Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

13: And the Earth

Mirra was slowly bidding farewell to the Western world.

She had traced the whole curve, touched the rare sum­mits and secret powers that others would have seized upon for their personal peace or glory, touched the whole gamut of culture and notes that many would have turned into symphonies, thus adding one more genius to the collection of human realizations—but what interested her was the human realization, the species, the human whole. She went up and down the Boulevard St. Michel, like everyone else, but always with that intense gaze. She also continued taking care of Theon’s “Revue Cosmique”: I found the printer, corrected the proofs—all the work for a long time. Five years, in fact. She even translated into French the experiences that Madame Theon, while she was in trance, dictated to her English secretary: an entire initiation in the form of stories.¹ But it was the Story that interested her, and every­thing else slowly receded like the old, superfluous garment of a “something” that She widely experienced, without initiatory walls or spiritual constructions. And finally, Theon would disappear one day as mysteriously as he had appeared, without leaving a trace. Alma had crashed down on the rocks of the Isle of Wight while walking in trance along the cliffs. An "accident” that was no accident; she had probably seen that Theon was not destined to bring down the new world—therefore she no longer had any raison d’etre. Having lost her, Theon had lost his base. He was suddenly no more than an old Atlantean from an out­dated world, and despite everything, he was too great to be satisfied with being a miracle-maker. He knew that he was not meant to succeed, but had only come to prepare the way to a certain extent,² Sri Aurobindo would later say. Perhaps one day we shall see him again, without a toga, perhaps even in rags, sowing the seeds of revolution among the last stragglers of the old world.

She had started keeping a "journal” in which She recorded her experiences, her hopes and prayers for the future—She seemed to think only of the future, it was an obsession. At every moment we must shake off the past like falling dust so it does not tarnish the virgin path ...³ Thus Prayers and Meditations was born, which She began in 1911. Why all this noise, all this bustle, this vain and hollow agitation? Why this whirlwind that sweeps men away like a swarm of flies caught in a tempest?...⁴ Oh, to be a pure, a stainless crystal which lets Your divine ray pass through without obscuring, altering and distorting it.... All men s hearts beat in my heart, all their thoughts vibrate in my thought; the slightest aspiration of a docile animal or a humble plant unites with my tremendous aspiration... .⁵ By a total and constant effort, we want to advance like a rising and indomi­table tide, shattering all obstacles, crossing all barriers, lifting all veils ...⁶ to the conquest of the marvelous secrets of the Unknown. ...⁷ That divine world of Your immutable realm of pure love, of indivisible oneness, must be made to commune intimately with the divine world of all the other realms, down to the most material realm in which You are the center and the very composition of each atom.⁸ The cell, the atom: this was the heart of the problem—not the cosmic summits.

She even had several little "groups" (one of which was named Idea) to which She tried to convey her first stam­merings and a kind of first vision of the future: The general goal to be attained is the advent of universal Harmony (that is, the "Supramental"), She said as early as 1912, the real­ization of human unity (already, before Sri Aurobindo) ... the establishment of an ideal society in a place propitious for the birth of the new race (in anticipation of the future Pondicherry Ashram, and Auroville)... to put the earth into contact with one or several sources of universal force that are still sealed to it.⁹ Yes, the “supramental” source, that "Har­mony,” that yet nameless something She felt beating like the heart of the future—but how was it to be unsealed? Who will open those closed floodgates?¹⁰ She carried this question, this call, everywhere She went, as if the very call would force the answer to spring forth (perhaps it was already this call that had brought Richard to her side and would lead her to Sri Aurobindo). Yet a few strange phe­nomena were starting to happen everywhere, on the bus, the tram, in a thousand ordinary places: children who suddenly tore themselves away from their mothers and literally clung to Mirra; tormented men suddenly relieved; sorrows here and there that seemed to dissolve: Once, in a bus, there was a man who was tense and weeping; you could see he was utterly wretched. Then without stirring, unnoticed, I saw that “Force" going out towards that man, and little by little, his face relaxed, everything calmed down, he grew quiet. This happened several times.... Something which was not human at all was there, quietly acting THROUGH me (I wasn’t even occupied with it,) and doing it. It acted through her body without any will on her part, as if this mental transparency had granted access to the body. Something that takes hold of the body, oh, so warm, so sweet a vibration, and at the same time so terribly powerful!¹¹

She groped her way into something very new She did not quite understand but which seemed to become more and more concrete as that transparency increased, as if one had to be “nothing," totally nothing, before the other current could flow through: The least vibration in this perfectly pure and calm atmosphere is an obstacle,¹² She had already noted in 1912. As a matter of fact, we can well imagine that had some higher ape wanted to let a single mental vibration pass through, he would have had to become the equivalent of “nothing" in the ape world; but what is remarkable here is that the point of junction with the new forces is not the mind but the body. The body is the bridge. Each new evo­lutionary "summit,” each new rung, is marked by a change in the point of junction. We speak of “summits," “new forces," but this is only our inadequate language—the sum­mit is always there! There are no “new” forces. There is only a new layer being cleared, which allows what was always there to shine through. A curtain is drawn back. We are full of superimposed layers, and we slowly clear them up from the outermost or "highest" to the deepest, down to the very heart of the story: Matter. And the deeper we descend into the dense layers, the more powerful and direct is the force, because we are nearing the origin. The supreme junction of the end is at the beginning of everything: What would be the use of man if he were not meant to be a bridge between That which eternally is and all the dark and painful ignorance of the material world? Man is the link between what must be and what is, the bridge thrown across the abyss.¹³ And Mirra wondered in her Prayers and Medita­tions: Oh, when shall I have forgotten myself completely enough to be nothing but an instrument shaped solely by the forces it must manifest?¹⁴ Something had to manifest, or perhaps was manifesting.

The Change of Government

In fact, She was becoming less and less "Mirra” but someone else, who was not really "someone," an individual confined in a bag of skin, but a consciousness that seemed to become more and more of the world, if we may say so, as She herself, when she was a child, became a python, the geraniums of the Tuileries or a certain tree at Fontainebleau —the same thing—as if the more the person dissolved or the transparency grew, the more the consciousness widened and the forces got through. However, She kept on living as usual and led as worldly a life as anyone else; She even met Anatole France, whose gentle irony She shared (always the refusal to take herself seriously; oh, how well She would understand Sri Aurobindo's humor!), and even asked him if his Revolte des Anges, which She liked very much, had not been inspired by Theon's ideas. But She was already on the verge of another revolt, infinitely more fundamental than any of the old religious dilemmas: something that seemed to take place at the level of her body and link her to the very body of the earth ... as if one could not touch a speck of Matter without touching all of Matter: I now have a constant and PRECISE perception of the universal unity that determines the absolute interdependence of all actions,¹⁵ She noted at the time. "Precise," that is, a material fact, not the mind's haze. A mute revolt had begun to stir in the earth, spreading its seismic waves from the Yangtze Valley to Agadir (1911): The whole earth is in our arms like an ailing child who must be cured.¹⁶ Already ... some sixty years ago.

But sixty years ago, something very new was beginning on earth.

Deceived by appearances, we might believe that the world has exploded into a million chaotic experiences that tear it apart everywhere down to the least hook of our little borders and even of our hearts—nothing and no one esca­pes; it is all one single mass of Matter! We might think that the great newness of the world goes back to this last decade, but the first shock, the first wave, the epicenter of the phe­nomenon surprisingly takes place in Asia at the turn of the century. It all stems from there, everything else is an amplification or an exacerbation of what started there. Three revolutions, all from Asia. And Mirra came into contact with all three through sometimes strange circum­stances. The shock came from India: in 1893, Sri Aurobindo wrote his first revolutionary article and, at the turn of the century, fourteen years before Gandhi,¹⁰⁰ he was already the uncontested "revolutionary leader," "the most dangerous man we have to contend with," as Lord Minto, the Viceroy of India, wrote while bombs were exploding in Bengal. And Mirra was in contact with India as early as 1904. Then in China, also at the turn of the century, Chinese insurgents laid siege to the European legations in Peking—the famous "Boxer Rebellion” and the proliferation of "secret societies” (whose leaders came to France for inspiration) resulting in the formation of the Kuomintang and the uprisings in the valley of the Yangtze River in 1911, followed by the collapse of the Manchurian Dynasty in 1912. Mirra would meet one of the Chinese militants in Paris. And finally (or simulta­neously), in Russia, with the torpedoing of the Russian fleet by the Japanese at Port Arthur in 1904, which precipi­tated the first revolutionary waves: the assassination of the Grand Duke Serge in Moscow in 1905, the repression of revolutionary students and their exile to Siberia during the iron rule of the inflexible Stolypine. Mirra would also meet one of these students in Paris in 1907, after he escaped Nicolas Il’s retaliatory measures. Three revolutions in the making which were going to change the face of the world. And finally, the intrigues of William II in Europe resulted in the dispatch of a German gunboat to Agadir in 1911, under the very nose of a threatened England and France, and precipitated the flare-up of the great fiery arch that strangely linked the uprisings of the Yangtze Valley to those in Europe, Russia and India. One single Matter stirring. And it might have begun stirring when Mirra in Paris and Sri Aurobindo in Calcutta began entering their own Matter to cleanse the layers of the old evolutionary world and free the new ''source.” One single great Body in transformation.

Slowly, the floodgates were opening.

A strange incident had taken place in Tlemcen in 1906. During her explorations into the planes of consciousness surrounding the earth (what is called its “future,” and is yet to occur only due to the thickness to be crossed), Mirra had seen something, or rather something had been said to her, which She had carefully noted down along with the date (and heaven knows, She was far from bothering about China, when even India was an obscure subject for Her): The revolution will take place in exactly five years [in China], And that will be the first terrestrial movement heralding the transformation.¹⁷ In 1911 exactly, in October, the Kuomintang fomented the uprisings we now know, and the Manchurian Dynasty collapsed shortly thereafter. But these events, which we can now see in their true perspective, were then only vague rumors that took months to cross the seas and were less known, in the end, than the latest speech of the honorable French representative from Lot-et-Garonne (Mr. Fallieres, not to name him). Mirra herself knew noth­ing about it all, until the day she met "by chance" in Paris (we do not know exactly how and when), a chance as mys­terious as all the others, a member of a Chinese secret society (just as in a novel) who informed her of the events in Wuhan in circumstances that are even stranger: Unknow­ingly, Mirra had made a certain gesture in front of that man (one fist on top of the other) which happened to be the secret sign of that society (it seems we are definitely in the midst of a novel, but Mothers life is the most extraordinary of novels); thinking She was another member, the man gave her a detailed account of what was happening in China. Suddenly, Mirra remembered the note she had writ­ten five years earlier.

And She was left pensive.

It was as if circumstances wanted her to be informed. That She unwittingly made that “gesture" does not come as a surprise to us; for a long time Mirra had had the quite natural capacity of entering into everyone just as herself, without even wanting it, and of doing things without even knowing why, simply because the gesture was forced upon her. It was no longer the mental mechanism that made her move. But what leaves us in wonder is, why China? Forthcoming history, which is probably just around the corner, will certainly tell us why the “first terrestrial movement heralding the transformation” had to take place in that country. We ourselves have no idea. We can only note the fact. Is that where the knot is? But the fact remains that at the turn of the century, three revolutions were in progress, which were going to change the face of the world. Everything we see today is only the consequence and the extension of something that began then.

And what began?

We can be easily deceived by appearances. We see com­munism here, socialism there and capitalism still elsewhere —one hundred and fifty-odd nations tearing one another apart, each raising up its own war cry, fighting poverty, fighting racial injustice of one color or another, fighting for justice, freedom, oil and chemical fertilizers, for what have you, against what have you: it is the reign of for and against, truth against falsehood, good against evil, and everyone has the truth, everyone brandishes his slogan and condemns the truth of the other who condemns the truth of the other—"truth” is everywhere, like an enormous, pestilential corpse that each one displays, proclaims, broad­casts and prints in six hundred and fifty infallible languages, each supremely truthful. And everything is true, everything is false. It is the truth of falsehood or the falsehood of truth. It is the reign of yes-no, good-evil, for-against, the great mental Babel among a rapidly mushrooming four billion humans. It is the age of countless panaceas: against cancer, against recession and poverty, for rain or fine weather; we invent everything to disinvent everything the very next minute, and everything starts all over again in the great cauldron. It is always new, it is always the same. Sickness here today, sickness there tomorrow, but the whole world is sick. It is the great sickness of the mind coming to its end. It is the great devaluation of the mind—the one nobody speaks of, but which screams everywhere in a thousand "cultures” whose words no longer mean anything, whose ideas no longer mean anything, whose truths and lies no longer mean anything, and everything looks like some enormous fraud adorned with a million truths that rever­berate through loudspeakers all the way up to the smallest villages in the Himalayas, hypnotized, deafened, drugged with words and dazed with ideas. This is the end of the Mind. Thought is annulling itself. It is the beginning of something else. We are at the time of a great “change of government,” She said—the replacement of the mental government of intelligence by the government of spiritualized consciousness. ¹⁸

This is the time of the Supramental.

In a thousand languages and with a thousand labels, left and right, in yellow, red or black, Christian, Muslim, Marxist or atheist, everyone is doing the same thing. Everyone is shifting into a new evolutionary stage under the unbearable inner and outer Pressure of Consciousness. Every "for” goes there, every "against” goes there, every yes and every no, it makes no more difference than the branchiosaur's first rumblings at the beginning of the Carbon­iferous—whether in Chinese, American or perfect French. We are being dragged right to the bottom of the fishbowl, we are all going there, toward the exit from the Mind. Nature could not invent a better way: no plague or earth­quake—she simply turns the Mind's screw, or rather lets it turn itself until it is completely crushed. This is what began at the turn of the century. Not a Chinese or a Russian Revolution, but a revolution of Consciousness. And all revolutions are meant to precipitate that one revolution. All miseries exist only to hasten that one deliverance. All falsehoods exist solely to force out that one Truth. Everyone is going there and everyone is working for it, whether they like it or not, in black or white, true or false, it is all the same. It’s very simple, Mother said; the whole of humanity follows an evolution, an evolutionary course, and. at some periods—special periods—a particular experience becomes almost universal, that is, terrestrial, absolutely terrestrial, and though with different names, different labels or different words, it is more or less the same experience going on. And there are old experiences on their way to extinction, but which still persist, changing for a time the appearance and content of some new things. But it is only the tail end of the thing. The whole new movement is moving toward ONE experience which becomes as generalized as possible, for it is only useful when it is general. If it remains local, it is like ; a mushroom; it is fruitless for the human consciousness as a whole.¹⁹ We are in the midst of the terrestrial experience of Consciousness, as others were in the terrestrial experi­ence of the great telluric folds, or the terrestrial experience of breathing with lungs, and all our convulsions are the slow clearing away of evolutionary inutilities: The end of a stage of evolution is usually marked by a powerful recrudes­cence of all that has to go out of the evolution,²⁰ Sri Aurobindo said in 1910.

The Last Door

1914 is at the door.

She was intensely aware of that "movement of terrestrial transformation" while we were still conquering Chad. Science was Triumphant; everything was going to be cured, it was all a matter of invention. “We have extinguished stars in heavens that shall never be lit again!” exclaimed an eloquent French statesman. Indeed, the stars had fallen from heaven and were really in Matter—but perhaps not matter as envisioned by the materialists. And yet half the world still thinks of nothing better than imitating the West: Western technology, Western industry, the Western "stan­dard of living"—salvation through the machine. But Mirra did not think so, nor did Sri Aurobindo over there, who had already foreseen the red evening of the West and exhorted his compatriots (in vain) to turn to the one invention, that of themselves. Ute scientific, rationalistic, industrial, pseudo- democratic civilization of the West is now in process of dissolution, he wrote, and it would be a lunatic absurdity for us at this moment to build blindly on that sinking founda­tion.²¹ But the Machine is advancing imperturbably, it is covering the entire earth and the "underprivileged” call out to it as to their only salvation. Though indeed, the colossal Machine may have been necessary in Nature’s economy for reasons unforeseen by man: it was the surest way to tie the whole earth into one single bundle and reduce it to the mercy of a few loose bolts which one day, at one stroke, will confront the whole humanity with the fantastic, general breakdown of this symbol of the Mind. Then a child shall destroy her,²² Sri Aurobindo said before 1914. It will be overwhelmingly simple: no one could ever have imagined it. A global heap of rust. And we will move on to the forgot­ten invention—we will be reduced to it. That great reaction of the cult of Matter, which has been very useful to knead it and make it less unconscious of itself: it has forcibly brought consciousness back into Matter. So perhaps all that has been a sufficient preparation for the moment of the Total Manifes­tation to have come.²³

This "Manifestation" was what held her interest. In other words, the advent of the new Consciousness. The word recurs again and again in her "journal" with increasing urgency from 1913 onwards: The hour of Your manifesta­tion has come ... The glorious news of Your next Coming... Your new Manifestation ,..²⁴ But She did not even know who Sri Aurobindo was really, and She was alone, knocking at every door, dismantling all the mechanisms—religious, social, political—as if She had to exhaust all the solutions before being driven to the right door, as if her very quest created the circumstances that would put her on the boat to Pondicherry ... for the electoral campaign of Richard, who this time had decided to become himself the represen­tative of French India (he was to be pitifully beaten). She who did not believe in democracy, even before 1914! This was another door She found closed: All human organiza­tions are based on: the visible fact (which is a falsehood), public opinion (another falsehood), and moral sense, which is a third falsehood! So ...²⁵ And with her disarming sim­plicity, which went straight to the heart of the matter, She asked: Indeed we need a world organization. But by whom? It should be by people who have at least a world conscious­ness!²⁶ And there we are. Everywhere and from all sides, She was brought back to this question of "consciousness”: Governments follow governments, regimes follow regimes, centuries follow centuries, but human misery remains piti­fully the same ... Only a transformation, an illumination of the human consciousness, can bring about a real improve­ment in the human condition.²⁷

She had only to look at what was before her eyes, in Paris itself: What the mental atmosphere in a city like Paris can be, with millions of beings thinking, and what thoughts! Just imagine that swarming and moving mass, that inextricable tangle. At first it seems that you cannot make out anything, and yet, despite all the conflicting tendencies, wills and opin­ions, there takes place a kind of unity, an identity among all these vibrations, for with very few exceptions, all of them express ... greed. Greed in every form, every aspect, on every level. All the thoughts of the socialites whose only goals are pleasure and material entertainment express greed. All the thoughts of the intellectuals or artists athirst for recognition, fame and honor express greed. All the thoughts of men in power and civil servants aspiring for more power and more influence express greed. All the thoughts of the thousands of employees and workers, the oppressed, the unfortunate, the downtrodden struggling for an improvement in their dreary existence express greed. And all, rich or poor, powerful or weak, privileged or deprived, intellectual or ignorant, want gold, always more gold, to satisfy all their greed.²⁸ This was in 1912, We do not know if the situation has improved since then, or if it is better in some other latitude, but what can possibly change in the world, as long as this conscious­ness has not changed? How many tons of penicillin or institutions will ever cure that indigence? Or else how many tons of policemen, and more and more policemen? Sometimes She even criticized her brother Matteo, who, after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique, had become a governor; yet he, too, seemed to have special faculties, since he was able to have certain experiences—which he dismissed because they did not conform to his idea of the “welfare of the world”: One day when he was eighteen, just before the Polytechnique exams, as he was crossing the Seine (I think it was the Pont des Arts,), suddenly in the middle of the bridge ... he felt something descend into him with such force that he became immobilized, petrified; then, although he didn’t exactly hear a voice, a very clear message came to him: “If you want, you can become a god"—it was translated like that in his consciousness. He told me that it took hold of him entirely, immobilized him—a formidable and extremely luminous power: “If you want, you can become a god. ” Then, in the thick of the experience itself, he replied, “No, I want to serve humanity. ” And it was gone. Of course, he took great care to say nothing to my mother, but we were intimate enough for him to tell me about it. I told him, “Well, what an idiot you are!..." And he understood nothing. Yet he was an intelligent, capable man: he was a governor, and a rather successful one, in several countries. But he under­stood nothing ...He didn’t conceive of anything better than “helping others”—philanthropy. That's why he became a governor. When he came out of Polytechnique, he had a choice between different posts, and he deliberately chose that post in the colonies, because he wanted to “help backward races to progress”—all that nonsense !²⁹ Already, at the age of sixteen and a half ... Enough to send a few Nobel Prize laureates through the ceiling. And indeed, Matteo was regarded as a kind of Christ by the Congolese he governed; they had never seen such abnegation, according to the records. But we may wonder whether our Congolese broth­ers, who are no longer called by this name, are more advanced in well-being, wisdom and beauty of life for it... We labor under a tenacious illusion and the more moral and right- thinking it is, the stronger it is—a true spiritual blockhouse. Perhaps one day those “humanitarian” marvels will appear as obsolete to us as the conquest of Chad or the famous "French Peace”—which could as well be called Pax Britan­nica or the American peace—because they have never brought peace to anyone. Thus, we come to realize that there are a number of sacred myths which have no other utility than that of fashioning our own consciousness, our own being and our own good, or not. THE CONDITIONS IN WHICH PEOPLE LIVE UPON EARTH ARE THE RESULT OF THEIR STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, She said. TO WANT TO CHANGE THE CONDITIONS WITHOUT CHANGING THE CONSCIOUSNESS IS A vain CHIMERA.³⁰ The whole problem of the world and the whole enormity of the illusion that has driven us since the first locomotive in one single sentence. How can you pos­sibly change anything without having changed yourself? Only a child would say, “I will open a dormitory, I am going to build a nursery, give soup to the poor, preach knowledge, spread religion... ” It's only because you think you are better than others and know better than they what they should be or do. This is what “serving humanity" means. Do you want to perpetuate all that? It has not brought much change. You can open millions of hospitals, it won't keep people from falling ill. On the contrary, they will be given all the conve­niences and encouragement to fall ill ...In fact, the first humanity you should concern yourself with is yourself. You want to alleviate suffering, but unless you can change the very capacity for suffering into a certitude of being happy, the world will not change. It will always be the same, and we merely go round in circles—civilization follows civilization, catastrophe follows catastrophe, but nothing changes, because something is missing, something is not there, and that is consciousness. That's all.³¹ To “change the capacity for suf­fering.” To her, this was already the heart of the question.

That suffering thing in the depths of man, whatever the attire, the vocabulary, the professions of faith and hope. That something like a call of death, which temporarily garbs itself in one religion or another, in this or that salva­tion, in a red, black or blue "ism,” in a socialist or celestial heaven, trying to elude its deep pain—interludes upon interludes, intellectual, sentimental, patriotic or religious, a thousand interludes between that core of pain and death: perhaps death itself throbbing in the heart of things ever since the first earthly breathing. Life that knows itself doomed—a knot of pain in which both life and death are locked in an intimate embrace, as if life needed death to find its total secret, and death needed life to transmute its dark refusal, and both change into a third state, which will be Life. This capacity for pain in our depths, which is the cry of our naked secret. The one thing we must face with­out masks, without tricks, without good and evil, without all the tawdry rags in which we try to clothe it so as to for­get—in vain. We have something radical yet to find, and our very pain is the means. And at the turn of this century, after that formidable explosion of hope in a Machine that was supposed to save everything, that formidable explosion of brotherhood based on the Ideology of Human Improvement, perhaps we are being led, not to a collapse and defeat, but nearer to the real question, nearer to the heart of an unforeseen "improvement,” in which the old Pain, freed from its false hopes, false heavens and false improvements, consumed and transmuted, reduced to its own question, will free the new life from its mortal cocoon. But first, all the "improvement” had to collapse, we first had to be free from the old spiritual, humanitarian and religious and scientific bunker—all the constructions of the Mind—which confine to specious salvations the one Thing that needs no salvation because it cannot die and needs no machines because it is Power. “If only each one did his best," they say. But this best is absolutely worthless! Mother exclaimed. Unless everything changes, nothing will change. It is this “best” that has to changed.³²

And ultimately, nothing changes until death changes.

Mirra had thoroughly explored all the mechanisms, we could rather say all the old tombs. There were no doors left anywhere, except one—in the .silence of the heart: The true progressive evolution, the one that can lead man to the hap­piness he is entitled to, does not reside in any external means, material improvements or social transformation. In deep inner improvement of the individual lies the true progress and the key to a complete transformation of the present state of things,³³ She wrote in 1912. All our "improvements” are no more useful from the standpoint of the next evolu­tionary stage than the apes improved somersaults in the Pleistocene forests—unless they are a pretext for the devel­opment of our own consciousness. But then, they are but a pretext. Over there, Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn from his revolutionary activities for the same reasons, although everyone expected him to assume the leadership of India’s political destinies—and this "withdrawal" was greatly resented, because nobody understood it. The advocates of action think that by human intellect and energy making an always new rush, everything can be put right, He wrote; the present state of the world after a development of the intellect and a stupendous output of energy for which there is no historical parallel is a signal proof of the emptiness of the illusion under which they labour. Yoga takes the stand that it is only by a change of consciousness that the true basis of life can be discovered; from within outward is indeed the rule. But within does not mean some quarter inch behind the surface ... The choice is between remaining in the old jumble i and groping about in the hope of stumbling on some discovery or standing back and seeking the Light within till we discover and can build the Godhead within and without us.³⁴

Mirra had found the key to the within, but She did not i yet have the key to the transformation. Just one month before embarking for India, She wrote, How much greater a splendor than all the previous ones, how marvelous a glory and light would be needed to draw these beings out of the horrible aberration the life of cities and so-called civilizations plunges them into!³⁵

When everything has been said and done, and seen and understood, nothing remains but to love. Perhaps that is the ultimate door. But it is not enough: One said, “I bring Love”; another said, ‘‘I bring Peace"; another said, “I bring Libera­tion"; and then a little change took place within, something awakened within the consciousness, but outside everything remained the same. That is what causes the fiasco ..³⁶ Love alone, such as Christ preached it, was unable to transform men. Force alone, such as Mohammed preached it, did not transform men—far from it. That is why the Consciousness that is striving to transform humanity unites force with love, and he who is to realize this transformation will come upon earth with the Power of Divine Love.³⁷ Behind her irony, her mischievous laughter, her violent heart athirst for progress, Mirra, Mother, was perhaps first and foremost love: To be an immense mantle of love enveloping the whole earth, penetrating all hearts ...³⁸ But a love we have a lot of trouble understanding, because it seems to be armed with a sword —until the day when this sword, too, dissolves in the bareness of the last days, letting such a vast, transparent and formidably powerful Love shine forth that it was almost crushing for the body—a love that demands the utmost from us, and at times finds us surprised and at our worst, with such a Tenderness, as if we had known ourselves there forever, in the heart of this burning question which is like the very question of the earth within us: Don't you know that the most sublime forces of expansion seek matter's dark­est veils to clothe themselves in?³⁹ She said in 1910. It is because of the worst that the best can be found, and because of the best that the worst can be transformed.⁴⁰ It is there that one meets Mother, there that one begins to touch the secret of Powerful Love, as if such a rending and naked and help­less cry were lit in Matter’s depths of pain that it suddenly turns into a pure fire, which simply says, I love, I love, I love ... that is all, and it is overwhelmingly powerful. There Mother shines, and forever. As if Mother were the love in Matters heart, and Mirra, Matter’s first groping search for what it really is. She opened the Age of divine materialism.

Over there, in Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo had already sent forth his cry: I seek a materialism that shall recognize matter and use it without being its slave.⁴¹

On March 7, 1914, She embarked aboard the Kaga Maru, after thirty-six years of Western materialism.