Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III

15: The Supreme Door

Since a small girl flew over the stones in the forest of Fontainebleau, spoke to the big Python, listened to the story of a mummy in the Guimet Museum and looked, through the transparent pages of her book, into a living History that she thought she had known for a long time and perhaps everywhere, so many experiences had flowed: the strange types of Matter in Tlemcen, the vertiginous falls, the journeys without the body, the first entry into death and the Impressionists’ explosion of light, the revolution of the atoms, the revolutions flaring up from the Yangtze Valley to Moscow, then a postern which a vine of “faithfulness” was hanging from⎯a long, immense faithfulness to the Earth’s history, to the old walk of Matter towards its accomplishment. Throughout all times, all pains, black or golden experiences, in the corridors of Thebes or the dungeons of the Palazzo Ducale, that same quest for a truer, larger, freer world, without borders, without religion, without police, a “sunlit path” for the Earth. I say you don't need to suffer.¹ And at the top of a small staircase leading up to a big white veranda, the One who said: “The world is preparing for a new evolution.” This Mother, how She walked, walked until the end in this prison of Matter that She so much wanted to open up for man, in that golden-carpeted dungeon where She was assailed by the old pain of a world that clung to its Falsehood and opacity. And She laughed, She opened her wide immobile eyes on an earth that had already changed, She said strange things while panting and still pulling the thread to desperately make herself heard on this side⎯pure imagination?… I prefer that imagination to yours,² She simply said to the evangelists of death: those who believe in the tomb, believe in science, believe in the prison forever. Oh! how She wanted to give to men, to give back to the earth its own creative power, its “imagination of truth,” to wrest from Matter its own miracle. The miracle of Truth, for there is no other. And in everything, through everything⎯the good, the evil, the minuscule or the big thing, the white or blue or black sample, and all the samples of the world’s pain⎯to love forever.

At least, we’ll have tried.

The Old Way That is Dying

And I say that She has not failed, any more than evolution can fail. Only there is something that we do not understand⎯not yet⎯an unknown piece of data. Or something that is not yet manifested, but ready, like the chick in its eggshell. Or perhaps like the caterpillar in its cocoon. How could the man who has never seen a chick emerge from an eggshell imagine that that calcareous crust has ever contained a bird? It took us quite a while only to move from Neanderthal to Lascaux and from a bare cliff to a first little lavender. The secret, always, lies in discovering what is there, in the evolutionary shell. That unknown piece of data is there, in Mother’s last years. That is what we have to decipher now. And it is not Mother’s secret, really, it is our secret as a species walking towards … what Mother was precisely looking for.

A “bizarre state,” as She would say. All we can do is to “clinically” observe the unfolding of the phenomenon and see if, by chance, we stumble upon the whisper of the future. She was blind and deaf, according to medical standards: a walled-in world, the absolute shell of Matter, a sort of living tomb for any of us. And yet She heard our least words and saw better than we did the smallest vibration of our being or objects that told her where they were. She could hardly walk any longer and Yet She went everywhere and knew all the bodies’ miseries and the movements of the world and of circumstances. She no longer slept as we did, barely ate, and yet there was that formidable energy around her. She seemed to be in a senile torpor, but there was that crystalline lucidity which saw everything, understood everything, and She smiled, with her eyes closed, at all our nonsense or at a pure little flame. She forgot everything but made every gesture as if infallibly, knew the exact duplicity and the exact truth of everyone, each thing at each minute. It was a paradox of consciousness, of vision and wideness in a walled-in, annulled Matter, like an increasingly thinner shell. A triumph of consciousness over Matter, or perhaps the extreme product of the long evolutionary march. It seemed that all there was to do was to get rid of the simulacrum and extend the wings of an immortal consciousness which now encompassed the Earth and beyond⎯who could still care about a digestive tract at that stage? Who could bear all the countless miseries of a body that was so stooped that it could not even lay in a bed anymore, when She could disconnect in a breath: She knew very well how to “die” at will. “Anyone else would have left a thousand times,” I told her one day, “rather than stay in that and bear all what you are bearing.” It was completely inhuman, doubtless. All that for a mere little shell. But the “shell” was our whole terrestrial envelop, it was the evolutionary stake: the triumph of consciousness over Matter, or the triumph of consciousness in Matter?

She had reached the ultimate mineral, or atomic layer, that first beginning of the shell and of any shell: She was facing the beginning of the world in her body, right where the original hardening of Matter had taken place; just a thin, tiny peel which bathed and steeped in a flow of lightning-fast Energy, but as if immobile. A “permeation” that had all the appearances and gave all the sensation of a formidable trituration, a hammering, a demolition in the flesh, perhaps not unlike what takes place in our cyclotrons, and which was bearable only because of that kind of “dilation” of the corporeal consciousness that broadened her to the size of the universe, as it were. One second of loosening, to fall back for one second into that “hole,” as She would say, into that body-I, that perception of “I” move, “I” eat, “I” speak, was perfect hell, it was entering the demolition alive. There was no longer any layer of unconsciousness and obscurity to protect her from that “assault of ether and of fire” Sri Aurobindo spoke of: all that was left was that body, pure, without ramparts, or which was itself perhaps the last rampart undergoing its own transmutation. And on the other side, a physical universal consciousness, another state, a different way of being … unspeakable, but which no longer obeyed the laws of the tomb, no longer needed eyes, ears, a memory and even a body to move with, and for which the body’s very pain was a kind of unreality⎯yes, perhaps a different time, a “moving eternity” in the depths or behind that atomic film, a different state of Matter behind that hardened crust. On one side, the hole of death and pain; on the other side universal life, without any possibility of pain. A “funny” physical life on two levels, a paradoxical duality: This body’s life is a miracle, She said in April, 70, after a series of heart attacks. Which means that if it weren’t what it is and the way it is, anyone else would be dead. But then, if you knew how it becomes strange. The body is conscious, it says, “After all, it would make a difference mainly for others! [if

Mother “died”] For me. ” Only, you understand, they are still in this kind of illusion of death because this [the body] disappears; and even this [Mother’s body] no longer quite knows which of the two is true! For it, the truth should be Matter—well, even about that, it isn’t quite sure what that is! There is the other way of being. And the body is beginning to wonder ... It knows that the old way is no longer that, but it’s beginning to wonder what it will be like. At times it comes it’s strange, it comes like a breath of air and then it disappears again. Like a breath of another way of seeing, another way of feeling, another way of listening. And that’s something drawing near, as it were, and then getting veiled. Actually that new functioning had manifested itself for quite some time, but each time it was a discovery for Mother.... The body suffers; sometimes it suffers with a very a strange kind of suffering! A very strange kind of suffering: my body groans, literally groans as if it were suffering terribly, and at the same time it says to itself, “Ah, this is bliss!” And it groans! You understand, the two are like this [fused gesture]. It depends on a little something that looks like an act of will—but that’s not it. I really don’t know it’s something new. The “little something” was the imperceptible shift from one position to the other, from one type of time to the other The body groans, and it says to itself it’s suffering, then a little something occurs, and there’s no more suffering, yet it’s not at all what we call “bliss”—we don’t know what it is . .. it’s something else. It’s something else. But extraordinary. New, completely new.... It is truly the beginning of a new state in Matter. It’s no longer ... visibly NO LONGER the body consciousness as it was. No longer: the relationships are no longer the same, the way of hearing, of speaking.... And it isn’t yet oh, it’s on the way to something, but it’s not there yet. But the presence of the Grace is an absolutely marvellous thing! Because as I see things, the experience as it is if I were not given at the same time the true meaning of what’s taking place, it would be endless agony—it’s the old way of being which is dying. Naturally, there is the whole yogic preparation, but the body is ... you know, it’s a constant miracle! People couldn’t bear it for more than a few minutes, and it goes on and on and on ³

It was to go on for three years.

Three years of nonstop agony during which, slowly, imperceptibly but irresistibly, a new state of Matter was born, which was no longer life as we know it, death as we imagine it, time as we measure it or eternity in which one falls asleep; no longer the suffering that makes us faint or the beatitude of the sages in which one faints in another way; no longer the Matter that dies of a heart attack or the non- Matter in which one bathes in a transcendence…. Something else. A fully new state.

And in all that, a shell between two worlds or within two worlds. And Mother added this, which is decidedly very mysterious: We think that this, this appearance [the body] is ... to the ordinary consciousness it seems to be the most important thing—it’s obviously the last thing that will change. And to the ordinary consciousness, it seems to be the last thing that will change BECAUSE it’s the most important: that will be the surest sign. But it’s not that at all! It’s not that at all. The important thing is this change IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS—which has taken place [the change of position regarding time]. All the rest is a consequence. For us, when this [the body] is able to visibly be something different from what it is, we’ll say, “Ah, now the thing is done.”—That’s not true: the thing IS done. This [the body] is a secondary consequence.⁴

So we are full of questions. What is it that, in that new state or new position, is such a decisive factor that it makes the very conditions of the shell negligible, or at any rate secondary? Is the outer transformation⎯that is, the transformation of our whole visible terrestrial Matter⎯of no interest compared to another piece of data? Is the “transformation” … something else?

“If one knew what it is,” Mother had said ten years before, “it would be done already”⎯perhaps She was nearing the point or the position where She was beginning to know what it was?

As for us, we do not know at all.

Perhaps she will give us the key to that last mystery?

The Mystery of the Contradiction

The clinical picture continues.

A growing paradox, more and more acute. It’s difficult… The English would say, it’s not a joke… Everything, everything is getting disorganized. It’s easy to see that it’s getting disorganized TOWARDS a higher organization but nothing at all is working in the ordinary way any longer. So the body can no longer eat, can no longer It’s a very strange sensation: no relationship remains as it was before. Nothing: neither of the body with itself, nor of the body with others, nor anything; it’s all like something that has disappeared. Now and then, you know, it’s like a breath of air passing by, a small thing ... I can’t say how it is—charming. It’s not a pleasure, not a joy, it’s a breeze passing by, something quite special—and charming, quite charming. The next minute, it’s gone. The body suddenly feels a sense of peaceful and luminous rest, something quite ... adorable—the next minute, it feels pain all over. So everything is like that. A sort of identification with everything, which is far from being too pleasant (it’s not unpleasant either), but ... it gives a bizarre impression of life. One moment, the impression that you don’t depend on anything, that you are an expression (how could I put it? [Mother smiled] an expression of the Lord, and that you depend on nothing; the next minute, that you are nothing at all, merely a sort of semiconscious movement in the middle of a general semi-consciousness—very unpleasant. It’s like that, and all the time like that.... At one time, things become so repugnant, almost, that you feel like screaming—and in fact, if you don’t keep a check on yourself, you do start screaming. Another time everything is so peaceful that you feel as if you are entering an eternity. So you understand All that you can do in the middle of all that is to be still!⁵ A good thing there was no tendency towards madness! Mother said. Lucky chromosomes from Mathilde. Then, it comes along with an awareness of all that people think, all that people think OF IT, all that ... it’s all oh, so pitiful! ⁶

Mother said that the change WAS DONE, but quite obviously something was not yet (?) done. Or what? And the contradiction accelerated, if one may say so, the shifts from one state to the other became shorter and shorter, like a kind of electric arc ceaselessly traversing a hole of darkness and going in one direction, then in another, and it seemed that the experience always thrust her in the same direction, so as to oblige her to find the solution. It has been this experience that a very slight shift, a very slight change of attitude, which isn’t even expressible, and in one case you are in divine bliss; then, things remaining exactly the same, it almost becomes a torture! That’s something constant. At times, you know, the body would scream in pain, and ... a very slight change, which is almost inexpressible, and it becomes bliss—it becomes ... it’s something else, this extraordinary thing of the Divine everywhere. So the body is constantly switching from one to the other, like a sort of gymnastics, a struggle of the consciousness between the two. And all these suffering vibrations are as though supported by the mass of the general human consciousness—that’s right.⁷ Something that supports pain in the world, that almost likes it. One day (once more), as She was suffering from a tooth infection that She had managed to “densify,” stop, and reduce the swelling of⎯someone came near the body, thinking: “Oh, poor Mother, how she must suffer”⎯it came back immediately. Yes, She must suffer. The cellular contagion was obviously there, perpetually there. And at the same time, progressively, the direction of the solution in the very contradiction: …

This body goes from one to the other, she continued, and sometimes ... sometimes almost the two together! So then, to the vision of ordinary things, anyway of life as it is, it gives the perception of a general madness, and no really perceptible difference between what people call “mad” and what they call “reasonable.” That ... it’s comical, the difference people make. All that is a world of simultaneous perceptions, so it’s really impossible to speak. It’s something which has an INNUMERABLE experience at the same time, with a capacity of expression that has remained as it is, that is to say, incapable. But that “passage” is the most constant work. There are no more ideas, no more feelings, almost no more sensations, it’s this kind of shift, and a shift SO different, you know, and in total immobility!⁸

Such was the phenomenon that was more and more clearly emerging: a sort of cellular eternity or cellular immobility in the very midst of the contradiction, or which perhaps even arose from that contradiction … so much so that one wondered whether in fact one was not wrong to think that there was a side of death and pain, and a “true side” of eternal beatitude⎯whether there was not another place which was made of both sides, as it were, a third … incomprehensible state. And in the body, you know, in Matter. It was not a question of ethereal states: it was a question of toothache or of a body that was (or seemed to be) dying. A state that seemed to be the exact opposite of what we call the natural state, the state of the world of Nature, and yet which belonged to the physical world. Perhaps a new physical Nature? It is obvious that the physical Nature that controls the fish and that which controls man are very different, and yet they are the same. All the functions that worked naturally—that is, in accord with the laws of Nature—all of a sudden, brrm, finished! They stop. Then ... something ... which I call the Divine—perhaps Sri Aurobindo called it the Supramental, I don't know; it's something like that, which is tomorrow's realization (I don't know how to name it); so when everything is thoroughly upset and I feel really awful, then “That” consents to intervene. The transition isn't pleasant, that's all. Along with sharp pains, and ... impossible to take any food, etc. etc. Evidently someone had to do it.⁹ She was working out the transition, the transition from what to what, and in what? One does not know. Can the caterpillar describe the transition to the butterfly? And the caterpillar is quite comfortable in its cocoon⎯but to do it with one’s eyes wide open and without hibernation?… Sometimes, I tried to ask her questions (though less and less, because it was heartrending), I wanted so much to decipher what it all meant: But I don’t know! She exclaimed. My body is in the middle of living the process.¹⁰ And that was it. It does feel a process of transformation taking place. But sometimes it feels it's impossible—it's impossible, you simply can't go on existing like this—but then, just at the last minute, something comes, and then it's ... it's a Harmony totally unknown to this physical world. A Harmony—the physical world seems appalling in comparison. But that doesn't last. My perceptions are getting clearer and clearer, more and more luminous—vaster and vaster. It's really like a new world that wants to manifest itself.¹¹

And I am obliged to say that I do not understand⎯the end, yes, one can understand; the other side, one can imagine. But the transition, that which creates that new state⎯the mechanism. We can only observe that it is when everything is completely disorganized that “That agrees to intervene.” Obviously, the caterpillar has to be completely disorganized for something of the butterfly to agree to intervene. A sort of total contradiction of the caterpillar is needed. And what was taking place within that contradiction?⎯always the same movement of densification or “eternization” (perhaps it was the particular form that hibernation took at the level of a human transformation with one’s eyes wide open). But was it only that⎯a trick to work out the transition⎯or on the contrary the new state itself? I am obsessed by the idea of that old body which, I suppose, must “transform itself,” and it will actually have to transform itself, it is not meant to remain this frozen and hardened old garment. But first of all, is it not the very conditions of its “breathing” that have to change⎯a physical way of breathing that makes for a certain death or decrepitude, and another way that makes for life without death and decrepitude? If the latter way or breathing environment settles in physical Nature (I really mean another mode of breathing, made of something other than oxygen and nitrogen), there is truly no problem of transformation anymore, it is a “secondary consequence,” as Mother says; it will take place very naturally in the whole species, little by little. And I remember the story of the Mexican axolotl, this sort of animal which is half-worm, half-fish and lives, blind and colourless, in the depths of caves, in the water falls of the high mountains of Mexico, where it had reproduced, died and reproduced … perhaps for centuries, until the day some scientists brought a few samples back to observe them further in their laboratory. To everyone’s utter amazement, within a few days, because the conditions were different, those worms took on colours and changed into … salamanders! (which they called amblystoma), which reproduced normally. They discovered this extraordinary thing: the axolotl was a larva which lived, reproduced and died without leaving the larval state⎯one changes one’s environment and the implacable circuit breaks open, the larva becomes another being which lives and reproduces in its own way. An environment to change. An air to change. And everything changes. What has to be created is the new breathing environment (it is hardly a metaphor). Perhaps it was that new environment that tried to open up or be created in Matter through that bit of Matter that She represented. It is like a kind of new composition of the air, which should be breathable or absorbable by all those who have reached the needed degree of aspiration⎯one has to aspire, of course, in order to breathe! There is a quality of aspiration in humans that should open to them the door or the window to that new physical air. Of course, it is not physical like the nitrogen, but it is physical all the same, compared to the subterranean air that we breathe, or to the air of well- brought-up crucian carps that we absorb in our rather muddy fishbowl.

Was it that that was happening in Mother’s body?

Of whom are we the larvae?

Was that acute, painful, infernal contradiction not the very instrument of that new mode of being or breathing? Because one day, in 1970, She had made this remark: It has become very interesting. I spent the whole of last night with Sri Aurobindo, but with a world of explanations. He made me understand lots of things, but quite ... well, extraordinary. A demonstration in detail of the difference between the two consciousnesses. Among other things and in a quite practical and positive way, he explained to me that the cause of all illnesses, all disorders, all conflicts, here in the material world, is that the two simultaneous movements (one is the movement of duration—what we could call Stability—and the other, the movement of transformation), the two movements in the original Consciousness are only one and not in contradiction; and I was shown how here, they are separate, and that’s what is the cause of death. It’s because they can’t be in harmony—they don’t know HOW to be in harmony: they can, but they don’t know. One is the movement of transformation, the other the movement of stability.... In other words, they are like Eternity and the Becoming, the movement of progress and immobility. When they are not in harmony where they should be, it causes a break in equilibrium and the being dies—things die, everything dies because of that. It’s so simple! So obvious once you have the experience. We could say (almost) that if the two find their equilibrium of SIMULTANEOUS existence, it re-creates the Divine. He is in us, but not in harmony.¹²

And we are again dealing with that cellular, supramental time which combines both perfect immobility and lightning-fast movement. This was the corporeal, physical state, the “environment” that tried to permanently establish itself in Mother’s body, through and even because of the acute contradictions that threatened to engulf her into death at every instant. This was the other breathing.

And one day, the mystery of the contradiction (which I mistook for the transition to “the other state,” the other side, the “blissful” one), proved (or seemed to prove?) the very condition or the very site of the new state⎯we have not to move to the other side! For I would complain to Mother, and at the level of my own experience, which seemed to psychologically follow what She was physically living, I told her: “The farther I go, the more contradictions I uncover in myself⎯acute contradictions. One has the impression that they are like impossibilities. And She answered this: No, not impossibilities—it probably means you have to go deeper or higher to their meeting ground. That's how it works: the opposites get increasingly vehement until we find the point where they where unity is established. One must go deeper and deeper, or higher and higher—it's the same thing. All our old ways of understanding things are worthless—WORTHLESS. All, all our values are WORTHLESS. We are on the threshold of something truly marvellous, but we don't know how to keep it. Never, never before have I had such a sense of ignorance, of impotence, of of being a jumble of frightful contradictions, and I know, I KNOW—deep down, beyond speech— that it's because I don't know how to find the place where they they harmonize and unite. And strangely, almost at the same time, there's torture and bliss—almost at the same time. There you are.¹³

Of course, a new state which is neither bliss nor torture, neither good nor evil, neither life nor death … something else … that combines all that together and makes for a new substance, a new being, a new air. All our values of caterpillars⎯medical, spiritual, moral, legal or scientific⎯are worth nothing, because they are their own admirable thing, inflated and magnified. Even our ideas about transformation are perhaps pure human imagination…. There is another air, another environment. There is a place where everything meets. We carry all the contradictions that are needed to reach that place. So did Mother.

Would She reach that place in the body where the contradictions of the earth are reconciled⎯where life and death are reconciled? Or rather where they meet and fuse into a something else that is the third state we are looking for. A state in which transformation would not be a kind of individual feat, but the natural consequence of a certain way of being and breathing. Like the axolotl in its new environment. Some forty years earlier, in 1930, Mother had said: The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions of the world.

The Layer of Carbon

Then the great blows fell. Truly a frenzied demolition.

As if the passage were being dug in her own body.

The first one happened in August ’70, when her personal assistant, who had served her for so many years with great fidelity had to stop her work. One year before, She had already lost her smiling treasurer, Amrita, then Pavitra, her General Secretary, one of the only pure and solid elements around her. She was increasingly alone in front of the pack. For a month, during those days of August, 1970, her body struggled with death. Once more, the turning points of 1962 and 1968 repeated themselves: The experience of the body left to itself....¹⁴ It is the body, always, that must find the solution. And each time, it is emptied of whatever it may have acquired in the meanwhile. One has to go down to the place where the thing is done. I still hear her panting voice (her lung was affected, She was always coughing). If I remember once it’s over, I’ll have something really interesting to say. But I don’t know whether I’ll remember ¹⁵ And a few days later: This little body is like a point, but its impression is of being the expression of an awesome power, and it’s ... like this: no capacity, no expression, nothing—and rather miserable. And yet ... it’s like the condensation of an awesome power! At times, it even has difficulty bearing it, you understand? All experiences are as if multiplied a hundred times.... And then the legs hurt. You see, twenty-four hours a day, no possibility of real rest. That’s it.... If I let myself go, I would cry out.... Terrible! So that night, I said to myself, “Yes, this is how hell is.” Terrible, it’s terrible. I don’t see why I’ve had to go through this Because, you understand, that way, it was death that wasn’t a solution. That was frightful.¹⁶ She was touching the point, reaching the point where death was no longer a solution. Because in fact there was no death left in her body, no forgetting, no “one closes one’s eyes” and one leaves⎯leaves for where? She was fully conscious, each cell of her body was fully conscious, there was no “other side” of forgetting, nowhere to escape from that. Can we understand?… It’s so horrible that it ... I am tempted to say, pray for me.¹⁷ Lord….

At the same time, a disciple who had a remarkable power of vision saw this, which I noted down: “Mother was going down and down, sinking into the earth, then She was as if completely enveloped in a carbon layer. There was light where She was, but the thread that linked her to her origin was very tenuous: a tiny little thread that went through that layer of carbon. And at times the contact was cut⎯and Mother was in difficulty.” She was reaching that root of death. The radical asphyxiation. And at the same time, that formidable, almost crushing Power one felt around her, as if growing increasingly formidable as her body was annulled. I had the impression that I was all the pain of the world ... felt together. I don’t know how to explain. That sense of being crushed hasn’t gone yet. It’s like something preventing me from breathing freely. I had (and that was frightful), I had the consciousness of all that Sri Aurobindo suffered physically. And that was one of the things most ... the hardest to bear [Mother’s eyes were full of tears]. And our physical unconsciousness beside that, and the kind of physical torture He was subjected to. That was one of the most difficult things.¹⁸ Sri Aurobindo had reached the same place, there, among all those recalcitrant little axolotls. Now, She understood. And they “treated” him … as in medical books. “But that pain of the earth, I told Mother, is it not to call the supreme Consciousness there too, in the very depths? Yes, of course. That’s what I say to myself, what I try to find. There is something to find And She stopped, out of breath, as if suffocating. And it’s still there. There is one spot, like a spot where there is such a dreadful anguish.... It’s constant. It’s here. [Mother drew a bar across the top of her chest]. It’s here. And I am as if forbidden to exteriorize myself She could no longer leave her body. As if I absolutely had to find something. “We’ll overcome, sweet

Mother”. Yes. You understand, that it will be conquered I am absolutely certain of, but ... has the time come? That’s the question. And it’s this, this doubt, that’s a torture.¹⁹

Then She recovered. She started pacing her room again, indomitably, and her cough stopped ... the invasion of people started up again. If I could have purged the world of it by having those days of horror, then it doesn’t matter, I don’t mind.²⁰

But She had not yet found the “something.”

Five months later, just a break to breathe a little, the second blow fell, even more radical, if possible. That place of the change had to be reached indeed. This time, it was a paralysis of her left leg (a blood-clot, it seems), I saw her again a month and a half later. What ties me down is this leg that became paralyzed, the lower part of it, from the knee to the heel. So naturally you become an imbecile, you can no longer do anything!... It is coming back little by little. There was a time when it was total: it was as cold as ice. There was no circulation. But it was not an innocent paralysis! For at least three weeks there was a continuous pain, night and day, 24 hours out of 24, without any let-up, none whatsoever: it was as if everything were being torn out of me.... This one [Mother touched her right leg] was on the verge of being paralyzed also, but the day it happened, I concentrated with a vengeance, I walked for a long, long time to keep it from being paralyzed. She would walk until the end. You could say I was just a cry all the time. It lasted a long time. It lasted several weeks (I didn't keep track). Then, gradually, it alternated with moments of peace when the pain in the leg subsided. And for the last two or three days, it seems to be recovering.... You know, it was such a it was the whole problem of the world—a world that was nothing but pain and suffering, and a great question mark: why? I tried every possible remedy: changing pain into pleasure, suppressing the capacity to feel, thinking about something else. I tried all the “tricks”—not a single one worked.

There is something in the physical world as it is which is not which still is not open to the Divine Vibration. And that “something” is what causes absolutely all the trouble.... The Divine Consciousness is not perceived. And so there are lots of IMAGINARY things (but very real to the sensation) that exist, while That, the only thing that's true, is not perceived.²¹

And here we reach something that is capital, as if all of that pain of the world, so concrete (a paralysis is not “innocent” or imaginary) were only due to a false consciousness of Matter or in Matter. But it is quite capital, because a consciousness can change. One could believe that death cannot change, any more than cancer or paralysis, but a consciousness can change.

There is a consciousness to change in Matter. There is a mode of vibration to change in Matter.

There is a true vibration that changes everything⎯including death.

Would a conscious axolotl, endowed with vision, not say that its subterranean environment is a false environment, a real unreality? An opaque illusion. Only, in the present case, the true environment already exists. We are in it. It is here.

One year earlier, in 1969, Mother had had an experience that was exactly the same but that I did not very well understand at the time, and in the same conditions of physical disintegration and pain as in 1970. Suddenly, in the midst of disintegration and suffering, a light, “something,” and everything was physically changed. As if that whole pain did not exist. A sort of corporeal repetition of the Buddhistic experience of Illusion⎯but instead of being destroyed in one’s consciousness up above, while the body continues to suffer below, it is destroyed in the body. It is in the body that there is an illusion to destroy. Never, never in this body’s whole, entire existence, has it felt such a total and profound sorrow as on that day, said Mother. Oh, something that made it ... You know, separation, then wickedness, cruelty, suffering, and then all disease, decomposition, death—destruction. (All that is part of a single thing.) The experience I had was the UNREALITY of those things, as though we had stepped into an unreal falsehood, and when you step out of it, everything vanishes—it does not exist, it isn’t. That’s what is frightful! What to us is so real, so concrete, so dreadful, all that does not exist. It’s ... stepping into Falsehood. Why? How? What?... And at the end of it all, Bliss. And then, pfft! it faded away, as if all this, which is so awful, did not exist. Something in the body that makes evil, death and destruction unreal. And all the methods—which we may call artificial, Nirvana included—all the methods to get out of it are worthless, Mother added. Beginning with the fool who kills himself to “put an end” to his life: of all stupidities, that one is the biggest. From that up to Nirvana (where one imagines one can get out of it), all of it is worth NOTHING. Those are different stages, but they’re worth nothing. And then, after that, when you really have a sense of perpetual hell, all of a sudden ... (nothing but a state of consciousness, it’s nothing but that), all of a sudden, a state of consciousness in which all is light, splendour, beauty, happiness, goodness “Oh, here it is,” and then pfft! It shows itself, and hop! it’s gone. And Mother asked herself: Is this, is this the lever?... I don’t know. But SALVATION IS PHYSICAL—not at all mental, but physical. I mean it’s not in escape: it’s HERE. There’s only ONE way out of all that, only ONE—ONLY one, not two, there’s no choice, there aren’t a few possibilities, there’s only one: it’s ... the supreme Door. The Marvel of Marvels. All the rest ... all the rest is an impossibility. But it’s not that it’s veiled or hidden or anything: it’s here. Why? What in the whole deprives you of the power to live that? I don’t know. It’s here, HERE! All the rest, including death and everything, really becomes a falsehood, that is to say, something that does not exist.²²

Another environment where all that does not exist.

Mother was reaching the central point: that knot of Falsehood and pain, that layer of carbon. The absolute contradiction. The suffocation of the axolotl. And right in that, suddenly, something … a bliss, the Marvel. The lever. Something that changes in the vibration of Matter and that changes everything⎯including death: the old circuit of the axolotl. There has been a tremendous change, noted Mother after the days of horror in 1970 and 1971, but I can’t say anything about it ²³ But the whole body has changed drastically. It really seems as if this physical being had been prepared for another consciousness, because for certain things ... its reactions are entirely different, its attitude is different. I went through a period of total indifference in which the world represented meant nothing. And then little by little a kind of new perception grew out of it I am only in the middle of it. But I have noticed how those things, the so-called catastrophes or calamities or mishaps or difficulties or how they all come JUST at the right moment to help you—JUST when it's needed to help you. You see, everything in the physical nature that still belonged to the old world and its habit and ways of doing and being and acting, all that couldn't be handled in any other way than this: by illness. It certainly was interesting.²⁴ Just like Mother: She was studying the phenomenon. And after a long silence during which She peered into the distance, She suddenly remarked: The world is in a dreadful state. It too, within the carbon layer. “But, I told Mother, I never felt as intensely as I do now that the moment was close, very close!” ⎯Yes, yes, very close.... I think something has been achieved from a general standpoint; it wasn't just the difficulty of one body or one person: I think something was achieved in terms of preparing Matter to receive in the right way, correctly It will come. I don't know whether it will take months or years for the thing to become clear.²⁵

And little by little, the thing became clear. A new passage was being dug in her body. Or a new state.

A state of consciousness that changes the physical world and the physical nature⎯resolving that eternal contradiction of life and death, of pain and bliss, of escaping to heaven or into Nirvana and the earth that rots. Truly a new evolution.

Salvation is physical.

So it is obvious that, if we find that, the physical transformation begins a natural, spontaneous consequence, as the amblystoma is the natural, spontaneous consequence of a little axolotl waking up from its layer of black silt.