Mother's Chronicles (Book 1)

8

It's My Habit

"This nasty habit of wanting rules ..." said Mother one day. "It means building yourself an iron cage and getting in it."

Mirra was not one to be kept in a cage, let alone get in one, be it of iron or of gold, she who had come to break all

Square du Roule or Boulevard Haussmann, what difference did it make? The curtains might be different, the walls might be different. But life? The Big Turk had his canaries and Mathilde had her theorems.

A great deal took place which had little to do with theorems and defied the laws of Newton.

She was reproached more than once for her disregard of rules, moral or Newtonian. "But naturally, it's against the rules! Everything I do is against the

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rules, it's my habit! Otherwise, it wouldn't be worth my being here, the rules might as well continue."

We can well believe what she confided in us one day: "Had I been born in India, I think I would have broken everything!" Yes, break the tentacles of the past to shape anew the present. Yes, like Mathilde with the Khedive, like Mira Ismalun with the customs of a feudalistic Egypt. The same seed.

Let us come back to Newtonian laws, or rather, let us see how Mirra broke these laws.

One day, in the grand salon of Square du Roule, all the little friends were gathered. A grand salon, therefore ornamental and awe-inspiring. But nothing awed little Mirra. "I'll show you something: how one should dance." The little friends cleared the space, the Louis xv (or xviii, whichever) pedestal tables were shoved out of the way, and "I went to a corner of the room to get the longest distance from one corner to the other. I told them, 'One single step to the middle' [the salon was about 12 metres long and 4 metres wide]. And I did it!" Mother laughed joyously. "I sprang (I hadn't even the impression of

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jumping: like I was dancing, you know, just as one dances on points), landed on my toes, rebounded and reached the other corner. One can't do that by oneself, not even champions —to take off they run, then jump. But I didn't run. I was standing in the corner, and hop! up I went (I said 'hop' to myself, soundlessly), and frrt! I came down on the tips of my toes, rebounded and reached the other corner. Quite evidently I was carried."

Who carried her?

Mother went on, "I remember also, once. . . . There were hoops [low and thin arched fencing] bordering the lawns in the Bois de Boulogne — I don't know whether they still exist — I used to walk on them! I was challenging my brother (sixteen months separated us; he was older —and much more sensible!), I would dare him to it: 'Can you walk on these?' He told me, 'Let me alone, it's not interesting.' I said to him, 'Just watch!!' And I began walking on them, with such ease! As though I had done it all my life."

Mother concluded, "It was the same phenomenon: I didn't feel any weight. Always a feeling of being

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carried. Something that supported me, something that carried."

With her disarming can dour, she said one day, "I didn't know the rules, so I didn't even have to fight them!" Mirra saw things very simply, without any rules cluttering her brain, so she did things very simply without a cluttered head, and naturally everything worked very simply too, without a hitch.

"You know the flint stones in France?" Mother queried. "I was nine or ten years old, and I was running with my friends in the Fontainebleau forest. The forest is sufficiently dense, so one can't see much ahead. We were running, and in the rapidity of my sprint I didn't see that I was nearing the edge of the road. The place where we were jutted out over the road by about 3 metres (a drop of over one storey), and the road was paved with stones — freshly paved. And we were running. I was racing ahead, the others were behind. Well, so great was my momentum that I was unable to stop. Whish! I sailed through the air. Mind you," Mother said to Satprem, "I was ten, at the very most eleven, with no notion of the miraculous

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or marvellous, nothing, nothing —simply I was flung into the air. And I felt something upbearing me. Something up bore me and I was literally SET DOWN on the ground, upon the stones. I got up (it seemed perfectly natural to me, you understand!); not a scratch, not a speck of dust, nothing —absolutely intact. I fell very, very slowly. Everybody rushed up to see. I said, 'Oh, it's nothing! I am all right.' "

Mother continued, "And I left it at that. But that impression lingered, of something carrying me. I fell this slow [Mother shows a leaf falling by stages, with slight pauses]. And the material proof was there, it wasn't an illusion, since I was intact. The road was paved with stones —you know the flint of France? Not a scratch, nothing. Not a speck of dust."

Mother added, "A lot of things like this happened, which seemed absolutely natural to me. I never had any impression of doing something miraculous. It all was quite natural."

Mother explained, "The soul was very alive at that time. It resisted with all its strength the intrusion of the material logic of the world. Things seemed

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perfectly natural to me. I simply told myself, 'No. No accident can happen to me.'

But from the age of thirteen or fourteen it became more difficult. Before that everything was 'natural' to Mirra.

"But flung like that!" Mother mused awhile, then resumed. "Later on, when I was working with Theon, I saw it was an entity, what the Europeans call angels . . . 'Guardian Angels,' that's right. They have wings by free choice, because they find them pretty! Well, Mme. Theon saw two of these beings always near me. Yet, she knew me after more than ten years. It appears they were always with me. So I looked, and sure enough I saw them."

Years later, indeed it was seventy-five years later, when Mother was narrating these episodes to Satprem, recalling all those dancing, air-borne memories, she suddenly noticed a strange link connecting that impertinent non-gravitation to a certain inner centre which as a child she already felt very clearly near the heart and which was "like great beatific wings, vast as the world, beating slowly. . . ."

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The same centre to which she drew down the 'Great Force' when she wanted to shake off the tirades of Matteo or the rebukes of Mathilde, "the same vibration."

There is perhaps another way of vibrating that escapes Newton and his apple with its tiresome habit of falling?

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