Mother or The New Species - II

4. The Supramental Descent

Then, abruptly, this universal beginning concretized itself. On a 29th of February, 1956—a leap year.

In fact, if things depended on the good will or ill will of men, or even on what they think, there would be very little hope for the Earth. Sometimes I have the strange impression that the earth's entire history is read the wrong way: the facts and events are true, the same as we all know, but they seem to be read on a single level, through one type of lens, while, in fact, things have a completely different meaning. Geologists and palaeontologists are probably nearer to the earth's true movement, their vision is less falsified, closer to the bare material facts; basically they do not look at the earth with the Mind. We see Renaissances, Mongol invasions, political doctrines and spheres of influence, but nothing of Matter's own movement, of the terrestrial experience seen as the progress of a species whose every instrument and speech and even history may crumble to dust and disappear forever without changing an iota in the progress of... something that has to do with collective and terrestrial human physiology. Our interpretation of this progress could very well have never existed, or could have been read in a completely different way—with different words and quite different principles—yet the fact would have remained the same. We are actors in a play we have no knowledge of, or of which we know only one layer, like geologists of a surface layer. What meaning did the first Achaean tribes attribute to their existence? Certainly not the same as we now attribute to them, and ours is probably as erroneous and limited as theirs. There is another layer which completely escapes us, and as long as we have not touched that bedrock of Man, touched his true purpose concealed in a tiny cell, then all our Histories are but the childish travesties and charades of an entirely different tale.

We must remove our mind-glasses if we are to truly understand the real movement of the world. We must get out of the mind's translation. We live nothing of the world as it is, we are living in a translation of the world. But the spectacles, too, may be part of the evolutionary plan; it may have been necessary, for a time, to see the world in a certain way so as to commit all the necessary "errors." We shall never be sufficiently aware of the utter wisdom of things and how even our errors have a totally different meaning. Evolution does not err, it advances step after step, using every means, using both good and ill wills, or no will at all; it moves toward an inevitable goal, in whatever language we may like to name it. For it is not Mind's evolution, but Matter's evolution.

And we are all in it together, little Marxists and little Christians alike.

The Change of History

But a moment comes when the spectacles can fall off mean, collectively and terrestrially. A moment when glasses are changed. A pure and unobstructed vision may well be the final goal of evolution. As though a number of filters were initially needed to screen from us too blinding a reality. The Supramental is Matter's direct vision. It is Matter itself seeing, doing, effectuating and knowing directly, without going through the Mind. It is Matter's own consciousness—in Matter—directly and infallibly shaping its own world. We cannot really understand anything of this Supramental, because we always put a mental coating on it; if we could just sense a little this consciousness buried in Matter, in the atom, in the cells, the one which governs so infallibly all of Nature's movements, including the flight of birds, and for which nothing is separate, nothing "different," or far, or past, but everything is one pulsation, one continuous space, one single terrestrial movement which knows itself each instant everywhere and thus each instant knows the right action, the right direction, the exact coordination of everything—and without "thinking" about it: it quite simply is, and it is like that—we would probably start shedding great, colossal scales, and the world would become utterly different, stunningly so. All of our Histories would vanish into a formidable non-sense. It is another mode of being. And the body is the "bridge," because this consciousness is in the body, not in the mind. It is not an improvement of the mind, it is a clarification of Matter, which sees for itself and does what it sees. A fantastic simplification of everything. The great Exactness. Really another life. Perhaps the life.

In short, a mutation of and in the body consciousness. But the word "mutation" is again the mental adaptation of a phenomenon that we do not really explain in the least, it is a pseudo-scientific label to exorcise something which eludes us—and that something is everything. We constantly translate in physiological and material terms, within the frame of reference of our present human perception, something that is of another order, or of another layer of time and reality. Thus, "mutation" denotes to us physiological oddities bursting out right and left like a butterfly from a caterpillar (and there well may also be phenomena of this kind, but probably not as we imagine it), and we see ourselves facing strange variations, chubby megalocephalics, perhaps men growing a third eye or telepathic organs or changing their color—we constantly transpose the present, like incurable children. But what is going to mutate first and foremost is consciousness, the perception of the world and of Matter, or rather our false perception of something that is a false matter, because it is falsely seen; instead of seeing through a mental mudbath, the body is going to start seeing directly in its own milieu. And that changes everything! It is as if another reality were taking birth, another world, and yet the same. When the body sees differently and perceives Matter differently, it will naturally handle it differently, by means we cannot even conceive of, because we can conceive only of means that work "through" scalpels, cranes, telescopes, pulverizers.... We understand nothing of what the handling of real Matter can be, because we do not know what real Matter is. And naturally, perceiving itself differently, the body will be lived differently, perhaps it will remold itself—because it will have seen itself differently. The body can only become what it sees as possible for itself. At present, its only possibility is to grow old and stiff, deteriorate and die, because it is imprisoned in a system, an air, which is not its own. How did the other evolutionary transitions or mutations take place? We know nothing about them; all we do is stick labels on them. It seems quite unlikely, though, that the crayfish suddenly began growing another kind of legs through some aberration similar to our pseudo-scientific fancies (although that too is possible: everything is possible). More likely, at each evolutionary stage (at any stage whatever), a change of perception occurs first, another mode of perceiving the milieu, which is probably set in motion by outer circumstances, climatic or otherwise, and which automatically triggers a refashioning of the being and eventually a more appropriate change of form. It is always the consciousness that works first, the perception that starts to touch Matter in a different way and therefore starts handling it differently. We have no idea how wonderfully adaptable Matter is, because we see it as fossilized as our own perception. One lives, dies, lives again, dies again, one falls ill, recuperates and falls ill again and dies again—that is the law. But it is the law of our mental perception. Mutation means a mutation of consciousness. It means another order of the same reality—a more clarified one—unveiling itself.

The Supramental is perhaps a new unveiling, or a new "clarification," in the history of Matter. Naturally, this new clarification has to create its own means and instruments, its own mode of being within this "other" Matter. Our great History will then appear to us in quite another light, for we can only see it in the light of our mental perception and only with the meaning given to it by the Mind. Truly another era. An era as radically different from the present one as the explosion of Life must have been among the pebbles of the world.

A sea change of History.

The Incorrigible Need

"When is it going to happen?" the children asked. They took up the old refrain of Sri Aurobindo's disciples: "The Supramental—when? When is it going to come down?" Because naturally, for them, it was something which was going to fall from heaven, as it were. They did not see how much road had to be cleared between that "heaven" and our Matter bogged down in thousands of years of mental habits. Matter is completely engulfed and caged in a mental web; "Heaven" shines up above for the experts in cosmic consciousness, who drift off to sleep there very honorably and religiously, but in between there is quite a "mudhole" to clean out—the path must be cleared! We have been much too busy playing with our new mental toy, haven't we? It's so much fun to have a new game, she told them. We played with it and tried out every way of using it... like children on a playground: they invent, they look for something, they play, they find it, they scuffle and fight, they quarrel and make up, they discover and destroy and build. But there is a purpose behind all this.... More and more there is a purpose. And perhaps all this surface play is nevertheless leading towards something which will happen one day...¹ "When? What will it be like?" She answered them patiently in this Playground: That depends on you.² They did not understand that through their own purer gestures and less clogged up bodies She was in the process of making them bring the answer into being. When you can be completely conscious of the infirmities and stupidities of the outer consciousness, she said to them, of the utter falsehood of so-called material knowledge and physical laws, the so-called needs of the body and the "reality" of these needs, if you begin to see how false all this is, how stupid, illusory, dark and idiotic, then you are very close to the solution.³ She was trying to peel off the mental scales that tyrannize over the body and govern it by their laws, their you-cans, you-cannots, you-musts, or you-must-nots. And how painstaking it is! The first reflex of each one is "But still, I need this vitamin, and I need bread, and eight hours of sleep is essential, and...." The list is endless, microscopic, and crafty at each and every turn. And this is how the new species begins, in this microscopic cleansing. The cleansing must begin somewhere. "When is it going to happen?" For the mind or the higher intelligence to conceive of new things is easier than for the vital being, say, to feel things in a new way. And for the body it is still more difficult to have a purely material perception of what a new world will be. Yet, this perception must PRECEDE the material transformation; the strangeness of old things, their lack of relevance to the present conditions must first be felt very concretely, if you will. EVEN MATERIALLY they must be felt as obsolete, and as part of a past which has no longer any reason to exist.⁴ The body must begin to perceive what the new mode might be, and for this to happen, obviously the old mode must first become obsolete in its own eyes. The process is always the same: it is not so much a question of educating the body as of de-educating it, knocking off the Mind's spectacles. To "need" something else is essential, the need is the key to all evolutionary transitions.

The need: the ancient memory in our depths that remembers the great Possible from long before the Mental Age. It is the driving force within, the memory of the earth really—perhaps the real Earth remembering its existence. The mental transition is an obscure evolutionary transition whose meaning we shall fully understand only when we arrive beyond the Mind, in true Matter. We shall then say: "So that's what it is—that's what it was!" But this implies that someone will be there to say, "So that's what it is!"whereas prior to the Mind's advent, no one would have been there to say it, or to feel or enjoy it: there would only have been a huge cosmic soup floating in itself quite indifferently—and perhaps with great delight, who knows? The whole earth must feel this need—a few more or less recalcitrant beings on some Playground are not enough. Every man who has gone beyond the stage of animal-man and becomes man-man truly feels a need—which I could call "incorrigible"—to be something other than this wholly unsatisfying semi-animal.⁵ It is this "incorrigible" need that must become utterly incorrigible in humans. They must no longer be able to endure being stuck in their asphyxiating skin. And it may be that right now Nature is tightening the screws to make the asphyxiation more certain or the need more obvious. I think it will happen when a sufficient number of conscious people feel without a doubt that there is no other choice.... Everything past and present must first appear as an absurdity that has to go—only then can it happen, not before.⁶ This was in 1955. The screw was already tightening then. Quite clearly, the present time with all its turmoil and chaotic inanities is the time when this need is awakening; there is almost a sensation of how things could and should be—that means that the hour is at hand. For a long, long time it was said, "It will be, it will be," as a promise to come. Thousands and thousands of years ago, we were already being promised the advent of a new consciousness, a new world, something divine that would manifest on earth, but all that was really said was, "It will be, it will be"— meaning in millions and billions of years. But never before has there been the present feeling that it MUST come, that it is very close.... Despite everything, a moment will come when it will happen, a moment when the movement will swerve into a new reality⁷.

Day in and day out, She was pouring into their consciousnesses this yearning for the Moment. She seemed to have taken hold of the whole Earth. She was lifting up the whole asphyxiating mass through those little specimens, pummeling them like dough. One could almost feel the whole Earth in that corner of Playground—how vast She was, this Mother, how She pummeled and kneaded that obscure dough! There was a MOMENT. There was a moment when the mental being was able to manifest on earth. The starting point may have been quite poor and incomplete and partial, but it was a starting point just the same. Why could it not be now? ⁸ There will be a moment when a human consciousness reaches a state sufficient to allow the supra-mental consciousness to enter and manifest in it.... It does not keep stretching like a rubberband, you know: it has to happen sometime. It may happen in a flash. ⁹

The "Descent"

It was a "Wednesday class" on February 29, 1956. She had read a few pages from The Synthesis of Yoga and answered their questions—the same old question of the world's unconsciousness: "How can unconsciousness aspire to become conscious?" they had asked. Meaning a stone, or this Matter? But we are quite mistaken, for the stone is conscious, Matter is conscious (not as we are, to be sure), one can have a contact with a stone (sometimes more easily than with a human being): amethyst does not respond the same way as granite, and a piece of granite that has lived near a conscious being retains the imprint of the contact; the walls of Thebes have such an imprint. Even our houses sometimes have sad imprints. We could not make contact if there were no consciousness; an "unconscious" object would quite simply be invisible, because it is consciousness that makes the contact possible. Without consciousness, there is no contact. In reality, it is not Matter that is unconscious, it is the Mind. The mind has covered everything with a layer of unconsciousness and separation. It has separated itself from everything—like the Swiss cuckoo in its clock. That evening She told them: It is the Divine in unconsciousness that aspires for the Divine in consciousness. Without the Divine, there would be no aspiration, and without the consciousness concealed in unconsciousness, it would be impossible to change unconsciousness to consciousness.¹⁰ Sometimes we wonder if Matter, our own corporeal matter, will not become conscious before we do; or rather if its true, pure, already existent consciousness will not circumvent the Mind by a sort of evolutionary strategy and, taking us by surprise, reveal an unexpected world. It is a question of allowing Matter its free expression, of the Mind releasing its obscuring grip—such is the endeavor of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. But even if the Mind does remain recalcitrant, could it not be that, because of the evolutionary thrust and in spite of ourselves, this consciousness in Matter, this truly divine and exact and supramental consciousness, would begin to thrust its antennae irresistibly outward, as the caterpillar is irresistibly transformed into a butterfly in spite of all caterpillar laws and principles? For, once again, evolution is not a process of the Mind but of Matter or of the consciousness of Matter—that is where the seed is, not in any cerebral convolution, and because the seed is there, that is where it must develop, inevitably and automatically. The only requirement is favorable evolutionary "climatic" conditions. Today Matter has taken the shape of a man endowed with a brain, but who knows whether tomorrow, through its own impetus, it will not take still another shape endowed with yet another instrument for making contact? It is this evolutionary inevitability which prompted Sri Aurobindo to write in his Life Divine: If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation.¹¹ The whole effort of Mother and Sri Aurobindo may have been to make the process occur with rather than without us.

That evening, for some mysterious and favorable reason, or perhaps without reason, by grace, the Manifestation occurred. The "general descent" Sri Aurobindo had strived for, for so long, took place. Why at this time rather than six years earlier? That is yet another question. We call it a "descent," like falling rain, but that is still our childish language. In fact, for years and years Sri Aurobindo and Mother had tried to establish the connection in their own substance, to clear the passage between the pure Consciousness they had seen on their clear summits and that same Consciousness buried in Matter; and there were moments the connection was made, then everything closed up again. Then another opening, which closed again. The first anthropoid must have gone through a similar experience (let us say, the pioneer of the anthropoids): he was trying to make the connection with that same thing (there are not hundreds of them), that same Force which produced strange little vibrations in his head, that is, in the most unhampered or cleared part of himself, and sometimes, for some bizarre reason, it "happened": he found himself "reflecting" and making unexpected associations—as if the world had acquired a new kind of coherence—but then again it closed up, the passage became obstructed by the old ape habit. Nevertheless, a time came when the "thing" took place more naturally, when it even became contagious—probably when the universal preparation was adequate (we always forget that the world is a single whole). In a way, the ape shed its monkey skin for a moment and became aware of the great universal, total Consciousness, and because he was an ape, the opening, the point of contact, took place at the most clarified level of his body, i.e., in his evolved cranium; and, entering that level, the great Consciousness was expressed by a certain quality of vibration which we call mental. At each level where it enters or is able to enter, that same total Consciousness takes on a particular color or quality of vibration. Until such time when it can be purely and totally itself in an undistorted medium. That medium is Matter. It is the story of the dragon biting its tail. The supramental realization is the perfect union of what comes from above and what comes from below.¹² On February 29, 1956, the union was achieved, no longer at the level of the cranium and through a mental medium, but at the level of Matter and in all points of the body. The barrier was broken and the flow rushed forth. ¹³ Something in the collective human barrier had perhaps given way. Why? It would take a total world vision really to understand. The universal movement is like this: through inner effort and progress, certain individuals, the pioneers, the forerunners, establish a contact with the new Force that is to manifest and receive it in themselves. And because there ARE calls like that, the thing becomes possible, and the age, or the era, or the moment for the manifestation comes. This is how it happened—the Manifestation occurred.¹⁴

But our mental language is a constant snare. We say "the new Force," but what is "new"? It is as old as the world. It is we who are very young and become aware of a very old world! Years ago, as I was mentioning to Mother the work of an Italian scientist on the electric energy produced by the body's cells: It is ALL the same Force! she exclaimed The Power is mixed with different states: mental, vital, or even the purely material state, in which case it becomes electricity—the Lord as electrical vibrations! And She laughed. It's their material notation of the Fact.¹⁵ There you are! We have still not really understood anything about the Fact, for the electric or atomic or magnetic level is still a superficial level, a translation, as it were, of that same Power through a given medium, which we believe is Matter, or which we call Matter—but there is something even more fundamental... which is perhaps true Matter, matter without our mental looking glasses: the Fact. Truly the Mystery. The mystery that Mother was slowly going to unveil. One day, the ape opened up the passage to the Power in his cranium, and, by so doing, he opened up the mental world and a mental perception of Matter—including perception through telescopes and microscopes, for what looks if not the Mind? One day in a remote corner of India, a being opened up the passage to the Power, or Shakti, or Consciousness-Force, in his body, and he opened up the supramental world and the supramental perception of Matter—the same "something," but seen differently. The same Power, but lived differently. the forerunners, establish a contact with the new Force that is to manifest and receive it in themselves. And because there *ARE calls like that, the thing becomes possible, and the age, or the era, or the moment for the manifestation comes. This is how it happened—the Manifestation occurred."

*This body, she said, is just the same as all the rest of the earth, but for some reason or other, it happens to have become conscious in the *OTHER way; well, that normally shoul be expressed in the earth consciousness as a "coming," a "descent," a "beginning".... But is it a beginning? What has "come"?... The experience came as the experience of an eternal fact: not at all something just now taking place.¹⁶ The "what was always there" revealing itself... more and more clearly. It is the eternal Amazon becoming the Amazon by the fact of our walking through it—perhaps Matter progressively becoming what it truly is.

And now the earth is on the way to becoming aware of "the other way."

A Little Pulsation

What does the Supramental look like?...

Were we able to define it or to describe it fully, it would be fully there, on earth. It is not a fixed quantity like hydrochloric acid or the moon: it grows and develops—or rather our perception of it grows and develops. Mother was going to develop this perception for seventeen more years, as if to accustom human eyes and human substance to it. She was clearing the passage. Exactly the same extraordinary vibration which I recognized when the supramental world descended. It comes in and vibrates like a pulsation in the cells.¹⁷

Very few were to recognize it on that evening of February 29 at the Playground. To recognize it, the physical consciousness must already be very free from its mental coating, its mental swarming, we might say. In fact, we become aware of it negatively through the reaction of the "swarming." The lights in the Playground had been turned off; the reading of The Synthesis and the children's questions were over. They were sitting on the ground in a semicircle around Her. The roar of the sea could be heard, and the lighthouse swept its beam across the tops of the walls: two short, one long. It was the "Wednesday night meditation." Mother could be discerned in the shadowy light, seated on her low chair, a little bent over, a frangipani flower in her motionless fingers. She was always very white, this Mother, even when She was dressed in red or in many colors, as if something were filtering through her body, a sort of white luminescence, which sometimes became compact and visible to our material eyes. And the disciples were there in the silence with the children in green shorts sleeping near her chair. She was "unifying a field," as she said. She had gathered all these young shoots of the earth together to produce her "evolutionary meteorology"—and She laughed. She laughed about everything, this Mother. She laughed especially in the face of difficulties: the best way to dissolve them. I must admit to you that I personally feel much more myself when I am cheerful and playing (in my own way) than when I am very grave and serious—much more. When I am grave and serious, I feel as if I were dragging the weight of this whole heavy and dark creation; but when I play in it—when I can play, and laugh, and enjoy myself—it feels as if a powdering of joy were drifting down from above, imparting a special glow to this creation and this world, bringing it much nearer to what it is essentially supposed to be.¹⁸ For joy is the truth of the Earth, only we have forgotten it: we are sad and suffer. She wanted to bring down her rain of joy, her "sunlit path," as She called it. Why suffer? You don't need to suffer; it's not necessary.¹⁹ The supramental is, in fact, the joy of the world prior to the advent of the Mind; one's suffering consists in not being what one is. The real Earth is an earth of joy, it is for joy that the whole thing was created in the first place. Only we are not there yet. She wanted to accelerate the process. She kept drawing down her lovely supramental rain onto this substance. And silence. A terrible Pressure could be felt. (Mother thought everyone on the playground would be knocked flat on the ground.) That a Power was there was obvious; it was so dense you could almost cut it with a knife. It was even suffocating at times. At other times something melted, something opened, and you were carried away in the Great Current, life became utterly fresh and your substance was full of sparkles—perhaps those were the little' "pulsations," but it was almost too "natural" to be noticeable. The Marvel is so natural that, idiots that we are, we only notice it afterwards, once it is gone. I was there that evening; it was during the first years of my stay. The meditation had barely ended and the lights turned on when I wished I could have packed up and gone away as far as possible, to the devil, if possible.... I spent ten years trying not to go to the devil—only trying. The "swarming" within was suffocating.

A negative way of experiencing the phenomenon, we might say.

I went to town to have a drink to the health of the "integral" yoga. I am a free being, after all! This is what is so sad really, this something in us which clings to pain, to the freedom of pain. This suffocating night within, which does not want to yield and repeats No, No, No. The Supra-mental is the night's great suffocation. The swarming routed from its hiding place, forced out into broad daylight by the surreptitious little pulsation engaged in creating the joy of the world in spite of us—it forces everything outside, it insists on being but itself, pure. It is inexorable and irresistible—a kind of little sparkling inside, in Matter: so there is nothing we can do about it. We may cry and scream, but it keeps on growing. It is embedded in the world's Matter, deep inside, ineradicably within. And it will go through to the end—to the total joy within—and will not leave us a minute's peace before; it will not let go of us any more than the first thought let go of the smartest baboons two million years ago (or was it three?). We are merely in the year 20 or so after this universal beginning. We can already appraise the situation; a simple look at the world around us is enough. It is writhing and thrashing about. This Consciousness is kneading them from within, whether they want it or not.²⁰ How well we understand Sri Aurobindo now: "The attempt to bring a great general descent having only produced a great ascent of subconscient mud I had given up that...." The mud is rising up and overflowing. It is frightful. In 1956, things were still fairly decent, almost charming. Let us take a look back: France had just chivalrously offered its place in Indochina to the United States, the Warsaw Pact was newly concluded. Insurrection in Budapest, and the calling in of the Russian troops. President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, French and British troops landed at Port Said, only to retreat—Suez was closed. The Israelis march on the Sinai desert. It was the period of the independence of Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia and Togolandthe beginning of the great "independences." Khrushchev had just indicted Stalin in a secret session of the communist party... four days before the 29th of February. The Polish workers were rioting in Poznan, and Budapest was occupied by the Russians. The first congress of the Chinese Communist party confirmed Mao Tsetung as president of the Central Committee....

There is quite a seed there.
But not the seed we think.
We shall see—we shall see more and more.

It could have been a continuation with some improvement, a widening of the same world... but, she said, what has happened—the truly new thing—is that a new world has been BORN, BORN, BORN. It is not the old world which is being transformed, it's a NEW WORLD that has been BORN. And we are in the middle of the transition period, when the two are intermingled: the old one still persists, all-powerful and entirely controlling the ordinary consciousness, but the new one is stealing in, still modest and unnoticed—so unnoticed that, externally, it disturbs very little for the moment [this was in 1957] and is even quite imperceptible to the consciousness of most people. Yet it is working, it is growing—until such a moment when it is strong enough to assert itself visibly.²¹ Forty years earlier, when He was writing the Arya, Sri Aurobindo had commented: When the conscious Spirit [the supermind] intervenes, a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible.²²

The acceleration is quite breathtaking.

But why now? Why at this particular point in time?. One would think that this new supramental world would have been born more peacefully and decently in the midst of refined humans, in the Renaissance, say, or perhaps during Pericles' time? In any case, during an age when men had a certain. I was going to say "polish"—but that is the point: the polish is now wearing thin—because underneath, it is all the same, whether in the skin of Pericles or the Khmer Rouge, it is the same inner swarming. Only, now it has become unrelieved. It is even being forced to show its face everywhere, in the broad daylight of the world, for everyone to contemplate. The Supramental is like a huge pair of clothespins hanging out all the dirty laundry of the world right under our nose, until we become sufficiently asphyxiated and disgusted to... consent to something else. "Why have the difficulties increased since this supramental descent?" complained a disciple one day at the Playground, four months after the famous "descent." Who says it is not because you have become more conscious! That your difficulties were there before, and you just weren't aware of them? If you see things more clearly and see things that are not very pretty, it is not the Supramental's fault, it's your own! It is providing you with a light, a mirror in which you can see yourself better than ever before, and you are a little upset because what you see is not always too pretty? But what can I do !²³ A formidable searchlight, indeed, the harshest of all, which compels all the hidden little beasts to emerge from their lairs.

The Supramental is a formidable power that draws all out.

In 1925, Sri Aurobindo had made a strange remark, when asked what would be the signs of the imminence of the supramental descent. He enumerated four signs, the fourth leaving us pensive. Firstly, the knowledge of the Physical world has increased so much that it is on the verge of breaking its own bounds [perhaps in order to reach beyond them and find the little "pulsation" there]. Secondly, there is an attempt all over the world towards breaking the veil between the outer and the inner mental, the outer and the inner vital and even the outer and the inner physical [this "inner physical," still unknown to us, is precisely where the vibratory foundation underlying what we call Matter lies]: Men are becoming more "psychic." Thirdly, the vital ²⁰⁰ is trying to lay its hold on the physical as it never did before. It is always the sign that whenever the higher Truth is coming down, it throws up the hostile vital world on the surface, and you see all sorts of abnormal vital manifestations, such as an increase in the number of persons who go mad, earthquakes, etc. Also, the world is becoming more UNITED on account of the discoveries of modern science—the airplane, the railways, the telegraph, etc. Such a union is the condition for the highest Truth coming down and it is also our difficulty [indeed!]. Fourthly, the rise of persons who wield tremendous vital influence over large numbers of men.²⁴

This is something to ponder over.

Why these "large numbers of men"? Why this world all tied up in one net with its "airplanes" which became "jet planes," its abolished distances and its televisions? A compact human knot. You raise your voice in Peking, and it sends ripples all the way to Chicago or Tierra del Fuego. Pericles is long gone. But what has evolved since Pericles? Science? That is not sure. But for sure the human net has become inextricably tied up—indissolubly, we might say. We cannot move an atom without moving everything. A terrible universal disease... or something else? An unthinkable contamination of everything. Pericles would never have thought of it—but we are all "thinking of it," nonetheless.

And it comes to us in flashes that this frightful state of things may in fact be the best possible condition for the supramental contagion. It is not Pericles' brain that is progressing through evolution; evolution is not meant to produce some super-Pericles: it is all of terrestrial Matter that is evolving simultaneously; it is in Matter that the little ((pulsation" is happening—so very new and upsetting for everything.

The whole earth is rounding the bend, all together, whether we like it or not. Mother laughingly called it the supramental catastrophe. She said: Anything that disturbs the Inertia is, for Inertia, a catastrophe. In the world, the earthly world (it's the only one I can speak of with competence; of the others, I have only overall visions), in the earthly world, for Inertia (which is the basis of the creation and is necessary to fix, to concretize things), anything that disturbs it is a catastrophe. That is to say, the advent of Life was a monstrous catastrophe, and the advent of intelligence in Life another monstrous catastrophe, and now the advent of Supermind is the final catastrophe! That's how it is.²⁵

Indeed, we would be absolutely wrong to think that the present chaos can be patched up—it is not going to be patched up, it is going to be un-patched completely, until the very last atom of night is pushed out—until we get to the OTHER THING... which may well spring up right under our noses in spite of ourselves, surreptitiously born of our own Matter. It is happening within there, it is there we have to look. And the less we rely on our mental glasses, the more we will be able to see the beauty of the phenomenon, as it were. Another history is beginning, which will give us the key to everything: From this point of view, the phenomenon that is now taking place, she said to the children, is unique in the history of the Earth; and probably (most certainly), once we reach the end of this transformation process, we will have the key to all prior transformations, in other words, everything we are now trying to understand will be known in relevant terms once the process has recurred from the mental to the supramental being.²⁶

And to the rebellious children sitting on the playground—I being one of them—She declared a little banteringly and with an underlying touch of humor: You are therefore invited to develop in particular your capacity of observation, so that all this does not happen to you in a half-dream, and you do not wake up to a new life without knowing how it all happened. You must be quite vigilant and wide awake and, instead of focusing your attention on small inner psychological events which are rather... old hat (they belong to a whole human history that has lost its novelty, at any rate), it would be better to pay attention to more universal, more subtle and impersonal things, which will give you a chance to make new discoveries of special interest.²⁷

In short, we must start pre-perceiving tomorrow's Matter.

But there are also those human mobs rumbling in the background....

4. The Supramental Descent