Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

10: The Need to Be

Like Mirra, we can have the most beautiful visions in the world, touch supreme summits of consciousness and bathe in the great waves of a divine music which drown us in rapture; we can have, on this earth, the most beautiful adventures, passions that for a moment draw us into a fullness of life never experienced before; we can bathe, with Monet, in a soft and opaline light, lose ourselves in a seagull’s cry, love, love to distraction a great sparkling sea where the infinite narrows down so much that it almost nestles in our heart, or our heart softly drifts away to the sound of the surf, through ever-lived centuries and split- second crystalline lives. And then ... then everything begins again. Life clashes and shakes, and there is that never- seized second. Life shimmers and sparkles; but something is still missing. Something is missing, is terribly missing from life. We twist and turn, and it is all the same; we walk on across continents and through stories upon stories, and it is always the same: it is there, as if it had never moved, a never-filled little hole within, a little cry from a self-same child, forgotten at the edge of a great shore of no country, while we run and speak on the outside, come and go on the outside, but who goes in all that, what is all that? We like, or do not like, take and give and laugh and cry, but what good does it do, what is left, what is there? Something is missing and missing. It is like a story never begun, a little breath within never breathed, a pure and naked little cry of BEING, there, which says—Oh, where is life? Where am I in this? Where does it all begin? And sometimes it crumbles and everything crumbles, and we say, "Ah!"—as if we had never lived a second of all that chaos. Sometimes, in a dis­tracted second, at the edge of an ancient shore of forever, between two footsteps lost among the millions of steps we have taken, something pauses, something looks, we are there without seeing anything, but staring as if from the beginning of all time; we stand there, futile and null, and for one second we are; we are a nothing that yet is and for once is something; we are like a nothing that looks and for once the world is wrapped in softness; and it is nothing, and it is utterly soft, like the only thing that is. And then it is like a smile rising through centuries of oblivion, shores upon lost shores, millions of steps for nothing and millions of similar stories, and nothing is the same anymore ... for a second. A full little second that contains all eternities and all lives, as if it were that we were seeking, that that we were, through countless lives, and for that that we were walking, and for that that we loved. It is nothing, and it is like everything. The only story, contained in a second. And what else is there? All the Himalayas and all the visions in the world are like a vain breath of air compared to that one little breath, and if we have not touched that, we have touched nothing, lived nothing, loved nothing—something is missing and goes on being missing ... because that is what fills, what lives and what loves. What else is there?

The world s great story is very simple. It is contained in one second.

A little second that is.

Like a white flame.

A drop of the great Ray.

And so much fuss for nothing. So many cries, so many quests and steps and words, religions and philosophies: How complicated they make it! She said. But we pause for a second, and it is there. It is always there. It stares like a lost child, it understands so little of all this fuss: "Well, is this what life is? Is this what men are? Is this ...” We stare, but that does not need to gaze at anything—it is the pure gaze. We walk, we run and search, but that does not need to search for anything—it is right there, always there. We want this, do not want this, love and hate, but that needs none of that—it is. And it is everything—what could be missing? It is a flower, a rose, a man, a horse, a lizard scur­rying away: it is everything that is. It stares and it is. We let sand run through our fingers, we let ourselves flow with the ray of light upon a little leaf, we look while walking down a sidewalk, we look at anything, we look purely, and we are elsewhere, lost in wonder; if we let ourself go, we would look for hours: a sudden gap in that enormous noth­ingness that moves and comes and goes ... and then, it is. IT IS. A child looks at that for hours. But man has forgotten how to do so. Thus he needs steps and more steps, words, gospels, sorrows upon sorrows and philosophies which confuse everything, a terrible confusion of everything in order for us to bore a hole in all that, all of a sudden, and emerge into open air. And sometimes we can never bore a hole in it, and we are quite dead on two feet with medals and six children ... who will try to find what we have forgotten. It is, and it is so simple that no one ever thinks of it, it is even too simple to be thought of: it cannot be that simple! So goes the magic of the Mind—it weaves and embroiders, it miraculizes and mystifies all it touches, it evangelizes and anathematizes, believes or does not believe, condemns or approves, and it is all the same in black or white, yes or no, for or against, the same fabric of nothingness over what simply is. It pushes its microscopes into walls and its telescopes toward the stars, invents inter­galactic distances and geological depths so as to probe its own density and travel the whole course of its falsehood, in order to mimic BEING to the sidereal extent of its own nothingness. Yet it is all there, in a split second: the far and near, before and after. It is as light as air, as insignificant as a sparrow, no larger than a blade of grass or a gleam of mischief. It is not even worth thinking about, it is. It does not need a thousand stars or oceans: it is found in a fall­ing raindrop, a passing nothing. We touch it for a second, as a child absent-mindedly gazes at the rippling of a wave, and the earth's four corners are right there—Asia, Africa, the unknowns of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow; everything is perfectly known, it is there in one second. It is the world's great body in the blink of a second. It is there, completely and entirely there, without plus or minus or other. How could anything be left out? There is only one thing that is, not two. There is but one story to know, not two. A pure little drop of being. Such is the whole future of the earth—its "eternally-there” that it does not see but toward which it endlessly and painfully moves, wearing away the whole distance of its mental falsehood and all the layers of its forgetfulness.

The furthermost bounds of evolution are here.

It is all contained in the smile of a child.

Some call it the soul, others God, heaven, salvation, but the salvation of what in the end? If only we could extricate ourselves from our gospels—from our creeds of the left and the right, of above and below, our countless boxes of salva­tion. If only we were this pure little drop of being.

Thus was Mirra’s new field of experience opening up, a field as old as the Pleistocene and as young as a child’s smile. We are around 1908, Mirra has just left a more and more distant "artist’s life” by having divorced Morisset. Theon's fireworks have already burned out. In the end, there only remains what one is, or is not.

The Shattering of the Fishbowl

But what is that little drop of being?—Poetry? Maybe so, because it, after all is the "doer," the "poet" par excellence. But why is it so veiled? Why should the mind be a false­hood? Nature does not invent falsehood, nor does she invent truth; she needs neither one nor the other—she invents means. It is the mind that invents truth and its twin brother, falsehood. The mind is the maker of miracles; Nature, as it should be, is perfectly natural. She needs neither philosophies nor gospels: she just needs to progress. We simply move ahead—right or left, above or below, by any means whatsoever, we keep progressing, whether we fall flat on our faces or soar into heaven. The descending road ascends perfectly. The mind is the maker of good and evil. Nature herself needs neither good nor evil; she needs to advance. Then why would Nature, who is so wise, have invented this instrument, the mind, if only to reject it? True, she has rejected many things since the Pre-Cambrian era; she is a perfect iconoclast. The mind is the idolater, a perpetual idolater: pharaohs, totems, penicillin and equa­tions to the nth degree. Whether it idolizes materialism or God, we are not sure it makes any difference. The mind is the maker of ideas. Nature needs no ideas; she simply does things. She even produces miracles that we find hard to imitate. Of course, she is not clever enough to invent theories; what concocts them is that mind of ours—only to unmake them immediately afterwards in an attempt to catch Nature at the next bend. But she laughs, and slips away! Mean­while, she makes us progress. Progress in what? That is the question. Mind is power. And that is that! Let us pause and take stock: the steam engine, electricity and automatic doors for people in a hurry, not to mention the jet plane to take us at top speed to the other end of nowhere. Nature does not have powers; she is what she is, quite simply. If something bothers her, she causes an earthquake, that is all. But as for us, we are not what we are, that is the whole difference—and that is also why we can do nothing, finally, for to be means to have the power to be what one is. We have borrowed everything, there is not one minute of a man in all our millions of discoveries! We have even caught the sun to put it in a box. The mind is the imitator. It is even a perfect counterfeiter. A bird flies perfectly, for it is its nature to fly. Man walks, in theory, and he even pretends to know where he walks and where he is going, while Nature does not know. The mind is knowledge. And that is that! We just have to stop and contemplate: Nature has no knowledge—she is, so things are done naturally; they are known because they are done, and they are done because they are. It is very simple. It is automatic knowledge-action, like the migratory bird flying straight from Siberia. Whereas we need maps and goniometers—an improvement, perhaps. The mind is an eternal improver; it has improved on Nature so much that she no longer knows where to turn—unless she creates another earthquake to shake up all those pygmy improvers. Whereas we have a soul and a spirit. Yes, sir! For the mind also knows how to trap the soul and spirit when it finds it convenient to do so—in order to raise its arrogance right up to heaven. Nature has no spirit: she is. And perhaps she is the spirit, after all, because spirit is what is. Man is not—he does not understand, does not know and has no power, because he is not what he is. That is all. As simple as that. When one is, one knows, and when one knows, one has power. And one laughs.

But why the devil did she invent this tool? Nature is not wasteful, her economy is wise. After all, she is the one who invented man and fitted him with a mind, as she fitted others with a pair of claws. But finally, to think that think­ing is the supreme tool is our supreme folly. And Nature, the perfect iconoclast, is in the midst of shattering that idol. We can at least have enough "spirit” to acknowledge the delightful little cleansing of the world she is indulging in, while thoroughly enjoying herself. We have only to turn on the evening news to be informed of the latest progress of the cleansing. A geometrical progression, since we still love mathematics. But finally, whether annoyed or hurt, we can grab Nature by the neck and ask her why she invented this means, the mind, if it were only to shatter it.

In fact, Nature does not shatter: she transmutes. She is the great transmuter. She has not stopped since a certain protoplasm in its pond, and we are no exception to the rule. Here, the mind will pause a moment, sober and serious (because the mind is dreadfully serious), in order to remark that we are turning Nature into a new Demiurge. For no one has the right to be a demiurge, except man, of course. Oh well, let him be! Though for the moment, he cuts a different figure. Nature has no need to be a demiurge, nor God to be God!—each one needs to be what he is, not more, and when one is, there is only ONE thing, and it is all the same: God, demiurge, crocodile or ladybug. Because there is only one thing that is, not two. So where is God in all that, and the materialist and the ladybug? There is only that, which is and becomes increasingly what it is, with a pair of claws or a pair of spectacles, better and better and more and more. And when man is what he is, he will under­stand. And he will have power, and he will laugh heartily.

The mind is the most striking negative proof of the neces­sity to be. Anything that pretends just collapses and dies. When we are, we shall no longer need to die; death is the ultimate expedient to force us to be in our body as in our soul. Then we may know what being is. For so-called "Mat­ter” does not exist without Spirit and so-called “Spirit” does not exist without Matter. The union of the two is being. Only the body can understand, Mother will say. Until we have realized Spirit in Matter—or perhaps the Spirit of Matter, or perhaps divine Matter—we will understand neither Spirit nor Matter—nor God nor Nature nor the devil nor anything. Nor even ourselves. Matter is the key to total knowledge—perhaps we should say, to the knowl­edge of the Totality. I saw this Secret, Mother would say, I saw that the Supreme only becomes perfect in terrestrial Matter, on earth. ¹ And She would keep tirelessly repeating, until the last days of her life: To be capable of understanding the spiritual extreme and the material extreme , and to find the meeting point where ... it becomes a true force.²

A FORCE, she said. A real force.

We have yet to realize that being is power. It is even the only power.

And if the goal of evolution is to draw those millions of little evolutionary points that we are toward their totality— totality of consciousness, totality of being, totality of power and vision, and ultimately totality of joy, for only joy is missing, and how could there be joy in what is truncated? —then evolution had to find the means of making each one of these points conscious of its own individuality. So it cast the big net of the mind out into that indivisible totality, where the ancient hominids ran with the herds of aurochs and beat in unison with the moons and the slow glaciations in the same flux of being that linked everything to every­thing: the Siberian bird to the tropical lagoons and the hominid to the mute pulsations of the tribe—without error, without you or me, without here or there, tomorrow or yesterday, and the whole horde of sorrows that stems from not knowing and from being a man cut off all alone in his skin. The mind is the great divider. Such is its evolutionary necessity and its mortal feature. It has divided everything, not a single thing escapes its fragmentation: good and evil, truth and falsehood, time and space, far and near, hell and salvation, spirit and matter, and you and me and millions of little selves at sidereal distances from one another—but who know themselves as a self. And all the impotence of no longer knowing directly, and all the millions of devices to bring nearer what they have driven away, to cross the expanses that they have sealed-off, to know what they have forgotten, to feel what they have shut under shells thicker than those of their dinosaur brothers, to love unhappily, painfully and separately what used to be loved in oneness, each one as much as the other, amidst a joy that did not even need to be called joy. The whole mind's circuit—that prodigious trajectory of the self in a separate skin, that tremendous re-invention of everything through substitutes, that endless trickery—just to try and rediscover the only trick, the ONE simplicity that would tie everything back together in a single wingbeat, a single glance, a single pul­sation of being at last, a single knowledge that would be like a love endowed at last with power. The million colors of the one complete picture, the thousand gospels of the one tranquil Ray, the thousand apparatuses of the one power of being, the thousand little beings of one being, the thousand suffocating miseries in a man-made fishbowl. Truly, he who believes that the mind was meant to be the inventor of sublime philosophies and divine equations and Raphaelesque paintings is a madman of evolution. The mind is only the inventor of the necessary division, neces­sary falsehood, necessary pain and necessary illusion, so that each evolutionary point can rediscover the total BEING in an individual being, the total consciousness in an indi­vidual consciousness, and the total power in an individual powerlessness. And the joy of being at last.

And when the fishbowl reaches the end of its evolutionary necessity, when those millions of beings can no longer stand suffocating in a separate little self, suffocating in pestilen­tial thoughts and decomposed words, suffocating in their gospels that save nothing and their panaceas that cure nothing and their science that knows nothing, solves noth­ing, can do nothing and mechanizes man in a terrible rat trap of steel and concrete, where economic policemen will soon be kings behind a facade of nonexistent liberty, non­existent equality and nonexistent fraternity, with a thousand deadly parties pulling to the left or the right in order to find out in which direction it is better to be drowned—then the time comes for evolution to smash the fishbowl.

That moment has come.

Our failure is our most marvelous hope.

The last convulsions of the old mental Babel are opening onto a new cycle, a supramental cycle. The most tremen­dous illusion of all times is collapsing in a crash of rust and dust, as if it had never existed. And indeed, it never did. Separation never was. Consciousness was never divided, Spirit is not as we think it, Matter is not as we see it; life and death—that first and fundamental division—are neither life as we know it nor death as we think it, but something else: a radical something else into which we are slowly toppling, as if into a bewildering and unexpected child­birth—even more radical and unexpected than that which transformed the reptile in its swamp into a bird in the sky, and more total, because it is another being. It is not an improved extension of the same old evolution; it is a leap, an evolutionary saltus into a different consciousness. A new evolution, Sri Aurobindo would say. A different life in Matter. A different Matter. A different law of being.

For to be differently is to have a different power.

But being begins with one drop.

The Way Out Below

Nature always gives us the means to move to another cycle and to work out our own evolution. Collectively, she creates the pressure of new or suffocating conditions in the milieu; individually, the internal pressure of a need toward ... the other state or new milieu.

That need is the lever of the transition.

Fundamentally, from the beginning of time, millennia upon millennia, there has always been that Need at the source of the world's obscure impulsion. It is the moving force of evolution. The need for sun in the heart of the plant, the need for air in the heart of the larva, the need to live, to be. Even the galaxies need to expand. And how could what is really dead aspire to be? Death does not exist, what is not cannot be. Nothing in the world can need what it does not already have and what it is not already— if the sun did not exist, we would not need the sun, and if we happened to invent one single sun, it would mean that it already existed in our first steps toward it, it would actually push us toward it, would remember itself in us. We constantly invent what is already there, we dig up the obscure layers of an “eternally there,’’ we need what we are. This is the world’s great Need: TO BE. It is that need that remembers itself, becomes itself. That is what slowly becomes before our eyes and through our eyes—we become what we are. And to be is to be completely, for how can what is not be everything—it is, or it is not, and if it is, it is everything. One cannot be a part of oneself without need­ing to be wholly oneself. The need of the world and of each particle in the world is to be everything that is. Being needs to be. That is all. Where is the nothingness that needs something?

And the need to be grows from cycle to cycle, from spe­cies to species. It is like a flame that pushes within—which pushes grains of atoms toward grains of atoms, ever more atoms, toward the great nebulae; which pushes molecules toward molecules, ever more molecules, toward a first body of being; which pushes each being toward other beings, toward ever more being·, which grows with the body of the world and remains unsatisfied until every atom and every molecule and every little cell in a body has again found its totality of being. For it is the same being that wants to be in all points, in the interstellar totality and the most infinite total sum as in the tiniest grain of atom. And when, for a second, one is in the most microscopic point, one is everything and everywhere, for there are not two things or two beings. The smallest and the first to be will be the last to become its own totality of being—for it has been the most encrusted by evolution. And since being is contained in one point, the total secret and the total power and the total being are to be found in the atom and in the cell. The point is the key to the whole. The summit of evo­lution is not in billions of things added together or brought to perfection, but in a single point which remembers totally what it is. The Matter of the beginning holds the secret of final Matter: the secret of being, for it is the only secret. In the deepest oblivion lies the most perfect being. The oldest layer is the last one to surface and reveal its content. Con­sciousness, grown luminously conscious upon the summits of evolution, leans toward its base and meets the supreme being who had kindled this flame in it and led this entire journey back to itself. Memory concludes its remembering: it is. We will be completely only in our primal matter: the body. The final being is at the beginning. The dame of Need is the leader of the journey. The fire of Matter is the supreme fire of Spirit: ‘Ό Fire," says the Veda, “when thou art well borne by us, thou becomest the supreme growth and expan­sion of our being ... thou art a multitude of riches spread out on every side (Rig Veda, II. 1.12)... thou art the son of heaven by the body of the earth” (III.25.1).

A little white flame.

And it is joy.

A great joy of being willed this journey, because to be is to contain the joy of all that is. There is no other joy. All suffering is insufficiency of being. The world suffers from not being what it is, and humans suffer for not being what they are. But they are moving toward a great joy which is theirs, they are moving toward the totality they have always been. They are soon going to break out of the old fishbowl; the need to be is the key to the transition, and the pressure of the flame will shatter the wall of illusion. We are at the time of the unbearable Pressure. The mind is suffocating like an old fish at the bottom of its dried-up hole. But we are moving toward something else, we are the pioneers of a new air. And for once, it may be an air of joy.

This need is the key to every evolutionary transition, from the mineral to man to what will replace mental man. There are not several ways of getting through, there is only one. But because we are mental beings, we speak of the need for truth, the need for justice, the need for good, the need for freedom, that is, the countless dualities of the mind, each with its reverse of shadow and almost its necessity of shadow, for if only one of these dualities were really to triumph, it would be a catastrophe as insufferable as the triumph of its opposite, and what justice could we apply that would not be the ruthless exaction of a single idea, what truth that would not be the intolerant exclu­sivism of a single thought, what good that would not be the blind destruction of all the hidden aspiration and need for a wider good contained within the “evil?” If you follow this law of the guilty who must be punished, Mother said, then little by little, with the unfolding of things, everything should be punished! No one would remain to progress!³ We do not know, we know nothing; the mind is a not-knowing that needs to know—another of those thousand dual needs that are all a wrapping around the single need to be. For to be is to know the need of each being and the good of each being and the truth of each being, within something that encompasses all, loves all, understands all—and which carries us beyond our own limits of good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, to the point where the fishbowl ceases to exist and where the thousand rays are ONE. Each evolutionary transition is not the destruction of an evil grown unbearable, but of an old, suffocating Good, which swallows up the one need to be for the benefit of its own worn out mechanism.

But with man came what may be the saddest deformation in the whole history of evolution—though we do not really know, for we have always seen that in Nature's economy each deformation had its own deep necessity and hid some detour that enriched her realm, some subterfuge to make us emerge despite ourselves into an unexpected clearing ... and finally hid some formation of the one thing that formed itself through all the ages, all modes of being and all “deformations." But this Flame, this need to be, this true evolutionary fire which should have been our supreme treasure—“This Flame with his hundred treasures,” says the Veda (1.59.7), this "supreme growth and expansion of our being” (II. 1.12) has become synonymous with a tragic misunderstanding. The mind has grasped hold of it, as it grasps hold of everything else, and stuck this label on it, “God. Place of residence: heaven." Which is a supreme aberration. (But we are always wary of so-called "aberra­tions” which may still be a detour in the one and only Direction.) Indeed, to the encumbered humans that we are, this evolutionary future may have looked like some inac­cessible “heaven” beyond the walls of the fishbowl, at the phenomenal distance of our own layers of oblivion. Thus we had to "climb up,” "ascend,” "get out” in order to catch God somewhere above, all the way up there, in that golden Future inside a tomb. And again, we seem to hear Mira Ismalun, madcap that she was, who had so well under­stood Goethe: "Beyond the tombs, forward!” But were we to abolish death, what would be left of the religions? And of their salvations? Whereas now that we come to the bottom of the pit, now that we despair of ever finding any heaven in the midst of the sticky tidal wave that seems to have engulfed the world, amid this mental chaos, this vile eruption that seems to raise again the old fallen totems to adorn them with psychedelic colors; now that the most sordid instincts and age-old fears seem to be resurging with the triumph of a science that we are beginning to wonder might well be a more devastating plague than all the old plagues it pretended to cure; now, more than ever, it would seem that we have to “climb up," to "get out,” and that “heaven" is farther away than it ever was—but this is wrong, for we have never been so near! We are digging up the mud of the first evolutionary layers, close, very close to the primal secret at the heart of naked Matter; thanks to our religions, we have exhausted all the old heavens above, we are at the bottom of the pit and only one layer remains —the way out is below.

This is “the Sun in the darkness” of the Vedas.

But we have to grasp the lever of the Transition.

We have to understand what is going on.

To understand is imperative.

This whole Flame, stifled by the aberration of religions, discredited by the label of "God” stuck on it, diverted from its real goal—this idea of an arbitrary, supreme God is one of the most unacceptable things to any enlightened mind.⁴ Mother exclaimed, this “one” God amid our millions of one-God and one-way religions, whose reverse sides were invariably the Devil, to correct what might have been the intolerable triumph of that single light of death—this flame must rediscover its real meaning for the earth, its real meaning for “the supreme growth and supreme expansion of our being," and not for our extinction in some one-and- only heaven.

For it is the flame of the great evolutionary transition and the key to the total being.

It is not far away; it is right here, in the heart.

When I understood that, Mother recalled, I rushed head­long like a cyclone and nothing could have stopped me.⁵ Sixty years later, in 1964, at the age of eighty-six, She was still saying: Really a thirst, a need, you know, a need.... All the rest doesn’t matter, what you need is THAT. No more bonds —free, free, free, free! Always ready to change everything, except ONE thing: to aspire. That thirst. I quite understand: some people don't like the idea of a ‘‘Divine’’ because it imme­diately gets mixed up with all those dreadful conceptions, and so it makes their lives a little bit more complicated—but we don’t need that! The “something" we need, the Perfection we need, the Light we need, the Love we need, the Truth we need, the supreme Perfection we need—and that's all. The formulas... the fewer the formulas, the better. A need, a need, a need ... that THE Thing alone can satisfy, nothing else, no half measure. That alone. And then, move on! Move on! Your path will be your path, it doesn’t matter; any path, any path whatever, even the follies of today’s American youth can be a path, it doesn't matter.⁶