Mother or The New Species - II

8: The Triple End

Mother was reaching the turning point.

There is no doubt that She saw better than we do the supramental world, the supramental Power, so formidable, the incredible supramental creation, but it was for her as great a mystery as it is for us: how does one get there, how does one connect with it? In our heads, we can make any connection we like, but that is not where it takes place. And how is it to take place in the body? How can it take place? It is a kind of living impossibility. And yet, there is that formidable Power—She had seen it: A Power that can undo everything and re-do everything. Yes, that is all well and good, it would be almost child's play if it were a question of starting from scratch, but we have to begin with what is already there, with an old body and its old way of being, its cellular functioning and organs like everyone else's: As for the heart, the heart would be replaced by the center of Power—a fantastic dynamic power! She said, laughing. At what MOMENT do you stop the circulation and throw the Force in?... What seems unthinkable is the transition from one to the other, more so than the reality of a body animated by supramental energies. That to live we depend on the circulation of blood, and on food to have blood, and so on and so forth, with everything this entails—what a terrible limitation and slavery! As long as material life depends on this kind of things, it is obvious we won't be able to divinize our life.¹ How do we get there? That is how the mystery first appeared to her and quite logically She concluded, We must first acquire the capacity to prolong our life at will. Because if all the organic, nervous and cellular workings are to be transformed one by one, it will take time, and very conceivably several centuries. So, if you have resolved to transform your body, you must be willing to have all the patience necessary—three hundred years, five hundred years, a thousand years or whatever—whatever time is needed for the change. I personally see that three hundred years is a minimum.²

Until She chanced upon some entirely unknown and new data along the way. Actually, She remarked four years later, We call it "transformation" because we don't know what it is. For if we knew what it is, it would mean that we had already begun to realize it. And fortunately so, because, to tell the truth, the prospect of all those centuries makes me shudder. I would imagine that they make everybody shudder, except those who do not care, or rather, who only wish to continue their little mechanical round without too much trouble—there are hundreds of millions of them.... The great insensate masses are yet another aspect of the problem—"insensate" in the Buddhist sense: who have no sense. So what of them? In 1958, the "supramental catastrophe" had not yet visibly created its felicitous havoc.

The first victim of the havoc was going to be religions. The religious order. The second victim would be politics and finances and the whole system they engender: the materialistic order. And the third?... Perhaps a mysterious and rapid degeneration of the elements that cannot evolve.

An hour of choice.

A whole part of humanity, the part that is consciously or unconsciously open to the new forces, is going to be more and more impregnated with the new substance and the new consciousness to the point of rising toward it to serve as a link between the two... but those who cannot be raised up, those who refuse to progress, will be "dementalized": they will automatically lose the use of the mental consciousness and regress to an infrahuman stage. One must rise above, emerge into the Light and Harmony, or fall back down to the simplicity of a sound animal life without perversion.³

For once, metempsychosis would have a meaning.

This was in 1958, the year of de Gaulle and Khrushchev.

The End of Religions

Mother had her own terrestrial specimens before her.... It was heavy, even crushing sometimes—a mass that was very little inclined to move and would have been quite content to live on a sort of little sanitary island with a few proper meditations (because after all, we are "spiritualists") a little work—not too much—to be at peace with one's conscience, and some physical exercise to keep the body out of trouble. As for the rest, well, life goes on. Humans fly low, and when they decide to fly higher, they merely pierce a hole up above and smile at the angels... only to fall back down on the good old four animal paws, which makes you feel that, after all, life is "real." And it goes on—how frightening. Mother repeatedly blew her hurricane over all that, and her smile; but one felt—and She herself increasingly felt—that She could have gone on blowing tons of hurricanes without changing anything very much. And one day in the

Playground, with a touch of sadness and indignation, She told them, *At the beginning of my present earthly existence, I came into contact with many people who said they had a great inner aspiration, an urge toward something deeper and truer, but they said they were bound, subject, slaves of the basic necessity of earning their living, and this weighed them down so much, took so much of their time and energy that they were unable to devote themselves to any other activity, outer or inner. I heard this very often. I saw many poor people (I do not say "poor" from the standpoint of money), but poor because they felt imprisoned in a narrow and soul-destroying material necessity. I was very young then, and I always said to myself that if I ever could, I would try to create a little world—oh, very small... but anyway, a little world where people could live without having to be preoccupied with food, housing, clothes and all the other imperative necessities of life—in order to see if all the energies thus liberated by the certainty of a secure material existence would spontaneously turn toward the divine life and inner realization. Well, toward the middle of my existence—or what is usually considered the middle of a human existence—the means were given to me and I was able to realize it, to create those conditions of life. Now, however, I have come to the conclusion that it is *NOT the material ial bondage that prevents people from devoting themselves to an inner realization, but rather listlessness, a lack of aspiration, a miserable sluggishness, an I-don't-careism, and those who have even the most trying conditions in life are sometimes the ones who react the best and have the most intense aspiration.⁴

In a way, it is a stock-taking.

As a matter of fact, there was no shortage of respectable and irreproachably "spiritual" people suggesting that the

Ashram needed a "purge," whereupon Mother retorted, They are still in the mentality that wants to eliminate all the obstacles—just the opposite of what Sri Aurobindo did. Sri Aurobindo took them all, embraced them, and then He worked on them so that they would no longer be obstacles.... Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. But if you eliminate everything from life which is unresponsive to the Divine, what will be left?..⁵ I'm even told that there are some people who shouldn't be in the Ashram. My reply is that the whole world should be in the Ashram! But as I cannot contain the whole world, I have to contain at least one representative of each type. And with her charming smile, She concluded: All those people who make a spiritual effort bring me truckloads of morality!⁶ Indeed, it was not a question of the Ashram's morality nor even of the Ashram's spirituality; the problem was elsewhere entirely. What was really needed was a reversal of spirituality, one could almost say a reversal of Divine, to open Matter's divine doors, and not of washing away one's little sins or polishing one's little virtues. But the minute you speak of going beyond morality, people instantly fall headlong into immorality. It is a vicious circle, it is either yes or no, God or the devil, good or bad.... This "spiritual" gymnastics has been going on for a few thousand years now. And so we meditate and meditate to get out of this impasse, but the more we meditate, the more animal the animal becomes and the more saintly the little saint. And so it goes on. And we create a plethora of little ashrams to make it go on—they are the "good" of creation. Amen. The villains are outside, they are of course not us. Mother did not at all intend to make such little ashrams. But the "good" in the Ashram did not understand that, any more than the "bad"—no one understood the kind of revolution She was trying to bring about. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded,⁷ Sri Aurobindo had said twenty-five years earlier.

Most of all, the way was blocked in the consciousness, in a certain habitual way of looking at the world, and whether you looked at it through spiritual or materialistic glasses made virtually no difference, as false on one side as on the other: the same kind of distortion, one from above and the other from below. How She tried to explain that to them! Those last Questions and Answers at the Playground—eight years of questions and answers—are almost poignant in retrospect: one feels how much She was trying to open a way in those consciousnesses, how She took them all in her encompassing look as though She were trying to take in the whole earth: if only one or two could understand! Comprehension had to begin somewhere, in some corner, if only in one single being in the world. A new world begins with one. And one particular day, after the showing of the weekly film at the Playground—a very beautiful Indian film on Ramakrishna and Hindu religious devotion, on the meaning of the gods in life and that "supreme" something all these gods are the image of, and that song of the soul, behind everything, everywhere (in brief, something far superior in quality to the Western conception of "God")—She said to them, I was seeing the whole religious world of worship and aspiration, the whole human relationship with the gods, which was (I am already speaking in the past tense) the best of the human spiritual effort to reach something more divine than man, the highest and almost purest expression of his endeavor toward what is superior to him. And suddenly, I felt in a concrete and MATERIAL way that it was another world, a world that had ceased to be real and living, an obsolete world that had lost its reality, its truth, that was outmoded, surpassed by something that had just taken birth and was only beginning to be expressed, but whose LIFE was so intense, so true, so sublime, that all this appeared false, unreal, worthless. Then I really understood, for I understood not with the head, not with the intelligence, but with the body—do you understand what I mean?—I understood in the cells of the body that a new world is born.⁸

It is all here, really, only we must look at things differently. As long as our eyes are fixed on heaven or fixed on false matter, we shall understand nothing and see nothing: we are right in the Wonder, and we do not see it. The great turning points in evolution occur not by attaining a higher or wider consciousness, but by a new and more exact awareness of what has always been there. One could call it a growth in exactness. Oh, how She tried to shake all that up, it was almost pathetic to listen to her, as if the destiny of the world depended on a few less obstructed eyes. But they only said, "We don't see anything." As for me, I asked Mother, "But doesn't the soul have the power to change Matter, to produce physical wonders as the scientists do?" (Because I could not help thinking that the "other thing" had to be miraculous, some sort of abnormal disruption that comes and is planted on the face of the earth like a superwonder exceeding all scientific wonders. In other words, taking today's sorcerer, the scientist, and trying to do better than the sorcerer, that is, wanting to do like the sorcerer—with some improvements. But it is not that at all!) It [the soul] has that power; Mother answered me, and it uses it CONSTANTLY, but the human consciousness is unaware of it! And the great difference is that the human consciousness becomes aware, but it becomes aware of something that's ALWAYS there! The power isn't so much of acting on Matter—that's something happening CONSTANTLY-but... the difficulty is to open the understanding, that's what is so difficult.... The thing which you haven't experienced is nonexistent. The transformation can take place up to a point without your even being conscious of it! You see, it is said that there is now a great difference, that when man came, the animal didn't have the means of taking notice; well, I say it's exactly the same thing: in spite of all that man has realized, man doesn't have the means; certain things may happen, but he will know they did only much later, when "something" in him is sufficiently developed to enable him to take notice.⁹ Our conception of what is miraculous is part of the false means, it is the Mind that has created the notion of the miracle, because for the mind everything obeys laws, so if something eludes the "law," it must be a miracle. But these laws are mental laws, mental creations, it is Matter as seen by the mind—outside of the Mind, everything is miraculous and a constant miracle. Or rather, everything is miraculously natural. A natural we do not see. The supermind is the natural miracle of Matter. True vision is vision of the constant miracle. There is no need to create miracles and wonders. They are already here! We need only to see them, live them, and let ourselves be shaped by them without interposing the iron net of our mental impossibilities. And everything changes—changes materially. "It is the Divine becoming Matter," Mother said. It is the next stage of evolution, that which is being created, or coming to the forefront. Yes, breaking up the old crust.

And by the same token, all the supreme experiences of liberation, nirvana, cosmic vastness and all the divine visions in every language and from every age and every country, were as if annulled or "ousted," by this new perception of Matter; as if all the gods, miracles, liberations, paradises and all the rest came still from the Mind and were mental projections; perhaps the magic lantern of the mind, but a lantern nevertheless in comparison to the golden dust of Matter. The supramental is not an improved mental vision, widened, extended, and more divine: It is not something higher than the summit we can attain here, Mother tried to explain, it is not ONE MORE RUNG, not that. Here, we have reached the end, the summit, but... it's the quality that is different.... It is truly a new reversal of consciousness. When we begin living the spiritual life, a reversal of consciousness takes place which for us is the proof that we have entered the spiritual life; well, yet another occurs when we enter the supramental world. And probably each time a new world opens up, there will again be a new reversal. This is why even our spiritual life, which is such a total reversal compared to ordinary life, seems something still so totally different when compared to this supramental consciousness that the values are almost opposite.... It's as if our entire spiritual life were made of silver, whereas the supramental life is made of gold—as if our entire spiritual life here were a vibration of silver, not cold but simply a light, a light that goes right to the summit, an absolutely pure light, pure and intense; but in the other, in the supramental one, there is a richness and a power that make all the difference. This whole spiritual life of the psychic being and of all our present consciousness that appears so warm, so full, so wonderful, so luminous to the ordinary consciousness, well, all this splendor seems poor in comparison to the splendor of the new world.... It was almost as if the Supreme Himself were different.... ¹⁰

It is the end of religions. Because religions are the Mind looking at something other than itself. The other world is just... as it is.

Meanwhile those disciples were still trying to work out a "synthesis between East and West," a "union of the world's religions," a high "continuity" of the world's traditions... and so on. Continuity, yes indeed, as the bird followed the reptile, but it is not by adding up the visions of all the saurians of East and West that we shall ever produce a bird's vision. Nor in adding together the Upanishads + the Gospels + the Koran, then shake it all a little.... It is ANOTHER world! How difficult it was to understand, of course. Sri Aurobindo and Mother would live for 78 and 95 years respectively without even having three disciples who understood; that is what Mother told me before she left—and there are four and half billion people in the world.

The End of Materialism

Other means had to be found. It is not through "questions and answers" that the world can be transformed. Somehow, the process had to take place in spite and outside of people's heads, otherwise it was hopeless. And time was pressing. In 1958, She was eighty. All her material time was taken up by a Herculean task that would have demolished any man in his prime. Obviously She used a source of energy unknown to humans; what She could do during twenty-two out of twenty-four hours is simply unimaginable... since 1926, nonstop. The Ashram had become a rather gigantic affair with nearly 1,200 inmates in 1958, including more than 300 children and 250 houses. And She looked after everything down to the very smallest detail, from selecting the quality of paper for a book at the press to the way to paste a stamp on a package or to moving a disciple to another house so he might have a little garden with a breeze from the east. Nothing was overlooked. And endless letters. And endless quarrels. And the finances. unbelievable and miraculous. And the criticism... so petty, so inane! For instance, a look into the archives of the Quai d'Orsay would reveal the venomous little reports of generations of dutiful civil servants stationed in Pondicherry, it is unbelievable—none of them understood what Mother represented, if only for France, for their own country! But Mother just laughed. One day She told me with her humor, the humor that cures everything, including all the outbursts of pettiness, whether from the ranks of the "good" or the "bad," I receive letters positively exuberant, full of bombastic words, and then there are others who tell me very frankly that they are full of doubt, that I quite simply use "tricks" to run the whole "business"(! )... both make the same impression on me.... It's their opinions—they have the right to have any opinions they like. To tell the truth, all that we could reply to them is, "Have the opinions that make you progress."" This Mother, She was always seeking so simply for progress, ever further, always striving to derive the best from the worst—it was the progress of the world that interested her: Be "good," be "bad," it does not matter; think well of her, think ill, it does not matter but for God's sake (or the devil's), get a move on!

It was not the Herculean task that weighed her down, but time, which was pressing. One day, in one of the last "Wednesday classes," this sentence escaped (or perhaps not) her lips: Basically, the question in this race toward the Transformation is to know which of the two will prevail: the one who wants to transform his body in the image of the divine Truth, or the old habit of this body to go on decaying.... It is a race between Transformation and Decay.¹²

Does transformation mean all those centuries of slow labor? Or something else? Sometimes we feel that it is not really so much a problem of transformation as it is a problem of death: this resolved, or discovered, or annulled, all the rest must follow almost automatically, as if death were just what makes up the substance of false matter, the one we see, opaque, rigid, unchangeable except by death—only by death, decay and a return to atomic dust can it change. Yet there is also that "golden dust." What we want or need is not to slowly transform this false matter through the drift of centuries, but to replace it by the true one, or to remove the "something" that veils it. Then the operation could be strikingly swift... assuming the rest of humanity is not struck down by the violence of the operation. The rest of humanity that lives in death and by death, because they are death, they are made of it. Can one being really lift the veil without lifting it for the whole world, and once he lifts the veil for himself, can he continue to exist without vanishing from the eyes of the dead we call living? With what eyes would they see him, those "living ones" who see only death and the substance of death? When it is no longer opaque, they see nothing. There has to be a minimal connection with the old human organs. Perhaps Mother was going to make that connection, or prepare it. Prepare the eyes of the world. The thousands of eyes of our cells. And only the Mind will be struck down, one day, while our bodies will awaken from a long nightmare. Sometimes we have the feeling that the entire mystery of the future is incredibly simple, of an unthinkable (precisely so) simplicity, and something will take us by surprise. Sometimes we feel that everything is here, really here, and a little click would suffice —we just need to find where. If only one being could see, understand the mechanism. Mother saw everything, and She said everything—it can be read, it is written thousands of times over in her own words, only we do not realize that it is that. There is something that just cannot be grasped by the Mind. There is something to find. We grope along in Mother's discovery. We move through a great Amazon that lacks only a name, not unlike a first man trying for the first time to name his world and its objects and to draw things out of nonexistence by means of the word—he makes them come into being by naming them. Are we going to find the place, find the key that will make us see, the word that brings into being?

And her last words, her very last words in the Playground to the assembled children whom She had so much wanted to become able to see and touch the new world, come back to me now with an inexpressible poignancy: Basically, the vast majority of men are like prisoners with all their doors and windows shut, so they suffocate (which is quite natural), yet they have with them the key that opens the doors and windows, and they don't use it.... They are afraid—afraid of losing themselves. They want to remain what they call "themselves." They love their falsehood and their slavery. Something in them loves it and clings to it. They feel that without their limits, they would no longer exist. That is why the journey is so long and difficult.¹³

This was on November 26, 1958.

And while She was speaking, the tiny tots of the "green group," who were fast asleep on mats on the ground near her chair, began to "see things." Now that they are in their twenties, they could tell what they saw. They saw a strange Mother, taller than She was, with a body that seemed to be made of another substance, a substance that emanated light from within, as it were—a true Mother; for them this was the "true Mother." And they asked, or one of them asked, "Why have you come as we are? Why didn't you come as you really are?" The typical reaction of a child not yet perverted by the Mind; what seemed surprising to her was not that Mother was different, luminous and taller, but that She was not materially like that. "Why didn't you come as you really are?" And Mother quite typically also replied, Had I not come as you are, I would never have been able to be close to you and tell you: "Become what I am. "¹⁴

But of course! The world does not need to be struck down by a miracle, even by the miracle of one glorious body: it needs to find its own miracle. When it finds it, then all miracles will be natural. The mystery of Mother is our own unconsciousness. We must find the key, we must open the door. Then we will all become as She is—or perhaps we are already as She is! Perhaps the real body is already here. A link is missing. There is a veil of something to lift away.... Matter is altogether different, the world is altogether different—we understand nothing of it. There is a veil of death over the world. There are eyes that see death and create death. They will call me mad or schizophrenic or paranoiac—because they are so fatally enamored of their death, they just want things to be "as they are," it is their "law," their "common sense," their "but-I-see-it-I-touch-it"—like monkeys feeling the shadows of trees. We feel the shadow of an unseen world. Our patent facts of today are scientific puerilities of improved apes. Basically, Mother said in a strikingly trenchant way, materialistic thought is the gospel of death.¹⁵

But suppose we were done with gospels once and for all, whether those of death or of eternal paradise? Suppose we start believing in Matter's truth, in the divine possibility of Matter, in the divine life in a true body?

Well, then we must go and seek true Matter, that is all, without any prejudice of death or of life, without any of the prejudices of improved apes, whether scientific, materialistic or spiritualistic. Ingenuously. With eyes open for the unexpected. Because in any event, it is where we least expect it.

And that will be the end of materialism. Because materialism is the Mind dealing with something other than itself. The other world is just... as it is.

That materialism goes with that religion.

The End of Death

On December 9, 1958, exactly eight years to the day after Sri Aurobindo was placed beneath the great flame tree with yellow flowers, Mother was going to be stricken in her body and forced to stop all her outer activities. On December 7, She would play her last game of tennis and make the last of her daily visits to the Playground. She did not need to decide anything or to do anything arbitrarily: the very circumstances made her do what She was supposed to do—somewhat brutally. And that is precisely the characteristic of the new Power at work in the world: it works materially, it creates the circumstances that compel our action. When a "problem" or a difficulty or a hesitation arises, it never gives a mental answer: it gives a physical answer, through facts and circumstances. It is a Power that acts exclusively and overwhelmingly at the level of naked Matter—and brutally, through "striking" examples, if need be. Through the years I have watched with a growing sense of wonder and bewilderment this Power develop in precision. People want to see miracles. One wonders why—the world is swarming with miracles. But one has to look in the right place and in the right way, without preference for the circumstances to go in one direction or another, even without preference for enjoying so-called good health. Then one sees the working of things—in the most microscopic details. One begins to appreciate the formidable total oneness of Matter in which the tiniest circumstance, the least encounter, the slightest shock is as if instigated by the same great wave of Power that triggers an earthquake or a revolution. And sometimes one even catches a glimpse of how a little impact here, if true, can create an immense impact there; how a true little vibration here, in a small cranny of Matter, has its repercussions throughout the whole world of beings and things. The new world is truly new. It is a world that no longer uses the Mind: it is Matter playing with itself, as it were, conscious Matter, true Matter pushing and breaking through all the mental unconsciousness that covers it.

At eighty-one, Mother entered into the yoga of the cells. She entered into the why and how of Death. She was going to try to dissolve the veil, to traverse death without dying and to prepare in the cells of her body the thousands of eyes of our little cells that one day will awaken, perhaps without our knowing why. And everything will be changed.

Death will be dead because we will no longer see it.

Except those who want to.

There will be the mysterious and rapid degeneration of the elements that cannot evolve: those who believe in the truth of death.