Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III

2: A Body Without Memory

On August 22, 1968, I received a small note from Mother. I had not seen her since August, 10. Her heart gave out, her pulse was “more than erratic.” All the same, She appeared on her balcony upstairs, as on the poop of a big ship, on August 15, for Sri Aurobindo’s birthday. She was all draped in her silver cape, so pale. She remained standing for five minutes. There were two assistants behind her to prevent her from falling. And that crowd below. Then I remembered that anecdote about Queen Elizabeth, the 1st, who tore herself from her deathbed, despite her doctors’ protests, to receive a delegation of merchants: “We shall die afterwards.” It was Mother who recounted this story to me, and it was so like Mother. That small note of the 22nd is very typical. Here are some soups, you must be hungry [there were packets of dehydrated soups]. This time, it is TRULY interesting—but rather total and radical. How far, far away we are from the goal I will try to remember.¹ One is dying perhaps, but it is very interesting: a subject for study. Mother would have been a perfect physicist⎯but after all, this was a new sort of physics. And remember to eat, when She herself couldn’t even manage to eat anymore!

The Horrible Thing

It was, in fact, “rather total and radical.” She was seated in a very low rosewood armchair, which would be, from then on, her chair up till the end, always facing west, towards Sri Aurobindo under the big copper-pod tree. She wore tabis [sandals] on her feet that rested on a small cushion. The armchair was lined with light yellow silk from Bangalore. It smelt of “May lily,” her favourite perfume, which came straight from Provence (the “Power of Purity,” as She called it). She was strangely diaphanous, her voice, most of all, had changed a lot. It sounded more and more like a child’s voice. I had never thought that She would die, in fact, I have never thought that She could die. The violence of the shock was only the acceleration of the process: ten years were compressed into eight days. I must work fast, you see....

They all think it's the end. ⎯“No, no!” I cried out, “no, we all have faith that it is really the ultimate possibility, and that it cannot not work.”⎯ Do they understand? ⎯“They know that it is work that is on the way.”⎯ Yes? All right, then.² And She laughed without believing a single word of what I said.

A radical operation, the exact repetition of the turning point of 1962, but more total and definitive.

The mind and vital sent packing so that the physical be truly left to its own resources.³

And She showed me a bit of an indecipherable note scribbled in pencil. That is, the experience of the body, pure, all by itself. If you like, in appearance, I had become an idiot. I didn't know anything.⁴ She no longer could see, She no longer could hear, She no longer knew how to do anything, even move⎯She had forgotten everything. Yet, “something” was there to make her continue to move, act, coordinate⎯and speak with a crystalline (but very particular) intelligence. She spoke to me up to the end, and her stammerings were like drops of pure light, at times fulgurating with power. It was this “something” that was under study. That which remains when everything has been removed: the pure body. And not an atom anymore of vital force⎯an almost impotent body⎯while there was those torrents of crushing power around her…. A surprising contradiction. But those last five years are full of fulgurating contradictions⎯fulgurating, because through that impossible living paradox that She was more and more, one thought at times to grasp something that was so new … that it was almost unbelievable. As if the earth gave way under one’s feet, but not into an empty hole: into a Wonder, yes, an incredible Wonder, there is no other word for it. No more Mind, no more vital force⎯which She was never to recover. Gone forever. But She would come to move all the same, walk and write again, receive one to two hundred people a day. She would even take an oculist’s chart to learn how to see in our way again and would do daily reading exercises⎯a will that was indomitable. But it was another law. It was “something” else. Another

Possibility which silently, invisibly, but irresistibly, grew in that body that had been completely annulled and could grow only because all had been annulled.

Hell. Five years of hell.

It's hell, really; it's only thanks to this Possibility that it's not hell. It's because behind that hell, there is this Possibility—which is living, real, existing, tangible and livable—otherwise it's infernal.... You understand, in ordinary men, one gets the impression that all the states of being [reflexes, feelings, instincts, thoughts, ideals, etc.] have been whipped together (you know, like when you make mayonnaise!), all the states of being well mixed together like that, in a great confusion, so naturally the “horrible thing” is bearable ... because of all the rest in there. But if you start separating ... Oh!⁵ Remove feelings, thoughts, automatisms, memories, and of course, all possible ideals, tastes and mental constructions from A to Z, from top to bottom … and there remains “the horrible thing.” Mother was to be in the horrible thing, pure, until the end.

A new being can only be created with decoded cells. Without any mental, vital or material code. And what is it that can emerge from there, from that horrible nothing?

An impossible state.

A very unlivable state.

But it could only be because it was unlivable. Pure Matter, one could say.

And universal Matter to boot. Not an atom of protection against the tidal wave of the world, the thoughts of the world, the reactions of the world and the illnesses of the world…. Sometimes, one could hear her small childlike moans down in the Ashram courtyard. It was heartrending. And She apologized. You see and hear this CLAMOUR of protest, misery, suffering—it’s a clamour all over the earth, and that makes the cells feel a little ashamed. ⁶. I spend almost entire days and nights in silence, but seeing—seeing....⁷ There were no thoughts left, nothing, only pictures, an immense living film, all the time, one screen then another, which She entered fully alive, here and there and everywhere, to live this call for help or that illness, this assassination and that nasty thing or petty act…. Everything was living and lived. A bath of pain: the pain of the world. There isn't any sensation or perception of a separate individuality; there are innumerable experiences, dozens of them every day, showing that it's the identification or unification with other bodies that makes you feel this person's misery, that person's misery, the misery of ... it's EVERYTHING that is one's misery. In other words, it's not an egoistic complaint.⁸ She seemed to apologize. Then She looked at all of this earth in front of her, or within her. There is a very clear and spontaneous perception that it's impossible to extract a small part from the whole and make something harmonious out of it when the whole isn't harmonious. But why, why?... This physical is truly a mystery. I understand people who have said, “It must be abolished, it's a falsehood.” Yet that's NOT TRUE, IT'S NOT a falsehood, it's ... what is it? If we say “a deformation,” it doesn't mean anything. When I am told that someone is ill, at least ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I have already experienced the thing, I have already experienced it as being part of my physical being, an immense physical being, you know, immense and without a precise form. So… ⁹ And I told her: “Well, it means that the consciousness of the WHOLE must change. It is always the same problem: once the whole has progressed, changed its consciousness, the ‘material’ fact should become different.” It appears to be like that. There's no escape, no way to divide that. Individuality is merely a means of action for the transformation of the whole. I understand why they said one had to escape! It demands such a transformation ... it's almost an eternity of time.¹⁰ “One cannot transform one element, without transforming the whole, I insisted. That is, one element accelerates the transformation of the whole.” Yes, that’s it. And, after reflecting, She added, It's perfectly obvious that if it weren't unbearable, it would never change. And if it's unbearable, well it really makes you feel like running away—which is impossible, of course, it's foolish to think you can get out of it: it's NOT POSSIBLE. It delays the result.¹¹

She lived in this growing “not possible,” as if She were at the very heart of the pounding of the world. One cannot get out of it, there is no “other side,” and everything must always be done again, painfully done again, one Christ after another, but something else can come out of it, by the fact of that very impossibility. One cannot ever get out of evolution, whatever side one is on, alive or supposedly dead, but one can draw a new being out of the remnants of the old Matter. That’s all.

It is the only possibility. For who could say that our much vaunted chromosomes can invent a new being? Whose chromosomes?… The ones of our atavistic hodgepodge? Or of a mad lottery?

Perhaps for the first time on earth, in any case on the earth of men, we were in the presence of a phenomenon of Matter aggregated in a human way, but without any of all its genetic memories⎯except for the great living and lived memory of human Pain: the “horrible thing,” pure. And in there, under the Pressure of that pain, something….

Truly interesting, she concluded, and She laughed whenever She could, because to laugh was the best way to rout Death.

A New Mind

There were still other small pencil notes scribbled during those nights of August, ’68, “in order to try to remember.” In her great turning points or difficulties, Mother always turned her beam towards me, remembered me, even when She could not see me, as if She knew of that hour of separation beforehand, when a fragile bridge would have to be slung over the unknown, trying to link yesterday’s earth with the earth of tomorrow. Those little broken, overlapping lines furthermore said:

For several hours, the landscapes
were wonderful,
perfectly harmonious.
Constant visions.
Each thing with a precise reason and purpose,
to express nonmentalized states of consciousness.
Landscapes.
Constructions.
Cities.
The whole thing immense and very diverse,
covering the entire visual field and
expressing states of consciousness of the body.
Many, a great many constructions,
immense cities being built....*

Yes, the world being built, the future world being built. I couldn't hear anymore, couldn't see anymore, couldn't speak anymore: I was living inside that all the time, all the time, night and day. A body without mind and without vital. There were only those perceptions. It was living in soul states: there were others' soul states, the soul states of the earth, the soul states Those soul states were expressed in pictures.¹² In that pure and annulled Matter⎯inconceivable to us, for it would not even resemble the Matter of a baby⎯there remained nothing but the pain of the world, and pictures. It was the only instrument of perception. Not pictures that were seen: pictures that were lived. With that “perception of soul states,” there were things ... marvels! No mental conception, none at all, can be as wonderful—none. I lived moments All that one can humanly feel and see is nothing in comparison with that. There were moments... absolutely wonderful moments. But without thought, without thought.¹³ And they were physical, material “pictures” of the earth⎯not “visions”: the true earth. Perhaps we do not realize how beautiful the earth is. A “more effective,” “more complete” vision, as Mother said. But it's not “seen” as you see a picture: it's BEING IN, being in a certain place. I've never seen or felt anything so beautiful! And it wasn't felt, it was ... I don't know how to explain it. There were some absolutely wonderful, marvellous moments—unique. But it wasn't thought, I couldn't even describe—how can you describe? You can only start describing when you start thinking.¹⁴ This may well be the next instrument of the new being: one no longer thinks things, one lives them; each thing unfolds its own complete landscape which explains everything. Mother was trying to describe the functioning of the new being.

The mind and vital have been instruments to knead Matter—knead and knead and knead in every possible way [to awaken this Matter to its own buried consciousness]: the vital through sensations, the mind through thoughts. But they strike me as transitory instruments which will be replaced by other states of consciousness. They are a phase in the universal development, and they will fall off as instruments that have outlived their usefulness.¹⁵ The evolutionary atrophy of useless old limbs.

And Mother pointed to another note:

The body's state of consciousness and the quality of its activity depend on the individual or individuals among whom it is....

Ah, that was very interesting! It was very interesting because I saw… and it changed. If someone came near me, it would change. Something would happen to somebody, and it would change. ¹⁶ Every minute, the “landscape” of each person (the assistants, those who served Mother), changed, said or expressed what was taking place, automatically, with all the depth, the colours, the “decors” and the close or distant ramifications, down to the smallest details⎯all our thoughts about the world and all our “real” eyes are like flat photographs of an unsuspected terrestrial reality. And with the slightest thing changing in their consciousness, ah, everything would start changing! It was a sort of perpetual kaleidoscope, day and night. If there had been some way to record it it was unique [Matter’s eyes]. And the body was in it, you understand, almost porous—porous, without resistance, as if the thing were passing through it.¹⁷ There are no more barriers, it is the instant and exact consciousness everywhere … marvellous … and painful. A simultaneous Wonder and hell. Like the right side up and reverse of the earth lived simultaneously. One and the same earth.

And a “porous” body.

What actually takes place in such a body? How can it live, function, organize itself? Yes, it was perhaps like a new-born child of the earth. Nonetheless, one has to eat in the old way, sustain oneself in the old way, listen to and live stupidities in the old way and pain in the old way⎯keep a coherent contact with the old world, dwell in an old body in the depths of which … something was beginning to stammer. Something that would be like the formation of a new body. And this is where we begin to touch a very concrete and practical phenomenon, which, in its almost insignificant simplicity, is the greatest terrestrial turning point since the appearance of the first protozoan. A new form of life. Such is the experience that is going to unveil itself little by little, without our really realizing what it is at first, so insignificant it is. Was the small protozoan so significant in its pond?

The body, the cells of the body would like to make contact with the true being, without having to go through the vital or even through the mind. That is what is taking place.

And suddenly Mother remembered: Ah! I noticed that the cells, everywhere, all the time, were repeating the mantra, OM NAMO BHAGAVATE, OM NAMO BHAGAVATE ... constantly, all the time.

OM Namo Bhagavate is repeated spontaneously and automatically in a sort of hazy peace.¹⁸

It was the last scrawled little note.

A body, a new body. An awakened, conscious cellular Matter, freshly born to the world, which has no longer any laws, any code, and gropes its way … within a vast Consciousness, a Matter which repeats and repeats the mantra, rebuilding a new way of being for itself⎯a “way” means a form. Can we imagine a baby growing up in an old body, there, at the cellular root? Something that no longer creates enzymes or disasters and is absolutely decoded, un-coded, with the building power of a young shoot⎯have you ever seen a young shout breaking out of the frozen ground? Blop, the ground breaks open. An unthinkable thing. But it is a fact. For five years, we would watch the fact unfold⎯painfully, paradoxically. The old earth is cracking, isn’t it? The old forces are no longer there; the old tyrannical but convenient Mind, coordinator of all this substance, is no longer there⎯but what remains? How does a body that no longer has any laws stand up? A porous body. What are those pure, virgin cells going to create?

This is where something that is very simple, but of incalculable⎯perhaps formidable⎯consequence begins to take shape in Matter: a new mind. A mind of the body, of the cells. Something that begins to organize itself and furrow this Matter by repeating the Mantra⎯but with furrows that would no longer form a cage, turn round on themselves and get stuck in a molecule of amino acid. Something that would correspond to that “vertical time” in which everything that takes place is new at each second, without trace, “imprint” or memory, and yet like a memory of the future, as we could say with Sri Aurobindo, a forward-looking memory instead of a backward one⎯no longer a small granary that piles up grain on grain, grows larger and transfers its accumulated, stereotyped push to you more and more: a pull, not a push. The great pull of the Future at every second. A Mind that would be the exact opposite of the physical Mind and would take its place⎯and was beginning to take its place in Mother’s body. Another Vibration takes the place of this small mortal trepidation which, as if panic-stricken by the rush of life, tries to close itself in, barricades itself, while at the same time storing and piling up food it can no longer gather from the great flow of life, freezing all movements in an invariable and invulnerable frame, sleeping and sleeping to imitate the stone’s peace, and dying to be finished once and for all with all that labour⎯a trepidant Mind, which is only a tissue of coagulated repetitions and habits and which even managed to coagulate Matter into a certain form of being, as if it were the very vector and propeller, the true agent of the coagulation of Matter into a particular form, the very support or deep vibration of each molecule of DNA or amino acid. A new mantra of Matter, instead of the old malefic mantra of the physical Mind which repeats and repeats its mortal refrain. A new agent of coagulation of Matter. We say that the molecules of protein are what gives shape to bodies (a giraffe, a mouse, a man) but it is the superficial, external translation, the material covering of a certain vibratory quality. If the vibration changes, the type of coagulation or materialization changes. If the physical Mind, which collects or perpetuates this vibratory mode changes, the whole organization of Matter must change.

This was the phenomenon that occurred in Mother’s body.

Cells that spontaneously repeat the mantra.

A new Mind in Matter or of Matter, like a new force of propulsion and the agent of a new type of body upon earth, which will not necessarily be coagulated in the old way.

It is not a new way of thinking that is taking shape in Matter, it is a new way of being of Matter.

It is the embryo of the new species.

It is the key to the transformation of the body.

For ten years, from 1958 to 1968, She strove to break through the web, purify the cells from their old recordings, that spell of the physical Mind, and now it had become the Work: the building up of a new type of body in Matter.