. Dyuman had come to Pondicherry from Gujarat in 1923; since then, he had been serving Sri Aurobindo and the Mother personally, while at the same time managing the kitchen and the dining-room, thus having in fact the whole food-provision of the Ashram in his care. He was one of the six official trustees of the Ashram and was generally considered the example of ‘the worker,’ of the model practitioner of the karmayoga as an aspect of the Integral Yoga.

In February 1988 Dyuman had a conversation with a group of students of the Ashram school in front of his room, located in the central Ashram building a few steps away from the Samadhi. He talked to the youngsters about the history of the buildings they saw around them, about the cats the Mother had kept as a kind of experiment in evolution, and so on. Talking about the tomb itself, he said: ‘Why the place was kept here from 1930, that she [the Mother] knew, though she was telling us, though Sri Aurobindo was telling us from 1920 that he would remain for ever and 24 November 1926 was declared the Day of Victory, and two days later was the Day of Immortality. The Mother brought down the Force of Immortality. But the Divine Grace has other ways. He left his body and the Mother decided to keep him in this Ashram at the centre.’¹³

These statements by prominent and sincere disciples who at the time of the passing of the Mother had been living for thirty-five, forty-five or more than fifty years in the Ashram, unanimously proclaim the same, namely that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had said or let it be understood all along that they would not die, and that the body in which they had incarnated also would be the body of their supramental transformation. It is a unanimous conviction difficult to doubt at first sight by an outsider. What have Sri Aurobindo and the Mother themselves said or written about the immediate aim of their Yoga?

In an undated letter of Sri Aurobindo’s from the Letters on Yoga, we read: ‘What we are doing, if and when we succeed, will be a beginning, not a completion. It is the foundation of a new consciousness on earth …’ ¹⁴ In a letter from 31 July 1935, he writes: ‘I am not trying to change the world all at once but only to bring down centrally something into it that it has not yet, a new consciousness and power.’¹⁵ He had already written in The Synthesis of Yoga: ‘It must be kept in mind that the supramental change is difficult, distant, an ultimate change; it must be regarded as the end of a far-off vista; it cannot be and must not be turned into a first aim, a constantly envisaged goal or an immediate objective.’¹⁶

Had Sri Aurobindo perhaps spoken differently in the early conversations preceding his seclusion? We can look this up in A.B. Purani’s Evening Talks which cover the period from 1920 to 1926. On this subject, we find for instance:

• ‘Even I do not know the result [of my sadhana]. An indication I have received from within saying that it is going to be. Yet I myself do not know the end of my adventure. Very few in the past have followed this yoga and none has conquered the material plane. That is why it is an adventure into the Unknown.’ (13 February 1923)
• ‘We can make a beginning, afterwards it can be perfected.’ (2 July 1926)
• ‘It is perfectly possible that we may be able to make a beginning and that it will go on gradually developing in man.’ (2 July 1926)
• ‘This yoga is not a cut-out system. It is a growth by experience.’ (21 August 1926)
• Question: ‘Do you promise that the world of the Gods will descend?’ Sri Aurobindo’s answer: ‘I don’t promise anything. “If the Supermind comes down,” that is what I say.’ (9 November 1926)

All this is in the line of what we have seen before, of the Vision and the Assurance which were given to Sri Aurobindo and then the working out of his sadhana, step by step in the Unknown, in the ‘virgin forest’ with all its insecurities and perils. Peter Heehs therefore writes: ‘[Sri Aurobindo] did not look forward to full success in his lifetime. But he believed that whatever he accomplished would help in the eventual establishment of a divine life on earth, in a body, and not only in an insubstantial heaven or nirvana.’¹⁷

We must conclude that Sri Aurobindo cannot have been the source of the belief or conviction that he and the Mother would transform their material body supramentally. Might it be that the Mother had given cause for this opinion to be rife? Some of her statements in this context are as follows:

• ‘Of course, if suddenly there were luminous apparitions and if the physical forms changed completely, I think that then even a cat or whatever would see it. But this will take time, it is not for all at once. It is not for all at once, it is for further on, for much later. Before that many great things will happen which, note, are much more important than that [the visible transformation of the body]. For [the visible transformation of the body] is only the flower that opens. But before it opens, the principle of its existence must be present in the root of the plant.’ (4 January 1956)

• ‘If one follows the line of what Sri Aurobindo has written at the end, one sees very clearly that after what he has strewn … (yes, it is like a rich seed of light) and after having said: “It is now that it will be realized,” even while going on with his work, working precisely on the realization, he saw more and more all stages one had to go through. And the more he saw that, the more the portent of his words was: “Do not believe that you will arrive at the end all at once. Do not think that the way is an immediate miracle.”

‘And after having talked of the descent of the Supramental, he said that one had to prepare an intermediary between our present mental condition (even in the highest levels of the higher mind) and the supramental region. For he said that if one entered directly into the Gnosis, it would be such an abrupt change that the constitution of our physical state would not be able to stand it. An intermediary is necessary. Of this I am absolutely convinced by the experiences I have had. Two times it was a veritable seizure by the supramental world [of her physical body], and both times it was as if the body — and I mean the physical body — was going to be completely torn apart by what one could almost call the opposite of its condition.’ (15 October 1961) Be it noted that Sri Aurobindo has told explicitly and repeatedly: “My will is for now,” but that every time he was talking about the descent, the establishment of the Supramental Consciousness on Earth, which would indeed take place in 1956. As we have seen elsewhere, he refused pertinently to be drawn into utterances about the working of the Supermind, consequently also about the how or the when of the supramental transformation of the body. Another point is that nowhere, in not a single analysis by the disciples of the subject under consideration, the necessity of the apparition of intermediary beings is taken into account.

• ‘… the aim for which this body is alive, namely the first steps towards the supramental transformation …’ (3 April 1962, during the prelude of the great experience at that time)

• ‘It is evident that something is happening, but it is not something that has been seen and foreseen and that will be the accomplishment: it is one of the stages that is going to be realized, it is not the final result.’ (31 December 1966)

• Satprem: ‘One has the impression that if nothing miraculous happens in the sense people understand this, well, that it will take centuries.’ — The Mother: ‘But you have never hoped that it wouldn’t take time?’ Satprem: ‘Well yes, of course.’ — The Mother: ‘But I have never believed that it could come quickly! … If the divine Consciousness, the divine Power, the divine Love, if the Truth would manifest too quickly upon the Earth, the Earth would be dissolved!’ (15 November 1967)

• ‘We think that this, this appearance [the Mother points to her body] … to the ordinary consciousness this seems to be the most important, but it is evidently the last that will change. And to the ordinary consciousness this is the last that will change because it seems to be the most important: it will be the surest sign [to the ordinary consciousness]. But it is not like that at all! It is not like that at all. It is the change in the consciousness — which has been accomplished — that is important. All the rest are secondary effects … When the body will be able to be visibly something different from what it is, one will say: “Aha, now the thing is done.” This is not right: the thing is done. This [the change of the gross material body] is a secondary effect.’ (29 April 1970)

It would be difficult to keep asserting, taking into consideration quotations of this kind, that the Mother saw the transformation of her physical body as the goal of her sadhana. Besides, Sethna himself mentions the words of ‘a co-disciple’ who had written to him: ‘I have searched everywhere in all the available writings but nowhere the Mother seems to have promised or given us even a remote hint that in the immediate present, at the present stage of evolution, in Her present body, She Was going to achieve the transformation of the entire physical being, including that of the external structure.’¹⁸ The inevitable conclusion from all this is that the conviction that the Mother had to or would transform her physical body was one of the ‘Ashram legends,’ as Sri Aurobindo called some of the opinions which had attached themselves like parasites to the stem of his teaching, even in the mind of some who were looked up to as intellectual beacons. ‘There are hundreds of wrong notions current in the Ashram,’¹⁹ he wrote to Nirodbaran.

Legends and Myths

Nirodbaran himself, for instance, in his exceptionally confidential relation with Sri Aurobindo, formulates candidly one of the myths common in the Ashram in 1935. It has to do with the descent of Krishna in Sri Aurobindo’s body on 24 November 1926. ‘Datta seems to have declared that day that you had conquered sleep, food, disease and death. On what authority did she proclaim it then?’ (The various versions of what Datta is supposed to have said on that occasion are mentioned earlier in this book.) Sri Aurobindo answers him: ‘I am not aware of this gorgeous proclamation … If all that was achieved on the 24th November 1926, what on earth remained to work out, and if the Supermind was there, what blazing purpose did I need to retire? Besides, are these things achieved in a single day?’²⁰

A more recent instance is the still widely spread legend that Pondicherry was called Vedapuri (town of the Vedas) in olden times and that the central building of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram stands exactly on the spot where thousands of years ago the hermitage of Rishi Agastya stood. In an article in Sri Aurobindo Archives and Research of April 1989, Peter Heehs has decisively proved that both assertions are based on the wrong interpretation of some findings by the French archeologist Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil. A pity, but it was too good not to be true.

One of the most wide-spread legends — closely connected with the expectation about the physical transformation of the body of Sri Aurobindo and afterwards of the body of the Mother — was however that the sadhaks and sadhikas by the fact of their acceptance as members of the Ashram became immortal, just like their Gurus! K.D. Sethna recollects: ‘Psychologically, one of the most central facts of the early days [of the Ashram] was the conviction that complete divinisation of the physical being was not only an aim of Sri Aurobindo’s Yoga but also a practical goal. “Supramentalisation” was clearly understood to include a complete change in the body itself. What is most significant is that by “body” was meant the physical instrument of even the sadhaks and not simply of the Master and the Mother … In this context I remember some words of Amrita, one of the earliest sadhaks. He used to be often in my room. Once when he was there we heard the sound of a funeral passing in the street. In a whisper as if conveying a secret, he said: “I have the feeling that this will not happen to me.” I did not raise my eyebrows in the least, for most of us who understood the originality of Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual vision and his reading of the Supermind’s implications could not help the expectation of a radical bodily change.’²¹ (Amrita had been among the first followers of Sri Aurobindo; later on, he would become one of the secretaries of the Ashram. He was loved by everybody and had an ever ready sense of humour.)

In March 1935 Nirodbaran wrote to Sri Aurobindo: ‘I firmly believed that death was impossible here … You said, I hear, that you have conquered Death, not only personally, but for others as well.’ Sri Aurobindo: ‘I am unaware of having made any such statement. To whom did I make it? I have not said even that personally I have conquered it. All these are the usual Ashram legends … The sadhaks have a habit of turning spiritual truths into crude downright statements of a miraculous kind which lead to many misunderstandings.’²² The next day, Nirodbaran wrote: ‘Amal⁹¹ and myself firmly believe that those whom you have accepted [as disciples] are absolutely immune to death.’²³

On 9 October 1936, Nirodbaran again brings up the subject: ‘In [your] letter to me, there was a very high optimistic, almost a certain tone about the conquest of death. Now it appears that you no longer hold that view and say that death is possible because of the lack of a solid mass of faith [in the sadhaks] …’ Sri Aurobindo: ‘In what does this change of views consist? Did I say that nobody could die in the Ashram? If so, I must have been intoxicated or passing through a temporary aberration … Surely I never wrote that death and illness could not happen in the Ashram … Conquest of death is something minor and, as I have always said, the last physical result of it [of the supramental change of consciousness], not the first result of all or the most important … To put it first is to reverse all spiritual values.’²⁴

It is important to illustrate the existence of certain legends among the Ashram population²⁵ because the legend of the physical transformation is related to the passing of the Mother in 1973. This was the last perceptible event in the epic of the Work of the double-poled Avatar Mothersriaurobindo; being the perceptible outward event, it places the interpretation of everything that preceded in a certain perspective.

To put it simply, the positive or negative interpretation of the passing of the Mother creates a positive or negative evaluation of the Work of the Avatar, a confidence that the Work either has been successful or has failed. If the ‘postponement’ is a fact, then practically speaking it means their work was a failure, whatever clamouring metaphors and other figures of speech one may use to cover up the fact. There is no known example of an Avatar who had to come back to finish his job. Asserting that the result of the physical transformation has been postponed is equal to wiping out all important intermediary stages, for instance the establishment of the Supramental Consciousness in the Earth-atmosphere in 1956 and that of the Overman Consciousness in 1969 — a fact that, just like the necessity of the appearance on Earth of transitory beings, never crops up in the reasonings of K.D. Sethna and the other commentators. Neither do they ever mention that Nolini Kanta Gupta must have revised his opinion about the postponement, as can be deduced from the fact that he testifies to the presence of the superman among us. It is worthwhile here to repeat the words of the great yogi Nolini was: ‘Although we may not know it, the New Man, the divine race of humanity, is already among us … It waits for an occasion to throw off the veil and place itself in the forefront.’ If this is so, then nothing has been postponed and the supramental change is in full swing.

‘The Radiance of a Thousand Suns …’

The expectation that the very aged, ravaged body of the Mother would one day, as it were in the blink of an eye, be turned into a radiant divine body was an example of what Sri Aurobindo had called ‘crude downright statements of a miraculous kind.’ Surely, the coming about of the supramental world as a whole can be considered a miracle, but then a miracle of the kind by which the terrestrial substance of gravel and rock has become alive and started running about in the armadillo, flying in the crow and writing a letter in the bipedal human being. In most of the preceding parts of this book we have been following the process of the new worldwide miracle, the greatest of all miracles, and we remember that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have always stressed that the supramental manifestation, however miraculous, follows certain lines of development which are the continuation of the general evolutionary process.

The belief that the Mother suddenly would be supramentalized physically was the expectation of an ‘unreasonable miracle,’ totally contradictory to the many years of struggle and suffering spent by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother on the transformation of the evolutionary process. Sri Aurobindo had to remind his correspondents so often that the Avatar comes to work out processes which he himself, as the essential Divine, has built into the Creation. Were it not so the Creation would be a divine caprice, a Lila without rhyme or reason, and, considering the terrible suffering caused by it, a cruel joke.

How could the Mother all at once become a supramental Sun without gross matter being transformed to a sufficient degree in order to allow the functioning and even the presence of a supramental body? Every time she questioned the invisible but always present Sri Aurobindo about this, he answered: ‘Not ready,’ meaning that terrestrial matter was not ready, even though he himself was working behind the veil to hasten its transformation.

The Mother has built the ‘archetype’ of the supramental body in the ‘true physical’ with her supramentalized cells. When the terrestrial substance will be sufficiently transformed to enable the functioning of a supramental body in it, that archetypal supramental body of hers can take shape in all those on Earth who are adequately prepared — in the ones from the supramental ship who set foot ashore, in the candidates of overmanhood, the mature souls present on Earth (il y en a, there are some), in the new men among us referred to by Nolini. And the first essays to work out supermanhood in the sufficiently transformed terrestrial substance will result in the formation of intermediary links between the human and the supramental beings, the overmen (surhommes). As the Mother said to Satprem in this connection: ‘I would be very glad if it is somebody else, whoever it may be. I have not the least desire that it should be myself,’ and: ‘There is nothing in this body that even “aspires” to be that, which means that it is not its work.’²⁶

Still nearer the end the Mother said: ‘We are — at best, at best — transitional beings … The use of this body now is therefore simply: the Order of the Will of the Lord so that I may perform as much preparatory work as possible. But [the transformation of this body] is not at all the goal … The problem that keeps me occupied is to build that supramental Consciousness in a way that that may be the being. It is that Consciousness that must become the being … Therefore all the consciousness that is in the cells must become grouped, organized, and form an independent conscious being. The consciousness that is in the cells must be gathered and organized, and form a conscious being that can be conscious of Matter and at the same time of the Supermind. This is what it is about. This is what is happening.’²⁷ These words date from April 1972. The Mother was constantly perfecting her ‘archetypal’ supramental body, which she had already repeatedly seen and which she would describe soon afterwards.

Another fact never taken into account by the naive belief in a visible supramental miracle in the Mother is that the Supermind is a Truth-Consciousness. To us this is merely a compound word; in reality it is an energy of which only nuclear power can give us some idea and ‘compared to which the sun is a black spot.’²⁸ It was not for nothing that the physicist J.R. Oppenheimer, when witnessing the first nuclear explosion in the desert of Alamogordo, was reminded of the words of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendour of the Mighty One.’

One of the capacities of the Truth-Consciousness is that it automatically dissolves the Falsehood in all its forms. The Falsehood is the fundamental Ignorance, the Inconscient with it’s daughter the Subconscious, of whom all of us in our cells and the Earth in its matter are the children. (This is why by means of the supramental ‘permeation’ gross matter must be changed into refined, supramentalized matter.) Which means that the world as it is and the beings of the world as they are would be dissolved by a sudden contact with the unveiled supramental Force — for instance by the appearance of a supramental body; they would be dissolved as if by magic, they would simply vanish! ‘The supramental Power is dangerous … It is so powerful and so formidable, even in an infinitesimal quantity, that it may disrupt the whole established order,’²⁹ the Mother said. ‘They don’t even understand that this Vibration of Truth, if it would impose itself, would mean the destruction of all that — which means of themselves, of what they think is themselves.’³⁰ She was familiar with the supramental Force from experience and had feared more than once that it would destroy her body. On such occasion she uttered each time her astonishment at the way everything was regulated with such a great accuracy.

A World for Crawling, a World for Flying

One can only conquer death when death makes no sense any more.³¹

— The Mother

So, what had actually happened on that 17 November? The answer can be found in the information we have discovered up to now. And it is a logical answer, or let us say an answer that stands to reason if one knows the facts considered in the previous chapters of this book. It is not ‘a cause for heartfelt pain’ (Nirodbaran), but — and how could it be otherwise? — as grand and hopeful as everything that preceded and everything that inescapably must follow.

We could make the whole event of the departure of the Mother clear with a comparison she has used herself: the pupation of the caterpillar into the butterfly. When its time comes, the caterpillar withdraws into a cocoon which it builds around itself. In this cocoon the pupation takes place, a wonderful transformation resulting into a wholly different being: a butterfly. The process of pupation is one of the numerous inexplicable miracles invented by Nature millions of years ago. Can one say that the caterpillar dies in the cocoon? Can one say that the caterpillar has died when becoming a butterfly? The butterfly has originated in the body of the caterpillar, from the body of the caterpillar. The body of the butterfly is an (invisible and scientifically inexplicable) transformation of the body of the caterpillar. The caterpillar exists in the dimension of the crawling-world of the caterpillars; the butterfly exists in the dimension of the flying-world of the butterflies.

The human body of the Mother existed in the world of the humans, who are mental beings. Unseen by human eyes, the pupation, the transformation took place, in the cells of that material body, into a supramental body existing in a supramental world. The world of mental man is a world of darkness and ignorance, comparable to the crawling-world of the caterpillar; the supramental world is the flying-world of the colourful, winged and light butterfly, imperceptible to beings of the crawling-world and beyond the horizon of their interests.

The human being is seldom aware of the fact that his world is the result of his consciousness, of the manner in which he knows and perceives things. ‘We exist within a formation,’ the Mother said, a consciousness-formation which we might call ‘the mental projection,’ ‘the veil of falsehood upon Truth.’³² We are living in the one Unity, yes, because there is nothing else. But we have seen how, within the Unity, an evolutionary world has come into being having as its base the Ignorance, which is unconsciousness, blindness, endless division. We are on our way back towards the Unity-Consciousness which is the Supramental Consciousness. We are actually very near to it as it has been actively present in our world since 1956. But we are still being born as mental beings, as children of the Ignorance living under a magic spell, under the curse of the Ignorance, blind and so very vulnerable in our magic but to us quite realistic crawling world. ‘We are living in a consciousness of falsehood,’ said the Mother. ‘All substance of being in Space is a flowing sea not divided in itself, but only divided in the observing consciousness,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. And the Mother said: ‘There is a constant Reality, a constant Divine Order, and it is only the incapability to perceiving it which constitutes Disorder, the actual Falsehood.’³³ We do not experience the world as it is, we experience a distorted reproduction of the world, distorted by the way our mental consciousness functions. All is One, all is connected and coherent, all exists in Unity, but thereupon we project our pettiness, our impotence to comprehend the Unity, and we see everything as separate entities. We live in a pseudo-world, a false world — which outside of our consciousness nonetheless is the true world of the divine Unity.

‘They forget that, if they stood face to face with the Divine himself when he is present on earth, with their gross physical mental they would fatally see nothing but what is gross,’³⁴ the Mother said. The human beings saw, of the complex being that was the Mother, only the human aspect — the human body and the apparently human way of behaving. Sure, the Mother was considered to be divine, and she was by many also experienced as such in their heart, but who dared to contradict radically in their mind what their eyes were seeing? It was expected that the eye would see that the supramental transformation had succeeded, there, in that rosewood chair on the second floor in the Rue de la Marine in Pondicherry. All else, the theories and experiences the books and periodicals were full of, was excellent to meditate on and fantasize about, but, all the same, nobody could deny that that body there in that chair was deteriorating, that the Mother was continuously in dire physical difficulty, and that the end might be expected before long! She could not eat, was often dozing, forgot everything, sometimes lost consciousness, had one illness after the other or several at the same time, her heart was beating faintly and irregularly … Those were facts, weren’t they?

The caterpillar in the sadhaks was unable to see anything but the caterpillarhood of its own world. It remained not only limited but also mesmerized by its own manner of existence. The black magic of the habit of centuries had everybody believe that what was happening to the Mother was exactly what should happen, deterioration and death being the laws of Nature. Nobody can be prevented from imagining great things like the cancellation of death, a divine life upon Earth, an end to suffering, and what not — but, you see, Sri Aurobindo too had succumbed, even Sri Aurobindo. Therefore one could be reasonably certain that this lady, called the Mother, would also fail to succeed.

And the Mother was sitting there, fully supramentalized except for the outward appearance, with a Power which compelled her to cover herself with veil upon occult veil not to harm those who approached her. ‘They are totally inconscient,’ she said. ‘It is all the time as if I am putting up a screen not to be really unbearable … When that luminous Power comes, it is so compact, so compact; it gives the impression to be much heavier than Matter. It is being screened off, screened off, screened off [by herself], otherwise unbearable⁹².’³⁵

‘This body is no longer a body within a skin,’ she had said years ago. She talked about her ‘apparent’ body, the visible one, and about the other, the real one. The two bodies were existing at the same time, she said, in two still separate worlds. ‘It is as if the physical had become double,’ and we know that she experienced the subtle physical as much more real than the gross physical. Her visible body was like an empty shell, she said, with that enormous Power inside. ‘It is as if a superhuman Power wants to manifest through millennia of powerlessness.’³⁶ ‘These hands are not hands, my boy,’ she once said to Satprem. What were they, then? One could say: instrumental fictions for her to be able to contact matter and human beings. So was her whole visible body. A kind of hologram by which the butterfly could still be present in the world of the caterpillars till the Work was completed.

The Residue

The material body of the Mother had been conceived and borne like the body of all of us. It was a child of Mother Earth, grown according to the procedure she had developed up to now. Therefore it carried, like all of us, the past of the whole evolution in itself ‘like a residue of everything that had come before: of the mineral, the plant, the animal — of all that’. The base of all that, the substance from which it had developed and of which it consisted, was the Inconscient. ‘Infrarational life still bears some stamp of the Inconscient in an underlying insensitiveness, a dullness of fibre, a weakness of vibratory response,’³⁷ Sri Aurobindo wrote. It had become clear to him, as we have seen, that a being with a body of this sort could effectively acquire the supramental consciousness but that it was impossible to supramentalize the material substance of its body through and through. Although Sri Aurobindo had changed the ‘programming’ of the Inconscient at its base, by which it had become accessible to the Light, the evolutionary machine still kept turning; the complete supramental transformation was a realization still in the making for something like another three hundred years, according to his estimation. It was in the body of the Mother, the occult battlefield of the world, the interface between the Supermind and gross matter, that the process of transformation was taking place. She was supramentalized in all her layers of existence except in the lowest, the most external, the visible, the one consisting of gross matter: in the ‘residue.’

Could this residue, this sediment of the Inconscient, also be transformed? ‘What I don’t know yet, what is not yet completely clear, is what will be the fate of this residue,’³⁸ the Mother said. Sri Aurobindo had been of the opinion that it could not be transformed, ‘he said that nothing could be done with it,’ the Mother said. She herself, on the contrary, thought from 1965 onwards that it could be transformed and she described on several occasions how the mental physical, the housing of the residue, got more and more involved in the process of transformation. But later she was again confronted with the untransformability of the mental physical:

• ‘[There is] a residue that remains unconscious … What will be the fate of this residue? … One has the impression that there is a waste product.’ (15 June 1968)
• ‘The substance of which we are built is not sufficiently purified, illumined, transformed — whatever, the words don’t matter — to express the Supreme Consciousness without deforming it.’ (25 September 1968)
• ‘Only is rejected what does not exist according to Truth — everything that is not capable of transforming itself into the image of the psychic being and to become a part of the psychic being.’ (1 July 1970)

‘This body belongs to this, to the earth,’³⁹ the Mother said of her gross material body. ‘There is what we might call the “inner” consciousness of the cells and which is fully, fully conscious, but there is something that remains like this,’⁴⁰ like a crust on the surface, untransformable. ‘It will only be the untransformable residue that … that really will be death.’⁴¹

The presence of this residue and the metaphor of the pupation of the caterpillar into the butterfly allow us to understand what happened on 17 November 1973. On the one hand there was the Mother who had accomplished her avataric mission: ‘The change has been accomplished. It will perhaps take centuries [before the supramental body becomes visible physically], but it has been accomplished.’⁴² The butterfly had resulted from the pupation and existed as such, on its own. On the other hand there was the gross material body that she had taken up again in 1962 to go all the way to the destined end; this human body was the most external, atavistic aspect of her being, the remainder from the past that would not be able to cross over into the refined substance of the future. This was the body of the caterpillar, visible to our caterpillar-eyes, which had undergone the terrible process of the pupation; this was what stayed behind — a thin, dry, but extremely resistant covering ‘not thicker than an onion peel,’ representing the untransformable element of the cells.

Did the Mother die on 17 November 1973?

Can one say that the caterpillar dies? It lives on in the butterfly. Nothing has died there except an old manner of existing. What to the comprehension of the caterpillar-world is death is in fact a transmutation of life into another manner of existence. The corpse was the residue, a kind of dry membrane consisting of the elements which were untransformable and belonged to the caterpillar-world. It was because of the ‘caterpillar-body’ that the Mother still remained visible and addressable in the ‘caterpillar world,’ that she could work upon that world to transmute as much as possible of its substance into the substance of the ‘butterfly-world.’

To die means to leave one’s material body. The Mother existed simultaneously in two material bodies, one in gross matter, one in the true physical, supramental matter. The supramental body is by definition immortal, for it is divine. Conclusion: it is impossible to say that the Mother has died. She has laid down the untransformable residue, the pupa that was her gross material body, but she goes on living as concretely as before in her much more real and much more material supramental body. What was death to caterpillar-eyes was in fact the final phase in the Work of the humanly embodied Avatar, the Work of the Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

On 5 December 1950, Sri Aurobindo entered willingly and consciously into death, but in the process he transferred the part of his already supramentalized substance materially to the body of the Mother.

On the night of 12 April 1962, the Mother died but took up her body again.

On 17 November 1973, the Mother laid down the untransformable remainder of her gross material body but went on living materially, for ever, in her archetypal supramental body built up by her with the supramentalized true physical substance.

The same kind of substance is now constantly being formed in gross matter on Earth by the process of ‘permeation.’ Once the substance of the Earth is changed to a sufficient degree, the prepared souls descending on the planet will build for themselves a body with the changed substance after the example of the archetypal supramental body worked out by the Mother, and the first being(s) of the new species will be visibly present on planet Earth (and in the cosmos). ‘The transformation may up to a point even take place without one being conscious of it. It is said, isn’t it, that now there is a great difference, that when the human being arrived the animal did not even have the means to be aware of it. Well, I say that it is exactly the same, that in spite of all the human being has realized, it does not have the means [to be aware of the arrival of the new being]. Certain things may happen, but it will know about them only much later, when “something” in it will be sufficiently developed to become aware of it.’⁴³

Possible Solutions

The Mother has said several times that it was her task to make possible the transition from the one world into the other, to build the bridge, to carry out the transfer of power, to be the transparent link in order that the supramental Power may penetrate into matter and make matter suitable as building stuff for the body of the supramental beings. The Mother has not been the cause of a postponement or a delay of the process of supramentalization; on the contrary, in her love for humanity she has probably gone much farther than was originally foreseen in the Plan, or at least as far as possible. Everything Sri Aurobindo had intended to obtain was realized in 1956. At that time, the Mother asked for an unmistakable sign that she had to go on with her task in her earthly body. The fact that she has gone on with it lets us assume that the sign was indeed given to her. In 1962 she confirmed that the Work was done: ‘What had to be done is done!’ Nonetheless, she took her body again to continue working for the Earth on the Earth. The result of this third phase was the establishment of the Consciousness of the Overman on Earth and shortly afterwards the realization of her supramental body, in a ‘true physical substance,’ as the mould of all future supramental bodies in what will then have become the true physical substance of the Earth. These are the facts found in the documents.

That an end could come to the existence of the gross material body of the Avatar was always a possibility as far as the Mother was concerned. (This is a strong argument against the expectation of the visible supramental transformation of her body.) We remember what she wrote to her son André in the first years of the Ashram about the rights of succession. Dyuman told that the place of the tomb in the courtyard of the central Ashram building had been kept there since 1930. In December 1950 the Mother had a space built for herself in Sri Aurobindo’s Samadhi. After the manifestation of the Supermind in 1956, the Mother thought that she might perhaps leave her body. Already in 1961 she took all necessary precautions in case she would depart, and the persons concerned received relevant instructions.

The Avatar had come to establish the Supramental Consciousness upon the Earth. Working out his mission, He went gone as far as possible, and maybe farther than originally expected, to hasten the first result of that manifestation: the formation of the visible supramental being upon the Earth. That at a certain moment his own terrestrial instrument, exhausted and worn out by the Work, would have to be discarded was always held to be the normal way of things by the Avatar himself.

Many disciples, not to say all, were painfully moved by the deterioration the Mother’s body was subject to towards the end of her life. Courageous in their convictions and faith, they were severely put to the test by the sight of that stooped and tortured body, apparently increasinly suffering of the pitiful symptoms of very old age. This was the fundamental mistake. We have seen how the Mother underwent even the harshest suffering with a cry of pain and simultaneously of ecstasy. ‘This is no longer a body in a skin,’ she said to Satprem. ‘Each cell is totally conscious.’ To caterpillar-eyes the caterpillar-appearance, however, was completely different and all have remained mesmerized by that appearance despite their faith: the Mother was mortally ill; she went downhill fast; death was — alas, alas — inevitable. What the Mother published in the passages of her conversations in the Bulletin was of little use. She tried to make herself understood by coining expressions like ‘dying without dying,’ ‘a necessity to stay but without staying,’ ‘not dying, but the body may be dissolved’ … ‘The body deteriorates in a forward direction,’ she said in a statement at first sight bizarre but so very significant: her material body was being dissolved not backwards towards a death in the night of the Inconscient but, as a result of its transformation, forwards into the supramental world. Death, supposedly the ever present companion of man, had ceased to exist for her, for she had a permanent, immortal body consisting of permanent supramental matter.

The negative opinion of the disciples in 1973 is understandable. The published passages in the Bulletin were neither frequent nor extensive, and difficult to place in the right context because their tone and even their terminology were so different from ‘Sri Aurobindo’s system of yoga,’ not to speak about their content. The Agenda as a whole would be published only years later (the first part in 1978), in the original French and with introductions, annotations and footnotes by a Satprem inimical to the Ashram. Who, in the presence of the harrowing tangibility of the signs of deterioration in the body of the Mother, had the faith and especially the insight to dare and look behind what his eyes were seeing? And the Mother herself had said some of those things …

She spoke about the oppressing terror which suddenly took hold of her body without any apparent reason. It was the existential anguish of a personal, self-centered, humanly egoistic way of existing, of the body’s fighting to stay alive, to remain itself; it was a way of existence in a death-struggle. ‘Suddenly such a horror of death.’ One should not hurry to put her body in a coffin and into the tomb, she said. ‘It will know that. It is conscious. The cells are conscious.’ She asked ‘the Lord’ to be warned when the time had come. And then again: ‘Isn’t it strange, I ask myself: “Does the Lord want that I go?” And I am completely in agreement, quite willing⁹³ … But does He want that I stay on? … No answer. There is no other answer than: “Transformation.”’⁴⁴ She was the Handmaid of the Lord, unto her it would be according to his word — from the beginning right through to the end. ‘Ce que Tu veux.’

As Mother-in-the-sadhana she did not know whether and eventually how it would end. ‘To tell the truth, it does not keep me occupied very much.’ Several possibilities presented themselves to her, some of them probably reminiscences from previous lives. One of those possibilities she dictated: ‘It is possible that this body, because of the demands of the transformation, enters into a state of trance that has the appearance of being cataleptic. No doctors, by all means! This body must be left in peace. And do not be in a hurry neither to announce my death or to give the government the right to intervene. Keep me carefully protected from all kinds of deterioration that may come from outside — infection, poisoning, and so on — and have an unflagging patience. It may last days, perhaps weeks and even more, and you will have to wait patiently for me to come naturally out of that state when the work of the transformation will be accomplished.’⁴⁵ (14 January 1967)

Afterwards a lot of noise has been made because of this statement. For the body of the Mother was brought downstairs and laid out in the meditation hall no more than seven hours after her official passing away — a body that, indeed, still seemed to be in intense concentration. Two days afterwards, it was put into the Samadhi. Had those responsible thrown her instructions to the winds? Had they in their haste broken off the cataleptic trance and therefore spoiled the definitive transformation of the Mother’s body?

That the Mother has dictated those words and that later on she has referred to them a couple of times is, of course, a matter of fact. One should however consider that she herself had said that there were ‘all kinds of possibilities’ to achieve the transformation of the body, and also: ‘The highest part of the consciousness [hers] is clearly in favour of the fact that this trance be not necessary.’ (18 January 1967) One should not forget either that the Mother saw afterwards several other possibilities to form the supramental body.

In October 1967, for instance, she said, in connection with a woman who had died in the Ashram, that it was normal that the material consciousness of the body cells of that woman had left her body together with the inner being, ‘and this means that everything the cells have gained is not lost.’ It was the answer to her question of some time earlier, whether at the time of death nothing but dust remains of the cells and all the sadhanic work has therefore been in vain. Once she had said: ‘Suppose I leave my body tomorrow; this body will revert to dust — not immediately but after some time — and everything I have done for these cells will be of no use at all.’⁴⁶ This did not seem to be true any longer. For in March 1969 she also said: ‘That consciousness [of the Overman which had manifested on 1 January of the same year] has a fantastic imagination! It makes me see all kinds of fantastic possibilities of what will happen in the future.’ One of these possibilities was that the transformed cells of her body ‘would gather within to form a new body with a higher matter than the usual one.’ ‘It was so interesting that I have been considering that this morning in every detail.’

Some days before, she had said: ‘The body-consciousness has become at once individualized and independent, which means that it can enter into other bodies and there feel absolutely at ease … This changes altogether the attitude of the body towards the solutions; you see, there is no longer any attachment [to life] or sense of disappearance [because of death], for the corporeal consciousness has become independent And this is very interesting. It means that in any physical substance which is sufficiently developed to receive it, it can manifest itself.’⁴⁷ The supramentalized consciousness of the Mother’s cells was able to pass into all sufficiently prepared bodies.

But the question about the dissolution of the cells and their return to dust kept coming back: ‘All this work of transformation of the cells, of the consciousness in the cells, seems to have been wasted since the body will disintegrate.’ This time, the (inner) answer was not to be misunderstood, doubted or forgotten: ‘There is a way, which is to prepare within oneself before death a body with all the transformed, illumined, conscious cells — to assemble and form them into a body with the maximum number of conscious cells. Once this is completed, the consciousness enters this body and the other one [the gross material body] can dissolve, it doesn’t matter anymore.’⁴⁸ Considering everything we have seen, this is indeed what has happened: the supramental body has been formed within — the Mother has seen and described it — and the gross material body, which served as the cocoon, was put off, it did not matter any more.

One is reminded of the fact that the central process of the transmutation is the growth of the supramental consciousness in and of the cells, by which the transmuted cells are divinized in the fullest sense of the word. For the equation Matter = Energy = Consciousness can as well be turned around: Consciousness = Energy = Matter. In the case of a supramental transmutation, the adjective ‘supramental’ is added to each term of the equation. The supramentalized Consciousness in the cells of the Mother became supramental Energy and supramental Matter; the micro-universe of every cell became universalized and part of the whole supramental body, the cell itself containing the whole. In the infinity of what is divine, each part is equal to the whole and the whole is equal to each part.

The difficulty to understand the transformation of the body of the Mother and therefore the Integral Yoga has two reasons. The first is that we cannot conceive that a cell may really acquire the divine Unity-Consciousness, that it can be divinized and become the Divine, and the second reason is that the Unity-Consciousness exists concretely in its own substance, which is a supramental substance.

Kireet Joshi writes in his book Sri Aurobindo and the Mother: ‘When Sri Aurobindo left his body, the accumulated result of all his physical consciousness was transmitted to Mother’s body, and thus there was no waste. But now, apart from Mother’s body, there was no other body which was so developed that it could receive, if Mother left her body, the accumulated result of her physical consciousness. This was a formidable problem. But as we see from what she said, this problem was now solved. Even if she left her body, the work would not be spoilt, there would be no waste. The work would continue.’⁴⁹

The Entourage

The Mother’s entourage has been blamed in several quarters for the way her body was treated after her heart stopped beating. As mentioned above, there are some who have blamed those who assisted her day and night in the most difficult years of having spoilt the process of transformation. This is not an imputation to be passed over lightly. It goes without saying that what is at stake here is not the agreeable or less agreeable character of the persons involved, but something of much greater importance.

After the crisis of 1962, the Mother said of her assistants: ‘This body has been delegated to three persons, who have taken care of it marvellously, with … — really, I was constantly full of admiration — with an abnegation and a care, oh, admirable! And all the time I was saying to the Lord: “Lord, really, You have arranged all the conditions in an absolutely marvellous way, unimaginable, all the material conditions so that everything necessary was brought together, and You have put near me people above all praise.” They have had a very difficult time during at least a fortnight, very difficult. [This body] was a sort of rag, you know. They had to think of everything, to make all decisions, to take care of everything. And they have kept it very well, very well indeed.’⁵⁰ Her assistants in 1973 were, with the exception of Vasudha who had been replaced by Kumuda, the same.

Time and again she expressed her admiration about the way everything was being arranged up to the smallest details, in the world generally and in connection with her body and sadhana in particular. ‘How wonderfully everything is being arranged,’ she said, and: ‘The life of this body is a miracle.’ On 28 June 1972 she said: ‘Those near me must have a certain attitude towards me, they must take some precautions. You see, they must think, they must believe certain things to act as they have to, otherwise they would not act [as they have to] … Everything is arranged up to the smallest detail. It is not foreseen as we foresee things in our ordinary consciousness: it is the Force that exerts pressure and that produces the desired result — I would almost say: by whatever means, by whatever means necessary.’⁵¹

How, then, can one still talk about errors and mistakes where the Mother was concerned? We have seen that in the Unity-Consciousness, in which we are burrowing our tunnels like blind moles, there are no errors or mistakes possible, as there are none in all that concerns the Avatar, his Work and the consequences of his Work. If we ourselves have a psychic being that guards us through all so-called good and all so-called evil, how much more the Great Mother must have protected that so vulnerable and so often attacked material body of hers. How could the Yoga of the Evolution, accelerated by the dynamic presence and the labour of the Avatar, have been ruined by a mistake or an idiosyncrasy of a human being?

And there are those last six months about which we know nothing except what some human eyes have seen. ‘The Mother remained practically the whole time with her eyes closed,’ Pranab said. It is absolutely essential that we wipe out in our mind the picture of a little old lady who was suffering terribly and was fast nearing the end. Then as before she was the Avatar in his sadhana in which every moment was a kaleidoscope of experiences in space and time, and in many spaces and times, but particularly focused on the body of the Earth. To Mona Sarkar the Mother had told how she had prepared the lives of all her children, of all those who were tuned to her, for their whole future. In an identical way she has prepared the body of the Earth as a whole for the future. In the seed planted by the supramental Avatar, the fully grown tree of the Kingdom of God on Earth is present.

All have made the same all-too-human error and, despite their belief in the divine presence of the Mother, have gone on considering that battered body of hers as a human reality. Even on 31 March 1973, after all those years of conversations, Satprem still asks her: ‘Are you active, or are you simply in — [in trance, withdrawn]?’ And the Mother answers quite trenchantly: ‘Yes, I’m active. But what do you actually mean? … I’m active!’ — ‘For instance, when you are within, when you are in an inner state …’ — ‘But I act then much better than … It looks as if I am within, but it is not so. Everybody is making the same mistake … When I am in concentration like that, it is not because I am within, it is because I am in another consciousness … No, you are trying to translate this mentally, but it is impossible, impossible. One must enter into this consciousness and … and then one knows how it is. But there is no “active” and “passive,” “within” and “without.” All that has been replaced by something else that I cannot express … I don’t have the words for it.’ And she stopped trying to talk.

All of us would probably have committed the same mistake seeing that apparent impotence, the twitching of that body, that apparent decay. But that was the Great Mother and the supramentalized Mother nonetheless — except for the body of the caterpillar with that kind of membranous residue that was not nice to look at.

‘Mother made an effort at a complete transformation of the body, although she had no assurance whether this goal could be reached or not. The effort went up to the extreme point of acuteness; that effort had long ago become the effort of the body of the earth; that effort continues. Mother had said that it would require three hundred years to bring about the transformed body. She had also spoken of the need to follow the rule of several intermediate bodies as in the case of the evolution of man in succession of the chimpanzee. That work is on, and there is no obstacle. There is continuity; in that continuity all the bodies are involved; the body of each one of us is in the cauldron of transformation. This is the cosmic yoga which none can escape and in which salvation and realisation are at once physical and collective.’⁵² Thus Kireet Joshi concludes his book on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother. In the light of what we have seen ourselves, we cannot but endorse his conclusion.

The Certitude

… like a sword of Light, intangible, the Certitude …⁵³

— The Mother

In one’s mind’s eye one stands again before the laid out body of the Mother in the meditation hall of the Ashram. One stands again near the Samadhi, now opened to receive her body too. And one hears that voice again.

A new world is born, is born …

Nature has accorded her collaboration …

There are some who have gone ashore and who are already supramentalized in parts of their body …

This new substance is now generally spread in the atmosphere of the Earth …

What is won remains won …

The certitude that what had to be done is done …

There is such a certitude that it is already like that, but seen from the other side …

The foundations of the new world are being established …

It is impossible that a change somewhere, a change towards perfection, would not have its repercussions on the whole Earth …

As if something has been established that is unshakable …

As far as the Earth is concerned, we have turned the corner … It is the miracle of the whole Earth …

The fact is certain — it is not a possibility but a fact …

I am certain that it is happening now; we have not reached the end, but we are on the other side …

The consciousness of this new race is active on the Earth …

The change has taken place, the physical is able to manifest the Truth …

Some overmen are needed — there are some …

I have seen my new body; it is a supramental body …

This really is a new world …

When the Mother’s material body was lowered into that tomb in the inner courtyard of the central Ashram building, there was sobbing, and crying, and lamenting. Twenty-three years earlier she had said that crying because of Sri Aurobindo’s departure was an insult to him and to his Work. Now the same petty human behaviour was being repeated, caused by a small-minded understanding, while the laying down of that body was the symbol of the success of her Work. Nothing has gone wrong and nothing has been postponed — or nothing is true of what the Mother and Sri Aurobindo have said. What they have accomplished is totally new on Earth; it has to be judged according to new norms and requires a new kind of insight. It is worthwhile to make the effort and to open oneself for this new vision because — if it is true — it is about the world of tomorrow and the meaning of the dawning millennium, and, far beyond that millennium, about the Great Meaning which lets us look ahead with confidence. On regarde là où on veut aller — one keeps the eye fixed on the aim.

‘When an Avatar comes, he comes to fulfill a certain purpose,’⁵⁴ Sri Aurobindo said. The Mother talked about the descent of those ‘polarized forms of consciousness,’ meaning the Avatars, and she said: ‘They always come on earth with a well-defined purpose and for a special realization, with a mission decided, determined before their incarnation.’⁵⁵

Sri Aurobindo said so many years ago: ‘I know with absolute certitude that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how. That also is decided and predestined from somewhere above; but it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces. For in the terrestrial world the predetermined result is hidden and what we see is a whirl of possibilities and forces attempting to achieve something with the destiny of it all concealed from human eyes. This is, however, certain that a number of souls have been sent to see that it shall be now … My faith and will are for the now.’⁵⁶

The Supermind has manifested and is present and active in the Earth-atmosphere; the supramental body has been formed in the true physical substance and is ready to appear in terrestrial matter when this matter will be sufficiently refined; in the meantime, the Supramental Consciousness is directing the great Change and forming the first transitional beings between animal man and the supramental new species.

The Great Change in evolution is happening around us and within us, whether we want it or not.