The Mother

15: The Manifestation of the Supramental

I know that the supramental Descent is inevitable – I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later age.¹

– Sri Aurobindo

A Prediction

The Mother had been giving messages for the new year since the early 1930s. She said about these messages: ‘I look at the year that is coming. To be able to speak about it, I must look at it. I look at the coming year and, looking at it, I see at the same time everything people imagine about it, all their speculations and their expectations about what is going to happen in [what people always fancy to be] that “wonderful year.” I look at all that and at the same time I look at what that year really is, what it already is beforehand. It is already like that somewhere.’ ² On New Year’s Eve 1954, she read in French and English her message for 1955: ‘No human will can finally prevail against the Divine’s Will. Let us put ourselves deliberately and exclusively on the side of the Divine, and the Victory is ultimately certain.’ ³ And she gave her comment: ‘This message was written because one foresees that next year will be a difficult year and that there will be many inner struggles, and perhaps even outer ones. So [in the message] I tell all of you what attitude you should take in these circumstances. These difficulties will perhaps last not only twelve months – in other words one full year – but fourteen months. During these fourteen months you must make an effort never to lose the attitude about which I am going to talk to you in a moment. Actually, I insist on the fact that the more difficult things are, the more you must remain quiet and the more you should keep an unshakable faith. Of all things this is the most important.’ ⁴

Manoj Dasgupta, then one of the young pupils, now a trustee of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and head of the Ashram School, asked: ‘Will it be a difficult year for the Ashram or also for India and the whole world?’ The Mother replied: ‘Generally – [for] the world, India, the Ashram and individuals. For everyone according to his manner of being, naturally, not in the same way for all. Some things will seem easier than others. But generally speaking it is … If you want I can tell you: it is the last hope of the adverse forces to triumph against the present Realization. If we are able to hold on during these [fourteen] months, afterwards they will not be able to do much, their resistance will crumble. That’s what it is about: it is essentially the conflict of the adverse forces, of the anti-divine forces, who are trying to push back the divine Realization as much as they can – they hope for thousands of years.

‘It is this conflict which has reached its climax. It is their last chance. And as those who are behind their action are very conscious beings, they know very well that it is their last chance, and they will put everything they can into it. And what they can, is much. These are not ordinary little human forms of consciousness. They are not human consciousnesses at all. They are consciousnesses who, compared with the human capacities, seem divine in their power, in their strength, even in their knowledge. This means that it is a terrible conflict, and one which is totally concentrated on the Earth, because they know that it is upon Earth that the initial victory is to be won – the decisive victory, a victory which will determine the course of the earth’s future. Those who are noble-of-heart and stand up when things become dangerous, can be happy. It is an opportunity to rise above oneself. That’s what it is about.’ ⁵

At the time, the Mother said nothing about the inner battle, or battles, she must have been fighting with the hostile forces in those fourteen months. Only years later did the Mother mention in passing, in one of the conversations constituting Mother’s Agenda, that the beginning of February 1956 had been a terrible time, with all the asuric forces of destruction on the offensive.⁶ Knowing that she, like Sri Aurobindo, was not given to exaggeration, this must have been a terrible period in the yoga of the Avatar – one of the many sustained and crucial battles we know nothing about.

This occult turmoil was reflected in the outer world. At that time the Cold War was on the verge of turning into a hot war. The Warsaw Pact was signed, the first Russian H-bomb exploded, the first American nuclear submarine launched. It was the time of the Bandung Conference, ‘a revolt of Asia and Africa against the white race,’ with Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno as its celebrities. Egypt’s seizure of the Suez Canal and the Russian invasion of Hungary were in the offing.

The tension in the visible and in the invisible worlds could only indicate that something crucial was about to happen, for better or worse. Sometimes one senses this in the Entretiens. ‘It is quite evident that from the purely mental point of view, of the physical mind, we have come a long way since the Stone Age,’ she said on 5 October 1955. ‘It is said that we haven’t made much progress because there’s something else [i.e. the inner life] which has not been much developed, because we were much too busy playing with the new instrument [the mind]. For it is so interesting to have a new game⁹¹ … [It was] like children in a playground: they invent, try things out, play, find out, dash against each other, fight, make peace, quarrel, discover, destroy, build up. But behind all that there is a plan. There was a plan. There still is a plan – there is more and more a plan. And perhaps all this playing on the surface is, in spite of everything, leading to something which will come to happen one day. Perhaps, if we speak and think so much of it now, it is perhaps because … A time will surely come that it will happen. It may happen gradually, in stages, but all the same there is a moment when it begins to happen. So perhaps we have reached that moment.’ ⁷

The ‘it’ that was to happen was the manifestation of the supramental consciousness, its ‘insertion’ in the earthly evolution, which is the precondition for the appearance of a new species on earth, the ‘superman’ or supramental being, and the creation of a divine world, the Kingdom of God on earth.

A week later, she said: ‘I think that it will happen the moment there is a sufficient number of consciousnesses which feel in an absolute way that it cannot be otherwise … Your consciousness is so dependent on what is, that it finds it even difficult to imagine that things can be otherwise. And until what must be becomes for a sufficiently big group of consciousnesses an inevitable necessity, and until all that has been and all that now still is looks like an absurdity which cannot last: it is at that moment that ‘it’ will be able to happen, not before.

‘A problem remains, namely whether it is something which can take place and will happen individually before happening collectively. It is probable [that it will first happen individually]. But no individual realization can be complete nor even approach that [supramental] perfection if it is not in accord with at least a group of consciousnesses representative of a new world. After all, there is such a great interdependence of the individual and the collectivity that the individual realization, however great, is limited, impoverished by the unresponsive atmosphere of its surroundings. And it is certain that the entire terrestrial life has to follow a certain line of progress in order for a new world and a new consciousness to manifest. This is why I said in the beginning that it depends at least partially on you.’ ⁸

In the same conversation she said: ‘For a very long time it has been said: “It will come, it will come” … Many thousands of years ago some already began to promise that one day there would be a new consciousness, a new world, something divine which would manifest upon Earth, but they said: “It will come, it will come” in the future – they spoke of ages, aeons, thousands and millions of years. They did not have this feeling which we have now: that it is bound to come, that it is very near. Of course, human life is very brief and there is the inclination to wish to shorten the distances in time so that they may be proportionate to our human dimensions. But in spite of everything there will be a moment when it happens; there will be a moment when the development tilts into a new reality. There has been a moment when the mental being was able to manifest upon Earth. Its starting point may have been very poor, very incomplete, very imperfect, but all the same there was a starting point. Why would the starting point [of the supramental being] not be now?’ ⁹

When a child remarked that the Mother had said that the event was ‘very near,’ the Mother confirmed: ‘Yes, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking about it. It is obvious that if it were to happen after a number of millennia, we wouldn’t have to be concerned about it and only see it as a far-off dream … It is, however, possible that before this [race] becomes a new race, like the human race [has become a new race], it may take much, much time. And it will come about progressively. But, as I said, one thing is sure: when it happens, it happens. It is not something that stretches out like a rubber band: there is a moment when it happens – when the descent takes place, when the fusion occurs, when the identification comes about. It can happen in a flash. There is a moment when it occurs. The rest may take much, much time. You mustn’t hope to see supermen spring up everywhere overnight, it won’t be like that.’ ¹⁰

The message for the year 1956 too spoke of the battles the Mother was waging – and apparently winning. ‘The greatest victories are the least noisy. The manifestation of a new world is not proclaimed by beat of drum.’ ⁹² On 4 January 1956, she again warned her audience that they must be reasonable in their expectations of the great miracle: ‘Of course, if all of a sudden there were luminous apparitions, or if the outer physical forms changed completely, then, I think, even a dog or a cat, or whatever, would notice it. But that will take time, it can’t happen all at once. It can’t happen right now, it is for further on, for much later. Many great things will take place before that, and they will be much more important than that, mark my words.’ But: ‘The world will go on. Things will happen, and there will be, perhaps, a handful of human beings who will know how they came about. That’s all.’ ¹¹

And then it happened, on 29 February 1956: the manifestation of the Supramental – exactly fourteen months after the Mother’s prediction on the New Year’s Eve of 1955.

The Supramental Manifestation

‘The lights had been turned off at the Playground after the reading of some passages from The Synthesis of Yoga and the children’s questions. They all sat on the ground in a semicircle around her. One heard the sea in the distance, and the beam of the lighthouse swept over the top of the walls – two short flashes, one long. It was the “Wednesday meditation.” One saw Mother in the dark, seated in her low chair, bent somewhat forward, with a Plumeria flower between her motionless fingers. She always looked white, this Mother, even when dressed in red or in whatever colour, as if something radiated through her body, a kind of white luminosity at times so dense that it became visible to our materialistic eyes. And there were the disciples, silent …’ ¹² This is how a French disciple, present there on 29 February 1956, gives his impression of the moment at the Playground when the Supramental manifested in the atmosphere of the Earth.

The Mother herself noted down that very evening: ‘This evening the Divine Presence, concrete and material, was there present amongst you. I had a form of living gold, bigger than the universe, and I was facing a huge and massive golden door which separated the world from the Divine. As I looked at the door, I knew and willed, in a single movement of consciousness, that “the time has come,” and lifting with both hands a mighty golden hammer I struck one blow, one single blow on the door and the door was shattered to pieces. Then the supramental Light and Force and Consciousness rushed down upon earth in an uninterrupted flow.’ ¹³

Later she explained in a conversation with K.D. Sethna: ‘The whole thing is not so much a vision or an experience as something done by me. I went up into the Supermind and did what was to be done. There was no need for any verbal formulation as far as I was concerned, but in order to put it into words for others I wrote the thing down. Always a realization, a state of consciousness gets somewhat limited in writing: the very act of expression narrows the reality to some extent.’ ¹⁴

The significance of this event cannot be overestimated. What Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had been working for since the beginning of their avataric yoga was now realized. What had they been working for? To bring the supramental, i.e. divine Consciousness down on Earth, to insert it into the earthly evolution and thus make the decisive evolutionary step possible by which one day a divinized species will be present on Earth in a material body. It was now certain that the Kingdom of God would be established upon Earth.

The supramental Consciousness is the Unity-Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness, the Divine Consciousness. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother have often compared the Manifestation as a whole to the two hemispheres of a globe: in the upper hemisphere all aspects, gradations or worlds exist in the Unity-Consciousness and are therefore divine; in the lower hemisphere all forms of consciousness in their respective layers or worlds are supported by fragmented or partial rays of the Unity-Consciousness, which means that everything here belongs at least partially to the Ignorance, of which the Inconscient is the Black Pit, the lowest, total Darkness.

The avataric intervention of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother consisted in establishing the link between both hemispheres, thus creating not only the possibility but the certitude that the upper, divine hemisphere would become manifested⁹³ upon Earth. Therefore, the manifestation of the Supramental on 29 February 1956 meant, among other things, that the future embodiment of the supramentally conscious being beyond Man, of the divine Superman, was now assured, as it was assured that the human aspiration throughout countless millenniums was being fulfilled: the world would not always be a place of frustration, suffering and death. Like everything else in the One Divine it would be able to materially develop its essential divine nature. K.D. Sethna wrote in his diary: ‘I wonder when the world will realize that [on 29 February 1956] the greatest event in history took place.’ ¹⁵

The Mother announced the Event in the Bulletin of April 1956. There she published the following four lines under the heading ‘29 February’:

Lord, Thou hast willed, and I execute:
A new light breaks upon the earth,
A new world is born.

The things that were promised are fulfilled.¹⁶

This was a modification of four great lines from her diary entry on 25 September 1914, forty-two years earlier:

The Lord has willed and Thou dost execute:
A new Light shall break upon the earth.

A new world shall be born,
And the things that were promised shall be fulfilled.¹⁷

The future expectation had become the present realization. At the same time she had the following declaration published, under the date 24 April 1956: ‘The manifestation of the Supramental upon earth is no more a promise but a living fact, a reality. It is at work here, and one day will come when the most blind, the most unconscious, even the most unwilling shall be obliged to recognize it.’ ¹⁸

‘Was this advent unexpected?’ asked Indra Sen, a disciple. ‘Absolutely,’ answered the Mother, ‘but all my greatest experiences have come like that. I am in my usual consciousness and they come suddenly, as if to show their reality in the fullest contrast and vividness. They have the best value when first received in this way. When one is informed beforehand, the mind begins to play a part …’ And she added: ‘The working of the Supermind in my body has gone on since the 5th December 1950. It has been a progressive individual working; so I thought things would go on like that. But in January of this year Sri Aurobindo appeared to me two or three times and it was as if he indicated that the Supermind was coming on a universal scale. What has come has become engulfed at present and it has to work itself out. Nature did not reject – she could not.⁹⁴ The Supreme decided that the time had come and He released the Force.’ ¹⁹

Henceforth in the Ashram 29 February was called the Golden Day. Why did the Mother have to publish these two statements nearly two months after the great Event when so many disciples were present when it happened? ‘When I came back from the Supermind [i.e. after she had shattered the Golden Door] I thought that, since the outpour was so stupendous, everybody would be lying prostrate. But when I opened my eyes I found everybody sitting quietly and perfectly unconscious of what had happened.’ ²⁰ Nirodbaran had once written to Sri Aurobindo in a rare surge of enthusiasm: ‘The Supramental is bound to come down and we shall lie flat at the gate and he can’t pass by.’ ²¹ But on that 29 February he too will probably have eaten his evening meal like on every other day.

Yet the Mother had foreseen the possibility that even the closest disciples would not be aware of the unexpected presence of the Supramental, for she had said in March 1951: ‘It may very well happen that at a given moment the supramental Force manifests, that it is conscious here, that it acts on Matter, but that those who don’t consciously participate in its vibration are incapable of perceiving it. People say: “When the supramental force manifests, we shall know it quite well. It will be seen.” Not necessarily. They will not feel it any more than those people of little sensitivity who may pass through this place [the Sri Aurobindo Ashram], even live here, without feeling that the atmosphere is different from elsewhere.’ ²² And she had written also: ‘Man must understand that in spite of all his intellectual achievements he is as incapable of perceiving the supramental vibrations as the animal was incapable of perceiving the mental vibrations when they pervaded the earth before the appearance of the human species.’ ²³

All the same, not everybody had been ignorant of the fact that something out of the ordinary had happened. K.D. Sethna notes in his diary that he had heard that four people, one inside the Ashram and three outside, had been aware of the supramental Manifestation, and that he had written to the Mother about this. ‘The Mother told me: “What I said was not that four people knew it to be the supramental Manifestation, but that when the Manifestation took place they had some unusual experiences because of it, even if they didn’t understand why … Among those outside, I counted you.” I was surprised to hear this. The Mother continued: “You wrote to me – didn’t you? – that on the night of 29 February I was with you. I had promised you long ago when you had gone from here that I would inform you at once if the Supermind manifested. I never forgot this. And when the Supermind did manifest I went out to tell you.”’ ²⁴ Actually, on the night of 29 February 1956, K.D. Sethna had his experience with the Mother around midnight, in the train between Pondicherry and Madras when seeing off his sister-in-law. The Mother’s promise dated from 1938.

In K.D. Sethna we also read: ‘Not too long after the glorious 29 February the Mother said to a few sadhaks, including my close friend Nirodbaran, that she saw no reason why she should not leave her body now that the things that had been promised had been fulfilled. The attendants were perturbed and pleaded with the Mother not to leave us but to continue her labour towards the divinization of the body.’ ²⁵ That this was much more than gossip in the sadhak community is proved by a note of the Mother’s included in Champaklal’s Treasures. It runs as follows: ‘Now that the Supramental is there – for of that I am absolutely certain even if I am the only one upon Earth to be aware of it – is it that the mission of this form [her body or adhara] is ended and that another form is to take up the work in its place? I am putting the question to Thee and ask for an answer – a sign by which I shall know for certain that it is still my work and I must continue in spite of all the contradictions, of all the denials. Whatever is the sign I do not care, but it must be obvious.’ ²⁶

This is an extremely important address of the Mother’s to ‘the Lord.’ Firstly, an obvious sign must have been given to her, for we know that she remained on Earth for seventeen more years. Secondly, this prayer shows clearly that the aim of the endeavour of the Avatar had been accomplished with the manifestation of the Supramental. A completely new phase of the avataric Yoga was to begin. For this new phase there was no available guidance, neither from Sri Aurobindo nor from the Mother’s own experience. Some insights, guidelines and suggestions can be found in The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, in Savitri, and in the last chapters of The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga – but that only in retrospect. This new phase of the Integral Yoga might be called ‘the Yoga of the transformation of the body.’ It fell completely outside the ‘system’ of the Integral Yoga as deduced and constructed by some commentators from Sri Aurobindo’s writings, sometimes without acknowledging the important part the Mother has played in discovering the main lines of this yoga and putting them into practice. To conclude this section about the momentous event that was the manifestation of the Supramental, let us drop in on two or three of the Mother’s Wednesday classes in which the subject came up.

On 2 May, about a fortnight after the manifestation had been announced, a child asked: ‘Mother, you have said: “The Supramental has descended upon Earth.” What does that mean exactly? You have also said: “The things that were promised are fulfilled.” What are those things?’ – The Mother replied: ‘Ah, if this isn’t ignorance! It was promised very long ago. It was said a very long time ago – not only here: since the beginning of the Earth. There have been all kinds of predictions by all kinds of prophets. It has been said: “There will be a new heaven and a new earth; a new race will be born; the world will be transformed.” Etc. Prophets have spoken about this in all the traditions.’

The child: ‘You have said, “They are fulfilled.”’ – The Mother: ‘Yes, and?’ – The child: ‘Where is the new race?’ – The Mother: ‘The new race? Wait let’s say some thousands of years and you will see it! When the mind has descended upon Earth, between the time the mind manifested in the Earth-atmosphere and the first human being appeared, nearly a million years elapsed. Now it will go faster because man expects it, he has a vague idea. He is expecting something resembling the advent of the superman. The apes, on the contrary, certainly did not expect the birth of the human being, they had never thought of it – for the simple reason that probably they didn’t think much. But the human being has thought of it and awaits it, so it will go faster. But “faster” still means thousands of years, probably. We shall talk about it again after some thousands of years!’

Another child: ‘Mother, when mind descended into the Earth-atmosphere, the apes had made no efforts to change into the human being, had they? It was Nature that provided the effort. But now – ’ – The Mother: ‘But it is not man who is going to convert himself into superman!’ – The child: ‘Isn’t it?’ – The Mother: ‘Just try a little! … That’s the point, you see, it is something else that is going to do the work … But – yes, there is a ‘but,’ I don’t want to be that cruel – now man can collaborate. That is to say, he can lend himself to the process, with goodwill, with aspiration, and help as best he can. And that is why I said that it would go faster. I hope it will go much faster. But even so, ‘much faster’ is going to take some time!’

And the Mother continued: ‘Listen. If all of you here who have heard about this, not once but perhaps hundreds of times, who have talked about it, thought of it, hoped for it, wanted it – there are people who have come here for that, with the intention of receiving the supramental Force and being transformed into supermen; that was their aim, wasn’t it? – how is it that all of you were so alien to this Force that you didn’t even feel it when it came? Can you solve this problem for me? If you find the solution to this problem, you will have found the solution to the difficulty.’ ²⁷

On 15 August the Mother reported: ‘The movement [of the Yoga] is much accelerated. The march forward, the stages succeed each other much more rapidly. And it is perhaps more difficult to follow, or at least, if one doesn’t make an effort to keep the pace, one is much more quickly outdistanced than before; one gets the feeling of being late or of being left behind. Things change quickly.’ ²⁸

7 February 1957. ‘It will soon be a year since, one Wednesday, the manifestation of the supramental Force took place. Since then it has been working very actively, even though very few people are aware of it! … Of course, it is not working only in the Ashram. This Force is at work in the whole world, in all places where there is a receptivity, and I must say the Ashram doesn’t have the exclusive receptivity in the world, the monopoly of the receptivity.’ ²⁹

And then there was the Entretien of 10 July 1957, one of the most lyrical spiritual talks the Mother has ever given. Here, a few passages will have to suffice. She was commenting on a passage from Sri Aurobindo’s The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth and said: ‘That other world [the supramental world in the making on Earth] is necessarily an absolutely new experience. One would have to go back to the time when there was a transition from the animal to the human creation to find a similar period, and at that time the consciousness was not sufficiently mentalized in order to observe, understand or feel with intelligence. That transition must have taken place in a very obscure way. So, what I am speaking about is absolutely new, unique in the terrestrial creation. It is something without precedent, truly causing a perception, or a sensation, or an impression, that is quite strange and new. [There is] a gap [between] something which has overstayed its time and has only quite a subordinate force of existence, and something totally new, but still so young, so imperceptible, one could almost say so weak. It hasn’t yet the power to impose itself, to assert itself and to predominate, to take the place of the former. The result is a simultaneous existence but, as I said, with a gap in between, by which I mean that the link between the two is still missing.’ ^{95 30}

The day before the Mother had been present in the Playground at the projection of a Bengali film on the life of Rani Rasmani, the rich widow who in 1847 built the Kali Temple at Dakshineshwar for Ramakrishna Paramhansa. ‘It seems strange that something so new, so special, and I might say so unexpected [i.e. her experience], should happen during a film show … I have always noticed that it is the unexpected which gives you the most interesting experiences … Suddenly I had concretely, materially the impression that that [the world of religion and the Gods as shown in the film] was another world, a world which had ceased to be real, alive, an outdated world which had lost its reality, its truth, which had been surpassed, transcended by something which had just taken birth and was only beginning to express itself, but of which the life was so intense, so true, so sublime, that all that [in the film] became false, unreal, worthless. Then I really understood – for I understood not with the head, not with the intelligence, but with the body, if you understand what I mean: in the cells of the body – that a new world is born and is beginning to grow.’ ³¹

This reminded the Mother of her overmental creation in 1926-27, which she briefly described to her audience. Then she continued: ‘I announced to you all that this new world is born. But it has been so swallowed up, as it were, by the old world that up to now the difference has not been very perceptible to many people. Still the action of the new forces has continued very regularly, very persistently, very steadily, and to a certain extent very effectively. And one of the effects of this action was my experience, really so very new, of yesterday evening …

‘What has happened, what is truly new, is that a new world is born, born, born! It is not the old world being transformed, it is a new world that is born! And we are right in the middle of the transitional period in which the two are still entangled in each other – when the old one still persists all-powerful and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but when the new one is slipping in, still very modestly, unnoticed – unnoticed to the point that, for the time being, outwardly it doesn’t disturb anything very much and that to the consciousness of most people it is even altogether imperceptible. And yet it is working, it is growing, till it will be strong enough to assert itself visibly …

‘Now, all those ancient things [the world of the religions and the Gods] seem so old, so outdated, so arbitrary, such a travesty of the true truth. In the supramental creation there will no longer be any religions. The whole life will be the expression, the unfolding into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the world. And there will no longer be what men now call Gods. Those great divine beings themselves will be able to participate in the new creation, but in order to do so they will have to put on what we might call the “supramental substance” on earth. And if some of them choose to remain in their world as they are, if they decide not to manifest physically, their relation with the beings of a supramental earth will be a relation of friends, collaborators, equals, for the highest divine essence will be manifested in the beings of the new supramental world on Earth. When the physical substance is supramentalized, to incarnate on earth will no longer be a cause of inferiority, quite the contrary. It will give a plenitude which cannot be obtained otherwise.

‘But all this is in the future. It is a future which has begun, but which will take some time to be realized integrally. Meanwhile we are in a very special situation, extremely special, without precedent. We are now witnessing the birth of a new world; it is very young, very weak – not in its essence but in its exterior manifestation – not yet recognized, not even felt, and denied by most people. But it is there. It is there, doing its best to grow and absolutely sure of the result. But the road towards it is a completely new road which has never been traced out before – nobody has ever gone there, nobody has ever done that! It is a beginning, a universal beginning. Therefore it is a totally unexpected and unpredictable adventure.’ ³²

And this is where the Mother made her call to the Great Adventure: ‘There are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell them: “I invite you to the Great Adventure.” It is not a matter of repeating spiritually what others have done before us, for our adventure begins beyond that. It is a matter of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen events, the risks, the hazards it entails. It is a real adventure, of which the goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown and must be made step by step in the unexplored. It is something that has never existed in this present universe and that will never be again in the same way. If this interests you, well, embark. What is awaiting you tomorrow, I couldn’t say. You must leave behind all you have foreseen, all you have planned, all you have built up, and start walking into the unknown – come what may! And that is that.’ ³³

Mother Nature

Along a path of aeons serpentine..
The Earth-Goddess toils across the sands of Time. ||11.8|| ³⁴

The New Year’s Message for 1958 read as follows: ‘O Nature, material Mother, thou hast said that thou wilt collaborate and there is no limit to the splendour of this collaboration.’ ³⁵ On New Year’s Day a youngster asked the Mother to explain her mysterious message. The Mother, foreseeing the question, had already written down her answer.

However, before we ourselves read her answer it must be said that the Mother had been having for many years a sort of ongoing quarrel with Mother Nature. This is rather surprising, for Mother Nature is of course an emanation of the Great Mother, the Mother’s essential Self. Yet all emanations have a considerable degree of independence, a status which Mother Nature seemed to take advantage of and to be thoroughly enjoying.⁹⁶ In her fancy of creative moods she never seemed in a hurry to take the earthly evolution forward, something which at times vexed the Mother, who was always pressed for progress.

So for instance on 6 February 1957, when the Mother talked about the obstacles on the road to the supramental transformation of Matter. ‘Obviously the greatest obstacle is the attachment to things as they are. But even Nature as a whole finds that those who possess the profound knowledge want to go too fast. She likes her meanderings, she likes her successive attempts, her failures, her fresh starts, her new inventions. She likes the fancy of the [evolutionary] path, the unexpectedness of the experience. One could almost say that, for her, the longer it takes the more she enjoys it. But one tires even of the best of games. There comes a time when they need to be changed …

‘For her [the burden of the earthly existence and the ‘macabre joke’ of death are] of no importance. She sees the totality, she sees the whole. She sees that nothing is lost, that there is only a recombination of quantities, of numberless minute elements without importance, which are put back into a pot, thoroughly stirred, and thereby produce something new.⁹⁷ But this game is not amusing for everybody. And if in one’s consciousness one could become as vast as she, if one could become more powerful than she, why wouldn’t one do the same in a better way? This is exactly the problem which confronts us now. With the addition, the new help of this [supramental] Force which has descended, which is manifesting, which is working, why wouldn’t one take up that tremendous game [of Nature] in order to make it more beautiful, more harmonious, more true?

‘It only needs brains powerful enough to receive this Force and formulate the possible course of action. There must be conscious beings powerful enough to convince Nature that there are other methods than hers. This looks like madness, but all new things have always looked like madness before they became realities. The hour has come for this madness to be realized. And since we are all here for reasons that are perhaps unknown to most of you, but that are nevertheless very conscious reasons, we may set ourselves to fulfil this madness. It will at least be worth its while living it.’ ³⁶

But now, all at once Nature seemed to have changed her mind, as was proclaimed in the message for 1958. The Mother’s answer to the request for her comment on that message went as follows: ‘In the course of one of our classes [from which we have quoted in the preceding paragraphs] I spoke of the limitless abundance of Nature, the inexhaustible creatrix … The evening I told you about these things, I identified myself with Nature, totally, I joined in her game. And this act of identification provoked a response, a sort of new intimacy between Nature and myself, a long process of increasing closeness culminating in an experience which came on the eighth of November. Suddenly Nature understood. She understood that this new [supramental] Consciousness which has been born does not seek to reject her but wants to embrace her entirely. She understood that this new spirituality does not turn away from life, does not recoil in fear before the formidable amplitude of her workings, but wants on the contrary to integrate all its facets. She understood that the supramental Consciousness is here not to diminish but to complete her.

‘Then from the supreme Reality came this order: “Awake, o Nature, to the joy of collaboration.” And all of Nature suddenly rushed forward in a great surge of joy, saying: “I accept, I collaborate!” And at the same time there came a calm, an absolute tranquillity, so that this bodily vessel [i.e. the Mother’s] could receive and contain, without breaking, without losing anything, the mighty flood of this joy of Nature which rushed forward as it were on an impulse of gratitude. She accepted. She saw with all eternity before her that this supramental Consciousness was going to fulfil her more perfectly, give a still greater strength to her movement, a greater amplitude, more possibilities to her play.

‘And suddenly I heard, as if they came from the four corners of the earth, the great notes one sometimes hears in the subtle physical. They resemble somewhat those of Beethoven’s [Violin] Concerto in D-major and come at the time of a great [evolutionary] step forward, as if fifty orchestras burst out together without a single discordant note, to proclaim the joy of this new communion between Nature and Spirit, the meeting of old friends who meet again after having been separated for so long.

‘Then these words came: “O Nature, Material Mother, thou hast said that thou wilt collaborate and there is no limit to the splendour of this collaboration.” And the radiant felicity of this splendour was perceived in perfect peace. This is how the message for the new year was born.’ ³⁷

The Ship from the New World

Soon we will have to take leave of those wonderful Entretiens or ‘French classes.’ What we have read is only a fraction of the treasures they contain, chosen because they were felt to be essential to the story of the Mother’s life. Here and there an edge of the veil is lifted, we get a glimpse of the way the Mother acted in many places and on many levels of existence, even while apparently just sitting there, addressing a group of students and disciples in the playground. Let us therefore have a last look behind the scenes and participate in an experience the Mother had on 3 February 1958, and which she read out a fortnight later from notes dictated by her immediately after the experience.

‘The supramental world exists permanently and I am there permanently in a supramental body. I had proof of it this very day, when my Earth-consciousness went there and remained there consciously between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. Now I know that what was lacking for the two worlds to join in a constant and conscious relation⁹⁸ is an intermediate zone between the physical world as it is and the supramental world as it is. This zone remains to be built both in the individual consciousness and in the objective world, and it is being built …

‘I was on a huge ship, which was a symbolic representation of the place where this work is going on. This ship, as large as a city, is fully organized, and it had certainly already been functioning for some time, for its organization was perfect. It is the place where the people are trained who are destined for the supramental life. These people, or at least part of their being, had already undergone a supramental transformation, for the ship itself and everything on board was neither material, subtle-physical, vital, or mental: [everything consisted of] a supramental substance. This substance was of the most material supramental, the supramental substance nearest to the physical world, the first to manifest.

‘The light was a mixture of gold and red, forming a uniform substance of a luminous orange. Everything was like that. The light was like that, the people were like that – everything had that colour, although in various shades, which made it possible to distinguish things from each other. The general impression was of a world without shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order. Everything went [on] in an orderly way and in silence. And at the same time one could see all the details of an education, of a training in all fields, through which the people on board were being prepared.

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

‘While I was observing everybody, the part of my consciousness coming from here became extremely interested; it wanted to see and recognize all those people, to see how they had changed, and check who were taken at once and who had to remain in order to accomplish their training … Things continued in this way until suddenly the clock here struck three, and this brought me back violently. There was a sensation of suddenly falling into my body. I came back with a shock but with the full memory, because I had been called back very abruptly. I remained tranquil, without moving, until I could recollect the whole experience and keep it.

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

‘Those who were sent back for additional training were not of a uniform colour. It was as if their body showed patches of a greyish opacity consisting of a substance resembling the terrestrial substance. They were dull, as if they had not been entirely permeated with light, as if they had not been transformed. They were not like that everywhere, only in spots …

‘When I was called back [into her material body] and while I was saying: “Not yet!” I had each time a brief glimpse of myself – of my form in the supramental world, that is. I was a kind of combination of the tall beings and the beings aboard the ship. My upper part, particularly the head, was not much more than a silhouette of which the contents were white with an orange fringe. The more down towards the feet, the more the colour looked like that of the people on the ship, that is to say orange; the more upwards, the more it was translucent and white, with less red. The head was only a contour with a brilliant sun in it. Rays of light radiated from it, which were actions of the will.

‘As for the people I saw on board the ship, I recognized them all. Some were from here, from the Ashram, others were from elsewhere, but I know them too. I saw everybody, but as I knew that I would not remember them all when coming back, I decided not to mention any names … Most people were young. There were very few children and their age was something around fourteen or fifteen, certainly not below ten or twelve … There were no very old people, apart from a few exceptions. Most of the people who went ashore were middle-aged, except a few …

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

‘When I came back I knew, simultaneously with the recollection of the experience, that the supramental world is permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and that only a missing link was needed for enabling the connection in the consciousness and in the substance, and it is this link which is now being established. There I had the impression … of an extreme relativity – no, more exactly the impression that the relation of this world with the other one completely changed the standpoint from which things must be evaluated or appraised. The standpoint was not at all mental and it gave the strange inner feeling that lots of things we consider good or bad are not really so … What is very obvious is that our opinion of what is divine or undivine is not right … In the people too, I saw that what helps them to become supramental or prevents them from it, is very different from what we, with our habitual moral notions, imagine. I felt how ridiculous we are.’ ³⁸

In November of that year, the Mother, when talking about the relation of our world of ordinary Matter and the supramental world ready to take its place, commented: ‘But the link between the two worlds has not yet been built. That was the meaning of the experience of February third [the supramental ship], namely, to establish a link between the two worlds. For the two worlds are there in fact – not one above the other: one within the other, in two different dimensions – but there is no communication between the two. They overlap each other without being joined together. In the experience of 3 February, I saw some of those from here and elsewhere who already belong to the supramental world in part of their being, but there is no connection, no junction. The moment has come just now in the history of the universe when that link must be established.’ ³⁹

The Mother Withdraws

Meanwhile the Mother had continued working out in her own person what she called ‘the transitional being’ between man and the supramental being, or le surhomme,’ (the overman). We have been able to follow the progress of this work from the moment in December 1950 when Sri Aurobindo transmitted the Mind of Light into her body. On 16 April 1958 she again gave a progress report: ‘It can be asserted with certainty that there will be an intermediate being between the mental and the supramental being, a kind of overman who will still have the qualities and in part the nature of man, which means that he will still belong in his most external form to the human species with its animal origin, but that he will transform his consciousness sufficiently to belong in his realization and activity to a new species, a species of overmen.’ ⁴⁰

What Sri Aurobindo had foreseen in The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth, the Mother now announced as a fact: ‘We have now reached a certitude, since there is already a beginning of realization.’ ⁴¹ The transitional being, overman, was present on earth in the Mother’s material body. To understand the importance of this fact, it must be realized that humanity is one just as Matter is one, which means that what is possible in a part of the whole is possible in the whole: what was possible in the Mother became possible for the whole of humanity. This truth is the basis of all spiritual action; without it, the Work of the Avatar would make no sense, for it would remain limited to the person(s) of the Avatar and have no effect on the rest of humanity. The Mother also repeated Sri Aurobindo’s expectation that this transitional species would discover the occult means of ‘producing new beings without having to use the old animal method, and these beings, who will have a truly spiritual birth, will constitute the elements of the new race, the supramental race.’ ⁴²

A new species requires a new body, a new material body. ‘It seems – it is even certain – that the very substance which will constitute the intermediate world that is already being built up, is richer, more powerful, more luminous, more resistant, with certain subtler, more penetrating new qualities, and a kind of innate capacity of universality, as if its degree of subtlety and refinement allowed the perception of vibrations in a much wider, if not altogether total way, and it [i.e. that new substance] removes the sensation of division one has because of the old substance, the ordinary mental substance. There is a subtlety of vibration which ensures that a global, universal perception is something spontaneous and natural. The sense of division, of separation, disappears quite naturally and spontaneously with that substance. And that substance is at present almost universally spread out in the Earth’s atmosphere.’

This is one of the first times the Mother tries to formulate something that will become one of the main lines of her subsequent effort: the change of Matter effected by the change of consciousness, or the change of Matter made necessary to incorporate a new consciousness. All degrees of consciousness above the mental degree which denominates humankind exist somewhere in the invisible worlds, but the substance of those worlds is not the gross material substance. The Earth is a material field. Earthly Matter has already evolved sufficiently to allow for the elements of the vital and mental degrees of manifestation to be embodied in it. If a new, higher degree of the manifestation is to embody upon the earth, earthly Matter has to evolve once again to serve as a means of embodiment, as a body for the consciousness of that new, higher degree.

It may be recalled that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother had been supramentalized many years before in the mental and vital parts of their earthly personality. From then onwards their whole effort consisted in bringing a supramental power of consciousness down into Matter. The result of their effort was the supramental manifestation in 1956. A consequence of this manifestation was the certitude that the supramental Consciousness, now present in Matter, would produce materialized supramental beings. As on all previous occasions in the evolution, the manifestation of such beings would happen in stages, as the enormous evolutionary change gradually worked itself out and produced the corresponding material beings. This is what Mother called le surhomme (the overman) – who may consist of various types of beings with a supramentalized consciousness but with a body still generated in the usual human way.

The supramental Consciousness is a Unity-Consciousness. Sri Aurobindo and the Mother possessed this Unity-Consciousness in their mind and vital, and Sri Aurobindo had already started realizing it in the cells, in the Matter of his body, at the time he had to take the decision to descend fully conscious and with all his avataric powers into death. The Mother, who was carrying on the Yoga, reported from time to time on the growth of the transitional, overhuman being in her and therefore in humanity. Now she says that Matter is developing the Unity-Consciousness. Can a body cell contain the universe? Can a body cell contain the All in its complete aspects of Spirit and Matter? It is obvious that the cell must be capable of this if it is to be divinized, for the Divine is the All, and the All is the One, and the One is the Unity-Consciousness. We are entering a domain in which the cell and its Matter will prove to be an organic, living conglomerate of vibrations, and in which each single vibration will prove to be an element constituting and reflecting the whole cosmos.

And the Mother continued the report of her experience: ‘This new perception is asserting itself more and more. It becomes more and more natural, and it is even sometimes difficult to recapture the old way of being, as though it were vanishing into a misty past – something which is on the point of ceasing to exist.

‘From this one may conclude that the moment a body, which was evidently formed by way of the old animal method, is capable of living this consciousness naturally and spontaneously, without any effort, without going out of itself, it is proven that [the experience of her body] is not an exceptional and unique case. It is simply the forerunner of a realization which, even if it is not altogether general, can at least be shared by a certain number of individuals who, besides, as soon as they share it, will lose the perception of being separate individuals and become a living collectivity.

‘This new realization is proceeding with what might be called lightning speed, for, if we consider time in the ordinary way, only two years have passed – a little more than two years – from the moment the supramental substance penetrated into the Earth’s atmosphere to the moment the change in the quality of the Earth’s atmosphere took place.’ ⁴³

The Mother’s audience at the playground was, as she has so often said, a selection, a cream – but it was of course also young and human. There was goodwill, intelligence and psychic openness, but often also lassitude to the point of losing interest in what the Mother was saying. ‘Mother, why don’t we profit as much as we should from our presence here in the Ashram?’ asked a child. ‘That is very simple: because it is too easy!’ answered the Mother. ‘When you have to go all around the world to find a teacher, when you have to give up everything to obtain only the first words of a teaching, then that teaching, that spiritual assistance becomes something very precious, like everything that is difficult to obtain, and one makes a serious effort to be worthy of it.

‘Most of you came here when you were very small, at an age when the spiritual life or a spiritual teaching were still out of the question, for it would have been altogether premature. You have indeed lived in this atmosphere but without even being aware of it. You are accustomed to seeing me, hearing me. I speak to you as one speaks to all children. I have even played with you as one plays with children. You have only to come and sit here and you hear me speak. You only have to ask me a question and I answer you. I have never refused to say anything to anybody. It is so easy. It is enough to live – to sleep, to eat, to do your exercises and to study at school. You live here as you would live anywhere else, and so you are used to it.’ ⁴⁴

On 5 November 1958 the Mother wanted to see the fundamental cause of the lack of reaction, of the inertia in her audience. To that end she descended into their Subconscient and even deeper, into the general Inconscient. She described her experience⁴⁵ as a descent into a crevice between two jet black masses of rock with razor-sharp excrescences. And the crevice became more and more narrow, and there seemed to be no bottom to it. So narrow did the downward passage become that there was hardly place for consciousness to pass, she said.

And then a miracle happened. In that blackest of blacknesses there was, as it were, an invisible spring which suddenly projected her into a limitless golden immensity, almighty, of an infinite richness. She formulated the experience as follows: ‘At the very bottom of the Inconscience most hard and rigid and narrow and stifling I struck upon an almighty spring that cast me up forthwith into a formless limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of the new world.’

A few days later she commented upon it: ‘The experience of November the fifth was a new step in the construction of the link between the two worlds. I was indeed projected into the very origin of the supramental creation: all that warm gold, that living tremendous power, that sovereign peace. I saw once again that the values which govern this supramental world have nothing to do with our values here below, even the values of the wisest, even those values which we consider most divine at the time we live constantly in the divine Presence. They are altogether different.’ ⁴⁶ The supramental world was very much present, below at the core of the black Inconscient, above in a bright, limitless Vast, within a distance difficult to conceive in our earthly way of seeing and therefore experienced as a sudden projection by a spring. This experience of the Mother was a promise that radiated over the difficult years to come.

She made the formulation of this experience into her New Year’s message for 1959. By the time the message was published, however, a radical change had taken place in her life. On 26 November she had given her last Wednesday class at the playground; on 5 December she had given her last Friday class at the playground; on 7 December she had played her last game of tennis; on 9 December she had stopped leaving the Ashram premises except on special occasions. She went through a severe, life-threatening ordeal.