Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

8: Tlemcen 1: The Doors of the Possible

A new and strange adventure was about to begin in that already strange life. We have called it “Mother's great forest,’’ and we could wander it to the very last day of her ninety-five years and still discover even greater mysteries than we had suspected—transparent mysteries, which are the most undecipherable; every time we try to decipher them, they elude us, laughing in our face, or take us along a totally unexpected path which suddenly opens up on a dazzling spread of light, as if we were on the verge of— what? Something gaping at a vertiginous future. It is fan­tastic and yet real, more real than today’s concrete reality, but when we try to grab hold of it, it slips away—we cannot catch it. One cannot decipher Mother; one has to plunge into Her. And come what may. Mother is the greatest novel we have ever experienced—everything is there; love, beauty, vastness, the unexpected, the paths of the future, the paths of the past; one wanders there as in a future beforehand; it is the fiction of the Infinite becoming true.

And so many other things that cannot be put into words, which beat within a secret abyss and will go on beating long after our little bodies are no longer there. There is nothing to believe in, nothing to believe at all—one must simply taste.

Yet this new episode—occultism—closely resembles a dead-end adventure, a path one should not take, but then we always wonder what path ‘‘should not” be taken, for after all there is no path anywhere; walking is what makes the path and walking is what is necessary—to the left or to the right, above or below—and if we are sincere, really sincere, we are bound to end up exactly where we are supposed to go. ‘‘Sincere”—another one of Mother's key words. And as for all the occult knowledge She had accumu­lated, the science of the fourth dimension, those astounding powers that leave common people dumbfounded because they do not understand the process—She quite simply let it all drop by the wayside one day in May 1962:1 no longer need all that. Perhaps because the fourth dimension had merged with this one ... Indeed, there is something simpler, more direct—and more extraordinarily effective. Mirra was always seeking effectiveness. Nevertheless, it took her fifty-eight years to drop that baggage. Might we take advan­tage of the shortcut?... But, truly, what is "useless” or "circuitous” in this good universe? We have yet to find a single blade of grass that does not have its specific use in Nature’s economy, like that Vedic Rishi s disciple who, after studying all the medicinal plants, was sent into the forest by his master: "Bring me a plant that is useless and I will give you initiation." The disciple went, searched and searched, then came back in despair: “I haven't found the plant.” Whereupon the Rishi pressed him to his heart; the disciple no longer needed initiation because he had received knowledge. It is that simple—but quite difficult to realize in every detail, with our eyes wide open, because at the first scratch or "mishap" or “sin,” we raise the rafters: "That shouldn’t have happened!" But everything should happen, ; and perfectly so. Including that delicious original apple, : whose falling might not have been such a bad thing after ! all. It is for us to make sense of it. This is a vital truth when wandering through Mother's forest. Then, specks of gold and meaning start shining everywhere before our eyes, where once there had only been useless dust. But Mother’s forest can also be held within a speck of dust ; it is a magical forest of all dimensions.

A Doge in Dark Purple

It was through a friend of Matteo’s that one day in 1904 Mirra was to meet a singular man who called himself Max Theon—The "Supreme God,” no less. He never said who he really was or where he was born, nor his age, nor anything.¹ It seems he was a Russian or Polish Jew, who was forced to leave his country for that reason. He published in Paris a magazine called La Tradition Cosmique through the agency of someone called Themanlys, a friend of Matteo’s. Mirra pounced on it like a starving lioness. It was the first time ever She had heard of something similar to her own expe­riences, albeit in a rather bizarre language. For her, it was a revelation; all of that had a meaning at last; She was not totally crazy! Perhaps she knew even more than she had realized! We can picture this well-bred little positivist— odd and alien among humans, silent, always silent, because for twenty-six years She could never say anything without being threatened to be taken to the nearest doctor—suddenly thrown into the rationality of her irrational world. It was a sort of cataclysm in reverse—at long last, I am not crazy! She must suddenly have laughed to her heart s content. But let us not be mistaken; Mirra was not the type to gape with admiration and throw herself at the feet of the first mas­ter who comes along (except, of course, in “dreams,” but dreams are strange, as anyone knows). She looked at her cataclysm calmly, but nonetheless with a sigh of relief, now that she knew she was sane and normal. And who was that mysterious initiate? Themanlys knew little about him and spoke of him in the trembling whispers of a young neophyte. "He" lived far away in Algeria, in Tlemcen. That was all. And "He” knew. Then, one fine day, Max Theon unexpectedly turned up in Paris—he already knew who Mirra was. Indeed, he knew many things. Theon was rather tall, about the same size as Sri Aurobindo, and thin, slim, with quite a similar profile. But Mirra immediately knew that he was not the person of her visions. I saw (or rather I felt) that it was not he, because when I met him, he didn’t have that vibration.² Indeed it was not "that vibration”; it was something quite different. Yet, strikingly, there was a likeness—and there would be many more likenesses to Sri Aurobindo's discoveries, but with just that "little difference” which made them stand worlds apart, as if Nature took pleasure in devising the counter-type or anti-type of each being—and the more powerful the model, the more power­ful the anti-model, so to speak. Nietzsche had died just four years earlier—another curious model, or anti-model, we do not know which. Anti-models may well have been devised by Nature to force the models to go beyond themselves and to grow so much ... that no more caricature is possible, or that the reverse of what one represents vanishes at the point where reverses or obverses cease to exist. But that is another story.

Indeed, “that vibration” was not there, but something even more bizarre greeted Mirra’s eyes: suddenly, a portrait by Titian She had seen eleven years earlier in Venice (when Mirra "looked” at something, it was inscribed for centuries, like Thebes’ gutters) superimposed itself over Theon's face in a flash. Absolutely Theon! HIS portrait, you know, as if it had just been done.³ It was the portrait of one of the doges —Mirra had certain suffocating memories from the Palazzo Ducale. She must have swallowed a little hard, and then flashed a broad impassive smile, which probably did not fool Theon for a minute. Things were off to a good start. It might be interesting to know which doge it was, but unfortunately I have never seen the Titian in question, nor have I been able to compare it with one of the most strik­ing portraits Mirra has ever drawn—that of Theon. It looks like one of Rembrandt s etchings, or perhaps a Durer figure: a rather sparse beard, long hair, a black velvet cap, maybe fifty or sixty years old (or forty?), an ascetic face, an eagle's profile, and those eyes ... One side of the face almost illu­mined, clear, with a faint smile hesitating imperceptibly between irony and the lights of heaven, and a chilling left side. Powerful, incredibly powerful indeed, but a power ... Pain, perhaps—that pain everywhere in the depths of human beings—the pain of not being what one is, which results in a sort of struggle to emerge from one's reverse side into one’s obverse side of joy—a power condensed in one point instead of bursting out in the vastness. A high, very high forehead, which must have been capable of receiving many things. A remarkable intuition,⁴ Sri Aurobindo himself would say, which is no meager compliment coming from his pen. And a long, dark purple toga, fastened with a red cord.

It is not hard to imagine one of those powerful doges who carved out their domains from Dalmatia to the Pelo­ponnese and Byzantium or waged their bloody struggles against the Sforzas, then coolly tossed their victims off the Bridge of Sighs. Assuming that Theon's "genealogy” is correct, one may be surprised to see him set out on the “spiritual" path, but our conception of the "Spirit" is prob­ably as erroneous as our perception of Matter, and for the same reason. When speaking of Napoleon, Sri Aurobindo saw God armed striding through Europe,⁵ and this “evolution of consciousness,” which was also one of Theon's themes ("if only humanity understood its role as evolutionary agent of the planet,”⁶ he said) does not necessarily, or preferably, involve little saints. To evolve means to churn Matter, not to soar into heaven. But the way of the Spirit and the way of the Titan are separated by an imperceptible hair, which has only to do with a tiny difference of inner attitude: in one case, one seizes hold of the Shakti while in the other, one lets it flow through oneself—but in both cases the Shakti can strike just as cruelly. This time, Theon too "was meeting the problem from a different angle”: he was going after the Spirit as one goes after Euboea. And he found Mirra on his path. The world is truly a strange thing, infinitely stranger than it seems to us, and infinitely more fabulous than anything all our telescopes can discover across interstellar space; the least thing that takes place here, the least encounter on this earth, describes trajectories next to which the great orbits of our constellations are but four-lane highways totally devoid of mystery. We pass each other by as if it were the first time, for a few seconds or a few years, while that chance gesture echoes the memories of old disasters or pursues an old interrupted story, which will still continue under other latitudes and beneath other skies, in a dark purple robe or in the lightness of a self that no longer needs to shine in any color or conquer anything, because it has all the colors of love in its heart and a single delight in everything. We do not know the millions of "chances” that led to this little chance nor which Titian was preparing this conjunction, unless everything is woven from a single thread—a single picture gradually unveiling itself—the motion of one single Body moving through timeless ages with its myriad little doges shut up in a body, in quest of the one body, the one force and the one conscious­ness, and the one love that would cure all our truncated spaces and misery-laden ages.

But Wisdom is wise. It veils our ancient misdeeds as well as our good deeds so that, free of both, we may move ahead. In any event, Theon had recognized at first glance, if not who Mirra was, at least her uncommon gifts, and he invited her to visit him in Tlemcen—to work. She would go there two consecutive years, in 1905 and 1906, so far as we can determine dates as far as Mother is concerned whose fore­most gift was undoubtedly to slip through all times at once.

Zarif

It was undeniably a wonderful place. Theon had good taste, though sometimes his taste was sarcastic. Zarif was the name he gave to his terraced gardens on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains. A sprawling estate with hundred-year- old olive trees, fig trees unlike any I have ever seen—it was a marvel, just on the hillside, from, the plains all the way up to almost the middle of the mountain....⁷ and a rose garden that was “a work of art,” according to Themanlys, for "Aia” (as Theon had himself called by the Arabs; Aia Azis, "the Beloved," which is a little more amiable than "Supreme God" but hardly more reassuring) was also a gardener—as well as a painter, sculptor, carpenter and ironsmith; he did everything. "To cultivate men as one cultivates plants!" he exclaimed. "Indeed, if one knew it, wanted it, dared it!”⁸ He dared aplenty. But let Mirra herself tell us about that first memorable encounter. It was the first time in my life I had travelled alone and the first time I had crossed the Mediter­ranean. Then there was a fairly long train ride between Oran and Tlemcen—anyway, I managed rather well: I got there. He met me at the station and we set off for his place by car (it was rather far away). Finally we reached his estate—a won­der! It spread across the hillside overlooking the whole valley of Tlemcen. We arrived from below and had to climb up some wide pathways. I said nothing.... When we came in sight of the house, he stopped: “That's my house. "It was red! Painted red! And he added, “When Barlet came here, he asked me, ‘Why did you paint your house red?’" (Barlet was a French occultist who put Theon in touch with France and was his first disciple.) There was a mischievous gleam in Theon’s eyes and he smiled sardonically: "I told Barlet, ‘Because red goes well with green!’" With that, I began to understand the gentle­man.... We continued on our way uphill when suddenly, without warning, he spun around, planted himself in front of me, and sa id, “Now you are at my mercy. Aren't you afraid? " Just like that. So I looked at him, smiled and replied, “I’m , never afraid. I have the Divine here." [And Mirra touched y that white flame in her heart.]

Well, he really went pale.⁹

We cannot help thinking of Gurdjieff and Katherine Mansfield. But Gurdjieff was a little boy compared to Theon, and Mirra was not Katherine Mansfield.

Thus one went through the rose garden with a smile, then through the last terraced garden with a "square pool where water kept spurting out from a spring,”¹⁰ and finally up a little staircase of white stones that led to a high court­yard and Theon’s house. "A Moorish manor,” painted red for the color scheme, as we have seen, with a living room on a level with the garden and overlooking “mosaic court­yards enclosed by high walls, with ogival doors adorned with huge amphoras reminiscent of Scheherazade tales,” said Themanlys, though I am not so sure about Schehe­razade. But there were those terraced gardens. And a grand concert piano in the middle of the living room, with Theon himself standing there in his dark purple toga. There was also an Arab gong, which had the strange habit of resound­ing all by itself, whenever Theon looked at it somewhat seriously. I really saw all kinds of things there, Mother would tell us, and we can well believe it.

But there was also another person, and that was Mrs. Theon. Another personality altogether. Actually, she was the one who had amazing powers—a vast knowledge of the psychic planes,¹¹ Sri Aurobindo would later say—and it was on her experiences that Theon based his teaching. She was Theon’s foundation, and regardless of what can be thought of him, it was certainly to his credit to have been chosen as the companion of this marvelous woman—marvelous! (said Mother), who had certainly enough knowledge and clairvoyance to choose a very capable being for herself. Overwhelmingly capable—that was the trouble. Yet Alma, as she was called, was all sweetness and silent light: Such a soft, tender, luminous peace.¹² We can imagine her wide blue eyes, which seemed to have been washed by the sea, for she came from the Isle of Wight (at least we know where she came from). A small woman, fat, almost flabby— she gave you the feeling that if you leaned against her, it would melt ... absolutely the feeling of sinking into eider­down,¹³ dressed in a long white dalmatic, with an air of being elsewhere, constantly elsewhere, rather sensitive to cold—indeed she spent three-fourths of her life in trance, outside her body, even while she walked, moved about or attended to her chores. She was almost constantly in trance, but she had trained her body so well that even when she was in trance, that is, when one part (or more) of her being was exteriorized, her body kept a life of its own and she could walk about and even attend to small material chores.¹⁴ She could also speak and narrate everything she saw on the other planes, while she was exploring them, which is how Theon gathered all the material for his Revue Cosmique. "Her eyes have the purity of a child's, but they look tired of having seen so many things,”¹⁵ Themanlys noted. She had absolutely fabulous talents! Mother exclaimed, and coming from Mother's lips, who herself was not lacking in rather surprising talents, these words set one thinking. Her powers were of the highest order; she had received an extremely complete and rigorous training, and she was capable of exteriorizing herself, that is, to draw out a subtle body from her material body, totally consciously, and twelve times in a row. In other words, she could shift consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, then again put that more subtle body into trance, exteriorize herself from it, and so on, twelve times in

a row, up to the extreme limit of the world of forms.¹⁶

It is this extreme limit that interests us.

Strange Matter

What was that bizarre couple doing together?

Indeed everything at Zarif seemed to behave in a strange manner and to follow a different law, as if one were entering another world. Matter responded to a different force—was it a “different” force or a different degree of the same force? When the ground was too dry, Theon made the rain fall on his roses while not a drop fell twenty yards away, or he sent the rain to the poor fcllaheens (and also cured them by looking at them, which is perhaps why he deserved to be called “Beloved” after all). They would take a walk along the shaded lanes scented with "marvels-of-Peru," while delightful little asps worthy of Cleopatras slithered up to them or slipped away beneath Theon's gaze, who pretended not to notice anything while watching Mirra out of the corner of his eye. Mirra smiled; She was a friend of all animals, and She understood them very well. Theon, too, understood—he had easily learned his lesson. All in all, it was quite pleasant ; one got on with everything—one got on and everything got on with everything within the complicity of a different law where nothing was “another thing” or "another” body. When Mrs. Theon needed her sandals, she did not go to get them; she made them come to her, very quietly; or else, like Theon, she rang the gong by looking at it rather than shouting for a servant, and all this was done in the most natural way, unostentatiously, as naturally as we would press an electric button—which sometimes fails to work, whereas that current never failed and was simplicity itself. She didn't boast; she didn't say, “I’m going to do this or that"; she didn't say anything—she did it quietly.¹⁷ It would be a mistake to think that Theon or Mrs. Theon were trying to show off their powers, which, by the way, did not impress Mirra. But they amused her; She was thoroughly enjoying herself. It was simply a different knowl­edge and different laws that were at work. Sometimes, however, they indulged in rather dubious jokes, for instance, like the day when that somewhat limpet-like Arab merchant had planted himself in the dining room and would not budge. All of a sudden, I heard a scream—a terrified shriek. The table had started moving (a huge oak table), and with an almost heroic lunge it charged at the poor man ... Madame Theon hadn't touched it, nobody had touched it. First the table wobbled a little, then it slowly started moving, then suddenly, in a single lunge, it threw itself on this man, who ran away and never came back!¹⁸ Sometimes, too, these jokes were more alarming (though not for Mirra) and the "current" seemed somewhat... disproportionate, as on one stormy day: There were terrible thunderstorms there. One stormy day, he climbed to the high terrace above the sitting room. “It’s a strange time to be going up there," I said to him. He laughed, “Come along, don’t be afraid!" So I joined him ... Then I clearly saw a bolt of lightning that had been heading straight towards us suddenly swerve IN THE MIDST OF ITS COURSE. You will say it’s impossible, but I saw it turn aside and strike a tree farther away. (Not one of Theon's, of course!) I asked Theon, "Did you do that?" He nodded.

Oh, that man was terrible—he had a terrible power. But outwardly, perfectly correct.¹⁹ And Mother laughed.

They could also eat in a most peculiar way at Zarif; it would be good for us to take a leaf out of their book, for it would free us from a lot of bother. Actually, Mrs. Theon was very often tired because she spent much of her time outside her body, which meant that a great part of her body’s energy went elsewhere instead of staying quite pru­dently in its box performing all the operations or tasks that one normally expects to be done in the said box. So she needed to recover her material energies. She did this in a very simple, very direct way; instead of sitting down to eat and going through the whole process of peeling and digest­ing a fruit, she stretched out on her bed and put a big grapefruit from the garden on her stomach: "Come back to see me in an hour." One hour later, Mirra returned, and the grapefruit was as flat as a pancake... that is, she had absorbed all the life of the fruit, which had gone limp and completely flat.²⁰

But Matter itself had strange ways, and we might now begin asking ourselves what Matter really is. Because, of course, there are no miracles or "magic" in all that, except for the simple-minded—to the cynocephalous baboons and a few others, man’s machines are magic. As for us, we know perfectly well that we are not magicians, far from it! We merely follow processes. Therefore, we can think better than cynocephalians and observe the processes at Zarif with a less superstitious eye. But in the end, maybe we are all a bit superstitious regarding Matter—scientifically superstitious. Superstition, that is, a blind belief in a single type of dogma or process, in a certain habitual way for Matter to behave—but is it really the habit of Matter, or rather the habit of our mind in Matter?... At this point, we begin feeling the earth give way beneath our feet and we flee like the Arab merchant, full speed ahead. All the same, the "marvels-of-Peru” were very beautiful along the paths of Zarif, they had a nice fragrance, it was exquisite: Huge bushes, this tall. Madame Theon always put some behind her ears, for they smelled very good... And when she went walking along this path, between those huge bushes that were so high, she would gather flowers.... (Meanwhile, Mirra was off walking with Theon) and when I returned from my walk and opened my door (which was locked, so no one could have entered), those flowers would be in my room!²¹ A little garland of marvels-of-Peru discreetly placed on her pillow, which means that Madame Theon could also “dematerialize" flowers to make them pass through walls, and “rematerialize" them, so they could be perfectly fresh on Mirra's pillow. A simple and charming gesture for Mirra, every evening, for this Alma was a very charming person.

What, then, was going on in that house?... Perhaps this was a more advanced stage of evolution—though it is not at all certain. Obviously there was a different atmosphere, we might almost say a certain transparency in which things could go through and take place, for the greatest obstacle and the thickest wall may not, after all, be the granite or concrete we shut ourselves in, but the wall of our own thoughts: we are constantly weaving a veil of impossibility between ourselves and things, and because we think it is not possible, then obviously it is not possible—how could it be impossibly possible? And really, one of life's most marvelous miracles is when we begin opening the great eye of the Possible and think, then feel, then see, with amaze­ment, that the simple little thought that "all is possible” makes an imperceptible crack in the prison—a transparency —and stealthily, almost timidly, one little thing slips in, then another and another, as if encouraged by our acqui­escence, then everything begins to tilt into another law. It is as we wish. We have only to think it. But we think of sickness, death, accidents, mathematics and the penal code, so everything happens just as we expected, exactly and mathematically. We cannot break out of the prison while believing in the prison, obviously.

Our first prison is not Matter, it is the Mind. Matter's walls are a dream of our mind, perhaps a railing to keep us from prematurely tipping over into an immensity too rich for us. I remember a very revealing little story that Mirra was soon to hear from the lips of Mrs. David-Neel, which She had every reason to believe true. When she was living in Indochina (I guess), Mrs. David-Neel used to medi­tate with her eyes closed while walking. She would follow the trail, leaving the others at the camp, and walked straight ahead ,.. till the end of her meditation. Now, one day, after finishing her meditation, she turned back as usual to return quietly to the camp, with her eyes open—when suddenly she found herself before a river. The river had not suddenly appeared between her coming and going, so she must have crossed the river on her way out—but how? And she had to get wet to return to the camp. We might call it a miracle —"she walked on water,” like Christ—or we might think that her meditation was so deep and so ethereal that.,. We may think whatever we like, but the fact is that Mrs. David- Neel herself did not think of the river. So the river did not exist. And one walked on it as easily as one would walk on anything else. Of course, the moment she thought of it (and, above all, thought that one cannot cross a river with­out getting wet), she had to get wet, like everyone else. But—there is a but—it is not enough to think that it does not exist for it to cease existing, because it is still the mind playing a good or a bad trick on itself: the magic of the Mind has far deeper roots. This magic was the very thing Mother was going to clarify meticulously, layer after layer, right up to a certain cellular frontier which is perhaps the very root of death.

Meanwhile, Mirra let everything pass through her with­out erecting any wall of impossibility, and where would there be any “miracle" or "magic" in all that? No, there is no magic to do, there is only a certain magic to undo. We are under a scientific spell, and all our science reinforces the spell. When I recounted these experiences to Sri Aurobindo, he told me it was quite natural; when you have the power, you live in and create around you an atmosphere where these things are possible. Because it is all here, it just hasn't been brought to the surface.²² Yes, "not brought to the surface,” that is, veiled, blocked, hindered by layers upon layers of dense determinism we are shut in, or so we think. But as soon as we rise even a single degree above, or to be exact (for where is the “above”?), as soon as our substance grows clearer and shakes off the mud' of its usual ways of seeing and doing and proceeding, this same Shakti—because it is the same that flows in the mud, the dust, the walls, the asp and the thunder, or in Beethovens symphonies: there is but one thing in the world, not two—that same and only dis­entangled Shakti lets its purer ray, therefore more direct and powerful and freer, flow into the same old substance, but now clear, altering all its laws which were only the laws of our entanglement or the laws of the veil we draw between things as they are and things as we see or think them. This “as they are" is the mystery, the magic we have to undo to get to the Secret, the layers to be cleared up. We know nothing, we only stick ineluctable and mathematical pro­cesses onto "something” that exactly has the mathematics of our brain. Scientific laws, said Sri Aurobindo with his wonderful lucidity, only give a schematic account of mate­rial processes of Nature—as a valid scheme they can be used for reproducing or extending at will a material process, but obviously they cannot give an account of the thing itself Water, for instance, is not merely so much oxygen and hydro­gen put together—the combination is simply a process or device for enabling the materialisation of a new thing called water; what that new thing really is, is quite another matter.²³ The "thing itself" eludes us everywhere. We move to a clearer level and all the processes change: the marvels-of- Peru materialize and dematerialize, just as hydrogen plus oxygen "materialize" into water, then “dematerialize” into gases. But what is the "thing” called "marvels-of-Peru?" We do not know. And in the end, there is only one consciousness "fact,” or one Shakti “fact" which is handled more or less directly depending on the level or the layer we move in. There is no such thing as a “foreign body,” there is no fire reacting to water; there is consciousness reacting on con­sciousness, Shakti on Shakti. Shakti is the only process— one can handle it as a monkey, as a scientist or otherwise, that is all.

So there were no miracles at Tlemcen, there was simply a certain atmosphere of a somewhat more real knowledge.²⁴ Perhaps we should say: a more real Matter. A Matter closer to “what it really is." The whole question is to know whether we want to act like the Arab merchant or to dare, after all, to exchange our eyes, that are but those of an improved baboon, for the eyes of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo always said, Mother told me, regarding the happenings at Tlemcen, that the greatest obstacle to true understanding and participation in the Work is common sense. He said that’s why Nature creates madmen from time to time: they are people not strong enough to bear the dismantling of this petty stupidity called common sense.²⁵ And Mother smiled, and in her smile it seemed we could catch fantastic possi­bilities in the wings. Perhaps Nature is prudently waiting for us to be a little less childish and frightened before pull­ing down, with a smile, the big scientific Wall of China that protects us ... from ourselves.

Once we really know what Matter is, we shall really know what Spirit is. And we shall conquer death.

The Impasse of Power

The doors of the Possible have to be opened, but not just any door.

It is all very fine—we handle bolts of lightning, the rain and the weather, big and small animals; we make our san­dals come running to our feet or even ring the tocsin of the scientific world—and it is all very well, we have power·, it is even quite natural when we know how to do it, just as natural as it is for us to pick up the phone and call the fire brigade. It is another organization—certainly simpler, with­out firemen and all the trepidation that is plainly beginning to grate on our nerves. Mirra was quick to learn the “trick,” if we may say so, though it was not really a trick, or at any rate no more a trick than putting H2O together, and when She returned to France, in the midst of a stormy sea that threatened to engulf her ship, She quietly retired to her cabin, lay down on her bunk and went out of her body, in order to pacify that wild dance of angry forces; and half an hour later everyone was cheerfully busy drinking their whisky as though nothing had happened. That is all very well. We can even use our power in a “humanitarian” way, since humanity has become fashionable: cure lepers with a single glance—but three minutes later they go back to their leprosy because they have no desire to be cured of the cause of their leprosy; put out fires—which will reignite three minutes later, three fields away or in the next neighborhood, because the stupidity that kindles fires and little wars will not have been put out; stop thieves and criminals with an inner bolt of lightning, and let us be done with the police!—but they grow back like weeds, thieves as well as policemen. We keep going round in circles, merely at a higher level, with fewer telephones and less racket, but with the same human matter that will be quick to use thun­der to get rid of a disturbing neighbor. In short, a chaos of a higher degree, a supra-scientific superchaos. Is this the next level of evolution? Each one will purge the earth of everything that does not conform to his own idea of Good, and finally there will be nothing left but a superascetic or a superdemon, one of whom will cheerfully go drink his whisky as if nothing had happened, and the other cheer­fully go back to his pure heaven, which he should never have left—for why on earth do we even come down into this damn mess if it is only to abolish it, and furthermore, why do we take on a body if it is only to go roaming about outside of it?

Indeed, this is not a higher level of evolution; it may even be an anterior level of evolution, one of Nature’s many fruit­less attempts, which she easily wiped out, as if it had never existed—for she is wiser than we are. If Atlantis ever existed, then it may well have witnessed the flourishing of this type of superman, who was just a man with super-powers: For, says Sri Aurobindo, man intellectually developed, mighty in scientific knowledge and the mastery of gross and subtle nature, using the elements as his servants and the world as his footstool, but undeveloped in heart and spirit, becomes only an inferior kind of asura [demon] using the powers of a demigod to satisfy the nature of an animal. According to dim traditions and memories of the old world, of such a nature was the civilisation of old Atlantis, submerged beneath the Ocean when its greatness and its wickedness became too heavy a load for the earth to bear.²⁶ It could well be that our brutal return to what we might call scientific barbarism was the gentle wisdom of our Mother Nature, who knows better than we do what she wants us to discover in her scorned soil, and who uses our first materialistic stumblings to take us farther than our scientists suspect and deeper than our spiritualists imagine. Of how many cycles, how many fruitless quests are we the residue? But perhaps this time we have reached the real turning point, precisely because our science is crumbling down along with all our pretentions, which cloaked an old and stub­born poverty, and perhaps we are here by the very power of our failure. Divested of our trifling victories, both material and spiritual, we are approaching the Zero Point where Matter and Spirit will change into something ... which is perhaps the reality of the earth.

And Mirra was there.

She was not fooled—nor was Theon—and She knew quite well that those brilliant powers come from the lower door. The more brilliant and thundering and miraculous it is, the lower the door, you can be sure, because it is the door nearest Matter. Over the centuries, there have always been plenty of good folk to be dazzled and less good folk to perform their heavenly sleights of hand. It’s heavenly if you like, Mother said, but it all depends on which heaven it comes from!²⁷ Anyway, let people have their fun, as long as it keeps them amused. But the earth is not amused. In fact, it suffers, it is in pain; it is desperately searching for its real cure. And Mirra, in Tlemcen, already understood very well two things that are but one, because it was right there, under her very nose. First, there were all those poor people Theon used to cure with magic tricks, but who came back two days or a week later with another illness, which was still the same illness. One plugged the hole here and it reappeared farther—were all the cancers in the world plugged up, man would invent others. This is doubtless one of the most tremendous illusions we so-called rational beings are living in. We are constantly in search of millions of remedies for one Disease we do not really want to cure: unconsciousness. The thick layer that does not allow the smallest ray to enter. Of course, it is not quite so easy as getting pills from the drugstore. And Nature kindly lets the doctors proliferate, because in so doing, she still helps her children progress; she uses all their tricks to teach them ... that they know nothing. This is the great lesson, the longest to learn, but once we have learned it, then we are ready for knowledge. And if they refuse to learn, Nature resorts to her old usual trick: death. We begin the lesson again in another skin, a little less encumbered. And so on, until everything is exhausted. Then there is nothing left but a wall no thicker than rice paper, and we have only to blow on it to get out of the fishbowl. The terrible Lesson of unknowing. The earth is very close to exhaustion. Perhaps it has had enough of dying. All that was seen, lived, touched by Mirra: The conditions in which humans live on earth are the result of their state of consciousness. Trying to change the conditions without changing the consciousness is a vain chimera.²⁸ So if people want to build hospitals and treat lepers and invent anti-cancer drugs, let them do it, but it is not the world that they are helping to progress or heal: it is they themselves who progress in the unknowing. Change yourself if you want to change the world.²⁹

And then there is this so-called "power," which is the other side of the same question ... The more She saw Theon’s marvels, the less She marveled. It’s like stretching a rubber band, ³⁰ She told me one day; once you let it go, it snaps back, and everything is the same. As long as you stretch it, it can cure, hurl thunderbolts, rain like a bless­ing, it is even perfectly immortal for ... a quarter of an hour. And She always came back to that same Lesson of death, in fact, that was the very Point; why does it ah die, what can keep it from dying? Once this is solved, all else is solved. The cause, the mechanism. While over there, 6,000 miles away (perhaps at the same moment), Sri Auro­bindo was putting his finger on the same question, possibly through that trivial incident when one of his revolutionary companions was bitten by a rabid dog and had dominated the disease for years, thanks to his yogic power—until the day he got angry during a political meeting and died of rabies a few hours later, for he had lost control of himself and therefore had placed himself outside the conditions in which the power could work. A conditional power is not a power; a power that works for ten or twenty years and then breaks down is not a power; a power that is imposed on Matter like a fist blow, by stretching it like a rubber band, is not a power—a power that does not change Matter itself is not a power. It is Matter itself that must be changed. We must create a new physical nature,³¹ Sri Aurobindo would soon say. The true change of consciousness, Mother emphasized, is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and turn it into an entirely new creation.³²

And Nature may very well have invented death only to compel us to find here, in the depths of the body, the supreme secret and the supreme mastery.

Otherwise, we would all have already left for heaven, in single file, like little saints. Our greatest falls are our great­est possibilities of victory, our greatest failures may well be the supreme Door of the Possible.

Such is the impasse of power: it is powerful. Scientists do not act differently with their cyclotrons, pulverizers and crushing machines: they bully Matter with their equations, as others bully it with their occult stare, but it gets its revenge, and the few-hours- or few-decades-old miracle snaps back like a rubber band, or a wind of destruction, and in the end nothing is changed, for they have not mas­tered Matter—they have merely circumvented it. Power is a myth from which we keep dying obstinately. We must BE—be differently in Matter. Then nothing will be able to touch that, for what could touch what is?