Mother or The Mutation Of Death - III

6: The Cellular Winding

It is a whole new world that reveals itself at the cellular level, a very unexpected and amazing world, which seems to correspond only distantly to the knowledge of the microscope and the biologist’s rigid laws! It is almost like the difference between a bird’s eye view of Guiana’s forests and the same forest experienced step by step along the smooth banks of the Oyapock. But it is a cellular level that is lived. This is the whole difference. And those laws that appeared so implacable, those chains and coils of DNA that seemed to be the key, the cellular reality, look like mere usual concretions floating and whirling on a big river and flowing with that current, well, because the current happens to be going that way. We have mistaken the spinning of the small wreck for the law of the great Current and it is true that the stars floating in the great sea above, passing each other, coming together or moving apart, seem momentarily to determine the character of a man or of a people, for everything responds and corresponds, the small wreck, the weightless star and the molecule, but there is a great Current that carries everything along. Instead of entering a cellular prison, one discovers an extraordinarily flexible, fluid and open world. We have imprisoned everything, we are completely imprisoned in our heads. And amazingly enough, the small docile molecule obeys the dictionary’s edicts, it can continue obeying them for thousands and millions of years because nothing is more docile than a cell, until some convulsion of Nature makes a hole in them, or simply someone who is a little less stupid comes and tells them: but why don’t you spin in another direction? Then they spin in another direction, it’s that simple⎯only there has to be a small “I want” in the heart of the molecule. Perhaps we have travelled thus far just to discover that I-want. Our journey is a journey towards freedom, with love at the end, for pure love can only be found in absolute freedom. Basically, we are the prisoners of our laws only insofar as we need to be prisoners: they are the little evolutionary ramparts for the babies of the earth; and all of evolution tends to create new needs that come to shatter the old law, which is quite natural⎯as long as there is no need, it is hopeless, they keep spinning. Perhaps we are at the moment of the Great Need? But to take laws for laws is the eternal human madness.

Cellular Plasticity

So, I had expected to see Mother battling against cellular and millennial imperatives, a “pleasant” sort of physiological impossibility, since after all, even the cellular Don Quixotes have their worth in a world dried-up with legalities from tip to toe⎯but not at all! The problem or difficulty does not lie where we imagine it does. What seems implacable to us is child’s play⎯it is what does not appear to be implacable that is most terrible! What takes the most time is becoming conscious of what must be changed, she said, having a conscious contact that enables it to change.¹ A contact. Step by step, Mother proceeded from one discovery to another⎯one could almost say that there is nothing to “discover,” that we have only to get rid of all the walls that prevent us from seeing that which is there. Illusions upon illusions to be disillusioned before we reach the real. Mother is a great destroyer of illusions. With her, one breathed in a world that was at last possible, there where everything is not-possible-not-possible-not-possible. And one wonders how one can live in that without suffocating. But it is coming, the joyous, final suffocation that will shatter all those little legal windmills. We have only to reach the right dose. Now, as soon as the world of impossibility of the physical Mind had been crossed, Mother discovered a world that was so totally flexible that it was amazing⎯frightening, too (it is the other side of the difficulty, the one we were not expecting). As if that so very rigid Matter were only the Matter of our fear. Mother had been telling me that for years, but I could not completely understand her (because like my fellow human brothers, I am singularly saddled with my own physical Mind), until the day a small experience cleared up the whole “problem” (we should rather say: “deflated the problem”). It concerned the beginning of a tumour in someone’s neck. And Mother explained: Probably a hair that coiled up and the body covered it in a layer of skin, and then, out of habit, went on building skin around it: one layer, then another layer, then ... It's an idiotic goodwill. The whole cellular story was there, in those three words: idiotic GOOD will. And that's how it is for almost all illnesses. The trick (there is a trick) is to tell the cells that that's not at all what is expected of them; that what is expected of them isn't at all to gather there into a bundle like that; that it isn't their duty to do that—you must convince them. It's rather peculiar. It is the origin of habits, of course; they are under the impression that “This is what we have to do, this is what we have to do, this is...” [Mother turned a finger in a circle]. It's the same thing with me, but I told them. Only, one should be conscious of the movement, [that’s the whole point, we are not conscious of the movement, not clear, everything is covered over by the mental din, so naturally we need microscopes and surgery⎯but is only a movement, a current] then, very quietly but very, very confidently, very confidently, you tell them as you would children, “No, it's not your duty to do this; this isn't your duty. ” All chronic illnesses come from that. There may be an accident (something happens, an “accident”) and then there is a sort of submissive and unconscious goodwill that causes the effect of the accident to be repeated: “We must repeat, we must repeat, we must ”

And it stops only if a consciousness is in contact with the cells and can make them understand that “No, in this case, you mustn't go on repeating!” And Mother laughed a lot. Oh, it's very interesting. But one has to be very modest to do this work, with no liking for brilliant displays—very modest. And very quiet.²

Not anyone will of course know how to traverse the layers and come into contact with the cells in order to “speak” to them, and in truth Mother hardly expected to find this type of hero of the microscopic, because it demands a “silent” heroism; She was doing the work for all bodies; but it is the fact, the phenomenon in itself that is of capital importance in its simplicity. For it is a human, terrestrial fact: there are billions of little cells that are all alike throughout the world⎯and it is a world of passive goodwill. Not a single law there, not a single rule, not a single fatal and prohibitive DNA, but flexible Matter that spins whatever you like. You give the impetus and it carries on and on…. It catches anything at all and it continues. But it is quite formidable if we think about it⎯why would it not catch a vibration of joy and of sun?… There is nothing that impedes, NOTHING. It is total freedom, a completely malleable world! Mendel’s revolution in reverse. The physiological future unblocked⎯oh, how one could breathe with Mother. She was far beyond all myths. Only it cannot be done in three days, can it? (the Heavenly Father, after all, needed at least seven days), and since we cannot see the instantaneous miracle that is right in front of us, we do not believe in it⎯but the miracle IS DONE. The body is learning its lesson—all bodies, all bodies. It’s the change of authority.... It’s difficult. It’s hard. It’s painful. Naturally, there is some damage done, but ... But truly, one can see—one can see. There is something that is really changed in the world That was the work Sri Aurobindo had given me. Now I understand. Now I see, I see how his departure and his work so ... so immense, you know, and so constant in this subtle physical, how much it has helped! How much he has helped prepare things, change the structure of the physical. Truly, it is not as it was, NO LONGER as it was. And all, all circumstances are as catastrophic as they can be: everything is unleashed like that, like wild beasts, but it’s over. The body knows that it’s over. It may take centuries, but it’s over. This completely concrete and absolute realization that one could have only when going out of Matter, it’s sure, sure and certain that we will have it RIGHT HERE.³

It is the end of the “mental barbarism” that Sri Aurobindo spoke of. A barbarism from top to bottom, from the religious summits down to the genetic code.

An open, fluid world, where everything is possible.

Another little golden vibration is being spun in bodies, as imperturbably, quietly and irresistibly as our old cancers, which were only cancers of the Mind. Ever since that day of 1968 when Mother’s body was left to itself, cut off from its memories, its Mind, its old forces, the Mind of the cells grasped the last thing it could in order not to be dissolved into nothingness and decay completely (it was decay and death indeed: something is needed to mass those cells together, a vibration, a beam of habitual forces that repeat themselves, or else it crumbles, everything crumbles). The cells caught the Mantra, the Consciousness, the sole great Current that remained in that general rout of small genetic concretions, and they started repeating it round the clock, day and night, without a second’s respite, like mules, as invariably and imperturbably as they used to repeat the old round of habitual death.

When everything has vanished, that remains. The supramental vibration.

The vibration of pure, true Matter. The primal fire that ignited the stars.

But it is an awesome fire…. “A vibration that has the intensity of a higher fire,”

Mother said. And which resembles love.

And with her ever present humour, Mother added this, which gives us both the key to the old Matter that keeps on spinning its little cancers and the key to the new Matter that is spinning … something … the secret of the future in the making: There are cases in which this power of repetition is extremely useful! I even think that this is what gives stability to the form, otherwise we would change form or appearance, or we would liquefy.⁴

It is the coagulator of forms.

Matter is only a vibration that repeats itself.

Matter is neither a hardness nor an opacity nor a thickness⎯nothing of what our eyes see, nothing of what our hands touch, nothing of what our fabricated reactions feel: a quality of vibration that makes for more or less thickness, more or less opacity, more or less of death⎯a heavier or lighter coagulation. Death is the scattering resulting from the absence of the usual coagulative vibration. One changes the vibration and Matter changes. Density changes. And so does Death.

It is the secret of transformation. It is the secret of the next body.

A new Matter born of a new vibration. Or perhaps of an eternal Vibration.

It remains to be seen whether the old body can bear the change of vibration without dying from it⎯transform itself without paying for it with its life.

A dangerous unknown.