Mother or The New Species - II

3. A Universal Beginning

The Evolutionary Bridge

But the superman is still a tiny transition—at best a few more swollen heads in the universe. Although a prerequisite, it is not the core of the problem. The sense of Oneness, the concrete perception of Oneness, is only the abc's for the children of the new evolution, it only means the unblocking of the old natural door—and as a matter of fact, it is not even meant to give a few vaster perceptions or enlarge one's field of investigations and produce little world citizens. There would be no lack of candidates for the world brain. And so what? We shall merely perceive the world's sordidness, misery and pain a little more universally. The first effect of this "oneness" is more commonly painful than pleasant. It is unbelievable what one swallows—this consciousness is very "exact." In fact, the cause behind the unifying abc's, or re-unifying rather, is not mental as we presume. We cannot refrain from transplanting the old mental man into the skin of the next being, but this is our mistake. The real cause is almost mechanical, as it were, a physiological mechanics, not at all meant (or only secondarily) to provide great world panoramas. For the New Consciousness is crushing, it is formidable and utterly disproportionate to the little network of nerves that faint when a finger gets pinched in the kitchen door. This Consciousness is first and foremost a Power, or it appears to us as such and is perceived as such by the microscopic consciousness enclosed in the network of veins, capillaries and pyramidal cells which burst like bubbles. Hence the very functionings of the material substance must expand to bear the charge. A corporeal change has to take place. The body consciousness itself must try hard to widen (or clarify, which comes to the same thing), the physiological counterpart of the mental expansion that differentiates Neolithic man from present-day man in front of his TV set. We know nothing of what this next being will or can do, unless, once again, we attempt to transfer to this being our own glorified human qualities, for which he would probably have no use. "Only the body can understand," Mother said. The body will know and perceive before we do what the next life will be. Evolution is unfolding at the level of Matter, not at the level of the brain—the brain is but a pretty appendage to help us understand the phenomenon—if we want—and perhaps to take part in it. And here we come upon two key texts which completely opened my eyes one day, as I was still incorrigibly seeking the world's next meaning through little pyramidal cells. First, an excerpt from Sri Aurobindo, a small sentence as He had the art of writing them, amidst other things, with the air about it of nothing at all: A fully conscious body might even discover and work out the right material method and process of a material transformation.... THE BODY would be thus a participator and agent in its own transformation... ¹ Next, an extraordinarily illuminating text of Mother's: As it is, the physical body is really only a very disfigured shadow of the eternal life of the Self but this physical body is capable of a progressive development; through each individual formation, the physical substance progresses, and one day IT WILL BE CAPABLE OF MAKING A BRIDGE BETWEEN PHYSICAL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT AND THE SUPRAMENTAL LIFE THAT WILL MANIFEST.²

The body will be the bridge.
The key is in the body.
The whole mystery begins there.

Hence the supreme importance She attached to the culture of the body in her laboratory. How She watched over it, down to the smallest details, how much attention She lavished on each and every one, each exercise, each movement of the body! Never in the world had there been (especially in those years between 1945 and 1950) an "organization" that devoted so much time and care to the body: several hours every day. And there were no specialized exercises; each one had to practice a whole range of exercises, and the girls took up boxing as well as the horizontal bar and weightlifting. One might wonder how boxing could produce a new body (apart from a muscular one) and whether sprinters might have a better chance in the next stage of evolution than M.A.'s in literature? But why not, after all? It all depends on the way you sprint. And it all depends on the way you study to get the arts degree. And here again lies the imperceptible detour that this invisible yoga of the next world takes: we do everything we usually do, but "with a different attitude." Climbing stairs can be done consciously, or lifting a bucket of water, or using one's body—we can even apply consciousness to the act of running. Sports are simply a means or pretext for infusing consciousness into Matter—perhaps even a different consciousness. Or perhaps simply to help clarify a certain number of cells, thus allowing the Consciousness in the depths—the Exact Consciousness, the real Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness of Matter—to pierce through the obscure layers of bodily inertia and start operating directly in the body as it operates in a bird, the atom, and everywhere, although indirectly, through a particular habit or way of being a bird, a plant, a table, or any mould at all. It is the old mould of being, the old bodily way of being, which must let itself be permeated and handled differently. A next way has to be found. The body must discover and work out its next way. A real adventure.... How She exhorted those children, how She encouraged them! What tons of energy She poured onto them, the atmosphere seemed electrified by her presence, as if the doors to the Possible were really open: No one has gone there! No one has done this; it's a beginning, a universal beginning, she told them. Therefore it is an absolutely unexpected and unforeseeable adventure.... Every evening after their exercises, they filed past her, one by one, to receive that look that battered down doors, freed the impossible from the depths of a body smothered in atavism—undoing, undoing, undoing all the old habits, the old refuges of death, the little negations stemming from the great fear of the new in those cells. I invite you to the great adventure. There's no question of spiritually redoing what others have done before, because our adventure begins AFTER THAT. The question is of a new creation, entirely new, with everything it entails of the unforeseen, of risks and hazards—a REAL adventure whose goal is certain victory but whose course is unknown and has to be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something which has never been in this present universe and which will never again be in the same way. If that interests you... well then, let's embark. What will happen to you tomorrow I don't know We must leave aside all plans, all projects, all constructions, and... walk into the unknown. Come what may.³ She was there, slight and very white, beneath the great map of India. She twirled a frangipani flower—which she called "Psychological Perfection"—in her fingers as She spoke and it really, truly did seem that a new chapter of evolution was opening in a corner of the earth.

If only they had truly understood.

If only a few—even two or three—had really, totally tried.... And yet, in those first years, a handful did try. I saw the great Possible shine in a few eyes, and a beautiful and promising sincerity, so simple and fresh, in a few girls (more than in the boys, I must admit) who, beneath their headscarves of white tulle, did their exercises with a bright enthusiasm and worked during the day at a monotype machine or washing dishes. A few pure samples were there. But the second wave of children was already no longer the same, the wave of the world was already there—ever there. Truly the problem was a world problem.

The Contagion

The beginnings of a new evolution are frail, as threatened as a young shoot. We do not know how many species Nature has tried out, destroyed, tried again and again until the sprout—one sprout—survived the millions of little insects and the climatic hardship. This is the stark picture of what happens and has happened and will happen each time a new attempt labors to germinate in the evolutionary terrain. Perhaps Nature wills these difficulties to make her young sprouts stronger; we always misunderstand the vast wisdom of our Mother, and we never sufficiently realize that her obstacles are her means of work and that, after all, she is also in the little insect that wants to destroy the pretty sprout. Humanity must indeed clearly understand the situation, as it will have to undertake the evolutionary venture, here or there, in one form or another, with one vocabulary or another, with a tulle headscarf or an astrakhan hat. That is how it is—we are all heading there. The problem is the same for all, whether this caterpillar or another. We must try to unify the terrain, she told them, to create a particularly fertile soil to obtain the maximum collective receptivity.⁴ Yes, just as young trees aspire, aspire for rainfall, and when they are there, huddled together tightly, the cloud will come there, and it will not drop its rain anywhere else—plants are needed, many, many young plants to attract the rain. The alternative is a civilized desert where nothing grows except machines. It is a simple law; evolutionary meteorology exists, too. There is a moment in each one's life, a moment when the need for a perfect sincerity comes as a decisive choice.... Sincerity is to aspire for the lovely rain that makes things grow, but strangely enough we simultaneously aspire for germs; we always pull in two directions. There is also a moment in the collective life—if one is part of a group—there is a moment when a choice MUST be made, when the purification must be achieved. Sometimes it is imperative, it's almost a question of life and death for the group; it must progress in order to survive.⁵ How She mothered those saplings, how She poured, poured down her rain of light upon them! The "Ashram" was only a name, what did She care about ashram stories! She had not come to "create an ashram": This spot on earth was where a sapling, just one sapling, had to take root in the evolutionary terrain. The problem had to be conquered somewhere on earth. And Sri Aurobindo and Mother had deliberately chosen to cultivate their evolutionary experiment amidst the very conditions of the world, not on some Himalayan peak, not within four walls, but right in the midst of society—the experiment had to withstand the world's climate, or of what use was it?

But the world is very contagious. Day after day, She explained the whole problem to them in the Playground, which was perhaps a playground of evolution. It was indispensable that a few humans take in the task's magnitude. To understand what had to be done was to participate; this was the real role of our pretty brains, not playing arpeggios. Even the ascetic, the hermit who goes off and sits in a cave or under a tree in the jungle cannot completely free himself from his solidarity with the rest of the world. The air he breathes is full of the vibrations of the world, the food he eats contains the vibrations of the world, and consequently his mere physical existence makes him share the difficulties of the world.⁶ For such was the constant refrain: If only I went away for a while to the Himalayas, I could overcome my difficulties so much more easily! After that, I would come back stronger, I would have made a step—after that, one puts on the coat of the world again, and it is all the same as before. Afterwards never comes! The work must be tackled in the conditions of the earth's laboratory, there is no escape. You can, to some extent, achieve an inner balance, but the environment you live in is full of imbalance.... You give and take, you breathe and absorb. And so the result is a mixture; and it can be said that everything is contagious, for you live in a world of constant vibrations.⁷ And yet it was very simple; we do not know how simple it is: the sum of personal difficulties is not what counts, not even stumbling on the way; being virtuous or sinful does not matter at all—where is he, the lone saint in the world? We swallow our share of germs like everyone else... but with a difference: SINCERITY of purpose. This was her own refrain: be sincere, be sincere.... It was the only defense in this generalized cataclysm, the only solid ground. Simply a sincere attitude so that throughout everything, through the most obscure, rebellious or contradictory of states—and we carry a world of contradictions in us, every obscurity and every possible germ—in spite of everything and against all odds, "something" inside keeps to the evolutionary course: that's where I'm going, that's what I want. Each contradiction then becomes an additional impetus to move farther ahead. The battle of evolution does not consist in never making mistakes, but in seizing all that happens in its true sense. Then we are always in the Sense, no matter what turn we take. It is the need for truth that creates truth, it is the need for another air that creates the next evolutionary air, as the need to emerge from the swamp made reptiles of the Jurassic Age grow wings. It was not its reptilian virtues that pulled it out of its predicament. That is what Evolutionary sincerity means: to go in the true direction by all possible means—yes, to want to go there. That's where I'm going, and even if I fall into the fires of hell, that's still where I'm going, for only there can I breathe. There comes a moment, she said, when life as it is, when human consciousness as it is, seems truly impossible to bear. And you say to yourself: "No, that's not it, that's not it, that CANNOT be it, this can't go on." When you reach that point, the only thing to do is to throw in your all—all your effort, all your strength, your life, your whole being—into this chance or, if you like, the exceptional opportunity which is offered to go to the other side.... Taking THAT leap is well worth leaving behind a lot of baggage and unloading a lot of things.⁸ She said that that sincerity, that need for something else, was so powerful in its simplicity that it had a power even over death. We shall never know how simple the keys to the next world are—as simple as the difficulties are tremendously complicated.

And once the sapling takes root, it will automatically spread to the rest of the terrestrial field: the contagion, too, works in both ways.

Interdependence

The years were passing, and the problem seemed to become more acute, more urgent. Something had to happen. What? She herself did not very well know. I wish we had hundreds and hundreds of years before us to do the work,⁹ she was already telling them. She was facing that human mass, more than a thousand people-1,185 in 1958—her laboratory, and it moved so slowly, so much like everyday life. People are shocked when a few thousand rupees are wasted, but they are not shocked when torrents of consciousness and energy are diverted from their true ends!... To do a divine work on earth, one must come prepared with tons of patience and endurance, one must know how to live in eternity and await the awakening of consciousness in each one—the consciousness of what true honesty is.¹⁰ They did not really understand what the terrestrial stakes were and how their acts, one little "honest" and conscious act in a small detail of Matter, could have repercussions throughout all Matter. For there are moments in Matter's history, exceptional moments, when evolutionary or "climatic" conditions, if you will, are such that one tiny grain of pollen for the love of the thing, pretty, deliberate and simple—pure—can spark a whole new way of being on earth. We have no idea what "big" things in the world are about, we look for them in all the wrong places, in human pomp and circumstance while it is something other than the human that has to emerge: post-human "uselessness." An inconspicuous way of being with a different quality. In the Ashram, there was a crazy old man, perfectly "useless" and quarrelsome to boot; and everyone was amazed that Mother kept such a black sheep (the implication being: "I am so much better" and not crazy, of course): "Why do you keep So-and-so?"But he makes such nice envelopes! No one makes envelopes as well as he does! And there you are: someone in the world who could glue perfect envelopes. And She invented all sorts of "unlikely" occupations for this one or that one, a minuscule work for five minutes a day: mixing nail polish to get an exact shade of salmon pink, arranging flowers in a vase in a certain way and counting the petals to obtain a particular number, filing stamps from New Caledonia or Patagonia according to their date of issue... there is no end to the improbable lists, sometimes "useful," but apparently not always. Each of these invented occupations was a particular way of touching Matter. With each one She was touching Matter in a specific manner. Who understood the exact, conscious and "honest" gesture? Who understood that the other way is not created in the old way, but it must be created just the same? You must start somewhere, it is not going to fall from heaven. The next world begins with a small gesture. And that gesture has to be made. We must start somewhere. What would the chimpanzee of the Neolithic age say about a certain human way of polishing flint?... He would have a good laugh—if chimpanzees laugh.

We are completely beside the point.

And they thought, "Mother is here, she will do it, we are not going to do all that by ourselves...." Obviously, they were not going to do it all by themselves; not a single man is capable of creating the next man, because in order to create something, we must first know what it is—how do you create the unknown, the nonexistent? Yet there is a way of giving ourselves to the other thing and not constantly blocking the door with our old mortal routine. They were only asked not to block the door, to create an opening there so that those tons of consciousness She poured down may enter in. Mother could not do it all alone. This is one dimension of the problem which She tried to explain to them with a kind of pathos which now wrings my heart. She stood there, as an Ancient of evolution who knew the story so thoroughly, who had lived it so many times, had suffered through it so many times and would so much have wished them to take the step, the saving step. She could not take the step all alone. Is it possible to achieve total individual transformation without some measure of correspondence in the collectivity?.. It doesn't seem possible to me. Human nature remains unchanged—one can greatly change the consciousness (for sure, one can purify one's consciousness), but the total conquest, the material transformation, certainly depends to a great extent on some degree of progress in the collectivity.¹¹ What would Einstein do, all alone in the midst of flint polishers? He could not have existed, that is all, he would have been asphyxiated by the psychological climate. Mother lived her last years in an agonizing state of asphyxiation. She saw, She knew; how She entreated them, exhorted them! The individual progress is, in a way, restrained or checked by the collective state. Between the collectivity and the individual, there exists an interdependence from which it is impossible to free oneself totally, even if one tries. And even he who, in his yoga, would attempt to free himself totally from the terrestrial, human state of consciousness would, at least subconsciously, be bound to the state of the whole, which impedes and pulls backwards. One can try to take shortcuts by giving up all attachments and responsibilities, but even so, the realization of even one who is at the very top and foremost in the evolutionary march, is dependent upon the realization of the whole and upon the state of the terrestrial collectivity. And that pulls backwards in such a measure that it sometimes takes centuries for the Earth to be ready....¹² Still more centuries? And yet it depended—it depends—really on such a trifle, a microscopic new way in Matter, our Matter, a tiny little "honest" gesture—will there not be such a gesture somewhere? A sudden break in the old habit of being human. And that's why, she continued, to the endeavor for personal progress and realization must be joined an endeavor to uplift the whole and make it progress so as to allow a greater progress of the individual: in other words, THE PROGRESS OF THE MASS ALLOWS THE INDIVIDUAL TO TAKE A FURTHER STEP FORWARD.¹² Will this "progress of the mass" be that which is dully rumbling in the East, or will it rather be one we wrest from our own Matter? Because "progress" there will be, whether we like it or not—the more rebellious we are, the more heavy and merciless and crushing will the process be. Nature is no moralist. Why not do the same thing but in a nicer way? she asked.... We would thus avoid Nature's macabre joke. For her, it's of no importance whatsoever; she sees the entirety, the whole, she knows that nothing is lost, that it's only a reshuffling of various quantities, it's like innumerable tiny and unimportant elements being thrown back into the cauldron, mixed thoroughly, and a new thing comes out of the cauldron. But this game is not pleasant for everyone. So if in consciousness, we managed to be as vast as she is... why couldn't we do what she does but in a nicer way?¹³ Always She called and invoked the great Possible, She endeavored to sow it in their consciousnesses, the great-Possible-always-there which depends upon... a nothing—the formidable tomorrow depends upon a mere breath. It is unimaginably easy, if only we knew... but there have to be a few who do know, and who want to take THAT step. It looks like madness, but all new things have always looked mad before becoming realities. The time has come for this madness to be realized.¹⁴ I wish we, here, could open up the way, go a little beyond, everyone together.¹⁵

A little, she said....

She was trying to open up the Age of Conscious Matter.

She pulled this mass along—what torrents of energy and light did She not lavish upon that handful of humans in that obscure Playground, so small and white and frail in their midst, and so terribly powerful. She would have broken all bondages had it depended solely on her, She would have rushed like a hurricane to conquer her own Matter. But one cannot force open the door all alone—or can one? That is yet another mystery to clarify. What did She do in spite of us? What could She do? In 1953, exactly twenty years before her departure and in that very Playground, She asked the question—She asked the very ones who would be with her to the end, those human specimens who would turn out to be the symbols of the world's great Negation, but who nevertheless expected her to become radiant, all-powerful, rejuvenated, transformed, the living miracle of the next earth: Is it possible for one body to change without something changing in its environment? What would be your relation with other objects if you have changed so much? And with other beings?... It seems that a whole range of things should also change, at least to some degree, to enable such a body to exist and continue to exist.¹⁶ This was on May 20, 1953.

On May 19, 1973, all contacts with the outside world were severed, and She entered... what? Death, or something else?

Who will ever understand those years when Mother slowly asphyxiated amongst us?

Was it in vain? What happened?

Did something happen?

Something we do not yet understand, for we can only understand the posturing and glitter of the immediate human present. A universal beginning is usually understood centuries later, when historians suddenly realize that that pillaging tribe was France, or that wrinkle, the Tertiary. I am trying to stammer out the history of the next Age like a scribe without a memory.

Alone with Mother. Through a curtain which one should destroy, or exorcise perhaps.