Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III

13: Cellular Time

Cellular Interdependence

It was more and more “a race between transformation and death,” as She said twelve years earlier, in 1958. She received blow after blow, it was more and more the “rush of Falsehood” around her as in the world: It’s as if, through the Pressure, all the Falsehood had been brought out. As if there were a poison, you know, and by putting pressure, the poison comes out to be got rid of—and how it’s coming out!...¹ And one well understands that it was not a sudden turpitude or degradation: simply what was hidden—hidden for millennia—came out of its hole. And how it came out! It had to come out of its hiding place there, in that animal filth around the cells, so that the “other thing” could come out—it was the very sign of the operation. The famous panis of the Vedic Rishis, the wolves, devourers and gnomes of all sorts hidden in the “cave” and who were impeding the “dawn,” the breaking out of the “sun in the obscurity,” the forcing open of the “mountain,” they had all come out, in the full light of day, they no longer had a hiding place—it is the time when everything is plain for all to see. And how it becomes plain.… Things unmask themselves, people unmask themselves. It is not the “worst” time: it is the time of truth. And her body got thinner from day to day. But you must know, She wrote to one of the disciples, that in each of my children and everyone of them, whenever they speak or act under the impulse of Falsehood, it acts on my body like a blow.² They knew it perhaps, but the blows continued. They would climb, impeccable and draped in white, the small turning stairway padded with a carpet of golden wool. They have put on a mask of goodwill. But the inner vibrations still belong to the world of Falsehood.³ Oh! She was not fooled by her children, and She loved them, but.… This body is acquiring a terrifying sensitiveness,⁴ she remarked at the beginning of 1970. Naturally! it was everywhere, in everything. And She scolded herself: to sense and feel pain was still the sign of a hidden “I” in the body, an “I” that felt. Basically, what still has the illusion of being something separate must dissolve. It must say to itself, “It’s not my business, I don’t exist.” That’s the best attitude it can take. Then ... It goes into the great Universal Rhythm.⁵ It was more and more this movement of fusion that one felt in her body. Instead of walling itself up in suffering, like all bodies, to become frozen and ever more encrusted in order to build a protective wall, which is finally a wall of death, She tried to explode the last traces of the wall, the last small layer that retains pain and piles up death. Yes, but.…

A small incident, one day, came to provide the exact dimension of the problem. The incident occurred in the “music room,” where Mother was still, at times, receiving people. I had a very clear experience, She told me after the “fact”. I was with X., who was in a dreadful state of agitation, revolt, confusion ... everything one can imagine. And for certainly nearly three quarters of an hour, he kept throwing it all on me violently. I was there—I didn’t notice it! I was laughing, speaking, acting, moving around, and the body felt per-fect-ly fine. I came back to my room here, Y. and Z. were here and they had heard the whole thing (he was shouting like a madman); they were full of a sort of horrified pity because of what that boy had inflicted on me—and INSTANTLY the cells felt the fatigue, the terrible tension ... which they had not felt all the while, not for a minute! When I got up to leave X., everything was charming, it was amusing [exactly like Mother!], and instantly, when I entered this room, there was a fatigue and tension ... COMING FROM THEM! It gave me an interesting measure of the interdependence. The body follows the action very well and does all that it has to do, but when around it there are consciousnesses that feel or think otherwise, that still has a considerable action. Although the consciousness isn’t affected: it’s perfectly lucid, it sees the whole play all the time, and it is conscious of the forces that come. So how is it that, the consciousness being conscious of the forces that come, those forces still have the power to act on the cells directly?... That’s a problem. It means a cellular interdependence that makes the program very, very difficult.⁶ And in fact the “program” was to become more and more difficult.

Then Mother added this, which gives another dimension to the problem: So an all-powerful vibration is needed to flatten all that: vrrm!… But as Sri Aurobindo wrote, if that came ... maybe it would destroy too many things?⁷ And we are exactly in the heart of the contradiction: on one hand one needs an all-powerful Force to overcome the obstacle, and on the other, if this Force only shows the tip of its nose, it is the crushing of all that resists around it. Because those were vibrations of goodwill, there was no hostility in Y and Z, nothing, absolutely nothing—the hostility was before, with X.! The revolt and so on had no effect whatsoever.⁸ It is not the obstacle of “evil,” it is also the formidable obstacle of all the false “good,” sanctified, sentimentalized, constitutionalized and medicalized. There were also doctors around Her, there were all sorts of people who wished her the greatest “good.” So.… After that, I said to myself, “How little we know! How limited all our understanding is in comparison with what IS: the mechanism.”⁹

She was looking for the mechanism.

How to overcome this cellular contagion ... without crushing everything around her?

How to avoid that the new species be swallowed up by the old one?

The Central Experience

Now, there is an experience, repeated thousands and tens of thousands of times during those years since the first exit from the web of the physical Mind in 1962, that tended to take on a new depth, as if deep down underneath thousands of forms or faces, we were always in front of the same Experience, the same Reality, which unveils what it is little by little—the same Matter which we are made of gradually revealing what it is. But this true Matter, as it is, obviously cannot reveal what it is except by breaking a little the comfortable habits within which it had been enclosed. So, we cry, we protest, we suffer because we do not know how to see that each thing, each accident, each circumstance is in truth a formidable and innumerable grace which is given to us to reach the Secret, or a layer closer to the Secret, and that everything is marvellously organized—but we want to counter the Marvel, we pass by or we put a layer of penicillin on it, ten layers, twenty layers to “rectify” the abominable disorder, or the abominable Falsehood. And we do not see that that break or that crack was just the occasion for a small new reality to squeeze through the ruins or the exploded scales. If we were able to apply that to the

slightest thing, life would begin to abound in miracles—because finally the Miracle is constantly there, it is only clogged by a certain habit of seeing. Matter is a miracle, it is the last miracle: The rejection of falsehood by the mind seeking utter truth is one of the chief causes why mind cannot attain to the settled, rounded and perfect truth, said Sri Aurobindo, not to escape falsehood is the effort of divine mind, but to seize the truth that has masked behind even the most grotesque and far-wandering error.¹⁰ And Mother made the same discovery IN HER BODY with sickness and death Instead of the selfish answer that consists in saying, “Ah, no! I don’t want that, I don’t want any of it!—let it come, accept it and see what the solution is. In other words, instead of the old problem—rejection of life, rejection of the difficulty, rejection of the disorder and the flight into Nirvana—it’s the acceptance of everything—and Victory. This is really (as far as I know) the new thing Sri Aurobindo has brought. Not only the idea that it’s possible, but that it’s the true solution, and the idea that we can start now. I am not saying we’ll reach the end now, I don’t know, but the idea is that we can begin right now, the time has come when we can begin, and it’s the only true solution, the other solution is no solution; well, it was a necessary experiment in the universal march, but flight is no solution⎯ the solution is Victory. And the time has come when we can try.¹¹

The truth behind illnesses and death. One must be fearless, that is all.

And one must have faith in the true miracle of Matter.

We can go back several years to choose the simple, classical example of it, which was soon to take on another depth. There is a sudden perception of a sort of disorganization, like a current of disorganization; at first the substance making up the body feels it, then it sees the effect, and everything starts being disorganized: that disorganization is what prevents the cohesion necessary for the cells to constitute an individual body, so then you say, “Ah, it’ll be the end.” Then the cells aspire, there is a sort of central consciousness in the body which aspires intensely, with as complete a surrender as it can make: “Your Will, Lord, Your Will, Your Will ” Then there is a kind of ... not something thunderous, not a dazzling flash of light, but a sort of well, the impression is of a DENSIFICATION of that current of disorganization; [and it is here that we approach the key] and then something comes to A HALT: first there is a peace, then a light, then Harmony—and the disorder has vanished. And when the disorder has vanished, there is instantly IN THE CELLS a sense of living eternity, of living for eternity. That is to say a sort of time-change in the cells: a densification of time. The current stops. Well, that experience, such as I’ve told you, with the whole intensity of concrete reality [a heart attack or neuritis is something very concrete], occurs not only daily, but several times in a single day. At times it’s very severe, that is, like a mass; at other times, it’s only like something that touches. But those aren’t thunderous events, the human neighbour isn’t even aware of them; he may note a sort of cessation in the outward activity, a concentration [She would place the palms of her hands over her eyes for one or two minutes], but that’s all. So of course, you don’t talk about it, you can’t write books about it. That’s how the work goes. It’s a very obscure work. And She added, as if She saw Sri Aurobindo’s face, all those years of silence, his last immobile years in the large green armchair, staring at the Wall: Proclamations, revelations, prophecies, all that is after all very comfortable, it gives a sense of something “concrete”; now it’s very obscure, there is a sense that it’s very obscure, invisible (it will be visible only in results far, far ahead), and not understood. And as a matter of fact, insofar as it's truly new, it is incomprehensible.¹²

She did not understand herself, She felt her way along in the forest. She had well observed a sort of “vertical time” that seemed to have strange properties, but it was a fugitive phenomenon, was it not, and in fact, as Pavitra said, it is an eternity that never has time! Mother never had the time. She had to be on the very verge of death for them to give her the time to catch her breath—one, two days—then She would begin again. But the curve developed itself, became more and more precise, more and more acute, the blows rained down on her ... in order to teach her the mechanism: It’s as if the two extremes—a marvellous state and a general decomposition—were here like this, intertwined. Everything, but everything is falling apart: people you count on give way, it seems there’s a general dishonesty spreading, people getting sick all the time [that is to say, their illness fell on Mother]. As difficulties go, there have never been so many, never, and compounded: big difficulties with ruinous ones. But at the same time, for... a flash (it comes for a few minutes, then it goes away), there is a ... marvellous state (the body feels it), unimaginable, you know, like the extreme opposite. As if it wanted to take over—but the other fights back fiercely. And so, all circumstances are like that, all the people are like that, from the government on down to the people here. And then that marvellous state: it comes into my body for a few minutes, then it goes away. There you are. That’s what I’ve been living since ... night and day without let-up. Three minutes of splendour for twelve hours of misery.¹³ Two states one in the other, like life and death together. And in that the cry of the cells, constant: the call, the aspiration, the Mantra. And sometimes the Marvel that was lived: The very air seemed to change into divine Presence. Everything was touched, touched, permeated [Mother made that gesture of dots everywhere in the air], but with ... above all, there was a dazzling Light, a MASSIVE Peace, a Power, and also such sweetness ... something ... you felt it would be enough to melt a rock. And it’s the BODY’S experience, you understand, physical, material, the body’s experience: everything, absolutely everything is full, full, there’s nothing but THAT, and we are like... everything is like something shrivelled. You get the impression that things (not completely—superficially) have become hard, dry, and that’s why they don’t feel. That’s why they don’t feel Him, otherwise everything, but everything is nothing BUT That; you can’t breathe without breathing Him; you move about, and it’s within Him that you move about; you are ... everything, the whole universe is within Him—but MATERIALLY, physically. Physically. It’s the cure of the “drying up” that I am now seeking. I feel it’s fantastic, you understand.¹⁴ On the other side of the web, under the dried-out sheath of the cells, a massiveness of Power. Another air, miraculous. The miracle of Matter is there, there at each instant. What impedes to live that? Or is this crust of old Matter decidedly incapable of letting that filter in? And then, when I listen, It also says things; I told Him, “But then, why do people always climb up above?” And with the most extraordinary, fantastic humour: “Because they want me to be very far from their consciousness!” So the body is trying to be fluid, it’s trying to melt; it’s trying, it understands what it is. It’s trying—not succeeding, obviously!¹⁵ And Mother looked at her hands, her bones that went through her skin.

But the experience became each time more evident, imperious, up to the day when She touched the key, after again having had a bad time with the most common of disorders: a tooth abscess that tumefied her face: I’ve spent days when I really lived all the horrors of the creation. It wasn’t moral things at all: it was mostly physical sufferings. A physical suffering that lasts—unceasing, going on night and day. And all at once, instead of being in that state of consciousness, you are in the state of consciousness of this exclusive divine Presence—the pain is gone! And it was physical, quite physical, with a physical reason. You understand, doctors might say: “It’s for this reason, that reason....”—quite a material thing, absolutely physical: poff! Gone. Your consciousness changes: it comes back. Then Mother went on in her small, slow voice: And if you stay LONG ENOUGH in the true consciousness, the appearance, that is, what we call the physical “fact” itself disappears, not just the pain I have the feeling of having touched the central experience.¹⁶

With time the physical fact changes.

But it’s a very small beginning, she continued. One would have the impression of having touched the supreme Secret only if the physical were transformed. According to the experience (the tiny experience in details), that’s how the transformation should occur.¹⁷

It was towards this supreme Secret that Mother was being slowly led, “in details.”

It was in 1968, a 23rd of November.

But then, Mother asked herself, would there first be ONE body in which this Consciousness was expressed, or must everything, but everything be transformed?... That I don’t know.¹⁸ Can one body make, live the experience without all the other bodies? It is still a question. It is perhaps the decisive question. But there is no physical impossibility. Two years later, in 1970, Mother made this mysterious remark: Last night, suddenly I saw a functioning, and I said to myself, “Oh, if we knew this, how many things—how many fears, how many combinations, how many would crumble away, would lose all meaning!” It was ... what we see as “laws of Nature,” “ineluctable” things, it all was absurd, an absurdity! With the true consciousness, it crumbles away. And Mother concluded: Several times like that, when people tell me they feel as if in front of an ineluctable law (“There is this + this, and therefore that is inevitable”), the answer is always the same: if you want it so! YOU are the ones who decide it’s ineluctable!¹⁹

But this “functioning” that reverses the ineluctable laws, what was it, this something that forces the physical fact to change? And one would have said that Mother had heard our silent question: It’s probably a ... there’s a POSITION to be changed, a position of the consciousness to be changed.²⁰

A position of consciousness that heals the drying-up, allows the infiltration or the permeation of the old Matter and changes physical laws.… I feel it is fantastic, do you understand?

Perhaps another position in time. A densification.

Another time within time.

Not a time “over there,” eternal, not a time that takes time: a time here in

Matter.

A new time of Matter.

Or, its true time?

The Change of Position or Massive Time

And one well understands that if the rhythm of Matter changes, all of its structure must change. All of matter is built or made of a certain movement, from the atom to our outer metabolisms, and all our scientific manipulations tend to finally act on this movement, to accelerate it, to slow it down or conquer the forces and gravitations that it engenders. Small electrons make a solid wall in their movement. Everyone has observed the metabolic modifications that occur during the marmot’s winter sleep. And the caterpillar in its cocoon. Cryotherapy and the cold temperatures that are provoked are still a tentative science. Recent studies on drosophilas²⁰¹ (fruit flies) seem to have shown that the cells that do not belong to the germinal line, those that do not reproduce and do not regenerate themselves and thus grow old, like, for example, the cells of the brain, would only grow old because of the accumulated “noise” resulting from all the exterior stimuli, and that this “noise” could be theoretically effaced, as one effaces a tape recording, by a cooling of the said cells.… A cooling means a change of rhythm. I am no scientist, I know nothing really of their stories and manipulations, but the fact is that all modifications of movement or of time engender modifications of structure and this joins up with Mother’s central experience. “If one remains long enough in the true consciousness, the physical fact changes.” But scientists only know an exterior time, superficial, if one can say so, which they have to brutally and somewhat barbarically manipulate like the apprentice sorcerers that they are, without truly modifying the structure of Matter except in a somewhat catastrophic way—they do not have the central lever. They do not have the lever of consciousness that produces the movement and all the forms of Matter that result from the movement. They do not have the secret: Matter = Consciousness. One can say that Mother’s whole experience consists in reaching the consciousness of Matter, the pure substratum, or the pure Movement, the pure vibration around which all forms have encrusted and enrolled themselves. It was those distant “golden clouds” that She saw as of 1906, that powdering of gold of 1958. Then slowly, slowly, that scintillation—which seemed to colour, to become iridescent while traversing the layers of old Matter, the old evolutionary encrustations—became as if coagulated anew, densified, unified, once it had finished its voyage of infiltration and touched the pure, direct, veilless corporeal substance, once Mother was capable of sustaining that “boiling porridge.” It was “like gold that had melted,” She said the first time, “it was very thick ... of a weight that was surprising.” That is to say, the “bottom” of Matter had traversed the web and joined the surface of Matter. And in 1969, while She was talking of that eternal same thing that was surfacing, She said the “new consciousness”—it was nothing that was “new” but it was for the first time perhaps on earth that true Matter, the true Movement, the pure Consciousness at the bottom of Matter emerged into the terrestrial field—and She said this that rejoined the schema of thousands of small, scattered experiences that had come to her across the years like heralds: There’s such a power! A tremendous power. Tremendous.... As if it were inflated with power. An almost concrete power, I don’t know [and Mother felt the air]... it’s a light, but a light you could touch, as it were: if it goes through your fingers, it’s so concrete that you feel it go through. A deep golden light. We could say this: if you compare the consciousness, not of ordinary humanity but the higher consciousness of humanity, with this Consciousness, you feel that as soon as the human consciousness tried to contact higher things, to purify lower movements, to widen, it used to become fluid, transparent, ethereal, whereas this Consciousness, with a vision, a perception infinitely superior to the other, is SOLID and concrete. And the impression is ... it’s so strong! Solid. From the point of view of consciousness, it has been the greatest change in my whole existence; I’ve had many of them, I’ve worked a lot, but .... nothing in comparison with what has taken place since the 1st of January [1969]. To such a point that the body feels like a different person But it’s not enough.²¹

Solidity, massiveness, density: always the same schema. Something that densifies itself.

She was thus arriving at the heart of the story, “the golden clouds” were there. But it was a low flame (or high flame) hell that started in her Matter that was subject to this formidable agent ... which seemed to be the very agent of transformation, since it was the first agent of all material formation. But “that was not enough.” A new adaptation or something other seemed necessary for the agent to be able to work without demolishing everything and without taking centuries that Mother no longer had in her old reduced body. And it is there that we begin to approach the most enigmatic part of Mother’s forest. Of course, in the moment, one understands nothing of it, one does not know what is going on, it is “something,” a phenomenon amongst thousands. It does not have a logic, logic is for later, when it is “understood.” It is that logic that we are trying to track down in the dense thickets and the miraculous undergrowth of the thirteen volumes of Mother’s Agenda.

It is in 1961 that we find a first hint of the phenomenon, and truly these are thousands of minuscule phenomena which seem like nothing, appear and disappear to resurface five or ten years later with all their sense, as if they had journeyed underground, so much so that one does not know where things begin and the transformation, to say truly, is thousands of phenomena together without a date and without a special “moment.” There is nothing sensational, interesting to recount, She told me one day in 1961. It’s a miniscule labour, minute to minute. Every day and all the time, night and day and at any moment whatsoever, there are tiny, tiny things, tiny things, tiny—it’s not interesting. There are successive curves, each second of which would have to be noted down; and in the course of one of these curves, something is suddenly found This type of (one can scarcely speak of a Mind) this kind of mind-like activity in Matter [the physical Mind] interfering it is sordid. I haven’t yet been able to eliminate it completely. There are moments when it’s brought to a dead halt. Oh, sometimes while I walk for the japa, everything is held like this, inflexibly.²² [And Mother made a gesture as if She were suddenly immobilized: the physical Mind stops and it is the instantaneous opening of the web, an invasion of massive Power] The difficulty is that for the ordinary consciousness—and unfortunately I am surrounded by a lot of people who have a very ordinary consciousness⎯ I seem to be in a stupor, a coma, a state of imbecility, of yes, of torpor. It has all those appearances.

Something which becomes IMMOBILE, unresponsive, stopped short; one can no longer think, one can no longer observe, one can no longer react, one can no longer do anything. But all these things keep coming from outside, all the time, coming and trying to interrupt that state; yet if I manage to prevent this, if I can KEEP THIS CONDITION, after a while it becomes something so MASSIVE! So concrete in its power, so massive in its immobility, ohh!... It must lead somewhere.²³

And in fact, it did lead somewhere⎯six years later.

And then She continued: But I could not remain in that state long enough (it would have to go on for HOURS), I could not, due to all these constant interruptions... And six years later, the problem remained the same, there was always something that interrupted, and the rush of people. And then, when the body is pulled brusquely out of it, it seems to lose its balance—it has a few difficult moments.²⁴

It was the beginning of that “change of position” of the consciousness that was to have the power to change the physical fact.

And once again it is remarkable to observe that this first change of position of the consciousness coincided with the first attempt to traverse the physical Mind. On the other side of the cage, another time begins, another material time, not a spiritual one (unless the Spirit rejoins Matter). A massive time. Because I asked Mother, practical and materialistic as I was (but so was Mother, as much as me!): “But what happens, when everything is like that, immobile, does something happen?”— Something happening?... I don’t know. But that state IN ITSELF is something. When the body is conscious of that it means precisely that it has come out of its narrowness: it is the same Infinite as the one you get when out of the body. It’s very difficult for the body to have, very difficult: something is always vibrating and moving. Not only silence: it is immobility [and Mother made a massive, compact gesture, as if it could be cut with a knife], WITHOUT TENSION, without tension, effortless, without anything. It is like a kind of eternity—in the body. It’s as if it put everything back in order, but nothing is moved.²⁰²

An eternity of the cells.

And that happened while walking, while She was repeating the mantra. So there is a true immobility of Matter behind its apparent movement, and those who would like to practice some cryotherapy of transformation, manipulate the appearances without manipulating the real fact, would be deeply mistaken just as those who think of mastering atoms with cyclotrons, because it is Consciousness that one has to touch, it is the movement of Consciousness that one has to truly change in order to change Matter—otherwise one only touches the grimace of things—and one ends up only with monsters or caricatures of power. One can “freeze” Mr. Smith, but he will only make for a cryogenic Mr. Smith perfectly fossilized in his filth.

When the scientists become yogis, they will understand and they will master Matter.

It is perhaps the time that is to come.

The time of the physicians of consciousness. A change of position on a terrestrial scale.

Because, having the key to the consciousness of Matter, the beings of the supramental species will have the power to model Matter directly, by emitting the corresponding vibration in their own Matter: they will act from Matter to Matter in the same way that today we communicate and act from mental consciousness to mental consciousness. It was why Mother said: The foremost realization for man is understanding—understanding things. For the Supermind, realization means Power, the creative Willpower.²⁵ Like the beings of the supramental boat that modified their corporeal appearance or their means of transportation by the simple deployment of their will.

The position of the consciousness must change and go from the mental to the cellular level. One must go from reflected to cellular time in order to act directly on Matter and to transform its structure.

There is definitely a logic in that forest.

The Contradiction

And Mother advanced.

The problem tightened itself from day to day, or rather defined itself—our problems are insoluble because we do not know what the problem is. It was no longer at all the problem of death such as we conceive or see it: a body that ages, diseases that pile-up, deterioration, a wearing down. She had seen, lived the unreal absurdity of all these “natural laws” as soon as She had crossed the web of the physical Mind. They do not exist, death is something else. I have seen more and more often, more and more clearly, that all that takes place, all the people we meet, all that happens to us personally, all of it is always a test: you stand firm or you don’t; if you stand firm, you make a progress forward; if you don’t, you have to go through it again. Now it has become that way FOR THE BODY: when it hurts, when it gets disorganized, when it threatens to fall apart And then, there is always that Consciousness, inside, straight as a sword, saying, “Now, will you stand firm?” So you remain very quiet, very peaceful, and then you call—you call the Lord. And you say the mantra, which comes automatically, and ... peace establishes itself. And after a while the pain has disappeared—everything, just everything, all the threats disappear one after another. And you know, such dazzling, indisputable proof of this Presence, which is so wonderful and so simple, so simple, so total, in all that comes, all that happens, down to the smallest details, so as to lead you as fast as possible to the transformation. It’s this extraordinary experience that when you take all that comes as the means to learn what you should be—you immediately feel a wonderful, all-powerful Presence, but concrete. Then you understand that nothing is impossible. ²⁰³ Just a drop of THAT.²⁰⁴ One must learn to be. All the difficulties of evolution are meant to teach us to be what has the power to conquer the difficulty. On the other side of the web, it is the perpetual, or rather natural miracle. There is no death, it is the impossibility of death, there, at that level, at the pure cellular level where the great primordial Consciousness- Substance-Power circulates that Sri Aurobindo called the “Supramental.” True Matter. So where is death exactly? Where does it hide? If the whole corporeal consciousness moves into the true position, there is no longer any material reason to die. Is there something, in the body, that cannot or does not want to move into the true position? A sort of implacable point or corner of death by which one can be caught? What? Where is eventually true death, if it is not found in any of the pseudo- sicknesses, agings or wearing downs? What is it that refuses That in the body: That, life? And Mother described circles that were more and more concentric and closer around the central point. It seemed that the more the cellular level cleared, clarified and illumined itself, the more the invisible scoria outlined, which before was mixed up with the general opacity. Until the day Mother placed her finger on it: The impression was that death is now only an old habit, no longer a necessity. It’s only because first, because the body is still unconscious enough to, not to “desire,” because that’s not the word, but to feel the need of complete rest, that is, inertia At the end of all the concentric circles, one finds the mineral again. Rock, primitive stone. When that is abolished, there is no disorganization that cannot be mended, or at any rate (the field of accidents hasn’t been studied, but let’s say in the normal course of things) no wear and tear, no deterioration, no disharmony that cannot be mended. It’s only this residue (a considerable one), this residue of inconscience that asks for rest. What it calls rest is the state of inertia. That is to say, the refusal to manifest the consciousness.

It’s no more than that.²⁶

Mother was reaching the bottom. It was in 1967.

And then...

And then that FORMIDABLE collective suggestion... weighing down. The form which accepts a progressive deterioration because of the formidable weight of the collective suggestion—the habit of millennia: “It’s always been like that, it can’t be helped.” The great argument. Which isn’t true, besides.²⁷ It was the other face of the problem. Inertia and the desire of rest in the body, bad will and mortal suggestions around; and of the two it was the collective problem that was going to become more and more painful, almost insurmountable: There are minutes when the body feels it has escaped that law of death. But it doesn’t last; it’s for one minute, then it passes and things are back as they were. But the body consciousness is beginning to wonder why it’s like that: why, why?... Then, people come with all their thoughts Some come, sit down in front of me, and start thinking, “Maybe it’s the last time I am seeing her!”

Things of that sort, you understand ²⁸ There are worries around (of all kinds), from an anguish at the idea that it could happen [and Mother laughed] to a haste for the end to come: “Free at last! Free at last to do all the foolish things I want to do!...” A considerable number of desires that it should die. Everywhere, they are everywhere! The body has become very conscious: it’s very sensitive to what comes from people. ²⁹

So it all comes (gesture like a truckload being dumped), and because of that, it’s a bit difficult. There are other things [i.e., good ones] that come too, but those other things ... there are perhaps oh, they happen perhaps once or twice in twenty-four hours: all of a sudden, a light that is pure something pure, which makes what we might call a minute of eternity. That’s good. But it’s rare. A little flame.... And that Presence… That Presence, that Presence.... These cells are like children: when they feel, everything, but everything disappears except that Presence; then, for this body, there is like a sigh of relief. Generally, when it suffers, it doesn’t complain: it calls. It calls and calls and calls And it’s quite aware that it’s absolutely useless, that if it only knew how to go into immobility, go into silence, it would be enough. As soon as it does it But I am not quite sure that all those pains it feels all over, all the time, aren’t coming from ... aren’t the effect of all the bad wills. They are all over the earth, you know.³⁰

The difficulty of the world was there.

Inevitably, in front of this contradiction, something had to happen: either death or something else. And in fact, through or because of the very contradictions Mother was led to the solution. Contradictions were only the key to the other door.

Cataleptic Trance?

Yet, one morning in January 1967, at the very moment She reached the bottom of the hole, at that last (or first) layer of fundamental inertia, that residue of the stone, simultaneously and as if by necessity, a solution sprang forth, and the first rough shape of an experience. One would truly say that there are never “problems” but only moments when one arrives exactly at the centre of the difficulty, and when one is there, the solution is there, along with the problem. One must only proceed up to the exact centre of the contradiction.

There was never any contradiction!

The “solution” was hardly satisfying, at first sight, but the experiences that followed were decidedly of a very new order. Hardly satisfying, but it imposed itself on Mother like an imperious order, “as if” it were Sri Aurobindo who dictated the solution to her, and in fact that morning, very suddenly, Mother stopped in the middle of the conversation, and in a neutral voice, separating her words in a very imperative tone, She dictated the following note to me (let’s mention that just before, Mother had had a series of very important physical experiences that could have signalled a beginning of the transformation of the body, but they had all been interrupted half way through by the “rush of people”: But I am not accusing anything of having made the state go away: it went away because the body isn’t yet capable of holding it, that’s all). Thus was conceived the note:

Because of the necessities of the transformation, this body may enter a state of trance that will appear cataleptic Above all, no doctors! This body must be left in peace. Do not hasten, either, to announce my death [And Mother laughed like a very amused little girl] and to give the government the right to intervene. Keep me carefully sheltered from all injuries that may come from outside—infection, poisoning, etc.—and have untiring patience: it may last days, perhaps weeks, perhaps even longer, and you will have to wait patiently for me to come naturally out of that state once the work of transformation is accomplished.

I was a bit stunned and I asked Mother: “It is therefore something that is going to happen?”

It looks like that.... Because I was fully conscious that this [the body] needed... it takes time, that’s the problem. The disciples never left Mother the time! And She added: Instantaneous things are miraculous and don’t have the power of duration: they don’t correspond to the STATE—the vibratory state of something lasting. So then, this intimation came. It was very imperative, it was an imperative necessity—which to me seems to prove that it will happen.... I became aware of all that needed to be changed for this body to be capable of holding the thing constantly, for it to be there all the time. So that intimation came.— “But there would have to be a little bit of wisdom amongst the disciples,” I remarked.—Yes. Nobody should say anything except, “Mother has gone into trance.” That’s all. But if they are prepared for the idea beforehand, they might be more reasonable?...³¹ The reasoning of the disciples is one of the wonders of the world yet to be discovered.

A few days later, Mother explained to me: I have seen rather clearly that the work depended on the ratio between two aspects, the proportion between two aspects: that of the individual transformation (that is, the transformation of this body), and that of the general, collective and impersonal work. If a certain balance is kept, that state of prolonged trance may be dispensed with, but then the same work which would have been done in a few weeks or months (I don’t know) will extend over years—years and years. So it’s a question of patience—patience isn’t lacking [but it was beginning to be lacking in the disciples]. But it’s not only a question of patience, it’s a question of proportion: there must be a certain balance between the two, between the outside pressure of the collective work, and the pressure on the body for its transformation. If the instrument [the body] is constantly and infallibly capable of doing exactly what is expected of it, then the trance might not be necessary. It would only be if there is a resistance in the execution.³²

There was to be much resistance, more and more.

But no more than I (let’s say it) was Mother satisfied by the “solution.” One would have said that it was only the foresight of a Consciousness that envisages all accidents. This possibility of transformation in trance was announced to the body some ... yes, about sixty years ago now, and periodically afterwards. And there has always been a prayer: “No, may it not be necessary: it’s the method of laziness.” Mother was someone who was always standing; it is strange, usually I would meet her as She was sitting in her chair, but She always seemed to me standing up and heading somewhere. It’s the method of inertia, She concluded. There is an increasingly awakened consciousness, but awakened to the point of being alerted to the possibility of unconscious resistances.... All depends on the plasticity, the receptivity.³³—“But what purpose would this trance precisely serve?” I insisted.—To transform what’s not receptive. There are billions of elements in the body, so it’s a mixture of receptivity and non-receptivity. It’s still mixed. And that mixture is why the appearance remains what it is. You understand, it is a formidable work. If it had to be done in detail, it would be impossible, but through the pressure of the Force it can be done.... On the condition that the pressure does not make everything boil and explode. So then, the trance would be made necessary precisely so it’s done fast (relatively fast). This work is BEING DONE, but, you understand, it may stretch over hundreds of years! That’s what Sri Aurobindo said: a state of consciousness has to be established in which the collective life of the cells can be preserved for as long as desired.³⁴ And effectively, it was what was in the process of happening with the development of the Mind of the cells, that small golden vibration that repeats and repeats itself. But hundreds of years mean an entourage that follows and consents.

And all those centuries give us a shiver in the back when already the present hour is suffocating.

It has always been said, she continued, that the external form would be the last to change; that the whole internal, organic functioning would be changed before the external form, the appearance (it’s only an appearance, of course); that the appearance would be the last to change. And truly, the whole problem came back to that, to that exterior crust, that “bark” as She would say, because a cellular body very well existed within, physical, independent, which could journey everywhere across the world and move without encumbrance, on the other side of our veil. This bark was the test, the bridge between the two sides—the mystery ... apparently unsolvable except through interminable centuries. This appearance seems to me to be the legacy of primordial habits—the habits of Matter. This Matter, of course, comes from total unconsciousness, and throughout the ages and all the ways of being, it returns to total consciousness—it goes from one extreme to the other. Well, what gives that need for trance is the habits of static immobility. It shouldn’t be necessary. One should replace the need for immobility and immobile rest by. ³⁵

By what?

One had to reach this new state of Matter that unites immobility to movement, death’s repose to the movement of life, the inertia of the stone to the dynamism of existence. To change the base of inertia that drags us all into death. It was another time that one had to live in Matter: a time that would no longer be the time of tiredness and decomposition. Nor the time that takes centuries. Time is the very sign of death. To change time is necessarily, automatically to change the very foundations of Matter, its encrusted “way of being.”

A cellular time that changes the conditions of Matter.

It was precisely the experience that began to trace itself, as if emerging from the very heart of the problem. One had to reach the heart. Always one has to touch the bottom, then one reaches the door.

And we recall Sri Aurobindo:

A voice cried, “Go where none has gone!
Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate.”³⁶

At the bottom of death is hidden the last door.

The Innumerable Present

Just a month after Mother dictated that note on the possibility of a cataleptic trance, and exactly as She arrived at that last layer of inertia, that mineral residue in the cells, truly that root of death, a very small experience came that Mother did not very well understand at first but which was the exact continuation of her experience of 1961, six years earlier, when She found herself seized by that strange “massive immobility”: “It must well lead somewhere,” She said. Things take a long time to get going. At first, She thought that She was learning a new way of resting without going out of the body,³⁷ and it was perhaps that also, but it was very much something else. For years—eighty years perhaps—Mother had spent her time leaving her body in order to rest: She would climb in the fraction of a second to the supreme regions of consciousness up there, in that great white immobile light (as all accomplished yogis do methodically, and as we all do or almost, without our being aware of it, for some seconds at night where we lose all contact). For men it is a complete fainting, there is no link, we have not built up the intermediary steps of consciousness, and when we “fall” there, it is a hole from which we come out of refreshed. It was how Mother was able to live more than a half century of her exhausting life while only taking two hours rest per night. She would go there as if it were home. But as She advanced in this yoga of Matter, She became well aware that that means, that sort of negation or oblivion of Matter complicated her cellular work in a strange way. It is without doubt a great relaxation and rest to escape from the stranglehold of the physical Mind, but it is the exit from the cage above, not below, and during that time the cells, Matter, flowed in their primordial Inertia: a sort of death in white, one could say. That is to say, exactly the inverse of the sought-after goal. That is the exact preparation for death—a refreshing death. That very convenient means was to be radically and brutally cut from her, so much so that She could no longer escape from her body, She was bound there, in all sorts of infernal pains, in order to find the solution there. No more current one cuts, no more nervous sensibility one anesthetizes with a small inner concentration—all the yogic tricks gone. And tricks they were, a super medicine that we would truly hope for all of humanity, but which only sealed off the problem, like others with their sleeping tablets or tranquilizers. It is truly Matter that must find its own solution—She was precipitated to it.

I was sure I was then “awake,” as it’s called: there was nothing resembling sleep. There was only the consciousness watching. But interiorized. And a will to get up at 4:30 [when Mother got up every morning]. I looked at the time once in between—it was 3:15—I was surprised, I thought, “How come? It was 2:30 a minute ago ” And at exactly 4 : 30: “How come? I’ve just seen it was 3:15!” It was dumbfounding, because I DIDN’T LEAVE my body, I know I didn’t sleep, and the consciousness was perfectly still, motionless, so to say. It was as if instantaneous. It happens to me now and then during the day. I go into a certain state (it only lasts for a minute or two), a strange state: you are perfectly awake, perfectly conscious, and at the same time totally unaware of time and things around you not exactly of things around you, but NOT CONSCIOUS OF THEM IN

THE SAME WAY—I don’t know how to explain.³⁸

It was the change of position that was taking place. It was the beginning of cellular time.

In fact, the beginning of a completely new state which could well mark the beginning of a new age of Matter. But then, after all, words are big, but when that happens, one does not know that it is a new age, it is ten in the morning and that seems so simple, almost ordinary. And we would be totally mistaken if we thought it was a sort of definitive state, like that of the fish, the monkey or of the Mind: it was the beginning of something. It must lead somewhere, as Mother would say—we do not know for when this somewhere is nor if it will not change form on the way. It is something that is being born, a new state that is being born in Matter. It would not come to the idea of anyone that the next species would be a sort of super-marmot— and first of all because it is not sleep. It is ... something that was going to develop in a bizarre but very rapid way. Perhaps we will only truly understand the phenomenon in twenty or fifty years, or in a century, when it has taken on its true form or led up to its true formula in evolution.

A year later, in 1968, the curve of the phenomenon had already become more precise: I am getting lazy.... It’s strange, it imposes itself like that: I’ll be following a movement, and then ... I’ll go off in trance. It happens at any time. I’ll be eating: in the middle of the meal, something comes like that, I follow the movement and I remain absorbed; then afterwards, I see all the people waiting!³⁹ And in fact, Mother sometimes remained for 45 minutes with her spoon in her hand, suspended in mid- air.—“I have noticed that,” I told Mother, “since a few months, it has been like that. I even had the impression sometimes that ‘Mother is becoming distant’. —No. I am WITHIN, far more within than before—not within here, in “me,” but within all things.... Extremely sensitive to all the movements of those around me. And She once again remarked: The relationship with external things is no longer the same.⁴⁰

It was a whole new world that was tracing itself, or a new way of being in the world.

“But what do you do?” I asked, as I was hopelessly fixated on the practical side of things—When I go off like that, “within,” she answered, I always seem to ... to be shaping vibrations. And afterwards (the next day, or later in the day) I’ll learn that something has happened to someone: he called me and asked me that. It’s always a call. And it’s a response. Something has happened to him, something has got twisted; so one works on it, one sets it straight again, puts the light, the good vibration back on it, and then, later in the day, or the next day, I’ll receive a line, “I was in a lot of pain” or “ I called you.” Like that.⁴¹ But these vibrations that Mother “moulded,” it is precisely the beginning of the new manipulation of Matter: it will be like that, eventually, that the supramental beings will mould all of Matter to their will. It is a state in which Matter is moulded. And if it appeared to us negligible to look at the small twisted hurts and scratches or the small cancers that Mother “set right,” we are completely missing a capital phenomenon. It is not at all a question of healers, it is Matter that rectifies itself by the sending out of material vibrations, an action from Matter to Matter. A direct connection, without cyclotrons, sleight of hand, or aspirin. Something strange is happening which I don't understand—and it's getting stronger and stronger: it took me more than an hour to eat my breakfast, and I really thought I had finished in twenty minutes! Time . . . I have completely lost the sense of time. I was convinced I had finished in twenty minutes and it took me more than an hour—to eat nothing! I take a bite or a sip, and then ten minutes, twenty minutes go by⎯I don't know where, I don't know what. I feel I am in a light. A light that's . . . . “But,” I insisted, “is this light active, or what ?”—Yes, it does all SORTS of things. But, not, not in that way. It is...?? And Mother did not know how to say.

It’s the quality of time that’s changing, She observed towards the end of 1968. There’s a sort of intensity of consciousness that alters the value of time. I don’t know how to put it. It’s a beginning....⁴² You enter a state in which time no longer has the same reality. It’s something else. It’s very peculiar... it’s an innumerable present.⁴³ And what is very remarkable is that it concerns the body. It is the body that enters this other state of time, it is not consciousness that escapes into ethereal regions where time no longer exists, the old yogic trick. It is Matter itself that changes its sense of time. But what does that mean, for Matter, to change time? What time does Matter have?!

It has the time of its trepidation.

And it is where the phenomenon begins to take on other proportions.

“It is a beginning ”

We are walking in a forest where no one has ever been. In fact, we are now leaving the paths of universal evolution, which seem sufficiently laid-out with the discovery, the implementation and the functioning of the Mind of the cells: this mind will automatically elaborate its own results and will reach its own inevitable evolutionary formula in a new species. It will find its own manipulation of Matter, as did the mental man of the Neolithic. This book could stop here, even with suspension points, because evolution is always in suspension points. It is a question of time ... and perhaps of human collaboration. But do we have time? That is the question.

From now on we are entering Mother’s last Mystery, which seems to circle around this question of time, and the only way to approach it is to follow the chronological order of the experiences without trying to gather them together in groups of the same nature (groups of what? what nature?). In what way does this last Mystery link itself to our evolution?... If we knew it exactly, a great rent would be made in the veil. A Mystery that perhaps outmaneuvers all other mysteries and would undo all our immediate impossibilities. Constantly, we are next to a small “something” that changes all the data. This little something is perhaps the Grace ... or the gracious smile of the next world—as if it were not already there! lying in wait for us and silently preparing its smiling coups d’Etat.

Or perhaps its worldwide coup d’Etat.