Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

16: One Pure Little Cell

She would come to see him every afternoon on the spacious veranda of the Guest House, and He taught her Sanskrit; we can picture her poring over those beautiful characters that seem charged with power, and the silence between them. Or else practical pieces of news—Mother was always practical, the rest has no need for words. She had formed a small group with Sri Aurobindo's “boys” and a few soccer players from the “Sports Club,” some Tamil youths from Pondicherry: L’Idee Nouvelle—The New Idea. It would be hard to imagine a more humble beginning for this “labo­ratory,” and how astonishing for us to see Sri Aurobindo, the revolutionary leader who had only to say one word to have all India behind Him and millions of men ready to follow his orders, attending to that handful of boys, well, pretty much “like anyone else at all.” Perhaps this is another of those illusions we must shatter if we have to acquire the “other way of seeing”—the distinction between “big things” and "small ones.” We do not realize how absolutely important everything is and how the least gesture reverber­ates throughout the world if it is absolutely the gesture— if it is. Life does not happen the way we think; there is a totally different way that needs to be learned—the way of ONENESS. Then we realize that a point shining here, in this banality, is the only thing that shines among a million frantic gestures throughout the world and hundreds of tremendous events which are merely hot air. We do not know what counts; we walk through a great forest whose signs we do not know, nor whether this little pebble is not precisely the first landmark to an unimaginable treasure— if we could conceive of the treasure, it would already be there. We constantly walk over the treasure, and at times we become aware of it. The moment we are constantly aware of it, we will be walking in a different world—which will nevertheless be the same one. Sri Aurobindo and Mother had a handful of very “ordinary” boys count the pebbles of the new world—but everyone is so utterly ordinary; extraordinary people are only the extraordinary ones of the old world, like pretty Ming vases of the Mental Dynasty. The treasure of the New World is to be found in what is most ordinary—which is not yet extraordinary, that is all. Curiously enough, the best response came from the Chris­tians of the “Sports Club,” more than from the local Hindus, Nolini remarked¹—we have so many sacred vases to smash before having a right to the extraordinary of the ordinary.

There was the news of the war, too: It is curious that several things that my mind was hammering at got done after I had dropped the idea altogether, Sri Aurobindo told a disciple. At one point I had an idea that France must get back Alsace-Lorraine. It was almost an obsession with me and when I had ceased to think about it, the thing got done.² Yes, Sri Aurobindo loved France, and He who never said anything about his past lives (when asked what He had been doing in his previous lives, He laconically replied, Carrying on the evolution),³ told Mother that He had had a French past life and that French had come to him like a spontaneous memory. So every day She read the "dispatch" at the gates of the government building. Sri Aurobindo was surrounded by maps; He followed Moltke's advance along the Marne step by step. When the Germans were marching upon Paris, He said, I felt something saying, “They MUST NOT take Paris. ” And as I was consulting a map I almost felt the place where they would be stopped.⁴ He would do the same thing during the Second World War. He "felt”: the map under his fingers was really the Marne under his fingers, in a body that no longer stopped at small physical borders and well understood the continuum of Matter. We have yet to shatter that great phantasmagoria of the separation of bodies before being able to see and touch the world in the other way—we are still babies of Matter, as it were, we do not know all that remains for us to discover, once we stop playing around with our futile machines—which bring nothing nearer but our own walls. In 1914, Mother, too, noted in her journal, The work in the constitution of the physical cells is perceptible; permeated with a considerable amount of force, they seem to expand and grow lighter. But the brain is still heavy and asleep...⁵ Fifty years later, Mother would tell me the same thing: it is the brain cells that remain the least receptive, almost the most opaque, as if they found it more difficult to become universalized, while the other cells very spontaneously extended everywhere. Probably because they have become extremely "mentalized,” covered over and permeated with mental substance, while the other “natural” cells, if we may say so, have a very direct perception of Matter’s oneness. Like Sri Aurobindo, She was beginning to expand everywhere: I feel I have no more limits, She noted, only a few days after receiving mental silence from Sri Aurobindo. There is no longer the perception of the body, no sensations, no feelings, no thoughts A clear, pure, tranquil immensity, permeated with love and light, filled with an unutterable bliss is what alone seems now to be myself⁶—We will never realize well enough what a wall the Mind is. We literally live under an artificial bell jar which seals us off from the whole world—which is probably why we had to invent so many machines to replace what a little cell knows quite directly and naturally ... and nicely. Without any hindrance. In fact, we have yet to learn how to live. In the body lie priceless and unknown treasures.⁷

However, we would be completely beside the point if we thought that Sri Aurobindo and Mother were endowed with superhuman powers. They used the most human powers there are, but human in a clear sense. And once everything has become clear, it is no longer a question of "power,” but of being, quite simply, like pure love. And it is all-powerful. Infinite. It is the Amazon all spread out, the treasure everywhere, and natural.

So life went on quite “banally.” She even had the idea of opening a shop to remedy Sri Aurobindo’s chronic state of penury—the “Aryan Stores,” an authentic variety store right in the middle of the bazaar, Rue Dupleix, where one of the boys enthusiastically sold split-peas along with soap and cosmetics, and even clothes swinging from a string in the gentle Pondicherry dust. But they were not to make a fortune, for the dear boy, yielding to pity, could not help selling things on credit and never got his money back— which was in fact Mother’s money. And Sri Aurobindo watched it all, like everything else, like the Battle of the Marne, while Mother was having her first experiences with commercial and financial organization, which was to take on considerable proportions in the future Ashram. She could have a genius for business, as she had a genius for music or for handling rain and storms—to her, too, it was all the same: forces to handle, and the power of money had to be mastered and transformed like all the other forces, from sex to Nirvana. Nothing was "outside.” You can act as easily upon the world of money through a street stall as you act upon a battlefield through a map—the magician of yore did nothing else when he took a piece of his enemy’s fingernail to cast a spell over him. The part contains the whole. There is no need of “big things” to work on the world, only pure instruments—although even their "impu­rity” is part of the general work of rectification, like the idiocy of the soap-peas-underwear seller. Mother and Sri Aurobindo would have many more idiocies to "rectify” ... A humble work indeed, very humble. You must not have a mania for greatness, Mother would never cease repeating. Sri Aurobindo listened to the tally, or perhaps the tales, of the Aryan Stores, while correcting the proofs of Arya and finalizing The Life Divine—the life divine begins with the first rectified idiocy, and God knows there are millions of them everyday, in our words, gestures, looks, a whole swarm of inexactitudes checking the pure flow of the Shakti —a bird makes no inexact movement, it goes straight to its goal. Or else Sri Aurobindo left his typewriter to admonish Amrita, the young Tamil disciple who had been scolding the typesetter of the Modern Press for he was something of a drunkard and was always late with his proofs: You have no right to interfere in his personal life, Sri Aurobindo remonstrated. It is meaningless to advise him. He has per­fect freedom to drink. What you should tell him is to observe the terms of the contract and give proofs regularly.⁸ This was quite typical of Sri Aurobindo: no interference. Puritans have been distributing their good advice to the world for a few thousand years now—we really need SOMETHING else for things to change. Sri Aurobindo was changing the inside of things, He was going straight to Matter—in silence. He was going where the cell responds to the exact vibration, the very one that made the Arya flow through his hands. One pure little cell in a single comer of matter is what can change the world. Everything else is the huge mental edifice a single thread of which we cannot touch without getting entangled in a million threads equally sticky with false­hood—everything in the mind lies, even the truth lies. And the “bearers of light” are just as sticky with falsehood as the rest. One ... pure ... little cell. That is all. The Force is there in matter’s inconscient depths, as the Irresistible Healer,⁹ Mother wrote in her journal of 1914.

And She was getting impatient. No, Mother was not—not yet—like Sri Aurobindo; She was the hurricane that wants to knock down everything in its path. She saw this planet suffering, She saw these people slaughtered here and there, this sordid Falsehood everywhere, right down to Richard with his noble philosophies, and She had touched, felt, seen the Secret of the Cure, here in this very Matter: The formidable omnipotence of Thy Force which is here, ready for manifestation, waiting, preparing the propitious hour, the favorable opportunity ...¹⁰ She would have liked to wrest it from her own matter and hasten the hour: But why dost Thou spare the body’s animality? Is it because it must be given time to adapt itself to the marvelous complexity, the powerful infinity of Thy Force? Is it Thy will that makes itself gentle and patient, not wanting to precipitate anything, but leave to the elements leisure to adapt themselves? I mean, is it better this way, or IS it IMPOSSIBLE OTHERWISE? Is it a particular incapacity that Thou toleratest with magnanimity, or is it a general law, an inevitable part of all that has to be transformed?¹¹ She still did not know what world is touched when a single little cell is touched and how one has to toil through the whole Matter of the world to earn the right to change one single little cell truly and completely. No, She was not at all aware of the long, dark path that She would have to open step by step, death after death, like successive little deaths in her own body, in order to open up the path of the world. Why spare us so much? We must triumph or perish! Victory, victory, victory I We want the victory of Trans­figuration !¹² And She asked, Will You bring about a lightning transformation, or will it still be a slow action in which one cell after another must be wrenched from its darkness and its limits?¹³ She did not know what She would have to go through for the next fifty-nine years, She who asked me one day in 1973, How many years left till I reach my cente­nary? "Five years, Mother," I replied. Five more years in this hell!¹⁴ Fifty-nine years of that relentless hurricane which kept pounding and pounding Matter’s door ... until the day She opened her hands totally, wanted nothing more, could do nothing more. What You will, What You will ... And perhaps that was the moment when the Door opened up. She had reached the end of her formidable Amazon, the path was hewn, the hurricane abated. It was right there.

When the amphibian wants to move on to the mammal, it is not the amphibian’s philosophy that must change, nor its morality: it is its cell.

We must discover the new form that will make the new manifestation possible.¹⁵ This was in June 1914, the 18th of June. It was perhaps the first time on earth that a being fitted with a human body had ever spoken of the deliberate transformation of the species. Mother is the extraordinary story of this change of species. It is a story more incredible than Jules Verne, more profound than Dante, more mys­terious than all the planets yet to be explored—perhaps another planet within this planet. A mystery that we must decipher together. For in truth, we do not know what the mystery is. If we knew, the New World would be all there, visible. Perhaps this book is a desperate attempt to make the mystery visible: to conjure up the new world, like the Rishis of old who hammered the mountain with their cry.

Our common cry.

We must change into a new species or die.

We must find the key to the New World.