Beyond Man

Chapter Twenty-two: Making Possible the Impossible

By what alchemy shall this lead of immortality be turned into that gold of divine Being?¹

— Sri Aurobindo

The Mother played her last game of tennis only a few days before she withdrew. She had started playing tennis — ‘my passion’ — at the age of eight; she was now eighty. ‘Being young means never to accept something as irrevocable.’ These are her words.

Where had she come by now? As we have seen, the bridge between the already existing supramental world and this, our world, had to be built. The ship from the New World played an important role in the construction. ‘This was the significance of the experience of 3 February 1958: the establishing of a link between the two worlds. For both worlds are there all right, not one above the other but one inside the other, in two different dimensions. But there is no connection between them: they overlap each other, by way of speaking, without being connected. In the experience of 3 February I have seen certain persons from here and from elsewhere who belong already to that supramental world in part of their being, but there is no connection, no junction. The time has come at this very moment in universal history in which the link must be established.’²

That happened in her. It was the reason why the Avatar had taken up a material body: to be able to come into contact with Matter, ‘pour toucher la matière’, to touch Matter, for this was an indispensable prerequisite for its transformation. This contact occurred on the plane where her embodied being had a direct connection with Matter as such: in the cells of her body.

During the following fifteen years the transformation of the Mother’s body cells is an enormously rich, varied, multifaceted, spellbinding and sometimes also baffling process — baffling for the understanding of beings like us, that is, to whom spiritual experiences are for the most part abstract imaginings, not to talk about experiences of the frequency and range of those taking place in the Mother. To her awareness things happened at every moment, far too many for her to store in her active memory and talk about it afterwards, although she has been so kind as to share some of her experiences in order that we might construe some idea of that fantastic process of transformation. It is something totally new, never tried out or even thought out before, formulated in words inadequate to express the experiences, which therefore to us at first sight seem unthinkable, unimaginable, and maybe weird or outlandish. We know that Sri Aurobindo was a master of the English language; the Mother, in her way, was a master of French, if only to express such completely new, complex and transmental experiences in simple and clear words.

In this process of transformation some lines of experience can be made out which in the course of years are coming to the fore time and again, but each time further elaborated, more fully developed, larger in scope. We know that the Mother has never had the same experience twice, that she never stopped after an exhausting effort to congratulate herself or to enjoy the fruit of her labour, and that she kept up her progress ‘with the speed of a jet plane.’ She had remained on Earth to do a specific job in her great love for humanity, the love of Savitri for Satyavan. She had already prepared her body for its task in her mother’s womb; she had trained it so that it might fully and exclusively be at the service of this task without any consideration for herself. She never looked forward to a limit, to a crowning of her effort, but always did the maximum possible ‘here and now.’ Hers was a life of an unimaginable concentration, every hour, every minute, every second. Indeed, so enormous was the effort, so much was at stake and so great the danger that a lack of concentration, even for a moment, could have had disastrous consequences. One remembers Sri Aurobindo’s stumbling on the tiger skin.

Typical in the evolution of the Mother were the ups and downs in its curving, broadening course. She noticed it herself: each time she felt strong and energetic enough for her body to tackle another obstacle, the blow fell — the blow which activated the crisis by which the process of transformation would be further elaborated. In most cases this was a so-called illness, sometimes accompanied by an attack of black magic: a new part of the vicious Subconscient together with its representatives had to be faced, fought and transformed. She waged the battle, strenuously gained the upper hand, conquered the resistance, formulated the experience for herself and sometimes for others — and got ready for the next crisis. What she has suffered none can imagine, because none would be able to endure the same ordeals.

What was it all about again? A new species had to appear on the Earth, this time a divine species of supramental beings, as Sri Aurobindo called them. Somewhere this was decreed. After the many cycles of the human presence and evolution on Earth, the time had come for the arrival of this new species without humankind even being aware of it. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the Avatar, the Two-in-One, had come to make this possible. Therefore, they had to take the past of the evolution upon and into them, and they had to work in order to make the earthly embodiment of the new species realizable. To be able to descend deeper than ever into Matter and its foundations, the Subconscient and Inconscient, they first had to climb higher than ever in the Spirit by means of a new Yoga beyond the existing yogas. Only after discovering there the divine Unity-Consciousness and acquiring it, could they descend more deeply into the caves of existence, guided by the Light of which they had become the bearers.

The supramental world had approached very near to the Earth. Its Light and Power were definitively established on Earth by the Manifestation in 1956. For the beings of the supramental world to embody on the magic planet which is our Earth, it was necessary that her gross matter should be refined or transmuted by the supramental Substance. Thus would come an end to her long agony, for she would literally become the Kingdom of God. Now the last phase of the preparatory work was being done by the Mother, her own body serving as testing material, as the instrument and intermediary by which earthly matter could be ‘touched’ and transformed. ‘I am the guinea pig,’ she said with a smile. An indispensable condition and the only means of all this was the transformation of the cells.

To understand what follows, two points should be kept in mind. The first is that the sadhana of the Mother now took place in her body. All the amazing things we are going to hear are about her body, which is not the same as her gross body which people thought they were perceiving. The perceptions of the human being are limited and deformed by the instruments of his perceptions called senses. They are, moreover, limited by the mental processing of the sense perceptions, in its turn influenced by the deformations of the senses and a priori limited by our mental consciousness, by the mechanisms of division to which this consciousness automatically subjects the One Existence.

The Mother in that room on the second floor of the central building of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Rue de la Marine in Pondicherry, was something completely different from and more than that old, frail, stooped body by which all were mesmerized. She was the Universal Mother, ‘the divine Mahashakti, original Power, supreme Nature, holding in herself infinite existence and creating the wonders of the cosmos,’³ as Sri Aurobindo wrote. Of herself, she said: ‘The central Consciousness, here, in the material world, is the Mahashakti.’⁴ And Sri Aurobindo again: ‘All powers of all the planes must be seen and known as self-formulations of the one spiritual Shakti, infinite in being, consciousness and Ananda.’⁵ He also wrote about ‘the supramental personality’ of the Mother ‘which from behind the veil presides over the aim of the present manifestation.’⁶ This was the source of her existence, of her knowledge, of her action. ‘There is nothing that is impossible to her who is the conscious Power and universal Goddess all-creative from eternity and armed with the Spirit’s omnipotence.’⁷ What happens in the core of the atom and the quasar, in each heartbeat of a body and in the fire of God’s Love is her work, intended and executed by her, borne and brought to fulfilment. From this we may conclude that nothing happened to or in the body of the Mother that she herself had not willed and for which she was not responsible, totally, unconditionally. This conclusion is inevitable if she was really that — ‘either she is that, or she is not’ — not only in theory and feelings of devotion, but in most concrete reality.

But: ‘There is the Mother who is carrying on the sadhana and the Divine Mother, both being one but in different poises.’⁸ (Sri Aurobindo) The Mother has explained this: how some wanted to see her exclusively in her almighty divine glory, and how they expected from her that also in a body, in an evolutionary world with a preordained process, she would perform what is possible or allowed only in a divine world; others, on the contrary, saw her rather as the human albeit divinely inspired incarnation, as the avant-gardiste of the Integral Yoga and as their guru. With all possible combinations and variations in between. The Divine Mother had taken the burden of the world upon her in a human body and she had accepted all consequences of this commitment.

To do this, it was necessary for her to limit voluntarily her instrumental knowledge and power. This was her sacrifice at the origin of her incarnation, before all the suffering she would be subjected to: the sacrifice of the divine accepting to become human in order that humanity might be divinized. ‘All knowledge is available in her universal self, but she brings forward only what is needed to be brought forward so that the working is done,’⁹ wrote Sri Aurobindo. (All this had been applicable to himself too.) In Savitri we read about ‘her deep designs which from herself she had veiled.’¹⁰

Satprem, for instance, writes in his trilogy about the Mother: ‘Mother has never known. This seems unbelievable, but it is true,’¹¹ and also: ‘Mother herself did not know what she was doing.’¹² This is an opinion which at least should be qualified: the Mother as body in transformation did not know what was awaiting her the next moment or at the end of her adventure, the consciousness of her body did not know that; but her soul (as we will see), her higher consciousness (supramentalized and therefore essentially divine) and her inner being as the Great Mother of course knew every bit of it. For anything whatsoever, including her incarnated existence and her own Yoga of physical transformation, could only have been willed, planned and executed by her higher aspects of being. There is no doubt that the Mother knew that the development of her transformation was preordained, but that the knowledge of it was (mostly) denied to her body because such knowledge would have had negative repercussions on her yogic effort. ‘It is absolutely certain that it would be wrong if one knew what is going to happen, for then one wouldn’t do what is required.’¹³ She herself found it so ironical: ‘To be sure that one knows’ — somewhere — ‘and to ask oneself how it is coming about.’¹⁴ ‘It is indeed known, somewhere in the back of the consciousness.’ Sometimes when she tried to know something, she was bluntly told from Above: ‘This does not concern you,’ or: ‘This is none of your business.’ At times she said: ‘I know perfectly well how it will be, but I do not know when.’¹⁵ Once this was in connection with the course of the process of transformation and another time in connection with its outcome.

But it was always her body that did not know, the not yet transformed consciousness of the cells of her body, because such knowledge would have influenced its attitude and yogic striving. And this is the second point we should keep in mind: the body of the Mother was something quite different from what was ‘naturally’ visible. In their interpretations of the sadhana and the passing away of the Mother, the commentators always keep their eyes fixed on her external figure, on her visible ‘human-like’ presence, and it is mainly that external figure they call ‘the Mother’. If they express themselves differently every now and then, it is because they cannot but quote statements from her which tell something quite other — but in their conclusions they again fall back into their first attitude concentrating on that apparently deteriorating body, however much respect or devotion they may profess for ‘the divine Mother’, for ‘sweet Mother’. Still, the Mother had impressed it so strongly on them: ‘I am talking about cellular realizations, don’t forget it!’ or: ‘I am talking about something completely material’ — in the period of her life we have now reached in our story, when her sadhana was the sadhana of her body, of the cells of her body, of the matter of those cells. That is why she called her yoga ‘the yoga of the body’, ‘the yoga of the cells’, ‘the physical yoga’, ‘the yoga of the physical vibrations.’ ‘It is the experience of the body, you understand, physical, material — the experience of the body.’¹⁶ In the levels of being above matter, everything was ready, worked out; that work was finished and even the mental and vital were completely supramentalised. This now was about the transformation of Matter, ‘don’t forget it’. But this sadhana was so new that it was still forgotten, wrongly interpreted or simply not understood.

When she said ‘I’, whom did she mean? Who was that ‘I’? In most cases the ‘I’ was no more than a personal pronoun as grammatical subject, ‘because otherwise one cannot talk.’ Or it referred to the body which was narrating its experience. Or it was the psychic consciousness in the heart. (‘There [the heart], it is like a sun, all the time. It is like a radiant sun. It is there that I work — it is from there that I work … This and that [gesture towards her supraphysical forms of being in her heart and above her head] is so natural that I do not pay attention to it anymore: it is my way of being.’¹⁷) Or ‘I’ was ‘the high Lady Above,’ or it was the central Supreme Consciousness, or simply a consciousness enabling her to converse with other people. One could fill pages with definitions of that personal pronoun ‘I’ as used by the Mother in later years. It is therefore essential to take this into account when reading her conversations so that one does not commit the error of identifying the Mother with the instrument which was her body — a body of which she soon will say that it is not even her own.

The Mother giving Darshan from her balcony, late 1960s

The Pillars of the Mother’s Yoga

For this sadhana which I am doing, there are certain guiding indications which are being followed. I have some sentences from Sri Aurobindo.¹⁸

— The Mother

If this yoga of the cells was so new that the Mother even used new names for it, was this still the yoga of Sri Aurobindo, called by him the Integral Yoga? Or was it a continuation, a development of his yoga of which he had had no notion? It goes without saying that Sri Aurobindo could not have experienced everything which awaited the Mother after his departure in the task he had transferred to her, for it was the intention that she should continue the risky journey of discovery in the ‘virgin forest.’ At first, the Mother more than once let it be understood that she was involved in something completely new, something for which she could find no explanation in her past exchanges with Sri Aurobindo or in his writings. But little by little, and one may say to her own astonishment, she time and again found in his texts indications foreshadowing, as it were, her experience, and this is probably the greatest testimony to Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual genius. On the one hand he must have progressed much farther in his sadhana than commonly supposed; on the other hand this is a striking illustration of the exactness with which he had viewed the whole of the supramental process of transformation, of the course of the great River. Who can tell what he had discovered in his spiritual and occult explorations, what had been revealed to him by the Gods and the Godhead, what he knew without revealing it, not even to the Mother in her sadhana because for her the time proper for such knowledge had not yet come?

Looking back over the Mother’s experiences in her last fifteen years and trying to consider them as a whole, one finds there clearly the foundations of the Yoga as expounded by Sri Aurobindo in the Synthesis and in his letters.

The central pillar of the Integral Yoga is the total SURRENDER of oneself to the Divine. One finds the surrender on each and every page of the Agenda: ‘Ce que Tu veux, ce que Tu veux’ (what You want, what You want — ‘You’ again being here the confidential form of addressing the Divine as the most intimate part of ourselves). ‘Day and night without interruption: “As You want it, Lord, as You want it.”’¹⁹ This, in all her difficulties and suffering, was ‘the sole refuge,’ ‘the sole means,’ ‘the sole solution.’ She said it with words or she only turned the palms of her hands upwards in a gesture of surrender.

It was her central attitude of unconditional Openness, acquiescence, availability for the new creation. And in our thoughts we go back as far as 1914, when Sri Aurobindo said that never before had he seen a surrender like that of Mirra at her very first meeting with him. The surrender of the ignorant instrument to the Divine Will is the cornerstone of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga, the theme with variations of his Synthesis — and the fundamental yogic act of the Mother in the long years of her glorious ordeal. When the sound of her voice ebbed away in the last months of which we have the recordings, these were almost the only words she still spoke: ‘Ce que Tu veux.’ It was her central mantra.

Of SINCERITY she had said: ‘This is why I have told you that it is not easy to take up the yoga. If you are not sincere, don’t start.’²⁰ ‘Whatever the way one follows’ — and everybody has his own way — ‘there is only one means, one only, I know only one: a perfect sincerity — but then a sincerity that is perfect.’²¹ This kind of sincerity, however, is something completely different from not telling untruth. It means essentially that all parts of the embodied being are gathered and in direct contact with the core of the embodiment: the psychic being. At first sight this is a somewhat strange definition perhaps, but on further examination it is the basic process of the yoga. For the psychic being is the representative of Truth. The parts which stay apart from the psychic being decline the contact with the Light that is Truth and remain the subordinates of their dark origin. ‘Sincerity is the safeguard, it is the protection, it is the guide, and finally it is the transforming power.’²²

Did the Mother then, after all those years of a superhuman sadhana, still have ‘grey spots’ of insincerity, or were there parts of her being still separated from her psychic being — she who was so exalted in the eyes of so many? Yes, she had. Very tiny ones, but innumerable. In fact as many as there were cells in her body. ‘Psychologically’ (psychically, mentally and vitally) the Mother was the purest, most truthful, most sincere being that has ever walked on this Earth, but her body consisted of the same matter all our bodies are made of — and the base of that matter is the Night of the Subconscient and Inconscient, that is to say of the NO, the Negation at the Origin, of the Falsehood which resulted in the division and separation within the Unity.

‘The very first necessity for spiritual perfection is a perfect EQUALITY,’²³ wrote Sri Aurobindo in The Synthesis of Yoga. Equality is not the same as indifference; it is an active attitude based on the acceptance of the world, of all things manifested, all events, all experiences, for they can only come from the One, there being nothing else. An imperturbable equality was named by the Mother as one of the two characteristics that might allow an outward recognition of the supramental being. (The second was an absolute certainty, ‘a cubic certainty,’ of the knowledge.) It is the clarity which nothing can render turbid, by which things can happen according to their truth-content, to their divine purity and reality, without being subject to any kind of deformation and darkening caused by the Shadow. Time and again the Mother, in that explosive process of transformation of hers, felt the absolute necessity of equality in the cells of her body — of a state of equality in which the Unity-Consciousness could express itself in all its purity. Not only was equality precious during the invasions in her body of the Golden Light or the red-golden Fire, but also it was indispensable in the midst of the incessant swarms of vibrations surrounding her and rushing through her, the smallest pulse of which she was fully conscious.

The fourth fundamental feature of this yoga was the underlying principle of everything: UNITY. All is one, all is one single Being, ‘don’t forget it.’ ‘Being’, to us, is one of the most abstract words, but in the spiritual experience there are no abstractions. For abstraction is a fictitious projection of the impotently grasping mental consciousness. Unity is the basis; Unity is the stuff of experience; Unity is the aim of the supramental transformation; Unity is the medium in which the supramental being exists. Unity is the Divine. From that we come, in that we live, to that we go. ‘There is nothing but That.’

The Mother was familiar with the Unity-experience in her mental and vital being, for in these parts she had realized Unity. But the cells, in their materiality, represented extreme division. Her sadhana — it should be stressed again and again — was happening exactly on that level. That was where the ultimate Victory had to be won, where the supramental Unity-Consciousness had to replace the infinite inframental division. Let this not be misunderstood: the consciousness of the cells had to be transformed into the divine Unity-Consciousness. In other words the cells had to be divinized! It was on this level that she underwent also the terrors of the Subconscient, and it was here that, more poignantly than anywhere else, the question was put of the wherefore of our World of darkness, ignorance, suffering and death.

Wherefore?

The question of the wherefore of a world like ours — her so often repeated ‘pourquoi?’ — which is supposed to exist in the divinity of Being, Consciousness, and Bliss, the question as to the cause of ‘that plunge of Light into its own shadow,’²⁴ sounds like a gloomy litany, like a heart-rending lament through the ages. Suffering is ‘so great a stumbling-block to our understanding of the universe,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo, ‘for we cannot suppose that the only Being is compelled by something outside itself, as no such thing exists.’²⁵ The question as to the wherefore of things had to be stated ‘trenchantly,’ he said, and the Mother endorsed this: ‘Why would there be a manifestation, then? What would be the use of it? It would mean that there is an absurdity at the beginning of the creation. If it had not been done on purpose, it would mean that things are not done on purpose, or that He had made a mistake, or that He had no understanding of what He intended to do — that he thought he was doing one thing but in fact did another!’²⁶ Such a God one can only call a blunderer or a monster and his creation a hell. Yet the Divine is assumed to be a Being of Love and Bliss … Each time she was plunged once more into the fire of her suffering, she again asked the question as to the wherefore of existence. She sometimes cried it out aloud.

There is no mental answer, no answer on our level of comprehension to this problem. ‘The mystery of the universe is suprarational … We have to go beyond the intellect in order to bridge the gulf and penetrate the mystery; to leave an unsolved contradiction cannot be the final solution,’²⁷ writes Sri Aurobindo in The Life Divine. Sometimes the Mother shoved the problem aside: ‘Things are what they are because they are what they are … One has to start from what is and go on from there.’²⁸ Which reminds us of one of Sri Aurobindo’s aphorisms: ‘I believe with you, my friends, that God, if he exists, is a demon and an ogre. But after all what are you going to do about it?’²⁹

But after every ordeal the Mother, in her body that had become the body of the world, came out of the crucible more transformed, more divinized. After every cry of existential desperation, which was the cry of humanity in her, the design, the aim and the cause of the divine manifestation became more clearly discernible, not mentally, not abstractly, not theoretically or theologically, but concretely, ecstatically concrete. She found out, literally in the body, that omnipotence remains omnipotent even when apparently impotent, that the Light of Omniscience keeps glowing in the darkness of the Ignorance, and that no suffering can exist without Bliss. The universe is without flaws; however, we are involved in processes of evolutionary growth, so much so that the meaning of the whole and of its parts is temporarily hidden from us, as is the meaning of our suffering. ‘It is Joy that has created and it is Joy that will accomplish.’³⁰ (the Mother) Our suffering is necessary in order that our Joy may become complete and that unnameable, unending suffering by which man has permeated matter with his sweat and blood will find its justification in the Joy at the time of man’s completion. We have known that at the beginning, no doubt. For it was our Self, the real Self in us, that chose the adventure of discovery and the growth in Matter; we have chosen to forget our Self for the future joy of rediscovering It. This joy must at least be equivalent to all the suffering throughout the ages — which is the mystical equation behind the universe. Somewhere we are remembering this in the depths behind the mists of our consciousness, otherwise we would not be so strongly attached to life. Suffering is ‘the hammer of the gods,’³¹ the purification and strengthening which enables the divinization.

The multidimensional personality of the Mother, who to the human eye was only visible in that fragile body, her sadhana which by now had completely descended into the body, had become ‘the yoga of matter’, and her journey into the unknown a clear continuation of what Sri Aurobindo began and partially worked out — all this provides us with the perspective in which we should place the experiences of the Mother’s last years in order to be able to understand them to some extent. A complete understanding of matters spiritual, and a fortiori of matters supramental, is only possible by identification. Those who want to experience the transformation have to follow on the path the Mother has trodden. She has invited everybody to this adventure.

The Universalization of the Body

The Mother felt that the prerequisite of the process of supramental transformation at this point was the ‘universalization’ of her body. Is this possible? Can this small, limited and vulnerable body in which we are enclosed be universalized? In The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo wrote that the individual must be the first instrument of the transformation, but that an isolated individual transformation is not sufficient and cannot even be completely attainable. ‘It is sure, for I know it by experience, that there is a degree of individual perfection and transformation which cannot be realized without the whole of humanity having made a certain progress … There are things in matter that cannot be transformed as long as the whole of matter has not undergone a particular degree of transformation. One cannot isolate oneself completely, it is not possible,’³² said the Mother. Sri Aurobindo stated his own experience: ‘[The sadhak of the Integral Yoga] often finds that even after he has won persistently his own personal battle, he still has to win it over and over again in a seemingly interminable war, because his inner existence has already been so much enlarged that not only it contains his own being with its well-defined needs and experiences, but is in solidarity with the being of others, because in himself he contains the universe.’³³

The only real, conscious sadhaks of the Integral Yoga in their time were the initiators of it, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, and after Sri Aurobindo’s passing the Mother alone. Many followed in their footsteps, but then by an inner orientation based more on surrender and intuition than on knowledge or a consciously directed yogic effort; their integral yoga was more a yoga of intention than of knowledge, insight or purpose. Yet, it is clear that the adhara, even of the Avatar, is a limited instrument because it is individualized. It was possible to enlarge this limitation on the mental and vital level almost boundlessly, so much so that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had been able to supramentalize first their mental and then their vital; but the matter of their body cells, however much impregnated by the psychic and supramental presence, remained bound within a given shape of the body. ‘An individual transformation would not be the creation of a new type of beings or a new collective life.’³⁴

The evolutionary gain to be won by this Yoga, by this new development in the life of planet Earth, was clearly delineated. All previous Avatars had universalized themselves in their mental and vital to turn their evolutionary effort into a terrestrial acquisition. The mental consciousness, for instance, was turned into an established element of life upon Earth thanks to the work of the Avatar Shri Rama. But this time the Avatar had to universalize his body, as the new evolution of consciousness could no longer take place in the ‘subtle’ ranges of the mental and vital; it had to happen in matter itself, in the matter of which the body of the Avatar, just like all other bodies, consisted. MATTER had to become conscious with a higher, nay, a divine consciousness, a Unity-Consciousness. What in Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had become possible in the Spirit must now be realized in Matter. A tremendous revolutionary-evolutionary step, indeed an Umwertung aller Werte. Small wonder that those who in former times had seen the future possibility of a step of this order, great beings everywhere on the Earth, never had dared to try out such a transmutation in their flesh.

The means, the instruments, the testing material of this transmutation were the tiny but extremely complex little building bricks of the body: the cells. The cells are a product of evolution. They contain matter, they contain life-force, and they have their own consciousness — which irrefutably appears from their wonderful organization of which molecular biology daily discovers new and amazing secrets. The cells too, like everything in the universe, have the divine Presence within them, for otherwise they could not be. Nothing can be without That.

Once, when the Mother was fully involved in the yoga of the cells, their composition and modus operandi were shown to her. ‘The cells,’ she said afterwards, ‘have a composition and a structure which agree with that of the universe.’³⁵ Science is being forced to recognize that in the universe everything exists in relation with everything else, the atoms and the elementary particles⁹¹ too. The cosmos looks more and more like a living organism, like an individual — as the Seers have always said. ‘The cell, in her internal composition, receives the vibration of the corresponding state in the composition of the whole,’ said the Mother. ‘Every cell is a miniature world corresponding to the whole.’ ‘Every vibration in one centre awakes automatically a vibration in another centre,’³⁶ she had said years ago. Behind and in everything is the Unity.

In our body’s cells there sits a hidden Power
That sees the unseen and plans eternity.³⁷

— Savitri

The cell contains the Unity-Consciousness in itself, but this Consciousness, of course, is not manifest, otherwise the cell — and we too as a consequence — would now already in appearance as well as in essence be divine. The cell is a product of evolution and therefore carries in itself its evolutionary past. ‘Every cell has its own consciousness,’ said the Mother, but this consciousness too is already composite. Deep within there is the Unity-Consciousness, the reason why the cell is able to vibrate on the rhythms and movements of the whole. Its surface-consciousness, on the contrary, is its evolutionary consciousness, gradually increased by each evolutionary saltus, which each time is experienced as a calamity. (The supramental turn about will perhaps also be experienced as a catastrophe by us.) The cells carry the remembrance or imprint of those ‘calamities’ in them.

Inflicting still its habit on the cells
The phantom of a dark and evil start
Ghostlike pursues all that we dream and do.³⁸

— Savitri

According to Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, the remembrance of Life, therefore of man and therefore of his parts, goes much farther back than one normally imagines, and contains elements of its whole evolution — even of experiences in prehistoric cycles, even of lives on other planets, and all the way back to before the pralayas, the cosmic contractions that followed the cosmic expansions.⁹² The result of all this is, firstly, that the cell obstinately clings to its evolutionary acquisitions, structure and way of functioning. Thanks to them it has been able to survive, and it knows from experience that every structural genetic alteration (or mutation) may imperil its existence, for mutations are pernicious almost without exception. To a higher form of consciousness the cell’s surface way of functioning therefore looks mechanical, stubborn and dull, not to say irrational or stupid. Secondly, the cell always fears the worst, its attitude is spontaneously catastrophic. Life, of which it is the bearer, has always existed in the shadow and under the threat of death. One look at animal life in nature gives us instant illustrations of this. For all forms which Life has created up to now survival ever remains precarious and is constantly accompanied by hunger, pain, mutilation, illness and finally death, which is their only certainty. It has to be a strong Ananda indeed which keeps manifesting life with so much enthusiasm, in such abundance, notwithstanding all these negative factors.

Therefore the supramental yoga had to take up the confrontation with the ‘laws’ of life, with habits millions of years old, to change the structures built by them or to make these structures susceptible to change. ‘We do not want to obey the orders of Nature, even if those orders are supported by billions of years of habits,’³⁹ said the Mother. Good, but once more: is this possible? All sensible people up to then had answered this question in the negative. Who might be so demented to cross swords with the laws of nature? Is not even God bound by what He once ordained? ‘Across each road stands armed a stone-eyed law …’⁴⁰

But Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had come to change the Law. Every Avatar incarnates to establish a new Order which of necessity has to come into conflict with the existing Order. It is precisely through the person of the Avatar that the Divine changes the structure of things established in a previous stage of the evolution against the former Order, etc., all the way back to the Beginning. The laws of Matter do not allow for the laws of Life, they are incompatible with them, and yet Life has colonized Matter and united intimately with it. Likewise Mind has worked out a harmonious coexistence with Life and Matter. This proves that in the course of the evolution of our magic planet the impossible has proved to be possible on many occasions. ‘The impossible is the certainty of tomorrow,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo. We have the extraordinary privilege to assist at the event of those great Impossibilities becoming possible this very moment

‘No Law is absolute,’⁴¹ Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Life Divine. ‘What Nature does, is really done by the Spirit.’⁴² And the Mother said: ‘Down here, there are no fixed laws … Not two cases are the same.’⁴³ ‘If there are not two combinations in the universe who are the same, how can one establish laws and what is the absolute verity of those laws?’⁴⁴ She even said that the universe is re-created at each moment, which means that in principle everything is possible.

But then only in principle. ‘All is possible, but all is not licit — except by a recognisable process; the Divine Power itself imposes on its action limits, processes, obstacles, vicissitudes,’⁴⁵ Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter. ‘The Law! The Law! It is the Law! Don’t you understand that it is the LAW? You cannot change the Law. — But I have come to change the Law! In that case: pay the price.’⁴⁶ These are the Mother’s words. And she has paid the price.

The domain of the cells in her was the interface where the Old and the New World met. There the transmutation had to take place. There the Unity-Consciousness had to be infused into Matter, from above or from outside, to connect and unite with the Unity-Consciousness that always was and is present in Matter. If this operation was successful, the cells and the Matter of the cells would effectively possess the Unity-Consciousness. The cell, divinized, would be prepared to become part of a divine body, the body of the new species on Earth. That is where the battle was fought. ‘Le corps, c’est le champ de bataille’ — the body of the Mother was the battlefield where the battle for the world of tomorrow was waged and decided.

Mantra

It was while watching another Indian film, Dhruva, shown at the Playground on 29 April 1958, that the Mother heard a mantra being recited for quite some time and marked that those sounds had a profound and favourable influence on her body, on the cells of her body.

A mantra is a formula of words. ‘The Word has power,’ wrote Sri Aurobindo, ‘even the ordinary written word has a power. If it is an inspired word it has still more power.’⁴⁷ ‘The mantra is the pronounced word that has a creative power … It is not only the idea, it is the sound that has the creative power … Sound always has a power. It has a lot more power than people imagine.’⁴⁸ (the Mother) The poets have always known this. There are those inspired formulations which remain vibrating in the mind or in the heart of the auditor or of the reader listening with his inner ear. It is then as if the reader himself becomes the poet, or rather, both become one in the vibration of the words. This power has also been discovered by the advertising world which exploits it for its commercial purposes. In religions the mantric power is evoked by constant repetition of certain formulas, an exercise called japa in India. An example is the constant repetition of the Lord’s Prayer or of the Hail Mary. The essential elements of all religions are closely related. And of course there are also the spells of black and white magic.

K.D. Sethna gave in a talk the following description of the mantra: ‘The Mantra is the highest spiritual poetry: it is the Divine, as it were, expressing Himself directly, not through any other medium of consciousness. The Divine Being, getting embodied in words on the very plane of the Divine Himself: that is the Mantra. It is the Word from the Overmind, the Supermind’s delegate that has been the governing Power of the universe so far.’⁴⁹

The supreme and generally known mantra is OM, rendered in Sanskrit by a single graceful glyph. The Mother called OM ‘the Lord’s signature.’⁵⁰ ‘With the help of OM one can realise the Divine. OM has a transforming power. OM represents the Divine,’⁵¹ she said. For a long time, actually since her Parisian years, she had had ‘a whole stock of mantras,’ some of which have been published by Satprem in the first volume of the Agenda as ‘Prayers of the consciousness of the cells.’ In a footnote accompanying the conversation of 11 May 1963, we even read the intriguing words: ‘When I say that my mantra has the power of immortality, I mean the other one, the one I do not talk about. I have never given the words of it.’⁵²

The basic mantra of the Mother was ‘Ce que Tu veux’ (‘what You want’). This mantra, sometimes in a slightly varying form depending on the need of the circumstances, welled up from her heart every second of her existence. It formed the ground of her mission on the Earth. It was her ‘sole refuge’, ‘the only means’ of the supramental transformation. These simple words were the expression of her surrender, of the total giving of herself which was the stuff of her whole earthly existence, as it is the stuff of the whole Integral Yoga. When her voice will slowly die away, those are the words we will still hear, and when those words grow too faint it is still their expression in a fervent gesture, both palms turned upwards, we will see. Her sadhana was one of surrender; the mantra of her soul could be no other but an utterance of that surrender.

But in 1958 her body was in need of a mantra, the cells of her body needed it. And the reason is understandable. The attitude of the cells, as we have seen, is almost exclusively negative, catastrophic; and as they also have the character of relentless repetition, they keep incessantly repeating their negative, catastrophic obsessions and formations. Normally we do not hear it, this whispering under our skin, under the surface of our personality, because it is drowned by the noise of our thinking, for the most part automatic, and by our feelings, tense from desire and fearfulness. From this alone we can deduce how much our instrumental personality is affected by the mumbling and angst at its base, on the level of the cells. The deepest existential angst is corporeal. Examining this in ourselves, we discover the measure in which the human being is a wavering, fearful and negatively motivated being. In us there is still very much alive the fear of the elements, the animals and the co-humans, of the precariousness of existence, of pain, hunger, sorrow and the torments from countless lives. All that remains gnawing at our insides; it embitters our life and poisons our love. It drains and erodes us.

The number of cells in our body is astronomical. The background noise in our life, in our own body, is a cacophony preventing by its incoherent vibrations every direct contact with the Pure, the Harmonious, the Divine. The soul remains forever unstained; our thinking can be quieted or tuned harmoniously; feelings can be purified — but the body in its fundamental elements is the Great Barrier Reef in the tide of the divinization. That is why the Mother felt such a strong need of a mantra for her body: the power of the sound of the word would harmonize the cells’ vibrations and tune them to the power contained in the mantra. OM, I invoke or contact You, NAMO, I bow to You in total surrender, BHAGAVATE, make me as You are, divine. As the atoms in a laser crystal are tuned to the same frequency, so she used the age-old mantra ‘OM Name Bhagavate’⁹³ to tune the vibration of her cells to the divine supramental Power in order to assist them in their transformation.

‘OM Namo Bhagavate’ was her mantra. For a mantra springs spontaneously from the soul, or the soul spontaneously begins vibrating to it when hearing it; the mantra is therefore personal, the soul’s very own. Moreover, at the time no human body had reached the same yogic stage of evolution as that of the Mother. It was precisely because of its advanced development that the need of the mantra had arisen in it, the mantra in that stage was the required yogic tool. Sri Aurobindo probably had not known the role and the importance of the mantra in the transformation of the cells at the point he had reached; anyhow, he has never written or said anything about it, and it is far from certain that the Einsteinian formula he talked about in his correspondence with Nirodbaran was a mantra, as supposed by some. And so the Mother said: ‘I have become aware that for this sadhana of the body the mantra is essential⁵³ … Sri Aurobindo has not given one … Had he arrived where we are now, he would have seen that the purely psychological method is insufficient and that a japa is necessary, because only a japa has a direct effect on the body. So I had to find the method all alone, I had to find my mantra all alone. But now that everything is worked out, I have done ten years of work in a few months.’

It is true that the Mother, as a guru, gave the mantra ‘OM Namo Bhagavate’ to one or two of her disciples for reasons known only to her, but she never declared it to be a general instrument of the supramental yoga. One may conclude this from the following quotations, some of them dating from years after she had discovered the mantra and started using it.

• ‘[The mantra] wells up in you. It may be different for everybody … But it has to be a spontaneous movement of the being.’ (5 May 1951)

• ‘It is not exclusively the words [which contain the power] but everything they are going to represent and carry in their vibration. It is evident that another centre of consciousness, another concretization, another amalgam [the Mother meant ‘another adhara’] would have a different vibration — that it would of course have another vibration … What counts is not the mantra as such: it is the relation established between a mantra and the body … It is purely a personal phenomenon … A mantra which would lead one straight to the divine realization might leave another cold and unaffected.’ (31 May 1962)

• ‘Nobody can give you your true mantra. It is not something one gives: it is something that wells up in you … It is your very own cry … My mantra has the power of immortality … My mantra makes no sense for somebody else, but for me it is full, chock-full of sense.’ (11 May 1963)

• ‘It must be your own mantra, not something you have received from whomever — the mantra that has spontaneously risen up from the depth of your being, that has come from your inner guide.’ (23 September 1964)

• ‘It is good for the mantra to rise up spontaneously with the simplicity of the call of a child — two or three words which repeat themselves rhythmically. If it does not come by itself, then your body can repeat the mantra which your mental consciousness has chosen.’ (21 May 1969)

• ‘Outwardly — outwardly — I say the mantra: OM Namo Bhagavate. To me, it is an external being which says that. But inwardly, I am like this [Mother opens her hands with the palm upwards in a total immobility].’ (23 December 1972)

The Conditions of the Supramental Yoga

The conditions to start the supramental yoga have been formulated by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother in clearly defined terms. Let us quote some of their statements about this important subject.

• In 1935 Sri Aurobindo wrote to Nirodbaran: ‘There are different statuses of transformation. First is the psychic transformation, in which all is in contact with the Divine through the psychic consciousness. Next is the spiritual transformation in which all is merged in the Divine in the cosmic consciousness. Third is the supramental transformation in which all becomes supramentalised in the divine gnostic consciousness.

‘Nobody can have the supramental realisation who has not had the spiritual.

‘The psychic is the first of two transformations necessary — if you have the psychic transformation it facilitates immensely the other, i.e., the transformation of the ordinary human into the higher spiritual consciousness.’⁵⁴

• ‘One first has to find one’s soul,’ said the Mother in 1955, ‘this is wholly indispensable, and you have to identify with it. Then you can go on towards the transformation … You cannot skip this link, it is not possible.’⁵⁵ In these words, we hear an echo of what Sri Aurobindo wrote in The Life Divine: ‘This is the first step of self-realisation, to enthrone the soul, the divine psychic individual in the place of the ego.’⁵⁶

• The following year the Mother said again: ‘The true spiritual life begins when one is in communion with the Divine in the psychic, when one is conscious of the divine Presence in the psychic and in constant communion with the psychic. Then spiritual life begins, not before — the true spiritual life.’⁵⁷ The true spiritual life is the prologue to the supramental transformation.

• In 1957 she stressed emphatically: ‘Now that we are talking about this, I will remind you of what Sri Aurobindo has said, repeated, written, confirmed, and said again and again: that his yoga, the Integral Yoga, can begin only after that experience [the realisation of the soul], not before. Accordingly, one should not have any illusions and imagine that one can know what the Supramental is, and that one can make any judgments about it in whatever way, before having had that experience.’⁵⁸

These statements are as clear as they can be. They touch the fundamental principle of the Integral Yoga. All the same, one could object that they date from before the Mother’s discovery of the importance of the mantra for her body. We therefore also add the following:

• In July 1970 she detected: ‘But it is the psychic being that will materialize itself and become the supramental being! … And this gives a continuity to the evolution.’⁵⁹ We will return later to this very important discovery.

• ‘It is the psychic being, the representative of the Divine in man, that will remain, that will pass on into the new species,’ she said in April 1972. ‘Therefore one has to learn to centre one’s whole being around the psychic. Those who want to pass into supermanhood must get rid of the ego and concentrate themselves around the psychic being.’⁶⁰

• We have from her the following message written in her handwriting on 24 June 1972: ‘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.’⁶¹

Now that we are acquainted with the main elements of the process of transformation in the Mother, we can go on with our story.