Beyond Man

Chapter Twenty-one: The Ship from the New World

One must first of all fight an enormous mass of foolish prejudices which put material and spiritual life irreconcilably against each other … One must be able to take up all, to combine all, to synthesize all.¹

— The Mother

The quality of the atmosphere had changed, the Mother said. ‘The development has been much accelerated. The stages of the march forward follow each other much faster … Things are changing quickly.’² She felt that very concretely during the projection of a film at the Playground. (She always had found film a powerful means of expression for better or worse. And why is it so difficult to show a deeply stirring beautiful story with an encouraging, positive ending, she asked.)

It was a Bengali film, Rani Rasmani, about the rich widow of that name and Ramakrishna Paramhamsa. In 1847, this lady had the Kali temple built where Ramakrishna passed his later years in adoration of Kali, the Mother. The temple is still a much visited place of pilgrimage.

The Mother saw all films at the Playground together with the young and the adult Ashramites. ‘Then I have really understood — for it was not an understanding with the head, not with the intellect, but with the body, you know what I mean: it was an understanding in the cells of the body — that a new world is born and that it is beginning to grow … I have announced to all of you that that a new world was born. But it has so much been swallowed up, so to speak, in the old world that up to now the difference has not been very perceptible for a lot of people. Yet, the activity of the new forces has been going on in a very regular way, very persistently, very assiduously and, in a certain measure, very efficaciously,’ she said in July 1957.³

The film gave a vivid picture of the religious life, perhaps as lived by Ramakrishna Paramhamsa at the highest and purest level. But even to him, one of the precursors of the New Age, religion, even in its most unselfish and ecstatic devotion, could not but be directed towards a world hereafter — just like all religion, all spirituality, all yoga formerly. The Mother, now permeated by the manifested Supermind and opening herself totally to its action even ‘in the cells of the body’, experienced a New World in which the Promise to humankind would be fulfilled here, on the Earth, and not in a hereafter. She experienced this New World as such a contrast with the former one that the difference appeared to her as big as the difference between the new human being and the animals. To realize the importance of the birth of the New World, one had ‘to find a comparison, to go back to the time of the transition between the creation of the animal and the creation of the human being.’⁴

This is why she said with such emphasis to her audience, the young ones sitting there in the sand in front of her, in one of her most lyrical, at times hymnic talks: ‘It is a new world that is born, born, born. It is not the old one that is transforming itself, it is a new world that is born. And we are now fully in the transitional period in which both are overlapping: in which the old one still persists in an all-powerful way and entirely dominates the ordinary consciousness, while the new one is penetrating still very modestly, unnoticed — so much unnoticed that on the surface it does not upset much for the time being, and that even to the consciousness of most people it remains as yet altogether imperceptible. But it is active all the same, it is growing, till the moment that it will be strong enough to impose itself visibly.’⁵

And she went on: ‘All those former things [the religions] are now looking so old, so outdated, so fortuitous, such a travesty of the true truth. In the supramental creation there will be no religions anymore. All life will be the expression, the unfolding in forms of the divine Unity manifesting itself in the world. And there will not be what men now call “Gods” any longer. Those great beings will be able to participate in the new creation themselves, but to this end they will have to embody in what one might call “the supramental substance” on earth. And if among them there are some who prefer to remain in their own world as they are, who decide not to manifest physically, then their relation with the beings of the [future] terrestrial supramental world will be a relation of friends, of co-workers, of equals; for the highest divine essence will have manifested in the beings of the new supramental world on earth.

‘When the physical substance will be supramentalised, to incarnate on earth will no longer be a condition of inferiority; on the contrary, one will acquire a fullness which otherwise is unobtainable. But all this is in the future. It is a future that has begun, but that will take a certain time to realize itself integrally. In the meantime, we find ourselves in a very special situation, extremely special, which never had a precedent. We are present at the birth of a new world, so young, so feeble (not in its essence but in its exterior manifestation), not yet recognized, not even sensed but denied by most. But it is there! It is there, exerting itself to grow and completely sure of the result. But the way to arrive at it is totally new and has never been cleared before: nobody has ever gone there, nobody has done this! This is a beginning, a universal beginning. Consequently, it is an absolutely unexpected and unforseeable adventure.’

Through that youth there in front of her she summoned the whole world to the adventure, the present world which in the vortex of accelerated time does not very well know anymore what things are all about or which way it is going. Things are about nothing from the past; it is going in the direction of Something completely new.

‘There are people who like adventure. They are the ones I am calling up, and I say to them: “I invite you to the great adventure.”

‘It is not about spiritually doing once again what others have done before us, for our adventure starts beyond. It is about a new creation, entirely new, with everything it brings that is unforeseen, with risks and insecurities — a true adventure of which the aim is a sure victory but of which the road is unknown and has to be cleared in unexplored terrain. It is something that never has existed in the present universe and that never will present itself in the same way. If you are interested, good, come aboard. What will happen tomorrow, I do not know.

‘You have to leave behind everything you were expecting, everything you planned, everything you built, and then go forward into the unknown. What will happen, will happen! And that is that.’⁶

On regarde là où on veut aller.⁷

(One keeps one’s sight on the aim one wants to attain.)

— The Mother

The victory is assured, she said. The years 1957 and 1958 were years of assurances, with many emphatic affirmations. There is no doubt that the Mother in those months has physically realized the overmanhood of which the general Consciousness will establish itself in the Earth-atmosphere on 1 January 1969. The following passages from the Entretiens leave no doubt about this.

• On 29 May 1957 she talked about the transitional being between the present animal-human and the future supramental being, and she said: ‘Now, at this moment, that state [of the transitional superman] can be realized on earth by those who are ready to receive the supramental Force that is manifesting.’⁸ And she repeats this. Such an unconditional confirmation could only stem from her own experience. (‘The only thing I can speak of is my own experience.’⁹)

• On 25 September of the same year, she comments on a passage from The Supramental Manifestation in which Sri Aurobindo writes about the ‘overman’ according to his novel definition. The Mother tells her audience at the Playground: ‘That was surely what he was expecting of us: what he saw as the overman (le surhomme) who has to be the intermediary being between humankind as it is and the supramental being created in a supramental way, which means that it will not at all belong to the animality anymore and that it will be free of all animal needs.’ And another affirmation: ‘I think … I know that it is now certain that we will realize what he expects from us. It has become no longer a hope, but a certitude.’ What she adds is also interesting at the point we have arrived: ‘There is a moment that the body itself finds that nothing in the world is worth to be lived as much as that: the transformation … It is as if all cells of the body were thirsting for that Light that wants to manifest. They cry for it, they find such an intense joy in it, and they are sure of the Victory.’¹⁰

• **Durgapuja is the festival of goddess Durga with her trident and lion, one of the belligerent forms of the Universal Mother. It is a big religious feast in India, especially in Bengal, and lasts ten days of which the last three are the most important. On the tenth day, Durga with her trident kills a demon, a rakshasa — a killing which is symbolical for the victory of the Mother over the hostile forces. On 2 October 1957, vijaya dashami, the ‘day of Victory,’ the Mother gave the following message: ‘For those, who use nothing but their physical eyes, the victory will be apparent only when it is total, that is to say, physical.’ And she added the same day: ‘But this does not mean that it is not already won in principle.’¹¹

• On 16 April 1958 the Mother begins her commentary on a long passage from The Life Divine, in which Sri Aurobindo gives one of the earliest indications about the indispensability of a superhuman intermediary being, with the words: ‘We have now reached a certitude since there is already a beginning of realization.’ In whom but in herself ? ‘We have now proof that in certain conditions the ordinary state of humanity can be surpassed and that a new state of consciousness can work itself out which at least renders possible a conscious relation between mental man and higher man [i.e. overman, le surhomme]’.¹² And once again she describes in unmistakable terms what that intermediary being will be.

All this is very plain and very positive. In the post-1973 comments on her work, these important realizations, these milestones on the road of the transformation seem to be forgotten, eclipsed in the minds of commentators by ‘the fact of the death’ of the Mother. But it is no exaggeration to posit that every year of her avataric sadhana, of her work on Earth after 1956, when she had voluntarily consented to stay with us, has expedited the supramental transformation of the Earth by thousands of years. A postulate of this kind cannot be rendered in exact numbers, of course, but its general truth is unquestionable.

She concludes that Entretien as follows: ‘This new realization keeps evolving with what one may call “lightning speed”. For if we consider time in the common fashion, only two years have gone by (a little more than two years) between the moment that the supramental substance penetrated into the Earth-atmosphere and the moment that this change in the quality of the Earth-atmosphere has taken place.’ And a change in the Earth-atmosphere, just like the manifestation of the Supramental in it, cannot be cancelled, cannot be effaced. The transformational process was and remains irreversible.

• On 8 October the Mother again talks about the overman, ‘what we call the overman [le surhomme], namely the being born in the human way and which tries to transform its physical being which it has got by its common human birth.’ Will there be such intermediary forms? ‘There will certainly be an innumerable quantity of partial realizations … There will be a considerable number of essays, more or less fruitful or more or less unfruitful, before arriving at something that will resemble the overman, who himself will be a more or less successful attempt.

‘All those who make an effort to surpass ordinary nature, all those who try to realize materially the profound experience that has put them into contact with the divine Truth, all those who, instead of turning their attention to the Hereafter or the Above, try to realize physically, externally, the change of consciousness which they have realized inside themselves: all those are apprentice-overmen … They have more or less advanced on the way, but before reaching the end of it nobody will be able to tell which degree of his development he has reached. It is the last degree that will matter.’¹³ Who or where were those apprentice-overmen then? Who or where are they now? ‘How far we have come is of no concern to us.’ Defining the position, getting the bearings is for later, for the suprahistory of the future, when the whole of the process of transformation will be surveyable. And she formulated one of those unforgettable dicta of hers: ‘On regarde là où on veut aller.’

Mother Nature

We do not want to obey the orders of Nature, even when enforced by habits having lasted for billions of years.¹⁴

— The Mother

The New Year’s message for 1958 read: ‘O Nature, material Mother, Thou hast said that thou wilt collaborate and there is no limit to the splendour of this collaboration.’¹⁵ We know that every message of the Mother was the precipitation of an experience, of something she had perceived or gone through. ‘It is an experience, something that has happened.’ On what experience could this mysterious message have been based?

Mother Nature is one of the emanations of the Great Mother herself, more precisely the emanation which is in charge of the Earth, of the material evolution of the Earth, and of the beings born from her womb. Which means that she is fairly familiar to us, for example from Greek mythology.

Along a path of aeons serpentine …
The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time.¹⁶

— Savitri

It is comical, in a sense, that the Mother fell foul with Mother Nature, which meant that she had a quarrel with a part of her own self! We have already seen that emanations lead independent lives. (This is the reason, for instance, that whole ‘cascades’ — emanations in stepwise gradations — of two of the four great Asuras are still active, while the one Asura has converted himself and the other has been dissolved into his Origin.)

Mother Nature, though being an emanation of the Creatrix, has her own character and will. What vexed the embodied Mother, she who was the incarnated Shakti with always that strong ‘pressure for change’ and progress, was the fact that Nature executed her task much too slowly and in a roundabout way. ‘She throws herself into action with an abundance and a total lack of economical sense.’ We can see this for ourselves: the trillions of blades of grass, the trillions of seeds, the trillions of insects’ eggs. ‘She tries out everything possible in every way possible and with all possible kinds of invention which naturally are quite remarkable, but … it is like a road without end … She projects her creative spirit with an abundance that does not calculate, and when a combination is not very successful, she simply eliminates it without any bother. To her, you see, that abundance has no limits. I think that there is no kind of experiment she is not eager to perform. It is only when something has a chance of leading up to a line of development ending in a result that she keeps going on with it … It is evident that she enjoys it and that she is not in a hurry. If one asks her to work faster and to finish some part or other of her work, her reply is always the same: “But why? Why? Don’t you find this amusing?”’¹⁷ No, the Mother did not find it amusing. The laying of the foundations of the supramental manifestation had to be done now, within a given period of time.

Some months before the Mother had already talked about the ‘macabre whimsy of Nature’. ‘She sees the whole, she sees the connections. She sees that nothing is lost, that the quantities, the innumerable minuscule elements without any importance, are only recombined, thrown once more into the cauldron, to be well stirred and produce something new again. But this game is not funny for everybody.’ It was time to change the rules of the game. ‘It is evident that the biggest obstacle [to the transformation] is the attachment to things as they are. But Nature as a whole finds that those who have a profound knowledge want to go too fast. She likes her meanders, she likes her successive attempts, her failures, her new starts, her new inventions. She likes the whimsicality of a way, the unexpected result of an experiment. One could almost say that for her the more time it takes the more pleasant it is.’¹⁸

However, Mother Nature had now agreed to collaborate in the New Creation. ‘The evening I have told you those things’ — when the Mother had expressed her annoyance at the meanderings of Nature — ‘I have identified myself with Nature, completely, I have entered into her game. And that act of identification has resulted in a response, a sort of new intimacy between Nature and myself, a long movement of approachment that has culminated in an experience which produced itself on 8 November [^1957].

All of a sudden, Nature understood. She understood that this new Consciousness which is born does not intend to reject her but to embrace her fully. She understood that this new spirituality does not distance itself from life, does not recoil in fear before the amplitude of its movements but that, on the contrary, it wants to integrate all its elements. She understood that the supramental Consciousness is not there to diminish her but to complete her.

Then, from the supreme Reality came the following order: “Wake up, o Nature, to the joy of collaboration!” And the whole of Nature, in an immense impulse of joy, rushed up to answer: “I agree, I collaborate” … She accepted. She saw, with all eternity in front of her, that this supramental Consciousness was going to accomplish her more perfectly, that it would add more force to her movements, more amplitude, more possibilities to her game.

‘And suddenly I heard, as if coming from the four corners of the Earth, the great musical sounds which one sometimes hears in the subtle physical, somewhat alike to those of Beethoven’s [violin] concerto in D minor, as if fifty orchestras burst out together without one single discordant note, to tell the joy of this new communion of Nature and Spirit — the encounter of two old friends who meet again after a long separation.’¹⁹ This was how her message for the New Year had come about.

And so, once more, a veil lifted from the daily existence of the Mother. She never spoke just like that; her words were always actions — in her environment, in the whole of this world and in all worlds. For what may a message of this kind mean to somebody who sees it printed on paper without any background information? What notion do we have of the echoes vibrating in her words? What notion did her still so young audience have of her multidimensional presence, of the complex play of forces they were involved in, focused on that apparently frail, white, small but so powerful figure sitting there in front of them? ‘For instance, in whatever happens, there is at the same time its explanation (“explanation” is not the right word, but anyhow) its explanation by the ordinary human consciousness (by “ordinary” I do not mean banal, I mean the human consciousness as it is), the explanation as given by Sri Aurobindo in an illumined mind, and the divine perception. All three are simultaneous for the same happening. How to express this with words?’²⁰

The end of those years of Entretiens is now fast approaching; soon this kind of voice will no longer be heard. Let us therefore listen to a very important experience — but what experience was not important? — which she dictated herself (probably to Pavitra) and which she even found worthwhile to read out at the Playground.

‘Formerly I had an individual subjective contact with the supramental world, whereas on 3 February [^1958] I walked in it concretely — as concretely as I once walked in Paris — in a world that exists in itself, outside all subjectivity. It is as if a bridge is being built between the two worlds. This is the experience as I have dictated it immediately afterwards. [The Mother reads:]

‘The supramental world exists permanently and I am there permanently in a supramental body. I got proof of it this very day, because my terrestrial consciousness has gone and remained there consciously between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. I know now that what is lacking for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relation is an intermediate zone between the physical world as it is and the supramental world as it is. It is this zone which remains to be built, both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world, and which is being built. When formerly I used to talk of the new world that is being created, it was this intermediary zone that I meant. And similarly, when I am on this side (in the domain of the physical consciousness, that is) and when I see the supramental power, light and substance constantly penetrating into matter, it is the construction of this zone I see and in which I participate.

‘I was on a huge ship, which is a symbolical representation of the place where the work is being done. This ship, as large as a city, is fully organized and surely must already have been functioning for some time, for its organization was completely established. It is the place where the people are being trained who are destined for the supramental life. These people (or at least a part of their being) had already undergone a supramental transformation, for the substance of the ship itself and of everything on board was neither material nor subtle-physical, vital or mental: it was a supramental substance.

‘This substance consisted of the most material supramental, the supramental substance nearest to the physical world and the first that will manifest. The light was a mixture of gold and red, resulting in a uniform substance of a luminous orange. Everything was like that — the light was like that, the people were like that — everything had that colour, although in various shades so that things could be distinguished. The general impression was that of a world without shadows; there were colour variations but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm and orderliness; everything went on harmoniously and in silence. And at the same time one could discern all the details of an education, of a training in all fields, by which the people on board were being prepared.

‘That gigantic ship had just reached the shore of the supramental world and a first group of people who were destined to become the future inhabitants of this supramental world were to go ashore. Everything had been arranged for this first disembarkation. Several very tall beings were posted on the jetty. They were not human beings, they had never been human before, nor were they permanent inhabitants of the supramental world. They had been sent down from above and posted there to control and supervise the disembarkation. I was in charge of the whole enterprise from the beginning and throughout the proceedings. I had prepared all the groups myself. I stood on the ship at the head of the gangway, calling the groups one by one and sending them ashore. The tall beings posted there inspected as it were those who were disembarking, letting pass the ones who were ready and sending back the ones who were not and who had to continue their training on board the ship.

‘While I was there watching everybody, the part of my consciousness coming from here got extremely interested; it wanted to see and recognize all those people, to see how they had changed and check who were taken at once and who had to remain to continue their training. After a while, as I stood there observing all that, I began to feel that I was being pulled back to make my body wake up — by a consciousness or a person here — and in my consciousness I protested: “No, no! Not yet! Not yet, I want to see the people!” I was seeing and noticing everything with intense interest. Things continued that way till suddenly the clock here struck three, which brought me back violently. I had the sensation of a sudden fall into my body. I came back with a shock but with the full remembrance because I had been called back very abruptly. I remained tranquil, without making a movement, until I could recollect the whole experience and keep it.

‘On that ship the nature of the objects was not as we know on earth; for instance, the clothes were not made of fabric, and what looked like fabric was not manufactured: it was part of the body, it was made of the same substance which took different forms. It had a kind of plasticity. When a change was required, it took place not by any artificial and external means but by an inner movement, a movement of consciousness which gave the substance its shape or appearance. Life created its own forms. There was one single substance in everything and it changed the quality of its vibration according to need and usage.

‘Those who were sent back for additional training were not of a uniform colour: it was as if their body showed patches of a greyish opacity consisting of a substance which resembled the terrestrial one. They were dull as if not entirely permeated by the Light, as if they had not been transformed. They were not like that everywhere, only in spots.

‘The tall beings on the shore were not of the same colour, which means that they did not have that orange tint: they were paler, more transparent. Except for a part of their body one could only see the outline of their figure. They were very tall, seemed to have no bone-structure and could take any shape they wanted. Only from the waist down did they have a permanent density, which one did not suppose in the rest of their body. Their colour was much lighter, with very little red; it rather tended towards gold or even white. The parts of whitish light were translucent; they were not positively transparent but less dense, more subtle than the orange substance.

‘When I was called back and saying “not yet”, I had each time a fleeting glimpse of myself — of my figure in the supramental world, that is. I was a kind of combination of the tall beings and of the beings aboard the ship. My upper part, particularly the head, was not much more than a silhouette of which the contents were white with an orange fringe. The more down towards the feet, the more the colour looked like that of the people on the boat, that is to say orange; the more upwards, the more it was translucent and white, with less red. The head was only a contour with a brilliant sun in it; rays of light radiated from it, which was the action of the will.

‘As for the people I saw on board the ship, I recognized all of them. Some were here in the Ashram, others were from elsewhere, but I know them too. I saw everybody, but as I knew that I would not remember them all when coming back, I decided not to mention any names. Anyhow, it is not necessary. Three or four faces stood out very distinctly, and when I saw them I understood the feeling I had here on earth when looking into their eyes: such an extraordinary joy. Most people were young. There were very few children and their age was something around fourteen and fifteen, certainly not below ten or twelve. (I did not stay long enough to see all the details.) There were no very old people, apart from a few exceptions. Most of the people who went ashore were of middle age, except a few. Before this experience, certain individual cases had already been examined several times at a place where people capable of being supramentalised were examined. There were a few surprises and I took note of them. I even talked to some of them about it. But the ones I made disembark today I saw very distinctly: they were middle-aged, neither young children nor old people, apart from some rare exceptions, and this agreed very well with my expectations. I decided not to tell anything, not to give any names. As I did not remain till the very end, it was not possible for me to get the exact picture; the picture was not absolutely clear or complete. I do not want to say things to some and not to others.

‘What I can say is that the formation of the appraisal, of the assessment [about their readiness to go ashore], rested exclusively on the substance of which the people were made, that is on their belonging completely to the supramental world, on their being made of that so particular substance. The adopted view is neither moral nor psychological. It is probable that the substance their bodies were made of resulted from an inner law or an inner movement which at that time was not put into question. It is quite clear, at least, that the values differ.

‘When I came back, I knew, simultaneously with the recollection of the experience, that the supramental world is permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and that only a missing link is necessary to enable the connection in the consciousness and in the substance, and it is this link which is now being established. There I had the impression … of an extreme relativity — no, more exactly the impression that the relation of this world with the other one completely changed the standpoint from which things must be evaluated or appraised. This standpoint was not at all mental and it gave the strange inner feeling that lots of things we consider good or bad are not really so. It was very clear that everything depended on the capacity of things, on their aptitude in expressing the supramental world or being in relation with it.

‘It was so completely different, sometimes even so much contrary to our ordinary way of appreciating things … What is very obvious is that our opinion of what is divine or undivine is not right … Our usual feeling of what is antidivine seems artificial, seems based on something that is not true, not alive. At any rate, what we call life here did not seem alive to me when compared with that world … In the people too I saw that what helps them to become supramental or prevents them from it, is very different from what we with our habitual moral notions imagine. I felt how … ridiculous we are.’²¹

At that time, the supramental world existed already ‘somewhere’ in a reality outside our physical reality.

There too the Mother was present as the Executrix.

By then many persons were ready to participate in the supramental creation.

A certain number of them were present on Earth in 1958.

The link, the connection, the intermediary world, the bridge between our world and the supramental world had to be built. For this the Mother had remained upon Earth and she worked on it with all her might, with all her Power.

It turned out that her work, especially because it increasingly concerned her physical being — her body and its cells — now demanded her withdrawal too from the active outward life she had been leading all these years. She gave her last talk at the Playground on 26 November 1958; on 7 December she was present there for the last time to watch the gymnastics. On 9 December she fell gravely ill. The situation was very serious. ‘I have stopped everything, the attack on my body was too severe,’ she wrote to Satprem.

That attack came from a mighty Titan, chosen by the Lord of Falsehood; this Titan, ‘whose aim is this body,’ had been born together with her — her shadow, as it were — to make life difficult for her and if possible to terminate it. (One will remember how Sri Aurobindo was constantly concerned about her protection.) This time the Titan used black magic. It is worth noting that from now onwards every serious crisis, signifying an important step forward in the Yoga of the Mother, will coincide with an attack of black magic, sometimes through living persons, sometimes through deceased ones or through unearthly beings. The Titan’s preference went to persons in the Mother’s entourage after he had first taken possession of them. In the present case he used a woman who had served the Mother well initially, but who had little by little become a real devil. When Udar asked the Mother why she had not discarded that person from her entourage, she answered that this would not have solved the problem as the Titan then would have picked out somebody else close to her. We find here one of the reasons of the Mother’s extensive occult training in the beginning of the century: she had to be able to confront her opponents at least on an equal footing on this plane too. Life and work of the Avatar form a whole, preordained in time(s) and space(s), connected by a web of invisible threads spun by Providence or by the Unity-Consciousness, without which the execution of his or her Work would be impossible.

The withdrawal of the Mother on 9 December 1958 — exactly eight years after Sri Aurobindo’s body had been lowered into the Samadhi — was not so abrupt as Sri Aurobindo’s. On 15 January, she would again step out on the balcony at sunrise. Yet she changed her daily schedule drastically. (We will see, though, that her outward activity, parallel to the inward action, was not restricted but only redirected.) In her total surrender the Mother has never left even a minute of her life unused, in order to accomplish the Work she had accepted. ‘The true reason why I am still here is that my physical presence helps humanity to progress,’ she said to Mona Sarkar. ‘My presence hastens the terrestrial evolution … I made the descent of the Supramental possible. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. It is not worth spending my time uselessly upon earth if my presence doesn’t help humanity to make a decisive progress. I can’t spend my time uselessly, I have many important things to do in other worlds. But because my presence helps, I am still here, otherwise I would have left already.’²²

Her presence at the Playground was of course badly missed. Her ‘evening classes’ had been the occasion of that admirable collection of Entretiens. All the same, her audience could have asked so many more relevant questions. They probably lacked the poignant side of the life-experience which causes questions to arise. ‘You never have any questions to ask me.’ Was it because they were timid, or because they were afraid to get entangled in their French sentences? ‘To all of you who have come here many things have been told. You have been put into contact with a world of truth, you live in it, the air you breathe is full of it.’²³ She let them write out their questions on a piece of paper to be handed to her before the beginning of the classes. Still nothing was asked. What on earth might be the cause of this ‘terrible sleepiness,’ of this intellectual drowsiness, this lack of interest?

During the meditation after one of the classes, in November 1958, she asked the question to herself. But for her asking a question meant identifying with the very concreteness of the problem. Only knowledge by identity is true knowledge, she said, time and again. Afterwards she has described how she was sucked down into that unconsciousness there in front of her, deeper, and deeper still, ‘looking for the spark of light that answers.’ The force pulling her down in that black abyss, in a sort of black volcanic shaft of razor sharp basalt, was so strong that it made her body literally bend forward, her head touching her knees. What was to be found there below in that pit?

At the bottom of the stagnant night of the Inconscient she found the divine Presence, the supramental Golden Light in which she was unexpectedly projected as in a vastness of ‘dark, warm gold’. And a total surprise it was! She formulated the experience in her New Year’s message for 1959 — this being our last look at that Playground where part of the Play of the New World had taken place. ‘At the very bottom of the inconscience most hard and rigid and narrow and stifling I struck upon an almighty spring that cast me up forthwith into a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world.’²⁴

‘And this almighty spring was a perfect image of what happens, is bound to happen and will happen for everybody: all at once one is projected into the Vast.’²⁵ A miracle, for everybody.