Mother or The New Species - II

11: The Mind's Magic

Then everything disappeared behind the green wall. Or the wall of mud, rather.

In fact, we shall see that this famous veil or screen of mud that masks the true world from us, true Matter, is actually a kind of cellular covering or grimy coating and the whole task, this long, slow, perilous crossing of the veil, is a work of purification of the cells, a cleansing of all their atavistic, genetic and millennial coating, in order to reach the pure little cell. The exit from the cellular programming.

And the foremost covering is not the molecules of DNA or RNA, as we might imagine, but the Mind: the roots of the Mind in Matter.

The first experience of the other side of the veil was not as fleeting as I have said, however; it was not like a "dream" that comes and then fades away: I remained in that state for two full days, two days of absolute felicity. And Sri Aurobindo was with me the whole time, the whole time—when I walked, He walked with me, when I sat down, He sat next to me..¹ It was not a dream, it was the body consciousness that experienced it, the one that feels heat and cold, sees what is opaque, touches what is hard. A veil had been removed. For two full days She walked in another world, which was nevertheless ours. Sri Aurobindo gave me two days of this—total bliss.... Had there been a personal goal, this goal was clearly attained; it is indescribable, absolutely beyond all imaginable or expressible splendors. And that was when I received the Command from the Supreme, who was right here, this close [Mother presses her face, her body, her hands]. He told me, "This is what is promised. Now the Work must be done." And not individual but collective work was meant.² And Mother added this, which suddenly left me pensive: Well, what Sri Aurobindo did by leaving his body is somewhat equivalent, although far more total and complete and absolute—because He had that experience, He had that, He had it; I saw him, I saw him supramental on his bed, sitting on his bed. He has written: I am not doing it individually, for myself but for the whole earth. And it was exactly the same thing for me—but oh, that experience! Nothing counted for me anymore: people, the earth—even the earth itself had absolutely no importance.³ So Sri Aurobindo had it, He knew the double world, when sitting there, in his armchair, looking at the wall.... And He succeeded to live in both worlds simultaneously: He listened to the disciples and saw them playing jokes around him, He waited for Mother's steps.... It was the same world, and yet it was another world. And by his physical presence here, He drew the other into this one, thinning the separating layer, the Wall... which was already no longer a wall when Mother had the experience; something had already become thinner, clarified—until the day, perhaps, when He understood that He would work more effectively from the "other side," less caught up by the external demands of the disciples, the letters, the thousand stupidities that devoured all his time for the real work. It was as if He had been pushed to the other side; five times He had said: I have no time. And Mother stayed on this side of the bridge, until that day in 1959 when the first connection was made. But He did not need to die, He had the "treasure of the two worlds," as the Rishis said, "this Treasure in the rock like the young of the bird." Do we understand what that means?... Probably not really. He accepted to die, to enter consciously, with a conscious, living body into the opposite of consciousness: night, death. As if to throw this seed of being into the rock, into nonbeing. Perhaps that is just it, Krishna in gold growing and shattering the walls. It is rather frightening. Well then, Mother left that real world, that really living world, to reenter our death, which we call life. She did the reverse of what Sri Aurobindo did. She was going to wear away the veil from within, as it were. Attempt the connection for the earth. For indeed, what appears to us as life IS DEATH. So we could correctly say that there are kinds of GRADATIONS in death. Gradations in life and gradations in death: some beings are alive to a greater or lesser degree, or if we want to put it negatively, some beings are dead to a greater or lesser degree. But for those who know, oh, for those who know that this material form can manifest a supramental light, well, those who don't have the supramental light in them are already a little dead. That's how it is.⁴

To put the supramental light into the body of the Earth is to uproot death. It means lifting the veil of "something" that creates death, the very one that had been lifted for two full days.

The Triple Condition

And everything disappeared. Once again there was the forest. Walking blindly, suffocating, step by step, without a path. How does one fix that—the supramental light in the body? Not a fleeting experience, but something permanent. What prevents that? As always, the difficulty is not to find what must be done, but what must be undone, because the thing to be undone is invisible, like one's habits, as obvious and certain as Newton's apple. There is all the certainty of the laws of death to be undone, and where do they nest, these laws, prior to our putting them into equations? They must be nabbed in their nest. All the "obvious facts" of the world must be nabbed in their nest: why we fall, why we are heavy, why X is followed by Y which is followed by Z, which makes a little death at the end of the line. We must go back to the origin of the whole irrefutable chain, link by link, right to the microscopic source—where the little beast hides. The whole logical, obvious, unchallengeable and mathematical chain that creates the veil. An enormous Falsehood in all its details. Of course, we must first think of it as falsehood—the trouble is, we are not alone in thinking: the cells of the body have their own mode of thought, they have caught the illness of death like all the rest of us dressed in a suit and tie. So we must go and ferret out that little "thought" from its nest.

The first step, therefore, is a work of clarification of Matter, or false matter, rather. When it is clear, it will be true, and the light will be able to go through it; the real life will enter it, the "other" world will be there, while we walk or talk, with our eyes wide open.... But simultaneously there is another kind of work to be done: when that light, that formidable Power enters, it is like a raging fever, it seems everything is going to burst, you feel crushed inside, in all the cells of your body—of course, there is a resistance, an obscurity, a heaviness within which creates an unbearable friction. The current tries to get through, but it cannot: everything turns red. If you persist, it can even blow up everything. It is not a little mental current, of course. But we must say, it is extremely well dosed, the current is simply cut when the going gets bad, or else you faint. The consciousness of the body is like a baby's consciousness; it is very small, it has none of the mental "immensities." Just pinch your finger in the door to understand what I mean. The fainting is not due to pain but to the intensity of the current of reaction, which simply blows the fuses. There must be no more reaction, everything must flow within a corporeal immensity similar to the immensity up above. An unbroken immensity. It is in the body that we have to experience the infinite. And in fact, it is in the body that we have to have all the "great experiences" of up above. Then we will begin to bear the current without fainting like a frail woman (although women are much more solid than men, their substance is far more wrought than ours. Mother always said that they had a decisive role to play in the transformation and they were better able to make the bridge). So the first lesson of the experience of 1959 was the need to universalize this corporeal consciousness, to widen it into the motionless infinite that can bear any hurricane without a quiver of reaction—it flows without obstruction. The obstruction is precisely what creates the veil. Clarification and universalization go together. The body—the body-consciousness—must first learn to widen itself It is indispensable, for otherwise all the cells become a kind of boiling porridge under the pressure of the supramental light.⁵ And Mother looked at me out of the corner of her eye, stuck as I was in my pallid little infinity up above:

What I am trying to bring about is the great opening. Only when it has opened wide will there really be (how should I put it?) the irreducible thing, and all the world's resistance, all its inertia, even its obscurity will be unable to swallow it up—the determining and transforming thing. I don't know when it will come. And She added (here She had a mischievous little smile), If you concentrate long enough on any one point, you discover the Infinite (it is the infinite that X, Y or Z have found in their own experience), what could be called their own Infinite. But this is not what WE want, not this.... So then it is no longer an individual or personal contact with the Infinite, it's a total contact. And Sri Aurobindo insists on this, He says that it's absolutely impossible to have the supra-mental transformation without becoming universalized—that is the first condition. You cannot become supramental before being universal. And to be universal means to accept everything, be everything, become everything—really to accept everything. And as for all those who are shut up in a system, even if it belongs to the highest regions of thought, it is not THAT.⁶

The infinite in Matter. The whole universe in the body. But how is it to be done? It is as if suddenly "spirituality" became a concrete affair, almost a matter of cellular mechanics. Infinity must be achieved so that the current can flow without shattering everything, and there must be also some kind of impersonalization or depersonalization of the bodily consciousness so that the pure, exact vibration of the material spontaneity (such as in the bird, the insect and the whole world except us) may pass through without being caught, denatured and falsified by all our so-called natural reactions, which are mentalized, moralized, medicalized or marxified reactions, but false just the same because they are personal and they jam the vibrations—or rather the Vibration. All our reactions are mortal reactions, the most beautiful and the most stupid alike. And now I know why this sort of impersonalization of the material individuality is so important. It is very important for the exactness of this Action, so that it is only—ONLYthe purest divine Will (if it can be put that way), expressing itself with a minimum of admixture. Any individualization or personalization results in admixture.... And then one understands all, all—all the details. Some things can be understood intellectually or psychologically (which is very good, it has an effect and it helps you), but that always seems so hazy; it works through an imprecision. But now the vibration's mechanism is understood—its MECHANICS; and thus it becomes precise. All these attitudes the yoga recommends—beginning with action done as offering, then complete detachment from the result (leaving the result to the Lord), then perfect equanimity in all circumstances, all these stages which one understands intellectually, feels sentimentally—well, all this takes on its TRUE MEANING only when it becomes what could be called a mechanical action of vibration—at that point one understands why it must be like it is.⁷

Ultimately, the Spirit is understood in Matter. It is most comprehensible there—I was about to say most real, as if the other one up above were a pale copy, a mental imitation. One day, it could well be that all our "spirituality" will appear to us as an enormous travesty of something else—which is really and totally understood only at the level of Matter. And which explains the whole world.

Clarification, universalization, impersonalization.

Yes, but practically, in a body, how does one do it?

The Physical Mind

The body begins at any point and at any minute of the day.

You go down the stairs from your room and something begins to whisper: Oh, what a heavy day!—and you become heavy. You go into the bathroom and it whispers: Watch out, it's slippery, you're going to fall!—and you slip and fall. Watch out, you're going to cut yourself!—and you cut yourself. You go to meet someone and it whispers again: Be careful, he's going to throw his bad mood on you—and you begin to grate inside. You cough, there is a draft: I'll catch cold!—and you catch cold. It creates interminable colds, countless cunning illnesses that have neither a temperature nor medical charts, but that poison and smear and curdle everything—veil everything. Nothing is received as it is: it is veiled in advance. There is illness, disorder, confusion in advance—everything is foreseen, to the last catastrophic detail. Or else (more rarely) it colors everything pink—or yellow, green or indigo—and everything is seen in advance in that blend. Things happen as they were foreseen, it is remarkable, as if some dwarf magician were standing there. But we pay no attention because the tiny little muted voice is covered over with our idealistic rantings, our grave mental decisions, our superorganizations... which become disorganized without our knowing why, suddenly, undermined by an unforeseeable, ridiculous little accident. Here it comes, and everything falls apart. Sometimes it takes ten years to fall apart or to produce cancer—but the falling apart or the cancer is imprinted in the tiny whispering secretion which spins and spins ceaselessly, as you walk, as you eat, as you speak.... "Be careful, you're going to get tired!" and you are instantly tired. "Be careful, you're going to make a mistake!" and you instantly make a mistake, almost compulsively, vertiginously, as if the tentacles of an octopus were quietly winding around the cells. "And then one dies, you know"—well, yes, death is fatal. And you die. When one begins to touch that particular endless, numberless octopus that smears everything, veils everything and asphyxiates everything—but ever so lightly, soft like a breeze, beyond all belief or even a second's "thought"—one begins to touch a formidable black magic that escapes us only because it forms the very texture of our existence. Subtle, almost wordless, it is less than a breeze, the caress of a vibration around or under you, sometimes like a faint odor or a "forethought," a "forefeeling," a vague embryo of something sliding under a dead leaf—and everything decomposes. It is the invisible and constant decomposition of everything. Not necessarily the decomposition of a corpse (that is reserved for the end), but an imperceptible decomposition of color that makes the world fluctuate in a kind of muddy shimmer (the "muddy" is for those who have clearer eyes: for the others, it is simply a charming shimmer) which has a strange power over the thousand little circumstances of daily life—and sometimes over the big ones when the dose is stronger. And a quasi-hypnotic action on the body.

Of course, when you are a little conscious of what is happening, you chase it all away. But it is sticky. You chase it away once, ten times, but it comes back in another form, with another color. You hit it: it goes underground, puts on a saintly air, looks as lovely as an angel. And then, zap! it pops up again. You conquered this difficulty, dissolved that impurity fifteen years ago; it slips back into your memory like a breath: "Oh! That's old, luckily it's finished"—and instantly it enters again, called back by the memory, tickled by the memory,⁸ as Mother said, all fresh and bubbly, doubly energetic on account of the long torpor; and it starts again as if nothing had been done. You have simply slept on the difficulty for fifteen years. A breath of memory, an imperceptible vibration—NOTHING is dissolved. There is something there, the tissue of something, which uses anything, a draft, a chance encounter, a sneeze, to make it all come back again. And there is not one thing, one difficulty, one weakness, one illness to extirpate, no—there is a whole tissue, almost a corporeal substance. A denaturing substance. Then one begins to see the size of the problem, as if everything had to be uprooted. A kind of rottenness in advance. And so inextricably blended with the body that one wonders if it is really possible to remove it without removing the very life of the body.

This is the "physical mind." A sort of primal thought in Matter.

But then, it is not even a "thought," it is a breath, or rather an imprint. Probably the imprint of all the catastrophes it had to go through in order to awaken to life—a catastrophic awakening. The emergence from the great, quiet Sleep. The material consciousness, that is to say, the mind in Matter, was formed under the pressure of difficulties—difficulties, obstacles, suffering, struggle. It was, so to speak, "worked out" by those things, and that gave it an imprint almost of pessimism and defeatism, which is certainly the greatest obstacle.⁹ It is the great thirst to get out of the catastrophe. The great basis, the immense basis of Life. Life rests on that, on that NO. A no that assumes thousands and millions of forms and little illnesses or little weaknesses, which all thirst for the ultimate no: death. At last, the peace of death. It is very imperceptible, perfectly covered over with our mental din, our gospels or socialisms, our this and that, which are but little feverish agitations on a platform of death. We merely pretend for a while. Then we no longer pretend (or it no longer pretends), and we call for penicillin, or the doctor, or the pastor, or heaven to our rescue. But death is not of today; it was always there. Things have not really changed: they have only become what they already were. And we call that life. We walk constantly with death at our side, while going up and down the stairs, speaking, or laughing... it whispers and whispers and whispers.... And it can jam absolutely anything: if you dare look closer at that whispering to correct it or lecture it a little, it becomes very shrewd, it assumes the appearance of ten good thoughts, each of them a particular trap. It is a perfect and indisputable trap, no matter how you look at it, as good or as bad. It overtakes you in a flash, catches your own thought in advance and waits for you up ahead with a fresh, unexpected piece of mischief. Right thinking is wrong, wrong thinking is wrong, everything is wrong. Everything is blurred. But of course! This is THE MIND, so no one is mentally stronger than the mind. The mind cannot correct the Mind. There is really a complete rottenness, stuck there, in the body, in each reflex, each reaction, each mouthful you eat, each step you take. You can extricate yourself from intellectual thought, stop the thinking process, enter into liberated heavens. Everything is fine up above, but down below it's swarming. As a matter of fact, it is a battle against small, really tiny things: habits of being, ways of thinking, feeling and reacting...¹⁰ A TREMENDOUS battle against millennial habits....¹¹ It's interesting only for someone who finds interest in EVERYTHING, to whom EVERYTHING is interesting, that is to say, who has the sort of will for perfection that neglects no detail—otherwise, it isn't.... As soon as you enter the mental realm, of course, the mind says, "Ah, no! No, it's a waste of time." It isn't, but the mind regards all that as trifles.¹² Those trifles make up the very substance of death. Our life is made of a million fatal trifles. It would almost seem that our depths are made of an imperceptible sediment of clay producing a microscopic powder—loamy, dense and absolutely black. It is in the heart of the cells, or rather around them. A veil of powdered clay. Simply touch it a little and it all rises up en masse like a screen, filling the fishbowl, and it is night—it is the night the "living" call day. They bathe in it, in that trifle. Whereas if you let it settle quietly, you certainly see more clearly, the fishbowl becomes transparent, but it is there nevertheless, lurking in the depths. So what is to be done?

It would almost seem that that trifle is the root of the problem.

But certainly when there is an extreme difficulty, there is also an extreme key and an extreme power. It is the obstacle that opens the door. It is there only to lure us toward the discovery. Death is the ultimate obstacle which conceals from us the greatest discovery.

In the beginning, Mother was very proud of herself (may I be excused for teasing her a little, but from time to time we can switch roles). She used to tell me, When this mill starts turning... you take it—as if you were picking it up with pincers, and then (She lifted it upwards), then I hold it there, in this motionless white—no need to keep it there for long !¹³ Yes, and then She let go of the tweezers and everything started again. Or else you bring down the Power: in one second you are practically bursting with a power of light that dissipates the seething... for five minutes, the time the power is there. Mother clearly saw that that did not work either: I well understand why the Truth, the Truth-Consciousness, doesn't express itself more constantly: it's because the difference between its Power and the power of Matter is so great that the power of Matter is as if cancelled—but then, that doesn't mean Transformation: it means a crushing.... That's what used to be done in the past: they would crush the entire material consciousness under the weight of a Power that nothing can fight, nothing can oppose; and then they would feel, "Here we are! It's happened!" It hadn't happened at all! Because the rest down below remained as it was, unchanged.¹⁴ And if you do not want to use or cannot use a Power that crushes the seething, if you do not want to climb or cannot climb above into the motionless Whiteness, then what is left?... And if, on top of that, you cannot use the Mind to fight the mind in Matter, what are you to do?... You are nowhere. Or rather you are completely in it, at the only possible level, in the heart of the mental mud in Matter and, from within, within the obstacle itself you try to find the power that will go through or transform the obstacle. The very power of the obstacle holds the very power of the victory. One struggles with Victory all the time, and perhaps the secret is to know how to look in the right direction.

The Little Seconds of Death

But upon observing this seething closely, we have more than one surprise.

Mother was observing it, "was in it," in the long corridor of the second floor, in the midst of the disciples' thousand little stories that were all "her" story, her difficulty, her opacity; She followed it, tracked it down in all her gestures and movements, and there seemed to be no solution—it was dislodged here only to reappear there, protean and endless—as if the only solution were to live the difficulty. And that is where there is a thin line dividing two different faces of the same thing, the same difficulty, the same impossibility: a face of death and a face of life, a closed, negative face and an open one—depending on one's attitude. One lives the same stupidity and opacity, but on one side it is lived positively, with a question, a call, a kind of deep yearning or embracing of the truth that one feels behind, that one keeps wanting and longing for behind the black glue: one is in the midst of it like a cry. And on the other side one refuses, one says no, one does not want to see it or admit its existence, but it sticks all the same. It means refusing the enemy, and as long as one refuses the enemy, one has no power over him—he simply waits for you at the other end.

Mother advanced step by step into the swamp, and the solution was merely to walk in it, even if one had to keep walking there for three hundred years. This material mind loves catastrophes and attracts them, and even creates them, because it needs the shock of emotion to awaken its unconsciousness. All that is unconscious, all that is tamasic needs violent emotions to shake itself awake. And that need creates a sort of morbid attraction to or imagination of those things—all the time it keeps imagining all possible catastrophes or opening the door to the bad suggestions of nasty little entities that in fact take pleasure in creating the possibility of catastrophes...¹⁵ The wisp of imagination it does have (if you can call it imagination) is invariably catastrophic. Whatever it anticipates is always for the worst—the pettiest, meanest, nastiest kind of worst—always the worst. It's... really, its the most sickening condition human consciousness and matter can be in...¹⁶ You feel a little pain—oh, is it going to be a cancer?..¹⁷ And then that wonderful character, after imagining the worse (in the space of a second, of course), it submits it all to the Lord and tells Him, "Here, Lord, here is Your work, it's all Yours, do what You will with it"! The silly idiot, why did it have to prepare its catastrophes! A catastrophe, invariably a catastrophe, everything is catastrophic—but it offers its catastrophe to the Lord ¹⁸ And of course, we do not think for a second that it is a catastrophe, or that it may be catastrophic: "It's trifling," it is only a passing "silly idea"—but we err. It is authentically catastrophic. It is walking death. It just takes a certain accumulation of trifles to cause a real cancer and a real accident. Through these microscopic stupidities, Mother was slowly trailing Death to its source. She was going there "without a solution," She simply went through, went through all that, making a "mistake" each time, having the "wrong reaction" each time, repeating some past blunder or another each time... as if She were nothing but a tissue of error, falseness and blunders. "I" is but constant error. The first step to "clarification" seems to be a quintessential mudbath. And She was right there, She was in it. She was not up above, She was not "impeccable," but She was set on wresting the key to the victory from the very obstacle. It was the sordid battlefield.¹⁹

And the story, or the swamp, began to deepen. How many times in the middle of a conversation, or while speaking to someone out there in the corridor, did I suddenly see her stop and place the palms of her hands over her eyes, her head between her hands—five seconds, ten seconds—and become white, but not white like a dead person: as if a compact column of light were descending and enveloping her... then it was over, She smiled again, continued, went step by step from one to another, gave a flower or another, swallowed this poison or another. Or else She remained seated in front of me, her eyes closed, suddenly wrapped in that white light, as if totally arrested, immobile—there was no longer a quiver of being in that body. Then She would quietly say to me, Things don't happen at all as they do in ordinary life; for three or four minutes, sometimes five or ten minutes, I'm a-bo-minably sick, with every sign that it's all over. But it's only to make me find... to make me go through the experience and to find the strength. And also to give the body this absolute faith in its Divine Reality—to show it that the Divine is there and that He wants to be there and that He shall be there. And it's only at such "moments" as these—when logically, according to the ordinary physical logic, it's all over—that you can seize the key. You have to go right through everything without flinching.²⁰ Then She looked in front of her at the great flame tree with its yellow flowers (She always faced Sri Aurobindo, her chair or her bed always faced that direction, as if that were her living question, as if everything was her path toward him, the swamp to be crossed to join him, the opacity to be crossed, the something to be dissolved for him to be there: She was wearing away the swamp as He used to wear away the Wall), and She added, flow many more such experiences will be necessary? I don't know, you see, I'm only building the path.²⁰

There had to be many "such moments," hundreds and thousands of little seconds of death to be gone through in order to "grasp the key." And they came from everywhere, more and more, as if the farther She advanced into the swamp without a solution, the more the difficulty seemed to spring up everywhere, not only from her body, but from everyone's body as well, as if her body extended farther and farther. Truly, the more microscopic it was, the more universal it seemed to become. She was in the body of the world. It is an INUNDATION pouring in from outside! One thing after another, one thing after another—what a mixture! From all sides, from everyone and everything and everywhere. And not only from here, but from far, far away on the earth and sometimes from far back in time, back into the past—things out of the past coming up, presenting themselves to the new Light to be put in their place. It's always that: each thing wanting to be put in its place. And this work has to be done constantly.... It's as if one keeps catching a new illness to be cured.²¹ The world was becoming a very "material" thing. She was catching all the diseases of the world.

And the problem, or the question, was closing in, becoming very acute, as if everything was being enacted in these little seconds: A sort of intensive discipline, at a gallop—every minute counts.²² Then suddenly, a more serious illness, which concentrated the problem: filariasis. A nasty disease that attacks the legs and makes them swell excessively, those stings burning from inside out, from the tips of the feet up to here, everywhere, in the back... four hours of minuscule tortures.²³ Four hours that day; it went on for three years. It's the turn of the lower centers!²⁴ she said simply, like Sri Aurobindo when He fractured his leg. She was reaching the same point He had reached at the end of 1938, just after Munich. The subconscient, the universal swamp. But She would continue to walk, to remain standing for hours, listening to this one and that one, giving a flower, an opinion—the same work. But this time She was going to observe in detail the working of the disease in the bodily substance. Now, the very interesting point is that She had caught this filariasis some twenty years earlier, from a mosquito bite at the Playground. She had immediately applied her Force and Sri Aurobindo had applied his—the disease disappeared... underground. That is to say, a higher yogic power had been applied to cure the body. The same famous power that performs every possible miracle, if you know how to wield it. It is with this power that some Theon or super-Theon could have made a very miraculous and astounding world. Those are the higher powers of the Mind, which we hardly know or do not know at all (and so much the better). But they are powers imposed on Matter from above, they go on working as long as one remains in the proper conditions for the power, namely, in the mental heights. Matter is not really touched: it is muzzled. You can muzzle it for an entire life and be "cured"—but you die in the end, like everyone else. Death itself has not been cured; Matter has not been cured. And this is how we could dance in a miraculous world without changing anything, except we pleasantly sugar the pill for as long as it lasts. Of course, the doctors would go bankrupt, along with quite a few of our cumbersome mechanical devices, but the root of the evil would not have been touched and this world would remain a world of death. We are supposed to find the true key, something much better for us than stunning miracles, we are supposed to find the true life. But for this, naturally, all the powers, meaning ultimately the false powers, must collapse. The key must be ferreted out in Matter—in the natural, which is ultimately the only great Miracle of the world. And thus Mother lost all her powers, one by one, so that the body itself could find the solution. And her old muzzled filariasis, buried for twenty years, quietly returned from the body's subconscient.

The earth itself must find its own miracle.

The Cellular Mind

This long school of pain was going to accelerate the movement and bring Mother to a major double discovery which seems like nothing—but it is always like that, the discoveries in the body seem like nothing, one does not even realize very well that they are "discoveries," they seem so insignificant.... And that is why things last for millennia. The discovery of radium is important; the discovery of relativity is very important—we are so full of important discoveries that we are completely beside the essence of the problem. In fact, we are completely beside life—but of course, we are in death! One day as I was complaining to Mother of seeing no "results," She told me with that special "tone" which opens walls up, I have been shown in a perfectly objective but tenuous way some effects that are insignificant in their dimensions, yet overwhelming, I am telling you, overwhelming in their quality. And with a smile, as if I were made fun of and told, "Oh, so you want results? Well, here they are. You want effects? Well, here they are." And then it went on (you know, what I call "insignificant" is what concerns life's tiny little circumstances of every minute): "You want TERRESTRIAL results? Well, these are far more considerable in their quality than you can see." And indeed, I saw small, very small things, movements of consciousness in Matter, tiny little things that were... truly astounding in their quality, and that are never noticed because they are totally unimportant (outwardly unimportant). Only if you observe in a most tenuous way do you notice them, because they are, in fact, phenomena of consciousness in the cells—are you conscious of your cells? No. Well, become conscious of your cells, and you will see that there are results! All these last few days, it has been coming as... as proofs, proofs that can crush any doubt: proofs of the Supreme's omnipresence in the apparently most unconscious Matter—something so overwhelming that the rational reason can hardly believe it. But it is forced to. Only, of course, you notice it when you have reached that most tenuous degree of attention and when, instead of wanting great things that cause a lot of noise and movement and appear very dazzling, you content yourself with observing very, very little, very tiny things that are to our pretentious reason perfectly insignificant…²⁵ Suddenly you catch the physical Mind in the midst of unwinding its catastrophic reel, and "without reason," spontaneously, something in the body says no, and the reel stops immediately, as if by magic: the headache vanishes, the toothache stops—everything is dissolved by just that little "something" in the body that said no. It seems like nothing, but it is absolutely irresistible. Something that says no to death and has the power to stop the movement of death. (For let us make no mistake, a headache or a bruise or an object one drops on the floor are all death.) It remains for us to find out what that "something" is.

Thus Mother was "in" pain, as She was in all the rest of the insoluble swamp; but pain creates a more intense need to find the solution. Mother knew how to rise up above, cut the current and smile in bliss—it is elementary when the consciousness is developed, the equivalent of morphine, except better and more radical. But spiritual morphine was once and for all a part of the rejected means. Right to the end, She would refuse to cut the current. Now, her way of paddling through pain had this particularity that pain was totally and physically accepted like all the rest: no reaction of the type "no-no-I-don't-want-it, I-refuse, it-hurts"everything was accepted, the entire swamp. And already, through this acceptance of pain (not a mental acceptance, mind you, a physical acceptance), the quality of the suffering changed imperceptibly... as if it were less compact. As if the current of pain, one might say, flowed more easily. A few more steps, and it is just a current flowing through you. And first of all, you realize that it is the physical Mind that furiously magnifies the reaction, flails about, panics, imagines things, writhes every which way and tries to block the current as much as possible, which naturally feels obstructed and opens up its own passage... painfully, through the howling negation of the physical Mind. Because for the physical Mind, everything is a catastrophe—it would almost seem that it seeks catastrophes in order to be done with everything once and for all. When the fellow has calmed down, one notices a sort of subtle aeration of the body as if things could get through more easily and everything could get through more easily—the "pain" gets through more easily. And as one allows things to take their course, without any reaction, without any will (or with the single inner certainty that all this is the "Lord" playing, as Mother said, that all is a certain veiled wonder that we must in fact unveil), the body, the substance of the body, the consciousness of the body, seems to become wide, fluid, rhythmical, almost undulating, endowed with a very different kind of undulatory movement in which pain is only... the same current that has magically changed its face. It is imperceptible, it lasts a few seconds, "unbelievable"—and naturally, as soon as it is "unbelievable," the pain furiously returns. The operation is repeated thousands of times, and it is like going from one world into another in the space of few seconds, from one world into another, back and forth from a world of pain to another... inexplicable one—the same, but completely different. One has reached the consciousness of the body: the body itself, as it really is, its true consciousness, free from the character that covers it up with its magma of howling catastrophe. Almost as if there were two bodies: a body of pain and the other; a body imprisoned and the other; an "undulatory" body, if one may say so, and the other, shriveled up, doubled over upon itself, painful and on edge like a patient in a dentist's chair. And just after one of these almost magical experiences in which the "illness" evaporated, as though dissolved by that real body inside, Mother observed with surprise, But the cells themselves didn't care a whit! To them it was like a... sort of "accident" or an "inescapable disease" or something that DID NOT FORM A NORMAL PART of their development and had been forced on them.²⁶

The beginning of a prodigious experience.

The first time it happened to her, Mother noted, A kind of perception of the almost total unimportance of the external, material expression of the body's condition: the consciousness OF THE BODY was absolutely indifferent to external, physical signs, whether they were like this or like that... such as swollen legs or a malfunctioning liver.... Well, it was all utterly unimportant: IT IN NO WAY CHANGES THE BODY'S TRUE CONSCIOUSNESS. Although we are in the habit of thinking that the body is very disturbed when it's ill, when something is going wrong, it's not so. It isn't disturbed in the way we understand it.²⁷ "But then," I asked Mother, "what is disturbed if it's not the body?" Oh, its the physical mind, this stupid mind! It makes all the trouble, always. "It's not the body?" I insisted. No! "But then what suffers?" Suffering also comes through the physical mind, because if this entity is calmed down, we no longer suffer—exactly what happened to me! The physical mind, you see, makes use of the nervous substance; if we withdraw it from the nervous substance, we no longer feel anything, FOR THAT'S WHAT GIVES US THE PERCEPTION OF SENSATION.²⁷

And here a great big chunk of the wall begins to topple down. In fact it is not a wall, it is a veil of mud, it is that black sediment like a gluey, infinitesimal powder that coats everything—that envelops the cells of the body. The black glue of the physical Mind.... And one begins to get out of the cage. One begins, very slightly and imperceptibly, to lift up the veil of death. One begins to touch the real body, to touch true Matter. Because this discovery is far more prodigious than we think, let us repeat once more: it is "the physical mind that gives the perception of sensation"—hence all sensations are false, absolutely and utterly false. We live in a cage of falsehood. We live behind a veil of falsehood; pain is false and everything is false: heavy, light, big, small, closed, open, opaque, clear... all the perceptions are perceptions manufactured in the cage of that character and by that character—precisely with the view to single out or enclose a given individual in a personalizing cage that gives him the sensation of being separate from the others: I, a person. Such was the first evolutionary aim. We have been shaped as individuals through strokes of falsehood. And now the Falsehood is crumbling—everything is different, we are completely different! The physical world we perceive is a huge falsehood put into an equation by a physical mind that has conditioned everything. The physical body that we perceive and experience is a body of falsehood. And death is another falsehood: it is the death of falsehood.

So we must become the true body through the old.

We must become the true life through death.

We must cross the veil of death fully alive before it decomposes us.

And then the observation becomes very fascinating, infinitesimal as always (on the scale or in the likeness of the fine powder of black clay smeared over everything). For one notices the existence of a link between that physical mind and the pure substance of the body: the physical mind acts upon the body through an intermediary. Two different substances can touch each other or communicate only if there is a minimum of correspondence between them, that is to say, the vibration from one domain must be able to awaken or arouse something corresponding to it in the other substance. Only then can a contact and reciprocal influence—some communication—take place. When Mother entered into contact with the mummy at the Guimet Museum, or when She entered into contact with the python, the geranium or the amethyst, She was touching a vibration there, a form of consciousness which found a mental transcription in her. Thus there was a kind of "mind" there, though it scarcely resembled ours, a vibration perceptible at a certain level, which was obviously not the cerebral level of our intellectual mind: a vibration that She felt or experienced in her body, and which was subsequently translated by words, sensations and images. A corporeal mind. A cellular mind, she would say, or even atomic. Sri Aurobindo had made the same discovery: And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscules. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable individual variation in the activity of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a secret reality.²⁸ This cellular mind is the missing link between the purely material substance and the primary form of evolved Mind we call the physical Mind. It is through the body that one communicates with the rest of the world, through this cellular mind. It is what makes everything communicate (except us). If we were suddenly reduced to having our cerebral mind and a little pair of human eyes, we would see a dead, photographic world, a crust of the world (this is actually what happens in most cases). But this cellular mind is covered, dominated and subjugated by the physical Mind: it blindly obeys the physical Mind, it seems hypnotized by it. And here we begin to touch the secret more intimately.... One day a little corner of the veil was lifted up by chance, as She was holding the hands of someone with Parkinson's disease. The irresistible, uncontrollable trembling stopped completely for a moment, frozen, as it were, by the pressure of her consciousness: for an instant, She touched the body directly, the corporeal, cellular consciousness of that person, and everything stopped. As if She went through a veil. And the second the veil was stepped through, everything stopped, not a single tremor—it simply did not exist.

It lasted only a few seconds because the physical mind of that person instantly noticed: Oh, I am no longer trembling—and all the trembling started again immediately. The veil fell back into place.

So we begin to measure the enormity of the tiny, microscopic black clay; we are at the root of all illness, perhaps at the very root of death: When this material mentality is seized with an idea, it is actually possessed by the idea and its almost impossible (not impossible but extremely difficult) for it to free itself.... Diseases are just that. It's the same thing with Parkinson's disease: this tremor is the possession by an idea, it's what in the conscious intelligence is expressed as the possession by an idea, a hypnosis—a sort of hypnosis accompanied by a fear in Matter.²⁹ The great fear of the physical Mind, which at heart is the fear of life, the negation of life, what we might call the "catastrophic will": let everything end in mortal peace. It's a sort of TWIST that you try to straighten out and which goes back to its shape automatically, idiotically—you untwist it, it twists up again; you reject it, it comes again. It's extremely interesting, but it's miserable. Miserable. And ALL ILLNESSES are like that, all, all of them, whatever their external form. The external form is only one way of being of THE SAME THING—because things are arranged in every possible way (there aren't two identical things and everything is arranged differently), so then, some follow SIMILAR TWISTS, and that's what doctors call "such and such an illness."²⁹

It is the crease of death.

All human Matter is under the spell of a formidable hypnotism of death, of disease, of obscure and heavy and aging matter... in other words, everything we perceive in the cage of the physical Mind, beneath the veil of black glue of the physical Mind. The experts in hypnosis know this can be cut—they cut it... momentarily. They cut it arbitrarily, forcibly. The veil of our own hypnosis must be consciously lifted up. The body must do its own miracle. And then it is not a little illness or a little pain that we shall cure, annul: it is the illness of the world, the pain of the world and perhaps the death of the world.

It will be another Matter... and yet the same.

It will be the real body, as it is.

It will be the end of the mind's magic.

There is not a new world to be created: there is a magic spell to undo.

And Sri Aurobindo said it three times in Savitri:

A spell is laid upon [our] glorious strengths³⁰

The body's tissues thrill apotheosised,
Its cells sustain bright metamorphosis...
As if reversing a deformation's spell³¹

A grand reversal of the Night and Day All the world's values changed...³²

And suddenly, Mother perceived the secret: It is the mind of the cells that will find the key.