Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

11: From the Infinite to the Infinitesimal

The Central Experience

One moves about, comes and goes, one is a king, a schoolboy, a painter; like Mirra, one even has a child, and visions in every color and of every country; one has lived indeed, for a long time, one has been here or there, a priest­ess, a princess or anybody, and in the Luxembourg Garden where She used to walk, as she did in Thebes, Venice or Versailles, it was so much the same that it seemed to have been forever: "it” was there, in a little lane, wearing a bonnet or a cap embroidered with gold thread—but what is it all about, what remains, what is there? One has done this or that, run about, dreamed, listened to one music or another, drawn this curve or other curves, read and read again—“cosmic reviews," reviews that review everything, but nothing is really viewed, nothing is truly understood; today is like everyday, there is just "something” moving about, here or there, with or without baggage, with or without a family, with every possible power or no power at all, what difference does it make? Millions and millions of things added to one another, added to ... what? Future Thebes, undiscovered Eldorados, this or that, and then what? Millions of things to do, but what is actually being done? Millions of wonders yet to come, but what does it matter, what difference does it make? Pluses, minuses, but where is that which is here, at this simple, present minute when we walk along, the something that is moving right now? The something that will never be millions of years old, which will never expect tomorrow's wonders, which has no yesterday or tomorrow, and is quite simply moving at this frightfully blank second, ah! What is it? What is there? If it is not here, it is nowhere, nor in any century, and what good are all the wonders if this one second is not the wonder? Tomorrow is like yesterday, we have nothing to add anymore, nothing to find anymore: if it is not here, it will never be here. Ne-ver. There is no future, there is this one second. There is no past, there is this one second. There is no hope, no wonder, nothing to gain or lose, there is this one second. There is nothing to find but what is already found there; the supermen and supergods of every possible universe, tomorrows paradises, evolutionary sum­mits or abysses—are nothing, and they will always be nothing until this one second is filled with “something” that IS.

So we can make all the fuss we want, boast of the seven wonders of the world and a forthcoming eighth, create philosophies and religions, make little children and take lots of trips, but that leads nowhere if our little second is not right now. At page 800, we will find ourselves as we were before, after all the baptisms we will remain unchanged, and after a thousand lives it will be still the same—if superman is not right now, he will never exist at any lime in any universe. Because this “here and now” is what creates every superman and every universe, every' plus and minus, but we have no further need of plus or minus, before or after—there is nothing to add, nothing to subtract, it is fully here, and it is full forever.

A drop of being.

We may say all we like, but all existence in the world is reducible to this simple second. There are no great or small things to do, no inventions, discoveries or improvements— nothing is improved if there is not this one little second. This second is what is unimprovable. It is the instanta­neous best of everything that moves, the great journey in one second. It is the one story of a million stories which come and go like phantoms and recur again and again, for that single existing little second to be found.

It is something suddenly beating in the heart, something warm, calm, rich in content, and very still, very full, like a sweetness ... Like a reflection of something eternal on very peaceful waters.¹

But it is so light and limpid, that it looks like nothing, a mere breath of air, and one is left with a smile. The Great Wonder is so transparent that we do not see it. We laugh and just pass. We pass everything by. We scale summits, soar into cosmic consciousness, move here and there, in a monk's robe or no robe at all, a sinner or a saint, it is all the same—and right in the middle of the road, without a temple, without fuss, it is there, and it smiles mischievously, lightly, so lightly, unveiled and naked, so fluid that we cannot catch it, so clear that it is instantaneously everywhere, and so simple, so simple! Millions of years equivalent to one second. And so young that it is like the eternal childhood of the world. So where is tomorrow? Where is over there? How complicated they make it!

The world’s future in a second. Its eternal present.

And everything fills with presence.

And without that, there is nothing at all. Just a vain dream. And there will be nothing at all for ever and ever. We would merely add loads of wonders to nothing.

Mirra suddenly felt relieved the day someone happened to tell her, You know, that has nothing to do with the one- God-up-above: it is the God within, and that is what the world is becoming. And it has no need of religions. I was an outright atheist: till the age of twenty, the very idea of God made me furious. Therefore / had the most solid base—no imaginings, no mystic atavism; my mother was very much an unbeliever and so was my father. So from the point of view of atavism it was very good: positivism, materialism. Only one thing: since I was very small, a will for perfection in any field whatever; a will for perfection and the sense of a limitless consciousness—no limits to one's progress or to ones power or to one’s scope. And that, since I was very small. But mentally, an absolute refusal to believe in a "God”: I believed only in what I could touch and see. Only, the sense of a Light here above, which began when I was very small, I was five, along with a will for perfection. A will for perfec­tion : oh, whatever I did always had to be the best I could do. And then, a limitless consciousness. These two things. And my return to the Divine came about through Theon’s teaching, when I was told for the first time, "The Divine is within, there." Then I felt at once, “Yes, this is it."²

It was like a wall collapsing.

We are all behind a wall—the enormous wall of our own conceptions, fear or hope, for hope, too, is a kind of wall— our hopes are so poor!—and then, on the other side of the wall lies the simplicity of the Wonder we never dare hope for. It was so simple that we had never thought of it. And we could not have thought that it was so simple, because for the mind, nothing can exist without complication, or difficulty, or conquest, or toil, or ... The mind is complica­tion itself; if things are not complicated enough, they cannot be true; if a child can do it, then what is the use of "I"? In fact, all this toil is not so much to “find” the thing as to get out of the complication. To conquer the non-conquest. To build a transparence. One might almost say that the mind is a tremendous edifice for catching a breath of air—which it never catches; it catches cyclones, earthquakes, all kinds of fireworks that give it a feeling of existence—Ah, look how strong I am! I boil and bubble, I foam, I fume! And then ... nothing. It has not caught one second of anything refreshing. It has not breathed for one second. Suffocation is what best gives the mind the sense of existence; it even writes volumes about its refined suffocation. But perhaps, in Natures economy, this enormous machine of suffoca­tion was invented only to drive us to the point where we cannot stand it any longer, and to compel us to get out of it ... as conscious individuals. All the barriers—religious, like the one that held Mirra back, philosophical, political, scientific ... the millions of little barriers—may only have existed to accumulate enough Force or Shakti to burst the barrier and make us emerge into the open air, free and fully formed, instead of being an amorphous Precambrian little larva unknowingly imbibing the great sap of life. So we are not fabricating science, machines, religions or philoso­phies; we are fabricating the Shakti. We are letting the being grow beneath its bell jar. But it is only a bell jar.

Mirra had been building up her cyclone for twenty-six years.

And suddenly, everything seemed to conspire to open the doors before her (or undo the complication): It was at a lecture on India, at a time when I knew nothing of India, absolutely nothing, only the usual nonsense. I didn’t even know what a mantra was. I had gone to a lecture given by some fellow who was supposed to have practiced “yoga" for a year in the Himalayas and recounted his experience (none too interesting, either). All at once, in the course of his lec­ture, he uttered the sound OM. And I saw the entire room suddenly fill with light, a golden, vibrating light. ...I was probably the only one to notice it: my whole, entire body, everything vibrated in an extraordinary way! It was like a revelation—everything, but everything started vibrating. Then I said: "At last, here’s the true sound!”³ Someone had "captured the sound."

Almost at the same time (everything did seem to have been triggered like a conspiracy,) a very ordinary Indian, on his way through Paris, put Vivekananda’s book Raja- Yoga into her hands, the very first Indian book She had ever read: It really seemed so wonderful that someone could explain something to me!⁴ She fell on it. Then yet another traveller gave her the Bhagavad Gita and told her, Read this, knowing that in the Gita, Krishna represents the God within.⁵ India was knocking at Mirras door from every side. Not that She suddenly found herself a disciple of India and a devotee of the "religions of India" (which besides has no "religions”—still another nonsense); whether exotic or not, all religions seemed equally aberrant to her, but it was there, within—not in books, not in India, but within her­self, there, immediate. Within a month, all the work was done!⁶ Everything was un-complicated at one stroke. Truly, there are moments in life when all circumstances seem to converge into a silent conspiracy to lead us to a certain point—there is no need for “big events,” amazing individuals or luminous words; sometimes it just takes a breath of nothing, an “ordinary” person, a chance encounter, a book, and scales seem to fall from your eyes. Like a little shock; "Oh, but I’ve always known that!” Each time there is this "I've-always-known-that!” It is nothing new and it is com­pletely new. Like a meeting between yourself and yourself. It is nothing, it looks like nothing, it is uncatchable, but it is another air. Just a little breath. You can shrug your shoulders and pass right by it because it does not hold a sufficient dose of complication. But if once, only once, that little door opens up, that little skylight in the fortress, that golden little breath, then you come back to it, as if by sheer force—because it is nothing and yet it is filled with a supreme power running through the years like a smile. It is even what runs through all lives. Suddenly, that futile second pulls you by the sleeve as if it were the only existing second among a million empty hours. A little drop of pure diamond. It is the Force itself. Pure. It is the only thing that ever was amidst a million trifles. It is not serious at all, and yet it is all that remains. It is as fragile as a smile and yet more powerful than tons of stockpiled uranium—but it is millions of years old, it is not in a hurry, and does not show off; it bides its time, and does not need to perform miracles: it is the miracle. It can recreate the world in a second. It is the power of the world, what makes the cycles turn, what has pulled us out of the protozoan and is slowly leading us toward what we are—toward our own power of being. Then we will not need uranium or machines to make up for our powerlessness to be: we shall act, with a smile, we shall quite simply be. From beginning to end, we are only heading toward a meeting with ourselves.

But we would be quite wrong to think that Mirra was satisfied with one little second "like that.” If it can be once, it must be forever, at every moment and precisely in all those little minutes, there, between two footsteps on a boulevard, on the stairs and everywhere, so utterly empty and poignant with absurd emptiness that they seem about to burst with something. Life becomes very poignant at that moment. We are on a kind of empty reverse side and everything is suffocating, as if we were constantly inside a non-reason, a non-sense, a non-being; something stirs within which is so terribly empty that it almost feels like a painful full­ness—a need ... pure, without meaning, without even an “I want,” and anyway what do I want? What is there to want? A need, a stark need, as if that empty intensity were the only fullness, the very beat of our being, the yet-unborn-being somewhat poignant with being, and there is only that, only that, this nothingness throbbing with each step, each gesture, that need to be which bums ... like a white flame. It burns—for nothing. It simply burns. And it is because it burns. Being is a fire. Emptiness is a fire, full­ness is a fire. Nothingness is a fire, somethingness is a fire. It is all the same, and we no longer know if we need or do not need, if it is absurd or not absurd, if we refuse or do not refuse, live or do not live, are or are not—there is that same fire stirring with our every step, and what does it matter as long as it burns, like the being of our being, our only fullness, our only meaning, the only right there that is.

And then, it is always there.

It is there all the time. There is nothing to find, nothing

to seek: the need was being, the emptiness was being, the suffocation was being—that which was seeking and seek­ing itself, filling itself with its own fire of being. Good was a fire, evil was a fire, the future and the past are a fire, and what do all those centuries matter! It burns: it is. That is all. Tomorrow and yesterday, summits and stupidities, here or there, it is all the same and it burns: it is. And one day it becomes so compact within it feels as if we were too large for our body, too full of being-fire for our body to contain us. It is almost overwhelming. You bump into walls everywhere: within, without, everywhere, in beings and in things—a world of walls—as if that fire raised the walls, or perhaps made you aware of them—nothing is natural anymore, falsehood becomes flagrant, suffocating, you wonder how you can go on living in all that. The closer you come to the other side, the more you see the difference, Mother said. As long as you wallow in your ignorance, you don’t notice it.⁷ This is the last suffocation, “The bronze door,” I thought only of that—that concentration, concentra­tion, as if you were sitting before a closed door. And the pressure hurt, hurt physically. She carried that with Her everywhere she walked, went up and down the Boulevard St. Michel with it, was almost run over by a streetcar on her way to the Luxembourg—she heard nothing, saw nothing. She was there pushing and pushing against that door, push­ing more and more with a growing energy ...⁸ Then, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason—I was neither more concen­trated nor more or less anything—vloom! It opened up. And not for hours, but months, my child, it never left me: that light, that radiance, that light and vastness! And the feeling that that is what wants, knows, rules all life and guides everything—that feeling never left me. Not for a single, minute from that moment on. And whenever I had to take a decision, I would stop fora second and receive the answer from there.

A total reversal. And this reversal never returned to the original point ...a feeling of becoming another person.⁹ And all life changes: Absolutely everything changes completely, and everything that seemed to you true, natural, normal, real or tangible, starts immediately looking very ridiculous, very odd, very unreal and absurd; but you have touched some­thing that is supremely true and eternally beautiful, and you never lose it again.¹⁰ It is as if we entered life for the first time; and we know, it is instantaneous knowledge; we know because we are—a horse, a swallow, a pebble, a baby, it is all the same being. We know ourselves perfectly, here or millions of miles away. We know what to do, what to say, what gesture to make, and for the first time life becomes natural. It is all one and the same being moving about, and it knows its own steps and the millions of steps of its mil­lions of other "selves" moving about. It is very simple, it is immediate, harmonious, infallible. It is Harmony that moves about. It feels quite comfortable at every minute, like resting your back against a great light.¹¹ It is the central experience. "O Fire,” says the Veda, "thou art the knower of all things born” (1.59.5), "thou art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way (II. 1.12). That splendor of thee, O Fire, which is in heaven and in the earth and in the plants and in the waters ... is a vivid ocean of light which sees with a divine seeing (III.22.2). He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there for man, he is there in the middle of his house—he is as one universal in creatures" (1.70.2).

Physical Salvation

But it is not the end of the journey.

Satisfied, we could stay there and doze off into bliss, but our bliss does not change the world one iota. We could catch hold of that light to make sermons, gospels and even miracles. But no sermon has ever changed the world and all miracles end up in the same hole. We are "saved," indeed, so what? The world is not saved, and our first world, this body, will still end up rotting in a tomb—is it saved? What is saved when everything is not saved, since there is but one body? Until we have "saved" this body and this Matter, ultimately nothing will be saved, for what in the universe is "outside?" There is only that. If this single cell, like this single second, is not full, nothing is full and nothing is totally true. In the ultimate finite is the ultimate infinite. In the infinitesimal, the total being. Salvation is physical,¹² Mother would say. And Sri Aurobindo added, The end of other yogas ... is, as it were, the beginning of ours.¹³

Mirra saw the situation very clearly; She was not one to doze off into bliss or preach sermons—She always hated sermons: They want a truth expressed in a few very clear and well-defined words, so they can say, "This is true. " The old calamity of religions: ‘‘This is true—therefore the rest is false­hood ... When a thing is true, you can be sure that its opposite is also true. When you have understood this, then you will begin to understand.¹⁴ Indeed, She was faced with all those “opposites,” the perpetual contradictions in the human mind, in human life, in the human body, in Herself and in everything. We shine on a summit of being, we see, we know, it is perfect and even very "comfortable”... provided we close our eyes. Below, or outside, or within, the same old beast continues to walk, pant, hurt and grate, and Con­tradiction assails us on all sides—the great Contradiction everywhere, the yes-no, good-evil, true-false, life-death, there is no way out of it—of course, there is no way out! Where would we get out? There is nowhere to go I Go where? There is only THAT.¹⁵ We cannot get out of the only thing that exists! And She was beginning to grasp hold of this key that the "opposite" is precisely what enables us to reach totality: For fear of acting wrongly, we stop doing anything; for fear of speaking wrongly, we stop saying anything; for fear of... Virtue has always been busy eliminating things from life and if we could put together all the virtues from all the coun­tries in the world, nothing much would remain in life!,.. It’s a very widespread tendency, which probably comes from a poverty, an incapacity: to reduce and reduce and reduce ... and it all becomes so cramped! In the aspiration not to make any mistakes, you eliminate the opportunities of making them—that’s no cure. It's simply reducing the manifestation to its minimum. And the natural outcome is Nirvana. But if the Lord wanted only Nirvana, there would be only Nirvana! He obviously conceives the coexistence of all opposites and that, to Him, must be the beginning of a totality.¹⁶ Right there, She touched the whole key, the simple key, the one that goes right through to the end: to death, the ultimate "contradiction" that still hides from us the ultimate totality. The obstacle is the lever. The opposite is the lever. It is what has made the world grow since the first protozoan began suffocating in a swamp (had it had the mind to, it would certainly have said that its suffocation was due to Evil, the great Evil, and the one who made it suffocate was the devil, the great Devil of evolution). Here we touch the very root of what was and is the most tremendous calamity of all the spiritualities in the world, the reason for their failure and for the world’s failure; torn between religions full of sin and a Matter that is the very clothing of sin, man has packed God off to heaven (which is not so bad) while he himself dived into Matter like a guilty urchin: "short but sweet,” and after us heaven can fall. Having said that life is a condemned, reprehensible, anti-divine thing, this is the logical conclusion. Then, what to do? We don’t want to do away with life, so we do away with the Divine.¹⁷ And at the same time they close their eyes to the very lever of the world's transformation; they turn their backs on evolution, as do the others in their pure heaven. In short, both the religionist and the materialist, each in their own way, strive to rectify the great Contradiction, the former through salvation, the latter through machinery. And they are all convinced that had they created the world, they would never have made all the blunders God made !¹⁸ Mother exclaimed with her delightful humor. And finally, no one has the lever of either power or deliverance.

What is that evil, that great Evil of the world?

We create religions, philosophies, systems, yet we are nothing but so-called "higher” mammals in Nature's great crucible. Nature has no philosophy: She simply "does.” And what She does is the philosophy. We add all sorts of things to it, which She takes into account... for a moment, then blows them away if they do not suit her progress. She moves forward, that is her philosophy. We do not know what the higher reptile’s philosophy was or if it ever con­ceived of any heaven at all, but it flew all the same. What mattered was to fly. And certainly its dried-up swamps and torrid air were a great Evil that threatened the excellence of its reptilian qualities—it would certainly have said that all this was “against" the good of reptiles. From species to species we have never ceased being attacked by "adverse” conditions, and as lor us poor human creatures, we have more than our share of parasites; like the slightest tree in the forest or the smallest plant in our garden, each of us has his own particular parasite, his own special adversity, the something we wish were not there and which prevents us from ... what? Probably from becoming the excellent man we would like to be—but those millions of excellent men might be remarkably insipid on the surface of this good earth, and our Mother Nature may have other designs. There is no “against" in Nature, everything is for and every­thing is made for us to move forward. This may be the most important lesson we have yet to learn. When we stop thinking that things are "against," we will be closer to the Great Lever. If instead of pushing them away and packing them off to God or the devil, we took a moment to examine that "against” and see what it is made of, we would be very close to the solution. But we go on, like veritable babies of evolution, crying and exclaiming, "Oh, how wonderful it is!”—hence it is God. “Oh, how disgusting it is!”—hence the Devil. But we do not see that everything is marvelous and that the Marvel is at every moment—a marvel of exactness to the second; we see only a microscopic portion of the road, and anything that does not blossom exactly as we think it ought to in this absurd minute along the way is obviously evil and detestable. But our good is as absurd as our evil; we miss the point, we live in an idea of the universe but not in the reality of the universe! We live in the mind, which has divided up everything according to its habit, cut out little cubes from an imperturbable unfolding Totality, in which there is not an atom of contradiction, even for a second. Everything goes there, everything is for that which is unfolding, everything is in that which is growing, and everything is becoming what it is. For there are not two things in the universe, there is only one. And all the "againsts" are designed to make us find that, all the "no’s” to make us touch that yes, that geometric point of the world where all opposites melt into the ONE and become the ONE by the very force of their contradiction.

The only evil, really, is not to be. It is even the ultimate evil of the body—which dies because it is not. The problem can be seen at every level: ugliness, meanness, disease, accidents, suffering, death, they take place in different realms and with different vibrations, but the cause of them all is the same.¹⁹ When we touch the root, we touch all the other levels as well. There is but one thing to touch. Perhaps we are slowly driven to that microscopic cellular point that holds the cure of the world. But we must get there. We must clear away all the layers to reach that point—all the layers that have been piled up on us over thousands of years of evolution, and which are in fact the layers of our forgetfulness. This is our evolutionary burden, our obstacle and our key. The famous "against” that amounts to "for.” And with the wonderful simplicity that takes all the "great human problems” and their huge philosophical para­phernalia and reduces them to their simplest universal expression, She said, laughing: Everyone’s born with some special twist (!) but it's something that has been added, placed to enable one to touch Matter.²⁰ And She further explains: There are two things in every human being: what comes from the past and has persisted because it is fanned and conscious, and then all that dark, unconscious mass, really muddy, that is added in every new life. Then the other thing gets into that and finds itself imprisoned, you know— adulterated and imprisoned—and generally it takes more than half your life to emerge from that entanglement. This is the part of the being that still belongs to Unconsciousness, to Ignorance, to Darkness, to Stupidity, and is ... not even as harmonious as a tree or a flower; something that’s not even as tranquil as a stone, not even as harmonious and not even as strong as the animal—something that is really a downfall. That is really human inferiority. It is ... yes, what was put together more or less clumsily and ignorantly by father, mother, grandparents, education, that whole mudhole, as it were, into which you fall headfirst.... And it was added BECAUSE its one of the victories you must win.²¹ Without our detestable mortal or medical sins, we all would have already gone off into some pure heaven or shut ourselves up in some hygienic and democratic paradise, from which evo­lution would have a hard time plucking us out. But it sees to it that we are well and truly suffocated, parasitized through and through, to compel us to touch Matter and find there, at the very bottom of this pit, in the very heart of the Contradiction, the ultimate secret and the ultimate being and the ultimate power: The remedy is at the center of the evil.²² The way out is below. And in 1912, at the very moment Sri Aurobindo, in Pondicherry, was preparing an even more radical sedition, She was already writing: In full sunlight the roads of intelligence light up, but in the night’s white brightness are revealed the hidden paths of perfection.²³

Thus began what She would soon call the "descending path."

Do not try to be virtuous. See to what extent you are united, ONE with all that is antidivine. Take up your share of the bur­den; accept to be impure and false yourself, and in so doing you will be able to take up the Shadow and offer it. And inso­far as you are able to take it and offer it, things will change.²⁴

We must make a breach in the old wall, but the breach cannot be made by the sum of our human virtues, which only solidify the old complacency—something has to be missing, terribly missing; then we bend over the wound, which burns and hurts, until we find the little cry of being there too, until we have drilled the well of light all the way down. And we begin again and again, and each lime we touch a deeper layer, more painful, more burning—even larger, as if the deeper we went, the more the layers widen, like the reverse of the great layers of light up above, and each time it seems to grow more intense—the Pressure of a growing suffocation, a growing need, a more absolute want, and a more poignant fire, as if the whole earth ached there, with its centuries yet to be healed. And we go deeper; we dig the well of light, we pull down the little ray from above, and sometimes it even seems that the white little flame from above is swallowed up in that Fire, and that all we need is to burn on and on, as if this burning were the very being in this nothingness: an ever more powerful and vaster and more compact Fire, as if our very being were , growing in order to touch a deeper layer of itself. The deeper we go, the more the being grows, as if it were forged, fanned by the power of the contradiction, widened by a pain that seems to touch the furthermost bounds of the earth. "I dug and dug” said the Vedic Rishis (1.179.1). This is the great breach. The cleft. The bridge of light between the old, dull surface, the old celestial heavens, which seem so insubstantial, so empty and hollow in comparison with that burning density of being, and ... something that each time draws us deeper, more within, toward its unbearable mystery, where burning is like a paroxysm of contradiction, a yes-no, a nothingness of being, a flaming refusal, such a desperate or despairing end-of-everything that nothing is left but to love. As though the depths of the night were made of love.

These are the steps of the descent.

At the end: the cell. The body. Pure Matter beneath its millennial coatings.

To man has fallen the painful privilege of making mis­takes. Among the millions of infallible animals, such is his evolutionary distinction and the most powerful indicator of his degree of mutation. The earth is full of cracks and holes and wounds as never before during a million years of the Quaternary. A great evolutionary breakthrough is under way.

There is always a weak point, She said, a sensitive spot we generally call a weakness—but this is in fact the very strength of the being, the point through which he can be touched.²⁵ We must accept the weak point. We must build a bridge between That which eternally is and all the dark and pain­ful ignorance of the material world.²⁶ "He has cloven wide away the darkness as one that cleaves away a skin that he may spread out our earth [earth = body] under his illumin­ing sun,” says the Veda (V.85.1). To triumph in the inner worlds is not enough, we must triumph even in the most material worlds.²⁷ Man must accomplish his mission of purifying matter²⁸ transforming matter,²⁹ She said as early as 1912, even before meeting Sri Aurobindo. Man must enter the path of the divine life,³⁰ create a new race.³¹ And with a prophetic vision of all that Sri Aurobindo's yoga would be, as well as her own up to the age of ninety-five, She wrote, The obstacle merges with the very reason for accomplishing the work: the present state of imperfection of physical matter.,. ,³² We must constantly strive to conquer this bedrock of universal unconsciousness and, through our organism, gradually transform it into luminous con­sciousness.³³

The remarkable phenomenon is that as this "luminous consciousness” on the summits crosses the dark layers of our evolutionary past—everything in us that grates, struggles, suffers, falls ill and revolts, desires or does not desire, wants or does not want, all the enormous imbroglio that makes us toss and turn as on a rack of torture and makes us die in the end—as Matter is purified and the light descends and ignites in there, drawing nearer to the fron­tiers of pure Matter in the body and cells, it is as if Matter itself changed, in vision, in power, in touch, even in law, as if the Being itself, above, upon its summits, changed its eternity, as it were, its time and space, changed even itself in its skin of being—it is no longer the same being! And it is no longer the same Matter, ft is something else ... some­thing divine, She would say. A supreme conjunction in which Spirit and Matter merge into a third thing ... which is the secret of the Future. And which is perhaps total being. Something that transmutes all opposites: life-death, still­ness-movement, time-eternity, being-becoming, high-low, you-me, here-there ... A supreme and powerful conjunc­tion that contains the real power, and the world's liberation, and the beginning of a "new evolution” on earth.

The fishbowl shatters at the level of Matter. And at that level only.

The infinitesimal meets the infinite.

Such is the work of conjunction that Sri Aurobindo and Mother would pursue in their bodies, which is ultimately the one great Body of the Earth. And such is the meaning of our evolution, the goal of our millions of trials and tribulations—not a return to heaven or some post mortem salvation,³⁴ as Sri Aurobindo put it, not a "fall," but a delib­erate descent of consciousness toward its secret in Matter and toward our plenitude in a body. An immense spiritual revolution that rehabilitates matter and creation, Mother would say, speaking of Sri Aurobindo’s work. Thus we can say that the experiment will be truly conclusive when the circle is completed and the two extremes have met, when the highest manifests in the most material.... It seems we can never really understand until we understand with our body.³⁵