Mother or The New Species - II

9: The Forest

Now we enter the forest.

We enter there blindly, without knowing anything, really. Things shoot up on all sides, it is a jungle of experiences. Illuminations, hundreds of illuminations springing up, you think you have understood, grasped the whole thing, the mechanism, and you are whisked off elsewhere, where it seems to be just the opposite; you no longer understand anything, but whether you understand or not, the experience keeps on developing, singularly indifferent to what you might think of it; you come upon mystery after mystery, clear, transparent, obvious... and utterly unthinkable mysteries. They are obvious and incomprehensible at the same time. Yet everything is full of meaning, rife with meaning, in a way, like a tree in the jungle with all its lianas and delirious splendor; but what sort of tree is this? It is without a name. In 1950, when I was in the middle of the virgin forest, the geographically "real" one in South America, how many times did I find myself before the wonder of a gigantic, disheveled tree, collapsing under lianas and the cry of birds, but with no name for it; the birds had no name, and absurdly, even while I was beholding the marvel, those thousand marvels, I felt rather deprived of something: I was unable to name the tree, to name the birds; there were thousands of things, plants, creatures without names, rivers without names, swamps without names, in an unbelievable sumptuous delirium. So I invented names for the rivers and birds, in order to tame the wonder, to bring it a little under control. It was absurd and childish. The marvel was perfectly there without all my names, but it was as though it did not fully exist, was not totally mine. In the midst of her experiences, which kept growing and growing, Mother, too, was as in a state of knowing without knowing. One day, facing one of those nameless facts, She said to me: The day I know... it will probably be done. Because it will come like a massive fact: it will be LIKE THAT. And only much later will the understanding say, "Ah! So that's what it is!" First it comes, afterwards we know it.¹

Thousands of times it was to be "like that," and Mother never knew.

Mother never knew.

It seems unbelievable, but it is so.

She went through the forest from one end to the other without ever knowing what it was, where it led to, or even its purpose; She never had a single name, or a single explanation—or thousands of explanations, each thing was its own explanation. It kept growing, straight up, like a tree, and that was all. And there were thousands of trees. There was nothing to do but to go through it all, and the very fact of going through it made up a whole world... a nameless world. A jungle of experiences that did not seem to relate to one another, any more than the "balata tree" by the "Marie-Louise" river was related to the "iron-heart tree"—yet at the end, it made a world. One did not emerge anywhere, one was in it everywhere. But unexpectedly, the forest would open up onto a savanna of emerald palms, and then there was the sea. You could not see it, some hundreds of yards or perhaps miles away, behind this endless swamp of slender trunks where the "insects" and the "birds" were chirping—but you heard and smelled the sea. It was like one end of that world's outline—but which end? There is no "end." When we know it, it will be done. But it is already done! It has been done automatically by Mother's passage through it, only we do not know this is that, there is no name—no map. She traced the entire course without a map—but of course! You do not go into the unknown with the map of the unknown. It becomes known because you walk through it. Once we have charted the map—if only we succeed in charting it—they will say: Why, that's it! It will become "clear," as they say: the trees will be listed in the dictionary and the rivers will be colored in pink in the atlas, with dotted lines and contours. But meanwhile, it is not yet "done"... at least not for us. To sum up, we are going into a not-yet-done world that is all done!

Mother never knew what She was doing: She simply kept going on. More and more, she told me, the life allotted to this body is to do things without knowing it, to change the world without seeing it, and to... to ignore all that, to be absolutely unconcerned with the results.² The "result" is the map. And sometimes we wonder if charting the map will not make the new world emerge. A kind of magic. If only one being could manage to open his eyes, see the outline, connect the lines and put the coordinates on the contour lines and join the streams to the river and this river to that mountain... will it not suddenly bring to life that nameless mass that looks simply like a green wall before us?

Which is tomorrow's world.

I have followed Mother's journey step by step without understanding anything, or rather, with thousands of successive understandings, and I am scarcely better off today, on page 164, than eighteen years ago when Mother first began with me. So let there be no mistake: I am not skillfully leading the reader in a direction that I know in advance and am carefully saving for the end. I do not know what the direction is! I am leading the reader "nowhere"!—but perhaps just going there will make it "somewhere." That is all. I am going blindly into that, clinging to Mother's hand on the other side of the veil and praying that She guides me in the right direction—I do not know the direction. It is an adventure into the unknown. I am writing each line without knowing the next one. No one can possibly imagine what that means.

The story began one day in 1957, when I had already been in the Ashram for three years, fighting with myself every day not to run away. I wanted to go back to the virgin forest, the only place in the world where I seemed to be able to breathe, with the macaws, the tapirs and the red howlers, and snakes, a lot of snakes, but you get quite used to them; after some time, you feel them without even seeing them and everything moves in the same rhythm, you step over them or to the side, you feel everywhere and are in tune with everything, all things flow through your body, life streams in your veins, the trees speak to you, your legs run all by themselves as if they knew where to go—I lost my compass many times in the jungle, and each time my legs knew better than the compass the infallible direction in that green tangle where everywhere was the direction. So I very much wanted to return to the forest, supposedly to look for gold, but the iguanas were worth their weight in gold, and the gold was mostly in the searching. But I was very obstinate, I had seen Sri Aurobindo in 1946 or '47 and that had opened up a kind of hole in me, a sort of inexplicable clearing in my forest of negation of the world, and Sri Aurobindo was following me step by step, smiling (He always seemed to be smiling, his left eye especially), while I ran through the woods and leaped about like a young anthropoid from an age before men. I was vaguely drawn back to India, "just like that." All right, I said, let's go and try it for two years, "just to see," in the event it might really be a world unlike the others, and most of all unlike the one that had civilized me.

The first evening I arrived in Pondicherry, I wanted to run away immediately, to catch the first train out. But I am stubborn, it is my weakness: I had said "two years".... I spent more than ten years trying not to go back to my forest. Mother had another one in store for me.

And I could not make out anything, I was seduced in spite of myself and very angry at myself for that seduction. Mother laughed a lot—not me. She put up with everything from me, I held my own for ten years. For such was the mystery of the human samples around her, I was one of those samples. involuntarily—and if I mention the kind of sample I was, it is merely to give some idea of the collection of negations that surrounded Mother. Each one was a particular negation. A particular form of death, actually. Somehow, I had found an excellent "trick" to escape, since I could not extricate myself physically from the place: the trick of "liberation." I had discovered a certain way of drilling a hole in the shell from above, a tiny little skylight and off you slip into an expanse... oh, so vast and clear and rhythmical, almost musical, without any movements, problems or questions: it is, it marvelously is. You bathe there as if in eternity.... Until the day I said to Mother: "Well, one could really remain there for an eternity ..."—Not for an eternity—for Eternity,³ She cut me short, "... without anything changing." In other words, I was trapped. No one could ever extricate me from there, not even Mother, not even "God": it was impregnable with light and beauty. Perhaps it was even God, who knows! But all of a sudden, I was in my eternity as in a jar of honey, stuck—I did not want to be stuck, even in eternity. That was the beginning of my downfall.... Mother was waiting for me at the bottom.

But the day I understood, then I understood totally, and I loved Mother totally. And I began to enter the new world. And up to Mother's last day I lived in a total faith that was totally obvious, and I threw all my negation of the world into a negation of death. Because it was not really the world I was rejecting, I can see now, it was the smell of death in the world, it was the world of death. I am perhaps the only one or one of the only two people who have never believed in Mother's physical death. And I still do not. Because I have seen, touched, felt—only I do not know how to tell what I have seen. The map is not charted yet. We are going to chart it together. Perhaps we shall see Mother at the end of it. We do not believe in death; death is the falsehood of the world.

We are going to shatter the myth of death.

We are going to make what is true visible.

For those who want it.

The Birth of the "Agenda"

I wanted to see, it was my foremost aspiration when I arrived at the Ashram: for me, the yoga was first of all a kind of education of sight which one did with one's eyes closed in long meditations. I was convinced there was something to see. What? I really did not know. In fact, I knew nothing at all, I was a "complete" Westerner in revolt, and any way to change the world seemed a priori excellent to me: Europe was simply suffocating. But I meant to change this world materially. The Spirit was of interest to me at the level of my two feet. And there I was, receiving my first and rather shattering reverse from Mother's hands: in fact I remained shaken by it for years. She had me called twice a week on some pretext of work, and She talked to me. This was in 1957. I accepted the work as part of life's "duties," but I had not at all sought or even desired the privilege of meeting Mother personally. For me, yoga was to be done in one's room, when all alone, and also in walking down the streets with a certain kind of thirst. Mother laughed up her sleeve, took me very seriously, and casually recounted a thousand and one happenings of her life, of Tlemcen, of her experiences... which demolished bit by bit, almost unnoticeably, my whole way of seeing the world. These were her experiences, there was nothing to say, it was not theory—with Mother there was never any theory. And when She spoke... oh, that wonderful mixture of thunder and sweetness and laughter, always this laughter, this barely veiled teasing, and then those sudden bursts of light that opened up an immense vista in front of you: you remained suspended there and began to see things with her. You saw as She spoke, as if the power of truth were made palpable, as if the word came alive, a vibration that made you see; and always at the most unexpected moments, when She had just been laughing or speaking of some "trifle," suddenly her immense diamond eyes would open up and you entered into something else, it was there. It was beyond discussion: you do not contradict a cataract. I would come out of it shaking my head: oh, that Mother!... I was enormously afraid of being caught, I did not want to be caught, by anything—except by myself, of course. One is one's own best laid trap. And I did not understand very well why She was telling me all that—so many lost treasures, never noted down, I did not have the least idea that it was the beginning of the story of the new world. ²⁰⁰ In any case, it was very "interesting"! And so I went there week after week, without quite realizing to what extent She was uprooting me with her thousand stories that seemed like nothing: it was as though She were slowly forming me to walk the earth in another way. It has taken me all these years to understand how stubbornly, fiercely, unrelentingly we humans are shut up in the prison of a certain atavism. It is a prison of glass, but it is harder than concrete and allows in only one type of ray—and we believe we possess the whole spectrum of the world! We see everything through a little colored ray or, if we prefer, a discolored one. She was breaking down my walls... gently, because She was fond of me (Why, I did not know, either). She could break everything down, except my little infinity there up above; that was untouchable, it was my great hiding place. She broke that down too, after ten years of precaution. Then, I was so utterly flabbergasted that it was like being born to the world for the third time—a world that was no longer the atavistic falsehood of material birth, nor the semi-falsehood of the spiritual birth up above... it was like a rebirth in Matter, but a strange kind of matter, which has not ceased to amaze me.

But my first astonishment, or my first tumble, came earlier, during the first years, when She spoke to me in Pavitra's office, seated in her big carved straight-backed chair, which always reminded me of the throne of the Queen of England. This Mother, She had the air of a queen, and something more. One felt infinitely close, and exceeded on every side; She was there with me, and She was inscrutably thousands of light-years away as if there were a Mother behind a Mother behind a Mother; and sometimes a veil fell away, then another, and there were other depths of Mother, other, radically different faces, yet somehow with the same kind of smile, and eyes that became jet-black, or golden, or ultramarine, or azure blue... and something else again when there were no longer any eyes but a sort of infinity moving upon an immensity. And you entered a new dimension each time: you no longer saw Mother from the outside, as a spectator: you entered into her. With Mother, there was never any theory or even images: She made you become what She was or what She was seeing at the moment. Each time I returned from seeing Mother, it was like coming back from a new journey. I have traveled through all ages, I have traveled through many spaces. But I was terribly materialistic, just the same, and yet a peculiar kind of materialist because I never doubted that there were other ways of seeing than that of the scientists, but I was certain also that that other way of seeing had to be another material way of seeing things. In short, I was a materialist of the Spirit, without knowing it. For instance, I was convinced that the "visions" one had were a kind of material precipitation or condensation or unveiling: the god, or whatever it is, actually comes into the room. He may come through the wall, but he is physically there. Well, not so! The day Mother said to the type of Western savage that I was, Not at all, mon petit! It is not physical. You enter into another plane of consciousness and you see with the eyes of that other plane, everything collapsed. If it's not physical, it's a hoax. A superior hoax, perhaps, but it is unreal, a kind of dream on two feet. I never forgave that particular dream. All the spiritualists will laugh at my childishness—and truly, it is very childish.

But I was right.

I wanted it to be material.

I wanted it to be another way of Matter.

Without knowing it, I was seeking the supramental world.

And She was slowly polishing me, without my noticing anything, except that this Mother seemed so lovable, but I was terribly guarded with that love. She had to become totally helpless, crushed with weakness and pain by the pain of the world, for me one day to understand who Mother was. And it was not She who made me realize, who forced me to realize: it was my body that realized, it was my flesh that realized, it was my human pain that realized, touched, felt and loved. And wept also.

Weeks and months went by, three years went by interspersed with attempts to flee but always returning, as if I could not possibly deny or disown what I had seen with Mother, as if my virgin forest over there were a flight away from myself, a return to the earth's past and not a leap into the future; until the day when Mother said to me, "out of the blue," in the middle of the conversation, with that deceptive little air (but it gave me a strange, incomprehensible little shock): We have something to do together.

That "something to do together" grew surreptitiously: it was the hundreds and thousands of experiences that Mother was to call her Agenda—more than 6,000 pages, 13 volumes: the chronicle of the future—the great Forest both She and I had entered without even quite knowing that it was the Forest of the future. One does not know it is a forest, one does not know it is the future, but suddenly one finds oneself before a tree, then another tree, then another one... hundreds and thousands of trees growing one after the other. And all of a sudden, one realizes: but it's a forest. It is a forest!

We are going to walk together in the forest.

The great forest of Mother.

The forest of the next world.

And this "something to do together" continues behind the veil, as if She were holding my hand... as if She wanted me to reach the point where the veil will disappear.

Then we shall see.

We shall see materially.