Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III

14: The Residue

The Missing Side of the Atom

All of the work, secretly, consisted in illuminating and transforming the ultimate mineral layer, that “grim foundation stone” Sri Aurobindo spoke of, that primary tomb in the body.

All the time, we think that we do things in a certain direction and we build up all sorts of justifications and theories around that, then we uncover another layer of meaning and the theories are reversed⎯but we simply walk towards … “something.” Mother never made any theories: She walked, and She recounted what She saw as She proceeded, that was all. So, the meaning was never distorted, no more than a river is. In one or two centuries, one will still be able to immerse oneself in this Agenda, whose water will be as clear as ever. We stick a pretty, magical little label: “cellular time,” but what is it that hides behind? Perhaps we do not know it as yet. It may be similar to the time of the man who linked the trajectories of a few stars and built an entire world⎯but these are other stars and this is a new world. And the former prepared the latter, which prepare what? I am not very sure that that “cellular time” has all the meaning that we try to decipher.

Step by step, this was how it appeared to Mother (and what is very striking is that, since She used to forget everything, experiences were always new, lived for the first time, the world was new at each moment, very fresh as if it had just been born⎯pure, not a stain of past that weighted down … except precisely in those cells, which were rediscovering their past, their very old past, the old mystery): For the cells of the body, it’s a transition from the tranquillity of “tamasic” origin (the calm that was, in the distant past, the outcome of Inertia), to the calm of All-Powerfulness. There is a difficult transition. For the cells it's difficult. It's this transition that's being worked out in the details, and it's not easy.¹

It is the very change of the movement of the cells. In fact, it is perhaps what we would feel if our bodies were suddenly hurled into “death.” It is such a radical change of time, or such a different state, that it is like the death of everything else. Can we understand?… Mother was learning in small doses, without knowing very well where it led her, whether it was death for good or something else. Has one ever seen a living species move into another species … while noting down the transition? It was a little that. Mother’s self-control was something that almost terrified me. I say terrified, because I saw and felt, She drew me a little into the “movement” of her cells and, well…. To traverse that, one needs to make real fun of it, with Sri Aurobindo’s great irony or Mother’s sense of humour, or to desperately want something else. Then if it all breaks, it does not matter. In 1969, the picture was becoming rather “clear” (but the picture of what, we do not know). For the Force to be able to go through rapidly so as to reach the body, a GREAT passivity is needed, She noted. I can see that: every time there is a pressure so as to act on some part of the body or other, it always begins with an absolute passivity, which is ... the “perfection of Inertia,” do you understand? What Inertia imperfectly represents—it’s the perfection of that. And Mother looked at me out of the corner of her eye. It is very difficult precisely for those who have a great mental development, very difficult. Because its whole life long, the body has worked to be in that state of receptivity to the Mind, and that state, which is what brought about its obedience, docility and so on, is what needs to be abolished.²

And all of a sudden, I understood the extraordinary miracle of Sri Aurobindo who lent his fingers’ cells to the keyboard of his typewriter without anything moving in his Mind. And the current passed through directly. The current that perfectly leads small birds and big stars as well.

How can I explain? Mother further said... The development through the Mind is a constant and general awakening of the whole being—even the most material being— an awakening as a result of which there is also something that’s the opposite of sleep. But to receive the supreme Force, what’s needed is, on the contrary, the equivalent of stillness—the stillness of sleep, but an ABSOLUTELY CONSCIOUS SLEEP. “Stillness,” I don’t know how to explain that It’s almost the opposite of Inertia in stillness. That’s what now makes me understand why the creation began with Inertia.³ Perhaps because only the primary Inertia was capable of bearing the lightning-fast Current in all its purity? A non-inertia, that is, a resistance, might have exploded everything (?) So then, Mother continued, we had to recover that primary state after going through all the states of consciousness⎯a whole journey. The impression is that only the body— receptive, open, at any rate partially transformed—is capable of having the understanding of the creation, of what we call the “creation”: why and how, the two things. And it’s not at all something thought, not something felt: it’s something lived, and that’s the only way to know.⁴ All the same, I did not understand the mechanism of that “immobility” at the human level and I pointed out to Mother that, in the highest states I knew, there was an intense aspiration, even in the body, and that it was the exact opposite of an immobility. It was an active aspiration. So? “What must one do, I asked, has one to let everything go slack or persist in that active aspiration?” It’s hard to say, She replied, because I am convinced that everyone has his own path, but for this body, the path is to have that active aspiration. “But then it is no longer that immobility!” It has found the way, it has understood how it can be done. “You mean both together? The union of the two?” I asked without understanding. Yes, they are together.... And this is where the mystery of the supramental time, or cellular time, begins to unveil itself. That’s what the body has managed to get : a complete stillness and an intense aspiration. And it’s when stillness is left without aspiration [i.e., pure Inertia] that it falls into a dreadful anguish which instantly “wakes it up.” That’s it, you understand: an intense aspiration. And it’s absolutely still within, as if all the cells grew still [the trepidation in the cells fades away]. That must be it: what we call intense aspiration must be the supramental vibration. I have often said that to myself. But if even for five minutes the body falls into the state of inertia— stillness without aspiration—it’s woken up by an anguish as if it were about to die! To that point, you understand [the precise point that separates death from immortality, which look almost like twin sisters with just a tiny difference of aspiration]. For the body, stillness is ... Yes, it feels that the highest vibration, the vibration of the true Consciousness, is so intense that it’s ... it’s the equivalent of the inertia of stillness. That intensity is so great that, for us, it’s the equivalent of inertia. That’s what is now being established. That’s what made the body understand (because now it understands) the process of the creation We could almost say that it began with a state of perfection, but an unconscious perfection, and that the creation must pass from that state of unconscious perfection to a state of conscious perfection, and in between is imperfection.⁵

A new time, which is a very old time, but conscious. The protoplasm remembers what set it in motion. Only the body can understand.

And Mother’s schema actually meets that of the original creation with the apparent immobility of the stone in a lightning atomic movement: the passivity of Matter that enables it to bear the formidable Energy, and at the same time provides it with an automatism that has all the appearances of infallibility. At the end of the curve, Mother found again that original “perfection,” with a difference that really separates the path of life from the path of death. And one cannot even say that the difference lies in the intense aspiration of the final product (Mother), while the original product would be devoid of aspiration and consciousness⎯there is a consciousness in the depths of the atom, there is an aspiration in the depths of the atom, in the depths of any form of movement: the very movement is the sign of that aspiration; that aspiration in the depths is what made the whole evolution ascend. But as soon as there was a “form,” were it to be the form of an atom, there was an imprisonment of the Current, an aspiration “to oneself,” as it were, like a child clasping its doll to its heart: it is mine; and a will or a reflex to keep that particle of “self” to oneself⎯it is the very face of Inertia, the copy or caricature of immortality. It is the beginning of death. Something that appropriated that particle of current and keeps sticking to it. So every time one has to break the form so as to move into a higher form, or a higher aspiration. That inertia is the stability of every form: a frozen, stereotyped movement, which wants to continue to be what it is, perpetually. And that is why every form says no-no-no. Each form is a formidable NO which fears to lose its life, to let it vanish through the least little pore, the smallest hole, and turns and spins around so as to build a wall of electrons or of anything else, and save its ego-centric gravitation. Inertia is the NO. Death hangs on a mere “no.” But that same Movement can make for endless life ... if we let it flow, if the “something” that says “no” finds the same rest, the same security and the same stability in an open immensity instead of a closed point. There is no death indeed: there is a difference of behaviour. But it is the behaviour of Matter that must change. It is the YES of Matter that has to be found. It is really the transition from the inertia of a dead aspiration, buried in an individual whirl which gives it the appearance of an opaque tomb of eternity, to a living, open aspiration, bursting into a universal movement, so swift that it has all the density of the walls of electrons, but without their hard opacity, and all the real immobility of eternity, but without the tomb. The Supramental, the cellular time, is precisely that which gives the missing side of the atom, the one that the whole evolution desperately seeks: immobility in a ceaseless motion. An immobility one does not die of. The whole journey of evolution consists really in rediscovering the immensity that contains everything in a form that is not a tomb.

And one wonders whether those scientists who are “peeling” Matter layer after layer, continually uncovering more infinitesimal and “massive” particles²⁰⁵, as it seems, in the depths of the nucleus, are not looking for a fundamental unity that is everywhere here, dense, golden, without any gap, in a time that is too swift for all their microscopes and in which the ultimate velocity of the movement meets the immobile instantaneity of eternity. The missing side of the atom. The one that the body will perhaps uncover before them.

The whole question consists in knowing whether Matter is capable of saying “yes,” of relaxing, we might say, without being pulverized, of opening to the formidable Movement without resistance, without anything that holds back⎯which means that one has to be totally immense, and yet in a body, in a form. This was Mother’s whole cellular training for so many decades. It is the change of time or change of position that is to ultimately transform Matter, that bark that is hardened and frozen because it does not let the Current through and falls asleep in the false peace of death. Matter has to find its own eternity, then it will no longer seek to die, it will no longer contract in a position of death. It was the experience that began to settle in Mother’s body. Looking at what happens from one day to the next, the body’s experience is like this: In a certain way, at certain times, it’s in the consciousness of Immortality, and then, out of influence (also out of habit now and then), it falls back into the consciousness of mortality, and that’s really ... As soon as it falls back into the consciousness of mortality, there’s a dreadful anguish; it’s only when it emerges from that, when it enters the true consciousness, that it passes. So now it’s like this, now it’s like that [Mother made a to-and-fro gesture, from one consciousness to the other]. And the other state, the state of Immortality, is immutably peaceful, tranquil, with ... like lightning-fast waves, so rapid that they seem still. It’s like this: complete motionlessness (apparently) within a tremendous Movement.⁶

A cellular eternity in a lightning-fast movement.

“A moving immobility,” Mother would say.

Then suddenly, Mother would close her eyes, go off into that “light which did so many things,” her spoon in her hand: an innumerable present, an “inside all things”⎯not at all adapted to the life that surrounded her and watched her every gesture, relentlessly trying to obtain something from that body, to ask it to do this or that, sign this or that, a thousand things mostly deceptive. Even to make her take medicine in order to cure her of her bizarre eternity, which some of them (many of them, in fact) mistook for senility. The body is beginning to wonder ... to wonder what it will be like, that is to say, the way of perceiving, the relationship with things: How will the new consciousness relate with the old consciousness of those who will still be humans?...⁷ It was at the beginning of 1970. Exactly seventeen years before, She had asked those rebellious little samples on the Playground the same question: Is it possible for one body to change without something also changing in the surroundings?

What will be your relationship with others if you change that much?... It would seem that a whole range of things would also have to change, at least to some relative degree, in order for that body to exist, to continue to exist.⁸ The question was to pose itself more and more painfully⎯who followed? It was not only in her body that the NO had to be vanquished, but in all the bodies around her. There’s a background (it’s mostly that), a background of unconscious Negation which is still behind everything, but everything; it’s still there everywhere: you eat or breathe—you receive that Negation For everything to be transformed, it’s still a colossal work.⁹

And we seem to hear Sri Aurobindo:

The stubborn mute rejection in Life’s depths,

The ignorant No in the origin of things.¹⁰

What was going to happen?

Where did that cellular unity lead, to what impossible state among men? Would She be able to make that negation melt away, that residue of the original Inertia, and could one change one bit of matter without changing all of Matter?

Or did it lead to another, deeper layer of meaning, where the Yes, instead of confronting the No, and immortal life, instead of confronting Death, would both change into something else, a third state?

A Question of Patience

Mother did not know, She cruelly did not know anything. Why, but why am I not told what will happen ? I don't know I think it's to insure a kind of very passive state.¹¹ Perhaps because we do not know what we have to fight against: we say “death,” but what does it hide? Perhaps there is nothing “against,” but successive means, successive steps to reach that “something,” that ultimate mystery, and everything is a means of stirring up the flame of aspiration which will open the last door.

Death, for now, was that fixity of Matter that led to the slow disintegration of the form. And yet the experiences multiplied, obvious, convincing, always following the same pattern. The body is beginning to feel in an extremely precise and clear way that the moment it’s aware of itself—the moment it’s aware of itself and of the rest in relation to itself [i.e., the old egocentric position]—it falls into a hole; and the moment it’s aware of the Force acting—the Force acting, the Consciousness acting— then this [the body’s solidity] has no more than a wholly relative reality The body is learning well, it sees, it can see that in tiny details, all the time: as soon as it feels it’s “something” and the Force is “something else,” there’s a pain here, a pain there, this goes wrong, that goes awry.... A world ... a complex and thoroughly ugly world. And when it has a movement ... (how could I put it?), the opposite of condensation, like a dilation, something like a dilation in the consciousness, then limits grow dim, they fade away, everything becomes supple, and pain goes away PHYSICALLY. It’s an experience the body is given day after day, now on one spot, now on another, now for one thing, now for another.¹² The body feels that the solidity of matter is an illusion and that it may ... be overcome.¹³

And one wonders whether that “dilation of consciousness,” that sort of acceleration of consciousness, which at the same time eternalizes and universalizes, should not have a more powerful movement than that which coagulates and immobilizes this Matter in its mortal position⎯or is this old Matter completely unable to bear the change of movement without dissolving? Mother did not know. She felt that movement of fusion, but…. I have the most peculiar feeling that there's a kind of ... like scales, or tree bark, or turtle shell, melting. What seems like Matter to man is like something shrivelled up which has to fall away because it is unreceptive. And in this body (Mother touched her own body), it is trying ... it is trying to It's really curious! It's a curious sensation. If one could last long enough for all that to melt away, then it would be the real beginning.¹⁴

To last long enough.

Always that problem of time. It was probably that that was trying to settle in her body through that more and more accelerated change of position, that sort of eternity in the cells. In the true position, there would be no friction The body itself senses that it must learn to live in eternity,¹⁵ she said as early as 1962. Yes, but would She be given the time to live in eternity?

Or else the cataleptic trance?

And the question became increasingly acute: There is an impression of fluidity and plasticity asserting itself increasingly with the growth of the true consciousness. The hardening seems to be the result of Unconsciousness; the lack of fluidity and plasticity seems to be the result of unconsciousness. Not only in the body: for everything the impression is the same. With the growth and the normal state of consciousness, there come a suppleness and fluidity that completely change the nature of the substance, and the resistance comes from the degree of unconsciousness alone, it's proportional to the degree of unconsciousness. The appearance of materiality is in proportion to the unconsciousness....¹⁶ [This is quite interesting. The world we experience, the Matter we experience are immobile and opaque only through their degree of unconsciousness⎯through nothing else. A real illusion, as it were. An opaque illusion.]

The interesting thing regarding this body is that I have a growing impression ... of a “residue” which still remains unconscious.¹⁷ There are still layers that remain as a residue of all that preceded: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, all that. So the whole fully conscious part of the cells is fully illumined, but ... Besides, one just has to see [Mother touched the skin of her hands, visibly untransformed]. It appears not to have the same “density” ... but the appearance is exactly the same. Those who have an inner vision see something, but that’s only because they have the capacity of inner vision.¹⁸ The new way of being would only be visible to someone who himself or herself had the supramental vision.¹⁹ And yet that so-called “inner vision” or supramental vision is a material vision, since Mother saw material facts: I MATERIALLY see all sorts of things, which aren't visible to others. But it's materially. A funny state....²⁰ We are always brought back to those two worlds of Matter, one within the other: an illusory, unconscious, opaque crust, and the other. And I looked at Mother: I could well understand the growth of that new consciousness, that new vision, that new body, but the other, the “residue”? That was really where the mystery lay, the bridge. Or else the illusion dissolves and all the old bodies in the world crumble into dust⎯which would make a lot of dust.

Mother seemed to have heard my question: What I don't know yet, what's not very clear, is ... what will be the fate of this residue?… To people's ordinary thought, it's what they call “death,” that is to say, the rejection of the cells that weren't able to enter this plastic state of consciousness. But the way the work is being done, there is no categorical division into groups of conscious or unconscious cells: there are imperceptible (almost) states of variations between the different parts of the being. So you wonder, “Where? What? When? How? What's going to happen?...” It's increasingly becoming a problem.... The impression is of a remnant, but the remnant isn't something that's rejected: it's something which hesitates, lags behind, has difficulty and tries—it would be only too pleased: if, for instance, there is in one spot a perceptible disorder, a pain, the body no longer starts fidgeting, worrying, wanting medicine or doctors or interventions, no, not at all; it asks ... it says, “O Lord ... ” That's all. And it waits. And generally, in the space of a few seconds, the pain goes away. What complicates matters is the ENTRY from outside of formations, with thoughts, ignorant attitudes, impressions—all kinds of impressions that swarm around. Most of the time it has no effect, but sometimes it gives a shock. So that complicates matters somewhat. Like this fact that I am increasingly stooped (although it's neither the result of fatigue nor the result of a lack of equilibrium, nor ... it has no material cause), my impression is that the present part of the body (or rather the part belonging to the past) is shrinking, while I myself, my consciousness, I am so vast and on the contrary so large and so powerful, I don't know how to explain, it's a strange sensation. It's as if you were still dragging some old baggage along. But it's not that it isn't willing. It's more or less difficult, you understand, so it takes more or less time. It's like elements lagging behind.²¹

Time, always time.

But I'd like to know, Mother continued. I am beginning to be interested in the problem [there was always that touch of smiling humour running in the background]: Will this residue. ? But the question isn't like that, it's a question of TIME.

With time (Sri Aurobindo said three hundred years), with time EVERYTHING would get to change. But there is the wave of habits, and the easy solution which consists in quite simply taking this old garment and throwing it away: “Off with you, I no longer want you!” It's disgusting. Because it can no longer get along fast enough, one takes it and says, “Off with you! Go away, go to decomposition.” It's disgusting. And I feel the atmosphere. There is the whole collective thought, people writing to me, “I hope you'll still live for a long time”! And all the usual nonsense. It makes a difficult environment. I look at this body; at times it says (at times, when there is too much incomprehension, when the people around are too absolutely unwilling to understand), it says, “Ah, let me go” (“it,” what is it? what's still unconscious, too unconscious and not receptive enough), it says, “Very well, leave me, it doesn't matter, let me go.” But not disgusted or tired. So I say to it [in a tone of voice as if speaking to a child]: “No, no, no.” It's a question of patience, of course. ²²

Whom for? For her or the others?

But there was no question of letting the old residue crumble into dust.

Question of patience. What's going to happen? I don't know. We'll see. You, at any rate, you will know. You'll be able to tell them, “Things are not as you think they are....” [And Mother laughed, mocking, as if She were already seeing the whole “atmosphere.”] I would tell them, but they won't hear me. I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. What's going to happen? Do YOU know? And I looked at her, it was so obvious! “One day it will be glorious.” When you do something for the first time, no one can explain it to you.²³

She was alone, so alone.

At the frontier between decomposition and something else.

But one morning in February 1970, Mother suddenly remarked: It’s a curious thing. I am not asleep, yet I am not awake; it’s neither one nor the other. It’s a sort of new state I have; whether I am in my bed or sitting in my armchair makes no difference.... It’s something else. Yet I don’t sleep! What is it?... I don’t know. There’s something there.... Is it possible?... And I don’t go out of my body.... Or is this body replaced by another?—I don’t know. And everything is different.²⁴

Is it possible?

A new state in Matter…. Mother’s last mystery.

All the data were clear, there only remained the unknown.

Mother was 92. She had three years left.