Mother or The New Species - II

21: The Cellular Level

We shall never fully appreciate the evolutionary significance of what was happening in Mother's body—until the new stage is here, visible and realized. Then we shall say: Oh, so that's what it is! In short, we are asked to understand a little in advance, and it is quite possible that our understanding will help or hasten the evolutionary process. That is what is called a conscious and willed evolution, instead of going through the interminable concoctions of Nature's great cauldron where the little human elements are mixed and remixed, combined and recombined until the new composition is perfect. Perhaps Mother's "That" will seem like a new form of mysticism—what would primates have said of that little alarming mental vibration which today we handle like evolved grown-ups? They, too, were going through a transfer of power from one way of being to another. The supernatural, said Sri Aurobindo, is that, the nature of which we have not attained or do not yet know, or the means of which we have not yet conquered.¹ There is no supernatural: there are successive naturals. The whole work of the evolvers is to make it become natural. And once it becomes "natural," then we will no longer notice it at all, it will be like the air we breathe, and we shall say: but what is so Divine in all this? Divine or no Divine, it is all the same—just a little smile... that makes a difference. And this little smile is perhaps everything.

But it is up to each one to discover it.

It has no catechism.

The only catechism today is our scientific laws—others had invented the 10 commandments of God, these ones invented the 10,000 commandments of Physics! It is the world's last religion. Quite possibly its last superstition.

Time and Matter

How does this new natural work? It does not seem natural at all, at times it is incomprehensible and unfathomable (for us). We are trying to understand it. We are trying to put some order in Mother's forest! And God only knows whether our "order" will not appear silly to the new realized species, but anyway.... Each of those who go through Mother's Agenda will be able to discover new and unexpected roads in it. The road is everywhere. I have tried to sort out some lines or curves of phenomena, and I have called them: universalization, impersonalization, unrealization, false matter, Harmony, vertical time, transfer... because things have to be expressed one after the other, it is the law of the Mind, it sees one blade of grass after another; but there is only a single, innumerable and simultaneous phenomenon unfolding, in which each little progress at one point changes the position or the value of all the other points, and each time you advance here, in X4, from that moment on, innumerable little skylights open elsewhere at the same time. In fact, it was a new kind of air that was beginning to flow everywhere. A new perception.

A new breathing too.

And what is this same, identical phenomenon which is innumerably unfolding? It is the web giving way in one area or another, or in all areas, with the various physiological consequences. We are deceived because we do not see Mother flying through the air, but it is far more serious than that—that type of miracle is basically the Mind projecting itself outside of its cage and imagining what it would do. When you get out of the cage, there is no need to fly: you are immediately everywhere. You see immediately everywhere. And you do not see the same Matter as those in the cage—it is evident, because what makes their Matter is precisely that which prevents them from being and seeing everywhere. Such are their ineluctable laws: the law of death, the law of life, the law of gravity, everything is a law. It is their gross and opaque and solidified Matter—although their microscopes are less solidified than their eyes. This is Matter as they think and feel it. While the phenomenon that seems to become more and more precise in Mother's experience is a certain fluidity of Matter. It is always the same Vibration of fantastic speed, yet motionless at the same time (everything is decidedly contradictory in the supramental consciousness, or rather all opposites are together simultaneously), which filters through the meshes of the web and is endowed with very strange properties; it cures illnesses as if they did not exist, cures death as if it did not exist, cures all the miseries or the laws of our Matter as if they did not exist—and it is not really that it "cures," it is rather that it makes you step into another kind of Matter (yet you remain apparently in the same one, since Mother's body was there, "concrete", tangible and firmly seated in her armchair) in which all these things do not exist. A reversal of consciousness, Mother said. A change of vibration that changes everything. A change of Matter, we might say. A Vibration which annuls the opacity and fixity of Matter, as it annuls its illness and death, its distances and laws and the whole caboodle, which are precisely the result of that opacity and fixity. One ought to therefore examine the workings of this strange Vibration more clearly. For instance, could our "concrete" Matter simply be the product of a particular perception of time? Change the sense of time, and space also changes, with everything that is in it, yet you are still very much in the same thing. Now, that Vibration of extreme speed (yet as if motionless) alters the sense of time, freezes it, if one may say so, while at the same time it makes you go everywhere at once, as if New York and everything else were simultaneously right under your feet, without distance and sense of "space"—and in that corporeal "non-space" or non-time (it is the body's perception), age, deterioration and their inescapable consequences disappear. Yet it is the same Matter. And it is like another Matter. Space is connected to time, as we know, but everything contained in this "concrete" space changes properties as if by miracle as soon as the perception of time changes—as soon as the supramental Vibration comes into play. We could say that a particular speed of vibration, or rather a particular slowness, gives us the impression of colliding everywhere with pieces of solid Matter separated by far-flung distances, whereas another vibratory speed seems to melt distances as well as that frozen opacity that constitutes our "perceptual" milieu. They will tell us that Mother's foot still bumps against the table leg and is quite possibly bruised from it, even though Mother's consciousness may be simultaneously in New York and Hong Kong and goes through the meshes of the web. And they will tell us that at the end there is the fact of the corpse. And that all the changes in time and consciousness change nothing of this fact. The corpse is the proof. You simply live within a fantasy of "higher" consciousness (unless it is the fantasy that is higher, the other being of course a lesser one). Your vibration changes nothing.

True, the ape could have also said (if he spoke) that that stupid mental vibration had changed nothing in his ape life—and yet.... Man's "time" is no longer that of the ape, and it has remarkably modified our space and Matter (granted, perhaps not for the better). Therefore we can simply say that the experiment is under way, it is the onset of a new evolution—what will happen at the end, to what extent will the "other matter" or the "other time" be able to modify the old Matter we experience and live in ("the bark," as Mother called it)?... It was a question Mother frequently posed herself. Perhaps it is indeed the question. Perhaps it is also a false question: if the caterpillar began to fly, what would it say of its crawling Matter? There only remains the corpse of a caterpillar and a butterfly within another time, another Matter—which is still the same world and the same Matter. Can one become a butterfly without shedding one's caterpillar body? This is in a way the problem we are facing. Instead of leaving one for the other, can one be changed into the other? That is the unresolved mystery.

But the fact of the corpse in no way negates the butterfly. Perhaps it is only that our vibration is still too slow to seize the butterfly.

Is the difference between life and "death" only one of vibration?

Mother's experience is the place where both meet.

The secret of all transmutations and of the two worlds in one is hidden at the cellular level.

Passing through the Web

It bears repeating that the peculiarity of all these experiences, what makes them so enormously interesting from the point of view of the evolutionary Experience on earth, is that they are all happening in Matter, at the mysterious threshold where the old cellular imprints vanish—the obscure code, we could say, the grill or web that envelops and hypnotizes the cells—and where the pure cell begins to shine, the great Code of the universe, without past, created anew each "instant": the unique Pulsation in which everything beats at the same time. What we call the "past" is only our effort to learn what really *is*—it is our obscure journey toward that, our millions and billions of painful imprints and vain attempts and repeated efforts. And when we reach there, when we arrive at what really is, there is nothing more to learn, no more past: it is forever Present. It was forever present. It will be forever present. And this is experienced in the midst of Matter. So where is death in what no longer is in time? Oh, up above, one can experience eternities of consciousness and eternal waves of Becoming, a desert of bright peace,² as Sri Aurobindo said, but then what?... We are not born to live in contemplation, or are we? We human beings are here to walk. We are born in Matter to find the Truth of Matter and not the truth of heaven—and the strangest thing of all is that it might well be that there they are ONE.

Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth, Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven...

They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears; Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought,

They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep.³

The old "magic spell" undoes itself at the cellular level, and sleep too becomes something else.

And it is there that the gulf is filled.

It is the stammering of that new life, the groping of that new perception that we are pursuing in and behind Mother's words: We need a new language!⁴ she exclaimed so often.... That can't be expressed yet. It's not through words and ideas that it must express itself [Of course, for it is concrete life at last, the direct life of Matter!] It's the means of expression that must be found. Ultimately, the big difference with man is that he invented language—and naturally, writing and so on. Well, a means of expression superior to language and writing—that's what must be found...⁵ In Vedic times they spoke of "The Word"—the creative word.... The word that exactly expresses the vibration...⁶ The words must have a power—they should carry the meaning in themselves!⁷ Perhaps the conscious and deliberate manipulation of certain luminous vibrations in addition to sound?..⁸ But these modern languages are so artificial (by this, I mean superficial, intellectual); they cut things up into little pieces and remove the light behind.⁹ It is the language of divided and separated life—but how to speak the full and total life everywhere? So at times She took to her organ: I was trying to play music, precisely *TO SAY something.

Others will come and invent a musical language, the creative Word, the mantra of Matter, but in the meantime you had only to be able to walk in that strange life, or rather in that strange kind of Matter, that strange Time, that other Rhythm—everything was different! Truly as if a totally different material world existed at the cellular level. But when the old imprints have vanished, you still have to learn to remain standing "in the other way," as Mother would say. The transition is the difficult thing. She did not have all those experiences while in contemplation, but while walking, moving, and most of the time in her bathroom because it was the only place She was left somewhat in peace: These experiences are so concrete and spontaneous and real (they aren't the result of a will, still less of an effort) that they don't require rest: I was busy washing.¹⁰ You do not meditate upon swimming in the sea: you go and enter the water. One enters the sea of new life, quite simply and practically, because it is the same everywhere. It is walkable, drinkable and breathable. Go and make a catalogue on sea-bathing! I understand more and more why Mother always spoke of her "bath of the Lord."

Nonetheless, there was the wavering of the first times when one loses one's footing (what She called the "support" of the old habit, the old dusty but still reassuring code). The quality of those two vibrations (which are still superimposed, so one can be aware of them both) is indescribable. One is a kind of fragmentation, an infinite fragmentation and absolute instability: like a powdery cloud of atoms in ceaseless movement; and the other is eternal immobility, an infinite Immensity of absolute Light.... The consciousness is still going from one to the other.¹¹

Then, the experience develops further and both vibrations seem to merge into one another, as we have already noted: Now the body has the sense not only of a terrestrial movement, but of a universal Movemen( so fantastically rapid that it is imperceptible, beyond perception. As if there were a "something" that's both... I mean, that doesn't move WITHIN a space but is both beyond immobility and beyond movement, in the sense that it's so rapid as to be absolutely imperceptible to all the senses...¹² It is the supramental Vibration, which decidedly combines all opposites. I've noticed that in that state, the Movement exceeds the force or power that concentrates the cells into an individual form...¹² That is, you feel you are pulverized all over the place. That is what happened in the beginning: Mother lost her footing. And that state seems to be all-powerful; the effect is automatic (not willed): as soon as something takes the form of a physical pain, it disappears INSTANTLY¹². as if pain, illness and all the rest depended only on the old code, on too slow a vibration—death also hinges on the old code. Indeed, the cage of pain to teach us... what we really are. But then, and this is most interesting, the second the body reverts to its ordinary state, it recaptures the MEMORY of its pain, and along with the memory comes the possibility of reverting to it.... It is probably the passage from the true thing to the thing no longer true—a first alteration compared to the pure Vibration. It gives the impression of a wrong habit, what remains is merely a question of a wrong habit. And something is to be found to check—check, eliminate, prevent—that effect from recurring automatically. Because it happens constantly. It's a constant phenomenon: passing from this to that, this to that, this to that [and Mother gestured to and fro, as though from one vibration to the other, from one state to the other], to such a point—it's so strong—that a second comes, or a minute, or anyway a certain interval of time (I don't know), when you are neither this nor that; then you have a feeling of nothingness. It lasts just an instant; if it lasted longer, it would probably result in fainting or something. But it happens all the time: this, that. And between this and that, there is a passage.... It's a bizarre life, neither this nor that, nor a mixture of the two, nor a juxtaposition, but as though both were operating through each other. It must be intercellular, the mixture must be very microscopic, on the surface.¹² And I have the distinct impression that it is exactly the passage through the web or the opaque periphery: the tilting into the old "memory" takes place at the surface of the cell. It is the long training at the obscure borderline between life and death, not only to learn how not to "tilt" from one side to the other, but also to transform the very transition.

Then, slowly, the "new habit" or the new way is brought under control, the initial panic of the cells melts into total surrender—that "stupid instinct of self-preservation," as she said—but the old organs still have difficulty withstanding that sort of "pulverization" (or the sensation of pulverization, rather): "You look pale," I said to her one morning. I feel as if I am not here.... My body is far away from me.... I am in a very, very diluted consciousness, very diluted." Naturally: She was everywhere! It is truly very difficult not to mistake the new Movement for disintegration. It's like this [and She stretched out her two arms as over an immense sea], im-mo-bile.... But with a great intensity of vibration.... There is a growing sense of a Power that's beginning to be limitless. But that state is in fact linked with those difficulties [cardiac, circulatory]. I am like this... in "something" that feels as if it could be eternally like that. But within it, I perceive waves, movements (and sometimes concentrations, when it has to do with world events) that have a stupendous power. Then She smiled: We just have to keep still and, well, we'll see what will happen anyway.¹³

She had to learn to be in a body while being everywhere at the same time: "A mere nothing could make you lose contact."

A new life to learn.

A cellular level in which life seemed to spread out everywhere. A fluid and undivided Matter.

My body is far away from me....

Decentralization

In that state, what we call "Matter" seemed more and more problematic, something that seemed associated exclusively with the cage of our mental perception and had a completely different reality—not that Matter was an illusion, but it was perceived and lived illusorily, and this illusion was the cause of all the misery. The question was not of getting out of Matter as one gets out of a nightmare—the way all the spiritualities have recommended—but of removing the pair of glasses or whatever it is that creates the nightmare; and one remains in the same Matter, the true one instead of the false one. And everything is changed. This nightmare or distortion was brought about by the "I" which proceeded to build the world around itself: it has walled itself up in the world. Whereas the other Matter has no "I," or all is "I," and it "flows" without walls—Matter flows. We may be told that it is consciousness that flows, perhaps, or an imagination of consciousness, but not Matter. We could reply that it is another imagination of consciousness that solidifies Matter! But the point is that it is not an imaginary perception of the Mind, but a cellular perception, by the cells—indeed, they even catch the hemorrhage of an unknown person ten thousand miles away. Until proved otherwise, the cells are made of Matter.

But for once in the history of the earth, someone took off the pair of glasses and saw the earth, felt and experienced the earth, as Matter itself feels it and lives it, directly. Thus is the phenomenon being studied. And the whole question is to find out whether this phenomenon, the new perception, has the capacity to transform the body—this body made of false matter, one might say—that has served evolution by being a bridge at the cellular level to the other reality of Matter (without the body—this "old thing," as Mother called it—we could never have built a bridge), or whether the illusion will be dissolved and the body along with it: the skin shed by the caterpillar. That is to say, we go to the other side, into true Matter, which is right here but imperceptible to our deceiving and distorted perception. And the body is shed.

That does not seem consistent with the facts of evolution, which, until now, has always maintained a continuity of its bodies and brought one out of the other.

But whether it is a question of "passing to the other side" or remaining on this side and combining the two in a new being, how does one live without a physical "I," without the something that gives a separated and solid assurance in the middle of this moving enormity of the world? At the cellular level, there is no "I," there is no need to perceive in relation to "someone," because this someone is everything simultaneously; "I" is everything, so how does one deal with that? And what does one perceive? Assuredly, it is not comfortable in the beginning, like a fish that suddenly has to fly: For a long time one has had the impression that if the ego disappears, the being disappears, the form disappears—but that's not true! It isn't true. The trouble is that life's ordinary laws no longer hold. Which means all the old habit, plus the new thing to be learned. It's as if the cells—not the body's cells: the organization that makes up the form (that holds everything together and makes up a form we call human), it's as if that had to learn it can go on living without the sense of separate individuality. While for thousands of years it's been accustomed to existing separately only because of the ego—without ego it goes on... according to another law the body doesn't yet know, and which... it finds incomprehensible. It has nothing to do with a will, it's not... I don't know... a something... a way of being.¹⁴

A universal way of being.

And I can see that for years the body and the whole body consciousness used to rush back into the old way to seek safety, it used to find its safety in flight [indeed it was "like" fainting]; but now, the body has been persuaded not to do it any longer and on the contrary to accept: "Well, if it's dissolution, let it be dissolution." "Come what may, we'll see soon enough!" The great adventure.¹⁵

The different stages of this adventure look a little dizzying, and we can only note Mother's words, here and there, through the years: The body has become transparent, so to speak, and almost nonexistent; I don't know how to put it... it doesn't obstruct the vibrations: all vibrations can go through. I can see it has come about rather progressively, but it's fairly new, so it's hard to express. But it's this very body that no longer feels limited: it feels spread about in everything it does, in everything around it, in all things, people, movements, sensations, in all that.... It's spread about like that. It has become very amusing, very interesting. Its really new. The body has to be a little attentive and careful not to bump into things or drop them: the gestures are somewhat wobbly. It must be a transitional phase, which will last until THE true consciousness is established; then it will have a wholly different functioning from the one it had previously, but with a precision that can be foreseen to be incalculable... . [Of course, because if you are even in the smallest particle of granite or in any molecule of any body, where is the "secret" then? What remains "to be known," "to be measured?" Everything is exact to the millionth of a second and inch.] And of a very different order. With many things, for instance, the vision is clearer with eyes closed than with eyes open.¹⁶ You no longer have to look "over there" at something "other": it is right here; you are what you look at. And there is no need for an organ of vision: the organ is everywhere.

And for everything, everything... there is a change in the mode of being. And the consciousness... is, yes, constantly external to the instrument [the body], like something very vast—very vast and supple—but constantly like this, night and day. Yet it's the consciousness OF THIS BODY. Instead of the consciousness being inside the body, it is the body which is inside the consciousness, yet it is still the body consciousness.¹⁷ It would appear that the body—what we call the body, this thin and hard crust on the surface—is carried by, enveloped or contained in that boundless cellular body that goes and feels and perceives everywhere as if it were at home. And the thin crust is no longer necessarily its home. There is no more center: the center is everywhere. It's decentralized, completely decentralized,¹⁸ she was soon to say. It's not even like a person who might have expanded so as to take others within himself it's not that: it's a force, a consciousness SPREAD OUT over things. I don't get the sense of a limit: I have the sense of something spread out, even physically...¹⁹ it's as much there or there as here.²⁰ This [the body] is like something floating within this consciousness, but it's not active. I can't explain. It's like an ocean of light that keeps doing its work, and then, in it, there floats something.... Its deep ultramarine blue. Do you know that color?... That's it.²¹ And more and more, in this ultramarine-blue ocean of cellular consciousness, the old body seemed like something rigid, almost unreal, a kind of falsehood: The impression is of something which is still... a bit tough—that's it, a bit tough, somewhat like bark. It was like kinds of vestiges, I don't know; pieces of something a bit hard or shriveled. And nothing, nothing but this Great Vibration so powerful, so calm. [Mother made a gesture of two immense wings beating in infinity.] And this appearance is the only contradiction. That's the interesting point: this appearance [i.e., the body] is clearly a contradiction of the truth; it's something that still belongs to the old laws, at least, in fact, in its appearance. But it doesn't correspond to your state of consciousness, not in the least.... There is a fluidity, a breadth, a sort of totality with only, only just something outwardly which... is increasingly becoming an illusion. And yet, yet that's what others see, understand, know and call "me. "²² And the surface, the very part that gives the sense of bark, is what will change last—what's going to happen? I don't know... I don't know. But it will change last.²³

The dissolution of the piece of bark, or the transformation of the piece of bark?

It has been said that Matter is Energy, E = mc2, but at the cellular level a new equation is revealed: Matter = Consciousness. An ocean of consciousness and of omnipotent power, the color of ultramarine.

But how did we go from that fluidity to this solidity, how did the crust, or the piece of bark, become solidified? The whole evolution is a tremendous process of solidification, a building of a cage, at one level or another. "False matter" did not wait for our Mind to start forming—perhaps it has made it thicker than the other species had; it is true that we are the only ones to be cut off from universal life, the only ones to know personal pain and death, the only ones to experience disorder and to be deprived of the knowledge of the exact law and spontaneous movement, but we are also the only ones to have become aware of our individual cage, and perhaps the only ones capable of consciously refinding the mainspring or the source that would allow the transformation of our cage of pain and death and disorder into something else that none of the preceding species know. Such is the Turning Point Mother was reaching. And one morning, as She was nearing that moving borderline of Matter (our "Matter"), the whole picture of evolution became clear to her: We may say that all experiences tend toward a single revelation—that consciousness alone exists. And that it is the decision or the choice of the consciousness that causes the form—all the forms, from the most subtle to the most material ones; and the material world, the APPARENT fixity of the material world stems from a distortion or a darkening of the consciousness, which has lost the sense of its all-powerfulness. This distortion has been still more pronounced since the advent of the Mind, which in its working has so much taken the place of consciousness [the great evolutionary cutoff point that began with our parting of the ways with the "animal"], that it has so to speak substituted itself for consciousness, and that the Mind, in its ordinary working, cannot be distinguished from consciousness—it doesn't know what consciousness is.²⁴ For the Mind, to be conscious is to mentalize, in other words, obstruct the Current, divide things into pieces and put them into little pigeonholes that replace (poorly) the spontaneity of animal life. To be conscious means to label. No label, no "consciousness." All this has a meaning, really a meaning, only if we reach the end. The end is consciousness reassuming its power.²⁴

Will it have the power to transform the "piece of bark"?

This transformation of the piece of bark, or the attempt at melting the bark, will be the last stage of Mother's yoga after the great Turning Point of 1968. To combine the two sides into a new being.

The Zero Hour of Matter

But then, if Matter = Consciousness, depending upon the lightness of the consciousness we shall have a more or less thick and obscure matter. If the vibration is heavy, matter is heavy. If consciousness is slow, matter is slow—almost at a standstill. The thickness of Matter is proportionate to the speed of consciousness. In that true time, Matter is light and transparent, boundless; in false time, it is sticky and imprisons you—yet it is the same Matter. Like that of the caterpillar and the butterfly. With different tempos of consciousness.

To go from caterpillar to butterfly, Matter does not need to change: the tempo of consciousness needs to change. In the chrysalis of the caterpillar, time stops... and Matter is transformed.

This is perhaps an unexpected angle of the problem. The transformation of Matter is a problem of transforming the tempo of material consciousness.

The supramental Vibration is at once perfectly still and characterized by fantastic movement.

Mathematicians say that at the speed of light time stops, or it is the limit of time when it curves back onto its space, and a man traveling at the speed of light would theoretically remain ageless, while his less fortunate brothers would grow old and die on the slow earth. Without knowing it, they have touched a profound law. Only it is not a question of speed in miles per hour, it is a question of speed of consciousness. At the spatial limit of material time, as well as at the cellular limit of material thickness, the same Matter is transformed and changes its laws. At both poles, one meets a single consciousness that forms and re-forms Matter according to its speed... or its joy.

Matter is a property of the speed of consciousness. When time stops, Matter is changed.

The zero hour of Matter.

Death is a change in tempo.

Instead of changing tempo by dying, we must change tempo in a body.

That is perhaps the whole problem of transformation. Now, we are going to see.

But first, how can that cellular fluidity, that life "without barriers," be lived and organized practically?

What does that decentralized life look like?