Mother or The New Species - II

24. The Transformation of the World

We are nearing the great Turning Point of 1968.

As chance would have it, the year of the student revolutions across the world.

There are so many questions in that forest, so many mysterious and poorly understood areas that sometimes my heart sinks. I have no ready-made explanation, I am going blindly through this forest and sometimes the explanation seems to spring up while walking, and sometimes it escapes to spring up elsewhere. I am not really writing a book, I am blazing a trail in the night, while my body vaguely hears a murmur behind the veil and, by chance, lets its hand wander into the true thing. We must wear down the veil, each of us in his own way. They are slowly wearing down the veil in the body of the Earth. And what is going to happen?

The Three Solutions

There is this true earth, just here, free. Sri Aurobindo and Mother are here, They are working, They see. They are here as much as we are—more than we are. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the President of Bangladesh, is assassinated. It was yesterday, or the day before. A thousand dark and sordid madnesses are perpetrated every day—more and more sordid, it would seem, darker and darker, as if there were no end to the earth purging itself of its darkness, as if more and more sinister phantoms were inhabiting the earth, the lovely earth. Phantoms, indeed, without any real existence, but they kill and destroy—scientifically, medically, theoretically and idealistically or religiously. They destroy and destroy, these phantoms by the thousands, and more and more so. They give birth to other little phantoms who will destroy, destroy more and more—is the earth, the lovely earth, destined to be peopled with nothing but phantoms? Or else with the fakers of consciousness delivering their solemn speeches? The intelligences that have emerged into a higher light are like stars scattered over a perfectly dark sky,¹ she said.

What is going to happen?

It would seem we are closing in on the true essence of Death.

No, not the hole; true death: unconsciousness. The world is full of dead men.

Dark dead men in pin-striped suits who televise their eternal words from the heights of intelligent satellites and hypnotize men by the millions. The web of the Mind has grown almost visible, it furrows the sky in every direction and deafens our consciousness at every street corner. They are closing in, they are closing in more and more, almost day by day. And the phenomenon is irreversible. Meaning that the unconscious ones are not going to improve by a miracle. It is a dark and muddy progression. Death is closing in.

And yet it is only a veil. A thin screen reflecting some dark silhouettes filled with murder and barbarous gospels. In terms of consciousness, it is a zero. And yet it reigns. In terms of reality, it is zero. And yet it is our supposedly real world. We vote for them, we prepare degrees for them, we fly the planes and man the laboratories for them—as if preparing a made-to-measure future for them. Sometimes we revolt, but at the first opportunity we act just like them: the College graduation, the children, the progress of Science for them. Each of us picks up his serial number in line. We are of the right or of the left, but they are the two sides of the same Unconsciousness. We work to prepare a silhouette on the screen, and the darker it is, the more visible it is—the more perfect. We all want to succeed in that world. We even want to succeed in the world of yoga or of spirituality. And it is all the same thing. But who wants to get through the screen, really, who wants the true earth?

Who wants something else?

That is what the whole problem boils down to, individually and cosmically.

We could say: all right, let's forget this body of unconsciousness—let's forget death and the dead—and go catch up with the living in true Matter. But this does not seem to be a very evolutionary or very courageous solution. And to begin with, that cage has a very definite purpose, it is not a diabolical invention, it is the evolutionary device to create beings who, precisely, will find the means of changing the cage or opening it. But if we stay in the cage, how can we get out of it while staying in it, one could ask? That is the whole story of Mother. And finally, what happens to this body once it has discovered the secret of its reality, true Matter, the true world? Do the laws of that Matter have the capacity to change the laws of this Matter: a transformation of the old body? Or do we rather throw the old rag away once it has served its purpose: we fly away, a butterfly, into true Matter? A dissolution of the old body. This does not seem to me a very evolutionary solution either. Death is the acceptance of defeat, so ...² she said. Mother was a warrior (actually I do not know why I say "was"). Or else a third solution....

Mother never knew what was in store for her Right to the end She never knew. There must be a reason for it.

The third solution? We could call it an invasion of the Real. The rending of the veil.... But what a terrible shock for the earth—or in any case, for the parade of the non-living. They may well never recover from it. And we always forget that we ourselves, in our own bodies, are endowed with a heavy dose of unconsciousness—our bodies are not completely conscious, not completely real; if they were, we would be immortal and transformed. So, invasion of the Real or not, we remain with this old body endowed with death, and what happens to it in the end? The hole or transformation? It is always the same question: does the butterfly shed its caterpillar skin, or what? The Real reigns on earth, and nothing remains but real butterflies... but how many will remain in the end? How many butterflies? Perhaps not so many... perhaps not even three.... So?

So perhaps the evolutionary solution is a paradoxical mixture of the three possibilities: a more or less progressive or abrupt dissolution of the Unconsciousness, hastened by an Invasion of the Real, which in turn will hasten the body's transformation.

Mother never knew what was going to happen. Sometimes She thought or felt it would be Transformation of the body—and She fought right to the end with that faith.

Sometimes She thought an Invasion would change everything. And the nearer She drew to the "end," the thicker the mystery seemed to grow: a paradoxical state, the impossible butterfly in a world of caterpillars. As if this very impossibility, the disintegrating old body held the key to the world's mystery.

Can one body become transformed all alone without the rest being transformed, or at least a minimum number of elements? A lone butterfly among caterpillars?

Is the body of the world, too, undergoing a crisis of disintegration in order to arrive at the new state?

When the body of the world is ready, the new butterfly will open its wings.

The invasion of the Real.

We must prepare ourselves,³ Mother said.

The Supramental Power

Through the years, I witnessed quite a surprising phenomenon which finally pulled me down from the paradise of the liberated Mind in which I was more or less comfortably floating ("less" when I had to come down from it only to bump against the same old stupidities); I used to feel a vast rhythm one could enter at will and from which one could draw any required knowledge: automatic books, painting or music. It was enough to sit down and translate the rhythm, or rather to let it clothe itself in words all by itself (or notes or colors, had I been a painter or a musician), everything was known and understood. A lovely transparency in which beings had no more mystery: you just directed the quiet beam this way or that, up close or thousands of miles away, and it was known. And when it had nothing to say, it kept wonderfully quiet in a snowy eternity—with only a little uneasiness or apprehension that this eternity might drag on for long, for an eternity. Mother let me wear out my paradise very gently, She even urged me there, for Mother was always urging people along their way. I had the privilege of meditating with her, and I would take off like an arrow; three seconds later, it was perfect eternity. With her, however, the eternity was a little more powerful than when I was alone (!). But then, dammit, I was beginning to wonder what all this meant—writing books or music is all very nice, it could fill up more than one life, but I felt I had already lived that thousands of times, and then you start all over again and continue: the books pile up, the music piles up, the babies pile up and... phew, is this what life is all about? It seemed quite thin to me. It seemed to prettily fill a mental compartment alone, and then what? The virgin forest had more life, it was more real. But miles and miles of virgin forest make only a virgin forest—it pleasantly and lightly filled a vital compartment, and then what? And you could take anything at all, it was for ever: and then what? Or else you turned the tap off and soared off into the white drifts above—that, too, was another kind of compartment, a spiritual compartment, but there is nothing more alike than miles of virgin sky. So this damned story seemed to me damned or damnable enough, there was nothing but compartments, hardly communicating: the virgin sky could not care less about the virgin forest, which could not care less about little babies, which could not care less about books.... Where was the full and encompassing life? Not in the sum of all the aforesaid pretty ingredients—although millions and millions of men do just that in a little compartment, more or less roomy and stylish.

Then one day, I saw a marvelous healer gifted with astounding powers arrive at the Ashram (and he too surprisingly enough for someone of his kind, had a little paradise of his own, quite a powerful one as a matter of fact, in which he enjoyed a "perfect realization"). He met Mother and meditated with her. "Oh! It's all the same," he told me afterwards. Eternity was exactly the same, in Jerusalem as in Pondicherry—obviously, nothing is more similar to itself than eternity. So he had met Mother, and it was all the same. That is where I had a jolt, because in spite of everything I did feel that it was not "all the same." And what was not the same? Whereupon I began to tumble down from my paradise and to discover the fuller, more encompassing life, without compartments... and something more: a tremendous Power which I had not really felt up above, because up above there is no longer anyone to feel anything, but it became almost crushing when I tuned in to Matter here at ground level; and the more at ground level it was, the more tremendous and crushing it was, almost unbearable, as if you were being kneaded, pounded and pummeled in a frightening way. And there, I finally entered the Thing. There, I landed in a real virgin forest, while Mother smiled—in fact, I was landing on the true earth. And this true earth has a very particular way of landing upon you, which is to pound on everything that obscures or obstructs its passage: you let it flow through you or you break. It is that simple. But this Power was so extraordinarily living, for once, as if for the first time you were touching something real—dangerously real. But once you touched it, you could no longer do without it, everything else vanished into an almost nonexistent dullness. As if one had never lived or breathed before—never known what life was. The great symphonies seemed dull, books seemed dull, life itself seemed dull, yes, not "concrete," as I suddenly understood what Mother meant by "concrete." And "heaven," well, was mere smoke—never again did I return there, not once, not even for a second. I was bathing in a quite incredible heaven that had nothing celestial about it, it was even rather like a cyclone, but a cyclone moves and lives—and ultimately, it felt like a cyclone only because I was blocked: the more unblocked one became, the more the cyclone, or the pounding, changed into a sort of expanse of massive power which you clearly felt moved everything, manipulated everything—all of Matter—and without any division, without "over there." One was astonishingly in everything, except for the little outer shell (here, too, I finally understood what She meant, because it felt indeed like a crust): in the Power that was in everything or, more exactly, that carried everything. Life became strangely close and immediate, a compact oneness. Life really. And there, more and more, the living stood out instantaneously: there was instant communication, they had density, reality, while the others... indeed, they were the phantoms. There was no need to "think" or to try to "understand": it was tangible, it leaped at your face. Or more exactly, it was felt within you in a kind of material continuity in which the "other" became like yourself. "Tactile vision" was beginning to mean something.

So one day, I could not help telling Mother about this "difference": "Before, I used to catch hold of 'That' up above, and I could catch hold of it by prostrating before a pile of stones or anything at all, in the street or anywhere. And it was undeniable. And it was the same thing and always the same thing. And now, I feel that when I am with you, it's not something I catch hold of up above, but rather it's something from within. As if I were seized from within and everything became lit within, in the body. It is not something that falls down on my head from above." And Mother smiled: Yes, that's right. But it's the raison d'être for this body, for the presence here. It's so things may be... from within—not a miraculous descent.⁴ Then all of a sudden I understood what Sri Aurobindo meant by his "automatic power." It was not something that had to be forcibly seized from above: it was growing in the substance itself, irresistibly, like fire in a volcano. Mother had loosened the threads of the web and that Power—a tremendous Power—in Matter, from the other side of the enveloping veil, or rather the other side of the Wall of the physical Mind, was beginning to infiltrate and invade our Matter from within. A tremendous, invisible revolution within Matter.

And as the years went by, the phenomenon became more extraordinarily striking: Mother was becoming more and more like a transparent breath, a very tiny form more and more huddled in her armchair, and the more She seemed to melt, as it were, the more... fantastic that tremendous Power became, to the point that you could not feel any limit to it, except the limit of what you yourself could absorb without exploding. And it did not radiate from Mother at all! It was not a sort of concentration of power around Mother, no, not at all! It was the opposite of a concentration: an ocean of Power without a center, which seemed to be everywhere, in everything, springing from everything, and near Mother it was as though intensified spontaneously from within. It was not in one body: it was in all bodies, even in a bottle of mouthwash. And you immediately understood who was in contact with it (or what things were in contact with it) and who was not. There were two worlds as it were—really the living and the dead. And those who were in contact were not specially gifted with "spirituality." It was simply... perhaps a clear and sincere simplicity that made all the difference in permeability. Simple bodies and dark bodies. And quite possibly they understood nothing of the phenomenon or believed they were doing hatha yoga, playing football or... nothing at all, it did not matter, they could believe anything at all—"by any method chosen," said Sri Aurobindo—but it entered nonetheless, quite spontaneously and naturally. And others, who displayed their virtuous solemnities, were quite simply like blocks of wood—not even that: plaster. So I could not help telling Mother my amused and amazed observations in the stuttering of an awkward language: "It's a power that seems to invade all the parts of the body and to... I don't know, to fill them with an intense aspiration." Yes, she said, that's how my body feels all the time.⁵ "As though it were making the body pray. It fills it with a Power that.... It is like warm gold lifting everything up."

A warm gold lifting up the body of the world, unknown to it, kneading it from within.

The supramental Power.

The invasion of a kneading power.

An invisible revolution in Matter.

Not so invisible.

A Little Click

And the earth exactly repeats the individual cellular phenomenon.

The obscure periphery enveloping the cells, this veil of mud that has been slowly deposited and hardened through evolution, this solid screen of the physical Mind that has created our cage and the laws of our cage—this veil of illusion really that covers the earth as it covers our cells—is being shattered, or dissolved, under the Pressure of the evolutionary Movement. We always forget that the meaning of evolution is not human-oriented any more than it was frog-oriented, and that all these millions of years were not intended to improve some little useful gadgets, or even some little useful borders for the well-being of the average democratic man. Sri Aurobindo called it the Supramental Power, we can call it whatever we like, but it is the very Power that forced the amphibian out of the fish and mammals out of the reptiles: the great tidal wave of evolution that laughs at our little momentary conceptions and our nicely catalogued laws bound forever in the directory of the little modern physicist. And actually, it is quite remarkable that this new evolutionary turning is taking place precisely when the physical Mind is most triumphant, at its convulsive apogee, we could say, when the old scientific Parkinsonism is on the verge of locking the movement of the world forever in its implacable straightjacket and making us take its disease for universal salvation: Indeed, it has convinced all humanity! Mother exclaimed. The whole so-called elite of humanity has been convinced that nothing worthwhile can be achieved without this mental organizing power.⁶ Well, we are just at the hour of the Physical mind's collapse, including everything it stands for—not only the end of Science, or at any rate this particular brand of science, but the end of the so-called genetic code in which they wanted also to confine us, because they want to confine everything, then they enjoy trying to find out how to open the door they themselves have locked. Beneath the crust of the physical Mind, the body of individuals as well as the body of nations and the body of the Earth is, in spite of itself (God knows), rediscovering the great Code of Consciousness and of the Power of Consciousness. Everything else is nonsense. That is the Sense. And everything can be read with that key. Because it is the only key. It is the only Fact of the modern world. There are those who understand and those who do not; and more and more there will be those who do and those who do not, the living of tomorrow and the old dead. On the whole, those who believe in the wonder and those who believe in death. It is that simple. Three quarters of humanity are obsolete,⁷ Mother said coolly. The whole point is to know which fourth we belong to. One thing seems clear, she observed ten years before the great Turning Point of 1968, when she was still going to the Playground, humanity has reached such a generalized state of tension—tension in effort, tension in action, tension even in daily life—with such an excessive hyperactivity, such an overall restlessness [that is just where our old Parkinsonism comes into the picture with its deadly little trepidation], that the species as a whole seems to have reached a point where it must either burst through the resistance and surge forth into a new consciousness, or else sink back into an abysm of obscurity and inertia. All this is a sure sign that a new principle of force, consciousness and power has been infused into Matter and by its very pressure has produced this acute state.⁸

The infusion of the Supramental Power into the terrestrial body seems to follow exactly the pattern of its infiltration into the individual body. At first, you feel that everything is going to explode under the pressure of that "bubbling porridge of the Supramental," as Mother would say in the beginning. In actual fact, what is most remarkable is that it does not break (at least not so far); the process seems extraordinarily dosed, it goes to the breaking limit at one point, then once that point is thoroughly shaken, kneaded and pummeled, it moves on to another point, and so on, methodically, everywhere—nothing escapes. And it does not break things, but it disorganizes them so perfectly that one no longer knows which thread to seize—all remedies crumble, one after another. One is led to the point of no remedy, as it were, until one catches hold of the Remedy. Then everything is arranged miraculously and incredibly (but the earth is not quite there yet: it is coming). Thus all the threads of the web are taken up, one after the other, in the consciousnesses, in the body, in countries, in religions, in finance, in whatever... dismantled, loosened—one thread, another thread, then another.... Until there is no solid base left. Exactly as in the body: the earth's transfer of power is being done. So the earth looks very sick, but it is under transformation—not improvement, no, not at all, there is nothing worth patching up; it is cracking everywhere, it has to crack, and all those who are trying to mend it live in a blissful illusion: under trans-for-ma-tion. Transformation does not mean making a supercaterpillar. Are we going to improve penicillin for tomorrow's butterflies? Or the banking system for the savings of supramental beings? But a few have to have the courage to work out the transition. Tomorrow begins today. The transformation is right now, it is being done. One is in it or one is not, this is not meant for our improved little progeny. It is here: a veil to be gone through. Who has the courage to go through?

There are moments when one can go through.

Perhaps the word is misleading: "Transformation" seems to imply a long evolutionary process, like the transition from fish to amphibian, a drastic structural change, but in the same Matter; and such a drastic change may actually take place, but in what matter and with what matter? Indeed, what matter? Our visible Matter, this binocular look on... something, which is precisely the world's utter Falsehood, its sticky, deadly, malignant and gravitationally false illusion. It is not Newton's Matter that is going to be transformed, it is not the falsehood that is suddenly going to grow wings, to the contrary, it is going to collapse under its iron-bound gravity. We are up to our neck, or rather over our head, in an opaque mud puddle whose laws and refractive indexes we have fully catalogued: the mud falls away and the laws fall away. They were merely the laws of our mud. It can happen in a second. The secret of that second is in enough humans becoming aware of the utter falseness of the mud puddle. And this is what is happening in the world's body as it was in Mother's body—but of course, everything is the same Body! A dizzying little tilt into disintegration, sudden illness, sudden death—countless little flash-deaths, continental, national, political and religious, and then, whop, things suddenly clear up, god only knows how, and again, whop, back into the hole, you've had it. And everything seems to have had it, more and more so. The acceleration is dizzying... until the whole earth learns the lesson of the Miracle. It looks like death, and it is death, but it is being "undone forward." The whole earth is becoming undone toward the future. The secret, the extraordinary second, is to know that particular "forward." There are those who will be undone forward and those who will be undone backward. Those who will fall away along with the mud and those whose eyes will suddenly blink in the clear air—in a clear, incredible and miraculous world. Another world, and yet the same. It was the lesson Mother was learning ten times, fifty times a day in her body, with filariasis, neuritis, an abscessed tooth, or a heart attack, and the tilt into dissolution, a minuscule back-and-forth from life to death, life to death.... Until "death" changes into something else, and life along with it. We are moving toward the death of death. It is only the death of what is really dead, nonexistent, unreal—the tremendous muddy illusion we are emerging from through "blows of fist and hammer," exactly like Mother in the beginning. Do we believe in the mud, or don't we? That is all, everything boils down to that. Do we believe in death—certified, registered, guaranteed and legalized by all the scientific experts on death—or do we believe in SOMETHING ELSE? This is where the partition of the world takes place. This is the secret of the coming great Second of Truth—"the Hour of God," said Sri Aurobindo. *You see, it's not as if this world of Truth had to be created from nothing: it is fully ready, it is there, like a lining of our own present world. Everything is there, *EVERYTHING is there.... A little click would be enough.⁹

An invasion of the Real.

The Invasion of the Real

This invasion of the Real is in fact powerfully, methodically and mercilessly taking place now. But we see only the negative side of the phenomenon: we are abruptly being stripped of our lovely toys that worked so well for so long (not so long: about fifty years), so we are bringing down the roof: "Where is it all leading! Morality is becoming dilapidated, religion is becoming decrepit, honesty is becoming derelict—oh, how bad the world is! And the falling apart of finances, of democracy, of everything, where are we going?" So we patch things up, we repair, and they crack again and again—they will crack right up to the end. Until we throw the lovely, useless toys overboard. We are done with being the baby-galley-slaves-of-the-Mind! All those who seek to restore order pull back toward all the old ideas—that's why they are unsuccessful. But that's all over now. It's over. We are going upward. Only those who can go upward are able to accomplish something.¹⁰ And if we do not want to do it, we are being forced to do it! It is thrashing our lovely toys, relentlessly, along with all those who stitch up the laws. It looks like a demonstration of universal ineptitude. These are the last days of the mind's Falsehood, perhaps its last hours. But what we do not see is the tremendously positive side of all this: the formidable and yes, automatic Power that is shaking up the old carcass—and what a Power it is to be able to operate so universally and minutely this great saraband, or rather this worldwide coup d'Etat, in the slightest detail of consciousness, of countries, of organizations. No one considers this side: the tremendous Positiveness that has the universal impudence to knock down our reasonable institutions—as it knocked down the sense of "good health" and "bad health" in Mother's body in order to teach it something other than ideas of good health and bad health: perhaps the state in which that does not exist, and there remains only what really is. The world is being hammered so that it may learn what really is. It is the great devastation of the Mind and of the laws of the Mind in all its forms. That conviction, I am now paying for it! Mother said the day after a new "sickness" had broken out. The body, in its transfer of authority goes through difficult moments, really difficult, and then, seen with the ordinary vision, it would make no sense because difficulties appear to increase with what we might call the “conversion."¹¹ Indeed, the world is going through an unprecedented "conversion," and the more converted it becomes, the more it is falling to pieces; this is what we do not see or understand, we see everything upside down! But it is the conversion of the world. Not its political or religious or economic conversion—its evolutionary conversion, its transition from the crawling of the Mind to the wings of Consciousness. It's the same thing for countries and Nations: it's the same change of authority that causes the unspeakable chaos we live in—because of the resistance.¹¹*

Every evolutionary transition is a catastrophe for the old specimen.

But who sees what is trying to steal in through the meshes of this "catastrophe"?

Through the years, I followed the phenomenon step by step and saw this tremendous invasion of Power from 1962 (the year of Cuba and the Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation), when the meshes of the web gave way for the first time. The great disorganization in the earth body, the accelerated mudbath, the "illness of transformation" and something else that the true eye could see. I was looking, she noted in 1964, and everywhere there were... as if the world were made of huge engines with enormous pistons that were falling—you know, like in engine rooms: they were rising and falling, rising and falling.... It was like that everywhere. And it was pounding Matter—it was frightful. To such a degree that the body felt pounded. It was a compression—a mechanical compression—and at the same time (both things at the same time such an intensity of aspiration!

There is in these cells an extraordinary intensity: "The Truth, the Truth, the Truth..."¹² This suffocation everywhere, this mute prayer that has no name, or obscure names, which rises from the earth everywhere behind its excesses; these driven people, these driven masses—this immense, nameless drive which is like a barbarous prayer: the drugs, the wanderers, the revolts, the desertions, the schisms, anything at all, but SOMETHING ELSE. The body of the world is being pounded, the body of the world in its first primitive aspiration, like a whole herd of pithecanthropus men thrown off balance by the Pressure of the first Mental wave. All the youth seem to be seized with a kind of curious giddiness, she already noted at the time, which for reasonable people would be disquieting, but which is a sure indication that an uncommon Force is at work. It is the disruption of all habits and all rules—it's good. For the moment, it's a bit "strange" (!), but it's necessary.... It's like a Pressure exerted on Matter to draw the response out of it. And WHATEVER FORM that response may take, its part of the general Action.¹³ Something that was little concerned with any morality, legality, or "humanism," any more than it used to be concerned with simian morality or any other "simianism" at all; but just let something change. There's a very strong Action. But, of course, people expect everything to go smoothly according to their conception, and then they are surprised: how come this divine Consciousness is at work and there are so many difficult or painful or unexpected things?...—They don't understand. But this body understands very well ¹⁴ Her body, pounded and hammered as it was, well understood the necessity of the process; the heart attacks and the rest were indeed very "barbarous." The filariasis was quite immoral. But then, there was that Flame which rose up under the painful pressure.... It is the Fire that is growing and growing in the body of the Earth, until the day.... Everything is organized down to the minutest detail, but its not preplanned as we do with our ordinary consciousness: the Force simply PRESSES down and produces the required result. I could almost say: by any means whatsoever—any necessary means. Its a Force that is PRESSING down upon the earth and making people do the most improbable things, those who seem the worst as well as the best, just to... to obtain the necessary result.¹⁵ And with that smiling humor, she added: If everything had gone very well, with good results, they would have become puffed up with statistics.¹⁶ This was 1964, the year of the first Chinese atomic bomb.

But the other side of the phenomenon, the positive side, also was gradually coming to light through the meshes of the web; in 1965 She observed the positive infiltration of the Power on the reduced but close scale of the small body that was the Ashram. A riot, some buildings set on fire, an obscure mob which instinctively knew that the Enemy was there and hurried toward the Ashram with handcarts and rickshaws loaded with rubble and bricks to attack the gathered disciples. That also was part of the "Action," for better or for worse, on one side or the other, without any preference; it was pounding upon Matter and the difference of sides hardly mattered. Mother was "watching" the phenomenon, quietly seated in her chair and innumerably present on all sides of the battle, at that cellular level where one is fully everywhere. It was an excellent opportunity to study the functioning. Stones started flying; and there were places they could touch and others they could not touch. It was the phenomenon that was "under study." A very small phenomenon "without importance" (except for those who under the painful pressure.... It is the Fire that is growing and growing in the body of the Earth, until the day.... Everything is organized down to the minutest detail, but its not preplanned as we do with our ordinary consciousness: the Force simply PRESSES down and produces the required result. I could almost say: by any means whatsoever—any necessary means. Its a Force that is PRESSING down upon the earth and making people do the most improbable things, those who seem the worst as well as the best, just to... to obtain the necessary result's And with that smiling humor, she added: If everything had gone very well, with good results, they would have become puffed up with statistics.16 This was 1964, the year of the first Chinese atomic bomb.

But the other side of the phenomenon, the positive side, also was gradually coming to light through the meshes of the web; in 1965 She observed the positive infiltration of the Power on the reduced but close scale of the small body that was the Ashram. A riot, some buildings set on fire, an obscure mob which instinctively knew that the Enemy was there and hurried toward the Ashram with handcarts and rickshaws loaded with rubble and bricks to attack the gathered disciples. That also was part of the "Action," for better or for worse, on one side or the other, without any preference; it was pounding upon Matter and the difference of sides hardly mattered. Mother was "watching" the phenomenon, quietly seated in her chair and innumerably present on all sides of the battle, at that cellular level where one is fully everywhere. It was an excellent opportunity to study the functioning. Stones started flying; and there were places they could touch and others they could not touch. It was the phenomenon that was "under study." A very small phenomenon "without importance" (except for those who got hit on the head), but very enlightening. Certain places in the Ashram were as if free from contact with the dark Falsehood of the riot. I was having my dinner, and a little before it started, that experience came, that consciousness: I wasn't this body anymore, I was the earth—the physical truth-consciousness of the earth, to be exact—with a Peace, a Stillness unknown to the physical.... [And Mother sat like a statue, with her spoon in midair, outside the time of the Web and in that strange supramental "immobility" which is like a lightning-fast Movement.] And it all seemed like an absolute Falsehood, without any element of truth behind it. [Meaning unreal, an unreal riot, like a number of other phantoms yet equipped with flesh and blood.] Yet at the same time, I had a microscopic perception (but absolutely precise and exact) of all the points of falsehood in the Ashram's atmosphere that ESTABLISHED THE CONTACT. So if that Consciousness that was there had been collective, if it had been possible to receive it collectively, nothing would have been touched: the stones would have been thrown, but wouldn't have hit anyone. For instance, a stone was flung and hit my window; it fell on the roof there and I saw, that very minute, I saw in the consciousness of the people present the exact vibration of Falsehood that had allowed the stone to hit there. And at the same time, simultaneously (it can't be said, but it was simultaneous), everywhere, all over the town and especially over the Ashram here, I saw all the points, the exact vibration of Falsehood in everyone OR EVERYTHING that made the contact possible...¹⁷For there is also falsehood in houses or objects, just as there is in men (probably those who live in them or handle them). For instance, X went out, everyone shouted to him, "Come back in, come back in! You are mad!" But he went across (stones were raining everywhere): not one hit him. And he felt it was impossible for them to hit him.¹⁸ Each of us has already experienced one of those special moments when nothing can touch us, and actually nothing touches us—a snake cannot bite you then, or an animal attack you, or a bullet strike you. But then, the very interesting explanation of the phenomenon begins to emerge....

*I know now (I know it in a certain, absolute and unforgettable way) which is the vibration of Truth in the Physical, in which state the Physical must be so as to respond to the Truth—so as to BE the Truth.... You know, it's something which is absolutely immobile, which PHYSICALLY does not budge. Mentally, it's nothing, it's easy. It is like a physical magnet for the true physical vibrations. It doesn't go through the Mind or through intelligence or even through the vital: it's physically a sort of magnet that attracts physical truth. Something that is unshakable. The vibrations of Falsehood: that sort of movement which is like a tremor in Matter. And Mother added this, which definitely opens up very unexpected horizons: This riot was like a demonstration of the discernment between the vibration that responds to Falsehood, and the vibration in which there is no response, which means that no contact is possible—THEY ARE DIFFERENT WORLDS. It's a world of Truth and the other one is a world of Falsehood. And this world of Truth is PHYSICAL, it is material: it's not up above, it is material. *AND THAT'S WHAT MUST COME TO THE FORE AND TAKE THE PLACE OF THE OTHER.

"The true physical?" I asked Mother. Yes, the true physical.¹⁸ So, with a sort of feeling of wonder, we are beginning to catch a glimpse of the physical world in which the laws of Falsehood no longer apply: the laws of Newton, the laws of gravity and ballistics, the laws... all the laws. And yet a physical world. There is no contact there, it cannot touch there, they are like "different worlds," yet it is the same world. The contact is the Falsehood one carries in oneself. When the Falsehood disappears, Death can no longer touch us—nothing can touch us. The laws no longer hold. They cease to exist. ²⁰⁰ That is how the cyclone could not enter Sri Aurobindo's room. A kind of immobility in the physical Mind: nothing reacts there. There, at the cellular threshold, beneath the coating of the Physical Mind, the laws of the false world end—the laws of false matter. And we cross the river very easily, we go through the shower of stones, and swamps full of snakes, and everything quite easily. It is that true world, that true physical, which is terrestrially in the process of going through the meshes of the web. And all the Falsehood, the obscurity, the mud, is merely Death thrashing about. It is Death in the process of dying.

And everything is devised and organized, minutely and innumerably and very brutally, to teach us not to react, or rather to cease reacting to the world of Falsehood—to receive or perceive only the vibration of Truth. To be the vibration of Truth.

It could well be that a worldwide process of preparation for those who will survive the Shipwreck is under way. Not an earth-scale plague, not an Apocalypse, no, but the growing dissolution of the elements that are in contact... with their own death. All those who are below a certain vibratory frequency, as it were, will automatically be caught by their own Falsehood, struck down by their own Falsehood, as if by a shower of stones. An automatic, almost microscopic sorting out, according to the intensity of the internal vibration. And the others will see the meshes miraculously loosen—it was a dream.

An invasion of the Real.

That is why Matter is being pounded.

It is the time to be true.

Simply true.

In the great disintegration of the terrestrial Unreality, only the real ones will survive.

Because they will have no contact with what does not exist.

Death is what does not exist.

It is the last unreality.