Mother or The New Species - II

25. The Miracle of the Earth

And the Pressure kept mounting.

This invasion of the Real does not seem believable. It is too simple, too fairytale-like. We cannot conceive of something other than everyday life, we cannot believe that one day it will not be so, or it is so far off, so far off.... We have been told so many stories. And when we are caught unaware, unexpectedly, there is always this reflex—even among those who "believe"—it is so spontaneous that it seems ingrained in our very own flesh: well, of course, one dies; well, of course, one grows old; well, of course.... It is yes to death, yes to catastrophe, it is just incoercible—it is like that. The whole tissue of our existence is like that, steeped in death. We may whip it up a bit, stir up attractive ideas, idealize and poeticize, but in our heart of hearts "we know better"—the truly powerful, organized and inescapable hypnotism, as it were, of our primal matter. Even if we know it is hypnotism, at the first disturbing symptom we rush off to the doctor: is it cancer? And the whole edifice collapses. And it has been collapsing for thousands of years. That is why not a single idea, no book, no revelation, no gospel, not even any proof will ever convert that deadly habit—and Sri Aurobindo kept silent—unless "something" catches hold of this Matter from within, in its very depth, at the roots, and extirpates its Falsehood. And belief shall be not till the work is done,¹ said Sri Aurobindo. So what hope have we of making the great Hope understood?... And at the same time, one perceives that the veil is so thin, it is nothing really, almost a breath of air. This thing, so fateful and impregnable, which covers the world, is almost a transparent veil, it has never been so thin—a tremendous, invisible change is taking place in the world. Even two years ago it was not like this. Perhaps it is useless to speak of it; useless to speak or try to speak of the secret of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. As long as it is not here, it will not be believed. And that is why Matter is being pounded and pounded, ground from within, tossed and turned in every direction like a dying person on his deathbed, till the thing is wrung out of us; then we shall believe. And one fully understands that it cannot be a miracle seizing us from without—all the sublime apparitions fail two minutes after their appearance. All the divine revelations get entangled at the first bend in the road. It has to be Matter itself that changes, it has to take us from within and be that, as clear and obvious as a crabapple or a punch on the nose. It has to be our own miracle.

All of a sudden, the illusion falls away.

There is nothing more to "believe": it is a fact.

And everything falls from our hands, it no longer means anything.

Perhaps this is how the first invasion of the Real will take place: in reverse. A sudden "dis-invasion" of everything that fills us. A fantastic vacant and "empty" hour. Everything eludes us. It no longer has any meaning. A great, senseless moment. An overwhelming minute of unreality.

The collapse of the Unreal.

Like scales falling from the eyes.

And we seem to hear an immense Laughter rising from the depths of that sudden disencumbrance. No, perhaps not the final catastrophe: an immense laugh of freedom.

Oh, everything is a great mystery, but perhaps, after all, a smiling mystery.

There are only those who will not know how to laugh. The men made of plaster.

And a divine laughter will take men by surprise.

The Substitution of the Vibration

But in fact, men are always taken by surprise. They believe they control the destiny of the world or even that of their countries, their households, even their steps in the street—and they find themselves where they had not expected to be. The Mystery consists perhaps in our not understanding all the mystery of this present little second. At each second the mystery is there. The great "dis-illusion" of the end (or of the new beginning) is at each instant piercing the crust of appearances for those who know how not to look in the "usual way." An enormous veil of habit eclipses to us the stupendous change. The infiltration of the supramental Power into Mother's body, the little twinkling of iridescent, multicolored light is repeated in the earth's body, as if at each second there were a Vibration of Truth coupled with each vibration of Falsehood and, almost according to the look or the attitude taken by this country or that organization, it is either the old catastrophic vibration that prevails, unfolds and causes this accident, that decomposition or distortion, and finally a destruction, or else its clear little counterpart that steals in—and the same circumstances are deadly or beneficent, open or closed. It is really a strange, almost magical kaleidoscope which turns this way or that in the consciousnesses, in nations, in business and everywhere, and which forms a bright or dark picture with the same elements. Truly the magic of each second, which is right there, if we look closely enough. Really as if the entire world could be transformed in one second depending on which side one chooses, or which attitude, which vibration—the Mystery of the end is in each instant, in miniature, scaled-down. It begins right now—it has begun. One tunes in to this vibration, or the other one. One tunes in to the accident or the minute Wonder that seems like nothing: it is an invisible miracle because one notices it only when an accident occurs; one never notices the non-accident, the all-natural. And yet, sometimes, one actually sees.... One sees at each second the Unreal and its lining of Real. The unreal accident, unreal death, unreal conflict and riot, which become concrete or not, hit the mark or not, take the place of the Real or not. When things are completely destroyed or damaged, then we say it is real—indeed, a real illusion. It is all a matter of choice. At each second and in each thing or each circumstance, both vibrations are there, superimposed. The rending of the veil is not for tomorrow: it is being rent microscopically each instant. Exactly like the "great Harmony that changes into a serious illness" Mother spoke of. Each instant her body was learning to choose between life and death, the real and the unreal, the little twinkling of iridescent light and the old habit. Everything is the same, and everything is mortal, or marvelous. It isn't necessary to move, or to move anything, for this Truth-Consciousness to replace the consciousness of deformation or distortion. In other words, the capacity to live in and be this true Vibration—essential and true—seems to have the power to SUBSTITUTE this Vibration for the vibration of Falsehood and Distortion.... Maybe the sense of wonder comes when the quantity that has infiltrated is large enough to be perceptible. But I have an impression—a very acute impression—that this phenomenon is going on all the time, all the time, everywhere, in a minuscule, infinitesimal way, and that in certain circumstances or conditions that are visible (visible to this vision: its a sort of luminous swelling—I can't explain), then, the mass of infiltration is sufficient to give the impression of a miracle—but it is the miracle of the whole Earth.²

Indeed the true Miracle—the one we are blindly taking part in—because the web has given way in the terrestrial body. We are witnessing the vibration of Falsehood thrashing about or showing itself beyond measure because the black threads of the web are standing out against a clear sky unseen by us. Before, we saw nothing at all, except an elegant, polite and compact web, airtight. Everything was so full of polished Falsehood that we were completely taken in. Now things are out in the open. The main thing is to find the secret of letting the air in. That is why we are being pounded. We are put on the brink of every possible accident to learn to choose the non-accident, to go through the meshes of the Unreal. To put it simply, in every circumstance, whatever they are, the most minute or insignificant, we are put in the presence of the two attitudes or two possibilities, the two vibrations: the one that dissolves the Falsehood (illness, death, accidents, the endless meanderings, the countless deformations) or the one that concretizes and hardens it. It is simply a little inner attitude, "a luminous swelling," as Mother said, a kind of call for air in the usual Falsehood. A pause; one gazes elsewhere. One second, one emerges from the habit of being and reacting just any old way, "as usual"—like a jellyfish in the atavistic sea. A little call. Yes, a hole in the web. And immediately it is there. It is there materially. It answers instantly. That is the miracle! Before, we had to do concentration and meditation and purification and.... Now, it is just like a large mouthful of air. The Miracle is extraordinarily simple, and material. That is the work of Sri Aurobindo and Mother: they punctured a hole there; they did not go disappear into the heights, they loosened the web in their own bodies. So it is loosened in all bodies. The passage is open, the famous mahas pathah of the Vedic Rishis, the "great passage." And the whole earth can go through it—it is going through it. If one looks at the dark side, then everything becomes dark, it is hopeless, there is no way out, it is destruction, a sticky porridge; but then, just a little glimpse at the other side, the bright side, and everything changes. One breathes again and everything is clear. Those things did not exist! And each country, everything, is learning the lesson of the Miracle. So who are those who despair of the world?... Those who hold on steadfastly to the web. Those who want death. But let the others breathe in the great mouthfuls of air! Let them not be suffocated by the Unreality—it will suffocate itself very well, without any help. Let them tune in to the light little vibration there, lining this whole enormous and putrid Falsehood: there is no need to "think" about it, or to be "wise" or solemn, no need to know numerous things of the old world of the cage and the laws of the cage—it is a certain way of breathing, a little silvery vibration that runs through the cells, and which sometimes may even seize an entire crowd of people: The intervention or manifestation of the true Vibration doesn't depend on egos or individualities (human or national individualities, or even individualities of Nature: animals, plants and so on), it depends on a certain play of the cells and Matter in which there are aggregates particularly favorable for the transformation to occur—not "transformation": the SUBSTITUTION, to be precise, the substitution of the Vibration of Truth for the vibration of Falsehood. And the phenomenon may be very independent of groupings and individualities (it may happen in one part here, another part there, one thing here, another thing there); and it always corresponds to a certain quality of vibration that causes a sort of swelling—a receptive swelling—and then, the thing can occur.²

That is what happened in 1968.

The Tower of Babel in Reverse

There are moments in History that are like dress rehearsals of a particular evolutionary scene of the future, and in them can be discerned not only the flaws, the obstacles, the contending forces, but also the central thrust and the unexpected lever, perhaps the indescribable "something" which is yet the mark of the future. And the scene recurs here or there, on a small or large scale, in people or nations, until everything is led to one "homogeneous point," as Mother would say.

Strange year, 1968. The second great Turning in Mother's yoga, it is the beginning of the attempt at bodily transformation, the transformation of this old Matter frozen by thousands of years spent in the cage. A tremendous Pressure to change. This is how it is: either change or dissolve,³ she declared in 1968, just one month before the radical little operation. And She was quite serious about it. She was ninety years old that year, still five more years of this life to live. The first war in Israel had just ended, the war in Biafra was beginning. There was the inauguration of Auroville, the city of Sri Aurobindo, a few miles from Pondicherry, a symbol of actual human Unity. It took place on February 28. Some future buildings of concrete perhaps, but above all, a few men, a handful of men and women on a plateau of red earth, who accepted to make the experiment of the new Consciousness in their bodies and in their lives—this Consciousness of the terrestrial body's material oneness. How is it materialized in a collective life? How will human bodies bear the infiltration of this true Vibration, let themselves be molded by it, and thus organize their lives according to norms that are no longer "human" or mental, but supramental and suprahuman? In a way, a first attempt at forming a nucleus for the next species. A field of experimental evolution.

A whole world in the making, from A to Z, without any reference points—everything has to be invented, or rather let itself be molded by the inner growth of this new Consciousness. A sort of challenge, because, by definition, there is nothing more human than man. Each one arrives there with his own baggage of morality or immorality, of spirituality or nonspirituality, with his ideals and so forth—everything has to be demolished, all the old crust, whether idealistic or not, right down to the pure cellular basis. Something that does not require heroism (or perhaps it does, after all), but an extraordinary sincerity of aim that will not let one atom of old reflex block the current of the clear little vibration—and a single faith: the Consciousness of the future and that tremendous Power that can do everything... if one lets it. The whole difficulty of the endeavor is in this single "let it"—no one wants to "let it" of course, each one has his own idea of the way in which things should or should not be done. There, one measures the earth's difficulty, quite symbolically and simply. Auroville is the earth's pilot experiment. It is not a question of raising millions of dollars to build a city, not even a question of finding thousands of men to live in a city, above all not a question of human success with a view to creating an exemplary superhumanity equipped with superschools and superlibraries—a handful of men and women who truly, integrally, will let their own substance be molded by the new Power to see what will come out of it. Some transparent specimens.... Will they succeed or not? Everything will depend upon their sincerity. If only a few men on earth understood, not only in their heads and hearts but in their bodies, that this Power can do everything! Nothing is impossible, no law holds. There are no material problems: only the web to traverse. That is all. On the other side is the constant Miracle, at every second. In short, a few men who are willing to learn the lesson of the Miracle.

A few clear men.

Disencumbered men.

Not so easy....

But silently, like Mother in her room, if they let a few clear drops filter in through the meshes of the web, they can invisibly revolutionize the world more than all the bombs piled up in all our charming countries and more than all the equations of Einstein—because there is only one single body and it is the infallible equation of the future.

Will there be three of them?

Three men.

It would be interesting to see.

Auroville is a great adventure, she said.

I can still picture her half-perched on a high stool, writing the "Auroville Charter" on her windowsill, armed with a large scroll of parchment and a thick felt-tip pen that made her writing look like cuneiform inscriptions. We won't put any solemnities, she warned, half turning towards me (and with that ever present little gleam of mischief in her eyes). "1) Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole...." I didn't put "to no nation" because India would have been furious!⁴ But that was the idea: no countries. First and foremost, no countries, no borders, no passports! And the four simple paragraphs, a little cuneiform-like, continued while She closed her eyes from time to time "to see better." Then She explained to me: No police, no army, no religions...⁴ Oh! How wonderful it was to imagine that "free port" on an earth where even the virgin forests are fenced with barbed wire, "mine, mine, mine," everything is mine, mine, mine on earth, even the temples are "Mine," there is nothing but little selves enclosed in civilized leather. And to begin with, the abolition of inheritance: no private property, no money.... The foremost law of Auroville was a vaster self who was lightly himself everywhere and in everything. But the knack of the not-I had to be learned, the little vibration that runs through everything. It's a kind of adaptation of the Communist system, she remarked, but not in a spirit of leveling: according to everyone's capacity, his position (not a psychological or intellectual one), his INNER position.⁵ An end to the hierarchy of phantoms: the true hierarchy, that of the inner reality, the inner density instead of the bank account and the false degree. And then the reality of work. But to tell the truth, the "work" may be an inner work.... One's participation in the welfare and existence of the whole township isn't something worked out individually: such and such an individual must give so much. It's not like that. It's worked out according to one's means, activity, possibilities of production; it's not the democratic idea, which cuts everything into small equal bits—an absurd machinery. It's worked out according to one's means: one who has much gives much, one who has little gives little; one who is strong works a lot, one who isn't does something else. You understand, it's something truer, deeper. It must be something living and TRUE, not mechanical.... The organization should be such, arranged in such a way, that everyone's material need should be met, not according to notions of right and equality, but on the basis of the most elementary necessities—you don't pay for your food, but you must give work, or ingredients—then, once that is established, everyone must be free to organize their life, not according to their monetary means, but according to their inner capacities.⁵

And no rules, no "laws"—which a number of individuals lost no time in taking as free license. But one does not cheat the Power. A strange automatic phenomenon occurs: the cheaters are self-expelled, as it were, they expel themselves—all of a sudden they have had enough, they can no longer stay on. Or else they are brought to such baseness that they bring on self-destruction. It is straightforward and categorical. Everything is exposed. No need for courts of law: things spring from within. And this is the true Law of the future world—everything springs from within, so it is inescapable because... it is your own work. One learns the more and more perfect Work. That is all. And ultimately, it is the only joy: to do the perfect work, whatever it may be. It is the work of oneself. Usually (always so far, and more and more so), men establish mental rules according to their conceptions and their ideal, then they apply them. And that's absolutely false, arbitrary, unreal, so the result is that things revolt, or else waste away and disappear.... Its the experience of LIFE ITSELF that must slowly work out rules as supple and vast as possible, in order that they ever remain progressive. Nothing must be fixed. That's the immense error of governments: they build a framework and say, "Here is what we've established, now we must live under it." So naturally, Life is crushed and prevented from progressing. It is Life itself, developing more and more in a progression toward Light, Knowledge, Power, that must little by little establish rules as general as possible, so as to be extremely supple and capable of changing according to need—of changing as rapidly as habits and needs do. At bottom, the problem almost boils down to this: to replace the mental government of intelligence by the government of a spiritualized consciousness.⁵

It is that "de-certification" of the Mind that must come down into the body. That is the ultimate experience of Auroville. Not a new society: a new type. That's what this body is now learning—to replace the mental government of intelligence by the spiritual government of Consciousness. And it makes (it looks like nothing, one may not notice it), it makes a tremendous difference, to the point of multiplying the body's possibilities a hundredfold.... When the body is subjected to rules, even if they are broad, even if they are comprehensive, it is a slave to those rules and its possibilities are limited by them. But when it's governed by Spirit and Consciousness, that gives it incomparable possibility and flexibility! And that's what will give it the capacity to prolong its life.... Necessities have lost their authority: you can adapt yourself this way, adapt yourself that way. All the laws—those laws that were laws of Nature—have lost all their despotism, if I may say so. All you have to do is constantly and always to be supple, attentive, and responsive to the influence of the Consciousness—the Consciousness in its all-powerfulnessso as to go through all this with extraordinary suppleness. That is the discovery being made more and more. And it's wonderful, you know! A wonderful discovery. It's like a progressive victory over all constraints. So naturally, all the laws of Nature, all the human laws, all habits, all rules, all that grows increasingly supple and finally becomes nonexistent. And then, you see: as the process grows more and more perfect —"perfect" means integral, total, leaving nothing behind—it necessarily, inevitably means victory over death. Not that this dissolution of the cells stops existing, but that it would exist only when necessary: not as an absolute law, but as ONE of the processes, when necessary.⁵ Because decidedly, the ((process" of death means solely and exclusively an incapacity to progress—the prison cell, the Parkinsonized cage that must be destroyed in order to go further. That is its only evolutionary object. One does not die from cancer—neverone dies from the consciousness being fossilized within a certain kind of experience. Death only attacks death. It's mainly all that the Mind has brought in terms of rigidity and absoluteness and near invincibility—that's what... is going to disappear. And simply by handing the supreme power over to the Supreme Consciousness.⁵

A testing ground for the mental subversion.

Right down to the cells.

The last sedition.

And in order that the evolutionary endeavor may hold on to something "concrete" according to human norms, in the manner of the ancient Pharaohs, or perhaps the knights of the Middle Ages who had to go through a "test," those Aurovilians received as a first task to build a symbolic center around Sri Aurobindo's symbol, like an enormous lotus bud ("Aurobindo" means lotus) rising from the earth, from the mud of the earth into which the true consciousness, the supramental Truth-Consciousness, must infiltrate. It is what Mother called with her delightful sense of humor "the Tower of Babel in reverse." They united and divided in the construction, so now, they come together to unite in the construction. That's it: a Tower of Babel... in reverse!⁶

Will we undo the mental Babel?

That is the whole question of the coming twenty-first century.

It is truly the very question evolution is putting before us. That was in February 1968.

The Immobile Revolution

A strange wave ran through the world that year.

I remember the first female Russian astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, who marveled at the small orange ball that conveyed such a lovely sense of unity when seen from above.... Streams of clouds, magnetic currents span our continents, but we are blind to the invisible stream that terrestrially links our every vein and cell. Yet it is there, pressing, more and more, more and more. There is a certain quality of vibration, which is difficult to describe but gives a sense of something coagulated (not broken up), she already said in 1966, something that feels denser than air, extremely homogeneous, with a golden luminosity, an awesome power of propulsion. And that, that Vibration, exerts a pressure on people, on things, on circumstances, in order to fashion them according to its vision. And it's irresistible. Even people who think the opposite, who want the opposite, do what is willed without wanting it; even things that are opposed in their very nature are turned around. For national events, relations between nations, terrestrial circumstances, that's how it acts, constantly, constantly, like an awesome Power. The resistance of inertia in consciousnesses and in Matter are the reason why that Action, instead of being direct and perfectly harmonious, becomes confused, full of contradictions, shocks and conflicts. Instead of everything working out "normally," I might say, smoothly (as it should), all that resisting, opposing inertia causes things to start clashing together in a tangled movement, with disorder and destruction... which are made necessary only by the resistance but were not indispensable: they might not have been—they should not have been, to tell the truth. Because that Will, that Power, is a Power of perfect harmony in which each thing is in its place, and It organizes everything wonderfully. But when It descends and presses down on Matter, everything starts seething and resisting.⁷ It is the constant infiltration and substitution by the true Vibration for the false vibration. And what is so extraordinary is that we bathe, in a way, in a world of wonder magically transformed into chaos—an unreal magic, for sure, a magic of unreality to which we are so integrally a party, down to the least detail of our reactions. The Vibration comes, you see it: it is simple and direct; and then everything gets magically tangled up. Really like a veil, or a mist of Falsehood enveloping you and enveloping everything. It has no reality whatsoever, it is almost like a systematic invention of catastrophe. You open your eyes truly and you realize that it is a phantom. And sometimes, the "amount infiltrated" is strong enough to dissolve the cloud for a second, and you open your eyes wide... it is unbelievable—nothing is to be believed of this world anymore.

That is what happened in 1968, unknowingly, as a general rehearsal—a very small rehearsal. And one can perceive so clearly the intermingling of the two movements, the two forces, the true Vibration and the false one; and how, almost instantly, the true and victorious Movement that seemed to carry all those students throughout the world became distorted—one must be able to bear the victory, especially that victory, and that is why you are plunged back into your inanity or insanity and pounded again and again until the infiltration is global enough to dissolve the cloud without breaking everything. Until we decide we really want to see. On February 28, 124 students from 124 countries (along with the representatives from 23 states of India, making a total of 147) came to throw a handful of earth from their countries into the urn at the center of Auroville, as if to blend all those handfuls of earth into a single true Earth, one, an earth of truth—and it was not a question of "Auroville," or any city here or there, any place from the East or the West: quite simply a place called Earth, the little orange ball wrapped in its evil spell. They were 147 wanting to undo the spell. On March 8, nine days later, out of the blue, the students of Warsaw provoke a riot: "Down with Censorship!" they shouted in the squares—censorship of what? Of the true man, perhaps, under his mental collar of iron. On April 23, another wave—or still the same one—seized the students of Columbia University in New York: "The revolt"... against what? No one really knows, or they put labels and banners on it, but it is really the revolt, quite simply. Then on May 2, Nanterre, the University of Paris: "The student strike"—It doesn't look like a strike at all, it looks like a revolution,⁸ Mother immediately declared. She had seen, She saw. And then all the "porridge of Falsehood" instantly seized upon the great Flame: that which was true History was turned into politics and petty little stories. (But perhaps the great primates would have seized upon that wave to settle their tribal quarrels?) They did not even understand what they were doing. But all the same that wind blew all the way to Mexico, where the army seized the university; to Cairo and Alexandria, to Calcutta and Madras—all the way to Prague in November. Jan Palach would set himself on fire in the first days of January, January 16, while the obscure rumblings of the old Falsehood rolled from East to West and everywhere: in the Pacific, France won the dubious honor of becoming the fifth nuclear nation. There was the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of John Kennedy's brother. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, the candidacy of Nixon. Finally, the gold crisis, the "worst one since 1930," the London stockmarket closed.... But this was only a beginning: The reign of money is drawing to its close,⁹ She said, and She saw clearly (She always saw clearly). The false gold of the earth, while a light gold ran for a moment in the veins of the Earth... and nobody knew why. In a few months we would land on the moon with helmets, boots, radars and computers programmed to the second—the "program" is flawless. But perhaps it is the end of mental programming—if we know or want to seize the golden little trigger.

There is in the consciousness the very strong feeling—very strong—that the time HAS COME, she said during the same month of May. There are immense periods during which things are prepared—the past wears out and the future is prepared—and those are immense periods... neutral, drab, during which things keep repeating themselves over and over, and look as if they will always remain that way. Then, all of a sudden, between two such periods, the change takes place. Like the moment when man appeared on earth—now it's something else, another being.... In any case, it is certain that we shall see the signs, or rather that we are now seeing the precursory signs.... Something is really changing. Those are still the precursory signs, the forerunner movements, so it's scattered, not combined, but for one who can see, it's obvious. For instance, all the students and the whole working class have joined forces. Naturally, on the mental level there's a whole mixture of all kinds of ideas, but the Force behind... they themselves are unaware of it, but they are driven by a force that wants the manifestation of a truer truth. It's clearly (not in the detail of it, but in the direction of the Movement), clearly a will to have done with the past and to open the door to the future. It's like a sort of revulsion with stagnation. A thirst for something which is ahead and appears more luminous, better. And indeed there is something—it's not just imagination: there is something. That's the beauty of it, it's that there is something. There is a Response. There is a Force that wants to express itself.¹⁰

And Mother added this, which leaves us pensive: It seems its not the students who started the violence, but the police. And that's very interesting, because the police stand for the defense of the past. When later I was given the news [of the riots], then there came in me (it was said very, very clearly, a very clear vision): the Future. It's the higher Power COMPELLING people to do what they must do. Between now and that Future (which is a long way ahead), there must be the power of an IMMOBILE number. And the vision was very clear: if millions—not thousands, millions—of people assemble together and occupy the place absolutely peacefully (simply assemble and occupy the place), then it will have power. But there must be NO VIOLENCE; as soon as one indulges in violence, it's the return to the past and the open door to all conflicts... an occupation by the mass, but a mass all-powerful in its immobility.... I know that. There has been—there has always been—an identification of this body's consciousness with all revolutionary movements. I have always known and guided them even before news of them came out: in Russia, in Italy, in Spain and elsewhere—always, everywhere. And essentially, it was always the same Force seeking to hasten the coming of the Future—always—but constrained to adapt its means of action to the state of the mass. And now, the state of the earth would seem to be precisely such that what is at the very least being prepared (if it's not yet actually like that) is the manifestation of the mass in a kind of silent and immobile will.... And that's an intermediate period to reach the condition in which this mass will be held under the control and directly driven by the Power from above. That's where we are heading."

Mao Tse-tung's "Union of the Masses" has perhaps another meaning altogether.

So, for an instant, we can imagine that little golden trigger pressing on the earth's masses, on those young, open masses that have had enough of this future of intelligent robots, and... everything stops. The pilot suddenly finds that his plane has lost all meaning; the government pen-pusher lifts his ball point from amongst his dusty ordinances and realizes that his paragraphs are suffocating him; the voter—the dear voter—suddenly discovers that his vote is worthless, and he is merely voting for the watchmen of the cage; the rightist, the leftist, the man in the center all discover there is no longer any center or direction and the ship is sinking on every side; people from the East, people from the West, yellow and red, look unbelievingly at those termite walls that imprison them in nonexistent ideologies; the young, the little ones, the not-yet-suffocated, look at the piles of equations and degrees and libraries, and all the charming bombs that their daddies are piling up, and it no longer means anything: we are not living for that, not for anything! Unless we are completely crazy. So we let drop the pen, forget about the paragraph, the locomotive, and the ballot, the equation and all the certified clockwork—and WE ARE NO LONGER IN IT. We have never been in it, it is a Falsehood, it does not exist. We belong elsewhere, we are of the next-world-here which is bursting in our face. And the veil is being rent. Through the power of those millions of looks that want to see the true earth, live the true life, be once and for all, the illusion crumbles. And we suddenly laugh, an immense divine laughter which seizes the entire earth under the very nose of the dazed phantoms—we laugh and laugh beyond belief, beyond all belief forever. It is done, we are in it. We live, we breathe. It is here. The general strike of the mental Machine. Immobile millions who turn their backs on the Machine, let drop the phantom, the laws, and Death. We return to life on the true earth. Simply through the immobile power of millions who want no more of it.

And the web vanishes.

No, not a return to the spinning wheel—a leap into the true earth.

A magical terrestrial act.

An immobile revolution.

And the Machine stops. It is all over, it is finished, it no longer works.

There is nobody left to make it work.

Nobody to elect the prison guards.

Nobody to barricade the borders.

Nobody to tighten the bolts.

There are only the living, that is all.

And they will invent a new future through the power of their joy.

There is a growing feeling that the True is the only way to change the world; that all the other processes of slow transformation are always at a tangent (you draw nearer and nearer but you never arrive), and that the last step must be this—the substitution of the true Vibration.¹¹

Nandanam
August 28, 1975