Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

9: Tlemcen 2: At the Furthermost Bounds of Evolution

To change Matter ... to change death.

We would be doing an injustice to Theon if we thought he was in search of the great, dazzling powers from the lower door, and besides, he did not have to search for them: he had them fully at his disposal. He was in quest of something far grander—which he was not fated to attain. This may be Theon's tragedy: the underlying defiance and pain and irony of a greatness that knows it is doomed to failure, but which struggles all the same, like a true con­quering doge. We always fall into the error of believing in "victory," but certain lives of "failure” are a soul’s true victory, and they find through the “reverse" side what they would never have reached on the precarious plateaux of virtue—where is the victory in the end, and whose is the victory, if there is not something within that smiles at victory as well as failure, because it is forever free, whether here or there? We know only a fraction of Theon, and sometimes the devil and the god are strangely intertwined. "Men are superior to gods,” he said, and he was right— although they are not yet so. And he wanted that divinity for men and the earth: "Men must be freed from the sad chains of habit and be shown life”; and he added, while ceaselessly rolling cigarettes at a disconcerting speed, "Everything depends on the plane you attain and the extent of your horizon. For the worm inside a radish, the radish is the entire cosmos—most people are like the worm inside a radish,”¹ which is quite true, but ... There was always a certain something in his words, an indefinable little vibra­tion with an ... uncertain tint to it. Something strangely reminiscent of Zarathustra, yet so full of genuine flashes— but somewhat tinted. Nothing is more misleading or cap­tivating than that tint, nothing more dangerous than a truth ensnared. Once a truth is captured, it is already almost a falsehood—oh, how w'ell Mirra knew that! Her own words eluded all categories and categorizations to leave only a clear little vibration that carried you, without your knowing it, into the simple, trouble-free truth. With Mother, you drank the truth, breathed the truth, and walked on lightly, with a laugh. But Theon talked and held forth, while “his long, sinewy sculptor's hands”² kneaded the future or stripped the past to wrest its secret from it. Actually, he knew a lot of secrets, and I have always thought that he wavered on a narrow crest between truth and falsehood, like some survivor from Atlantis who still remembered his triumphs and was unable to get rid of them completely, while peering into the future to perceive a mysterious new man greater than all the Atlanteans, but without their weight of "I”—for ultimately, that is the only thing that weighs down. He knew Egypt ; he had lived there several years and had founded an occult society before taking refuge in Zarif, after being expelled from Egypt for some mysterious reason perhaps not unrelated to his excessive indulgence in thunderbolts. How did he happen to meet Alma, this soft English woman from the Isle of Wight—by what inscrutably circuitous route? Truly, the meetings of beings through time and space make up a strange geogra­phy; we are still unaware of the invisible little beacons that guide our skiffs and hail one another in the night across trans-natal distances, while we go haphazardly, carried along by the southerly wind, and land at the antipodes of our maps. He even knew India, where he had received initiation: He knew a little Sanskrit and the Rig-Veda thor­oughly, Mother tells us, and he said he held “a tradition anterior to the Cabala and the Vedas."³ And where did it come from? From what lost cycle? But Theon did not bluff, except with Arab merchants, and one did not bluff Mirra, who, after twenty-six years of deprivation, listened to him ravenously while they strolled the lanes of Zarif or Tlemcen’s bazaar, where Mirra used to walk in ... a kimono, under the sharp eyes of the Muslims. (After all, we are at the beginning of the century. Abd-el-Kader’s shadow is not so far away, and Abd-el-Krim is nearby, stirring up his conspiracies with William II. All the same, Mirra did not like women to be veiled, any more than Mathilde liked the khedive's tutelage.) And Theon held forth: "This so-called civilization, whose leaders themselves are ignorant of life’s depths, whose mystics without knowledge read and under­stand the sacred books as one might tread upon unsuspected diamond mines, with nose upturned to heaven!”⁴ He him­self looked down to the earth—like Mirra. He even quoted Peter the Apostle: "A new earth where Truth shall live."¹⁰⁰ And, like Sri Aurobindo, he proclaimed a new, superhuman humanity, endowed with a new body that he said would be made of a substance "denser than Matter.” We are not very sure what he meant by that, for the only “denser Matter” we know of is ionized Matter, which results from intra- atomic modifications formed through shock or radiation, or the Matter of certain collapsed stars, involving inter­atomic convergences induced by gigantic forces ... But perhaps Mother’s subsequent experiences will enlighten us on this point.

What, then, was Theon’s secret?

The Door Above

There is the door above.

It is both the best known and the least known. The lower door used to arouse all the scorn of the so-called enlight­ened people, who were quick to accuse you of “a thirst for power” or even of sorcery, as in medieval Europe, and you were dutifully sent off to the stake. The door above had all the haloes of heaven, for indeed, what is the use of "powers,” when all you want is to find some way out of this predica­ment? A single power is enough, the one that brings you out. And for centuries upon centuries (but not all), sages and saints of every color have nimbly or laboriously scaled the vertical world, as vertically as they could, without even seeing, as Sri Aurobindo said, these great and. luminous kingdoms of the Spirit. Perhaps they arrive at their object, but only to fall asleep in the Infinite.⁵ Amen. The poor wretches below had to make do with pulling down some flashes of light to compose a poem, a quartet or a strikingly simple equation, but most often to found big or small Churches, each one claiming exclusive rights to the Ray. But what is the point of composing quartets or equations if the goal is only to get out, and if those who were not eager to get out had neither the mastery nor the discipline required to scale those verticalities knowingly and draw from them better quartets or better equations—so on one side we remained the playthings of vague "inspirations,” and on the other the pursuers of a certain "liberation”—which was not so certain, for if we happened to be pulled a little roughly out of our heaven, we got quite furious and disgusted with the pettiness of this world, like all the rest of the common humankind. In short, “heaven” was within the four walls of an abbey or an ashram. And we died just the same. So we used to be divided between powerless mystics and sometimes overly powerful charlatans, or else rather vague poets. And finally, this vertical world suffered from a certain irrationality, which was perhaps but our own.

But Mirra was not vague. She had noticed several degrees in that verticality. She knew the world of colored waves, the world of rhythms that form great musical waves, as it were, and then all the way up, suddenly, along came a sound ... but so complete, so full! As if something exploded ...I don’t know what, much more resounding than an orchestra— something exploding. It was overwhelming!... Great, blue notes.⁶ She had touched the origin of music, perhaps the source of all form. The sound must be captured,⁷ She said. It must be captured indeed, but how? And there was also the world of the great vibrations creating the future, like a mighty, unceasing peal of bells all over the earth, dropping intermittent little "pearls of light,” which formed a revela­tion, an intuition, or perhaps those lost poems She wrote in her sleep. But the moment we try to capture that “sound from above," that rhythm, those vibrations, it’s as if things were passed through a sieve and broken up into separate little bits.⁸ Nothing remains but a mental translation. And then, higher, it was like vanishing into light; no more movement, no more form, nothing: the great silence of snow. Eternity. Though truly speaking, I have always wondered about that silence of snow—it is indeed marvelous, and free and vast; one breathes—oh, how wonderfully one breathes there, one can turn it into a whole heaven, it is heaven!—But, at the risk of seeming impertinent, one wonders how our friend the baboon would perceive our merely mental world, which is his own verticality; would not he vanish all the same into an ecstasy of non-comprehension and an immensity quite baffling compared to the narrow workings of his sensory perceptions? Perhaps “Heaven" is "adjust­able," if we dare say. And perhaps we know nothing at all of that “up-above-there,” no more than we really know what is “right-down-here.” Perhaps we have to put the two together to know really what they both are?

This is what Mirra was beginning to say to herself.

But what struck her most, the key She was seeking, was the key to the "sieve” we were talking about. Whenever one tried to bring “that” down into Matter—this sound, vibra­tion, harmony (whatever the name), this something that would finally alter the lower layers of determinism, it was like water disappearing into sand⁹ and it came out all diluted, fragmented, distorted, without any apparent real power, as if the ray grew darker, veiled, tinted, shattered into little pieces as it went through each layer, right to the last pulverized darkening, which makes up the particular opaque Matter we tread upon. This is perhaps the desperate reason why all the sages and saints throughout the ages (but not all) tried to get out for good: there is nothing to be done here, it is hopeless, better purify yourself as much as pos­sible and soar off into the great silence of snow, or to a lesser height, into some adjustable heaven proportionate to your capacities, tastes or beliefs; and in the meantime, well, do your duty, be kind to your neighbors, cure the ill people if you can, and so it goes round and round, until everyone has had enough of it and is ready to get out for good. Very well. But after all, the baboon’s heaven is rather dubious—and are we so sure of our own? Is it not holding some other sinister trick in store for us, which would chain us to yet another wheel we had not foreseen—any more than the baboon had foreseen his future mental “liberation?" For after all, perhaps our Mother Nature has intentions that will thwart all our gospels, materialistic or other. What is this vertical world, finally, if not our evolutionary future? This future that is as much ours as we are the future of the fish in its fishbowl. And why do we necessarily want this future to be located in “heaven?” To a fish, as far as we know, we are perfectly terrestrial and are nothing super­natural; perhaps this future is also perfectly terrestrial and natural, although in a way that still eludes our dense Matter and our mind shut up in a box. We must find the "new earth.” We must find the “way,” the next way, as Mother said. There must be one, otherwise why on earth would Nature have invented this evolution?

And again we go back to that “sieve," the division of the ray, that trajectory of our future, which comes to us in pieces, as it were—if we could clear the intermediary layers, the problem might well be solved. To clear them in our­selves is still conceivable, but to clear them on a cosmic scale, or even simply on a human scale, appears ... difficult.

Or else it will take centuries and millennia, a slow and tremendous evolution wasting bodies upon bodies and piling up pains, only to reach the clear "simple” lesson. But if we must wait for each human being to learn his lesson ... And if one single, somewhat obstinate man remains, where will the "liberation” of others be since, ultimately, there is only ONE body? Either we do not get out, or we all get out together. Either nothing is changed, or we all change together—it is the whole body that must change. So, what pure Ray could work that singular miracle? We can leave the task to the millennia, and it will doubtless take place despite all the materialists and all the spiritualists, for what can prevent a seed from becoming a tree? Evolution is the surest thing in the world, it is an irresistible bulldozer. But after all, we might try to accelerate the movement and shorten this web of misery a little. That is what Theon was thinking. It is what Sri Aurobindo was beginning to think, over there. As for Mirra, she was seeking the Ray that would clear all those layers. The lower we want to go, the more powerful the ray must be: the deeper you want to descend into matter, the higher you must rise in conscious­ness,¹⁰ because the resistance is stiffer, as She clearly saw. But the higher one rises within this vertical consciousness —and here lies the dilemma—the more it seems to fade away or, to describe things as if they were seen from above, the more the earth seems to fade away into a kind of tri­fling irrelevance, like a bad dream. An illusion.

Such was the dilemma, which was not at all philosophical but purely practical, like a chemistry or physics experi­ment. But an element was missing. One was left wavering there between the single reality of a heaven cut off from Matter, and the single reality of Matter cut off from what could cure it. And, well, it was not a comfortable position to be caught between the two. Something as obscure, per­haps, as the transition from the fish to the mammal.

Perilous Experiences

But the passage exists; there is a connection. One does not leap from the mind's summits to the pure and formless silence of eternity, otherwise there would be no hope and we would be evolutionarily doomed to be supermen creat­ing superquartets and superequations and super-Churches, the same merry-go-round as below but glorified, inflated, titanized, a kind of human millipede inventing another thousand legs for itself or perhaps a fourth brain and super­machines to compensate for his weariness of living, until we are fed up in the end and ready to take the leap and go to sleep forever, or fade into a white eternity we should never have left. For all these “supreme” levels that delight and inspire us are merely the clearer layers or higher waters of the same fishbowl—the mental fishbowl, for the mind is the bowl; it is the same principle and the same law but more effective or resounding, if we may say so, the same fragmentation beneath a certain golden "sieve” that splits the ray into countless little colors, or big colors, which make up all our separate paintings and all our separate miseries—though in the end the only misery is to be sepa­rated in a body and in a never finished little painting. And up above is the great leap beyond all painting, which is obviously a solution for the sluggards of evolution.

But there is something else.

Mirra was about to experimentally rediscover what the Vedic Rishis had found some seven or ten thousand years earlier, at the beginning of this ill-starred (?) cycle—what Theon was seeking, and what Sri Aurobindo was already beginning to clear out in the Shakti’s great virgin forest. Because the Vedic Rishis were not somnolent of spirit, they were great conquerors and heroes as yet untouched by the haste and impotence of our present Iron Age, in which dulled humans have replaced self-mastery with the mastery of machines, and the powerful light with sociological ethics and rosewater paradises. The Rishis had methodically explored all the levels of consciousness, and they had dis­covered what they mysteriously called "a certain fourth,” turiyam svid.

So Mirra was working. Theon was not satisfied with making speeches, he wanted results. It would last for an hour every morning, a dangerous work, at that—all the body's vital energy would go out—all of it, as it does when you die. And She would go from plane to plane, methodi­cally, twelve times in a row, like Madame Theon: I could even do it with great dexterity; I could halt on any plane, do what I had to do there, move around freely, observe, and then speak about what J had seen.¹¹ For She had trained her body in such a way, and was so perfectly conscious on all the planes (which for us would amount to deep and quite unconscious sleep) that She could speak, faintly but dis­tinctly, even while out of her body—which was lying on a couch in a near-cataleptic state, her heart scarcely beating. Which meant that her corporeal matter was already quite cleared out or purified and able to communicate the expe­riences from "above.” And Theon listened avidly. There was just a thin filament of light connecting Mirra to the earth: "the cord,” as She called it—perilous experiences indeed. If the filament snaps, there is no longer any way of re-entering, you "forget” your body, as it were, and you are "dead”—you keep living quite well on the other planes, but the terres­trial plane is cut off. This is generally what happens when we die. One day Mirra was even to experience complete death under rather tragic circumstances, or which would have been tragic for anyone else and which clearly reveal Theon’s "other side.” On a certain plane, She had discovered what seemed to be the vibratory mode or the combination of vibrations that engenders life, and which could therefore also engender death—quite a dangerous power in the wrong hands. Inwardly, She knew that She should not speak, so She stopped just when Theon was beginning to find it all extremely interesting. He broke into a rage, which cut the thread—Mirra barely had time to whisper "cut,” and in a flash Theon realized the enormity of what he had just done. He must have broken into a cold sweat. All of Theon’s power and all of Mother’s science were needed to reestablish the connection; Mother said that the “friction of re-entry” into the body produced an excruciating pain, as if all the nerves had been brutally loaded with current—the current of life, obviously—and as a result, She understood why newborn babies cry In any event, Mirra had just had her first expe­rience of conscious death in the body, which would later become a subject of very thorough experimentation in her quest to solve "the old question." As for the "secret of life,” She later handed it over to Sri Aurobindo, who simply consigned it to oblivion because this is not the way to change life or death: not through an arbitrary power—the eternal failure of power—but through a change in the very substance of life and the body Mirra and Sri Aurobindo stood at the opposite pole of the supermen and super­demiurges who interested Theon so much. They wanted a new and natural evolution of terrestrial Nature and not an occult and "supernatural’’ revolution, which, besides, would not have lasted longer than a staggering display of fire­works, for the “rubber band" would have snapped back to what it was before. They were searching for a principle other than that of the mental fishbowl carried to its trium­phant summit—a poor summit indeed.

And Mirra was there.

Strangely enough, Mirra always found herself at the crossroads—just as She found herself at the crossroads of the first explosion of appearances (Max Planck, 1900, Einstein, 1905), which was curiously linked to the Impres­sionists’ explosion of color—as if all were not closely bound together! One and the same seed is sown at a given time, and it bursts open everywhere under different names, forms or faces. And now it was as if She were at the crossroads of evolution with Theon, perhaps facing an old resurrec­tion of Atlanteans—who would secretly walk their path right up to Hitler—and a totally unknown but perceptible path which She was treading gropingly with Sri Aurobindo, over there, and a hesitant Theon.

A Certain Fourth

A very peculiar experience was going to occur during those sessions, an experience Mirra had already had alone in Paris, which She was unable to explain to herself—but truly speaking. She could explain nothing, for She went through a kind of chaos of experiences leaping from one level to another without any apparent connection; as She said, it was not a matter of believing or not believing, the fact was there, and that was all. The advantage of this was that my experiences were not mentally contrived.¹² Which is why She remained always grateful to Theon, despite his perilous outbursts (which perhaps carried on those of some ancient doge): After all, he taught me a lot.¹³ What do we know of our gestures of today? They continue old gestures and are today completing a picture begun when we were clothed in other colors and perhaps thirsting for an opposite goal ... which is always the same, but seen in another light. We understand nothing as long as we have not understood everything. But it is another picture. The really curious fact, “scientifically curious,” we might say, is that not only was Mirra going to have the same experience several times in a row, as regularly as a repeated chemis­try experiment, but that Madame Theon had also had the same experience ... and so would Sri Aurobindo, over there. And this experience coincided with that of the Vedic Rishis Mirra had never heard about before meeting Theon.

One day, as She was going from plane to plane toward that “Supreme Point" where consciousness seemed to evaporate, dilute, lose its dimension in a sort of Infinity, just on the threshold of this Infinity, when all the great waves and luminous vibrations were about to expire under­neath—that golden summit whence men draw their gospels and revelations and divine music, their great picture of the world as it is innumerably depicted in so many contrary colors—at the very moment when, as though struck with futility, it was all going to melt into a supreme Whiteness of Bliss reabsorbed into itself, at that golden junction, just before taking the great leap, Mirra suddenly found herself caught in something else—something radically different. Another consciousness. Was it really a consciousness? For it was formidably solid, the opposite of evaporation or subtilization: a substance of compact and almost coagu­lated consciousness. Nothing moved in it nor seemed to move, not one wave; or if there were some wave, it seemed solidified, as if all the rays, the countless rays that divided up below and went on fragmenting down to the infinitesi­mal, were reunited there into one compact block. It was so dense that it was rather crushing. A dense consciousness, of a crimson gold color. And for a moment, as had hap­pened once before, when She was alone in Paris, She saw what Madame Theon herself had seen, a form silhouetted in a glory of crimson gold,¹⁴ which was like the "prototype,” She said: a man, not at all a god, but the most inconceiv­able superman we could ever imagine. Something that was there, waiting. Perhaps it had been waiting since the begin­ning of time. Our future, the future of man. A man within another substance of consciousness, but not a "dream”: there were no dreams in it all, and it was more solid than the Himalayas. A dense man. Powerful, supremely power­ful, but in an immobility—it was this immobility that was overwhelmingly powerful. A crimson gold glory. The Future. No superquartets, no supergospels: a dense man. Another principle of being. Something like the prolongation of man but in such a radically different air, perhaps as different as man's oxygen is from the oxygen of the fish—what was different was the way of breathing. One did not breathe there in the same way, one was not the same. A different being, a different way of being.

Beyond the "Supreme" Point, there was something.

The end of man was the beginning of something.

Evolution led to something, which was not the white infinite.

Some seven to ten thousand years ago, the Rig-Veda spoke of the same thing, the same experience, in its sym­bolic language: "Concealed by this truth is that truth where they unyoke the horses of the Sun; the ten thousand [rays] meet there together; That ONE, tad ekam—I have seen the supreme God of the embodied gods.” (V.62.1). Beyond the golden truth of the mind's summits, there is a solar Truth where the ten hundred rays of our scattered intuitions and contradictory pictures unite within a compact body; there is this ONE. "The face of the Truth is covered with a brilliant golden lid,”¹⁵ say the Upanishads, the golden "sieve" that fragments our whole mental world. They passed through the spiritual lid of the world, the rarefied layers of "spirit." They found "the great passage," mahas pathah (II.24.6): "The heaven [of consciousness] was made firm like a well-shaped pillar ... a god opened the human doors” (V.45). They entered "the dense consciousness,” chidghana,¹⁶ they touched another power and “set flowing in one movement human strengths and things divine" (IX.70.3). “Then, indeed, they awoke and they wholly saw, all behind and wide around them, then, indeed, they held the ecstasy that is enjoyed in heaven” (IV. 1.18). "Mortal, they achieved immortality" (1.110.4).

This is the new world Sri Aurobindo would call the supra­mental. It is the turiyam svid of the Vedic Rishis, a "certain fourth," which is perhaps a fourth state of Matter—the next state. A state in which Matter does not die.

A different Matter? Or a different way of seeing the same Matter, a different way of breathing within a Matter freed from its mental prison?

At last, Mirra had found this Ray that was capable of modifying all the lower determinisms.

But what is very interesting is that She was going to see—at what moment we do not know, but probably at the same time—a kind of replica of that being from above, but down below, in the deepest layers of the material inconscient: A being lying in a deep sleep, in the depths of a very dark cave, and, while he slept, rays of prismatic light (She would also say "iridescent") emanated from him and spread out little by little into the Inconscient. ¹⁷ One was in a crimson gold glory at the very summit of the ladder of consciousness, and the other in a diamond whiteness, ema­nating opalescent rays, at the first mute levels of existence, within the most ancient layers of evolution, when "dark­ness was wrapped in darkness,” according to the Rig-Veda’s powerful image (X. 129.3). And the moment Mother looked at him, he opened his eyes, as if he were awakening—as if, in the deepest Matter, in the obscure beginning of things, there were hidden, asleep, the realization of the end, the very Energy that will drive this entire evolution toward its golden blossoming.... We speak of "future," “past,” “summit above" and "deep cave below” in an inadequate language and with images expressive only of our three- dimensional impotence in a fishbowl that distorts and frag­ments a totality that has never ceased being total, without any high or low, heaven or hell: there is only the journey of our consciousness crossing all the evolutionary layers in order to reach what was always there; there is only the rediscovery of our own Wholeness, "and they wholly saw.” "What is in this world is also in the other," say the Upan­ishads, “and what is in the other, that again is in this: who thinks he sees a difference here, from death to death he goes.”¹⁸ In other words, the more we “progress" in evolution by purifying and clearing up those thick layers, the nearer the eternal thing "over there” draws to our consciousness— at first to our dreams, our visions, then to our imagination, thoughts and sensations—until it finally coincides with our Matter and our body; then, the being over there becomes the being right here and the two become ONE—without ever having ceased to be ONE. All our misery and aspiration are only the first murmur of the forgotten one who remem­bers himself in the forgetful other. We aspire for what is already there] otherwise, what would we aspire for? Mud does not aspire for mud, and if it changes into light and into a lotus in the light, it is because the light was always there and the lotus shone eternally in the depths of its dark seed. The supreme Energy is the primordial Energy, the supreme degree is the first degree. Always and everywhere, we keep going toward ourselves—and how would the non­existent go toward the existent if it had not existed since the beginning of time? In the atom is hidden the supreme Ray, fragmented, divided, pulverized; the supreme ONE, total, powerful and immortal, lies in the heart of a little forgetful cell as much as in all interstellar space. For really, "the Spirit who is here in man and the Spirit who is there in the Sun, lo, it is One Spirit and there is no other.”¹⁹ And there comes a moment in evolution, a supreme moment, when the coincidence draws near, when, freed from the dark layers which are really the layers of our forgetfulness, the radiant consciousness bends over its little body and becomes itself, total, powerful, luminous and immortal, down to the most obscure little cell. Then the Being "above" meets the being “below,” the superman becomes man, the untruncated totality finds itself again even down to the most obscure fragment—what was, is. A new time is born. A new gaze is born. And death will be conquered, because death was only self-forgetfulness. When the body remembers itself wholly, when it wholly becomes what it is, enlight­ened and clear, when the two have embraced down to the most obscure cell, we shall become completely immortal in a new body and on a new earth. "O men,” said the Vedic Rishis, "follow the shining thread ... weave an inviolate work, become the human being, create the divine race ... Seers of Truth are you, sharpen the shining spears with which you cut the way to that which is Immortal; knowers of the secret planes, form them, the steps by which the gods attained to immortality” (X.53.5,6,10). “Then shall thy humanity become as if the workings of these gods; it is as if the visible heaven of light were founded in thee" (V.66.2).

This coincidence of the two is what Sri Aurobindo and Mother would call transformation. It is the transition from the human body to a supramental or superhuman body.

The Great Passage

A mysterious transition indeed. But each of the preced­ing evolutionary transitions from one species to the next was always a mystery. There has always been a moment when the change occurred, the mutation abruptly took place, however slow the preparation and despite all the intermediary specimens. The process of the transition can be endlessly questioned and discussed, but each time, the transition was worked out despite all natural impossibili­ties, and possibly despite the specimen who was the object of the mutation. Our language may be inadequate—We need a new language! Mother exclaimed, like Rimbaud— and our images may be childish to describe the transition to that other species which will breathe such a different air and whose standards of consciousness are likely to be as radically different from ours as those of the mineral are from the animal's. This is not unlike the caterpillar trying to define its own tomorrow as a butterfly. But despite all its caterpillar science, no rational caterpillar can prevent itself from becoming a butterfly. We may doubt it with our rational intelligence, which sees nothing beyond a superglori­fication of its own rationality (which is failing abysmally), but evolution does not doubt, and the transition will take place—with or without us. In fact, we are right in the middle of the transition, mahas pathah, the great passage, and our scientific and rational materialism is probably the most antiquated thing there is after old Moses on his Sinai. That Sinai we will speak of again as the biggest balloon that has ever burst. Yet why should the transition not occur with us? Instead of being the passive and rather ill-treated guinea pigs of evolution, we could be co-experimenters, as it were. This is Mother's and Sri Aurobindo’s whole story. And Theon's unsuccessful story.

After all, we do not care about immortality, and the moment the consciousness awakens and begins to pick up the thread of past existences, the idea quickly becomes childish: who would care to wear one coat for a hundred years, said Sri Aurobindo, or be confined in one narrow and changeless lodging unto a long eternity?²⁰ But that “lodging” is what bothers us, along with the fact of death. Death is really a defeat: the defeat of the body, we might say, but this is not true; it is the defeat of the Spirit, for Spirit and Matter are one and the same thing, despite what our cater­pillar eyes may see, and we die just because we have found neither the reality of the Spirit nor the reality of Matter. When the two are one in something else, that will be it— and that something else is undoubtedly our next body.

But we must build that body; it is not going to drop from heaven ready-made. What is the process of fabrication?

Obviously, to perpetuate the consumer-cum-metaphysi­cian citizen is meaningless—evolution could not care less about metaphysics, although it makes use of it, as it does of everything else; it is not trying to create a fourth or a tenth brain, a superman who would be just an improved chimpanzee fitted with mathematics and television, but an instrument capable of handling consciousness directly, because consciousness is the primordial fact of evolution, the original moving force, the beginning of the end, that which we strive to handle as best we can through a crab shell or a brainbox, or whatever big or small box it may be. Evolution does not build civilizations, it builds ever wider consciousnesses. Consciousness is the key to the transition and to every transition. It is the Shakti in search of its own totality. And like the Rishis, like Mirra scaling the planes outside of her body while deeply asleep, we have seen that next consciousness, wider and "denser," in some heaven up above. But all this is still our caterpillar language, or the language of fish in their fishbowl. If, by the means of some special talent, our friend the baboon were to explore the next layers of evolution, it is likely that the first levels of the mind would appear to him like a distant heaven, far above, which he might only touch in an utter cessation of all that makes up his ape life—but how could that mental heaven enter straight down his consciousness? There is no room for it, the place is all cluttered with the many mechanisms of his ape life; an abrupt “descent" of the mental heaven into his consciousness would produce a kind of intolerable explosion. But while asleep, when everything ceases its usual racket, some first strange gleam or vibration may appear on the screen of his simian consciousness and leave him with a kind of nostalgia or aspiration, a distant and unexplained sense of wonder, a sudden break into an infini­tude of comprehension embracing in one glance his ape life and all apes' life: an inexplicable explanation, A mystic baboon, his rational neighbors would say. And yet these first slumberous traces prepare the next evolutionary groove. Something awakens in him, like another being in the depths of a bottomless cave, slowly, slowly wending its way to the surface. Nature slowly cleanses the layers and lets the centuries flow on while waiting for the next emer­gence: the meeting of mental “heaven" and earth in a new hominid creation. This cleansing of the intermediary layers seems to be the process of every transition. Each time, the ray grows and reaches a wider periphery, a darker depth, as if each time the conquered height gave it the power to cross a deeper layer, until the supreme Energy meets itself in the atom and the supreme Being in supreme oblivion. Death is the last door to the Supreme. And so goes the world, limping along from one stage to another, one being to another, one “heaven” to another, toward its totality of consciousness—toward the ONE, innumerable, in every point.

And now we have reached the point where a new heaven is to touch a new earth.

But the difference is even more radical than we think, for after all, between the ape and man there is scarcely more than a difference in degree of the same principle. What Mirra had seen, and the Rishis, and Sri Aurobindo over there, was another principle, something as radically differ­ent as mans oxygen is from the oxygen of the fish, as we said, and yet it is the same oxygen, only breathed in entirely different ways. She saw a different structure, we could rather say a different Matter: a conscious Matter, or a Matter made of consciousness, a massive consciousness— perhaps the real Matter, the one that eludes us and that we see so poorly and live so poorly. What does “earth" Matter look like to a fish? Obviously, like the asphyxiation of everything the fish is, that is, if it can see it; and yet, to us, they are the same atoms and molecules both here and there, but combined differently—the same “something” (which we do not really know) combining. And what combines dif­ferently is consciousness. It is that new combination that Sri Aurobindo and Mother were going to try' and bring into their bodies—and hence into the earth, for if a single body is touched, all other bodies can be touched—because there is but one Matter and one body. If Matter changes in one point, it can change in every other point. But it takes a whole journey to clear up and purify intermediary layers, so that this new heaven or new combination may enter Matter without exploding everything. For the gulf has to be bridged, Sri Aurobindo would soon say, the closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now a void and a silence.²¹

A perilous adventure.

A perilous transition for the earth.

The Last Sedition

Around 1906, a little corner of the Atlas Mountains saw the strange encounter between a forgotten Vedic experi­ence, lost beneath the incomprehension of "more evolved" millennia, and a materialist girl from Paris who believed only what She could “see and touch.” While over there, six thousand miles away (perhaps at the very moment of His first arrest for "sedition”), a young Bengali named Auro­bindo Ghose, also raised in the West, discovered beyond the supreme "summit" of Nirvana—a goal that seemed so intangibly ultimate and absolute that pretending to go beyond it was like a blasphemy—a certain "something” containing the seeds of humanity’s next cycle. What kind of wind was it then blowing over the earth? What more radical sedition was brewing? It is not a revolt against the British Government which any one can easily do, Sri Auro­bindo would soon say. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature.²² And Mother was still marveling in 1972, just one year before leaving her body, as if this remarkable coincidence seemed to her ever more remark­able, or more revealing: Theon and Sri Aurobindo did not know each other, they never met each other. They didn’t even know of each other’s existence and, with totally different approaches, they reached the same conclusion. In totally different countries and without ever knowing about each other, they knew the same thing at the same time. And I met one and the other.²³

Two beings with the same Western materialistic upbring­ing rediscovered a tradition lost since the beginning of this cycle, some seven to ten thousand years earlier, as if human­ity had to travel an immense curve and explore to the very end, with innumerable sages and saints, the ways of heaven or nothingness, which all emerged into a white infinity or some extraterrestrial paradise; explore to the very end the paths of science, which all opened out onto an almost monstrous earth; plow or struggle on the mind’s paths, which all opened onto a new, worldwide Babel where thoughts and words became like counterfeit money at the service of teeming egoisms and pygmies of power; touch and delve ever deeper into its own misery along all the paths of faith or non-faith, yes or no, good or evil—and nothing was good or bad anymore—to end up in some dark hole where the only unmistakable reality was still the old death, with or without bombs, in the middle of a tragic and grotesque circus where man ridiculed himself beneath the sole onslaught of radio waves and democratic slogans —draw the whole curve of pain, from zero-Matter to zero- Spirit, in order to come full circle at last and reach that supreme Starting Point where a few Rishis had seen, in the heart of Matter and the depths of their bodies, as if in the dark depths of a cave, a new Sun of knowledge like a new Spirit in a new Matter: "This treasure in the infinite rock” (Rig-Veda 1.130.3), "the Sun dwelling in the darkness” (III.39.5). And this entire cycle was perhaps needed for the whole of humanity to reach the same realization, instead of a few Rishis scattered atop their Himalayas—because, in the end, there is but one Man. One single evolution. We all reach the goal together, or no one reaches it.

We are there, we are reaching that point; we have exhausted everything, there are no more marvelous beliefs to mislead us above or below, we have seen ourselves perfectly: the doors of bankruptcy open upon OURSELVES.

And finally, the same old law of evolution presides over this transition as over all the others. The key to the transi­tion is not to be found in some new pair of lungs or some frontal or parietal superlobes, but in this very pressure from within, this Need which pulled the reptiles from the bottom of their dried-up swamps and forced them to invent wings, which pulled the fish out of their asphyxiating hole and compelled them to invent lungs—which is pulling men from their mental pestilence, and is pounding and ham­mering them until they spring forth into another air of consciousness, into that ONE where all the misery of sepa­ration and division in Matter will be healed.

Matter is the obstacle and Matter is the key.

Thus Mother had to meet Theon before Sri Aurobindo, as if She, too, had to exhaust all the false paths of the Possible before knocking at the real door—perhaps in order to close the way once and for all to any resurgence of the old Atlanteans, whom Plato said had been swallowed up 9,000 years before him; perhaps, too, because She had to meet death once before wresting its secret from it. For Death, according to the ancient Scriptures, is the guardian of Knowledge.²⁴

We are in the time of the last sedition: against Mind in Matter and death in Matter. Perhaps one and the same thing.

The supreme obstacle is the supreme door.