Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

15: An Upside-Down Volcano

Sri Aurobindo groped his way through the supramental jungle. Except for bits and pieces, we do not really know what He was doing. He who wrote so much, thousands of letters and pages, and who did not refuse to speak abun­dantly with Richard or the first nucleus of disciples, never said anything about the body’s practical secrets—perhaps because no one would have understood him, or rather, because there is no use “explaining.” At the level of the body, things must be lived, experienced; one cannot teach the Shakti of the body as one teaches geometry or the paths to Nirvana; each one must walk, or perhaps even must invent his own path, because each body is different from the others, and one body’s obstacles are not another body’s obstacles. I had the surprise of my life when, one day in 1962, Mother told me quite simply, Sri Aurobindo left with­out revealing his secret.¹ It was not until Mother’s own yoga, when she was all alone, that Sri Aurobindo’s secret came to light and we could find out what He was really doing. That is how it was; Sri Aurobindo never imposed anything, we could even say that He did not teach; He simply set into motion the deep material, physiological mechanisms that would work silently and invisibly in everybody’s flesh and in the earth’s flesh, and which one day will break forth unexpectedly, from within, in all those who are ready. In short, He set into motion Matter’s truth so that Matter itself would do the work—which is precisely what happened while Sri Aurobindo was speaking with Richard; without his even trying, through the simple, material radiance of his presence, silence was established in Mother from within. He did not apply any special concentration or special will­power as all yogis do: He let Matter itself speak, if we may say so; Mother caught the contagion of Sri Aurobindo's silence. This “contagion” is the fundamental key to the working of the supramental power. It is not something imposed from without (this is the old failure of all powers), but something that is awakened from within and aspires by itself, from within. In fact, at the risk of sounding para­doxical, we might say that the Supermind is the only thing in the world that is not a “power”; it is the Truth of Matter, which, because it is, has the power to act—automatically, simply and naturally. It is that which is “natural” par excel­lence. To be is the real power. Silence was in Sri Aurobindo’s matter and it acted automatically on all matter able to respond. All other powers crumble, because they are imposed from outside, and they crumble as soon as the imposition ceases, as we have already said. Only what is cannot be undone. And what is most extraordinary is that Matter alone seems to have that power of being, purely—all the powers of the other levels fluctuate, come and go, burst, dazzle, work miracles and turn into dust. But this one does not budge. As if the body were the place of the supreme stability. Once the body has understood, it has understood forever, and it never forgets. But it is the one that has to understand. Hence, the vanity of teaching. Only a material contagion can do it. Sri Aurobindo and Mother were going to spread the great supramental contagion on the earth. Which is why Mother said. In the world’s history, what Sri Aurobindo represents is not a teaching, nor even a revelation, but a decisive ACTION direct from the Supreme.² Whether we believe or not in the “Supreme” or in Sri Aurobindo does not make any difference—Sri Aurobindo does not at all need to be a new god among the collection of humanity's saviors—besides, if we had to wait until each of us believe for the earth to change, we could go on waiting thousands of years more, for the Mind believes, then disbelieves, then believes again, then darts off somewhere else in the great bazaar of ideas. But Matter does not need to believe. For it, to feel is to believe. It was in Matter that Sri Aurobindo worked, directly. Perhaps He worked to make Matter believe in itself.

How did He go about it?

The Work on Matter

He went about it first on his own matter, and this is where we have a few scraps of information or external clues. In a letter of 1912 to a disciple in Calcutta, He speaks of his work to achieve immunity from disease—not that Sri Aurobindo personally cared about being immune to dis­ease, as there was very little of the “personal” in Him; but diseases are Matter's falsehood, an opacity equivalent to mental stupidity—and He said, I am now attempting suc­cessfully to perfect [the immunity] and test it by exposure to abnormal conditions.³ The only way to work on Matter is to make it react. You can work on a cold or a toothache like you mentally wade through the dusty pages of The Phenomenology of the Mind, or as you grapple with the whirl of emotional reactions. Instead of jumping for the first aspirin, you study the movement that relaxes the brains cells, for example. It is exactly like a chemistry experiment: this vibration produces such or such an effect, this attitude neutralizes or crystallizes, and that other one clears every­thing up, like a drop of sodium hydroxide in a vial of iodine. And you repeat the experiment until it is clear, precise, instantaneous, until it penetrates the substance of the cells. In fact, "to penetrate the substance” always means “to cleanse the substance,” because there is really nothing to inject into it, but rather all kinds of evolutionary impedi­ments to reject: underneath, it is all pure, natural and automatically powerful. True naturalness is the ultimate cure of everything. There is nothing to impose; it is, and it is automatically what it should be. This restoration of pure Matter, true Matter (the true physical, as Sri Aurobindo would call it) is the ultimate triumph of the transforma­tion. But meanwhile, one must remove one impediment after another. We do not know what those “abnormal con­ditions” to which Sri Aurobindo exposed himself were; they were probably as inconspicuous as a cold (there is nothing less “conspicuous” than this supramental yoga; it is the mere trifle looking like nothing that you catch at any moment, when speaking to your neighbor or tripping over a step—it is the most invisible yoga in the world). We know, at least, that He experimented with food, fasting (as we have seen), sleep, and even drugs (not to get “experiences,” God knows, but the opposite of an experience, in other words, nervous control and clarity of the reflexes while under the influence of massive doses of hashish or opium —He tried both—which would have smashed anyone else or sent him straight to Nirvana). “To test” was his favorite expression: I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane.⁴ One day, as his right eye was red and swollen, one of his disciples suggested that it could be due to His cigar smoke—“Wait,” He replied (we do not know if He was so mischievous as to light up another cigar under their very noses), then He began walking back and forth; two hours later, the eye was all white and clear, and the swelling had gone. We would be quite mistaken to think that Sri Aurobindo used a mental or vital power as healers or yogis do, or that he concentrated specifically on his eye; He only restored the Shakti's natural flow by the rhythm of his walk. He accustomed his cells to respond exclusively to the influence of the pure Shakti—a whole exhaustive program, which He would continue for thirty-six years. The working of the supramental power envisaged is not an influence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties but an entrance and permeation changing it wholly into a supra- mentalised physical,⁵ He wrote. In other words, a pure physical freed from all its evolutionary accretions and distortions, and endowed with its normal powers. For in truth, in every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter there live hidden and work unknown all the omniscience of the Eternal and all the omnipotence of the Infinite.⁶

But all this work on his own matter was only a prepara­tion for the work on terrestrial Matter—though indeed, experience shows that the two cannot be separated; there is no such a thing as “your” matter and “my” matter, there is but One Matter. Our isolation inside a brainbox is the most tremendous illusion ever created in this good evolu­tionary field. The sadhana [the work on oneself] shall first be applied in things that do not matter and only afterwards used for life,⁷ He noted in a letter of 1914. From the common cold one moves quite naturally to the battlefield of the Marne. We seem to be joking, but few and far between are those who can grasp the compact precision of the great terrestrial field and how a pure little vibration here, in this plot of matter, has worldwide repercussions—but to see that, one’s eyes must be cleared up. Already in a letter of 1913, Sri Aurobindo enumerated the four stages of his program as follows: What I am attempting is to establish the NORMAL working of the Siddhis [faculties or powers] in life, i.e. the perception of thoughts, feelings and happenings of other beings and in other places throughout the world without any use of information by speech or any other data; 2nd, the communication of the ideas and feelings I select to others (individuals, groups, nations) by mere transmission of will­power; 3rd, the silent compulsion on them to act according to these communicated ideas and feelings; 4th, the determin­ing of events, actions and results of action throughout the world by pure silent will-power ...in the 1st, 2nd and even 3rd I am now largely successful, although the action of these powers is not yet perfectly organised. It is only in the 4th that I feel a serious resistance. In other words, He says in this same letter, it is the attempt to apply knowledge and power to the events and happenings of the world without the nec­essary instrumentality of physical action.⁸

We may find it difficult to understand how one can go from a veranda, which one paces back and forth while letting the Shakti flow into one's body, to the great world stage. But it is quite simple, as we have said: when one is clear, everything is clear. There is no “you” over there in the distance; everything is perfectly here, as distinct as the pulse of our own bodies—and if it flows here, it flows over there as well. Only we must be clear, and above all, there must be no more separate “I”. The “I” is the Great Wall of China. So long as the “I” is there, there is no room for the rest of the world. This is the first carapace to break through before we can understand, that is, embrace a little of the world in our consciousnesses and eventually in our own bodies. Then we realize that curing a swollen eye can also cure a tumid pouch in some other place on earth—Serbia or Bengal—if need be. Sri Aurobindo had reached the point where the physical "I” (the "I” of the body) had to disappear so that the work in his own matter could flow out into all Matter. The first step is to get rid of the “I” in the head (the most difficult), then in the reactions and feel­ings, then in the body. My subjective Sadhana may be said to have received its final seal and something like its consum­mation, He wrote in 1913, by a prolonged realisation and dwelling in Parabrahman [that is, supreme Oneness—or supreme Transparency, as we prefer] for many hours. Since then, egoism is dead for all in me except... the physical self which awaits one farther realisation before it is entirely liberated from occasional visitings or external touches of the old separated existence.⁹ There only remained the “objec­tive” sadhana. That is when Mother arrived. One day, as a disciple asked him how his Supermind in the body could change the earth, Sri Aurobindo simply replied: If it [the Supermind] comes down into our physical it would mean that it has come down into Matter.¹⁰ And with his typical Aurobindonian humor, He said, At least you will admit that I have got some matter in me and you will hardly deny that the matter in me is connected or even continuous (in spite of the Quantum theory) with matter in general?¹¹ But simultaneously, Sri Aurobindo discovered the reverse side of Matters oneness: indeed, one goes everywhere, one is everywhere ... but one swallows everything, too. In myself it [the power] is trying to manifest as rapidly as the deficien­cies of my mind and body will permit, and also,—this is important,—as rapidly as the defects of my chief friends and helpers will permit, He wrote in June 1914. For all those have to be taken on myself spiritually and may retard my own development. I advance, but at every fresh stage have to go back to receive some fresh load of imperfection that comes from the outside.¹² This would be Mother's and Sri Aurobindo’s major problem right to the end.

The Work on the World

She came to see him every day, in the afternoon, at around 4:30. She lived nearby, in a little terraced house next to the Governor’s Palace, rue Dupleix. From her ter­race, She could see Sri Aurobindo’s room. She came and silently prepared a cup of tea or cocoa for him, while the others went to their soccer game. The house had changed imperceptibly since her arrival; the only bath towel had multiplied and there was less dust on the piles of books scattered all about the room right up to the visitors’ chairs. She looked after things, and Sri Aurobindo was able to drink his favorite tea more often—very strong tea, any hour of the day or night... if someone thought of making it for him. As an absolute rule, He never asked for anything and treated everyone as his equal. When inadvertently his foot hit a young Tamil student who had just joined them (it was Amrita, the future treasurer of the Ashram), He got up from his chair, and in the best British manner, bowed and said: I beg your pardon. The rather wild group that sur­rounded him—and respected and loved him, for who could have ignored that special “something” in Sri Aurobindo— began to notice that Mother never sat on a chair in Sri | Aurobindo’s presence, but always on the floor at His feet,? and they slowly realized that their “leader” was also some-? thing else. Not for a moment did they suspect what Sri Aurobindo was silently working on through them, nor did i they guess that they had unknowingly entered the yoga, 1 and that through them and their passion for soccer or literary interests, Sri Aurobindo was working on a whole youth. How? We will not understand unless we understand that each man is a summary of the world and when one point of the whole is touched all the points in the same category throughout the world are touched: Each one rep­resents a type of humanity and if one type is conquered that means a great victory for the work.¹³ Everything is linked; we shall never realize it enough. In 1913 already, He wrote to a disciple in Calcutta: I have also begun ... the second part of my work which will consist in making men for the new age by imparting whatever Siddhi [powers] I get to those who are chosen. From this point of view our little colony here is a sort of seed plot, a laboratory. The things I work out in it, are then extended outside.¹⁴

And all this took place in complete silence, we could almost say with the complete ignorance of the “laboratory subjects," and that very ignorance was Sri Aurobindo s best asset and the best condition for the effectiveness of his work. The “disciples” did not think of themselves as dis­ciples, and as they did not know that they were doing yoga, they did not instantly raise all their “ideas” of yoga between themselves and Sri Aurobindo—the greatest obstacle, in fact, is our own idea of things; we erect instantaneous walls. In no time at all, we have drawn up a whole list of "do's and don’ts,” of “it’s allowed” and “it’s not allowed,” “it’s yogic, it’s unyogic.” And nothing can get through any­more. We think that we do nothing and can do nothing if we have not “understood,” but the best part of our develop­ment takes place when we understand nothing and seek unknowingly, banging against everything and falling head­long in the unknown. Once we have “understood,” we are walled up in our own understanding. It takes hammer blows to undo our saintly ideas—which are far more resil­ient than our devilish ones. At least the devilish ideas have the humility to admit that they are foolish. As early as 1914, in a letter to a disciple in Chandernagore who was interested in tantric disciplines, Sri Aurobindo dropped an extraordinarily luminous remark which seems like nothing: The power that I am developing, if it reaches consummation, will be able to accomplish its effects automatically BY any method CHOSEN¹⁵ (the emphasis is Sri Aurobindo’s). Even through soccer. We say “this is part of the thing and that is not,” "this is an experience and that is not"—but every­thing is The Experience! Everything is part of the thing, everything moves in the right direction, it is Matter itself that is being transformed by any means. What misleads us is our mental education. Despite ourselves and despite everything, we cannot help thinking that the next stage of evolution involves the mind and that it is a kind of improved mind, but the evolutionary business does not take place there! Even if we understood nothing and no one in the world understood anything, it would no more prevent man from moving on to the next type than all the cries of the mammals prevented the advent of the human type. It is a Yoga meant for life and life only,¹⁶ Sri Aurobindo exclaimed one day, when asked once again if He had withdrawn to seek some salvation or other. It is The Mind that seeks its salvation, the Mind that invents disciplines, the Mind that builds heavens and windmills (and hells, too), but life is not saved in the least, even after millions of hours of medi­tation and miles of discipline.

A power that will be “able to accomplish its effects automatically”... This word “automatic” often recurs in his writings between 1912 and 1914. Sri Aurobindo must have touched upon quite a universal mechanism. A very central point.

And the war broke out on August 1.

The German cruiser Emden would even come as close as the waters off Pondicherry, as if Sri Aurobindo had to see for himself, and fire a few shells at Madras.

Fifteen days later—on his forty-second birthday—Sri Aurobindo brought out the first issue of the Arya, He who did not want to “teach” anything, day after day for seven years would in one go write almost the whole of his work, more than five thousand pages—pouring onto the world the call for the new evolution—while the dark seethings of the old bestial evolution were rumbling over Europe, spreading over the world, and would not have ceased rumbling even sixty years later, as if some dark universal mainspring, some supreme darkness, had been touched at the same time as that almighty and automatic power in the heart of “every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter”—as if, truly, the very root of Death had been touched. It was the beginning of the great, long death of Death. One year ear­lier, in 1913, in a letter to the Chandernagore disciple who had sheltered him when he was on the run, Sri Aurobindo spoke of a yogic sadhana that would help in the restoration of the Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth, and He added, That work has to begin now but it will not be complete till the end of the Kali [Yuga].¹⁷ It is the descending path for the whole world ... right down to the supreme mainspring. We cannot touch one point of Matter without touching all of Matter. We cannot destroy Death without destroying the root of death in every consciousness, every group and nation. That which emerges, rumbles and spreads outside is that which for millennia has lived cozily under the covering of our wisdoms, morals, religions and salvations. The Thief is driven out of his central shelter, he runs from door to door, waving his bombs and terrors, but he has lost, he has nowhere to hide, there is no longer any wisdom to shelter him, any pretence to disguise him; he is naked, he is the one who is terrified. He sows his great work of nakedness and transparency everywhere until nothing is left standing, not one hidden crack, not a single construction of the mind. Then, what is will shine.

The first book to come out of his typewriter would be The Secret of the Veda. The beginning of the cycle was link­ing up with the end of the cycle, the secret of the beginning was found again at the end. “Our fathers by their words broke the strong and stubborn places [the subconscious fortress of the pants, or robbers of the Truth], they have shattered the mountain rock [that is, Matters shell] with their cry ... found that Truth, even the Sun dwelling in the darkness” (1.71.2; ΙΠ.39.5) “The hill parted asunder, heaven accomplished itself.” (V.45)

The high meets the low, all is a single plan.¹⁸

Through the layers of darkness as well as through the German subconscient and the subconscient of all peoples one after another, the connection was slowly being established, down to the fundamental rock, that Truth-Consciousness in Matter’s depths which the Vedic Rishis called the “Sun of Truth," Savita, like the sun in the atom. And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher,¹⁹ Sri Aurobindo exclaimed, when He was told about his “philosophical” work. The Life Divine is not phi­losophy but FACT. It contains what I have realised and seen.²⁰ For seven years He would pour the “fact” over the world, just as the Vedic Rishis hammered the mountain rock with their “cry.”

He had, moreover, a strange way of writing. He would type out everything directly on his small portable Reming­ton, without correction—a minimum of sixty-four pages every month, which Mother herself punctually brought to the “Modern Press" on the fifteenth of each month. He corrected all the proofs himself and did all the work. “I used to find him sitting before his typewriter,” recalls his younger brother Barin, who had come to visit him, “tick­ing away his ideas and thoughts instead of writing them down ... He had made it a rule to go through as many as five proofs of each printed form. There was not that loose habit of doing things shabbily in Aurobindo which we find everywhere in India. He always wrote and worked with infinite care and patience, his actions springing from pure limpid energy,—sustained and patient, devoid of all taint of inertia or hurry."²¹ Even Barin, who knew nothing (he was the “bomb-maker,” later deported to the Andaman Islands by the British), could not help noticing that "lim­pid energy.” But strangely enough, He did not "tick away” one book after another; He started three simultaneously.

The first issue of the Arya contained the beginning of The Secret of the Veda, The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga (the two latter books alone would run to more than one thousand pages each). Then He started writing five and even six books at a time. No writer who knows a little what writing is about can imagine such a phenomenon, if only in terms of organization of consciousness, to mention only the external part of the task. Even if we put together all the geniuses of the world, we could not conceive of Plato writ­ing Phaedras, The Republic, The Laws and God knows what else at the same time, nor can we imagine Goethe managing Faust, Wilhelm Meister ... and whatever else in one go. Furthermore, Sri Aurobindo was also writing poetry and drama simultaneously, which He did not publish in the Arya, not to mention his voluminous correspondence. No, this is not the feat of a human or even superhuman genius. This has nothing to do with genius. What was at work was another order of consciousness. He would bring silence into his head, Mother relates, and he would sit at his typewriter. Then, from above, from the higher regions, everything that had to be written came down, already composed, and He had only to move his fingers over the keyboard—it was tran­scribed.²² But the phenomenon is even more interesting than we think, because this "from above” is still a way of saying things to make oneself understood by children; “from above” in no way explains how a human (that is, mental) consciousness can simultaneously pull on ten thousand threads and a number of sentences, all in logical, coherent order, and what is more, without using the brain! What was it that organized this totality of knowledge or inspiration? "Above,” it is quite total and put together in a bundle of compact light, we can see it clearly as soon as we make contact with the so-called higher regions. It is like an enormous ball of living electricity-light. But in Matter, it has to trickle down one sentence at a time, unless we have quite a few arms, like the god Ganesh; it descends one by one, unless we are fitted with half a dozen brains functioning simultaneously—but here the brain was not even function­ing. We speak of “inspiration,” which is well and good, but inspiration needs to use something as an instrument: how do you force a hurricane through a funnel? And what fun­nel? A logical funnel at that, since Sri Aurobindo was still addressing beings fitted with a mind: it was in order to break their mental shell that He did all that. Mother gives an answer to our question, but the answer may be even more enigmatic than the question, for it calls everything into question! Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness was above, in the Supermind [again that famous “above” which actually means nothing], and it was the consciousness IN HIS HANDS that gave expression to the words. He became aware of the words only as they were expressed.²³ And Mother added, From the intellectual point of view, the Aiya is perfect: clarity, order, logic. Yet the mind had nothing to do with it. Then what was it that had something to do with it?—The hands in fact. As the words were being typed on the platen, He "learned,” as it were, what He was writing. It was the consciousness in his hands—the material consciousness, the consciousness of corporeal matter—that did all the work. Sri Aurobindo was perfectly silent, transparent, and Matter went straight through the philosophical jungle, just as the Siberian bird flies straight to its exotic lagoon, without straying once and without knowing the route beforehand— but its wings know the way very well—we could say its “chromosomes,” if it is any consolation for us to trace the problem a few earlier generations back. Yet a moment comes when we are faced with the problem. A moment when we are faced with Matter, quite simply, a Knowledge in Matter, a Consciousness in Matter, which can produce perfect philosophy just as it produces little birds or earth­quakes, with an exactness to the second and an intelligence that surpasses all our geniuses. This is the Truth-Con­sciousness. The “above” is quite simply the thickness of the layers to be crossed (the mental layer has a particular thickness of its own), and once everything is clear, “The high meets the low, all is a single plan.” In the heart of Matter quiver the tornado of light and a few other songs yet to be known which will forever console us for the loss of our labor as galley slaves of the Mind. Thus would Sri Aurobindo write nineteen volumes in one stretch, in seven years, hammering the world with his cry of Truth.

An upside-down volcano, Mother would say.

Then Sri Aurobindo would put a full stop to his “teach­ing” by declaring quite simply, in a voice so tranquil that it seemed to travel through eternity like a slow-flowing river, so self-confident, so far away already, so far ahead, like Mother in her ever-forward moving cyclone: Super­mind would remain even if the whole of the Arya were rubbed out or had never been written.²⁴

The Divine Man

For the Supermind is an evolutionary fact as inevitable as the appearance of vegetal life or animal life on earth, and even if no one believed in it, everyone would be heading there all the same. It is really the first time on earth that one of those beings we call the "pioneers” of evolution has come to do, to open the way, not just to teach, preach or reveal. Here, the way opens up in the body, not in the thought. If it opens in one human body, it will automati­cally open in the body of the earth. And no amount of words will change anything to that. But we can understand, if only with our minds, and hasten the evolutionary process —shorten the misery. And who knows, we might even find a brand-new interest in the world and witness, in a multi­tude of microscopic, material details, the unfolding of the prodigious transition that previous species underwent unknowingly. But this time, it is a much more prodigious transition than that from ape to man, for it is a question of getting out of animal evolution; it is no longer Matter that will create new forms through successive groping attempts, it is Consciousness itself that will directly create its own forms, this Consciousness buried in Matter that took so many millions of years and countless instruments to emerge in a human body. Instead of a brain, it will make use of something else. And what is now taking place is the making of this “something else”—there is nothing to teach, nothing to believe—all that is needed is to see. Only, we have to look in the right direction. Then our brain will be able to usefully fulfill its role of observer, which is its true evolutionary function, until we radically move on to a new form. Sri Aurobindo's thousands of pages actually invited us to enjoy the performance instead of being tossed about without understanding anything and trying to patch up old cracks which are as unpatchable as an earthquake. We are in the great quake of Consciousness in Matter. In reply to a Calcutta student asking him whether He was not going to return among them to “make men”—“we need men”— Sri Aurobindo wrote, I have done my share of man-making and it is a thing which now anybody can do; Nature herself is looking after it all over the world ... My business is now not man-making, but divine man-making.²⁵

Sri Aurobindo called this divine man, who would be only the first stage in the transition to "something else” (the first subject, we might say, lending himself or lending his body to the Experiment), by the Vedic term "Aryan” (which is why he called his review Arya). For in the Veda the Aryan peoples are those who had accepted a particular type of self-culture ...²⁶ And Sri Aurobindo did stress that the “Aryan” is above all a self-conqueror (the root ar means to plow, to strive): The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all out­side him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature²⁷—the question is actually to conquer something very difficult in our own matter, against millennia of evolutionary habits. It is a yoga for conquerors and heroes. The magnitude of the problem is clearly laid out by Mother, who as usual goes straight to the heart of the question—the conquest of death. Death is not an inevitable thing, She said; It is an accident that has been occurring till now (in any case, which appears to have always occurred till now), and we have put it into our head and our will to conquer this accident and overcome it. Yet it is such a terrible, such a formidable battle, against all the laws of Nature, all collective suggestions, all terrestrial habits, that unless you are a first-rate warrior whom nothing frightens, it’s better not to begin the battle. You must be an absolutely intrepid hero because, at every step, at every second, you have to fight a battle against all that is established. So it is not very easy. And even individu­ally, it is a battle against oneself, for if you want your physical consciousness to be in a state which admits of physical immortality, you must be so much free from everything the physical consciousness presently represents that it is a battle of every instant. All feelings, all sensations, all thoughts, all reflexes, all attractions, all repulsions, all that exists, all that forms the very fabric of our physical life must be overcome, transformed and freed from all its habits. This is a battle of every second against thousands and millions of enemies.²⁸ And in that first issue of the Arya, Sri Aurobindo enumer­ated the Aryans three conquests as follows: He overcomes earth and the body and does not consent like ordinary men to their dullness, inertia, dead routine and tamasic limita­tions. .., He overcomes life and its energies and refuses to be dominated by their hungers and cravings or enslaved by their rajasic passions. ...He overcomes the mind and its habits; he does not live in a shell of ignorance, inherited prejudices, customary ideas, pleasant opinions.²⁹ That is a tall order!

In a country that had been dedicated to ecstatic con­templation for twenty-five hundred years, Sri Aurobindo brought the sword, as He had brought it to the peace-loving Congressmen who sought independence through political speeches. He brought the “armed revolution" into his yoga; as for "independence,” He sought it right down into the body. After fifty years of “non-violence” dinned into us as the supreme panacea, we see today, even in India, our so- called pacifisms burst in our faces, rising from the depths of dark entrails clothed in immaculate linen, because we lacked the courage to go down there and wage the war that deep. Indeed, it was never nonviolence that liberated India; it was the very Force set in motion by Sri Aurobindo at the beginning of the century and in spite of nonviolence. Another of those "sacred cows” we dare not speak of too loudly at a time when spiritual pygmies reign. No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu [the god of love] cannot prevail till the debt to Rudra [the god of destruction] is paid. To turn aside then and preach to a still unevolved mankind the law of love and oneness? Teachers of the law of love and oneness there must be, for by that way must come the ultimate salvation. But not till the Time-Spirit in man is ready, can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone, but it is Rudra who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand. And meanwhile the fierce forward labor of mankind tormented and oppressed by the powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle and the word of its prophet.³⁰

In the middle of the First World War, at a time when his Ashram was not even founded, Sri Aurobindo declared, I want strong men. I do not want emotional children.³¹ Indeed, we must be made of steel to descend into the body’s secrets.

And absolute stillness. Nothing moved in Sri Aurobindo, not a quiver of thought, not one emotional vibration—Sri Aurobindo was total impersonality, like pure, crystalline high mountain air. And inside, a volcano. A motionless vol­cano. Truly, the union of the two poles: absolute dynamism within absolute immobility, as though this very Dynamism sprang from this very Immobility. For such is the supra­mental consciousness: all opposites change into a third thing which is their real force.

The New Evolution

And how far ahead He saw! In January 1910, just before he escaped to Chandernagore, at a time when Europe and the world were still half-asleep, when the Chinese Revolution had not even begun, when the Tsars were still solid and William II was secretly seeking “colonial compensations,” while Edward VII, “The Pacifier” (when you read the list of all the "pacifiers” in history, you do wonder how come there are wars), was sitting on his throne of Emperor of India, Sri Aurobindo made this amazing statement, or prediction rather, to an astounded correspondent of the weekly "India”: Since 1907, we are living in a new era which is full of hope for India. Not only India, but the whole world will see sudden upheavals and revolutionary changes. The high will become low and the low high. The oppressed and the depressed shall be elevated. The nation and humanity will be animated by a new consciousness, new thought and new efforts will be made to reach new ends. Amidst these revo­lutionary changes, India will become free.³² India was to become free thirty-seven years later. What strange Fire was burning within him? He used to sign all his letters then Kali—the Warrior of the Worlds, the mighty Mother who pokes the world and the hearts because She loves human beings, not in their small virtues or spotless whiteness, but in the upright Truth of their hearts and a greatness greater than all our humanisms. For the Mother, She who is called the Mother in India, the Shakti, She whom Sri Aurobindo served and venerated in his acts as well as in his works and his silence, is indeed the very Force, the powerful Fire that drives the worlds to their supreme evolutionary achieve­ment. Without Her, we can meditate for millennia, invent democratic and electronic paradises and go round in circles ad nauseam ... until She shatters our paradises and virtues and littleness, compelling us to fashion the Divine Life on earth and the Divine Man in a body. There is in her over­whelming intensity, a mighty passion of force to achieve, a divine violence rushing to shatter every limit and obstacle. All her divinity leaps out in a splendour of tempestuous action; she is there for swiftness, for the immediately effec­tive process, the rapid and direct stroke, the frontal assault that carries everything before it... for she is the Warrior of the Worlds who never shrinks from the battle ... Her spirit is tameless, her vision and will are high and far-reaching like the flight of an eagle, her feet are rapid on the upward way and her hands are outstretched to strike and to succour. For she too is the Mother and her love is as intense as her wrath ... If her anger is dreadful to the hostile and the vehemence of her pressure painful to the weak and timid, she is loved and worshipped by the great, the strong and the noble; for they feel that her blows beat what is rebellious in their material into strength and perfect truth. But for her what is done in a day might have taken centuries; without her Ananda [Bliss] might be wide and grave or soft and sweet and beautiful, but would lose the flaming joy of its most absolute intensities ... Therefore with her is the victorious force of the Divine and it is by the grace of her fire and passion and speed if the great achievement can be done now rather than hereafter.³³

She is the Power which brings always the greatest possible good out of apparent evil,³⁴ He wrote in one of the first issues of the Arya, while the murderous "trench warfare” was raging in Europe. This short sentence, so simple, con­tains a whole world—perhaps the whole world. Each one can put it to the test in his own consciousness. Blinded by appearances, by the struggle, by the necessity to choose and act, and more often to choose and act wrongly, and still more often to err and make mistakes, sometimes even to cause suffering and destruction, we do not see that at every moment and in the least detail each of our errors was the secret door to an unexpected good, each of our false steps was a step toward the necessary progress, every pain, every darkness prepared a vaster light, a clearer field—and that everything, in a huge, terrible but fruitful plot, imperturb­ably and meticulously conspired to our own widening and the widening of the world. Then, sometimes, we pause for one second, the mirror turns over and we glimpse the whole other side—the dark half of truth,³⁵ as Sri Aurobindo called it. “He became knowledge and ignorance, he became the truth and the falsehood,"³⁶ say the Upanishads—And we realize that everything is a single Truth in motion down to the most microscopic detail, a single Good being fulfilled, a single marvelous Force transmuting at each instant, relieving at each instant, changing each drop of poison into its nectar... if only we know how to look in the right direc­tion. Sri Aurobindo is truly the One who comes to show us how to look in the right direction. Light in darkness, the Hope everywhere, the Positive in everything, the Meaning of everything. And all is embraced: not one obscure atom escapes that total Meaning, not one shadow of pain remains without its profound light, not one straying step without its infallible direction. It is a relentless transmutation. It is Truth taking everything in its arms, because everything is herself progressing toward Herself; Falsehood is an invention of our eyes, Evil is an invention of our eyes, and suffering, the only suffering in fact, is to be unable to look in the right direction, because if we could, just one second, see what the world really is without all our false vision of good and evil or yes and no, we would be cured forever, and the world, without altering, even for one second, what it is at this cruel and dark minute, would be wholly different. It is a veil of Falsehood over an unimaginably beautiful Reality.

Perhaps the veil of the Mind. Sri Aurobindo is the one who unveils. Sri Aurobindo is the one who changes the gaze of the world. Sri Aurobindo is the whole vision, the embrace of everything. And She whom He serves is the great Transmutress who relentlessly changes our relentless follies into their content of light, our relentless stumblings into their imperturbable direction, our relentless misery into the only Force that one day will give us the courage to shatter the mirror and dare the joy of the world because we shall have seen what really is. Sri Aurobindo came to give—not a hope: a certitude of the splendor towards which the world is moving. The world is not an unhappy accident, it is a marvel moving towards its expression.³⁷

No, Sri Aurobindo is not a “teaching”—No teaching! Mother exclaimed, She who was so afraid that Sri Aurobindo's words and her own might be made into a new religion: Men are such fools that they can change anything at all into a religion. ...I don’t want religions, an end to religions!³⁸—Sri Aurobindo is another way of seeing. The great Transition to the next species begins with a look. To move from one species to another does not consist in a change of structure, but in a change of consciousness. The caterpillar and the butterfly look at one and the same world. And when a few start seeing in the other way, then the great contagion of the supramental vision will begin; we will emerge from the mental nightmare, feel differently, breathe differently and we will build our world differently, because we will see it differently. And in the end, Consciousness itself will seize this body to recast it according to its vision of immortal beauty.

Thus nowhere in Sri Aurobindo will we find any yogic or spiritual mechanism; all is part of his yoga, there is not one direction but millions of directions and ways on every side, above, below, right, left, and every step is part of the path, every look is part of the path, every blunder is part of the path—everything is the path. But we must see. That’s what people have always reproached Sri Aurobindo for, Mother said, because he doesn’t tell you, “Do this in this way and that in that way...." And that's precisely what made me feel that there was the Truth. People cannot live without reducing things to a mental system, but as soon as there’s a mecha­nism, it’s finished. The mechanism may well be very good for the person who found it: it’s HIS mechanism. But it's good only for him. As for me, I prefer not to have any mechanism! After writing all those thousands of pages in the Arya, Sri Aurobindo used to tell his disciples that He had not writ­ten all that to “teach” them anything, but to quiet their minds. Once the mind is quiet, we can set to work—to the real microscopic vision of every instant, the hunting down of the meaning in everything.

And truly, in this age when we frolic on dead moons with tungsten helmets and brush past the planets with our com­puterized trajectories, when our very future is presented as a choice between one devouring mechanism or another, Sri Aurobindo simply invites us to our own adventure within our own body and within the chromosomes of our species. No big problems—no, no, no! Mother exclaimed. Sri Auro­bindo has come to tell the world that man is not the final creation, that there is another creation. And He said this not because He knew it but because He felt it. And He began to do it. That’s all... And mind you, it can be very beautiful in its simplicity, a beauty sorrowful people can feel, people who are tired of life, people whose heads are sick of all these arguments and dogmas—people who are tired of thinking too many great thoughts—and I am the first among them! Noth­ing tires me more than philosophers!³⁹

In 1915, Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter, My present “teach­ing" is that the world is preparing for a new progress, a new evolution. Whatever race, whatever country seizes on the lines of that new evolution and fulfills it, will be the leader of humanity.⁴⁰ He was thinking of India, of course, as long as they do not merely copy European politics,⁴¹ but He was also thinking of France, for which He felt an “attachment... as a second country.”⁴² With France's intellectual quality, the quality of her mind, said Mother, the day she is truly touched spiritually, it will be something exceptional. Sri Aurobindo had a great liking for France. I was born there—certainly for a reason. In my case, I know it very well: it was the need of culture, of a clear and precise mind, of refined thought, taste and clarity of mind—there is no other country in the world for that. None. And Sri Aurobindo had a liking for France for that same reason, a great liking. He used to say that through­out his life in England, he had a much greater liking for France than for England!... There is a reason.⁴³

Perhaps France will find this reason and “seize the lines” of that new evolution. Perhaps we will then rediscover what we have forgotten since a certain revolution which changed the face of Europe and which was really the first faraway chimes of the new world. For it might after all be appropriate that the country of clear intellect be the first to be clear enough to dethrone the obsolete king of the Mind and wage the revolution of consciousness.

And the face of the world would thus be changed.

Just one country having the courage to strike against the Mind, its means and its institutions.

When He launched the Arya, Sri Aurobindo foresaw one thousand copies for India, and He sought 250 subscribers from France.