Mother or The New Species - II

2. The New Species

It was almost a new Ashram that was emerging. Actually, we accept everything, the entire earth, and then... there's a churning. And everything useless goes away.¹ Children, a lot of children, more and more. And truly speaking, She was much more interested in them than in the disciples who knew everything that was or was not to be done, and were full of light and yoga and experiences: They have become set in their ways. Very good objects for shelving in a museum but not for doing work.... I must say that for my work I prefer someone who knows very little, who did not make too much effort, but who has a great flame of aspiration and plenty of good will. Something malleable, progressive, that doesn't need to be broken into little pieces in order to make progress.² Actually, it is obvious: the next life which is to come, the next step in evolution, is so radically different from all we are and think and see upon our summits of orthodox light—even our qualities are so utterly worthless and almost unrelated to those which will animate the next species—that we must make up our mind to cultivate something else if we do not want to go on being the head of the class of an obsolete species. There is no point in cultivating an expertise in tree swinging or even in "yoga," for in any case, the future will be something else entirely. What are the qualities of the future? It would be interesting to find out.

She saw things clearly, She saw far into the future. She had founded the Ashram School in 1943 with twenty-five students; nine years later, there were nearly two hundred of them, and She launched the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre. Don't forget, all of you who are here, she told them, that we want to realize something that doesn't yet exist on earth; so it's absurd to seek elsewhere for an example of what we want to do.³ Essentially, She was trying to inculcate in them the wonder of the future, the unexpected of the future, the strange "something" being fashioned in the evolutionary crucible—yes, evolution is to be "fashioned": why don't we fashion it together? Let us fashion another being upon earth. That is far more interesting than looking forward to becoming the contributors to the Social Security of the hundredth democratic dynasty after Christ, and we start over and over again. First of all, She tried to uproot the old routine of death from the teachers' consciousness; in other words, She began by teaching the teachers. The teachers sat on the students' bench and She kneaded all the dough together in a strange, unprecedented mixture in which no one was a teacher and no one a student, and in which everyone was seeking together the future's formula: the children with a spontaneity free from anxiety about some false "future" to be secured, and the teachers with their recalcitrance promptly pinched by Mother and by the students themselves until, willy-nilly, an uncommon product was formed. To start with, no diplomas and no examinations (eighteen years before the famous events of May 1968). But what a struggle to uproot that particular seed from the teachers' heads—diplomas for what? To become the superprefects of a decaying species? For about a century, the human species has been suffering from an ever-spreading disease which has now reached its most acute state: it might be called utilitarianism.... Children stricken with this disease are out of place in the Ashram's Centre of Education.⁴ It had indeed to be drilled into their heads that they were making the future: "It's amusing, don't you think so?" She would say. We invent the future. We invent it without getting bound by "this-is-not-possible" or "this-ispossible." Everything is possible, as She would never tire of repeating to them: When does a thing seem impossible to you? It's when you try to do it. If you had never tried to do it, it would never have seemed impossible to you. And why do you try to do it in the first place? It's because it is somewhere in your consciousness. If it were not in your consciousness, you would never have attempted to do it. And the minute it comes in your consciousness, it's quite obvious that it is something you will realize. Only what's not in your consciousness you are unable to realize. Simple as that⁵ No?

Consciousness was the crux of the future; the change of consciousness was the key. To change consciousness means, first of all, to dismantle all the old impossibilities, to throw open the doors and stop putting walls up between ourselves and the possibilities of the future—we constantly put up walls, we are constantly pre-fabricated. To tear down that pre-fabrication, it would be necessary to descend right into the body's cells, but meanwhile She was striving to open doors: Doubt hardens the consciousness, it puts a crust on it, which blocks its receptivity. It's like putting a coat of varnish on something to prevent contact.⁶ For we are all the time in the pure marvel, we bathe in the Future; it is right here, full and overflowing—but we can touch and realize only that which we are able to establish contact with. The Amazon is here, complete, the Supramental is here, complete—it all depends upon what we can touch. Had we faith enough, we could be transformed in a second.... Only, that faith must extend right down to the cells. And the first step to the cells is an open mind. The first wall is in the mind; a formidable wall, collective, millennial, upheld by millions and millions of "reasonable" people: "But, look here! This is impossible!" If you understood once and for all, she told them, that the whole universe (or if you like, our earth, to condense the problem) is nothing other than the Divine who has forgotten Himself then where do you put weakness in that? Surely not in the Divine! Therefore in forgetfulness. Hence if you fight against forgetfulness, you fight against weakness!⁷ She taught them, first of all, to believe in themselves. The change of consciousness really begins with the uprooting of the old forest around us. Were we purely ourselves, we would be purely divine. It is true. It is even the key to the future. "Oh, but look here!" retort the old evolutionary specimens—they say "but," and instantly sink deeper into the mudhole. Afterwards, they can easily quip, "I told you so." There must be no buts. There must be an absolute YES. We must emerge from the old mudhole of the world. We must cease being among the dead who think they are alive and only carry on with their grandfather's chromosomes. Basically, the ONLY THING you should do assiduously, she said to the teachers, *is to teach them to know themselves and to choose their own destinies.... Teach them to examine themselves, to understand themselves,* AND TO WANT THEMSELVES. It's far more important than teaching the past history of the earth, or even how the earth is made.⁸ And to the children, she said over and over: You are here to become the representatives of the new race. Everything depends on your will and your sincerity. If you no longer want to belong to the ordinary humanity, if you no longer want to be only evolved animals, if you want to become new men realizing the supramental ideal of Sri Aurobindo, if you want to live a new and higher life upon a renewed earth, then you will find here all the help needed to succeed...⁹ Humanity is not the last rung of terrestrial creation. Evolution continues and man will be surpassed. It is for each one to decide whether he wants to participate in the adventure of the new species. ¹⁰

A Little Window of the Soul

"Yes, but still," retort the wise men, "they must be taught a little history and geography, and also chemistry, and also some trigonometry while they are at it, and also...." The whole list, right down to death. It begins with a simple, little, microscopic "yes, but still" and you are ensnared right to your corpse (which, moreover, does not even belong to you, it is the legal possession of the authorities with burial certificates). And it is a fact that Mother had them taught chemistry (with superb laboratories organized by Pavitra), geography and all the rest—but in another way. Everything is in that "another way." "By any method chosen," Sri Aurobindo had said. The Supermind will steal in through any means, even through trigonometry, only we must remember that these are means... to something else. From the start, we must understand that these are just "gymnastics," like other kinds of dumbbells to train the muscles of consciousness, and that consciousness is the lever—the mind is simply an instrument... to knead matter," ¹¹ to permeate and impregnate this substance which inherited the mechanical inertia of the protoplasm. We believe that it is meant for creating gospels or philosophy or Marxism, but these are merely passing evolutionary fancies, not unlike the beautiful plumage of the male bird, there to attract more and more consciousness into Matter. For such is the goal, the hidden key, the reason for all this movement. The Mind is indeed a singular tormentor, it does not leave you in peace for a minute; nothing better could have been found to prevent your dozing off in the beatitude of natural evolution. If we have mistaken chemical valences and a Harvard Ph.D. for the goal, however, that is simply our misconception of "evolved animals." The intentions of evolution are far more marvelous, luckily.

And so She taught them "in another way."

In the evening, after her tennis game, She would come to the Playground, so slight, quiet and white, wearing Japanese getas, long, puffed out pantaloons tight round the ankles, a kameez of different colors depending on the day—because colors, too, have their meanings with specific powers and centers of consciousness—and a headdress of white muslin because of the wind. Although She had had her long hair cut. And in "winter," a little silk cape covering her already stooping shoulders. She was seventy-three. This Playground was really the heart of her special laboratory. They did gymnastics there—a lot—exercises on the bars, judo, hatha yoga asanas, everything imaginable, boxing and vaulting horses, and what not. The girls wore white headscarves and shorts—shorts in India, in 1950, were a scandalous outrage—and they mixed with the boys in groups identified by different colors: there was the group in red shorts, the blue group, the khaki group and the green group for the little ones, the white group for over eighteen, the gray—and what not. It was fresh, full of laughter, with a sort of transparent atmosphere. After all, it was fun to prepare a new species. And no parents—She did not want any parents, those parents are horrid beings.¹² They immediately stuff you again into the old atavistic-culinary groove with their anxieties centered around the common cold and ((good manners." There are children who come to you terribly well-brought-up—so polite, so well-mannered, they answer you so properly... they give the impression of little half-alive puppets—well-polished, well-brushed, well-groomed, on the outside, but inside, there is no response.¹³ She wanted a response inside. She wanted a fire inside. She knew exactly one's degree of evolution by the kind of response. For Her, people were a whole spectrum of colors and vibrations expressing, down to the last atom, the quality of consciousness and its degree of intensity. When you look at someone who is conscious of his soul and lives in his soul, you feel that you descend, you go deep, deep, deep into the person, far, far, far within... and then you get... a little response, very quiet... something that is warm, calm, rich in content and very still, very full, like a softness—that is the soul. And sometimes there are eyes you do not enter, they are shut like a door: two black screens. And also, there are eyes that are open, you enter, and just behind the surface you meet something that vibrates and even shines at times; it vibrates. You can be fooled and think: "Oh! he has a living soul." But its not that: its his vital." ¹⁴ The charming little whirlpool. She took in everything except "the black screens." She plunged her diamond look mingled with sweetness or laughter or irony, She descended to the very depths, as though penetrating swamps, thicknesses, layer upon layer of dark good manners, and She drew, drew forth, as if from the depths of a pit, a little pure flame of being, something that seemed to stir for the first time, something strange, unknown, craning its neck like a fledgling, which filled you with an entirely new and unexpected kind of life—and you felt like dancing and laughing, or even weeping as if all the old walls had been shattered, and you suddenly found yourself in the light of the world, no longer able to recognize yourself. And it was delicious to no longer situate oneself in that old, absurd muddle one had lived in for ten or twenty years as a well-groomed little robot. The old habit falling away. Another way of breathing. All of a sudden life had a meaning. Another meaning. And everything became possible. But sometimes people fled before that look: the swamp within found it unbearable. So much the better—an automatic sorting out. It would be lovely, she said one day while giving me a flower, if one could take people's consciousness as one takes a flower, and then, because one looks at it and holds it and the vibration is that Vibration of supreme Love, it opens up, like that, becomes organized, and grows magnificent. ¹⁵ "Yes, that's just what you do!" I replied. And She laughed like a mischievous child. She so much wanted each and everyone, all beings, to open to the real life, their real life—which is there so simple and noiseless behind the absurd layer. The first little window looking out upon another evolution. The first step of the new species. A "something" that is concealed in the very heart of Matter freed from its human ways. Evolution always seems to lead backwards: one finds what was there from the beginning. One un-forgets. I only put in you the necessary truth-consciousness, and the rest works itself out automatically. ¹⁶ Mother took a closed rosebud and held it in her hands: the rose opened. Oh, how She wanted to open the rose of the world!

And through that little window there opened another perception of the world. This little window is so simple, it is almost always open or about to open in children. But we plaster laws over it, warnings, anxieties, family doctors, deadly ideas and manners, the you-shoulds and you-shouldn'ts, the you-cans and you-can'ts; then we send the children off to school to fill up what has been sealed off behind the door: false geography, false history, the false law of life. Yet everything was there, open, immediate, through the little window, the world at our fingertips, instant geography, history everywhere: the great History that flows unchecked and dateless and enables us to understand all history and all beings. She was teaching them the great History, in the evening after their exercises. She sat beneath a large, relief map of India on the wall—one India, the one that had never been truncated by the British or by the sad falsehoods of history—with a small table lamp beside her. She looked very white, and most of all one saw her eyes, which seemed so huge below the little tulle headdress pulled low over her forehead. They all sat on the ground in a semi-circle around her, the teachers and students and disciples, already almost a thousand in number. She read a few pages from The Synthesis of Yoga, or possibly the last chapters of The Life Divine: "Man and Evolution." Philosophy was becoming simple—it was living experience, what one sees and touches when the inner door opens, it was evolution right under one's nose: you see it, so you become it. You have it within, so you are in it everywhere, you enter the world everywhere as you would enter your own home, for the world is in you. But everything is there! Everything everything you can experience and infinitely more which you can't experience... ¹⁷ The knowledge that seems to come to you from the outside is just a pretext to bring up to the surface the knowledge that is within you. ¹⁸ The teachers were not meant to "form" in this school of evolution, but to inform, she said. There is nothing to be taught! You have only to draw out what is already there, that is all. We are a prodigious totality of immediate knowledge which has forgotten itself... in a corner of the brain.

But how can we touch this direct knowledge?

Perhaps a very simple, ordinary example drawn from my personal experience might help to seize better the extraordinary physical, and even physiological, precision of this immediate knowledge. One day someone brought me a photograph of a total stranger living six thousand miles away; I looked at it... impossible to explain. There was a totality of simultaneous perception embracing all the levels of the being—all the vibrations, fluctuations, contradictions of this person—how can you express that in a mental language? Our mental language is as flat as a photograph, abstract, hollow, with long or short noses, virtues or sins, but nothing of those living, fluctuating and intermingled depths which make up a being. As it was impossible to make any mental comment to the person who had brought the photograph, I was suddenly impelled to make a gesture, an absurd gesture, like someone dealing cards in a game of bridge! "But that's exactly his mannerism! That's what he always does when he speaks!" So it is: one is in the person, six thousand miles away, not only in his head but in his body, taking on his mannerisms and physiological reflexes. An exact knowledge, down to the vibration (not always pleasant). And it is all there. You are in a pebble, in the moon, in the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty, or more pleasant, the smiling flower at the edge of the path. With Mother, it was this totality of the world that was opening up, the future, the past, the tangible evolution, the marvelous Possibility; the simple present suddenly lighting up with a depth of meaning, as though all the dynasties of the world and the millennia of History came back to be remembered in a trivial gesture, endowing it with a meaning for the earth's future. It was as if great doors were opening up in the consciousness, her words carried the experience, imparted it: with her one saw, one touched, the world became a concrete unified whole, an open book. And it was like that. The little individualities melted away, one began to be everywhere at once, to feel in everything, perceive in everything, live with all that lived over there and right here and everywhere. It was simple, it was ONE. You can understand and know something only because in some way it's in you or you are in it. ¹⁹ The little numbered and baptized bags of skin were there merely to prevent everything from blending together like soup, a kind of evolutionary trick to shape individualities, but behind it all, or within, the great Consciousness was flowing freely, without barriers, without laws—and once you caught hold of that Law, then.... Then everything became possible, then you were already in the next evolution, you were entering the new species with its great Consciousness, round and ONE, like a sun: If we were spread out in everything, if all the vibrations that come to us or go out from us expressed the need to melt ourselves with everything, to widen, to grow, not by remaining in our own limits, but by leaving our limits behind, and ultimately to identify ourselves with everything, we would have nothing left to lose because we would have everything. Only we don't moon, in the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty, or more pleasant, the smiling flower at the edge of the path. With Mother, it was this totality of the world that was opening up, the future, the past, the tangible evolution, the marvelous Possibility; the simple present suddenly lighting up with a depth of meaning, as though all the dynasties of the world and the millennia of History came back to be remembered in a trivial gesture, endowing it with a meaning for the earth's future. It was as if great doors were opening up in the consciousness, her words carried the experience, imparted it: with her one saw, one touched, the world became a concrete unified whole, an open book. And it was like that. The little individualities melted away, one began to be everywhere at once, to feel in everything, perceive in everything, live with all that lived over there and right here and everywhere. It was simple, it was ONE. You can understand and know something only because in some way it's in you or you are in it." The little numbered and baptized bags of skin were there merely to prevent everything from blending together like soup, a kind of evolutionary trick to shape individualities, but behind it all, or within, the great Consciousness was flowing freely, without barriers, without laws—and once you caught hold of that Law, then.... Then everything became possible, then you were already in the next evolution, you were entering the new species with its great Consciousness, round and ONE, like a sun: If we were spread out in everything, if all the vibrations that come to us or go out from us expressed the need to melt ourselves with everything, to widen, to grow, not by remaining in our own limits, but by leaving our limits behind, and ultimately to identify ourselves with everything, we would have nothing left to lose because we would have everything. Only we don't know it. And, as we don't know it, we can't do it. Instead, we take in order to accumulate, accumulate, accumulate—but it's impossible, we can't accumulate: we must become identified. So, the little we have we want to get back: we give out a good thought and expect some recognition; we give a little affection and expect the same.... Because we don't have the capacity to be the good thought in everything, we don't have the capacity to be the affection and tenderness in everything. We feel that's how we are, limited and cut off from the rest, so we're afraid of losing everything, we're afraid of losing what we have because we think we would be diminished. Whereas when you are able to identify with things, you no longer need to take. The more spread out you are, the more you have. The more identified you are, the more you become. And instead of taking, you give. And the more you give, the more you grow. ²⁰°

She was teaching them the true Oneness of the world—not the one that crushes and levels down for "the sake of the masses".; but the one that embraces and enters within and respects the infinite complexity of the elements because it is everything that moves, feels, lives, and, being everything, it knows the real need of each thing and the correct movement each instant. She made them touch the Spontaneity of the great Exact Consciousness: no plans, no foresight, which always fails, but oneness with the great Flow which makes you execute at each instant the necessary gesture. And the entire Ashram developed like that, unplanned, impromptu, in a kind of spontaneous growth. Another law seemed to be at work there. A direct key that doesn't need any complicated science to express itself.²¹

If those children had been pure long enough, perhaps today there would be a rather strange place in the world, like a sample of the next way of being on earth—but would the rest of the world have tolerated it? Oneness works both ways. The "rest of the world" was there, too, in the cells of those children. Something more radical than a few widened consciousnesses was needed; it was imperative to go down into the very cells of the world, in order to change things at the root. The "direct key" had to be found there.

A Matter of Attitude

And they asked questions, those children, a thousand and one chaotic questions, but always in French. She wanted everyone to speak French, and She answered only in French. Mixed with the young Indians there were now children from almost every country—it was really the laboratory of the world. These were the "Wednesday classes," the time of Questions and Answers, which would last for eight years, until 1958. In the simplest language, a language for children, She brought flowing down, like crystal water, all the occult knowledge which used to be carefully guarded for initiatory schools. These simple classes would constitute the most formidable "de-occultization" ever to take place in History. She wanted nothing "occult," She wanted all the secrets to be told, She wanted all of it right here, natural, without any fuss. And She wanted them to live what was being said. It was the living Veda. There is nothing simpler than Truth. It is as transparent as the air, we breathe it at every moment, it is an unaffected Marvel. How odd that we need so many special effects simply to begin to understand this. "But then, what's the purpose of the Mind?" asked the more rational ones. "Why do we go to school? Why do you take so much trouble to make us study, if the Mind is to be surpassed?" And quite so, when we begin emerging from the mental muddle, ²² as Mother said, when things begin to clarify above and all around, we begin to live in an ever-renewed wonder, down to the smallest detail: knowledge we did not know we had, unthinkable precision, distances abolished, as if someone or something cared—really cared—to let us know everything we need to know, even in the most unexpected details, and not only as a mental awareness, but tangibly, in life, through living answers, as it were, and "trivial" little scenes exemplifying a whole slice of the world with a smile... slightly humorous. As if, through this mental clearing, the whole of life were coming to show us the answer. Everything answers. It is a singular complicity between ourselves and the thousand and one things we encounter daily, as if they were all living a single life, knew one another quite well and were sending little signals to one another, "You see, that's how it is," most naturally and without any fuss. ONE life. Sri Aurobindo, when asked how He had been able to write five, six books simultaneously, replied: [I could have written] seven issues of the Arya every month for 70 years and still the knowledge that came from above would hardly be exhausted.²³ And so it is. We are bathed in an infinite wealth of knowledge which knows no "details": everything counts, utterly, absolutely. Everything is interrelated. And there is not one thought in all that unless we need to make speeches or write a book, for instance. The thousand imperceptible, simultaneous threads, unseizable by the Mind which advances step by step like a donkey on the path, are grasped by an exact superthought which reconciles the entire picture in the blink of an eye and guides you straight to the point through a virgin forest with millions of entangled branches. And everything is contained therein, with a quality of order, a powerful and translucent coherence unseizable by the Mind. In truth, there is nothing the mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness. ²⁴ But then why continue in the old mental groove if this next evolutionary stage, so much lighter, is meant to transcend it?

It is obvious, Mother explained, that if we have a simple three-note instrument, or a piano with eighty-eight keys, or even an orchestra with three hundred musicians, the music might be the same, but the quality of expression or transcription would be incomparable. We are creating keys, she told them, so that the other Consciousness can make use of a complete keyboard. But it is merely a keyboard for something else. The Mind began to degenerate when it composed incredible arpeggios, like Franz Liszt, for nothing other than a grand piano. And that is where the school of the new world, as we might call it, the school of the next evolution makes an imperceptible detour—imperceptible to everyone, Sri Aurobindo's yoga is the invisible yoga par excellence, like the air we breathe, perhaps like truth: ONE

CAN DO WHAT ONE IS USED TO DOING, BUT ONE DOES IT WITH A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ATTITUDE.²⁵ This simple sentence contains a formidable power... if only we knew. Years later, while She was fully engaged in this terrible yoga of the body which is really a battle against death and against the age-old physiological laws, Mother said to me: The right attitude is the real key to the whole problem of transformation. ²⁶ She had said the same thing thirty years earlier. As simple as that. But it is perhaps the most profound mystery we have yet to fathom. We do everything as usual—mathematics, boxing, reciting Shakespeare or brushing our teeth—with another attitude. This attitude has the power to change the circumstances—identical circumstances with totally different results. We go through a flu epidemic, or a page of mathematics, or cross the street, and these two worlds are so totally different that with one attitude we leap across years of life and consciousness compressed into a second, whereas with the other we partake of the round of death and catch the flu. Everything is different, all the laws change. These are really like two different worlds, one within the other, with only a slight inner difference of attitude. In one case, we are attuned to the old life as usual, or rather the old death as usual, and in the other we are attuned to... something, the next consciousness, the next life, the next evolutionary discovery—the incomprehensible something that will be our post-human stage, which must be built, for it is not going to fall from heaven ready-made. To build it means to call it. Like an incantation of the future. And this call forces it to be; it even causes it to take birth beneath our feet, as it were: It is like a magnet that attracts from everywhere the opportunity to make progress. A magnet to capture the next mode of being on earth. In times past, in ancient times, the candidates were told: "Now prepare yourselves: you will have to undergo terrible tests. You will be shut up in a coffin, you will face terrible dangers. These are tests meant to determine whether or not you have the required qualities."... But this is no longer the method. It isn't done like that any more. It is life itself the everyday circumstances that are the tests you must go through. ²⁷ We are right in the evolutionary test-trial. The Mind is simply an immobile zone of transmission,²⁸ and, in that silence, behind everything we do, everywhere, in each gesture, each encounter, we carry with us a kind of antenna pointed toward... what? The future, the thing. What we must become, what we must extract from our body as one day the ape extracted man. But had the great ape been told: you know, you have only to sit under a tree for five minutes and look at... nothing... or simply at a growing shoot, he would have thought it a useless stupidity. He would have understood nothing about the difference in attitude.

"Mother," asked a somewhat reflective child, "when the mind came down into the earth's atmosphere, the ape didn't make any effort to change itself into a man, did it? It was Nature that supplied the effort. Yet now..." And Mother instantly replied: But it isn't man who is going to change himself into the superman! "No?" queried the astonished child. Just try a little! Mother replied amidst laughter in the Playground. That's the point, you see, it's SOMETHING ELSE that's going to do the work. But now (yes, there is a "but," I don't want to be cruel), MAN CAN COLLABORATE. That is, he can lend himself to the process, with good will, with aspiration, and he can help to his utmost. That's why I have said it will go faster—) HOPE it will go much faster.²⁹ This was in 1956. Obviously the Mind is not going to create what surpasses it, any more than the apes' expertise in tree swinging created mental man. But once in a while the mistakes of the apes paved the way to man's thought. In man's case, the missed branch is the usual mental support that is constantly called upon to uphold the slightest gesture, the smallest circumstance—everything is a branch. When we let go of the mental branch, there is at first a void, a gap—quite a scary nothingness in which one might fear losing one's mind. Yet it is this very void which calls the other thing. Before the other thing can enter, there must be room for it. And one notices with surprise, then with amusement, then with increasing wonder, that it answers.

The answers come from all sides, they swarm everywhere, beneath our steps, before our eyes, in chance encounters, gestures... they flood in from everywhere. It is unexpected, unforeseeable, we could pass right by and not notice anything: suddenly, things mean something, everything means something. Truly the other life seems only to be waiting for us to free ourselves from the old in order to emerge. "You see," she said, "it is something else that is going to do the work."³⁰ We do not need to "fashion" the superman: we only have to let him be fashioned. We always forget that we are growing up in a world where everything already is; it is the future that compels our steps, the future beneath our steps... depending on our attitude, the old way of seeing or the new, the old habit of being, or the new one. Thousands of years of habit veil an ever-present radiance. A time comes when the evolutionary cage that has formed and carved all these little forgetful and separate selves—separate of necessity, in order to become conscious of themselves—must break open so that we may become conscious of the Great Consciousness and reproduce the total consciousness in a single point. This is the time. Man can collaborate. We are journeying through an ever-existing Amazon. only to realize at the other end that it is the Amazon. Then our way of seeing changes: everything remains the same yet everything becomes clear. The whole world is in the same magic forest—including the caterpillar. For the Marvel to exist, perhaps the whole has to become aware of it. A formidable change in outlook. Another way of being in the world—in the same world. Perhaps that is what the superman is?