Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

12: The Interregnum of the Mind

She had traveled a long curve since the time She silently communicated with trees, mummies, or the deer in Fontaine­bleau. Mother is the One who finds channels of communi­cation everywhere—or perhaps opens them up. We are in front of a big world obstructed by what we have placed on it, that is, our way of understanding it—we understand from the wrong level. But there are those who remove obstructions: all we ever uncover is the natural, we redis­cover only what was always there, but on another level. We are at the time of a change in the level of understanding. The sublime state is the natural state, She said, and you are the ones who are constantly in an unnatural and abnormal state, a falsification, a distortion.¹ The whole of evolution may only be the reconquering of the natural through an enriching complication—instead of the simple but empty oneness of the beginning, a full oneness innumerably conscious of itself. And ultimately, all distortions and fal­sifications are only the means of forming and carefully reconquering a truth that we could not possibly swallow in one gulp without exploding, for the simple reason that the ultimate truth is physical, and the body, that old animal, is so very slow to understand. The ultimate heaviness or the ultimate knot holds the ultimate understanding and the difficulty that will unknot all the others.

The Mind is our instrument of temporary truth or obsti­nate falsification, depending on whether we look at it from one side or the other. It is the prodigious form maker that has deformed everything. We cannot bat an eyelid without its immediately rushing forth to give its explanation for the batting of the eyelid. It has explained everything, that is the trouble, or it wants to explain everything, and weaves such a thick web around the universe that we do not really live in the universe but in an "explanation” of the universe: Each thing carries within itself its own truth—its absolute truth, so luminous and so clear, She said. And if you are in contact with that, then everything falls into place so won­derfully; but men are not in contact with that, they are always in contact THROUGH their thought—what they think of something, what they feel about something ...² That is what creates the “marvel” of chaos we live in; we are only in communication with our own heads. We communicate through. We do not live anything as it is.

Will the Mind have to be undone?

Perhaps it is being undone all by itself.

Mirra among the Philosophers

But one can only undo what has been completely con­quered. Basically, the process is the same, at any level: all the little barriers help accumulate the Shakti so as to gain enough force to shatter the barrier and move on ... to another, thicker barrier, proportionate to the newly acquired force. The mental barrier has Himalayan layers of thickness compared to which Matter is as light as a breeze. But the Mind has its roots right down in Matter, which is another solid secret we shall soon uncover with Mother. For the moment, Mirra had not yet conquered the Mind. Strangely enough, it is the last thing She explored, at the end of the curve—perhaps not so "strangely,” for She had quite natu­rally explored the natural (which we call supernatural, since everything is upside down!) before reaching the arti­ficial, the external explanatory layer we mistake for the solid universe—mentally solid, that is. She had found out how to communicate with plants, animals, She had found the great colored waves, the creative vibrations, the Sound from above, the great blue notes that create music. She played the piano a lot (even in the large drawing room at Tlemcen, where She enchanted ... the toads!) and did some painting as well. She knew the planes of conscious­ness, went out of her body, wandering everywhere. She was even at ease with higher mathematics—strangely again, this exercise which might seem highly mental was more natural to her than everything else; perhaps because equations tend toward the Simple. Einstein was a great simplifier who, almost mathematically, strove to touch the oneness of the universe behind the enormous veil of phenomenal compli­cations. Had he known her, Einstein would have understood Mother very well. Perhaps he would have put Mother into an equation ... and the universe would have burst out laughing. That laughter of Mother’s in the midst of the most excruciating pain—who will ever understand it?

So She laughed, took part in Theon’s fireworks, even pro­jected herself from Tlemcen to Paris, where She appeared to a group of friends materially enough to pick up a pencil and write down a note on a piece of paper, as Sri Aurobindo would later relate³—strange body, strange Matter. But to materialize or dematerialize Matter is not to transform Matter, it means simply playing with different laws of the same old thing—we too might like to play with those laws, but alas, it is rather they that would play with us, and the secret remains well-kept for a riper age—when we will no longer need to “produce miracles", because everything will be perfectly natural to us. So She played, laughed with Rouault, Rodin and Matisse, knew the museums and castles of France and Italy thoroughly, all the old culture at her fin­gertips, and we doubt whether many people ever had such a refined and diverse culture. A fully-fledged Parisian, we could say. But she was missing His Excellency the Mind. Mental jugglings, in other words. It may be more compli­cated than juggling with the little snakes at Zarif, Theon’s thunderbolts or the Mediterranean’s tramontana. However, we would be wrong to believe that Mirra had not cultivated her "mind”; She had devoured libraries, like anyone else, but She had never touched "the mechanism,” as She put it. However, She was going to gulp down a big dose of the mechanism in the most painful experience of her life—for truly, the Mind is always the pain of being or the pain to be. And if She had touched death with Theon, She would touch the worlds Falsehood with Paul Richard. We always meet in life the obstacles that help us to perfect the very realization we have to accomplish, and finally, there are no obstacles anywhere except in ourselves, and everything is meant for perfection. ‘"My life is terrible!” they say; “I have the most dismal life in the world!" But they are simpletons. Everyone has the life that is best suited for his integral develop­ment, everyone goes through the experiences that are best suited for his integral development, and everyone meets the difficulties that are best suited for his integral realization.⁴

His Excellency Mr. Mind thus presented himself one day in the form of Paul Richard, whom She met around 1908 at Montmorency, at the house of Morisset s sisters, to whom She had entrusted her son. She often went there to visit those kind sisters, with whom She was on the best of terms, and She played tennis, which was her old passion. Paul Richard also played tennis. He was a quite remarkably intelligent man, a "philosopher,” who would in fact end his days as a professor in a well-known American university. He was also a lawyer. But what is more interesting—and here we shall never cease marveling at and wondering about the threads of that vertiginous sphinx we call "des­tiny”—is that at the beginning of 1910, and for the most ordinary reasons, or perhaps the funniest ones, if consid­ered from the large perspective of the world, Paul Richard had to go to Pondicherry ... to participate in the electoral campaign of a certain Bluysen, a noted member, or rather aspiring member of the French National Assembly—and would meet Sri Aurobindo, who had just arrived there. It was thanks to Richard, and in his company, that Mirra would come to meet Sri Aurobindo in 1914 and discover that he was none other than the very individual She used to meet almost every day in "vision attire” and whom She had ended up calling "Krishna," presuming Him to be a Hindu divinity. We could keep wondering for a long time about those vertiginous meanderings of destiny which seize hold of “any” individual or "any” pretext (like a tennis game in Montmorency) to weave its powerful threads and prepare its revolutions. If all this is but "chance,” then this entire universe is a fantastic and mad chronometer, set to the exact second. And if nothing is chance, then it is another extraordinary chronometer no more mad than the movement of a single Consciousness moving itself everywhere at the same time, to the very atom, and that may only be waiting for us to emerge from our own dementedness in order to move freely with us everywhere and recognize everywhere its millions of threads tying together the least flight of a passing bird, the slightest futile gesture, and that great breath which is going to awaken an Age. It is all the same breath. And it is the same Paul Richard, who, under­standing the extraordinary newness of Sri Aurobindo’s experiences, would urge Him to put them down black on white, in the form of “philosophy.” Thus the Arya was founded in 1914, a periodical into which, day after day, Sri Aurobindo would come to pour some 6,000 pages of writ­ing, with sometimes four or five works under way at once, that Mirra and Paul Richard would then start translating into French. But we are running ahead of ourselves.

Thus Mirra began to hear of Sri Aurobindo. She was particularly struck by certain similarities with Theon's teachings, but Richards account was still too mingled with his own additions and interpretations for Mirra to be able really to grasp what lay behind. She married Richard in 1910 and settled in on rue du Val-de-Grace, near the Lux­embourg gardens, on the edge of the Latin Quarter. She was thirty-two. Their marriage, with many detours through Japan and India, would last until 1920, when Mirra settled down definitively in Pondicherry: Ten years of intensive mental studies leading me to ... Sri Aurobindo. A mental : development of the most complete type: a study of all the phi­losophies, all the conceptual juggling, in minute detail— delving into systems, getting a grasp on them.⁵

"Entering"—such is indeed Mother’s way, on every level.

For her, to understand something was to live it, and She went into it as wholeheartedly as into painting, music, occultism, or the truth of one’s being. That is, a develop­mental stage where it’s already understood that all ideas are true and that there's a synthesis to be made, and that BEYOND THE SYNTHESIS lies something luminous and true.⁶ This "beyond the synthesis” is a stage of human development yet to be achieved, for all our syncretisms finally disappear into a kind of mental morass devoid of any real power to transform life. Mirra liked the tangible: An explanation has value only insofar as it gives you the power to act upon the thing that is being explained; otherwise, what good is it?⁷ She said with her refreshing simplicity. Thought is such an approximate thing, really, so far from the truth ... so basi­cally, it's time to be practical and say, “Well, I’ll accept this thought if it helps me to progress.’’ But if you believe that it is the absolute truth, then you're bound to be fooling your­self, because no thought is the absolute truth. As long as it helps you to progress, keep it; but when it begins to crumble and no longer to have any effect, then let it go, and try to get hold of another one that will take you a bit farther.⁸

A strange meeting of philosophy and ingenuousness, which tends to remind us of Andersen’s impudent child pointing his finger at the king parading past in great pomp: “But he's naked!”

Perhaps the Mind is just like that king, appareled in nonexistent gold, and whom no one dares to call naked for fear of everyone finding themselves naked.

Because this nakedness is what we fear the most.

The Mind’s Constructions

In fact, the difficulty with the Mind is that we have not explored it thoroughly enough. We have cultivated, or rather endlessly ruminated on, some intermediary mental layer, which is starting to get very inhibiting and to contort itself in every possible way, like the last days of "photographic painting” just before its final dislocation by the Cubists—and that is what we call “culture," the proverbial king no one dares to call naked, the brilliant trapeze artist flying through the air by the light of... acetylene lamps. But the Mind has other layers, both above and below. Above, where "inspirations” come from, the pure and universal sources of the Mind; below, infinite layers representing the entire formation of the Mind throughout evolution, down to the deepest layer, a first Mind in Matter, what Sri Auro­bindo would call the "body-mind” and Mother the “cellular mind,” that which holds the secret of our future (that new "level of understanding”) and probably the key to our next mutation. But as always, the deepest shows up last, the primal or original is the last to emerge from the entangle­ment. To reach the bottom, one must have traced the whole curve—such is the laborious evolutionary story of our ascent. But carried by our old momentum, we remain stuck at a truncated level, an intermediary Mind which imperturbably spins its old cocoon, twisting and turning in every direction, banging and clanging its old cymbals and scraping away at well-worn ideas—for nothing is more well-worn than ideas—and filling its tenuousness with high-sounding words that reverberate against its own walls. It is a walled-in Mind. It keeps echoing its own noise everywhere. Mirra called it the world of mental construc­tions. And if by' chance we happen to break through the wall like some rare and privileged people who have access to the pure and direct sources of inspiration—the very ones who delight us because they infuse a vaster air, another rhythm into our cage—we immediately catch hold of this opening to make new cymbals, which wear out almost as quickly as they clash and end up as only one more idea amidst all this din; then, those same ones who climbed up above to give us those fleeting and quickly devoured flashes seemed to go off into more and more ethereal regions, more and more luminous and vast, from which it becomes very difficult to bring down an untruncated rhythm, acces­sible to our heavyweighted minds; and finally, like religious minds, they seem to lose themselves up above in a realm where one no longer wishes to formulate anything what­ever, but only remain there, in the great snowy silence where everything is so clear that there is no longer any­thing to express. A sort of Nirvana of the Mind. And always the ultimate inanity of trying to pull down into the cage, into this enormous construction of the human mind, some reflection, rhythm or flash of light that would not be imme­diately devoured or neutralized by the rabble of ideas, get mired and left powerless in the Mind's brilliant opacities. Mirra would soon discover that here, too, salvation is to be found below, in that mind of Matter where thought changes into something else which is at once power and vision: a sort of instantaneous understanding that acts automatically, and is fitted with a strange power of mate­rial contagion, whereas ideas only clash against one another and discuss endlessly without ever changing anything or having any power.

But to get there, the mechanism had first to be dis­mantled. For Mirra, it was very simple, because thoughts could be seen. Words and ideas were visible. Depending on their content, they formed swirls and spirals, variously colored or luminous—a sort of noise, more or less in tune depending on the quality of light or rhythm that clothed itself in French, English or Italian; She could even under­stand a certain Swede whose language She did not know, and make herself understood by complete foreigners simply through the vibration of consciousness. She went straight to what the Mind clothes in every color and rhythm: con­sciousness, Shakti. But this whole package of ideas, this aggregate we wrap around ourselves or carry on our backs and which constitutes what we call our “conception" of life, our ideal perhaps, our religion or philosophy of existence, all that more or less coordinated, clear, rigid or articulate hodgepodge which we cannot define without volumes of invariably contradictory words—was all very simple for Mirra: it was “constructions.” She saw them in a second. And it really is the kind of vision we would wish for every­one, because it would cure us of a number of prisons that we imagine to be very spacious and airy and "ideal.” But this is not at all “clairvoyance," as might be imagined; it is something else, something much simpler and much more accessible—more material—which we will speak of later. Something related to the "new level of understanding.” Constructions of every color and form, seen as if with a sharp and piercing eye—indeed, piercing through all the appearances in order to touch the real substance—almost a humorous eye. Exactly, graphically and pictorially, with one infallible stroke, these constructions express the reality of the mixture we find so difficult to define abstractly. A pictorial translation of thoughts. Ideas in the form of small and graceful chapels, igloos, temples, swamps, old walls ravaged with cracks or shining in every color, floors upon floors stacked like sad, gray apartment buildings, hovels, the flying wings of Japanese roofs, openwork partitions like Arabian lattices, and sometimes a solitary tower, closed like a fist, or huge and suffocating Gothic structures ... It is interminable, as varied as the world itself, but it is always a construction, that is, walls. A more or less graceful and airy bell jar that surrounds and strengthens us, giving us a comfortable feeling, a feeling of being “at home." It is our idea of the world. We live enclosed by it without being aware of it. But when it is seen from outside by that par­ticular eye, it all becomes clear and each detail explains the situation with an unimaginable and humorous precision: the texture of the stone, the colors, the layout, the compli­cations, accumulations and dimensions—and stairways, so many stairways! It goes up and down endlessly. Some­times, thoughts also take shape as clothes: sumptuous or tattered, clean or filthy, with buttons and incredible fabrics —a whole range of outfits. As Mother said, You see that, and everything is explained!

Then the world of ideas starts looking like a transparent book. You may say, “Yes, it's free will” or "it’s Zen medita­tion" or “the world’s salvation,” but it is just a medieval fortress surrounded by lapping moats, unless it is a little burst of silver light in the midst of a concrete necropolis. And sometimes it is only the wind rattling empty gourds. But the burst of light is enchanting, the gourd is rose- veined opaline, and the fortress has winged cantilevers. It is all very charming and well-made ... but it saves absolutely nothing. To shed a more pictorial light on the subject, let us mention two examples among hundreds of others. One is Mother's visit to the “house” of a traditional spiritualist brimming with the most righteous ideas in the world— impeccable, apparently; but more amusing in this vision. Perhaps we could call it “the vision of Matter's smile”... at all our mental fuss. It was his house, and it was rather com­plicated to enter, Mother narrates. I was saying a mantra or japa when X came along; he had a terribly reproachful air! Then he smelled my hands: "It’s a bad habit to wear perfume. You cannot live a spiritual life when you wear perfume.” [Mother also wore lipstick—how frivolous!] Then I looked at him and thought, “My God, does he have to be so back­ward!" But it annoyed me, so I said, “Very well, I'm going." When I got near the door, he started saying, "Is it true you have been married several times, and that you've been divorced?" Then, Mother said, laughing, a kind of anger entered me and I told him, “No, not just once, but twice!" And with that, I left the house. At the door was a little squirrel sitting on his haunches making friendly little gestures towards me. "Oh!" I said, “Here's someone who understands better!"⁹ But we would be quite wrong to think that a nontraditional non­spiritualist lives in a nicer house; in every case, there are stones over our heads and ramparts around us, whether they are white or black, for or against. It is a world where each idea is a decorative or not so decorative brick. The other example is drawn from a personal experience; it was one of my first tastes of "Matter’s smile.” I knew a spiritu­ally very powerful man who had many disciples, the best will in the world and a very advanced knowledge of tantrism acquired through strenuous discipline. Let us call him X. That day (in my vision) I was in a place on earth as if in midair; I was standing on the ground, and all around me was sky, an immense landscape of light from which I drank in the most refreshing air. X suddenly appeared in the midst of all this, and I noticed a sort of cement tower next to him, about ten feet in diameter and some twenty-five feet high. Strong, gray cement. X went into the tower (there was a kind of spiral staircase going up) and invited me to follow him. It was his “house.” He would climb up in his cement tower to look at the galaxies from ... twenty-five i feet higher up! Finding plenty of refreshing sky all around me at ground level, I refused. It was the exact equivalent, measured in tons of cement, of his hours of discipline, to the nearest cubic foot. This is exactly how we erect our towers in the fullness of an ever-there and ever-refreshing sky. I do not know whether the galaxies revolve better from twenty-five feet higher up, in cement, in Gothic or in exotic, 1 But anyway ...

But anyway Mirra started to explore all the world's religions. A systematic, detailed and comparative study of the "history of religions" was her first subject with Richard. And She found herself astounded. For all those experiences upon the summits of consciousness or in the depths of the Ϊ heart had come to her quite naturally. So why on earth: put all this solemn and dogmatic paraphernalia on them? Everywhere, She recognized—in different words or forms, with thicker or thinner, variously colored bricks—the same core of experience, full and vast to varying degrees—but why on earth such a fuss? Each one seizes a little piece and turns it into his all. And they all do this! But who can seize the all? I’d very much like to know!¹⁰ And She added, This is why religions are always wrong—always—because they try to standardize the expression of ONE experience and impose it on everyone as an irrefutable truth. The experience was true and complete in itself convincing—for the one who had it. The formulation he drew from it was excellent—for him. But to try to impose it on others is a fundamental error which can have disastrous consequences,¹¹ for the simple reason that each individual is a special manifestation in the universe, so his true path must be an utterly unique path.¹² And Mirra often cited this paradox of a well-known mate­rialistic doctrinaire, who had retained enough sense of humor to exclaim: Thank God, He made me an atheist! And She added: As long as there are religions, atheism will be indispensable to counterbalance them.¹³ Not that the mate­rialistic doctrinaire has fewer bricks over his head and a less suffocating edifice than his counterpart, any more than we must start making a “synthesis” or even a "union of religions," as if those thousands of edifices put together would make a less crushing atmosphere: The time of religions is over, Mother said. It’s old, it's past; now it’s an extra- and supra-religious perception that imposes itself as being indispensable.¹⁴ We could also say, “an extra- and supra-materialistic perception," something that finally escapes this old aberrant dichotomy which is neither the reality of the Spirit nor the reality of Matter, but simply a little wire-meshed mental skylight on an intermediate layer.

Mental “Liberation”

Mirra liked the open air.

But her study was not confined to religions; political and social systems were reviewed in detail, as were philoso­phies of every color, the exercises and disciplines of every spirituality—that is, the Minds higher levels. We can picture her in that charming house on rue du Val-de-Grace, with its tiny garden with ivy on the walls, its drawing room lined with books and even a big grand piano, the Luxembourg Gardens next door and the hum of the Latin Quarter. Almost every evening, She received Madame David-Neel there, just back from her first journey to the Far East and soon to become “the first woman to enter Lhasa," dis- i guised as a mendicant monk. Mother heard of Bahaism ; and Taoism, watched and listened to everything, explored disciplines of meditation, Buddhist dhyana, Buddhist renunciation; though, truly speaking, I never had much that experience of renunciation.... To renounce something, you must be attached to it, while I always had the thirst, the NEED to go farther, to go higher, to do better, to know better and ... instead of having a sense of renunciation, you have rather a sense of good riddance!¹⁵ She even went so far as to practice Buddhist concentration in the loges of the Opera- Comique—an unlikely place, but after all, Massenet’s musical outpouring was nothing particularly uplifting, and besides, Mirra’s meditation took place everywhere; to Her, it always seemed that the divorce between life and Spirit, within and without, was a ruinous distortion and that all those meditation exercises were pointless and did not change life in the least: They think that the sign of spiritual life is one’s capacity to sit down in a corner and meditate!¹⁶ Yes, you sit down in a corner, but as soon as you leave the meditation, you leave your peace of mind at the same time.¹⁷ Right from the beginning, She touched a very powerful and very painful discovery, experienced by ail those who have undergone long inner practice, who have touched the light and emerged into the infinitudes, liberated their minds and lived in the illumination we can call by a thousand names, but which is always the absolute That, a kind of marvelous sailing off, and who find themselves faced with the same old unchanged beast below, no more divine than that of their unillumined neighbors, as if they had been living in a dream for thirty years—and it is a dream. "And this too was a dream,” said Sri Aurobindo:

Ascetic voices called of lonely seers
On mountain summits or on river banks

Seeking heaven's rest or the spirit’s worldless peace, Or in bodies motionless like statues, fixed In tranced cessations of their sleepless thought Sat sleeping souls, and this too was a dream.¹⁸

For four or five thousand years, the world has never ceased fantasizing about saints and ascetics and "liberated yogis," who have not removed an atom of filth from our universal misery: They take off' their outer being as they would take off a coat and leave it in a comer: "All right, don’t bother me now; be quiet—you’re disturbing me!” Then they go into a contemplation (their "meditation," their "deep” experience), after which they come back and put on their coat again, which of course has not changed and is perhaps even filthier than before, and they remain exactly what they were without their meditation.¹⁹ The more static it is, the happier they are. They could go on meditating like that for eternities and it would never change anything in the universe or in themselves.²⁰ They have peace, no doubt: Λ boxed-in peace,²¹ She said.

For Mirra, the solution was elsewhere. She was seeking the solution. Indeed, this blissful "box" is still a great prob­lem, as solid as man’s mental constructions—maybe even more solid. But it is the same thing, as rigid as the finally-discovered-truth. There is nothing more solid than an entrapped truth. It is an irrefutable and impregnable box. The box of the summits. But the truth is something else, something we have not discovered as yet and which can only be discovered at Matter's level, where it can no longer be wrapped in any box, name or system, where it is lived, quite naturally and simply, as one breathes. Matter is the one thing that does not cheat: it is. If it is not right, it simply dies. There is no saying "this-is-true-this-is-false”: if it is false, it falls ill; if it is true, it trots along, and that is that. We still do not know what true life is, we are not true Matter yet; we are only matter-shut-up-in-a-box. And we wonder if all those marvelous realizations they have harped on about for ages, those liberations and “muktis” and peaks of light and white infinitudes are not simply the same upper part of the fishbowl, where the Mind, out of breath, mistakes its own vaporization for the divine reality, rather like the man under anesthesia who mistakes his blackout on the meditation table for the supreme truth. Sometimes, it would seem that there is still something very radical we have not grasped. In the last days of her life, Mother would say, I saw absolutely concretely that all men who thought they knew, they had had the Experience, well, it was ... it was halfway, so to say.²² Mirra, and Sri Aurobindo over there, were groping toward that radical experience, or rather that root—instead of escaping into a somewhat dried-up bliss,²³ as Mother said, one must call into oneself the power capable of conquering.²⁴ But for that, we have first to clean the "coat.” If we want to change Matter, we obviously have to make contact with Matter. The secret does not lie in the Mind's higher layers, but in the very' obscurity we wish to escape from. As Sri Aurobindo said:

This darkness hides our nobler destiny A chrysalis of a great and glorious truth, It stifles the winged marvel in its sheath Lest from the prison of Matter it escape And, wasting its beauty on the formless Vast,

Merged into the Unknowable’s mystery, Leave unfulfilled the world's miraculous fate.²⁵

The Transparent Mind

Mirra was still searching for the mechanism of the change. If the Mind, our daily tool, our evolutionary legacy, exists, what then is its true role?... On several occasions, in Tlemcen and before, She had clearly seen an entirely different world of consciousness above, far above, a world Sri Auro­bindo would come to call the "Supramental,” which Theon inelegantly named "pathetism” (one really wonders why!) and which She called the World of Harmony, probably because it seemed to unite or dissolve all the opposites. But how to bring this world down, how to drive it into Matter? A problem similar to that of the higher ape who one day happened to catch an odd little wave, something unlike the old vibrations of life, and who remained there, "pensive,” between two branches. A new world is like something that does not exist, an invention of nothing which is but a some­thing driving us to "invent”—we just invent what is there. Only afterward do we know that it is a new world. While it is happening, it is merely everyday life moving gropingly and sometimes "missing its branch,” its gesture amidst the routine—a sudden little lapse of memory in the usual gymnastics—and one is left there ... pensive. This "pensive­ness” about nothing may be the rift through which the new thing steals in. A new world is not an improvement of the old gestures, it is a lapse of memory, a rift in the old habit of being. In this case, a rift in the Mind. But where is this rift?

Actually, Mirra never pondered abstract “problems,” it was against her nature; She just carried on. One walks on and one sees what happens. She looked out at every step she made as intensely as She had looked at the gutters in Thebes, three thousand four hundred years before. And something always happens; everything depends precisely on our need to "invent,” or perhaps simply on our need to be—let us call it anything we like, but it is a Need. It is the invention itself that drives us to its invention. Something that burns. A Fire we carry with us everywhere and which makes things be, or makes them "happen.” If we only carry our old routine, nothing happens but the routine. It is simple and obvious. The whole world is a “nothing” one makes happen. At first, it is always a "nothing”—a moments pause, a missed minute—and this “nothing” seems to be the only something. But it is a nothing with fire in it. If we want to cultivate the future, we have to cultivate the nothing- that-burns. A constant aspiration, uninterrupted, intense, all-consuming, in an immutable serenity.²⁶ In short, it is a question of changing the “program.” If the future resides somewhere at the cellular level, we have first to get out of the mental program before we can ever hope to get out of the cellular program. The tremendous entanglement of the animal program, with its countless impulses and reactions : to anything that moves, feels and vibrates, that constant 1 call and alertness before the onrush of life, gives way to the J still more tremendous entanglement of the mental onrush, j which no longer seems to respond to anything but itself, like an endless echo bouncing from one to another, reverberating and rebounding and universally going round in j circles. There is nothing of yourself in all this, Mother said: it comes in from everywhere and it goes out everywhere.²⁷ And because we catch a number of vibrations in mid-air, which we stack up and compress into neat (or not so neat) little bricks of thoughts, and because we combine and recombine them in our particular way to build some struc­ture or another, we say it is “our” thought, "our” house. But it is a house built with everyone's and anyone’s bricks. It is no more ours than the south wind or the scent of jasmine wafting by. It is simply, as Mother said, a passing notation. An animal does not act differently when it sniffs the wind, it just tunes in to a different milieu. And in the end, all organisms, from the top to the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, whether they are fitted with an osmotic membrane or a brain, do the same thing: they draw on the milieu, they absorb what is there—they are receiving organs. We no more create thought than the bee creates honey—only there is honey and there is honey, that is all. Everything simply depends on the quality of our reception and the milieu which we tune in to. The whole story of evolution is simply the improvement or expansion of a receiving capacity. The true mind, said Sri Aurobindo, is the universal within us and the individual is only a projection on the surface ...a marking board or a communicating switch on the surface.²⁸ If we remain at the level of our claws, mem­branes or surface parietals, we cultivate the telephone, if we may say so, instead of cultivating what is at the other end of the telephone. Man’s peculiarity lies not in his pleas­ant or not so pleasant creations or secretions of “honey," but in his ability to discover new levels of reception. His antenna is not immutably turned in a single direction, be it a mental direction. To think otherwise is to mistake the means for the end, the instrument for the goal—“culture” for the ultimate human purpose. Man is not irremediably destined to just be the stomach for a particular brand of honey, which we may be beginning to find rather sickening.

As for Mirra, She had had enough of that kind of thought current, that circulates through your brain, then the brain of another person and the brains of the multitude.²⁹ As early as 1911, She noted laconically: We are a product determined by all our antecedents and driven by the blind and arbitrary will of our contemporaries.³⁰ She found it absolutely unac­ceptable that one should be manipulated by this enormous mental conditioning, like bees or even superior Titians: Haven’t you ever found it intolerable that wills from outside can have an influence upon your own will? She asked the Ashram children. But my children, that bothered me even when I was five.' And it's been a long time since you were five ...³¹ To get out of the “program," yes, at any cost, and for that, the first condition is to silence all that racket. In the thinking crush, nothing can be seen or understood—we might as well try to see clearly through the choppy waves of a pond riddled with pebbles. “Become a mirror” was her familiar dictum. In a clear mirror, we can see where things come from and where they go. We begin to see the great play of the world. We even realize that to cease thinking is a far superior accomplishment io being able to unreel thoughts endlessly—and it requires a much greater development.³² Mental silence (or mental transparency, according to her favorite expression) is the first crack in the carapace that blocks the future from us—it is the human counterpart of the ape’s absent-minded minute between two branches, which prepared the way for the advent of Homo sapiens. To be “pensive” was the rift in the old habit of being an ape. To be non-pensive is the first rift in the habit of being a man, the crack through which the new world can steal in. The mind is simply a pair of old gills preventing us from breathing the new air.

But gills can be changed into lungs.

In evolution, each stage always prepares or contains the next one, and we would be hard put to find a useless rung —including the Mind. Evolution never makes any mistake, but there are the laggards of evolution, that is, the trium­phant ones of a certain stage clinging to their summit—and about to become a stationary species. But here, too, Nature thwarts the natural laziness of the species through the Pressure of its own Need to grow. The Invention always drives us to the invention of itself. At the end of the men­tal curve, we can thus open up to the "logical” necessity of moving on to the next state and even intuit that this state must be “non-pensive,” even feel the need to get out of this rattling, buzzing and tireless machine, and mentally try to stop the Mind. This is what meditators generally do: they grab hold of the Mind with the Mind and heroically strive to strangle it—for a few minutes. But the moment they release their grip, it all starts up again. The higher ape who, after having stumbled upon those pensive little glimmers, would have been quite mistaken, had he tried to reproduce them by swinging around his branch until he felt dizzy. It was not by the means of his muscles that he was to shift to the other state, and it is not through the efforts of our mental muscle that we shall reach silence. The very fact of trying makes noise,³³ Mother noted. Always and everywhere, the lever of the transition is the Need, It is strangely simple. What we must discover presses from within: that pressure is what we must take hold of, but since it is still the pres­sure of "nothing”—for if it were "something,” it would already have been seized upon and done—we must resolve ourselves to catch this nothing-at-all as the one supremely tangible thing! What could the ape know of the superape?

Nothing at all. And what do we know of the superman? Nothing at all. On the contrary, the moment we start imag­ining it, we are right back in the same old mechanism, merely inflating it to a higher degree; we swing on our : mental flying trapeze like the ape around his branch. That is exactly what Nietzsche did, with some flashes of genius. But this Need within, completely pure, this pressing Flame, this hole of nothing filled with fire by its sheer need of being ’ something, anything, a stork, a horse, but something, so i that we get beyond this thinking and clanking and repetitive s biped; this need we carry everywhere, with every step, j every heartbeat, which grows and consumes everything, ' fills everything with its fire of nothing, or something at last, 1 and what else could we want, what other need than that : nameless and formless Need, without plus or minus, as ‘ long as it burns—and it burns everything: ideas, thoughts, the future and the past, tomorrow and the millions of ; years, what does it matter as long as that one second bums? This is the lever. It is the Silence-of-Fire. It burns everything that gets in: sins and virtues, high and low, the superman, and the little man. It is the Nothing of fire, the beginning of something, the compact non-pensive that breaks open the barrier by the sheer force of its being unable to be held any longer in its skin.

And we emerge.

Then, in that silence—not a silence “in a box” but a living, active, “directed” silence, a silence that does not need the protection of walls and can as well walk about amidst a crowd or in a marketplace, among the millions of thinking human pistons as on a boundless immobile steppe, a vast transparency of everything—the world becomes clear. We are clear and all is clear. In its true functioning, the Mind appears as a huge play of vibrations putting on clothes and colors, becoming entangled, accumulating and combining. We can see the rhythm directly, hear the sound, listen to the great waves which, down below, will form little thoughts, minor music or whatever else it may be—this whole “cre­ative," discursive and endlessly repetitive jumble. We are in an utter silence in which every thought comes automati­cally, whenever it is needed. We are in the great Current in which every gesture is made automatically, whenever it is needed. We are in the Consciousness, we flow with the great Shakti. And we realize that we can think outside the brain,³⁴ and even quite well, without thinking about it, and that thought is only a residue from below, a tool of execu­tion³⁵ to carry out in Matter what has been seen in the Consciousness, known in the Consciousness: an ever more open, ever wider channel,³⁶ She said, in order to let the transforming forces penetrate Matter. We have left the intermediate layer, left the old oxygen-assimilating gills, and we breathe the pure air of Consciousness directly.

The external gills, as the physiologists tell us, are first transformed into Internal gills, and then into lungs.

Between the luminous and the dark poles of existence, Wie Mind is simply an interregnum in Reality,³⁷ says Sri Aurobindo.

But in this mental transparency, Mirra was going to uncover yet another, deeper layer, well hidden beneath the thinking racket of the first one, which She would not so easily penetrate. It is the “physical mind.” The last barrier before the cellular mind, our next evolutionary secret: a liberation, yes—but a genetic one. It would take her years, and the presence of Sri Aurobindo, to cross this next barrier.

But the path of descent was open.