Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

Introduction

Mother and I are one but in two bodies.¹

—Sri Aurobindo

November 17, 1973, 7:25 p.m. She left.

The doctors declared her dead—there were three of them.

No mistake.

She left.

And yet...

Her face was so thin, so white—oh, not beatific, not the “peace of the dead": a fierce concentration on that face—She who had all the beatitudes, all the liberations of the soul—an overwhelming concentration, as if She were star­ing at ... what? The Enigma—inexorably, unwaveringly, without a quiver, straight as a sword to pierce the heart of Falsehood, Death is a Falsehood, She used to say; We have put it into our head and our will to conquer this accident.²

What happened? Or what perhaps is happening?

What was She looking at with her two eyes closed, She who said, I can see more clearly with my eyes closed than with my eyes open?³

They will think I am dead because I can no longer move

and no longer speak. But you who know ,.. you will tell them.

You will tell them ...

The oldest mystery since the beginnings of man, the most powerful secret ever since ancient Egypt and before, in the mists of time, ever since man has been dying. After all, as long as there is death, She said simply, things will always end badly.⁴ Always end badly—we may sing, paint, poeticize, create religions (in fact, this is why we create religions) and philosophize (this is also why we create philosophies), but it will always end up with this radical calling into question, which renders all our endeavors and our most beautiful songs futile. For the last few million years we have entrusted future races with the care and the hope of reaping those laurels—ah, later!—and we go on and on with the vain song, while awaiting our turn to open our two eyes upon the Enigma. Remove this accident and everything changes: religions, philosophies, songs, life. It is the one and only radical event in the world. It is what changes everything and determines everything. It is as if it were THE question given me to resolve,⁵ She said.

You will tell them ...

The most extraordinary secret, whose many threads we scarcely know how to unravel properly—and yet, all the threads are there; everything is there in this formidable epic, Mothers secret Agenda, in which the experiences of a new terrestrial transition are laid out step by step. But it is not enough to tell the secrets, any more than it is to utter tantric mantras; we have to drive them into our substance; there has to be the little trigger that makes them living and powerful and dynamic—we must enter Mother's experi­ence. We must approach Her as if in search of that which revolutionizes life. Until we undertake the revolution of death, we will not revolutionize a thing in the world, even if we gathered all our bombs and miles of libraries and equa­tions. We can blow up the planet and nothing, absolutely nothing, will be changed—we will go on dividing and sub­tracting somewhere else, on other earths, and begin all over again, from molecules to amino acids to some new Nobel Prize of no Peace at all. For nothing changes so long as that is not changed. We want to effect THAT change, She said.

And She left.

Or did She? What is the mystery of Mother's "death”?

Sri Aurobindo left without revealing his secret,⁶ Mother said to me one day. But perhaps She has left us her secret, which will enable us to find Sri Aurobindo’s secret—because it is the same one. When we know what She was doing, we shall know what He was doing—which had nothing to do with philosophy, despite the thirty-four volumes He left us, but living evolution, or, rather, a living revolution, A revo­lution which is still under way. Both of them came to wage that revolution, to open that new evolutionary stage or that new state, a deathless state—which is something other than physical immortality, however, because our immortal­ity is simply the reverse of our mortality, or rather its glorified continuation minus the tomb—such a total revo­lution of life that the very roots of death can no longer grow there, and that both life and death are transformed into ... something else.

Let us take stock.

Can we hope that it will be possible for this body, which is at present our means of terrestrial manifestation, to trans­form itself progressively into something capable of expressing a higher life, or will we have to abandon this form altogether and enter another that does not yet exist on earth? Will there be continuity or the sudden appearance of something new? Will there be a progressive transition between what we are now and what our inner spirit aspires to become, or will there be a break, which means being obliged to discard this present human form and waiting for the appearance of a new form—an appearance whose process we do not foresee and which will have nothing in common with what we are now?⁷

This was at the end of 1957, just one year before She withdrew into the great experience—into the dangerous unknown, as She called it—fifteen years before that fateful November 17, 1973. What happened during those fifteen years? Did She find "the process”?

And this further question: Will the human species be like certain other species that have disappeared from the earth?⁸

They carried her down from her room. They laid her on a chaise longue draped with white satin. Swarms of people filed past in front of her under the droning fans, beneath a burning hot zinc ceiling ablaze with gold—enough to decompose a body at top speed. Everything was meticu­lously arranged so that Death could do its work as fast as possible. Yet She had said: This body must be left in peace .,. it should not be rushed into a hole ... because, even long after the doctors have declared it to be “dead, " it will be conscious —its cells are conscious—and it will be aware of it, it will feel it, and that will mean adding one more misery to all those it has had.⁹ Then She corrected herself: It seems silly to make a fuss; better say nothing.

She was put into the hole, in a rosewood coffin, near Sri Aurobindo. She was half sitting up in her coffin because her back was so bent—from too much suffering, perhaps. I was all the pain of the world ... felt together.¹⁰ Slowly the lid was lowered over her head. There was still a ray of light on her neck. She was gazing all alone, her face bent over her chest. Gazing at what?

Then the lid was shut on her head—night. Night, or what? They drove twenty-five screws into her coffin.

She was ninety-five. She fought like a lion to the very end. But where is the end?

Outside, it was the second war in Israel. November 1973. The petroleum tap had just been turned off for the first time—a tiny little tap. Palestinian commandoes carried out their machine gun attacks in Khartoum, Athens, Fiumi- cino. There was a coup d'etat in Afghanistan, a coup d'etat in Chile, terrorism in Ireland. Students were demonstrat­ing in Barcelona, in Bangkok, in Greece. There was the Cultural Revolution in Libya, the Cultural Revolution in China. There were droughts in the Sahel, the devaluation of the dollar, Watergate. It was the fifteenth Chinese nuclear explosion, the fifth French explosion. It was the last quarter of the 20th century-—the death of Picasso as well. The death of a world perhaps. Or the beginning of something else.

Even those around Her were beginning to grumble. She was so alone.

It was twenty-three years after Sri Aurobindo’s departure.

And we still hear his prophetic words:

A day may come when she must stand unhelped On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast, Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.

Alone with death and close to extinction's edge, Her single greatness in that last dire scene, She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time And reach an apex of world-destiny

Where all is won or all is lost for man.¹¹

They grumbled. But it is the whole world that grumbles, as if something has been thrown into it which caused a seething furor everywhere.¹² Let there be no mistake—it is not a question of a human revolt to have a better life, to feel better—even that better is worth nothing! She said. It is not a question of putting a little more socialism here, democracy there, or justice or fraternity—even that fra­ternity is a fraternity of death. Nor of replastering the system or repairing an oil tap—tomorrow the tap will leak somewhere else, it is the great leak everywhere. It is the red evening of the West,¹³ the one Sri Aurobindo already saw fifty-three years earlier, when we were glorying in all our sciences and discoveries. There is nothing to discover except ourselves! There is no superpower except in ourselves, no other source of new energy than in ourselves! This is what is being hammered into the head of the earth, this something that has been “thrown into it," this “Supra- mental Force," which is pushing and pushing us to find the real secret of Matter, the real power, true life without death, true fraternity without gunfire, justice without a guillotine, and men masters of their destiny—or other men. There are immense periods during which things are prepared—the past wears out and the future is prepared—and those are immense periods, neutral, drab, during which things keep preparing themselves over and over and look as if they will always remain that way. Then, all of a sudden, between two such periods, the change takes place. Like the moment when man appeared on earth. Now it’s something else, another being.¹⁴

Did She fail? Did She find "the process,” the transition to the other being?

There are more secrets to this “death" than one might think. There is the secret of the future.

A difficult secret, which we approach with a prayer on our lips and a quivering in our heart. Perhaps this is how the first man in his clearing approached a first awesome thought. But the secret of the next world lies not in a thought. It is supra-mental; it takes place within the depths of the body, at that knot between life and death where, for the first time, something has begun to stir in Matter—in a body’s cells, on the frontier of biology and prayer. It is not a secret to "understand"; it is an ordeal by fire, because, to "understand,” for Matter, is to have the power—a power which is found only at that narrow junction where life and death embrace, where the cells escape the old genetic code to enter the law of the next kingdom. It is a new transmu­tation, more arduous than that of the caterpillar. The transmutation to the next age. To find the secret is to have the power. To stand upright before death, upright before life, at the point where this death dies out and where this life dies out—or else is rekindled to another PHYSICAL life, which is no longer life or death, but something else. Perhaps the life divine. Another clearing. A formidable transition.

You will tell them.

This is the transition we are going to try to work out together, groping through Mother's great virgin forest. And perhaps at the end, in the clearing of the next world, with the eyes of the next being, we will find what She was seek­ing, She who said, I am on the way to discovering the illusion that must be destroyed so that physical life can be uninterrupted,¹⁵

And let there be no mistake: the discovery is not yet there—it has to be made.

Maybe even many will have to make this discovery for it to be truly done.

Then, perhaps, we will meet Mother again as if She had never died.

And Death's deep falsity¹⁶ will disappear.

Deer House
Nandanam
January 6, 1975