Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III

11: The Transformation

For a long time, and perhaps until the end, Mother did not know the way. If one dares say so, it is perhaps now, with this pen, that the path tries to trace itself for the first time— bodies do not need to know, they walk: it is our heads that need to know, that is to say, to have a map in front of their eyes. But the map is of no use to the body. The new world is only that step; the map is just that aspiration. And all the bodies that want to set out on the path need but that aspiration alone—for truly it is the only path since the protoplasm: an aspiration. And it will always be the way. One finds at the end that with which one started out. One always carries the goal with oneself, the goal is at each instant. When one becomes aware of this, time dissolves: today was a million years ago. If it is the head that becomes aware of it, one drifts off in contemplation into a white eternity, and nothing changes. When it is the body that perceives it, one perhaps touches one of the levers of transformation, because time is the body’s enemy: one enters a golden eternity that seems to have strange qualities. The body is what carries the key to the long journey. So it has no need of a map, it has a need to be. And it is quite curious, when the body finds that eternity, it is no longer at all a static eternity like that of monks, poets or meditators, but an eternity that seems made of supreme dynamism—an eternity in lightning-like movement. It is another time. And it is not the eternity that we know. There is a “time” of the body that contains perhaps the secret of another space, that contains perhaps the secret of Matter, because Matter is already a sort of frozen time. And the secret of the dissolution of Death that goes along with time. In the face of Death, we have only found a white eternity: two types of dissolution, in white or in black. When we have found the third time, the body’s time, the time that does not die and the time that does not get caught in eternity’s rut, we will perhaps have the complete key. Only the body can know.

Slowly, Mother’s body was veering into a third time.

Transformation or Change of Perspective?

It was a sort of living contradiction, as if Mother found herself not in front of, but on two totally different paths. Our heads can very well follow contradictory ideas and live their chaos as best as they can, but a body, how can it have one foot here and the other there? Two paths or two bodies that seemed to go in two opposing directions, or parallel ones that met at the infinite—but the infinite is far. On one hand, She vaguely, imperceptibly felt this new body forming itself in her: I am not quite sure that I do not already exist PHYSICALLY with a true body, She said as early as 1963, there, in Matter on the other side of our cage. I say “not quite sure” because the outer senses have no proof of it!... But from time to time, it somehow imposes itself: for a minute, I see myself, feel myself, objectify myself as I am. But it just lasts a few seconds, and pfft! gone—it’s replaced by the old habit.⁸⁵ And all of a sudden, we wonder if this formidable, indisputable “scientific” materiality of the world is anything more than a habit, an old habit of seeing things. People who see me at night (those who have this vision in the subtle world) don’t see me like this [and Mother pointed to her outer bark]: they see me as I am, and they tell me—they say, “Oh, but you are like this, like that ” And She added: But for the one to take the place of the other ?⁸⁶ It was the whole question. It was the whole ambiguity of it: was the one going to take the place of the other or was the other going to transform itself into the one? She did not know it, She oscillated from one to the other. It was a sort of infernal coming and going from one to the other—and it was evidently in that hell that the key to the solution was hidden. It was in the very contradiction that the possibility of a junction of the two was to be found. It is very simple to say, but not at all convenient to live it. In fact, it was unlivable, except for Her. Then one day in May 1970, things concretized themselves. She saw this body Herself: Well, I saw it, I saw my body, how it will be. It’s fine! [Laughing] It’s fine. A form resembling our body, but sexless: neither man nor woman. It’s a body ... not very different, but so refined! So ... such a refined thing. Its colour was ... a little like Auroville’s colour [orange], like that, but vibrant, that is, as if ... not luminous, but with a sort of luminosity. I was fully awake, I didn’t sleep, it wasn’t a dream. I had the same objectivity we have when awake.⁸⁷And I remember, twelve years earlier, that vision of the supramental boat and the tall orange-coloured beings. A whole journey. As if what She had seen over there, far-off in vision, had entered Matter—but it is not really “entered,” it is all the opaque layers of consciousness to be traversed: it is only “at the end,” “over there,” on the other side of the sleep of our physical Mind. Once the curtain crossed, it is there, with one’s eyes wide-open, as “objective” as the table or the chair, and even more objective because it has more content of consciousness than a table or a chair: it is denser. I think that I even understand what Mother meant when She said that this new Matter was “without division”: our scientific Matter is full of emptiness, it is composed of a formidable splitting-up of particles separated by enormous distances (on that scale),* whereas that one is compact, dense, without “holes.” “As dense as diamond, but elastic,” she said in 1906.

And it is quite curious to remember that the first revolution or revelation in Mother’s life occurred when She was eight or ten years old and She was told: “You see this table? You think it’s a table, that it’s solid and it’s wood—well, it’s only atoms moving about.”.... It caused a kind of revolution in my head, bringing such a sense of the complete unreality of all appearances. All at once I said, “But if it’s like that, then nothing is true!”⁸⁸

Now She was in the second revolution, behind the other “surface”: the atomic one.

We have never found what is behind the atom. Where is the ultimate indivisible nucleus?

And Mother asked herself what was going to occur between this old body and the other. Would the old habit of seeing not change amongst humans? Will there “Like a ping-pong ball in relation to Houston’s baseball field,” remarked the American scientist Jastrow, speaking of the distance that separates the nucleus from its electrons. (Red Giants and White Dwarfs: The Evolution of Stars *(Harper, 1967).

always be a world like the one we know?... We can readily imagine a world where you would live in a new state which would develop according to its own laws. But would the existence of such a world cancel out this one?... So you see, here we face a problem that has yet to be solved.⁸⁹ And She was already wondering in 1962 if, in fact, the whole problem did not come down to a sort of collective mutation of outlook, something that would make the experience gradually spread like oil on water, because we always forget that nothing is separated, no experience is isolated as if within walls, the earth is one body of evolutionary experience. It all practically comes down to a capacity to spread the experience, or to INCLUDE things in the experience (it’s the same thing). You really have to forget this business of one person and then another, one thing and then another Even if you can’t realize it concretely, at least imagine that there is but ONE Thing, exceedingly complex, and one experience taking place in one spot, or spreading out like oil on water, or embracing everything, depending on the case. And the sole explanation for “contagion” is in that Oneness.⁹⁰ An experience that is sufficiently contagious. But it is the whole experience of Sri Aurobindo and Mother: the collective wearing down of the veil of this physical Mind. If it is worn down in their bodies, it must be worn down in the body of the world. And sometimes Mother thought that She had caught the “tail of the solution,” as She would say. A sort of knowledge (is it a knowledge?) or foreknowledge given to the body of how this appearance will be changed. And it sounds so simple, so easy, it can be done in a flash, because it’s not AT ALL—it won’t at all be done in the way people think or expect. It’s rather like the vision of the TRUE internal movement that would IMPOSE itself in such a way that it would veil the false vision There is something that is true, that is the true Physical, which, although it’s not perceptible to our eyes as they see, could make itself perceptible through an INTENSIFICATION.⁹¹ It is what Mother always said: it is not as if this other world had to be created from scratch. It is there, totally existent, “a small trigger would suffice,” an invasion of the Real. And that intensification would be what would effect the transformation outwardly—that would replace the false appearance with the real form.... Now, of course, when I say that, people imagine it’s a “psychic” or mental vision—that’s not it, I don’t mean that ! I mean a PHYSICAL vision, with these very eyes [and Mother touched her eyes]. But a true physical vision, instead of the distorted vision we have now.⁹² A physical mutation of sight? We cannot help but think (we = the fish in the fishbowl) that this “other” world is “another” reality—but it is the same seen with other eyes! It is not supernatural, it is a more exact natural. This , concluded Mother, means, basically, that the true reality is far more marvellous than we can imagine, because all that we can imagine is always an improvement or glorification of what we see—but that’s not it! That’s not it. We can only conceive of things changing from one to another: you grow young again, all the signs of aging disappear and so on [in short, the improvement of the fish in the same bowl]—that’s old hat, that’s not how it works. That’s not it!⁹³

It is very simple: the world-wide touch of a magical wand. And it is very possible that things will happen in that way, up to a certain point. It is quite possible that all of the Falsehood of the world suddenly fills up with grey or black, and fades from sight But we do not know how many humans would suddenly “fade out,” if the only measurement and weight is that of true consciousness. I have no idea whether the false appearance wouldn’t still exist for those not ready to see the true thing, Mother asked herself. At any rate, it would be an intermediary period: those whose eyes are open (what is called “open eyes” in the Scriptures) would be able to see, and they would be able to see not through effort or seeking, but the thing would impose itself on them. While those whose eyes are not open For a time, at least, it would be that way, they wouldn’t see—they would still see the old appearance. The two may be simultaneous.⁹⁴ It is obvious that if even a few hundred or thousand of humans were “included” in the new vision, the contagion of the new world, this would have incalculable repercussions on the rest which could not but be “affected” by this other human “species” whose superior qualities and superior joy, superior harmony, would come to pose a somewhat formidable question mark, perhaps even a challenge, an invisible constraint on the less evolved others, more and more pain-filled in their suffocation. It would obviously be a phenomenon as similar, and perhaps more powerful, than that of the invasion of the first wave of amphibians amongst fish. It is perhaps the phenomenon that is underway, the less and less invisible contagion.

But.…

There is a formidable “but.”

The appearance of the world changes for those whose eyes are open. The very appearance of the body changes: the true light, the true consciousness, the true content imposes itself. And it is certain that the more the true vibration becomes evident, visible, the more it will, as if automatically, rectify the false, lying vibration—and the more we will be obliged to be truthful. There will be no possibility of rigging anymore. An enormous step will have been taken in the consciousness, with incalculable consequences for the harmonization and organization of life But there will remain a body to bury.

All is there.

A body that ages, shrivels, dies.

The very symbol of Falsehood lies there.

Mother observed this new body that was more and more perceptible and that death pressing more and more in her old body. What was going to happen?

The FACT must change, she was to say ultimately. Can it change?

And it was as if Mother were on two simultaneous paths: a path of life, a path of death, an imperishable body, a decomposing one. She was at the same time in life and in death, on one side and the other of the bowl as if the two had to become one, or change into a third thing.

The body is the bridge.

The Problem of Transformation

It is difficult to imagine the passage or entry of this “vibrating body”—dense but fluid, rather luminous, without structure as we know it—into this old body equipped with a skeleton and whose very opacity seems the sign of its existence. It is true, it is certain that it was impossible to imagine, at the beginning of the primary era, the passage or transformation of those metals and stones into living and “fluid” forms when compared to that complete and inert original opacity. The phenomenon is therefore not improbable nor even anti-scientific on the evolutionary scale, no matter what it seems to us today. But practically, on a day to day basis? An evolution does not start tomorrow, it is done day after day, and even if there is a sudden mutation, that mutation is the fruit and result of a long preparation, an accumulation of factors that suddenly provoke a rupture and change in balance. What is the process of this new transformation, there must be a rational process, even if it is slow, invisible and answers to a “reason” that eludes us obviously because it is the reason of the next being. If we had always expected the reason of metals, it is probable that we would continue to have a very metallic universe. Mother is the logic of the future, which did not in any way impede her from handling the logic of today with the rigor of a mathematician: She always pursued things to the very end, coldly, to dismantle the mechanism. The “mechanism” was her passion. There isn’t much difference between the calf being formed in a cow’s womb and the child being formed in its mother’s womb. There is one difference: that of the Mind’s intervention. But if we envisage a PHYSICAL being, that is, as visible as the physical now is and with the same density—for instance, a body that wouldn’t need blood circulation and bones—it would be an infinitely greater transformation than that from animal to man; it would be a transition from man to a being that would no longer be built in the same way, that would no longer function in the same way, that would be like a densification or concretization of ... “something.” Up till now, it doesn’t correspond to anything we have seen physically.⁹⁵— “One can conceive,” I said, “that a light or new force gives the cells a sort of spontaneous life, a spontaneous force.”— Yes, that’s what I said: food can disappear. That’s conceivable.⁹⁶— “But the whole body could be animated by that force? The body could remain supple, for example, while still having its bone structure, have the suppleness of a child.”— But that’s just why a child can’t stand! she exclaimed. What would replace the bone structure, for example?⁹⁷ “It could be the same elements, but they would have a suppleness: elements whose firmness would not come from hardness but would come from the force of light, no?”— Yes, that’s possible.... Supple and plastic, we can also conceive it could be plastic, that is, the form wouldn’t be fixed as it is now. All that is conceivable, but ⁹⁸ “But,” I insisted, “one could very well see that as a type of flowering or luminous swelling, like the bud of a lotus that blossoms. A bud is hard. The light must have that force. And that destroys nothing of the present structure.” But Mother was like St. Thomas: But visible, that can be touched?⁹⁹ (She too was very attached to the “concrete.”) “Yes, simply it is like a flowering: what was closed blossoms like a flower, but the structure of the flower remains.” She nodded her head: I lack experience, I don’t know.¹⁰⁰

Concrete experience was the only thing that concerned Mother, and whenever I tried to imagine or to guess, She would coldly cut me off: “Again poetry,” “Vague things,” she would say. During the nineteen years spent near her, I never once saw her in vagueness. I am absolutely convinced (because I’ve had experiences that proved it to me) that the life of this body—its life, what makes it move and change—can be replaced by a force; that is to say, a sort of immortality can be created, and the wear and tear can disappear. And it can come about psychologically, through total obedience to the divine Impulsion [i.e., a willing automatism],which means that at every moment you have the force you need, you do the thing that must be done—all these things, all of them are certitudes. They’re not a hope, not an imagining: they are certitudes. You must educate the body and slowly transform and change the habits. It can be done, all that can be done. But the question is, how much TIME would it take to do away with the necessity (to take just this problem) of the skeleton?... Time, yes, that was the problem. So a supramental body suspended in a world that’s not the earth is not the thing! How true!... Only, what I mean, she added, is that it may again take place through a large number of new creations. The transition from man to this being, for instance, will perhaps take place through all kinds of other intermediaries. You understand, what I find formidable is the leap from one to the other I can very well conceive of a being who could, through spiritual power, the power of his inner being, absorb the necessary forces, renew himself and remain ever young—that’s quite easily conceivable, even providing for a certain suppleness so as to be able to change the form if necessary. But the complete disappearance of this system of construction right away—from one to the other right away, that seems It appears to require stages.¹⁰¹ There will probably be intermediary beings who won’t last, you see, just as there were intermediary beings between the chimpanzee and man.... But I don’t know, something has to happen that has never before happened.¹⁰²

Something that escapes us, but which is perhaps right in front of us, incomprehensible.

In all our data, we always forget the “something” that is not the data of the past.

But that is not all. Mother saw the problem in its totality: The personal experience is like this: all that I do with the Lord’s Presence, I do effortlessly, without difficulty, without fatigue, without wear and tear, like that in the great Rhythm, but it’s still open to the whole influence from outside and the body is forced to do things that aren’t directly the expression of the supreme Impulsion, hence the fatigue, the friction.... Something is needed that has the power to resist the contagion. Man cannot resist the contagion from the animal, he can’t, he has constant relationships. Well, how will that being manage?... It would seem that for a long time—a long time—he will still be subject to the laws of contagion. “I don’t know,” I answered in my innocence, “but that does not seem to me impossible; I have the impression that that Power of Light being there, what could contaminate it?” And Mother exclaimed: But the whole world would disappear! That’s the problem, you understand. When That comes, when the Lord is there, there isn’t one in a thousand for whom it’s not terrifying. And not to the reason, not to the thought: to the flesh, like that. So assume—assume it happens and a being is the condensation and expression, an embodiment of the supreme Power, of the supreme Light—what would happen?!... I’ve seen adults come (I did the experiment: I charge the atmosphere, the Lord is present), well, I’ve seen forty-year-old men enter that and ... brrt! literally run away, disregarding all social courtesy, and after having ASKED to come, you understand! Anyway everything was there to allow them to behave decently—impossible, they couldn’t. It’s too strong. “Well, that’s the whole problem,” I said to Mother.… And She would agree. “... Because I don’t see the difficulty of the transformation in itself. It seems to me more the difficulty of the world.”

The difficulty of the old recalcitrant species.

If everything could be transformed at the same time, she said, it would be all right, but it’s clearly not like that. If one being were transformed all alone.... Perhaps it would be unbearable.¹⁰³

Such is the problem of the transformation, which is perhaps not only nor essentially a physiological or anatomical one, but a total problem, because evolution is everything, from the protoplasm up to us. There is no material impossibility, there is no physiological impossibility, no more than in the Iron Age or the Age of nickel—there is always, eternally, a difficulty of the past that does not want to die and clings to the old forms. To its favourite suffocation. Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s experience is no doubt the most violent traumatism the earth has suffered since the appearance of Life. It is but a beginning.

And everything can be miraculous.…

If something gives way in our consciousness. There are only difficulties of consciousness.

A little datum of joy.

And we wonder if it won’t be our bodies that will want joy before we do ... and take us by surprise?

Cellular Stabilization

This transformation of the body is as slow and invisible as the formation of the new body, and in fact, it is concomitant, one cannot separate the two phenomena: that which produces the spinning of the new substance, the primary Matter, also produces an in-depth alteration in the cellular functioning and in the material, corporeal substance; only there, for obvious reasons, the action is slower— everything would break if the change were too brusque. Fall apart or be transformed, it’s ... almost the same procedure!¹⁰⁴ Mother exclaimed. So one begins to understand a bit the hell of the last years, the frightening paradox that She lived. “To undo oneself forward”.… The process of the transformation is the same as the process of the formation of the new body, quite simply—what seems to us extraordinarily complicated, a sort of unimaginable impossibility, has the simplest key there is: it is the Mind of the cells that attracts or stops the formidable Current of the primary, supramental substance. It is the fixative or connector of the supramental vibration. That was why Mother fainted every time She wanted to enter into contact with the Supramental by abolishing the Mind of the body: for it is the intermediary, the bridge between Matter as it is now, hardened, stuck in its evolutionary habits, and the primary Matter, supramental, fluid, vibrant, and so formidably powerful, without a “hole.” Obviously, one does not “fix” such a current with impunity: it is a sort of low-flame demolition, if one may say so. The first bodies that formed themselves, particles, atoms lost no time in encrusting and dividing this substance by dividing themselves from the formidable magma and everything came to encrust itself on this first crust. One really needs a total widening of the cellular consciousness—just the opposite movement of the first encrusting—in order to bear the formidable supramental tidal wave with just, just that very small vibration of the Mind of the cells, that minute nucleus of prayer or of call, which fixes or spins out the quantum that it can sustain. This Mind of the cells is therefore the key, the simple key to the transformation as to the new body as well, but one had to reach this key. Sri Aurobindo’s “mathematical formula,” when He reached the cellular bedrock, was precisely that: He found the missing link between Matter and the Supermind, and all that remained was to “elaborate” it ... cell by cell. The mind is everywhere, he observed in one of the only revealing texts that He left on this subject and which we have already partially quoted And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilization of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature.¹⁰⁵ It is Mother’s whole experience: once delivered from the hypnotism of the physical Mind, this corporeal, cellular mind began to fix the supramental vibration and form a new body. It began to repeat the Mantra as invariably as its old catastrophes. It is the stabilizer. That is why that mind alone was left, She said after the radical cleansing of 1968. If you like, in appearance I had become an idiot, I didn’t know anything. And it’s that mind that developed, slowly, slowly. Sri Aurobindo said that if the physical Mind is transformed, the body’s transformation will follow quite NATURALLY. We’ll see!¹⁰⁶

And we wonder whether the formation of this new body is not only the first stage of the transformation instead of the last one as many think. Whether the two phenomena are not complimentary. For if only the new body remains, it is still something that is “suspended in a world that is not the earth”: one evaporates. It is not that, Mother would say. But it is this new body, more rapid to form because precisely it does not have to demolish the old encrustations, that must or should infuse itself slowly into the old formation as much as it is able to support it up, until the two are melted one into the other; then we would have something that would no longer be the old bone structure that we know and no longer the imponderable new body, something that would confer a ponderability to the new body and a new materiality to the old one, and it would be truly the supramental body on earth. The old body would be the bridge.

The whole question lies in this “ponderability” or in this new materiality; there we are completely in the unknown—perhaps “the dangerous unknown” that Mother spoke of—and we will not truly know until the thing is done. How could the mineral understand the “materiality” of life?

Cellular Survival

No doubt one can think that this ponderability is simply a question of vision and if the human vision changes, the imponderable will become perfectly ponderable. But there still remains this old rag that we bury, and I do not know why, but I feel that the whole secret is precisely there. Otherwise why talk of transformation? The first time that Mother went into “Sri Aurobindo’s home” in 1959, I asked her if this “other” world, this true “lining” of the earth was the supramental world. She answered me thus: My feeling is that this life which Sri Aurobindo is living right now is not the full satisfaction of the supramental life for him. In this “other” world, there was infinity, majesty, perfect calm, eternity—all was there.... Perhaps it was joy that was missing. Of course, Sri Aurobindo himself had joy.

But I had the impression that it was not total and that this is why I had to continue the work. I felt that it could only be total when things here have changed.¹⁰⁷

Changed here, that is to say, when the two sides are ONE. When the other body and the body of the earth are ONE. What is the mystery that separates the two?

It was perhaps this mystery that was being “elaborated” in Mother’s body?

We can’t both remain upon earth, one must go, Sri Aurobindo had said to Mother. And Mother had answered him, “I am ready, I’ll go.” Then he answered me, “No, you can’t go, your body is better than mine, you can undergo the transformation better than I can do.”¹⁰⁸And Mother cried out, with an I don’t know what, which was like a pain mixed with anguish, still nineteen years after the fact (it was in 1969): Why?... How many times since then I have asked myself that question Why?¹⁰⁹ As if the transformation of this body were the condition for the two sides to join, as if the body were the place of junction, the place where the veil is torn. But what, what veil, what “mechanism”? And I asked Mother: “Is it that your presence here (on this side of the veil) could help (Sri Aurobindo) one day to materialize?”—Yes, yes. That he said clearly (I asked him), “I’ll come back only in a supramental body. ” But there’s the big question of that supramental body, I don’t know.¹¹⁰ What change in this body of Matter could make the very nature of Matter change to the point that the other body could infuse itself here, in our terrestrial conditions? It is perhaps this change in the nature of Matter that is the knot of the story: a “hybrid” Matter, if one may say so, between the supramental fluidity and the opaque hardness of our terrestrial bodies? A new transparency of Matter. Like a new milieu to be created that would allow for the joining of the two sides. “Perhaps there is just a passage to open ?” (for Sri Aurobindo and that world to materialize), I asked Mother. —That may be But this body has never had a desire or ambition to work miracles—it’s not interested in that. It has seen many miraculous things, but it has always felt it was the Supreme Lord who was doing all that (which it finds quite natural, by the way). But imaginings.... When they come, it drives them back, it says, “No, that doesn’t interest me.”¹¹¹ And in fact it was not a “miracle” to accomplish, it was Matter itself that had to be changed, the body itself to be changed: the sole imaginations of the body are reality. Perhaps it was in the process of creating the “miracle” without knowing it. Things people find “marvellous”, Mother continued, all of that doesn’t interest it. It wouldn’t be surprised to see Sri Aurobindo walk in one day—not in the least; but it doesn’t have ... it feels no urge to do it, you understand. It feels no need to astound people—none at all. We’ll see!¹¹² And She laughed. But I insisted, because I clearly felt that it was not a question of miracle, nor even of Sri Aurobindo’s appearing, but of the transformation of the earth, truly, the transformation of the physical, material milieu that would permit the junction of the two sides, a bit like the transformation of the mineral opacity had given Matter its first eyes, and the afternoon of the day I had had this conversation with Mother, I sent her a two-line note: “Savitri goes seeking Satyavan in death⎯therefore Mother will bring Sri Aurobindo back?”—

Something of the sort,¹¹³ She answered.

“To bring Sri Aurobindo back” means to join the two sides.

And truly the question defines itself; everything centres around something to be transformed in the nature of this terrestrial body, of this terrestrial Matter, so that the veil is torn—now, this veil is what makes the very death and separates the two sides. It is in the body that death can be conquered, it is in the body that the veil tears. It is the body that has the key to the junction of the two worlds as in ONE—it is that that makes “Satyavan” return. The mystery of the transformation is not really the mystery of a marvellous growing young again of the bodies, nor even of the glorious change of the bodies: it is the very mystery of death in its nest.

Mother’s body now is in the very nest of that death. Has it failed? Or is it pursuing some incredible task? “Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory.”

There is only one transformation to be done, it is the transformation of death. This was the point that Mother was reaching, slowly, dangerously.

She was entering death, alive.

And those cells, those very small cells with their unflagging vibration of call, repeated thousands and millions of times as much as there are seconds in the day and in the night, slowly accumulated a strange life, as if indestructible, beneath that bark that seemed to disintegrate as quickly as they were integrating themselves— what were they going to do? Were they that site where one remains alive in death? The site of the ultimate mystery and perhaps of the transformation of death. The place where the supramental light is “stabilized,” the light that does not die. In 1965, when for the first time Mother succeeded in piercing the crust of the physical Mind and reaching that Mind of the cells, She said this: There has been a whole work of PREPARATION for the transformation. What could I call it?... A transfer of power. The cells, the whole material consciousness, used to obey the inner individual consciousness—the psychic consciousness most of the time, or the mental (but the mind had been silent for a long time). But now this material Mind is organizing itself like the other one, or the other ones, rather, like the Mind of all the states of being—do you know, it is educating itself. It is learning things and organizing the ordinary science of the material world. That’s very interesting.... You see, all the memory that came from mental knowledge went away a long, long time ago, and I used to receive indications only from above. But now it’s a sort of memory being built from below. It’s like a shift in the directing will; it’s no longer the same thing that makes you act—“act” or anything, of course: move, walk, anything. It isn’t the same centre any longer.¹¹⁴ An autonomous cellular life governed by the Mind of the cells, by that small indestructible, universal vibration. And as I did not understand very well back then what this new Mind was, I asked Mother: “How do you define this physical Mind, that which was subject to this transfer of power?”—That isn’t the physical Mind. It is the material Mind—not even the material Mind: the mind OF MATTER. It is the mental substance that belongs to Matter itself, to the cells. That’s what was formerly called “the spirit of the form,” when it was said that mummies kept their bodies intact as long as the spirit of the form persisted. That’s the Mind I mean, that completely material Mind.¹¹⁵ So, it was like a revelation.… All of a sudden, I could see that small silent girl looking at that mummy in the Guimet Museum.… She had covered the whole trajectory, fifty years of “descent” to reach there.

The place that survives death.

Stabilized, the Mind of the cells no longer stops, it vibrates no matter where, even in death.

It is the site of the transformation of death.

It was there that Mother entered more and more. A dangerous unknown.

And time changed: Time does not exist anymore. As if another time had entered this one.¹¹⁶

In the Mind of the cells is found the double secret of the transformation of death and the transformation of the body—perhaps one and the same secret.