Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

2: Oneness

A child is the primordial evidence of what will later be veiled from us by our culture. It takes a lot of learning before one can unlearn and find oneself again. And some­times one never finds oneself; there is only culture, like a mask over a great emptiness. Unfortunately, we are not always lucky enough to find a child who can tell us what he experiences—though there is but one experience, it is unequally shared among children, who have a pinhead or an ocean of it, depending—depending on what? If this inequality were better understood, we might be nearer to the truth of births than all Mendel’s laws, at least as far as the human species is concerned, though there are also roses and roses. In truth, we do not know if there are two things alike in the universe, even two similar little leaves on the same tree, and we wonder how it is at all possible to make laws, unless they be the laws of our own minds; we are all color-blind to a certain color we do not even know. Yet if we could find that Color and that Law, perhaps we would find what informs every form—this pinhead or that ocean, and the tender little leaf quivering in the wind —and what reconciles everything within its innumerable Oneness. One very small parameter was missing for Einstein to succeed with his unified field theory. Perhaps a little girl will bring us this simple piece of data.

So it is not a question of extraordinary visions in the dubious style of psychics, though little Mirra never lacked for such visions—the more extraordinary it is, the simpler it is, and finally it is so simple that we do not realize how extraordinary it is.

The Shakti

We must confess that little Mirra was rather roughly handled in that severe household. When things got a bit too rough, she would sit in her little chair and look at it all with her huge, changing eyes, at times a golden hazel, beneath a big bow of ribbons that clasped her already long auburn hair (or was it chestnut brown?), which later turned strang­ely to amber, and the long bangs on her forehead like Queen Tiy’s headdress—She simply looked out. Mother is someone who always looked a lot. She looked neither to the left nor to the right, nor even within, for within was still everywhere without; nor did She cry, for tears were not the program—one was not Mathilde’s daughter for nothing. She looked uncomprehendingly at that harsh and bizarre and obscure world, which smelled of mothballs from the high-hanging curtains and rattled under the wheels of the first streetcars pulled by four horses. And it was such a poignancy of incomprehension that it created a kind of comprehension of non-comprehension, a sort of dense mass that held ... something, the “explanation" without thought (She was five years old), which was perhaps Mirra herself—a mute condensation. That lived, that answered, that was. And it dispelled all the phantoms. That, i.e., consciousness, which I felt like a light and a force; I felt it right here, above the head. It was a very pleasant sensation. I would sit in a little armchair, made especially for me, all alone in my room (I didn’t know what it was, you see, not a thing, nothing—mentally zero) and I had a very pleasant feel­ing of something very strong, very luminous, and it was here (above the head)—Consciousness. And I felt: "That's what I have to live, what I have to be, ” not with all those words, naturally, but... Then I would pull it down, for it was ... it was truly my raison d'etre ... Otherwise I was in a stunned amazement all the time. And the blows I received!... Con­stantly. Each thing came to me as a stab or a punch or a hammer blow, and I would say to myself, “What? How is this possible?" You know, all the baseness, all the lies, all the hypocrisy, all that is crooked, all that distorts and undoes the flow of the Force. And I would see it in my parents, in cir­cumstances, in friends, in everything—a stupefaction ...It wasn't translated intellectually: it was translated by that stu­pefaction. And I went through the whole of life, up to the age of twenty or twenty-one (when I began to encounter Knowl­edge and someone who explained to me what it all was) like that, in that stupefaction: "What—is this life? What—is this what people are? What ...?" And I was as though beaten black and blue ...So whenever I felt sad, I was most careful not to say anything to my mother or father, because my father didn't give a hoot and my mother would scold me—that was always the first thing she did. And so I would go to my room and sit down in my little armchair, and there I could concen­trate and try to understand ...in my own way.

And the experience was automatic: I only had to sit down for a moment to feel it, that Force which would come.¹

It is Mother's very first experience, and it is the key to everything.

Yes, a force which was like a consciousness, because "it" understood, “it" was comprehension itself, pure, naked; and yet it was a force, because her senses perceived it first—a child touches, feels—like a density that She pulled downward, and it filled her with well-being. Indeed, when THAT descends, one feels as if charged with freshness and light, exactly like a plant breathing. It even seems as if one is breathing for the first time ever. Sri Aurobindo would call it “Consciousness-Force." It is the shakti, the driving force of the worlds. It is what we soon no longer under­stand and no longer feel, because we garb it in words, thoughts, colors, religious or political philosophies, music, and triumphantly declare, "This is my thought, my music, my gospel"—more or less noisily, depending on the inten­sity of the current passing through, but it is the Current circulating everywhere, and passing through everything: the atoms, the plants or the galaxies. When you touch that here, you touch that over there, thousands of miles away, in the most foreign individuals or the most closed things— and nothing is foreign anymore, nothing is closed or distant or outside anymore, for everything flows within that and by that; it is what links everything, the bridge connecting everything, the immediately-here, the very substance of the world. Consciousness-Force—Shakti. It is the foundation of the world’s Oneness, that which we try in vain to trans­late (or restore) through equations, fraternity or machines —all our telescopes, periscopes, telephones and televisions are our clumsy ways of recapturing this “tele" which is at our finger tips, just before our eyes, in our fingers and our eyes—or anywhere at all, for it can be captured without hands or eyes, instantly, like a little breath of air which is the breath of everything, the key to everything, and the comprehension of everything. And until we have rediscov­ered this primal substance of the world, we will try in vain to bring closer what we have artificially driven away, cut and externalized from ourselves; try vainly to reunite some brothers who can only come together there, and to force open some frontiers (or to invade them, which amounts to the same thing) that can only dissolve there; and we can go to the moon and all the moons until doomsday, without ever filling the emptiness of our hearts and minds, which can only be filled there, because that is the fullness of the world, the life of life, the breath that upholds all our vain words and music, and all our moons, and which creates thoughts and music and everything. We are the arrogant tools of a Force we do not know, but which knows us well, and perhaps wishes us a little more joy, if we would only consent to let it do its work instead of constantly interfering with “our” silly ideas, “our" silly philosophies, “our" silly religions, and all our silliness which, as we are beginning to realize, saves nothing, knows nothing and can do nothing.

All our yogic exercises, meditations and concentrations are ultimately only a means of silencing that little outer arrogance, that mental machine that veils everything, blocks everything, divides everything—when it falls quiet, everything is right there. A child knows that very well, like Mirra; but once he acquires the means of saying it, he has already lost contact, and everything has to be done again or, rather, undone. Oh, we think we have so many things to do in this world, while we have everything to undo before we reach the very first letter of knowledge and organiza­tion—and power. But undoing is painful; it goes right down into the cells. There is something very drastic to undo there before we can capture the great Flow in its immortal and boundless purity.

Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.²

This is Mothers whole life, her whole work of 95 years— 90 to be precise, since She began at the age of five: I have thought of nothing but that, I have wanted nothing but that, I had no other interest in life, and not for a single minute have I ever forgotten that it was THAT that I wanted. There were not periods of remembering and forgetting: it was con­tinuous, unceasing, day and night... and I am over eighty,³ She told me then. That is what She would never cease repeating to the children of the Ashram: You must get out of your little shell, there, in which you are so perfectly con­fined, in which you bump against everything—you know, like moths bumping against the light bulb?... Everyone's consciousness is like a moth. It goes along bumping here, bumping there, because these are things foreign to it. But, if instead of bumping about, you enter things, then they start to become a part of yourself You widen yourselves; you have air to breathe, space to move in; you no longer bang into things. You enter, you penetrate, you understand. And you live in many places at the same time.⁴

In fact, Mirra would live in many places, not only in space but also in time, for it may be that what we call past and future are no more separate or distant or outside the present than the neighbor in his house, the father and mother in their ruminations, or the little cat scurrying on the edge of the wall. We have to unlearn everything of the world before we can learn the real world, and the real time, which has no clocks or coffins, and the space where we are at home everywhere, instantly. But for that, we have to know the means of transportation; we have to know the great Shakti, how she works and moves. It means learning a new way of being. A child can teach us very well, because it is entirely natural for him before he is so ruinously well brought-up. With Mirra, you travel quite well. Her great forest has all kinds of secrets and more than one dimen­sion. Only, you must want to have the experience of it, and not merely read books which leave you just as dusty as before, and just as mortal according to the false time of a clock that has never ticked away anything but our sorrows and a life that seems never to have been. You have to walk with Mirra, be with Mirra. Strangely, or not, the earliest composition we have of Mirra that she wrote as a school­girl, before the turn of the century, ended with these words: Don't fall asleep in the present, come toward the future!

A future that we can very well start growing right now in the present.

The Dance of Vibrations

Like Mira Ismalun, little Mirra was impatient with all frontiers, but what She felt most deeply were not the arti­ficial boundaries with which we have barbed-wired our mother Earth, but the far more real walls within which humans confine themselves, and which She encountered everywhere: in her mother, her father, her little friends, everything one runs up against at every step. But it's physi­cally impossible to take a single step outside one's body without meeting unpleasant, painful things, She said. *At times you come in contact with a pleasant substance, some­thing harmonious, warm, vibrating with a higher light; it happens. But it's rare. Flowers, yes, sometimes flowers sometimes, not always. But this material world, oh! It batters you from all sides; it claws you, mauls you—you get clawed and scraped and battered by all sorts of things which just don’t blossom. How hard it all is! Oh, how closed human life is! How* shriveled, hardened, without light, with­out warmth ... let alone joy.⁵ She watched, looked at each thing; She spent her time observing this sort of human enigma. Gropingly, She was learning the workings of the great Shakti.

They had left boulevard Haussmann for square du Roule, N°3, where She would live until her marriage at the age of nineteen, but it made no difference; things were still the same, with different curtains and different walls. And that piercing gaze at things and beings intensified, and brought the Force more and more down into her, around her; it circulated, it moved about—it could be handled. And She saw that it was the same phenomenon in others, at various intensities—it also moved, went in and out—and that everything moved within THAT or was driven by that. And how could there be walls in that? Why the walls? She observed; it was more fascinating than the circus her father wanted to take her to, more fascinating than the chit-chat of her little friends. And it was Mathilde (of all people!) who exploded: "You're a monster, you have no feelings!” But She found that these "feelings" were just as sharp and hard as their wails, and that it was merely another way of swallowing you into their walls. So She remained silent, looking: "Mirra, the silent one”; they all found it unbear­able, because there is nothing more intolerable than what is different—there is no way to swallow you up, so they claw or hit you to get by force what eludes them, and it is simply the reverse of those admirable “good feelings” they reproached you for not having: Even goodwill is aggressive, even affection, tenderness, attachment—all of that, it’s all terribly aggressive. Like the blows of a stick.⁶ Indeed it is. And Mirra untiringly looked at it all in order to understand "in her own way." And She noticed that what emanated from humans—sometimes even from objects—touched her at various levels of herself, where “something" seemed to receive the movement (the thought, feeling or words of others, or even no words at all, even in the “silence" of human presences) and reacted, responded. It plucked a little chord there; it vibrated. And not only did it touch different levels in Herself, but the quality of whatever vibrated was extremely different. Mirra was discovering vibrations, which She was going to study as passionately and meticulously as a chemist measures his molecular weights and valence numbers. Unwittingly, She was dis­covering those well-known "centers of consciousness" or chakras Indian literature is full of. Yet all this was a sort of single Movement, which also encompassed this “force” She felt sometimes above her, sometimes within her, or in beings, objects, here or there. It was the movement of it all that astonished and interested her a lot—and those little walls in the midst of it all seemed so strange. She was taken to see a dead relative (Mathilde wanted no doubt to train her in her own stoicism), her "first dead person," for whom she had neither interest nor special feelings, when sud­denly tears filled her eyes, her throat tightened and She wanted to cry as if in the grip of a great sorrow—She looked at this quietly, rather perplexed by this invasion, and all of a sudden, understood: oh, it's their grief that has come into me! It travels it moves, comes in, goes out, passes from one to another, and everything communicates —we are a marketplace, She used to say ... Vibrations moving within an absolutely single and identical field. It is only the intricacy and interception of vibrations that give the impression of something independent and separate. But there is nothing separate or independent; there is only one sub­stance, only one force, only one consciousness, only one will moving in countless ways of being.⁷

It did not at all please Mirra to be like a marketplace and let herself be invaded by the grief of others or by the anger of her brother Matteo: a terribly serious boy, and frightfully studious—oh, it was awful! But he also had a very strong character, a strong will, and there was something interesting about him. When he was studying to enter the Polytechnique, I studied with him—it interested me. We were very intimate (there were only eighteen months between us). He was quite violent, but with an extraordinary strength of character. He almost killed me three times, but when my mother told him, “Next time, you will kill her," he resolved that it wouldn’t happen again—and it never did.⁸ A decidedly vigorous family. But when Matteo got angry, She clearly perceived that something started to quiver in a center in the lower abdomen; those centers were like quivering knots, which received and emitted in a serried or less serried trepida­tion, depending on the level; at times it could be soft and undulating (but that was much higher in the system). She observed it all quite clearly—and instead of catching the vibration and starting, by contagion, to lose her own temper, She noticed that all she had to do was to switch off the current. No need to exert willpower or control like Matteo —you just switch off the current and it is all over. It is cut off. She was discovering the extraordinary "contagion” of vibrations: All vibrations are contagious, and there are so many of them! A dance of vibrations. But in no way did She want to catch the neighbor's sympathetic (or antipathetic) illness—Mirra wanted to be the master of her house, not be tossed about like a cork on the sea. To know exactly and scientifically all the qualities of vibrations. When you become scientific in those matters, She said, you are no longer like a cork tossed hither and thither by the waves. A certain move­ment of nature passes by—oh, how nature plays with men! My god, when you see that, how positively revolting! I don’t understand why they don't revolt!—she sends a wave of desire, and they all become like sheep running after their desires; she sends a wave of violence, and they again become like other sheep indulging in violence, and so on, for every­thing. As for anger, nature has just to snap her fingers, like this, and everybody gets angry. She has only to make one gesture—just one gesture at her whim—and human crowds follow.⁹

Mirra did not merely stop at switching off the current. She discovered that one could handle that current. Instead of letting it accumulate in one's head, with the resulting mental fermentation, as She called it, She saw that it could be drawn into other levels-— any level at all—and even pro­jected outward onto other people or circumstances, and that it produced effects; but when one drew it at the level of the heart or deeper, it became quite soft and vast, taking on a rhythm, like great wings. This was the "pure” current, the unadulterated Shakti. She did not at all like the adul­terations that got mixed in with this current; first of all, it jammed everything and one could no longer understand anything, exactly like a pebble making ripples in a pond. One had to be very quiet and clear—clear—for the current to pass undistorted. She wanted the pure current for the simple reason that it was far more gratifying that way—one danced, one was light. And She could easily follow the itin­erary of the Shakti: She saw that, along the way, it clothed itself in feelings, desires and even thoughts, depending on the level—it grew heavy, bemired, took on every possible color, but it was no longer the color, and the whole world appeared discolored. Everything became thick and gray— opaque. It started to think and think. It was hard and com­plicated. Then, pfft!—She would blow on it, become like a mirror, and once again it was clear, evident, simple. It was the extraordinary simplicity of everything. And in this clarity everything fell into place miraculously. If there were a need to know something, the Current would tell you quite clearly; it rained little drops of words: a fine rain of white light, and after a time, that fine rain seems to make the words grow, as if it were watering the words! And the words come. Then they start a sort of dance, a quadrille, and when the quadrille has taken a clear shape, then the sentence becomes clear. Very amusing ...It all plays, it's like little will-o'-the- wisps coming out from here and there, doing a dance, arranging themselves—very amusing.¹⁰ And if something needs to be done, it makes you do it very well, without thinking; it pulls here, pushes there, repels the people you do not need to see, or attracts them—it even attracts circumstances. Everything works in a different way, according to another mode or rhythm, almost miraculously (why do we even say “almost"?). It is miraculous. But it is such a natural miracle that we never mention it or even notice it (except perhaps Mirra, who was always looking with her large hazel eyes which at times turned emerald green, or black or celestial blue—very strange eyes indeed which changed according to ... perhaps according to the little rain of light and the level She was observing). Miracles without a fuss. In fact, it is the mind which creates a big fuss, and needs "miracles,'' because it has completely obstructed the simple miracle it constantly lives in. So it invents machines to replace the very air it breathes. It does not breathe so well either; it even suffocates, but it seems as if its suffocations were what gives it the sensation of living. Strange world. Mirra was very much in agreement on this point.

Mirra's penetrating observation was not limited to herself and others, or to that sort of tactile vision of vibrations, as She would later say (For it has almost to do with touch— it is touch—and it is not a vision located in the eyes but everywhere in the body, as if thousands of little eyes were twinkling in the cells; in fact, we do think that our outer round eyes are simply an evolutionary convention, as it were, but that we can actually see from anywhere at all, from every multicolored level, like Mother’s great changing gaze; we have only settled there through laziness, because it is our habit to nail everything down, and then we solemnly declare, "That is the law"—yes, the law of our laziness.) Her observation took in everything, and not a single object was inanimate to her. She would walk quietly, silently, in the Tuileries gardens, the Bois de Boulogne, the Jardin des Plantes²⁰⁰ her little hand tucked in the big Turk’s huge fist, and She would see that same Current running through everything, as if connecting her with everything, and if her gaze lingered long enough, silently (the least thought blurred everything), on a flower, a tree or the big python of the Jardin des Plantes, She felt, more or less rapidly, a response in her depths, a communication, an exchange, something that vibrated in herself at one level or another, that was like a language without words, perhaps, but espe­cially a kind of fragrance filled with its own meaning, as if the fragrance also were a sort of language. But in fact everything was a language: forms, movements, colors; everything speaks—it is we who no longer know the lan­guage! A universal language, because, in truth, there is but one language—the language of Consciousness. It is our forgetfulness of that language which makes for all our towers of Babel. And there, too, She found a whole gamut that filled her with interest: Certain differences between vibrations resemble differences in tastes. There’s a whole gamut, you see, all vibrations, nothing but vibrations, and the differences between them resemble differences in taste or color or intensity, perhaps differences in force as well—essen­tially, of course, they are differences in quality ...I don't know the scientific name they use to distinguish one vibration from another, but it's like that. They come almost exclusively as sensations, but those sensations ... Some vibrations have rounded edges. Some come horizontally, others result from the state of consciousness (vertical gesture from top to bottom). While at the same time, others are.... Yes, it's like looking through a high-powered microscope: some are rounded, others pointed; some are darker, some brighter. Some are very upsetting to the body, and some even feel dangerous.¹¹ There is a whole chemistry of vibrations,* She would soon say.

But flowers were what interested her most (and cats, too, but in another way). In them, She felt a very pure type of flowing of the Force and a certain quality of vibration, a fragrance that spoke to her, we might say, and filled her with its meaning and its cellular effect within her own body: This one has a cleansing fragrance, She would say, speaking about a tiny flower, with yellow daisy-like petals. Once I cured myself of the onset of a cold with it.¹² And She would later give names to hundreds of flowers, simply by the quality of the vibration they elicited in herself: Ah, Devotion! She exclaimed one day on Indian soil, as She held a sprig of basil. It vibrates, it has meaning—everything has meaning. There is "Tenderness,” "Aspiration,” "New Creation,” "Joy's Call," "Supramental Sun,” “Flame," "Light in the Cells," "Transformation," "Divine Consciousness in Matter,” “Grace,” "Transparency,” and hundreds of others. And that little yellow daisy-like flower She called "Simplic­ity." These are conscious vibrations in Nature. The fragrance, the color, the shape are simply the spontaneous expression of a true movement.¹³ Mother’s Great Forest is laden with unexpected fragrances: there are odors that lighten you, as if they opened up horizons to you—they lighten you, make you lighter, more joyful; there are odors that excite you (those belong to the category of odors I learnt not to smell); as for all the odors that disgust you, I smell them only when I want to—when I want to know, I smell them, but when I don't want to know, I don’t. Unfortunately, men also have an odor, a “psychological odor," Mother would say. I can smell people’s psychological state when I come near them. I can smell it—it has an odor. There are very special odors, a whole gamut.¹⁴ Human beings are probably not among the most pleasant to get a whiff of, but perhaps only because they have forgotten what makes up the fragrance of a being, its true color, its pure vibration—a certain sound within which is our own music, as it were, like the crickets and mongooses—or no music at all. Our true, natural name. One day, when a child asked Mother why a given flower reflects a given color of the light spectrum, thus making it appear red or yellow or white, while absorbing all others, She answered in her unexpected way: The scientists say it is due to the composition of its atoms, but I say it's due to the nature of its aspiration. That is the real movement of the world, its rhythm of truth, its breathing. It is the pure flowing of the great Shakti, the fragrance of all fragrances, the true color of things, the meaning that gives meaning to everything.

It is the world’s great mother tongue.

The Great Body

We might think that little Mirra's experience was excep­tional and extraordinary— actually, this acute perception of vibrations was to assume rather impressive proportions over the years, as we can see in this story Mother told me much later, one day in November 1964: I am extremely sensitive to the composition of the air, from my earliest child­hood: "airs," if I may say so, they each had their own taste, their own color and quality, and I would recognize them to such a point that sometimes I would say, “Oh, the air of..." (I was a child, of course), "the air of this country or the air of that place has come here." It was like that to an extremely sharp degree: for instance, if I was moved from one place to another, I could be suddenly cured of an illness from the change of air. It was like that ... Perhaps a few days ago, I said, "There’s something new in the air. "And something very unpleasant, extremely pernicious; I felt that that “something" (I didn’t say anything to anyone, naturally) had a peculiar, extremely subtle odor, not a physical one, and had the power to separate vital vibrations from physical vibrations— that is io say, an extremely noxious element.

Immediately I set to work (it lasted for hours), and the night was spent counteracting it. I tried to find which higher vibration could counteract it, until I succeeded in clarifying the atmosphere. But the memory remained very precise. And very recently (maybe a day or two ago), they told me that the Chinese had chosen an Indian territory, in the North, to test a certain kind of atomic bomb, and that they had exploded a certain bomb there. When they told me this, the memory of my odor abruptly came back.¹⁵

But this almost microscopic precision is nothing extraor­dinary; in fact, it is the most natural experience in the world, and the most common ... except for the human species.

She read the great universal Book, complete with plants, squirrels and the big python—which She watched, or rather experienced very calmly, for She feared nothing (perhaps, then, her eyes turned to emerald green, as we sometimes saw them). She moved according to a rhythmic Law that led her straight to what She needed—to the required encounter, the necessary experience, the thousand direct detours of the great Flow—and landed her on a flint road in Fontainebleau—You know, French flint?—without a scratch, after falling from ten feet high. She lived with the great Shakti, She flowed within its indivisible Oneness. We will say “instinct,” because we are expert at putting syllables (Greco-Latin preferably) on anything we do not under­stand, like the witch doctor, to exorcise the evil spell of those annoying little things that refuse to let themselves be pigeonholed into our non-rhythmical laws; but once we have appealed to instinct and invoked the father of the father who sired the son of the son, we will finally set out into the great original Totality, where beings that were not yet humans and not yet equipped with a neocortical screen moved quite well with the high ferns and wandering stars and went straight to their goal as though they were all one single body. We may only wonder—and this is the only pertinent question—why Nature, who always knows very well what she wants and never misses a single turn that would enrich her kingdom, could have grown these little screens so plentifully—a first brain, then a second, then a third, like a veritable explosion—increasingly refined and tight and encased in one another, to cover up our reptilian perceptions (mesencephalic, since we are so fond of Greco- Latin), which in turn are covered by a "limbic system" which is covered by lobes, lobules and protuberances, to be finally wrapped in this almost cancerous excrescence which has turned us into Homo sapiens—cut off from everything, "sapiens" only of our little misery in a cage and equipped with innumerable tools to replace what we no longer know how to see, touch, hear or know "instinctively?" We do not know the world; we know only a translation of the world in a cerebral language. No, it is not a "dichotomy,” we have been totally cut off from the great terrestrial Body—this is all our pain and misery. To resolve this one question may be the very reason why Nature made the question grow, as if she raises all the obstacles needed to reach a greater per­fection. Perhaps her world was too vast for those herds of bisons or protozoans which swam undistinguished within her great obscure Body and blindly followed her Law according to a more ancient and radical communism than ours; perhaps it was necessary to divide, seal off, cut up little sectors of the arc to veil this too great an immensity, this too wide a vision, to filter this perhaps too unbearable light, and to create little individuals who could grasp themselves as separate entities and understand them­selves because of their own limits. But once the entire course has been completed, with its thousand direct detours and circumvolutions that raised up questions upon questions, problems upon problems, and more and more thinking and separated and anguished individuals; once we have fully learned that we know nothing and can do nothing— but that we are one individual, far richer for all his miser­ies and questions, which end up kindling a strange fire born of no lamp at all, a fire within that even seems to communicate gropingly across the old walls and to touch, without seeing it, a great, similar light and to understand without words and to aspire, oh! to aspire for more space, more truth, more light and vision—then, perhaps, the moment will have come in the slow march of evolution to let the Current flow through other, less limited centers, to shatter the screens, to get out of the mental chrysalis where our Mother Nature has shielded us from a too premature birth to the world, and to return to the great Body, but without losing, in a mystic, cosmic or egalitarian way, this point of individuality she has laboriously built up. For ultimately such may be the great, ultimate evolutionary plan, that next supra-mental "humanity” announced by Sri Aurobindo and Mother, that new being who will be able to have the consciousness of the point and of the whole at the same time.¹⁶

And to have it physically, cellularly.

An individual being conscious of the whole.

Each individual being conscious of the whole.

There is something more than the mere self-breaking of an illusory shell of individuality in the Infinite,¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo wrote. lb be and to be fully is Nature’s aim in us ... and to be fully is to be all that is.¹⁸

Then all our sorrows shall be cleansed, our miseries rewarded with a vast smile, our blind eyes lit up with a thousand visible and invisible colors, which we had exor­cised, and with a Color unlike any other; we shall know the rhythmic Law that rhythms everything, the little music in the depths that recognizes its music everywhere, the single vibration that we are and which travels everywhere directly —through all ages, all space and places, across the seas and forests of the great Shakti—toward its goal of joy at every instant.