Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

7: The Real Reality

She was progressing alone in a world where appearances had exploded. The very ones who had sounded the first tocsin—or first chimes—with their colors or science did not know the meaning of their gesture. We walk blind­folded in the forest of the future while the future is already here, guiding our hands and our steps. She was twenty- three or twenty-four; She moved alone and fearlessly in several worlds at the same time, day and night, and that Matter She was clarifying seemed to sink deeper and deeper into a time without clocks and a space without measure, in a strange geography where the past mingled with the future and where this Matter, so solid, ebbed and flowed under powerful currents, leaving only a thin and fragile crust intact—futile, almost false, and yet so imperiously essential to her materialistic soul, as if this lost speck of star held the key to all other stars, this tiny quivering cell the very power that revolved all the worlds, and this casual little gesture or this passing banality, the ultimate stage where every knot of every other world was knotted and unraveled. A small, decisive representation of a "something" whose laws and real movement She was gropingly seeking. “God” had no doubt blessed her with knowing nothing of Buddhism, otherwise She might have fallen into the great illusionist Maya, and further blessed her with knowing nothing of any "ism"—She progressed innocently, alone, with her eyes open in every direction, and why should the way with eyes open be any falser than the way with eyes closed? Though it is more than likely that no way was absolutely true, save that something in her heart which shone in the midst of everything, night and day, in the banal or the marvelous, the catastrophe or the non-catastrophe, and which pushed and prodded, in search of the real truth of Matter as well as of the Spirit. I have experienced all kinds of things in life, but I have always felt a sort of light—so intangible, so perfectly pure (not in the moral sense, but pure light) and it could go anywhere, mix everywhere without ever getting mixed with anything. I felt the flame as a young child—a white flame. And never have I felt disgust, contempt, recoil, the sense of being dirtied by anything or anyone. There was always this flame—white, so white that nothing could make it other than white.¹ What could possi­bly scare THAT? What Maya could possibly stand before that? What paradise or hell of the twelve worlds—or of the thirteenth, ours, which may not be yet what it really is? But when it is what it really is, then the thirteen worlds will perhaps become one in a time free of sorrow and a space free of clashes—and in a deathless body.

The Supersense

Basically, we are saying that Mirra was in search of the real law of Matter, the real movement of life, but everything revolves imperceptibly around one single problem or one single fact. The fact is that we die, or at least the body dies, and until we have found the key to death, we will not hold the key to life or to Matter. Strangely enough, in order to understand what Matter really is, we have to understand what death is, as if our way of perceiving Matter induced death, too. Both together. No spiritual or scientific revolu­tion will revolutionize anything until we have waged the revolution of death. This side and all the sides of the world are divided by a single lacuna that causes life and the world to be a certain way in a body and another way without a body—two ways separated by a mortal body, a body that dies perhaps because it has not found the way. To find the real way is to find the real law of life and Matter. It means filling the lacuna that prevents life from really being life, something other than a prey for death, and Matter from really being what it is—for we know nothing of what matter really is, except through our microscopes, which can scarcely be more intelligent than we are or are mere extensions of our own intelligence—the same golden or black net extending all the way down to the infinitesimal, the same pair of spectacles looking at itself in a different way. But where is the way? The way that changes every­thing? If only once we open the real window in Matter, then it will surely change as radically as it did the day the mental window replaced the window of the ape.

Over there in Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo, like Mirra, was also seeing exploded appearances, and He would soon write: Everybody now knows that Science is not a statement of the truth of things, but only a language expressing a certain experience of objects, their structure, their mathematics, a coordinated and utilisable impression of their processes— it is nothing more. Matter itself is something (a formation of energy perhaps?) of which we know superficially the structure as it appears to our mind and senses and to certain examining instruments (about which it is now suspected that they largely determine their own results, Nature adapting its replies to the instrument used) but more than that no Scientist knows and can know.’’²

Such was the quest that Mirra had started step by step and that She would pursue day after day and night after night, until her ninety-fifth year. “Seeing visions” did not particularly interest her, no more than witnessing someone’s features change shape and color, or objects sink into another dimension—“another" dimension, but where is the real dimension? All that interested her only insofar as it changed something in Matter and in its organization and was ulti­mately capable *οΐ *doing something for the world, this world on which She walked very solidly. This is one of Mother's, or Mirra's, fundamental characteristics—pragmatism. She did not try to turn what She saw into a philosophy or a system, but into a means of action. I never had that kind of curiosity, I never cared to understand with the head, I wasn’t interested—I was interested in the result, in the inner change: how my attitude towards the world changed, my position relative to the creation—that interested me from my infancy; how what seemed to be quite ordinary incidents could so completely change my relationship with that whole little world of children. And it was always the same thing: instead of feeling burdened, with a weight on your head, and just plodding on like a donkey, something would lift and you would be on top of it—you could look at it and smile, and gradually begin to change. See that thing that’s out of place?... Why not set it right! Like arranging things in a drawer.³

To find the secret of the body and of Matter, obviously, we first need to master them; no one can say what the prison is until he is out of it; one might as well probe the walls of a psychiatric hospital with a microscope to find its reality. And to begin with, how do the senses, the eyes that look into the microscope, work? She conducted hundreds of experiments every day, in season and especially out of season, and it would be hard to choose among those little hops of a cageless bird. But luckily, She recalled one par­ticular type of experiment, which gives us a clue as to the direction, or one of the directions, in which Her quest was flowing. For several months I was immobilized in bed, and found it very boring—I wanted to see what was happening. Next to the room I was staying in was another little room, and outside that little room was a sort of bridge which extended to the middle of the garden and became a stairway leading down to a very spacious and beautiful studio built in the garden. It was the studio of rue Lemercier. So I would keep very still, close my eyes, and send out my consciousness little by little, little by little.⁴ You concentrate your consciousness and then extend it, as it were (almost as if you extended it materially), you cover the whole distance and you arrive in the studio. If you do it correctly, you can see what is in the studio and hear what is happening, though you are not in the studio yourself—your body is lying on a bed in another room, but the consciousness has been projected outside. It is a physical consciousness—it isn't an inner state, because you see physically and hear physically; if there are people in the room, you can see them, and if they are speaking, you can hear them.... It is a kind of supersense, that is to say, a sense that has reached such a degree of intensity and refinement that it can feel precisely what the ordinary sense doesn’t feel,

and see at a distance—see really, see physically at a distance, through the walls.⁵ That “supersense” is consciousness. For in the end there is but one sense—consciousness—which has found it evolutionarily convenient to get into the habit of using eyes, ears, etc., but this is just a sort of evolutionary laziness, we might say, or perhaps a condescension, which accepts momentarily the means of the evolutionary baby that we are—who firmly believes that one cannot see with­out eyes, cannot hear without ears, and cannot live without a body. And because he believes it, it is so. If he stopped believing it, things could well be different. And if we stopped believing in death, that too could be entirely different. We have many habits to change—The prison of millennial habits,⁶ She said.

She was rediscovering all alone what some ancient sages knew, that sanjnana of Sanskrit texts which Sri Aurobindo so limpidly defined in his fashion: Sense is fundamentally not the action of certain physical organs, but the contact of consciousness with its objects, sanjnana.⁷ The child of evo­lution that we are always forgets the fundamental law that would give him the key to his prison and the key to free­dom, namely, that this world is one, an indivisible whole without separation, in which we have cut out anthills, shells and braincases, but it all communicates instantly as if it were a single body—we are one single body of the world, and it is no more surprising to touch New York, Hong Kong or the studio in rue Lemercier than the scratch on one's toe, nor is it surprising that one particular little cell knows another little cell within the same body. We have shut ourselves in a cage and declared it to be the law. Yes, the law of our cage, but it is not the law of the world, neither is it the law of Matter.

Conscious Sleep

To extend one’s consciousness is a first step; to be inde­pendent of the physical instruments is another; and to be independent of the body, the final step. The body is a “relay station," Sri Aurobindo would say, but what does it relay? Mirra had been independent from her body for quite some time, “naturally,” without trying or seeking anything. It was a sort of removable object She could leave anywhere to go wandering elsewhere, but what elsewhere? There are many "elsewheres,” and Mirra was no more interested in wander­ings than in visions, if they did not bring her the means of knowing better and acting better on Matter, her primary field—and why even take a body if it were only to leave it and if She could live better elsewhere? It is simple and logical. We may even wonder why so much fuss has been made about all the heavens and beatitudes up above if it is only to get beatified there while the rest goes on rotting. Nature’s economy has always turned out to be wise, and if she has built this cage, it may be after all, and despite all that, that this cage contains something that exists nowhere else—our materialism always turns out to be the best touchstone, only it is not a "downward materialism,” a materialism of death, as it were, that we should cultivate, but an ascending materialism, which grasps this Matter to make it yield something other than telephones and trinkets, or even super-paintings and super-symphonies that are still a song from elsewhere. Mirra wanted that elsewhere to be here as well, right down to this Matter and this body’s cells. She was simple and straightforward: If it is, it always is, every day, or it is not; drowsy beatitudes and Sunday mass meditations were not for Her. A day means 1,440 minutes and some seconds. But first, we have to know the real workings of the cage, the "mechanism.” And Matter seemed increasingly mysterious and “supple" to Her, like Einstein’s energy or Louis de Broglies wave-particles—this body dies, but why does it die? For everything else went on living before her eyes, with or without a body, and quite supplely. She was not concerned in philosophy or in any ism what­ever: I believed only what I saw, what I touched.

She saw all kinds of things; first, all those worlds or planes of consciousness ranging continuously from the most material Matter—perhaps without any clear-cut dividing line between Matter and Spirit—to vaster and vaster regions, increasingly “ethereal" and very pleasant to live in, where consciousness seemed almost to vanish—but here again, what does this vanishing mean? Is it a limit? Or our own limit? A supercage? Or what else? She was beginning to find her way around all these worlds and to move from one to the other with great dexterity, just as we change from one dress to another, ever lighter and wider, while the physical body remained there at the far end of the thread—a thin “thread of light”—in a deep “sleep,” progressively deeper as She went farther and farther "away,” and almost cataleptic in the end. Life or death hung on that thread, and nothing really died except that odd little chunk of a thing all the way at the end of the thread. She was not afraid; She was never afraid of anything. And there was that "white flame,” everywhere.

Thus, sleep was her first field of study at rue Lemercier. It was not complicated, it was at hand. She was simply trying not to lose the thread of consciousness for a second during her outings. She wanted to know where She was going, what She was doing, why She was doing it and how that nocturnal action influenced her life in Matter or inter­fered with the incidents and accidents that suddenly and oddly took place the next day, as a sort of extension or consequence of her trips. Above all, She did not want to fall into a hole of unconsciousness; in no way did Mirra want unconsciousness; to her, it was death, real death—one had to have one’s eyes always open, everywhere, on this side of the world and on any side whatever. It was not so easy in the beginning, for there is a sort of little threshold to cross between every world or every plane, an imperceptible change of state; just a breath and one loses contact, which means one falls “asleep” like a log. For some people, there’s no path between one state of being and another; there's a little gap, and so they jump from one state to the other. There is no path linking all the states of being with no break of consciousness. A small dark hole, and you don't recollect. It is like a small chasm over which you have to extend your consciousness. It takes a very long time to build a bridge; it takes even longer than building a physical bridge.⁸ She built all the steps patiently, night after night, and in the end She never "slept" at all. I followed this sort of self-discipline for more than a year. I would note everything—a few words, a trifle, an impression—and try to go from one recollection to another. At first the results weren't very substantial, but after about fourteen months, I was able to trace back all my “dreams" from the end right up to the beginning of the night. It puts you into such a conscious and continuous state that, in the end, I was no longer sleeping at all. My body was lying down, fast asleep, but the consciousness was not in the least resting. The result was absolutely marvelous: You become aware of the different phases in your sleep and of absolutely everything that takes place in it, down to the smallest detail.

And then nothing can escape your control anymore.⁹

This "control" was what interested her, for what good is it to “dream’’ if it changes nothing in Matter? If the seeker has taken care of unifying his being and instilling his con­sciousness into the elements that make up his body, his sleep will be a conscious sleep and of a universal nature. He will be able to know at will what is happening in one place or another, in this person or that one, in this part of the world or another; and, being universal, his consciousness will naturally put him in touch with all the things he wants to know. Instead of an unconscious and useless sleep—except from the purely physiological point of view—he will have a productive and entirely conscious sleep.¹⁰ And She thus explained the method of recall: Keep your head exactly where it was and make a sort of tranquil mirror within your­self, and concentrate on that. Then you’ll catch just the tail end of the dream. Grasp it and pull gently, still without moving. Pull very gently, and one part of the dream will come, then another. Keep going backwards. The end comes up first. Everything goes backwards, slowly—and suddenly the whole dream will flash back: “There it is. So that’s what it was!” But don't jump; keep very quiet. Just repeat the dream to yourself several times—once, twice—until it is cleat- in every detail. Once this dream is worked out, continue not to move and try to go farther within—suddenly you'll catch the tail end of something else. This one is more distant and vague, but you can still grasp it. Here too hang on and pull it in the same way—and you see that everything changes, you enter another world. All of a sudden, you're in the midst of an extraordinary adventure—it's another dream. Follow the same process. Tell yourself the dream once or twice until you’re sure to remember. Remain very quiet. Then start going even deeper within yourself, as if you were getting in farther and farther. And then, suddenly, you’ll catch a vague form, a feeling, a sensation ... like a breath of air, a gentle breeze, a little puff "Well, well!" you say to yourself. It slowly takes shape, grows clearer—and this is the third category.¹¹

And finally, at the end of all the categories, there was a supreme phase up above in the consciousness, a purely luminous, white and motionless phase, where everything rested as if in an eternity, and which left one completely refreshed, A few minutes in that bath and everything was supremely relaxed and renewed.

We have yet to discover that all these worlds or planes are the source of all that happens to us here, and that our millions of little chance events are infallibly, methodically and continuously woven there, as if by someone who knows all and sees all—and who is perhaps ourselves without the partitioning of a little mental shell.

Then we shall realize that we are naturally universal.

The Subtle Body

But first, there was that immediate frontier of Matter one was not sure whether it was still Matter or something else, perhaps another type of Matter, or real Matter itself? But that She saw even with her eyes open. Around herself and around everyone (though with very different aspects), She saw a lighter body, a lighter garment that She took on for her excursions in Matter’s immediate vicinity—a world resembling the physical world, but a physical that would be less grating, where things are more harmonious and satisfy­ing, less excited; there is less of that feeling of haste and uncertainty.¹² And this lighter body used to follow her everywhere, even on the boulevard, and seemed to be the means of transportation into that other, less heavy Matter —like a lining of the physical world,¹³ She said. She was discovering what thousands of people, not necessarily wise, had discovered here or there, under every latitude and over thousands of years, but which is veiled to us by our too heavily materialistic look—the sukshma sharira of Indian tradition, the "subtle body,” which is going to play an important role in our story, as we shall see. This body She had been seeing for a long time, ever since She was very young: The higher understanding of the intellectual con­sciousness came long after the experience. Since my earliest childhood, experiences have come like that: something massive takes hold of you and you don’t need to believe or disbelieve, know or not know—bam! There's nothing to say—you are facing a FACT.¹⁴ The “fact," in this case, was the body that people sometimes take on in their sleep, or even more radi­cally when they die. It is the first step in a journey we have yet to undertake with Mirra. We are actually fortunate to find in Mirra an experimenter who is not perverted by the sum of her past experiences and everything that has been woven around them—a kind of spontaneous Einstein free from all the possibilities or impossibilities of Newtonian mechanics, Sanskrit grammar and initiatory treatises. We might call her a materialist of the Spirit.

We could agree with Mathilde that all this was the stuff of dreams, and we would not deny it, for after all Einsteins equations are also a kind of dream for a good many (per­haps) superior mammals. Let us recall a lively little scene between Mathilde and Mirra, which took place soon after the amazing grandmother's death. “Just imagine," said Mathilde, “I'm constantly seeing your grandmother! And, what's more, she gives me advice! ‘Don’t waste your money,' she tells me." “Well, she’s right, one must be careful,” I replied, (we can well imagine Mirra's tone while her cheeks puffed with suppressed laughter) “But look here, she’s dead! How can she talk to me! She’s dead, I tell you, and quite dead at that!” I said to her, “What does it mean, to die?" It was all very funny.¹⁵ Because for us, whatever takes place outside the fishbowl is obviously a "dream.” Perhaps we are the dream of fish. Or whose dream are we? To find out, we must get out of the bowl. To make things clearer, I could give an example of that subtle physical; it is a personal example, but after all, what good is the most extraordinary knowledge in the world if it is to remain in libraries? A person very close to me committed suicide in France while I was in India. To do so, he rented a room in a small town where I had never been. Of course, I had no idea that he was going to kill himself. And one night, in a deep sleep, I saw something that seemed quite banal and insignificant to me, but as Mother had taught me never to disregard anything (especially "banalities”), I recorded the scene. I was climbing a rather dark staircase and I came to a room. I did not enter this room but only stood at the threshold. Somehow I understood it was this person s room but I did not see him. My eyes simply scanned the room—longer than it was wide, carpeted with a kind of straw-colored carpet and completely bare except for a whitewood bed in the far end corner. All this was clearly seen. But my eyes lingered especially on a window, as if this window had a sort of special intensity. Through this window, one could see a small square with trees (the room was over­looking them), lined with houses on one side and a kind of rather low rampart on the other; this square extended out perpendicularly and disappeared into the distance under a pallid, misty and icy sky streaked with black clouds. I gazed at that sky for a long time, and there was a sort of moving intensity in it all. And that was all. Nothing really interesting. Two days later a telegram came announcing his death. I remembered my "room” and immediately sent a sketch of it with the window. It was the very room where he had committed suicide, with the difference that there was no carpet on the floor, but a parquet of pitch pine— which is straw-colored. I had not seen the lines between the boards. Six thousand miles away, it is not surprising. But the window with its landscape was exactly as I had seen it. He was found lying on the threshold of the room. I had seen what his last look saw.

This is a journey in the subtle physical, with the subtle body.

I wonder if our telescopes would have seen the lines on the floor through the walls, from Pondicherry all the way to the French Atlantic coast. One can only wonder how I went there without knowing anything, at the very moment he was dying. Forewarned how? This is the constant great illusion of separateness (such is the real "dream” of the world); we cannot help thinking and feeling that there is there and here, you and me separated in two little bags of skin, and lots of little unknown rooms out there, but as Mother said, You are there, lam there, and everything is there / We are one and the same body calling out and answering itself across thousands of nonexistent miles. Only, we have to get out of the fishbowl; we have to stop being the dream of fish, or of someone else—who is perhaps ourselves, complete and without divisions at last.

Had it not played a very decisive role in everyday life, this subtle body might not have particularly interested Mirra, for after all, may the “dead” rest in peace and what good are journeys in the subtle physical if they do not improve our journey right here? We may not all be fortunate enough (?) to see our subtle body, but it is there nevertheless, and with­out it we would be just a more or less chubby automaton feeling and perceiving nothing but what came in direct contact with its skin or retina. It is our instrument of com­munication with the “outside." All the vibrations of the horizontal world come in through it. It can be considered our psychological clothing, an envelope made up of all the forces we are used to collecting—we could say "secreting,” but in fact we do not secrete anything; we ceaselessly take in, and once it is inside, we say "this is mine.” We are not aware of the intrusion of vibrations. To tell the truth, we live haphazardly. So this clothing takes on the color and intensity of our vibratory habits. There are all kinds of clothing; we are a whole network of microscopic, habitual forces of anxiety, desire, anger, stray impulses, thirsts or aspirations ... which make up a more or less strong and clear garment—red, blue or green, but most often a "horrid mixture” reminiscent of the best Picassos. And sometimes there is no color at all, just a gray blur. A dark magma. And sometimes this clothing is full of holes. Depression, discouragement have a disastrous effect; they riddle it with holes, as it were, weaken its fabric, strip it of all resistance and open up an easy path for hostile attacks. And it is constantly changing. It is open to every kind of suggestion, and they can, from one moment to the next, change and almost reverse its condition. A wrong suggestion has the strongest effect on it, while a good one is equally effective in the opposite direction ... Peace, an equal temper, confidence, faith in good health, a restful and an unchanging good mood, and a radiant happiness give it strength and substance.¹⁶ It is the entryway of all our illnesses. We speak of such and such a microbe, such and such a germ, but there is noth­ing that is not a “microbe” or a “virus”; we are entirely made up of these things! Mother exclaimed. They give ugly names to the things they don’t want, but it’s all one and the same thing.... What’s called “illness” is something constant, a constant state in which you are, or aren’t.¹⁷ When we are in a good temper the "microbe” does not act; when we are in a bad temper, anything can turn into an illness. We are inside the illness. We happen to catch the little "chance" accident we have meticulously woven around ourselves. We carry the illness of our own clothing. That is the only illness.

And the only cure is to repair the clothing, mend the holes, take on another color—a brighter and healthier one. But to do this, we first have to make our substance a little "clearer,” to stop being a public place where anything can drop in of its own sweet will. Then we start perceiving "the dance of vibrations." As they approach us, we see them outside of ourselves, as if coming tangentially toward us, just as they touch our envelope or subtle body—a tiny vibration with varying intensity and all sorts of colors, which says exactly what it is: desire, anger, a dark thought or suggestion of illness; it is unmistakable despite all the smiles, fine words or pleasant airs that can be stuck onto it. It may be accompanied by a feeling, by a taste, or even by an odor... Some formations of illness impart a special taste, a special odor, a particular little sensation to the air, like when you rub a piece of fabric against the grain. ¹⁸ The whole world becomes clear; everything becomes clear. We are the master of our own house, letting in what we want, kicking out or sweeping away what we do not want. And all of life becomes quite different, instead of being that incompre­hensible and horrid mixture. And when we go out of our body to die or to "dream,” we are sure to avoid many night­mares.

Vertical Determinism

Then there is the whole world of vertical vibrations.

To go there had no meaning for her unless something of it could be brought back here. An inner illumination that does not take into account the body or external life is fairly useless, because it leaves the world exactly as it is.¹⁹ Instead of our polychrome, fragmented, syncopated and discor­dant little racket, She wanted to grasp the pure flowing, the great rhythmic waves of the Shakti—that single body of consciousness or force She saw passing through all sorts of human or nonhuman little “relays," and which seemed to alter, take on a yellow or black color, according to the medium it went through, scatter and almost pulverize itself as it plunged into Matter. She spontaneously felt that, if a pure drop of that could be made to flow into Matter, it could change everything. "To change” was already her mantra or her password. After all, death—that blackness which absorbs all the colors of the spectrum without reflecting anything, which no longer responds, and decays because it no longer responds, that ultimate pulverization —was merely a paroxysm of discordance. If one could instill the Rhythm everywhere and in everything, the mortal consequences of that discordance had to stop. It was almost a question of "mechanics” for her: How to straighten what is twisted? Any deviation from what to me was the luminous line, the straight line (not geometrically straight: the lumi­nous line), or the pure light—the slightest deviation from that and ... Oh, it was the only thing that tormented me ... No sense of being virtuous or sinful, none at all—never.²⁰ The straight ray. This was what She sought and wanted to instill into everything, at every step and in the slightest banality. Without that straight ray, everything was or could be mortal. Death began when the ray broke up. This ray She felt above her; She saw it go through all those different zones and take on color, refract itself as in the pharmacist's little bottles, break up and scatter into innumerable little forces quarrelling naturally with each another because each one wanted to be the only ray, and naturally suffering because each one was in search of the great ray that it no longer was. It was simple—but then why was it so compli­cated?

As soon as one rose a single step, a single degree above the little fishbowl, everything began to change. One could see and follow all the little forces frolicking underneath like fish in an aquarium—the shoals of petty thoughts, the swirls of desires, the rush of dwarf or more voracious wills assaulting each other or moving from one person to another without discrimination; and all that generated all sorts of evil spells with sometimes, by chance, little bubbles of light altering the direction of the forces and currents. Among the hundreds of small incidents Mirra saw constantly, one in particular must have struck her because She recounted it several times. It took place in the days when everyone in Paris read the newspaper Le Matin. The top of the front page displayed a little page boy gently holding out a calen­dar with the day's date. It was the 22nd or the 23rd with its usual calamities, but the gentle little page boy was there all the same. The hero of this incident had rented a room in a big hotel; he had just arrived from a long trip and was tired; he fell asleep. But during the night he saw something quite strange: the little page boy from Le Matin was coming toward him, but, instead of holding out the date and inviting him to the joys of the new day, he was inviting him to step into ... his own hearse. Sleep is full of strange happenings and, well, the traveler did not pay too much attention; he got up, shaved and left his room to go downstairs. Right in the corridor, one of the hotel’s pageboys politely invited him to step into the elevator ... He froze, suddenly recalling his "dream." “No, thank you, I’ll walk down.” Two minutes later, the elevator crashed to the ground floor.

This, too, is an excursion in the subtle physical, just one little step above this Matter that appears so material to us—a lucky excursion. But we could perhaps undertake many such lucky excursions that would ward off all the little evil spells of the currents of force colliding within our human fishbowl. We might enjoy a more pleasant journey in Matter if we brought in it the view from above and the ray from above. Which is exactly what Mirra was saying. For all these divided and tangled forces stem from a single Force, after all. There are not umpteen forces in the world, nor umpteen evil spells or “good ones”; there is only one, and if we touch this pure “one,” if we can bring it down into this chaos, all the laws of the fishbowl ought to be altered— or, rather, the whole milieu and its index of refraction will be altered, and what appeared to us divided, fragmented, clashing, colored or discolored like a disparate palette, would start flowing in another way and produce a com­pletely different picture.

We do not really know what the picture of the world looks like. We live an approximation, almost a caricature, of something that eludes us, but which is here nevertheless, entirely here, for where actually is “elsewhere”? Elsewhere is merely clothed in everything we put on it; it has the color of our eyes and the thickness of our fingers, it is as far away as our heart and the millions of light-years of our thoughts and the laws of our thought. In fact, the goal of the journey is not to "get out” of it all, to climb the summits of con­sciousness, crossing plane after plane in order to reach some inaccessible "something," but perhaps simply to cross our own sargassos, through layers and layers of accu­mulated evolution, which give us a feeling of traveling, of going farther and farther away into an ever clearer, lighter and vaster elsewhere—but this vastness was there all the time, beneath our every step and in the grayest of banalities; this lightness was always within us, and this clarity was not from far "above” but from a cleared up right-here. Our heav­ens are not millions of miles away, nor tomorrow or in "other" lives; the complete life is right here, and death is only the journey of our unconsciousness—when that layer, too, is cleared up, eternity will shine in the moment and heaven will dwell in our weightless body. There is no jour­ney! There is no tomorrow, no elsewhere, no "something else"—there is this eternal thing beneath our footsteps and in our least gestures, covered over by a million colors and laws that are only the law of that color and the implacable gravitation of our own darkness. In reality, we live within an infinitely light and fluid and supple and incredible world— but we do not believe in it; we believe in death, in Newton, in Mendel’s laws and all the implacable equations of the doctors and judges of a little colored bubble they them­selves have inflated. We follow the inexorable determinism of our own color and our own milieu of consciousness. Layers upon layers of determinism,²¹ Mother would say. It is as if this immense world were a huge projection—one single projection—crossing increasingly dense and dark layers, and taking on the color or the "law” of each level; but it is one and the same ray from the same pure, light, immense, seeing and free Shakti!—the same thing always, for there are not two. We ourselves, in that little body of ours, are made of a series of superimposed milieus, of dense or not so dense layers, each with its little center attuned to the corresponding universal layer or milieu, and we have every possible kind of life depending on the center or milieu where we are poised. We could say that we are capable of living every possible kind of story, and that every particular gesture or scene or accident occurring below is like a caricature or a distortion of an identical gesture or scene which, if enacted at a higher level, could have resulted in an entirely different story, though still the same, but seen in another light, as if in each life we painted a picture with one particular color—and sometimes we get little flashes of a different color (a little break in the absurd determinism) which herald the next painting, the same story, but purer and more harmonious. We could say that every circum­stance, event or thing has a pure existence, which is the true existence, and a large number of impure or distorted exist­ences, which are the existence of that very SAME thing in die. various realms of the being,²² said Mother. Which amounts to saying that, despite the most absolute determinisms along the horizontal line, if you know how to cross all these hori­zontal lines and reach the supreme Point of consciousness, you can alter things that appear absolutely determined.²³ Rather like the person of the second-floor who stops a falling rock from crushing the head of a passerby, by simply extending his hand out the window. The little page boy of the "dream" is only a first step in this new "vertical deter­minism”—a first step "above," as we said, but it may be simply a first disentanglement of the “immediately-there," a first clearing-up of the thick layer we live in, a first light­ness amid the barbaric equations. A beginning of the real story.

And perhaps we are forever enacting one and the same immense scene, life after life, but each time in a fuller light. The world is an eternal story growing clearer. We are a total “someone else" gradually becoming himself.

The Meeting

It is the story of the world that Mirra would have wished clearer. Her own She knew well; it had been lived and gone over under every possible headdress, Pharaonic headgears as well as straw hats. What She saw around her were Rodin's woes, Rouault's woes, Morisset’s woes: "What! Is this life? What! Are these men?"—everyone's woes under a shiny or not so shiny coating. It was those little deter­minisms She would have liked to change and perhaps, ultimately, the dark determinism of this world confined within a thin and supposedly scientific layer, with each one shut up in a bag of Matter which he thought rigid, separate and mortal. May the illusion be dispelled! She exclaimed in one of her earliest writings. May this painful universe emerge from its frightening nightmare, shake off its dreadful dream.²⁴ And what did She have at her disposal? "Dreams," chaotic and sometimes inexplicable visions, countless perceptions that punctured appearances without healing them, rhythms of another harmony, little vibrations as sparkling as a diamond light, which seemed to rip the darkness without dispelling it, level upon level of con­sciousness that seemed to end in a rarefied air, worlds and bodies that no longer were the earth’s body, unless they were from another, still unborn earth. All this was sketchy, mixed, unexplained. She had only that thirst, as if her thirst were her clearest certainty, a sort of unborn future burning within like a white flame—"dreams." "You'll never achieve anything in life.” She was twenty-six. She was alone. Yet She felt that there had to be a way of driving these dreams down into Matter—the way, there had to be a way. And it was this thirst for a way that ultimately crys­tallized the way; all these “dreams” and "imaginations,” as they say rather commiseratingly, were preparing an over­whelming revolution whose magnitude the world has not yet begun to comprehend. Oh, we do have our imaginings of death, of the telephone, the bomb or our medical charts; we have every destructive imagination, not to mention the most splendid imagination of the great scientific doctors who prescribe remedies for diseases they themselves have created, chemical fertilizers to enrich lands they have emp­tied of their birds—all the pharmacology in keeping with their indigent consciousness. But there are some rare beings —still children—who have the imagination of truth,²⁵ as Mother would say, some young shoots, still untouched by the putrid wind of our intelligent civilization, who have the capacity to imagine something still unmanifested—a truer earth, a more living Matter—who have antennae that seem to reach out into a still unrealized world, capturing something there and then pulling it down here.²⁶ This is what Mirra was already doing—pulling. She was gropingly pulling down tomorrow’s world. She was seeing a Matter that is to be our next Matter; She was unwittingly looking for that small number of beings capable of bringing down another determinism into the physical determinism.²⁷

She was quite alone.

Then, toward the beginning of 1904, when She was quite at the end of her own resources and just before meeting a strange character who was to give her, at last, some rather coherent explanations of her experiences, Mirra had a series of "dreams" (more dreams) in which She met... Sri Aurobindo, whom She had never heard of and who was completely unknown in France—ten years before meeting him physically in Pondicherry in 1914. / had a series of visions and in several of these visions ... (I knew nothing about India, mind you, nothing, just as most Europeans know nothing about it: a country full of people with certain customs and religions, a confused and hazy history, where a lot of "extraordinary things" are said to have happened. I knew nothing.) Well, in these visions I saw Sri Aurobindo just as he looked physically, but glorified; that is, the same man I would see on my first visit, almost thin, with that golden-bronze hue and rather sharp profile, an unruly beard and long hair, dressed in a dhoti with one end of it thrown over his shoulder, arms and chest bare, and bare feet. At the time I thought it was ‘vision attire’! I mean I really knew nothing about India; I had never seen Indians dressed in the Indian way ... And in these visions I did something I had never done physically: I prostrated before him in the Hindu manner. All this without any comprehension in the little brain (I mean I really didn’t know what I was doing or how I was doing it—nothing at all). I did it, and at the same time the outer being was asking, ‘What is all this?’²⁸

What is quite interesting is that just at the beginning of 1904 Sri Aurobindo was starting his own conscious yoga, while Mirra, as for her, was setting out on her systematic exploration of the planes of consciousness or layers of determinism in order to go back to that “Supreme Point." As if they both were waiting for this encounter to start their work together—ten years before meeting each other.

It was an encounter in the subtle physical, just a little step above Matter (but is it really above and outside of Matter, or within a Matter more exact than that of our eyes?).

If these are "dreams," then where is reality? Or perhaps reality is a dream becoming real, according to the dreamer’s capacity? Some people have the capacity to dream the future of the world, just as others capture little hells that become real or thin utilities that vanish away. Let us beware of our dreams. For what can we actually dream within our fishbowl? No dream is ours, nor can we engender a single thought of our own; it all comes and goes and passes and rolls amid the great torrent of the Shakti; we catch small sorrows, big sorrows, gray or pink dreams, depending on the wavelength we are able to tune in to, and all that is the distortion, clear or cloudy to varying degrees, of the ray crossing our fishbowl. But the future is not tomorrow, any more than Pondicherry is six thousand miles away, the meeting in ten years’ time or the great light that will change everything millennial distances away and on ethereal planes. It is at the distance of our own obstruction; the future is the slow journey through our layers of unconsciousness; tomor­row is on the other side of the fishbowl just as we are for our brothers the fish; our heavens are not waiting for our death, nor is our freedom waiting for super-constitutions, any more than the beautiful earth is waiting for a millen­nium of grace—it is all here, unhindered, it is not on any other side or at any distance. There is no other side than the thickness of our consciousness, no determinism other than the darkness of our own milieu, no laws other than those we dream up within a fishbowl. Let us beware of our dreams. The future is a great solar flower shining in our midst, which seems to open petal by petal as our eyes are unsealed—and what if we opened our eyes a little quicker? What if we understood a little quicker? What if we tore this false darkness with a radiant gaze? Oh, what are we waiting for?!

Some people open their eyes sooner, quicker, and they draw into our consciousnesses this great, right-here dream, which is a dream only to us. They experience the pain of bearing the dark layer of unconsciousness so the ray may reach our opaque substance. They are waiting and waiting ... Oh, what are we waiting for to wake up from this nightmare? And we invent machines, constitutions and panaceas that always fail, while the one Gaze that would dispel all our phantoms is waiting—if only we understood.

One may perhaps wonder how Mirra could, ten years in advance, meet someone She did not know, a "stranger” whom She thought wore a "vision attire" (!). But where is the "unknown,” except in our fishbowl; where is the “other,” the great mystery without mysteries? The mystery is in our layer of unconsciousness; the other is our self that thinks it lives in a separate little bag. We have been walking since time immemorial with a million “strangers” who have shared our roof, our play and our woes, toward one supreme point where all recognize each other because each one is all and all was forever known. Time may be only the slow­ness of our consciousness. Mother and Sri Aurobindo had long walked together, long dreamed together, and each time their dream drew closer, each time they cleared the way a little more for the great ray. They had “the imagina­tion of Truth”; they drew onto earth the real reality that the ordinary world calls illusion.²⁹