Mother or The New Species - II

15. The First Exit from the Web or The New Type

Then came the great Turning Point.

It was March 1962. The beginning of the formation of a "new type" on earth, in a first terrestrial body, or perhaps the second, after Sri Aurobindo—but no one knew it at the time. Not even Mother! It was only in 1967, five years later, that Mother suddenly realized, "why, that is what happened in 1962!" And even then only because I was asking her questions. At the time, one knows nothing about it: it is just "a phenomenon that is taking place." Mother's Agenda is full of unlabeled "phenomena." Who would have noticed the new type Homo sapiens among the primates? Now we speak of "true Matter," but when you only see the first twinkling of light, what is it? Something twinkling, that is all. And when you faint with a bizarre sensation, the doctors take your pulse and give you Coramine²⁰⁰ for your heart. Would they have given Coramine to Christopher Columbus to cure him of America?

We are basically doing some pre-geography, or perhaps paleontology in reverse, before things become fossilized.

Then we will have to evolve another geography for another age.

There will always be a new geography of the same eternal world.

An Undulation

In fact, the phenomenon had started earlier than March.

Little by little, with "alternations"—sometimes hundreds of alternations in the same day, like a veil being lifted up and falling back again, or a door opening and closing according to... according to what?—Mother had reached a sort of corporeal transparency in which her own existence was nothing more than the existence of a particular ray that became aware of "something" whenever it got caught somewhere or met a screen. Sometimes the screen was still within on account of a rather acute pain that instantly made a "me" somewhere, but even then, there was a way of "stretching" that pain out, as it were, of flowing through it and dissolving it by not associating with it any reaction of "it hurts"—and it would go away whenever a particular thought of the physical Mind that made the "it hurts" went away. In any case, "me" is the pain. It is the great disorder. It is the cage. So the false sensations fell away, the false reactions fell away, the false "me versus others" fell away. But as we have said, it is microscopic, it slips back in again on a breeze, a stupidity, a mere trifle—a trifle which kept blocking and blocking up again a formidable new America.

All that made for a bizarre kind of state peopled only by more or less aggressive specimens (naturally everyone wants to take), and it somewhat resembled a nightmare in which at times there was still enough "me" to grow impatient with the nightmare: In the inner worlds of course, certainly! It's all very well, one is very happy living in those worlds. But it is here—HERE! How to make of this life here, this world here, something really worth living.... Haven't yet found the trick. That's all I can say. That's what I am up against.¹ "But still," I replied, "here, in the physical life, there are quite a few beautiful things" (I did not understand then to what an extent Mother was seeking something else, something radically different for the earth, I was still dreaming of the virgin forest and sailing around the world), "there are adventures at sea...." Oh, such a trifle! she interrupted, It's nothing, childish. The physical life—yes, it's nothing at all (as it is now). All these things of the physical life—nothing at all, nothing at all! Its childish, not worth thinking about for a second. Even those momentary breakthroughs one can have in life before having found the Truth, when one is on the way and suddenly has glimpses of an immortal consciousness, the contact with a truth, even that.... These experiences are all very fine, it's very good, but it's on the way. It is not THAT. What is worthwhile is to seek the true SENSE of life: to what does it really correspond? What is there behind it all? Why has the Lord created it? What is He heading toward? What does He want? What does He want to happen? That, we have not found. What does He want! He obviously has a secret, and He is keeping it. Well, I want His secret. Why is everything the way it is? It's certainly not the way it is just to be the way it is—it's meant to become something else. And its this something else that I want.¹ She so much wanted the beauty of this world and the sweetness and the truth of this world here. A true earth.

Even this "I want" was going to melt away. She was made to live the Secret, she was slowly taught the Secret in her own body—for ultimately what wants to know? It is the Mind that wants to know, the body wants only to live. Things had become absolutely "infernal" downstairs, in that corridor and at every door—sometimes She would go faint in her bathroom, the only quiet place to faint without causing a commotion. Then She would start again. But She did not faint from over fatigue (although fatigue there was, enough to crush a thirty-year-old man, but it was annulled or diffused, you could say): all of a sudden, She would simply go through everything to such a degree that her body escaped her, as if her body were no longer sufficiently hers, so it fell down... to remind her of its existence. It's a very impersonal sort of state in which that whole habit of reacting to outside things, the things around me, has completely vanished. But nothing has come to replace it. It is... an undulation. That's all. She went off into the undulation. When will it change into something else? I don't know. You can't, you just can't try! You can't make an effort, you can't try to find out, because intellectual activity immediately comes in, and that has nothing to do with it. So I have concluded that it's something one must become, something one must be and live.... But how? In what way? I don't know.² You cannot try to become the new species! Because it is the old species that is trying with its super-old methods. There are no methods! You cannot try to become what is not (or apparently not); how could you do it? You can try to become a mathematician or a poet or even a yogi in the cosmic consciousness, but how do you try to do what is nonexistent? There's no path, nobody went there! So She lived that undulation, interspersed with abrupt returns to the cage.

The Double World

Yet it is in those returns to the cage that our secret lies. To speak of the other state is all very well, it is even rather fascinating—to look at Mother was an adventure, an inexhaustible adventure. It was new every time, as if you were entering the future beforehand—but that transition is the heart of the mystery. How does one get there, and why does one return to the old state again? Mother lived that sort of back-and-forth movement hundreds of times, for years on end, and She always came back to the moment of the transition from one to the other as if it were the great Mystery. Each time, her description was very similar (it is a minute little thing), and each time it was like an enigma. A minute little thing which seems to contain the whole mystery of the world. What is bewildering is the subtlety of the problem. Take absolutely identical circumstances... a few hours—not even a day—apart: the same outer circumstances, the same inner circumstances—the "psychological condition" is the same; circumstances of life, the same; events, the same; people, no appreciable difference. And in one case, the body—that is, the cellular consciousness—feels a sort of eurhythmy and general harmony, everything dovetails in such a marvelous way, without rubbing, without friction—everythin functions and organizes itself in a total Harmony.... Then in the other case... everything is the same, the consciousness is the same and... something escapes—the perception of Harmony is no longer there. For what reason? One doesn't understand anymore. And then the body begins to function wrongly. But note that we might just as well say the world is going wrong—it is the same thing. It is really the problem of the body of the Earth. It's like running after something that escapes. Things become meaningless. In absolutely identical conditions—even the movements of the body (functional movements, I mean) may be identical, but they are felt to be disharmonious (these words are much too crude, it's more subtle than that), meaningless, disharmonious. And what escapes? You can't make it out.... More and more I have the impression of—what? How can it be explained? A question of vibrations in Matter. It's incomprehensible, completely eluding all mental law, all psychological law: a self-existent something.... So many question marks! The more one goes into it in detail, the more mysterious it becomes.³ And Mother sat with her eyes closed as though listening to the pulsations of that Matter: what makes the world go wrong—for the Harmony is HERE! It's so subtle! Mother resumed, it could almost be.... It's almost like being on the border between two worlds. It's the same world and it's—is it two aspects of this world? I can't even say that. Yet it's the SAME world; ALL is the Lord, He and nothing but He, only it's.... And so subtle, so subtle: ifyou go like this [Mother tilted her hand slightly to the right], it's perfectly harmonious; if you go like that [She tilted her hand slightly to the left], oof! It's... it's at once absurd, meaningless, and laborious, painful. But it's the SAME thing! It's all the same thing.... If you stand back from it and employ big words, you would say, "All this [Mother tilted her hand to one side] is Truth, and all that [to the other side] is Falsehood"—but it's the SAME thing! In one case, you have the sense of being carried—not only the body but the entire world, all circumstances—carried, floating in a beatific light toward an eternal Realization; and in the other case, its... deadening, heavy, sorrowful—exactly the same thing! Almost the same material vibrations. And its so subtle, so incomprehensible—there's a distinct impression of it TOTALLY eluding even the highest conscious will. What is it? What is it?... If we found that, perhaps we would have it all—the total Secret.³

Two worlds in one.

A microscopic "something" that makes you tilt to this side or that. And Mother was very familiar with the microscopic battles: She spent her time in them. A breath, and you move to that side. It was almost as if She were going back to the obscure Origin. The moment when something tilted the wrong way in Matter (not in the head, the stupidity is plain there, but at the source, at the first moment). That must have been how Truth became Falsehood. But "how"—what is that "how"?... I am up against this fact: how did Truth become Falsehood ?³ How did it become death, you could say, that moment of death in the world. Death is not in the nature of the world, it is the false world we see, it is something... that became distorted—and that needs to be set right again. For the whole world. A cosmic "accident." I am not asking myself intellectually—that doesn't interest me at all! It is here, in Matter.... It is double, it is double.³ Oh, how long those words have been ringing in my ears and are still ringing: it is double, it is double.... HOW did it happen? (But not just "how" as in a story: the MECHANISM). And how will we get out of it?... with a sort of prescience I see that only the body can know—that's the extraordinary thing!³

If we knew that mechanism, we would get out of death. We would see Mother, we would see Sri Aurobindo, we would see the supramental world—because it is here, everything is here! It is not on the "other side"—the other side of what? It is double, it is double.... A veil of death over something which is the same. And which changes all life. It is the same world!

Obviously, one must seek in the body.

Mother was to seek. She wanted to UNDO the mechanism. Undo death.

What happened? Or what is happening.

She left, apparently. But Mother does not like flights, as we know.

Physical Universalization

She would live that "undulation," then again return to the painful cage, ten times, fifty times a day. Can it even be said that it was the "I" that made the cage? For quite some time She no longer had an "I"—an "I" in Matter, then? Perhaps.... We do not really know, we are walking through the forest with her. But sometimes, "the other thing" came and revealed itself, emerged from Matter—yes, it was there, and it was indeed the same world, it was not that She went into another consciousness (unless the body itself went into another consciousness: true Matter, perhaps, cellular Matter was emerging from behind its veil of inertia): The whole atmosphere became solid...⁴ That is what is so surprising, every time Mother touched the other thing, She said "the world is becoming concrete," as if it had been abstract before! As if before there really had been nobody in it, as if it were a copy of something: All, all had the taste of the Lord. I don't know how to make it clear. It was quite material, as if you had a mouthful of it, everything was full of it—it was like that. In such a physical way! Like.... You might compare it to the most delicious taste you could ever have—very, very material. It was like closing your hand on something solid—such a warm, soft vibration, and so strong, so powerful, so concrete!... It was as if I had a mouthful of the most marvelous foods one could imagine. And my hands were gathering it up in the atmosphere—it was so funny!⁴ But curiously, it seemed that approaching that cellular Matter—although it was there, right there, just below the surface—was accompanied by a kind of spreading of consciousness as if you were thrust... goodness knows where, perhaps to the furthermost bounds of the universe. A more and more rapid and encompassing undulation. Until the day in the beginning of 1962, just before the great Turning Point, when Mother fainted once again, but this time with a better perception of the phenomenon: This time I was alone in my bathroom.... For a long time my body had been telling me, "I've got to lie down, I've got to lie down." And I would very sternly reply, "You don't have time!" So then this happened. But it had its own way of lying down! It just stretched out right where it was.... I was spreading over the world—spreading PHYSICALLY, that's the strange thing! The sensation is in the CELLS. There was a movement of diffusion in me, becoming more and more rapid and intense, and then suddenly I found myself on the floor. And Mother laughed, then She went on to explain, It's a sort of... decentralization. You see, to form a body all the cells are concentrated by a kind of centripetal force that binds them together. Well, now it's just the opposite A kind of centrifugal force seems to be dispersing them. When it gets a bit too much I go out of my body; outwardly I seem to faint—but I don't faint, I remain fully conscious. So obviously this creates a sort of... bizarre disorganization.⁵

That was when they wanted to give her a dose of Coramine to cure her of the new world.

In the end, when She could no longer fight, She swallowed the Coramine anyway, because it made them happy. With disastrous results to her consciousness. A drug means of course an instantaneous veil over the cellular consciousness. It is the return of the possession by the physical Mind —in other words, the return of the possession by death.

But the problem was there, becoming more and more frequent and pressing: I constantly find myself facing this problem, which is utterly concrete, absolutely material when you're dealing with cells that have to remain cells and not vaporize into some nonphysical reality, and at the same time have to have a suppleness, a lack of rigidity, enabling them to widen indefinitely....⁶ To hold or withstand the crushing supramental Vibration, we must widen (it is "crushing" only because of our smallness and cellular clogging), and when we widen or lose the "center of coagulation," as She said, what happens? How can we live that?... It is probably always the same thing, it seems impossible because it has never been done, but if it is achieved once, we realize that only a tiny little "something" prevented it from being possible. At the very beginning, in 1959, it also did not seem possible for the body to withstand the "bubbling porridge" of the Supermind. The right method has to be found, that is all. Everything is a question of method. Only, it is the body that must find the method. Mentally, it's all very easy. abolition of limits set by the ego, indefinite expansion with a movement following the rhythm of the Becoming. Vitally.... But this body! It's very difficult, very difficult to do without the body losing its center (how can I put it?)... its center of coagulation—without it dissolving into the surrounding mass. Although, if one were in a natural environment, with mountains and forests and rivers, with lots of space and lots of natural beauty, it could be rather pleasant! But it's physically impossible to take a single step outside one's body without meeting unpleasant, painful things. At times you come in contact with a pleasant substance, something harmonious, warm, vibrating with a higher light; it happens. But it's rare. Flowers, yes, sometimes flowers.... But this material world, oh I—you get clawed and scraped and battered by all sorts of things which... which just don't blossom. How hard it all is! Oh, how closed human life is! How shriveled, hardened, without light, without warmth... let alone joy.⁶ This is exactly what She had felt seventy-nine years earlier in her little child's chair, at the age of five.

Mother was looking for the something that makes this Matter shrivel up. That moment in evolution when things became warped. There is but one thing, one root, however we consider the "problem." A microscopic something that makes it the same world and yet no longer the same. It is wide; it is shriveled up. It lives; it dies. So where is the life that is no longer this life or this death, but is nevertheless Life? The true life.

It is double, it is double....

All the same, one must have nerves of steel.

The Great Pulsations

Mother was going to receive the answer through facts, as usual: a brutal answer. Nineteen sixty-two is the year of the Cuban crisis, of China's attack on the northern borders of India. Instead of "arranging" things, the Force (let us say the one that rules things and moves the world, the Shakti) was going to upset everything—a complete mess, in the body. But it seems that such is Her way of functioning, everywhere: Her way of putting things in order is to disorganize everything—evidently to bring in a new organization. But when it comes to the body... which no longer knows quite how to pulse, how to breathe? During the last meeting I was to have with Mother downstairs, before She withdrew to her room upstairs, never again to come out of it except to rejoin Sri Aurobindo under the big yellow flame tree eleven years later—another eleven years—Mother laughed a lot. In fact, She was making fun of me, and I was quite upset, but nevertheless, a little warning escaped her which should have alerted me, had I been less furious. First, She no longer wanted her words recorded: it's better not to waste the tapes. I tried to make her understand that her path could be of interest to the world later. Well, let's make a date for fifty years from now... Will you have a white beard in fifty years?⁷ The joke seemed questionable in the first place, but on top of it, Mother said that her Agenda had "no importance": If I make it through to the end, it will be done, WE'LL SEE. And if I go.... But I don't intend to. And She laughed, and I grated my teeth. Listen, she said, I can tell you: when I am like that, when I seem to be making fun of things, it's because at times it's really dangerous, really dangerous. I can't stand drama. I don't want to be tragic. I would rather make fun of everything than be tragic! Instead of putting on grand airs and saying it's difficult, I make jokes. I don't like drama—I just don't like it. The greatest, loftiest, noblest, most sublime things can be said with simplicity. There's no need to be dramatic, to see things tragically. I don't want to be a victim or a hero or... or a martyr or anything of the kind! You know, I don't like the story of Christ. That's exactly the point. The crucified god—no thanks. If he loses his skin, he loses it—so what, it doesn't matter. You understand? Well, that's it. That's precisely the situation.⁸

This was on March 13. Three days later, Mother could not take a step without "fainting"; not only that, but no mental vibration could go through her head anymore—that is, an appearance of complete imbecility: all the vital and mental strength was gone. There remained only a body... which could not remain standing alone. The body was a wreck, you know⁹ she said after, laughing. You must accept to be a total imbecile¹⁰—are you ready? she asked me later, *for I had enough *of the meanderings of the Mind and yearned for more radical ways. And I was ready, imbecility did not bother me that much, because the Mind seemed to me an imbecilic instrument in any case, except possibly for writing a book! (Although I discovered that a book could be written without the mind; I even had a sort of demonstration of how Sri Aurobindo did it when tens of thousands of lines were passing directly through the cells of his hands.) But I did not quite grasp the extent of the upheaval, and Mother wanted to spare me: Because of the number of years, I have had to do it quickly; that's why drastic measures had to be used.¹¹ And we do understand the enormous crust that covers the body and prevents it from being itself: we cannot take one step without thinking or drawing upon vital strength—the body never functions by itself, except sometimes when the doctors declare it is lost and stop poisoning it, then it has its own "miraculous" way of recovering—it simply escapes the miracles of medicine and performs its own little natural miracle. But generally, the crust is too thick and the body cannot extricate itself from the collective suggestion. Mother was radically freed from the suggestion in order to learn how to live in a body left to itself. Mother was only a body, a sum total of cells... that had forgotten to live in the usual way. Then, after a month of this regime, her heart failed—even the heartbeats could no longer remember very well how to function—which, for a body, is akin to death. But then, from within that "death," a new kind of beat emerged, one could almost say a new body within the old, a new way of being, living, seeing, breathing, understanding and feeling. A new type on earth, really. The first embryo of a new species. Man has been accustomed to thinking that the beings of future evolution, of the next species will be... divine beings; that is to say, bodiless beings, appearing in the light, anyway all the gods in human conception—but it's not that at all!¹²

Indeed, it was not that at all.

The first signs of this radical experience took place during the night of April 12, 1962, when the old body was utterly failing. Mother could not use many words to tell what was happening, but when She was able to express herself again, She began to speak in English, as if Sri Aurobindo were controlling the process, and the words were brief: It was the formidable pulsations of the eternal, stupendous Love, only Love: each pulsation of the Love was carrying the universe further in its manifestation. This was going on and on and on and on.... The heavens are ringing with chants of Victory. And the certitude that what is to be done Is DONE and the Supramental Manifestation IS REALIZED...¹³ At that instant, it was done. The work of Sri Aurobindo and Mother was accomplished, as if this one pure contact with That, in an earthly body, had made the Work be. Perhaps much like the first time in the world when a mineral object came in contact with Life—or dissolved enough to allow the first stirring of Life to take place. Mother's body was half-dissolved. The new "something" came in contact with the earth. It entered a terrestrial body.... What entered? We have no words apt for what appertains to another species; Mother said Supreme Love, but it is merely what was there in the depths of the cells, free of any coating; and it was everywhere instantly: it was the whole universe. A pulsating universe, she was later to say. Without the mental and vital cage, the material universe was like one pulsation, one single beating thing: All the results of the Falsehood had disappeared: Death was an illusion, Sickness was an illusion, Ignorance was an illusion—something that had no reality, no existence.... Only Love, and Love, and Love, and Love—immense, formidable, stupendous, carrying everything.... And the thing is DONE. Then She added, this time in French, Later on, I will explain it more clearly. The instrument is not yet ready.... Now, let us get to work.¹⁴

Get to work to make that live in a body that is... capable. This "new" thing (It's nothing new! Mother exclaimed. What's new is the capacity to perceive the thing¹⁴), this something in the depths of the cells had to find the way to beat normally in a body. It was like creating a new body in the old one or using the old one as a support for the new. Mother's experience had nothing to do with any kind of cosmic super-vision blah-blah-blah as all the others had had on the summits of consciousness: it was the experience of her body, an earthly body, like everyone else's: It is made of exactly the same thing, with the same elements, I eat the same things, and it was made in just the same way. And it was as dull, as dark, as unconscious, as stubborn as all other bodies in the world.... It began when the doctors declared I was seriously ill, that was the beginning. Because the entire body was emptied of its habits and forces, and then, slowly, slowly, the cells woke up to a new receptivity.... In short, it is the cosmic consciousness of the body—its natural consciousness. For the animal to become a man, it didn't take anything else than the infusion of a consciousness—a mental consciousness—and now, it's the awakening of that consciousness which was there, deep down, in the very depths. The central light of the cell. And Mother said, It's a denial of all the spiritual assertions of the past: "If you want to live fully conscious of the divine life, leave your body—the body cannot follow." Well, Sri Aurobindo came and said, "Not only can the body follow, but it can be the base that will manifest the Divine...." The work remains to be done.'s They used to go far, far above, in deep meditation, into something more and more ethereal and thin and "marvelous," which made the world appear as an illusion—and indeed the crust of this world is an illusion: "Death is an illusion, sickness is an illusion," she said, but behind or beneath the crust, there is a corporeal, material and universal reality infinitely more marvelous and concrete—the true concrete—without death and disease and all our Ignorance, and yet it is an earthly life in a real earthly body: the true Matter. These material cells had to acquire the capacity to receive and manifest the consciousness [is it "receive," or simply remove what is standing in the way?] and what permits a radical transformation is that instead of an ascent which is so to speak eternal and indefinite [from plane to plane of consciousness, as all the yoga manuals for the last four thousand years recommend; and then you dissolve up above, at the summit], there is the appearance of a new type. The awakening of that consciousness which was there, deep down, in the very depths. The mind has withdrawn, the vital has withdrawn, everything has withdrawn; when I was supposedly ill, the mind had gone away, the vital had gone away, and the body was left to itself—purposely. And that's why, it's precisely because the vital and mind had gone that it looked like a very serious illness. And then, in the body left to itself the cells little by little started awakening to the consciousness... the consciousness which had been infused into the body through the vital (from the mind to the vital and from the vital to the body) started slowly, slowly emerging.... The same consciousness which was the vital's and the mind's monopoly has become corporeal: the consciousness acts in the body's cells. The body's cells grow into something conscious, entirely conscious. A consciousness which is INDEPENDENT, absolutely independent of the vital consciousness or the mental consciousness: it's a corporeal consciousness.... Then, out of that, once it has been thoroughly kneaded (there's no knowing how much time it will take), a new form will be born, which will be the form Sri Aurobindo called supramentalit will be... anything, I don't know what those beings will be called. What will be their mode of expression? How will they make themselves understood and so on?... There will certainly be stages in the manifestation with, perhaps, a specimen that will come and say, "Here is how it is." And Mother closed her eyes: One can see that.... Only, when man emerged from the animal, there was no way to record—to note and record the process; now it's quite different, so it will be more interesting.... Although Mother had some doubts: But even at this moment in time, the vast majority—the vast majority—of human intellectuality is perfectly satisfied being busy with itself satisfied with its little progress going round in circles.... It doesn't even, doesn't even have a desire for something else! Which means the advent of the superhuman being may well... it may very well go unnoticed, or not be understood. We can't say, because there is no analogy; it's obvious that if one of the apes, the large apes, had met the first man, he would just have felt there was a somewhat... strange being, that's all.¹⁵

In other words, the experience of 1962 is the first crossing of the veil, or of the web. The enormous web that conditions all our human existence in a body. The genetic and atavistic and millennial covering that blocks the working of a pure little cell. An evolutionary experiment as new as the first mental vibration in a piece of gray matter—which filled everything with grayness. It is the dissolution of the grayness of existence. It is the pure cell, directly expressing consciousness. Another world in the world. And when I asked Mother how her experience could in some way influence the earth, She exclaimed, But since it's taking place in one body, it can take place in all bodies! I am not made of anything different from others.¹⁵

Now to work. Mother is 84 years old. There only remained to "work out and create the instrument" capable of bringing that "other world" or true cellular mode into this one, to develop the new body, which could not even stand very well on its two feet—such are the eleven years that were left to Mother before coming to the Mystery of 1973, the real, great Mystery of this whole story which is perhaps the world's own Mystery. Eleven years in which the incredible ((process" unfolded, step by step, with all its changes of time, vision, space and sense organs: really the making of a new body. Until the year 1973, when something took place. Something happened... what? Perhaps the complete fusion of the two worlds. Sometimes we seem to understand Sri Aurobindo's "mathematical formula"... minus one unknown. There is an unknown.

Perhaps we shall find it at the end.

But now, Mother concluded, there is a certitude. The result is still very far—very far ahead, there is much to do before the crust, the outermost surface experience as it is, can manifest what takes place within (not "within" in the spiritual depths: within in the body). For it to be able to manifest what is within.... That will come last, which is very good because if it came earlier, we would neglect the work; we would be so happy that we'd forget to complete the work. Everything must have been done within, everything must be fully and thoroughly changed, then the outside will express it.¹⁵ Sri Aurobindo had said the same thing: from within outward.

The "outward" is perhaps the crust of the world.

In the end, it is nothing: one puff and it will be there. It is the rest that is difficult.

Perhaps we are very near to that puff.

And the veil will be torn.

Something wholly new, wholly unexpected, which they had never thought of.¹⁵