Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

3: The Wings and Flights of the Shakti

In fact, Mirra s stern family was a perfect natural ground —nothing there to suggest or invite a temptation to imitate, except a predilection for Matter, with all that the wind can sow there, unless it is already there—but fallen from where? That wind is quite mysterious indeed and blows in from farther off than the Urals, not to mention the chromo­somes—and why that particular little field between the Big Turk’s canaries and Mathilde's theorems? As a matter of fact, She loved mathematics very much, this little Mirra, already not so little, really very much! And also I understood; it made sense. ¹

Another Gravitation

But many things were taking place in that wild terrain which had little to do with mathematics and were hardly consistent with Newton’s laws—Mother never liked laws, whether “moral," Newtonian or otherwise, for which She was very often reproached. But naturally that is against the rules! She exclaimed one day before some impertinent (or pertinent, rather) and shocked individual, I make a habit of doing everything against the rules, otherwise, there would be no point in my being here; the rules could just go on and on!² We have already mentioned the incident in the Fontainebleau forest, when, pursued by her friends, She was running without watching where She was going. Sud­denly, She found herself on the ledge overhanging the road and, carried by her own momentum, fell off and down onto the road below—freshly paved with flint: Whoosh—I went sailing into the air! I was ten, eleven at the most—with no notion of the miraculous or the marvelous, nothing, nothing—1 was just flung into the air. And I felt something supporting me, holding me up, and I was literally set down on the ground, on the stones. But what is interesting about this incident, which we might attribute to anything at all, is Mirra's comments: I found it perfectly natural, you under­stand! Not a scratch, not a speck of dust, nothing, absolutely intact. I fell down very, very slowly. Then everyone rushed up to see. “Oh, it’s nothing! I said, lam all right!"³ Yes, “noth­ing," not a single thought—especially no thought, because if She had thought about it for even a second, She would probably have broken her nose outright, or worse. But where is the worse? You do not think about it, so it obvi­ously does not happen. You find it perfectly natural, so you are quite naturally carried. It is simple. Simplicity itself. Could it be that our minds have invented a nonexistent gravity? Or is there perhaps another type of gravity?

One day, with her refreshing simplicity, Mother said to me, I didn't know the rules, so I didn't even have to fight them!

Another incident (there is no scarcity of them) took place in the grand salon of square du Roule. A grand salon is by definition ornamental and rather boring, but not for Mirra —who says nothing however; She never says anything, this stubborn and silent girl—She does it. I'll show you how one should dance ... All the little friends circled around her, and the Louis XV (or XVIII, if you prefer) pedestal tables were pushed out of the way. I went to a comer of the room to get the longest distance to another comer, and I told them, “One single step in the middle” (the salon was more than 30 feet long), and I did it! I sprang (I didn’t even feel I was jump­ing; it was like dancing, you know, like when they dance on point), landed on the tip of my toes, bounced up and reached the other comer—you can't do that alone, even champions cannot... And I didn’t run; I was standing in the comer— and hop! Up I went. (I said “hop” to myself, soundlessly) and frrt! I landed on the tip of my toes, bounced and landed on the other side—quite evidently I was carried. And Mirra added, There were many things of the kind, all of which seemed to me perfectly natural. It didn't feel as though I was doing something miraculous—perfectly natural.⁴ Had She felt it were miraculous, the “miracle” would not have hap­pened and She would have found herself sprawled out in the middle of the floor. Perhaps we have invented the miraculous as a kind of incredible lie covering our one true machine—or is it the machine that is quite “miraculous” in a universe free of complications? Newtons included. The soul was very alive at the time, Mother remarked. She did not even have a name for that most natural of things, though had She labeled it, the soul would have vanished in thin air like the deer of Fontainebleau—which by the way came quietly near her. With all its strength, the soul resisted the intrusion of the material logic of the world—it all seemed perfectly natural to me. I simply thought, "No, accidents just can't happen to me. "⁵ At times we wonder if the accident of the world happens only in our thoughts. If we changed thoughts, it might not happen at all, or perhaps happen in another way, a charming way, who knows? It is this "other way” that we want to track down. For, after all, what is most interesting is not these trifling incidents, but the seed they hold; years later—indeed seventy-five years later—as She recalled these dancing, air-borne memories, Mother suddenly noticed the strange connection between this impertinent non-gravity and a certain inner center, which She already felt quite well, near the heart, and which caused a sort of harmonious, undulating movement... like a great movement of wings⁶—the very center from where She drew the Shakti whenever She wanted to shake off Matteo’s fits of anger or Mathilde’s rebukes—the same vibration. Perhaps there is another way of vibrating that eludes Newton and all our laws.

But we must learn the law of the “great wings."

But let us emphasize right away that the point is not so much to start flying in the air as to get out of a suffocating machinery that hides from us a more real life. Where is reality—where? Where is real life, true life? What does it look like? It is the very question that arose in Mirra like a revolution when She was twelve years old: I was quite small when I was told that everything was “atoms" (that was the term they used in those days). They said to me, “You see this table? You think it’s a table—that it's solid and it’s wood—well, it’s only atoms moving about." I remember, the first time I was told that, it caused a kind of revolution in my head, bringing such a sense of the complete unreality of all appearances. All at once I said, “But if it’s like that, then nothing is true!"⁷

This was Mother's first decisive experience.

It is the beginning of the first real chapter of her life and of her quest to unmask false appearances, which was to last more than eighty years. A total calling into question, which was neither metaphysical nor mystical, but solidly material. And what is the material reality of the earth? The true earth?

What is it that is real? The atoms, the table, or Ali Baba's flying carpet? ... Unless everything is true—the atoms, the table and the flying carpet—plus something else that com­bines all this within one total vision and may be our next vision, when we have had enough of the partitions of the mind. We must find the "next way." We must "look” intently with Mirra. But what is that other way? We do not know yet. Perhaps we will discover it on the way, and who knows, the whole world may be changed by it—a miracle even greater than Newton's apple, which had the bad habit of falling. Perhaps it is only a matter of changing our habits, old habits dating back to a certain neo-cortex. Unless we have to go right down into the cells to erase their memory—a dark malicious memory which abruptly makes us tumble into a hole. And why the hole, since we know that our Mother Nature has no useless detours, no abyss that does not conceal her still unaccomplished and secret perfection?

But let us not jump ahead.

Another History

It was not only space but time that behaved in a light- mannered way with Mirra. Oh, all is light and transparent when we ourselves are light! Why do we seek to improve the world when it is that primal world which one should clear up? And we keep moving on the outside like puppets, while the story of the great world and the one thread that weaves all our stories run within. That is where the thread is, but we do not take it seriously, immersed as we are in our important problems, which are only the problems of our false vision. Little Mirra was put into a private school—my mother considered it unfitting for a girl to be in a state school!⁸—the "Cours des Feuillantines,” if I recall correctly, and there, like everyone else, She learned assidu­ously the false world, the one that is arranged in maps, atoms and "golden ages,” which, we finally come to realize, were not all that golden; as for our atoms, we have yet to discover whether they are not masking something else that masks something else that masks something else—but where is the Thing? Indeed, we have a whole succession of truths, which as long as they last are as infallible as the Pope or the Sorbonne—but they pass, and the next one is just as irrefutable, until it, too, passes; meanwhile we are stuck, stuck up to the neck, but it is scientific and historical —not for Mirra. She was not so easily fooled. Talking of history, it was shown to her in a strange way with its innocent little illustrations: I’d read and suddenly the book would seem to become transparent, or the printed words would become transparent, and I'd see other words or even pictures.⁹ History started to become animated, quite alive, and was not always as printed words said. But we should not think that Mirra was witnessing a "phenomenon” (we do not know where the phenomenon is, really, nor who the phenomenons are); She found it as natural as empathizing with animals, feeling with flowers or flying over roads: I had not the faintest idea of what was happening to me. And

it appeared so natural to me that I thought it was the same for everybody. But my brother and I were great chums, so I would tell him, “They talk nonsense in History, you know— it's like this. It isn’t like that; it's like this!" And several times the corrections I got turned out to be quite exact.¹⁰

Not only books, people or animals were transparent to her, places also started to live differently, as though they bore their past at the same time as their present—perhaps everything is there at the same time, the future as well. If we looked at the future, it might grow faster and, who knows, break through this small shell of the present, no thicker than a page of History, and slip its golden rays into it. She would go with her friends to see Versailles by night; then, suddenly, I saw the park filling up with lights (the elec­tric lights had vanished), with all kinds of lights: torches, lanterns—and then crowds of people walking about in Louis XIV dress! I was staring at this with my eyes wide open, holding on to the balustrade to keep from falling down, I was not too sure of myself! I was seeing it all, then I saw myself there, engrossed in conversation with some people ...I mean I was a certain person (I don’t remember who); and there were those two brothers who were sculptors (Mother vainly tried to recollect the names) anyhow, all kinds of people, and I saw myself talking, chatting.¹¹

Who, then, was this “self”? Even Mirra was a little per­plexed—but not surprised; it was merely something “to study,” until fuller information was made available. For her, the world was not a fixed quantity in a perpetually linear unfolding; it had bumps and holes everywhere, it sank into depths and gushed forth unexpectedly.—“It's very amusing.” Actually, these bizarre "selves” came in profu­sion, wearing every possible costume. Objects, too, were a bit peculiar. They did not remain quietly locked up in their stone or incrustations; they started to tell their story—not "tell” with words, because words are meant for learned people, who know the world so well that they have put it all into a dictionary; but tell like the marmosets, the pythons or the chrysanthemums, in the language of stones, which move quite well (so say the scientists), but not only with their atoms—with consciousness, which is the conscious­ness of everything, for there is but one consciousness, not two; and those little fingers which today caress an amethyst or an Egyptian jewel case remember down in their cells— as the other remembers down in its atoms, for objects, too, have a “memory,” like places and houses—having already encountered that old friend. We have many old friends, perhaps the whole world is an old friend down in our cells —only we have forgotten the language in which everyone meets. She went to the Louvre; She went to the Guimet Museum, and there I found objects that I had used in the past. This is how I was later able to find the threads again. Or else it was the mummy in the Guimet Museum which suddenly told her its story: My first contact took place when I was quite small, nine or ten, and it was with that mummy in the Guimet Museum. There are two mummies in the Guimet Museum. Nothing remains in one; but in the other, the “spirit of the form" has remained very conscious— conscious to such a point that you can have a contact of consciousness with it. And Mother added ingenuously, But evidently when a bunch of idiots come and stare at you with round eyes which understand nothing, saying, “Oh, he’s like this, he's like that!" it must not be very pleasant!¹² And that is the way it is. Sometimes even a mummy meets someone who understands it.

Had anyone pronounced the word “reincarnation," prob­ably it would have been Mirra’s turn to stare—let us not forget that we are in the century of Taine and Renan, caught between Mathilde and her banker husband. But at Mirra’s age it all seems quite natural; it is just another way for Nature to behave, no stranger than the ladies beneath their parasols marching in a line to the church of Saint-Philippe du Roule on Sunday afternoon. In any event, thank Heav­ens, She was not in the least tempted to speak of those things to anyone around her. My mother had kept it all completely taboo: those matters are not to be touched—they drive you crazy!¹³ Thus her experience could unfold spon­taneously from beginning to end, without interference or criticism, like some rather nonsensical petunia in the midst of all the sensible and positivistic flowerbeds of that righ­teous century. We may call it, like Mathilde, a sort of mental disorder or a morbid fantasy—to which Mother would have replied, All right then, have the fantasies that make you progress ! She never held that one should "believe" in any­thing whatsoever, whether in “God” or in the devil, but that each one should have his own experience—“It’s my expe­rience" She would say, and that is all. The goal is one and beyond the summits—but each one can reach this summit on his own path, by climbing his own mountain, not the mountain of another person.¹⁴

Let us note that She, who was brought up on exact sci­ences, did say "beyond the summits”; something which strangely echoes Mira Ismalun’s "beyond the tombs." Per­haps because one is nothing but the reverse of the other— or its inevitable complement.

Yet little Mirra's mountain is worth a glance, for it may throw some light on the strange meandering mazes of our molehills, which surface here or there, in a nineteenth century or twentieth, in a French or Patagonian field, sud­denly, unexpectedly, like a little skylight unforeseen, with funny dresses and a whole array of vague desires or impulses that seem to go back elsewhere, further into the past—but what elsewhere? How, elsewhere?—while here, outside, we are like a slightly amnesiac traveler of a thousand lost trails and of a story that may not even begin or end here.

We are chased by a self we cannot now recall And moved by a Spirit we must still become.

We keep the ache of breasts that breathe no more.¹⁵

But the experience continues—chaotic, perfectly unex­pected, anywhere at all, in all circumstances, in front of a portrait by Clouet in the Chateau de Blois or among the pages of a dictionary: It was in Blois. We went to see the museum and I suddenly halted in front of a painting by— now let’s see, who was he? Coue? No, Clouet!— Clouet: the princess ... one of the princesses. And I started making a few remarks out loud: “Look at this! I was saying, look what this fellow has done to me! Look—he made this like that, but that's not at all how it was, it was like this!"—Details. And then I became aware (I was not too conscious physically) that people were standing around listening. So I got a grip on myself. But it was definitely me! It was MY portrait. It was ME!¹⁶ We must say She had many trails, this Mother. Thank God She was not born in China, or we would have far to travel. But then, who knows? We are only talking of this planet, our today’s little skylight above this human journey, but how many other planets have prepared this journey— planets that we will never know, that have vanished or are continuing their perpetual motion here or there, like little tufts of thistle, scattered through the great interstellar fields. And we recall Sri Aurobindo: The experiment of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated.¹⁷

But it is this world here that we would like to fecundate a little through a better understanding of its workings, which means living it better, for that is what counts in the end—theories, well, they can remain in their libraries. We could mention another experience of Mirra’s from among hundreds, this time occurring in Italy, where She went with her mother when She was fifteen: It struck me very much. It was very striking indeed! It was the memory of having been strangled in the Doges’ prison ... I was visiting the entire Palazzo Ducale with my mother and a group of travelers shown about by a guide: they take you underground, where the prisons were located. The guide started telling some story (which didn’t interest me) when, all of a sudden, I was seized by a kind of force that came into me, and then, without even—without even being aware of it, I went to a comer and saw a written word. But then, there came at the same time the memory that I had written it. And the whole scene came back: I was the one who had written that word on the wall (and I saw it, saw it with my physical eyes, the writing was still there; the guide said that all the walls with writings on them made by the Doges’ prisoners had been kept intact). Then the scene went on: I saw, I had the sensation of people entering and catching hold of me (I was there with a prisoner).

I was there, and then some people came and seized me and... (gesture to the neck) tied me up. And then (I was with a whole group of about ten people listening to the guide, near a small aperture opening onto the canal), then, the sensation of being lifted and thrown through the aperture.... Well, you understand, I was fifteen, so naturally ...II told my mother, "Let’s get out of here!” ¹⁸ And She laughed. Oh, if there is one thing that is inexpressible, it is Mother’s laughter! This Mother, how She laughed, how She enjoyed herself with everything, with that touch of mischief that so resembled Sri Aurobindo’s humor.

A Growing Gaze

Thus, the point is not to find out what wind had pushed that little winged seed onto that particular field and into those dissimilar chromosomes—although one may still wonder—nor is it even to attempt some "invisible geneal­ogy" of Mother, which would have made her laugh heartily, even more than the penguins of the first motion pictures. What does it matter, after all, that She was the daughter of a Doge—strangled on top of that—a princess of Navarre or an Empress of Russia or China, as if the meaning of this difficult human journey were to develop bigger and bigger, more and more titled and imperious personalities—a world where nobody would ultimately be left but pharaohs and sultans, as if we were not already swamped with tyrants—or even to evolve ever more intelligent geniuses, super-Goethes or super-Beethovens—a world ultimately so overflowing with literature and music that we might be saturated or bored to death, as if this formidable human ascent of suf­fering and chaos and conflict were only meant to eternally produce the same song, only greater and louder? And when there is nothing left but "bestsellers,” what will we do if we have not found the little song within that enchants every­thing? Indeed, where is That for which those singers sang? Where is That for which those marchers of the great human invasion sculpted or poeticized or conquered? Where is it? Where is that only kingdom never conquered, that one note which fills all, that little color for no canvas or art gallery? Tomorrow, tomorrow, they say, but tomorrow never comes; and where is the real person in all those actors? We go on and on, in ever increasing numbers and dresses, on the great human thoroughfare, as though there were no one inside.

What could be more relevantly asked, in front of this profusion of "selves” that seemed to spring up from every side before little Mirra’s tranquil eyes, is not who they were—we have all lived thousands of times—but why these thousands of times and names and miseries that we have all incarnated in a white or a black skin have not sunk with the rest into the same rush of oblivion? What is it that makes them remain—remain for Mirra and for a few privi­leged others? What makes them live still and perhaps live forever? What gives that indestructible little vibration to the gestures of a certain moment—a pebble in our hands, a banal place, a park in the evening, and that futile detail already lived a thousand times? Life is so futile. We think it is grand and gilded in our history books, like the Court of the Great Moghul, but life is made up of a thousand steps and little stairways in our heads and sidewalks beneath footsteps that really lead nowhere—or to somewhere so similar here that it might as well be there—and we find ourselves again, or not, as if none of these footsteps had ever been trod, none of these walls seen, none of these minutes lived. So what is? What lives? If it is, it is forever— or else is not. If it lives, it lives forever—or else it is not life but just a little well wound-up mechanism that comes undone with everything else. No, life is not grand—but are we in it?

One little story struck us more than all the others among little Mirra’s thousand memories, precisely because of its detailed banality, if we may say so. In fact, it was no longer Mirra but already Mother, and that morning She had met a one- or two-year-old child who had seemed very familiar to her, without her knowing why—because of his eyes, of “something” in the depths that sparkled with a kind of mute recognition. Then, in the afternoon, She had a vision: I was inside a wonderful monument, immense, so high! But it was completely bare: there was nothing, except in one place where there were magnificent paintings. That’s where I recognized the paintings of ancient Egypt. I was coming out of my apartments and entering a sort of large hall: there was a kind of gutter running on the ground all along the walls to collect water. And I saw the child playing in it, half-naked. I was very shocked, I said, "What! This is disgusting! This child is impossible! He keeps doing what he isn't supposed to do." The tutor came, I had him called. I scolded him: "What, you lei this child play in that?" I heard sounds—well, I don't know what I said, I don't remember those sounds. I heard the sounds I uttered, I knew what they meant, but the translation was in French, and I didn’t keep a memory of the sounds, "And he answered me (I woke up with his answer), "Such is the will of Amenhotep." ...So l knew the child was Amenhotep.¹⁹

Never mind Amenhotep, but that gutter is quite intriguing —a gutter lasting for three thousand and five hundred years (since the 18th Dynasty), with a child in it. What is it that makes even a gutter last?

We could argue simplistically that, in order for something to be remembered, there must be someone who remembers. But who remembers, who sees things? An old habit of seeing, the way we look at things everyday—like our books, our fathers and mothers, our movies for millions of people—a ready-made sight that sees only its little desire, the little idea in its head, its likes and dislikes, setting upon setting where nothing really is being played out, or else a story so similar to millions of others that it could be anybody at all looking at it, in a three-piece suit or a peplum, in Carthage or Brooklyn, in that century before or after Christ, with just a few differences in trepidation. But the pure gaze—sud­denly, for nothing, like a cry that rends this whole setting and rends the heart and rends these million futile things, like a sudden gaping over a terrible void ... which may be the first something of an entire life—that piercing some­thing without a name, without a face, without anything, like a look looking at itself, like a void so painful it is almost powerful, perhaps the first stirring of a being at last, without words, without thought, without anything that knows or understands—his pure vibration, his cry within. This is what remembers. As if it were the only memory. When that opens, everything is seen in its eternity: a gutter, a particular shade of the sky, a face or a little cat running on the wall; it is all the same, because it is the Same Thing one sees every­where, in everything, inside and outside, or which looks at itself everywhere—THE Thing, bursting everywhere, vibrant everywhere, without beginning or end, without centuries, without time; that which moves everywhere and links everything, yesterday and a thousand years ago, this pebble and that idle little hand, this place, that place, that little figure beneath a pharaoh's pschent or a wide-brimmed hat, and what do headdresses matter to it as long as someone is looking?—Consciousness-Force, Shakti. A look that opens once, twice, then thirsts to open more and more often, everywhere, in a temple or without a temple, in the street and in the thousand passing miseries—a look that grows from life to life, a vibration that becomes clearer, a force that gathers itself, as if it were the only thing that did not flee amid the great failure of our bodies, one day, at the edge of a hole; a memory without memory, which is the memory of everything, as it were; an enduring little king­dom of nothing which is its own monarch everywhere, for it is the kingdom of the great Shakti, and the whole world is its realm.

And one day that gaze never closes again, ever.

Some people have looked very much while others come and go like blind men; some people have gathered drop by drop the little rose-colored pearls, the blue or multicolored beads of the great Shakti, and they have become this moun­tain brook, that little spring, this torrent or that large river —or sometimes that ocean. Here lies the only difference, which no chromosomes or laws of Mendel will ever explain. Not an evolution of the species or of talents, but of Con­sciousness and Force or, rather, of a million gazes of one single Consciousness ever discovering itself vaster, stron­ger, more alive—a cascade or a cataract. An evolution of sight, perhaps? But it is one and the same drop of the Same Thing. It is the same great River traveling on and on through the centuries, through our small or big miseries, through our philosophies, our systems and religions, our gold or black cages by the thousands, driving all these millions of men, all these blue or black little gazes of a great Country we do not really know; and it leads us slowly, surely, toward that next Moment of its great march, that sudden turning away from our pains, when all our small screens will fall down because they are no longer necessary to wrest our cry from within a cage.

Then each one will have his real name beneath all the costumes or without a costume, his unique vibration, his irreplaceable music amidst the great Totality, his memory restored at last, and his great wings. And our eyes will open upon our earth as if we had never seen it before.

Perhaps it will be another earth.

Another history.

Another gravity beneath the stars.

Our real country at last and our indestructible body. Beyond the tombs, and beyond the summits.