Mother or The New Species - II

12. The Infiltration

And sometimes, without really knowing why, the true Vibration, the supramental Vibration or Power, emerged from behind the veil of mud. All we know is that the experience seemed to come more and more often. Twice the supramental world took veritable possession of me and both times it was as if the body—truly the physical body—was going to completely disintegrate, due to... what you could almost call the opposition of the two conditions.¹ Of course, we can imagine one of those "tall beings" of the supramental shore, whose body was a sort of condensation of power and light, trying to enter into this kind of rigid box full of nerves screaming at the least scratch.... And suddenly, when we realize that, we get the impression that our bodies are made of some kind of superior cardboard with about as much life as a puppet compared to that life and that light. We begin to touch upon a formidable difference—we simply do not know what life is. And when that life enters this pretence or caricature... the difference between our habitual way of functioning and this new way is something so tremendous and overwhelming that an adaptation is evidently required.' Is cardboard ever adaptable?... To be sure, we wonder if it is this false, muddy and rigid substance that is to "adapt" and gradually become the real substance, or if some other mechanism will intervene. Certainly, there must be some degree of clarification and broadening first, a beginning of infiltration through the veil of mud—later on, we will understand, or rather the body will understand.

The Supramental Vibration

The infiltration took place, slow, controlled and more and more "nourished" through the years, with an occasional great onslaught of supramental Power. And each time Mother's description is very similar, the only difference concerns the amount, which will become more and more colossal, so much so that I often had the feeling of leaving a bath of lightning as I came out of Mother's room, and I seemed to need hours afterwards to digest the few drops that had filtered into me. But Mother did not call it a bath of lightning. She called it "the bath of the Lord!" See, I'm going to give them a bath of the Lord! And She laughed, and sometimes perfectly civilized people fled her room at full speed, all their manners abandoned, unable to bear the charge. It is a special vibration. Don't you feel something like... like a pure superelectricity? And Mother added this remark, which opens new vistas: When we touch That, we see that it's everywhere, but we are unaware of it.² It is everywhere. It is not really something that must be brought into the world, not really even into the body; it is here, it is the very vibration of the atom and stones and plants and animals, of all that exists. It seems that only our caricature of a body, our false body, we could say, does not realize this or is veiled from it: it is simply unbearable for it. What is so special in this human body unless the mental cage we have built, which is not a "subjective" cage at all, as we might think, but an actual cage that cuts all currents—the other kinds of matter, real Matter, that of the animals or plants or stones, are not like that: they are open. Things can get through. They are not blocked. And this Vibration (which I feel and see) gives the feeling of a fire. That's probably what the Vedic Rishis translated as the "Flame" fAgniiin the human consciousness, in man, in Matter. They always spoke of a "Flame." It is indeed a vibration with the intensity of a higher fire. Even the body felt several times, when the Work was very concentrated or condensed, that it is the equivalent of a fever.³ But perhaps it feels like a "fever" or a "fire" only because it is shut up in a cage. Birds do not get fever! At least not supramental fever. But neither do they know that they are "birds."

Mother described the supramental Vibration to me dozens of times over the years, each time, however, with a sense of wonderment. What is very remarkable is that the perception of that Vibration seems to cause a triple transformation or alteration of our material data: an alteration ot the material boundaries or apparent divisions of Matter, an alteration of the sense of Time—space and time are modified—and a totally radical alteration in the perception of life (what we call "life"). These descriptions will become more precise and will increase in volume, if we may say so, but the essence is already there in her first remarks. The line A1, A2, A3 is beginning to branch out and divide in every direction (poor us!). First, the sense of opaque Matter divided into hard little pieces disappears: *It was a kind of powdering, you know, even finer than tiny dots—a powdering like an atomic dust, with an EXTREMELY intense vibration but without any shifting of place. And yet it's in constant *motion. Something shifting about within something that vibrates on the same spot without moving (something does move, but it's subtler, like a current of tremendous power which passes through this powdering. But the milieu does not move at all: rather it vibrates on the same spot with an extreme intensity).⁴ A kind of universal current running through all these powder-like concentrations, without boundaries anywhere. It is the Mind that wants to enclose that formidable current in a rabbit cage—and obviously it cannot, it cannot even perceive it, because to perceive it would already mean to explode into something other than itself. The limits indeed vanish with that perception: The feeling of having a much larger (by larger I mean more voluminous) and much more powerful being in my body than I usually have. It was as if it could scarcely be held inside me but was spilling over; and so compactly powerful that it was almost uncomfortable.... ⁵ Always that "density," that "dense Matter." And we wonder if the "density" is not a superconcentration of consciousness-force, as it were, compared to which Matter, as it is lived in and through the Mind, seems like a flimsy and unsubstantial wisp of straw—it tolerates only a drop of it, a copy in mental cardboard which is of course rather hollow compared to the original. It was as though in each cell there was a vibration, and it was all part of a single BLOCK of vibrations...⁵ What gives the sensation of Matter here is no longer opacity or hardness. It is the compact density or "thickness," so to speak, of the vibration of consciousness. And it went out about this far [Mother made a gesture to show that her vibratory body extended rather far beyond the limits of her apparent body]. Sometimes, even, the entire apparent body seemed to dissolve [when Mother would faint]: Like molten gold- molten and luminous. It was very thick. And it had a power—a weight, you know, like that, it was astonishing. And then, no more body, nothing anymore—nothing anymore, nothing but that.⁶ Which indeed poses many problems if we want to continue living in a body like ours, without constantly fainting! How does one hold together in a body that goes off everywhere? The false perception of the Mind in its cage was obviously a protection. Thus there is a problem of "adaptation."

And time changes too. If you let yourself go with the ((movement," that universal movement which flows through the little powder-like concentrations, time is no longer the same, as space is no longer the same: A Movement so total—total and constant, constant—that to any perception it gives an impression of perfect immobility. A Movement which is a sort of eternal Vibration, without beginning or end.... Something existing from all eternity, for all eternity, and without any division of time: it's only when it is projected onto a screen that it begins to assume the division of time. ⁷ All right, but the apparent body, what we might now call the mental body, for it seems to be our mental creation, continues to live from minute to minute, along with the days, months and years, or at least a perception of days and years... which is perhaps the cause of its aging. Our screen "takes on the division of time." But what if there is no longer a screen? If one can go at will into the past, the present, the future, how is the "normal" life of such a body to continue among people perfectly set to clockwork? Here too lies a problem of adaptation: to remember the present so as not to dart off God knows where... and perhaps in the process forget this apparent body, falsely glued to an armchair, on the 25th day of May, 1961. It would seem that a transitional means of leading a double life in the old body and in the new, without losing one or the other, is yet to be created. These are physiological problems, you see, and not metaphysical. What do you do when metaphysics becomes physics!

But perhaps this is a totally mental problem, because for birds, there is no difficulty. The difficulty is the structure of the mind, and the fact of living with other beings who themselves are terribly caught up in the mind. Truly, a transition has to be worked out from one species to another.

And life changes too—when I say "life," I mean not only the way of relating to people and things, but the very quality of the air one breathes, this sort of breath that moves us: A golden Light, absolutely immobile.... And then things seem to become swollen—swollen with an infinite content.... It's really the feeling of something that is full rather than empty—life as people live it, as I see them live it, is something hollow, empty, dry. Hollow. Hard and hollow together. And empty.... While when the other thing is there, you instantly get an impression of full-full-full-full—full! Overflowing, you know, no more bounds. So full that all, but all bounds are swept away, erased, gone—and there remains only That, that Something.⁸

How to infiltrate this "something," how to live in this something, tolerate it, bear it, while at the same time apparently remaining in a body that seems to be made of the very opposite of all these qualities?

The Web

She was going through her forest which was occasionally lit up by flashes of light, and sometimes it was almost discouraging. We delude ourselves about life, we clothe it in ideals, movement, agitation, violence and passions, and we declare, "This is life," it is "thrilling," but that is not true! We merely plaster a decoration over some kind of inanity of each second in which there are footsteps and more footsteps and nothing + nothing + nothing, and gestures and more gestures, thousands of gestures for... something else we always run after but which is never there. The true life, the "pure" life, if we dare say so, is this fabric, this tissue of zeros, like a taxi meter ticking away the nonexistent time it takes to get "over there." The "full" time is over there, once we have arrived—but we never arrive! It is always the same. The basis of life is like that. Oh, all of life, WHATEVER IT IS, is like that.... Mother exclaimed. Even events which seem quite extraordinary when seen from afar, which is the way they appear to most people, even historical things which have furthered the earth's transformation and its upheavals—the crucial events, the great works, you might say—are woven from the SAME fabric, they are the SAME thing! When you look at all this from afar, on the whole it can make an impression, but the life of each minute, of each hour, of each second is woven from this SAME fabric, drab, dull, insipid, without any true life—a mere reflection of life, an illusion of life—powerless, void of any light or anything that resembles joy in the least.... It is worse than horrible, it is a kind of... Oh, not despair, for there isn't EVEN any sense of feeling—there is NOTHING! It is dull, dull, dull gray, gray, gray, clenched tight, a closed web that lets through neither air nor life nor light—there is nothing.⁹ We spoke of a "veil," a "cage," but it is really this same tightly woven web that envelops everything, right down to the cells of the body, as if all of life were smothered by something. And then, at times there is an invasion of the other life without our understanding very well how this invasion works, without our even being able to bear it more than a few seconds or a few hours. A splendor of light—so sweet, so sweet, so full of true love, true compassion, of something that is so warm, so warm.... THAT is what must come forward and manifest in the vibration of EACH second—not in a whole which looks interesting when seen from afar; it must enter the vibration of each second, the consciousness of each minute, otherwise...⁹ Yes, otherwise... the only alternative is to soar off to heaven or go to hell. But it is down below that the veil must be lifted, not up above. It is down below that we have to disasphyxiate ourselves.

The momentous secret is truly found at the microscopic level of each second, right where we have never wanted to look, because it is hideous—it is "nothing," as Mother says, a suffocating nothing that flings men into every kind of aberration so as not to see, not to see it at any cost, not to be confronted with it. To confront it means to enter into the skin of a black pygmy. For Mother, who had known all the great expanses of consciousness above for eighty years, it was... suffocating. Because the physical mind is not only a driveling fool, an endlessly repetitive parrot that makes you check ten times to see if you have properly locked the door when you know full well you have locked it, but it drivels and repeats sordidly, and freezes everything: in one second it perceives a thousand details that will be served to you ten years later in exact detail, from the remark of the doctor who says, "Oh, this disease will take two years of treatment" (so naturally two years are actually needed), to the most furtive image. It is an implacable memory, perhaps a millennial memory. It is the primal mind of Matter.

Everything gets frozen and crystallized there—indeed, it is the builder of the cage. Everything has a consequence, everything is connected, everything flows from cause to effect, inexorably. It has riveted our cage, microscopically and in every detail. And nothing can be cured as long as that whispering is not cured: in a single stroke, it demolishes all the victories won up above, in the higher realms of consciousness. The roots of sex are hidden there, not in any "sexual organ" or any "instinct" one can very easily detach oneself from, but in the obscure little fixation that wants... ultimately it wants night, decomposition, the disintegration of everything. It is a kind of vertigo in Matter. And it repeats and repeats its little whisperings of death in every gesture, every occurrence and encounter, in everything. Parkinson's disease is sheer delight for it, its element, the "exemplary" summit of its activity. It wants only to freeze everything, tetanus-like—and as a matter of fact that is what it does, stealthily. That is its job: to build a cage. It would like to re-create the peaceful rigidity of the stone.

Death is its greatest success.

So the root of evil is not to be found in any bottomless and psychoanalytic subconscious: it is here, within arm's reach, or ear's reach, rather. Only, if we want to perceive it, we must not cover it up with all the usual racket, including the moral one. All the things that are considered "unimportant," and its all that, the whole mass of all that, which prevents the physical transformation. And because they are very small things (that is, APPARENTLY very small things, without any importance), they are the worst obstacles... very small things that belong to the subconscious mechanism and because of which in thought you are free, in sentiment you are free, even in impulse you are free, and physically you are a slave. One must undo all that, undo it, undo it.... There only remains the mechanism of habit. But it holds on, it clings, oh! ¹⁰ And we do not even know what must be done to undo it! Mentally we say: we must become clarified, universalized, impersonalized—that is all very well, but it is a mental picture. How does one do it in the body? How does one puncture that web? How does one have an effect on that black loamy powder? The minute we touch it slightly, it rises up like a curtain of mud.

The Mantra

The only device Mother used on this pathless path for which there is no device, except to be in a certain way, to strain toward in a certain way, and to walk on, was the "mantra."

All the organized forms as we see them are an agglomeration of vibrations (the scientists say atoms because they see only one layer of Matter and with mental spectacles at that) expressing the particular quality of the object, its "aspiration," Mother said, and that is how She could give names to flowers, for example. In a way it is the real name of things, their particular music, which becomes a rather sad one on the human level. It is the repetition of those vibrations that ensures the stability of forms. A change in the vibratory play would entail a rupture of the form (a change of the form if it is bearable, or disintegration and "death" if it is unbearable). Each thing moves with its own particular "sound," which is the movement of the forces composing it. The mantra is the pure sound of a thing, whatever it is, the essence of its vibration, what creates it or maintains it in a form. There is a whole so-called Tantric science that manipulates these sounds and apparently performs "miracles" by reproducing the sound of things—it disintegrates or reintegrates them, combines or alters them. Poetry and music are forms of this "magic of sound" when they are true music or true poetry, that is, when they really evoke certain forces or aspirations, certain forms of being—there is every possible level, down to the most gross. It is also our very commonplace magic—which we do not know is magic, but the effects are there all the same, sad and muddy—when we walk up and down the streets muttering our mute desires or petty anxieties... which naturally occur since we have called them. If men saw the enormous colored glue (and what a color!) they live in, they would find the carbon monoxide of their cities quite charming in comparison. But if a pure sound is injected into Matter, the effect can be equally magical; only, as our false matter is thick and sticky and repetitive, a lot of tenacity is needed. The same repetitive and parrot-like virtue of Matter and of the physical mind can be used in the other direction also and, "miraculously," it can start repeating a true sound instead of going on with its usual mortal rut—insofar as it can do it without traumatic consequences or a dangerous disruption of its vibratory mode. There is here a "borderline" which exactly illustrates the transition from the old material mode to the new mode, the next mode of Matter.

That "pure sound" is not to be found in any magic formula. There is AUM, the Sanskrit sound, a marvel, but as always, the real magic is the simplest one, the one we possess without knowing it, which seems like nothing but which can be extraordinarily powerful if it is pure, if purely uttered • like the cry of our heart, the need of our very being gathered together in a second of life or death. The last word that remains when all else is gone. Our pure sound, the one that resembles no other and makes us this particular person and not just an anonymous someone equipped with a necktie and a doctorate in mathematics. Each of us can find this sound or a translation of this sound in one word or a few words that are our own "password," so to say, our particular Open Sesame: a sound that represents an experience and has the power to recall that experience. It may be a sound of flame, a sound of certainty or freedom, a sound of joy, a sound of pure love... That, which for us has a total meaning. The cry at the summit of our being, or in the abyss of our being when all is lost. And we try to instill this sound in everyday Matter, in every minute, every second, in every gesture, every stupidity, every futility, mistake, sorrow and joy—everything. It must become the music of our material substance.

That is the mantra.

It is an attempt to divinize material substance,¹¹ Mother said. There's a power in the sound itself and by forcing the body to repeat the sound, you force it to receive the vibration at the same time.¹² It is the same principle as doing daily exercises on the piano, for example. You keep mechanically repeating them, and in the end your hands are filled with consciousness—it fills the body with consciousness.¹³

She had found her mantra. It was the first thing She had felt the need of after her first "illness" in 1958: My body would like to have a mantra... to hasten its transformation¹⁴ (to change this opaque vibratory mode), She wrote to me then. She found it and repeated it until her last breath, day and night and every second, for fifteen years, as perhaps Sri Aurobindo did when He walked back and forth in the high- ceilinged corridor. And perhaps She is still repeating it now For who can disintegrate that vibration?

Now, this mantra has a surprising power over this vibratory web, the opaque veil of mud that envelops us and creates all our illnesses and aging and endless accidents. This mantra has an action on my body, She remarked the first time. It is strange, but it coagulates something: all the cellular life becomes one solid, compact mass, in a tremendous concentration—with a SINGLE vibration. Instead of all the usual vibrations of the body, there is now only one single vibration, one single mass...¹⁵ The countless tremors, murmurs, whisperings of the body, the whole sly network of a thousand little contradictory forces that pull in every direction, is suddenly coagulated into a single vibratory mass. Death does not enter there. Illnesses, accidents do not enter there. The body is as if filled with an unassailable substance. But one must be able to bear that "substance." Still another time, in the beginning, She noted: As soon as I have a quiet minute to concentrate, it always begins with this mantra, and there is a response in the cells of the body: they all start vibrating.... The other day it came; it took hold of the entire body. It rose up in the same way, and all the cells were trembling. And with such a power! The vibration went on expanding, ever widening, as the sound itself was expanding, expanding, and all the cells of the body were seized with an intensity of aspiration as if the entire body were swelling—it became overwhelming. I felt that it would all burst.... And it has such a transformative power! I felt that if it continued, something would happen, something like a change in the equilibrium of the body's cells.¹⁶ The dangerous point of rupture. And we are again facing the same problem of the "adaptation" of the substance. From whichever end one tackles the problem, there is the old web encircling everything: can that web, that deadly vibratory network, be broken without breaking life itself and disintegrating the form?

This will be Mother's major problem for years: a problem lived minute by minute, physiologically. In short, She was trying to build the first "new body." Or perhaps to set the true one free. And that means a... perilous passage.

Mother's mantra had seven syllables:

A UM NAMO BHAGAVATE Mother gives it to the world.

The Surrounding Thoughts

Mother's forest was not only in her body, it was in those 1,300 little specimens (in 1960), each representing a particular way of death, a certain way of being in the web and of cultivating the web. Since She had stopped her outer activities, the problem had become more focused instead of diffused: now that they could no longer besiege her at the Playground or on the tennis court or anywhere She set foot, they came instead in the corridors, to the door of her bathroom or of the refrigerator where She kept her flowers, to every door and at every second. It was a regular invasion. And if She allowed a person to come once to receive a flower or her look, it became a right for all eternity—and naturally "Why not me?" Everyone was me, me, me. It was full of little me's brandishing their flowers from Mother... and continuing to cultivate the web. And if Mother did not do exactly as they wanted, the opaque and violent web threw off a lot of muted little vibrations, which Mother swallowed and swallowed. She never said no to anyone. Mother never said no, people themselves had to discover the suffocation of their own web. She simply put her calm light on the web... and it thrashed about even more under her pressure. And letters too: They assassinate me with their letters. Oh, if you only knew all the letters they write me... If you knew, first of all, the tremendous pile of stupidities that need never be written at all; then, added to that, such a display of ignorance, egoism, bad will, total incomprehension and unequalled ingratitude, and all this so candid, my child! They heap all this on me daily, you know, and it comes from the most unexpected quarters.¹⁷ And She replied, replied. And at times there was a cry in her: Sri Aurobindo became blind, I don't want to become blind!... She would sit down in the big chair with carved back, remain a moment with eyes closed in front of me, her arms resting on the chair, so pale: What's difficult is my contact with the Ashram people. As soon as I go down and... simply that, having to fidget on my feet, giving people flowers.... And they are so unconsciously egotistical! If I don't go through the usual concentration on each one of them, they wonder, "What is it? What's wrong? Have I done something?..." And it turns into a big drama.¹⁸ Her legs, which She carefully hid in Japanese tabis, were swollen from the filariasis, like iron rods. And She kept going here and there, all the while repeating the mantra. But just the same, the problem was there: Every person, every letter, every action brings its own volume of disorder, disharmony and disintegration. It's as if all that were dumped by the truckload on your head. And you have to hold out...¹⁹ Each vibration absorbed from the outside instantly creates a disorder [in the body], dislocates everything, creates wrong contacts and disrupts the organization; it sometimes takes HOURS to put it all back in order. Consequently, if I really want to make use of this body's possibility without having to face the necessity of changing it because it can't follow along, then, materially, I would really need, as much as possible, to stop having to gulp down all sorts of things that drag me years backwards.²⁰

She continued "swallowing" right to the end, and more and more so—the nearer She came to the goal, the more relentless became the surrounding web, kicking and struggling as if to death. It was not "her" web: it was really the web of the world. And the problem became more intricate because there was not only the physical presence of 1,000 or 1,300 specimens dancing a saraband in her body, but there was the whole invisible crowd. And to begin with, all the thoughts. As long as we are snug and warm in the web, we do not understand, but as soon as the mesh loosens, it is a total invasion. Thoughts are not innocent: thoughts are actions. It takes our normal armor not to be smashed to pieces. Some thoughts are as deadly as a scorpion, there is a whole swarm of various centipedes. Yes, quite a dreadful mixture, "as if I were constantly coming down with a new disease and had to find a cure for it." If you could perceive this atmosphere I am made to breathe, mon petit! [and Mother held her head between her hands as if She were being hammered, beaten] The foolishness, the stupidity, the nastiness, the inanity. It is full, full of all that—full. One cannot breathe without breathing that!²¹ Already at the Playground, She had tried to make them understand: If the people around me were receptive, it would help my body enormously because all the vibrations would go through my body and would help it.²² But who understood that, apart from a small handful of silent ones who never asked for anything, never sought to see her and worked silently? And as more time went by, her own mesh loosened: The body has grown terribly sensitive. For example, a wrong reaction in someone, a tension or some reaction of a quite ordinary order, causes a sudden weariness in my body, as if it were exhausted.²³ Little by little her body was becoming all bodies. Those innocent (or not so innocent) little thoughts and whisperings of the surrounding bodies were seen at their true value—almost immediately they show their true face, i.e., the death that is inside them. Each of those little murmurs is really, actually and materially a claw of death. We do not die from it because the dose is not strong enough and it takes time. And also, we are thick. But all that entered Mother as it was, "pure," if one dare say so. And Mother was beginning to face the great problem: Oh, it's people's thoughts that are so annoying! Everybody, everybody is constantly thinking about old age and death, and death and old age and illness... oh, they're such a nuisance!²⁴ We do not realize it, but a thought of death is death. We are as unaware of the real movement of forces as a primate of the Paleocene, we know nothing of the play and power of vibrations, we are walled in our mental web! But what of those who no longer are?... You are almost stoned to death with all that.²⁵ This was in 1961, already—She would swallow their thoughts of death right to the end. They exuded death on her every day (and every night), right to the end. And then her humor got the upper hand, She laughed: There are many—many—who think I am going to die and are making preparations so as not to be left completely out on the street when Igo. I am aware of all this. But it's childishness—if I leave, they are right; if I don't, it doesn't matter!²⁶ This was in April 1961. Still twelve years more of this regime.

The problem before Mother, or rather in Mother, was clear.

So what was to be done? Or rather how was one to undo that web without dying for good, without literally being smothered by the surrounding air? One could almost ask • how does one die without dying from it?

Impersonalization

Between 1958 and 1962 Mother was going to learn the great lesson, which is a microscopic lesson, but whose material results are more essentially significant for our species than the splitting of the uranium nucleus. We still do not realize just how overwhelming these microscopic discoveries are—they do not even have a name. They are too radically new to have any equivalent in our language. Mother did not even know what She was doing! Sometimes She would utter a word or a sentence out of the blue, in the middle of the conversation, that left me dazed, and years later you say: Oh, but...! It is not the splitting of an atom, but of the entire conditioning of a species. It is the very power of the atom itself that comes before you with a smile and is almost making fun of you: Oh, so you want miracles! Well then, look.... Look at this law here, and look at that one. It is like the essence of the miracle that comes poking its nose through a crack in the door, or though the mesh of the web; and it does nothing sensational: it simply blows on a little "inescapable" law to let you see clearly how things work... naturally. You rub your eyes for a second: But how come...? And it is gone. There is still a "But how come?" to be eliminated. But then you really understand that the world is on the verge of a miracle that depends on... something that is still a mystery, but is felt as an infinitesimal mystery, a "nothing"—a prodigious nothing. It's something prodigious... which looks idiotic,²⁷ Mother said toward the end. We are perhaps going to stumble upon it, if Mother holds our hand firmly from the other side of the veil.

The first lesson—perhaps the only lesson—is that we can really do nothing. We go into the web and bump into everything, get stuck everywhere, get tangled up with every gesture, in our wish to do good as well as in the stupidity of our "bad" actions. All reactions are false, the good as well as the bad. You refuse something and it bounces right back in your face like a tennis ball; you accept and it goes through endless meanderings. And all the sensations are false. "I do not want to be blind," and it is as if instantly something wanted to be blind, and you see ten times worse; "I'm exhausted," and you feel completely exhausted, like a ton of lead. "But look, I'm spitting blood! It's really serious...." And you catch a little something there that wants it to be serious and wants to be taken seriously, and is very hurt if it is not taken seriously. The day Mother sent me packing by saying, Tell your cells they are stupid to spit blood... !²⁸ I was very offended. Stupidity is abysmal, it is everywhere, in every nook and corner: it is "serious" indeed. It is deadly. All medicine is in question, all physics is in question, all physiology—all the untold Stupidity that envelops us with its impenetrable and irrefutable web, worse than the Hydra: a myriapod with thousand upon thousand of microscopic heads—and IT IS RIGHT. It is always right, it is jam-packed with right reasons and dazzling proofs. It makes you get sick: so there, you see! It makes you fall down: so there, you see! Imperturbably, innumerably, it provides you with all the denials, all the failures, all the defeats, all its proofs. We must be a little childish to contradict Newton's apple. We must be frightfully childish to want to get out of the web. We are too intelligent to be childish. And Mother was moving in this, bumping into one side, bumping into the other, plugging up a hole here only to see it reopen there, taking one stupidity off its shelf only to find a thousand others: you find yourself full of stupidities, full of mistakes, full of mud. A myriad little flash-illnesses. A myriad little deaths, simply while going down the corridor. One is full of prospective illness, full of prospective death. It is swarming and teeming, it is incredible. It's infinitesimal. It's only because they are multiplied millions of times that they can have some importance—but they're nothing! Mere nothings. Yet that's just what blocks the way. All this makes the web. All this blocks the real Vibration—the natural... "miracle." It gives me the impression of a miniature painting done with a magnifying glass and tiny dots—miniatures are painted with a very fine brush, very pointed, and you make tiny dots with a big magnifying glass.... And it takes many, many, many tiny dots to paint just a bit of cheek. Tiny dots, tiny dots.²⁹

And then, if you start looking at the dots, they too begin growing out of complete proportion. You do not know what to do, everything seems fake everywhere. The good is fake, the bad is fake. And there are all the little specimens around you who increase the magnitude of the problem. You are there, just as if you were in the problem of the earth. It is the whole earth, the laboratory of the earth. You say no to someone—or rather no to a harmful reaction in someone—and instantly it is as though you had erected a wall between yourself and the mischief: you are no longer touched, but neither is the mischief any longer touched—it wriggles about on the other side of the wall. And ultimately it comes back to you because the mischief in someone is our mischief, and everything is our mischief. What says "no" in you is precisely what can be touched by that particular mischief: it is there in you, the same thing, hidden, only it says no instead of yes, that is all. As long as there is a response, it means that we are all in the same soup. And naturally, for each of us, the no is really a yes clothed in sanctity—it is a saintly soup. We just do not get out of it at all, not at all. It is all the same thing. But of course, all bodies are made of the same Matter. There is not a saintly type of matter versus a devilish type of matter: there is Matter. Mother was learning that lesson, too: You are beaten and battered until you understand. Until you are in that state in which all bodies are your body. But at that point, you begin to laugh! You were upset by this, hurt by that, you suffered from this or that —but now, how laughable it all seems!³⁰ Yes, it is all the same thing. The body extends to the ends of the earth. There is not a single stupidity that is not absolutely, totally, integrally our own stupidity. Only it is reflected in each of us in a different way. Note that I said "reflected": the Stupidity is held in us, fixed in us by a screen—even if it is a microscopic screen no bigger than the head of a cell. But it is a reflection of stupidity, it is not a reality of stupidity—it is a reflection of illness, a reflection of death... a thousand reflections of the same thing that plays and shimmers in or on all bodies. It would almost seem that it is the screen that makes the stupidity.

Mother was moving gropingly toward a simple and monumental discovery that others had made on the summits of the liberated mind, but She was making it in her body.

When you have completed all those little dots, those interminable little portions of a cheek, when you bump against things everywhere, are sick everywhere—sick in this person, sick in that one—when you are misled and misled again and everything is misleading, the yes as well as the no, good as well as evil, effort as well as non-effort, when the will for clarification becomes an even thicker veil of mud, the will for universalization an even heavier prison, the aspiration for the transformation like one more obscuration, because you just do not know what you are supposed to look for and how to look for it—you do not know the way, you do not know what leads to the goal and what does not, you do not even know what the required qualities are or perhaps the required defects... when you seem to be bludgeoned from all sides, numbed with fatigue (and perhaps that too is a fake fatigue), broken by impossibilities from every direction, assailed by swarming thoughts, when you move somewhat like a drunken man in a cloud of pain, then... then you open your hands: The only thing I do is this [and Mother opened her hands on her knees, very white hands with fine violet veins, they seemed translucent], constantly this, in everything—in thoughts, feelings, sensations, in the body's cells, all the time: "To You, To You, To You. It's You, it's You, its You." That's all. And nothing else. In other words, a more and more complete, a more and more integral assent, more and more like this [gesture of letting herself be carried]. *That's when you have the feeling that you must be *ABSOLUTELY like a child. If you start thinking, "Oh, I want to be like this! Oh, I ought to be like that!"you waste your time.³¹ Effort is merely the other side of the same screen. "I do not want to be ill" is yet another illness. "I do not want to die" is yet another death. And "I want to be immortal" is still death on the screen. As for "I do not want to make any mistakes," the Mistake comes instantly: its shadow is captured on the screen. There must be no more screen, then illness flows through you, the mistake flows through you, death flows through you—there is nothing left but eternity. The web is destroyed. Stupidity no longer exists. Stupidity is the screen; death is the screen. There is no reality of stupidity, no reality of illness, no reality of death: there is a REALITY of the screen.

The physical mind is the screen.

Remove the screen, and there is no more death.

What makes up the screen is what makes death.

Impersonalization is immediate universalization and immediate clarification, including the clarification of death.

Years later, Mother would tell me, I have tried many things, a great many, I have looked a great deal, and I see only one that's absolute—only one that's absolute and can bring the absolute result, its this (gesture turned Upward): the complete annulment of all that, leaving it all, "To You, Lord—You, You, to You...." And for every difficulty, every time, whatever it is, simply this: "Everything to You, Lord. Everything for You, to You. You alone can do it, You, You alone, You alone. You alone are the Truth; You alone are the Power." And those words are nothing, they are only the very clumsy expression of something... a stupendous Power... It's only the incapacity, the clumsiness, the lack of faith we mix into it that takes away His power. The minute we are truly pure, that is, under His influence alone, there are no limits, no limits—nothing, nothing, there is nothing, no law of Nature that can resist, nothing, nothing.³²

No law of Nature.

And indeed a whole series of physical, physiological consequences—incredible for our physical mind—begin to get through the mesh, as if we were dealing with another physical Nature—or perhaps the true one. We are completely misled, not only by false matter but by the false God that has ruled over this false matter. Reality is altogether different: an altogether different "God" and an altogether different "Matter." That God goes with that Matter which goes with that Death. Mother said "You" because there is as yet no language for that other material reality: That's the hitch, you say "Divine" and they understand "God"!... There is ONLY That: That alone exists. That, what?—That alone exists!³³ She called it "the Lord," you can call it what you like—it is the other thing. It is the Thing in which "I" no longer exists: squashed, gone. A total consciousness. A total movement, a total power. A totality one is. Without a screen. The next consciousness. Another species which is no longer humanity or superhumanity, not an improvement upon the animal: something else. Something that obeys another law which has no longer anything to do with universal gravity. And yet it takes place in a physical, material body. A divine, material reality. And a "divine" who is no longer "other"... who is what you are, who is everything. Not a "You" up there, at the back of beyond, whom one doesn't know; He is everywhere, He is in everything, He is constantly there, He is in the very being—and one clings to that. It's the only solution.³⁴ "God" was used in order to reach the other side—but what do you say when everything is on the same side?

The first key, and the total key, is to surrender. Only it is no longer a mystical surrender on the summits of the being: it is a material, corporeal surrender. But as long as there is personal effort, it's... oof! it's like the man who rolls his barrel uphill, and down it rolls again every minute.... Because as the balance changes between the parts of the being and as the luminous part increases, the rest grows more and more inadequate and intolerable. Then you are really utterly disgusted and more and more there is the movement "I can't do anything about it. It's impossible, I can't, it's such a colossal work that it's impossible—Lord, do it for me." And when you do this with the simplicity of a child, really like this, you know, really convinced that you cannot do it, "It's not possible, I'll never be able to do it—do it for me," it's wonderful!... Oh, He does it, mon petit, you're dumbfounded afterwards: "How come!..." There are lots of things that... prrt! vanish and never come back again—finished. After a time, you wonder, "How can that be?! It was there..." Just like that, prrt! in a second....³⁵ It's the only solution, there's no other. All the rest is... aspirations, conceptions, hopes... it's still the superman, but not the supramental. It's a higher humanity that tries to lift all of its humanity upward, but... it's useless. It's useless.... It has to nullify itself Then something else can come, can take its place. The whole secret is there.... And then, to let oneself be flattened until one disappears.³⁶

The best way of going through the web is to be like a breeze.

The "I am a reptile" must disappear so the "it is a bird" may appear. The competence of a reptile is quite useless to the bird.

And ultimately the only thing that disappears is the screen. And WE ARE.

Only, Mother added, there is no place for fear—if you're afraid, it becomes dreadful. Fortunately my body is not afraid.³⁷

There are indeed some very radical consequences compared to which our nuclear fission looks like some sinister and powerless childishness, except for dying, because that is the only power in this false world.

Now we are really entering the magic forest.

Now the Vibration can begin to infiltrate.

Now we are entering another world that is nevertheless the same.