Mother or The New Species - II

16: The Body is Everywhere

Now the forest is beginning to get very dense, and I must admit I feel a little lost. For eleven years, I was the witness of thousands of experiences; I traveled on and on into tomorrow with Mother, but how can one describe a whole world, how can a man, suddenly falling on the planet in Rueil-Malmaison, ¹⁰⁰ describe all the rest of the world? Everything is new, from A to Z. So?... Where is the "right" experience, the one that counts? There is Chantilly¹⁰¹ and Hong-Kong and then Alaska and.... I landed in Mother's large room upstairs, with its immense bay windows opening onto a yellow flame tree and coconut palms, and sky everywhere. A tiny silhouette, white and all alone in her wheelchair. There were garlands of jasmine over the back of the chair; there was a big golden-yellow wool carpet, it was like walking on moss. And then those cool hands, almost cold, those eyes where everything seemed to plunge elsewhere, so much elsewhere, into the True thing as if you were breathing at last. You felt like resting your head there and never moving again from that intimate vastness, sweet and clear, so soft, where you sank deep as though into the love of your own heart, a love you did not know you had, as if you discovered another being in you, as if you had long lived in a caricature of yourself, and all of a sudden it was there, everything was changed, you laid down the burden and went off into your own millennia. One was lost to view in Mother, one went into a vast and sweet Country, forever known, and wished one could stay there forever.

"Now to work."... We are here to work, we are here to make that pass through to this side. Then everything will be full, every second will be full of all the millennia and all the vastnesses. More and more it was filtering into Mother, as if She had changed density since March. Before, you always felt a kind of coagulated Power near her, you were seized in a ray; now... it was something else. Yes, perhaps, as if the ray were everywhere: you were not seized, you went off in her. It felt like Sri Aurobindo. And yet it was powerful, tremendously powerful, but powerful as if it came from every side simultaneously, without any particular center: a bath, quite exactly. An immense bath in something that went off into infinity. And very soft. Cool like her hands.

The Great Rhythm

Her "illness" had left its mark, She looked so frail and so extraordinarily tranquil, that was what was so striking: nothing stirred in her body, She seemed transparent, things passed through her as if they went on to reverberate. who knows where, in infinity perhaps, or nowhere, engulfed within that snowy immobility. And She had her little mischievous smile as if She had just played a good joke on everybody, and there you found Mother again. She quietly narrated her latest adventures, that sort of universal pulsation (and I was suddenly reminded of the first time She had felt the "supramental descent" in 1956, there was "a sort of pulsation in the cells"): And it was like gusts—like great gusts ending in explosions. And each one of these gusts was a span of the universe. It was Love in its supreme essence—which has nothing to do with what people normally understand by that word.... The universe as we know it no longer existed; it was a sort of bizarre illusion, bearing no relation to THAT. There was only the truth of the universe, with those great gusts of color—they were colored—great gusts colored with something that is the essence of color.¹ The whole creation was colored waves, but not like the colors we have here, it was... this endlessly unfolding creative Vibration.² And I was wondering how it was possible, with that Consciousness, that supreme Consciousness, to relate to the present, distorted universe. How to make the connection without losing that Consciousness? A relationship between the two seemed impossible.³ "But did you go out of your body, or what? " I asked, because this kind of experience is quite possible when you climb above, in the cosmic consciousness. And Mother gave me a somewhat enigmatic answer (She did not understand the phenomenon very well herself): It can truly be said that for a short while the body went out of my consciousness completely. I didn't leave my body; the body left the consciousness.... Its the first time I have tried to explain it. In fact, it's the first time I am looking at it. And it's interesting. An interesting phenomenon.... For instance, I am walking a little now, with someone's assistance, to get the body used to it again. And when I started walking, I became aware of a rather peculiar state... I might describe it as: what gives me the illusion of a body. [And I quite understand now what Mother meant: to be one particular body felt like a kind of illusion.] I entrust it to the person I walk with. In other words, its not my responsibility: the other person has to make sure it doesn't fall, doesn't bump into anything—you see what I mean. And the corporeal consciousness is a limitless consciousness, like a material equivalent or expression of these gusts—it's like waves, but waves with no.... Not separate waves, but a MOVEMENT of waves; a movement of what might be called material, corporeal waves, as vast as the earth, but not... not round, not flat.... Something giving a great sense of infinity but moving in waves. And this wave movement is the movement of life. And the consciousness (the body-consciousness, I suppose) floats along in this, with a sensation of eternal peace.... But it's not an "expanse"—that's not the word for it. It is a limitless movement, with a very harmonious and very tranquil rhythm, very vast, very calm. And this movement is life itself I walk around the room, and that is what is walking. And it is very silent—there is no thought; there is barely, barely the ability to observe.... And an infinity of movements and vibrations of something that could be the essence of thoughts and that moves there, rhythmically, in a movement of waves without beginning or end, with a condensation like this [vertically] with a condensation like that [horizontally], and a movement of expansion. That is, a sort of contraction, concentration, and then expansion, diffusion.⁴ A pulsation. A pulsating "body" that would be everyone's body, that would be any body. If I spoke carelessly, I could now say "what used to be my body," although I know well enough it's still alive!⁵ And She laughed.

But how to make the connection between That and this? The world without a web and the world in the web.

The Battlefield

She knew painfully enough that her body was alive. Strangely, the only link or bridge between that "truth of the universe" and the old bodily substance, the old body, we might say, was pain: So I felt the pain: it was the first sign of individuality coming back. Other than that, there was nothing any more—no body, no individual, no limits. But it's strange, I have made a strange discovery: I used to think it was the individual who experienced pain and disabilities and all the misfortunes of human life; well, I perceived that what experiences misfortunes is not the individual, not my body, but that each misfortune, each pain, each disability has its own individuality as it were, and each one represents a battle. And my body is a world of battles. It is the battlefield.⁶ And suddenly, it dawned on me that that body, that little conglomerate sitting in a wheelchair, was, so to say, the only terrestrial bridge between that true Matter, total, ONE, which moved in an unbroken Harmony, and this old, opaque, divided and painful Matter—our bodies. She was on both sides at once, and it was as if, through her, in her, in that conglomerate, the pain of the world had to be conquered for the other thing to infiltrate. It was not "her" pain, it was the very screen of the world, that which prevents it from receiving and living that. It was through her old substance that that could percolate from one world into the other. What would we say about a fish breathing its first free oxygen, and its suffocation when it falls back into the water? And yet, if it does not fall back, if it does not suffocate with the others, what will build the bridge between the two? In a way, She was the site of the veil—yes, the site of the battle.

The place of junction. The ONLY sensation that remains in the old way is physical pain. And really, those points of pain... they seem like the SYMBOLIC POINTS of what remains of the old consciousness. Pain is the one thing I sense the way I used to. Food, for instance, taste, smell, vision, hearing—all that's completely changed. They belong to another rhythm. The whole story is a fairy tale.... And the only concrete thing left in this world—this world of illusion—is pain. It seems to me the very essence of Falsehood. But what feels it feels it very concretely!... I clearly see it's false, but that doesn't stop my body from feeling it—and there is a reason: it is the battlefield. I have even been forbidden to utilize my knowledge, power and force to annul the pain in the way I used to (and I used to do it very well). That has been totally forbidden. But I have seen that something else is in sight. Something else is in the making.... It can't be called a miracle because it's not a miracle, but it's something wonderful—the unknown.... When will it come? How will it come? I don't know. But it's interesting.⁷

A fairy tale for the whole world?

And Mother made this very little and... mysterious remark: It's not a body that suffers: it is suffering that suffers. Its a point. ...⁸ There is something dizzying in that little sentence. The very vertigo of the world. Perhaps it is better to leave it for the time being....

Then the experiences began multiplying as soon as her body began to recover. As if there were a regulating Wisdom, perhaps the very Wisdom of this totality of consciousness from which we are cut off in a mental body, because birds and animals are not like that, their bodies are not like that—perhaps we are the only real featherbrains! Their suffering is not at all like human suffering, except for those we have tamed and which are beginning to ape us: it is as if their suffering had no individuality, were not fastened and held tight to the mesh of a screaming and medical "I". Perhaps in them suffering does not like to suffer. But that is another story. Take this example: someone accidentally bumps me (it does happen) with an object or a part of his body. Well, it is NEVER something external: it happens INSIDE—the body's consciousness is much larger than my body...⁹ When there is a relaxation in someone, or when there is a tensing up, I feel it: something in me relaxes, or tenses up; but not "in me" here, like this (Mother in her armchair): in me THERE (Mother in the "other" person). It's becoming more and more like that. The reaction here [in Mother's body] isn't any more intimate than the reaction in others. And it's barely more perceptible: it all depends on the state of attentiveness and concentration of the consciousness. But the consciousness isn't—is no longer individual at all. I am positive about that. A consciousness... which is becoming more and more total. And now and then—now and then—when everything is "favorable," it becomes the Lord's Consciousness, the Consciousness of everything, and then it's... a drop of Light. Nothing but Light.¹⁰

Then the experiences started getting more severe, one coming upon the heels of the other, one could say, as though happening hour upon hour; how often I saw Mother suddenly stop, close her eyes as if She were plunging within, sometimes even groan like a child, then resume as if nothing had happened, except for her pallor—there was a key to find, a key for the whole world, for the pain of the world. It was not just a matter of swallowing the suffering of this one or that one, it was a matter of finding the mechanism, the vibration that undoes. To "undo" does not mean cure but put the True back into place, there where suffering does not exist.

And finally, the experience became very clear, brutally so, exactly one year after the experience of the great pulsations. It was April 6, 1963. I am conscious of the body, but it isn't the consciousness of this body (Mother touches her body): it's the consciousness of THE Body—it may be anyone's body. I am conscious, for instance, of vibrations of disorder (most often they come in the form of suggestions of disorder) in order to see whether they are accepted and have an effect. Let's take the example of a suggestion of hemorrhage, (I mention hemorrhage because it will soon come into the picture). Under the higher Influence, the body consciousness rejects it. Then begins the battle (all this takes place all the way down in the cells, in the material consciousness) between what we could call the "will for hemorrhage," for example, and the reaction of the body's cells. But it's very like a real battle, a real confrontation. And all of a sudden, there's something like a general issuing a command and saying, "What's this!"... You understand, that general is conscious of the higher forces, the higher realities and the divine intervention in Matter; and after trying to use the will, this reaction, that feeling of peace and so on, suddenly he is SEIZED by a very strong determination and issues a command—in no time the effect begins to make itself felt, and little by little everything returns to order. All this takes place in the material consciousness. Physically, the body has all the sensations—but not the hemorrhage, you understand. But it does have the sensations, that is, all the sensory effects. All right. Once the battle is over, I take a look and wonder (I observe the whole thing, I see my body, which has been fairly shaken, mind you), I say to myself "What in the world is all this?"A few days afterwards, I receive a letter from someone. In the letter: the whole story, the attack, the hemorrhage, how suddenly the being is SEIZED, the consciousness is SEIZED with an irresistible will, and hears words—the very words that were uttered HERE. The result: saved (he was dying), saved, cured.... I remembered my episode... and began to understand that my body is everywhere!! You see, it's not a question of just these cells here: it's a question of cells in, well, quite a lot of people, hundreds, maybe thousands.... It is THE body—this is not my body any more than other bodies it is seized with such things all the time! All the time, all the time, all the time, you know, they spring tip, brrm! pounce on it, brrm! from this side, that side, every which way. So I have to keep still, and then I start waging the battle.... But then what tremendous, prodigious power has to be *EMBODIED in the physical cells to withstand all that!...¹¹

Twenty times a day She went through death.

She was embodying the other thing in the body of the world. All those miseries were the place of junction with the other thing, one might almost say the means of junction. It was not a matter of curing a little pain here or there, or even thousands of little or big pains, but of transforming THE pain—that pain may be seized by its own reality of love. Or, to put it more "scientifically," to replace this obscurity, this opaque point (and painful because it is opaque) by the luminous fluidity of true Matter: that pulsation, those great waves of Harmony without division. So that it may begin to twinkle everywhere.

Through the old painful Matter of her body, it was beginning to twinkle in the body of the world.

After the lesson was drawn from this story, suddenly something arose in the general body consciousness: an aspiration, something so pure, so sweet... so sweet... something like an entreaty that Truth and Light may at last be manifested here, in this. Not "here in this" (Mother touches her own body): it was everywhere. Then there was a contact—there was a contact—and a pale blue Light, very sweet, very bright, and an Assurance. It lasted only a second, but it was like a new chapter suddenly opening up.¹¹

Only a contact—with WHAT IS THERE.

Then it will be the fairy tale for the whole world.

The Third Position

And by the same token, a whole big chunk of spiritual life collapsed. A big chunk of material life, too. Or rather, the collapse of that material wall or partition, that web, automatically and simultaneously brought with it the collapse of the whole terrestrial spiritual mode, as if one were the reverse side and the accomplice of the other—what will the materialists say when they learn that everything they loathe and refuse is their own lovely offspring? Yet that is what happened during that month of April 1962 (and probably before, but Sri Aurobindo said nothing about it).

Since man has been man, he has vaguely perceived, first in his sleep, then with closed eyes, in his "lost" moments (lost for the material life), all kinds of forces and influences which assumed one face or another, frightening or sweet, luminous or dark, threatening or beneficent; he has felt immense movements that carried him off to "heaven," like another kind of sleep within sleep, a luminous plunge, a radiant swoon from which one never fully recovers; sometimes he has perceived other mysterious movements, as if his own body or another body within this one were traveling, and he has found himself witnessing surprising scenes, which materially took place unexpectedly a few hours or a few days later; or else he has perceived over there, thousands of miles away, some earthly events, or some friends, some familiar landscapes, as if one could travel at will (though not yet completely) to any place in the world; he has perceived strange ill spells that brought all kinds of little ills to his life and around him, or exalting lights; he has received knowledge he did not know he had, information he had no idea of; and sometimes he has awakened cured without knowing how it happened (and other times ill without knowing why either). Through the centuries, he has systematized his knowledge, cultivated a sort of conscious sleep, cultivated meditations and transcendence, strange and not always happy powers. He has distinguished some planes of consciousness, some worlds, recognized some saviors here or there and many little devils everywhere. To navigate through this great mystery of the world, religions were convenient and reassuring, or else sorcerers, initiates—except for those who positively felt nothing at all. But perhaps it was only because they had thicker skins. Anyway, there were "thinkers," and even geniuses (and not necessarily baptized) who did feel "something" up above, such as a downpour of inspiration or a flow of music or "intuitions," some regions of revelation and vivid light—something that exceeded this little confined body and even exceeded its brain, as if the brain were only a receiver of something else. And then there were all those little animals around which behaved so infallibly, without even thinking about it(!), and what is "instinct" really? They say "God," they say the "Devil," they say "chromosomes," and the whole saintly or scientific lot. They have baptized and tamed everything with equations, Graeco-Latin terminology or holy water. And then they have made dictionaries or encyclicals depending on the particular taste or climate.

They have been going on with all that more or less comfortably—but....

There was a "but," just the same. They never really felt secure either on one side or the other. When everything was thoroughly "materialized," there remained the other side with its irrational surprises, and when they had thoroughly "spiritualized" everything, the other side brought them brutally back into the mud at the first occasion. And so the two went limping along, Matter and Spirit, like some unhappy couple unable to divorce and unable to get along, as if they were not on this side and that side, but were the two sides of the same Wall of incomprehension.

Well, it is that Wall that collapsed on April 13, 1962. And one does understand that it could only collapse in Matter, at the material and bodily level because that is where it is actually located. The division between materialists and spiritualists is not situated at the summit of human conscious thought, but in the cell. It is not a metaphysical division, it is a physical one. That is where the Wall is. And when it falls, there is no longer materialism or spiritualism, there is... something else. We could even say there is no longer Matter as we understand it or Spirit as we understand it, but something else. Something that is all ONE-but not ONE on the summits of thought (there is no thought left there!): ONE corporeally, cellularly, physiologically—and universally. Really another world, and yet the same. All now is changed, yet all is still the same,¹² said Sri Aurobindo.

It is also one of the first things Mother told me, just one month after her experience: Through yoga I had come to a sort of relationship with the material world based on the notion of the fourth dimension (of the innumerable inner dimensions opened up by yoga) and on the utilization of this attitude and state of consciousness. Using this sense of inner dimensions, and through perfecting the consciousness of the inner dimensions, I used to observe the relation between the material and the spiritual worlds.... [Mother used to go out of her body and travel everywhere, on all the planes]. But now the whole use of the sense of the fourth dimension—along with all it entails—seems superficial to me! And so much so that I can't recapture it...¹³ But of course! The so-called fourth dimension had merged with this one! The sense had become something else. Mother no longer needed to close her eyes and meditate and ascend from plane to plane to meet some far-removed Supreme, She no longer needed to go out of her body to know what was happening over there, to act upon this one's consciousness or cure that other one, or go into the past or the future—it was all there. The body is everywhere! No more need to "sleep" as we do, or enter deep inside the consciousness: there are no more depths! The depths are outside, with eyes wide open and in all the cells of the body—over there is here, tomorrow is here, yesterday is here. And the Divine is here, it is all Him, there is only That. And not some kind of Divine that is an extension of the other side of the Wall—there is no more "other side": there is only a certain way of being, of breathing, which is the Divine. And we strongly suspect, now, that men needed those states of "sleep" and "trance" and "meditation" and ((concentration," simply to be able to get through the mesh of the physical Mind. When the physical Mind "sleeps," the cage opens up and everything is here. So it looks like the "other side" to us, a "dream," but it is only the other side of the physical Mind, the more or less hazy or distorted "dream" of the old body trying to recall what it saw and lived through the mesh. And now that the mesh has naturally come undone, in the body, in the cells of the body, there is neither "dream" nor another side nor "planes of consciousness" nor "worlds": all that belongs to the Mind's geography. Everything is lived, instantly lived. Everything is touched, we might say. The whole world becomes concrete, palpable, immediate. Everything is a single plane, a single dimension embracing all dimensions. We no longer need "visions" because everything is a lived vision, anywhere in time or space. It is ANOTHER world... in this world. But not "inside" this one: it is the true world that is emerging and the other is like a kind of distorted caricature, indeed a dream—that is where the dream is. We dream the world... scientifically.

And we have begun to realize that it is a nightmare.

For not only is the fourth dimension collapsing, but also the third—which goes with the fourth one. Both are unreal (not in the Buddhist sense of illusion, because Buddhist illusionism is yet another sort of illusion, an illusion of the illusion), both are visual delusions, one might say, or tactile, physiological, congenital ones, of the same reality that can be really and totally perceived only at the cellular level: The other world, the three-dimensional world, is completely unreal; but now that one... (the four-dimensional world) seems... how could I put it?... conventional to me. Like a conventional transcription opening a particular type of approach to you. And as for expressing what the other, the true position is like.... It is so far beyond any intellectual state that I can't manage to put it into words. I know the words will come, but they will come through a series of lived experiences, experiences I haven't had yet. Well, that's the state I am in. I can't say more. I would prefer to make some progress before saying anything else.¹³

This series of lived experiences will make up her whole new life for eleven years; it will be the slow process of joining the experience of cellular life, what we might call the consciousness of true Matter, with the experience of the old body in the old Matter; something had still one foot on one side and one foot on the other and a bridge had to be built between the two—not built intellectually: built physiologically. A new mode of being. Another "position." A new kind of body with new organs. At the age of 84, Mother was waking up with old, outer organs giving a false perception of the world and inner organs giving another kind of false perception of the world. It was as if She had to work out in her body the transition from the old three-dimensional world to the other one... rather like passing suddenly from fish to bird, in one and the same body.

And that is why it suddenly dawned on her in a concrete, material, physiological way that the scientific position could not provide the solution to the problem any more than the spiritual position could. It was not a question of one or the other, but of something else. You could no more build the new organs or the new mode of being and breathing by seeking it with false eyes through a microscope than by seeking it with other kinds of false eyes through meditation: I thought for a time, a very long time, that if Science went to its furthest possible limits (if this is conceivable), it would join up with true Knowledge. In the study of the composition of Matter, for example—by pressing the investigation further and further on—a point would be reached where the two would meet. But when I had that experience of passing from the eternal Truth-Consciousness [the universal pulsation] to the consciousness of the individualized world, well... it appeared impossible to me. And ifyou ask me now, I think that this possibility of Science pushed to its extreme limits joining up with true Knowledge, and this impossibility of any true conscious connection with the material world are both incorrect. There is something else. And more and more these days, I find myself facing the whole problem as if I had never seen it before...¹³ Because She was facing the problem in her body. It was no longer metaphysical, it was purely physical. The "other thing" is truly another thing. Not an improvement, a hyper-precision or even a glorification of the old: something different. Both paths [science and spirituality] may be leading toward a third point, and that third point is what I am at present... not exactly studying. I am rather in quest of it—the point where the two paths merge into a third that would be the true Thing." She told me this just one month after the radical experience. But in any case, if it could be absolutely total, objective, scientific knowledge pushed to its extreme limits would certainly bring you to the threshold. That's what Sri Aurobindo means. But he also says it's fatal, because all those who went in for that knowledge believed in it as an absolute truth, thus closing the door to the other approach. In this respect it is fatal. From my own experience, though, I could say to all those who believe exclusively in the spiritual approach, the approach through inner experience, that this—at least if it's exclusive—is equally fatal. For it reveals to them ONE aspect, ONE truth of the Whole—but not THE Whole. The other side seems just as indispensable to me, for when I was so utterly in that supreme Realization, this other falsified, outer realization was undeniably just a distortion (and probably accidental) of something EQUALLY TRUE. This "something" is what we are seeking. And perhaps not merely seeking—we may be taking part in the MAKING of it.... Something none can yet imagine, for so far it hasn't come into being. It is an expression yet to come.¹³

And Mother remained silent for a long time, bent over, as if listening to the future pulsating in her body. *This is exactly the state of consciousness I am living in now. It's as if I were facing the same eternal problem but... *FROM A NEW POSITION. These positions—the spiritual and the "materialist" (if you can call it that) positions—which consider themselves exclusive are inadequate, not only because neither one will accept the other, but because even accepting and uniting them both won't solve the problem. Something else is needed, a third position that isn't the result of these two but something still to be discovered, which will probably open the door to total Knowledge. Well, that's where I stand.¹³

A third position to be constructed in Matter.

Something that would be able to move with those great waves without vanishing everywhere. Something that could perceive itself in all other bodies without forgetting "its own" body on the way, live in any time without forgetting the present, express its perception through organs nonexistent as yet... and communicate with other bodies that have remained in the old rhythm without dying from the shock of them.

Something that could live outside death while remaining in a mortal body and in a world of death.

How can one, physically, pass through death?

Because all this is the consciousness of the body, a cellular consciousness—and what is left if the old body disintegrates? Even when conscious, the cells need a body to hold them together.

A new body?

Formed with what?

Or else, does the cellular consciousness have the power to transform the old body, as it transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly?