Mother or The New Species - II

23: The True Earth

The physical world as it really is?

We are now entering a quite mysterious part of Mother's Forest. All is a mystery to us. We are trying to reconstruct a coherent world through the bars of our cage, we are thrusting measuring rods and antennas and microscopes out in order to grasp that enormous whole, but we really grasp nothing of the world, we grasp only what has come into our cage: it is not the world, it is the world of our cage And when we die, we go to the other side of the cage—to nowhere, nothingness, paradise. We can say whatever we like since no one has returned from there, at least not in the same body. When we sleep, we also go to the other side of the cage—dreams, a dark or shining jumble, question marks and disconcerting encounters, and all this is put back into the language of the cage upon returning: it is a translation of the pastoral life, or not, by a perpetual prisoner who has never set eyes on a real field. We can say whatever we like, but it is never these eyes which see, these eyes will have to decay in order to see differently, maybe. When we meditate, we are supposed to go out of the cage—gods, devils, dazzling or murky cosmoses, staggering revelations and lots of question marks that dissolve into an air free of any problems—we can say whatever we like, but when we return, all the problems are there, unchanged. And no one agrees, each one has seen something different, each one creates their own gospel. But finally, what has gone out of the cage? A less ensnared part of the Mind, which after going back through the bars translates what it thought it saw without bars—it is the Mind deluding itself with its own story of the world, only in a wider fashion, with a few additions to make it pretty. And yet all that brilliant or murky nothing, strange and capricious, is what makes the best of our cage, its most comfortable part for those who are not mere machines. But the world, the great world keeps sailing onward, no one will ever catch it, no one has seen it with his blue or brown eyes, as one sees the little leaf that quivers so gently in the wind, right in front of us.

The Living and the Dead

We could say that Mother is someone who has returned from there, but it is not even that. She did not go to the other side of the cage with a view to bring back a story in a mental language. She brought the other side here, not for stuffing it into the cage (as if we could ever stuff that into a marmot's hole), but to the place in the body that is like both sides at once: what the others sought up above and in dreams, She found down here, concretely, in the cells of her body. And since it is not a little piece of the Mind that went on the journey (I was about to say excursion, but it is more of an incursion), it is difficult to couch that in Cartesian language. In fact, only the cage is Cartesian, the rest is much less rigid. It is the eyes of the cells that see, very young eyes that are still rather mindless (happily), but the descendants of the new species will be more gifted to make them twinkle. We always forget that the supramental body, which will live and handle all this very naturally, has not yet been created by evolution—for the moment, there is an old, transitory body which is on both sides at once, as it were, and which is beginning to possess the organs of the "next way" without having the means of movement and expression of the next way. That body will be created, that much is sure—how, we do not know at all, or perhaps Mother will give us some glimpse—but meanwhile, we are at the stage of the butterfly inside the caterpillar. That is exactly what I said to Mother one day, after one of her drastic experiences: "If a caterpillar were abruptly endowed with butterfly eyes, it would be rather panicking!" But Mother was never panicked by anything, She experimented, noted the result and went on. Mother never stopped on the way, not for any experience, even if it were the sublimest one—the moment it was seen, it was done with. To know a thing is to make it die. One must go farther. And so She did.

Therefore we are left with the experience itself, without logic: on such a day, in such and such circumstances, at 95° Fahrenheit (it is always hot in Pondicherry), this is what I saw; others may put any logic they like on it, I have only the Philistine eyes of the New World, or rather the little mischievous eyes of Mother's body. How strange that even Mother's cells were humorous. But since I was the Philistine, She tried to explain to me as best She could: Just try for a moment, try and imagine you're the Divine! Everything is in you; you simply play at bringing it all out in a certain order. But for you, in your consciousness, it's all there simultaneously: there is no time, neither past, future, nor present it's all there together, every possible combination. He's just playing at bringing out one thing and then another [which means, letting them out one after another through the bars of our cage]. But the poor devils down below see only a small part of the whole (about as much as this) and say, "Here's an error!" How is it an error? Simply because what they see is only a small part.... Its clear, isn't it? It's easy to understand. The notion of error belongs to time and space. The same goes for the feeling that a thing cannot both BE and NOT BE at the same time. And yet that's the way things are: something both is and is not at the same time. The notion of time, of time and space, is what brings in the notion of error.¹ All the same, this was a bit too much, even for my unorthodox Cartesianism: "How do you mean a thing is and is not at the same time, how can that be?" Something is, and simultaneously its opposite exists. Well, for us it can't be both yes and no at the same time; but for the Lord it's CONSTANTLY both yes and no at the same time!... It's the same with our notion of space. "I am here," we say, "therefore you are not here." But I am here and you are here and all is here!¹ And Mother burst into laughter looking at my face. But, here, suddenly something became much more serious: It's the same with those poor "dead." How many, many poor human beings have been destroyed by the very people they loved the most! Under the pretext that they were dead. People give them a very bad time. "Destroyed?" I was somewhat flabbergasted. Yes, burned [i.e., cremated]. Or shut up in a box without air and light—while FULLY CONSCIOUS. And just because they can no longer express themselves, people say they are "dead." They don't waste any time declaring them dead! But they are conscious. They are conscious. Imagine someone who can no longer speak or move—according to human laws, he is "dead." He is dead but he is conscious. He is conscious, so he sees the people around him: some of them are weeping, some of them are... if he's a bit clairvoyant, he also sees that some of them are rejoicing. And then he sees himself put into a box, sees the lid nailed down, shutting him in: "Ah, now its all over, they're going to cover me with earth!" Or he's taken over there [to the cremation ground], and then its fire in the mouth—FULLY conscious. I have lived this in recent days. I have seen it Last night or the night before, I spent at least two hours in a world—the subtle physical world—where the living mingle with the dead with no sense of difference, it makes absolutely no difference there. For instance, when X was in her body I used to see her at night maybe once a year (maybe not even that much). For years she was utterly nonexistent in my consciousness... but since she left her body, I see her almost every night! There she is, just as she was, you know, but no longer troubled, that's all. And there were both living and... what we call the "living" and the "dead"—they were both there together, eating together, moving around together, having fun together; and all in a lovely, tranquil light—pleasant, very pleasant. "There!" I thought, "humans have drawn a sharp line, saying, 'Now he's dead!"

This was in 1962, just after the first great Turning that hurled Mother out of the web. That was the first time Mother saw the living and the dead together—the first time, at eighty-four, after a vast life filled with a deep experience on every possible plane and every possible world. She had gone out of her body thousands of times since the age of five and She had never seen that. She had never seen that world where the living and the dead are together... as if life and death were on the same side. Hence, there is a place in the consciousness where this exists; and the only place where her experience was taking place at the time, was on the cellular level, in the consciousness of the cells of the body. At cellular level, at the bottom-most of the material ladder, the living and the dead are together, there are no longer two sides: there is a single side—just as there is no longer "over there" or "here," "yesterday" or "today." And yet it is a material world, for if the cells are not material, then what is? It means that our physical world extends in quite an unexpected way: its "life" and "death" are not real and definitive data—or "scientific," we could say—any more than its space and time. They are a temporary way of seeing and being that suits our evolutionary transit through the cage but does not correspond to the ultimate physical reality of the universe. It is reality only for the cage.

As for "other worlds," there is no lack of psychics, sages and saints in every age and clime, from Egypt to India, to Eleusis and Dante, who have seen and described them; any person at all conscious and developed has seen his "dead" friends after their death (in sleep, generally, precisely when the web of the physical Mind gives way), and each one has made his own "translation into mental language" of the experience he had on the other side (to make you think, however, that there are 100,000 other sides, as if each one were looking at the same phenomenon atop a ladder of a different height). Whereas here, at the cellular level, in that world Sri Aurobindo and Mother at first called the "subtle physical," then the "true physical," then "true Matter," as their experience became more precise, it would seem that every possible "other side," every possible plane and illumination and revelation and inspiration and the thousand kinds of knowledge always located "above" at various levels or at different depths of sleep, suddenly merged in a single material plane. There was no need of "climbing" or "going out of the body" anymore, of contemplating or meditating or sleeping: everything was right here, quite concretely. The universe was a single continuous plane. Cosmic consciousness was perfectly material and cellular. The "dead" were perfectly coexistent, if I may say so, with the living, in direct continuity with the rest of Matter. This is the great revolution of Sri Aurobindo and Mother, their stupendous discovery: the total Oneness of Matter, the fusion of Spirit and Matter into One—and not a philosophical fusion, but an experimental fusion, just as one discovers a new continent, or rather as one sees anew with other eyes the same eternal continent.

Our next eyes.

Things become... I don't know... concrete. Things that were like this (ethereal gesture), what's called the "realm of the spirit," are becoming concrete, material. Things become... real.²

It is remarkable—Mother would say the same thing each time: the world becomes real.

The Free Earth

It would be absurd to think that Mother was trying to evolve a new kind of physicospiritual theory of the world. First of all, She was not trying to do anything, and secondly She would have been very perplexed if She had to tell what She was evolving: She did not even know where She was going. She was walking, and suddenly the Orinoco was emerging, or Canada, or America; all this without a name, without dotted lines or a dictionary. It was one country, many countries, which in the end would make a new kind of earth. Can you demonstrate the Orinoco through theory? It is exactly the opposite of a mathematical theorem—for us, in the Mind, everything is proved starting from a particular idea. But here, there is no idea, you know nothing: you know as you go along and it is only when everything is done that you can say: here, this is the map. Then Euclid or Lobachevski may come and theorize all they want. All we can say is that it is a new journey on earth—an earth that has somewhat lost its fossilized habit of tamely sitting in the atlas. Thus She had stumbled upon this place where the living and the dead seemed to walk quietly side by side as if it were nothing at all—in fact, as if neither one nor the other had any idea that they were "dead" or "alive." A place where one has no ideas, so obviously one is not dead or living—one simply is. We are probably as fossilized in our idea of life versus death—or simply life—as is the old atlas of Dr. Ptolemy. We have stopped inventing life: we are the dead ones. We have completed the map, the only alternative left is to earn our living and make children to fill life up. But after all, perhaps the world, the real world, is less senseless than that; perhaps it invents itself at every second, perhaps it discovers itself at every second, perhaps it is new at every second—perhaps we are going to enter the era of an ever-new world, like those Pulsations without effect or consequences. A new discovery at each instant. So one lives forever because there is always something to discover. It was what Mother said: Things always come as a new revelation—and not in the same manner.³ Because She had also lost her memory, along with everything else. Our fossilized memory which fiercely remembers that one dies, that one falls ill and cannot fly, and cannot cross the river and cannot... for the memory everything is "you-cannot." So naturally you cannot. It is the memory of the cage. It is what has hardened, frozen and made our matter opaque. It is the physical Mind, the first mentalization of Matter. And that is also what makes the "I'm living," "they're dead," "it's here," "it's over there"—we have lost the memory of freedom. The journey of Mother and Sri Aurobindo is perhaps the great journey of the earth's return to freedom.

When we have totally forgotten that we die, we shall be in the real life—or perhaps, in the other way of looking at it, when we know that That only exists. When we have nothing but a memory of beauty.

And really, that "subtle physical" world, as They at first called it, seemed to be an absolutely free world. The same world, minus our laws. The same beings, minus the memory of our laws. But not beings "in vision garbs," not "apparitions," no: physical beings—Peter, John and perhaps also ourselves, in another way. And what is very curious and extremely interesting is that Mother's perception (and Sri Aurobindo's, too) evolved. It is not that they suddenly saw the "subtle physical," like a satellite photo of America with its neat little ready-made rivers below. No, it is as if gradually, as the web gave way, they were seeing more and more clearly, more and more physically, we could say, what had at first appeared to them as a kind of distant continent: it was not "another world," it was this one! This one without the web. It was not the kind of thing one sees in sleep or while out of one's body: it was something physically seen, with our eyes open, like the same world beneath our crust. A physical world within the physical world. And after calling it "subtle" physical, Sri Aurobindo and Mother went on to call it "true physical," then "true Matter." It was there, just behind that "veil of unreality." It was the real world, the real earth, without the web. And recently I unexpectedly came across a text by Sri Aurobindo that I found very much to the point (and yet it is an old text, from the 1920s, and probably He would have been even more precise thirty years later, but He chose to say nothing): The material realm too cannot for very much longer be our sole or separate world of experience, for the partitions which divide it from psychic and other kingdoms behind it are WEARING THIN [emphasis added] and voices and presences are beginning to break through and reveal their impact on our world.⁴ We now understand better why Sri Aurobindo used to say that He had no need to "explain" the Supramental: it will explain itself. The screen is wearing thin, and perhaps Mother and Sri Aurobindo, by going through the screen in their very bodies, their bodies of opaque terrestrial Matter, have prepared the rending of the veil in the body of the Earth itself. One day, we shall see. And we will not see mysterious and psychic worlds, but the earth itself, as it is. Although perhaps it is also psychic! It is the supramental earth. And we understand also why Sri Aurobindo called it "supramental": it is a world in which mental laws no longer apply. A world without the mental cage. A world where you do not think of "dying "! You quite simply are alive, but really alive, unlike the ghosts with eyes like "black plates" who just vanish into an unreal grayness, not those digestive tracts equipped with a functional intelligence and perfectly adapted to death—the ones who have literally invaded the earth, the last of the Mongols. Those need not die, since they are already dead, nonexistent. Perhaps they are the ones, the economic super-Philistines, who are suddenly going to vanish behind a veil of unreality. There will remain only the true world. And the others—in a dream. A reversal of the present situation. It is they who will pass "to the other side." Perhaps it is just what the famous "Last Judgment" is about: not the resurrection of the dead, but the vanishing of the really dead. The illusion torn apart. The thunderstruck ones will perhaps die from it for good. Let the others be ready.

An earth that rediscovers the Memory of Freedom.

Conscious Matter

What is this subtle physical, really? How does one get there, what is the means of communication? What are its laws or non-laws? So often I asked Mother these questions. What needs to be done to get there? I don't know, she answered me in the beginning; In fact, I rather followed Sri Aurobindo there.⁵ And it took her nearly nine years (until 1959) to find "Sri Aurobindo's abode "! This always seemed incredible to me. But perhaps we are seeking very far away something which is close at hand, right here. And as the web gradually loosened, or as the veil wore away, not only would She constantly encounter Sri Aurobindo, but that "other side" seemed to come here, as if there were no longer any transition from one to the other—as if it were part of Matter exactly like the rest, and perhaps more than the rest. It was not at all different from this or that disciple whose face suddenly became blurred or clear—came into existence—according to his state of consciousness, not different from this bottle or that very material object which suddenly seemed lit from within, alive with its own life, not by a reflected light but by the true light it contained. What was supposedly on the other side was living side by side, we could say, just like the disciples or the bottles. But what was false did not have any existence there, was not living there. The phantom disciples were absolutely dead on this side, behind a veil of unreality, while other so-called phantoms from the "other world" were perfectly alive on this side. What made the difference in sides was not "life" or "death," but consciousness or unconsciousness. We could say that the subtle physical is the world of conscious Matter, and ultimately the world of true Matter, the one that truly exists, in which the walking digestive tracts have no place, in which the liars have no place. All the little fakers of consciousness: gone, made unreal.

But we are right in that subtle physical world, we are already in it, everything that is conscious in us lives there constantly and in total continuity with all the rest of conscious Matter, whether "here" or "over there," in Spitsbergen or right next door. Only, for us, there still exists a veil of unconsciousness, a bodily web that scarcely gives way except in sleep and that prevents any communication except in certain privileged states: we then have "inspirations," "visions," "messages"... all kinds of more of less distorted or hazy things—although sometimes surprisingly vivid, even more so than so-called material things, as if one had collected there the most vivid memories of one's entire life—but while going back through the web, something is altered and distorted: there remains only a translation in the cage. We say, "It's a dream." But for Mother, the dream state seemed to be gone—She could no longer have "dreams": She could only see what was really there. And there was no longer any translation: it was direct and immediate, a "tactile vision." "Suddenly, I am that," in the same way She was that in the disciple near her or in a bottle in the bathroom. It was exactly the same, the same world. One was no more real or hazy than the other. She no longer had "visions": things existed or they did not exist, that was all. So where is the "other side," where is "death" really? There is increasingly an impression that our head and our way of seeing are what makes clear-cut limits—but it's not like that! It's all mingled.⁶ It's a whole... something that moves. So what's going to happen? How is it going to take expression? I don't know. It's contrary to all habits.⁷

It is assuredly another way of being, but a physical way of being since Mother was perfectly in her body, doing her work here and there in the midst of all kinds of little specimens, real or phantasmal to varying degrees, but absolutely ((material" just the same. It is the way of being without the web. The world without mental partitions. The world as it is.

And what is particularly interesting—what we constantly forget—is that this perception of the world as it is, of the so-called dead and the "truly alive" next to each other, and then Spitsbergen just next door, is not at all the perception of a "psychic," but the perception of the body. It is the body that sees, the cellular consciousness, not the mental or psychic consciousness. You cannot even call it "seeing": it lives, it is, it touches. It is a material perception. The body understands nothing of our tales of visions and psychics and all the rest of our mental theatrics, it understands nothing of our heavens and hells, which are mental creations, it understands nothing of our gods and damnations: for the body, a thing is or is not—like a baby. But a cosmic baby!... Perhaps that is what the "Divine" is. It is quite easy. Any stupid body can understand that, but it is not stupid, it is only covered over with stupidities. We are full of intelligent stupidities that block us off from the natural world—the great undivided natural. Basically, "consciousness" is nothing but the ability to perceive what is really there. The body, the cells of the body, perceive what is really there. For them, without any doubt, Matter = Consciousness. Babies are infinitely more aware of people's states of consciousness than of their good or bad appearances. A necktie is immaterial, even if it comes from Dior. And there are a lot of things that are immaterial to them, and a lot of other things that we may not feel but which are infinitely palpable to them. So what is "concrete"? What is material"? The fossilized Falsehood or the rest? There is no difference between life and death, material and nonmaterial, this side and the other: there is a difference between consciousness and nonconsciousness. We may be medically dead on this side while perfectly alive on the other. And what is not alive here is alive on neither side, because consciousness is the only side of the world. There is but one Matter, divided by a veil of unconsciousness. What we call "Matter" is a fossilized appearance in our cage. You go out of the cage and there is the same Matter in a different light. A stone is real, a tree is real, they carry the vibration of their consciousness; a policeman in black leather shoes carries only the vibration of his digestive tract. You carry the vibration of what you are. The falseness of the mental reign is that, unlike the vegetable, mineral and animal realms, we have contrived what is not. The counterfeiters of existence, you could say. Digestive tracts full of words. For the vision of the body—a childlike vision—the true material world, this same world, is fluid, vibrant, without walls or partitions, without "life" and "death." The degree of reality is in the degree of consciousness. The degree of life is in the degree of consciousness.

A world that definitely seems to make a lot of sense The next world. The world of conscious Matter.

We have to learn the laws of the next world.

A More Complete World

Progressively, through the years, Mother's experience took shape, with a kind of obvious concreteness growing more palpable as the web, that obscure sheath of the physical Mind, grew thinner. It was as if, slowly, what seemed to be on two different sides, like two very close but nevertheless separate worlds, were merging into a single world, which was our material world, only complete. This word "death" is so absurd! I see it as simply passing from one room to another, she said in the beginning. You take one simple step, you cross the threshold, and there you are on the other side—and then you come back. Have I told you about the experience I had the day I suddenly found myself in Sri Aurobindo's home in the subtle physical? Well, it's as if I took a step and entered a far more concrete world than the physical—more concrete because things contain more truth. I spent a good while there with Sri Aurobindo and then, when it was over, I took another step and I found myself back here... slightly dumbfounded. It took me quite some time to regain my bearings here, because it was this world that seemed unreal to me, not the other.⁸ Then the passage grows thinner over the years, there is no longer any need to take "a step" from one side to the other, but they are still like two slightly different states: Now, the visions are so concrete that they are almost material—they aren't "visions," you understand: its life for a certain length of time. It's certainly in a region where I didn't use to see previously. Very concrete, precise, and the transition from that state to the waking state is almost imperceptible. It's not a reversal of consciousness as it usually is: it's almost imperceptible, as though intermingled.... But the setting isn't the same. It's a VERY familiar setting: I don't feel I am in a new place; it's a place where I am, if not all the time, at least every day. And where there are habits, and.... It's very strange. There would seem to be a whole life like that—a whole life, a whole activity going on, yes, very near, probably in the subtle physical, but very near. Very, very concrete, not at all the impression of a dream. And a continuity: even when I am not conscious of it, and when I become conscious, the continuation is there: and it has changed while I wasn't conscious there. It looks like a material region (material, that is, physical) where the consciousness is more awake—the consciousness is very clear, very clear, and sharp, you know: sharp perceptions. It [this subtle physical world] is like a lining, but a lining that would be more conscious. ⁹

It is the world of conscious Matter.

And the line between the two slowly melts away: I was with Sri Aurobindo, but a quite joyful Sri Aurobindo, full of liveliness, and slightly more material than what I usually see, as though... and we spent hours working together, seeing things, seeing people, doing things, and so on. But then, the strange part, the peculiar part was that it didn't depend on my. body being asleep: it didn't sleep, it was simply quiet; and in the middle of it I had to get up, but when I did, that consciousness and activity didn't cease. It was the ordinary consciousness (that is, the perception of ordinary things, of the room and all that) which was somewhat less precise. It was as if topsy-turvy, you understand. And it remained for a long time, even in the morning, until I was obliged to see people and do things. It was very particular, it's the first time it has happened like that. Which means that this slightly inner consciousness was more concrete than the ordinary consciousness. The funny thing is that this ordinary consciousness, these ordinary things, it's not that they fade away and are effaced: they become... like paper! Paper, or bark, or... something dry—dry and thin and devoid of true reality, simply like a thin appearance.¹⁰ And the experience multiplies, becomes more pronounced, the living and the "dead" seem to move more and more in one and the same world: One phenomenon was there before but has grown more precise: I went to some places where there were lots of people, but mingled, that is, the so-called living and the so-called dead together. Quite together, and used to being together, and finding it quite natural—but CROWDS of people!... It's a place in the subtle physical where those with a body and those without a body are mingled without difference.¹¹ They have the same reality, the same density and the same conscious, independent existence. There's an extraordinary likeness to material life, except that you can feel they're freer in their movement. But that's not new. What's new is... My sleep is no longer sleep at all, I don't know, its a sort of... withdrawal, that is, I go within, and then I am active. And those people are in that same state [the so -called dead]. Among them, some are with people who still have a body: I am also there, and in the same kind of state. But the strange thing is that when I supposedly "wake up" and get up, I go on with something that's not physical! You understand, the state of over there goes on, and it's as real, as tangible as physical things; and after half an hour I realize that I have moved about here and done all kinds of things ENTIRELY in that consciousness!... What's that consciousness?... It's a very clear, very harmonious consciousness, in which there are no difficulties, and very creative.... I don't know what it is.... This morning, for a half-hour I was literally there and I wasn't aware of it! Its afterwards that I wondered, "But... is it PHYSICALLY like this?" There was someone, you understand, I was with someone, and I wondered, "But is this person physically like this? Is it physical? "And I was standing!... So it's as if the two worlds were.... [Mother slipped the fingers of her right hand through the fingers of her left hand]... blended. Strange.... The physical appears to be less imperative. Previously, there was the impression that, all right, it wasn't a "dream" as people call it, but a more subtle and less precise consciousness, and that the physical consciousness was quite concrete and precise. But now this distinction... the other consciousness has become almost more concrete and real than the physical consciousness; the purely material consciousness is more wobbly.... Strange.¹²*

"But how does one go from one state to the other or from one perception to the other?" I asked Mother. "What makes the difference between the two?" I don't know what comparison I should use, she answered, but I am certain there are some things that are invisible this way [Mother turned her hand in one direction] and visible that way [the other direction]. My impression is that what we see as a considerable difference between the tangible, the material, and the invisible or the fluid, is only a change of position. Because I have experienced this I don't know how many times, hundreds of times: like this [in one direction] everything is what we call "natural," as we are used to seeing it, then all of a sudden, like that [the other direction], *the nature of things changes. And nothing has happened, except something within, something in the consciousness: a change of position. A change of position. It's no more tangible than that, that's what is so wonderful! Oh, the other day, I found another sentence of Sri Aurobindo's: "All now is changed, yet all is still the same." I read that and said to myself "Oh, that's what it means!" It's true, now everything is different, yet everything has remained the same.... The nearest explanation is a "shift"—a shift, the angle of perception becoming different. And it's not, as we might be tempted to think, a drawing within and a drawing without, it's not that at all, not at all *[Mother did not close her eyes or enter contemplation to see]: An angle of perception that changes. You are in a certain angle, then you are in another.... I have seen small objects of that sort that are for the amusement of children: when those objects are in a certain position, they look compact and hard and black, and when you turn them another way, they are clear, luminous, transparent. It's something like that, but it's not that, that's an approximation.¹³

And it is the same milieu that is being seen: it is not two different milieus or planes. I MATERIALLY see all sorts of things, which aren't visible to others. But it's MATERIALLY. A funny state....¹⁴ And then, for sight, for instance, sometimes I see more clearly with my eyes closed than with them open, and the vision is the SAME, physical, purely physical vision; but a physical that seems... more complete, I don't know what words to use.¹⁵ Basically, as if the body were seeing the world for the first time without mental glasses. A more complete world.

A funny state... perhaps the transition from the caterpillar state to the butterfly state. From obscure Matter to conscious Matter, as it really is, total and undivided.

And now Mother's words come back to us with an added depth: Life and death are the same thing, simultaneous...

it's just that the consciousness moves back and forth.¹⁶ And Mother slipped the fingers of her right hand through the fingers of her left hand. The two worlds "in the same nest," said the Rishis.

The End of the Cage

And death had no more meaning.

I am learning a lot of things about this transition called death. It's starting to become thinner and thinner, more and more unreal.¹⁷

It is simply fantastic... the most powerful fact in the universe—painfully powerful—is in the process of changing. Because all this is translated materially, you see, it is not simply an extra trip that psychics were not clever enough to have discovered! I personally could not care less about "visions"; all the gods of the universe can come and dance their saraband on earth and I would be totally unaffected, I would not even take the subway to go and see them! And first of all, let them stay in their comfortable world where they enjoy themselves while we struggle down here with death. But may this death be changed, may this universe locked in its hopeless and more and more cluttered geography be clarified, may pain disappear, may Beauty be, may what is true walk in its path of truth and falsity disappear like a ghost.... It can be, it is possible, it is there, just on the other side of the web. There is only a web to be removed and... all is the same and all is changed. You do not go out of Matter, you do not soar off to paradise: you only go out of Falsehood and pain. So my heart was beginning to beat faster; with Mother one was living a fabulous hope, as if leaning over this painful and lovable earth, so lovable and so false, warped at the same time. One felt that for the first time on earth a breath of air was getting in, and how I clung to that breath, how I listened to the throbbing of that great hope of the world, to the stammering of those strange words, and how I looked at that tiny body, so frail, "as if on a ridge between two chasms".... For the first time, something in a body was crossing the web, and if it could happen in one body, it could happen in the earth's body—such were the stakes. All the while the little specimens watched Mother "disintegrating": going blind and deaf, losing her memory, forgetting the time—forgetting the laws of the Falsehood. But was She going to make that other Law come to this side? "Formerly," I asked, "you often went into the inner states in trance, but now, what is this state in which you seem absorbed (... like Sri Aurobindo in his armchair)?" Completely different. "It's not a trance?" I persisted. No. No, its another type of consciousness. The difference is such that I wonder... sometimes I wonder how it is possible—at times, it is so new, so unexpected its almost painful. "Do you mean that you don't really go out of Matter?" No, not at all! "Is it a new state IN Matter, then?" Yes. Yes, yes, exactly. And ruled by something other than the sun—I don't know what.... Probably the Supramental consciousness.¹⁸

"Sometimes I wonder how it is possible...." She was right there at the border, precariously, between life and death: caterpillar and butterfly... together. She was trying to make the earth's body molt.

At her side, I watched Death slowly grow unreal, its meaning so totally changed that there was no longer a word for death... or for life. It was something else completely. Another world. Another earth. And yet our earth.

Really a third position or a third state in Matter. A deathless state. With Mother, I watched that wonderful hope slowly grow, that possibility of an unbroken life—"I am seeking the illusion that must be destroyed for physical life to be uninterrupted," she would say—a life in which you can continue to grow, to develop, to widen, to increase in beauty and knowledge without needing to cut short everything abruptly and start again painfully in total forgetfulness, in a world that no longer remembers anything, except to earn one's living and save for one's retirement, with a few intellectual soarings in between. With her, I was listening to the story of the true earth taking shape. By insisting and pressing on, I have reached the conclusion that there is really no such thing as death. There is only an appearance, and an appearance based on a limited outlook. But there is no radical change in the vibration of consciousness. The importance attached to the difference of state is a merely superficial difference based on an ignorance of the phenomenon in itself One who could retain a means of communication would be able to say that as far as he himself is concerned, it doesn't make much difference. But this is something being worked out at the moment. There still remain gray areas and some details of experience are missing...¹⁹ And I interrupted Mother, I was so afraid of losing this earth, I was so fond of our wretched and delightful earth: "You say there's no difference, but when one is on the 'other side,' does one continue to perceive the physical world?" Yes, yes, exactly! "You mean perceive beings, perceive (I wanted to say the forests and flowers and the sea with its gulls)?" Yes. Only, instead of having a perception.... You leave a sort of illusory state and a perception which is one of appearances, but you do have a perception. Not absolutely identical, but with an effectiveness which is sometimes greater in itself But it's not really perceived by the other side." It is the other sideours—that is blocked. And finally I was beginning to understand that the difference did not lie in the physical or in a so-called change of the world—we stayed right on earth—but the human illusion, the illusion of man in his cage, was falling away. Flowers, plants and gulls were not in the cage, one could even perceive them in a more "complete," more "effective" way. It is our eyes that are in the cage, our ears that are blocked, our limbs that are chained, hypnotized by the physical Mind. And it is that Falsehood which is falling away. It is life stripped of its deceptive appearance. The life of the next species. And it was in that life—supposedly of the "other side"—that Mother, or rather Mother's cellular consciousness, was moving about... completely on this side, with her eyes wide open and on her two feet: Things here are always cloaked in a number of clothes, it's never the exact thing, but there, it is the exact thing. And then, I go to America, I go to Europe, I go... all the time. I go to some places in India. And all of that is work, work, work—but so living! Life stripped of its false appearance! It's very interesting, you know! People are so accustomed to... travestying everything—all that is gone; there, it's gone. It’s the BODY'S activity; it's interesting: it's the body's inner life.²⁰ It is the body, the consciousness of the body that discovers the secret of the earth.

Matter discovering the secret of Matter.

The other side is right here—it is we who are totally beside the point!

"But what are the laws there?" I insisted. "What does it all look like?" It's very similar to the material world, only, there doesn't seem to be the same laws of gravitation, because you can move about through the will. You don't have to walk or.... The consciousness and the will have a far greater power than in the material physical.²¹ In other words, it is our world minus the laws of the mental cage. You cross the river without thinking of it, as Madame David-Neel had inadvertently done when she forgot the existence of the river and the mental laws that govern rivers and gravity.

A world in which we forget the mental laws.

An earth without the laws of the Mind—dehypnotized.

The true earth, free at last.

True Matter, light at last.

The only law, that of consciousness. The only density, that of consciousness. The only existing bodies: conscious bodies. The end of the phantoms.

At the cellular border, the body, freed from the enveloping spell of the physical Mind, forgets about heaviness, thickness, powerlessness, separation and distance, past and future—it forgets death. It forgets the laws of Death. Yet one remains in Matter. One is in Matter, but differently.

It is the beginning of the story of the true earth.

Death was but the painful evolutionary transit through the cage so that we may learn to exist as individuals—but once the conscious individual is made, the cage breaks open. And one remains perfectly in Matter, true Matter, the physical world as it is. I felt that things are much simpler—much simpler—and much less dramatic than human thought imagines. Its very strange, I have a growing feeling of something... without mystery, and that its our way of thinking and feeling that adds the whole mystery and the whole drama—while in fact there isn't any.²²

In short, we can say that through evolution we have slowly grown from unconsciousness of the earth's reality to consciousness of the earth's reality—from an obscure and unknown Amazon to the clear and unveiled Amazon. This consciousness of the earth's reality is the last stage of evolution, or perhaps the first stage of a new evolution: the stage of the true earth, the Amazon as it really is, the physical world as it really is. The stage of conscious Matter—which has always been, and which we are gradually becoming aware of. Evolution means to become aware of what is really there.

To reach this point, we had to put on or bear different cloaks, shells and pains on our shoulders. Bit by bit, the veil thins. We are reaching the moment when the veil is about to fall away.

Only the living will remain really alive.

The others will be consumed by their own unreality. There is nothing more deadly than death.

And the pure memory of beauty that had us groping in search of it shines resplendent.

The true earth.