Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

5: Other Worlds, Other Bodies

This world, this great world we stride across with a con­fident step as if it were our home, like young offspring of men on their legs but clinging nevertheless to the hand­rail, is scarcely our home or, rather, there are many homes where we have not yet been; we barely know the edge of the great forest. The little path that abruptly emerges here, that unexpected gesture in the midst of our routines, those surging words, the wave that seizes our human crowds and suddenly makes them move, like Matteo's tantrums or the hops of a little girl amid the orderly flower beds at the Tuileries—we do not know where they come from or what breath of air has just passed by. Outside, everything is crumbling; we patch up the Machine, meet with an acci­dent in the street or come across this little coincidence that will alter a whole life, but who moved what, who drew that unforeseeable coordinate? We do not know—millions and millions of coincidences in this great forest of the world, like little random shoots creating an incredible forest, like little random humans creating an incredible story, like so many little random gestures and chance molecules creat­ing a symphony, or an explosion. And finally, we must say it, if it is chance, that chance is damn intelligent. But we are so scared by the idea that our great chance intelligence might be supplanted by a greater intelligence that we prefer to consign this world to its wretched chance rather than to a demiurgic God whose non-random blows are sometimes strangely diabolical and often cruel—but in both cases we are eaten alive by the same bogeyman. It might be about time to inquire into this intelligence of the world without allowing ourselves to be caught by the whims of the gods, or of the scientists of the day before yesterday, or of a chance that goes back to a certain little “bang”—but then we must not be afraid of "God" or the devil, nor especially of ourselves. For it may be that everything is held within, inside those chance little cells—we are the primary subject of inquiry, and there may be no other one, for what is held in a single little body, a single little cell, is in all bodies and all universes. One wonders why on earth we go to the moon. And who knows, if we found the real law of these cells, we might go to all universes and all moons without rockets and without complications.

A Poetical Sleep

She tried everything, that little Mirra, even poetry, "to see how it feels"—to Mathilde’s wild despair: “She will never achieve anything in life!" Painting, music, science, litera­ture, practical work—She did not miss anything. Then, after a while, very well, I would leave it. I had experienced the thing and it didn’t seem to me important enough to devote a whole life to it.¹ To her, it seemed that there were many experiences to be had, that the world was an endless field of experiment—She continued till the age of ninety-five, without ever stopping. And we are not sure the experience is not still continuing. So to confine oneself to one thing, be it the loftiest, seemed to her a sort of aberration, an extension of the termite. They 're fossilized; they are excellent objects to put in a museum. And I see no point in being the greatest painter, the greatest musician; it always seemed to me to be a vanity.² And she concluded candidly (always with that little touch of mischief), And it’s absolutely unim­portant; that’s perfection for human beings.³ Perhaps She already knew unconsciously (?) that man has far more to discover than his small or great summits, which all collapse one day into a certain hole in the ground. So my mother (she was a very stern person) would say, “My daughter is incapable of seeing anything through to the end!" And it remained like that: incapable of seeing anything through to the end—always taking to something, then leaving it, then after a time taking to something else—lots of things. “She will never achieve anything in life /" And it was really the childlike transcription of the need for ever more, ever better, ever more, ever better ... endlessly—the sense of advance, advance towards perfection. A perfection that I felt to be quite beyond anything people thought of—something ...a “some­thing" which was indefinable, but which I sought through everything.⁴

Evidently, there must have been more than one clash with Mathilde. There is even a certain carrot dish between them which nearly turned sour; Mirra refused obstinately to eat carrots and Mathilde was no less obstinately bent on making her eat carrots—Mirra fasted for three days. We do not know who gave in first. Probably Mathilde. But the last straw—and the first sign of another, singular adventure— came the day Mathilde discovered that Mirra was writing poetry. Poetry, my daughter, poetry! And in her sleep on top of it! Yes, Mirra’s sleep was a little strange, like everything else, or unnatural—or quite natural depending on whether one sees it with the eyes of a child who does not yet know that the body is a very fixed little box that encloses us for life; and Mirra, very impertinently, used to wander out of her body as if there were nothing to it. You go out of your body as you go out of your house, it is that simple. Not for Mathilde. But in any case, we seldom meet children who know how to tell us about their peregrinations: Every night at the same hour, when the whole house was very quiet, I would go out of my body and have all kinds of experiences. And then my body gradually became a sleepwalker (that is, the consciousness of the form¹⁰⁰ became more and more con­scious, while the link, a sort of thread of light connecting us to the body, remained very solidly established). I got into the habit of getting up—but not like an ordinary sleepwalker: I would get up, open my desk, take out a piece of paper and write ... poems. Yes, poems—I, who had nothing of the poet in me! I would jot things down, then very consciously put everything back into the drawer, lock everything up again very carefully and go back to bed. One night, for some reason or other, I forgot and left it open. My mother came in (in France the windows are covered with heavy curtains and in the morning my mother would come in and violently throw open the curtains, waking me up, brrm!, without any warning; but I was used to it and would already be prepared to wake up—otherwise it would have been most unpleasant!).¹⁰¹ Any­way, my mother came in, calling me with unquestionable authority, and then she found the open desk and the piece of paper: "What's that?" She grabbed it. "What have you been up to?" I don't know what I replied, but she went to the doc­tor: "My daughter has become a sleepwalker! You have to give her a drug." It wasn’t easy,⁵ Mother added laughingly.

We do not believe that the poetical period lasted very long, and Mirra, or Mother, always regarded that diffident and scarcely scientific species with a certain commisera­tion, She who unwittingly expressed herself in such a poetic way—but it was too simple to be put into alexandrines. What mattered to her was that the expression be true, exact, endowed with the vibration, a pure translation of the great Shakti’s flowing—a limpid transmitter,⁶ such was her supreme key, even when She was ninety-five. But why would not the Shakti also make poetry flow, she who poured down like a cataract into the 23,814 verses of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri? We still do not know all the secrets of that Shakti, and Mirra was learning the workings— the mechanism, to use her favorite word. Continuously, through everything, She was learning that limpidity is the supreme mastery of everything, including poetry. Sri Aurobindo would call it "mental silence." When all is silent, the vibrations pass clearly, undistorted, through the limpidity of consciousness, in accordance with their right rhythm, which is also the right power and right action at the right time. For, we have forgotten it, ultimately poetry (like painting, music and all the forms) is “simply" the con­densation of certain vibrations that have the capacity to reproduce or materialize the state of consciousness they represent: the flame of aspiration—or even just fire—light, joy, love ... Everything in this world is the expression of a state of consciousness: the flower is a state of consciousness (a state of the consciousness, rather), as is the stone, fire and rain. The whole world is myriad states of conscious­ness. It is the magic of sound, the mantra, the "Word" of the Shakti that informs all forms, makes them vibrate, colors them, and garbs them in its musical or electromagnetic geometry. Ultimately, one day, it may be the power of directly materializing or precipitating into a form whatever is the object of our consciousness—a direct creation by conscious manipulation of the vibrations. This is tomor­rows "poetry," when the world becomes a pure implementa­tion of the Shakti through limpid transmitters. At present, we are only “condensing" petty ideas and petty desires, and states without any power (except the power to harm) or much consciousness, and all sorts of small machines to replace the simple power of the original vibration. Mirra was already learning this future poetry, not only through poems, but through everything—that “something" She sensed, which was like the secret perfection of everything, even of a stone. As for me, I am not a poet, She said. I am only a doer⁷—but the Greek word for “poetry" [poiein] pre­cisely means "to do." And the Sanskrit for "shakti” [shak] is "to be able" or "to effect."

The Change of Milieu

Thus Mirra was inventing beforehand what the surreal­ists were going to discover some thirty years later; but truly there is no invention, or else it is as old as the Vedas and Ajanta murals themselves, for what creator does not close his eyes a little, gropingly pulling down some flash from above? It is not enough to sit down one inspiring morning, or one lovely evening, and write "automatically," for what is likely to come out is some will-o'-the-wisp from below— from our subconscious and barely conscious lagoons—or the syncopated echo of our own incoherence. First of all, we must be limpid, otherwise we will hear nothing but our own rumblings. Our colored lagoons or inspirations do not all originate from the same place, though everything flows from a single ocean. We must learn the levels and recognize the floodgates of the great flowing—there are small flood­gates, large floodgates, and no floodgates at all. This is what Mirra was discovering step by step, meticulously, level by level and world after world. With animals, flowers, por­traits and mummies (not to mention very living humans buzzing with desires) She had already learned that each thing struck its little note at very different levels of her body, and that these “centers”—for which She had no erudite names—were like little, very accurate tuning forks vibrating at one note and one only, and She knew instantly, through the note struck or the vibration, not only its significance, but also which level of the world it came from, and She could be presented with the most exquisitely colored appearances, the most closed objects or the men wearing the finest neckties in the world without being fooled for a moment: it vibrated at a certain level, therefore it came from that level. And a painting or a poem could be signed with the most prestigious name of the time, yet it was only some sixth-class lagoon. It was mathematically precise, and unmistakable. But to what note did all these centers, these little tuning forks vibrating right up to the top answer? Where did the music come from? That is what interested her. Had She been told by this famous, yet-to-be- born American mechanist that it all comes from a particular "consciousness-creating machine,” that is, our distinguished brain, She would have opened her eyes wide, perhaps startled-blue this time, and immediately wondered where that idea came from and whether this extraordinary mecha­nist had not also created the world. That may just be the case. In any event, a world that works upside down. You wouldn’t say that it's the phonograph that has created the sound you hear, would you? That would never occur to you !⁸

In fact, She discovered these worlds, all these worlds and levels, in the most prosaic and unexpected way, just as one suddenly comes upon a totally unexpected orchard and bites into an apple. This was not theory; it had to be tested, touched or seen. The door opened and there it was. The body was just a lot of little doors opening in every direc­tion, and one could even let it fall on occasion, not only in a bed and when asleep, but right in the middle of lunch, or even while walking, with eyes wide open. It had become a kind of detachable object She took off like a coat to go else­where : into the atmosphere of a person or a city, to other places or other worlds, which She discovered “just like that,” a little at random, with no more surprise than when discovering the Bois de Boulogne or Clouet's "living” por­traits. This is called "trance" in the dictionary, but it is such an ugly word, evoking whirling dervishes or the Pythia on her tripod, while it is simply a lovely walk outside the body ("lovely” for those who have a lovely consciousness, other­wise it could well be nightmarish), and we would prefer to use the word "exteriorization”—one goes off into an “out­side” that is the very inside of everything. I would all of a sudden, right in the middle of an action or a sentence or anything at all, go into trance—and nobody knew what it was! They would all think I had gone to sleep! But I remained conscious, with an arm raised or in the middle of a word— and poof! No one there. No one there outwardly, but inwardly quite an intense, interesting experience. That used to happen to me even when I was very young.

I remember once (I must have been ten or twelve years old at the time), there wax a luncheon at my parents’ house for a dozen or so people, all decked out in their Sunday best— they were family but all the same it was a ‘luncheon’ and there was a certain protocol; in short, one had to behave properly. I was at one end of the table next to a first-cousin of mine who later became director of the Louvre for a while (he had an artistic intelligence, a rather capable young man). So there we were, and I remember I was observing something rather interesting in his atmosphere (mind you, although the faculties were already there, I knew nothing about occult things). I was observing a kind of sensation I had felt in his atmosphere and then, just as I was putting the fork into my mouth, I took off! What a scolding I got! I was told that if I didn't know how to behave, I shouldn’t come to the table.⁹ Sometimes, with even less ceremony, She simply let her body drop to the ground. That happened once in Paris. I had been offered a good dinner, then I went to hear a conference. It was very crowded and very hot. I was standing there with that dinner in my stomach, when suddenly I felt sick. I said to the person who was with me, "I must go outside immedi­ately!" Once outside (it was on the Trocadero Square), I passed out completely. I saw my body lying there and I found it so ridiculous that I rushed back into it—and I gave it a good scolding.¹⁰

Having been brought up in the kindergarten of evolu­tion, we have become used to thinking that a body, well, is something that contains consciousness—if it does not create it—that without a body we are quite simply dead, and that we cannot see without eyes, hear without ears, and move without a pair of legs, or half a dozen, depending on the case. It is an evolutionary fact, and that is how it is. That is also how a child cannot walk about without its nanny or open the park gate because it is a few inches too short. In the great park of Oneness, the great primal Totality, little particles of consciousness have grown up, become indi­vidualized, identified themselves as “different from”— identifying that difference precisely thanks to their limiting walls—in other words, they begin to see through their own eyes, feel through their own tentacles, and naturally the world becomes the phenomenon of their eyes and tentacles. But when we have declared (having grown a few thousand years “wiser") that the world is not our personal affair, we will nevertheless continue to individualize the world through a skull and personal spectacles, like the little beasts. The world is “different," we are "different” and everything is different thanks to those peculiar spectacles and soft cranial protuberances, to the point that we say, “I only exist through my spectacles”—perhaps even, “I am the product of my spectacles; without spectacles and protuberances, I am dead." And this is also true for those who are the real babies of evolution. For a fish in an aquarium, the outside of its bowl is also nonexistence or death. However, there are flying fish; there are reptiles that have grown wings and all sorts of species that have left their "milieu"—we have indeed flown out of more than one milieu since we used to fidget about with certain pseudopods ... Perhaps this is the time of the next change of milieu, but this time, instead of moving from one fishbowl to another, larger one—be it celestial or aerial—or instead of growing super-protuber­ances (as if we were not already congested enough in our human fishbowl), the point is to find the Milieu again, the one that contains all the fishbowls and bodies and the vision of all that is seen by those millions of eyes and all that is touched gropingly by those little antennae—which had cut out these small bits of the world, these little win­dows in a dungeon, and these little adjustable spectacles, only to then acclimatize themselves step by step and day after day to their own Totality. Then we will realize that we can see quite well, even better, without spectacles, that we can think quite well without a skull, and that we can take a walk outside the fishbowl without dying from it. And finally, we will realize that it is not the body that contains consciousness, but consciousness that contains the body— and all bodies. Then we shall move here or there, unhin­dered, because everything will be our body.

The Hierarchy of the Worlds

Mirra could go out of the "fishbowl" quite easily, at will. She was no baby of evolution. In fact we all go out of this body during our sleep, but we do not know it—in truth, we know very little of the real way of living; we are taught mathematics, codes, laws, languages, but not even the abc's of life, nor the language of the world: There isn't one person in a million who knows how to live! Mother exclaimed. They are born into life—they don’t know why. They know they have a number of years to live—they don’t know why. They think they will have to go because everyone goes—and they don’t know why either... They are born; they live; they have what they call good fortunes or misfortunes, then they come to the end and they go. They came in and left without learning anything.¹¹ Sometimes, fortuitously, on an opera­tion table or in an accident, we realize that one can leave this body quite easily, but it is a kind of "phenomenon," perhaps unhealthy, and, like Mathilde, we are all prone to classify it under “mental disturbances,” and it is indeed really disturbing to the reasonable little habits that we have inherited from mammal to mammal. We are very attached to our cage. To tell the truth, Mother remarked, the vast majority of men are like prisoners with all doors and win­dows shut; so they suffocate—which is fairly natural—yet they have the key that opens the doors and windows, but they don’t use it.¹² Or else, like imprudent youths, we set out on a “trip" under the effect of some hallucinogenic drug— often disastrously. For it is not enough to get out—this is not a super Bois de Boulogne in technicolor, although colors there are, and all depends on our own "color,” as it were; like always finds like, and if we are gray and full of anxiety, we will only experience the super-grays of nightmare and super-anxiety. What moves us here is what moves us "over there”—in all its “purity,” we might say, or all its vastness, and without the little protective shell of the body or of decency. This is precisely the invisible (for us) source of all that moves us here and moves us along like little puppets. but also a whole field of study for those who do not like being moved like puppets. That is what Mirra constantly saw moving everywhere, behind paintings, objects, or in her cousin’s atmosphere: little clouds, red or black waves, sparks, dark dart-like stings, movements of force that impel our gestures and our future, whether that sudden accident, this golden inspiration or that false one, and millions of little chance events we do not have the first clue about. People who live in the ordinary consciousness know in fact very, very little about what is happening physically—very little. They think they know, but they know only a very thin appearance, like the wrapping paper around a package; there is the whole package inside, with all its content, but they see only the outside appearance, and they are so accustomed to it that they always have an explanation.¹³ But for those who do not have the good fortune or misfortune to see (the sight is not always a pretty one, and it is likely that in the wisdom of Nature's economy our eyes open only to the extent of our understanding), there is a vast field of study at night, when our eyes are no longer deluged with the onrush of appear­ances: Daytime is a certain kind of school, nighttime is another. For Mother, everything was "school,” Why, they don’t even teach you how to sleep! People think you have only to lie down on your bed and just go to sleep. But that isn’t so!¹⁴

Likewise, going out of the body does not mean finding some kind of big and rather disorderly warehouse. There is a whole hierarchy of worlds (or “planes of conscious­ness,” if one prefers) which ranges from the most material Matter to the regions of light and bliss, whence the greatest of us sometimes draw a flash, a symphony or a gospel— and still other regions we do not yet know. This discovery is as old as the hypogea of Luxor or the Upanishads. It is mysterious and dubious only for this scientific interlude, which thought it wiser to develop its machines rather than its consciousness—until men, having reached their last resort and their last breath, rediscover the air that was missing from their lives and the very power that drove their machines, perhaps richer and more mature for that demanding schooling of steel. But in the meantime, we must say that we are in a sort of psychological and philoso­phical confusion that would have appeared quite childish to our less mechanized predecessors. One of the great difficul­ties for most philosophies, Mother said, is that they have never recognized or studied the various planes of existence, the various levels of being ... They have made a creator God, and his creatures. So all kinds of problems arise. He created the world with what? Some say with dust, but what is that dust? What was it doing before being used to make a world?... Or else with nothing! The universe was created from nothing—it's absurd! It is very disturbing to a logical mind. And on top of it, it is said that “He" did all that consciously, deliberately, and, when He was finished, He exclaimed, “Hmm, this is very good!” I think that one of the greatest stumbling blocks to understanding things comes from an arbitrary simplification that puts the Spirit on one side and Matter on the other, Mother added. It is because of that stupidity that we don't understand anything. There is spirit, and there is matter—it is quite convenient. So if you aren’t on the side of the spirit, you're on the side of matter; if you aren’t on the side of matter, you’re on the side of the spirit. But what do you call spirit? And what do you call matter? It is a countless number of things, an unending gradation. The universe is made of an infinite gradation, as it were, of worlds and states of consciousness—and where does your matter leave off and your spirit begin in this increasingly subtle gradation P Then they say: free the spirit from matter—die and you will free your spirit from matter. These are the stupidities that prevent people from under­standing anything at all! Yet they do not represent the world as it is.¹⁵

Mirra had not yet reached "the world as it is"—it would take her some eighty years to do it, because all these worlds and planes still do not embrace the totality of existence; there is something else, something very mysterious, and very simple, which is perhaps the world's next revolution. A new world within a little cell. That which is our base— this body—is also our ultimate mystery. That which is our failure—death—is also the key to a supreme victory. There perhaps lies the utility of our "scientific detour”·, to bring us back face to face with matter and force us to stumble upon our own mystery instead of soaring into the so-called heavens of the spirit, which have never saved anything. There is a long way to travel before reaching the heart of things, but all these detours, the thousand detours of the great evolutionary forest, are part of the straight line that prepares our consciousness and fashions the Shakti in our bodies.

A Growing Body

For finally, this is what it is all about—fashioning the Shakti. The ancient Vedic Rishis spoke of "the human fore­fathers” who forged the gods within themselves “as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy."¹⁶ Those planes and those worlds can remain where they are, like the distant forests of Brazil or Victoria Falls, for what do the most magnificent forests and waterfalls matter if we do not know how to bring a few drops to our own water mill and a single flower to our garden—or if it is the exclusive privi­lege of a few geniuses of the spirit? But we all have little doors in ourselves that open out on those great fields—we have just to open the doors. Like Mirra, we all have little pulsating, vibrating "centers” that communicate with those worlds, like the iridescent tentacles of the terebella. We must know where we want to live and where we stand: whether we wish to press the nightmare button and floun­der down below, in the little swamps of the thousand desires that make such a gray and painful and erratic life, or whether we wish to open the doors above and feel sud­denly vast, amidst wide-open landscapes that leave us refreshed for days. Our life with eyes wide open is a trans­lation of our life with eyes closed and we pull here a story we have woven elsewhere—we can draw out a beautiful story; we can draw out forces and lights that make life vibrate differently, that may even change life. For the great kaleidoscope "above” goes on turning and turning, waiting for us to let its little colored rain filter down here, and its lovely arabesques, or great unknown cascades that will change the world’s destiny. We must tune all the centers of our instrument to the lovely frequency, to the vast rhythm; we must make that cadence flow down here, which will give rhythm to all our gestures, big or small—it is all the same, for if the rhythm is not in this idle little second, this first footstep on the sidewalk, it will be nowhere.

Mirra wanted that rhythm to flow not only for herself but for everyone. Strangely enough, this very young girl, whose roots seemed to plunge so far back in time, also seemed to expand herself out into space and be capable of embracing distances as well as ages, as if space were actually a kind of dimension of time, or the spread of our consciousness proportionate to the quantity of experiences we have lived through time, as though we constantly grew within another, more subtle body—a body of experience—and fashioned an ever vaster and more encompassing expanse of being. Some fashion a little garden with a single flower, some fashion a park, and others embrace seas and rivers, because they have long flowed with the great Shakti, held many sorrows and struggles, and plucked more than one color from the great rainbow. They have loved much and perhaps loved all. When I was a child, Mother related, around the age of thirteen and for about a year, every night as I went to bed, I felt as if going out of my body and shooting up above the house, then above the city, very high. Then I would see myself dressed in a magnificent golden robe flowing out behind me; and as I rose, this robe would expand and spread out in a circle all around me to form as if a huge roof over the city. And I would see men, women, children, old people, sick people, unhappy people coming out from every side; they would gather beneath the outspread robe, begging for help, telling of their woes, their sufferings, their pains. In response, the robe, supple and alive, would stretch out toward each of them individually, and the moment they touched it, they were consoled or healed and would go back into their bodies hap­pier and stronger than before leaving them. Nothing seemed more beautiful to me, nothing made me happier; all my day­time activities seemed dull and gray—devoid of real life— compared to this night-time activity, which was the true life for me.¹⁷

But that more subtle body—perhaps the body of the world's sorrows—seemed to spread not only over one city or in one particular direction; it sometimes seemed immense. At times, also, it did not have the same color or the same size. Mirra clearly noticed that depending on the region She visited, that body, or bodies, those beings within her, had a different hue, a different movement, as if She had gradually grown on different planes of her being, in several directions—and each of those lives, indeed, in Egypt or elsewhere, in the thousands of places we pass through, rich or poor, as princesses or monks—represents a certain type of experience, a type of vibration or note that we have specially nurtured, one center or another where we have particularly concentrated our efforts—a certain way of touching Matter, Mother would say—until all our centers and all our notes become tuned to the same rhythm and we are a somewhat complete and unified human being living on all the planes and mastering all the colors and rhythms. To every center there corresponds a body of experience (we would call it a personality), which we fashion bit by bit and which represents our thousand footsteps on a given level, our thousand efforts in one direction—and which keeps on growing, for what dynamism can vanish into thin air? What is is forever, and if we have nurtured a little stream or a torrent, or an evil spell, this stream, torrent or evil spell will catch up with us thousands upon thousands of years later and will become a river, an ocean, or a catastrophe. We have to know what we are nurturing. Mirra had nur­tured more than one world; She had more than one being, like each of us, but some people come and leave just as they came, while others open their eyes wide and remember. Some beings form an ill-assorted and unequally developed troop and spend their time quarrelling among themselves, with sometimes very cumbersome gnomes or dark, rebel­lious pygmies; others have united their entire kingdom and subjected all their beings to the great Cadence. And finally, they have nurtured so many beings and developed so many worlds that it is like the whole world within one conscious­ness. Perhaps this is the experience that visited young Mirra one day in a temple (it must certainly have been the first time She went into such a place): I had one of my first experiences in a temple. It was at a marriage, and the music was wonderful—Saint-Saens, I later learned; organ music, the second best organ in Paris—wonderful! I was 14 years old, sitting high up in the galleries with my mother, and this music was being played. There were some leaded-glass windows—white, with no designs. I was gazing at one of these windows, feeling uplifted by the music, when suddenly through the window came a flash like a bolt of lightning. Just like lightning. It entered—my eyes were open—it entered like this, and then I... I had the feeling of becoming vast and all­powerful. ... And it lasted for days.¹⁸

It would be interesting to have a description of these worlds and bodies, but to speak of them in a solemn and academic manner would be unfair to Mother, who always hated the dogmatic and absolute “this is how it is” like the Ten Commandments (which, by the way, She found extraordinarily banal! And Moses climbed up the Sinai to hear that!).¹⁹ We will not climb up the Sinai of the invis­ible to put it into twelve paragraphs; indeed there were— there are—twelve of these worlds, but all these divisions are just a way of peering into a certain “something”—the earth, our earth, which still eludes us, and which we have perhaps not really seen yet! There is still ample room for discovery, and all has not been said, even by the seers of the highest wisdoms (possibly because they were too high). We ( can only be surprised—but is it really surprising?—that a very young girl from square du Roule discovered, in the age of positivistic Light, what the Rishis and many other sages as well had discovered some seven thousand years earlier. But such is the fact. However, She attached no particular importance to it, or at least no more particular than to the thousand everyday mysteries, which are no longer mysteries to us because we have covered them with quite decent and reassuring mental labels and we are so accustomed to them that they look like nothing—though if we stopped being accustomed to the world and removed our convenient labels, we might start discovering more things than appear to be and more mysteries than all those of Eleusis.

So we will not give out the recipe for a "good sleep" or for the worlds: This habit of wanting to force others to think like you always seemed, strange to me. You have your own experience; well, try to make it as true and complete as pos­sible, but leave each one to his own experience.²⁰ As simple as that. The important thing is to know that there is an experience and to remove the eye-glasses of habit. The important thing is to know that there is "something" to look at—to look at without dogmas, positivistic or other­wise. We must stay on the positive side of the experience, that is all. And the most extraordinary part of this enter­prise is that the very effort to know opens the doors of discovery, automatically, as if that intense little vibration that latches on things opened up invisible skylights within that "as if nothing” of habit, and everything starts speaking to us, telling its story and its unfoldings, as if our very foot­steps—feeling their way without knowing anything, but yearning, so much yearning to know—actually created the path; as if this sincerity of effort did create the body of the Shakti in ourselves. Then we go from one little door to the next and from one discovery to another, where before there was nothing but futile boulevards and a thousand senseless footsteps.

And we walk from life to life and from experience to experience—from one way of touching matter to another— until our body of experience has grown to the size of the universe.

For this, finally, is the whole meaning of evolution: to develop the body of the Shakti in ourselves. We think that we wage wars, revolutions or crusades; that we evolve philosophy, socialism, capitalism and carve empires from the Hellespont to Bactria; that we create machines, litera­ture, good and bad, and little children. But all the while it is the Shakti growing in us, through good and bad, through socialism or despotism, and even through our machines or our foolishness. The whole time, it is the great empire of the Shakti we carve, the same Shakti beneath all the names and faces, in black or white skins, beneath our sins and our virtues, indifferently, in our defeats or our triumphs. It is the same, small fragment of the great Milieu that we colonize, pile up and put into our granaries of feeling or thought, like the honeybees of a great Comb, grain by grain, day after day, through our labors and pains and countless lives in one costume or another, through philoso­phy or no philosophy, through religions and foolish things in every language. We individualize the great Shakti; we bathe in it like tadpoles in a torrent, which will become pterodactyls or shrews, which will become mathematicians or tramps—which will become what? Some beings are nothing but their body and their function; they store only the little fragments of Energy they need to keep their machinery going, and when the machinery breaks down, all that is left is what they have put into it: they "go out” into nothing, because they are nothing but common com­bustible, and all the philosophies they may have stuck on it make no difference if they never were a living substance, a means of catching a few drops of the Great Shakti. And where could they go when they sleep, too? Night is as dark outside their body as it is inside, for they have colonized nothing but materials for their good looks and their func­tioning—here and elsewhere, in sleep as in death, you go into what you are. If you are nothing except thinking jelly, you go nowhere except back to the general melting pot. Some means of transportation is needed to go somewhere. To “go out" of the body, clearly, there has to be someone going out. And who goes out?

Some beings have accumulated little drops of the great Shakti with a sword or a chisel, with religion or irreligion, anything, anything that fell into their hands: a piano or a brush; they have lived each minute as if they had to be in that minute—be anything but at least be—not stroll through life from one occupation to another with a thou­sand steps of nothingness in between; they have accumulated and accumulated little sparks of the great Energy, through everything, everywhere, through rebellion or submission, agreement or disagreement, yes or no—anything so long as it lives, and it is. And what remains once we have closed all our books, ceased all our gestures and our footsteps, the thousand footsteps of life, to lie down in sleep or in death? That is what remains, those little drops of being, without a religion or party—quite pure—without a profession or any pretext—so simple and the only living reality. This is all that remains: little imperishable drops, for what fire, what kind of fuel could possibly destroy that Energy, since it is the very fuel of all the stars! Little drops accumulating within ourselves, hour by hour, day by day, life after life, and building an indestructible body inside and around us—a body commensurate with our true color, our true measure of being and intensity. This is the means of trans­portation. It is the accumulation of the great Shakti that can go through all ages and places, and gravitates according to our lightness. Some beings have accumulated their little intensity within a single occupation and have only striven to know, know ever more; striven to love, love ever more; striven to do and to do again. They have projected their flame within a small family circle, a small country's circle, within greater and greater circles, and they have dissolved their little individuality into the love of the earth or into the Whole, merged their little intensity into the great Intensity. These are those that have more than one body and many colors. They have the body of their accumulated knowledge, the body of their accumulated love, the body of their action —lots of bodies glistening with all those little vibrating centers. They have cultivated all the notes of all their tuning forks, all the colors of their intensity. They have projected themselves farther and farther afield; they have loved and known farther and farther beyond, acted farther and farther on. These have a body and other bodies that have grown throughout the ages, grown in every latitude and through every occupation, grown so much, finally, that they no longer need to “go out" of anything whatever or to change their milieu, for everything has become their body and the Shakti itself is their Milieu.

These, perhaps, will discover a supreme way of touching Matter and a supreme way of being.

The next body upon earth.

And perhaps there is no "supreme,” but an ever growing way of being.