Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

18: The Physical Plunge

It was April 24, 1920.

I felt Sri Aurobindo’s atmosphere, felt it materially, ten miles from the shore—ten nautical miles, not kilometers! It was very sudden, very concrete, a pure and luminous atmo­sphere, light, so light that it lifts you up.¹

Once again She crossed the old postern with its garland of “Faithfulness,” climbed the stairs to the spacious col­umned veranda. Sixteen years earlier, She had seen him for the first time in a “vision attire.” But that vision was never completed, its end had not taken place: Only after a series of experiences—a ten months' sojourn in Pondicherry, five years of separation, then the return to Pondicherry and the meeting in the same house and in the same way—did the END of the vision occur.... I was standing just beside him. My head wasn’t exactly on his shoulder, but where his shoulder was (I don’t know how to explain it—physically there was hardly any contact). We were standing side by side like that, gazing out through the open window, and then TOGETHER, at exactly the same moment, we felt, "Now the Realization will be accomplished.” That the seal was set and the Realization would he accomplished. I felt the Thing descending massively within me, with the same certainty I had felt in my vision. From that moment on there was nothing to say—no words, nothing. We knew it was that.²

That ... the Divine, the Lord, the Supreme, the Supra­mental, whatever—the next stage of evolution, the next consciousness. But it is that. The Obvious Fact. Personally, I call it “Supreme Consciousness” because I don’t want to say “God".... It's full of... the very word is full of deception. It’s not that way, it’s: We ARE—We ARE the Divine who has for­gotten Himself. And our task, the task is to re-establish the connection—call it by any name you like, it doesn't matter. It’s the Perfection we must become, that's all. The Perfection, the Power, the Knowledge we must become. Call it what you like, it doesn't matter to me. That’s the aspiration we must have. We must get out of this mire, this stupidity, this uncon­sciousness, this disgusting defeatism that crushes us because we allow ourselves to be crushed.³ And the foremost defeat­ism is death. This was in 1972, one year before She left.

They were going to "reestablish the connection,” but this time not for an individual little salvation in a dream of consciousness that believes it is liberated while everything else rots: to reestablish the connection in Matter—to uncover the Obvious Fact there, the wide-open air there, the great vastness there, the infallible knowledge there. How you speak of it does not matter. What matters is to follow the path, YOUR path, any path—yes, to go there.⁴ Like the bird, the electron, thunder and the monsoon—each one in its own exactness. Because all the pain in the world lies in that inexactness which does not know what it is doing, why it is doing it, how to do it in that unconsciousness, that powerlessness, that misery of not knowing the exact place of things, their exact role and exact value; everything is a tremendous approximation and everything is pain because we see nothing as it is and live nothing as it is. And as it is, it is simply THAT.⁵ That is the great Exactness which is Harmony, the plenitude of doing what we have to do, of being what we are, which is the love of everything that is, because we see the Wonder everywhere, the Treasure everywhere, the unimaginable Solicitude behind a million errors and false steps that were never an error, never a false step, but the imperturbable straight line of a Consciousness forever leading us to our own totality of consciousness. That, at last, purely. Infallible—like the electron, the bird or the thunder, but in a million, a billion certitudes looking at one another everywhere through our gaze and everywhere at the same time. For such is the Supramental Conscious­ness. It might also be called the Exact Consciousness. It is what reestablishes the connection—with everything. With what is. Man is a transitional being: We are the distorting intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the gods.⁶

She is forty-two, He is forty-eight.

The realization begins.

The Evolutionary Laboratory

To tell the truth, it was the first question that arose when I met Sri Aurobindo: should we do our yoga and go right to the end, then see about the others, or should we immediately let all those who have an identical aspiration come to us and walk all together toward the goal?... Both possibilities were there: either to do an intensive individual sadhana by with­drawing from the world and having no contact with others, or to let a group form in a natural and spontaneous way without preventing it from forming, and then setting out all together on the path.⁷

This is the very question of the world.

For after all, we have a certain conception of the world. We have seen or think we have seen what the next stage of human consciousness is to be, the inevitable development, but what does evolution itself think of it? Evolution, mean­ing Tom, Dick or Harry—everything is part of it, even little cats and the vegetables in the garden—not to mention our own stupidity, which is also part of the evolution and may not feel at all like replacing its stupidity with states of con­sciousness that after all must seem rather problematical. Throughout the world, there has never been any lack of human pioneers (we know nothing about ape pioneers) who also strove to accelerate evolution, only to end up at the stake like those moving Cathars (see the entry “heretic sects” in any dictionary), and others who have disappeared under the silt of the Nile or the dust of Bamyan—the her­etics may well be tomorrow’s orthodox, but in between, this is just abortive evolution, or a drop of water in the evolutionary ocean. There is no way round it: the whole of evolution has to move together, which is why it nicely breaks or burns all those who try to keep to themselves. And what a bunch of selves!... Mother and Sri Aurobindo saw the problem quite clearly and ruthlessly: Your idea of what things should be is so infinitely removed from what they will be that, even if you try to see things as globally as possible, you will still leave out such a great part of the uni­verse that it would amount to an almost linear realization, or in any event, so small and narrow that the greater part of the universe would remain unchanged. But even if you had a very broad view of things, even if you could conceive of something more total and advance on the path that is ready —for it is with paths as with beings: some of them are ready —without having the patience to wait for the others, that is, if you try to realize something that would be very close to the real truth in comparison with the actual state of the world, what would happen?—The disruption of a certain whole, a break not only in harmony but in balance as well, because a whole part of the creation would not be able to follow. And instead of a total realization of the Divine, you would have a small, local, infinitesimal realization, and nothing of what must ultimately be done would have been done.⁸

It is clear that Mother and Sri Aurobindo had no inten­tion of becoming super-Cathars for the benefit of fiscal stakes and bureaucratic Inquisitions of the 20th century, which are very efficient at evolutionary purges. We always make the same mistake: each one does his job, even the torturer, even the victim. And in the end, who does if not She, always and everywhere—except that her reasons have nothing to do with the fiscal or spiritual labels we stick on them. In other words, what is the Intention?... It is global, obviously. I am concerned with the earth, Sri Aurobindo wrote, not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits.⁹ Therefore, there was no question of isolating oneself for an “intensive sadhana,” and afterward coming back to collect the rest that would have been comfortably waiting in its evolutionary mud—“afterward," it is no longer possible. This “afterward” is an extraordinary illusion. You can go on meditating all alone for one hundred and seven years, you “take off your coat,” as Mother said, but after­ward you return to frantic subconscious notations catching up with their hundred-and-seven-year-old fast that break you at one stroke. For we all have the same mud inside, inevitably. Right away, Sri Aurobindo and Mother donned the world's mantle: The decision was not at all a mental choice; it came spontaneously. The circumstances were such that there was no choice; in other words, the group was formed quite naturally and spontaneously, in such a way that it was an imperative necessity. And once you begin like that, there is no going back—you have to go right to the end.¹⁰

This is how the Ashram formed around the first soccer players—later joined by dozens, then hundreds and hun­dreds of others over the years. The coat of the world was there, the whole world was there, all the types of mud and all the types of light or human ingredients needed to make up the evolutionary laboratory: an attempt at conscious evolution,¹¹ Sri Aurobindo said as early as 1925. In other words, a whole range of elements, each one ready to work on his own particular little plot of mud. And that is the whole difficulty, for each of the elements who eagerly rush into the laboratory, precisely because he or she wants to get out of the ordinary stupidity and hopes to have “experi­ences” or discover beautiful and breathable expanses of consciousness, stumbles at the first attempt, or the second (more often the second, after a preliminary period of euphoria), into the opposite of the light, a mud all the more sticky the more one strives to change it. It is really the world’s coat, without a missing crease. And it takes many samples, if we may say so, for the laboratory to be complete, with all possible test-tubes and conceivable mix­tures so as to put to the test a conscious and accelerated evolution on an approximately terrestrial scale. Mother and Sri Aurobindo had seen this clearly, too: If you want to do the work in a solitary way, it is absolutely impossible to do it in a total way, because every physical being, however complete he may be, is only partial and limited; he represents but one law in the world. It may be a very complex law, but it is only one law. ...¹² And Mother did not place herself outside the law, nor even Sri Aurobindo; She saw the whole problem with crystal-clear vision, because She saw it not only at the psychological level of the particular and idiosyncratic little bits of mud, but at the corporeal, physiological, we could almost say “genetic” level: Each individual being, even if he is of quite a superior quality, even if he has been created for quite a special work, is only an individual being; that is, THE totality of the transforma­tion CANNOT TAKE PLACE THROUGH A SINGLE BODY.... If we want to have a general action, a minimum number of physical individuals is required.¹³ Because the transformation of the muddy little subconscients is only a first stage in the evo­lutionary operation; at the end, there is the transformation of bodies, the change to another species. And it is no use saying “afterward-later”; afterward is right now or it never is. The horn of the evolutionary bull must be grasped totally and at once; the ultimate transformation is already contained in the very first second you seize hold of the problem. You seize hold of it in the right way or in the wrong way. It really is a dangerous operation, let us face the fact, and we do wonder why thrill-seekers go to the moon. There are tremendous craters right within and tumultuous Vietnams fully unknown. But it is also quite possible that those who fight outside, in Bangladesh or Chile, are the physical and mechanical—and very uncon­scious—counterparts of the phenomenon which is taking place in the inner laboratory. Everyone goes there, by all possible means. “By any method chosen,” Sri Aurobindo said kindly. The difference lies in the fact that here we work out conscious evolution: each of us “represents/' on an accelerated and tiny scale, the great battle outside. In fact, the real Vietnams are within, with no possibility of cheating, and one silent little victory may have its repercussions on the whole evolutionary battlefield—but of course, it is one and the same Battlefield! A single stupidity purged within is worth a whole Mekong Delta. One clear little cell clears up the whole terrestrial field, prepares and brings the trans­formation of the great body closer. We become "represen­tative” beings. Maybe if there is a symbolic being, said Mother, a symbolic being who has the power (it takes a great deal of endurance I), the power to CONTAIN the representation of all those disorders and to work on that symbolic represen­tation, it must help the whole.¹⁴

Sri Aurobindo for the next thirty years, and Mother for the next fifty-three years, were going to be “a symbol” and contain the sampling of every possible disorder.

But once again, “a representative group” is needed, according to Mothers words; a single being is not enough, a single law is not enough, a single quality of cell is not enough (or so it seems to us, but after all, the process is in the making and we are not so sure of its laws or whether a single tiny atom does not hold the key to everything else— chain reactions do exist). This is why, She said to the Ashram children, though you are unaware of it or do not conceive of it clearly, each of you represents one of the diffi­culties that has to be conquered for the transformation. And that makes quite a few difficulties! I had even written some­where that it was more than a difficulty; I had said that EACH ONE REPRESENTS AN IMPOSSIBILITY TO BE RESOLVED. And it’s all these impossibilities together that can be transformed in the Work. They are no longer isolated difficulties, they are collective difficulties—because you are not doing your yoga for yourselves alone, you are doing the yoga for everyone— without wanting it, automatically.¹⁵

Such is the meaning of this evolutionary laboratory called “the Ashram."

No, the Ashram is not a hermitage; it is a sampling of the world—with a Light proportionate to the thickness of the Mud to be transformed. Both are there in exactly equal proportions. And, well, each one can turn his gaze either here ... or there.

And perhaps the point lies in neither of them, but in a third thing—which is growing quite shyly.

Will it grow or not?

It would be interesting to see.

But the real question for the world, through this little symbolic plot, remains: Has the time come, or is it just one more botched evolution? Which assault will prevail, that of the little cell, or the other? ’

The Iridescent Light

When I returned from Japan and we began to work together, Sri Aurobindo had already brought the supramental light into the mental world and was trying to transform the Mind. “It’s strange,” he said to me, “it’s an endless work! Nothing seems to get done—everything is done and then constantly has to he done all over again. ” Then I gave him my personal impression: “It will be like that until we touch bottom.”¹⁶ Indeed, Mother had just had a vivid experience with Richard in Japan: the Mind is a perfect eel, or perhaps a chame­leon; it takes on whatever color we wish, depending on taste or circumstances—actually, in a way it is right, for the Mind is made for whatever one wishes—everything depends on that “one.” It is not made for discovering the truth or discovering anything whatever, but for putting the materials in order—-any materials. So instead of continuing to work in the Mind, both of us descended almost immediately (it was done in a day or two) from the Mind into the Vital,¹⁰⁰ and so on quite rapidly, leaving the Mind as it was, fully in the light but not permanently transformed... Then we descended into the Physical—and all the trouble began. But we didn’t stay in the Physical, we descended into the Subconscient and from the Subconscient to the Inconscient.¹⁷ The Inconscient, that is, what we might call the beginning of the world, Matters bedrock, the famous “something" on which all the evolutionary layers have been piled up and from which all forms rose—the first “chromosome” in the world, if we may say so, that which lies in our body’s depths with all the rest of the evolutionary accumulation. That was how we worked. And it was only when I descended into the Incon­scient that I found the Divine Presence—there, in the midst of Darkness.¹⁸ It was the experience of Tlemcen that was being repeated, “the Sun in Darkness” or the “Black Sun" (Martanda) of the Vedas—what we, in our rational lan­guage, might call the Exact Consciousness, the one that drives the atom and the beast’s instinct, the pure little law that rules all of Nature’s movements. What Sri Aurobindo called the Truth-Consciousness, or Supermind. And there I suddenly found myself in front of something like a vault or a grotto (of course, it was only something “like" that), and when it opened, I saw a Being of iridescent light reclining with his head on his hand, fast asleep. All the light around him was iridescent ,..¹⁹Iridescent, meaning made up of all colors, and this is quite important, for we will often meet that light which has very special qualities, in other words, a very special power over all the forces of disintegration (disease, death, the obscure NO in Matter’s depths, as though it were simultaneous or concomitant with that light). By "light” we do not mean some psychic’s practice or an apparition of Saint Theresa, but a force—there is an atomic force, an electrical force, and others ... or perhaps THE OTHER FORCE, which is the pure source of all these. It is always the same thing: there is but one Force and one Light which takes on various colors or darkens to varying degrees, depending on the layer it crosses. This iridescent light may well save our lives. But then a rather remarkable phenomenon occurred: when I looked at him [this being of iridescent light], he woke up and opened his eyes, express­ing the beginning of conscious, wakeful action.²⁰ What had taken place until then through instinctive or “natural” layers (or less natural ones, like our brain), was now going to come to the surface—at least this was the attempt, the challenge of the whole work. Would it succeed or not? And how can one bring this to the conscious surface of the world without bursting everything or toppling all the neatly piled-up layers? How can this light be made to act directly? —That iridescent light which immediately seems to stand out as a constructive light, as opposed to all the countless little deadly and decaying phenomena that characterize all the other “lights” or forces.

This is the whole problem of the work.

The connection had to be made through Matter. “Up above," at the top of the ladder, in the great transparency of the evolved consciousness, things are perfectly supramental, because they are perfectly clear; at the very ‘/bottom,” in Matter’s depths (behind Matter, as it were), they are per­fectly supramental, too, because they are perfectly pure. In between there are all the gradations of impurity, all the more or less dark or clear (rather less than more) milieus, all the charming, teeming evolutionary compost that has settled over that "something” one finds pure up above and at the very bottom—in fact, it is one and the same thing, the same "Supermind” (if we wish to name it by this word), continuous, uninterrupted from top to bottom, full and round like a sun, but veiled, sealed off, eclipsed by the intermediate layers. The individual consciousness is like a big curtain: transparent and luminous at the top, then changing to silver gray to flaxen yellow to a deeper and deeper blue (in the various strata of the Mind) to a deeper and deeper red (solar plexus) to an emerald green to the purple of power (in the umbilical and pelvic areas); then the curtain gets muddy and dark, completely black (as it approaches the knees and feet—there is even a center below the feet, according to Mother), and suddenly, at the bottom of the curtain, one emerges into purity and transparency again—that light as iridescent as a rainbow, as if made up of all the intermediary colors combined. In short, we have to draw the curtain. That is what Sri Aurobindo and Mother called “to bring down the Supermind,” connect high and low, which are neither high nor low but the two extremities of the spectrum of consciousness. That is what ancient tra­ditions had symbolized by a snake biting its tail. As Mother said, if you go straight to the tail instead of evaporating into the higher heavens, you will reach the same thing, but with a transformed and illumined Matter instead of a Nothingness of light. But the problem is, will Matter accept to be transformed? Or rather (and this is what we strongly believe), will the intermediate layers accept to be cleansed, because Matter, true Matter, is infinitely purer and more flexible than all the brilliant, intermediary obscurities we juggle with frantically and, it would seem, with great delight.

The "intermediate layers” made up all the samplings of the charming evolutionary laboratory that had formed itself around Mother and Sri Aurobindo, or rather had spontaneously stuck to Them, as if the whole earth— perhaps we should say the difficulties of the earth—had chosen to meet there. Now we begin to understand the endeavor.

The Physical Plunge

Thus came the plunge into the physical.²¹

Apparently nothing had changed, except that Mother's arrival had begun to introduce a little order and well-being into the bohemian life of the Guest House. “Paul and Mirra Richard came to see Sri Aurobindo every evening,” writes Barin, Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother, "to talk of Yoga and discuss the great future, when man will be capable of bridging the gulf between matter and spirit, by divinizing even his body ... Nobody knew at the time what a tremen­dous role this foreign lady was to play in Aurobindo’s sadhana ... She was exceedingly beautiful.”²² Then one day during a cyclone, as the roof of the seaside house She was living in was threatened with collapse, Sri Aurobindo asked Her to move in with them and, from that day on, She never left him again. It was the 24th of November, 1920. Paul Richard, “incapable of accepting this life of self-surrender,” as Barin expressed it, would soon disappear. Two years later, Sri Aurobindo and Mother would move a short dis­tance away to the present Ashram building, 9 rue de la Marine, with its white-bordered pearl gray walls, its postern crowned with a big jasmine bush and its columns in the style of those old, spacious, fresh and not yet utilitarian colonial houses. An old Pondicherry archaeologist¹⁰¹ used to say that this was the very place where the Vedic Rishi Agastya, coming from the North, like Sri Aurobindo, with his wife Lopamudra, had founded his Ashram some seven thousand years earlier. The place was then called Veda Pun, the City of the Vedas. We do not know whether the location is exactly the same, but this is the area where tradition situates the retreat of the first Rishis to speak of the “Sun of Truth” beneath the rock of the “mountain.” The Truth in Matters depths. Lopamudra’s very words come back to us like a pure little echo, so poignant in its simplicity: "Many autumns have I toiled night and day; the dawns age me. Age dims the glory of our bodies” (Rig-Veda, 1.179.1). Would She who was seeking the “Nectar of Immortality," find it this time?

The divinization of the body.

This is the period of the "Evening Talks"—and Sri Auro­bindo’s voice could still be heard before his complete withdrawal in 1926. There were now about a dozen dis­ciples around him (twenty-four in 1926). "One always felt,” writes Purani, one of the earliest disciples, “that his voice was that of one who does not let his whole being flow into his words; there was a reserve and what was left unsaid was perhaps more than what was spoken. But there were occasions when He did give his independently personal views on some problems, on events and other subjects. Even then it was never an authoritarian pronouncement. Most often it appeared to be a logically worked out and almost inevitable conclusion expressed quite impersonally though with firm and sincere conviction. This imperson­ality was such a prominent trait of his personality! Even in such matters as dispatching a letter or a telegram it would not be a command from him to a disciple to carry out the task. Most often during his usual passage to the dining room He would stop on the way, drop in on the company of four or five disciples and, holding out the letter or the telegram, would say in the most amiable and yet most impersonal way: ‘I suppose this has to be sent....' The expression He used very often was ‘It was done,’ 'It hap­pened,' not Ί did it.'” ²³ His younger brother, Barin, observed the same silent reserve in Sri Aurobindo; nothing ever “ostentatious,” no miraculous display: “His quiet, dreamy eyes seldom lost their inward absorption even in the midst of his most engrossing outward preoccupations.... Sri Aurobindo’s method of inducing yoga in others was then what it is now—a silent unobtrusive transmission of his yogic power slowly helping to open some door in the aspirant.”²⁴ This “unobtrusiveness” would remain with Sri Aurobindo right to the end, He who had a deep, perhaps British, distaste tor any thing, resembling a miracle—there, miracles, you know, are such a show of bad manners!—I have not come here to accomplish miracles, but to show, lead the way, help on the road to a great inner change of our human nature.²⁵ Indeed, it was not miracles he sought, but just the opposite of miracles: the very “natural" of the world—even if it meant disappointing the man in the street, or even his own disciples: Only if we had given them a good bag of dubious miracles, would they have been happy, he told Mother one day. And if by chance some of them asked to meditate with Him, He would receive them in the morning on the spacious veranda upstairs, near the Ashram entrance, where He used to live in those days, and He allowed them to meditate ... “while He read the newspaper,” notes Champaklal²⁶ with a touch of surprise, who would be Sri Aurobindos faithful attendant until the end. No, Sri Auro­bindo did not at all need to close his eyes or to concen­trate—what does "concentrate” mean? To concentrate in one’s head? But it was his body that was concentrated, his body that did the yoga and radiated the yoga. "To plunge into the physical” means to live in the physical: we never live in the physical, we live Matter through the Mind, except perhaps for a few blissful gardeners or artisans (though most of the time even they continue to race around in their heads, amidst their rose-cuttings or pottery). In fact, to descend into the physical means first of all to descend into inertia and darkness, because our substance is so accus­tomed to obeying the mind’s orders and being manipulated by the mind that it no longer knows how to live by itself; everything is covered over by a mental crust which lets nothing filter through. We are the pioneers hewing our way through the jungle of the lower Prakriti [Nature].²⁷ The body must slowly be taught to live its own life again, and this cannot be done from the heights of the mind; it is done by lifting buckets of water (Sri Aurobindo's preferred exercise in the Alipore Jail), climbing stairs or doing anything at all—which in the end is no longer "anything at all/’ but something that begins to live its own life, breathe its own air, feel with its own feeling. It was another constitution of the physical consciousness²⁸ that Sri Aurobindo sought, a fact he had so much difficulty impressing on his disciples, who remained stuck to the traditional notions of yoga: cosmic consciousness and so on: One can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic Bhakti [love] or Ananda. But one may and usually does still go on in the outer parts of Nature thinking with the intellect or at best intuitive mind, willing with a mental will, feeling joy and sorrow on the vital surface, undergoing physical afflictions and suffering from the struggle of life in the body with death and disease.²⁹ And he would keep repeating to his disciples: Our Yoga can suc­ceed only if the EXTERNAL man too changes, but that is the most difficult of all things. It is only by a change of the physi­cal nature that it can be done, by a descent of the highest light into this lowest part of Nature. It is here that the struggle is going on... but the external [being] still clings to its old ways, manners, habits. Many do not seem even to have awakened to the necessity of the change.³⁰ (This was fourteen years later, in 1934, but even forty years later the situation would not be better.) There is a certain way to climb stairs that can make a tremendous difference in life.

But it is not “conspicuous." Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is the most inconspicuous there is, as we have said. Though when it does become conspicuous, then there will no longer be a few pretty thoughts capering down to a grave: there will be a changed earth—conspicuously changed. Not a “pretty earth” as seen through the eyes of some super-Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, but another earth, another Matter. The next Matter is to be made, or rather revealed, through the breaking of a million little habits of seeing in the wrong way, living in the wrong way, being in the wrong way. As for cosmic consciousness, we will find it in Matter, every minute and in the smallest pebble. The time has come to emerge from the Minds old cosmic imposture. Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Union of the Popular Masses” may well be a truer step in the direction of evolution than all our spiritual tomes—only, instead of a mechanical, outer and oppressive oneness, we should need a conscious, inner and ... smiling oneness. The question consists in knowing which will forge cosmic oneness: our willing matter, or a crushed matter? It comes down to that.

The divine materialism or the other one.

The Physical Consciousness

We do not know what Matter is. It is the most obvious and most mysterious thing in the world. Once we have cleansed the body of its mental coating and cleansed even more this Matter of a thousand vital vibrations throbbing with their reactions of desire, attraction or repulsion, plus or minus, yes or no (and this is not even a true “vital" like that of the animal, but still the Mind creeping in and lurk­ing in Matter), once clarity has been achieved and the first jungle cleared, then the physical consciousness, the consciousness of the body, begins to emerge. A perfectly autonomous consciousness—once it has been freed from these two usurpers, the mind and the vital. And a con­sciousness endowed with quite peculiar qualities: When that consciousness is present, Sri Aurobindo says, you feel the calm like something solid, substantial, settled like an immovable block which cannot be shaken even by the most material shock, less so by the mental or vital shocks.³¹ This solidity of calm, we might almost say this solid immobil­ity, which was Sri Aurobindo’s distinctive characteristic, is the foundation of an awesome power still entirely unknown to the earth—we know nothing of the body’s secrets or of its little miracles, as Mother would say. The strong immo­bility of an immortal spirit,³² wrote Sri Aurobindo in one of his books, which is exactly what He was. A cellular immobility "freezing” everything, neutralizing everything, dissolving everything and almost immediately letting us glimpse or discern or even concretely realize that in their natural state, uncorrupted by the Mind, our cells are invul­nerable to disease; they do not want disease, do not want disorder, this is a foreign thing they reject, or do not even need to reject: the disease cannot cross that barrier of immobility. The cells have the sense of their own immor­tality. There is only a problem of wear and tear that destroys this impermeability, as it were. But the power of that cor­poreal, cellular calm is so amazing that it can even act upon surrounding material circumstances: Matter within acts upon Matter without, in perfect continuity. The most striking example is that of Pondicherry’s “great cyclone” (I no longer remember which year, but it was earlier than 1930), as narrated by Mother: During the night of the great cyclone, as the noise was frightening and floods of rain poured down all over the town, I thought I should go to Sri Aurobindo’s room to help him close his windows. I half-opened his door and found him quietly sitting at his desk, absorbed in writing. There was such a solid peace in his room that nobody could have imagined there was a cyclone raging outside. The win­dows were wide open, but not one drop of rain was coming in.³³ It could not come in. Indeed there is no need to perform miracles—Matter itself can perform its little miracles quite well if we only allow it to do so. But what is even more remarkable is that this spontaneous power of Matter (Sri Aurobindo did nothing, He did not even pay attention to the cyclone) can radiate and act even upon human masses, which would seem harder than acting upon a cyclone (1) for in this case the human Mind intervenes. Once, as He was told of accidents and attacks, Sri Aurobindo remarked in his ever perfectly neutral tone, like a source so obvious it does not need any emphasis: As regards violence—for example, of a riot—I would have to concentrate for four or five days in order to protect myself³⁴ For it was really a question of “concentrating” Matter (which took more time than for a cyclone and a deliberate action, because human forces are not at all natural). Who would ever imagine that Matter, through its own radiation, without any extra­human or occult powers like those of Theon and all yogis, could by itself erect such an invisible barrier that a human mob is suddenly stopped without knowing why? Though in truth people always do things without knowing why. The more reasons they put on it, the more it escapes them.

But it does not escape a little cell.

We still know nothing of Matter.

But the jungle is deepening. It sends us delightful and unexpected, all-powerful little clearings, innocently, unas­sumingly, only to close again, all of a sudden, on something thicker and more mysterious: it was just “to lure” us farther ahead, farther into its Mystery, as if it wanted us to find out its Mystery. What is surprising about our first setting out on this “path”—which would more rightly be called a “non­existent path”—is that it automatically seems to give rise to little clues left and right, which begin springing up everywhere, as if the Secret itself wished to get caught—but it is as complex as Matter itself, and there are thousands of signs, detours and pitfalls. And yet it is extraordinarily simple. Right to the very end, it seems to you that the Secret is transparent, and yet it all remains an absolute jungle. The physical layer is a very obstinate thing and it requires to be worked out in detail, said Sri Aurobindo dur­ing the “Evening Talks.” You work out one thing, then think it is done; something else arises and you have again to go over the same ground. It is not like the mind or the vital where it is easier for the Higher Power to work. Besides, there—in the mind and in the vital—you can establish a general law leaving out the details; the physical is not so; it requires constant patience and minutiae. ,..³⁵ And Sri Auro­bindo gave an example: In the case of Swami Brahmananda (of Chandod) he lived up to 300 years so that he was practi­cally immune from the action of age, but one day a rusty nail pricked him and he died of that slight wound. On the physi­cal plane something you have not worked out turns up and shows that your conquest is not complete. That is why the process takes such a long time. You must establish the higher Consciousness IN EVERY ATOM OF THE BODY, otherwise what happens is that something escapes your view in the hidden depth of the lower physical being which is known to the hostile forces and then they can attack through that weak point. They can create a combination of circumstances which would give rise to the thing not worked out and before you can control them they are already beyond control. In that case they can destroy you.³⁶

In every atom....

Nothing is done unless everything is done, Mother said.

In fact, it would seem that the jungle wants to lead us into death. And it may well be so; not really to destroy us, but because that is where the Secret lies. It wants us to find its Secret. There is not one obstacle in the end that is not the key to a more complete discovery and a more total realization. The art, always and everywhere, consists in changing the poison into nectar. As long as we go on apply­ing penicillin or morality to the poison, we will understand nothing and will never understand anything about Matter. One must approach Matter bare handed, but with a fire in the heart, a faith ... which is the memory of the soul,³⁷ as Sri Aurobindo put it. Something within that remembers the whole Amazon, unfolded, victorious. Faith is the Ama­zon itself driving us to its own discovery.

Now the most material level remains and that is the most dangerous, added Sri Aurobindo in that conversation of 1924.—“Why dangerous?” the disciple asked—Because it is solid, compact, and can refuse or even give up its own stuff completely. It is the least open to reasoning and in dealing with it you require the highest divine Power. Besides, the whole samskara—established imprint—of the whole uni­verse is against your effort.³⁸

There comes a moment when it is no longer one body or one bit of matter: it is the body of the world and universal Matter. It is the Subconscient of the world, the Inconscient of the world. As if the problem could not be solved for one individual but for the whole world, or not at all.

This is where the sampling of the evolutionary labora­tory plays a considerable ... and saddening role.