Beyond Man

Chapter Twenty-six: In the Crucible

The Soul is the Key

The liberation of the individual soul is the keynote of the definite divine action.¹

— Sri Aurobindo

The previous chapters have given us some idea of the supramental process of transformation the body of the Mother was undergoing. This process is new and unusual for anyone who learns about it for the first time. So it was for her who experienced it in her body. But what had happened to the soul? What about the soul in all of this? We are hearing a lot about body, matter, cells, consciousness of the cells, universalization, and what not, but isn’t it the soul that is supposed to play a central role in the existence of man as well as in the cosmic evolution, in which it was said to be the fundamental active element? One of the last times the Mother talked about her soul had been on 19 May 1959. ‘[This body] is full of the psychic in each of its cells,’ she had then said. Mighty experiences she had gone through since, but the soul she had not mentioned anymore. If the soul held such a central position in the evolution throughout, it should surely play a role, and an important one at that, in the evolutionary process of transformation? But one reads volume after volume of the Agenda and the soul is not mentioned anywhere except in passages quoted from former years and comments on such passages.

Till one comes to the conversation of 11 September 1968. Suddenly the Mother discovered: ‘The soul has not left at all,’ as her mental and vital had done. She was of course talking about her own psychic being, which means that during all this time she had not been aware of it; perhaps she had even thought that it had been ‘sent packing’ together with her mental and vital, leaving nothing but the ‘agglomerate’ of body cells directly exposed to the influence of the radiating, transforming power of the supramental Sun. ‘The vital and the mental have left, but the psychic has not left’, she now stated.

The occasion of this experience had been the presence of a woman with a very developed, matured psychic being, and the Mother’s own psychic being had reacted so strongly to that presence that she had again become aware of it. And how! She now marked that: ‘When I say “I”, I do not mean the body: I mean the psychic consciousness.’ This reduced a lot of her ‘I’s’ to one ‘I’. And also this: ‘It is possible (I don’t pronounce myself because there is nothing as yet … nothing definitive, that is), it is possible that a new relation or a new intermediary form is developing between the psychic being and the material, the physical. It looks as if this is something that is being done.’ A new body? The new body? However that be, her psychic being was ‘completely transparent,’ which had been the reason why she had not noticed it during all this time. For she was that psychic being; she existed and acted from that core and had thus perceived the sheaths around it (the mental, the vital — in so far as these were still present — and the physical), but not what was at the centre of her perception became this was the perceiving element itself. We may also suppose that the perception of her psychic being had temporarily remained veiled for her in order to make her concentrate fully on the physical and its transformation.

It may be appropriate here to remind one briefly what the psychic being is. After the fall of the four original Asuras, the Supreme, at the intervention of the Universal Mother, poured out his Love into the Night of the Manifestation in order that that Night should no longer remain an eternal, coagulated darkness, but that it might evolve back towards its Origin. That Divine Love is the essence of the psyche. If that Love is divine, then the psyche must be divine, exist in the Divine, have come forth from Him and carry Him most intimately in its being in the course of its evolutionary journey back towards the full integration into Him. Being divine, the psyche cannot but have willed and itself chosen its journey, its adventure through the Night of the Ignorance, to experience the joy of rediscovering itself as divine in the Divine. (Of course, ‘joy’ in this case is a rather colourless, insignificant word. One should realize that this ‘joy’ should counterbalance the horrific amount of suffering during the return journey.)

The psyche, the soul, is simple as a manifesting part of the Divine but complex as a concept. It exists eternally in the Divine (as jivatman), is present in all parts of creation in the Love that has been poured out into the creation (as antaratman), and regains, individualized, in the human being the potential to build up its own materialization (as the evolving psychic being). The reincarnation of the soul, by which it descends time after time into the material manifestation, is necessary because gross matter is not sufficiently plastic to adapt itself to the growth of the soul. In life after life, the soul gains the necessary experiences by which, blow by blow, its divine shape is being sculpted. It comes into each life with ‘a very precise programme of experiences it will have to go through in order to be able to make the progress it wants to make’.² After death, it assimilates the experiences from the previous life and prepares itself for the following episode of the adventure — which, superficial appearances notwithstanding, it enjoys intensely, as everything is Ananda in essence and cannot be anything else but Ananda. We were the Divine, we are the Divine (essentially), and we are again becoming the Divine (in the manifestation). Tat tvam asi: you are That.

Considering all this, the psychic being must of necessity be involved in the supramental process of transformation. It must even form the nucleus of this process; it must be its key, for this process determines the higher phases of the divinization of the material manifestation of the psychic being. Even in its mature state — the maturity of the soul is, as we have seen, the primordial condition of supramentalization — the psychic being cannot halt at the point in the evolution now reached by humanity. For its redivinization it has also to experience and integrate into itself the higher levels of existence between mental consciousness and the absolute Divine if its presence in creation has to make any sense at all.

This was exactly what the Mother observed on 1 July 1970, thanks to the presence of the same woman mentioned earlier, an American disciple called Rijuta. ‘I had an experience which was interesting for me because it was the first time. It was yesterday or the day before, I don’t remember. Rijuta was here, there in front of me, and I saw her psychic being that dominated her by this much [gesture: about 20 centimeters]. It was the first time. Her physical being was small and her psychic being was that tall. And it was an asexual being, neither man nor woman. I then said to myself … “But it is the psychic being, it is this that will materialize and become the supramental being!”’³

She had so often asked herself how the supramental being could possibly arise from an animal humanity. Sri Aurobindo and she herself had seen the prerequisite of transitional beings, of overmen (surhommes), but these would still have an animal-human origin and body despite their supramentalized consciousness. It was the leap from animal man to the supramental being that seemed to her so enormous, not to say impossible. ‘It is the leap, you understand, which looks so formidable to me.’⁴ For the divine being really had to be divine, for instance simultaneously present here, there and elsewhere, and not subject to illness, gravity and death. It had to be, physically, a cosmic being and even more than a cosmic being. This meant, proportionally speaking, a much greater difference with our present human condition than the difference between the body of animal man and the primates, who for the most part have the same physical morphology.

Rijuta’s psychic being had the same colour as the hibiscus the Mother had chosen as the symbol of Auroville, orange. (Those who from the supramental ship went on land to help found the New World also had this colour. Everything there, the one substance, had this colour.) ‘Then you understand that. You understand it: the psychic being materializes and this gives a continuity to the evolution. This creation consequently gives completely the impression that it is not something arbitrary, that there is a kind of divine logic behind it which is not like our human logic but very superior to it. But there is a logic and it was plainly satisfied when I saw that. It is really interesting. I was fully interested. It was present there [Rijuta’s psychic being], very quietly, and it said to me: “You are trying to find out how it will be? Well, look, this is it.”’⁵

In The Supramental Manifestation, Sri Aurobindo had written about the evolutionary continuity: ‘The necessary forms and instrumentations of Matter must remain since it is in a world of Matter that the divine life has to manifest, but their materiality must be refined, uplifted, ennobled, illumined, since Matter and the world of Matter have increasingly to manifest the indwelling Spirit.’⁶

This important passage was now as it were being illustrated by the psychic being of Rijuta. The process, the mechanism of the supramental transformation at once became clear to to the Mother. If one realizes what the psychic being really is, and if one takes into consideration the crescendo of the evolution, which is an evolution of the Spirit, then this cannot but be the logical course of progression. Its key is the soul. ‘In this Yoga the psychic is that which opens the rest of the nature to the Supramental Light and finally to the Supreme Ananda. If the inmost soul is awakened, if there is a new birth out of the mere mental, vital and physical into the psychic, then this Yoga can be done; otherwise it is impossible,’⁷ wrote Sri Aurobindo.

The Mother goes on in that same conversation mentioned above: ‘I have then understood why the mental and the vital were taken away from this body and why the psychic being was left in place. It was, of course, the psychic being that always guided all movements … All the complications caused by the vital and mental, who superimpose their impressions, their tendencies — all that was gone. And I have understood: so, this is it, it is the psychic being that must become the supramental being.

‘But I had never taken any time to find out how [the supramental being] would look like. And when I saw Rijuta, I understood. And I see it, I still see it, I have kept the remembrance. It was as if its hair was almost red (but it was not like that). And its expression! An expression that was so refined and so sweetly ironical. Oh, extraordinary. Extraordinary!

‘And, you know, my eyes were open, it was a vision that was almost material

‘Then one understands. All at once all questions are gone. It has become very clear, very simple.

‘And the psychic is precisely that which survives. So if it materializes, that will mean the suppression of death. But “suppression” … Suppressed is only what is not consistent with the Truth. That disappears — everything that is not capable of transforming itself according to the image of the psychic and to become an integral part of the psychic. It is really interesting.’⁸

Afterwards, she confirmed this crucial revelation, as on 13 April 1972: ‘It is the psychic being, the representative of the Divine in the human being, that will remain, that will cross over into the new species.’ And a couple of days later, on 15 April, she said in passing: ‘[The psychic consciousness] has been governing the being [hers] for a very long time. This is why one has been able to take away the mental and the vital: because the psychic being had taken over the direction very long ago.’⁹ In the same conversation she also said: ‘It is possible that there are some overmen (surhommes) — there are some⁹¹ — who execute the changeover …’ And also in passing: ‘The heart has switched over from the old dominance by Nature to the divine dominance.’ (The heart! The transfer of power of the heart!) On 24 June of the same year she wrote the words already known to us: ‘It is indispensable that each one finds his psychic and unites with it definitively. It is through the psychic that the supramental will manifest itself.’¹⁰

The psyche, the presence of the Divine in his creation, is not a gradation of existence like the others in the great scale of Being. The psyche is ‘behind’ the other gradations and uses them for its growth, just as the psychic world is ‘behind’ the other worlds. The psyche uses the substance of the various levels of existence as its sheaths or coatings in the material manifestation in order to climb the World Stair from the lowest Inconscience, into which it was sent as pure Love, up to the highest Ananda, which is its origin.

Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Life Divine: ‘The material Energy that aggregates, forms and disaggregates,’ as for instance in the perpetual transformations of the elementary particles, ‘is the same Power in another grade of itself as that Life-Energy which expresses itself in birth, growth and death.’ And here he inserted a footnote: ‘Birth, growth and death of life are in their outward aspect the same process of aggregation, formation and disaggregation, though more than that in their inner process and significance.’ For Life is a higher gradation than Matter. And he continued: ‘Even the ensoulment of the body by the psychic being follows, if the occult view of things is correct, a similar outward process, for the soul as nucleus draws to itself and aggregates the elements of its mental, vital and physical sheaths and their contents, increases their formations in life, and in its departing drops and disaggregates again these aggregates, drawing back into itself its inner powers, till in rebirth it repeats the original process.’¹¹

In other words the psychic being forms an adhara, a complex body consisting of several sheaths of mental, vital and physical substance and energy, from what the evolution (as a result of the presence and the work of the psyche in all its individualities) has realized on Earth. The psychic being utilizes the available substances and energies to help continue the evolution. If the supramental substance becomes available on Earth, then the psychic being that is ready for it can also take up the new, supramental substance into its adhara. This means that it would build for itself a supramental body. It is a logical evolutionary development with the psychic being at its core: the fully grown psychic being will supramentalize itself in the manifestation when the manifestation allows it, i.e. when gross matter will be transformed. We now must have a look at the way the transformation of gross matter was coming about according to the Mother’s testimony.

The Sun-Vibration

Million d’oiseaux d’or, ô future Vigueur …

(A million golden birds, O Strenght of the future)

— Arthur Rimbaud, in “Le bateau ivre”

Sri Aurobindo’s disciples have asked him in writing, and sometimes orally too, countless questions about the Supramental, tomorrow’s Wonder. This was only natural. Had we ourselves steered our life on the course of his ideals and had we had the privilege of his company, we too would have asked questions and tried to get an answer from the very source itself. What the Supermind was in itself in the supramental world, Sri Aurobindo knew without any doubt, for it was the revelation of the Supermind which had made his avataric task clear to him. As ‘traveller of the worlds,’ who wrote down a few of his experiences in the grandiose second ‘book’ of Savitri, he had been up to the ultimate limit of the manifestation, even beyond the supramental worlds, that is.

Nevertheless, he almost systematically brushed aside all such questions for the simple reason that they were impossible to answer to human beings, in human language. The human is a mental being — the mental being — which cannot form an idea with its mental consciousness of that which surpasses such a kind of consciousness, not analogically but ontologically. The primates are very intelligent beings, but a jet engine, a recipe for a chocolate cake or a piano concerto are simply not within the order of their consciousness. We should not forget that the Supermind is a divine world, which means a world unimaginably different from ours, limited mental beings.

Sri Aurobindo therefore gave answers like: ‘The Supermind alone can discern the method of its own workings,’¹² or: ‘Supermind cannot be described in terms that the mind will understand, because the terms will be mental and mind will understand them in a mental way and mental sense and miss their true import.’¹³ ‘Have you any idea how the Supermind will proceed?’ asked Satyendra. ‘No idea,’ replied Sri Aurobindo. ‘If one has an idea the result will be what has been in the past. We must leave the Supermind to work everything out.’¹⁴ He did not want to define the Undefinable because such definitions would inevitably become caricatures of the divine Reality in the mind of his mental audience, perhaps even with negative consequences for them. And in spite of all their ideas and occult experiences, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have always considered those ideas and experiences as hypothetical, as they had to go on marching forward into the unknown. For the supramental world as a typal world is very different from a supramental world being inserted by a process of transformation in an evolutionary manifestation located on a lower level of existence.

Yet, the Pioneers have given some indications of what may be expected in the future. We have just seen that the process of transformation follows a logical evolutionary development with the psychic being as its central agent. When the Mother, sometime in 1966, discussed the characteristics of the supramental body, she said: ‘It therefore would be an infinitely greater transformation than that of the animal into the human being. It would be a passage of the human being into a being that no longer would be built in the same manner, that no longer would function in the same manner, that would be a kind of densification or concretization of “something”’. (Two years later she will find out that that ‘something’ is the psychic being.) ‘Up to now, this corresponds with nothing that we have seen physically, unless the scientists have found something that I do not know.’¹⁵ One thing is certain: the true reality of the Supramental ‘will be much more marvellous than we are able to imagine, because what we imagine is always a transformation or a glorification of what we see.’¹⁶ Here the Superman of the comic strips and the cinema comes to mind, who is formidably strong, who can fly, see through a wall or burn through a steel plate with his look, who is invulnerable and immune to illness. Or there is the hypothetical hyperintelligent, extraterrestrial being with a brain like a balloon or a supercomputer.

The main quality of the supramental being is its consciousness, its divine consciousness, its Unity-Consciousness. ‘Supramental nature sees everything from the standpoint of oneness,’¹⁷ wrote Sri Aurobindo, and: ‘The law of the Supermind is unity fulfilled in diversity.’¹⁸ ‘Therefore all is in each and each is in all and all is in God and God in all.’¹⁹ The brain is the radio, the consciousness produces the music made audible by means of the radio. The brain is the television set, the consciousness produces the show one can enjoy by means of the television set. The Unity-Consciousness needs a unity-body in order to express itself on Earth.

The Mother once described the characteristics of the unity-body, of the future supramental body, to a young Ashramite: ‘You know, if there is something on that window-sill and if I [in a supramental body] want to take it, I stretch out my hand and it becomes — wow! — long, and I have the thing in my hand without even having to get up from my chair … Physically, I shall be able to be here and there at the same time. I shall be able to communicate with many people at the same time. To have something in my hand, I’ll just have to wish for it. I think about something and I want it and it is already in my hand. With this transformed body I shall be free of the fetters of ignorance, pain, of mortality and unconsciousness. I shall be able to do many things at the same time. The transparent, luminous, strong, light, elastic body won’t need any material things to subsist on … The body can even be lengthened if one wants it to become tall, or shrunk when one wants it to be small, in any circumstances … There will be all kinds of changes and there will be powers without limit. And it won’t be something funny. Of course, I am giving you somewhat childish examples to tease you and to show the difference.

‘It will be a true being, perfect in proportion, very, very beautiful and strong, light, luminous or else transparent. It will have a supple and malleable body endowed with extraordinary capacities and able to do everything; a body without age, a creation of the New Consciousness or else a transformed body such as none has ever imagined … All that is above man will be within its reach. It will be guided by the Truth alone and nothing less. That is what it is and more even than has ever been conceived.’²⁰ This the Mother told in French to Mona Sarkar, who noted it down as faithfully as possible and read it out to her for verification.

The supramental body will not only be omnipotent and omniscient, but also omnipresent. And immortal. Not condemned to a never ending monotonous immortality — which, again, is one of our human interpretations of immortality — but for ever existing in an ecstasy of inexhaustible delight in ‘the Joy that surpasses all understanding.’ Moment after moment, eternity after eternity. For in that state each moment is an eternity and eternity an ever present moment.

If gross matter is not capable of being used as a permanent coating of the soul in the present phase of its evolution, then it certainly is not capable of being the covering of the supramental consciousness, to form the body that has, to some extent, been described above. This means that the crux of the process of supramental transformation lies in matter; the supramental world has to become possible in matter, which at present still is gross matter. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother were supramentalized in their mental and vital, but their enormous problem was the supramentalization of the physical body, consisting of the gross matter of the Earth. As the Mother said: ‘It is matter itself that must change so that the Supramental may manifest.’²¹ A new kind of matter no longer corresponding with Mendeleyev’s periodic table of the elements? Is that possible?

In the One all substance is one substance. ‘All substance is one single substance, completely the same, everywhere.’²² (the Mother) In order to perceive substance in its unity, the perception has to be actuated from the Unity-Consciousness. In the infinite division of reality by the mental consciousness, conditioned in ignorance, we perceive substance as infinitely divided in apparently separate agglomerates of atoms and elementary particles. But the Mother has clearly said, for instance in her narrative about the supramental ship, that everything is one single substance out of which all things and beings are made; and as she once told her youthful audience at the Playground: ‘It is one and the same single substance which is in all of you.’²³

Considering the various levels of existence, however, it is clear that within the Unity there are gradations or distinct densities of that one Substance, otherwise transformation would not be necessary or even possible. Sri Aurobindo writes in The Life Divine: ‘Being, consciousness, force, substance descend and ascend a many-runged ladder on each step of which being has a vaster self-extension, consciousness a wider sense of its own range and largeness and joy, force a greater intensity and a more rapid and blissful capacity, substance gives a more subtle, plastic, buoyant and flexible rendering of its primal reality.’ And it is there that he says: ‘For the more subtle is also the more powerful — one might say, the more truly concrete; it is less bound than the gross, it has a greater permanence in its being along with a greater potentiality, plasticity and range in its becoming. Each plateau of the hill of being gives to our widening experience a higher plane of our consciousness and a richer world of our existence.’²⁴ The supramental body therefore requires ‘a substance other than ours, a subtle substance tangible only to subtle sense, a supraphysical form-matter.’²⁵

The Mother had perceived this new substance as early as 1954, for in that year she wrote her ‘New Experiences of the Body Consciousness,’ and one of these experiences was: ‘In this intensity the aspiration grows formidable, and in answer to it Thy Presence becomes evident in the cells themselves, giving to the body the appearance of a multicoloured kaleidoscope in which innumerable luminous particles in constant motion are sovereignly reorganized by an invisible and all-powerful Hand.’²⁶

In 1957 she said at the Playground, as ever speaking from her own experience: ‘It seems — it is even sure — that the very substance of that intermediary world which is being elaborated will consist of, will be a substance that is richer, more powerful, more luminous, more resistant, with certain new qualities of a greater subtlety, a greater power of penetration, and a sort of inborn capacity of universality, as if its degree of subtlety and refinement allows for a larger, not to say total perception of the vibrations; and it eliminates the impression of division one has within the old substance, the ordinary mental substance. There is a subtlety of vibration which makes that the global, universal perception is something spontaneous and natural. Within this substance the sense of division, of separation disappears in a wholly natural and spontaneous way. And this substance is at present almost universally spread out in the terrestrial atmosphere.’²⁷ As early as 1957.

In 1967 the Mother said to Satprem: ‘There is a continuous perception, rendered by a vision, of a multicoloured light, consisting of all colours — of all colours not in layers, but as if it were [gesture: dots everywhere] an association by dots of all colours. Two years ago (somewhat more than two years, I don’t remember anymore) when I met with the Tantrics and got in relation with them, I started seeing this light and I thought that it was a “tantric light,” the tantric way of perceiving the material world. But now I see it constantly, in connection with everything, and it seems to be something that one might call “a perception of real Matter.” All possible colours are mutually associated without being mixed, [same gesture] associated in luminous dots. Everything consists of it. And it seems to be the true way of being. I am not yet sure, but it is anyway a much more conscious manner [of being].’²⁸

This is another striking example of the Mother’s attitude, just like Sri Aurobindo’s, vis-à-vis her experiences: meticulous, exact, detailed, scientific. ‘I am not yet sure,’ she said, and she waited for a confirmation, and another one, and yet another one, to be certain of not being the victim of a misconception or an illusion. The supramental yoga is an undertaking with the broadest perspectives, but at the same time exacting attention for the smallest detail. The Truth-Consciousness is the opposite of Illusion, which is a falsehood. If one imagines the Mother as a kind of occultist juggling with pseudo-realities, one cannot get a proper insight into the Work she has done. She had to descend into ever more profound layers of reality in the body, in Matter, where there is no place for fancy or imaginings, neither occult nor spiritual, nor of any other kind.

As her sadhana was progressing, she perceived that the presence of the supramental substance in her body became more frequent. At first she described that substance as dots in all colours of the rainbow, every dot being of one single colour; that substance was a sort of powder consisting of atoms or dots, apparently immobile but with an incredible intensity of vibration, ‘that moves and does not move.’ (This is now one of the accepted paradoxes of modern physics.) Or it was a diamond with the brilliance of trillions of dots; or it was pure gold, ‘a Light that is golden and absolutely immobile, with such an inner intensity of vibration that it cannot be perceived, it escapes all perception.’²⁹ In a letter Sri Aurobindo quoted the Isha Upanishad: The One unmoving is swifter than thought, the gods cannot overtake It, for It travels ever in front; It moves and It moves not, It is far away from us and It is very close.’³⁰ That motionless dance of the new, pure substance took place within gross matter, which seemed to be ‘porous.’ The supramental substance penetrated effortlessly in matter as we know it and which was being transformed from within. It was a penetration which ‘changed the composition’. Sri Aurobindo, in this context, had used the word ‘permeation.’

The presence of this supramental substance was not neutral or inactive. Supramental substance is charged with supramental consciousness. Reading about the wonders of gross matter as discovered by the physicists in this century, one can to some degree imagine how much more wonderful the ‘physics’ of supramental matter must be. For it is a substance that must allow a presence on several places at the same time; it is a substance that concretely expresses the divine attributes. The Mother did not live in a world like ours anymore since Tlemcen, there were no boundaries to her inner experience. But she now found that supramental substance in her body, which had become the body of the Earth; she saw that marvellous substance illuminating her body, sparkling like gold and diamonds. Million d’oiseaux d’or …

That substance proved to be totally different from the material substance we are accustomed to. Its power over gross matter was much greater than the power of physical things. It was a substance ‘with a greater density than the physical’, ‘more concrete than matter’. ‘Solid’ and ‘massive’ were the adjectives she used for it. And at the same time it was subtle, supple, fine like gold dust, but with an enormous Power. Subtle, but anything other than fuzzy or indeterminate. ‘There is nothing nebulous about the supramental; its action depends on the utmost precision possible.’³¹ (Sri Aurobindo) Greater than the precision in physics, which astonishes us no end.

Already in 1926 Sri Aurobindo had said in one of the evening talks that the supramental substance was ‘harder than diamond and more fluid than gas.’ It cannot be otherwise if it is to possess all those wondrous qualities. The Mother called the immobile vibration that is quick as lightning a ‘sun vibration.’ It was something glorious, as if the world of gross matter which it penetrated ‘suddenly became a sun world.’ ‘The sun is sallow and pale and cold and almost black compared with it,’³² she said. She observed how much Sri Aurobindo had been working in the ‘subtle physical’ since his departure to change the structure of gross matter. Would this mean that Mendeleyev’s table of the elements would not remain the table of the law? ‘It is indeed possible that at present things are happening which one is not in the habit of experiencing,’ said the Mother. ‘The only fact of which I am sure is … that the quality, the quantity and the nature of the possible universal combinations is suddenly going to change so considerably that it will probably be baffling for all those who are doing research in life. Now, we are going to see.’³³

The Yoga of the Earth

By the fact that you are now living on earth … you absorb with the air you are breathing that new supramental substance that is spreading in the earth’s atmosphere.³⁴

— The Mother

Because of its universalization, the body of the Avatar became identified with the Earth in the consciousness of its cells. As the cells grew more and more supramentalized, their universalization too increased. How many among those who met her realized that that apparently shrivelling body in front of which they sat was the conscious centre of the Earth, of the solar system, of the physical universe? Most of them kneeled out of respect, in the belief that they were in the presence of the divine All-Mother, or because her presence was so overwhelming that one took an attitude of devotion even without reflecting about it, or because some happenings in their life were not explainable without her direct although invisible intervention. Some had seen her in another shape, in one of her other shapes; some fostered the burning Flame of Love for her in their breast. But who had an idea of the process of transformation the Mother was undergoing? Who saw, behind or beyond the theory of what Sri Aurobindo’s yoga was supposed to be, the fantastic event of the unfolding of a New World, through her, in her?

She talked about ‘the general yoga’ (le yoga général), the Yoga of the Earth. ‘It is the miracle of the whole Earth.’³⁵ This too was a line of development which had been discernible years ago. The Mother had already said in 1957 about the supramental Force: ‘It is active in the whole world, and at all places where there is a receptivity that Force is at work.’³⁶ A year later she had talked about ‘the new substance that is spreading and active in the world,’ a substance with ‘a warmth, a power, such an intense joy that in comparison all mental activity seems cold and dry.’³⁷ In that same year she said to her usual audience at the Playground: ‘I can tell you that, by the fact that you are now living on earth — whether you are aware of it or not, even whether you want it or not — you absorb with the air you are breathing the new supramental substance that is spreading in the earth’s atmosphere. And it prepares in you things which quite suddenly will manifest once you have made the decisive step.’³⁸

Sri Aurobindo had already mentioned the future general spreading of the Supramental, for instance in a letter from 1936: ‘Your idea that [the supramental Force] may spread and happen elsewhere is not without foundation; for, when once something is there in the earth-atmosphere that was not there before, it begins to work on many sides in an unforeseen way. Thus, since the Yoga has been in action, its particular opening movements have come to a number of people who were at a distance and not connected with us and who understood nothing of what was happening to them.’³⁹ And he wrote in a letter from 1939: ‘As the Conscious Force descends in matter and radiates, it seeks for fit instruments to express and manifest it.’⁴⁰

‘I know that there are people in the whole world,’ the Mother said in 1972, and she meant people who, at least in a part of their being, were receptive to the supramental Force and influenced by its workings. Moreover, had not Sri Aurobindo written: ‘A number of souls have been sent to see to it that it is for now,’ and: ‘Some psychic beings have come here who are ready to join with the great lines of consciousness above’?⁴¹ And hadn’t the Mother told in her story about the supramental ship: ‘I have seen some persons from here — and from elsewhere — who already belong to the supramental world in a part of their being’?

While she was sitting there like that, the world was present in her and she was working in the world, meanwhile listening to the forty, fifty or more persons who daily passed by her, making an effort to swallow a morsel of food, or dozing, as her assistants thought, which after all is normal of little old ladies. She was never unconscious, not for a moment. For unconsciousness meant tumbling back into the old mode of being, into the very narrow housing within which we move and live our life, and which actually is a construction of the consciousness proper to our species, the mental consciousness. If we can break out of our consciousness, then we step out to other, more spacious rooms, or into the supramental consciousness outside all rooms. For one who possesses the Unity-Consciousness, falling back into our mental prison is the same as plunging into suffocation, darkness, death, hell. These metaphors are not merely poetic ones but stem from the experience of the Mother; she suffered them as painful reality when, for some reason or other, she yet happened to fall back into the conscious unconsciousness of our humanity, pulled down into its narrowness by some negative presence far or nearby, by an attack of black magic, or by a part of the as yet untransformed cells of the body that formed the terrain of her yogic activity. While sitting there, she was being the world. While sitting there, she was working in the world. While sitting there, she was making the world more and more transparent to the divine Sunlight.

‘What expresses this best, I think, is: in the ordinary human consciousness one is in a point and all things exist in their relation to this point of consciousness. And now such a point does not exist anymore, and as a result the things exist by themselves.’ The axis of reference of the corporeal ego had disappeared. ‘You see, my consciousness is in the things, it is not “something” that receives. It is much better than that, but I don’t know how to say it. It is better than that because it is not only “in the things,” it is in “something” that is in the things and that makes them move. I could express this in a literary way. I could say: “It is no longer a being among others. It is,” I could say, “the Divine in everything.” But I don’t feel it like that. “That what makes things move,” or “that what is conscient in things.” It is evidently a matter of consciousness, but not of a consciousness like the human beings normally have. It is the quality of the consciousness that has changed.’⁴² The whole process of transformation is a phenomenon of consciousness, a switching over from the mental consciousness to the supramental.

Her own body functioned only as ‘a means to contact the Earth’ (pour toucher la terre). With this purpose she had taken it up again in 1962: in order that the supramental Force might enter, via her body, into contact with the Earth, with Matter, and penetrate into Matter to transform it. She was ‘the centre of descent’ of that Force, liquid-like sun-fire, and she tried to be an obstacle as little as possible, she said. She tried to be ‘a pure passer-on,’ a channel, a connecting pipe (her own metaphors). Her Work consisted in connecting the Supramental with the Earth, to be a mediating presence without whom the two worlds would have had no interface, and to purify her cells in the highest possible degree so that the action of the Supramental would not be hindered or deformed by them. ‘Ce que Tu veux’ — what You want — was the formulation of her active-passive attitude by which she put herself unconditionally at the disposal of the divine Will in the smallest elements of her being, in order that her physical presence on Earth might have the greatest possible supramental output.

Be it remembered that what is being talked about here is the body of the Mother. In the other parts of her being she was divine purity itself, but physically she consisted of the terrestrial stuff all of us are made of. The Avatar incarnates in Matter in order that the evolution of Matter may continue. The cells of her body were a hindrance to the transformation and they were its means. In every cell, we have seen, the whole universe is present, but every cell represents a specific differentiation too, a specific function of the universe. The whole universe being present in it, the cell can if necessary and in certain circumstances take over the function of other cells, as biology has found out; but representing a specific aspect of the universe, the cells enable the building of a body with specific parts and functions. This is an illustration of ‘unity in diversity,’ the basic principle of the Unity-Consciousness. Another application of this principle: ‘If one sincerely wants to help the others and the world, the best thing one can do is to be oneself what one wants the others to be, not only as an example, but because one becomes a centre of a radiating power which, by the very fact of its existence, compels the rest of the world to transform themselves.’⁴³ (the Mother)

‘Everything that happens is interconnected; all things are closely connected consciously; there cannot be a vibration at one place without consequences at another,’⁴⁴ the Mother said. ‘You think that you are separated from each other, but it is the same unique Substance which is in you in spite of all differences of appearance, and a vibration in one centre automatically awakens a vibration in another one.’⁴⁵

The Contagion

The phenomenon by which everything reacts to everything in the universe was called the ‘contagion’ by the Mother (la contagion). ‘Everything is nearly reduced to a capacity of spreading the experience, of including [the rest] in the experience (this means the same). One must forget, you see, that there is this person and that person, this object and that object. If you cannot visualize this concretely, imagine that there is only one Thing, excessively complex, and that an experience which happens on one point spreads like an oil stain, or expands, or englobes everything else, according to the case. This [i.e. her words] is only an approximation, but it is only in this way that one can understand. And it is the only explanation of the ‘contagion’: Unity.’⁴⁶ The vibration of the elementary particle has a repercussion in the whole universe, and vice versa; to the vibrations of one cell answer the vibrations of all cells, and the life of all cells has an effect on the life of the single one. The spiritual vibrations, and certainly the supramental ones with their immense power, are ‘contagious.’ ‘The only thing that is really effective is the possibility to transfer to others a state of consciousness in which one lives oneself. But this is a power that cannot be the result of the imagination. It cannot be imitated, it cannot be possessed only in appearance.’⁴⁷ For it is not a mental but a physical power, and in the physical something is or is not. ‘What the body [her body] now accomplishes is contagious, and in the measure of the receptivity of the others it passes them on its experience,’⁴⁸ she wrote to a disciple. With a smile she warned everybody that her presence was dangerous, for that she was the carrier of a contagion, of the supramental contagion. Indeed, those who wanted to march on in their habitual tracks, who did not want to be sucked into the vortex of the unexpected, would do better to stay away from her. And neither should they think of her, for thinking too established a contact and consequently the danger of contagion. But how to keep her at a distance? For her body was everywhere. Where, then, could one find shelter from the contagion? At the Time of the Great Change no being on Earth will be able to find shelter from the Light that may, to him, reveal himself in his naked Truth. Nobody can escape the choice between the future and the past: the entering into the Kingdom of God on Earth the possibility of which is borne by all in themselves, or the fall back into the animality of a past which also is borne by all in themselves. If there is some truth in the Last Judgment, judgment is now being passed by ourselves on ourselves.

Rounded and Square Vibrations

Practically speaking it was all a matter of vibrations. The Mother said that she had become an incredibly sensitive apparatus for the registration of vibrations. ‘To my consciousness the whole life upon earth, including the human life and all its mentality, is a mass of vibrations.’⁴⁹ ‘It’s a rather curious development. For some time, but increasingly more accurately, when one reads something to me, when I listen to music or when I am told a fact, I feel immediately the origin of the activity of the plane on which that is located, or the origin of the inspiration is automatically rendered by a vibration in one of the centres [chakras]. And that is then, in accordance with the quality of the vibration, something constructive or negative. And when at a certain moment that touches even in the least a domain of Truth, there is … — how to say this — like a spark of a vibration of Ananda … And that is of such a precision — oh, infinitesimal — in its details … I am an infinitely delicate machine for the reception of vibrations.’⁵⁰

Depending on her experiences she described the vibrations as rounded or square, constructive or destructive, true or false, and so on. There were vibrations of suffering — or, as she said, ‘vibrations that suffered’ — and ‘a state of vibration in which it is exclusively the Divine Vibration that possesses some truth,’⁵¹ namely the state of surrender. Once she called the Divine ‘that Sun-Vibration.’ Science has now arrived at a point where mass is energy, which means vibration (a particle is no longer a thing or object, but a vibratory ‘event’); but it is clear that in the experience of the Mother the vibrations were something very dissimilar from supposedly neutral, purely quantitative configurations, mathematically represented as graphic alternations along a given axis. To her vibrations were not only quantitatively but also qualitatively definable, they had qualitative characteristics. To her vibrations were not only material entities, but also vital, mental, overmental, supramental and essentially divine entities.

The fundamental cosmic reality of one Being incorporated in one Substance — the world of the Unity-Event and Unity-Consciousness — became to the Mother an ever more concrete reality as her cells were more and more supramentalized. We, ordinary humans, see everything as separately existing objects and beings. She, on the other hand, saw everything as states of consciousness which are the expression of the One in its infinite diversity, and as vibrations of the Truth-Consciousness much more tangible than the concretion of gross matter and therefore dangerous to the concretion of gross matter. When the supramental vibrations permeated her body, especially in the beginning, she sometimes thought that it would break up, that it would burst, although that body of hers was suited and prepared for the transformation like no other.

Therefore one of the wonders that kept amazing her was the way in which, in the process of transformation, everything was dosed from Above so that nothing catastrophic happened. For supramental matter, ‘harder than diamond and yet more fluid than gas,’ is not a bound but a free nuclear force. ‘Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells,’ Sri Aurobindo had written in Savitri. This will be the physics and the microbiology of tomorrow, but before the world reaches there we may expect a lot of sensational discoveries and shifts in the paradigms of science. The near future will be a difficult but also an interesting time.

The world does not consist of matter alone. Physical science at present looks at reality from below, from the lowest level of existence where the laws of gross matter are most applicable (though not exclusive), material laws for material processes. Of Life and the life forces hardly anything is understood, and everybody, including the psychologist, knows that psychology is little more than a caricature of a reality which remains unformulable, sometimes even a sinister caricature. The mental consciousness is still being confused with the soul, and the soul is … well, some kind of epiphenomenon, in other words a functional illusion.⁹² Everything that is most ourself (love, creativity, the sense of harmony and beauty, the aspiration to aggrandize and elevate ourself, the divination of the soul and the Divine), all of that is declared to be functional illusions or an equally mysterious sublimation of our animality — all of that, except the functional illusion of materialistic science itself, which always as it were instinctively supposes the lower to be more real than the higher.

Let us listen once more to the French biologist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod, a contemporary militant exponent of materialistic positivism. At the end of his book Le Hasard et la Nécessité (chance and necessity), he writes: ‘If he accepts this message [of positivistic materialism] in its entire significance, then Man cannot but finally awake from his eternal dream to discover his total loneliness, his radical foreignness [étrangeté]. He knows now that, like a gypsy, he moves in the margin of the universe where he has to live — a universe that is deaf to his music and indifferent as well to his hope as to his sufferings and his misdeeds.’⁵² ‘Living beings are chemical machines’ to Monod. His lyricism of despair is the lyricism of a chemical machine.

The sober answer of the Mother to the materialist was the following: ‘It so happened that I had some philosophical interest and that I have studied all problems in a certain measure. And I have discovered the teaching of Sri Aurobindo. And what he has taught — I would say ‘revealed’, but not to a materialist — is of all revealed human systems by far the most satisfactory to me. It is the most complete [system] and it answers in the most satisfying manner all questions that can be asked. It is what helps me most in life to have the feeling that it has some purpose … I do not give a whit whether others believe in it or not.’ She concluded her conversation on this subject with the words: ‘Even if everything I think is nothing but imagination, I prefer this imagination to yours.’⁵³

‘The Cells are Conscious’

One can hardly call imagination what she has gained for humanity with so much suffering. ‘Once one body has done it, it has the power of passing it on to others … It is contagious,’⁵⁴ she said. But who believed her? For a body is a body, that body there, talking, smiling, handing you your birthday card with a friendly ‘Bonne Fête!’ And it eats and rests, and sometimes it even improvises on an electronic organ. Everybody kept seeing that … functional illusion. They understood that the mental consciousness could go anywhere, for the mind could be compared to something like radio waves. They also could accept that the vital could go anywhere, for one happens to experience this in one’s dreams. But matter? The cells? How could they be present here and somewhere else at the same time? A cell is a thing; therefore when it is here it cannot be there and when it is there it cannot be here.

She had stressed it time after time, she had explained it and illustrated it with examples from her experiences: supramentalization was a phenomenon of consciousness and the consciousness of the cells was supramentalized. The part of the supramentalized cell that remained discernible to our eyes, to the perception of the mental consciousness, was a kind of thin external covering, a membrane composed of the residue of the animal origin of the cell. What human eyes still saw of the Mother consisted thereof, of that dark covering of the cells of her animal-human body, while the ‘essence’ of the cells, with their supramentalized consciousness and substance, was literally divinized and therefore, as ‘all in one and one in all,’ present everywhere. Not yet the essence of all cells however, which is why her sadhana still had to go on, but of a sufficient number to consider the supramentalization of her body as a fact. The transfer of power of all body parts and functions was in progress; more and more cells of those parts and functions were being transformed, which required that, as illustrated in the Agenda, those parts repeatedly became the focus of the process of transformation. The importance of the ‘residue’ will soon become clear.

‘The consciousness [of the cells] is more and more being awakened. The cells live consciously, aspire consciously. I have been trying to explain this — good grief! — for months! For months I have been trying to explain this!’ And she tried to explain it again: ‘The same consciousness which was the monopoly of the vital and the mental has become corporeal: the consciousness is active in the cells of the body. The cells of the body are becoming something that is conscious, totally conscious. A consciousness that is independent, that not in the least depends on the vital or the mental consciousness: it is a corporeal consciousness …

‘But because this happens in one body, it can happen in all bodies! I am not made of something different from the others.’ (Matter is one.) ‘What is different is the consciousness, that is all. [My body] is made of exactly the same substance, with the same parts. I eat the same things, and it has been made in the same way, completely. And it was as foolish, as dark, as inconscient, as stubborn as all the other bodies in the world.

‘And it has started when the doctors declared that I was very ill, that was the beginning [in April 1962]. For the whole body has been emptied of its habits and its forces; and then slowly, slowly, slowly the cells have woken up to a new receptivity and they have opened to the divine Influence, directly …

‘This is the denial of all spiritual confirmations of the past: “If you want to live fully conscious of the divine life, leave your body, for the body cannot follow.” But Sri Aurobindo has come and he has said that the body can not only follow: it can be the base manifesting the Divine. The work still has to be done.

‘But there is now a certainty. The result is still very far off … very far off. A lot has to be done in order that the crust, the experience of the most external surface as it is at present, should manifest what is going on inwardly — not “inwardly” in the spiritual depths but inwardly in the body … That will come last, and this is very good, for if it came first one would neglect the work to be done. One would be so content that one would forget to finish one’s work. It must be completely finished inside, it must be thoroughly, thoroughly changed, and then the outside will express that.

‘But everything is one single substance, totally the same everywhere and which was everywhere inconscient. And what is remarkable is that things are automatically taking place [gesture showing multiple points in the world], completely unexpected, here and there, with people who do not even know anything.’⁵⁵

This is what the Mother said in 1967 to Satprem. In 1970 he asked again — and he was all the same somebody who followed the process of transformation with utmost attention and from very nearby — how the permeation of the Supramental into gross matter was taking place. ‘But like this! This is it, this is the work: permeation,’ answered the Mother. Because of her sadhana, the supramental Force penetrated via her body into the gross matter of the Earth. She found this so natural and she had been explaining it so often that words failed her to answer this kind of question so late in the process. ‘But is this happening over the whole earth?’ — ‘Yes.’ — ‘In everybody?’ — ‘Yes.’⁵⁶

One reads a lot about the intrinsic unity of everything; it sounds beautiful, mystic, and if one is susceptible to such emotions, they provide you with a vaster, profounder way of experiencing things. But who is living in this way? Who moves with a clear awareness in the one Consciousness, in the one Substance, in the one Body? Who experiences this? Whatever she had said — whatever people had been able to read in the Notes on the Way, which after all was little more than a few pages every three months — practically nobody understood it. Her statements were always mentally interpreted according to ‘Sri Aurobindo’s system of the Integral Yoga.’ It is true that the contact with the Mother and the surrender to her sufficed to bring you all the way to the end of the road. All the same, who showed some understanding for the stupendous Work of Love she was performing for the world? Or was it not necessary that humans should understand? ‘The work is being accomplished in spite of the mental lack of understanding and even in spite of the mental understanding,’⁵⁷ she said not without irony. When somebody asked her in writing: ‘From Your long experience of over sixty years, have You found that Your expectation from us and from humanity has been sufficiently fulfilled?’ she answered: ‘As I am expecting nothing I am unable to answer the question.’⁵⁸

No doubt, the supramental Force is active in the whole world. She has repeated it so often. ‘All bodies are learning their lesson.’ Or: ‘It is not for one body that it is happening, it is for the whole Earth.’⁵⁹ ‘I feel that there are people over the whole Earth’ being touched by the Force. ‘There are exceptional responses,’ though most of those who had those responses did not realize what was actually happening to them. ‘Whatever it be, everything that is ready to receive even a spark or a particular aspect of the supramental Consciousness and Light must automatically receive it. And the effects of this Consciousness and Light will be innumerable because they certainly will adapt themselves to the possibility, to the capacity of everybody in accordance with the sincerity of his aspiration.’⁶⁰ The being which vibrates on the supramental frequency, even partially, is transformed by it, everywhere, ineluctably. The iridescent dots radiate in the whole world with ‘effects which according to their dimension are insignificant but enormous because of their quality.’⁶¹ But there remained the crust, the residue on the surface which is the result as well of the terrestrial past as of our mental way of perception.

‘To calm down all personal ambitions, I must declare the following: “If for some reason or other this body becomes unusable, the universal Mother will recommence manifesting herself in hundreds of individualities according to their capacity and receptivity, every one being a partial manifestation of the Universal Consciousness.”’⁶²

‘Mother is Getting Old’

I am the only one who is young.⁶³

— The Mother

The battle in her body between the new and the old world was leaving its traces. After all, she was now ninety years old, more than ninety. She was a living contradiction: on the one hand the Great Mother whose terrestrial body was partially supramentalized, on the other ‘a poor piece of cloth,’ but ‘a piece of cloth that suffers.’ These are her words. The crucifixion of this Avatar has lasted for years, and she too had voluntarily accepted the bitter chalice when in 1962 she had taken up her body again to hasten the coming of the Kingdom of God on Earth. But her suffering for the Earth was not spectacular. ‘I have a dislike for dramas.’

As far as the others were concerned, that little woman there was simply becoming very old. That she did not hear well anymore and found it difficult even to take a sip of fruit juice, that she had serious heart problems and a lot more symptoms here and there in her body, well yes, that is how things are when somebody reaches a very old age, isn’t it?

‘I think — I don’t know, but this seems to be the very first time — that the instrument [she herself in her incarnation], instead of having been made to bring the “Good News,” the “Revelation,” to cause the illumination, has been made to try out the realization: to do the work, the hidden labour.’⁶⁴ According to her the advanced phases of the transformation were happening at such an old age to make her physical perils look normal to the others. The people are therefore convinced that I am always dozing, that I can’t hear any more, and so on, and of course I can hardly speak anymore — [smiling] all of which means that I have become a little old woman … I hardly still belong to the old world; therefore the old world says: “She is finished.” It leaves me completely cold.’⁶⁵

We know that all organs and functions of her body were subject to the transfer of power, which is another way of saying that they were being transformed from an animal-human state into a supramental state. From the millennia-old way in which those organs and functions were used to work, they had to be transferred to a working under the direct governance of the divine Unity-Consciousness. The body had to be divinized, and if one remembers more or less how a divine body is supposed to work, one can hardly find words for the awesomeness of the undertaking. The most perceptible, external side of the process of transformation was that all organs and functions were being disorganized, which each time required a transitional period of crisis in which the Mother seemed to be terribly ‘ill.’ She therefore had to repeat time and again: ‘These are not illnesses, these are disruptions of the functionings,’ and: ‘I have nothing doing with an illness of which one can be cured: I can’t be cured! What this is all about is a labour of transformation!’⁶⁶ This meant, practically speaking, that all at once she did not know anymore how to walk or how to bring a spoon to her mouth.

We do not realize how much our simplest movements are learned and practiced, how much everything is mentalized even in the ‘instinctive’ aspects of the mental beings we are. In the womb of the mother the human baby already practices the use and the mastery of its body. But here now an end was made to the dominance of the mental consciousness; here the body was no longer governed by means of the subconsciously mentalized nervous system: it was being tuned to the direction from a supramental centre. This could not be effected all at once, for it would have caused instant death. Organ after organ and function after function were being ‘processed,’ repeatedly, and again the miracle was the dosing of the transforming Power by which each focus of the transformation — the apparent ‘illness’ — was treated up to the utmost limit bearable, after which followed a period of recuperation and assimilation of the newly heightened capacities.

During the periods of recuperation the Mother felt alright and had the most brilliant experiences; the phases of intense transformation were pure hell — ‘twenty-four hours of hell for ten minutes of paradise.’ Who else would have been willing to bear that, years in succession, not for oneself but for others? Again we hear Sri Aurobindo’s words, which might have been hers too: ‘It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear.’ Who else would have been capable of bearing that? Which other body would have been capable of being taken apart, as it were, and then reconnected to another power source, to another Force, in each of its cells? Sri Aurobindo, ‘he who knew,’ had said to her: ‘Only your body is capable of undergoing the transformation.’ She said that in order to undergo the transformation one had to be prepared to become apparently totally senile: ‘You have to accept the helplessness and even the feeble-mindedness.’ Who else would have been willing to become like that? ‘Sri Aurobindo has told me that I was the only one who had the courage for it.’⁶⁷ The consequence was that in appearance she looked rather like ‘a negation of the Truth’ than its incarnation. What occurred in the Mother was without precedent.

She could hardly see anymore, but she saw very well with her eyes closed. She was almost deaf, but if necessary she could hear a pin drop. She had trouble swallowing a bite, except when she placed her consciousness into the One that was the bite and her mouth and her throat, and then there was no trouble at all. Hunger is an expression of the corporeal life force, a need to uphold life; but the life force, the vital, had in several operations been taken away from the Mother’s body and it was only by an act of the will, in order to keep the body going, that she could eat, with great difficulty. And food always contains a certain amount of unconsciousness which she had to swallow too.

A healthy person does not realize how much life force speaking demands; it was only by an act of the will that the Mother still spoke, with a voice that seemed to come from afar or from deep in the body, artificial as it were, sometimes shrill and often breaking. It looked as if she were dozing (the poor dear!) while she was working everywhere in the world. ‘When I remain silent and quiet for hours, there is so much work that is being done, but everywhere at the same time.’ ‘What are you seeing?’ she was once asked when she had been staring in front of her for a long time. She answered: ‘Nothing. I see nothing. There is no longer “something that sees.” But I am. I am a countless number of things. I live a countless number of things. And so there is so much, so much, so much, that there is nothing anymore. I don’t know how to say this.’⁶⁸

From the Agenda we can get some idea of that extraordinary process of body-transformation and of the experiences the Mother had. Otherwise we would know as little of what she has gone through as we know of Sri Aurobindo. ‘You would not understand,’ he had said. The Mother too sometimes complained, more and more frequently, about ‘the general and total incomprehension’ even by those who were nearest to her — physically, that is. It would nevertheless be a misconception to suppose that the Agenda contains the full picture of her sadhana in the last years. The Mother has been so kind as to share some of her experiences by means of those conversations, in order that those really interested might get an idea of how the human being has been transformed into the being beyond man. The Agenda contains some communiqués but not the full report of the battle for the Future that was being waged in her.

She was involved in it every hour of the day, living in an unfailing concentration. To narrate one minute of what was happening in her Consciousness, a whole book would have been necessary, she said. ‘One might compose a whole teaching with a single one of those experiences, and I have at least several a day.’⁶⁹ During the time she was discussing one of those experiences again so much more happened. ‘I am not limited by what people call time or space. You understand, I am doing many things at the same time without anybody seeing it or being aware of it. You see,’ she said to Mona Sarkar, ‘what is happening [while he was sitting in front of her], you are not conscious of it, not even of what happened within yourself.’⁷⁰ She did narrate an experience of hers every now and then, but the experiences came in droves, even the one through the other, ‘a world unfurling at each moment.’ And they thought that she was dozing, that she drowsed her time away. ‘Look, Mother is falling asleep again!’

Or they thought she was ‘in trance.’ A yogic trance is most often an exteriorization into one of the worlds above the mental; the trance of the mediums is mostly an exteriorization into a vital world. But the Mother did not exteriorize, she did not leave reality behind. During a certain period it was even forbidden for her to leave the material reality, something she had been so skillful at. She was forced to stay where her job of transformation needed her, in the crucible of the transformation, by a merciless Mercy. The pain, the suffering were closely related with the old Matter. The only way in which she still felt a separate personality was because of the pain. It was the old Matter that suffered, and at one time she even spoke the mysterious words: ‘It is the pain that suffers.’ In Savitri Sri Aurobindo had called pain ‘the hammer of the gods,’ and the Mother said that pain was the goad which had awakened the Inconscient and made the evolution possible.

The Mother analyzed all that, even when for days she was nothing but a cry of pain and had to endure all the suffering of the world, all of it simultaneously. She was always present as a witness at everything that happened, and everything happened in herself, the vibrations suffering pain in a cell of her own body as well as the agony of a person at the other side of the Earth. ‘It is obvious that things would never change if they were not unbearable.’⁷¹ She had to go all the way to the utmost limit possible in order that the Permutation might happen all at once.

It is a principle of the evolution: a new possibility can manifest itself only when the old order has reached the point of the impossible. Were it otherwise — and it is important to comprehend this — the divine Action would be little more than a kind of divine comedy. This applies also to the world as a whole: it has to reach the impossible point if the transition to the New World must become possible. But such a transition then happens all of a sudden, just like a child after a long, hidden growth in the womb of its mother reaches the point of impossible further gestation and is suddenly born in a kind of cataclysmic happening. All signs point to the fact that the old world has arrived at the impossible point. ‘And at the end there will be a miracle’: a New Birth.

Every, day, if in the least feasible, she also continued performing her enormous task as the head and heart of the Ashram and as the Avatar who proffers the grace and blessings of her earthly presence to all who cross her path. Representatives of the whole world went crossing her path on those few square meters of her room on the second floor in the Rue de la Marine. Some insisted that she should stop that daily labour that lasted for hours, or that she should at least drastically curtail it, but she put them right. Her reasoning was simplicity itself, based on the first premise: everything is That, consequently nothing happens without the Will of That. For reasons absolutely valid within That ‘I know that everything that comes to me is necessary, otherwise it would not come … There is nothing that is not willed and that does not come with a well-defined reason.’⁷² ‘I am convinced that everything that happens is willed by the Lord.’⁷³ She lived in the absoluteness of the perception and concrete experience of the Unity, in the absoluteness of the surrender to That — which, after all, is the only sensible attitude if one has some notion of what That is.

And That, mostly called by her the Lord (le Seigneur), talked to her: ‘Each time I am complaining or grumbling a bit, he says: “But it is for me … I am the one, I, who brings all those people to you. I am the one who is arranging everything. I am the one who makes them ask. It is me!…”’⁷⁴ What happened at each and every moment was the best that could happen in the present general circumstances. ‘It is evident — it is evident — that one is placed in the best possible circumstances and with the maximum of possibilities for the action, if one sincerely wills it.’⁷⁵

All the same it was rather much: forty, fifty, sixty letters per day, fifty to one hundred or more visitors per day, plus the secretaries and heads of departments for the organization of the Ashram. And no, everything was not innocent. Using that person there in front of her, the Enemy slashed out with his stiletto, or petty humanity secreted its acids. ‘Do not be ill-humoured, you make me ill,’ she said, for she felt that within herself, like poison. She had it printed and distributed in the Ashram: know that every lie strikes my body like a blow! And there was the covert hatred towards her: ‘Go away, disappear from here.’ ‘A considerable number of persons desires that it [her body] would die.’ For so many were sure that that stooping, shrivelled, ill, suffering body would not last much longer. When on their birthday or on another occasion they sat in front of her, they thought: ‘This may be the last time I see her,’ and the Mother read their thoughts like an open book without their being aware of it. There were even those who spread stories that the Mother during their last visit had made them understand with a look that she would depart soon!

The important thing was to endure, ‘il faut durer.’ ‘The victory is for those who are the most enduring.’ Twenty times she has said something like this. And she talked less and less. No doubt, talking was an enormous physical effort for her — ‘It has become very difficult to talk, I mean the material fact of speaking’ — but this was not the main reason, for she has never avoided a physical effort.

In the first place, talking about an experience meant fixing that experience, as it were, and thereby limiting it. ‘It is very, very inexpressible; this means that, as soon as you try to express it, it becomes mentalized and is no longer that. This is the reason why it is so difficult to express. I cannot talk about it.’⁷⁶ One sees time and again how the Mother gradually gives an ever more accurate account of her important experiences — and there are so many we know nothing of — encircling them as it were with intense concentration to be sure not to distort them, and that she only defines an experience definitively when it has run its full course and thus has become completely clear. ‘It is not good to talk when one is still underway,’ she said, and this regarded as well her separate experiences as her sadhana as a whole. ‘As soon as you begin to see, to understand and to formulate [the experience], it is already something that belongs to the past.’⁷⁷

Secondly, her experiences occurred outside and above the mental domain, which meant that the fact of expressing them in (mental) words pulled the whole experience down unto a level that no longer corresponded with it. What is supramental cannot be put into mental words.⁹³ ‘The consciousness is lowered as soon as I begin to talk,’ the Mother said. ‘Words, languages are inappropriate to express something that surpasses the [human] consciousness. As soon as one formulates it, it descends on a lower level … As soon as one expresses it in words, it looks like a caricature.’⁷⁸ ‘The spiritual truth is a truth of the spirit and not of the intellect,’⁷⁹ Sri Aurobindo had said.

Thirdly, to express an experience in words means concretizing it in a plane where undesirable and hostile forces may get a grip on it and can thereby thwart the results of the experience. This is the rationale of the age-old yogic principle that one should talk about one’s experiences only to the guru.

Fourthly, to really understand an experience one has to have had the experience oneself, or one should at least have access to the spiritual level on which it has occurred. The Pioneers were too far ahead. This was the reason for Sri Aurobindo’s refusal to answer certain questions or to explain certain matters; it was also the reason for the Mother’s relativizing everything she had said or written. ‘If one has not had the experience oneself, reading about it is of no use. We do publish the Bulletin, but what I have just said is true.’⁸⁰ And this truth is applicable to everything Sri Aurobindo, she herself and others have published or are publishing about them. The Supramental on the Earth is a fact of realization by the Avatar. If this fact is a reality, it works itself out despite all human opinions and actions or reactions. But, of course, all inspired writings have an intrinsic force and may have an effect on the readers because their soul may understand what their intelligence cannot, and because an intellectual approach may be of great importance in certain phases of the soul’s development.

Sometimes she still formulated and wrote things when they were inwardly dictated to her, and then the wording occurred spontaneously together with the imperative compulsion to pronounce them or write them down (as in the case of the charter of Auroville). But she hardly spoke on her own initiative in the last year. ‘I can do so much more without words.’ Besides, what visitors had to say or to ask was usually so petty in comparison with the panorama of their soul spread out before the Mother, including the soul’s past and future, and on which she could work directly. Even to Satprem she said as early as in 1970: ‘If you want to make me talk, you have to come with questions, otherwise it is impossible.’⁸¹ She needed a receptivity, a questioning presence to make answer a body that never acted on its own initiative anymore. Bertolt Brecht has written a poem about the unknown person who must have begged Lao-tze for his wisdom and to whom we therefore owe the Tao-te Ching. Without Satprem’s questioning presence, cultural baggage and analytical intellect, the conversations which constitute the Agenda would never have taken place. That afterwards he put himself so much to the fore will prove to be of minor importance.

It is touching how the conversations in the last part of the Agenda are as it were ebbing out. ‘Je finirai par me taire,’ a day will come that I will remain silent, the Mother had said already in 1969. And this is indeed what has happened. ‘Rien à dire,’ nothing to say, were her words towards the end of her life practically time after time. ‘Mother manages to say nothing,’ Satprem notes about the meeting of 30 May 1970. ‘The [body] likes speaking less and less … I would prefer to say nothing anymore … I cannot speak. Besides, I have nothing to tell.’

Although the documents may give the impression to the reader that the Mother was slowly slipping into a sort of lethargic state, on the one hand because her health became apparently more and more miserable and on the other hand because she hardly spoke anymore, it would be a mistake to conclude, as most have done, that she was deteriorating with death as the inevitable consequence. ‘It is impossible to put into words because it is so multifaceted, so complex,’ she said about her experiences. Then too there was the worldwide dynamic action of the Mother-in-the-sadhana, whose physical visible body (that functional fiction) as the interface with the Earth, as the means to ‘touch the Earth,’ was transforming Matter with the utmost intensity. The whole of her ‘yogic’ act was her surrender, expressed in word or attitude in ‘what You want,’ in order to allow the supramental Force, which she saw as a golden mass above the Earth, to penetrate into Matter as purely as possible. There was the paradox of apparent deterioration and an ever greater Glory. ‘Outwardly I am nothing anymore, but inwardly there is such an enormous power.’ And because she saw her outward deterioration reflected in the consciousness of the persons present, she reminded them from time to time, with sweet irony, that her consciousness had not deteriorated: ‘This old age is purely physical … but from the standpoint of the perception, of the consciousness, there is no diminution; on the contrary, it is becoming ever more clear and ever more accurate.’⁸² And finally she kept silent.

What has happened in those last six months?

Six months, at the speed with which her action, her transformation and her experiences took place, is a long time.

And she had then a supramental body.