Mother or The New Species - II

22. The New Perception

That passage out of the web, that innumerable cellular life or cellular consciousness, is first of all a frightful chaos. Truly the chaos of a new birth in the world. If it were a matter of being born all fresh and naked, it would be fine, but it is a re-birth in the old bark, or through the old bark, and in spite of it. The eyes will not see in the same way, the arms will not respond to the same will, the legs remain standing by the same law; the body functions will not obey the old imprints, the sleep will not sleep peacefully, time go by the clock and the body remain carefully sheltered in its little glossy armor. It takes time to begin to see things clearly and organize what appeared at first as something rather indefinite, if not an infinite consciousness of ultramarine blue—not to faint: in spite of everything to go on seeing and listening to those fifty, one hundred, two hundred people every day, to answer their questions, untangle their quarrels, sign checks and estimate expenses.... To keep up a contact while having a radically different contact. The "comedy" will continue up to 1973. And naturally, "Mother's getting senile, Mother's old, Mother..." as she told me, laughing, with her humor that never left her, as if humor were truly the only thing that could exist on both sides! Perhaps it is the only thing missing in animals and the only thing in us that the next species will inherit.

And as a matter of fact, all the new functionings that were emerging gradually seemed to alter, atrophy or obliterate the old functionings: sight was diminishing, hearing was diminishing, the pulse beat so oddly that it would have killed anyone else ten years before, memory was failing... all the signs of disintegration. Eating, too, was becoming a problem. It goes without saying that it's part of the things demanded, she said, laughing, the body has to eat. But to what extent and how?... The transition: how to effect the transition? The pace of the transition, the mode of transition?... It knows nothing. This poor body cannot say anything because it knows nothing; all that it thought it had learned for ninety years has been demonstrated most clearly to be worthless! It's been shown that it has everything to learn. So it is like that, goodwilled, but absolutely ignorant. What it tries to do is to be attentive to the least indication—but the indications are... not very clear. It has reached the point where all the things that are accepted and obvious (from a very young age one is accustomed to things taking place "just like that") have become absolutely unreal and fantastic! All the things that are beyond arguing, that are self-evident—unreal and fantastic. At times, it wonders how, how a gesture can be made?... You understand, the whole functioning, all, all of it is called into question.¹ And the little specimens watched and took note of everything, and all that swarming was within Mother, or rather She was everywhere in that swarming of worried or impatient or catastrophic reactions—the siege. The siege of Death. It would be there right up to the last second. They had foreseen everything, even her death. They knew everything. Wait, the last act has not yet been played,² she said. You who know, you will tell them.

You will tell them

I do not know; I am holding her hand on the other side of the veil and strange things are preparing themselves for the world.

We are really on the brink of a new era. Completely unexpected.

Then She would laugh—She was always laughing: All of a sudden, I understood [why the work of transformation had begun so late, after eighty years], I understood, as if Sri Aurobindo made me understand that it has come at this advanced age to give the semblance of reason. My age gives it a semblance of reason.³ And suddenly, it became crystal clear—and I said to her: "Had this happened to you at the age of thirty, no one would have understood the physical ordeal you were going through, because... it seems as if the body has to die in order to pass to the other side."

Bodily Oneness

It is difficult to describe logically what a newborn baby sees and feels when an entirely new world rushes at it from every side—there are thousands of phenomena that the readers of the Agenda will not finish discovering—not even having begun, in this strange forest of Mother's. From the very beginning, Mother had been fantastically gifted with vision, but I have intentionally avoided that subject, first because we have had enough of marvelous visions: we would quite simply like to see our physical life better; second, "psychics" have taken up so much space in our magazines with their dubious visitations that the subject is devalued, like everything else: we are in the age of a general devaluation. The old principle of political economy applies to all domains: bad money drives away good. And perhaps it is for the best, for after all, what we need is not a supernatural but a truer natural. However, a very new type of vision was beginning to emerge through the meshes of the web, one that had nothing to do (or less and less) with our organ of sight, nothing to do with the divine visions of Jacob or any of the prophets, and the yarns of psychics (which however are not necessarily yarns, far from it, but shall we say a poorly mastered instrument in most cases, almost always mixed with other things and too often misrepresented). It was a sort of new vision not only of Matter but of life in Matter: a cellular vision, we could call it, although the term risks being vulgarized and debased; it would be better to call it: a bodily vision. It is the body looking directly at its world, without the intervention of the Mind and less and less the intervention of the eyes which are just as blurred, as if fixed beforehand by the Mind. Years later, Mother would make a very interesting remark following a radical little operation that we shall mention later, which quite simply obliterated the Mind in her: Its strange, I realized how much the Mind influences what we see. She began to lose her physical vision, that is to say, to become blind, when her Mind was removed... as if 90% of physical vision depended on the Mind. But then if it is not the physical eyes that see, not the Mind that sees, if all that is removed, what sees? Mother had never seen so well as when She became blind. So?... Thousands of miles away or up close, it was all the same. Sometimes She could not make out the face of a person in front of her, yet She would see a tiny needle She needed, or people walking in New York. It was another law of vision, and what was that law? If it was not the eyes, not the head, neither contemplation nor ecstasy nor the eyes of sleep, what saw, what was the support of vision? Mother was seeing with the only support left in her: the consciousness of the body. And the body is everywhere! Once it is out of the web, the bodily consciousness directly reaches out everywhere. It sees everywhere physically. It is the body looking directly at the world.

But it does not look at the world as we would were we suddenly endowed with millions of eyes! Indeed, it is not at all a material projection of our false mental vision (which is exactly what we might have imagined, because we always project through imagination our way of seeing in the cage): it is a vision outside the cage, a vision of material reality free from all its mental appearances, by-products and disguises. It is the material world seen without any distortion. "But then how is it different from the old vision and all the old visions?" I asked Mother one day. It's as if the consciousness were not in the same position with respect to things. So they seem completely different.... The ordinary human consciousness, even in people who are broad-minded and all that, is always at the center, and things exist in relation to a center—you're at one point and everything exists in its relation to that point of consciousness. While now, the point no longer exists, so things are self-existent.⁴ And all of a sudden I opened my eyes wide (these poor physical eyes) as if the whole phantasmagoria of the world was rearing itself. We see nothing as it is! We live in a fantastic mentalization of the world centered on a little point of "I": it is "I" that is projected immeasurably, with all its petty baggage of heredity, philosophy, matrimony and the rest. You see, my consciousness is IN things—it isn't "something that receives" (it's much better than that, but I don't know how to put it into words)...⁴ So often She did not know how to say it, and how does one say it?! Previously when I used to have experiences (long ago, years ago), it was the mind that benefited more or less, and then it would spread it, use it; now its not like that: it's directly the body, it's the body that has the experience, and it's MUCH TRUER. There's an intellectual attitude that puts a kind of veil or... I don't know, something... something unreal on the perception of things. It's like seeing through a certain atmosphere, whereas the body feels the thing in itself it BECOMES that. It's not as if the thing were taken [in oneself]... it's as if the body itself became that.⁵

The body, purely, without the addition of organs or thought (really a body of a newborn baby), sees the pure world, pure Matter, pure man and pure everything. It does not even need to "see," as if the thing were in front of it; it does not even need to "become" what it sees: it is everything—the perfume bottle, the passerby, Mount Everest, the war in Biafra—it sees because it is. It is a vision through oneness (and even the word "oneness" presupposes two: there is only ONE). It is lovely to be Mount Everest, but it is less lovely to be the anguish of a disciple afflicted with cancer, the hemorrhage of another, or even the death of a third.

A strange world.

What does the pure world look like?

And is there not some sort of filter to protect you from undesirable experiences? Yes, there is a Filter, a tremendous Filter, a miraculous Filter. For that total consciousness is not the consciousness of a madman: it is an exact consciousness, to the second and to the thousandth of an inch—it is everything. And it obviously knows each point of its totality quite well, from this electron to that traffic cop. Everything moves together and everything is everything. And it knows perfectly well the amount of current that may pass through each thing without blowing a fuse or breaking something. In short, it is everything innumerably experiencing itself. And the world's great delight—toward which Mother was moving and wanted the world to move step by step—is to have in each point the innumerable experience, the innumerable discovery, the innumerable surprise of oneself everywhere in the delight of everything. That is why this damned story was concocted in the first place.

So then it is an enchanting "Filter."

It does not have any beard or any cross or commandments. It is a particular smile to be found.

Perhaps it is really our smile.

For once.

There is only ONE, you understand, so where is the other, the God over there on his perch?

We have still understood nothing of the world.

The Eyes of Matter

This new vision was not established in one day; actually, a whole new life was taking shape on all fronts, as it were, a first outline of the mode of being of the next species; and the transitions from one way of seeing or hearing or moving to the other are infinitely interesting, because through them we can grasp the mechanism that basically makes the difference between the old species and the new one. In the beginning, Mother would say: I am losing my sight, I am losing my hearing, I am losing my memory... It is always "I am losing" when something new must be put in place—there is a certain "I am losing my life" which must also change. And She noted with amusement, because She was always amused: For instance, I'll pick up a piece of paper: I'll see as clearly as I did before; I'll notice that I am seeing clearly —and its finished!..⁶ She notices. Yes, one "notices" as one reenters the cage—there, one notices everything, so nothing works naturally or miraculously anymore, as it should work. Yet another time, after reading a message with great difficulty, taking her magnifying glass, laying it aside, and finally reading the message in one single breath, She remarked: I just read and I see very clearly; then comes the old habit (or the idea or memory) that I need a magnifying glass to see—and I can't see anymore! Then I forget about seeing or not seeing, and I can do my work very well, I don't notice that I see or don't see! And it's like that with everything....⁷ Its an apparent incoherence.... It must depend on another law, which for the moment I don't know, and which rules the Physical.⁸ She was soon to learn this other law: that there is only one organ, consciousness, which through evolution has been conveniently fossilized or associated with an eye or an ear, but which travels everywhere very well without any support—naturally, for it is itself the support of everything!

Then countless other phenomena were multiplying from other angles: old phenomena which took on another meaning or a new sharpness; what formerly She used to see with inner eyes or the eyes of "sleep" was beginning to pass into the physical, as if the very perception of the body were changing and everything were physical, even the "other worlds"! I raised my eyes (I was sitting in front of a mirror, although I don't usually look at myself); I raised my eyes and looked, and I saw many things).... At that moment, I had an experience which made me say to myself "Ah! That's why, from the physical, purely material standpoint, my vision seems to be a bit blurred." Because what I was seeing was MUCH CLEARER and infinitely more expressive... as though Mother were beginning to see the physical much more clearly, but in another way. The senses change—it's not that you employ the senses proper to another plane (we have always known we had senses on all the different planes; its quite different from that): THE SENSES THEMSELVES change. The content is different, you know... The state of consciousness of the person I'm looking at, for instance, changes his physical appearance—FOR MY PHYSICAL EYES. The eyes of the person I am looking at are not exactly the same and the rest of the face too, even the color and the shape—that's what sometimes makes me hesitate. I see people (I see my people every morning) and I recognize them, and yet they are different, they are not the same every day (some are always, always the same, like a rock, but others are not). And I even... I hesitate sometimes: Is it really he? But he is very...⁹ And the phenomenon was getting more and more precise in its direction or its curve: You understand, it's more a CONSCIOUSNESS of things than purely and merely a vision. And I've noticed, when I have someone in front of me, for instance, with some, when I look at them they grow more and more precise and clear; others become more and more blurred TO MY PHYSICAL VISION. It must depend on their state of consciousness. Some grow extremely precise, especially the eyes, and in their eyes I see the consciousness. Others, on the contrary, become blurred like that; with some, even, in place of their eyes I've seen two black plates. As if they wanted to put a veil. Its very interesting.¹⁰ In other words, more and more, the physical world, things, beings took on a clarity for Mother only in proportion to the consciousness they contained—and strangely enough, human beings were not always the ones to contain the most consciousness! Those "black screens" are a typically human phenomenon, perhaps even purely human: how often did Mother speak of the life in stones, not to mention the bottles of mouthwash! Well, some people come to see me, they come in: I see only a silhouette. Then suddenly it becomes clear-cut. Then off it goes again—DEPENDING ON THEIR THOUGHT. It's extremely interesting! ¹¹ And the whole physical world seemed to ebb and flow, become clear or dim, like a fluid picture, according to the consciousness it contained.

And it was the same thing for hearing: I hear things that way too. Certain sounds.... On one occasion I noticed a sound, a seemingly imperceptible sound, coming from about a hundred yards away, and it seemed to be right here.... I hear what's necessary for me to hear, even if it's a very faint sound, but all the sounds of conversation, all the things that make a lot of noise, I don't hear at all!...¹² Whereupon they said, "Mother is deaf," "Mother is blind," but She was deaf to their stupid "porridge of Falsehood" and blind to their nasty thoughts, and She knew very well (or rather felt very well, unfortunately). When some people speak to me, I hear absolutely nothing. With others, I hear the drone of a sound devoid of meaning. And with other people, I hear everything they say. But it's a different way of hearing: what I hear is the vibration of their thought and that's what makes it very clear.... For a very, very long time—years—I've had the feeling that when people don't think very clearly, I can't hear. But that's not quite the point: it's when their consciousness isn't ALIVE in what they're saying—it's not so much a question of "thought," it's their consciousness that isn't alive in what they're saying; its a mental machine; then I don't understand anything at all—nothing. When their consciousness is alive, it reaches me. And I have noticed, for instance, that people whom I don't hear think it's because I am deaf in the ordinary way, so they start shouting—which is even worse! Then it's as if they were throwing stones in my face.¹³ Not once, not for a minute, right to the end, did I ever feel that Mother was blind or deaf. She always heard me perfectly, even my craziest questions, and She always saw me... probably better than I see myself in the mirror!

So then, where is the real vision, where is the "concreteness"? Is it that material grayness which grows dim, or this unexpected object which shines all alone? And with her marvelous sense of humor, one day She remarked: The way in which I see is something very interesting. Something suddenly comes alive (an object or a face or a letter or... ), clear, precise, almost luminous. The next minute, everything is blurred. I seem to be told, "This is worth seeing." So I look at it. "And [laughing] don't bother about that"! ¹⁴ Thus letters—piles of letters—objects, people, everything grew clear or disappeared according to... its truth or usefulness. A whole world of human encumbrances was vanishing. What is really concrete is seen. What is concrete is what is conscious. All this has changed—I mean the whole way the organs function. Have the organs themselves changed, or is it their functioning? I don't know. But they all obey another law—absolutely.¹⁵

Nevertheless, I kept pestering Mother because I had always had a kind of instinctive and rational mistrust of "psychics." (In fact, it may sound very surprising, but Mother always seemed to me the most rational being in the world, as if at last I had met someone who was reason incarnate compared to this world of madmen equipped with science and television, and all of her experiences, rather bewildering for most people, always seemed to me to have a kind of deep logic, like the true logic of the universe. Mother is the true logic of the universe. She was no more irrational than blind or deaf. Only, it is the next logic of the universe, or perhaps the old eternal Logic we thought we could invent better and "improve" in our cage.) And I asked her, a bit brazenly: "But listen, wouldn't a psychic see that way?" No, not at all! This isn't like all the visions I have had!... This new vision of things—it's not going out of Matter to see the world in another way (that has been done for a long time, of course, it's nothing new, and it's nothing marvelous), that's not it: it's Matter looking at itself in an entirely new way, and that's where the fun is! It sees the whole affair anew and altogether differently.¹⁶ Mother did not close her eyes, She did not go off into contemplation nor did She even try to see: things took shape just like that, spontaneously, before her eyes, as if in their true form, as if the consciousness of the body were seeing the world in its way, purely, without the mental covering that gives an apparent gloss of "consciousness," a gloss of culture, a concrete gloss of face powder and moustache... which was not concrete at all, which did not really exist. It was not Mother who "saw": things showed themselves... as they actually were. And She added, with a kind of youthful smile, so clear, so childlike, which would spread over her face (strangely, at such moments, She looked like a laughing Chinese baby!): Everything is becoming like that, as if it were seen for the first time and from an altogether different angle; everything, everything: people's character, circumstances, even the motion of the earth and the stars, everything is like that, everything has become entirely new and... unexpected, in the sense that all the human mental vision—is completely gone! So things are much better!

In short, false matter is gradually vanishing, the one with the waxed moustache—the one that emits heavy waves. But something remains, which is true Matter.

The Veil of Unreality

Little by little, as the result of the gradual loosening of the web's meshes, the phenomenon was increasing in intensity and scope. It was sight everywhere. We cannot even speak of "vision" because it had nothing to do with an enchanting and embellished physical reality—no auras, no shower of flowers or musical-pictorial whorls: a more scientific physical, we could say, meaning more exact, without any misrepresentation. But the more that reality emerged, the more unreal the other became, as if the eyes could no longer see what was not true—exactly the opposite phenomenon to what happens in our world where the more things are false, the louder and more visible they are: It's the same when I look at people: I don't see them as they see themselves, I see them with the vibration of all the forces that are in them and pass through them, and quite frequently with the supreme Vibration of the Presence. And that's why my physical sight is... not exactly failing, but changing in character, for the physical precision that normal physical sight gives is... it's false for me.¹⁷ Even her taste could no longer taste what was not true! A few days ago I had the experience that the quality of tastes had changed: certain things had an artificial taste (the usual taste is an artificial taste) while others carried IN THEMSELVES a true taste; so this is very clear—very clear and very precise.¹⁸ What is very precise to us is just what becomes most blurred (I am speaking and Mother speaks essentially of the human world, because trees and fruits and the whole natural world kept their natural preciseness). And this blur became a kind of veil She was unable to figure out very well at first, except that apparently She was going blind—one loses all the "qualities" of the old species. It's rather strange, this eyesight. There always seems to be a veil between me and things, constantly [this was in 1965, well before the time She became "officially" blind], I am so used to it.... Then all of a sudden, without any apparent reason (an outwardly logical reason, I mean), a thing becomes clear, precise, sharp—the next minute, it's over. Sometimes it's a word in a letter, sometimes it's an object. And it is a different quality of vision, a vision... (how can I explain it?) as if light were shining from within things instead of shining on them: it isn't a reflected light. It isn't luminous, it isn't like a candle, for instance, or a lamp, not that, but instead of being lit by a projected light, things have their own light, which doesn't radiate. It's becoming more and more frequent, but with perfect illogic. Which means that I don't understand the logic of it; and the vision is so precise! Extraordinary, with the full understanding of the thing seen while you are seeing it. For instance, I noticed this while washing early in the morning: I go into the bathroom before turning the light on; but I see just as clearly as when the light is on! It makes no difference. And then everything was as if behind a kind of veil. Then I turned my attention and I said to myself, "But all this is becoming so lackluster, it's completely uninteresting!" And I started becoming aware of one thing or another. And suddenly, I saw that phenomenon of a bottle in the cupboard becoming so clear, so... with an inner life. "Oh!" I said—the next minute, it was over. This is clearly the preparation for a vision through the inner light rather than projected light. And it is... oh, it's warm, living, intense—and of such precision! You see everything at the same time, not only the color and shape, but the character of the vibration. It's marvelous.... I seem to be behind a veil—that's really the feeling: a veil; and then, suddenly, something lives with the true vibration. But that's rare.... And with her ever cheerful irony, She added: Probably there aren't many things worth seeing!¹⁸

This veil resembles strangely that of the physical Mind, which envelops the cells, each and every cell, in a dark cocoon, because as She gradually emerged from the web, the other vision—what She called "the next way"—became not only natural, spontaneous and constant, but universalized. And curiously enough, it was not only a "vision": I can't call it an image: it is a knowledge. I can't even say it's a knowledge, it's... something that is EVERYTHING at once,¹⁹ and there, in that kind of global perception, the old ordinary way of seeing with eyes seemed more and more unreal. after all, what would a marmot say if it were progressively equipped with a pair of human eyes? The sense of the "concrete" fades away—it fades farther and farther away. "Concrete" vision, "concrete" sense of smell, "concrete" taste, "concrete" hearing, it all seems far away—far behind in an unreal past. And that kind of dry and lifeless "concrete" is replaced by something that's very supple, very complete in that all the senses function together, and VERY INTIMATE WITH EVERYTHING. Before, each thing was separate, divided, unconnected with the other, it was very superficial—very precise but very superficial, like a pinpoint. It's not at all that way any more. The foremost feeling you get is one of intimacy, that is to say, there is no more distance, no more difference, no more seer and thing seen....²⁰ Mother was beginning to go into that ultramarine ocean of cellular consciousness where the body spreads out everywhere, and what is there to "see"? There is nothing to "see" as if from outside: you are in it. You are, therefore you see and you hear and taste. You are everything that happens in each thing. "A kind of tactile vision," as she would put it. It's above vision. It's a kind of perception: there is no more differentiation of the organs. And its a perception... yes, which is total: at the same time vision, hearing, and knowledge.²¹ And always that feeling of something smooth, smooth, without any clashes, any complications, as though you could no longer bump into things, no longer.... It's quite interesting.²²

A fluid life, everywhere, in everything.

A paradoxical life, more and more paradoxical, on the border between caterpillar and butterfly—but more and more on the side of the butterfly. Before, when I used to use this magnifying glass, I could read very well, but now it's absolutely no use! It doesn't grow any clearer, there is always the same cloudiness. Its bigger, that's all. Strange, it's bigger but it's the same thing, there is the same veil... of unreality.²³

Not that Matter was becoming unreal in the way of the illusionists; it was the human way of seeing Matter that was receding into the past. It is very strange; actually it was as if Mother's body were becoming an increasingly clearer and more precise instrument—true and exact because it was total—which could no longer register anything other than what was really there—a kind of total supermicroscope that could not see phantoms, if we dare say so, or nonexistent Matter. Now we do understand why Sri Aurobindo called it the "Truth-Consciousness" and in what way He was "blind." I never saw the world so much as since I have withdrawn, he wrote.

Naturally, we shall be told that the human vision, real or unreal, is perfectly adapted to the human milieu, as is the marmot to its hole—but the point is to know whether death, too, and pain are forever "adapted" to our life or if they are some unreal and removable parasites.

Lived Vision

That innumerable life came in little dabs of experience; one could feel it was groping its way through Mother's body in order to find its right means of expression. A new kind of life to be set up, as when a certain little tarsier in the Philippines had to open its binocular vision for the first time, but here this vision is not a vision and has millions of eyes—truly, it is not a vision, it is a mode of life, a "way of being," as Mother would say. And it is not some final way of being either, it would be quite erroneous to take Mother's experiences as a sort of gospel of the new world, heaven forbid! She would shudder, She who shuddered at nothing. Those experiences, of which we can select only a few here, indicate rather the general direction of the development, its process; and most likely, the new species will perfect, adapt and diversify the instrument. This is only the first stammering of the new world. Hundreds of bizarre or comical or sometimes even anguishing experiences, which would have been rather frightening for anyone other than Mother. Suddenly, Mother was discovering all the merits of Mathilde and her positivist "iron bar" education: A splendid education, mon petit! Splendid. I am infinitely grateful to her...²⁴ I don't think there's anyone more materialistic than I was, with all the practical common sense and positivism; and now I understand why it was like that! It was the most solid base one could have for these experiences. No danger of imagining.²⁵

We are in search of the mechanism, not stories (it is a pity in some respects, but that will be the joy of the future readers of the Agenda). Anyway, we can choose one rather typical and striking experience. Piles of letters were waiting in Mother's basket, and She was saying to herself: "I must absolutely see to them," but there was never enough time and the days were passing. Then one morning, while I was sitting, I suddenly felt something so heavy in my head, heavy in my chest, and... odd. I had never felt that before. And all the sensations had become as if violent. So I closed my eyes, and... you know, an avalanche, a stampede of forms, sounds, colors, even odors, which imposed themselves with a reality and intensity—I had never known that before, never. I watched, then I said to myself "But that's a good way to go insane!" And I started doing what had to be done for it to stop. But it wouldn't stop! It wanted to go on. So I thought, "It's clearly here for a reason. There's a reason for me to have this experience." I watched, studied, observed. And I saw it was a magnified faculty of sensation—inordinately magnified, you understand—because the equilibrium between all the faculties of the being had been disrupted. The natural equilibrium which makes things balance each other, harmonize and organize spontaneously into a coherent whole with a conscious existence, was shattered—shattered to the benefit of the faculty of sensation. Naturally, that faculty of sensation was terribly multiplied (or aggravated, I might say) and even imposed itself brutally.²⁶ Then the experience was filed. Two or three days later, the person who read out the mail took a letter from the basket and read it to Mother: "What do you think of LSD? Can it help human consciousness progress?" Immediately, Mother broke out laughing. She had no need to "think" about the value of LSD: She had experienced LSD. So, I had the experience without swallowing the drug! And everything was there: sounds, colors, smells.... It was not "as if": it was lived. Lived spontaneously.

And all the experiences of this new (I was about to say "vision," but obviously it is something else), of this new perception or way of being, are of this same living kind: there is nothing to "know"—you are. Now, this perception which includes everything—taste, color, smell, sound, knowledge—was groping to find its means of expression, and it appears through certain repeated experiences that it took the form of a kind of movie screen, but not an "external" screen that one watches from the outside like a spectator in a theater: an inner screen... which one enters! You go into the screen and begin living the story: it is happening to you. It is not that you look at it: you live it. Early one morning, the screen opened, and She saw (it is not that She "saw," you see; it happened, it happened to her), She saw a priest and some altar boys coming to give her the last rites! Not that I felt particularly sick! But anyhow that's how it was. They wanted to give me last rites, so I watched—I watched, I wanted to see; I thought, "Well, before dismissing them abruptly, let's see what it is...." (I had no idea why they had come, you understand; someone had sent them to give me the last rites.) I watched carefully to find out if really it had a power of action, if the last rites had the power to disturb the progress of the soul and tie it down to old religious formations.... Once I had seen that, suddenly (it was as if on a screen) the whole story vanished and it was over.²⁷ Nevertheless Mother had actually been given the last rites, if you can believe it! The next day She opened a letter from a dying gentleman from a Catholic family asking her if he should accept the last rites, whether it would not disturb the freedom of his soul.... Now Mother knew. She had undergone the "operation." Curious, isn't it? It's not a mental contact that lets you know what the gentleman has written and so on; no, it was the experience—it always takes the form of an experience, an ACTION: something that has to be done and gets done, or that has to be known and becomes known. It is never the mental transcription of ordinary life. And all this happens IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY, not while I am sleeping. This story happened to me when I had just had my bath! All at once something comes, takes hold of me, and then there's a sort of life in which I live, until something is done—some action—and when that action is done, everything goes away. And it goes away without leaving any trace…²⁷ Nonetheless, She would spend one whole night, eight hours, in the body of a dying disciple with all his agony, and not "as if": She was the dying person. The body, the body consciousness was the consciousness of a dying body, with all the anguish, all the suffering.... And it lasted a long time: it lasted all night. I saw her afterwards, and She was still shaken by it—understandably so. And a few hours later She was given the news that the disciple had passed away. Then I understood…²⁸

But what a marvelous way of "knowing," it is matchless! Now we fully understand the meaning of understanding: it is direct and lived, it is the very thing in its entirety. All our so-called knowledge is just imaginary and indirect chatter, through hearsay, through a veil of unreality. Here, the body itself lives—and a "pure" body, as it were, without the mattress of fabricated pseudo-knowledge and pseudo-sensations, in other words, without the old imprints, the obscure and distorting cellular cocoon. Every day, thirty, forty of them will come and take hold of me, and then, all at once, I'll go into a concentration, LIVE a certain thing.²⁹ I catch myself doing something, to be precise.³⁰ And these kinds of unexpected slices of life—or actions rather, because it always involved doing something (it is a sort of work, a means of work)—will increase in scope, become more and more unexpected and universal: At times I find myself talking with people whom most of the time I don't know, then describing a scene: they can get such and such a thing done, they can be advised to do this or that thing, and it will end with such and such a thing. They are kinds of scenes from a book or scenes from a movie. Then, the same day or the next, someone suddenly tells me, "I received a message from you and you told me to write to so-and-so and tell him such and such a thing"!... And I am not doing it mentally, its not that I think, "A letter must be sent to so-and-so and such and such a thing must be done," not at all: I live—I live a scene or narrate a scene, and it's received by someone else. And it's happening here, in France, in America, everywhere. Its becoming amusing! Someone writes to me, "You told me this," and it's one of my "scenes"! One of the scenes I lived—not "lived," lived and created at the same time! I don't know how to explain it.³⁰ As though, in that particular life, Mother were creating or shaping the circumstances—and quite naturally so, since She was the circumstances. She was the accident, so She turned the steering wheel to the left (to take a simple example) and "quite naturally" the person who was there driving the car pulled to the left. The accident was not somewhere out there: She was in it. She was the accident. There are stories of countries, stories of governments; I don't know the result there—maybe we'll see after some time. And in this type of activity, I have all kinds of knowledge that I don't have! Sometimes even medical knowledge or technical knowledge that I don't at all have—yet that I have, of course, since I say, "This is how it is, that is how it is...." It's rather amusing.³⁰ Of course, there is no need for technical knowledge: She is knowledge, so everything is known automatically!

The direct world—exact.

Continuous Matter

But let us not imagine that it is some kind of grandiose life (unless they are grandiose, things do not exist for the Mind) and that Mother was busy managing the destiny of the world and the government of nations—that also happened, but She was not "busy" doing this or that: it was a natural life in which She did not "choose" beforehand and mentally what She was going to do. On the other side of our mental web, things move in a single Movement and there is no "choosing" between two things or a thousand: each thing has its place (accidents also) and each has its role (blunders also), and depending on the total necessity, you are made to act upon one circumstance or another. And in that totality, strangely (or not), tiny microscopic things and world upheavals have equal value. Each thing is an absolute that holds its total joy or its unique and irreplaceable purpose in the millions of interlacing movements—everything holds together. One day, I was bowled over by a veritable revelation (it was in 1971, the third time Mother was speaking of the "web," I am anticipating): I have a curious impression of a kind of web—a web with... like very loose threads, I mean not tightly meshed, connecting all events, and if you have power over one of these webs, there's a whole field of circumstances that apparently have nothing to do with each other but which are linked together there in such a way that one necessarily implies the existence of the other.... And I have the impression it's something that envelops the earth.... They are circumstances that depend on one another, in a completely invisible way outwardly, without any mental logic, and yet as though connected to each other. If you are conscious, really conscious of that, that's how you can change circumstances. And do you feel you have power over one of those webs?" I asked her. No, it's the other way around: it's because I was working on one of those webs that I noticed it.... You touch one point and everything moves. If you had the power to replace one of those webs with another one, she added, you could change all circumstances that way. It's inexpressible. And I insisted (that's how I got my revelation): "What web are you acting on right now?" But I don't know! They're webs that are around the earth.... There's one... I see.... [and I was hanging in midair, struck, really struck]... I see.... Why, every little circumstance of life is on it.³¹ The smallest circumstances... together. You drop something, and over there, in the Bering Strait, an iceberg slowly drifts, and this man prepares his coup d'etat and that one revises the 229th page of a book—and everything is connected. Without logic... or with an inconceivable logic. Marvelous. That is how the supramental consciousness sees, or rather how it lives. An innumerable and compact marvel... that moves with this object you drop inadvertently, with the little scorpion that comes to your doorstep, or the white hibiscus that blooms in the garden.

One reads the world in a gesture.

The slightest thing pulsates totally.

One need not go "far" to change the world.

One need not perform "special" things to change the world.

One little act, true. One pure little cell.

It is inexpressible... it is to be seen. To be lived.

One day, as I was rereading the some six thousand pages of Mother's Agenda after her departure, I received the proofs from the reprint of an old edition of her Questions and Answers from the year 1930, page 229. So I corrected page 229, closed the envelope and sent it back to the press. Then I resumed reading the Agenda, the year 1968: on the first page I opened that morning, Mother was commenting on that very conversation, p. 229 of her Questions and Answers.... By what "chance" did all these years of the Agenda, perhaps around page 4000, happen to coincide with that page 229 of an old Questions and Answers, and with what chronometric complicity of the printers, the proofreaders, the delivery boys? The year 1930 of Mother's Questions and Answers had intersected the year 1968 of her Agenda through a singular journey through time, space, printers and typists as if they were on the same web, to the very second. And it had no importance.

And sometimes, for a second, the intertwining is revealed. So we say: oh, what a coincidence!. Millions and millions of miraculous little coincidences.

An innumerable life within a point... without any relevance, or with a total and unique relevance.

One should live each point, each second totally. It is the supramental life.

Mother was learning to live the supramental life. Without any logic She was entering one "screen," then another screen, which, as it turned out two days or two hours later, was perfectly logical. And the most "banal" things came on (or in) the screen. One morning I brought a certain amount of money to Mother as an offering. It had already come on the screen. Everything comes in that way! she exclaimed jokingly... How can I explain?... Its not words, not thoughts, it's something absolutely concrete which comes as if on a screen. If I were in a superficial consciousness I would ask myself "Why am I thinking of this?" But I don't "think" of it and it's not a thought... it's a life being organized. It's very interesting. I must learn to receive things accurately. I don't objectify them, of course (meaning that I don't put them on another screen where they would become objective knowledge), I don't do that at all, so I can't play the prophet—otherwise, what a prophet I'd be! [Mother was not trying to "remember," nor even to "understand": it was like something crossing her path, along with asters, little donkeys and a passer-by, and She kept walking.] From the smallest things to the biggest: cyclones, earthquakes, revolutions, all that, and then very small things, very small, even much smaller than a "pension," a tiny little circumstance of life, or something that's going to come, like a gift someone has sent me or... very small things, very small, totally unimportant in appearance—everything is shown with the same value! There is no "big," no "small," no "important," no "unimportant." And it's constantly like that! Its strange. Its almost... a memory in advance.³²

Sri Aurobindo spoke of a "memory of the future." Obviously another way of being.

Another time... in advance.

And sometimes, it was ancient Egypt that came. Another time... from tomorrow? Or a timeless time in which everything is known. A spaceless space where everything is together. The ordinary consciousness is like an axis with everything revolving around it. That's the ordinary individual consciousness. And if the axis shifts, one feels lost. Its like a big axis (more or less big, it can also be tiny), it is planted in time, with everything revolving around it. The consciousness may be spread more or less out, more or less high, more or less strong, but it always turns on an axis. And now for me there is no more axis—gone, vanished! It can go here, it can go there and there, it can go backwards, forwards, anywhere at all—no more axis, no turning on an axis. Interesting. No more axis.³³

Mysterious.... Undoubtedly to be lived, not to be understood.

But what is certain is that the cage is narrow... and optional.

And the experience develops and takes shape, but it always seems to look like a "lived film": The moment it comes, I stop the film, and then I work on it to clarify the ideas, put things in their place, see all the relationships... [you would almost think of a film director organizing the various sequences—except it is not a film, it is a slice of material life that is being organized] and when the work is finished, it goes away. Only, it takes the form of a memory, so I ask myself why I remember that. It is odd, these are circumstances that are going to happen, and yet Mother "remembers them".... It's a lack of true objectification. That's how I explain it: otherwise, maybe the film wouldn't be stopped, it would pass on. It would be completely natural and be part of the millions of things that go by or happen without our paying any attention to them—so sometimes She "stops the film" to enter it and work on it, that is, consciously take part in this scene or that in order to alter it or widen it, and then She remembers: it takes the form of a lived memory. A "memory in advance." There are very funny things all the time: I answer letters I haven't received! Then I receive them afterwards—my answer is already written down!³⁴

But what is most interesting—much more than knowing or living through a cyclone, a revolution, or some human event in advance—is that not only there is no separation of time—before, after—but there is no separation of Matter either: there is no "matter there" and "matter here" separated by bodies and miles and "otherness." A continuum of living Matter. Everything is becoming a LIVING consciousness, each thing emanates its own consciousness and exists because of it.... That is where the equation "Matter = Consciousness" becomes very concrete. For instance, knowing in one's consciousness just a second or a minute beforehand: "The clock is going to strike, someone is going to enter, someone is going to move...." And those things aren't mental, they are part of the mechanism of things [a clock is mechanical, the movement of a body is mechanical], yet they are all phenomena of consciousness. The things themselves LIVE (I say "live," but that's not it), they LET YOU KNOW WHERE THEY ARE, where you'll find them; other things suddenly GO OUT of the consciousness and disappear. It's a whole world—a world of tiny, microscopic phenomena that are another way of living, a world that seems to be the result of consciousness without the intervention of what we call "knowledge": its something that has nothing to do with knowledge or thought. The world stripped of its mental crust, the pure world. A body that knows the clock, or the person climbing the stairs to see Mother, or anything whatsoever ten thousand miles away in a perfect material complicity. For instance, from time to time, when I hear people speak of something or other and say, "It will be like this and like that," instantly there comes a sort of "tactile" vision... how can I explain this?... It resembles touch and sight (yet its neither touch nor sight, but both together): it's the thing as it is, that's IT. Someone said to Mother: we are going to build the house here. And Mother replied: no, build there instead, you will hit water. They dug, and there was a spring. Or else someone said: I need two truckloads of cement for this work, and Mother saw eight bags of cement passing in front of her, together with the disciple's deceit. Or I can perhaps give a personal example, because that consciousness of Matter is frankly very humorous in its own way—mercilessly, it sees what is true: I had been told that someone (a young woman) wanted to commit suicide, and I saw her as if in the window of a huge department store, with a revolver to her head. I rushed up only to realize she was looking at herself in the window and... powdering her face with a revolver! Who has ever heard of such a sense of humor? The comedy of the earth, without make-up. Except that it is not always comical. Or else, someone said to Mother: this eucalyptus tree is dying; Mother said: plant another eucalyptus tree next to it, it needs a companion. And the tree started to revive. And they may say what they like, that's IT and it is irrefutable. And so far, there has never been any contradiction. Its a consciousness in which the mental element is absent. It comes just on its own, and it's so clear! It's like an immediate contact with the thing as it is. It is another way of living.³⁵

Sri Aurobindo also felt the battle of the Marne on a map. For us, the mental species, to know is to understand. For the next species, to know is to live, to be—everywhere, anywhere and anytime. I am as though bathed in it and it isn't something I "see" (something foreign to me that I see), it's... suddenly I am it. There's no longer any person, any... I can't find words to describe these experiences.³⁶

And all that happens on the cellular level. They are not exceptional powers but the normal, ordinary perception, as we now breathe or feel. It is not a superconsciousness up there looking at Matter from its luminous height; it is here, in the body consciousness. It would almost seem that without the web, the body lives in another world, which is nevertheless physical and material, because after all, that body lives by the clock, sensibly goes to bed on time and sees two hundred very physical people a day—and its perception is physical: New York is physical, the Chinese troops are physical, and so are the gutters of Thebes. So then, what kind of physical? What is the truth of our material world? And in that same physical, behind the "veil of unreality," death does not exist, illness does not exist, gravity does not exist, rivers can be crossed effortlessly... as if the Matter we now live were a morbid invention of the Mind from one end to the other. A passing invention to make an individual cage. But this is not the truth of Matter, this is false matter.

This is the material, experimental conclusion Mother was coming to: The notion of time and space, objectivity and subjectivity—whether things are concrete or not—all that seems to have been... devices for preparing the consciousness for a new way of being.³⁷ It is like... death, food and money: this Consciousness feels those are the three "awesome" things in human life, that human life revolves around those three things—eating, dying, and having money—and to it, the three are... they are passing inventions which derive from a wholly transitory state that doesn't correspond to anything very deep or very permanent. That's its attitude. And then, it teaches the body to be otherwise.³⁸*

Time, space and death are interlinked.

And all three are passing inventions leading to... what?

Just as Matter is hardened, frozen and divided in our cage, so time is congealed, thick and slow-flowing across the distance of our fragmented Matter—our fragmented consciousness. Time is but a false sensation of separation in a milieu where everything is continuous, unbroken and immediate—and light. Time is a rhythm of consciousness,³⁹ Mother said. Our Matter is in a false rhythm, just as it is falsely thick—if the rhythm changes, Matter will change, or rather become what it really is. Time = Consciousness = Rhythm = Matter.

Another rhythm of Matter.

What is the true rhythm of Matter?

What does that true Matter look like, that physical world as it is, in which Mother's body, Mother's cellular consciousness, "traveled" instantly and everywhere?