Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III

20: The Last Path

What would the path be now?

Surely and obviously, another path had to exist, the terrestrial enterprise could not fail. Perhaps She will come and tell me what this path is, I don’t know. She spoke to me for so long, surely She will come and tell me the Truth. We do not need tall stories, we need an Earth of Truth.

Death was not a solution and I did not think about it once, from that black April 7 to that November 17 which fell on my head like a cry: NO. It’s not possible. It’s not that, it’s not how it is! Oh, how I cried no that day, and how I have never ceased crying no. It was not possible. Or else, what?

For one year and eleven months, I have never stopped hunting down that “what,” listening to it, struggling with it and tracking it down in each line of this book, as if it were the very blood of the Earth that strove to know and understand⎯I set every possible trap to capture it and never tried to delude myself, I explored every corner of that terrible and marvellous forest with my sword, and at the end, I simply pray: the truth, the truth, let the truth be.

May we be told how we can build that true earth. What is the path? The last path?

And I seem to see her smiling.

The Last Meeting

So, we resume our journey. Seven more months. I did not know that destiny had taken a turn on that April 7, I looked forward without fear, only a great question in my heart. I could see Mother’s growing pain, of course, but … will I dare say that for me, it was like a struggle against unreality? One only had to touch her atmosphere to understand and feel that formidable Reality, far more solidly than any suffering. She was struggling against the Earth’s past. She was struggling against all the ghosts of evolution, symbolized by all of that Negation around her. It was the

No of the earth that had to be vanquished, not “death”, that ghost of ghosts. Mother was not 95 years old! She was … as one wished.

And what did they wish around her? What was the reality for them?

I feel I am being pulled in opposite directions by the old world and the new. ¹

The laboratory notebook was becoming very sparse, I had no longer any question in my heart. The day after April 7, they had stopped the daily flow of one to two hundred people. Only the dozen “regular” disciples remained, but those were precisely the dreadful nucleus⎯those who knew that She was going to “die,” oh! they knew everything, they were so well-informed⎯it was not the 150 others who weighed down on her. She had indeed to battle until the end. I feel like screaming ... But.... I haven't seen anybody this morning. They're all here [waiting at the door]. What can I do, mon petit?² And that “what can I do?” was so poignant. It was really “what shall I do,” what? What one could do?⎯”We need you, sweet Mother,” I said, and that was all. Oh! ... Oh, thank you.... she said. And it was so heartrending. Then She plunged into her eternity that flashed past like a second and it was half an hour. Then they would come and ring the bell near her. Oh, they are ruthless! ³

Then, on April 14, the last operation I have already spoken of took place: the transfer of the nervous system. From then on, the whole body was to function automatically, independently. It was the cells’ little vibration, the new body, that enveloped her and made her move, breathe and feel; nothing obeyed the old laws anymore. There was a logic in all that, obviously, but the logic of what? The last operation of the caterpillar in its cocoon may precisely be that removing of the nervous system. But in her case, without a material cocoon to protect her from the onslaught of the environment⎯or a cocoon of light which was constantly broken by the outer contacts that made her suffer every time⎯what was possibly going to happen, since the cataleptic trance was impossible, as the people around her would never have the needed patience? What solution? “What can I do?” All the time I have to keep a grip on myself not to howl.... she told me on May, 14. From time to time, there's a marvellous moment—but it's short!⁴ She could not break the contact, that contact was precisely what allowed her to transform the old Matter⎯or else, one disconnects, it is over. She could not even exteriorize herself as She had done for so many decades in a fraction of a second, outside of that whole terrestrial jumble. For SO MANY years, so many years, I would lie down in bed and phew! I would go into the Lord. And I am now forbidden to do this—that’s probably what is the greatest suffering. When I start doing this [gesture of rising above the body], instantly, instantly a terrible discomfort: it’s NO. If I persist, I literally start howling as if I were tortured. It’s only when I am concentrated here that it gets better.⁵ But that “better” was a strange hell. Indubitably, it was in the body that She had to find, She was tied up there until She reached the solution. And the only solution was transformation, there was no other⎯but circumstances seemed to impede the only condition that would have enabled her to undergo the operation. So?…

So May 19 came. It was our last meeting, but I did not know it.

I climbed the small stairway covered with wool. The door opened, and there was that ray of sunlight on her nape. Her armchair was turned towards Sri Aurobindo’s tomb. She was bent over herself in her immobility, her hands open in her lap as if She were offering all of this world, all of this misery. “What You will, what You will….” Truly, She was the prayer of the earth. Then She opened her eyes with a smile, took my flowers. What is it?⎯“It’s Joy in the Physical.” It was a very small champagne-coloured hibiscus, with a bright-red heart. We badly need it! She exclaimed. And you? No questions? That day, precisely, I was full of questions, I who had been silent for weeks. “Yes, I was thinking about something Sri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri, He clearly says: Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.⁶⎯Ohh!... Oh, that is interesting!... He doesn't say anything else?⎯“No, not on that subject…. The consciousness of your cells seems to be awakened but not the power.”⎯You said “awakened”?⎯“Because had the power been awakened, there wouldn't be any weakness in your body”⎯No. And I was stupid enough not to understand that if that Power “awoke,” manifested itself, it would have been the upheaval, the destruction of all the negations around. There, too, She was trapped, trapped on every side: the very conditions of the transformation could not happen without “a miracle that would upset too many things.” So?… “But how to awaken it?” I asked. Through faith, our faith.... If one knows that and has trust.... But you see, my physical, my body is deteriorating very rapidly—what could stop it from deteriorating?⎯“I do NOT believe it is deterioration—it's not. My feeling is that you are physically being led to a point of such complete powerlessness that the most complete Power will be forced to awaken . . . .” Ah! ... you're right,⁷ she said. “That Power will then be COMPELLED to come out.”

And She remained silent, her hand resting on her lips. There were crows in the big yellow copper-pod tree, flowers galore, a golden cataract. It was May. Or else I could ... I could leave this body, no? She said that so quietly, perhaps to tease me, or tease the earth a little, to see if it really did not care.⎯“ Ah, no. No, sweet Mother, it must be done now. It’s now…. You see, I am certain it's NOT disintegration, not at all. It is NOT disintegration.

You know, I have always seen that the other pole springs up from the most extreme opposite. So the supreme Power must spring up from the sort of apparent powerlessness you are in. By no means is it a disintegration.”⎯For me, you see, the question is food. More and more I find it impossible to eat. Can this body live without food? Sweet Mother, I insisted (I had the impression of fighting with her, or rather with the suggestion that weighed down on her, that “completely rotten atmosphere”), “I really think you are led to the point where something ELSE will be forced to manifest. You know, as long as that point . . . of impossibility has not been reached…. ⎯Oh, it's almost the point of impossibility. ⎯“Yes, sweet Mother, yes, that's also what I feel. I feel you're reaching that point, and something else is going to emerge….” And She replied nothing. “It is not at all the end; quite the contrary, it will soon be the beginning.”⎯I was told that the beginning would take place when I am a hundred; but that's a long way off!⎯“ No, Mother, I don't think it will take that long. I don't think so. I really don't think so. Another type of functioning is going to set in. But the end of the old has to be reached, and that end is the terrible part!”⎯Oh ... I really don't want to say, I don't want to insist, but ... truly... And She shook her head, and all the pain of the world was in that shake. The consciousness is clearer, stronger than it has ever been, and I look like ⁸⎯“ “Yes, Mother, YOU’RE GOING

TO PASS into something else, I sense it—it isn't faith in me that speaks, it's something else deep down that understands. It's really like something telling me: that's THE WAY.

She closed her eyes on her eternity. Never was I to see those eyes again. Those were our last words.

Two days after, they barred everyone from her room. There was no longer any communication with the outside.

“There will be no communication anymore,” I replied to a disciple that stared at me, dumbfounded. They did not understand that, by closing her door on me, they cut the thread! Oh! there are always two ways of looking at things and everything is decreed, everything follows the divine Plan. She probably had to be alone. But sometimes, one wonders whether things could not have been different, oh! they could have been, they could…. But it was the whole earth that should have been different. So?…

There was no longer anyone to pull on the thread. She was alone with the Negation.

Or perhaps alone with the Answer.

Not for repose do I aspire, but for Thy integral Victory,⁹ she said. By what path?

And we recall Sri Aurobindo’s words, the last lines He dictated in 1950, The Book of Fate, in Savitri.

A day may come when she must stand unhelped
On a dangerous brink of the world’s doom and hers.
Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast,
Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole
To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.
Alone with death and close to extinction’s edge,
Her single greatness in that last dire scene,
She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time
And reach an apex of world-destiny
Where all is won or all is lost for man.¹⁰

Hold On

What happened during those six months?

All appearances called for death, all doors were closed, there was no way out⎯except the supreme Door. Except the best possible path to ineluctable Victory. It is my theorem, my stubborn faith. And I know that I am right. But…. I am not seeking consolation, I do not need to be consoled, I have a Fire within that laughs at all deaths. That’s it. And Mother is with me. But the earth? What is the path of this beloved, damned and painful earth, how does Mother’s last path meet up with the path of the earth? The earth was her path; She hewed the path for the earth. What is the path? Sri Aurobindo told us in a positive and definite way that the supramental creation will follow the present one, so, whatever is in preparation for the future must be the circumstances needed for the advent whatever they are.¹¹

It is that “whatever they are” that I want to look into, without childish nonsense or sentimentality: the truth. Pure.

But the truth of the earth.

I can only recount my experience. There must have been a reason why She built that last line of communication.

Here are the facts:

Thus I was waiting for the last “change of functioning,” the cessation of food, it had been a simple self-evidence to me for those last six months. She appeared a last time on her balcony, on August 15, 1973, for Sri Aurobindo’s birthday. She was completely bent over, still struggling. She was such a small figure up there, on that big poop deck, while the peanut sellers made clanging noises as at a fair. It was the small world, so very small, as usual. Were we going to get out of that habit at last? Really, if it is only a question of “superman,” it is hopeless⎯it must be something else. A sort of physiological cataclysm is needed for all that to change⎯not a war indeed, not millions of bombs that change nothing, and people make small babies and they start all over again. NO. Something else. How I watched out for that “something else” in that small bent figure. Then She grasped the railing with both hands and slowly, slowly, She disappeared in her small golden cape.

What I was to see was a corpse, three months later. But I did not believe it. Can one believe in the failure of the earth? Could man fail after the ape, or the batrachian after the tadpole?⎯what we have to know is the path. That is all. There must have been more than one ape to say “no” to man⎯who cares?

On November 10, She began to choke, as if She could no longer breathe: a slow asphyxiation. The time of that breathing was reaching its end. The time of that air. What did death matter to her? One cuts the thread, so what? And it is done with that bag of misery⎯She could have cut the thread ten years earlier, She would have avoided a lot of misery. She never cut it. Even “dead,” there, on that chaise longue, She was as if stuffed with consciousness⎯a fierce consciousness. What did those days, those last days, mean for her, when She was suffocating? “I am told nothing….” She was told nothing until the end. She had to be there until the end, until the last second. She had to enter death fully alive. That was the dreadful thing. One day in 1972, She told me three things which seemed not linked one to another, three things I have already spoken of separately, but they had been said together: Its prayer, the prayer of the body was: “Let me know when the time for dissolution comes, if dissolution is necessary, so that everything in me will accept the dissolution, but ONLY IN THAT CASE.”¹² She had not been “informed,” nothing in her body had accepted dissolution−⎯She was fiercely there, on her chaise longue, at the “end.” And in that same conversation, She had also said: My body is in the middle of LIVING THE PROCESS. It's only when I am immobile, in a sort of cellular contemplation ... then—then it's magnificent. Time vanishes, everything ... everything is changed into something else. ¹³

She lived the process until the end. It was the process that continued. And She said that same day, on the same subject: It has become very intense. But at the same time, there's the knowledge: “Now is the time to win the Victory.” Which comes from above. “Hold on hold on, now is the time to win the Victory.” Quite interesting really.¹⁴ All three things together. If we gather all three things together, what do they mean?… Probably what She lived more and more acutely until that November 17. She was told nothing, so She kept going, it was that simple. The process kept going. “She went out like a candle,” related one of those who used to watch over her⎯no heart attack, nothing. Not even a trance or a coma. She continued as long as it was possible. She had to stay there completely and until the end. Why?… The process probably had to continue in death. She was not allowed, her entourage did not allow the cataleptic trance, they would never have had the necessary patience. But they allowed death, it was “recognized,” accepted as a medical fact. And since She could not perform the operation in her bed, She went into a tomb to do it. There, nobody would disturb her, it was the best possible cocoon, they would even burn incense sticks. You have to go through death in order to conquer death,¹⁵ She had said. There are no tricks in a tomb. Trance is still a yogic trick. There is no door left. So, it remains the supreme Door.

On November 14, around midnight, She asked to walk. I want to walk, otherwise I’ll become paralyzed. She leant on the arm of one of her attendants and She walked … until She turned blue.

And the days became more and more painful. She refused to eat, then accepted, and refused again. They scolded and cajoled her like a sick person. She was always half-seated: her back was full of burning bed sores. Every twenty minutes She would ask to be lifted from her chaise longue. Lift me up…. During the night of November 16, She asked again to walk. I want to walk⎯oh! She would have liked to enter death on her two legs. They refused. She struggled until the end, as long as there was a breath left in her body. In the afternoon of November 17, the signs of suffocation accelerated. At 7:10 P.M., her doctor gave her a heart massage. At 7:25 P.M., her breath stopped.

That was when the incredible madness began, truly.

Hardly seven hours later, at 2.30 AM, they took her out of her atmosphere, carried her downstairs to the “meditation hall,” put her on a chaise longue under burning spotlights and served her up to the crowd. Oh, whom can we accuse? They did what one ever does in “such cases,” they did “as usual.” And there were three doctors to certify that She was dead and … Come on, you are not going to make a fuss, are you? And I could still hear Mother’s own words: “They must not, they must not, Mother doesn’t want, you will tell them.…” And yet, those people were supposed to have some type of yogic knowledge … No?

I arrived among the crowd around 5 A.M., informed by rumour. She was there, so emaciated, on her chaise longue, in that white satin dress. And that concentration on her face … almost ferocious. Nothing like Sri Aurobindo’s smile in his massive peace. A stubborn concentration, as in the days when She was right in the thick of the battle. And that whole conscious body, stuffed with consciousness⎯it was palpable⎯ … served up to those millions of vibrations of grief and death and….

Hold on.

And the fans were humming, they hummed for two days at 85 degrees Fahrenheit under the suffocating zinc-plated ceiling lit with golden neon lights, while the whole town filed past her⎯exactly what was needed to decompose a body. And She looked at all that. At times, I almost expected her to have one of those small starts, just as when She came back to the surface: What time is it?

There was no grief in my heart. I was like a stone. I stared at that on and on, at that incredible spectacle.

Hold on….

Then, on November 20, at 8:15 A.M., they put her in a box. I was standing to the right of that coffin. She was half seated against white cushions, her hands in her lap. There was a ray of light on her nape. Then the cover was lowered: there was no more ray, there was nothing. There were half a dozen men driving 25 screws into that.

They carried her away.

A solemn voice was delivering solemnities into a microphone on the Ashram’s roofs. And it talked and talked. People were full of grief, people were full of thoughts. I could see through them all, through everything, the world was transparent. It was a dreadful masquerade. A Lie. An enormous Lie, a comedy of death such as one can see in dreams. It was not true. There was not a sole true minute in all that. That death was an awful lie.

They lowered her into the tomb.

As soon as it was over and I could decently leave that solemn masquerade, I ran away.

I am sorry, but this is what I saw, what I felt. It was my experience of those two days: an unreal Falsehood.

So what does all that mean? What is the sense?

The Most Beautiful Fairy Tale

And now the last fact.

In the thick of that incredible masquerade, on November 18, as I was among that crowd, staring and staring without understanding at that small white form under the humming fans, I had the most powerful experience of my life. I was unable to have any experience, I was there like a dumbfounded stone, with a splitting headache. I simply stared, without even a prayer in my heart, nothing. If She had get up to take her leave of that whole incredible jumble, it would have seemed to me the only sensible thing. She did not get up, but all of a sudden, something took hold of me, literally pulled me above that headache and that dreamlike crowd, then … it was a tidal wave. I knew what Power was, it was not in vain that Mother had taken my hand and drawn me into the experience. But there, it was not someone that had “an experience,” it took place as if outside of me, I was nobody, I was only witnessing a fact. I was immersed in a formidable wave of a Power that was made of elation, as it were⎯perhaps love, but it was an elation that was love⎯elation like a cataract, uninterrupted, without a gap, and it pealed out: a formidable peal all over the universe. All the flood-gates of the world were open. And it said, it rang in my ears as all over the world, a formidable, though soundless voice : NO OBSTACLE … NOTHING IMPEDES … NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING IMPEDES…. And it kept pealing over and over again, each word as if all the bells in the world were pulled together in a single, formidable peal of bronze: NO OBSTACLE … NOTHING IMPEDES … NO OBSTACLE …. And a joy in it, a triumph, oh! something that laughed so splendidly, but so formidably, and swept everything away on its way, toppling the walls, breaking the gates open⎯nothing impedes … no obstacle. As imperative as a Last Judgment. A cataclysm of joy.

I held out for a quarter of an hour, then I went out into the street, or else I would have burst. And it still kept pealing. I walked to the seaside, my body was shaking with it. Then it calmed down. And there was no “Mother” or “I” or even an experience in that⎯or rather it was the world that had the experience. Yes, in fact it was like the first manifestation of “something” over the world. We can stick labels on it, but it laughs at all labels. It was a formidable Fact. On that November 18, something happened.

Perhaps the first terrestrial wave of the joy of the new world.

So all that wailing there, those admirable close disciples who cried so much after having shoved her into death, those faces draped in their dignity, with questions of money behind, questions of prestige behind, questions of … oh! they were stuffed with questions, they were about to take over the management of the business⎯it was so ridiculous. That was the masquerade. And Mother laughed, She pealed out in my ears, swept that Ashram away like a feather, along with all their ridiculous little walls and all the sanctities they were about to saddle her with⎯NO OBSTACLE … NOTHING IMPEDES … NO OBSTACLE …

And they said: Oh! the transformation is stopped, oh! the Hour of God has been missed, oh! the Moment is passed, the world was not ready⎯the fools! Could the pithecanthropus have ever stopped the torrent of mental evolution and prevent themselves from becoming men!? Did they really think that Mother was so small that She could fit in the four walls of their Ashram and in their mortal conventions? She was there, before my eyes, bursting with consciousness, She was going to enter that tomb since it was the only place where they could tolerate her for a long time⎯now they had all the necessary patience. But She was laughing.

That is all that I know. That peal of joy all over the world. It is the Fact.

So what does it all mean?

I am really reaching the end of Mother’s forest, I know nothing more. It has been one year and eleven months since they stuck her there alive. For one year and eleven months I have never ceased repeating: what, what does it mean? It is my own peal. What does it mean, what is really there, what is happening, what is the truth, the truth… And I remember Sri Aurobindo’s words:

In that tremendous silence lone and lost
Of a deciding hour in the world’s fate,...
Alone with her self and death and destiny
As on some verge between Time and Timelessness
When being must end or life rebuild its base,
Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.¹⁶

Now, She is in that “tremendous silence,” that night, that cocoon of grey marble. Cement above, cement to the right and to the left, night, marble slabs: a tremendous silence. Each of her cells repeats and repeats the Mantra, indefinitely, like a golden little pulsation. She is undergoing the formidable operation. She is rebuilding the base of life, the “process” continues. That is what She had been prepared for for the last months, “my body is being prepared for something else.” That is why She was told nothing, because She had to enter there alive⎯I can still hear her little cry the first time She had the vision of her death. Nothing, nothing at all is working in the ordinary way any longer. So the body can no longer eat, can no longer.... The consciousness striving to help the body in the work has made it understand per-fect-ly well that going away isn’t a solution. Even if there was earlier a curiosity to know what the body will be, that curiosity is gone; as for the desire to stay on, that went away long ago; the possible desire to leave when things become a bit ... suffocating went away with the idea that it would change nothing at all. So only one thing remains for the body: to perfect acceptance. That’s all. The only thing that really consoles it (but not for long) is the idea, “What you are doing is useful for all; what you are doing isn’t for you, a stupid little person, it’s for the whole entire creation to profit by it....” I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen. But I would like ... I would like people not to put me in a box and shove the body ... like that, because it will be aware of it, it will feel it, and that will mean adding one more misery to all those it has had. I am saying this to you, so you will be able to say it to others if necessary. [They informed me nine hours after Mother left]… It doesn’t desire that, it doesn’t fear it— things will be as they will have to be, that’s all. Only, it would really like people to understand to understand the effort it has made, and not to rush to shut it in, with a heap of earth above it. Because even long after doctors will have declared it to be dead, it will be conscious: its cells are conscious. So there, that’s all.¹⁷

She is there, alive.

Aeschylus and Orpheus look pale in comparison.

And there is no one to really blame in that formidable tragedy, each of the actors probably did exactly what they had to. I remember, one day in 1969, Mother told me about the amazing circumstances of an Ashram girl’s “accidental” death, as if everything had conspired to oblige her to die, down to the least detail: it seemed that everyone had made just the required gesture, had the required distraction and the required lapse, the required three-minutes delay. But Mother knew that that girl had to die, wanted to die and that it was her soul that had organized all the needed circumstances to “help” her departure: Curiously enough, when you see things with this Consciousness, the perfection of the organization is so tremendous that you are ... you’re almost terrified! All our emotions, our reactions, all that absolutely looks like childishness. Mon petit, we don’t know anything! Day after day after day, I am increasingly convinced that we know nothing. We think we know, we think and we know nothing. We are in the presence of hidden wonders that elude us completely because we’re idiots. It’s what Sri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri: God grows up on earth— God GROWS—but man ... [And She laughed], the wise man talks and sleeps and no one will notice it till the work is over. That’s how it is.¹⁸

What is hidden behind that formidable performance of Mother’s “end,” The Eternal’s dreadful strategy,¹⁹ as Sri Aurobindo called it? What marvels, or what lost silence? Or what?

What stratagem?

And Mother’s words are coming back to me: Seeing the world such as it is and seems meant to be irremediably, human intellect has decided that this universe must be an error of God.... But the Supreme Lord answers that the comedy is not entirely played out, and He adds: Wait for the last act.²⁰

What is that last act, that bottom of Mother’s forest? That last path of the earth?

And my bells start again to peal out.

NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING IMPEDES….

And this: “We don’t know anything.”

We do not know anything. What tall words are we going to utter?⎯it is not words that the world needs! It has been kept harping on with every possible theory. But what if it heard that peal, if those bells came and rang on the earth?

Will they ring?

We can say: Oh! Mother will come out of that tomb one day, radiant, and the transformation will be done. And perhaps it is true. But Mother has never been inclined to impress people. A great show is not what will change the earth indeed! A deep miracle is needed, a change in this substance in spite of all we may think, want, say, believe or not believe. This life⎯this physiological life⎯has to rebuild its own base. We have to be seized by the miracle, in the miracle, engulfed into it. We have to get out of the carbon layer so that it bursts open and we emerge from this ridiculous little brain of axolotl and its ridiculous little panaceas and this small, so small humankind. What is the instrument, the lever, the open Sesame that will perform the miracle in this stubborn substance?

And I seem to see this.

A split. A tremendous split.

An old, obsolete humanity, drivelling and hopeless⎯the one which wears and tears faster and faster and is simply false matter held together by a necktie or a white piece of clothing and a frozen yogic smile. That one is dying of its own death. It rushes faster and faster into ineluctable dissolution. It reaches the last suffocation.

No need to push it, it is crumbling into dust, very solemnly. And then….

When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp²¹

… something that is very young, very new, and bumps here and there unknowingly. The new species, which is not really aware that it is the new species, except that it wants another air. So….

So this is where the miracle can happen. The open Sesame? We hold it.

All of Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s work, their real work, consisted in opening the cells’ consciousness, opening up that fortress. The demolition of the old genetic code: the old way of seeing, understanding and feeling⎯the old way of dying. The axolotls’ cave. A small new vibration that winds and winds in the cells. We must engage that little vibration, as others engaged the Mind’s vibration at the beginning of this wretched story. It is not complicated, there is not far to go, no superbrains to build, no cross-legged supermeditations: a Mantra. A password⎯whatever it is⎯provided it is the cry of our being, the breath of our breath in all that general decomposition, something that makes us break through. The last lifebuoy. And one clings to it, one repeats and repeats the Mantra until it pierces through the crust of banality, the daily stupid trifles, the millions and millions of useless things that we live instead of something else that never comes. One repeats obstinately like a mule, until the cells take hold of that vibration of call−⎯then they repeat it night and day nonstop, automatically, stupidly … and marvellously. This is where the Marvel begins. This is where the miracle begins. The cellular, physiological Miracle. For Sri Aurobindo and Mother have opened the way. It is not as if we had to break through impenetrable layers: the path is open. So everything is possible. It is a world where everything is possible⎯it was impossible only because of all the impossibilities that we conceived of. And there is no need to believe: we have only to go there, to that level. We have to touch that. And the marvel is that, when we touch that, it is the new world that starts to build itself on its own, without our needing to want, seek or understand: it does it by itself, spontaneously, automatically. It develops on its own. It changes the movement without our knowing how, it makes us do things without our knowing how, see all kinds of meanings where there was only incomprehensible blackness, connects and interconnects all sorts of unexpected paths⎯a formidable complicity of everything. And a power … a strange power, which is neither powerful nor formidable, but so fantastically magical, as if it dissolved all obstacles, all shadows, all fears and illnesses⎯a rout of ghosts on all sides. But … a firm Position to keep to: that. Always, in all circumstances: that, the Mantra, the new Truth, the supreme new Possibility. One holds to that, and that’s it.

So not dozens, but thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands or even a few millions of young shoots in the world which after having seized, understood the lever, pull that, want that, call that…. But it is instant multiplication! A formidable contagion, as if just a little bit of Possibility, lived, believed in, called for, made thousands and thousands of other Possibilities emerge⎯forced the Possibility out. And everything begins to change: physically, materially. The old laws crack. One looks at all that and it melts away, it stops being. It no longer exists, it is over. And the more one laughs to see that, to touch and live that, the more it develops, grows in a marvellous smile, as if it were only too pleased to smile and smile again, always smile, smile everywhere. The end of the mental Ghost.

And there we are. The Screen falls.

And Mother is there, the true earth is there. The end of the axolotls.

The true earth is only in our stupid tomb, our impossible tomb⎯the one they shoved Mother into because no one wanted to believe that it was possible.

So She will not need to “get out” of there, to impress people, because everything will be the Miracle, everything will be the Marvel. She is only behind our Screen of impossibility. There is no miracle to perform: it is already done. There is no Marvel to invent: it is already invented. It is the Marvel everywhere. It is the Miracle of the earth right there. We have to go there, to the true level of the Marvel.

And perhaps death will be the death of those who do not know how to see the Marvel. They will suffocate all by themselves in their open-air tombs.

And the division will be made, automatically. The dead go to death, the living go to life.

A small golden vibration in the body’s cells.

An open Sesame to the true earth.

Bells pealing out all over the ruins of the Mind. No obstacle, nothing impedes.

Mother is not dead! She is alive, She laughs, She is there, waiting for us to get out of our stupidity⎯it is not She who needs to get out, it is we.

And when the carbon layer is completely worn thin, even her body will come and laugh with us. She is there, wearing down Death from within. In fact, her body entered that tomb only to wear down our own death. It is her last sacrifice to our impossible Falsehood. She is waiting for us to accept to see WHAT IS. She wears down Unreality.

Sleeping Beauty is there.

She lived in spite of death, she conquered still.²²

Sleeping Beauty needs a Prince Charming. Perhaps She needs many Prince

Charmings … for her Prince Charming is the soul of the earth prisoner of death.

Slowly, She is performing the mutation of death in her cells. Each little cell like a cry for the truth of the earth⎯there are one hundred thousand billion cells in a body. And when we have had enough of the masquerade, when our cries meet up with hers, well, the masks will fall.

And it will be “the end of death.”

Why not help her a little?

The mutation of death is right now.

You see life, you see how it is, you are used to this sort of existence; and it's dreary and it's sad (some people find it entertaining—because it doesn't take much to entertain them!).... Well, behind it all there is a fairy tale. Something in the making, something that's going to be beautiful, beautiful, inexpressibly beautiful. And we shall take part in it You have no idea, you think you will forget everything when you die, leave it all behind you—but it's not true! And all who feel the call to a beautiful, luminous, joyous, progressive life, well, they will all take part in it, in one way or another. You don't know now, but you will after a while. There you are. Yes, a lovely story. And Sri Aurobindo was trying to draw that story down to earth, and it is sure to come. “And if you like, you too can help make that story come down to earth.”²³

What if we pulled a little?

A small golden vibration into the cells. A radiant new species.

A body of our joy.

And it's true! It is the most beautiful fairy tale in the world. There's none more beautiful. I am going to tell you the most beautiful story in the world… ²⁴

That’s it, Mother, your geographer has finished his map: let the true earth be.

Deer House Nandanam October 26, 1975