Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

14: Sri Aurobindo

He whom we saw yesterday is on earth.²

Thus, simply, did She note their meeting on March 29, 1914. Exactly my vision. ³ No, it was not a Hindu divinity, it was Sri Aurobindo. She had such a tender way of pronouncing his name—Shri Aurobin'do. I heard her say it thousands of times, and each time, even after fifty-nine years, there was the same love mingled with sweetness and veneration, just a second's pause in the midst of a sentence, a faint smile in her half-closed eyes, and one felt Sri Auro­bindo there, in an envelopment of pale blue light, almost white, whitish-blue, and very luminous. Never did She pronounce this name carelessly. It was like a mantra. It was Shri Aurobindo, there, as if they were fused together, with sometimes her in front, sometimes Him—He was that soft­ness, so vast, so comprehending. With Sri Aurobindo... you felt as if you entered into an infinity, always, and so soft, so soft! Always like ... something soft, I don't know. With vibra­tions that always made you wide, peaceful—you felt as if you were touching something limitless.⁴ Indeed, limitless—it did not stop at any point, it carried you far away from yourself, which was perhaps yourself, purely, on great wings of snow. Just one second, She would close her eyes, pronounce this name, and there it was. Forever. A name that incar­nates an experience, and holds the power of an experience. That is what the mantra is. Shri Aurobin’do ...

The Mystery of the Shakti

The first time, She wanted to meet Him alone. They had landed (was it mere chance?) at Dhanushkodi, far to the south, near the great temple of Rameswaram, whose high violet towers stood out above dunes of white sand; the temple of mental man’s first Avatar, and of his wife, Sita— who was engulfed alive by the Earth she loved—perhaps to pay homage to that story of the distant past, before going to meet the future. She already felt that something you breathe in with the country's atmosphere.⁵ They took a train and arrived in Pondicherry in the morning. She saw noth­ing, her gaze was turned within. We imagine her with a tulle veil covering long, flowing hair simply parted in the middle, a very white hand holding her veil against the gust of the sea breeze. On March 29th, in the afternoon, She walked alone toward a large columned house, somewhat battered by the monsoons, her heart beating, perhaps, as it does in the silence of life's moments when one knows without knowing. 41, rue Francois Martin. A big postern gate and its capitals adorned with vines of quisqualis, which She would call “Faithfulness.” An open door, a neglected courtyard with a few banana trees and weeds, a ground floor veranda with its colonnades, and a staircase to the right: I climbed up the stairway and he was standing there, waiting for me at the top of the stairs.... EXACTLY my vision! Dressed the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me ... and I saw in his eyes that it was He. The two things clicked, the inner experience immediately became one with the outer experience and there was a fusion—the decisive shock.⁶

And nothing happens in the cosmic play
But at its time and in its foreseen place.⁷

We always walk along two roads, the outer and the inner, and we go blindly on the former, weaving a million “chance events” like some absurd cubist painting, stumbling here or there into sorrows or joys, encounters, unexplained and inexplicable gestures, while a traveler within us knows the whole picture and all the threads, all the old and never lost encounters, the uncompleted gestures, until the day both travelers meet: the road within becomes the road without and everything is an eternal encounter, ONE Consciousness wanders through its eternal picture, gradually awakening to its own totality. The only minutes of memory in a life are the moments when the two paths meet; a little shock within that recognizes one point of the Great Picture and finds itself, for a moment, on the eternal highroad—a second of coincidence. And it is that. Everything else is a haphazard grayness where nothing happens, because nothing happens in life except on that road and during the sole seconds when we coincide with that road. The coinciding points are the exact measure of our consciousness. For some, every­thing coincides; each gesture and each encounter, and the whole universe down to the most microscopic detail is a fabulous encounter. These are the ones who pursue the great eternal Work and, from life to life, come back together to awaken an ever greater number of little points that will become aware of the great coincidence. Such is the supra­mental vision, the consciousness of the next cycle; such is Mother's and Sri Aurobindo’s long path through forgotten ages and countless consciousnesses: There is no difference between the Mother’s path and mine, Sri Aurobindo wrote; we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same.⁸ And She said: From the beginning of the earth’s history, in one form or another, under one name or another, Sri Aurobindo has always presided over the great terrestrial transformations.⁹ They are what we could call the pioneers of evolution. Their meeting was the sign that the new Manifestation was about to take place. The time has come, Mother wrote in her journal, the new manifestation is certain, the new manifestation is close ... This human, this earthly hour is the most beautiful of all hours.¹⁰ The Hour of the Earth ... How She thought of the Earth always! The Earth's beauty, the Earth's grandeur, the Earth's realiza­tion! Mother was perhaps the Earth's aspiration within a little body: Grant that my aspiration may be intense enough to awaken the same aspiration everywhere,¹¹ She prayed. Yes, that inevitable Need. Nothing else counts. That is all. Only that.¹² The supramental work of the end was at the beginning of the great journey, it is the fire of aspiration burning and burning from body to body, increasingly building itself, and remembering itself more and more until it touches its full totality and its solar body. It is the journey of the Shakti enclosed in the atom’s unconscious­ness to the Shakti fully conscious in each cell of its body.

Such is the mystery of the Shakti. We speak of the power of the atom, the power of Nature, electrical, intellectual or spiritual power, but there is only one Power, not two. These are varying levels or degrees of luminosity, varying intensities of a single Current that takes on one vibration or another depending on the milieu it goes through. That power rose through centuries and ages, built ever more complex instruments, covered itself with one shell or another, ever aspiring, ever striving for more space, more light, more earth and bodies to encompass, ever ascending toward some ineffable totality of itself. It built trap after trap to annex ever more of the world to its totality, invented love to bind beings to beings and the millions of species to its earth—it was love itself, a fire burning within, a need to be ever more, to embrace ever more, to live and live everywhere, in everything. It cast forth galaxies as it cast forth countless little creatures, as it cast forth man just a few moments ago. With him, it reached the conscious knot of its evolution. But it strove to grow still more, always, through the senses as through the heart as through the mind, to enfold always more of the world in its huge net of love-fire, to conquer and dominate. It even soared to the clouds with its ascetics and saints, dissolved itself for a few seconds in their contemplation, only to go back elsewhere and begin again and again its old conquest. It is the relentless Flame, the need to be that cannot stop until it is everything and ever more. Some call it Desire, Evil, and try to annihilate it in order to emerge into a nameless Peace at last; some call it Intelligence, Power, and try to yoke it to their Machine only to annihi­late themselves beneath the weight of their own inventions. It shatters every trap it has itself built, breaks men and the very structures it had itself erected, shatters Intelligence, shatters the Spirit, shatters even Desire, whenever they tie it to a stake, casts and recasts its terrestrial ore until it has found its own secret—it is Shakti, the Moving Force of the worlds, the Realization, and without Her none lives and none aspires. She is the Fire in the atom and the Fire of the yogi. She is Death who undoes herself into life, Nirvana bursting forth into a million new galaxies only to find her again; paradises breaking apart, species breaking apart, millions of machines, tricks and traps and inventions breaking apart, only to find her again endlessly. No one can extinguish that Fire. But from age to age, a few have known her Secret, though even this Secret She breaks and buries until the ALL is ready to live and build her Secret, because She is ONE in a million forms, She is the Mother of the worlds and everything is equally her child.

Sri Aurobindo knew her Secret. Mother knew her Secret. They were together again because the Time had come to attempt the great Experience once more—and who knows whether "other times” had not exploded into myriad par­ticles of stars just to forge this one more time?

For the mystery of the Shakti recurs in every being as it does in every universe, as in Sri Aurobindo, as in Mother— the Hour of the World begins with our little hour. One loses it or one wins it. Each one must discover the mystery of the Shakti and conquer her Secret. The world groans under the onslaught of her Fire; She pounds our senses, pounds our hearts, pounds our minds, stirs up ideas, passions and miseries—she is the relentless Fire. Every discipline seeks to check this Fire, as do science, morality, religion, law, each one at its own level—she breaks all the barriers, thwarts all the laws, finds herself naked and continues her very structures it had itself erected, shatters Intelligence, shatters the Spirit, shatters even Desire, whenever they tie it to a stake, casts and recasts its terrestrial ore until it has found its own secret—it is Shakti, the Moving Force of the worlds, the Realization, and without Her none lives and none aspires. She is the Fire in the atom and the Fire of the yogi. She is Death who undoes herself into life, Nirvana bursting forth into a million new galaxies only to find her again; paradises breaking apart, species breaking apart, millions of machines, tricks and traps and inventions breaking apart, only to find her again endlessly. No one can extinguish that Fire. But from age to age, a few have known her Secret, though even this Secret She breaks and buries until the ALL is ready to live and build her Secret, because She is ONE in a million forms, She is the Mother of the worlds and everything is equally her child.

Sri Aurobindo knew her Secret. Mother knew her Secret. They were together again because the Time had come to attempt the great Experience once more—and who knows whether "other times” had not exploded into myriad par­ticles of stars just to forge this one more time?

For the mystery of the Shakti recurs in every being as it does in every universe, as in Sri Aurobindo, as in Mother— the Hour of the World begins with our little hour. One loses it or one wins it. Each one must discover the mystery of the Shakti and conquer her Secret. The world groans under the onslaught of her Fire; She pounds our senses, pounds our hearts, pounds our minds, stirs up ideas, passions and miseries—she is the relentless Fire. Every discipline seeks to check this Fire, as do science, morality, religion, law, each one at its own level—she breaks all the barriers, thwarts all the laws, finds herself naked and continues her dance of Fire even as we are sure we have grasped wisdom. She breaks every Wisdom as one day she will break our machines, like the old crumbling temples along the Nile. She seeks what is farther than our wisdoms, more power­ful than our machines, truer than all our temples; she seeks her Secret in each of us. Devoured by her Fire, three Indian millennia¹⁰⁰ have said no. Hypnotized by her Flame, a few Western centuries have said YES. But neither that “no" nor that "yes” has found the Secret. The former have soared off into their so-called freedom, and have lost Matter, while the latter have sunk into their so-called Matter, and have lost freedom—but neither this matter nor that freedom was real, no one had the total Secret. If we pull the Shakti upwards, she turns into vapor and finally breaks this body, which is no longer of any use to her; if we pull her down­wards, she sinks into the mire and also breaks this body that fetters her. No one had the secret of the body—and She breaks and breaks her bodies until we find the Secret.

I looked upon the world and missed the Self, And when I found the Self, I lost the world, My other selves I lost and the body of God, The link of the finite with the Infinite, The bridge between the appearance and the Truth.¹³

For the body is the bridge. The body is Truth's last hiding place, the place where the full Shakti changes her restless Flame into something else, her white freedom into some­thing else, her black misery into something else, her death into Life divine. And that may be where even "God” changes into something else. "Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Ignorance, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Knowledge alone,”¹⁴ the Upanishad says.

Yet the danger seems to be lurking in the very opposite direction. A dark Shakti now reigns over the world. If it is true that in India, in more gracious ages, woman was regarded as a living symbol of the Shakti (Rama and Sita, Shiva and Parvati, Leonardo da Vinci and Mona Lisa, Sri Aurobindo and Mother)—for in fact Woman is the Shakti, the creative Force, the foundation of life, and without her no real creation can ever be embodied; She is the one who brings Consciousness down into Matter, the one who orga­nizes Matter, who fixes and concretizes Man's wayward thoughts and precipitates his free expanses into the mold of forms; She, the Body of the aspiring Earth—through a precipitous fall exactly commensurate to the fall of every­thing else, She has become, in our age, the symbol of Sex, another devaluation just as radical as that of the Mind. There is scarcely any risk that the Shakti of the world will vanish on the summits, for She is perfectly sunk in the mire below—for excellent reasons, since Nature always knows perfectly what she is doing. It is strange how we constantly think we obey higher or lower principles, heav­enly or muddy free wills, and how we are simply the parrots of the Mind, while forces infinitely more powerful than our own pull us in an unexpected direction and make us do what is needed for "reasons” that have nothing to do with the words we cover them with. The day we emerge from the Mind, we will be as astounded as Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnms. Now, Indian writings of some two thousand years ago had precisely foreseen that fall in a fourfold cas­cade of “ages,” or yugas, which saw, successively, the age of the thinkers or truth-knowers (Brahmins), that of the | knights or warriors (Kshatriyas), that of the merchants or | the middle-class (Vaishyas), and finally our own age, that .] of the laborers (Shudras), or rather the servants—of the ego, of the machine, of sex and comfort. The age of the "small dirty bodies,” ksudra deha samskara-barjitah, as the Vishnu Purana literally says.¹⁵ And each time, the Shakti came down from one center to another: from the mind center to the heart center to the stomach center to the sex center—that is, the center of Matter. We have come down all the way there, because the evolutionary work of our age—Kali Yuga, the Dark Age¹⁰¹—is taking place there, in Matter. We may deplore it rationally and morally and aes­thetically, but Nature could not care less about our reasons and our morals. She does not reason: she does. She is forcing us into another age—for it is said that this Dark Age, excruciating but brief and endowed with an over­whelming Grace as no other Age, is to be followed by a new Age of Truth, Satya Yuga ... or by a total decomposition, a complete recasting so as to attempt once more, perhaps beneath more clement galaxies, the eternal Experiment She WANTS to work out.

If we have reached this point, it is undoubtedly because sex is one of the keys to the body's Secret, and sexual mas­tery, says Sri Aurobindo,¹⁶ is the imperative condition for the manifestation of the new evolutionary Force, the supra­mental Force in the body. As always, the supreme obstacle is the supreme lever. Why?... It is no use giving abstract reasons, we must come to grips with the thing itself to understand what it conceals—unless we have tried, we cannot understand. We delude ourselves, involve our heart, ideas, feelings, thousands of masks and wonderful “reasons” in covering up what we want to hold on to. But it is obvious that if the new Shakti is to radiate in the body without exploding it by her sheer power, some transparency and wideness are needed there, just as they are needed in the Mind to let the first rays of Consciousness in, or simply a clear idea. The old mud cannot coexist with the new Force, and yet through its very resistance, narrowness and thick­ness, this mud compels a corresponding Force to manifest. Dams accumulate the Force necessary to get over the dam. But it can also break. The yoga of descent is a difficult and dangerous yoga for individuals as well as for the earth. It is a challenge to everyone and a challenge to the earth. We cannot do it without getting our hands dirty; we bump into things and fall, and in the very force of our fall, we find the force to jump farther. This yoga demands absolute sincerity, to use Mother's keyword; the least cheating with ourselves can have fatal consequences. But the slightest sincere open­ing has overwhelming results. This is the time of the infinite Grace as well as of the inexorable Sword, the time of all or nothing, of giant progress or gigantic collapse, in individu­als, nations and hearts, and everywhere on earth. No one is spared: it is one single Coup. The great coup d’etat of the New Consciousness. We get over the dam or we do not. And woman, this primal Shakti, has a decisive role to play in this supremely difficult Work—provided she under­stands her true role of creator and inspirer, which has no longer anything to do with the old small literary, aesthetic or conjugal stories, but with a new world and a new body difficult to give birth to, difficult to know, difficult to con­quer—for it must be conquered step by step in the most humble Matter and most obscure gestures, every minute of the day. At every minute, there is that or the old world of the "improved” ape. There can be no compromise, you under­stand, Mother said, it is not like convalescing after an illness: we have to CHANGE WORLDS.¹⁷

It is the most extraordinary adventure of all times—no continents to discover, no Vasco da Gama; an entirely unknown world within our own body, the conscious making of a being not yet existent on earth, the invention, as it were, of a new mode of consciousness and a new mode of perception. To replace all the old organs by new ones. Another vision, another touch, other means of communi­cating—another earth. And ultimately, another Matter. The way out of the old genetic program. Even the higher apes, when they were stirring up the first idea that would make an Einstein, had not experienced such a thrilling transition. But whether we like it or not, we are right in it, in the middle of the Transition. It is the only important Fact since the Stone Age.

Will we work it out, or not?

I know with absolute certitude, said Sri Aurobindo, that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how. That also is decided and predestined from somewhere above; but it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces. ...My faith and will are for the NOW.¹⁸

Such is the sense of the meeting between Mother and Sri Aurobindo on that March 29, 1914, a sort of zero hour of the new evolution.

The Whole Life

Mother would stay in Pondicherry almost one year, until February 1915, before leaving once again for Europe, where She would spend one last year, followed by a long four-year detour to Japan with Richard—the years of hell—before returning for good to Sri Aurobindo in 1920. I have often wondered why She did not stay with Him immediately and avoid this long circuit of pain. But Mother is One who exhausts every path and touches every difficulty to absorb them into her consciousness; we cannot transform what we have not borne.

Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change¹⁹

How far we are from the ascetic yogas which reject all darkness to sit enthroned in their pure light—and become a ruler over nothingness, as Mother would say. It really seems as if the yoga of descent consisted in swallowing all poisons, one after another, to grow stronger through the very force that wants to destroy. To run away from difficulties in order to conquer them is not a solution—although it’s very appealing. In those who seek the spiritual life, there is some­thing that says, “Oh, to sit down under a tree all alone, to remain in meditation, to remove all temptation to speak or act, how nice!’’... The true victory has to be won in life. You must know how to be alone with the Eternal and the Infinite in the midst of all circumstances. You must know how to be free, with the Supreme as your companion, amidst all occu­pations. That is the true victory.²⁰ And Sri Aurobindo said: We will enrich our realisation with the booty tom from the powers that oppose us.²¹ As we practice this gymnastic, we begin to touch a wonderful truth and to realize everywhere, in the least circumstance, that there is not one atom of adversity in the world, not one speck of “evil," not a single “enemy," and that everything is meant to compel us to uncover truth everywhere, purity everywhere, freedom everywhere—a huge conspiracy of light—and to build our own shakti to conquer farther, even farther, down to the last root of “Evil," to the very last mask:

An immortality cowled in the cape of death ²²

The conquest of death begins at the first street comer.

The great wonder of Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s Yoga is that it makes us discover the absolute positiveness of everything, including death. All of life, down to the last detail, becomes utterly positive, meaningful—not a single thing is “against." The only “Evil" is to take it as evil. It is incredibly simple, like Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

That yoga did not seem much at all, if one would look at it back in 1914; everything was so natural that it scarcely seemed like yoga, or perhaps everything was yoga, like the very air we breathe. Sri Aurobindo was surrounded by half a dozen boys, mostly Bengalis, who had followed their "leader” into his exile, and were all waiting for the moment He would return to the revolution—no one suspected that He was doing the revolution. Sri Aurobindo was always doing things without seeming to; even during the revolution, He preferred to remain in the background, and it took the “bomb case” and his final arrest for him to become known as “the brains behind it." He never laughed, except uproari­ously, like a god; He never raised his voice and He let everybody do as they pleased, but He silently applied his will to run things as He saw them. His apparent noninter­vention was so extreme that one day a disciple asked him, “But wouldn't you intervene if someone were drowning in front of you?"—No, not unless I was asked to. He well understood that changing circumstances is useless if people did not want to change within: you un-drown them, and they re-drown themselves at the earliest opportunity. For Sri Aurobindo, the problem lay elsewhere and was more central. But if He was called upon, if He was asked the least thing, He responded instantaneously, like a hurricane— without seeming to (as He still does). Indeed, Sri Auro­bindo was unlike anything we have ever known. Sparrows had built their nest on his bedroom door. He went all the way around so as not to disturb them—it was like that. To Sri Aurobindo, everything was perfectly equal, everything had an equal value; there were no pluses or minuses, everything was absolutely important: the sparrows, the Viceroy of India or the revolution, it was all the same, because He was conducting the revolution at every moment, in every gesture and every step. Actually, if the revolution does not begin with the sparrow, it begins nowhere. If we only grasped that secret, we would be very near to really revolutionizing the world.

So He did not sit in meditation or distribute blessings. He went about his work, walked—a great deal, eight hours a day, up and down his veranda, to bring consciousness into Matter. He had found that walking gave energy to meditation. In short, it was a physical meditation, which did not seem much. A meditation of the body. Walking was yoga, eating was yoga, climbing up and down the stairs was yoga, everything was yoga—All Life is Yoga, He would soon inscribe as an epigraph to his first book, The Synthesis of Yoga. That is why nobody could discern anything, for yoga, like life, was everywhere. And the "boys'’ went in and out at their own sweet will, discussed politics or the latest soccer game—their favorite, if not main occupation—with the youths of the Pondicherry Sports Club. Sri Aurobindo was their companion, their friend. If they wanted to learn, they just asked him, because they were young and with the revolution had not had too much time to go to university. They could ask Him everything. Some wanted to learn lan­guages, French, for instance; so, going straight to Moliere, he selected L’Avare, which was there amidst the piles of Sanskrit, English, German and Italian books scattered about his room and right on his cot, for they were too poor to afford even a cupboard. Or else He taught Italian, Greek and Latin (Antigone, Medea, The Aeneid) to one of them who proved particularly interested in literature—this was Nolini, Sri Aurobindo’s oldest disciple, who would become the General Secretary of the Ashram. But the boys did not regard themselves as “disciples,” and besides, Sri Aurobindo did not try to teach anything, unless He was asked to. There was no question of an "Ashram,” because Sri Aurobindo did not want to hear this word mentioned and his yoga had nothing particularly “ashramic” in it. Yet something in Sri Aurobindo, which they could not very well figure out, opened their hearts and consciousnesses. As for him, whenever He was not busy walking or answering their questions, He was reading the Rig-Veda in the original Vedic Sanskrit. He discovered the Rig-Veda with amaze­ment and wonder, finding in it all the experiences He had spontaneously had in Calcutta right in the middle of his revolutionary activities—not unlike Mirra in the midst of her artists life. He rediscovered The Secret of the Veda, He who had spent all his early years in the West and learned English before learning his own mother tongue.

He lived the Rig-Veda quietly in the midst of that "camp life," as the boys called it. In fact, since his arrival in Pondicherry in 1910 with a false passport, they had lived a "bohemian" life, as one of them would say,¹⁰² moving four times in a row from one house to another depending on the state of their finances, until they ended up in that famous but slightly dilapidated "palace" in the "European quarter,” the Guest House, which Sri Aurobindo had considered worthy of renting for the fabulous sum of thirty-five rupees per month in honor of the Richards' arrival. He would even send an SOS to Calcutta to pay the rent. They used to take their baths under the tap in the courtyard, and as Sri Auro­bindo was the last to wash, He had the privilege of using the only soaked towel which the six others had used before him. Electricity had been installed just the day before, otherwise there was only a single candle reserved for Sri Aurobindo's use, as He had the most incongruous habit of reading at night, walking during the day and sleeping God knows how and when on his camp cot. The others slept on mats, without any pillow, and of course they had no mos­quito nets, let alone fans. They ate as they could, with the boys taking turns cooking, each one according to his own speciality; one would do the rice, another would take charge of pulses with, God willing, a few vegetables and chilli, and that was about it. Sri Aurobindo was not difficult, He would remain twenty-three days without eating, "to experiment" —already facing the problem of the absorption of energies (which would preoccupy Mother till the very end), and He sought gropingly in his body to see how to change that whole animal functioning without disintegrating Matter: When I did my fast of about 23 days or more when I was living in Chetty’s house [Sri Aurobindo's first house in Pondicherry'], I very nearly solved the problem. I could walk eight hours a day as usual. I continued my mental work and sadhana [yogic discipline] as usual and I found that I was not in the least weak at the end of 23 days. But the flesh began to grow less and I did not find a clue to replacing the very material reduced in the body. When I broke the fast, then also I did not observe the usual rule of people who observe long fasts,—by beginning with little food and so on. I began with the same quantity as I used to take before.²³ Like Mother, Sri Aurobindo broke all the rules, including physiological rules. But that did not prevent him from smoking big, hardly yogic cigars, (Spencer's Flors, if you please!) but He dropped cigars overnight as soon as He realized that the smell disturbed Mother. In short, a quite illegal and unmedical scholar, terrorist, gentleman and yogi. But when people came near him, in his simple white dhoti (one end of which He drew over his left shoulder, leaving a part of his body bare), they could not help but say "Sir" and bow before something calm and majestic, with an immobile fire inside.

Then this fire melted into a blue infinity.

And there were also spies. They were well guarded. The British Government had rented a whole house in Pondi­cherry where it lodged a squad of plainclothes Anglo-Indian policemen, who took shifts at Sri Aurobindo’s door, watch­ing every gesture, taking down the visitors’ names ... and inventing all sorts of delirious stories to justify their sur­veillance and keep the legend of the "dangerous terrorist” alive. There was even a spy among the six “disciples,” who, after having learned one day that Sri Aurobindo was "also" a yogi, threw himself at His feet, terror-stricken. Sri Auro­bindo smiled quietly; it was all the same to him. A spy was a man with two feet like everyone else, after all, and who was going to spy on the Rig-Veda? Once, they even hid “secret maps” in the well, along with duly forged, “incrimi­nating" letters; whereupon the British amiably advised the French police to “investigate” and make sure that nothing was hidden in the well (the British Government tried every­thing to have him extradited). The Police Commissioner, in white gloves, would come with a detachment of sepoys, discover the documents, search the rooms and finally come upon Sri Aurobindo’s table—the only table—to find a scattering of books in Greek and Latin ... and walk out, throwing up his hands in the air: “He knows Greek! He knows Latin!” Such a man obviously could not make bombs. And Moliere, somewhere between the Rig-Veda and Aristophanes, burst out laughing. All of life was there.

The Supramental

Such was the life they led until Mother’s arrival.

He was forty-two years old, She was thirty-six. The day after their first meeting, She returned to see him, but this time with Richard. She again climbed the stairs, holding a veil over her long, flowing hair. He was waiting for her on the large veranda upstairs. There was only a microscopic little table, less than three feet wide, covered with a blue cotton cloth. This is where He would soon type the five thousand pages of his first written work, in one single stretch. A straight-back hardwood chair, and a few hardly more comfortable seats, rented the day before in honor of the visitors. And the tall stucco columns, the sky already ablaze. He started to talk with Richard about the war; He already knew in March that the war was going to break out (it would break out in August). He knew a lot of things in his silent pacing up and down—the mind’s small limitations were no longer there. I was sitting there on the verandah. There was a table in front of him, and Richard was on the other side facing him. They began talking. Myself, I was seated at his feet, very small, with the table just in front of me—it came to my forehead, which gave me a little protection ...I didn’t say anything, I didn’t think anything, try anything, want anything—I merely sat near him. When I stood up half an hour later, he had put silence in my head, that’s all, with­out my even having asked him—perhaps even without his trying ... Oh, I had tried—for years I had tried to catch silence in my head—I never succeeded. For years, I did end­less exercises, all kinds of things, even “pranayama”—if it would only shut up! I was able to go out (that wasn't diffi­cult), but inside it kept turning.... But at that moment, all the mental constructions, all the mental, speculative struc­tures, none of it remained—a big hole. And such a peaceful, such a luminous hole! Afterwards, I kept very still so as not to disturb it. I didn't speak, above all I refrained from think­ing and held it, held it tight against me—I said to myself, “make it last, make it last, make it last”... How happy I was! Aaah ...It was really the reward for all my efforts. Nothing, I knew nothing any more, understood nothing at all. Not a single idea left in my head! Everything I had carefully built up over so many years, through all my experiences: conscious yoga, non-conscious yoga, life, experiences lived, classified and organized (oh, what a monument!).... crash! It all came tumbling down. Magnificent.... Everything was gone, abso­lutely gone, blank—as if I had just been born. Then slowly, slowly, as though falling drop by drop, something was built up again. But it had no limits, it had no ... it was vast as the universe and wonderfully still and luminous. Nothing here, in the head, but THERE, above the head; and then everything began to be seen from there. And it has never left me—you know, as a proof of Sri Aurobindo’s power it’s incomparable! A miracle. It has NEVER left me. I went to Japan, I did all sorts of things, had all possible kinds of adventures, even the most unpleasant, but it never left me—stillness, stillness, stillness. ...²⁴ And all this while He was talking to Richard, without his even trying. In other words, a power that acted directly from Matter to Matter, or from body to body, without mental intervention. Like a contagion. That is the supramental power.

But the word is misleading. When we say “supramental,” we imagine a superintuition, a supervastitude of conscious­ness, a superpower that would be like a glorification of all the powers of human intelligence; but that is not at all how it is. It is natural power itself. It is the very consciousness of Matter, or in Matter, acting directly, automatically and spontaneously. We see this power at work in the bird, the animal, everywhere around us in Nature; it is that power which guides the birds flight toward its infallible goal, the movement of a little beast toward its precise need, the motion of the atom in its regular gravitation—everything is exact to the electron and the millionth of a meridian. It is perfect exactitude. We speak of “instinct” or of “the laws of Nature,” because we label everything and think we exorcise a mystery by running it through Sciences baptis­mal font, and we nearly declare—not even “nearly”—that it is a total “Unconsciousness,” in other words, a total stu­pidity, which fulfills the tasks of a perfect intelligence. How it manages, we do not know, but that is “instinct," so everything is explained; that it is a “law,” so everything is natural—indeed, it is perfectly natural, and everything is natural—except us. And everything is perfectly conscious, except us, and perfectly exact, except us. We are on the way, in the process of becoming conscious, of rediscovering the very consciousness and exactitude that lies in the heart of a little beast and in the center of the atom. Only, instead of being an "unconscious” power, in the sense that the instru­ment does not know the Force that drives it (a bird does not know what impulsion pushes it toward the tropics or the lime-washed wall that will provide the shell of its egg), it will be a conscious power, a conscious movement, and an instrument which knows the Force, consents to the Force and puts it to work or lets it work consciously through itself. It is the Consciousness within that is conscious, and the unconscious instrument that becomes conscious of what was always there. Then, instead of a long evolutionary course and a long circuit in which the Consciousness had to act through more and more complex instruments and finally through a mental shell in which it perceived itself as an individual, with all the distortions and infirmities of the mental environment, it will be that same “involved” Consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, confined within the cells and electrons, hidden behind life, hidden behind the mind, which, at the end of the circuit, will express itself directly, instantly, all-powerfully, within an instrument that will let it flow without distorting it and will experience the individual joy of knowing what is happening, how it is happening, where it is going and why—everywhere at once, because Consciousness is one and Matter is one. Sri Aurobindo called that infallible Consciousness the "Truth- Consciousness” (because it is automatically true), or the Supermind. Yet, in the blindness of Matter itself, He says, there are signs of a concealed consciousness which in its hidden fundamental being SEES and has the power to act according to its vision and even by an infallible immediacy which is inherent in its nature.... The purposeful drive and workings of the inconscient material Energy are precisely such as we can attribute to the presence of an involved con­sciousness automatic, not using thought like the mind.... The entirely and inherently enlightened Truth-Consciousness we attribute to Supermind would be the SAME reality appear­ing at an ultimate stage of the evolution, finally evolved and no longer wholly involved as in Matter or partly and imper­fectly evolved and therefore capable of imperfection and error as in life and mind, now possessed of its own natural full­ness and perfection, luminously automatic, infallible.²⁵ It is “the One conscious in unconscious things,” as say the Vedas. Evolution results from an involution—only that which is already within can come out. If Consciousness did not already exist in the atom's core, it could never come out, for nothing can come out of nothing; there is no seed which does not contain its fruit and consciousness cannot result from unconsciousness. At the end of the circuit, we rediscover what was there, pure, in the heart of the first atom.

The whole problem lies in that “pure” something.

Of course, the first thing Sri Aurobindo spoke about to Mother was this Supermind. He had just been discovering with amazement his first confirmations in the Veda. He himself did not very well know how it all worked; it was a “jungle,” as He put it: Our yoga is like a new path carved out of the jungle and there is no previous road in the region. I myself had great difficulties ...²⁶ For us, everything is simple and clear, explained, the path has been opened; but when you are in the middle of an Amazonian jungle that exists on no map, first of all, you do not even know that it is the Amazon, and whether you should go right or left, whether Peru exists over there or whether the Orinoco is a part of the path, or if you are only going round in circles—you walk through nowhere. Only afterward can you say, “This is the source of the Amazon” or “This is the Truth-Con­sciousness,” but when you are in it, it is Darkness, which lights up only as you walk. You walk in “nothing,” you invent the Amazon—there is only the invisible compass within which guides your steps as a bird is guided toward its unknown lagoon six thousand miles away. But for the compass to work correctly, you must be pure, you must not let your own ideas interfere suggesting ten thousand other possible paths—you must be silent. You must listen to the Amazon within which leads you to the Amazon without, or rather which creates the Amazon as you walk. Ambulando solvitur was Sri Aurobindo’s favorite maxim: we solve the problem while walking. And did He walk! And He was silent, letting the great Shakti flow through him—surrender, total abdication, that is, total transparency, is the only Power. But if we begin to build a lovely little Central Park in the middle of the way, we get shut up within our Central Park—the walls arise instantaneously and magically the moment we think them. We must really have the courage to walk in nothing and not let ourselves be shut up by any­thing, not even by the supreme splendors, or what we take to be supreme splendors. To use a truism, a new world is a world that DOES NOT exist, or exists only out there, in the future, once the map is completed; and yet, we are walk­ing in it all the time, it is what guides our every footstep in its invisible, involuted seed. Thus we can understand that Sri Aurobindo felt somewhat relieved to be able to talk to someone who understood at last, and to break his solitary tete-a-tete with the six- or seven-thousand-year-old Vedas. Oh yes, I know! exclaimed Mother, laughing, when He first told her about the supramental creation. I have seen it up there! These had been her experiences in Tlemcen, and even earlier, in Paris.

Here again, our language is misleading, for it is all made up of “high,” “low,” "future,” “past,” a three-dimensional language to describe a world that has never been three- dimensional, any more than the sun has ever “risen” any­where. We are the ones who revolve, who travel in our consciousness. Indeed, that Supermind was "up there,” at the end of the journey, as complete as the Amazon and for years and years Sri Aurobindo and Mother would speak of the supramental "descent" upon earth. They would keep “pulling" the Supermind onto the earth, until a certain day in 1956 when it “descended." They traveled in a Supermind that was there all the time, just like the Amazon, and which became the Supermind as They walked. Theirs was the work of the pioneers. And one day we will find ourselves naturally in a well-mapped-out Supermind, just as today we are naturally in a well-organized Mind. But this journey of consciousness does not take place in the Brazilian jungle, but through the thick layers of our being, which are every­body’s layers. It is a journey to meet up with something that has always been there, only veiled from us by ideas, feel­ings, millennial habits of being, living and feeling, layers upon layers like a deposit down to the bottom of our cells— a journey, indeed, through the millennia—and suddenly, at the end, there is the “Supermind,” when everything has been crossed down to the last little coat of electrons, when everything becomes transparent and pure. Then the “high” meets the “low,” the “future” enters the "present,” the map is completed, the Amazon spreads itself out before us, we have arrived. It is transparent, it shows through. The “over there” becomes the "right here.” We live in the always-there involuted in the core of the atom, unfolded through each step of the journey, and which secretly guided every step of the journey. Sri Aurobindo and Mother are the ones who were going to establish the first connection. But the “Supermind” was still a kind of nothing, seen “over-there- and-above,” in a vision of the future, mysteriously perceived in the body’s cells (as Sri Aurobindo and Mother were gropingly beginning to perceive it in their bodies), with a whole opaque world in between. Purity and transparency had to be driven between the two, just as one day the first ape must have driven purity and transparency into its ape habits, so that the first mental vibrations might pass through without being engulfed by the old simian mecha­nisms. Only here, there is not just one level to clear up, but quite radically the whole gamut of evolutionary levels right down to the first mechanism of life in Matter. And finally, it is the same Force that is at work, through the Mind, the heart, the body or the stone—depending on the level we have crossed, we speak of mental force, vital or atomic force; and it does take on a mental, vital or atomic vibration, but it is always one and the same Force, the Supramental Shakti, at work clearing various levels of herself. The pure Shakti of the beginning is at the end. A still heart, a clear mind and untroubled nerves are the very first necessity for the perfection of our Yoga.²⁷ Thus did Sri Aurobindo define the conditions of the supramental yoga in a letter of 1913 to a disciple in Calcutta. In other words, transparency on every level. This is what Mother already called "the purifi­cation of Matter.”

For the strangest experience is to discover suddenly, quite stupidly, that the body knows better than we do and has a fantastic vision, perhaps even a very simple and fantastic power, only veiled by our mental habits. An “enlightenment” of the body. Perhaps the very amazement of the hominid when he realized that he had just built the first bow in a second’s thought. A power of the body. A vision of the body. A direct knowledge of Matter.

This was Sri Aurobindo’s very experience in Calcutta, beyond Nirvana. At the end of the circle, we topple again into the beginning of things.

True liberation is in the body.