Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III

16: Overlife

This book is a challenge, all of Mother’s enterprise is a challenge, Sri Aurobindo’s silence was surely very wise, but what? I am trying. This is my own challenge and I have not finished looking into that stammering of a new world, I struggle with Mother’s forest just as She fought and struggled with the unknown. All the secrets are there, but unnamed⎯what formula will ever imprison the Amazon?⎯but one can walk there, lose oneself there, wander in all directions, and everything is as if full of meaning. Near Mother, one had the impression that She walked with a perpetual open sesame⎯each thing had its open sesame, down to the least trifle, everything was a perpetual open sesame. And the great Door can open at any page, any line of that Agenda: there is no need to understand, perhaps it is not even necessary, but to grasp hold of that straight little vibration which goes through all appearances and opens up the new world like a sudden cascade of laugh among hopeless trivialities and most obscure contradictions.

We do not know how to read what is here, right here. Mother is really the One who un-covers.

She grasped every minute of her life, every circumstance, in order to un-cover. Until the end. Never did She put a definitive meaning on things, because the meaning was to walk. Nothing was ever established, fixed: it was always the next step. She walked strangely upon nothing to make the something spring up at every step. And it was alive, it was brand new, it was like perpetual dynamite in the old crust that we carry about.

And now, what was She going to blow up?

No, She would not leave behind any Gospel or system or anything one can really walk on, but I don’t know what definitive hole in the carapace of the terrestrial habits of seeing and living, and an open sesame that only waits for our becoming aware of it.

The whole evolution is meant to lead us to Matter’s last open sesame.

Two States of Matter

A hole, of course, is illogical, things do not continue to be as they were before. And Mother did not know where on earth She was setting foot⎯neither do I. So, the best I can do is to go on with the “clinical picture,” in case it would happen to give a curve in the end. After those days of horror, something had really been given birth, but what? “One cannot say anything about it,” she said⎯one only understands the lotus seed when it has become a flower. The next world will understand Mother very well. I am in a state where I know nothing, that's all. And so my one and only refuge is to sort of curl up in the Divine, you know.... As if. To be You, that's all. Do what You want with me, that's all It's as if you were standing on a ridge and the least misstep would pitch you into a hole. Everything seems different, all the everything seems so different. The nature of the relations with people is changing, the nature of everything is changing, but what? What? It's like being on the brink or point or ... hanging in balance—a tremendous Power (there's a tremendous power, I have some examples), and at the same time, an incredible helplessness. You know: it's like being suspended between the most marvellous and the vilest. Like that. I don't know, better not to speak of it I don't even know where I am going—whether I am going towards transformation or towards the end.¹ Never would She know. “I am not told.” And transformation, what was it? There was the vile old thing, then…. Nothing in between. Or something so new that it was really unidentifiable⎯if one could identify it, it would no longer be new! And it is always the same story: it takes a lot of time to identify what is there. In life’s ordinary condition, the body has a sort of stable base as a result of which it isn’t uncomfortable, it can be quite busy with other things while remaining neutral: its existence goes unnoticed, and it doesn’t require a continuous attention in order to be in a ... favourable state. It’s an automatically functioning instrument. But in this present condition, the minute the body’s attention stops being wholly turned to the Divine, it becomes very miserable. But the whole rest of the time, if it’s not ACTIVELY concentrated, it’s enough to make it feel quite miserable. Then it becomes terrible ²

Concretely, the “Divine” was the other state, the other automatism, the one that made that body walk, breathe and last rather miraculously, and if the body forgot that or got out of that even for a second, it was like instant suffocation⎯of course, as the old laws did not work anymore. As soon as She went back into the cage, it was instantly the law of death. And yet, She was right in it … without being in it. In the old world and in the new one. One foot here, one foot there. Torture and bliss. Life, death. I don’t know if this is special to it, but the atmosphere is full of the most absurd suggestions [catastrophic thoughts everywhere and constantly, up to the end]. All that disappears only when it’s ACTIVELY concentrated.³ Truly a poisoned air, the carbon layer without interruption. So then: suffocation, light air; life, death, at each breath in fact. Can one understand? At each instant, each second, one had to transform the air of the old species into the air of the new one⎯or else to die or give up and go into bliss for good, outside of that wretched story. I don’t know if that’s special to this body or if it will be the same thing for all bodies. Naturally, it’s fully aware that this is a transitional period, but ... it’s very difficult.⁴ Perhaps She was in the process of creating another “air” with her little gasps, an air for all those who were beginning to suffocate too. Now and then, for a few seconds, there is perhaps a “specimen” of what is to be, what will be—when, I don’t know—it lasts a few seconds.

That’s wonderful, but It’s a very strange impression, as if one were on the edge— but on the edge of what? I don’t know.⁵

And everything was different. Not only did her body no longer breathe in the usual way and move according to the usual laws, as if suspended between two airs or two ways of being, yet equally physical since it involved a body⎯a mortal physical and another physical one did not know what it was, except that it was its true breathing, its air that did not suffocate, the automatism that made it move exactly, work smoothly, “that” which allowed things to “go on and on”⎯but its perception of the world was different. One might say or think that She was living or seeing in another world; but there lay precisely the mystery: it was not more a nonphysical world than it was nonphysical laws. It was one and the same physical world, but differently seen and lived, as if there were another category of physical laws, another category of physical sight, another category of existence, one within the other. Perhaps the next world and the next species that strove to emerge, still half-veiled by the residue of the old species. Yes, between the caterpillar and the butterfly, and at times it was the caterpillar, at times the butterfly⎯but the caterpillar and the butterfly are both physical. Strangely, they seem to be just the same, and they become very different.⁶ I'll be eating, and suddenly everything present vanishes from the consciousness, and long afterwards, I realize I am like this, with a spoon in my hand! ... Not very practical! “But what happens while you go off like that?” I asked. Oh, it's quite interesting! But I don't “go off,” you see. I am not at all in a trance: I am wide awake and fully active. I see things, I do things, I hear people, I ... the whole time. But I forget—I simply forget about material life. Then someone comes and abruptly calls me back. I don't go out of material life, but it appears different.

And Mother sat staring thoughtfully. I really think the physical world is changing. People will probably notice it only in a few hundred years, because it takes a long time for it to become visible to the ordinary consciousness. But the touch … [Mother felt the air, the atmosphere between her fingers] feels ... as if a different texture. Yes, the world of the butterfly beginning to emerge, or perhaps the air that will allow the next species to breathe⎯the air that perhaps is already preparing the next species, which we already breathe unknowingly and which slowly gets our cells used to a new way of being, breathing and seeing. A slow, invisible transformation. Then She added with a smile: From time to time, something tells me, “Don't talk, don't talk!” I have to keep quiet, otherwise people around me would think I am becoming deranged. And I insisted, repeating: “It is not just the vision of the physical world that changes, it is the very quality of the substance?”⎯Yes, yes, it's not at all my own way of seeing—not at all But it's odd. It is PHYSICAL, that's what is amazing! Before, I used to withdraw into an inner state of being (I know them all, I've experienced them, I've had a conscious life), but all that is finished. Completely finished. As if the physical world were becoming double.⁷

Two worlds, one within the other. Two levels of physical reality.

And one can wonder who or what it is that has this vision or perception of the other physical reality, because it could be simply another “way of seeing,” as a visionary has another way of seeing, or even as a being of another species has another way of seeing, as the butterfly’s vision is different from the caterpillar’s. Now, what is very curious in the present case is that the butterfly was within the caterpillar’s very body. It was not another species that saw, not a higher vision of Mother: it was the body that saw, the body’s cells that saw, the very material consciousness that saw Matter and saw it in a different way, lived it in a different way. It was not outside of Matter, another type of Matter: it was Matter itself. For, one day, Mother made this very revealing remark: For the body consciousness that remains conscious when the body is asleep, the world as it is (externally or superficially) is dark and muddy—always. That is, it’s always a half-darkness—you can hardly see—and mud. And that isn’t an opinion or a feeling: it’s a material FACT. Consequently, this body consciousness is already conscious of a world ... that would no longer be subject to the same laws.⁸ The consciousness of Matter, of the body, not veiled by the mental crust and by the organs of the external senses submitted to the laws of the Mind⎯the consciousness that is left in the body when everything else is asleep and the external organs are obliterated, blind, closed, that consciousness that is almost like that of a man who is dead to the world⎯which sees and perceives the physical world in another way, and not only does it see it differently, but it is submitted to other physical laws, which we never have the opportunity of knowing, except under hypnosis or in abnormal states, because they are hidden to us by the whole mental superstructure. It is the cellular level, the one at which Mother lived, from which She saw the material world differently and which made her body live according to laws that were miraculous for a body assailed by age, heart attacks and the rush of the world.

“As if the physical became double”: the old physical of the mental world, mental vision, mental laws, and the other one. So we understand now how strangely She came and went between all that drew her to the surface, suffocated her on the surface, which was like death to her, and the other, cellular state. Every minute: do you want life, do you want death; do you want life, do you want death?... It's as if every minute the body could die, and every minute it's miraculously saved. It is ... incredible. Incredible. And with a constant perception of world events, as if everything, but everything were ... as if interlinked—a link. ⁹

A universal, cellular level. Two states of Matter.

But I was eager to know more about that other state, what was it like, how did it work? She answered me in her clear little voice, slow and hesitant, as if her words had layers upon layers to cross before crystallizing in little drops as at the end of a stalactite. When I remain like that… quiet… after a while a whole world of things gets done, gets organized, but it's ... another kind of reality, a more ... substantial reality. How is it more substantial? I don't know. Matter seems unsubstantial compared to that. Unsubstantial, opaque, unreceptive. Whereas that is ... and Mother sat smiling. The funny part is that people think I am asleep!... I hardly belong to the old world anymore, so the old world says: she's finished—I couldn't care less! And She laughed, then pulled on a small garland of flowers She was wearing around her wrist and which She called “Patience.” Patience—do you want my patience? She put her garland round my wrist. Repeatedly it's: patience, patience, patience But the others, too, must be patient.¹⁰

“I hardly belong to the old world anymore….”

What was going to happen between those two states?

A great illusion of Matter and … an unknown reality.

Tomorrow’s Unknown

It is difficult to describe the hell She traversed those last three years and to say where it was leading to or what it was hiding or preparing. There is no clinical picture of pure pain. There was a mystery that one felt growing, becoming more and more acute, almost palpable⎯something that was full of an unknown meaning: it was there, one could touch it. But what? I hardly dared ask Mother questions anymore. She was herself a mute question, ardent, immobile and traversed by little cries of pain. And sometimes She laughed and laughed, making fun of all that hellish contradiction in her and around her, as if only humour could bear all that, or Love: A silence ... that worships.¹¹ And the pain of the world, the chaos of the world seemed to grow, the contradiction of the world as in her own body⎯one and the same body in transition … towards what? One day, as if strangled by that suffocation of the world, I told her, looking at her body as if really one could read, touch and feel there all of the mystery of the earth imprisoned in its carbon layer: “The only solution is for you to have a glorious body, visible to all, then everyone could come and see: Come and see the Divine, what it looks like!” And She laughed and laughed: Yes, of course! That would be really convenient. Will it be like that?... That’s certain, I wholly agree! And I would be very happy if it were anyone, I don’t have the least desire that it should be mine!¹² “Because, I said, the world has reached such an acute state of suffering and pain that … it seems that the TIME has come?” She sat staring in silence. There’s a refusal to answer.¹³ She could say nothing, She was herself the question, the living question of the world. “Because really,” I urged her, “it is the moment for one body to change enough to be able to give a concrete hope to humankind. The day that Power has sufficiently entered your Matter, you will be able to pass it on to other bodies that will be ready?” Ah, but the possibility ALREADY exists. I have constant proof of that—extraordinary proof. You know, little miracles take place all the time, all the time.¹⁴

Little miracles of a new air… which does not put on airs.

Lots of surreptitious little miracles that cross the web, or the carbon layer, without putting on airs. “Something” is perhaps taking place, without our being aware of it, as we do not know where to look. And that miraculous transformation of a “representative” body may vanish in front of something far more serious, profound and ineradicable that was being built for the world, silently, painfully, behind the little cries of that body imprisoned in the black misery of the world.

It is the mystery to resolve.

Mother’s “unknown.”

And there, we have nothing but our heart to grope our way through the ultimate redoubt of Mother’s forest…. There was the “other state” that made her move, breathe, see and hear⎯a miracle of each minute⎯and this one, our state, mortal and suffocating; and in between, the no-man’s-land She never stopped ploughing in a frightful back and forth movement, suspended in nothing: “One could not bear it more than a few seconds,” and it lasted and lasted…. There are many little seconds in three times 365 days. Perhaps that ploughing was the road of the “little miracles” leading to our earth’s crust? There was a road that was being hewed, but what road? She did not know, She was hewing the road, She was the road. She was her burning question in between. And sometimes, it was suffocating with mystery. It's as if all the ways of seeing the world were passing by one after the other: the most detestable and the most marvellous—like this, like that ... [Mother turned her hand like a kaleidoscope], and they all come to tell me: “See, you can look at it this way, you can look at it that way, you can....” But the Truth ... what is true? ... There is all that and “something” we don't know. First of all, I am convinced that the need to “see” things, to think them, is purely human and is a transitory device. It is a transitory phase, which seems terribly long to us, but in fact is rather short. Even our consciousness is an adaptation of the Consciousness—THE Consciousness, the true Consciousness is something else.... But what? And so the conclusion for my body is ... to curl up in the Divine. Not to try to understand, not to try to know: try to BE And “like this” [in that

“being”], the Power is tremendous, in the sense that for instance, for some people, a particular illness vanishes (without my doing anything outwardly in fact, without my even speaking to anyone, absolutely nothing—it's cured); for still another person, it's the end, he goes over to the other side. But then that other side has become both quite familiar to me and ... totally unknown.¹⁵

And that is where we are really entering an enigma. It seemed that She well knew that “other side,” among the so-called dead, She constantly went to that place where the living and the dead are together. “Crowds,” she would say. At the cellular level, in the corporeal consciousness, the barrier no longer exists, the “other side” is on the same side, it is only the other side of our mental web, of our mental Matter.

And suddenly, that “other side,” so familiar, was becoming as if unknown. What did it mean? What was happening? What change was taking place in Mother’s structure, which made that it was not as before? A new state of Mother?… What state?

And Mother continued: I remember a time when the memory of past lives, the memory of night activities was so very concrete; the so-called invisible world was totally concrete—now ... now everything is like a dream—everything—everything is like a dream veiling a Reality ... an unknown Reality, and yet appreciable.¹⁶ The “invisible” was becoming as imaginary as the material?! So where are we? Past lives, excursions out of the body, worlds, levels of consciousness⎯and even this visible Matter. What was happening? You asked me, Mother continued; When I am silent and motionless like this, what is happening?” In point of fact it's an attempt: the truth as it is. Not trying to know or understand it (it is all one to me): to be—to be—to be And then [Mother had a smile so full of sweetness.] Then curiously enough: at the same time—at the same time—not one in the other or one with the other, but one AND the other, at the same time: marvellous and dreadful.... Life as it is, as we feel it in our ordinary consciousness—as it is for men—seems something but so dreadful that one wonders how it can be lived even a single minute; and the other, AT THE SAME TIME: a marvel. A marvel of light, consciousness, power—wondrous. And a power, a power! ¹⁷

And all that in the body, simultaneously. A sort of unknown Reality that seemed to cross the road of that no-man’s-land and emerge, mixed with the most absolute pain, with the frightful misery of our condition inside the carbon layer. So at one and the same time one can be in a painful and incomprehensible and absurd life and absolutely at the same time ... unutterably marvellous. So naturally I can't speak to anyone anymore, I can say it only to you, because people would think I am going mad.¹⁸

A third state … which seemed to be on the other side and here at the same time. And which changed both the other side and here. An unknown, impossible new Reality. Almost unlivable. An incredible junction which created an insufferable contradiction of pain and marvel⎯in the body.

What did all that meant? Where was it going?

It was in 1971. Mother did not know.

I have a feeling I am becoming another person. No, not just that: I am entering ANOTHER world, another way of being ... which might be called a dangerous way of being. As if ... [and Mother nodded her head] dangerous, but wonderful. The feeling that the relation between what we call “life” and what we call “death” is becoming more and more different—yes, different, completely different And Mother remained silent, with her blue eyes wide open on the yellow copper-pod tree and Sri Aurobindo’s abode…. NOT THAT DEATH DISAPPEARS, mind you (death as we see it, as we know it and in relation to life as we know it): that's not it, not it at all. BOTH are changing ... into something we don't yet know, which seems at once extremely dangerous and absolutely marvellous. Dangerous: the least mistake has catastrophic consequences. And marvellous. The least mistake? To lose the thread in the no-man’s- land that is in the process of … in the process of what? Of filling with that unknown new Reality? Our natural tendency, Mother continued, is to want certain things to be true (those which seem favourable to us) and other things to disappear [like “death”]—but that's not it! It isn't like that. EVERYTHING is different. Different. Then Mother closed her eyes, perhaps listening to the beat of that strange new “life” that did not belong to any side. From time to time, for a moment (a brief moment): a marvel. But the very next minute: the feeling of ... a dangerous unknown. There you are. That's how I spend my time.¹⁹

And if it were the world as it is? The true “as it is” that emerges? It was in 1972. Mother was 94.

The body has the sensation of hanging between two states: one which people call life, and the other which people call death. The body feels it’s hanging between the two: neither alive nor ... [laughing] dead, like that, neither one nor the other. It’s between the two. In no-man’s land.... And that’s very odd. Very odd. There is an impression (not an impression, it’s a perception) that the slightest disorder would be enough to fling it to the other side, and that this very slight movement “this way” is made impossible by something one doesn’t understand.... Something that kept you from “dying.” And it takes very little to ... One just has to keep very still. And suddenly Mother added this: There is clearly an active Will at work for this body to learn to live in a state in which there is neither life nor death—a state which is something else.²⁰

The third state.

But sometimes, She gave a cry all the same, so gripping was that new mystery⎯gripping like a new air one is not used to breathing, probably it was exactly that: Obviously, everything is designed so that the only support is in the Divine [of course, for She literally walked on nothing, except that “something”]. But I am not told what the “Divine” is—how do you like that!... Amazing!... At ninety-four, Mother no longer knew what the Divine was! Everything else is collapsing, except the ... the WHAT? The Divine ... something—what?... And She sat staring so intensely, one felt in one’s veins, one’s body and heart such an intense question that it burnt⎯it was burning to live near her. Then She added: It's like an attempt to make you feel there isn't any difference between life and death. There. That it is something else than life or death—neither what we call “death,” nor what we call “life”—it is ... something. And that ... is Divine. Or rather it is our next step towards the Divine.²¹

Then everything tears open, gets clearer: It is the next step, the next state of human consciousness, a state that transforms both life and death. It is the true consciousness of immortality.²² That which has the power to undo death because death no longer exists, it is something else. Something that has melted into a third state where both sides are one. No more sides, finished. The no-man’s-land is filled, that is where we are going. This is what was being built in Mother’s body: the unknown of tomorrow. The mutation of both sides. The constant “little miracle.” Then the transformation of the body is a secondary consequence, we can see it now: if we breathe that air, everything changes, everything is different. Death exists only if we want it or are unable to follow the movement of progress; transformation is the natural, inevitable result of that new breathing. It is no longer life, it is no longer death, it is something else… a divine something else.

Divine life on earth.

An immortal consciousness in the body that remoulds the body in its immortal image. What was up above or at the very bottom of Matter under the carbon crust has come HERE. All the splendours you experience by rising, going out, leaving the body, are nothing. It's nothing, it doesn't have that concrete reality. It appears vague in comparison with HERE. This is truly why the world was created.²³ The Supreme only becomes perfect in terrestrial Matter, on earth.²⁴

It is not death that must be abolished, it is not life that must be embellished. It is radically something else that changes those two nightmares into a marvel.

The unknown of tomorrow.

Which is right here, in the air, waiting to be breathed. Truly a mutation of death.

In a clear little cell which has journeyed the long course of pain since original Matter is hidden the ultimate key to the two worlds as if in one.

Matter performs its own miracle.

The eternal traveller rediscovers his complete eternity in a body, its totality in a point.

There we are. This is the Hour.

And Mother, one day, grasped hold of and gave a name to that Hour that I did not know how to define, that state that I did not know how to describe⎯for once, She gave a name. And She named it “just like that,” by chance, among other things, as She used to do, without attaching too much importance to it, for in truth, She lived labels, She was creating our next label (if we absolutely have to have one). That’s what I have learned: the bankruptcy of religions was because they were divided—they wanted you to follow one religion to the exclusion of all others. And all human knowledge has gone bankrupt because it was exclusive. And man has gone bankrupt because he was exclusive. What the New Consciousness wants is: no more divisions. To be capable of understanding the extreme spiritual, the extreme material, and to find ... to find the meeting point where ... it becomes a true force. And it’s trying to teach that to the body too, through the most radical means.²⁵ The impossible contradiction the true force sprang up from, or rather which was becoming the true force, the other state. And She added this: The step forward humanity must take IMMEDIATELY is a definitive cure of exclusivism. They all say, “This and not that”—no, this AND that, and this too and that too, and everything at the same time. To be supple enough and wide enough for everything to be together. That’s what I keep knocking myself against at present, in every field—every field. In the body too. The body is used to, “This and not that; this or that....”—No, no, no: this AND that. And of course, the great Division: life and death—there you are. Everything is the effect of that. Well (words are stupid but...), overlife is life and death together.²⁶

Overlife.

The state of the superman.

And with her crystalline humour, She corrected herself: Why call it “overlife”?! We are always tempted to lean to one side: light and darkness (“darkness,” well ...). Ah, we’re quite small.²⁷ Indeed, we could call it overdeath!… And it is precisely in that “darkness,” the very one that saints, doctors, police, governments or moralists tried to deny, abolish, change or improve, that the key is to be found. In the very darkness of that carbon layer, that absolute contradiction, lies the Force where the two meet and are transmuted into WHAT IS.

“The Sun in the darkness.” Matter’s next state.

Divine and immortal Matter.

In 1953, nearly twenty years before, a little girl had had a strange vision which she had noted down in English in her school notebook, without understanding a thing. And that notebook fell into my hands, open at the entry of January 5, 1953: “I saw Mother coming back from the balcony. Pavitra was there. He asked Mother for a “message.” Mother handed him a drawing and said: “This contains Life and Death. You can choose what you wish. The person capable of joining the two doors will be saved.” On the drawing, one could see two houses with lovely green trees. Through the trees, I saw two doors: they were separated and closed.”

And the two doors are ONE. In the body.

It is the supreme Door.