Mother or The Divine Materialism - I

Introduction

Mother and I are one but in two bodies.¹

—Sri Aurobindo

November 17, 1973, 7:25 p.m. She left.

The doctors declared her dead—there were three of them.

No mistake.

She left.

And yet...

Her face was so thin, so white—oh, not beatific, not the “peace of the dead": a fierce concentration on that face—She who had all the beatitudes, all the liberations of the soul—an overwhelming concentration, as if She were star­ing at ... what? The Enigma—inexorably, unwaveringly, without a quiver, straight as a sword to pierce the heart of Falsehood, Death is a Falsehood, She used to say; We have put it into our head and our will to conquer this accident.²

What happened? Or what perhaps is happening?

What was She looking at with her two eyes closed, She who said, I can see more clearly with my eyes closed than with my eyes open?³

They will think I am dead because I can no longer move

and no longer speak. But you who know ,.. you will tell them.

You will tell them ...

The oldest mystery since the beginnings of man, the most powerful secret ever since ancient Egypt and before, in the mists of time, ever since man has been dying. After all, as long as there is death, She said simply, things will always end badly.⁴ Always end badly—we may sing, paint, poeticize, create religions (in fact, this is why we create religions) and philosophize (this is also why we create philosophies), but it will always end up with this radical calling into question, which renders all our endeavors and our most beautiful songs futile. For the last few million years we have entrusted future races with the care and the hope of reaping those laurels—ah, later!—and we go on and on with the vain song, while awaiting our turn to open our two eyes upon the Enigma. Remove this accident and everything changes: religions, philosophies, songs, life. It is the one and only radical event in the world. It is what changes everything and determines everything. It is as if it were THE question given me to resolve,⁵ She said.

You will tell them ...

The most extraordinary secret, whose many threads we scarcely know how to unravel properly—and yet, all the threads are there; everything is there in this formidable epic, Mothers secret Agenda, in which the experiences of a new terrestrial transition are laid out step by step. But it is not enough to tell the secrets, any more than it is to utter tantric mantras; we have to drive them into our substance; there has to be the little trigger that makes them living and powerful and dynamic—we must enter Mother's experi­ence. We must approach Her as if in search of that which revolutionizes life. Until we undertake the revolution of death, we will not revolutionize a thing in the world, even if we gathered all our bombs and miles of libraries and equa­tions. We can blow up the planet and nothing, absolutely nothing, will be changed—we will go on dividing and sub­tracting somewhere else, on other earths, and begin all over again, from molecules to amino acids to some new Nobel Prize of no Peace at all. For nothing changes so long as that is not changed. We want to effect THAT change, She said.

And She left.

Or did She? What is the mystery of Mother's "death”?

Sri Aurobindo left without revealing his secret,⁶ Mother said to me one day. But perhaps She has left us her secret, which will enable us to find Sri Aurobindo’s secret—because it is the same one. When we know what She was doing, we shall know what He was doing—which had nothing to do with philosophy, despite the thirty-four volumes He left us, but living evolution, or, rather, a living revolution, A revo­lution which is still under way. Both of them came to wage that revolution, to open that new evolutionary stage or that new state, a deathless state—which is something other than physical immortality, however, because our immortal­ity is simply the reverse of our mortality, or rather its glorified continuation minus the tomb—such a total revo­lution of life that the very roots of death can no longer grow there, and that both life and death are transformed into ... something else.

Let us take stock.

Can we hope that it will be possible for this body, which is at present our means of terrestrial manifestation, to trans­form itself progressively into something capable of expressing a higher life, or will we have to abandon this form altogether and enter another that does not yet exist on earth? Will there be continuity or the sudden appearance of something new? Will there be a progressive transition between what we are now and what our inner spirit aspires to become, or will there be a break, which means being obliged to discard this present human form and waiting for the appearance of a new form—an appearance whose process we do not foresee and which will have nothing in common with what we are now?⁷

This was at the end of 1957, just one year before She withdrew into the great experience—into the dangerous unknown, as She called it—fifteen years before that fateful November 17, 1973. What happened during those fifteen years? Did She find "the process”?

And this further question: Will the human species be like certain other species that have disappeared from the earth?⁸

They carried her down from her room. They laid her on a chaise longue draped with white satin. Swarms of people filed past in front of her under the droning fans, beneath a burning hot zinc ceiling ablaze with gold—enough to decompose a body at top speed. Everything was meticu­lously arranged so that Death could do its work as fast as possible. Yet She had said: This body must be left in peace .,. it should not be rushed into a hole ... because, even long after the doctors have declared it to be “dead, " it will be conscious —its cells are conscious—and it will be aware of it, it will feel it, and that will mean adding one more misery to all those it has had.⁹ Then She corrected herself: It seems silly to make a fuss; better say nothing.

She was put into the hole, in a rosewood coffin, near Sri Aurobindo. She was half sitting up in her coffin because her back was so bent—from too much suffering, perhaps. I was all the pain of the world ... felt together.¹⁰ Slowly the lid was lowered over her head. There was still a ray of light on her neck. She was gazing all alone, her face bent over her chest. Gazing at what?

Then the lid was shut on her head—night. Night, or what? They drove twenty-five screws into her coffin.

She was ninety-five. She fought like a lion to the very end. But where is the end?

Outside, it was the second war in Israel. November 1973. The petroleum tap had just been turned off for the first time—a tiny little tap. Palestinian commandoes carried out their machine gun attacks in Khartoum, Athens, Fiumi- cino. There was a coup d'etat in Afghanistan, a coup d'etat in Chile, terrorism in Ireland. Students were demonstrat­ing in Barcelona, in Bangkok, in Greece. There was the Cultural Revolution in Libya, the Cultural Revolution in China. There were droughts in the Sahel, the devaluation of the dollar, Watergate. It was the fifteenth Chinese nuclear explosion, the fifth French explosion. It was the last quarter of the 20th century-—the death of Picasso as well. The death of a world perhaps. Or the beginning of something else.

Even those around Her were beginning to grumble. She was so alone.

It was twenty-three years after Sri Aurobindo’s departure.

And we still hear his prophetic words:

A day may come when she must stand unhelped On a dangerous brink of the world's doom and hers Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast, Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.

Alone with death and close to extinction's edge, Her single greatness in that last dire scene, She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time And reach an apex of world-destiny

Where all is won or all is lost for man.¹¹

They grumbled. But it is the whole world that grumbles, as if something has been thrown into it which caused a seething furor everywhere.¹² Let there be no mistake—it is not a question of a human revolt to have a better life, to feel better—even that better is worth nothing! She said. It is not a question of putting a little more socialism here, democracy there, or justice or fraternity—even that fra­ternity is a fraternity of death. Nor of replastering the system or repairing an oil tap—tomorrow the tap will leak somewhere else, it is the great leak everywhere. It is the red evening of the West,¹³ the one Sri Aurobindo already saw fifty-three years earlier, when we were glorying in all our sciences and discoveries. There is nothing to discover except ourselves! There is no superpower except in ourselves, no other source of new energy than in ourselves! This is what is being hammered into the head of the earth, this something that has been “thrown into it," this “Supra- mental Force," which is pushing and pushing us to find the real secret of Matter, the real power, true life without death, true fraternity without gunfire, justice without a guillotine, and men masters of their destiny—or other men. There are immense periods during which things are prepared—the past wears out and the future is prepared—and those are immense periods, neutral, drab, during which things keep preparing themselves over and over and look as if they will always remain that way. Then, all of a sudden, between two such periods, the change takes place. Like the moment when man appeared on earth. Now it’s something else, another being.¹⁴

Did She fail? Did She find "the process,” the transition to the other being?

There are more secrets to this “death" than one might think. There is the secret of the future.

A difficult secret, which we approach with a prayer on our lips and a quivering in our heart. Perhaps this is how the first man in his clearing approached a first awesome thought. But the secret of the next world lies not in a thought. It is supra-mental; it takes place within the depths of the body, at that knot between life and death where, for the first time, something has begun to stir in Matter—in a body’s cells, on the frontier of biology and prayer. It is not a secret to "understand"; it is an ordeal by fire, because, to "understand,” for Matter, is to have the power—a power which is found only at that narrow junction where life and death embrace, where the cells escape the old genetic code to enter the law of the next kingdom. It is a new transmu­tation, more arduous than that of the caterpillar. The transmutation to the next age. To find the secret is to have the power. To stand upright before death, upright before life, at the point where this death dies out and where this life dies out—or else is rekindled to another PHYSICAL life, which is no longer life or death, but something else. Perhaps the life divine. Another clearing. A formidable transition.

You will tell them.

This is the transition we are going to try to work out together, groping through Mother's great virgin forest. And perhaps at the end, in the clearing of the next world, with the eyes of the next being, we will find what She was seek­ing, She who said, I am on the way to discovering the illusion that must be destroyed so that physical life can be uninterrupted,¹⁵

And let there be no mistake: the discovery is not yet there—it has to be made.

Maybe even many will have to make this discovery for it to be truly done.

Then, perhaps, we will meet Mother again as if She had never died.

And Death's deep falsity¹⁶ will disappear.

Deer House
Nandanam
January 6, 1975

1: Roots

This great virgin forest of Mother took root very early. It is full of unexpected turnings and cascades and deep thickets. One does not quite know whether to go right or left, and one maybe has to go everywhere, in all direc­tions—perhaps there is no path in Mother's great forest, or everything is the path. It begins everywhere; it ends every­where, for each blade of grass perhaps contains everything. One just walks; it is very amusing, She used to say.

I was wandering through all the human constructions, She told me just after a vision She had had—because She saw so many things, this Mother, everywhere, in everything. To be with Her was to see the world through unexpected eyes, as if we had never seen it before, and as no Picasso or super-Picasso could have ever imagined it—who, by the way, was three years her junior. I was wandering through all the human constructions, but not the ordinary construc­tions: the philosophical, religious, spiritual constructions... And they were symbolized by huge buildings—huge—that were so high ...as if men were as tall as the edge of this stool, quite tiny, in comparison with those huge things. I was going about, and each person came saying, “Mine is the true path. ” So I would go with him to an open door through which an immense landscape could be seen, and just when we came to the door, it would close!... I was quite amused, I said to myself, “It's quite amusing!” You know, when they spoke you could see, through a door, vast expanses before you, in full light, it was superb; then I would go with that person towards the door and... the door was closed. It was really interesting.

There was no end to them.... And there were people, always new people: now men, now women, now young people, now old people, and from every possible country. It lasted a very long time.

*I remember that I said to one of them, “Yes, all this is very fine, but it isn't true food, it leaves you famished.” Then there was one who was ...I don’t know which country he was from: he wore a dark robe, he had black hair, a somewhat round face (he may have been Chinese, I can’t say, I don't remember). He said to me, “Oh, not with me! Taste this and see.” And he gave me something to eat—it was absolutely first-rate, oh, it was excellent! So I looked at him, and I said, “Oh, you are clever... show me, show me your path. " He told me, “I have no path.”¹

So we are going to try to be as wise as this Chinaman and refrain from boxing Mother in cubbyholes: We always feel the need to put one box inside another, one box inside another!² And She laughed, because She always laughed— except, perhaps during those last years, and even then who knows—and She would always find me dreadfully serious. From a very young age, something in me has always laughed. It sees all the catastrophes, sees all the suffering—sees it all and can't help laughing, the way one laughs at something that pretends to be but isn’t.³ Yes, already, She was hunting down a certain illusion that must be destroyed so we may live a true life—and perhaps the most tenacious and cherished of all illusions is our love of suffering and drama. We may protest, but it is true all the same.

So we will step into Mother’s great forest "at random,” without neglecting any direction or turn, for the direction may be everywhere, and we are not so sure what is part of or not part of the pathless path, nor if the end is not at the beginning, as in a children's tale.

Once we have wandered through the great forest, then perhaps we will see lakes and mountains and contours take shape, although, truly speaking, what is interesting is simply to walk.

An Amazing Grandmother

But, for the time being, that little Parisian who was to live forty years of her life in Paris (thirty-eight, to be exact), is not yet called "Mother." She is simply called Mirra (with two r's) and is surrounded by a strange and cosmopolitan tribe.

We might as well start with the grandmother, for there is something sparkling there, very impish, and indeed reminiscent of a certain aspect of Mother. She was called Mira (with one r) Ismalun and was born in Cairo in 1830. It may not be mere chance that Mother had her roots in this ancient land of Egypt—but Mother has many roots, very old roots, perhaps everywhere. I am millions of years old and I am waiting,⁴ She said during those last years with a gaze that seemed to carry the world and with it all the resistance of her terrestrial children. And we recall those moving words of Walter Pater on Mona Lisa, with whom Mother shared strange affinities and a certain smile: "She is older than the rocks among which she sits ... she has been dead many times and learned the secret of the grave"¹⁰⁰. But the Ismaluns also came from the old Ural-Altaic region of Hungary, and Mira Ismaluns father, Said Pinto, while Egyptian, had his roots far back in Spain. Shifting winds blew over that cradle, those of the Urals mingling with the mysteries of the Valley of the Kings and an Iberian fire. In fact, it was not really men who watched over Mother's cradle, but women—a line of strong women.

So we are in the time of Mehemet Ali. The Suez Canal has not yet been dug. The armies of the Pasha are rebelling against the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. Feudalistic Egypt confronts the modem world while still remembering Bona­parte. But Bonaparte's tempestuous wind had possibly left something in the air, for Mira Ismalun, too, lost no time in throwing off the yoke. In well-bred fashion, she married a banker at the age of thirteen, as was customary in those days, after having met her fiance on a Nile River cruise. “He offered me a diadem of great value and a little basket of strawberries,” she recounts in her Memoirs. For she left an autobiography—as charming and funny as it is brief— dictated in French to her grandson, Governor Alfassa, when she was seventy-six. At the age of twenty, she embarked for Italy—quite a daring act if we recall the abject condition of women in the Middle East more than a century ago. “I spoke only Arabic. I wore an Egyptian dress and traveled alone with my two children and a governess, while my husband remained in Egypt (her husband was always par­enthetical). I was the first Egyptian woman to venture out­side of Egypt in this way.” All the same, she remarks: “I was considered positively ravishing in my sky-blue Egyptian dress embroidered with gold and natural pearls." She also sported a "small tarbush worn very low, with a large gold tassel ... but I did not know the language, so I vowed to learn it quickly"—which she did, as well as French, for Mira Ismalun was decidedly an uncommon character. Then she met the Grand Duke, "who sent me flowers every day, as did Rossini, the composer." And, with a blend of coquetry and wit, she adds candidly, "although well-behaved and even stern, I was not insensitive to all those attentions."

This was around 1850.

We do not know if she was really stern, but she under­stood life well, frankly loved it, and was already gifted with a very universal spirit for which little patriotic borders seemed but vain and cumbersome contrivances. Commut­ing between Cairo and Europe, she left her eldest son off in a boarding school in Vienna and dropped off a second, then a third son at the College Chaptai in Paris. "I was crazy about Paris and, being of unconventional temperament and character, it seemed to me quite permissible to go about everywhere with Elvire (her eldest daughter, who had a good Egyptian name, as we can see), but, since my attire was quite elegant and rather conspicuous, I attracted a great deal of attention wherever I went.” Yet, for all that, Mira Ismalun was no featherbrain. She read Renan, Taine, Nietzsche, Darwin, and, like Mother, was endowed with a remarkable poise and knew how to reconcile opposites. "One of my most invariable policies has been to maintain the head and the heart in a constant state of balance, thus avoiding being led into the excesses of either ... As for my finances, I have always taken great care to balance my income with my expenditures.” Thus, she brilliantly combined usefulness with pleasure and when she realized that the poor Egyptian princesses in their harems were dying to know of Parisian life, she brought them the latest creations from Worth, jewelry from rue de la Paix, perfumes and magazines, all of which defrayed the expenses of her own extravagances. “Everywhere I went I was received and catered to like a queen. My dignified air, my strict behavior, my stunning wardrobe and my lavish expenditures placed me on a veritable pedestal." She also brought back paintings to the little princesses, who were very anxious to have faithful oil reproductions of themselves in their finest jew­elry, taken from photographs by the finest Parisian artists. It was how Mira Ismalun came to know the Tout-Paris of artists and the atelier of Vienot and Edouard Morisset, who was to be the father of young Mirra’s future husband.

Mira Ismalun's broad-mindedness did not stop at bor­ders. She did not let herself get bogged down by religions either, which she probably found as confining as countries, but she left everyone free to do as they pleased. Having come to know that her eldest daughter, Elvire, had been converted to Catholicism by a very devout chambermaid, not only did she not reproach her, but she immediately set about to find her a husband with similar beliefs, as this would make her happy. “I was the first person in Egypt,” she notes, “to allow her daughter to marry a Catholic (and an Italian at that, we might add). This was very much frowned upon in our circle and I was criticized; certain members of the family even resented me for a while.” And, as the convivial side was never absent in her, she adds, "It was a civil marriage conducted at the Italian Consulate; the ceremony was quite lovely and intimate, and I wore a mag­nificent pearl-gray gown of faille. After the ceremony, Elvire, her husband and their witnesses went to the church and I pretended not to notice anything. Very liberal in my ideas, I have always felt the better for it."

She stayed long enough in Egypt, however, to attend the inauguration of the Suez Canal. “Mr, Lesseps came to fetch me with a cavalry escort" (we can only wonder whom she did not know, this amazing grandmother). Then she let her second daughter, Mathilde, who would become Mother’s mother, get married in Alexandria according to her taste. This was in 1874. “The marriage was celebrated in grand style in the government palace; the Viceroy and the Ministers were present. I wore a superb dress and they found me more beautiful than my daughter." Finally, this little Arabian who took Paris by storm with her sky-blue pourpoint and her tarbush tipped low, who read The Origin of Species and created havoc in the Grand Hotel, retired to Nice and spent the last years of her life commuting between the Mediterranean and the “calm shores of Lake Geneva.” "After having frequented galas and theaters, run about great capitals and spas, lived on familiar terms with celeb­rities .., after having lived this grand existence in which I had no other worry than to look after my affairs and to satisfy, if not my caprices, at least the legitimate desires of an easy life, I had the wisdom to resign myself to a more modest and tranquil existence." Her husband "generally” accompanied her, she notes laconically. “He worshipped me"—which does not surprise us.

But what is most unexpected in this impetuous and irre­sistible existence, so impatient with all frontiers, though rooted in the Valley of the Nile, is that a sudden cry escaped her at the end of this eventful journey, as if all limits seemed unacceptable to her, including those of death: "Truly speaking, at seventy-six, I scarcely like old age; I still find life beautiful... and, with Goethe, I exclaim, 'Beyond the tombs, forward!’”

There was a seed there.

Mirra among the Materialists

With Mother, it is another rhythm, profound, vast, silent —but intrepid. For intrepidity was required to venture where She went:

A statue of passion and indomitable force

An absolutism of sweet imperious will

A tranquility and a violence of the gods

Indomitable and immutable.⁵

She was born in Paris on February 21, 1878. It was the time of the exploding light of the Impressionists. Monet, Degas, Renoir—She would come to know them all: I was the youngest. Cesar Franck was composing The Beatitudes; Rodin had just finished The Bronze Age. She would also come to know Anatole France—he of gentle irony. Jules Verne had already completed his Around the World in Eighty Days. Over there, six thousand miles away, Sri Aurobindo was six. A year later, in 1879, He would disembark in England, where he would spend the next fourteen years.

She lived at 62 boulevard Haussmann, in a building that has since disappeared, next to the former Le Printemps department store. She would live there until the age of eight. This was hardly Mother’s type of decor, and in fact it would be quite a while before She found her decor, if She ever had one. Mathilde, her mother, was born in Alexandria, where four years earlier, at seventeen, she had married in grand style (as we have seen) a young and not- so-wealthy Turkish banker, Maurice Alfassa, who was born in Adrianople in 1843. Although of a style distinctly different from the savory grandmother, it was Mathilde who was the strong person in the family: an iron bar, Mother said simply.

Appearances are misleading. We could imagine one as tumultuous and the other as rigid and authoritarian, like two opposite poles, but it is the same current that passes through both, expending itself in various colorations—what counts is that the current flows. And flow it did! This is what is called Shakti, or creative force, in India. Mathilde, like Mira Ismalun, was a first-rate shakti, although every­thing in her was concentrated on human progress and a will for perfection. "My children will be the best in the world." It wasn’t an ambition; I don’t know what it was, Mother relates. And what a will she had! My mother had a formidable will, like an iron bar! Once she had made up her mind, it was made up; even if someone were dying before her eyes, she would not have budged. And she decided, "My chil­dren will be the best in the world..." And that was enough.⁶ In the kind of half-light in which human beings usually move, that will for perfection was like a brilliant little diamond spark, which was enough to attract Mother’s presence—for beings move in accordance with other laws than it appears, and while we act on the outside like pup­pets, other eyes see from behind and move with assurance, as a firefly drawn by its similar light. But Mathilde had nothing to do with a firefly, nor did Mother.

To begin with, Mathilde had found the pomp of the Egyptian court as insufferable as the social yoke imposed on the women of those days, but rather than smiling and rising above it like a queen as did Mira Ismalun, and taking advantage of it, she smashed everything. One day, to the utter scandal of all the proper-minded people, young Mathilde refused to bow to the khedive, probably finding it incompatible with human dignity. She had to pack her bags. She was twenty and had a young baby, Matteo (an Italian name in Alexandria?—one wonders why), who would be Mother's elder brother and intimate friend. Eigh­teen months separated them; he was born on July 13, 1876 in Alexandria. This is how Mathilde came to Paris in 1877, probably because it was meant that Mother should be born on French soil.

Mathilde would also become a Communist at a time when well-bred young ladies were busy knitting their trousseaux. And she remained a Communist until she left this world at the age of eighty-eight, just because she had set her mind to. There is, however, a paradoxical story: Mathilde had a henhouse and used to sell her hens’ eggs to supplement her budget; one day a bold tax collector put it into his mind to make her pay taxes, not only on her current eggs, but on all the eggs she had already sold—she never understood. "But these are my chickens!" We do not know what Karl Marx would have said or whether Mathilde's Communism had anything to do with the orthodox version —she who loathed orthodoxies, except for the first syllable of the word: straight, walk straight and no nonsense.

Things were pretty rough at boulevard Haussmann. Not that Mathilde lacked culture; on the contrary, that young Alexandrian lady was very cultured, at least as much as the grandmother who admired Goethe, and she was consider­ably more intellectual, but she viewed life as a mathematical theorem to be constantly and rigorously proven. Life had to be exact and tend imperturbably toward some ideal asymptote, which was not God—for, it goes without saying, she was a perfect atheist—but rather the triumph of the perfection of Homo sapiens. Mirra was to inherit that seed—and take it farther. Yet, the mathematician of the house was not Mathilde, but the father, Maurice Alfassa. My father was a first-rate mathematician, Mother said—but he was presumably less gifted as a banker (the poor man must not have found it very amusing), and the household finances were not always brilliant. But the Alfassas were not poor, far from it, and they could have resorted to tap­ping the rich grandmother (no longer so rich, in fact, since she was cursed with four sons, “each more extravagant than the other”) but for Mathilde's spartan dignity. So, no one stepped out of line at boulevard Haussmann; the son, Matteo, was even to graduate from Ecole Poly technique *Mother would have a solid and rigorous foundation from which fancies were banished as a waste of time, religions forbidden as "weakness and superstition," and the mani­festations of the invisible worlds violently rejected: "It's all brain disease,” Mathilde would say. And that was that. Full stop. But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for, without this uncompromising materialistic armor, little Mirra might not have withstood the avalanche of strange experiences that befell her right from her early years. She would simply open her eyes wide, look delicately at it all, as one catches an insect under a magnifying glass—and not breathe a word to anyone, especially to her mother, who would have whisked her off to the nearest doctor.

An obscure milieu, Mother said. An ascetic and stoic

One of the very top French scientific schools.

mother. One sometimes wonders at the absolute relativity of human conceptions and philosophies; for this same Energy or Shakti that drove Mathilde may, in other places and beneath other skies, have just as well made of her a yogi in a cave, a Danton-like revolutionary, a diligent physicist in her laboratory or even, like Mira Ismalun, a great cosmopolite on an ideological conquest of the Euro­pean capitals, with another tarbush. But she had chosen these limits (unless they had been chosen for her), which shows that we may think or profess anything we like, whether of the right or of the left, but it is no more than convenient and temporary little dams within a great Cur­rent that flows and laughs at all the words we use for it.

However, there was a wisp of imagination in this austere household, which surprisingly was lurking in the poor banker. Somehow, we even feel that this big Turk, neglected among Mathildes baggage, must have been secretly delight­ful. He had in fact quite an array of hidden talents and was called “Barine” because of something Russian or Cauca­sian in him. He was as strong as the Turk he was and could bring a horse to the ground simply by pressing his knees, for he was a very good rider (a luxury soon banned by Mathilde); he had had all his schooling in Austria, where he attended the best riding schools, and spoke German, English, Italian and Turkish fluently (he would soon be naturalized French).¹⁰¹ They definitely were a solid bunch at boulevard Haussmann: An extraordinary physical poise, Mother said. She was to inherit a seed of that, too. Not only did this man know all those languages, but I never saw such a brain for arithmetic ... And on top of it, he loved birds! He had a room to himself in our apartment (because my mother could never tolerate him much), he had his separate room, and in it he kept a big cage—full of canaries! During the day he would close the windows and let all the canaries loose ...⁷

It was probably the only bit of poetry in the place.

He also loved the circus.

Such were little Mirra's solid roots. But it would be a mistake to seek the "explanation” for Mother there. She is rather inexplicable, this Mother. But the end of our expla­nations is where poetry begins, perhaps the real world as well.

We recall Sri Aurobindo:

The universe is an endless masquerade:

For nothing here is utterly what it seems, It is a dream-fact vision of a truth

Which but for the dream would not be wholly true.⁸

Unless we admit that Mirra had other roots—many roots—that are not limited to Europe alone, but extend to the Urals and the Spanish Peninsula, via the Valley of the Kings, nor to the genetic laws of Mr. Mendel, who, inciden­tally, had just completed his work in Brunn; and even if we persist in trying to confine her, and all the rest of us as well, in some obscure crypto-genetic code, which appears to be our last crypt, She was born precisely to break that code, to shake off that ultimate yoke, just as Mira Ismalun shook up the barriers of convention and Mathilde the court of the khedive, and to pull us out of this atavistic quagmire, into the open air, into some new state of man or new nature: We do not want to obey Nature's commands, even if they have billions of years of habit behind them!⁹

2: Oneness

A child is the primordial evidence of what will later be veiled from us by our culture. It takes a lot of learning before one can unlearn and find oneself again. And some­times one never finds oneself; there is only culture, like a mask over a great emptiness. Unfortunately, we are not always lucky enough to find a child who can tell us what he experiences—though there is but one experience, it is unequally shared among children, who have a pinhead or an ocean of it, depending—depending on what? If this inequality were better understood, we might be nearer to the truth of births than all Mendel’s laws, at least as far as the human species is concerned, though there are also roses and roses. In truth, we do not know if there are two things alike in the universe, even two similar little leaves on the same tree, and we wonder how it is at all possible to make laws, unless they be the laws of our own minds; we are all color-blind to a certain color we do not even know. Yet if we could find that Color and that Law, perhaps we would find what informs every form—this pinhead or that ocean, and the tender little leaf quivering in the wind —and what reconciles everything within its innumerable Oneness. One very small parameter was missing for Einstein to succeed with his unified field theory. Perhaps a little girl will bring us this simple piece of data.

So it is not a question of extraordinary visions in the dubious style of psychics, though little Mirra never lacked for such visions—the more extraordinary it is, the simpler it is, and finally it is so simple that we do not realize how extraordinary it is.

The Shakti

We must confess that little Mirra was rather roughly handled in that severe household. When things got a bit too rough, she would sit in her little chair and look at it all with her huge, changing eyes, at times a golden hazel, beneath a big bow of ribbons that clasped her already long auburn hair (or was it chestnut brown?), which later turned strang­ely to amber, and the long bangs on her forehead like Queen Tiy’s headdress—She simply looked out. Mother is someone who always looked a lot. She looked neither to the left nor to the right, nor even within, for within was still everywhere without; nor did She cry, for tears were not the program—one was not Mathilde’s daughter for nothing. She looked uncomprehendingly at that harsh and bizarre and obscure world, which smelled of mothballs from the high-hanging curtains and rattled under the wheels of the first streetcars pulled by four horses. And it was such a poignancy of incomprehension that it created a kind of comprehension of non-comprehension, a sort of dense mass that held ... something, the “explanation" without thought (She was five years old), which was perhaps Mirra herself—a mute condensation. That lived, that answered, that was. And it dispelled all the phantoms. That, i.e., consciousness, which I felt like a light and a force; I felt it right here, above the head. It was a very pleasant sensation. I would sit in a little armchair, made especially for me, all alone in my room (I didn’t know what it was, you see, not a thing, nothing—mentally zero) and I had a very pleasant feel­ing of something very strong, very luminous, and it was here (above the head)—Consciousness. And I felt: "That's what I have to live, what I have to be, ” not with all those words, naturally, but... Then I would pull it down, for it was ... it was truly my raison d'etre ... Otherwise I was in a stunned amazement all the time. And the blows I received!... Con­stantly. Each thing came to me as a stab or a punch or a hammer blow, and I would say to myself, “What? How is this possible?" You know, all the baseness, all the lies, all the hypocrisy, all that is crooked, all that distorts and undoes the flow of the Force. And I would see it in my parents, in cir­cumstances, in friends, in everything—a stupefaction ...It wasn't translated intellectually: it was translated by that stu­pefaction. And I went through the whole of life, up to the age of twenty or twenty-one (when I began to encounter Knowl­edge and someone who explained to me what it all was) like that, in that stupefaction: "What—is this life? What—is this what people are? What ...?" And I was as though beaten black and blue ...So whenever I felt sad, I was most careful not to say anything to my mother or father, because my father didn't give a hoot and my mother would scold me—that was always the first thing she did. And so I would go to my room and sit down in my little armchair, and there I could concen­trate and try to understand ...in my own way.

And the experience was automatic: I only had to sit down for a moment to feel it, that Force which would come.¹

It is Mother's very first experience, and it is the key to everything.

Yes, a force which was like a consciousness, because "it" understood, “it" was comprehension itself, pure, naked; and yet it was a force, because her senses perceived it first—a child touches, feels—like a density that She pulled downward, and it filled her with well-being. Indeed, when THAT descends, one feels as if charged with freshness and light, exactly like a plant breathing. It even seems as if one is breathing for the first time ever. Sri Aurobindo would call it “Consciousness-Force." It is the shakti, the driving force of the worlds. It is what we soon no longer under­stand and no longer feel, because we garb it in words, thoughts, colors, religious or political philosophies, music, and triumphantly declare, "This is my thought, my music, my gospel"—more or less noisily, depending on the inten­sity of the current passing through, but it is the Current circulating everywhere, and passing through everything: the atoms, the plants or the galaxies. When you touch that here, you touch that over there, thousands of miles away, in the most foreign individuals or the most closed things— and nothing is foreign anymore, nothing is closed or distant or outside anymore, for everything flows within that and by that; it is what links everything, the bridge connecting everything, the immediately-here, the very substance of the world. Consciousness-Force—Shakti. It is the foundation of the world’s Oneness, that which we try in vain to trans­late (or restore) through equations, fraternity or machines —all our telescopes, periscopes, telephones and televisions are our clumsy ways of recapturing this “tele" which is at our finger tips, just before our eyes, in our fingers and our eyes—or anywhere at all, for it can be captured without hands or eyes, instantly, like a little breath of air which is the breath of everything, the key to everything, and the comprehension of everything. And until we have rediscov­ered this primal substance of the world, we will try in vain to bring closer what we have artificially driven away, cut and externalized from ourselves; try vainly to reunite some brothers who can only come together there, and to force open some frontiers (or to invade them, which amounts to the same thing) that can only dissolve there; and we can go to the moon and all the moons until doomsday, without ever filling the emptiness of our hearts and minds, which can only be filled there, because that is the fullness of the world, the life of life, the breath that upholds all our vain words and music, and all our moons, and which creates thoughts and music and everything. We are the arrogant tools of a Force we do not know, but which knows us well, and perhaps wishes us a little more joy, if we would only consent to let it do its work instead of constantly interfering with “our” silly ideas, “our" silly philosophies, “our" silly religions, and all our silliness which, as we are beginning to realize, saves nothing, knows nothing and can do nothing.

All our yogic exercises, meditations and concentrations are ultimately only a means of silencing that little outer arrogance, that mental machine that veils everything, blocks everything, divides everything—when it falls quiet, everything is right there. A child knows that very well, like Mirra; but once he acquires the means of saying it, he has already lost contact, and everything has to be done again or, rather, undone. Oh, we think we have so many things to do in this world, while we have everything to undo before we reach the very first letter of knowledge and organiza­tion—and power. But undoing is painful; it goes right down into the cells. There is something very drastic to undo there before we can capture the great Flow in its immortal and boundless purity.

Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.²

This is Mothers whole life, her whole work of 95 years— 90 to be precise, since She began at the age of five: I have thought of nothing but that, I have wanted nothing but that, I had no other interest in life, and not for a single minute have I ever forgotten that it was THAT that I wanted. There were not periods of remembering and forgetting: it was con­tinuous, unceasing, day and night... and I am over eighty,³ She told me then. That is what She would never cease repeating to the children of the Ashram: You must get out of your little shell, there, in which you are so perfectly con­fined, in which you bump against everything—you know, like moths bumping against the light bulb?... Everyone's consciousness is like a moth. It goes along bumping here, bumping there, because these are things foreign to it. But, if instead of bumping about, you enter things, then they start to become a part of yourself You widen yourselves; you have air to breathe, space to move in; you no longer bang into things. You enter, you penetrate, you understand. And you live in many places at the same time.⁴

In fact, Mirra would live in many places, not only in space but also in time, for it may be that what we call past and future are no more separate or distant or outside the present than the neighbor in his house, the father and mother in their ruminations, or the little cat scurrying on the edge of the wall. We have to unlearn everything of the world before we can learn the real world, and the real time, which has no clocks or coffins, and the space where we are at home everywhere, instantly. But for that, we have to know the means of transportation; we have to know the great Shakti, how she works and moves. It means learning a new way of being. A child can teach us very well, because it is entirely natural for him before he is so ruinously well brought-up. With Mirra, you travel quite well. Her great forest has all kinds of secrets and more than one dimen­sion. Only, you must want to have the experience of it, and not merely read books which leave you just as dusty as before, and just as mortal according to the false time of a clock that has never ticked away anything but our sorrows and a life that seems never to have been. You have to walk with Mirra, be with Mirra. Strangely, or not, the earliest composition we have of Mirra that she wrote as a school­girl, before the turn of the century, ended with these words: Don't fall asleep in the present, come toward the future!

A future that we can very well start growing right now in the present.

The Dance of Vibrations

Like Mira Ismalun, little Mirra was impatient with all frontiers, but what She felt most deeply were not the arti­ficial boundaries with which we have barbed-wired our mother Earth, but the far more real walls within which humans confine themselves, and which She encountered everywhere: in her mother, her father, her little friends, everything one runs up against at every step. But it's physi­cally impossible to take a single step outside one's body without meeting unpleasant, painful things, She said. *At times you come in contact with a pleasant substance, some­thing harmonious, warm, vibrating with a higher light; it happens. But it's rare. Flowers, yes, sometimes flowers sometimes, not always. But this material world, oh! It batters you from all sides; it claws you, mauls you—you get clawed and scraped and battered by all sorts of things which just don’t blossom. How hard it all is! Oh, how closed human life is! How* shriveled, hardened, without light, with­out warmth ... let alone joy.⁵ She watched, looked at each thing; She spent her time observing this sort of human enigma. Gropingly, She was learning the workings of the great Shakti.

They had left boulevard Haussmann for square du Roule, N°3, where She would live until her marriage at the age of nineteen, but it made no difference; things were still the same, with different curtains and different walls. And that piercing gaze at things and beings intensified, and brought the Force more and more down into her, around her; it circulated, it moved about—it could be handled. And She saw that it was the same phenomenon in others, at various intensities—it also moved, went in and out—and that everything moved within THAT or was driven by that. And how could there be walls in that? Why the walls? She observed; it was more fascinating than the circus her father wanted to take her to, more fascinating than the chit-chat of her little friends. And it was Mathilde (of all people!) who exploded: "You're a monster, you have no feelings!” But She found that these "feelings" were just as sharp and hard as their wails, and that it was merely another way of swallowing you into their walls. So She remained silent, looking: "Mirra, the silent one”; they all found it unbear­able, because there is nothing more intolerable than what is different—there is no way to swallow you up, so they claw or hit you to get by force what eludes them, and it is simply the reverse of those admirable “good feelings” they reproached you for not having: Even goodwill is aggressive, even affection, tenderness, attachment—all of that, it’s all terribly aggressive. Like the blows of a stick.⁶ Indeed it is. And Mirra untiringly looked at it all in order to understand "in her own way." And She noticed that what emanated from humans—sometimes even from objects—touched her at various levels of herself, where “something" seemed to receive the movement (the thought, feeling or words of others, or even no words at all, even in the “silence" of human presences) and reacted, responded. It plucked a little chord there; it vibrated. And not only did it touch different levels in Herself, but the quality of whatever vibrated was extremely different. Mirra was discovering vibrations, which She was going to study as passionately and meticulously as a chemist measures his molecular weights and valence numbers. Unwittingly, She was dis­covering those well-known "centers of consciousness" or chakras Indian literature is full of. Yet all this was a sort of single Movement, which also encompassed this “force” She felt sometimes above her, sometimes within her, or in beings, objects, here or there. It was the movement of it all that astonished and interested her a lot—and those little walls in the midst of it all seemed so strange. She was taken to see a dead relative (Mathilde wanted no doubt to train her in her own stoicism), her "first dead person," for whom she had neither interest nor special feelings, when sud­denly tears filled her eyes, her throat tightened and She wanted to cry as if in the grip of a great sorrow—She looked at this quietly, rather perplexed by this invasion, and all of a sudden, understood: oh, it's their grief that has come into me! It travels it moves, comes in, goes out, passes from one to another, and everything communicates —we are a marketplace, She used to say ... Vibrations moving within an absolutely single and identical field. It is only the intricacy and interception of vibrations that give the impression of something independent and separate. But there is nothing separate or independent; there is only one sub­stance, only one force, only one consciousness, only one will moving in countless ways of being.⁷

It did not at all please Mirra to be like a marketplace and let herself be invaded by the grief of others or by the anger of her brother Matteo: a terribly serious boy, and frightfully studious—oh, it was awful! But he also had a very strong character, a strong will, and there was something interesting about him. When he was studying to enter the Polytechnique, I studied with him—it interested me. We were very intimate (there were only eighteen months between us). He was quite violent, but with an extraordinary strength of character. He almost killed me three times, but when my mother told him, “Next time, you will kill her," he resolved that it wouldn’t happen again—and it never did.⁸ A decidedly vigorous family. But when Matteo got angry, She clearly perceived that something started to quiver in a center in the lower abdomen; those centers were like quivering knots, which received and emitted in a serried or less serried trepida­tion, depending on the level; at times it could be soft and undulating (but that was much higher in the system). She observed it all quite clearly—and instead of catching the vibration and starting, by contagion, to lose her own temper, She noticed that all she had to do was to switch off the current. No need to exert willpower or control like Matteo —you just switch off the current and it is all over. It is cut off. She was discovering the extraordinary "contagion” of vibrations: All vibrations are contagious, and there are so many of them! A dance of vibrations. But in no way did She want to catch the neighbor's sympathetic (or antipathetic) illness—Mirra wanted to be the master of her house, not be tossed about like a cork on the sea. To know exactly and scientifically all the qualities of vibrations. When you become scientific in those matters, She said, you are no longer like a cork tossed hither and thither by the waves. A certain move­ment of nature passes by—oh, how nature plays with men! My god, when you see that, how positively revolting! I don’t understand why they don't revolt!—she sends a wave of desire, and they all become like sheep running after their desires; she sends a wave of violence, and they again become like other sheep indulging in violence, and so on, for every­thing. As for anger, nature has just to snap her fingers, like this, and everybody gets angry. She has only to make one gesture—just one gesture at her whim—and human crowds follow.⁹

Mirra did not merely stop at switching off the current. She discovered that one could handle that current. Instead of letting it accumulate in one's head, with the resulting mental fermentation, as She called it, She saw that it could be drawn into other levels-— any level at all—and even pro­jected outward onto other people or circumstances, and that it produced effects; but when one drew it at the level of the heart or deeper, it became quite soft and vast, taking on a rhythm, like great wings. This was the "pure” current, the unadulterated Shakti. She did not at all like the adul­terations that got mixed in with this current; first of all, it jammed everything and one could no longer understand anything, exactly like a pebble making ripples in a pond. One had to be very quiet and clear—clear—for the current to pass undistorted. She wanted the pure current for the simple reason that it was far more gratifying that way—one danced, one was light. And She could easily follow the itin­erary of the Shakti: She saw that, along the way, it clothed itself in feelings, desires and even thoughts, depending on the level—it grew heavy, bemired, took on every possible color, but it was no longer the color, and the whole world appeared discolored. Everything became thick and gray— opaque. It started to think and think. It was hard and com­plicated. Then, pfft!—She would blow on it, become like a mirror, and once again it was clear, evident, simple. It was the extraordinary simplicity of everything. And in this clarity everything fell into place miraculously. If there were a need to know something, the Current would tell you quite clearly; it rained little drops of words: a fine rain of white light, and after a time, that fine rain seems to make the words grow, as if it were watering the words! And the words come. Then they start a sort of dance, a quadrille, and when the quadrille has taken a clear shape, then the sentence becomes clear. Very amusing ...It all plays, it's like little will-o'-the- wisps coming out from here and there, doing a dance, arranging themselves—very amusing.¹⁰ And if something needs to be done, it makes you do it very well, without thinking; it pulls here, pushes there, repels the people you do not need to see, or attracts them—it even attracts circumstances. Everything works in a different way, according to another mode or rhythm, almost miraculously (why do we even say “almost"?). It is miraculous. But it is such a natural miracle that we never mention it or even notice it (except perhaps Mirra, who was always looking with her large hazel eyes which at times turned emerald green, or black or celestial blue—very strange eyes indeed which changed according to ... perhaps according to the little rain of light and the level She was observing). Miracles without a fuss. In fact, it is the mind which creates a big fuss, and needs "miracles,'' because it has completely obstructed the simple miracle it constantly lives in. So it invents machines to replace the very air it breathes. It does not breathe so well either; it even suffocates, but it seems as if its suffocations were what gives it the sensation of living. Strange world. Mirra was very much in agreement on this point.

Mirra's penetrating observation was not limited to herself and others, or to that sort of tactile vision of vibrations, as She would later say (For it has almost to do with touch— it is touch—and it is not a vision located in the eyes but everywhere in the body, as if thousands of little eyes were twinkling in the cells; in fact, we do think that our outer round eyes are simply an evolutionary convention, as it were, but that we can actually see from anywhere at all, from every multicolored level, like Mother’s great changing gaze; we have only settled there through laziness, because it is our habit to nail everything down, and then we solemnly declare, "That is the law"—yes, the law of our laziness.) Her observation took in everything, and not a single object was inanimate to her. She would walk quietly, silently, in the Tuileries gardens, the Bois de Boulogne, the Jardin des Plantes²⁰⁰ her little hand tucked in the big Turk’s huge fist, and She would see that same Current running through everything, as if connecting her with everything, and if her gaze lingered long enough, silently (the least thought blurred everything), on a flower, a tree or the big python of the Jardin des Plantes, She felt, more or less rapidly, a response in her depths, a communication, an exchange, something that vibrated in herself at one level or another, that was like a language without words, perhaps, but espe­cially a kind of fragrance filled with its own meaning, as if the fragrance also were a sort of language. But in fact everything was a language: forms, movements, colors; everything speaks—it is we who no longer know the lan­guage! A universal language, because, in truth, there is but one language—the language of Consciousness. It is our forgetfulness of that language which makes for all our towers of Babel. And there, too, She found a whole gamut that filled her with interest: Certain differences between vibrations resemble differences in tastes. There’s a whole gamut, you see, all vibrations, nothing but vibrations, and the differences between them resemble differences in taste or color or intensity, perhaps differences in force as well—essen­tially, of course, they are differences in quality ...I don't know the scientific name they use to distinguish one vibration from another, but it's like that. They come almost exclusively as sensations, but those sensations ... Some vibrations have rounded edges. Some come horizontally, others result from the state of consciousness (vertical gesture from top to bottom). While at the same time, others are.... Yes, it's like looking through a high-powered microscope: some are rounded, others pointed; some are darker, some brighter. Some are very upsetting to the body, and some even feel dangerous.¹¹ There is a whole chemistry of vibrations,* She would soon say.

But flowers were what interested her most (and cats, too, but in another way). In them, She felt a very pure type of flowing of the Force and a certain quality of vibration, a fragrance that spoke to her, we might say, and filled her with its meaning and its cellular effect within her own body: This one has a cleansing fragrance, She would say, speaking about a tiny flower, with yellow daisy-like petals. Once I cured myself of the onset of a cold with it.¹² And She would later give names to hundreds of flowers, simply by the quality of the vibration they elicited in herself: Ah, Devotion! She exclaimed one day on Indian soil, as She held a sprig of basil. It vibrates, it has meaning—everything has meaning. There is "Tenderness,” "Aspiration,” "New Creation,” "Joy's Call," "Supramental Sun,” “Flame," "Light in the Cells," "Transformation," "Divine Consciousness in Matter,” “Grace,” "Transparency,” and hundreds of others. And that little yellow daisy-like flower She called "Simplic­ity." These are conscious vibrations in Nature. The fragrance, the color, the shape are simply the spontaneous expression of a true movement.¹³ Mother’s Great Forest is laden with unexpected fragrances: there are odors that lighten you, as if they opened up horizons to you—they lighten you, make you lighter, more joyful; there are odors that excite you (those belong to the category of odors I learnt not to smell); as for all the odors that disgust you, I smell them only when I want to—when I want to know, I smell them, but when I don't want to know, I don’t. Unfortunately, men also have an odor, a “psychological odor," Mother would say. I can smell people’s psychological state when I come near them. I can smell it—it has an odor. There are very special odors, a whole gamut.¹⁴ Human beings are probably not among the most pleasant to get a whiff of, but perhaps only because they have forgotten what makes up the fragrance of a being, its true color, its pure vibration—a certain sound within which is our own music, as it were, like the crickets and mongooses—or no music at all. Our true, natural name. One day, when a child asked Mother why a given flower reflects a given color of the light spectrum, thus making it appear red or yellow or white, while absorbing all others, She answered in her unexpected way: The scientists say it is due to the composition of its atoms, but I say it's due to the nature of its aspiration. That is the real movement of the world, its rhythm of truth, its breathing. It is the pure flowing of the great Shakti, the fragrance of all fragrances, the true color of things, the meaning that gives meaning to everything.

It is the world’s great mother tongue.

The Great Body

We might think that little Mirra's experience was excep­tional and extraordinary— actually, this acute perception of vibrations was to assume rather impressive proportions over the years, as we can see in this story Mother told me much later, one day in November 1964: I am extremely sensitive to the composition of the air, from my earliest child­hood: "airs," if I may say so, they each had their own taste, their own color and quality, and I would recognize them to such a point that sometimes I would say, “Oh, the air of..." (I was a child, of course), "the air of this country or the air of that place has come here." It was like that to an extremely sharp degree: for instance, if I was moved from one place to another, I could be suddenly cured of an illness from the change of air. It was like that ... Perhaps a few days ago, I said, "There’s something new in the air. "And something very unpleasant, extremely pernicious; I felt that that “something" (I didn’t say anything to anyone, naturally) had a peculiar, extremely subtle odor, not a physical one, and had the power to separate vital vibrations from physical vibrations— that is io say, an extremely noxious element.

Immediately I set to work (it lasted for hours), and the night was spent counteracting it. I tried to find which higher vibration could counteract it, until I succeeded in clarifying the atmosphere. But the memory remained very precise. And very recently (maybe a day or two ago), they told me that the Chinese had chosen an Indian territory, in the North, to test a certain kind of atomic bomb, and that they had exploded a certain bomb there. When they told me this, the memory of my odor abruptly came back.¹⁵

But this almost microscopic precision is nothing extraor­dinary; in fact, it is the most natural experience in the world, and the most common ... except for the human species.

She read the great universal Book, complete with plants, squirrels and the big python—which She watched, or rather experienced very calmly, for She feared nothing (perhaps, then, her eyes turned to emerald green, as we sometimes saw them). She moved according to a rhythmic Law that led her straight to what She needed—to the required encounter, the necessary experience, the thousand direct detours of the great Flow—and landed her on a flint road in Fontainebleau—You know, French flint?—without a scratch, after falling from ten feet high. She lived with the great Shakti, She flowed within its indivisible Oneness. We will say “instinct,” because we are expert at putting syllables (Greco-Latin preferably) on anything we do not under­stand, like the witch doctor, to exorcise the evil spell of those annoying little things that refuse to let themselves be pigeonholed into our non-rhythmical laws; but once we have appealed to instinct and invoked the father of the father who sired the son of the son, we will finally set out into the great original Totality, where beings that were not yet humans and not yet equipped with a neocortical screen moved quite well with the high ferns and wandering stars and went straight to their goal as though they were all one single body. We may only wonder—and this is the only pertinent question—why Nature, who always knows very well what she wants and never misses a single turn that would enrich her kingdom, could have grown these little screens so plentifully—a first brain, then a second, then a third, like a veritable explosion—increasingly refined and tight and encased in one another, to cover up our reptilian perceptions (mesencephalic, since we are so fond of Greco- Latin), which in turn are covered by a "limbic system" which is covered by lobes, lobules and protuberances, to be finally wrapped in this almost cancerous excrescence which has turned us into Homo sapiens—cut off from everything, "sapiens" only of our little misery in a cage and equipped with innumerable tools to replace what we no longer know how to see, touch, hear or know "instinctively?" We do not know the world; we know only a translation of the world in a cerebral language. No, it is not a "dichotomy,” we have been totally cut off from the great terrestrial Body—this is all our pain and misery. To resolve this one question may be the very reason why Nature made the question grow, as if she raises all the obstacles needed to reach a greater per­fection. Perhaps her world was too vast for those herds of bisons or protozoans which swam undistinguished within her great obscure Body and blindly followed her Law according to a more ancient and radical communism than ours; perhaps it was necessary to divide, seal off, cut up little sectors of the arc to veil this too great an immensity, this too wide a vision, to filter this perhaps too unbearable light, and to create little individuals who could grasp themselves as separate entities and understand them­selves because of their own limits. But once the entire course has been completed, with its thousand direct detours and circumvolutions that raised up questions upon questions, problems upon problems, and more and more thinking and separated and anguished individuals; once we have fully learned that we know nothing and can do nothing— but that we are one individual, far richer for all his miser­ies and questions, which end up kindling a strange fire born of no lamp at all, a fire within that even seems to communicate gropingly across the old walls and to touch, without seeing it, a great, similar light and to understand without words and to aspire, oh! to aspire for more space, more truth, more light and vision—then, perhaps, the moment will have come in the slow march of evolution to let the Current flow through other, less limited centers, to shatter the screens, to get out of the mental chrysalis where our Mother Nature has shielded us from a too premature birth to the world, and to return to the great Body, but without losing, in a mystic, cosmic or egalitarian way, this point of individuality she has laboriously built up. For ultimately such may be the great, ultimate evolutionary plan, that next supra-mental "humanity” announced by Sri Aurobindo and Mother, that new being who will be able to have the consciousness of the point and of the whole at the same time.¹⁶

And to have it physically, cellularly.

An individual being conscious of the whole.

Each individual being conscious of the whole.

There is something more than the mere self-breaking of an illusory shell of individuality in the Infinite,¹⁷ Sri Aurobindo wrote. lb be and to be fully is Nature’s aim in us ... and to be fully is to be all that is.¹⁸

Then all our sorrows shall be cleansed, our miseries rewarded with a vast smile, our blind eyes lit up with a thousand visible and invisible colors, which we had exor­cised, and with a Color unlike any other; we shall know the rhythmic Law that rhythms everything, the little music in the depths that recognizes its music everywhere, the single vibration that we are and which travels everywhere directly —through all ages, all space and places, across the seas and forests of the great Shakti—toward its goal of joy at every instant.

3: The Wings and Flights of the Shakti

In fact, Mirra s stern family was a perfect natural ground —nothing there to suggest or invite a temptation to imitate, except a predilection for Matter, with all that the wind can sow there, unless it is already there—but fallen from where? That wind is quite mysterious indeed and blows in from farther off than the Urals, not to mention the chromo­somes—and why that particular little field between the Big Turk’s canaries and Mathilde's theorems? As a matter of fact, She loved mathematics very much, this little Mirra, already not so little, really very much! And also I understood; it made sense. ¹

Another Gravitation

But many things were taking place in that wild terrain which had little to do with mathematics and were hardly consistent with Newton’s laws—Mother never liked laws, whether “moral," Newtonian or otherwise, for which She was very often reproached. But naturally that is against the rules! She exclaimed one day before some impertinent (or pertinent, rather) and shocked individual, I make a habit of doing everything against the rules, otherwise, there would be no point in my being here; the rules could just go on and on!² We have already mentioned the incident in the Fontainebleau forest, when, pursued by her friends, She was running without watching where She was going. Sud­denly, She found herself on the ledge overhanging the road and, carried by her own momentum, fell off and down onto the road below—freshly paved with flint: Whoosh—I went sailing into the air! I was ten, eleven at the most—with no notion of the miraculous or the marvelous, nothing, nothing—1 was just flung into the air. And I felt something supporting me, holding me up, and I was literally set down on the ground, on the stones. But what is interesting about this incident, which we might attribute to anything at all, is Mirra's comments: I found it perfectly natural, you under­stand! Not a scratch, not a speck of dust, nothing, absolutely intact. I fell down very, very slowly. Then everyone rushed up to see. “Oh, it’s nothing! I said, lam all right!"³ Yes, “noth­ing," not a single thought—especially no thought, because if She had thought about it for even a second, She would probably have broken her nose outright, or worse. But where is the worse? You do not think about it, so it obvi­ously does not happen. You find it perfectly natural, so you are quite naturally carried. It is simple. Simplicity itself. Could it be that our minds have invented a nonexistent gravity? Or is there perhaps another type of gravity?

One day, with her refreshing simplicity, Mother said to me, I didn't know the rules, so I didn't even have to fight them!

Another incident (there is no scarcity of them) took place in the grand salon of square du Roule. A grand salon is by definition ornamental and rather boring, but not for Mirra —who says nothing however; She never says anything, this stubborn and silent girl—She does it. I'll show you how one should dance ... All the little friends circled around her, and the Louis XV (or XVIII, if you prefer) pedestal tables were pushed out of the way. I went to a comer of the room to get the longest distance to another comer, and I told them, “One single step in the middle” (the salon was more than 30 feet long), and I did it! I sprang (I didn’t even feel I was jump­ing; it was like dancing, you know, like when they dance on point), landed on the tip of my toes, bounced up and reached the other comer—you can't do that alone, even champions cannot... And I didn’t run; I was standing in the comer— and hop! Up I went. (I said “hop” to myself, soundlessly) and frrt! I landed on the tip of my toes, bounced and landed on the other side—quite evidently I was carried. And Mirra added, There were many things of the kind, all of which seemed to me perfectly natural. It didn't feel as though I was doing something miraculous—perfectly natural.⁴ Had She felt it were miraculous, the “miracle” would not have hap­pened and She would have found herself sprawled out in the middle of the floor. Perhaps we have invented the miraculous as a kind of incredible lie covering our one true machine—or is it the machine that is quite “miraculous” in a universe free of complications? Newtons included. The soul was very alive at the time, Mother remarked. She did not even have a name for that most natural of things, though had She labeled it, the soul would have vanished in thin air like the deer of Fontainebleau—which by the way came quietly near her. With all its strength, the soul resisted the intrusion of the material logic of the world—it all seemed perfectly natural to me. I simply thought, "No, accidents just can't happen to me. "⁵ At times we wonder if the accident of the world happens only in our thoughts. If we changed thoughts, it might not happen at all, or perhaps happen in another way, a charming way, who knows? It is this "other way” that we want to track down. For, after all, what is most interesting is not these trifling incidents, but the seed they hold; years later—indeed seventy-five years later—as She recalled these dancing, air-borne memories, Mother suddenly noticed the strange connection between this impertinent non-gravity and a certain inner center, which She already felt quite well, near the heart, and which caused a sort of harmonious, undulating movement... like a great movement of wings⁶—the very center from where She drew the Shakti whenever She wanted to shake off Matteo’s fits of anger or Mathilde’s rebukes—the same vibration. Perhaps there is another way of vibrating that eludes Newton and all our laws.

But we must learn the law of the “great wings."

But let us emphasize right away that the point is not so much to start flying in the air as to get out of a suffocating machinery that hides from us a more real life. Where is reality—where? Where is real life, true life? What does it look like? It is the very question that arose in Mirra like a revolution when She was twelve years old: I was quite small when I was told that everything was “atoms" (that was the term they used in those days). They said to me, “You see this table? You think it’s a table—that it's solid and it’s wood—well, it’s only atoms moving about." I remember, the first time I was told that, it caused a kind of revolution in my head, bringing such a sense of the complete unreality of all appearances. All at once I said, “But if it’s like that, then nothing is true!"⁷

This was Mother's first decisive experience.

It is the beginning of the first real chapter of her life and of her quest to unmask false appearances, which was to last more than eighty years. A total calling into question, which was neither metaphysical nor mystical, but solidly material. And what is the material reality of the earth? The true earth?

What is it that is real? The atoms, the table, or Ali Baba's flying carpet? ... Unless everything is true—the atoms, the table and the flying carpet—plus something else that com­bines all this within one total vision and may be our next vision, when we have had enough of the partitions of the mind. We must find the "next way." We must "look” intently with Mirra. But what is that other way? We do not know yet. Perhaps we will discover it on the way, and who knows, the whole world may be changed by it—a miracle even greater than Newton's apple, which had the bad habit of falling. Perhaps it is only a matter of changing our habits, old habits dating back to a certain neo-cortex. Unless we have to go right down into the cells to erase their memory—a dark malicious memory which abruptly makes us tumble into a hole. And why the hole, since we know that our Mother Nature has no useless detours, no abyss that does not conceal her still unaccomplished and secret perfection?

But let us not jump ahead.

Another History

It was not only space but time that behaved in a light- mannered way with Mirra. Oh, all is light and transparent when we ourselves are light! Why do we seek to improve the world when it is that primal world which one should clear up? And we keep moving on the outside like puppets, while the story of the great world and the one thread that weaves all our stories run within. That is where the thread is, but we do not take it seriously, immersed as we are in our important problems, which are only the problems of our false vision. Little Mirra was put into a private school—my mother considered it unfitting for a girl to be in a state school!⁸—the "Cours des Feuillantines,” if I recall correctly, and there, like everyone else, She learned assidu­ously the false world, the one that is arranged in maps, atoms and "golden ages,” which, we finally come to realize, were not all that golden; as for our atoms, we have yet to discover whether they are not masking something else that masks something else that masks something else—but where is the Thing? Indeed, we have a whole succession of truths, which as long as they last are as infallible as the Pope or the Sorbonne—but they pass, and the next one is just as irrefutable, until it, too, passes; meanwhile we are stuck, stuck up to the neck, but it is scientific and historical —not for Mirra. She was not so easily fooled. Talking of history, it was shown to her in a strange way with its innocent little illustrations: I’d read and suddenly the book would seem to become transparent, or the printed words would become transparent, and I'd see other words or even pictures.⁹ History started to become animated, quite alive, and was not always as printed words said. But we should not think that Mirra was witnessing a "phenomenon” (we do not know where the phenomenon is, really, nor who the phenomenons are); She found it as natural as empathizing with animals, feeling with flowers or flying over roads: I had not the faintest idea of what was happening to me. And

it appeared so natural to me that I thought it was the same for everybody. But my brother and I were great chums, so I would tell him, “They talk nonsense in History, you know— it's like this. It isn’t like that; it's like this!" And several times the corrections I got turned out to be quite exact.¹⁰

Not only books, people or animals were transparent to her, places also started to live differently, as though they bore their past at the same time as their present—perhaps everything is there at the same time, the future as well. If we looked at the future, it might grow faster and, who knows, break through this small shell of the present, no thicker than a page of History, and slip its golden rays into it. She would go with her friends to see Versailles by night; then, suddenly, I saw the park filling up with lights (the elec­tric lights had vanished), with all kinds of lights: torches, lanterns—and then crowds of people walking about in Louis XIV dress! I was staring at this with my eyes wide open, holding on to the balustrade to keep from falling down, I was not too sure of myself! I was seeing it all, then I saw myself there, engrossed in conversation with some people ...I mean I was a certain person (I don’t remember who); and there were those two brothers who were sculptors (Mother vainly tried to recollect the names) anyhow, all kinds of people, and I saw myself talking, chatting.¹¹

Who, then, was this “self”? Even Mirra was a little per­plexed—but not surprised; it was merely something “to study,” until fuller information was made available. For her, the world was not a fixed quantity in a perpetually linear unfolding; it had bumps and holes everywhere, it sank into depths and gushed forth unexpectedly.—“It's very amusing.” Actually, these bizarre "selves” came in profu­sion, wearing every possible costume. Objects, too, were a bit peculiar. They did not remain quietly locked up in their stone or incrustations; they started to tell their story—not "tell” with words, because words are meant for learned people, who know the world so well that they have put it all into a dictionary; but tell like the marmosets, the pythons or the chrysanthemums, in the language of stones, which move quite well (so say the scientists), but not only with their atoms—with consciousness, which is the conscious­ness of everything, for there is but one consciousness, not two; and those little fingers which today caress an amethyst or an Egyptian jewel case remember down in their cells— as the other remembers down in its atoms, for objects, too, have a “memory,” like places and houses—having already encountered that old friend. We have many old friends, perhaps the whole world is an old friend down in our cells —only we have forgotten the language in which everyone meets. She went to the Louvre; She went to the Guimet Museum, and there I found objects that I had used in the past. This is how I was later able to find the threads again. Or else it was the mummy in the Guimet Museum which suddenly told her its story: My first contact took place when I was quite small, nine or ten, and it was with that mummy in the Guimet Museum. There are two mummies in the Guimet Museum. Nothing remains in one; but in the other, the “spirit of the form" has remained very conscious— conscious to such a point that you can have a contact of consciousness with it. And Mother added ingenuously, But evidently when a bunch of idiots come and stare at you with round eyes which understand nothing, saying, “Oh, he’s like this, he's like that!" it must not be very pleasant!¹² And that is the way it is. Sometimes even a mummy meets someone who understands it.

Had anyone pronounced the word “reincarnation," prob­ably it would have been Mirra’s turn to stare—let us not forget that we are in the century of Taine and Renan, caught between Mathilde and her banker husband. But at Mirra’s age it all seems quite natural; it is just another way for Nature to behave, no stranger than the ladies beneath their parasols marching in a line to the church of Saint-Philippe du Roule on Sunday afternoon. In any event, thank Heav­ens, She was not in the least tempted to speak of those things to anyone around her. My mother had kept it all completely taboo: those matters are not to be touched—they drive you crazy!¹³ Thus her experience could unfold spon­taneously from beginning to end, without interference or criticism, like some rather nonsensical petunia in the midst of all the sensible and positivistic flowerbeds of that righ­teous century. We may call it, like Mathilde, a sort of mental disorder or a morbid fantasy—to which Mother would have replied, All right then, have the fantasies that make you progress ! She never held that one should "believe" in any­thing whatsoever, whether in “God” or in the devil, but that each one should have his own experience—“It’s my expe­rience" She would say, and that is all. The goal is one and beyond the summits—but each one can reach this summit on his own path, by climbing his own mountain, not the mountain of another person.¹⁴

Let us note that She, who was brought up on exact sci­ences, did say "beyond the summits”; something which strangely echoes Mira Ismalun’s "beyond the tombs." Per­haps because one is nothing but the reverse of the other— or its inevitable complement.

Yet little Mirra's mountain is worth a glance, for it may throw some light on the strange meandering mazes of our molehills, which surface here or there, in a nineteenth century or twentieth, in a French or Patagonian field, sud­denly, unexpectedly, like a little skylight unforeseen, with funny dresses and a whole array of vague desires or impulses that seem to go back elsewhere, further into the past—but what elsewhere? How, elsewhere?—while here, outside, we are like a slightly amnesiac traveler of a thousand lost trails and of a story that may not even begin or end here.

We are chased by a self we cannot now recall And moved by a Spirit we must still become.

We keep the ache of breasts that breathe no more.¹⁵

But the experience continues—chaotic, perfectly unex­pected, anywhere at all, in all circumstances, in front of a portrait by Clouet in the Chateau de Blois or among the pages of a dictionary: It was in Blois. We went to see the museum and I suddenly halted in front of a painting by— now let’s see, who was he? Coue? No, Clouet!— Clouet: the princess ... one of the princesses. And I started making a few remarks out loud: “Look at this! I was saying, look what this fellow has done to me! Look—he made this like that, but that's not at all how it was, it was like this!"—Details. And then I became aware (I was not too conscious physically) that people were standing around listening. So I got a grip on myself. But it was definitely me! It was MY portrait. It was ME!¹⁶ We must say She had many trails, this Mother. Thank God She was not born in China, or we would have far to travel. But then, who knows? We are only talking of this planet, our today’s little skylight above this human journey, but how many other planets have prepared this journey— planets that we will never know, that have vanished or are continuing their perpetual motion here or there, like little tufts of thistle, scattered through the great interstellar fields. And we recall Sri Aurobindo: The experiment of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated.¹⁷

But it is this world here that we would like to fecundate a little through a better understanding of its workings, which means living it better, for that is what counts in the end—theories, well, they can remain in their libraries. We could mention another experience of Mirra’s from among hundreds, this time occurring in Italy, where She went with her mother when She was fifteen: It struck me very much. It was very striking indeed! It was the memory of having been strangled in the Doges’ prison ... I was visiting the entire Palazzo Ducale with my mother and a group of travelers shown about by a guide: they take you underground, where the prisons were located. The guide started telling some story (which didn’t interest me) when, all of a sudden, I was seized by a kind of force that came into me, and then, without even—without even being aware of it, I went to a comer and saw a written word. But then, there came at the same time the memory that I had written it. And the whole scene came back: I was the one who had written that word on the wall (and I saw it, saw it with my physical eyes, the writing was still there; the guide said that all the walls with writings on them made by the Doges’ prisoners had been kept intact). Then the scene went on: I saw, I had the sensation of people entering and catching hold of me (I was there with a prisoner).

I was there, and then some people came and seized me and... (gesture to the neck) tied me up. And then (I was with a whole group of about ten people listening to the guide, near a small aperture opening onto the canal), then, the sensation of being lifted and thrown through the aperture.... Well, you understand, I was fifteen, so naturally ...II told my mother, "Let’s get out of here!” ¹⁸ And She laughed. Oh, if there is one thing that is inexpressible, it is Mother’s laughter! This Mother, how She laughed, how She enjoyed herself with everything, with that touch of mischief that so resembled Sri Aurobindo’s humor.

A Growing Gaze

Thus, the point is not to find out what wind had pushed that little winged seed onto that particular field and into those dissimilar chromosomes—although one may still wonder—nor is it even to attempt some "invisible geneal­ogy" of Mother, which would have made her laugh heartily, even more than the penguins of the first motion pictures. What does it matter, after all, that She was the daughter of a Doge—strangled on top of that—a princess of Navarre or an Empress of Russia or China, as if the meaning of this difficult human journey were to develop bigger and bigger, more and more titled and imperious personalities—a world where nobody would ultimately be left but pharaohs and sultans, as if we were not already swamped with tyrants—or even to evolve ever more intelligent geniuses, super-Goethes or super-Beethovens—a world ultimately so overflowing with literature and music that we might be saturated or bored to death, as if this formidable human ascent of suf­fering and chaos and conflict were only meant to eternally produce the same song, only greater and louder? And when there is nothing left but "bestsellers,” what will we do if we have not found the little song within that enchants every­thing? Indeed, where is That for which those singers sang? Where is That for which those marchers of the great human invasion sculpted or poeticized or conquered? Where is it? Where is that only kingdom never conquered, that one note which fills all, that little color for no canvas or art gallery? Tomorrow, tomorrow, they say, but tomorrow never comes; and where is the real person in all those actors? We go on and on, in ever increasing numbers and dresses, on the great human thoroughfare, as though there were no one inside.

What could be more relevantly asked, in front of this profusion of "selves” that seemed to spring up from every side before little Mirra’s tranquil eyes, is not who they were—we have all lived thousands of times—but why these thousands of times and names and miseries that we have all incarnated in a white or a black skin have not sunk with the rest into the same rush of oblivion? What is it that makes them remain—remain for Mirra and for a few privi­leged others? What makes them live still and perhaps live forever? What gives that indestructible little vibration to the gestures of a certain moment—a pebble in our hands, a banal place, a park in the evening, and that futile detail already lived a thousand times? Life is so futile. We think it is grand and gilded in our history books, like the Court of the Great Moghul, but life is made up of a thousand steps and little stairways in our heads and sidewalks beneath footsteps that really lead nowhere—or to somewhere so similar here that it might as well be there—and we find ourselves again, or not, as if none of these footsteps had ever been trod, none of these walls seen, none of these minutes lived. So what is? What lives? If it is, it is forever— or else is not. If it lives, it lives forever—or else it is not life but just a little well wound-up mechanism that comes undone with everything else. No, life is not grand—but are we in it?

One little story struck us more than all the others among little Mirra’s thousand memories, precisely because of its detailed banality, if we may say so. In fact, it was no longer Mirra but already Mother, and that morning She had met a one- or two-year-old child who had seemed very familiar to her, without her knowing why—because of his eyes, of “something” in the depths that sparkled with a kind of mute recognition. Then, in the afternoon, She had a vision: I was inside a wonderful monument, immense, so high! But it was completely bare: there was nothing, except in one place where there were magnificent paintings. That’s where I recognized the paintings of ancient Egypt. I was coming out of my apartments and entering a sort of large hall: there was a kind of gutter running on the ground all along the walls to collect water. And I saw the child playing in it, half-naked. I was very shocked, I said, "What! This is disgusting! This child is impossible! He keeps doing what he isn't supposed to do." The tutor came, I had him called. I scolded him: "What, you lei this child play in that?" I heard sounds—well, I don't know what I said, I don't remember those sounds. I heard the sounds I uttered, I knew what they meant, but the translation was in French, and I didn’t keep a memory of the sounds, "And he answered me (I woke up with his answer), "Such is the will of Amenhotep." ...So l knew the child was Amenhotep.¹⁹

Never mind Amenhotep, but that gutter is quite intriguing —a gutter lasting for three thousand and five hundred years (since the 18th Dynasty), with a child in it. What is it that makes even a gutter last?

We could argue simplistically that, in order for something to be remembered, there must be someone who remembers. But who remembers, who sees things? An old habit of seeing, the way we look at things everyday—like our books, our fathers and mothers, our movies for millions of people—a ready-made sight that sees only its little desire, the little idea in its head, its likes and dislikes, setting upon setting where nothing really is being played out, or else a story so similar to millions of others that it could be anybody at all looking at it, in a three-piece suit or a peplum, in Carthage or Brooklyn, in that century before or after Christ, with just a few differences in trepidation. But the pure gaze—sud­denly, for nothing, like a cry that rends this whole setting and rends the heart and rends these million futile things, like a sudden gaping over a terrible void ... which may be the first something of an entire life—that piercing some­thing without a name, without a face, without anything, like a look looking at itself, like a void so painful it is almost powerful, perhaps the first stirring of a being at last, without words, without thought, without anything that knows or understands—his pure vibration, his cry within. This is what remembers. As if it were the only memory. When that opens, everything is seen in its eternity: a gutter, a particular shade of the sky, a face or a little cat running on the wall; it is all the same, because it is the Same Thing one sees every­where, in everything, inside and outside, or which looks at itself everywhere—THE Thing, bursting everywhere, vibrant everywhere, without beginning or end, without centuries, without time; that which moves everywhere and links everything, yesterday and a thousand years ago, this pebble and that idle little hand, this place, that place, that little figure beneath a pharaoh's pschent or a wide-brimmed hat, and what do headdresses matter to it as long as someone is looking?—Consciousness-Force, Shakti. A look that opens once, twice, then thirsts to open more and more often, everywhere, in a temple or without a temple, in the street and in the thousand passing miseries—a look that grows from life to life, a vibration that becomes clearer, a force that gathers itself, as if it were the only thing that did not flee amid the great failure of our bodies, one day, at the edge of a hole; a memory without memory, which is the memory of everything, as it were; an enduring little king­dom of nothing which is its own monarch everywhere, for it is the kingdom of the great Shakti, and the whole world is its realm.

And one day that gaze never closes again, ever.

Some people have looked very much while others come and go like blind men; some people have gathered drop by drop the little rose-colored pearls, the blue or multicolored beads of the great Shakti, and they have become this moun­tain brook, that little spring, this torrent or that large river —or sometimes that ocean. Here lies the only difference, which no chromosomes or laws of Mendel will ever explain. Not an evolution of the species or of talents, but of Con­sciousness and Force or, rather, of a million gazes of one single Consciousness ever discovering itself vaster, stron­ger, more alive—a cascade or a cataract. An evolution of sight, perhaps? But it is one and the same drop of the Same Thing. It is the same great River traveling on and on through the centuries, through our small or big miseries, through our philosophies, our systems and religions, our gold or black cages by the thousands, driving all these millions of men, all these blue or black little gazes of a great Country we do not really know; and it leads us slowly, surely, toward that next Moment of its great march, that sudden turning away from our pains, when all our small screens will fall down because they are no longer necessary to wrest our cry from within a cage.

Then each one will have his real name beneath all the costumes or without a costume, his unique vibration, his irreplaceable music amidst the great Totality, his memory restored at last, and his great wings. And our eyes will open upon our earth as if we had never seen it before.

Perhaps it will be another earth.

Another history.

Another gravity beneath the stars.

Our real country at last and our indestructible body. Beyond the tombs, and beyond the summits.

4: Of Music and Colors

More often than not the blade of the Mind comes down on these spontaneous experiences—certainly we all have threads, signs, scraps of memory, but we do not know that they are experiences, or that there is an experience, so we speak of "dreams," of "impressions”; it is vague, hazy, and soon covered over by the logic of the Cartesian world, which comes and seals us up like a glass jar. We are soon taught life, in other words, how to politely suffocate. After­wards, we will speak of mystics, cranks, or charlatans, while we ourselves embrace all kinds of not so philosophi­cal religions, because we have failed to embrace the only thing, the simple thing that could unravel all our threads. But it may be just as well; people need a strong logical and rational foundation to be able to meet the great, simple Truth on equal terms without capsizing into an air too vast, or mistaking a small exotic lagoon for the whole Pacific Ocean. It would almost seem, in Nature’s marvelous economy, that every falsehood or aberration of an age serves as a protective envelope for a truth still too danger­ous for our rudimentary skiffs, and that perhaps there is no falsehood anywhere and no error, but simply a truth growing in accordance with our own possibilities. If we could always remember the greater wideness behind and beyond us, we would quickly put an end to the childish quarrels between materialists and so-called spiritualists, who are only the "ists” of something yet to be born, which is perhaps neither their pure Matter nor their pure Spirit, but... something else—without any "ism," perhaps the real earth we still cannot see behind our materialist or spiritu­alist Homo sapiens lenses.

The Great Waves

Mirra was not encumbered with these antinomies, and She took up the jugglings of this world, as those of the other worlds, within her quiet look, no more, no less, just as phenomena “to be studied,” a particular behavior of the same thing, which perhaps is on the other side, or on this one, only for us. When there is no more prison, there are obviously no more sides. She painted; She studied music; She played a lot of tennis. She “fell in love" with tennis at the age of eight and continued playing imperturbably till She was eighty. Painting, however, seemed to be more important to her (She especially liked portraits; human faces were a far greater enigma to her than pharaohs or mathematics), and this is how She came to meet Henri Morisset, her future husband, a young student of Gustave Moreau and Rouault’s classmate, to whom She had been introduced by her amazing grandmother, who continued to dash about the capital under Mathilde’s uneasy eye. As might have been suspected, Mira Ismalun had a weakness for young Mirra: She considered me the only sensible person in the family (!) and she shared her secrets with me.¹ Yet painting, which She started at the age of twelve, was less important to her than it might seem—or not any more important—and my guess is that She plunged into it partly to annoy Mathilde and shake off the well-polished yoke of square du Roule, as one of the characters in the play She would later write avows: Born in a very respectable bour­geois family that considered art as a pastime rather than a career, and artists as somewhat irresponsible people, easily inclined to debauchery and harboring a very dangerous con­tempt for money, I felt, perhaps out of a spirit of contrariety, a compelling need to paint.² Yes, like Mathilde in her own way with the Khedive, or Mira Ismalun with the customs of a feudalistic Egypt. Had I been born in India, I would have smashed everything!³ Mother confided to me one day. We can well believe that.

Not far from there, in London, Sri Aurobindo was pre­paring to throw off a certain British yoke.

We do not know whether She could have been a great painter, but She certainly could have been a great musi­cian—assuming She cared for greatness—for there is Mother the musician, whose extraordinary “improvisa­tions" are an endless source of surprises. It would take ten books to just start speaking of Mother, and still more would remain for generations of exegetes to come, whom She used to gently poke fun at. I hear sounds up above. Oh, what I hear is so lovely! But I have no idea of what I play. I play without hearing what I play; I hear the other thing ... This is really amusing: it’s somebody having fun—having fun, and, so to say, forcing me to play. I am about to sit down, he says to me, “Start off that way,” so I start off that way and then he embellishes, elaborates on it. Then, sud­denly he says, “Ah, enough!" and off he goes! I don’t know who it is.⁴ And Mother laughed.

Another time She told me, / constantly hear something like great waves of music, I just have to withdraw a little and there it is; I hear it. It is always there. It is music, but with­out sounds—great waves of music!⁵ And most curiously, these “great waves” are also linked to that "motion of wings" we spoke of earlier, which set her down so gently on the flint road in Fontainebleau—our world may be more rhyth­mical than we think and its music more marvelous. But we must first find our own music within, otherwise how could we possibly hear the music from above, which is perhaps also within, and which is perhaps one and the same Music everywhere. Years ago, as I was writing a particular book, Mother suddenly said to me, I don't know how I can help you, but I am going to send you some music. And indeed the words came like a very vast rhythm, which was perhaps music and which garbed itself in words as it came down— it chose its words automatically, as if each sound created a word or attracted its own like word, but if the least think­ing occurred, the sound was scrambled and all the words came out wrong. Thought took shape underneath automati­cally, almost without my knowing, as if it were produced by the music, a secondary and inferior effect of the music; if one lost the rhythm, one also lost the thoughts. For thought—like everything else, like our architecture and painting, our gestures and revolutions—may simply be a translation of that great flow of Shakti which gives rhythm to everything—how wonderful if we always knew how to find the pure Flow! To create is to find the great Music again, to tune in to the pure Rhythm and let it flow. But most of the time we only tune in to “our" ideas; we translate through our opaque mental Sargasso—and naturally the rhythm is false, thought is false, and all life is false. It is no longer the motion of great wings; it is the motion of any­thing at all which fidgets and bumps into evety bar of its cage. If I only had an orchestra with two hundred performers at my disposal! She exclaimed. It would be quite interesting! Unfortunately, She had only a poor foot-driven harmonium, later replaced by a scarcely better electric organ. It’s like having to gather it all into an eyedropper and letting it out drop by drop—so of course it comes out very diminished!⁶ But even these little drops have yet to be discovered, and perhaps one day She will find the person who, to our delight, will know how to orchestrate those great waves of no human music. A sort of meditation with sound.⁷

The Explosion Above

Yet She did not meditate. Until She was twenty, She had no idea that one could meditate or make a big to-do about it: it was very simple, closely intertwined with life itself, and she would have found it very strange to sit apart from others, in order to do something that took place as natu­rally as breathing. She simply took this kind of fervor everywhere She went, this keen intensity that pierces through appearances, that gaze which insists on seeing the real thing, the real world, the truth in everything, that need for perfection which is only the prescience of a secret Perfection in things—though outwardly, to our eyes, it is disfigured, distorted, diminished—and which creates that kind of keen intensity, as if we were forever on a quest for the world's real face, for an enigmatic memory in every­thing: beings, encounters, objects, a piano one plays on for hours to make it yield its Note (She did work for hours everyday on her piano), a canvas one grasps to make it burst forth with an impossible color, or perhaps tear with a cry that unbearable blank, a mathematical problem one contemplates as if to pierce through the lines and volumes, and transpierce the problem of a world confined in a geometry that may not be Euclidian: My brother was study­ing advanced mathematics to enter Polytechnique and he found it difficult. I used to look on (Oh, She was always “looking," looking a lot) and everything would become clear: the why, the how; it was all clear. So the teacher was working hard, my brother was working hard, when I exclaimed, "But its like this!" Then I saw the teacher's face! It seems he went and told my mother, “It's your daughter who should be studying! ⁸

One day, however, by dint of sustaining that intense gaze everywhere, something burst out. It was at a concert, a recital by the great Belgian violinist Ysaye, a colleague of Rubinstein: The first time I heard Beethoven's concerto in D—in D major, for violin and orchestra ... suddenly the violin starts up (it's not right at the beginning—first there's an orchestral passage and then the violin takes it up), and with the first notes of the violin (Ysaye was playing, what a musician!), with the very first notes my head suddenly seemed to burst open, and I was cast into such splendor.... Oh, it was absolutely wonderful! For more than an hour I was in a state of bliss ... And mind you, I knew nothing of all those worlds, Mother explained, I hadn’t the slightest knowledge; but all my experiences came that way—unexpect­edly, without my seeking anything.⁹ Much ink has been spilled about this explosion above in Indian literature; it is the opening of the center above the head, sahasradala, or “thousand-petalled lotus,” the direct communication with the great Shakti's flow and her worlds of light and beauty, which we gropingly attempt to translate through a cranial shell. From then on, young Mirra would see the world otherwise—not only in the transparency of a history book, the secret murmurings of flowers and stones, or even the intimate vibrations of beings, but in its other origin above, its primal source—until the time She would see it still differently again (perhaps many times differently): more from within, more within the depths of things, within the very heart of Matter, where the secret Origin may be concealed in the atom or the cells of a body, as it is con­cealed in the infinitudes of the Shakti. For Mirra never ceased "looking"; even the immensities seemed to her yet another veil over “something else,” which was perhaps not only immense. She was too much of a “materialist" not to love Matter more than the scientists and not to wish it more beautiful than all quantum equations.

Everything now sprang up before Mirra's eyes; nothing was confined to a photographic flatness anymore: When I looked at a painting, same thing: something would suddenly open up inside my head and I would see the origin of the painting—and such colors!¹⁰ Even humans opened up, like the paintings, and behind their words or actions was revealed the true movement that gives them life, the vibra­tion that impels their gestures, the rhythm or color of their soul, or lack of soul, and everything was like a moving, colored and innumerable kaleidoscope endlessly turning the thousand faces of the Shakti, and often the thousand ways of disguising and distorting a single little color that would have liked to make such a lovely painting: I see the physical thing (words or action) and then this colored, lumi­nous transcription at the same time. The two things are superimposed. For example, when someone speaks to me, it gets translated into some kind of picture, a play of light or color (which is not always so luminous!). And that’s how it works—it is translated by patches and moving forms, which is how it gets registered in the earth's memory. So when things from this realm enter into people’s active conscious­ness, they get translated into each one’s language and the words and thoughts that each one is accustomed to—because that doesn’t belong to any language or to any idea: it is the exact imprint of what is happening.¹¹ The imprint that sticks to places, houses and objects, as it does to our cells— a tremendous living and exact History, which is like the world's truth in color. Our tape recordings may not be such a recent invention after all; we always "invent" a caricature of what is already there. Later Mother suddenly realized: So that’s what these modern artists see! And with a mischie­vous little smile that puckered her lips and puffed up her cheeks like a little girl suppressing a giggle, She added, Only, as they themselves aren't very coherent, what they see is not very coherent either!¹²

The world opened up and everything opened up. The far became near, the distant unknown vibrated as if it were right here, and the known here seemed to sink through the centuries; each thing was a world containing perhaps the whole world. Music mingled with colors, which mingled with one and the same great Rhythm that could also make poetry, or geometry, depending on whether it flowed this way or that, and even create a new gravity, or other gravities, depending on ... depending perhaps on the truth of our gaze. A gaze becoming truer and truer—which twinkled in the caterpillar along one single little line of the world, twinkled in the animal along tortuous trails and drew unchanging grooves, drew little meridians on its globes and confined galaxies into a bubble until the day it bursts its own bubble, and everything begins again according to another geometry. And perhaps all these little mental barriers were necessary to prevent us from tumbling— psychedelically or otherwise—into a world too vast for our consciousness. But the journey is not over; the true gaze has yet to be—the world has yet to be! The world is becoming more and more what it is. The world is a gaze becoming true. We must grow in consciousness; we must open eyes that do not stop at the grid of the little globe. And once we open our true eyes, once we are totally true, the world will be totally what it is, and all our laws will crumble like little children's blocks in the garden of the gods.

For the great world Kaleidoscope can also turn by an unexpected movement of the hand.

5: Other Worlds, Other Bodies

This world, this great world we stride across with a con­fident step as if it were our home, like young offspring of men on their legs but clinging nevertheless to the hand­rail, is scarcely our home or, rather, there are many homes where we have not yet been; we barely know the edge of the great forest. The little path that abruptly emerges here, that unexpected gesture in the midst of our routines, those surging words, the wave that seizes our human crowds and suddenly makes them move, like Matteo's tantrums or the hops of a little girl amid the orderly flower beds at the Tuileries—we do not know where they come from or what breath of air has just passed by. Outside, everything is crumbling; we patch up the Machine, meet with an acci­dent in the street or come across this little coincidence that will alter a whole life, but who moved what, who drew that unforeseeable coordinate? We do not know—millions and millions of coincidences in this great forest of the world, like little random shoots creating an incredible forest, like little random humans creating an incredible story, like so many little random gestures and chance molecules creat­ing a symphony, or an explosion. And finally, we must say it, if it is chance, that chance is damn intelligent. But we are so scared by the idea that our great chance intelligence might be supplanted by a greater intelligence that we prefer to consign this world to its wretched chance rather than to a demiurgic God whose non-random blows are sometimes strangely diabolical and often cruel—but in both cases we are eaten alive by the same bogeyman. It might be about time to inquire into this intelligence of the world without allowing ourselves to be caught by the whims of the gods, or of the scientists of the day before yesterday, or of a chance that goes back to a certain little “bang”—but then we must not be afraid of "God" or the devil, nor especially of ourselves. For it may be that everything is held within, inside those chance little cells—we are the primary subject of inquiry, and there may be no other one, for what is held in a single little body, a single little cell, is in all bodies and all universes. One wonders why on earth we go to the moon. And who knows, if we found the real law of these cells, we might go to all universes and all moons without rockets and without complications.

A Poetical Sleep

She tried everything, that little Mirra, even poetry, "to see how it feels"—to Mathilde’s wild despair: “She will never achieve anything in life!" Painting, music, science, litera­ture, practical work—She did not miss anything. Then, after a while, very well, I would leave it. I had experienced the thing and it didn’t seem to me important enough to devote a whole life to it.¹ To her, it seemed that there were many experiences to be had, that the world was an endless field of experiment—She continued till the age of ninety-five, without ever stopping. And we are not sure the experience is not still continuing. So to confine oneself to one thing, be it the loftiest, seemed to her a sort of aberration, an extension of the termite. They 're fossilized; they are excellent objects to put in a museum. And I see no point in being the greatest painter, the greatest musician; it always seemed to me to be a vanity.² And she concluded candidly (always with that little touch of mischief), And it’s absolutely unim­portant; that’s perfection for human beings.³ Perhaps She already knew unconsciously (?) that man has far more to discover than his small or great summits, which all collapse one day into a certain hole in the ground. So my mother (she was a very stern person) would say, “My daughter is incapable of seeing anything through to the end!" And it remained like that: incapable of seeing anything through to the end—always taking to something, then leaving it, then after a time taking to something else—lots of things. “She will never achieve anything in life /" And it was really the childlike transcription of the need for ever more, ever better, ever more, ever better ... endlessly—the sense of advance, advance towards perfection. A perfection that I felt to be quite beyond anything people thought of—something ...a “some­thing" which was indefinable, but which I sought through everything.⁴

Evidently, there must have been more than one clash with Mathilde. There is even a certain carrot dish between them which nearly turned sour; Mirra refused obstinately to eat carrots and Mathilde was no less obstinately bent on making her eat carrots—Mirra fasted for three days. We do not know who gave in first. Probably Mathilde. But the last straw—and the first sign of another, singular adventure— came the day Mathilde discovered that Mirra was writing poetry. Poetry, my daughter, poetry! And in her sleep on top of it! Yes, Mirra’s sleep was a little strange, like everything else, or unnatural—or quite natural depending on whether one sees it with the eyes of a child who does not yet know that the body is a very fixed little box that encloses us for life; and Mirra, very impertinently, used to wander out of her body as if there were nothing to it. You go out of your body as you go out of your house, it is that simple. Not for Mathilde. But in any case, we seldom meet children who know how to tell us about their peregrinations: Every night at the same hour, when the whole house was very quiet, I would go out of my body and have all kinds of experiences. And then my body gradually became a sleepwalker (that is, the consciousness of the form¹⁰⁰ became more and more con­scious, while the link, a sort of thread of light connecting us to the body, remained very solidly established). I got into the habit of getting up—but not like an ordinary sleepwalker: I would get up, open my desk, take out a piece of paper and write ... poems. Yes, poems—I, who had nothing of the poet in me! I would jot things down, then very consciously put everything back into the drawer, lock everything up again very carefully and go back to bed. One night, for some reason or other, I forgot and left it open. My mother came in (in France the windows are covered with heavy curtains and in the morning my mother would come in and violently throw open the curtains, waking me up, brrm!, without any warning; but I was used to it and would already be prepared to wake up—otherwise it would have been most unpleasant!).¹⁰¹ Any­way, my mother came in, calling me with unquestionable authority, and then she found the open desk and the piece of paper: "What's that?" She grabbed it. "What have you been up to?" I don't know what I replied, but she went to the doc­tor: "My daughter has become a sleepwalker! You have to give her a drug." It wasn’t easy,⁵ Mother added laughingly.

We do not believe that the poetical period lasted very long, and Mirra, or Mother, always regarded that diffident and scarcely scientific species with a certain commisera­tion, She who unwittingly expressed herself in such a poetic way—but it was too simple to be put into alexandrines. What mattered to her was that the expression be true, exact, endowed with the vibration, a pure translation of the great Shakti’s flowing—a limpid transmitter,⁶ such was her supreme key, even when She was ninety-five. But why would not the Shakti also make poetry flow, she who poured down like a cataract into the 23,814 verses of Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri? We still do not know all the secrets of that Shakti, and Mirra was learning the workings— the mechanism, to use her favorite word. Continuously, through everything, She was learning that limpidity is the supreme mastery of everything, including poetry. Sri Aurobindo would call it "mental silence." When all is silent, the vibrations pass clearly, undistorted, through the limpidity of consciousness, in accordance with their right rhythm, which is also the right power and right action at the right time. For, we have forgotten it, ultimately poetry (like painting, music and all the forms) is “simply" the con­densation of certain vibrations that have the capacity to reproduce or materialize the state of consciousness they represent: the flame of aspiration—or even just fire—light, joy, love ... Everything in this world is the expression of a state of consciousness: the flower is a state of consciousness (a state of the consciousness, rather), as is the stone, fire and rain. The whole world is myriad states of conscious­ness. It is the magic of sound, the mantra, the "Word" of the Shakti that informs all forms, makes them vibrate, colors them, and garbs them in its musical or electromagnetic geometry. Ultimately, one day, it may be the power of directly materializing or precipitating into a form whatever is the object of our consciousness—a direct creation by conscious manipulation of the vibrations. This is tomor­rows "poetry," when the world becomes a pure implementa­tion of the Shakti through limpid transmitters. At present, we are only “condensing" petty ideas and petty desires, and states without any power (except the power to harm) or much consciousness, and all sorts of small machines to replace the simple power of the original vibration. Mirra was already learning this future poetry, not only through poems, but through everything—that “something" She sensed, which was like the secret perfection of everything, even of a stone. As for me, I am not a poet, She said. I am only a doer⁷—but the Greek word for “poetry" [poiein] pre­cisely means "to do." And the Sanskrit for "shakti” [shak] is "to be able" or "to effect."

The Change of Milieu

Thus Mirra was inventing beforehand what the surreal­ists were going to discover some thirty years later; but truly there is no invention, or else it is as old as the Vedas and Ajanta murals themselves, for what creator does not close his eyes a little, gropingly pulling down some flash from above? It is not enough to sit down one inspiring morning, or one lovely evening, and write "automatically," for what is likely to come out is some will-o'-the-wisp from below— from our subconscious and barely conscious lagoons—or the syncopated echo of our own incoherence. First of all, we must be limpid, otherwise we will hear nothing but our own rumblings. Our colored lagoons or inspirations do not all originate from the same place, though everything flows from a single ocean. We must learn the levels and recognize the floodgates of the great flowing—there are small flood­gates, large floodgates, and no floodgates at all. This is what Mirra was discovering step by step, meticulously, level by level and world after world. With animals, flowers, por­traits and mummies (not to mention very living humans buzzing with desires) She had already learned that each thing struck its little note at very different levels of her body, and that these “centers”—for which She had no erudite names—were like little, very accurate tuning forks vibrating at one note and one only, and She knew instantly, through the note struck or the vibration, not only its significance, but also which level of the world it came from, and She could be presented with the most exquisitely colored appearances, the most closed objects or the men wearing the finest neckties in the world without being fooled for a moment: it vibrated at a certain level, therefore it came from that level. And a painting or a poem could be signed with the most prestigious name of the time, yet it was only some sixth-class lagoon. It was mathematically precise, and unmistakable. But to what note did all these centers, these little tuning forks vibrating right up to the top answer? Where did the music come from? That is what interested her. Had She been told by this famous, yet-to-be- born American mechanist that it all comes from a particular "consciousness-creating machine,” that is, our distinguished brain, She would have opened her eyes wide, perhaps startled-blue this time, and immediately wondered where that idea came from and whether this extraordinary mecha­nist had not also created the world. That may just be the case. In any event, a world that works upside down. You wouldn’t say that it's the phonograph that has created the sound you hear, would you? That would never occur to you !⁸

In fact, She discovered these worlds, all these worlds and levels, in the most prosaic and unexpected way, just as one suddenly comes upon a totally unexpected orchard and bites into an apple. This was not theory; it had to be tested, touched or seen. The door opened and there it was. The body was just a lot of little doors opening in every direc­tion, and one could even let it fall on occasion, not only in a bed and when asleep, but right in the middle of lunch, or even while walking, with eyes wide open. It had become a kind of detachable object She took off like a coat to go else­where : into the atmosphere of a person or a city, to other places or other worlds, which She discovered “just like that,” a little at random, with no more surprise than when discovering the Bois de Boulogne or Clouet's "living” por­traits. This is called "trance" in the dictionary, but it is such an ugly word, evoking whirling dervishes or the Pythia on her tripod, while it is simply a lovely walk outside the body ("lovely” for those who have a lovely consciousness, other­wise it could well be nightmarish), and we would prefer to use the word "exteriorization”—one goes off into an “out­side” that is the very inside of everything. I would all of a sudden, right in the middle of an action or a sentence or anything at all, go into trance—and nobody knew what it was! They would all think I had gone to sleep! But I remained conscious, with an arm raised or in the middle of a word— and poof! No one there. No one there outwardly, but inwardly quite an intense, interesting experience. That used to happen to me even when I was very young.

I remember once (I must have been ten or twelve years old at the time), there wax a luncheon at my parents’ house for a dozen or so people, all decked out in their Sunday best— they were family but all the same it was a ‘luncheon’ and there was a certain protocol; in short, one had to behave properly. I was at one end of the table next to a first-cousin of mine who later became director of the Louvre for a while (he had an artistic intelligence, a rather capable young man). So there we were, and I remember I was observing something rather interesting in his atmosphere (mind you, although the faculties were already there, I knew nothing about occult things). I was observing a kind of sensation I had felt in his atmosphere and then, just as I was putting the fork into my mouth, I took off! What a scolding I got! I was told that if I didn't know how to behave, I shouldn’t come to the table.⁹ Sometimes, with even less ceremony, She simply let her body drop to the ground. That happened once in Paris. I had been offered a good dinner, then I went to hear a conference. It was very crowded and very hot. I was standing there with that dinner in my stomach, when suddenly I felt sick. I said to the person who was with me, "I must go outside immedi­ately!" Once outside (it was on the Trocadero Square), I passed out completely. I saw my body lying there and I found it so ridiculous that I rushed back into it—and I gave it a good scolding.¹⁰

Having been brought up in the kindergarten of evolu­tion, we have become used to thinking that a body, well, is something that contains consciousness—if it does not create it—that without a body we are quite simply dead, and that we cannot see without eyes, hear without ears, and move without a pair of legs, or half a dozen, depending on the case. It is an evolutionary fact, and that is how it is. That is also how a child cannot walk about without its nanny or open the park gate because it is a few inches too short. In the great park of Oneness, the great primal Totality, little particles of consciousness have grown up, become indi­vidualized, identified themselves as “different from”— identifying that difference precisely thanks to their limiting walls—in other words, they begin to see through their own eyes, feel through their own tentacles, and naturally the world becomes the phenomenon of their eyes and tentacles. But when we have declared (having grown a few thousand years “wiser") that the world is not our personal affair, we will nevertheless continue to individualize the world through a skull and personal spectacles, like the little beasts. The world is “different," we are "different” and everything is different thanks to those peculiar spectacles and soft cranial protuberances, to the point that we say, “I only exist through my spectacles”—perhaps even, “I am the product of my spectacles; without spectacles and protuberances, I am dead." And this is also true for those who are the real babies of evolution. For a fish in an aquarium, the outside of its bowl is also nonexistence or death. However, there are flying fish; there are reptiles that have grown wings and all sorts of species that have left their "milieu"—we have indeed flown out of more than one milieu since we used to fidget about with certain pseudopods ... Perhaps this is the time of the next change of milieu, but this time, instead of moving from one fishbowl to another, larger one—be it celestial or aerial—or instead of growing super-protuber­ances (as if we were not already congested enough in our human fishbowl), the point is to find the Milieu again, the one that contains all the fishbowls and bodies and the vision of all that is seen by those millions of eyes and all that is touched gropingly by those little antennae—which had cut out these small bits of the world, these little win­dows in a dungeon, and these little adjustable spectacles, only to then acclimatize themselves step by step and day after day to their own Totality. Then we will realize that we can see quite well, even better, without spectacles, that we can think quite well without a skull, and that we can take a walk outside the fishbowl without dying from it. And finally, we will realize that it is not the body that contains consciousness, but consciousness that contains the body— and all bodies. Then we shall move here or there, unhin­dered, because everything will be our body.

The Hierarchy of the Worlds

Mirra could go out of the "fishbowl" quite easily, at will. She was no baby of evolution. In fact we all go out of this body during our sleep, but we do not know it—in truth, we know very little of the real way of living; we are taught mathematics, codes, laws, languages, but not even the abc's of life, nor the language of the world: There isn't one person in a million who knows how to live! Mother exclaimed. They are born into life—they don’t know why. They know they have a number of years to live—they don’t know why. They think they will have to go because everyone goes—and they don’t know why either... They are born; they live; they have what they call good fortunes or misfortunes, then they come to the end and they go. They came in and left without learning anything.¹¹ Sometimes, fortuitously, on an opera­tion table or in an accident, we realize that one can leave this body quite easily, but it is a kind of "phenomenon," perhaps unhealthy, and, like Mathilde, we are all prone to classify it under “mental disturbances,” and it is indeed really disturbing to the reasonable little habits that we have inherited from mammal to mammal. We are very attached to our cage. To tell the truth, Mother remarked, the vast majority of men are like prisoners with all doors and win­dows shut; so they suffocate—which is fairly natural—yet they have the key that opens the doors and windows, but they don’t use it.¹² Or else, like imprudent youths, we set out on a “trip" under the effect of some hallucinogenic drug— often disastrously. For it is not enough to get out—this is not a super Bois de Boulogne in technicolor, although colors there are, and all depends on our own "color,” as it were; like always finds like, and if we are gray and full of anxiety, we will only experience the super-grays of nightmare and super-anxiety. What moves us here is what moves us "over there”—in all its “purity,” we might say, or all its vastness, and without the little protective shell of the body or of decency. This is precisely the invisible (for us) source of all that moves us here and moves us along like little puppets. but also a whole field of study for those who do not like being moved like puppets. That is what Mirra constantly saw moving everywhere, behind paintings, objects, or in her cousin’s atmosphere: little clouds, red or black waves, sparks, dark dart-like stings, movements of force that impel our gestures and our future, whether that sudden accident, this golden inspiration or that false one, and millions of little chance events we do not have the first clue about. People who live in the ordinary consciousness know in fact very, very little about what is happening physically—very little. They think they know, but they know only a very thin appearance, like the wrapping paper around a package; there is the whole package inside, with all its content, but they see only the outside appearance, and they are so accustomed to it that they always have an explanation.¹³ But for those who do not have the good fortune or misfortune to see (the sight is not always a pretty one, and it is likely that in the wisdom of Nature's economy our eyes open only to the extent of our understanding), there is a vast field of study at night, when our eyes are no longer deluged with the onrush of appear­ances: Daytime is a certain kind of school, nighttime is another. For Mother, everything was "school,” Why, they don’t even teach you how to sleep! People think you have only to lie down on your bed and just go to sleep. But that isn’t so!¹⁴

Likewise, going out of the body does not mean finding some kind of big and rather disorderly warehouse. There is a whole hierarchy of worlds (or “planes of conscious­ness,” if one prefers) which ranges from the most material Matter to the regions of light and bliss, whence the greatest of us sometimes draw a flash, a symphony or a gospel— and still other regions we do not yet know. This discovery is as old as the hypogea of Luxor or the Upanishads. It is mysterious and dubious only for this scientific interlude, which thought it wiser to develop its machines rather than its consciousness—until men, having reached their last resort and their last breath, rediscover the air that was missing from their lives and the very power that drove their machines, perhaps richer and more mature for that demanding schooling of steel. But in the meantime, we must say that we are in a sort of psychological and philoso­phical confusion that would have appeared quite childish to our less mechanized predecessors. One of the great difficul­ties for most philosophies, Mother said, is that they have never recognized or studied the various planes of existence, the various levels of being ... They have made a creator God, and his creatures. So all kinds of problems arise. He created the world with what? Some say with dust, but what is that dust? What was it doing before being used to make a world?... Or else with nothing! The universe was created from nothing—it's absurd! It is very disturbing to a logical mind. And on top of it, it is said that “He" did all that consciously, deliberately, and, when He was finished, He exclaimed, “Hmm, this is very good!” I think that one of the greatest stumbling blocks to understanding things comes from an arbitrary simplification that puts the Spirit on one side and Matter on the other, Mother added. It is because of that stupidity that we don't understand anything. There is spirit, and there is matter—it is quite convenient. So if you aren’t on the side of the spirit, you're on the side of matter; if you aren’t on the side of matter, you’re on the side of the spirit. But what do you call spirit? And what do you call matter? It is a countless number of things, an unending gradation. The universe is made of an infinite gradation, as it were, of worlds and states of consciousness—and where does your matter leave off and your spirit begin in this increasingly subtle gradation P Then they say: free the spirit from matter—die and you will free your spirit from matter. These are the stupidities that prevent people from under­standing anything at all! Yet they do not represent the world as it is.¹⁵

Mirra had not yet reached "the world as it is"—it would take her some eighty years to do it, because all these worlds and planes still do not embrace the totality of existence; there is something else, something very mysterious, and very simple, which is perhaps the world's next revolution. A new world within a little cell. That which is our base— this body—is also our ultimate mystery. That which is our failure—death—is also the key to a supreme victory. There perhaps lies the utility of our "scientific detour”·, to bring us back face to face with matter and force us to stumble upon our own mystery instead of soaring into the so-called heavens of the spirit, which have never saved anything. There is a long way to travel before reaching the heart of things, but all these detours, the thousand detours of the great evolutionary forest, are part of the straight line that prepares our consciousness and fashions the Shakti in our bodies.

A Growing Body

For finally, this is what it is all about—fashioning the Shakti. The ancient Vedic Rishis spoke of "the human fore­fathers” who forged the gods within themselves “as a smith forges the crude material in his smithy."¹⁶ Those planes and those worlds can remain where they are, like the distant forests of Brazil or Victoria Falls, for what do the most magnificent forests and waterfalls matter if we do not know how to bring a few drops to our own water mill and a single flower to our garden—or if it is the exclusive privi­lege of a few geniuses of the spirit? But we all have little doors in ourselves that open out on those great fields—we have just to open the doors. Like Mirra, we all have little pulsating, vibrating "centers” that communicate with those worlds, like the iridescent tentacles of the terebella. We must know where we want to live and where we stand: whether we wish to press the nightmare button and floun­der down below, in the little swamps of the thousand desires that make such a gray and painful and erratic life, or whether we wish to open the doors above and feel sud­denly vast, amidst wide-open landscapes that leave us refreshed for days. Our life with eyes wide open is a trans­lation of our life with eyes closed and we pull here a story we have woven elsewhere—we can draw out a beautiful story; we can draw out forces and lights that make life vibrate differently, that may even change life. For the great kaleidoscope "above” goes on turning and turning, waiting for us to let its little colored rain filter down here, and its lovely arabesques, or great unknown cascades that will change the world’s destiny. We must tune all the centers of our instrument to the lovely frequency, to the vast rhythm; we must make that cadence flow down here, which will give rhythm to all our gestures, big or small—it is all the same, for if the rhythm is not in this idle little second, this first footstep on the sidewalk, it will be nowhere.

Mirra wanted that rhythm to flow not only for herself but for everyone. Strangely enough, this very young girl, whose roots seemed to plunge so far back in time, also seemed to expand herself out into space and be capable of embracing distances as well as ages, as if space were actually a kind of dimension of time, or the spread of our consciousness proportionate to the quantity of experiences we have lived through time, as though we constantly grew within another, more subtle body—a body of experience—and fashioned an ever vaster and more encompassing expanse of being. Some fashion a little garden with a single flower, some fashion a park, and others embrace seas and rivers, because they have long flowed with the great Shakti, held many sorrows and struggles, and plucked more than one color from the great rainbow. They have loved much and perhaps loved all. When I was a child, Mother related, around the age of thirteen and for about a year, every night as I went to bed, I felt as if going out of my body and shooting up above the house, then above the city, very high. Then I would see myself dressed in a magnificent golden robe flowing out behind me; and as I rose, this robe would expand and spread out in a circle all around me to form as if a huge roof over the city. And I would see men, women, children, old people, sick people, unhappy people coming out from every side; they would gather beneath the outspread robe, begging for help, telling of their woes, their sufferings, their pains. In response, the robe, supple and alive, would stretch out toward each of them individually, and the moment they touched it, they were consoled or healed and would go back into their bodies hap­pier and stronger than before leaving them. Nothing seemed more beautiful to me, nothing made me happier; all my day­time activities seemed dull and gray—devoid of real life— compared to this night-time activity, which was the true life for me.¹⁷

But that more subtle body—perhaps the body of the world's sorrows—seemed to spread not only over one city or in one particular direction; it sometimes seemed immense. At times, also, it did not have the same color or the same size. Mirra clearly noticed that depending on the region She visited, that body, or bodies, those beings within her, had a different hue, a different movement, as if She had gradually grown on different planes of her being, in several directions—and each of those lives, indeed, in Egypt or elsewhere, in the thousands of places we pass through, rich or poor, as princesses or monks—represents a certain type of experience, a type of vibration or note that we have specially nurtured, one center or another where we have particularly concentrated our efforts—a certain way of touching Matter, Mother would say—until all our centers and all our notes become tuned to the same rhythm and we are a somewhat complete and unified human being living on all the planes and mastering all the colors and rhythms. To every center there corresponds a body of experience (we would call it a personality), which we fashion bit by bit and which represents our thousand footsteps on a given level, our thousand efforts in one direction—and which keeps on growing, for what dynamism can vanish into thin air? What is is forever, and if we have nurtured a little stream or a torrent, or an evil spell, this stream, torrent or evil spell will catch up with us thousands upon thousands of years later and will become a river, an ocean, or a catastrophe. We have to know what we are nurturing. Mirra had nur­tured more than one world; She had more than one being, like each of us, but some people come and leave just as they came, while others open their eyes wide and remember. Some beings form an ill-assorted and unequally developed troop and spend their time quarrelling among themselves, with sometimes very cumbersome gnomes or dark, rebel­lious pygmies; others have united their entire kingdom and subjected all their beings to the great Cadence. And finally, they have nurtured so many beings and developed so many worlds that it is like the whole world within one conscious­ness. Perhaps this is the experience that visited young Mirra one day in a temple (it must certainly have been the first time She went into such a place): I had one of my first experiences in a temple. It was at a marriage, and the music was wonderful—Saint-Saens, I later learned; organ music, the second best organ in Paris—wonderful! I was 14 years old, sitting high up in the galleries with my mother, and this music was being played. There were some leaded-glass windows—white, with no designs. I was gazing at one of these windows, feeling uplifted by the music, when suddenly through the window came a flash like a bolt of lightning. Just like lightning. It entered—my eyes were open—it entered like this, and then I... I had the feeling of becoming vast and all­powerful. ... And it lasted for days.¹⁸

It would be interesting to have a description of these worlds and bodies, but to speak of them in a solemn and academic manner would be unfair to Mother, who always hated the dogmatic and absolute “this is how it is” like the Ten Commandments (which, by the way, She found extraordinarily banal! And Moses climbed up the Sinai to hear that!).¹⁹ We will not climb up the Sinai of the invis­ible to put it into twelve paragraphs; indeed there were— there are—twelve of these worlds, but all these divisions are just a way of peering into a certain “something”—the earth, our earth, which still eludes us, and which we have perhaps not really seen yet! There is still ample room for discovery, and all has not been said, even by the seers of the highest wisdoms (possibly because they were too high). We ( can only be surprised—but is it really surprising?—that a very young girl from square du Roule discovered, in the age of positivistic Light, what the Rishis and many other sages as well had discovered some seven thousand years earlier. But such is the fact. However, She attached no particular importance to it, or at least no more particular than to the thousand everyday mysteries, which are no longer mysteries to us because we have covered them with quite decent and reassuring mental labels and we are so accustomed to them that they look like nothing—though if we stopped being accustomed to the world and removed our convenient labels, we might start discovering more things than appear to be and more mysteries than all those of Eleusis.

So we will not give out the recipe for a "good sleep" or for the worlds: This habit of wanting to force others to think like you always seemed, strange to me. You have your own experience; well, try to make it as true and complete as pos­sible, but leave each one to his own experience.²⁰ As simple as that. The important thing is to know that there is an experience and to remove the eye-glasses of habit. The important thing is to know that there is "something" to look at—to look at without dogmas, positivistic or other­wise. We must stay on the positive side of the experience, that is all. And the most extraordinary part of this enter­prise is that the very effort to know opens the doors of discovery, automatically, as if that intense little vibration that latches on things opened up invisible skylights within that "as if nothing” of habit, and everything starts speaking to us, telling its story and its unfoldings, as if our very foot­steps—feeling their way without knowing anything, but yearning, so much yearning to know—actually created the path; as if this sincerity of effort did create the body of the Shakti in ourselves. Then we go from one little door to the next and from one discovery to another, where before there was nothing but futile boulevards and a thousand senseless footsteps.

And we walk from life to life and from experience to experience—from one way of touching matter to another— until our body of experience has grown to the size of the universe.

For this, finally, is the whole meaning of evolution: to develop the body of the Shakti in ourselves. We think that we wage wars, revolutions or crusades; that we evolve philosophy, socialism, capitalism and carve empires from the Hellespont to Bactria; that we create machines, litera­ture, good and bad, and little children. But all the while it is the Shakti growing in us, through good and bad, through socialism or despotism, and even through our machines or our foolishness. The whole time, it is the great empire of the Shakti we carve, the same Shakti beneath all the names and faces, in black or white skins, beneath our sins and our virtues, indifferently, in our defeats or our triumphs. It is the same, small fragment of the great Milieu that we colonize, pile up and put into our granaries of feeling or thought, like the honeybees of a great Comb, grain by grain, day after day, through our labors and pains and countless lives in one costume or another, through philoso­phy or no philosophy, through religions and foolish things in every language. We individualize the great Shakti; we bathe in it like tadpoles in a torrent, which will become pterodactyls or shrews, which will become mathematicians or tramps—which will become what? Some beings are nothing but their body and their function; they store only the little fragments of Energy they need to keep their machinery going, and when the machinery breaks down, all that is left is what they have put into it: they "go out” into nothing, because they are nothing but common com­bustible, and all the philosophies they may have stuck on it make no difference if they never were a living substance, a means of catching a few drops of the Great Shakti. And where could they go when they sleep, too? Night is as dark outside their body as it is inside, for they have colonized nothing but materials for their good looks and their func­tioning—here and elsewhere, in sleep as in death, you go into what you are. If you are nothing except thinking jelly, you go nowhere except back to the general melting pot. Some means of transportation is needed to go somewhere. To “go out" of the body, clearly, there has to be someone going out. And who goes out?

Some beings have accumulated little drops of the great Shakti with a sword or a chisel, with religion or irreligion, anything, anything that fell into their hands: a piano or a brush; they have lived each minute as if they had to be in that minute—be anything but at least be—not stroll through life from one occupation to another with a thou­sand steps of nothingness in between; they have accumulated and accumulated little sparks of the great Energy, through everything, everywhere, through rebellion or submission, agreement or disagreement, yes or no—anything so long as it lives, and it is. And what remains once we have closed all our books, ceased all our gestures and our footsteps, the thousand footsteps of life, to lie down in sleep or in death? That is what remains, those little drops of being, without a religion or party—quite pure—without a profession or any pretext—so simple and the only living reality. This is all that remains: little imperishable drops, for what fire, what kind of fuel could possibly destroy that Energy, since it is the very fuel of all the stars! Little drops accumulating within ourselves, hour by hour, day by day, life after life, and building an indestructible body inside and around us—a body commensurate with our true color, our true measure of being and intensity. This is the means of trans­portation. It is the accumulation of the great Shakti that can go through all ages and places, and gravitates according to our lightness. Some beings have accumulated their little intensity within a single occupation and have only striven to know, know ever more; striven to love, love ever more; striven to do and to do again. They have projected their flame within a small family circle, a small country's circle, within greater and greater circles, and they have dissolved their little individuality into the love of the earth or into the Whole, merged their little intensity into the great Intensity. These are those that have more than one body and many colors. They have the body of their accumulated knowledge, the body of their accumulated love, the body of their action —lots of bodies glistening with all those little vibrating centers. They have cultivated all the notes of all their tuning forks, all the colors of their intensity. They have projected themselves farther and farther afield; they have loved and known farther and farther beyond, acted farther and farther on. These have a body and other bodies that have grown throughout the ages, grown in every latitude and through every occupation, grown so much, finally, that they no longer need to “go out" of anything whatever or to change their milieu, for everything has become their body and the Shakti itself is their Milieu.

These, perhaps, will discover a supreme way of touching Matter and a supreme way of being.

The next body upon earth.

And perhaps there is no "supreme,” but an ever growing way of being.

6: From Art to Matter

She was to enter the “artists life” at nineteen by marrying Henri Morisset, a pupil of Gustave Moreau and a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. It seems odd to speak of an “artist’s life” for Her who had so many various lives present in her memory or living before her eyes—now glittering, now brutal, illumined or obscure, and initiated into so many mysteries—not to mention all the lives we do not know. Her view of the world was obviously not the same as ours, nor was she hurried and feverish like we who think we fall over at the end of the road, after a few years of struggle and pain mixed with meager joys, whose source and destiny we do not even know, nor whether they will fecundate anything except a doubtful progeny alien to us. We must admit that we live a complete absurdity and our ways would have seemed very barbaric to supposedly less intelligent ancestors. For Her, everything was different. She had a different way of touching Matter and a different way of growing up on a highroad that became ever clearer, vaster, and more precise: It is quite amusing, you learn.... Even if I lived a thousand years or more on earth, I would go on learning unceasingly, and I am sure I would always learn something new, for what was true yesterday is no longer so true today and what is true today will no longer be so tomorrow.¹ One day, when a child asked her what had become of Beethoven’s soul—probably thinking that that wonderful genius had to be reborn as a super-genius writing super-quartets—Mother, with that ever present touch of humor, replied to the deeply shocked child, 1 don't know— maybe a cobbler! For our concept of the grand road is as absurd as the absurd little bit of truncated path we hurry along in order to become the super-something of today’s fashion or todays taste or today’s knowledge—but fortu­nately tastes change, and fashions, and sciences. But what does not change in all this? What is the constant? And She added in order to reassure the child, disconcerted by the prospect of a cobbler Beethoven: It isn't a downfall; it is just meeting the problem from another angle.²

What then is this problem of all times and of each time?

The Artist’s Life

From Luxor or the Palazzo Ducale to rue Lemercier (the location of Morisset’s atelier) there was apparently quite a step, but this whole world is a tremendous appearance of "something" which goes on imperturbably beneath, and through all appearances.

We are in 1897, one year before Gustave Moreau’s death, six years after the death of Rimbaud. The Impressionists’ explosion of light had set off a whole train of waves across Europe and gathered together a remarkable palette on the banks of the Seine, which was already bursting into a thou­sand new colors. Monet was painting his Peupliers au bord de I'Epte, while the little atomized dots of the Pointillists were leaving in their wake a new thirst for kneading Matter and wresting goodness knows what emphasis or light from it. The Neo-impressionists, Expressionists, Fauvists were already drawing their provocative lines and catching the sky or trees to tinge them with canary yellow or brick red— the colors of their souls—or with “something" that had no longer anything to do with appearances. Rouault outlined his faces like bas-reliefs letting centuries pierce through or some surprised Assyria open its eyes amongst us. Like Mirra herself, painting was bursting the bark of the world to rediscover some ungrasped mystery. Vlaminck left his violin for that strange vertigo. Braque and Picasso were already progressing like young, ravenous wolves to disar­ticulate once and for all that old and dubious articulation. In the background, Rodin was chiseling and rechiseling his Porte de VEnfer, as if some new heaven might spring forth out of that chaos of the soul.

And Mirra was there.

She had her eyes wide open; She gazed at all this with her Mona Lisa smile or her laugh that delighted in every­thing, understood everything, played with everything— which understood so well what the others were seizing, clawing, kneading or tearing apart on their canvas or in stone. Like Morisset, like Rouault, Matisse was a student of Gustave Moreau, and She would know them all, as well as the old Impressionists—Renoir, Degas, the last days of Sisley, Signac, and the one who never painted his plates round (Cezanne). But he was right!³ And her gaze never paused; her thirst was as great as theirs, perhaps even greater. Even after they had stopped exploring, She was still digging and digging into Matter to wrest its secret. Even in front of the most extravagant explosions of colors and lines of our modernists, She, who had such a refined culture, would still exclaim, at seventy-seven, What’s terrible is that it gives you a complete distaste for all the other types of painting! Yes, they’ve managed to dispel all my taste for classical painting. There was a time when I looked at the paintings of Rembrandt, Titian or Tintoretto, Renoir or Monet, and I felt a great aesthetic joy. I no longer feel this aesthetic joy; they all seem empty of aesthetic joy. Naturally, I feel none of it when I look at the things they do today, but neverthe­less it’s SOMETHING BEHIND THIS that has caused the other to disappear. So with a little effort toward the future, we may find the formula for the new beauty.⁴

She was there—was it by chance? In fact, we had not had such a profound revolution since 1789, and Einstein was eighteen when Mirra turned nineteen. Like the poin­tillists, Max Planck was about to discover that light did not move sensibly at all, but in “little parcels." Newton’s apple was beginning to be seriously threatened, like a certain other apple that caused us to fall from paradise. And it is not over yet.

Of course She was everyone’s favorite. They were all thirty, thirty-five, forty years old, while I was nineteen or twenty ... I was by far the youngest.⁵ She had a little something that opened every heart and every door, like Mira Ismalun, but it had nothing to do with her eccentricity or her wardrobe (I had lacquered boots that were cracked and I painted them so it wouldn't show!)⁶ and her words were rarer than her laughter, but She had a silent way of going right to the heart of things, of casting off the mask of appearances and touching what vibrated there—that something the painter strove to capture, which he could hardly explain to himself —She also had that sweetness mingled with humor which knew how to be quietly violent, that sharp intelligence and that immediate comprehension which put each thing very simply in its place, so simply that no one had thought of it and everyone would break into unexpected laughter. Even Rodin confided in her. So many secret intrigues thus came to her unbidden, involving this one torn between his wife and his model, that one torn between his art and the diffi­cult truth he strove to wrench without flourish from a canvas or a block of granite. Had Mirra cared to collect her reminiscences, we would have had some remarkable mem­oirs, but for her it was all a fleeting breeze, and She had already moved ahead, far ahead into the forge of the future. Those who forge ahead, everywhere and in every form, were the only ones who interested her. She was just passing through. And everyone knew She was just passing through. We can picture her in her long sheath gown, as was the fashion in those days, the bodice tightly fitted like an hour­glass, her amber hair swept into a coil, high on top of her head like Shiva's jatta¹⁰² her round cheeks with the slightly golden complexion of the Middle East, that very impassive face which would suddenly open into laughter and so curiously model itself on what She was looking at, and those eyes which took on the colors of the worlds. She seemed to have stepped out of a painting by Renoir, but no Renoir would have known how to paint those eyes, and She stepped out of more than one painting, depending on the day or the hour, with a quite extraordinary mobility that could make her resemble a Clouet as well, an Egyptian mask or a Moghul miniature (one day I saw her look like a cat). This "adaptability” of Mother's features—and of Mirra’s, I suppose—is one of the strangest phenomena I have ever seen—probably not "strange” for her who became what She saw, who plunged so deep within that it all became one, without any barrier, as with the python in the Jardin des Plantes, the geraniums at the Tuileries (calm and smiling, nothing disturbs them), that opalescent reflection on Monet’s soft rivers, or the distress of this or that person —and ultimately the great distress everywhere. She went into everything—paintings, beings, cats, stones sculptured or not—and She left something in the heart of each one that no Mira Ismalun could ever have left.

The Division

Strange Mirra.

Yet, all this did not quench her thirst. She was in quest of a more profound revolution than that of lines and colors, and Einstein or Planck would have finally interested her more than the Impressionist explosion, although every­thing is linked. A secret ferment had crept into Matter to shatter the old facade.

In Bengal, Sri Aurobindo had started his revolutionary activities.

She was searching left and right; She kept her eyes wide open, making all sorts of "studies,” as She called them, and the experiences kept pouring in—unexpected, chaotic, but involving human matter this time. What could all of this mean? We make pretty paintings, talk madly in the night, dare this line or that color, chisel marble or mold clay, but life, that primary matter without frame or flourish, what is it? All that is like a lovely opaline or lemon yellow foam, or whatever color we sprinkle over something that remains so gray and drab underneath, so petty at heart (Culture? A sort of foam that has been whipped up and floats on the surface,⁷ She said), or else life was just a paintbrush or a chisel, or any kind of instrument, and the rest was a mere nothing strolling about between two brushstrokes. Where was life? Real life? And that color so warm and vibrant which bursts forth on the canvas was but rarely found on the face of the painter, quite the contrary. She had only to open her eyes and a different story emerged, sometimes even a curious story, as if the features of the face became transparent and formed other lines with moving colors, not always pretty—sometimes dark, or even an absence of a face within a gloomy haze—and at times the various parts of the face would take on different hues according to the moods of the person in question, and it all formed a kind of composite picture with harsh contrasts or muddy colors, which in no way resembled the artist’s lovely painting. Had Mirra dared to paint what She saw, She might have made a more “realistic" Picasso than Picasso himself. But Picasso had yet to paint his "Harlequins.” The state of conscious­ness of the person I’m looking at, for instance, changes his physical appearance ... The eyes are not quite the same, and the rest o/ the face, too, even the color and the shape. Within one individual aggregate, you find the whole range, and not only the whole range, but it changes constantly; the propor­tion of vibrations changes; only the appearance remains what it was, but that’s very superficial. And their state shows itself as—if you only knew the things one can see! A myriad of forms, faces, expressions. You’d think it was an album by the sharpest humorist possible ... And it all turns round and round, constantly. It’s very amusing, really. But it’s not seen by someone severe or harsh—no, no!—It's seen by someone very sharp—very sharp—with a wonderful sense of humor and a charming irony. It swarms and swarms. And people who are quite shut up in their bag of skin give you the feeling of something totally artificial, hard—hard, dry and artificial, and exact.⁸ So why should this picture not be as lovely as the other? Why should life be inferior to the picture we paint of it, a chance brushstroke in the midst of a dark “mudhole”? In the end, molding that human matter seemed to her more interesting than coloring a canvas that so poorly resembled the model. What about changing today’s canvas? What about painting a more beautiful picture? In short, the first and foremost of Mirra's morals was a sort of extension of aesthetics—the Greeks had not discovered anything else. But we are not so sure that all their Apollos did not conceal the same misery.

And Mirra did not like cheating. Honesty began with the color of ones thoughts.

She was to live this artist’s life for exactly ten years, until 1908, when She would divorce Morisset, just as Picasso had begun painting his “Harlequins”—a coincidence? Those artists were very much a fallow land, Mother would remark. When you saw the artist at work, he was living in a magnificent beauty, but when you saw the man at home, he had hardly any contact with the artist he was, and he became generally quite vulgar and ordinary.⁹ We do not know whether this comment applied to Morisset, whom She never spoke about, though not just to him alone. She already was deeply shocked by this division in a person —all persons—between art and life, between what we are and what we do, between the ideal and practical daily life. The eternal division between Matter and Spirit. For the "spirit" does not begin at a certain altitude; if it is not actually there in the most ordinary and banal act, it will really be nowhere, or it will be constantly under threat of being shattered by the first neglected banality. The power of “banality" is one of the most surprising discoveries we have yet to make, in case we still have not noticed that all our civilizations one after the other, all our spiritual or scientific triumphs one after the other, and finally our own lives and bodies, collapse under the most banal pretext—a tiny "random” shock, a speck of dust, a forgotten nothing, one of the million futilities we neglected to instill with spirit, which assail life and finally devour it. Meanwhile, since it takes us fifty or sixty years to become aware of the little nothing that will ultimately destroy everything, it remains “like nothing," and we move about with scores of swarming, silent little deaths biding their time. I recall (please excuse the digres­sion) making a beautiful speech one day to someone who was complaining about her difficulties. Simply "drown the little beast" by putting it in its microscopic place, here, before the ocean that stretches all the way to Malaysia and the Pacific, and beneath the revolving galaxies, I said—a microbe amidst the eternity of time and space. To be sure, cosmic consciousness is an excellent way of drowning the little beast. But the little beast takes its revenge—it never drowns. And this person quite simply replied, "Yes, but microbes are what galaxies are made of.” And what un­makes them. In fact, until we have infused the spirit into every last microbe, we shall keep on dying again and again. And perhaps all our civilizations die one after another only to learn that lesson.

We are not here to create "civilizations” but to find a new way of touching Matter, no longer with thoughts, claws or a trunk, but with something else this time.

Mirra was too much of a "materialist,” a lover of Matter, to tolerate this division and not strive to instill spirit every­where, or rather to free the spirit everywhere, since She saw the same totality of consciousness flowing everywhere. “To join the two poles,” She would call it: The universe was not created for anything other than that—to join these two poles, the two extremes of consciousness. And when they are joined, one realizes that both extremes are exactly the same thing—at once a single and innumerable whole.¹⁰ Over there, in Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo was discovering the same truth, while fully engaged in his revolutionary movement, and experiencing the infinitudes of the Spirit in the very midst of the most violent or most commonplace everyday actions. Most of the religions have put their curse upon Matter, He would write, and have made the refusal or the resigned temporary’ endurance of the physical life the test of religious truth and of spirituality. The older creeds, more- patient, more broodingly profound, not touched with the torture and the feverish impatience of the soul under the burden of the Iron Age, did not make this formidable divi­sion; they acknowledged Earth the Mother and Heaven the Father and accorded to them an equal love and reverence; but their ancient mysteries are obscure and unfathomable to our gaze who, whether our view of things be materialistic or spiritual, are alike content to cut the Gordian knot of the problem of existence with one decisive blow and to accept an escape into an eternal bliss or an end in an eternal annihila­tion or an eternal quietude.¹¹

And we recall this sublime line from Sri Aurobindo:

lied up the spirit to golden posts of bliss¹²

And the others have tied up Matter to the black posts of death. For the dogma of the ones—“We all are heading for death"—is as false as the dogma of the others—“We all are heading for heaven.” We "are heading” neither for death nor for heaven; we are in something else, which is neither Matter as we see it with our eyes of mental caterpillars nor heaven as we see it with our mind—something that our next pair of eyes will have to discover. Death might be the ultimate dogma to shatter. But to do this, we must go down into a certain microscopic, cellular "banality," which we have so far neglected for more brilliant pictures. For death no more begins with rigor mortis than the spirit begins at a certain altitude.

Sri Aurobindo and Mother are the whole story of a new relationship between Spirit and Matter, the discovery of a third piece of data that modifies both Spirit and Matter and opens the door to a new species upon earth.

The Clarification of Matter

How was Mirra to proceed? What path was She going to follow? ... It is hard to say. She may not have been too sure herself: It must mean that my course must be uncharted, even to my own mind, She would soon note. It is very easy to say first, second, third ... First, She did this, then She did that, so many exercises, so many meditations—and it all makes a nice little path inside a box. But, as always, She was mischievous enough to hop to the left and to the right, one step forward and another goodness knows where— to confuse everybody. Or perhaps to confuse our heads, which think of yoga as a sort of exercise, like dumbbells, geometry or gliding. In fact, She did not know what yoga was; She had never heard of that specimen, and as for “exercises,” well, all life was her exercise and the path ran everywhere, in every direction, without division. We might try to catch Mother in a roundabout way, but She laughs at us and has already run away. Quite a task for her present or future scribes, if they do not want to fall into the silliness of "Mother said" or "Mother did"—She said everything, even the most contradictory things, and did everything, even the most unexpected things. My consciousness is con­stantly a consciousness of action. Always action—action, action, perpetual action. Ultimately, constant creation. I could have been a scholar, I could have been a writer, just as I could have been a painter—and I have never had the patience for any of it. There was always “something" moving on too swiftly, too high and too far.¹³

Undoubtedly loo fast for Morisset; they went separate ways peacefully, smoothly, as good friends, until he remar­ried, as chance would have it, one of... Mirra's friends. We know little of him except that he was an unbeliever, like all the rest of the saintly tribe, and a lover of the good life, perhaps a bit fickle and undoubtedly not inclined to put into his life what he strove to put into his paintings. She never attempted to "reform" or convince him. It was com­pletely against her nature to try to convince others; She had a spontaneous sense of absolute freedom. I have the feeling that the world cannot be true unless it’s absolutely free.¹⁴ And with her disarming simplicity, She would later reply to those who reproached her for not being strict enough with certain unruly sheep, The Divine realizes Him­self differently in everyone—otherwise there would be only one person I¹⁵ And when Morisset closed his eyes forever to go elsewhere, it was of her that he thought and from her that he begged forgiveness. So, everyone must follow his own path and others have no business interfering with it.¹⁶

It is that simple.

Simple, but difficult if one is honest.

Nevertheless, She would have a son, Andre, who also became a "Polytechnician” (a family disease). She was exactly twenty. This was not what She expected from life, nor was it what She had hoped for from Morisset: I always dreamed of a great, shared love free of all animal activity, She would have one of her literary characters say, something that could physically reproduce the great love that is at the origin of the worlds.¹⁷ But producing daughters and sons ... I have never felt physically very maternal. There are millions and millions who do that, so do it again? No, truly, that’s not what one is born for.¹⁸

What we are born for ... We are a mystery to ourselves, each of us shut up in his bag of skin, with a father, a mother, and very soon geography and laws and history, lots of stories—but where is our story?—friends, family, then a job—what job?—a wife and children who begin the same story over again ... which we never began—when did we begin one second, one single little second of our own which would not be the story of the grandfather, of the great­grandfather and of the friends of our friends, with only a difference of a pen or a stethoscope, of a wife in brown or white who then begin again the grandmother's or the friends’ story, with a difference of religion or a straw hat, and scores of little libraries to recount the story that had never begun? We are wrapped up and bound in twenty- three thousand mysteries before we even know it. But truly speaking, there is no mystery here in all of this; it has just been laid on us along with the father, the grandmother, geography and the laws. Then we think we have to "do” this, and “learn” that, and we run after books that tell us only what others have learned, who in turn had learned it from others, adding only a little more mystery and some equations to it all in order to box-in the great Mystery they themselves have woven; we run after one object, another object, millions of objects to fill up the great emptiness of the subject in question, who is obviously not there—and where could he be? He runs about here and there; he runs multiplied a million of times after what he is not. He invents docks and telephones, but he has not even for a second invented himself. Has he ever once purely been himself—ή just a trace—free from ah this wrapping that cloaks itself in religion and philosophy and colors, lots of colors? We're born with a mudhole to clean out,¹⁹ She said. To know, know, KNOW! I knew nothing, nothing but the things of ordinary life, external knowledge. I had learned everything I had been given to learn; I had learned what I was taught, but also what my brother was taught, higher mathematics and all that! I had learned and learned and it was nothing. None of it explained anything to me. I couldn’t understand a thing!²⁰

Mirra was cleaning out the great, mysterious mudhole. She wanted to see things clearly—and without mystery, above all no mystery! She looked within herself and saw all their stories, scores of stories—Mathilde and the Big Turk and the neighbor of the neighbor—"the horrible mix­ture.”²¹ It’s like when you take different colors—three, four or five different colors—put them in the same water and mix it all up; the result is something murky, indistinct and incomprehensible, isn't it? You don’t know what is red, blue, green, or yellow anymore. It’s something turbid, a mixture of many colors together. So the very first task is to separate out the red, blue, yellow and green, and to put each one like that, in its proper place.²² It is quite possible in fact that She who had gone through so many “Mysteries" in other lives was born into the materialistic banality of this life in order to escape the burden of outdated initiations and, freed from all wisdoms, rediscover the Spirit’s supreme mystery at the heart of Matter. This is perhaps what "meeting the problem from another angle" means. There are large angles, small angles, millions of angles; and then there is a particular point where all angles originate, as the Big Bang originated from an atomic speck.

But first of all, Matter must be clarified.

She did it everywhere, at every moment, in the street or on the stairs leading up to her room, in the smallest thing, the least encounter. No, life is not mysterious; we just do not know how to live it; we constantly stir up the mud in the pond, on the boulevard and in everything we encounter, then we are surprised we cannot see anything clearly. We stir up thoughts, emotions, reactions, and we do not really encounter anyone or anything except our own mixture, which we then mix with everything. So how could the exact vibration, the exact perception, possibly occur? We might as well ask a radio set to broadcast on its exact wavelength after dipping it in coal tar. We BATHE in all conceivable things—good, bad, neutral, luminous, obscure—all of it is there, and everyone's consciousness is supposed, in principle, to act as a filter.... Basically, this is the purpose of physical existence: everyone is an instrument to control a certain range of vibrations that represent his particular field of work.²³ And it’s a wonderful thing—people do not realize what an ineffable grace it is—the way this universe is organized is such that there is a whole gamut of substance, from the most material substance to the highest spirituality, and all is gathered together within what we call a small individuality, but under the control of a central will. All this is yours; it is your field of work. It’s as if a number of particular vibrations had been carefully selected, collected, and put at your disposal so you can work on them fully—night and day, when you are awake or asleep, all the time. No one can take this away from you—it's marvelous!²⁴ So there is everything that comes from below, the old congenital and familial habits, the reactions that go back to the first milk we sipped, so "natural”—the enormous product of our education—and then there is the world of horizontal vibrations which come in at their own sweet whim and make us jump here or there; it is an infernal fandango compared to which our rush-hour traffic seems a pastoral dream. And everyday, we add some new “knowledge,” new encounters, new and wonderful "points of view” to this strange mixture, but all along there is nothing new in all that, except a gigantic mental tangle caught up in luminously obscure convolu­tions. We make a grand tour around a small trapeze and think we have gone around the world. And that trapeze is not even of our own making—what is ours in all this? Perhaps an idle second we had not even noticed, a second which seemed to give a little smile to goodness knows what.

No, there are no exceptional talents or exceptional visions; there are clear or clouded instruments.

But once there is the slightest bit of clarity, then ... then the world starts to become extremely interesting. Then “somebody” inside begins opening one eye—a completely fresh and clear eye, as if it were looking at the world for the first time ever. And nothing is mysterious anymore. We have emerged from the mysterious kneading trough. One learns to read the great book of the world, like Mirra in her little chair or with the trees in Fontainebleau: No one had yet spoken to me of meditation or of how to meditate. I would sit underneath those big trees; I felt very quiet and concentrated inside, and I almost lost the sense of the outer world; I felt a very intimate contact with the trees, and I was very happy. There are trees whose friendship with people grows very intimate. They are capable of a great affection and their generosity in giving protection may be far greater than man’s. If they like you, you can clearly feel the vibrations of their vital force.²⁵ We learn about a new kind of life flow, which spreads everywhere, in everything, connects everything without partitions of time or space—it is there immediately. We can take a river as a good symbol of life, Mother remarked, and what is constant in a river is the “water” element: it’s not always the same drop of water, but it's always water—without water there would be no river. And what is enduring in a human being is the “consciousness” element.²⁶ Freed from its mental coating and the multicol­ored "horrid mixture” of "our" feelings, “our" reactions, the countless “ours” that have nothing to do with us, the consciousness element flows completely clear and discloses its innumerable message. And we realize that it is a force, as concrete as electric or magnetic currents, which can be manipulated just as tangibly. We can aim the beam, emit, or switch off the current; we can make it travel where we want and as we want. And we receive what we want; we see the vibrations coming—light or dark, sympathetic or heinous, vibrations of illness or accident. Sorting out the different qualities of vibrations is a whole field of study. But there are no longer "morals” in all this, those horrible tiger-stripes of virtue and sin,²⁷ as Sri Aurobindo put it, that same devil in black or white; there are only “constructive vibrations” and “destructive vibrations,” the direct vibration and the vibrations with those absurd and completely useless twists and turns.²⁸ And instead of getting entangled in the swarm of horizontal vibrations, we free ourselves from it all and learn to perceive and receive the whole gamut of vertical vibrations, to project the antenna outside the little braincase and discover, world after world, plane after plane, the vibrations that move the world, people and events: I even have all kinds of knowledge that I don’t have!²⁹ Mother exclaimed one day. Yes, everything is there. We just have to draw it from the flowing of the great Shakti. In short, teaching is an attempt to replace Consciousness with an inner library!³⁰ She would say with her humorous touch.

And, finally, where is the misery when all is vast? The only misery is to be small and confined within a body.

We have got out of the little mentalized bag of skin—oh, we might as well say the "mental circus,” and the circus is very nice with its powdered clowns, its dancers and acrobats swinging wonderfully on their flying trapezes; it is a spec­tacle we would never get tired of, stunningly skillful, with jumps through flaming hoops and astonishing juggling ... but when we leave the big tent—that formidable tent, so brilliantly illumined with .., acetylene lamps, we realize that it was nothing but a small tent in the midst of an immensity. We can play in it for fifty years of our life or for centuries. We think we are, well, a highwire acrobat, a clown or a horse-rider; we think we are anybody, you know —a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, a dog or a horse, any­thing, a stone, the sea, the sun—we think we are all that instead of thinking of ourselves as the one.³¹ And this is where the whole mystery begins.

The "unified field" without equations.

In 1905, Einstein was formulating his first laws on the equivalence of Matter and Energy.

7: The Real Reality

She was progressing alone in a world where appearances had exploded. The very ones who had sounded the first tocsin—or first chimes—with their colors or science did not know the meaning of their gesture. We walk blind­folded in the forest of the future while the future is already here, guiding our hands and our steps. She was twenty- three or twenty-four; She moved alone and fearlessly in several worlds at the same time, day and night, and that Matter She was clarifying seemed to sink deeper and deeper into a time without clocks and a space without measure, in a strange geography where the past mingled with the future and where this Matter, so solid, ebbed and flowed under powerful currents, leaving only a thin and fragile crust intact—futile, almost false, and yet so imperiously essential to her materialistic soul, as if this lost speck of star held the key to all other stars, this tiny quivering cell the very power that revolved all the worlds, and this casual little gesture or this passing banality, the ultimate stage where every knot of every other world was knotted and unraveled. A small, decisive representation of a "something" whose laws and real movement She was gropingly seeking. “God” had no doubt blessed her with knowing nothing of Buddhism, otherwise She might have fallen into the great illusionist Maya, and further blessed her with knowing nothing of any "ism"—She progressed innocently, alone, with her eyes open in every direction, and why should the way with eyes open be any falser than the way with eyes closed? Though it is more than likely that no way was absolutely true, save that something in her heart which shone in the midst of everything, night and day, in the banal or the marvelous, the catastrophe or the non-catastrophe, and which pushed and prodded, in search of the real truth of Matter as well as of the Spirit. I have experienced all kinds of things in life, but I have always felt a sort of light—so intangible, so perfectly pure (not in the moral sense, but pure light) and it could go anywhere, mix everywhere without ever getting mixed with anything. I felt the flame as a young child—a white flame. And never have I felt disgust, contempt, recoil, the sense of being dirtied by anything or anyone. There was always this flame—white, so white that nothing could make it other than white.¹ What could possi­bly scare THAT? What Maya could possibly stand before that? What paradise or hell of the twelve worlds—or of the thirteenth, ours, which may not be yet what it really is? But when it is what it really is, then the thirteen worlds will perhaps become one in a time free of sorrow and a space free of clashes—and in a deathless body.

The Supersense

Basically, we are saying that Mirra was in search of the real law of Matter, the real movement of life, but everything revolves imperceptibly around one single problem or one single fact. The fact is that we die, or at least the body dies, and until we have found the key to death, we will not hold the key to life or to Matter. Strangely enough, in order to understand what Matter really is, we have to understand what death is, as if our way of perceiving Matter induced death, too. Both together. No spiritual or scientific revolu­tion will revolutionize anything until we have waged the revolution of death. This side and all the sides of the world are divided by a single lacuna that causes life and the world to be a certain way in a body and another way without a body—two ways separated by a mortal body, a body that dies perhaps because it has not found the way. To find the real way is to find the real law of life and Matter. It means filling the lacuna that prevents life from really being life, something other than a prey for death, and Matter from really being what it is—for we know nothing of what matter really is, except through our microscopes, which can scarcely be more intelligent than we are or are mere extensions of our own intelligence—the same golden or black net extending all the way down to the infinitesimal, the same pair of spectacles looking at itself in a different way. But where is the way? The way that changes every­thing? If only once we open the real window in Matter, then it will surely change as radically as it did the day the mental window replaced the window of the ape.

Over there in Calcutta, Sri Aurobindo, like Mirra, was also seeing exploded appearances, and He would soon write: Everybody now knows that Science is not a statement of the truth of things, but only a language expressing a certain experience of objects, their structure, their mathematics, a coordinated and utilisable impression of their processes— it is nothing more. Matter itself is something (a formation of energy perhaps?) of which we know superficially the structure as it appears to our mind and senses and to certain examining instruments (about which it is now suspected that they largely determine their own results, Nature adapting its replies to the instrument used) but more than that no Scientist knows and can know.’’²

Such was the quest that Mirra had started step by step and that She would pursue day after day and night after night, until her ninety-fifth year. “Seeing visions” did not particularly interest her, no more than witnessing someone’s features change shape and color, or objects sink into another dimension—“another" dimension, but where is the real dimension? All that interested her only insofar as it changed something in Matter and in its organization and was ulti­mately capable *οΐ *doing something for the world, this world on which She walked very solidly. This is one of Mother's, or Mirra's, fundamental characteristics—pragmatism. She did not try to turn what She saw into a philosophy or a system, but into a means of action. I never had that kind of curiosity, I never cared to understand with the head, I wasn’t interested—I was interested in the result, in the inner change: how my attitude towards the world changed, my position relative to the creation—that interested me from my infancy; how what seemed to be quite ordinary incidents could so completely change my relationship with that whole little world of children. And it was always the same thing: instead of feeling burdened, with a weight on your head, and just plodding on like a donkey, something would lift and you would be on top of it—you could look at it and smile, and gradually begin to change. See that thing that’s out of place?... Why not set it right! Like arranging things in a drawer.³

To find the secret of the body and of Matter, obviously, we first need to master them; no one can say what the prison is until he is out of it; one might as well probe the walls of a psychiatric hospital with a microscope to find its reality. And to begin with, how do the senses, the eyes that look into the microscope, work? She conducted hundreds of experiments every day, in season and especially out of season, and it would be hard to choose among those little hops of a cageless bird. But luckily, She recalled one par­ticular type of experiment, which gives us a clue as to the direction, or one of the directions, in which Her quest was flowing. For several months I was immobilized in bed, and found it very boring—I wanted to see what was happening. Next to the room I was staying in was another little room, and outside that little room was a sort of bridge which extended to the middle of the garden and became a stairway leading down to a very spacious and beautiful studio built in the garden. It was the studio of rue Lemercier. So I would keep very still, close my eyes, and send out my consciousness little by little, little by little.⁴ You concentrate your consciousness and then extend it, as it were (almost as if you extended it materially), you cover the whole distance and you arrive in the studio. If you do it correctly, you can see what is in the studio and hear what is happening, though you are not in the studio yourself—your body is lying on a bed in another room, but the consciousness has been projected outside. It is a physical consciousness—it isn't an inner state, because you see physically and hear physically; if there are people in the room, you can see them, and if they are speaking, you can hear them.... It is a kind of supersense, that is to say, a sense that has reached such a degree of intensity and refinement that it can feel precisely what the ordinary sense doesn’t feel,

and see at a distance—see really, see physically at a distance, through the walls.⁵ That “supersense” is consciousness. For in the end there is but one sense—consciousness—which has found it evolutionarily convenient to get into the habit of using eyes, ears, etc., but this is just a sort of evolutionary laziness, we might say, or perhaps a condescension, which accepts momentarily the means of the evolutionary baby that we are—who firmly believes that one cannot see with­out eyes, cannot hear without ears, and cannot live without a body. And because he believes it, it is so. If he stopped believing it, things could well be different. And if we stopped believing in death, that too could be entirely different. We have many habits to change—The prison of millennial habits,⁶ She said.

She was rediscovering all alone what some ancient sages knew, that sanjnana of Sanskrit texts which Sri Aurobindo so limpidly defined in his fashion: Sense is fundamentally not the action of certain physical organs, but the contact of consciousness with its objects, sanjnana.⁷ The child of evo­lution that we are always forgets the fundamental law that would give him the key to his prison and the key to free­dom, namely, that this world is one, an indivisible whole without separation, in which we have cut out anthills, shells and braincases, but it all communicates instantly as if it were a single body—we are one single body of the world, and it is no more surprising to touch New York, Hong Kong or the studio in rue Lemercier than the scratch on one's toe, nor is it surprising that one particular little cell knows another little cell within the same body. We have shut ourselves in a cage and declared it to be the law. Yes, the law of our cage, but it is not the law of the world, neither is it the law of Matter.

Conscious Sleep

To extend one’s consciousness is a first step; to be inde­pendent of the physical instruments is another; and to be independent of the body, the final step. The body is a “relay station," Sri Aurobindo would say, but what does it relay? Mirra had been independent from her body for quite some time, “naturally,” without trying or seeking anything. It was a sort of removable object She could leave anywhere to go wandering elsewhere, but what elsewhere? There are many "elsewheres,” and Mirra was no more interested in wander­ings than in visions, if they did not bring her the means of knowing better and acting better on Matter, her primary field—and why even take a body if it were only to leave it and if She could live better elsewhere? It is simple and logical. We may even wonder why so much fuss has been made about all the heavens and beatitudes up above if it is only to get beatified there while the rest goes on rotting. Nature’s economy has always turned out to be wise, and if she has built this cage, it may be after all, and despite all that, that this cage contains something that exists nowhere else—our materialism always turns out to be the best touchstone, only it is not a "downward materialism,” a materialism of death, as it were, that we should cultivate, but an ascending materialism, which grasps this Matter to make it yield something other than telephones and trinkets, or even super-paintings and super-symphonies that are still a song from elsewhere. Mirra wanted that elsewhere to be here as well, right down to this Matter and this body’s cells. She was simple and straightforward: If it is, it always is, every day, or it is not; drowsy beatitudes and Sunday mass meditations were not for Her. A day means 1,440 minutes and some seconds. But first, we have to know the real workings of the cage, the "mechanism.” And Matter seemed increasingly mysterious and “supple" to Her, like Einstein’s energy or Louis de Broglies wave-particles—this body dies, but why does it die? For everything else went on living before her eyes, with or without a body, and quite supplely. She was not concerned in philosophy or in any ism what­ever: I believed only what I saw, what I touched.

She saw all kinds of things; first, all those worlds or planes of consciousness ranging continuously from the most material Matter—perhaps without any clear-cut dividing line between Matter and Spirit—to vaster and vaster regions, increasingly “ethereal" and very pleasant to live in, where consciousness seemed almost to vanish—but here again, what does this vanishing mean? Is it a limit? Or our own limit? A supercage? Or what else? She was beginning to find her way around all these worlds and to move from one to the other with great dexterity, just as we change from one dress to another, ever lighter and wider, while the physical body remained there at the far end of the thread—a thin “thread of light”—in a deep “sleep,” progressively deeper as She went farther and farther "away,” and almost cataleptic in the end. Life or death hung on that thread, and nothing really died except that odd little chunk of a thing all the way at the end of the thread. She was not afraid; She was never afraid of anything. And there was that "white flame,” everywhere.

Thus, sleep was her first field of study at rue Lemercier. It was not complicated, it was at hand. She was simply trying not to lose the thread of consciousness for a second during her outings. She wanted to know where She was going, what She was doing, why She was doing it and how that nocturnal action influenced her life in Matter or inter­fered with the incidents and accidents that suddenly and oddly took place the next day, as a sort of extension or consequence of her trips. Above all, She did not want to fall into a hole of unconsciousness; in no way did Mirra want unconsciousness; to her, it was death, real death—one had to have one’s eyes always open, everywhere, on this side of the world and on any side whatever. It was not so easy in the beginning, for there is a sort of little threshold to cross between every world or every plane, an imperceptible change of state; just a breath and one loses contact, which means one falls “asleep” like a log. For some people, there’s no path between one state of being and another; there's a little gap, and so they jump from one state to the other. There is no path linking all the states of being with no break of consciousness. A small dark hole, and you don't recollect. It is like a small chasm over which you have to extend your consciousness. It takes a very long time to build a bridge; it takes even longer than building a physical bridge.⁸ She built all the steps patiently, night after night, and in the end She never "slept" at all. I followed this sort of self-discipline for more than a year. I would note everything—a few words, a trifle, an impression—and try to go from one recollection to another. At first the results weren't very substantial, but after about fourteen months, I was able to trace back all my “dreams" from the end right up to the beginning of the night. It puts you into such a conscious and continuous state that, in the end, I was no longer sleeping at all. My body was lying down, fast asleep, but the consciousness was not in the least resting. The result was absolutely marvelous: You become aware of the different phases in your sleep and of absolutely everything that takes place in it, down to the smallest detail.

And then nothing can escape your control anymore.⁹

This "control" was what interested her, for what good is it to “dream’’ if it changes nothing in Matter? If the seeker has taken care of unifying his being and instilling his con­sciousness into the elements that make up his body, his sleep will be a conscious sleep and of a universal nature. He will be able to know at will what is happening in one place or another, in this person or that one, in this part of the world or another; and, being universal, his consciousness will naturally put him in touch with all the things he wants to know. Instead of an unconscious and useless sleep—except from the purely physiological point of view—he will have a productive and entirely conscious sleep.¹⁰ And She thus explained the method of recall: Keep your head exactly where it was and make a sort of tranquil mirror within your­self, and concentrate on that. Then you’ll catch just the tail end of the dream. Grasp it and pull gently, still without moving. Pull very gently, and one part of the dream will come, then another. Keep going backwards. The end comes up first. Everything goes backwards, slowly—and suddenly the whole dream will flash back: “There it is. So that’s what it was!” But don't jump; keep very quiet. Just repeat the dream to yourself several times—once, twice—until it is cleat- in every detail. Once this dream is worked out, continue not to move and try to go farther within—suddenly you'll catch the tail end of something else. This one is more distant and vague, but you can still grasp it. Here too hang on and pull it in the same way—and you see that everything changes, you enter another world. All of a sudden, you're in the midst of an extraordinary adventure—it's another dream. Follow the same process. Tell yourself the dream once or twice until you’re sure to remember. Remain very quiet. Then start going even deeper within yourself, as if you were getting in farther and farther. And then, suddenly, you’ll catch a vague form, a feeling, a sensation ... like a breath of air, a gentle breeze, a little puff "Well, well!" you say to yourself. It slowly takes shape, grows clearer—and this is the third category.¹¹

And finally, at the end of all the categories, there was a supreme phase up above in the consciousness, a purely luminous, white and motionless phase, where everything rested as if in an eternity, and which left one completely refreshed, A few minutes in that bath and everything was supremely relaxed and renewed.

We have yet to discover that all these worlds or planes are the source of all that happens to us here, and that our millions of little chance events are infallibly, methodically and continuously woven there, as if by someone who knows all and sees all—and who is perhaps ourselves without the partitioning of a little mental shell.

Then we shall realize that we are naturally universal.

The Subtle Body

But first, there was that immediate frontier of Matter one was not sure whether it was still Matter or something else, perhaps another type of Matter, or real Matter itself? But that She saw even with her eyes open. Around herself and around everyone (though with very different aspects), She saw a lighter body, a lighter garment that She took on for her excursions in Matter’s immediate vicinity—a world resembling the physical world, but a physical that would be less grating, where things are more harmonious and satisfy­ing, less excited; there is less of that feeling of haste and uncertainty.¹² And this lighter body used to follow her everywhere, even on the boulevard, and seemed to be the means of transportation into that other, less heavy Matter —like a lining of the physical world,¹³ She said. She was discovering what thousands of people, not necessarily wise, had discovered here or there, under every latitude and over thousands of years, but which is veiled to us by our too heavily materialistic look—the sukshma sharira of Indian tradition, the "subtle body,” which is going to play an important role in our story, as we shall see. This body She had been seeing for a long time, ever since She was very young: The higher understanding of the intellectual con­sciousness came long after the experience. Since my earliest childhood, experiences have come like that: something massive takes hold of you and you don’t need to believe or disbelieve, know or not know—bam! There's nothing to say—you are facing a FACT.¹⁴ The “fact," in this case, was the body that people sometimes take on in their sleep, or even more radi­cally when they die. It is the first step in a journey we have yet to undertake with Mirra. We are actually fortunate to find in Mirra an experimenter who is not perverted by the sum of her past experiences and everything that has been woven around them—a kind of spontaneous Einstein free from all the possibilities or impossibilities of Newtonian mechanics, Sanskrit grammar and initiatory treatises. We might call her a materialist of the Spirit.

We could agree with Mathilde that all this was the stuff of dreams, and we would not deny it, for after all Einsteins equations are also a kind of dream for a good many (per­haps) superior mammals. Let us recall a lively little scene between Mathilde and Mirra, which took place soon after the amazing grandmother's death. “Just imagine," said Mathilde, “I'm constantly seeing your grandmother! And, what's more, she gives me advice! ‘Don’t waste your money,' she tells me." “Well, she’s right, one must be careful,” I replied, (we can well imagine Mirra's tone while her cheeks puffed with suppressed laughter) “But look here, she’s dead! How can she talk to me! She’s dead, I tell you, and quite dead at that!” I said to her, “What does it mean, to die?" It was all very funny.¹⁵ Because for us, whatever takes place outside the fishbowl is obviously a "dream.” Perhaps we are the dream of fish. Or whose dream are we? To find out, we must get out of the bowl. To make things clearer, I could give an example of that subtle physical; it is a personal example, but after all, what good is the most extraordinary knowledge in the world if it is to remain in libraries? A person very close to me committed suicide in France while I was in India. To do so, he rented a room in a small town where I had never been. Of course, I had no idea that he was going to kill himself. And one night, in a deep sleep, I saw something that seemed quite banal and insignificant to me, but as Mother had taught me never to disregard anything (especially "banalities”), I recorded the scene. I was climbing a rather dark staircase and I came to a room. I did not enter this room but only stood at the threshold. Somehow I understood it was this person s room but I did not see him. My eyes simply scanned the room—longer than it was wide, carpeted with a kind of straw-colored carpet and completely bare except for a whitewood bed in the far end corner. All this was clearly seen. But my eyes lingered especially on a window, as if this window had a sort of special intensity. Through this window, one could see a small square with trees (the room was over­looking them), lined with houses on one side and a kind of rather low rampart on the other; this square extended out perpendicularly and disappeared into the distance under a pallid, misty and icy sky streaked with black clouds. I gazed at that sky for a long time, and there was a sort of moving intensity in it all. And that was all. Nothing really interesting. Two days later a telegram came announcing his death. I remembered my "room” and immediately sent a sketch of it with the window. It was the very room where he had committed suicide, with the difference that there was no carpet on the floor, but a parquet of pitch pine— which is straw-colored. I had not seen the lines between the boards. Six thousand miles away, it is not surprising. But the window with its landscape was exactly as I had seen it. He was found lying on the threshold of the room. I had seen what his last look saw.

This is a journey in the subtle physical, with the subtle body.

I wonder if our telescopes would have seen the lines on the floor through the walls, from Pondicherry all the way to the French Atlantic coast. One can only wonder how I went there without knowing anything, at the very moment he was dying. Forewarned how? This is the constant great illusion of separateness (such is the real "dream” of the world); we cannot help thinking and feeling that there is there and here, you and me separated in two little bags of skin, and lots of little unknown rooms out there, but as Mother said, You are there, lam there, and everything is there / We are one and the same body calling out and answering itself across thousands of nonexistent miles. Only, we have to get out of the fishbowl; we have to stop being the dream of fish, or of someone else—who is perhaps ourselves, complete and without divisions at last.

Had it not played a very decisive role in everyday life, this subtle body might not have particularly interested Mirra, for after all, may the “dead” rest in peace and what good are journeys in the subtle physical if they do not improve our journey right here? We may not all be fortunate enough (?) to see our subtle body, but it is there nevertheless, and with­out it we would be just a more or less chubby automaton feeling and perceiving nothing but what came in direct contact with its skin or retina. It is our instrument of com­munication with the “outside." All the vibrations of the horizontal world come in through it. It can be considered our psychological clothing, an envelope made up of all the forces we are used to collecting—we could say "secreting,” but in fact we do not secrete anything; we ceaselessly take in, and once it is inside, we say "this is mine.” We are not aware of the intrusion of vibrations. To tell the truth, we live haphazardly. So this clothing takes on the color and intensity of our vibratory habits. There are all kinds of clothing; we are a whole network of microscopic, habitual forces of anxiety, desire, anger, stray impulses, thirsts or aspirations ... which make up a more or less strong and clear garment—red, blue or green, but most often a "horrid mixture” reminiscent of the best Picassos. And sometimes there is no color at all, just a gray blur. A dark magma. And sometimes this clothing is full of holes. Depression, discouragement have a disastrous effect; they riddle it with holes, as it were, weaken its fabric, strip it of all resistance and open up an easy path for hostile attacks. And it is constantly changing. It is open to every kind of suggestion, and they can, from one moment to the next, change and almost reverse its condition. A wrong suggestion has the strongest effect on it, while a good one is equally effective in the opposite direction ... Peace, an equal temper, confidence, faith in good health, a restful and an unchanging good mood, and a radiant happiness give it strength and substance.¹⁶ It is the entryway of all our illnesses. We speak of such and such a microbe, such and such a germ, but there is noth­ing that is not a “microbe” or a “virus”; we are entirely made up of these things! Mother exclaimed. They give ugly names to the things they don’t want, but it’s all one and the same thing.... What’s called “illness” is something constant, a constant state in which you are, or aren’t.¹⁷ When we are in a good temper the "microbe” does not act; when we are in a bad temper, anything can turn into an illness. We are inside the illness. We happen to catch the little "chance" accident we have meticulously woven around ourselves. We carry the illness of our own clothing. That is the only illness.

And the only cure is to repair the clothing, mend the holes, take on another color—a brighter and healthier one. But to do this, we first have to make our substance a little "clearer,” to stop being a public place where anything can drop in of its own sweet will. Then we start perceiving "the dance of vibrations." As they approach us, we see them outside of ourselves, as if coming tangentially toward us, just as they touch our envelope or subtle body—a tiny vibration with varying intensity and all sorts of colors, which says exactly what it is: desire, anger, a dark thought or suggestion of illness; it is unmistakable despite all the smiles, fine words or pleasant airs that can be stuck onto it. It may be accompanied by a feeling, by a taste, or even by an odor... Some formations of illness impart a special taste, a special odor, a particular little sensation to the air, like when you rub a piece of fabric against the grain. ¹⁸ The whole world becomes clear; everything becomes clear. We are the master of our own house, letting in what we want, kicking out or sweeping away what we do not want. And all of life becomes quite different, instead of being that incompre­hensible and horrid mixture. And when we go out of our body to die or to "dream,” we are sure to avoid many night­mares.

Vertical Determinism

Then there is the whole world of vertical vibrations.

To go there had no meaning for her unless something of it could be brought back here. An inner illumination that does not take into account the body or external life is fairly useless, because it leaves the world exactly as it is.¹⁹ Instead of our polychrome, fragmented, syncopated and discor­dant little racket, She wanted to grasp the pure flowing, the great rhythmic waves of the Shakti—that single body of consciousness or force She saw passing through all sorts of human or nonhuman little “relays," and which seemed to alter, take on a yellow or black color, according to the medium it went through, scatter and almost pulverize itself as it plunged into Matter. She spontaneously felt that, if a pure drop of that could be made to flow into Matter, it could change everything. "To change” was already her mantra or her password. After all, death—that blackness which absorbs all the colors of the spectrum without reflecting anything, which no longer responds, and decays because it no longer responds, that ultimate pulverization —was merely a paroxysm of discordance. If one could instill the Rhythm everywhere and in everything, the mortal consequences of that discordance had to stop. It was almost a question of "mechanics” for her: How to straighten what is twisted? Any deviation from what to me was the luminous line, the straight line (not geometrically straight: the lumi­nous line), or the pure light—the slightest deviation from that and ... Oh, it was the only thing that tormented me ... No sense of being virtuous or sinful, none at all—never.²⁰ The straight ray. This was what She sought and wanted to instill into everything, at every step and in the slightest banality. Without that straight ray, everything was or could be mortal. Death began when the ray broke up. This ray She felt above her; She saw it go through all those different zones and take on color, refract itself as in the pharmacist's little bottles, break up and scatter into innumerable little forces quarrelling naturally with each another because each one wanted to be the only ray, and naturally suffering because each one was in search of the great ray that it no longer was. It was simple—but then why was it so compli­cated?

As soon as one rose a single step, a single degree above the little fishbowl, everything began to change. One could see and follow all the little forces frolicking underneath like fish in an aquarium—the shoals of petty thoughts, the swirls of desires, the rush of dwarf or more voracious wills assaulting each other or moving from one person to another without discrimination; and all that generated all sorts of evil spells with sometimes, by chance, little bubbles of light altering the direction of the forces and currents. Among the hundreds of small incidents Mirra saw constantly, one in particular must have struck her because She recounted it several times. It took place in the days when everyone in Paris read the newspaper Le Matin. The top of the front page displayed a little page boy gently holding out a calen­dar with the day's date. It was the 22nd or the 23rd with its usual calamities, but the gentle little page boy was there all the same. The hero of this incident had rented a room in a big hotel; he had just arrived from a long trip and was tired; he fell asleep. But during the night he saw something quite strange: the little page boy from Le Matin was coming toward him, but, instead of holding out the date and inviting him to the joys of the new day, he was inviting him to step into ... his own hearse. Sleep is full of strange happenings and, well, the traveler did not pay too much attention; he got up, shaved and left his room to go downstairs. Right in the corridor, one of the hotel’s pageboys politely invited him to step into the elevator ... He froze, suddenly recalling his "dream." “No, thank you, I’ll walk down.” Two minutes later, the elevator crashed to the ground floor.

This, too, is an excursion in the subtle physical, just one little step above this Matter that appears so material to us—a lucky excursion. But we could perhaps undertake many such lucky excursions that would ward off all the little evil spells of the currents of force colliding within our human fishbowl. We might enjoy a more pleasant journey in Matter if we brought in it the view from above and the ray from above. Which is exactly what Mirra was saying. For all these divided and tangled forces stem from a single Force, after all. There are not umpteen forces in the world, nor umpteen evil spells or “good ones”; there is only one, and if we touch this pure “one,” if we can bring it down into this chaos, all the laws of the fishbowl ought to be altered— or, rather, the whole milieu and its index of refraction will be altered, and what appeared to us divided, fragmented, clashing, colored or discolored like a disparate palette, would start flowing in another way and produce a com­pletely different picture.

We do not really know what the picture of the world looks like. We live an approximation, almost a caricature, of something that eludes us, but which is here nevertheless, entirely here, for where actually is “elsewhere”? Elsewhere is merely clothed in everything we put on it; it has the color of our eyes and the thickness of our fingers, it is as far away as our heart and the millions of light-years of our thoughts and the laws of our thought. In fact, the goal of the journey is not to "get out” of it all, to climb the summits of con­sciousness, crossing plane after plane in order to reach some inaccessible "something," but perhaps simply to cross our own sargassos, through layers and layers of accu­mulated evolution, which give us a feeling of traveling, of going farther and farther away into an ever clearer, lighter and vaster elsewhere—but this vastness was there all the time, beneath our every step and in the grayest of banalities; this lightness was always within us, and this clarity was not from far "above” but from a cleared up right-here. Our heav­ens are not millions of miles away, nor tomorrow or in "other" lives; the complete life is right here, and death is only the journey of our unconsciousness—when that layer, too, is cleared up, eternity will shine in the moment and heaven will dwell in our weightless body. There is no jour­ney! There is no tomorrow, no elsewhere, no "something else"—there is this eternal thing beneath our footsteps and in our least gestures, covered over by a million colors and laws that are only the law of that color and the implacable gravitation of our own darkness. In reality, we live within an infinitely light and fluid and supple and incredible world— but we do not believe in it; we believe in death, in Newton, in Mendel’s laws and all the implacable equations of the doctors and judges of a little colored bubble they them­selves have inflated. We follow the inexorable determinism of our own color and our own milieu of consciousness. Layers upon layers of determinism,²¹ Mother would say. It is as if this immense world were a huge projection—one single projection—crossing increasingly dense and dark layers, and taking on the color or the "law” of each level; but it is one and the same ray from the same pure, light, immense, seeing and free Shakti!—the same thing always, for there are not two. We ourselves, in that little body of ours, are made of a series of superimposed milieus, of dense or not so dense layers, each with its little center attuned to the corresponding universal layer or milieu, and we have every possible kind of life depending on the center or milieu where we are poised. We could say that we are capable of living every possible kind of story, and that every particular gesture or scene or accident occurring below is like a caricature or a distortion of an identical gesture or scene which, if enacted at a higher level, could have resulted in an entirely different story, though still the same, but seen in another light, as if in each life we painted a picture with one particular color—and sometimes we get little flashes of a different color (a little break in the absurd determinism) which herald the next painting, the same story, but purer and more harmonious. We could say that every circum­stance, event or thing has a pure existence, which is the true existence, and a large number of impure or distorted exist­ences, which are the existence of that very SAME thing in die. various realms of the being,²² said Mother. Which amounts to saying that, despite the most absolute determinisms along the horizontal line, if you know how to cross all these hori­zontal lines and reach the supreme Point of consciousness, you can alter things that appear absolutely determined.²³ Rather like the person of the second-floor who stops a falling rock from crushing the head of a passerby, by simply extending his hand out the window. The little page boy of the "dream" is only a first step in this new "vertical deter­minism”—a first step "above," as we said, but it may be simply a first disentanglement of the “immediately-there," a first clearing-up of the thick layer we live in, a first light­ness amid the barbaric equations. A beginning of the real story.

And perhaps we are forever enacting one and the same immense scene, life after life, but each time in a fuller light. The world is an eternal story growing clearer. We are a total “someone else" gradually becoming himself.

The Meeting

It is the story of the world that Mirra would have wished clearer. Her own She knew well; it had been lived and gone over under every possible headdress, Pharaonic headgears as well as straw hats. What She saw around her were Rodin's woes, Rouault's woes, Morisset’s woes: "What! Is this life? What! Are these men?"—everyone's woes under a shiny or not so shiny coating. It was those little deter­minisms She would have liked to change and perhaps, ultimately, the dark determinism of this world confined within a thin and supposedly scientific layer, with each one shut up in a bag of Matter which he thought rigid, separate and mortal. May the illusion be dispelled! She exclaimed in one of her earliest writings. May this painful universe emerge from its frightening nightmare, shake off its dreadful dream.²⁴ And what did She have at her disposal? "Dreams," chaotic and sometimes inexplicable visions, countless perceptions that punctured appearances without healing them, rhythms of another harmony, little vibrations as sparkling as a diamond light, which seemed to rip the darkness without dispelling it, level upon level of con­sciousness that seemed to end in a rarefied air, worlds and bodies that no longer were the earth’s body, unless they were from another, still unborn earth. All this was sketchy, mixed, unexplained. She had only that thirst, as if her thirst were her clearest certainty, a sort of unborn future burning within like a white flame—"dreams." "You'll never achieve anything in life.” She was twenty-six. She was alone. Yet She felt that there had to be a way of driving these dreams down into Matter—the way, there had to be a way. And it was this thirst for a way that ultimately crys­tallized the way; all these “dreams” and "imaginations,” as they say rather commiseratingly, were preparing an over­whelming revolution whose magnitude the world has not yet begun to comprehend. Oh, we do have our imaginings of death, of the telephone, the bomb or our medical charts; we have every destructive imagination, not to mention the most splendid imagination of the great scientific doctors who prescribe remedies for diseases they themselves have created, chemical fertilizers to enrich lands they have emp­tied of their birds—all the pharmacology in keeping with their indigent consciousness. But there are some rare beings —still children—who have the imagination of truth,²⁵ as Mother would say, some young shoots, still untouched by the putrid wind of our intelligent civilization, who have the capacity to imagine something still unmanifested—a truer earth, a more living Matter—who have antennae that seem to reach out into a still unrealized world, capturing something there and then pulling it down here.²⁶ This is what Mirra was already doing—pulling. She was gropingly pulling down tomorrow’s world. She was seeing a Matter that is to be our next Matter; She was unwittingly looking for that small number of beings capable of bringing down another determinism into the physical determinism.²⁷

She was quite alone.

Then, toward the beginning of 1904, when She was quite at the end of her own resources and just before meeting a strange character who was to give her, at last, some rather coherent explanations of her experiences, Mirra had a series of "dreams" (more dreams) in which She met... Sri Aurobindo, whom She had never heard of and who was completely unknown in France—ten years before meeting him physically in Pondicherry in 1914. / had a series of visions and in several of these visions ... (I knew nothing about India, mind you, nothing, just as most Europeans know nothing about it: a country full of people with certain customs and religions, a confused and hazy history, where a lot of "extraordinary things" are said to have happened. I knew nothing.) Well, in these visions I saw Sri Aurobindo just as he looked physically, but glorified; that is, the same man I would see on my first visit, almost thin, with that golden-bronze hue and rather sharp profile, an unruly beard and long hair, dressed in a dhoti with one end of it thrown over his shoulder, arms and chest bare, and bare feet. At the time I thought it was ‘vision attire’! I mean I really knew nothing about India; I had never seen Indians dressed in the Indian way ... And in these visions I did something I had never done physically: I prostrated before him in the Hindu manner. All this without any comprehension in the little brain (I mean I really didn’t know what I was doing or how I was doing it—nothing at all). I did it, and at the same time the outer being was asking, ‘What is all this?’²⁸

What is quite interesting is that just at the beginning of 1904 Sri Aurobindo was starting his own conscious yoga, while Mirra, as for her, was setting out on her systematic exploration of the planes of consciousness or layers of determinism in order to go back to that “Supreme Point." As if they both were waiting for this encounter to start their work together—ten years before meeting each other.

It was an encounter in the subtle physical, just a little step above Matter (but is it really above and outside of Matter, or within a Matter more exact than that of our eyes?).

If these are "dreams," then where is reality? Or perhaps reality is a dream becoming real, according to the dreamer’s capacity? Some people have the capacity to dream the future of the world, just as others capture little hells that become real or thin utilities that vanish away. Let us beware of our dreams. For what can we actually dream within our fishbowl? No dream is ours, nor can we engender a single thought of our own; it all comes and goes and passes and rolls amid the great torrent of the Shakti; we catch small sorrows, big sorrows, gray or pink dreams, depending on the wavelength we are able to tune in to, and all that is the distortion, clear or cloudy to varying degrees, of the ray crossing our fishbowl. But the future is not tomorrow, any more than Pondicherry is six thousand miles away, the meeting in ten years’ time or the great light that will change everything millennial distances away and on ethereal planes. It is at the distance of our own obstruction; the future is the slow journey through our layers of unconsciousness; tomor­row is on the other side of the fishbowl just as we are for our brothers the fish; our heavens are not waiting for our death, nor is our freedom waiting for super-constitutions, any more than the beautiful earth is waiting for a millen­nium of grace—it is all here, unhindered, it is not on any other side or at any distance. There is no other side than the thickness of our consciousness, no determinism other than the darkness of our own milieu, no laws other than those we dream up within a fishbowl. Let us beware of our dreams. The future is a great solar flower shining in our midst, which seems to open petal by petal as our eyes are unsealed—and what if we opened our eyes a little quicker? What if we understood a little quicker? What if we tore this false darkness with a radiant gaze? Oh, what are we waiting for?!

Some people open their eyes sooner, quicker, and they draw into our consciousnesses this great, right-here dream, which is a dream only to us. They experience the pain of bearing the dark layer of unconsciousness so the ray may reach our opaque substance. They are waiting and waiting ... Oh, what are we waiting for to wake up from this nightmare? And we invent machines, constitutions and panaceas that always fail, while the one Gaze that would dispel all our phantoms is waiting—if only we understood.

One may perhaps wonder how Mirra could, ten years in advance, meet someone She did not know, a "stranger” whom She thought wore a "vision attire" (!). But where is the "unknown,” except in our fishbowl; where is the “other,” the great mystery without mysteries? The mystery is in our layer of unconsciousness; the other is our self that thinks it lives in a separate little bag. We have been walking since time immemorial with a million “strangers” who have shared our roof, our play and our woes, toward one supreme point where all recognize each other because each one is all and all was forever known. Time may be only the slow­ness of our consciousness. Mother and Sri Aurobindo had long walked together, long dreamed together, and each time their dream drew closer, each time they cleared the way a little more for the great ray. They had “the imagina­tion of Truth”; they drew onto earth the real reality that the ordinary world calls illusion.²⁹

8: Tlemcen 1: The Doors of the Possible

A new and strange adventure was about to begin in that already strange life. We have called it “Mother's great forest,’’ and we could wander it to the very last day of her ninety-five years and still discover even greater mysteries than we had suspected—transparent mysteries, which are the most undecipherable; every time we try to decipher them, they elude us, laughing in our face, or take us along a totally unexpected path which suddenly opens up on a dazzling spread of light, as if we were on the verge of— what? Something gaping at a vertiginous future. It is fan­tastic and yet real, more real than today’s concrete reality, but when we try to grab hold of it, it slips away—we cannot catch it. One cannot decipher Mother; one has to plunge into Her. And come what may. Mother is the greatest novel we have ever experienced—everything is there; love, beauty, vastness, the unexpected, the paths of the future, the paths of the past; one wanders there as in a future beforehand; it is the fiction of the Infinite becoming true.

And so many other things that cannot be put into words, which beat within a secret abyss and will go on beating long after our little bodies are no longer there. There is nothing to believe in, nothing to believe at all—one must simply taste.

Yet this new episode—occultism—closely resembles a dead-end adventure, a path one should not take, but then we always wonder what path ‘‘should not” be taken, for after all there is no path anywhere; walking is what makes the path and walking is what is necessary—to the left or to the right, above or below—and if we are sincere, really sincere, we are bound to end up exactly where we are supposed to go. ‘‘Sincere”—another one of Mother's key words. And as for all the occult knowledge She had accumu­lated, the science of the fourth dimension, those astounding powers that leave common people dumbfounded because they do not understand the process—She quite simply let it all drop by the wayside one day in May 1962:1 no longer need all that. Perhaps because the fourth dimension had merged with this one ... Indeed, there is something simpler, more direct—and more extraordinarily effective. Mirra was always seeking effectiveness. Nevertheless, it took her fifty-eight years to drop that baggage. Might we take advan­tage of the shortcut?... But, truly, what is "useless” or "circuitous” in this good universe? We have yet to find a single blade of grass that does not have its specific use in Nature’s economy, like that Vedic Rishi s disciple who, after studying all the medicinal plants, was sent into the forest by his master: "Bring me a plant that is useless and I will give you initiation." The disciple went, searched and searched, then came back in despair: “I haven't found the plant.” Whereupon the Rishi pressed him to his heart; the disciple no longer needed initiation because he had received knowledge. It is that simple—but quite difficult to realize in every detail, with our eyes wide open, because at the first scratch or "mishap" or “sin,” we raise the rafters: "That shouldn’t have happened!" But everything should happen, ; and perfectly so. Including that delicious original apple, : whose falling might not have been such a bad thing after ! all. It is for us to make sense of it. This is a vital truth when wandering through Mother's forest. Then, specks of gold and meaning start shining everywhere before our eyes, where once there had only been useless dust. But Mother’s forest can also be held within a speck of dust ; it is a magical forest of all dimensions.

A Doge in Dark Purple

It was through a friend of Matteo’s that one day in 1904 Mirra was to meet a singular man who called himself Max Theon—The "Supreme God,” no less. He never said who he really was or where he was born, nor his age, nor anything.¹ It seems he was a Russian or Polish Jew, who was forced to leave his country for that reason. He published in Paris a magazine called La Tradition Cosmique through the agency of someone called Themanlys, a friend of Matteo’s. Mirra pounced on it like a starving lioness. It was the first time ever She had heard of something similar to her own expe­riences, albeit in a rather bizarre language. For her, it was a revelation; all of that had a meaning at last; She was not totally crazy! Perhaps she knew even more than she had realized! We can picture this well-bred little positivist— odd and alien among humans, silent, always silent, because for twenty-six years She could never say anything without being threatened to be taken to the nearest doctor—suddenly thrown into the rationality of her irrational world. It was a sort of cataclysm in reverse—at long last, I am not crazy! She must suddenly have laughed to her heart s content. But let us not be mistaken; Mirra was not the type to gape with admiration and throw herself at the feet of the first mas­ter who comes along (except, of course, in “dreams,” but dreams are strange, as anyone knows). She looked at her cataclysm calmly, but nonetheless with a sigh of relief, now that she knew she was sane and normal. And who was that mysterious initiate? Themanlys knew little about him and spoke of him in the trembling whispers of a young neophyte. "He" lived far away in Algeria, in Tlemcen. That was all. And "He” knew. Then, one fine day, Max Theon unexpectedly turned up in Paris—he already knew who Mirra was. Indeed, he knew many things. Theon was rather tall, about the same size as Sri Aurobindo, and thin, slim, with quite a similar profile. But Mirra immediately knew that he was not the person of her visions. I saw (or rather I felt) that it was not he, because when I met him, he didn’t have that vibration.² Indeed it was not "that vibration”; it was something quite different. Yet, strikingly, there was a likeness—and there would be many more likenesses to Sri Aurobindo's discoveries, but with just that "little difference” which made them stand worlds apart, as if Nature took pleasure in devising the counter-type or anti-type of each being—and the more powerful the model, the more power­ful the anti-model, so to speak. Nietzsche had died just four years earlier—another curious model, or anti-model, we do not know which. Anti-models may well have been devised by Nature to force the models to go beyond themselves and to grow so much ... that no more caricature is possible, or that the reverse of what one represents vanishes at the point where reverses or obverses cease to exist. But that is another story.

Indeed, “that vibration” was not there, but something even more bizarre greeted Mirra’s eyes: suddenly, a portrait by Titian She had seen eleven years earlier in Venice (when Mirra "looked” at something, it was inscribed for centuries, like Thebes’ gutters) superimposed itself over Theon's face in a flash. Absolutely Theon! HIS portrait, you know, as if it had just been done.³ It was the portrait of one of the doges —Mirra had certain suffocating memories from the Palazzo Ducale. She must have swallowed a little hard, and then flashed a broad impassive smile, which probably did not fool Theon for a minute. Things were off to a good start. It might be interesting to know which doge it was, but unfortunately I have never seen the Titian in question, nor have I been able to compare it with one of the most strik­ing portraits Mirra has ever drawn—that of Theon. It looks like one of Rembrandt s etchings, or perhaps a Durer figure: a rather sparse beard, long hair, a black velvet cap, maybe fifty or sixty years old (or forty?), an ascetic face, an eagle's profile, and those eyes ... One side of the face almost illu­mined, clear, with a faint smile hesitating imperceptibly between irony and the lights of heaven, and a chilling left side. Powerful, incredibly powerful indeed, but a power ... Pain, perhaps—that pain everywhere in the depths of human beings—the pain of not being what one is, which results in a sort of struggle to emerge from one's reverse side into one’s obverse side of joy—a power condensed in one point instead of bursting out in the vastness. A high, very high forehead, which must have been capable of receiving many things. A remarkable intuition,⁴ Sri Aurobindo himself would say, which is no meager compliment coming from his pen. And a long, dark purple toga, fastened with a red cord.

It is not hard to imagine one of those powerful doges who carved out their domains from Dalmatia to the Pelo­ponnese and Byzantium or waged their bloody struggles against the Sforzas, then coolly tossed their victims off the Bridge of Sighs. Assuming that Theon's "genealogy” is correct, one may be surprised to see him set out on the “spiritual" path, but our conception of the "Spirit" is prob­ably as erroneous as our perception of Matter, and for the same reason. When speaking of Napoleon, Sri Aurobindo saw God armed striding through Europe,⁵ and this “evolution of consciousness,” which was also one of Theon's themes ("if only humanity understood its role as evolutionary agent of the planet,”⁶ he said) does not necessarily, or preferably, involve little saints. To evolve means to churn Matter, not to soar into heaven. But the way of the Spirit and the way of the Titan are separated by an imperceptible hair, which has only to do with a tiny difference of inner attitude: in one case, one seizes hold of the Shakti while in the other, one lets it flow through oneself—but in both cases the Shakti can strike just as cruelly. This time, Theon too "was meeting the problem from a different angle”: he was going after the Spirit as one goes after Euboea. And he found Mirra on his path. The world is truly a strange thing, infinitely stranger than it seems to us, and infinitely more fabulous than anything all our telescopes can discover across interstellar space; the least thing that takes place here, the least encounter on this earth, describes trajectories next to which the great orbits of our constellations are but four-lane highways totally devoid of mystery. We pass each other by as if it were the first time, for a few seconds or a few years, while that chance gesture echoes the memories of old disasters or pursues an old interrupted story, which will still continue under other latitudes and beneath other skies, in a dark purple robe or in the lightness of a self that no longer needs to shine in any color or conquer anything, because it has all the colors of love in its heart and a single delight in everything. We do not know the millions of "chances” that led to this little chance nor which Titian was preparing this conjunction, unless everything is woven from a single thread—a single picture gradually unveiling itself—the motion of one single Body moving through timeless ages with its myriad little doges shut up in a body, in quest of the one body, the one force and the one conscious­ness, and the one love that would cure all our truncated spaces and misery-laden ages.

But Wisdom is wise. It veils our ancient misdeeds as well as our good deeds so that, free of both, we may move ahead. In any event, Theon had recognized at first glance, if not who Mirra was, at least her uncommon gifts, and he invited her to visit him in Tlemcen—to work. She would go there two consecutive years, in 1905 and 1906, so far as we can determine dates as far as Mother is concerned whose fore­most gift was undoubtedly to slip through all times at once.

Zarif

It was undeniably a wonderful place. Theon had good taste, though sometimes his taste was sarcastic. Zarif was the name he gave to his terraced gardens on the slopes of the Atlas Mountains. A sprawling estate with hundred-year- old olive trees, fig trees unlike any I have ever seen—it was a marvel, just on the hillside, from, the plains all the way up to almost the middle of the mountain....⁷ and a rose garden that was “a work of art,” according to Themanlys, for "Aia” (as Theon had himself called by the Arabs; Aia Azis, "the Beloved," which is a little more amiable than "Supreme God" but hardly more reassuring) was also a gardener—as well as a painter, sculptor, carpenter and ironsmith; he did everything. "To cultivate men as one cultivates plants!" he exclaimed. "Indeed, if one knew it, wanted it, dared it!”⁸ He dared aplenty. But let Mirra herself tell us about that first memorable encounter. It was the first time in my life I had travelled alone and the first time I had crossed the Mediter­ranean. Then there was a fairly long train ride between Oran and Tlemcen—anyway, I managed rather well: I got there. He met me at the station and we set off for his place by car (it was rather far away). Finally we reached his estate—a won­der! It spread across the hillside overlooking the whole valley of Tlemcen. We arrived from below and had to climb up some wide pathways. I said nothing.... When we came in sight of the house, he stopped: “That's my house. "It was red! Painted red! And he added, “When Barlet came here, he asked me, ‘Why did you paint your house red?’" (Barlet was a French occultist who put Theon in touch with France and was his first disciple.) There was a mischievous gleam in Theon’s eyes and he smiled sardonically: "I told Barlet, ‘Because red goes well with green!’" With that, I began to understand the gentle­man.... We continued on our way uphill when suddenly, without warning, he spun around, planted himself in front of me, and sa id, “Now you are at my mercy. Aren't you afraid? " Just like that. So I looked at him, smiled and replied, “I’m , never afraid. I have the Divine here." [And Mirra touched y that white flame in her heart.]

Well, he really went pale.⁹

We cannot help thinking of Gurdjieff and Katherine Mansfield. But Gurdjieff was a little boy compared to Theon, and Mirra was not Katherine Mansfield.

Thus one went through the rose garden with a smile, then through the last terraced garden with a "square pool where water kept spurting out from a spring,”¹⁰ and finally up a little staircase of white stones that led to a high court­yard and Theon’s house. "A Moorish manor,” painted red for the color scheme, as we have seen, with a living room on a level with the garden and overlooking “mosaic court­yards enclosed by high walls, with ogival doors adorned with huge amphoras reminiscent of Scheherazade tales,” said Themanlys, though I am not so sure about Schehe­razade. But there were those terraced gardens. And a grand concert piano in the middle of the living room, with Theon himself standing there in his dark purple toga. There was also an Arab gong, which had the strange habit of resound­ing all by itself, whenever Theon looked at it somewhat seriously. I really saw all kinds of things there, Mother would tell us, and we can well believe it.

But there was also another person, and that was Mrs. Theon. Another personality altogether. Actually, she was the one who had amazing powers—a vast knowledge of the psychic planes,¹¹ Sri Aurobindo would later say—and it was on her experiences that Theon based his teaching. She was Theon’s foundation, and regardless of what can be thought of him, it was certainly to his credit to have been chosen as the companion of this marvelous woman—marvelous! (said Mother), who had certainly enough knowledge and clairvoyance to choose a very capable being for herself. Overwhelmingly capable—that was the trouble. Yet Alma, as she was called, was all sweetness and silent light: Such a soft, tender, luminous peace.¹² We can imagine her wide blue eyes, which seemed to have been washed by the sea, for she came from the Isle of Wight (at least we know where she came from). A small woman, fat, almost flabby— she gave you the feeling that if you leaned against her, it would melt ... absolutely the feeling of sinking into eider­down,¹³ dressed in a long white dalmatic, with an air of being elsewhere, constantly elsewhere, rather sensitive to cold—indeed she spent three-fourths of her life in trance, outside her body, even while she walked, moved about or attended to her chores. She was almost constantly in trance, but she had trained her body so well that even when she was in trance, that is, when one part (or more) of her being was exteriorized, her body kept a life of its own and she could walk about and even attend to small material chores.¹⁴ She could also speak and narrate everything she saw on the other planes, while she was exploring them, which is how Theon gathered all the material for his Revue Cosmique. "Her eyes have the purity of a child's, but they look tired of having seen so many things,”¹⁵ Themanlys noted. She had absolutely fabulous talents! Mother exclaimed, and coming from Mother's lips, who herself was not lacking in rather surprising talents, these words set one thinking. Her powers were of the highest order; she had received an extremely complete and rigorous training, and she was capable of exteriorizing herself, that is, to draw out a subtle body from her material body, totally consciously, and twelve times in a row. In other words, she could shift consciously from one state of being to another, live there as consciously as in her physical body, then again put that more subtle body into trance, exteriorize herself from it, and so on, twelve times in

a row, up to the extreme limit of the world of forms.¹⁶

It is this extreme limit that interests us.

Strange Matter

What was that bizarre couple doing together?

Indeed everything at Zarif seemed to behave in a strange manner and to follow a different law, as if one were entering another world. Matter responded to a different force—was it a “different” force or a different degree of the same force? When the ground was too dry, Theon made the rain fall on his roses while not a drop fell twenty yards away, or he sent the rain to the poor fcllaheens (and also cured them by looking at them, which is perhaps why he deserved to be called “Beloved” after all). They would take a walk along the shaded lanes scented with "marvels-of-Peru," while delightful little asps worthy of Cleopatras slithered up to them or slipped away beneath Theon's gaze, who pretended not to notice anything while watching Mirra out of the corner of his eye. Mirra smiled; She was a friend of all animals, and She understood them very well. Theon, too, understood—he had easily learned his lesson. All in all, it was quite pleasant ; one got on with everything—one got on and everything got on with everything within the complicity of a different law where nothing was “another thing” or "another” body. When Mrs. Theon needed her sandals, she did not go to get them; she made them come to her, very quietly; or else, like Theon, she rang the gong by looking at it rather than shouting for a servant, and all this was done in the most natural way, unostentatiously, as naturally as we would press an electric button—which sometimes fails to work, whereas that current never failed and was simplicity itself. She didn't boast; she didn't say, “I’m going to do this or that"; she didn't say anything—she did it quietly.¹⁷ It would be a mistake to think that Theon or Mrs. Theon were trying to show off their powers, which, by the way, did not impress Mirra. But they amused her; She was thoroughly enjoying herself. It was simply a different knowl­edge and different laws that were at work. Sometimes, however, they indulged in rather dubious jokes, for instance, like the day when that somewhat limpet-like Arab merchant had planted himself in the dining room and would not budge. All of a sudden, I heard a scream—a terrified shriek. The table had started moving (a huge oak table), and with an almost heroic lunge it charged at the poor man ... Madame Theon hadn't touched it, nobody had touched it. First the table wobbled a little, then it slowly started moving, then suddenly, in a single lunge, it threw itself on this man, who ran away and never came back!¹⁸ Sometimes, too, these jokes were more alarming (though not for Mirra) and the "current" seemed somewhat... disproportionate, as on one stormy day: There were terrible thunderstorms there. One stormy day, he climbed to the high terrace above the sitting room. “It’s a strange time to be going up there," I said to him. He laughed, “Come along, don’t be afraid!" So I joined him ... Then I clearly saw a bolt of lightning that had been heading straight towards us suddenly swerve IN THE MIDST OF ITS COURSE. You will say it’s impossible, but I saw it turn aside and strike a tree farther away. (Not one of Theon's, of course!) I asked Theon, "Did you do that?" He nodded.

Oh, that man was terrible—he had a terrible power. But outwardly, perfectly correct.¹⁹ And Mother laughed.

They could also eat in a most peculiar way at Zarif; it would be good for us to take a leaf out of their book, for it would free us from a lot of bother. Actually, Mrs. Theon was very often tired because she spent much of her time outside her body, which meant that a great part of her body’s energy went elsewhere instead of staying quite pru­dently in its box performing all the operations or tasks that one normally expects to be done in the said box. So she needed to recover her material energies. She did this in a very simple, very direct way; instead of sitting down to eat and going through the whole process of peeling and digest­ing a fruit, she stretched out on her bed and put a big grapefruit from the garden on her stomach: "Come back to see me in an hour." One hour later, Mirra returned, and the grapefruit was as flat as a pancake... that is, she had absorbed all the life of the fruit, which had gone limp and completely flat.²⁰

But Matter itself had strange ways, and we might now begin asking ourselves what Matter really is. Because, of course, there are no miracles or "magic" in all that, except for the simple-minded—to the cynocephalous baboons and a few others, man’s machines are magic. As for us, we know perfectly well that we are not magicians, far from it! We merely follow processes. Therefore, we can think better than cynocephalians and observe the processes at Zarif with a less superstitious eye. But in the end, maybe we are all a bit superstitious regarding Matter—scientifically superstitious. Superstition, that is, a blind belief in a single type of dogma or process, in a certain habitual way for Matter to behave—but is it really the habit of Matter, or rather the habit of our mind in Matter?... At this point, we begin feeling the earth give way beneath our feet and we flee like the Arab merchant, full speed ahead. All the same, the "marvels-of-Peru” were very beautiful along the paths of Zarif, they had a nice fragrance, it was exquisite: Huge bushes, this tall. Madame Theon always put some behind her ears, for they smelled very good... And when she went walking along this path, between those huge bushes that were so high, she would gather flowers.... (Meanwhile, Mirra was off walking with Theon) and when I returned from my walk and opened my door (which was locked, so no one could have entered), those flowers would be in my room!²¹ A little garland of marvels-of-Peru discreetly placed on her pillow, which means that Madame Theon could also “dematerialize" flowers to make them pass through walls, and “rematerialize" them, so they could be perfectly fresh on Mirra's pillow. A simple and charming gesture for Mirra, every evening, for this Alma was a very charming person.

What, then, was going on in that house?... Perhaps this was a more advanced stage of evolution—though it is not at all certain. Obviously there was a different atmosphere, we might almost say a certain transparency in which things could go through and take place, for the greatest obstacle and the thickest wall may not, after all, be the granite or concrete we shut ourselves in, but the wall of our own thoughts: we are constantly weaving a veil of impossibility between ourselves and things, and because we think it is not possible, then obviously it is not possible—how could it be impossibly possible? And really, one of life's most marvelous miracles is when we begin opening the great eye of the Possible and think, then feel, then see, with amaze­ment, that the simple little thought that "all is possible” makes an imperceptible crack in the prison—a transparency —and stealthily, almost timidly, one little thing slips in, then another and another, as if encouraged by our acqui­escence, then everything begins to tilt into another law. It is as we wish. We have only to think it. But we think of sickness, death, accidents, mathematics and the penal code, so everything happens just as we expected, exactly and mathematically. We cannot break out of the prison while believing in the prison, obviously.

Our first prison is not Matter, it is the Mind. Matter's walls are a dream of our mind, perhaps a railing to keep us from prematurely tipping over into an immensity too rich for us. I remember a very revealing little story that Mirra was soon to hear from the lips of Mrs. David-Neel, which She had every reason to believe true. When she was living in Indochina (I guess), Mrs. David-Neel used to medi­tate with her eyes closed while walking. She would follow the trail, leaving the others at the camp, and walked straight ahead ,.. till the end of her meditation. Now, one day, after finishing her meditation, she turned back as usual to return quietly to the camp, with her eyes open—when suddenly she found herself before a river. The river had not suddenly appeared between her coming and going, so she must have crossed the river on her way out—but how? And she had to get wet to return to the camp. We might call it a miracle —"she walked on water,” like Christ—or we might think that her meditation was so deep and so ethereal that.,. We may think whatever we like, but the fact is that Mrs. David- Neel herself did not think of the river. So the river did not exist. And one walked on it as easily as one would walk on anything else. Of course, the moment she thought of it (and, above all, thought that one cannot cross a river with­out getting wet), she had to get wet, like everyone else. But—there is a but—it is not enough to think that it does not exist for it to cease existing, because it is still the mind playing a good or a bad trick on itself: the magic of the Mind has far deeper roots. This magic was the very thing Mother was going to clarify meticulously, layer after layer, right up to a certain cellular frontier which is perhaps the very root of death.

Meanwhile, Mirra let everything pass through her with­out erecting any wall of impossibility, and where would there be any “miracle" or "magic" in all that? No, there is no magic to do, there is only a certain magic to undo. We are under a scientific spell, and all our science reinforces the spell. When I recounted these experiences to Sri Aurobindo, he told me it was quite natural; when you have the power, you live in and create around you an atmosphere where these things are possible. Because it is all here, it just hasn't been brought to the surface.²² Yes, "not brought to the surface,” that is, veiled, blocked, hindered by layers upon layers of dense determinism we are shut in, or so we think. But as soon as we rise even a single degree above, or to be exact (for where is the “above”?), as soon as our substance grows clearer and shakes off the mud' of its usual ways of seeing and doing and proceeding, this same Shakti—because it is the same that flows in the mud, the dust, the walls, the asp and the thunder, or in Beethovens symphonies: there is but one thing in the world, not two—that same and only dis­entangled Shakti lets its purer ray, therefore more direct and powerful and freer, flow into the same old substance, but now clear, altering all its laws which were only the laws of our entanglement or the laws of the veil we draw between things as they are and things as we see or think them. This “as they are" is the mystery, the magic we have to undo to get to the Secret, the layers to be cleared up. We know nothing, we only stick ineluctable and mathematical pro­cesses onto "something” that exactly has the mathematics of our brain. Scientific laws, said Sri Aurobindo with his wonderful lucidity, only give a schematic account of mate­rial processes of Nature—as a valid scheme they can be used for reproducing or extending at will a material process, but obviously they cannot give an account of the thing itself Water, for instance, is not merely so much oxygen and hydro­gen put together—the combination is simply a process or device for enabling the materialisation of a new thing called water; what that new thing really is, is quite another matter.²³ The "thing itself" eludes us everywhere. We move to a clearer level and all the processes change: the marvels-of- Peru materialize and dematerialize, just as hydrogen plus oxygen "materialize" into water, then “dematerialize” into gases. But what is the "thing” called "marvels-of-Peru?" We do not know. And in the end, there is only one consciousness "fact,” or one Shakti “fact" which is handled more or less directly depending on the level or the layer we move in. There is no such thing as a “foreign body,” there is no fire reacting to water; there is consciousness reacting on con­sciousness, Shakti on Shakti. Shakti is the only process— one can handle it as a monkey, as a scientist or otherwise, that is all.

So there were no miracles at Tlemcen, there was simply a certain atmosphere of a somewhat more real knowledge.²⁴ Perhaps we should say: a more real Matter. A Matter closer to “what it really is." The whole question is to know whether we want to act like the Arab merchant or to dare, after all, to exchange our eyes, that are but those of an improved baboon, for the eyes of consciousness. Sri Aurobindo always said, Mother told me, regarding the happenings at Tlemcen, that the greatest obstacle to true understanding and participation in the Work is common sense. He said that’s why Nature creates madmen from time to time: they are people not strong enough to bear the dismantling of this petty stupidity called common sense.²⁵ And Mother smiled, and in her smile it seemed we could catch fantastic possi­bilities in the wings. Perhaps Nature is prudently waiting for us to be a little less childish and frightened before pull­ing down, with a smile, the big scientific Wall of China that protects us ... from ourselves.

Once we really know what Matter is, we shall really know what Spirit is. And we shall conquer death.

The Impasse of Power

The doors of the Possible have to be opened, but not just any door.

It is all very fine—we handle bolts of lightning, the rain and the weather, big and small animals; we make our san­dals come running to our feet or even ring the tocsin of the scientific world—and it is all very well, we have power·, it is even quite natural when we know how to do it, just as natural as it is for us to pick up the phone and call the fire brigade. It is another organization—certainly simpler, with­out firemen and all the trepidation that is plainly beginning to grate on our nerves. Mirra was quick to learn the “trick,” if we may say so, though it was not really a trick, or at any rate no more a trick than putting H2O together, and when She returned to France, in the midst of a stormy sea that threatened to engulf her ship, She quietly retired to her cabin, lay down on her bunk and went out of her body, in order to pacify that wild dance of angry forces; and half an hour later everyone was cheerfully busy drinking their whisky as though nothing had happened. That is all very well. We can even use our power in a “humanitarian” way, since humanity has become fashionable: cure lepers with a single glance—but three minutes later they go back to their leprosy because they have no desire to be cured of the cause of their leprosy; put out fires—which will reignite three minutes later, three fields away or in the next neighborhood, because the stupidity that kindles fires and little wars will not have been put out; stop thieves and criminals with an inner bolt of lightning, and let us be done with the police!—but they grow back like weeds, thieves as well as policemen. We keep going round in circles, merely at a higher level, with fewer telephones and less racket, but with the same human matter that will be quick to use thun­der to get rid of a disturbing neighbor. In short, a chaos of a higher degree, a supra-scientific superchaos. Is this the next level of evolution? Each one will purge the earth of everything that does not conform to his own idea of Good, and finally there will be nothing left but a superascetic or a superdemon, one of whom will cheerfully go drink his whisky as if nothing had happened, and the other cheer­fully go back to his pure heaven, which he should never have left—for why on earth do we even come down into this damn mess if it is only to abolish it, and furthermore, why do we take on a body if it is only to go roaming about outside of it?

Indeed, this is not a higher level of evolution; it may even be an anterior level of evolution, one of Nature’s many fruit­less attempts, which she easily wiped out, as if it had never existed—for she is wiser than we are. If Atlantis ever existed, then it may well have witnessed the flourishing of this type of superman, who was just a man with super-powers: For, says Sri Aurobindo, man intellectually developed, mighty in scientific knowledge and the mastery of gross and subtle nature, using the elements as his servants and the world as his footstool, but undeveloped in heart and spirit, becomes only an inferior kind of asura [demon] using the powers of a demigod to satisfy the nature of an animal. According to dim traditions and memories of the old world, of such a nature was the civilisation of old Atlantis, submerged beneath the Ocean when its greatness and its wickedness became too heavy a load for the earth to bear.²⁶ It could well be that our brutal return to what we might call scientific barbarism was the gentle wisdom of our Mother Nature, who knows better than we do what she wants us to discover in her scorned soil, and who uses our first materialistic stumblings to take us farther than our scientists suspect and deeper than our spiritualists imagine. Of how many cycles, how many fruitless quests are we the residue? But perhaps this time we have reached the real turning point, precisely because our science is crumbling down along with all our pretentions, which cloaked an old and stub­born poverty, and perhaps we are here by the very power of our failure. Divested of our trifling victories, both material and spiritual, we are approaching the Zero Point where Matter and Spirit will change into something ... which is perhaps the reality of the earth.

And Mirra was there.

She was not fooled—nor was Theon—and She knew quite well that those brilliant powers come from the lower door. The more brilliant and thundering and miraculous it is, the lower the door, you can be sure, because it is the door nearest Matter. Over the centuries, there have always been plenty of good folk to be dazzled and less good folk to perform their heavenly sleights of hand. It’s heavenly if you like, Mother said, but it all depends on which heaven it comes from!²⁷ Anyway, let people have their fun, as long as it keeps them amused. But the earth is not amused. In fact, it suffers, it is in pain; it is desperately searching for its real cure. And Mirra, in Tlemcen, already understood very well two things that are but one, because it was right there, under her very nose. First, there were all those poor people Theon used to cure with magic tricks, but who came back two days or a week later with another illness, which was still the same illness. One plugged the hole here and it reappeared farther—were all the cancers in the world plugged up, man would invent others. This is doubtless one of the most tremendous illusions we so-called rational beings are living in. We are constantly in search of millions of remedies for one Disease we do not really want to cure: unconsciousness. The thick layer that does not allow the smallest ray to enter. Of course, it is not quite so easy as getting pills from the drugstore. And Nature kindly lets the doctors proliferate, because in so doing, she still helps her children progress; she uses all their tricks to teach them ... that they know nothing. This is the great lesson, the longest to learn, but once we have learned it, then we are ready for knowledge. And if they refuse to learn, Nature resorts to her old usual trick: death. We begin the lesson again in another skin, a little less encumbered. And so on, until everything is exhausted. Then there is nothing left but a wall no thicker than rice paper, and we have only to blow on it to get out of the fishbowl. The terrible Lesson of unknowing. The earth is very close to exhaustion. Perhaps it has had enough of dying. All that was seen, lived, touched by Mirra: The conditions in which humans live on earth are the result of their state of consciousness. Trying to change the conditions without changing the consciousness is a vain chimera.²⁸ So if people want to build hospitals and treat lepers and invent anti-cancer drugs, let them do it, but it is not the world that they are helping to progress or heal: it is they themselves who progress in the unknowing. Change yourself if you want to change the world.²⁹

And then there is this so-called "power," which is the other side of the same question ... The more She saw Theon’s marvels, the less She marveled. It’s like stretching a rubber band, ³⁰ She told me one day; once you let it go, it snaps back, and everything is the same. As long as you stretch it, it can cure, hurl thunderbolts, rain like a bless­ing, it is even perfectly immortal for ... a quarter of an hour. And She always came back to that same Lesson of death, in fact, that was the very Point; why does it ah die, what can keep it from dying? Once this is solved, all else is solved. The cause, the mechanism. While over there, 6,000 miles away (perhaps at the same moment), Sri Auro­bindo was putting his finger on the same question, possibly through that trivial incident when one of his revolutionary companions was bitten by a rabid dog and had dominated the disease for years, thanks to his yogic power—until the day he got angry during a political meeting and died of rabies a few hours later, for he had lost control of himself and therefore had placed himself outside the conditions in which the power could work. A conditional power is not a power; a power that works for ten or twenty years and then breaks down is not a power; a power that is imposed on Matter like a fist blow, by stretching it like a rubber band, is not a power—a power that does not change Matter itself is not a power. It is Matter itself that must be changed. We must create a new physical nature,³¹ Sri Aurobindo would soon say. The true change of consciousness, Mother emphasized, is one that will change the physical conditions of the world and turn it into an entirely new creation.³²

And Nature may very well have invented death only to compel us to find here, in the depths of the body, the supreme secret and the supreme mastery.

Otherwise, we would all have already left for heaven, in single file, like little saints. Our greatest falls are our great­est possibilities of victory, our greatest failures may well be the supreme Door of the Possible.

Such is the impasse of power: it is powerful. Scientists do not act differently with their cyclotrons, pulverizers and crushing machines: they bully Matter with their equations, as others bully it with their occult stare, but it gets its revenge, and the few-hours- or few-decades-old miracle snaps back like a rubber band, or a wind of destruction, and in the end nothing is changed, for they have not mas­tered Matter—they have merely circumvented it. Power is a myth from which we keep dying obstinately. We must BE—be differently in Matter. Then nothing will be able to touch that, for what could touch what is?

9: Tlemcen 2: At the Furthermost Bounds of Evolution

To change Matter ... to change death.

We would be doing an injustice to Theon if we thought he was in search of the great, dazzling powers from the lower door, and besides, he did not have to search for them: he had them fully at his disposal. He was in quest of something far grander—which he was not fated to attain. This may be Theon's tragedy: the underlying defiance and pain and irony of a greatness that knows it is doomed to failure, but which struggles all the same, like a true con­quering doge. We always fall into the error of believing in "victory," but certain lives of "failure” are a soul’s true victory, and they find through the “reverse" side what they would never have reached on the precarious plateaux of virtue—where is the victory in the end, and whose is the victory, if there is not something within that smiles at victory as well as failure, because it is forever free, whether here or there? We know only a fraction of Theon, and sometimes the devil and the god are strangely intertwined. "Men are superior to gods,” he said, and he was right— although they are not yet so. And he wanted that divinity for men and the earth: "Men must be freed from the sad chains of habit and be shown life”; and he added, while ceaselessly rolling cigarettes at a disconcerting speed, "Everything depends on the plane you attain and the extent of your horizon. For the worm inside a radish, the radish is the entire cosmos—most people are like the worm inside a radish,”¹ which is quite true, but ... There was always a certain something in his words, an indefinable little vibra­tion with an ... uncertain tint to it. Something strangely reminiscent of Zarathustra, yet so full of genuine flashes— but somewhat tinted. Nothing is more misleading or cap­tivating than that tint, nothing more dangerous than a truth ensnared. Once a truth is captured, it is already almost a falsehood—oh, how w'ell Mirra knew that! Her own words eluded all categories and categorizations to leave only a clear little vibration that carried you, without your knowing it, into the simple, trouble-free truth. With Mother, you drank the truth, breathed the truth, and walked on lightly, with a laugh. But Theon talked and held forth, while “his long, sinewy sculptor's hands”² kneaded the future or stripped the past to wrest its secret from it. Actually, he knew a lot of secrets, and I have always thought that he wavered on a narrow crest between truth and falsehood, like some survivor from Atlantis who still remembered his triumphs and was unable to get rid of them completely, while peering into the future to perceive a mysterious new man greater than all the Atlanteans, but without their weight of "I”—for ultimately, that is the only thing that weighs down. He knew Egypt ; he had lived there several years and had founded an occult society before taking refuge in Zarif, after being expelled from Egypt for some mysterious reason perhaps not unrelated to his excessive indulgence in thunderbolts. How did he happen to meet Alma, this soft English woman from the Isle of Wight—by what inscrutably circuitous route? Truly, the meetings of beings through time and space make up a strange geogra­phy; we are still unaware of the invisible little beacons that guide our skiffs and hail one another in the night across trans-natal distances, while we go haphazardly, carried along by the southerly wind, and land at the antipodes of our maps. He even knew India, where he had received initiation: He knew a little Sanskrit and the Rig-Veda thor­oughly, Mother tells us, and he said he held “a tradition anterior to the Cabala and the Vedas."³ And where did it come from? From what lost cycle? But Theon did not bluff, except with Arab merchants, and one did not bluff Mirra, who, after twenty-six years of deprivation, listened to him ravenously while they strolled the lanes of Zarif or Tlemcen’s bazaar, where Mirra used to walk in ... a kimono, under the sharp eyes of the Muslims. (After all, we are at the beginning of the century. Abd-el-Kader’s shadow is not so far away, and Abd-el-Krim is nearby, stirring up his conspiracies with William II. All the same, Mirra did not like women to be veiled, any more than Mathilde liked the khedive's tutelage.) And Theon held forth: "This so-called civilization, whose leaders themselves are ignorant of life’s depths, whose mystics without knowledge read and under­stand the sacred books as one might tread upon unsuspected diamond mines, with nose upturned to heaven!”⁴ He him­self looked down to the earth—like Mirra. He even quoted Peter the Apostle: "A new earth where Truth shall live."¹⁰⁰ And, like Sri Aurobindo, he proclaimed a new, superhuman humanity, endowed with a new body that he said would be made of a substance "denser than Matter.” We are not very sure what he meant by that, for the only “denser Matter” we know of is ionized Matter, which results from intra- atomic modifications formed through shock or radiation, or the Matter of certain collapsed stars, involving inter­atomic convergences induced by gigantic forces ... But perhaps Mother’s subsequent experiences will enlighten us on this point.

What, then, was Theon’s secret?

The Door Above

There is the door above.

It is both the best known and the least known. The lower door used to arouse all the scorn of the so-called enlight­ened people, who were quick to accuse you of “a thirst for power” or even of sorcery, as in medieval Europe, and you were dutifully sent off to the stake. The door above had all the haloes of heaven, for indeed, what is the use of "powers,” when all you want is to find some way out of this predica­ment? A single power is enough, the one that brings you out. And for centuries upon centuries (but not all), sages and saints of every color have nimbly or laboriously scaled the vertical world, as vertically as they could, without even seeing, as Sri Aurobindo said, these great and. luminous kingdoms of the Spirit. Perhaps they arrive at their object, but only to fall asleep in the Infinite.⁵ Amen. The poor wretches below had to make do with pulling down some flashes of light to compose a poem, a quartet or a strikingly simple equation, but most often to found big or small Churches, each one claiming exclusive rights to the Ray. But what is the point of composing quartets or equations if the goal is only to get out, and if those who were not eager to get out had neither the mastery nor the discipline required to scale those verticalities knowingly and draw from them better quartets or better equations—so on one side we remained the playthings of vague "inspirations,” and on the other the pursuers of a certain "liberation”—which was not so certain, for if we happened to be pulled a little roughly out of our heaven, we got quite furious and disgusted with the pettiness of this world, like all the rest of the common humankind. In short, “heaven” was within the four walls of an abbey or an ashram. And we died just the same. So we used to be divided between powerless mystics and sometimes overly powerful charlatans, or else rather vague poets. And finally, this vertical world suffered from a certain irrationality, which was perhaps but our own.

But Mirra was not vague. She had noticed several degrees in that verticality. She knew the world of colored waves, the world of rhythms that form great musical waves, as it were, and then all the way up, suddenly, along came a sound ... but so complete, so full! As if something exploded ...I don’t know what, much more resounding than an orchestra— something exploding. It was overwhelming!... Great, blue notes.⁶ She had touched the origin of music, perhaps the source of all form. The sound must be captured,⁷ She said. It must be captured indeed, but how? And there was also the world of the great vibrations creating the future, like a mighty, unceasing peal of bells all over the earth, dropping intermittent little "pearls of light,” which formed a revela­tion, an intuition, or perhaps those lost poems She wrote in her sleep. But the moment we try to capture that “sound from above," that rhythm, those vibrations, it’s as if things were passed through a sieve and broken up into separate little bits.⁸ Nothing remains but a mental translation. And then, higher, it was like vanishing into light; no more movement, no more form, nothing: the great silence of snow. Eternity. Though truly speaking, I have always wondered about that silence of snow—it is indeed marvelous, and free and vast; one breathes—oh, how wonderfully one breathes there, one can turn it into a whole heaven, it is heaven!—But, at the risk of seeming impertinent, one wonders how our friend the baboon would perceive our merely mental world, which is his own verticality; would not he vanish all the same into an ecstasy of non-comprehension and an immensity quite baffling compared to the narrow workings of his sensory perceptions? Perhaps “Heaven" is "adjust­able," if we dare say. And perhaps we know nothing at all of that “up-above-there,” no more than we really know what is “right-down-here.” Perhaps we have to put the two together to know really what they both are?

This is what Mirra was beginning to say to herself.

But what struck her most, the key She was seeking, was the key to the "sieve” we were talking about. Whenever one tried to bring “that” down into Matter—this sound, vibra­tion, harmony (whatever the name), this something that would finally alter the lower layers of determinism, it was like water disappearing into sand⁹ and it came out all diluted, fragmented, distorted, without any apparent real power, as if the ray grew darker, veiled, tinted, shattered into little pieces as it went through each layer, right to the last pulverized darkening, which makes up the particular opaque Matter we tread upon. This is perhaps the desperate reason why all the sages and saints throughout the ages (but not all) tried to get out for good: there is nothing to be done here, it is hopeless, better purify yourself as much as pos­sible and soar off into the great silence of snow, or to a lesser height, into some adjustable heaven proportionate to your capacities, tastes or beliefs; and in the meantime, well, do your duty, be kind to your neighbors, cure the ill people if you can, and so it goes round and round, until everyone has had enough of it and is ready to get out for good. Very well. But after all, the baboon’s heaven is rather dubious—and are we so sure of our own? Is it not holding some other sinister trick in store for us, which would chain us to yet another wheel we had not foreseen—any more than the baboon had foreseen his future mental “liberation?" For after all, perhaps our Mother Nature has intentions that will thwart all our gospels, materialistic or other. What is this vertical world, finally, if not our evolutionary future? This future that is as much ours as we are the future of the fish in its fishbowl. And why do we necessarily want this future to be located in “heaven?” To a fish, as far as we know, we are perfectly terrestrial and are nothing super­natural; perhaps this future is also perfectly terrestrial and natural, although in a way that still eludes our dense Matter and our mind shut up in a box. We must find the "new earth.” We must find the “way,” the next way, as Mother said. There must be one, otherwise why on earth would Nature have invented this evolution?

And again we go back to that “sieve," the division of the ray, that trajectory of our future, which comes to us in pieces, as it were—if we could clear the intermediary layers, the problem might well be solved. To clear them in our­selves is still conceivable, but to clear them on a cosmic scale, or even simply on a human scale, appears ... difficult.

Or else it will take centuries and millennia, a slow and tremendous evolution wasting bodies upon bodies and piling up pains, only to reach the clear "simple” lesson. But if we must wait for each human being to learn his lesson ... And if one single, somewhat obstinate man remains, where will the "liberation” of others be since, ultimately, there is only ONE body? Either we do not get out, or we all get out together. Either nothing is changed, or we all change together—it is the whole body that must change. So, what pure Ray could work that singular miracle? We can leave the task to the millennia, and it will doubtless take place despite all the materialists and all the spiritualists, for what can prevent a seed from becoming a tree? Evolution is the surest thing in the world, it is an irresistible bulldozer. But after all, we might try to accelerate the movement and shorten this web of misery a little. That is what Theon was thinking. It is what Sri Aurobindo was beginning to think, over there. As for Mirra, she was seeking the Ray that would clear all those layers. The lower we want to go, the more powerful the ray must be: the deeper you want to descend into matter, the higher you must rise in conscious­ness,¹⁰ because the resistance is stiffer, as She clearly saw. But the higher one rises within this vertical consciousness —and here lies the dilemma—the more it seems to fade away or, to describe things as if they were seen from above, the more the earth seems to fade away into a kind of tri­fling irrelevance, like a bad dream. An illusion.

Such was the dilemma, which was not at all philosophical but purely practical, like a chemistry or physics experi­ment. But an element was missing. One was left wavering there between the single reality of a heaven cut off from Matter, and the single reality of Matter cut off from what could cure it. And, well, it was not a comfortable position to be caught between the two. Something as obscure, per­haps, as the transition from the fish to the mammal.

Perilous Experiences

But the passage exists; there is a connection. One does not leap from the mind's summits to the pure and formless silence of eternity, otherwise there would be no hope and we would be evolutionarily doomed to be supermen creat­ing superquartets and superequations and super-Churches, the same merry-go-round as below but glorified, inflated, titanized, a kind of human millipede inventing another thousand legs for itself or perhaps a fourth brain and super­machines to compensate for his weariness of living, until we are fed up in the end and ready to take the leap and go to sleep forever, or fade into a white eternity we should never have left. For all these “supreme” levels that delight and inspire us are merely the clearer layers or higher waters of the same fishbowl—the mental fishbowl, for the mind is the bowl; it is the same principle and the same law but more effective or resounding, if we may say so, the same fragmentation beneath a certain golden "sieve” that splits the ray into countless little colors, or big colors, which make up all our separate paintings and all our separate miseries—though in the end the only misery is to be sepa­rated in a body and in a never finished little painting. And up above is the great leap beyond all painting, which is obviously a solution for the sluggards of evolution.

But there is something else.

Mirra was about to experimentally rediscover what the Vedic Rishis had found some seven or ten thousand years earlier, at the beginning of this ill-starred (?) cycle—what Theon was seeking, and what Sri Aurobindo was already beginning to clear out in the Shakti’s great virgin forest. Because the Vedic Rishis were not somnolent of spirit, they were great conquerors and heroes as yet untouched by the haste and impotence of our present Iron Age, in which dulled humans have replaced self-mastery with the mastery of machines, and the powerful light with sociological ethics and rosewater paradises. The Rishis had methodically explored all the levels of consciousness, and they had dis­covered what they mysteriously called "a certain fourth,” turiyam svid.

So Mirra was working. Theon was not satisfied with making speeches, he wanted results. It would last for an hour every morning, a dangerous work, at that—all the body's vital energy would go out—all of it, as it does when you die. And She would go from plane to plane, methodi­cally, twelve times in a row, like Madame Theon: I could even do it with great dexterity; I could halt on any plane, do what I had to do there, move around freely, observe, and then speak about what J had seen.¹¹ For She had trained her body in such a way, and was so perfectly conscious on all the planes (which for us would amount to deep and quite unconscious sleep) that She could speak, faintly but dis­tinctly, even while out of her body—which was lying on a couch in a near-cataleptic state, her heart scarcely beating. Which meant that her corporeal matter was already quite cleared out or purified and able to communicate the expe­riences from "above.” And Theon listened avidly. There was just a thin filament of light connecting Mirra to the earth: "the cord,” as She called it—perilous experiences indeed. If the filament snaps, there is no longer any way of re-entering, you "forget” your body, as it were, and you are "dead”—you keep living quite well on the other planes, but the terres­trial plane is cut off. This is generally what happens when we die. One day Mirra was even to experience complete death under rather tragic circumstances, or which would have been tragic for anyone else and which clearly reveal Theon’s "other side.” On a certain plane, She had discovered what seemed to be the vibratory mode or the combination of vibrations that engenders life, and which could therefore also engender death—quite a dangerous power in the wrong hands. Inwardly, She knew that She should not speak, so She stopped just when Theon was beginning to find it all extremely interesting. He broke into a rage, which cut the thread—Mirra barely had time to whisper "cut,” and in a flash Theon realized the enormity of what he had just done. He must have broken into a cold sweat. All of Theon’s power and all of Mother’s science were needed to reestablish the connection; Mother said that the “friction of re-entry” into the body produced an excruciating pain, as if all the nerves had been brutally loaded with current—the current of life, obviously—and as a result, She understood why newborn babies cry In any event, Mirra had just had her first expe­rience of conscious death in the body, which would later become a subject of very thorough experimentation in her quest to solve "the old question." As for the "secret of life,” She later handed it over to Sri Aurobindo, who simply consigned it to oblivion because this is not the way to change life or death: not through an arbitrary power—the eternal failure of power—but through a change in the very substance of life and the body Mirra and Sri Aurobindo stood at the opposite pole of the supermen and super­demiurges who interested Theon so much. They wanted a new and natural evolution of terrestrial Nature and not an occult and "supernatural’’ revolution, which, besides, would not have lasted longer than a staggering display of fire­works, for the “rubber band" would have snapped back to what it was before. They were searching for a principle other than that of the mental fishbowl carried to its trium­phant summit—a poor summit indeed.

And Mirra was there.

Strangely enough, Mirra always found herself at the crossroads—just as She found herself at the crossroads of the first explosion of appearances (Max Planck, 1900, Einstein, 1905), which was curiously linked to the Impres­sionists’ explosion of color—as if all were not closely bound together! One and the same seed is sown at a given time, and it bursts open everywhere under different names, forms or faces. And now it was as if She were at the crossroads of evolution with Theon, perhaps facing an old resurrec­tion of Atlanteans—who would secretly walk their path right up to Hitler—and a totally unknown but perceptible path which She was treading gropingly with Sri Aurobindo, over there, and a hesitant Theon.

A Certain Fourth

A very peculiar experience was going to occur during those sessions, an experience Mirra had already had alone in Paris, which She was unable to explain to herself—but truly speaking. She could explain nothing, for She went through a kind of chaos of experiences leaping from one level to another without any apparent connection; as She said, it was not a matter of believing or not believing, the fact was there, and that was all. The advantage of this was that my experiences were not mentally contrived.¹² Which is why She remained always grateful to Theon, despite his perilous outbursts (which perhaps carried on those of some ancient doge): After all, he taught me a lot.¹³ What do we know of our gestures of today? They continue old gestures and are today completing a picture begun when we were clothed in other colors and perhaps thirsting for an opposite goal ... which is always the same, but seen in another light. We understand nothing as long as we have not understood everything. But it is another picture. The really curious fact, “scientifically curious,” we might say, is that not only was Mirra going to have the same experience several times in a row, as regularly as a repeated chemis­try experiment, but that Madame Theon had also had the same experience ... and so would Sri Aurobindo, over there. And this experience coincided with that of the Vedic Rishis Mirra had never heard about before meeting Theon.

One day, as She was going from plane to plane toward that “Supreme Point" where consciousness seemed to evaporate, dilute, lose its dimension in a sort of Infinity, just on the threshold of this Infinity, when all the great waves and luminous vibrations were about to expire under­neath—that golden summit whence men draw their gospels and revelations and divine music, their great picture of the world as it is innumerably depicted in so many contrary colors—at the very moment when, as though struck with futility, it was all going to melt into a supreme Whiteness of Bliss reabsorbed into itself, at that golden junction, just before taking the great leap, Mirra suddenly found herself caught in something else—something radically different. Another consciousness. Was it really a consciousness? For it was formidably solid, the opposite of evaporation or subtilization: a substance of compact and almost coagu­lated consciousness. Nothing moved in it nor seemed to move, not one wave; or if there were some wave, it seemed solidified, as if all the rays, the countless rays that divided up below and went on fragmenting down to the infinitesi­mal, were reunited there into one compact block. It was so dense that it was rather crushing. A dense consciousness, of a crimson gold color. And for a moment, as had hap­pened once before, when She was alone in Paris, She saw what Madame Theon herself had seen, a form silhouetted in a glory of crimson gold,¹⁴ which was like the "prototype,” She said: a man, not at all a god, but the most inconceiv­able superman we could ever imagine. Something that was there, waiting. Perhaps it had been waiting since the begin­ning of time. Our future, the future of man. A man within another substance of consciousness, but not a "dream”: there were no dreams in it all, and it was more solid than the Himalayas. A dense man. Powerful, supremely power­ful, but in an immobility—it was this immobility that was overwhelmingly powerful. A crimson gold glory. The Future. No superquartets, no supergospels: a dense man. Another principle of being. Something like the prolongation of man but in such a radically different air, perhaps as different as man's oxygen is from the oxygen of the fish—what was different was the way of breathing. One did not breathe there in the same way, one was not the same. A different being, a different way of being.

Beyond the "Supreme" Point, there was something.

The end of man was the beginning of something.

Evolution led to something, which was not the white infinite.

Some seven to ten thousand years ago, the Rig-Veda spoke of the same thing, the same experience, in its sym­bolic language: "Concealed by this truth is that truth where they unyoke the horses of the Sun; the ten thousand [rays] meet there together; That ONE, tad ekam—I have seen the supreme God of the embodied gods.” (V.62.1). Beyond the golden truth of the mind's summits, there is a solar Truth where the ten hundred rays of our scattered intuitions and contradictory pictures unite within a compact body; there is this ONE. "The face of the Truth is covered with a brilliant golden lid,”¹⁵ say the Upanishads, the golden "sieve" that fragments our whole mental world. They passed through the spiritual lid of the world, the rarefied layers of "spirit." They found "the great passage," mahas pathah (II.24.6): "The heaven [of consciousness] was made firm like a well-shaped pillar ... a god opened the human doors” (V.45). They entered "the dense consciousness,” chidghana,¹⁶ they touched another power and “set flowing in one movement human strengths and things divine" (IX.70.3). “Then, indeed, they awoke and they wholly saw, all behind and wide around them, then, indeed, they held the ecstasy that is enjoyed in heaven” (IV. 1.18). "Mortal, they achieved immortality" (1.110.4).

This is the new world Sri Aurobindo would call the supra­mental. It is the turiyam svid of the Vedic Rishis, a "certain fourth," which is perhaps a fourth state of Matter—the next state. A state in which Matter does not die.

A different Matter? Or a different way of seeing the same Matter, a different way of breathing within a Matter freed from its mental prison?

At last, Mirra had found this Ray that was capable of modifying all the lower determinisms.

But what is very interesting is that She was going to see—at what moment we do not know, but probably at the same time—a kind of replica of that being from above, but down below, in the deepest layers of the material inconscient: A being lying in a deep sleep, in the depths of a very dark cave, and, while he slept, rays of prismatic light (She would also say "iridescent") emanated from him and spread out little by little into the Inconscient. ¹⁷ One was in a crimson gold glory at the very summit of the ladder of consciousness, and the other in a diamond whiteness, ema­nating opalescent rays, at the first mute levels of existence, within the most ancient layers of evolution, when "dark­ness was wrapped in darkness,” according to the Rig-Veda’s powerful image (X. 129.3). And the moment Mother looked at him, he opened his eyes, as if he were awakening—as if, in the deepest Matter, in the obscure beginning of things, there were hidden, asleep, the realization of the end, the very Energy that will drive this entire evolution toward its golden blossoming.... We speak of "future," “past,” “summit above" and "deep cave below” in an inadequate language and with images expressive only of our three- dimensional impotence in a fishbowl that distorts and frag­ments a totality that has never ceased being total, without any high or low, heaven or hell: there is only the journey of our consciousness crossing all the evolutionary layers in order to reach what was always there; there is only the rediscovery of our own Wholeness, "and they wholly saw.” "What is in this world is also in the other," say the Upan­ishads, “and what is in the other, that again is in this: who thinks he sees a difference here, from death to death he goes.”¹⁸ In other words, the more we “progress" in evolution by purifying and clearing up those thick layers, the nearer the eternal thing "over there” draws to our consciousness— at first to our dreams, our visions, then to our imagination, thoughts and sensations—until it finally coincides with our Matter and our body; then, the being over there becomes the being right here and the two become ONE—without ever having ceased to be ONE. All our misery and aspiration are only the first murmur of the forgotten one who remem­bers himself in the forgetful other. We aspire for what is already there] otherwise, what would we aspire for? Mud does not aspire for mud, and if it changes into light and into a lotus in the light, it is because the light was always there and the lotus shone eternally in the depths of its dark seed. The supreme Energy is the primordial Energy, the supreme degree is the first degree. Always and everywhere, we keep going toward ourselves—and how would the non­existent go toward the existent if it had not existed since the beginning of time? In the atom is hidden the supreme Ray, fragmented, divided, pulverized; the supreme ONE, total, powerful and immortal, lies in the heart of a little forgetful cell as much as in all interstellar space. For really, "the Spirit who is here in man and the Spirit who is there in the Sun, lo, it is One Spirit and there is no other.”¹⁹ And there comes a moment in evolution, a supreme moment, when the coincidence draws near, when, freed from the dark layers which are really the layers of our forgetfulness, the radiant consciousness bends over its little body and becomes itself, total, powerful, luminous and immortal, down to the most obscure little cell. Then the Being "above" meets the being “below,” the superman becomes man, the untruncated totality finds itself again even down to the most obscure fragment—what was, is. A new time is born. A new gaze is born. And death will be conquered, because death was only self-forgetfulness. When the body remembers itself wholly, when it wholly becomes what it is, enlight­ened and clear, when the two have embraced down to the most obscure cell, we shall become completely immortal in a new body and on a new earth. "O men,” said the Vedic Rishis, "follow the shining thread ... weave an inviolate work, become the human being, create the divine race ... Seers of Truth are you, sharpen the shining spears with which you cut the way to that which is Immortal; knowers of the secret planes, form them, the steps by which the gods attained to immortality” (X.53.5,6,10). “Then shall thy humanity become as if the workings of these gods; it is as if the visible heaven of light were founded in thee" (V.66.2).

This coincidence of the two is what Sri Aurobindo and Mother would call transformation. It is the transition from the human body to a supramental or superhuman body.

The Great Passage

A mysterious transition indeed. But each of the preced­ing evolutionary transitions from one species to the next was always a mystery. There has always been a moment when the change occurred, the mutation abruptly took place, however slow the preparation and despite all the intermediary specimens. The process of the transition can be endlessly questioned and discussed, but each time, the transition was worked out despite all natural impossibili­ties, and possibly despite the specimen who was the object of the mutation. Our language may be inadequate—We need a new language! Mother exclaimed, like Rimbaud— and our images may be childish to describe the transition to that other species which will breathe such a different air and whose standards of consciousness are likely to be as radically different from ours as those of the mineral are from the animal's. This is not unlike the caterpillar trying to define its own tomorrow as a butterfly. But despite all its caterpillar science, no rational caterpillar can prevent itself from becoming a butterfly. We may doubt it with our rational intelligence, which sees nothing beyond a superglori­fication of its own rationality (which is failing abysmally), but evolution does not doubt, and the transition will take place—with or without us. In fact, we are right in the middle of the transition, mahas pathah, the great passage, and our scientific and rational materialism is probably the most antiquated thing there is after old Moses on his Sinai. That Sinai we will speak of again as the biggest balloon that has ever burst. Yet why should the transition not occur with us? Instead of being the passive and rather ill-treated guinea pigs of evolution, we could be co-experimenters, as it were. This is Mother's and Sri Aurobindo’s whole story. And Theon's unsuccessful story.

After all, we do not care about immortality, and the moment the consciousness awakens and begins to pick up the thread of past existences, the idea quickly becomes childish: who would care to wear one coat for a hundred years, said Sri Aurobindo, or be confined in one narrow and changeless lodging unto a long eternity?²⁰ But that “lodging” is what bothers us, along with the fact of death. Death is really a defeat: the defeat of the body, we might say, but this is not true; it is the defeat of the Spirit, for Spirit and Matter are one and the same thing, despite what our cater­pillar eyes may see, and we die just because we have found neither the reality of the Spirit nor the reality of Matter. When the two are one in something else, that will be it— and that something else is undoubtedly our next body.

But we must build that body; it is not going to drop from heaven ready-made. What is the process of fabrication?

Obviously, to perpetuate the consumer-cum-metaphysi­cian citizen is meaningless—evolution could not care less about metaphysics, although it makes use of it, as it does of everything else; it is not trying to create a fourth or a tenth brain, a superman who would be just an improved chimpanzee fitted with mathematics and television, but an instrument capable of handling consciousness directly, because consciousness is the primordial fact of evolution, the original moving force, the beginning of the end, that which we strive to handle as best we can through a crab shell or a brainbox, or whatever big or small box it may be. Evolution does not build civilizations, it builds ever wider consciousnesses. Consciousness is the key to the transition and to every transition. It is the Shakti in search of its own totality. And like the Rishis, like Mirra scaling the planes outside of her body while deeply asleep, we have seen that next consciousness, wider and "denser," in some heaven up above. But all this is still our caterpillar language, or the language of fish in their fishbowl. If, by the means of some special talent, our friend the baboon were to explore the next layers of evolution, it is likely that the first levels of the mind would appear to him like a distant heaven, far above, which he might only touch in an utter cessation of all that makes up his ape life—but how could that mental heaven enter straight down his consciousness? There is no room for it, the place is all cluttered with the many mechanisms of his ape life; an abrupt “descent" of the mental heaven into his consciousness would produce a kind of intolerable explosion. But while asleep, when everything ceases its usual racket, some first strange gleam or vibration may appear on the screen of his simian consciousness and leave him with a kind of nostalgia or aspiration, a distant and unexplained sense of wonder, a sudden break into an infini­tude of comprehension embracing in one glance his ape life and all apes' life: an inexplicable explanation, A mystic baboon, his rational neighbors would say. And yet these first slumberous traces prepare the next evolutionary groove. Something awakens in him, like another being in the depths of a bottomless cave, slowly, slowly wending its way to the surface. Nature slowly cleanses the layers and lets the centuries flow on while waiting for the next emer­gence: the meeting of mental “heaven" and earth in a new hominid creation. This cleansing of the intermediary layers seems to be the process of every transition. Each time, the ray grows and reaches a wider periphery, a darker depth, as if each time the conquered height gave it the power to cross a deeper layer, until the supreme Energy meets itself in the atom and the supreme Being in supreme oblivion. Death is the last door to the Supreme. And so goes the world, limping along from one stage to another, one being to another, one “heaven” to another, toward its totality of consciousness—toward the ONE, innumerable, in every point.

And now we have reached the point where a new heaven is to touch a new earth.

But the difference is even more radical than we think, for after all, between the ape and man there is scarcely more than a difference in degree of the same principle. What Mirra had seen, and the Rishis, and Sri Aurobindo over there, was another principle, something as radically differ­ent as mans oxygen is from the oxygen of the fish, as we said, and yet it is the same oxygen, only breathed in entirely different ways. She saw a different structure, we could rather say a different Matter: a conscious Matter, or a Matter made of consciousness, a massive consciousness— perhaps the real Matter, the one that eludes us and that we see so poorly and live so poorly. What does “earth" Matter look like to a fish? Obviously, like the asphyxiation of everything the fish is, that is, if it can see it; and yet, to us, they are the same atoms and molecules both here and there, but combined differently—the same “something” (which we do not really know) combining. And what combines dif­ferently is consciousness. It is that new combination that Sri Aurobindo and Mother were going to try' and bring into their bodies—and hence into the earth, for if a single body is touched, all other bodies can be touched—because there is but one Matter and one body. If Matter changes in one point, it can change in every other point. But it takes a whole journey to clear up and purify intermediary layers, so that this new heaven or new combination may enter Matter without exploding everything. For the gulf has to be bridged, Sri Aurobindo would soon say, the closed passages opened and roads of ascent and descent created where there is now a void and a silence.²¹

A perilous adventure.

A perilous transition for the earth.

The Last Sedition

Around 1906, a little corner of the Atlas Mountains saw the strange encounter between a forgotten Vedic experi­ence, lost beneath the incomprehension of "more evolved" millennia, and a materialist girl from Paris who believed only what She could “see and touch.” While over there, six thousand miles away (perhaps at the very moment of His first arrest for "sedition”), a young Bengali named Auro­bindo Ghose, also raised in the West, discovered beyond the supreme "summit" of Nirvana—a goal that seemed so intangibly ultimate and absolute that pretending to go beyond it was like a blasphemy—a certain "something” containing the seeds of humanity’s next cycle. What kind of wind was it then blowing over the earth? What more radical sedition was brewing? It is not a revolt against the British Government which any one can easily do, Sri Auro­bindo would soon say. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature.²² And Mother was still marveling in 1972, just one year before leaving her body, as if this remarkable coincidence seemed to her ever more remark­able, or more revealing: Theon and Sri Aurobindo did not know each other, they never met each other. They didn’t even know of each other’s existence and, with totally different approaches, they reached the same conclusion. In totally different countries and without ever knowing about each other, they knew the same thing at the same time. And I met one and the other.²³

Two beings with the same Western materialistic upbring­ing rediscovered a tradition lost since the beginning of this cycle, some seven to ten thousand years earlier, as if human­ity had to travel an immense curve and explore to the very end, with innumerable sages and saints, the ways of heaven or nothingness, which all emerged into a white infinity or some extraterrestrial paradise; explore to the very end the paths of science, which all opened out onto an almost monstrous earth; plow or struggle on the mind’s paths, which all opened onto a new, worldwide Babel where thoughts and words became like counterfeit money at the service of teeming egoisms and pygmies of power; touch and delve ever deeper into its own misery along all the paths of faith or non-faith, yes or no, good or evil—and nothing was good or bad anymore—to end up in some dark hole where the only unmistakable reality was still the old death, with or without bombs, in the middle of a tragic and grotesque circus where man ridiculed himself beneath the sole onslaught of radio waves and democratic slogans —draw the whole curve of pain, from zero-Matter to zero- Spirit, in order to come full circle at last and reach that supreme Starting Point where a few Rishis had seen, in the heart of Matter and the depths of their bodies, as if in the dark depths of a cave, a new Sun of knowledge like a new Spirit in a new Matter: "This treasure in the infinite rock” (Rig-Veda 1.130.3), "the Sun dwelling in the darkness” (III.39.5). And this entire cycle was perhaps needed for the whole of humanity to reach the same realization, instead of a few Rishis scattered atop their Himalayas—because, in the end, there is but one Man. One single evolution. We all reach the goal together, or no one reaches it.

We are there, we are reaching that point; we have exhausted everything, there are no more marvelous beliefs to mislead us above or below, we have seen ourselves perfectly: the doors of bankruptcy open upon OURSELVES.

And finally, the same old law of evolution presides over this transition as over all the others. The key to the transi­tion is not to be found in some new pair of lungs or some frontal or parietal superlobes, but in this very pressure from within, this Need which pulled the reptiles from the bottom of their dried-up swamps and forced them to invent wings, which pulled the fish out of their asphyxiating hole and compelled them to invent lungs—which is pulling men from their mental pestilence, and is pounding and ham­mering them until they spring forth into another air of consciousness, into that ONE where all the misery of sepa­ration and division in Matter will be healed.

Matter is the obstacle and Matter is the key.

Thus Mother had to meet Theon before Sri Aurobindo, as if She, too, had to exhaust all the false paths of the Possible before knocking at the real door—perhaps in order to close the way once and for all to any resurgence of the old Atlanteans, whom Plato said had been swallowed up 9,000 years before him; perhaps, too, because She had to meet death once before wresting its secret from it. For Death, according to the ancient Scriptures, is the guardian of Knowledge.²⁴

We are in the time of the last sedition: against Mind in Matter and death in Matter. Perhaps one and the same thing.

The supreme obstacle is the supreme door.

10: The Need to Be

Like Mirra, we can have the most beautiful visions in the world, touch supreme summits of consciousness and bathe in the great waves of a divine music which drown us in rapture; we can have, on this earth, the most beautiful adventures, passions that for a moment draw us into a fullness of life never experienced before; we can bathe, with Monet, in a soft and opaline light, lose ourselves in a seagull’s cry, love, love to distraction a great sparkling sea where the infinite narrows down so much that it almost nestles in our heart, or our heart softly drifts away to the sound of the surf, through ever-lived centuries and split- second crystalline lives. And then ... then everything begins again. Life clashes and shakes, and there is that never- seized second. Life shimmers and sparkles; but something is still missing. Something is missing, is terribly missing from life. We twist and turn, and it is all the same; we walk on across continents and through stories upon stories, and it is always the same: it is there, as if it had never moved, a never-filled little hole within, a little cry from a self-same child, forgotten at the edge of a great shore of no country, while we run and speak on the outside, come and go on the outside, but who goes in all that, what is all that? We like, or do not like, take and give and laugh and cry, but what good does it do, what is left, what is there? Something is missing and missing. It is like a story never begun, a little breath within never breathed, a pure and naked little cry of BEING, there, which says—Oh, where is life? Where am I in this? Where does it all begin? And sometimes it crumbles and everything crumbles, and we say, "Ah!"—as if we had never lived a second of all that chaos. Sometimes, in a dis­tracted second, at the edge of an ancient shore of forever, between two footsteps lost among the millions of steps we have taken, something pauses, something looks, we are there without seeing anything, but staring as if from the beginning of all time; we stand there, futile and null, and for one second we are; we are a nothing that yet is and for once is something; we are like a nothing that looks and for once the world is wrapped in softness; and it is nothing, and it is utterly soft, like the only thing that is. And then it is like a smile rising through centuries of oblivion, shores upon lost shores, millions of steps for nothing and millions of similar stories, and nothing is the same anymore ... for a second. A full little second that contains all eternities and all lives, as if it were that we were seeking, that that we were, through countless lives, and for that that we were walking, and for that that we loved. It is nothing, and it is like everything. The only story, contained in a second. And what else is there? All the Himalayas and all the visions in the world are like a vain breath of air compared to that one little breath, and if we have not touched that, we have touched nothing, lived nothing, loved nothing—something is missing and goes on being missing ... because that is what fills, what lives and what loves. What else is there?

The world s great story is very simple. It is contained in one second.

A little second that is.

Like a white flame.

A drop of the great Ray.

And so much fuss for nothing. So many cries, so many quests and steps and words, religions and philosophies: How complicated they make it! She said. But we pause for a second, and it is there. It is always there. It stares like a lost child, it understands so little of all this fuss: "Well, is this what life is? Is this what men are? Is this ...” We stare, but that does not need to gaze at anything—it is the pure gaze. We walk, we run and search, but that does not need to search for anything—it is right there, always there. We want this, do not want this, love and hate, but that needs none of that—it is. And it is everything—what could be missing? It is a flower, a rose, a man, a horse, a lizard scur­rying away: it is everything that is. It stares and it is. We let sand run through our fingers, we let ourselves flow with the ray of light upon a little leaf, we look while walking down a sidewalk, we look at anything, we look purely, and we are elsewhere, lost in wonder; if we let ourself go, we would look for hours: a sudden gap in that enormous noth­ingness that moves and comes and goes ... and then, it is. IT IS. A child looks at that for hours. But man has forgotten how to do so. Thus he needs steps and more steps, words, gospels, sorrows upon sorrows and philosophies which confuse everything, a terrible confusion of everything in order for us to bore a hole in all that, all of a sudden, and emerge into open air. And sometimes we can never bore a hole in it, and we are quite dead on two feet with medals and six children ... who will try to find what we have forgotten. It is, and it is so simple that no one ever thinks of it, it is even too simple to be thought of: it cannot be that simple! So goes the magic of the Mind—it weaves and embroiders, it miraculizes and mystifies all it touches, it evangelizes and anathematizes, believes or does not believe, condemns or approves, and it is all the same in black or white, yes or no, for or against, the same fabric of nothingness over what simply is. It pushes its microscopes into walls and its telescopes toward the stars, invents inter­galactic distances and geological depths so as to probe its own density and travel the whole course of its falsehood, in order to mimic BEING to the sidereal extent of its own nothingness. Yet it is all there, in a split second: the far and near, before and after. It is as light as air, as insignificant as a sparrow, no larger than a blade of grass or a gleam of mischief. It is not even worth thinking about, it is. It does not need a thousand stars or oceans: it is found in a fall­ing raindrop, a passing nothing. We touch it for a second, as a child absent-mindedly gazes at the rippling of a wave, and the earth's four corners are right there—Asia, Africa, the unknowns of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow; everything is perfectly known, it is there in one second. It is the world's great body in the blink of a second. It is there, completely and entirely there, without plus or minus or other. How could anything be left out? There is only one thing that is, not two. There is but one story to know, not two. A pure little drop of being. Such is the whole future of the earth—its "eternally-there” that it does not see but toward which it endlessly and painfully moves, wearing away the whole distance of its mental falsehood and all the layers of its forgetfulness.

The furthermost bounds of evolution are here.

It is all contained in the smile of a child.

Some call it the soul, others God, heaven, salvation, but the salvation of what in the end? If only we could extricate ourselves from our gospels—from our creeds of the left and the right, of above and below, our countless boxes of salva­tion. If only we were this pure little drop of being.

Thus was Mirra’s new field of experience opening up, a field as old as the Pleistocene and as young as a child’s smile. We are around 1908, Mirra has just left a more and more distant "artist’s life” by having divorced Morisset. Theon's fireworks have already burned out. In the end, there only remains what one is, or is not.

The Shattering of the Fishbowl

But what is that little drop of being?—Poetry? Maybe so, because it, after all is the "doer," the "poet" par excellence. But why is it so veiled? Why should the mind be a false­hood? Nature does not invent falsehood, nor does she invent truth; she needs neither one nor the other—she invents means. It is the mind that invents truth and its twin brother, falsehood. The mind is the maker of miracles; Nature, as it should be, is perfectly natural. She needs neither philosophies nor gospels: she just needs to progress. We simply move ahead—right or left, above or below, by any means whatsoever, we keep progressing, whether we fall flat on our faces or soar into heaven. The descending road ascends perfectly. The mind is the maker of good and evil. Nature herself needs neither good nor evil; she needs to advance. Then why would Nature, who is so wise, have invented this instrument, the mind, if only to reject it? True, she has rejected many things since the Pre-Cambrian era; she is a perfect iconoclast. The mind is the idolater, a perpetual idolater: pharaohs, totems, penicillin and equa­tions to the nth degree. Whether it idolizes materialism or God, we are not sure it makes any difference. The mind is the maker of ideas. Nature needs no ideas; she simply does things. She even produces miracles that we find hard to imitate. Of course, she is not clever enough to invent theories; what concocts them is that mind of ours—only to unmake them immediately afterwards in an attempt to catch Nature at the next bend. But she laughs, and slips away! Mean­while, she makes us progress. Progress in what? That is the question. Mind is power. And that is that! Let us pause and take stock: the steam engine, electricity and automatic doors for people in a hurry, not to mention the jet plane to take us at top speed to the other end of nowhere. Nature does not have powers; she is what she is, quite simply. If something bothers her, she causes an earthquake, that is all. But as for us, we are not what we are, that is the whole difference—and that is also why we can do nothing, finally, for to be means to have the power to be what one is. We have borrowed everything, there is not one minute of a man in all our millions of discoveries! We have even caught the sun to put it in a box. The mind is the imitator. It is even a perfect counterfeiter. A bird flies perfectly, for it is its nature to fly. Man walks, in theory, and he even pretends to know where he walks and where he is going, while Nature does not know. The mind is knowledge. And that is that! We just have to stop and contemplate: Nature has no knowledge—she is, so things are done naturally; they are known because they are done, and they are done because they are. It is very simple. It is automatic knowledge-action, like the migratory bird flying straight from Siberia. Whereas we need maps and goniometers—an improvement, perhaps. The mind is an eternal improver; it has improved on Nature so much that she no longer knows where to turn—unless she creates another earthquake to shake up all those pygmy improvers. Whereas we have a soul and a spirit. Yes, sir! For the mind also knows how to trap the soul and spirit when it finds it convenient to do so—in order to raise its arrogance right up to heaven. Nature has no spirit: she is. And perhaps she is the spirit, after all, because spirit is what is. Man is not—he does not understand, does not know and has no power, because he is not what he is. That is all. As simple as that. When one is, one knows, and when one knows, one has power. And one laughs.

But why the devil did she invent this tool? Nature is not wasteful, her economy is wise. After all, she is the one who invented man and fitted him with a mind, as she fitted others with a pair of claws. But finally, to think that think­ing is the supreme tool is our supreme folly. And Nature, the perfect iconoclast, is in the midst of shattering that idol. We can at least have enough "spirit” to acknowledge the delightful little cleansing of the world she is indulging in, while thoroughly enjoying herself. We have only to turn on the evening news to be informed of the latest progress of the cleansing. A geometrical progression, since we still love mathematics. But finally, whether annoyed or hurt, we can grab Nature by the neck and ask her why she invented this means, the mind, if it were only to shatter it.

In fact, Nature does not shatter: she transmutes. She is the great transmuter. She has not stopped since a certain protoplasm in its pond, and we are no exception to the rule. Here, the mind will pause a moment, sober and serious (because the mind is dreadfully serious), in order to remark that we are turning Nature into a new Demiurge. For no one has the right to be a demiurge, except man, of course. Oh well, let him be! Though for the moment, he cuts a different figure. Nature has no need to be a demiurge, nor God to be God!—each one needs to be what he is, not more, and when one is, there is only ONE thing, and it is all the same: God, demiurge, crocodile or ladybug. Because there is only one thing that is, not two. So where is God in all that, and the materialist and the ladybug? There is only that, which is and becomes increasingly what it is, with a pair of claws or a pair of spectacles, better and better and more and more. And when man is what he is, he will under­stand. And he will have power, and he will laugh heartily.

The mind is the most striking negative proof of the neces­sity to be. Anything that pretends just collapses and dies. When we are, we shall no longer need to die; death is the ultimate expedient to force us to be in our body as in our soul. Then we may know what being is. For so-called "Mat­ter” does not exist without Spirit and so-called “Spirit” does not exist without Matter. The union of the two is being. Only the body can understand, Mother will say. Until we have realized Spirit in Matter—or perhaps the Spirit of Matter, or perhaps divine Matter—we will understand neither Spirit nor Matter—nor God nor Nature nor the devil nor anything. Nor even ourselves. Matter is the key to total knowledge—perhaps we should say, to the knowl­edge of the Totality. I saw this Secret, Mother would say, I saw that the Supreme only becomes perfect in terrestrial Matter, on earth. ¹ And She would keep tirelessly repeating, until the last days of her life: To be capable of understanding the spiritual extreme and the material extreme , and to find the meeting point where ... it becomes a true force.²

A FORCE, she said. A real force.

We have yet to realize that being is power. It is even the only power.

And if the goal of evolution is to draw those millions of little evolutionary points that we are toward their totality— totality of consciousness, totality of being, totality of power and vision, and ultimately totality of joy, for only joy is missing, and how could there be joy in what is truncated? —then evolution had to find the means of making each one of these points conscious of its own individuality. So it cast the big net of the mind out into that indivisible totality, where the ancient hominids ran with the herds of aurochs and beat in unison with the moons and the slow glaciations in the same flux of being that linked everything to every­thing: the Siberian bird to the tropical lagoons and the hominid to the mute pulsations of the tribe—without error, without you or me, without here or there, tomorrow or yesterday, and the whole horde of sorrows that stems from not knowing and from being a man cut off all alone in his skin. The mind is the great divider. Such is its evolutionary necessity and its mortal feature. It has divided everything, not a single thing escapes its fragmentation: good and evil, truth and falsehood, time and space, far and near, hell and salvation, spirit and matter, and you and me and millions of little selves at sidereal distances from one another—but who know themselves as a self. And all the impotence of no longer knowing directly, and all the millions of devices to bring nearer what they have driven away, to cross the expanses that they have sealed-off, to know what they have forgotten, to feel what they have shut under shells thicker than those of their dinosaur brothers, to love unhappily, painfully and separately what used to be loved in oneness, each one as much as the other, amidst a joy that did not even need to be called joy. The whole mind's circuit—that prodigious trajectory of the self in a separate skin, that tremendous re-invention of everything through substitutes, that endless trickery—just to try and rediscover the only trick, the ONE simplicity that would tie everything back together in a single wingbeat, a single glance, a single pul­sation of being at last, a single knowledge that would be like a love endowed at last with power. The million colors of the one complete picture, the thousand gospels of the one tranquil Ray, the thousand apparatuses of the one power of being, the thousand little beings of one being, the thousand suffocating miseries in a man-made fishbowl. Truly, he who believes that the mind was meant to be the inventor of sublime philosophies and divine equations and Raphaelesque paintings is a madman of evolution. The mind is only the inventor of the necessary division, neces­sary falsehood, necessary pain and necessary illusion, so that each evolutionary point can rediscover the total BEING in an individual being, the total consciousness in an indi­vidual consciousness, and the total power in an individual powerlessness. And the joy of being at last.

And when the fishbowl reaches the end of its evolutionary necessity, when those millions of beings can no longer stand suffocating in a separate little self, suffocating in pestilen­tial thoughts and decomposed words, suffocating in their gospels that save nothing and their panaceas that cure nothing and their science that knows nothing, solves noth­ing, can do nothing and mechanizes man in a terrible rat trap of steel and concrete, where economic policemen will soon be kings behind a facade of nonexistent liberty, non­existent equality and nonexistent fraternity, with a thousand deadly parties pulling to the left or the right in order to find out in which direction it is better to be drowned—then the time comes for evolution to smash the fishbowl.

That moment has come.

Our failure is our most marvelous hope.

The last convulsions of the old mental Babel are opening onto a new cycle, a supramental cycle. The most tremen­dous illusion of all times is collapsing in a crash of rust and dust, as if it had never existed. And indeed, it never did. Separation never was. Consciousness was never divided, Spirit is not as we think it, Matter is not as we see it; life and death—that first and fundamental division—are neither life as we know it nor death as we think it, but something else: a radical something else into which we are slowly toppling, as if into a bewildering and unexpected child­birth—even more radical and unexpected than that which transformed the reptile in its swamp into a bird in the sky, and more total, because it is another being. It is not an improved extension of the same old evolution; it is a leap, an evolutionary saltus into a different consciousness. A new evolution, Sri Aurobindo would say. A different life in Matter. A different Matter. A different law of being.

For to be differently is to have a different power.

But being begins with one drop.

The Way Out Below

Nature always gives us the means to move to another cycle and to work out our own evolution. Collectively, she creates the pressure of new or suffocating conditions in the milieu; individually, the internal pressure of a need toward ... the other state or new milieu.

That need is the lever of the transition.

Fundamentally, from the beginning of time, millennia upon millennia, there has always been that Need at the source of the world's obscure impulsion. It is the moving force of evolution. The need for sun in the heart of the plant, the need for air in the heart of the larva, the need to live, to be. Even the galaxies need to expand. And how could what is really dead aspire to be? Death does not exist, what is not cannot be. Nothing in the world can need what it does not already have and what it is not already— if the sun did not exist, we would not need the sun, and if we happened to invent one single sun, it would mean that it already existed in our first steps toward it, it would actually push us toward it, would remember itself in us. We constantly invent what is already there, we dig up the obscure layers of an “eternally there,’’ we need what we are. This is the world’s great Need: TO BE. It is that need that remembers itself, becomes itself. That is what slowly becomes before our eyes and through our eyes—we become what we are. And to be is to be completely, for how can what is not be everything—it is, or it is not, and if it is, it is everything. One cannot be a part of oneself without need­ing to be wholly oneself. The need of the world and of each particle in the world is to be everything that is. Being needs to be. That is all. Where is the nothingness that needs something?

And the need to be grows from cycle to cycle, from spe­cies to species. It is like a flame that pushes within—which pushes grains of atoms toward grains of atoms, ever more atoms, toward the great nebulae; which pushes molecules toward molecules, ever more molecules, toward a first body of being; which pushes each being toward other beings, toward ever more being·, which grows with the body of the world and remains unsatisfied until every atom and every molecule and every little cell in a body has again found its totality of being. For it is the same being that wants to be in all points, in the interstellar totality and the most infinite total sum as in the tiniest grain of atom. And when, for a second, one is in the most microscopic point, one is everything and everywhere, for there are not two things or two beings. The smallest and the first to be will be the last to become its own totality of being—for it has been the most encrusted by evolution. And since being is contained in one point, the total secret and the total power and the total being are to be found in the atom and in the cell. The point is the key to the whole. The summit of evo­lution is not in billions of things added together or brought to perfection, but in a single point which remembers totally what it is. The Matter of the beginning holds the secret of final Matter: the secret of being, for it is the only secret. In the deepest oblivion lies the most perfect being. The oldest layer is the last one to surface and reveal its content. Con­sciousness, grown luminously conscious upon the summits of evolution, leans toward its base and meets the supreme being who had kindled this flame in it and led this entire journey back to itself. Memory concludes its remembering: it is. We will be completely only in our primal matter: the body. The final being is at the beginning. The dame of Need is the leader of the journey. The fire of Matter is the supreme fire of Spirit: ‘Ό Fire," says the Veda, “when thou art well borne by us, thou becomest the supreme growth and expan­sion of our being ... thou art a multitude of riches spread out on every side (Rig Veda, II. 1.12)... thou art the son of heaven by the body of the earth” (III.25.1).

A little white flame.

And it is joy.

A great joy of being willed this journey, because to be is to contain the joy of all that is. There is no other joy. All suffering is insufficiency of being. The world suffers from not being what it is, and humans suffer for not being what they are. But they are moving toward a great joy which is theirs, they are moving toward the totality they have always been. They are soon going to break out of the old fishbowl; the need to be is the key to the transition, and the pressure of the flame will shatter the wall of illusion. We are at the time of the unbearable Pressure. The mind is suffocating like an old fish at the bottom of its dried-up hole. But we are moving toward something else, we are the pioneers of a new air. And for once, it may be an air of joy.

This need is the key to every evolutionary transition, from the mineral to man to what will replace mental man. There are not several ways of getting through, there is only one. But because we are mental beings, we speak of the need for truth, the need for justice, the need for good, the need for freedom, that is, the countless dualities of the mind, each with its reverse of shadow and almost its necessity of shadow, for if only one of these dualities were really to triumph, it would be a catastrophe as insufferable as the triumph of its opposite, and what justice could we apply that would not be the ruthless exaction of a single idea, what truth that would not be the intolerant exclu­sivism of a single thought, what good that would not be the blind destruction of all the hidden aspiration and need for a wider good contained within the “evil?” If you follow this law of the guilty who must be punished, Mother said, then little by little, with the unfolding of things, everything should be punished! No one would remain to progress!³ We do not know, we know nothing; the mind is a not-knowing that needs to know—another of those thousand dual needs that are all a wrapping around the single need to be. For to be is to know the need of each being and the good of each being and the truth of each being, within something that encompasses all, loves all, understands all—and which carries us beyond our own limits of good and evil, justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, to the point where the fishbowl ceases to exist and where the thousand rays are ONE. Each evolutionary transition is not the destruction of an evil grown unbearable, but of an old, suffocating Good, which swallows up the one need to be for the benefit of its own worn out mechanism.

But with man came what may be the saddest deformation in the whole history of evolution—though we do not really know, for we have always seen that in Nature's economy each deformation had its own deep necessity and hid some detour that enriched her realm, some subterfuge to make us emerge despite ourselves into an unexpected clearing ... and finally hid some formation of the one thing that formed itself through all the ages, all modes of being and all “deformations." But this Flame, this need to be, this true evolutionary fire which should have been our supreme treasure—“This Flame with his hundred treasures,” says the Veda (1.59.7), this "supreme growth and expansion of our being” (II. 1.12) has become synonymous with a tragic misunderstanding. The mind has grasped hold of it, as it grasps hold of everything else, and stuck this label on it, “God. Place of residence: heaven." Which is a supreme aberration. (But we are always wary of so-called "aberra­tions” which may still be a detour in the one and only Direction.) Indeed, to the encumbered humans that we are, this evolutionary future may have looked like some inac­cessible “heaven” beyond the walls of the fishbowl, at the phenomenal distance of our own layers of oblivion. Thus we had to "climb up,” "ascend,” "get out” in order to catch God somewhere above, all the way up there, in that golden Future inside a tomb. And again, we seem to hear Mira Ismalun, madcap that she was, who had so well under­stood Goethe: "Beyond the tombs, forward!” But were we to abolish death, what would be left of the religions? And of their salvations? Whereas now that we come to the bottom of the pit, now that we despair of ever finding any heaven in the midst of the sticky tidal wave that seems to have engulfed the world, amid this mental chaos, this vile eruption that seems to raise again the old fallen totems to adorn them with psychedelic colors; now that the most sordid instincts and age-old fears seem to be resurging with the triumph of a science that we are beginning to wonder might well be a more devastating plague than all the old plagues it pretended to cure; now, more than ever, it would seem that we have to “climb up," to "get out,” and that “heaven" is farther away than it ever was—but this is wrong, for we have never been so near! We are digging up the mud of the first evolutionary layers, close, very close to the primal secret at the heart of naked Matter; thanks to our religions, we have exhausted all the old heavens above, we are at the bottom of the pit and only one layer remains —the way out is below.

This is “the Sun in the darkness” of the Vedas.

But we have to grasp the lever of the Transition.

We have to understand what is going on.

To understand is imperative.

This whole Flame, stifled by the aberration of religions, discredited by the label of "God” stuck on it, diverted from its real goal—this idea of an arbitrary, supreme God is one of the most unacceptable things to any enlightened mind.⁴ Mother exclaimed, this “one” God amid our millions of one-God and one-way religions, whose reverse sides were invariably the Devil, to correct what might have been the intolerable triumph of that single light of death—this flame must rediscover its real meaning for the earth, its real meaning for “the supreme growth and supreme expansion of our being," and not for our extinction in some one-and- only heaven.

For it is the flame of the great evolutionary transition and the key to the total being.

It is not far away; it is right here, in the heart.

When I understood that, Mother recalled, I rushed head­long like a cyclone and nothing could have stopped me.⁵ Sixty years later, in 1964, at the age of eighty-six, She was still saying: Really a thirst, a need, you know, a need.... All the rest doesn’t matter, what you need is THAT. No more bonds —free, free, free, free! Always ready to change everything, except ONE thing: to aspire. That thirst. I quite understand: some people don't like the idea of a ‘‘Divine’’ because it imme­diately gets mixed up with all those dreadful conceptions, and so it makes their lives a little bit more complicated—but we don’t need that! The “something" we need, the Perfection we need, the Light we need, the Love we need, the Truth we need, the supreme Perfection we need—and that's all. The formulas... the fewer the formulas, the better. A need, a need, a need ... that THE Thing alone can satisfy, nothing else, no half measure. That alone. And then, move on! Move on! Your path will be your path, it doesn’t matter; any path, any path whatever, even the follies of today’s American youth can be a path, it doesn't matter.⁶

11: From the Infinite to the Infinitesimal

The Central Experience

One moves about, comes and goes, one is a king, a schoolboy, a painter; like Mirra, one even has a child, and visions in every color and of every country; one has lived indeed, for a long time, one has been here or there, a priest­ess, a princess or anybody, and in the Luxembourg Garden where She used to walk, as she did in Thebes, Venice or Versailles, it was so much the same that it seemed to have been forever: "it” was there, in a little lane, wearing a bonnet or a cap embroidered with gold thread—but what is it all about, what remains, what is there? One has done this or that, run about, dreamed, listened to one music or another, drawn this curve or other curves, read and read again—“cosmic reviews," reviews that review everything, but nothing is really viewed, nothing is truly understood; today is like everyday, there is just "something” moving about, here or there, with or without baggage, with or without a family, with every possible power or no power at all, what difference does it make? Millions and millions of things added to one another, added to ... what? Future Thebes, undiscovered Eldorados, this or that, and then what? Millions of things to do, but what is actually being done? Millions of wonders yet to come, but what does it matter, what difference does it make? Pluses, minuses, but where is that which is here, at this simple, present minute when we walk along, the something that is moving right now? The something that will never be millions of years old, which will never expect tomorrow's wonders, which has no yesterday or tomorrow, and is quite simply moving at this frightfully blank second, ah! What is it? What is there? If it is not here, it is nowhere, nor in any century, and what good are all the wonders if this one second is not the wonder? Tomorrow is like yesterday, we have nothing to add anymore, nothing to find anymore: if it is not here, it will never be here. Ne-ver. There is no future, there is this one second. There is no past, there is this one second. There is no hope, no wonder, nothing to gain or lose, there is this one second. There is nothing to find but what is already found there; the supermen and supergods of every possible universe, tomorrows paradises, evolutionary sum­mits or abysses—are nothing, and they will always be nothing until this one second is filled with “something” that IS.

So we can make all the fuss we want, boast of the seven wonders of the world and a forthcoming eighth, create philosophies and religions, make little children and take lots of trips, but that leads nowhere if our little second is not right now. At page 800, we will find ourselves as we were before, after all the baptisms we will remain unchanged, and after a thousand lives it will be still the same—if superman is not right now, he will never exist at any lime in any universe. Because this “here and now” is what creates every superman and every universe, every' plus and minus, but we have no further need of plus or minus, before or after—there is nothing to add, nothing to subtract, it is fully here, and it is full forever.

A drop of being.

We may say all we like, but all existence in the world is reducible to this simple second. There are no great or small things to do, no inventions, discoveries or improvements— nothing is improved if there is not this one little second. This second is what is unimprovable. It is the instanta­neous best of everything that moves, the great journey in one second. It is the one story of a million stories which come and go like phantoms and recur again and again, for that single existing little second to be found.

It is something suddenly beating in the heart, something warm, calm, rich in content, and very still, very full, like a sweetness ... Like a reflection of something eternal on very peaceful waters.¹

But it is so light and limpid, that it looks like nothing, a mere breath of air, and one is left with a smile. The Great Wonder is so transparent that we do not see it. We laugh and just pass. We pass everything by. We scale summits, soar into cosmic consciousness, move here and there, in a monk's robe or no robe at all, a sinner or a saint, it is all the same—and right in the middle of the road, without a temple, without fuss, it is there, and it smiles mischievously, lightly, so lightly, unveiled and naked, so fluid that we cannot catch it, so clear that it is instantaneously everywhere, and so simple, so simple! Millions of years equivalent to one second. And so young that it is like the eternal childhood of the world. So where is tomorrow? Where is over there? How complicated they make it!

The world’s future in a second. Its eternal present.

And everything fills with presence.

And without that, there is nothing at all. Just a vain dream. And there will be nothing at all for ever and ever. We would merely add loads of wonders to nothing.

Mirra suddenly felt relieved the day someone happened to tell her, You know, that has nothing to do with the one- God-up-above: it is the God within, and that is what the world is becoming. And it has no need of religions. I was an outright atheist: till the age of twenty, the very idea of God made me furious. Therefore / had the most solid base—no imaginings, no mystic atavism; my mother was very much an unbeliever and so was my father. So from the point of view of atavism it was very good: positivism, materialism. Only one thing: since I was very small, a will for perfection in any field whatever; a will for perfection and the sense of a limitless consciousness—no limits to one's progress or to ones power or to one’s scope. And that, since I was very small. But mentally, an absolute refusal to believe in a "God”: I believed only in what I could touch and see. Only, the sense of a Light here above, which began when I was very small, I was five, along with a will for perfection. A will for perfec­tion : oh, whatever I did always had to be the best I could do. And then, a limitless consciousness. These two things. And my return to the Divine came about through Theon’s teaching, when I was told for the first time, "The Divine is within, there." Then I felt at once, “Yes, this is it."²

It was like a wall collapsing.

We are all behind a wall—the enormous wall of our own conceptions, fear or hope, for hope, too, is a kind of wall— our hopes are so poor!—and then, on the other side of the wall lies the simplicity of the Wonder we never dare hope for. It was so simple that we had never thought of it. And we could not have thought that it was so simple, because for the mind, nothing can exist without complication, or difficulty, or conquest, or toil, or ... The mind is complica­tion itself; if things are not complicated enough, they cannot be true; if a child can do it, then what is the use of "I"? In fact, all this toil is not so much to “find” the thing as to get out of the complication. To conquer the non-conquest. To build a transparence. One might almost say that the mind is a tremendous edifice for catching a breath of air—which it never catches; it catches cyclones, earthquakes, all kinds of fireworks that give it a feeling of existence—Ah, look how strong I am! I boil and bubble, I foam, I fume! And then ... nothing. It has not caught one second of anything refreshing. It has not breathed for one second. Suffocation is what best gives the mind the sense of existence; it even writes volumes about its refined suffocation. But perhaps, in Natures economy, this enormous machine of suffoca­tion was invented only to drive us to the point where we cannot stand it any longer, and to compel us to get out of it ... as conscious individuals. All the barriers—religious, like the one that held Mirra back, philosophical, political, scientific ... the millions of little barriers—may only have existed to accumulate enough Force or Shakti to burst the barrier and make us emerge into the open air, free and fully formed, instead of being an amorphous Precambrian little larva unknowingly imbibing the great sap of life. So we are not fabricating science, machines, religions or philoso­phies; we are fabricating the Shakti. We are letting the being grow beneath its bell jar. But it is only a bell jar.

Mirra had been building up her cyclone for twenty-six years.

And suddenly, everything seemed to conspire to open the doors before her (or undo the complication): It was at a lecture on India, at a time when I knew nothing of India, absolutely nothing, only the usual nonsense. I didn’t even know what a mantra was. I had gone to a lecture given by some fellow who was supposed to have practiced “yoga" for a year in the Himalayas and recounted his experience (none too interesting, either). All at once, in the course of his lec­ture, he uttered the sound OM. And I saw the entire room suddenly fill with light, a golden, vibrating light. ...I was probably the only one to notice it: my whole, entire body, everything vibrated in an extraordinary way! It was like a revelation—everything, but everything started vibrating. Then I said: "At last, here’s the true sound!”³ Someone had "captured the sound."

Almost at the same time (everything did seem to have been triggered like a conspiracy,) a very ordinary Indian, on his way through Paris, put Vivekananda’s book Raja- Yoga into her hands, the very first Indian book She had ever read: It really seemed so wonderful that someone could explain something to me!⁴ She fell on it. Then yet another traveller gave her the Bhagavad Gita and told her, Read this, knowing that in the Gita, Krishna represents the God within.⁵ India was knocking at Mirras door from every side. Not that She suddenly found herself a disciple of India and a devotee of the "religions of India" (which besides has no "religions”—still another nonsense); whether exotic or not, all religions seemed equally aberrant to her, but it was there, within—not in books, not in India, but within her­self, there, immediate. Within a month, all the work was done!⁶ Everything was un-complicated at one stroke. Truly, there are moments in life when all circumstances seem to converge into a silent conspiracy to lead us to a certain point—there is no need for “big events,” amazing individuals or luminous words; sometimes it just takes a breath of nothing, an “ordinary” person, a chance encounter, a book, and scales seem to fall from your eyes. Like a little shock; "Oh, but I’ve always known that!” Each time there is this "I've-always-known-that!” It is nothing new and it is com­pletely new. Like a meeting between yourself and yourself. It is nothing, it looks like nothing, it is uncatchable, but it is another air. Just a little breath. You can shrug your shoulders and pass right by it because it does not hold a sufficient dose of complication. But if once, only once, that little door opens up, that little skylight in the fortress, that golden little breath, then you come back to it, as if by sheer force—because it is nothing and yet it is filled with a supreme power running through the years like a smile. It is even what runs through all lives. Suddenly, that futile second pulls you by the sleeve as if it were the only existing second among a million empty hours. A little drop of pure diamond. It is the Force itself. Pure. It is the only thing that ever was amidst a million trifles. It is not serious at all, and yet it is all that remains. It is as fragile as a smile and yet more powerful than tons of stockpiled uranium—but it is millions of years old, it is not in a hurry, and does not show off; it bides its time, and does not need to perform miracles: it is the miracle. It can recreate the world in a second. It is the power of the world, what makes the cycles turn, what has pulled us out of the protozoan and is slowly leading us toward what we are—toward our own power of being. Then we will not need uranium or machines to make up for our powerlessness to be: we shall act, with a smile, we shall quite simply be. From beginning to end, we are only heading toward a meeting with ourselves.

But we would be quite wrong to think that Mirra was satisfied with one little second "like that.” If it can be once, it must be forever, at every moment and precisely in all those little minutes, there, between two footsteps on a boulevard, on the stairs and everywhere, so utterly empty and poignant with absurd emptiness that they seem about to burst with something. Life becomes very poignant at that moment. We are on a kind of empty reverse side and everything is suffocating, as if we were constantly inside a non-reason, a non-sense, a non-being; something stirs within which is so terribly empty that it almost feels like a painful full­ness—a need ... pure, without meaning, without even an “I want,” and anyway what do I want? What is there to want? A need, a stark need, as if that empty intensity were the only fullness, the very beat of our being, the yet-unborn-being somewhat poignant with being, and there is only that, only that, this nothingness throbbing with each step, each gesture, that need to be which bums ... like a white flame. It burns—for nothing. It simply burns. And it is because it burns. Being is a fire. Emptiness is a fire, full­ness is a fire. Nothingness is a fire, somethingness is a fire. It is all the same, and we no longer know if we need or do not need, if it is absurd or not absurd, if we refuse or do not refuse, live or do not live, are or are not—there is that same fire stirring with our every step, and what does it matter as long as it burns, like the being of our being, our only fullness, our only meaning, the only right there that is.

And then, it is always there.

It is there all the time. There is nothing to find, nothing

to seek: the need was being, the emptiness was being, the suffocation was being—that which was seeking and seek­ing itself, filling itself with its own fire of being. Good was a fire, evil was a fire, the future and the past are a fire, and what do all those centuries matter! It burns: it is. That is all. Tomorrow and yesterday, summits and stupidities, here or there, it is all the same and it burns: it is. And one day it becomes so compact within it feels as if we were too large for our body, too full of being-fire for our body to contain us. It is almost overwhelming. You bump into walls everywhere: within, without, everywhere, in beings and in things—a world of walls—as if that fire raised the walls, or perhaps made you aware of them—nothing is natural anymore, falsehood becomes flagrant, suffocating, you wonder how you can go on living in all that. The closer you come to the other side, the more you see the difference, Mother said. As long as you wallow in your ignorance, you don’t notice it.⁷ This is the last suffocation, “The bronze door,” I thought only of that—that concentration, concentra­tion, as if you were sitting before a closed door. And the pressure hurt, hurt physically. She carried that with Her everywhere she walked, went up and down the Boulevard St. Michel with it, was almost run over by a streetcar on her way to the Luxembourg—she heard nothing, saw nothing. She was there pushing and pushing against that door, push­ing more and more with a growing energy ...⁸ Then, all of a sudden, for no apparent reason—I was neither more concen­trated nor more or less anything—vloom! It opened up. And not for hours, but months, my child, it never left me: that light, that radiance, that light and vastness! And the feeling that that is what wants, knows, rules all life and guides everything—that feeling never left me. Not for a single, minute from that moment on. And whenever I had to take a decision, I would stop fora second and receive the answer from there.

A total reversal. And this reversal never returned to the original point ...a feeling of becoming another person.⁹ And all life changes: Absolutely everything changes completely, and everything that seemed to you true, natural, normal, real or tangible, starts immediately looking very ridiculous, very odd, very unreal and absurd; but you have touched some­thing that is supremely true and eternally beautiful, and you never lose it again.¹⁰ It is as if we entered life for the first time; and we know, it is instantaneous knowledge; we know because we are—a horse, a swallow, a pebble, a baby, it is all the same being. We know ourselves perfectly, here or millions of miles away. We know what to do, what to say, what gesture to make, and for the first time life becomes natural. It is all one and the same being moving about, and it knows its own steps and the millions of steps of its mil­lions of other "selves" moving about. It is very simple, it is immediate, harmonious, infallible. It is Harmony that moves about. It feels quite comfortable at every minute, like resting your back against a great light.¹¹ It is the central experience. "O Fire,” says the Veda, "thou art the knower of all things born” (1.59.5), "thou art the plenitude that carries us to the end of our way (II. 1.12). That splendor of thee, O Fire, which is in heaven and in the earth and in the plants and in the waters ... is a vivid ocean of light which sees with a divine seeing (III.22.2). He is the child of the waters, the child of the forests, the child of things stable and the child of things that move. Even in the stone he is there for man, he is there in the middle of his house—he is as one universal in creatures" (1.70.2).

Physical Salvation

But it is not the end of the journey.

Satisfied, we could stay there and doze off into bliss, but our bliss does not change the world one iota. We could catch hold of that light to make sermons, gospels and even miracles. But no sermon has ever changed the world and all miracles end up in the same hole. We are "saved," indeed, so what? The world is not saved, and our first world, this body, will still end up rotting in a tomb—is it saved? What is saved when everything is not saved, since there is but one body? Until we have "saved" this body and this Matter, ultimately nothing will be saved, for what in the universe is "outside?" There is only that. If this single cell, like this single second, is not full, nothing is full and nothing is totally true. In the ultimate finite is the ultimate infinite. In the infinitesimal, the total being. Salvation is physical,¹² Mother would say. And Sri Aurobindo added, The end of other yogas ... is, as it were, the beginning of ours.¹³

Mirra saw the situation very clearly; She was not one to doze off into bliss or preach sermons—She always hated sermons: They want a truth expressed in a few very clear and well-defined words, so they can say, "This is true. " The old calamity of religions: ‘‘This is true—therefore the rest is false­hood ... When a thing is true, you can be sure that its opposite is also true. When you have understood this, then you will begin to understand.¹⁴ Indeed, She was faced with all those “opposites,” the perpetual contradictions in the human mind, in human life, in the human body, in Herself and in everything. We shine on a summit of being, we see, we know, it is perfect and even very "comfortable”... provided we close our eyes. Below, or outside, or within, the same old beast continues to walk, pant, hurt and grate, and Con­tradiction assails us on all sides—the great Contradiction everywhere, the yes-no, good-evil, true-false, life-death, there is no way out of it—of course, there is no way out! Where would we get out? There is nowhere to go I Go where? There is only THAT.¹⁵ We cannot get out of the only thing that exists! And She was beginning to grasp hold of this key that the "opposite" is precisely what enables us to reach totality: For fear of acting wrongly, we stop doing anything; for fear of speaking wrongly, we stop saying anything; for fear of... Virtue has always been busy eliminating things from life and if we could put together all the virtues from all the coun­tries in the world, nothing much would remain in life!,.. It’s a very widespread tendency, which probably comes from a poverty, an incapacity: to reduce and reduce and reduce ... and it all becomes so cramped! In the aspiration not to make any mistakes, you eliminate the opportunities of making them—that’s no cure. It's simply reducing the manifestation to its minimum. And the natural outcome is Nirvana. But if the Lord wanted only Nirvana, there would be only Nirvana! He obviously conceives the coexistence of all opposites and that, to Him, must be the beginning of a totality.¹⁶ Right there, She touched the whole key, the simple key, the one that goes right through to the end: to death, the ultimate "contradiction" that still hides from us the ultimate totality. The obstacle is the lever. The opposite is the lever. It is what has made the world grow since the first protozoan began suffocating in a swamp (had it had the mind to, it would certainly have said that its suffocation was due to Evil, the great Evil, and the one who made it suffocate was the devil, the great Devil of evolution). Here we touch the very root of what was and is the most tremendous calamity of all the spiritualities in the world, the reason for their failure and for the world’s failure; torn between religions full of sin and a Matter that is the very clothing of sin, man has packed God off to heaven (which is not so bad) while he himself dived into Matter like a guilty urchin: "short but sweet,” and after us heaven can fall. Having said that life is a condemned, reprehensible, anti-divine thing, this is the logical conclusion. Then, what to do? We don’t want to do away with life, so we do away with the Divine.¹⁷ And at the same time they close their eyes to the very lever of the world's transformation; they turn their backs on evolution, as do the others in their pure heaven. In short, both the religionist and the materialist, each in their own way, strive to rectify the great Contradiction, the former through salvation, the latter through machinery. And they are all convinced that had they created the world, they would never have made all the blunders God made !¹⁸ Mother exclaimed with her delightful humor. And finally, no one has the lever of either power or deliverance.

What is that evil, that great Evil of the world?

We create religions, philosophies, systems, yet we are nothing but so-called "higher” mammals in Nature's great crucible. Nature has no philosophy: She simply "does.” And what She does is the philosophy. We add all sorts of things to it, which She takes into account... for a moment, then blows them away if they do not suit her progress. She moves forward, that is her philosophy. We do not know what the higher reptile’s philosophy was or if it ever con­ceived of any heaven at all, but it flew all the same. What mattered was to fly. And certainly its dried-up swamps and torrid air were a great Evil that threatened the excellence of its reptilian qualities—it would certainly have said that all this was “against" the good of reptiles. From species to species we have never ceased being attacked by "adverse” conditions, and as lor us poor human creatures, we have more than our share of parasites; like the slightest tree in the forest or the smallest plant in our garden, each of us has his own particular parasite, his own special adversity, the something we wish were not there and which prevents us from ... what? Probably from becoming the excellent man we would like to be—but those millions of excellent men might be remarkably insipid on the surface of this good earth, and our Mother Nature may have other designs. There is no “against" in Nature, everything is for and every­thing is made for us to move forward. This may be the most important lesson we have yet to learn. When we stop thinking that things are "against," we will be closer to the Great Lever. If instead of pushing them away and packing them off to God or the devil, we took a moment to examine that "against” and see what it is made of, we would be very close to the solution. But we go on, like veritable babies of evolution, crying and exclaiming, "Oh, how wonderful it is!”—hence it is God. “Oh, how disgusting it is!”—hence the Devil. But we do not see that everything is marvelous and that the Marvel is at every moment—a marvel of exactness to the second; we see only a microscopic portion of the road, and anything that does not blossom exactly as we think it ought to in this absurd minute along the way is obviously evil and detestable. But our good is as absurd as our evil; we miss the point, we live in an idea of the universe but not in the reality of the universe! We live in the mind, which has divided up everything according to its habit, cut out little cubes from an imperturbable unfolding Totality, in which there is not an atom of contradiction, even for a second. Everything goes there, everything is for that which is unfolding, everything is in that which is growing, and everything is becoming what it is. For there are not two things in the universe, there is only one. And all the "againsts" are designed to make us find that, all the "no’s” to make us touch that yes, that geometric point of the world where all opposites melt into the ONE and become the ONE by the very force of their contradiction.

The only evil, really, is not to be. It is even the ultimate evil of the body—which dies because it is not. The problem can be seen at every level: ugliness, meanness, disease, accidents, suffering, death, they take place in different realms and with different vibrations, but the cause of them all is the same.¹⁹ When we touch the root, we touch all the other levels as well. There is but one thing to touch. Perhaps we are slowly driven to that microscopic cellular point that holds the cure of the world. But we must get there. We must clear away all the layers to reach that point—all the layers that have been piled up on us over thousands of years of evolution, and which are in fact the layers of our forgetfulness. This is our evolutionary burden, our obstacle and our key. The famous "against” that amounts to "for.” And with the wonderful simplicity that takes all the "great human problems” and their huge philosophical para­phernalia and reduces them to their simplest universal expression, She said, laughing: Everyone’s born with some special twist (!) but it's something that has been added, placed to enable one to touch Matter.²⁰ And She further explains: There are two things in every human being: what comes from the past and has persisted because it is fanned and conscious, and then all that dark, unconscious mass, really muddy, that is added in every new life. Then the other thing gets into that and finds itself imprisoned, you know— adulterated and imprisoned—and generally it takes more than half your life to emerge from that entanglement. This is the part of the being that still belongs to Unconsciousness, to Ignorance, to Darkness, to Stupidity, and is ... not even as harmonious as a tree or a flower; something that’s not even as tranquil as a stone, not even as harmonious and not even as strong as the animal—something that is really a downfall. That is really human inferiority. It is ... yes, what was put together more or less clumsily and ignorantly by father, mother, grandparents, education, that whole mudhole, as it were, into which you fall headfirst.... And it was added BECAUSE its one of the victories you must win.²¹ Without our detestable mortal or medical sins, we all would have already gone off into some pure heaven or shut ourselves up in some hygienic and democratic paradise, from which evo­lution would have a hard time plucking us out. But it sees to it that we are well and truly suffocated, parasitized through and through, to compel us to touch Matter and find there, at the very bottom of this pit, in the very heart of the Contradiction, the ultimate secret and the ultimate being and the ultimate power: The remedy is at the center of the evil.²² The way out is below. And in 1912, at the very moment Sri Aurobindo, in Pondicherry, was preparing an even more radical sedition, She was already writing: In full sunlight the roads of intelligence light up, but in the night’s white brightness are revealed the hidden paths of perfection.²³

Thus began what She would soon call the "descending path."

Do not try to be virtuous. See to what extent you are united, ONE with all that is antidivine. Take up your share of the bur­den; accept to be impure and false yourself, and in so doing you will be able to take up the Shadow and offer it. And inso­far as you are able to take it and offer it, things will change.²⁴

We must make a breach in the old wall, but the breach cannot be made by the sum of our human virtues, which only solidify the old complacency—something has to be missing, terribly missing; then we bend over the wound, which burns and hurts, until we find the little cry of being there too, until we have drilled the well of light all the way down. And we begin again and again, and each lime we touch a deeper layer, more painful, more burning—even larger, as if the deeper we went, the more the layers widen, like the reverse of the great layers of light up above, and each time it seems to grow more intense—the Pressure of a growing suffocation, a growing need, a more absolute want, and a more poignant fire, as if the whole earth ached there, with its centuries yet to be healed. And we go deeper; we dig the well of light, we pull down the little ray from above, and sometimes it even seems that the white little flame from above is swallowed up in that Fire, and that all we need is to burn on and on, as if this burning were the very being in this nothingness: an ever more powerful and vaster and more compact Fire, as if our very being were , growing in order to touch a deeper layer of itself. The deeper we go, the more the being grows, as if it were forged, fanned by the power of the contradiction, widened by a pain that seems to touch the furthermost bounds of the earth. "I dug and dug” said the Vedic Rishis (1.179.1). This is the great breach. The cleft. The bridge of light between the old, dull surface, the old celestial heavens, which seem so insubstantial, so empty and hollow in comparison with that burning density of being, and ... something that each time draws us deeper, more within, toward its unbearable mystery, where burning is like a paroxysm of contradiction, a yes-no, a nothingness of being, a flaming refusal, such a desperate or despairing end-of-everything that nothing is left but to love. As though the depths of the night were made of love.

These are the steps of the descent.

At the end: the cell. The body. Pure Matter beneath its millennial coatings.

To man has fallen the painful privilege of making mis­takes. Among the millions of infallible animals, such is his evolutionary distinction and the most powerful indicator of his degree of mutation. The earth is full of cracks and holes and wounds as never before during a million years of the Quaternary. A great evolutionary breakthrough is under way.

There is always a weak point, She said, a sensitive spot we generally call a weakness—but this is in fact the very strength of the being, the point through which he can be touched.²⁵ We must accept the weak point. We must build a bridge between That which eternally is and all the dark and pain­ful ignorance of the material world.²⁶ "He has cloven wide away the darkness as one that cleaves away a skin that he may spread out our earth [earth = body] under his illumin­ing sun,” says the Veda (V.85.1). To triumph in the inner worlds is not enough, we must triumph even in the most material worlds.²⁷ Man must accomplish his mission of purifying matter²⁸ transforming matter,²⁹ She said as early as 1912, even before meeting Sri Aurobindo. Man must enter the path of the divine life,³⁰ create a new race.³¹ And with a prophetic vision of all that Sri Aurobindo's yoga would be, as well as her own up to the age of ninety-five, She wrote, The obstacle merges with the very reason for accomplishing the work: the present state of imperfection of physical matter.,. ,³² We must constantly strive to conquer this bedrock of universal unconsciousness and, through our organism, gradually transform it into luminous con­sciousness.³³

The remarkable phenomenon is that as this "luminous consciousness” on the summits crosses the dark layers of our evolutionary past—everything in us that grates, struggles, suffers, falls ill and revolts, desires or does not desire, wants or does not want, all the enormous imbroglio that makes us toss and turn as on a rack of torture and makes us die in the end—as Matter is purified and the light descends and ignites in there, drawing nearer to the fron­tiers of pure Matter in the body and cells, it is as if Matter itself changed, in vision, in power, in touch, even in law, as if the Being itself, above, upon its summits, changed its eternity, as it were, its time and space, changed even itself in its skin of being—it is no longer the same being! And it is no longer the same Matter, ft is something else ... some­thing divine, She would say. A supreme conjunction in which Spirit and Matter merge into a third thing ... which is the secret of the Future. And which is perhaps total being. Something that transmutes all opposites: life-death, still­ness-movement, time-eternity, being-becoming, high-low, you-me, here-there ... A supreme and powerful conjunc­tion that contains the real power, and the world's liberation, and the beginning of a "new evolution” on earth.

The fishbowl shatters at the level of Matter. And at that level only.

The infinitesimal meets the infinite.

Such is the work of conjunction that Sri Aurobindo and Mother would pursue in their bodies, which is ultimately the one great Body of the Earth. And such is the meaning of our evolution, the goal of our millions of trials and tribulations—not a return to heaven or some post mortem salvation,³⁴ as Sri Aurobindo put it, not a "fall," but a delib­erate descent of consciousness toward its secret in Matter and toward our plenitude in a body. An immense spiritual revolution that rehabilitates matter and creation, Mother would say, speaking of Sri Aurobindo’s work. Thus we can say that the experiment will be truly conclusive when the circle is completed and the two extremes have met, when the highest manifests in the most material.... It seems we can never really understand until we understand with our body.³⁵

12: The Interregnum of the Mind

She had traveled a long curve since the time She silently communicated with trees, mummies, or the deer in Fontaine­bleau. Mother is the One who finds channels of communi­cation everywhere—or perhaps opens them up. We are in front of a big world obstructed by what we have placed on it, that is, our way of understanding it—we understand from the wrong level. But there are those who remove obstructions: all we ever uncover is the natural, we redis­cover only what was always there, but on another level. We are at the time of a change in the level of understanding. The sublime state is the natural state, She said, and you are the ones who are constantly in an unnatural and abnormal state, a falsification, a distortion.¹ The whole of evolution may only be the reconquering of the natural through an enriching complication—instead of the simple but empty oneness of the beginning, a full oneness innumerably conscious of itself. And ultimately, all distortions and fal­sifications are only the means of forming and carefully reconquering a truth that we could not possibly swallow in one gulp without exploding, for the simple reason that the ultimate truth is physical, and the body, that old animal, is so very slow to understand. The ultimate heaviness or the ultimate knot holds the ultimate understanding and the difficulty that will unknot all the others.

The Mind is our instrument of temporary truth or obsti­nate falsification, depending on whether we look at it from one side or the other. It is the prodigious form maker that has deformed everything. We cannot bat an eyelid without its immediately rushing forth to give its explanation for the batting of the eyelid. It has explained everything, that is the trouble, or it wants to explain everything, and weaves such a thick web around the universe that we do not really live in the universe but in an "explanation” of the universe: Each thing carries within itself its own truth—its absolute truth, so luminous and so clear, She said. And if you are in contact with that, then everything falls into place so won­derfully; but men are not in contact with that, they are always in contact THROUGH their thought—what they think of something, what they feel about something ...² That is what creates the “marvel” of chaos we live in; we are only in communication with our own heads. We communicate through. We do not live anything as it is.

Will the Mind have to be undone?

Perhaps it is being undone all by itself.

Mirra among the Philosophers

But one can only undo what has been completely con­quered. Basically, the process is the same, at any level: all the little barriers help accumulate the Shakti so as to gain enough force to shatter the barrier and move on ... to another, thicker barrier, proportionate to the newly acquired force. The mental barrier has Himalayan layers of thickness compared to which Matter is as light as a breeze. But the Mind has its roots right down in Matter, which is another solid secret we shall soon uncover with Mother. For the moment, Mirra had not yet conquered the Mind. Strangely enough, it is the last thing She explored, at the end of the curve—perhaps not so "strangely,” for She had quite natu­rally explored the natural (which we call supernatural, since everything is upside down!) before reaching the arti­ficial, the external explanatory layer we mistake for the solid universe—mentally solid, that is. She had found out how to communicate with plants, animals, She had found the great colored waves, the creative vibrations, the Sound from above, the great blue notes that create music. She played the piano a lot (even in the large drawing room at Tlemcen, where She enchanted ... the toads!) and did some painting as well. She knew the planes of conscious­ness, went out of her body, wandering everywhere. She was even at ease with higher mathematics—strangely again, this exercise which might seem highly mental was more natural to her than everything else; perhaps because equations tend toward the Simple. Einstein was a great simplifier who, almost mathematically, strove to touch the oneness of the universe behind the enormous veil of phenomenal compli­cations. Had he known her, Einstein would have understood Mother very well. Perhaps he would have put Mother into an equation ... and the universe would have burst out laughing. That laughter of Mother’s in the midst of the most excruciating pain—who will ever understand it?

So She laughed, took part in Theon’s fireworks, even pro­jected herself from Tlemcen to Paris, where She appeared to a group of friends materially enough to pick up a pencil and write down a note on a piece of paper, as Sri Aurobindo would later relate³—strange body, strange Matter. But to materialize or dematerialize Matter is not to transform Matter, it means simply playing with different laws of the same old thing—we too might like to play with those laws, but alas, it is rather they that would play with us, and the secret remains well-kept for a riper age—when we will no longer need to “produce miracles", because everything will be perfectly natural to us. So She played, laughed with Rouault, Rodin and Matisse, knew the museums and castles of France and Italy thoroughly, all the old culture at her fin­gertips, and we doubt whether many people ever had such a refined and diverse culture. A fully-fledged Parisian, we could say. But she was missing His Excellency the Mind. Mental jugglings, in other words. It may be more compli­cated than juggling with the little snakes at Zarif, Theon’s thunderbolts or the Mediterranean’s tramontana. However, we would be wrong to believe that Mirra had not cultivated her "mind”; She had devoured libraries, like anyone else, but She had never touched "the mechanism,” as She put it. However, She was going to gulp down a big dose of the mechanism in the most painful experience of her life—for truly, the Mind is always the pain of being or the pain to be. And if She had touched death with Theon, She would touch the worlds Falsehood with Paul Richard. We always meet in life the obstacles that help us to perfect the very realization we have to accomplish, and finally, there are no obstacles anywhere except in ourselves, and everything is meant for perfection. ‘"My life is terrible!” they say; “I have the most dismal life in the world!" But they are simpletons. Everyone has the life that is best suited for his integral develop­ment, everyone goes through the experiences that are best suited for his integral development, and everyone meets the difficulties that are best suited for his integral realization.⁴

His Excellency Mr. Mind thus presented himself one day in the form of Paul Richard, whom She met around 1908 at Montmorency, at the house of Morisset s sisters, to whom She had entrusted her son. She often went there to visit those kind sisters, with whom She was on the best of terms, and She played tennis, which was her old passion. Paul Richard also played tennis. He was a quite remarkably intelligent man, a "philosopher,” who would in fact end his days as a professor in a well-known American university. He was also a lawyer. But what is more interesting—and here we shall never cease marveling at and wondering about the threads of that vertiginous sphinx we call "des­tiny”—is that at the beginning of 1910, and for the most ordinary reasons, or perhaps the funniest ones, if consid­ered from the large perspective of the world, Paul Richard had to go to Pondicherry ... to participate in the electoral campaign of a certain Bluysen, a noted member, or rather aspiring member of the French National Assembly—and would meet Sri Aurobindo, who had just arrived there. It was thanks to Richard, and in his company, that Mirra would come to meet Sri Aurobindo in 1914 and discover that he was none other than the very individual She used to meet almost every day in "vision attire” and whom She had ended up calling "Krishna," presuming Him to be a Hindu divinity. We could keep wondering for a long time about those vertiginous meanderings of destiny which seize hold of “any” individual or "any” pretext (like a tennis game in Montmorency) to weave its powerful threads and prepare its revolutions. If all this is but "chance,” then this entire universe is a fantastic and mad chronometer, set to the exact second. And if nothing is chance, then it is another extraordinary chronometer no more mad than the movement of a single Consciousness moving itself everywhere at the same time, to the very atom, and that may only be waiting for us to emerge from our own dementedness in order to move freely with us everywhere and recognize everywhere its millions of threads tying together the least flight of a passing bird, the slightest futile gesture, and that great breath which is going to awaken an Age. It is all the same breath. And it is the same Paul Richard, who, under­standing the extraordinary newness of Sri Aurobindo’s experiences, would urge Him to put them down black on white, in the form of “philosophy.” Thus the Arya was founded in 1914, a periodical into which, day after day, Sri Aurobindo would come to pour some 6,000 pages of writ­ing, with sometimes four or five works under way at once, that Mirra and Paul Richard would then start translating into French. But we are running ahead of ourselves.

Thus Mirra began to hear of Sri Aurobindo. She was particularly struck by certain similarities with Theon's teachings, but Richards account was still too mingled with his own additions and interpretations for Mirra to be able really to grasp what lay behind. She married Richard in 1910 and settled in on rue du Val-de-Grace, near the Lux­embourg gardens, on the edge of the Latin Quarter. She was thirty-two. Their marriage, with many detours through Japan and India, would last until 1920, when Mirra settled down definitively in Pondicherry: Ten years of intensive mental studies leading me to ... Sri Aurobindo. A mental : development of the most complete type: a study of all the phi­losophies, all the conceptual juggling, in minute detail— delving into systems, getting a grasp on them.⁵

"Entering"—such is indeed Mother’s way, on every level.

For her, to understand something was to live it, and She went into it as wholeheartedly as into painting, music, occultism, or the truth of one’s being. That is, a develop­mental stage where it’s already understood that all ideas are true and that there's a synthesis to be made, and that BEYOND THE SYNTHESIS lies something luminous and true.⁶ This "beyond the synthesis” is a stage of human development yet to be achieved, for all our syncretisms finally disappear into a kind of mental morass devoid of any real power to transform life. Mirra liked the tangible: An explanation has value only insofar as it gives you the power to act upon the thing that is being explained; otherwise, what good is it?⁷ She said with her refreshing simplicity. Thought is such an approximate thing, really, so far from the truth ... so basi­cally, it's time to be practical and say, “Well, I’ll accept this thought if it helps me to progress.’’ But if you believe that it is the absolute truth, then you're bound to be fooling your­self, because no thought is the absolute truth. As long as it helps you to progress, keep it; but when it begins to crumble and no longer to have any effect, then let it go, and try to get hold of another one that will take you a bit farther.⁸

A strange meeting of philosophy and ingenuousness, which tends to remind us of Andersen’s impudent child pointing his finger at the king parading past in great pomp: “But he's naked!”

Perhaps the Mind is just like that king, appareled in nonexistent gold, and whom no one dares to call naked for fear of everyone finding themselves naked.

Because this nakedness is what we fear the most.

The Mind’s Constructions

In fact, the difficulty with the Mind is that we have not explored it thoroughly enough. We have cultivated, or rather endlessly ruminated on, some intermediary mental layer, which is starting to get very inhibiting and to contort itself in every possible way, like the last days of "photographic painting” just before its final dislocation by the Cubists—and that is what we call “culture," the proverbial king no one dares to call naked, the brilliant trapeze artist flying through the air by the light of... acetylene lamps. But the Mind has other layers, both above and below. Above, where "inspirations” come from, the pure and universal sources of the Mind; below, infinite layers representing the entire formation of the Mind throughout evolution, down to the deepest layer, a first Mind in Matter, what Sri Auro­bindo would call the "body-mind” and Mother the “cellular mind,” that which holds the secret of our future (that new "level of understanding”) and probably the key to our next mutation. But as always, the deepest shows up last, the primal or original is the last to emerge from the entangle­ment. To reach the bottom, one must have traced the whole curve—such is the laborious evolutionary story of our ascent. But carried by our old momentum, we remain stuck at a truncated level, an intermediary Mind which imperturbably spins its old cocoon, twisting and turning in every direction, banging and clanging its old cymbals and scraping away at well-worn ideas—for nothing is more well-worn than ideas—and filling its tenuousness with high-sounding words that reverberate against its own walls. It is a walled-in Mind. It keeps echoing its own noise everywhere. Mirra called it the world of mental construc­tions. And if by' chance we happen to break through the wall like some rare and privileged people who have access to the pure and direct sources of inspiration—the very ones who delight us because they infuse a vaster air, another rhythm into our cage—we immediately catch hold of this opening to make new cymbals, which wear out almost as quickly as they clash and end up as only one more idea amidst all this din; then, those same ones who climbed up above to give us those fleeting and quickly devoured flashes seemed to go off into more and more ethereal regions, more and more luminous and vast, from which it becomes very difficult to bring down an untruncated rhythm, acces­sible to our heavyweighted minds; and finally, like religious minds, they seem to lose themselves up above in a realm where one no longer wishes to formulate anything what­ever, but only remain there, in the great snowy silence where everything is so clear that there is no longer any­thing to express. A sort of Nirvana of the Mind. And always the ultimate inanity of trying to pull down into the cage, into this enormous construction of the human mind, some reflection, rhythm or flash of light that would not be imme­diately devoured or neutralized by the rabble of ideas, get mired and left powerless in the Mind's brilliant opacities. Mirra would soon discover that here, too, salvation is to be found below, in that mind of Matter where thought changes into something else which is at once power and vision: a sort of instantaneous understanding that acts automatically, and is fitted with a strange power of mate­rial contagion, whereas ideas only clash against one another and discuss endlessly without ever changing anything or having any power.

But to get there, the mechanism had first to be dis­mantled. For Mirra, it was very simple, because thoughts could be seen. Words and ideas were visible. Depending on their content, they formed swirls and spirals, variously colored or luminous—a sort of noise, more or less in tune depending on the quality of light or rhythm that clothed itself in French, English or Italian; She could even under­stand a certain Swede whose language She did not know, and make herself understood by complete foreigners simply through the vibration of consciousness. She went straight to what the Mind clothes in every color and rhythm: con­sciousness, Shakti. But this whole package of ideas, this aggregate we wrap around ourselves or carry on our backs and which constitutes what we call our “conception" of life, our ideal perhaps, our religion or philosophy of existence, all that more or less coordinated, clear, rigid or articulate hodgepodge which we cannot define without volumes of invariably contradictory words—was all very simple for Mirra: it was “constructions.” She saw them in a second. And it really is the kind of vision we would wish for every­one, because it would cure us of a number of prisons that we imagine to be very spacious and airy and "ideal.” But this is not at all “clairvoyance," as might be imagined; it is something else, something much simpler and much more accessible—more material—which we will speak of later. Something related to the "new level of understanding.” Constructions of every color and form, seen as if with a sharp and piercing eye—indeed, piercing through all the appearances in order to touch the real substance—almost a humorous eye. Exactly, graphically and pictorially, with one infallible stroke, these constructions express the reality of the mixture we find so difficult to define abstractly. A pictorial translation of thoughts. Ideas in the form of small and graceful chapels, igloos, temples, swamps, old walls ravaged with cracks or shining in every color, floors upon floors stacked like sad, gray apartment buildings, hovels, the flying wings of Japanese roofs, openwork partitions like Arabian lattices, and sometimes a solitary tower, closed like a fist, or huge and suffocating Gothic structures ... It is interminable, as varied as the world itself, but it is always a construction, that is, walls. A more or less graceful and airy bell jar that surrounds and strengthens us, giving us a comfortable feeling, a feeling of being “at home." It is our idea of the world. We live enclosed by it without being aware of it. But when it is seen from outside by that par­ticular eye, it all becomes clear and each detail explains the situation with an unimaginable and humorous precision: the texture of the stone, the colors, the layout, the compli­cations, accumulations and dimensions—and stairways, so many stairways! It goes up and down endlessly. Some­times, thoughts also take shape as clothes: sumptuous or tattered, clean or filthy, with buttons and incredible fabrics —a whole range of outfits. As Mother said, You see that, and everything is explained!

Then the world of ideas starts looking like a transparent book. You may say, “Yes, it's free will” or "it’s Zen medita­tion" or “the world’s salvation,” but it is just a medieval fortress surrounded by lapping moats, unless it is a little burst of silver light in the midst of a concrete necropolis. And sometimes it is only the wind rattling empty gourds. But the burst of light is enchanting, the gourd is rose- veined opaline, and the fortress has winged cantilevers. It is all very charming and well-made ... but it saves absolutely nothing. To shed a more pictorial light on the subject, let us mention two examples among hundreds of others. One is Mother's visit to the “house” of a traditional spiritualist brimming with the most righteous ideas in the world— impeccable, apparently; but more amusing in this vision. Perhaps we could call it “the vision of Matter's smile”... at all our mental fuss. It was his house, and it was rather com­plicated to enter, Mother narrates. I was saying a mantra or japa when X came along; he had a terribly reproachful air! Then he smelled my hands: "It’s a bad habit to wear perfume. You cannot live a spiritual life when you wear perfume.” [Mother also wore lipstick—how frivolous!] Then I looked at him and thought, “My God, does he have to be so back­ward!" But it annoyed me, so I said, “Very well, I'm going." When I got near the door, he started saying, "Is it true you have been married several times, and that you've been divorced?" Then, Mother said, laughing, a kind of anger entered me and I told him, “No, not just once, but twice!" And with that, I left the house. At the door was a little squirrel sitting on his haunches making friendly little gestures towards me. "Oh!" I said, “Here's someone who understands better!"⁹ But we would be quite wrong to think that a nontraditional non­spiritualist lives in a nicer house; in every case, there are stones over our heads and ramparts around us, whether they are white or black, for or against. It is a world where each idea is a decorative or not so decorative brick. The other example is drawn from a personal experience; it was one of my first tastes of "Matter’s smile.” I knew a spiritu­ally very powerful man who had many disciples, the best will in the world and a very advanced knowledge of tantrism acquired through strenuous discipline. Let us call him X. That day (in my vision) I was in a place on earth as if in midair; I was standing on the ground, and all around me was sky, an immense landscape of light from which I drank in the most refreshing air. X suddenly appeared in the midst of all this, and I noticed a sort of cement tower next to him, about ten feet in diameter and some twenty-five feet high. Strong, gray cement. X went into the tower (there was a kind of spiral staircase going up) and invited me to follow him. It was his “house.” He would climb up in his cement tower to look at the galaxies from ... twenty-five i feet higher up! Finding plenty of refreshing sky all around me at ground level, I refused. It was the exact equivalent, measured in tons of cement, of his hours of discipline, to the nearest cubic foot. This is exactly how we erect our towers in the fullness of an ever-there and ever-refreshing sky. I do not know whether the galaxies revolve better from twenty-five feet higher up, in cement, in Gothic or in exotic, 1 But anyway ...

But anyway Mirra started to explore all the world's religions. A systematic, detailed and comparative study of the "history of religions" was her first subject with Richard. And She found herself astounded. For all those experiences upon the summits of consciousness or in the depths of the Ϊ heart had come to her quite naturally. So why on earth: put all this solemn and dogmatic paraphernalia on them? Everywhere, She recognized—in different words or forms, with thicker or thinner, variously colored bricks—the same core of experience, full and vast to varying degrees—but why on earth such a fuss? Each one seizes a little piece and turns it into his all. And they all do this! But who can seize the all? I’d very much like to know!¹⁰ And She added, This is why religions are always wrong—always—because they try to standardize the expression of ONE experience and impose it on everyone as an irrefutable truth. The experience was true and complete in itself convincing—for the one who had it. The formulation he drew from it was excellent—for him. But to try to impose it on others is a fundamental error which can have disastrous consequences,¹¹ for the simple reason that each individual is a special manifestation in the universe, so his true path must be an utterly unique path.¹² And Mirra often cited this paradox of a well-known mate­rialistic doctrinaire, who had retained enough sense of humor to exclaim: Thank God, He made me an atheist! And She added: As long as there are religions, atheism will be indispensable to counterbalance them.¹³ Not that the mate­rialistic doctrinaire has fewer bricks over his head and a less suffocating edifice than his counterpart, any more than we must start making a “synthesis” or even a "union of religions," as if those thousands of edifices put together would make a less crushing atmosphere: The time of religions is over, Mother said. It’s old, it's past; now it’s an extra- and supra-religious perception that imposes itself as being indispensable.¹⁴ We could also say, “an extra- and supra-materialistic perception," something that finally escapes this old aberrant dichotomy which is neither the reality of the Spirit nor the reality of Matter, but simply a little wire-meshed mental skylight on an intermediate layer.

Mental “Liberation”

Mirra liked the open air.

But her study was not confined to religions; political and social systems were reviewed in detail, as were philoso­phies of every color, the exercises and disciplines of every spirituality—that is, the Minds higher levels. We can picture her in that charming house on rue du Val-de-Grace, with its tiny garden with ivy on the walls, its drawing room lined with books and even a big grand piano, the Luxembourg Gardens next door and the hum of the Latin Quarter. Almost every evening, She received Madame David-Neel there, just back from her first journey to the Far East and soon to become “the first woman to enter Lhasa," dis- i guised as a mendicant monk. Mother heard of Bahaism ; and Taoism, watched and listened to everything, explored disciplines of meditation, Buddhist dhyana, Buddhist renunciation; though, truly speaking, I never had much that experience of renunciation.... To renounce something, you must be attached to it, while I always had the thirst, the NEED to go farther, to go higher, to do better, to know better and ... instead of having a sense of renunciation, you have rather a sense of good riddance!¹⁵ She even went so far as to practice Buddhist concentration in the loges of the Opera- Comique—an unlikely place, but after all, Massenet’s musical outpouring was nothing particularly uplifting, and besides, Mirra’s meditation took place everywhere; to Her, it always seemed that the divorce between life and Spirit, within and without, was a ruinous distortion and that all those meditation exercises were pointless and did not change life in the least: They think that the sign of spiritual life is one’s capacity to sit down in a corner and meditate!¹⁶ Yes, you sit down in a corner, but as soon as you leave the meditation, you leave your peace of mind at the same time.¹⁷ Right from the beginning, She touched a very powerful and very painful discovery, experienced by ail those who have undergone long inner practice, who have touched the light and emerged into the infinitudes, liberated their minds and lived in the illumination we can call by a thousand names, but which is always the absolute That, a kind of marvelous sailing off, and who find themselves faced with the same old unchanged beast below, no more divine than that of their unillumined neighbors, as if they had been living in a dream for thirty years—and it is a dream. "And this too was a dream,” said Sri Aurobindo:

Ascetic voices called of lonely seers
On mountain summits or on river banks

Seeking heaven's rest or the spirit’s worldless peace, Or in bodies motionless like statues, fixed In tranced cessations of their sleepless thought Sat sleeping souls, and this too was a dream.¹⁸

For four or five thousand years, the world has never ceased fantasizing about saints and ascetics and "liberated yogis," who have not removed an atom of filth from our universal misery: They take off' their outer being as they would take off a coat and leave it in a comer: "All right, don’t bother me now; be quiet—you’re disturbing me!” Then they go into a contemplation (their "meditation," their "deep” experience), after which they come back and put on their coat again, which of course has not changed and is perhaps even filthier than before, and they remain exactly what they were without their meditation.¹⁹ The more static it is, the happier they are. They could go on meditating like that for eternities and it would never change anything in the universe or in themselves.²⁰ They have peace, no doubt: Λ boxed-in peace,²¹ She said.

For Mirra, the solution was elsewhere. She was seeking the solution. Indeed, this blissful "box" is still a great prob­lem, as solid as man’s mental constructions—maybe even more solid. But it is the same thing, as rigid as the finally-discovered-truth. There is nothing more solid than an entrapped truth. It is an irrefutable and impregnable box. The box of the summits. But the truth is something else, something we have not discovered as yet and which can only be discovered at Matter's level, where it can no longer be wrapped in any box, name or system, where it is lived, quite naturally and simply, as one breathes. Matter is the one thing that does not cheat: it is. If it is not right, it simply dies. There is no saying "this-is-true-this-is-false”: if it is false, it falls ill; if it is true, it trots along, and that is that. We still do not know what true life is, we are not true Matter yet; we are only matter-shut-up-in-a-box. And we wonder if all those marvelous realizations they have harped on about for ages, those liberations and “muktis” and peaks of light and white infinitudes are not simply the same upper part of the fishbowl, where the Mind, out of breath, mistakes its own vaporization for the divine reality, rather like the man under anesthesia who mistakes his blackout on the meditation table for the supreme truth. Sometimes, it would seem that there is still something very radical we have not grasped. In the last days of her life, Mother would say, I saw absolutely concretely that all men who thought they knew, they had had the Experience, well, it was ... it was halfway, so to say.²² Mirra, and Sri Aurobindo over there, were groping toward that radical experience, or rather that root—instead of escaping into a somewhat dried-up bliss,²³ as Mother said, one must call into oneself the power capable of conquering.²⁴ But for that, we have first to clean the "coat.” If we want to change Matter, we obviously have to make contact with Matter. The secret does not lie in the Mind's higher layers, but in the very' obscurity we wish to escape from. As Sri Aurobindo said:

This darkness hides our nobler destiny A chrysalis of a great and glorious truth, It stifles the winged marvel in its sheath Lest from the prison of Matter it escape And, wasting its beauty on the formless Vast,

Merged into the Unknowable’s mystery, Leave unfulfilled the world's miraculous fate.²⁵

The Transparent Mind

Mirra was still searching for the mechanism of the change. If the Mind, our daily tool, our evolutionary legacy, exists, what then is its true role?... On several occasions, in Tlemcen and before, She had clearly seen an entirely different world of consciousness above, far above, a world Sri Auro­bindo would come to call the "Supramental,” which Theon inelegantly named "pathetism” (one really wonders why!) and which She called the World of Harmony, probably because it seemed to unite or dissolve all the opposites. But how to bring this world down, how to drive it into Matter? A problem similar to that of the higher ape who one day happened to catch an odd little wave, something unlike the old vibrations of life, and who remained there, "pensive,” between two branches. A new world is like something that does not exist, an invention of nothing which is but a some­thing driving us to "invent”—we just invent what is there. Only afterward do we know that it is a new world. While it is happening, it is merely everyday life moving gropingly and sometimes "missing its branch,” its gesture amidst the routine—a sudden little lapse of memory in the usual gymnastics—and one is left there ... pensive. This "pensive­ness” about nothing may be the rift through which the new thing steals in. A new world is not an improvement of the old gestures, it is a lapse of memory, a rift in the old habit of being. In this case, a rift in the Mind. But where is this rift?

Actually, Mirra never pondered abstract “problems,” it was against her nature; She just carried on. One walks on and one sees what happens. She looked out at every step she made as intensely as She had looked at the gutters in Thebes, three thousand four hundred years before. And something always happens; everything depends precisely on our need to "invent,” or perhaps simply on our need to be—let us call it anything we like, but it is a Need. It is the invention itself that drives us to its invention. Something that burns. A Fire we carry with us everywhere and which makes things be, or makes them "happen.” If we only carry our old routine, nothing happens but the routine. It is simple and obvious. The whole world is a “nothing” one makes happen. At first, it is always a "nothing”—a moments pause, a missed minute—and this “nothing” seems to be the only something. But it is a nothing with fire in it. If we want to cultivate the future, we have to cultivate the nothing- that-burns. A constant aspiration, uninterrupted, intense, all-consuming, in an immutable serenity.²⁶ In short, it is a question of changing the “program.” If the future resides somewhere at the cellular level, we have first to get out of the mental program before we can ever hope to get out of the cellular program. The tremendous entanglement of the animal program, with its countless impulses and reactions : to anything that moves, feels and vibrates, that constant 1 call and alertness before the onrush of life, gives way to the J still more tremendous entanglement of the mental onrush, j which no longer seems to respond to anything but itself, like an endless echo bouncing from one to another, reverberating and rebounding and universally going round in j circles. There is nothing of yourself in all this, Mother said: it comes in from everywhere and it goes out everywhere.²⁷ And because we catch a number of vibrations in mid-air, which we stack up and compress into neat (or not so neat) little bricks of thoughts, and because we combine and recombine them in our particular way to build some struc­ture or another, we say it is “our” thought, "our” house. But it is a house built with everyone's and anyone’s bricks. It is no more ours than the south wind or the scent of jasmine wafting by. It is simply, as Mother said, a passing notation. An animal does not act differently when it sniffs the wind, it just tunes in to a different milieu. And in the end, all organisms, from the top to the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, whether they are fitted with an osmotic membrane or a brain, do the same thing: they draw on the milieu, they absorb what is there—they are receiving organs. We no more create thought than the bee creates honey—only there is honey and there is honey, that is all. Everything simply depends on the quality of our reception and the milieu which we tune in to. The whole story of evolution is simply the improvement or expansion of a receiving capacity. The true mind, said Sri Aurobindo, is the universal within us and the individual is only a projection on the surface ...a marking board or a communicating switch on the surface.²⁸ If we remain at the level of our claws, mem­branes or surface parietals, we cultivate the telephone, if we may say so, instead of cultivating what is at the other end of the telephone. Man’s peculiarity lies not in his pleas­ant or not so pleasant creations or secretions of “honey," but in his ability to discover new levels of reception. His antenna is not immutably turned in a single direction, be it a mental direction. To think otherwise is to mistake the means for the end, the instrument for the goal—“culture” for the ultimate human purpose. Man is not irremediably destined to just be the stomach for a particular brand of honey, which we may be beginning to find rather sickening.

As for Mirra, She had had enough of that kind of thought current, that circulates through your brain, then the brain of another person and the brains of the multitude.²⁹ As early as 1911, She noted laconically: We are a product determined by all our antecedents and driven by the blind and arbitrary will of our contemporaries.³⁰ She found it absolutely unac­ceptable that one should be manipulated by this enormous mental conditioning, like bees or even superior Titians: Haven’t you ever found it intolerable that wills from outside can have an influence upon your own will? She asked the Ashram children. But my children, that bothered me even when I was five.' And it's been a long time since you were five ...³¹ To get out of the “program," yes, at any cost, and for that, the first condition is to silence all that racket. In the thinking crush, nothing can be seen or understood—we might as well try to see clearly through the choppy waves of a pond riddled with pebbles. “Become a mirror” was her familiar dictum. In a clear mirror, we can see where things come from and where they go. We begin to see the great play of the world. We even realize that to cease thinking is a far superior accomplishment io being able to unreel thoughts endlessly—and it requires a much greater development.³² Mental silence (or mental transparency, according to her favorite expression) is the first crack in the carapace that blocks the future from us—it is the human counterpart of the ape’s absent-minded minute between two branches, which prepared the way for the advent of Homo sapiens. To be “pensive” was the rift in the old habit of being an ape. To be non-pensive is the first rift in the habit of being a man, the crack through which the new world can steal in. The mind is simply a pair of old gills preventing us from breathing the new air.

But gills can be changed into lungs.

In evolution, each stage always prepares or contains the next one, and we would be hard put to find a useless rung —including the Mind. Evolution never makes any mistake, but there are the laggards of evolution, that is, the trium­phant ones of a certain stage clinging to their summit—and about to become a stationary species. But here, too, Nature thwarts the natural laziness of the species through the Pressure of its own Need to grow. The Invention always drives us to the invention of itself. At the end of the men­tal curve, we can thus open up to the "logical” necessity of moving on to the next state and even intuit that this state must be “non-pensive,” even feel the need to get out of this rattling, buzzing and tireless machine, and mentally try to stop the Mind. This is what meditators generally do: they grab hold of the Mind with the Mind and heroically strive to strangle it—for a few minutes. But the moment they release their grip, it all starts up again. The higher ape who, after having stumbled upon those pensive little glimmers, would have been quite mistaken, had he tried to reproduce them by swinging around his branch until he felt dizzy. It was not by the means of his muscles that he was to shift to the other state, and it is not through the efforts of our mental muscle that we shall reach silence. The very fact of trying makes noise,³³ Mother noted. Always and everywhere, the lever of the transition is the Need, It is strangely simple. What we must discover presses from within: that pressure is what we must take hold of, but since it is still the pres­sure of "nothing”—for if it were "something,” it would already have been seized upon and done—we must resolve ourselves to catch this nothing-at-all as the one supremely tangible thing! What could the ape know of the superape?

Nothing at all. And what do we know of the superman? Nothing at all. On the contrary, the moment we start imag­ining it, we are right back in the same old mechanism, merely inflating it to a higher degree; we swing on our : mental flying trapeze like the ape around his branch. That is exactly what Nietzsche did, with some flashes of genius. But this Need within, completely pure, this pressing Flame, this hole of nothing filled with fire by its sheer need of being ’ something, anything, a stork, a horse, but something, so i that we get beyond this thinking and clanking and repetitive s biped; this need we carry everywhere, with every step, j every heartbeat, which grows and consumes everything, ' fills everything with its fire of nothing, or something at last, 1 and what else could we want, what other need than that : nameless and formless Need, without plus or minus, as ‘ long as it burns—and it burns everything: ideas, thoughts, the future and the past, tomorrow and the millions of ; years, what does it matter as long as that one second bums? This is the lever. It is the Silence-of-Fire. It burns everything that gets in: sins and virtues, high and low, the superman, and the little man. It is the Nothing of fire, the beginning of something, the compact non-pensive that breaks open the barrier by the sheer force of its being unable to be held any longer in its skin.

And we emerge.

Then, in that silence—not a silence “in a box” but a living, active, “directed” silence, a silence that does not need the protection of walls and can as well walk about amidst a crowd or in a marketplace, among the millions of thinking human pistons as on a boundless immobile steppe, a vast transparency of everything—the world becomes clear. We are clear and all is clear. In its true functioning, the Mind appears as a huge play of vibrations putting on clothes and colors, becoming entangled, accumulating and combining. We can see the rhythm directly, hear the sound, listen to the great waves which, down below, will form little thoughts, minor music or whatever else it may be—this whole “cre­ative," discursive and endlessly repetitive jumble. We are in an utter silence in which every thought comes automati­cally, whenever it is needed. We are in the great Current in which every gesture is made automatically, whenever it is needed. We are in the Consciousness, we flow with the great Shakti. And we realize that we can think outside the brain,³⁴ and even quite well, without thinking about it, and that thought is only a residue from below, a tool of execu­tion³⁵ to carry out in Matter what has been seen in the Consciousness, known in the Consciousness: an ever more open, ever wider channel,³⁶ She said, in order to let the transforming forces penetrate Matter. We have left the intermediate layer, left the old oxygen-assimilating gills, and we breathe the pure air of Consciousness directly.

The external gills, as the physiologists tell us, are first transformed into Internal gills, and then into lungs.

Between the luminous and the dark poles of existence, Wie Mind is simply an interregnum in Reality,³⁷ says Sri Aurobindo.

But in this mental transparency, Mirra was going to uncover yet another, deeper layer, well hidden beneath the thinking racket of the first one, which She would not so easily penetrate. It is the “physical mind.” The last barrier before the cellular mind, our next evolutionary secret: a liberation, yes—but a genetic one. It would take her years, and the presence of Sri Aurobindo, to cross this next barrier.

But the path of descent was open.

13: And the Earth

Mirra was slowly bidding farewell to the Western world.

She had traced the whole curve, touched the rare sum­mits and secret powers that others would have seized upon for their personal peace or glory, touched the whole gamut of culture and notes that many would have turned into symphonies, thus adding one more genius to the collection of human realizations—but what interested her was the human realization, the species, the human whole. She went up and down the Boulevard St. Michel, like everyone else, but always with that intense gaze. She also continued taking care of Theon’s “Revue Cosmique”: I found the printer, corrected the proofs—all the work for a long time. Five years, in fact. She even translated into French the experiences that Madame Theon, while she was in trance, dictated to her English secretary: an entire initiation in the form of stories.¹ But it was the Story that interested her, and every­thing else slowly receded like the old, superfluous garment of a “something” that She widely experienced, without initiatory walls or spiritual constructions. And finally, Theon would disappear one day as mysteriously as he had appeared, without leaving a trace. Alma had crashed down on the rocks of the Isle of Wight while walking in trance along the cliffs. An "accident” that was no accident; she had probably seen that Theon was not destined to bring down the new world—therefore she no longer had any raison d’etre. Having lost her, Theon had lost his base. He was suddenly no more than an old Atlantean from an out­dated world, and despite everything, he was too great to be satisfied with being a miracle-maker. He knew that he was not meant to succeed, but had only come to prepare the way to a certain extent,² Sri Aurobindo would later say. Perhaps one day we shall see him again, without a toga, perhaps even in rags, sowing the seeds of revolution among the last stragglers of the old world.

She had started keeping a "journal” in which She recorded her experiences, her hopes and prayers for the future—She seemed to think only of the future, it was an obsession. At every moment we must shake off the past like falling dust so it does not tarnish the virgin path ...³ Thus Prayers and Meditations was born, which She began in 1911. Why all this noise, all this bustle, this vain and hollow agitation? Why this whirlwind that sweeps men away like a swarm of flies caught in a tempest?...⁴ Oh, to be a pure, a stainless crystal which lets Your divine ray pass through without obscuring, altering and distorting it.... All men s hearts beat in my heart, all their thoughts vibrate in my thought; the slightest aspiration of a docile animal or a humble plant unites with my tremendous aspiration... .⁵ By a total and constant effort, we want to advance like a rising and indomi­table tide, shattering all obstacles, crossing all barriers, lifting all veils ...⁶ to the conquest of the marvelous secrets of the Unknown. ...⁷ That divine world of Your immutable realm of pure love, of indivisible oneness, must be made to commune intimately with the divine world of all the other realms, down to the most material realm in which You are the center and the very composition of each atom.⁸ The cell, the atom: this was the heart of the problem—not the cosmic summits.

She even had several little "groups" (one of which was named Idea) to which She tried to convey her first stam­merings and a kind of first vision of the future: The general goal to be attained is the advent of universal Harmony (that is, the "Supramental"), She said as early as 1912, the real­ization of human unity (already, before Sri Aurobindo) ... the establishment of an ideal society in a place propitious for the birth of the new race (in anticipation of the future Pondicherry Ashram, and Auroville)... to put the earth into contact with one or several sources of universal force that are still sealed to it.⁹ Yes, the “supramental” source, that "Har­mony,” that yet nameless something She felt beating like the heart of the future—but how was it to be unsealed? Who will open those closed floodgates?¹⁰ She carried this question, this call, everywhere She went, as if the very call would force the answer to spring forth (perhaps it was already this call that had brought Richard to her side and would lead her to Sri Aurobindo). Yet a few strange phe­nomena were starting to happen everywhere, on the bus, the tram, in a thousand ordinary places: children who suddenly tore themselves away from their mothers and literally clung to Mirra; tormented men suddenly relieved; sorrows here and there that seemed to dissolve: Once, in a bus, there was a man who was tense and weeping; you could see he was utterly wretched. Then without stirring, unnoticed, I saw that “Force" going out towards that man, and little by little, his face relaxed, everything calmed down, he grew quiet. This happened several times.... Something which was not human at all was there, quietly acting THROUGH me (I wasn’t even occupied with it,) and doing it. It acted through her body without any will on her part, as if this mental transparency had granted access to the body. Something that takes hold of the body, oh, so warm, so sweet a vibration, and at the same time so terribly powerful!¹¹

She groped her way into something very new She did not quite understand but which seemed to become more and more concrete as that transparency increased, as if one had to be “nothing," totally nothing, before the other current could flow through: The least vibration in this perfectly pure and calm atmosphere is an obstacle,¹² She had already noted in 1912. As a matter of fact, we can well imagine that had some higher ape wanted to let a single mental vibration pass through, he would have had to become the equivalent of “nothing" in the ape world; but what is remarkable here is that the point of junction with the new forces is not the mind but the body. The body is the bridge. Each new evo­lutionary "summit,” each new rung, is marked by a change in the point of junction. We speak of “summits," “new forces," but this is only our inadequate language—the sum­mit is always there! There are no “new” forces. There is only a new layer being cleared, which allows what was always there to shine through. A curtain is drawn back. We are full of superimposed layers, and we slowly clear them up from the outermost or "highest" to the deepest, down to the very heart of the story: Matter. And the deeper we descend into the dense layers, the more powerful and direct is the force, because we are nearing the origin. The supreme junction of the end is at the beginning of everything: What would be the use of man if he were not meant to be a bridge between That which eternally is and all the dark and painful ignorance of the material world? Man is the link between what must be and what is, the bridge thrown across the abyss.¹³ And Mirra wondered in her Prayers and Medita­tions: Oh, when shall I have forgotten myself completely enough to be nothing but an instrument shaped solely by the forces it must manifest?¹⁴ Something had to manifest, or perhaps was manifesting.

The Change of Government

In fact, She was becoming less and less "Mirra” but someone else, who was not really "someone," an individual confined in a bag of skin, but a consciousness that seemed to become more and more of the world, if we may say so, as She herself, when she was a child, became a python, the geraniums of the Tuileries or a certain tree at Fontainebleau —the same thing—as if the more the person dissolved or the transparency grew, the more the consciousness widened and the forces got through. However, She kept on living as usual and led as worldly a life as anyone else; She even met Anatole France, whose gentle irony She shared (always the refusal to take herself seriously; oh, how well She would understand Sri Aurobindo's humor!), and even asked him if his Revolte des Anges, which She liked very much, had not been inspired by Theon's ideas. But She was already on the verge of another revolt, infinitely more fundamental than any of the old religious dilemmas: something that seemed to take place at the level of her body and link her to the very body of the earth ... as if one could not touch a speck of Matter without touching all of Matter: I now have a constant and PRECISE perception of the universal unity that determines the absolute interdependence of all actions,¹⁵ She noted at the time. "Precise," that is, a material fact, not the mind's haze. A mute revolt had begun to stir in the earth, spreading its seismic waves from the Yangtze Valley to Agadir (1911): The whole earth is in our arms like an ailing child who must be cured.¹⁶ Already ... some sixty years ago.

But sixty years ago, something very new was beginning on earth.

Deceived by appearances, we might believe that the world has exploded into a million chaotic experiences that tear it apart everywhere down to the least hook of our little borders and even of our hearts—nothing and no one esca­pes; it is all one single mass of Matter! We might think that the great newness of the world goes back to this last decade, but the first shock, the first wave, the epicenter of the phe­nomenon surprisingly takes place in Asia at the turn of the century. It all stems from there, everything else is an amplification or an exacerbation of what started there. Three revolutions, all from Asia. And Mirra came into contact with all three through sometimes strange circum­stances. The shock came from India: in 1893, Sri Aurobindo wrote his first revolutionary article and, at the turn of the century, fourteen years before Gandhi,¹⁰⁰ he was already the uncontested "revolutionary leader," "the most dangerous man we have to contend with," as Lord Minto, the Viceroy of India, wrote while bombs were exploding in Bengal. And Mirra was in contact with India as early as 1904. Then in China, also at the turn of the century, Chinese insurgents laid siege to the European legations in Peking—the famous "Boxer Rebellion” and the proliferation of "secret societies” (whose leaders came to France for inspiration) resulting in the formation of the Kuomintang and the uprisings in the valley of the Yangtze River in 1911, followed by the collapse of the Manchurian Dynasty in 1912. Mirra would meet one of the Chinese militants in Paris. And finally (or simulta­neously), in Russia, with the torpedoing of the Russian fleet by the Japanese at Port Arthur in 1904, which precipi­tated the first revolutionary waves: the assassination of the Grand Duke Serge in Moscow in 1905, the repression of revolutionary students and their exile to Siberia during the iron rule of the inflexible Stolypine. Mirra would also meet one of these students in Paris in 1907, after he escaped Nicolas Il’s retaliatory measures. Three revolutions in the making which were going to change the face of the world. And finally, the intrigues of William II in Europe resulted in the dispatch of a German gunboat to Agadir in 1911, under the very nose of a threatened England and France, and precipitated the flare-up of the great fiery arch that strangely linked the uprisings of the Yangtze Valley to those in Europe, Russia and India. One single Matter stirring. And it might have begun stirring when Mirra in Paris and Sri Aurobindo in Calcutta began entering their own Matter to cleanse the layers of the old evolutionary world and free the new ''source.” One single great Body in transformation.

Slowly, the floodgates were opening.

A strange incident had taken place in Tlemcen in 1906. During her explorations into the planes of consciousness surrounding the earth (what is called its “future,” and is yet to occur only due to the thickness to be crossed), Mirra had seen something, or rather something had been said to her, which She had carefully noted down along with the date (and heaven knows, She was far from bothering about China, when even India was an obscure subject for Her): The revolution will take place in exactly five years [in China], And that will be the first terrestrial movement heralding the transformation.¹⁷ In 1911 exactly, in October, the Kuomintang fomented the uprisings we now know, and the Manchurian Dynasty collapsed shortly thereafter. But these events, which we can now see in their true perspective, were then only vague rumors that took months to cross the seas and were less known, in the end, than the latest speech of the honorable French representative from Lot-et-Garonne (Mr. Fallieres, not to name him). Mirra herself knew noth­ing about it all, until the day she met "by chance" in Paris (we do not know exactly how and when), a chance as mys­terious as all the others, a member of a Chinese secret society (just as in a novel) who informed her of the events in Wuhan in circumstances that are even stranger: Unknow­ingly, Mirra had made a certain gesture in front of that man (one fist on top of the other) which happened to be the secret sign of that society (it seems we are definitely in the midst of a novel, but Mothers life is the most extraordinary of novels); thinking She was another member, the man gave her a detailed account of what was happening in China. Suddenly, Mirra remembered the note she had writ­ten five years earlier.

And She was left pensive.

It was as if circumstances wanted her to be informed. That She unwittingly made that “gesture" does not come as a surprise to us; for a long time Mirra had had the quite natural capacity of entering into everyone just as herself, without even wanting it, and of doing things without even knowing why, simply because the gesture was forced upon her. It was no longer the mental mechanism that made her move. But what leaves us in wonder is, why China? Forthcoming history, which is probably just around the corner, will certainly tell us why the “first terrestrial movement heralding the transformation” had to take place in that country. We ourselves have no idea. We can only note the fact. Is that where the knot is? But the fact remains that at the turn of the century, three revolutions were in progress, which were going to change the face of the world. Everything we see today is only the consequence and the extension of something that began then.

And what began?

We can be easily deceived by appearances. We see com­munism here, socialism there and capitalism still elsewhere —one hundred and fifty-odd nations tearing one another apart, each raising up its own war cry, fighting poverty, fighting racial injustice of one color or another, fighting for justice, freedom, oil and chemical fertilizers, for what have you, against what have you: it is the reign of for and against, truth against falsehood, good against evil, and everyone has the truth, everyone brandishes his slogan and condemns the truth of the other who condemns the truth of the other—"truth” is everywhere, like an enormous, pestilential corpse that each one displays, proclaims, broad­casts and prints in six hundred and fifty infallible languages, each supremely truthful. And everything is true, everything is false. It is the truth of falsehood or the falsehood of truth. It is the reign of yes-no, good-evil, for-against, the great mental Babel among a rapidly mushrooming four billion humans. It is the age of countless panaceas: against cancer, against recession and poverty, for rain or fine weather; we invent everything to disinvent everything the very next minute, and everything starts all over again in the great cauldron. It is always new, it is always the same. Sickness here today, sickness there tomorrow, but the whole world is sick. It is the great sickness of the mind coming to its end. It is the great devaluation of the mind—the one nobody speaks of, but which screams everywhere in a thousand "cultures” whose words no longer mean anything, whose ideas no longer mean anything, whose truths and lies no longer mean anything, and everything looks like some enormous fraud adorned with a million truths that rever­berate through loudspeakers all the way up to the smallest villages in the Himalayas, hypnotized, deafened, drugged with words and dazed with ideas. This is the end of the Mind. Thought is annulling itself. It is the beginning of something else. We are at the time of a great “change of government,” She said—the replacement of the mental government of intelligence by the government of spiritualized consciousness. ¹⁸

This is the time of the Supramental.

In a thousand languages and with a thousand labels, left and right, in yellow, red or black, Christian, Muslim, Marxist or atheist, everyone is doing the same thing. Everyone is shifting into a new evolutionary stage under the unbearable inner and outer Pressure of Consciousness. Every "for” goes there, every "against” goes there, every yes and every no, it makes no more difference than the branchiosaur's first rumblings at the beginning of the Carbon­iferous—whether in Chinese, American or perfect French. We are being dragged right to the bottom of the fishbowl, we are all going there, toward the exit from the Mind. Nature could not invent a better way: no plague or earth­quake—she simply turns the Mind's screw, or rather lets it turn itself until it is completely crushed. This is what began at the turn of the century. Not a Chinese or a Russian Revolution, but a revolution of Consciousness. And all revolutions are meant to precipitate that one revolution. All miseries exist only to hasten that one deliverance. All falsehoods exist solely to force out that one Truth. Everyone is going there and everyone is working for it, whether they like it or not, in black or white, true or false, it is all the same. It’s very simple, Mother said; the whole of humanity follows an evolution, an evolutionary course, and. at some periods—special periods—a particular experience becomes almost universal, that is, terrestrial, absolutely terrestrial, and though with different names, different labels or different words, it is more or less the same experience going on. And there are old experiences on their way to extinction, but which still persist, changing for a time the appearance and content of some new things. But it is only the tail end of the thing. The whole new movement is moving toward ONE experience which becomes as generalized as possible, for it is only useful when it is general. If it remains local, it is like ; a mushroom; it is fruitless for the human consciousness as a whole.¹⁹ We are in the midst of the terrestrial experience of Consciousness, as others were in the terrestrial experi­ence of the great telluric folds, or the terrestrial experience of breathing with lungs, and all our convulsions are the slow clearing away of evolutionary inutilities: The end of a stage of evolution is usually marked by a powerful recrudes­cence of all that has to go out of the evolution,²⁰ Sri Aurobindo said in 1910.

The Last Door

1914 is at the door.

She was intensely aware of that "movement of terrestrial transformation" while we were still conquering Chad. Science was Triumphant; everything was going to be cured, it was all a matter of invention. “We have extinguished stars in heavens that shall never be lit again!” exclaimed an eloquent French statesman. Indeed, the stars had fallen from heaven and were really in Matter—but perhaps not matter as envisioned by the materialists. And yet half the world still thinks of nothing better than imitating the West: Western technology, Western industry, the Western "stan­dard of living"—salvation through the machine. But Mirra did not think so, nor did Sri Aurobindo over there, who had already foreseen the red evening of the West and exhorted his compatriots (in vain) to turn to the one invention, that of themselves. Ute scientific, rationalistic, industrial, pseudo- democratic civilization of the West is now in process of dissolution, he wrote, and it would be a lunatic absurdity for us at this moment to build blindly on that sinking founda­tion.²¹ But the Machine is advancing imperturbably, it is covering the entire earth and the "underprivileged” call out to it as to their only salvation. Though indeed, the colossal Machine may have been necessary in Nature’s economy for reasons unforeseen by man: it was the surest way to tie the whole earth into one single bundle and reduce it to the mercy of a few loose bolts which one day, at one stroke, will confront the whole humanity with the fantastic, general breakdown of this symbol of the Mind. Then a child shall destroy her,²² Sri Aurobindo said before 1914. It will be overwhelmingly simple: no one could ever have imagined it. A global heap of rust. And we will move on to the forgot­ten invention—we will be reduced to it. That great reaction of the cult of Matter, which has been very useful to knead it and make it less unconscious of itself: it has forcibly brought consciousness back into Matter. So perhaps all that has been a sufficient preparation for the moment of the Total Manifes­tation to have come.²³

This "Manifestation" was what held her interest. In other words, the advent of the new Consciousness. The word recurs again and again in her "journal" with increasing urgency from 1913 onwards: The hour of Your manifesta­tion has come ... The glorious news of Your next Coming... Your new Manifestation ,..²⁴ But She did not even know who Sri Aurobindo was really, and She was alone, knocking at every door, dismantling all the mechanisms—religious, social, political—as if She had to exhaust all the solutions before being driven to the right door, as if her very quest created the circumstances that would put her on the boat to Pondicherry ... for the electoral campaign of Richard, who this time had decided to become himself the represen­tative of French India (he was to be pitifully beaten). She who did not believe in democracy, even before 1914! This was another door She found closed: All human organiza­tions are based on: the visible fact (which is a falsehood), public opinion (another falsehood), and moral sense, which is a third falsehood! So ...²⁵ And with her disarming sim­plicity, which went straight to the heart of the matter, She asked: Indeed we need a world organization. But by whom? It should be by people who have at least a world conscious­ness!²⁶ And there we are. Everywhere and from all sides, She was brought back to this question of "consciousness”: Governments follow governments, regimes follow regimes, centuries follow centuries, but human misery remains piti­fully the same ... Only a transformation, an illumination of the human consciousness, can bring about a real improve­ment in the human condition.²⁷

She had only to look at what was before her eyes, in Paris itself: What the mental atmosphere in a city like Paris can be, with millions of beings thinking, and what thoughts! Just imagine that swarming and moving mass, that inextricable tangle. At first it seems that you cannot make out anything, and yet, despite all the conflicting tendencies, wills and opin­ions, there takes place a kind of unity, an identity among all these vibrations, for with very few exceptions, all of them express ... greed. Greed in every form, every aspect, on every level. All the thoughts of the socialites whose only goals are pleasure and material entertainment express greed. All the thoughts of the intellectuals or artists athirst for recognition, fame and honor express greed. All the thoughts of men in power and civil servants aspiring for more power and more influence express greed. All the thoughts of the thousands of employees and workers, the oppressed, the unfortunate, the downtrodden struggling for an improvement in their dreary existence express greed. And all, rich or poor, powerful or weak, privileged or deprived, intellectual or ignorant, want gold, always more gold, to satisfy all their greed.²⁸ This was in 1912, We do not know if the situation has improved since then, or if it is better in some other latitude, but what can possibly change in the world, as long as this conscious­ness has not changed? How many tons of penicillin or institutions will ever cure that indigence? Or else how many tons of policemen, and more and more policemen? Sometimes She even criticized her brother Matteo, who, after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique, had become a governor; yet he, too, seemed to have special faculties, since he was able to have certain experiences—which he dismissed because they did not conform to his idea of the “welfare of the world”: One day when he was eighteen, just before the Polytechnique exams, as he was crossing the Seine (I think it was the Pont des Arts,), suddenly in the middle of the bridge ... he felt something descend into him with such force that he became immobilized, petrified; then, although he didn’t exactly hear a voice, a very clear message came to him: “If you want, you can become a god"—it was translated like that in his consciousness. He told me that it took hold of him entirely, immobilized him—a formidable and extremely luminous power: “If you want, you can become a god. ” Then, in the thick of the experience itself, he replied, “No, I want to serve humanity. ” And it was gone. Of course, he took great care to say nothing to my mother, but we were intimate enough for him to tell me about it. I told him, “Well, what an idiot you are!..." And he understood nothing. Yet he was an intelligent, capable man: he was a governor, and a rather successful one, in several countries. But he under­stood nothing ...He didn’t conceive of anything better than “helping others”—philanthropy. That's why he became a governor. When he came out of Polytechnique, he had a choice between different posts, and he deliberately chose that post in the colonies, because he wanted to “help backward races to progress”—all that nonsense !²⁹ Already, at the age of sixteen and a half ... Enough to send a few Nobel Prize laureates through the ceiling. And indeed, Matteo was regarded as a kind of Christ by the Congolese he governed; they had never seen such abnegation, according to the records. But we may wonder whether our Congolese broth­ers, who are no longer called by this name, are more advanced in well-being, wisdom and beauty of life for it... We labor under a tenacious illusion and the more moral and right- thinking it is, the stronger it is—a true spiritual blockhouse. Perhaps one day those “humanitarian” marvels will appear as obsolete to us as the conquest of Chad or the famous "French Peace”—which could as well be called Pax Britan­nica or the American peace—because they have never brought peace to anyone. Thus, we come to realize that there are a number of sacred myths which have no other utility than that of fashioning our own consciousness, our own being and our own good, or not. THE CONDITIONS IN WHICH PEOPLE LIVE UPON EARTH ARE THE RESULT OF THEIR STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, She said. TO WANT TO CHANGE THE CONDITIONS WITHOUT CHANGING THE CONSCIOUSNESS IS A vain CHIMERA.³⁰ The whole problem of the world and the whole enormity of the illusion that has driven us since the first locomotive in one single sentence. How can you pos­sibly change anything without having changed yourself? Only a child would say, “I will open a dormitory, I am going to build a nursery, give soup to the poor, preach knowledge, spread religion... ” It's only because you think you are better than others and know better than they what they should be or do. This is what “serving humanity" means. Do you want to perpetuate all that? It has not brought much change. You can open millions of hospitals, it won't keep people from falling ill. On the contrary, they will be given all the conve­niences and encouragement to fall ill ...In fact, the first humanity you should concern yourself with is yourself. You want to alleviate suffering, but unless you can change the very capacity for suffering into a certitude of being happy, the world will not change. It will always be the same, and we merely go round in circles—civilization follows civilization, catastrophe follows catastrophe, but nothing changes, because something is missing, something is not there, and that is consciousness. That's all.³¹ To “change the capacity for suf­fering.” To her, this was already the heart of the question.

That suffering thing in the depths of man, whatever the attire, the vocabulary, the professions of faith and hope. That something like a call of death, which temporarily garbs itself in one religion or another, in this or that salva­tion, in a red, black or blue "ism,” in a socialist or celestial heaven, trying to elude its deep pain—interludes upon interludes, intellectual, sentimental, patriotic or religious, a thousand interludes between that core of pain and death: perhaps death itself throbbing in the heart of things ever since the first earthly breathing. Life that knows itself doomed—a knot of pain in which both life and death are locked in an intimate embrace, as if life needed death to find its total secret, and death needed life to transmute its dark refusal, and both change into a third state, which will be Life. This capacity for pain in our depths, which is the cry of our naked secret. The one thing we must face with­out masks, without tricks, without good and evil, without all the tawdry rags in which we try to clothe it so as to for­get—in vain. We have something radical yet to find, and our very pain is the means. And at the turn of this century, after that formidable explosion of hope in a Machine that was supposed to save everything, that formidable explosion of brotherhood based on the Ideology of Human Improvement, perhaps we are being led, not to a collapse and defeat, but nearer to the real question, nearer to the heart of an unforeseen "improvement,” in which the old Pain, freed from its false hopes, false heavens and false improvements, consumed and transmuted, reduced to its own question, will free the new life from its mortal cocoon. But first, all the "improvement” had to collapse, we first had to be free from the old spiritual, humanitarian and religious and scientific bunker—all the constructions of the Mind—which confine to specious salvations the one Thing that needs no salvation because it cannot die and needs no machines because it is Power. “If only each one did his best," they say. But this best is absolutely worthless! Mother exclaimed. Unless everything changes, nothing will change. It is this “best” that has to changed.³²

And ultimately, nothing changes until death changes.

Mirra had thoroughly explored all the mechanisms, we could rather say all the old tombs. There were no doors left anywhere, except one—in the .silence of the heart: The true progressive evolution, the one that can lead man to the hap­piness he is entitled to, does not reside in any external means, material improvements or social transformation. In deep inner improvement of the individual lies the true progress and the key to a complete transformation of the present state of things,³³ She wrote in 1912. All our "improvements” are no more useful from the standpoint of the next evolu­tionary stage than the apes improved somersaults in the Pleistocene forests—unless they are a pretext for the devel­opment of our own consciousness. But then, they are but a pretext. Over there, Sri Aurobindo had withdrawn from his revolutionary activities for the same reasons, although everyone expected him to assume the leadership of India’s political destinies—and this "withdrawal" was greatly resented, because nobody understood it. The advocates of action think that by human intellect and energy making an always new rush, everything can be put right, He wrote; the present state of the world after a development of the intellect and a stupendous output of energy for which there is no historical parallel is a signal proof of the emptiness of the illusion under which they labour. Yoga takes the stand that it is only by a change of consciousness that the true basis of life can be discovered; from within outward is indeed the rule. But within does not mean some quarter inch behind the surface ... The choice is between remaining in the old jumble i and groping about in the hope of stumbling on some discovery or standing back and seeking the Light within till we discover and can build the Godhead within and without us.³⁴

Mirra had found the key to the within, but She did not i yet have the key to the transformation. Just one month before embarking for India, She wrote, How much greater a splendor than all the previous ones, how marvelous a glory and light would be needed to draw these beings out of the horrible aberration the life of cities and so-called civilizations plunges them into!³⁵

When everything has been said and done, and seen and understood, nothing remains but to love. Perhaps that is the ultimate door. But it is not enough: One said, “I bring Love”; another said, ‘‘I bring Peace"; another said, “I bring Libera­tion"; and then a little change took place within, something awakened within the consciousness, but outside everything remained the same. That is what causes the fiasco ..³⁶ Love alone, such as Christ preached it, was unable to transform men. Force alone, such as Mohammed preached it, did not transform men—far from it. That is why the Consciousness that is striving to transform humanity unites force with love, and he who is to realize this transformation will come upon earth with the Power of Divine Love.³⁷ Behind her irony, her mischievous laughter, her violent heart athirst for progress, Mirra, Mother, was perhaps first and foremost love: To be an immense mantle of love enveloping the whole earth, penetrating all hearts ...³⁸ But a love we have a lot of trouble understanding, because it seems to be armed with a sword —until the day when this sword, too, dissolves in the bareness of the last days, letting such a vast, transparent and formidably powerful Love shine forth that it was almost crushing for the body—a love that demands the utmost from us, and at times finds us surprised and at our worst, with such a Tenderness, as if we had known ourselves there forever, in the heart of this burning question which is like the very question of the earth within us: Don't you know that the most sublime forces of expansion seek matter's dark­est veils to clothe themselves in?³⁹ She said in 1910. It is because of the worst that the best can be found, and because of the best that the worst can be transformed.⁴⁰ It is there that one meets Mother, there that one begins to touch the secret of Powerful Love, as if such a rending and naked and help­less cry were lit in Matter’s depths of pain that it suddenly turns into a pure fire, which simply says, I love, I love, I love ... that is all, and it is overwhelmingly powerful. There Mother shines, and forever. As if Mother were the love in Matters heart, and Mirra, Matter’s first groping search for what it really is. She opened the Age of divine materialism.

Over there, in Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo had already sent forth his cry: I seek a materialism that shall recognize matter and use it without being its slave.⁴¹

On March 7, 1914, She embarked aboard the Kaga Maru, after thirty-six years of Western materialism.

14: Sri Aurobindo

He whom we saw yesterday is on earth.²

Thus, simply, did She note their meeting on March 29, 1914. Exactly my vision. ³ No, it was not a Hindu divinity, it was Sri Aurobindo. She had such a tender way of pronouncing his name—Shri Aurobin'do. I heard her say it thousands of times, and each time, even after fifty-nine years, there was the same love mingled with sweetness and veneration, just a second's pause in the midst of a sentence, a faint smile in her half-closed eyes, and one felt Sri Auro­bindo there, in an envelopment of pale blue light, almost white, whitish-blue, and very luminous. Never did She pronounce this name carelessly. It was like a mantra. It was Shri Aurobindo, there, as if they were fused together, with sometimes her in front, sometimes Him—He was that soft­ness, so vast, so comprehending. With Sri Aurobindo... you felt as if you entered into an infinity, always, and so soft, so soft! Always like ... something soft, I don't know. With vibra­tions that always made you wide, peaceful—you felt as if you were touching something limitless.⁴ Indeed, limitless—it did not stop at any point, it carried you far away from yourself, which was perhaps yourself, purely, on great wings of snow. Just one second, She would close her eyes, pronounce this name, and there it was. Forever. A name that incar­nates an experience, and holds the power of an experience. That is what the mantra is. Shri Aurobin’do ...

The Mystery of the Shakti

The first time, She wanted to meet Him alone. They had landed (was it mere chance?) at Dhanushkodi, far to the south, near the great temple of Rameswaram, whose high violet towers stood out above dunes of white sand; the temple of mental man’s first Avatar, and of his wife, Sita— who was engulfed alive by the Earth she loved—perhaps to pay homage to that story of the distant past, before going to meet the future. She already felt that something you breathe in with the country's atmosphere.⁵ They took a train and arrived in Pondicherry in the morning. She saw noth­ing, her gaze was turned within. We imagine her with a tulle veil covering long, flowing hair simply parted in the middle, a very white hand holding her veil against the gust of the sea breeze. On March 29th, in the afternoon, She walked alone toward a large columned house, somewhat battered by the monsoons, her heart beating, perhaps, as it does in the silence of life's moments when one knows without knowing. 41, rue Francois Martin. A big postern gate and its capitals adorned with vines of quisqualis, which She would call “Faithfulness.” An open door, a neglected courtyard with a few banana trees and weeds, a ground floor veranda with its colonnades, and a staircase to the right: I climbed up the stairway and he was standing there, waiting for me at the top of the stairs.... EXACTLY my vision! Dressed the same way, in the same position, in profile, his head held high. He turned his head towards me ... and I saw in his eyes that it was He. The two things clicked, the inner experience immediately became one with the outer experience and there was a fusion—the decisive shock.⁶

And nothing happens in the cosmic play
But at its time and in its foreseen place.⁷

We always walk along two roads, the outer and the inner, and we go blindly on the former, weaving a million “chance events” like some absurd cubist painting, stumbling here or there into sorrows or joys, encounters, unexplained and inexplicable gestures, while a traveler within us knows the whole picture and all the threads, all the old and never lost encounters, the uncompleted gestures, until the day both travelers meet: the road within becomes the road without and everything is an eternal encounter, ONE Consciousness wanders through its eternal picture, gradually awakening to its own totality. The only minutes of memory in a life are the moments when the two paths meet; a little shock within that recognizes one point of the Great Picture and finds itself, for a moment, on the eternal highroad—a second of coincidence. And it is that. Everything else is a haphazard grayness where nothing happens, because nothing happens in life except on that road and during the sole seconds when we coincide with that road. The coinciding points are the exact measure of our consciousness. For some, every­thing coincides; each gesture and each encounter, and the whole universe down to the most microscopic detail is a fabulous encounter. These are the ones who pursue the great eternal Work and, from life to life, come back together to awaken an ever greater number of little points that will become aware of the great coincidence. Such is the supra­mental vision, the consciousness of the next cycle; such is Mother's and Sri Aurobindo’s long path through forgotten ages and countless consciousnesses: There is no difference between the Mother’s path and mine, Sri Aurobindo wrote; we have and have always had the same path, the path that leads to the supramental change and the divine realisation; not only at the end, but from the beginning they have been the same.⁸ And She said: From the beginning of the earth’s history, in one form or another, under one name or another, Sri Aurobindo has always presided over the great terrestrial transformations.⁹ They are what we could call the pioneers of evolution. Their meeting was the sign that the new Manifestation was about to take place. The time has come, Mother wrote in her journal, the new manifestation is certain, the new manifestation is close ... This human, this earthly hour is the most beautiful of all hours.¹⁰ The Hour of the Earth ... How She thought of the Earth always! The Earth's beauty, the Earth's grandeur, the Earth's realiza­tion! Mother was perhaps the Earth's aspiration within a little body: Grant that my aspiration may be intense enough to awaken the same aspiration everywhere,¹¹ She prayed. Yes, that inevitable Need. Nothing else counts. That is all. Only that.¹² The supramental work of the end was at the beginning of the great journey, it is the fire of aspiration burning and burning from body to body, increasingly building itself, and remembering itself more and more until it touches its full totality and its solar body. It is the journey of the Shakti enclosed in the atom’s unconscious­ness to the Shakti fully conscious in each cell of its body.

Such is the mystery of the Shakti. We speak of the power of the atom, the power of Nature, electrical, intellectual or spiritual power, but there is only one Power, not two. These are varying levels or degrees of luminosity, varying intensities of a single Current that takes on one vibration or another depending on the milieu it goes through. That power rose through centuries and ages, built ever more complex instruments, covered itself with one shell or another, ever aspiring, ever striving for more space, more light, more earth and bodies to encompass, ever ascending toward some ineffable totality of itself. It built trap after trap to annex ever more of the world to its totality, invented love to bind beings to beings and the millions of species to its earth—it was love itself, a fire burning within, a need to be ever more, to embrace ever more, to live and live everywhere, in everything. It cast forth galaxies as it cast forth countless little creatures, as it cast forth man just a few moments ago. With him, it reached the conscious knot of its evolution. But it strove to grow still more, always, through the senses as through the heart as through the mind, to enfold always more of the world in its huge net of love-fire, to conquer and dominate. It even soared to the clouds with its ascetics and saints, dissolved itself for a few seconds in their contemplation, only to go back elsewhere and begin again and again its old conquest. It is the relentless Flame, the need to be that cannot stop until it is everything and ever more. Some call it Desire, Evil, and try to annihilate it in order to emerge into a nameless Peace at last; some call it Intelligence, Power, and try to yoke it to their Machine only to annihi­late themselves beneath the weight of their own inventions. It shatters every trap it has itself built, breaks men and the very structures it had itself erected, shatters Intelligence, shatters the Spirit, shatters even Desire, whenever they tie it to a stake, casts and recasts its terrestrial ore until it has found its own secret—it is Shakti, the Moving Force of the worlds, the Realization, and without Her none lives and none aspires. She is the Fire in the atom and the Fire of the yogi. She is Death who undoes herself into life, Nirvana bursting forth into a million new galaxies only to find her again; paradises breaking apart, species breaking apart, millions of machines, tricks and traps and inventions breaking apart, only to find her again endlessly. No one can extinguish that Fire. But from age to age, a few have known her Secret, though even this Secret She breaks and buries until the ALL is ready to live and build her Secret, because She is ONE in a million forms, She is the Mother of the worlds and everything is equally her child.

Sri Aurobindo knew her Secret. Mother knew her Secret. They were together again because the Time had come to attempt the great Experience once more—and who knows whether "other times” had not exploded into myriad par­ticles of stars just to forge this one more time?

For the mystery of the Shakti recurs in every being as it does in every universe, as in Sri Aurobindo, as in Mother— the Hour of the World begins with our little hour. One loses it or one wins it. Each one must discover the mystery of the Shakti and conquer her Secret. The world groans under the onslaught of her Fire; She pounds our senses, pounds our hearts, pounds our minds, stirs up ideas, passions and miseries—she is the relentless Fire. Every discipline seeks to check this Fire, as do science, morality, religion, law, each one at its own level—she breaks all the barriers, thwarts all the laws, finds herself naked and continues her very structures it had itself erected, shatters Intelligence, shatters the Spirit, shatters even Desire, whenever they tie it to a stake, casts and recasts its terrestrial ore until it has found its own secret—it is Shakti, the Moving Force of the worlds, the Realization, and without Her none lives and none aspires. She is the Fire in the atom and the Fire of the yogi. She is Death who undoes herself into life, Nirvana bursting forth into a million new galaxies only to find her again; paradises breaking apart, species breaking apart, millions of machines, tricks and traps and inventions breaking apart, only to find her again endlessly. No one can extinguish that Fire. But from age to age, a few have known her Secret, though even this Secret She breaks and buries until the ALL is ready to live and build her Secret, because She is ONE in a million forms, She is the Mother of the worlds and everything is equally her child.

Sri Aurobindo knew her Secret. Mother knew her Secret. They were together again because the Time had come to attempt the great Experience once more—and who knows whether "other times” had not exploded into myriad par­ticles of stars just to forge this one more time?

For the mystery of the Shakti recurs in every being as it does in every universe, as in Sri Aurobindo, as in Mother— the Hour of the World begins with our little hour. One loses it or one wins it. Each one must discover the mystery of the Shakti and conquer her Secret. The world groans under the onslaught of her Fire; She pounds our senses, pounds our hearts, pounds our minds, stirs up ideas, passions and miseries—she is the relentless Fire. Every discipline seeks to check this Fire, as do science, morality, religion, law, each one at its own level—she breaks all the barriers, thwarts all the laws, finds herself naked and continues her dance of Fire even as we are sure we have grasped wisdom. She breaks every Wisdom as one day she will break our machines, like the old crumbling temples along the Nile. She seeks what is farther than our wisdoms, more power­ful than our machines, truer than all our temples; she seeks her Secret in each of us. Devoured by her Fire, three Indian millennia¹⁰⁰ have said no. Hypnotized by her Flame, a few Western centuries have said YES. But neither that “no" nor that "yes” has found the Secret. The former have soared off into their so-called freedom, and have lost Matter, while the latter have sunk into their so-called Matter, and have lost freedom—but neither this matter nor that freedom was real, no one had the total Secret. If we pull the Shakti upwards, she turns into vapor and finally breaks this body, which is no longer of any use to her; if we pull her down­wards, she sinks into the mire and also breaks this body that fetters her. No one had the secret of the body—and She breaks and breaks her bodies until we find the Secret.

I looked upon the world and missed the Self, And when I found the Self, I lost the world, My other selves I lost and the body of God, The link of the finite with the Infinite, The bridge between the appearance and the Truth.¹³

For the body is the bridge. The body is Truth's last hiding place, the place where the full Shakti changes her restless Flame into something else, her white freedom into some­thing else, her black misery into something else, her death into Life divine. And that may be where even "God” changes into something else. "Into a blind darkness they enter who follow after the Ignorance, they as if into a greater darkness who devote themselves to the Knowledge alone,”¹⁴ the Upanishad says.

Yet the danger seems to be lurking in the very opposite direction. A dark Shakti now reigns over the world. If it is true that in India, in more gracious ages, woman was regarded as a living symbol of the Shakti (Rama and Sita, Shiva and Parvati, Leonardo da Vinci and Mona Lisa, Sri Aurobindo and Mother)—for in fact Woman is the Shakti, the creative Force, the foundation of life, and without her no real creation can ever be embodied; She is the one who brings Consciousness down into Matter, the one who orga­nizes Matter, who fixes and concretizes Man's wayward thoughts and precipitates his free expanses into the mold of forms; She, the Body of the aspiring Earth—through a precipitous fall exactly commensurate to the fall of every­thing else, She has become, in our age, the symbol of Sex, another devaluation just as radical as that of the Mind. There is scarcely any risk that the Shakti of the world will vanish on the summits, for She is perfectly sunk in the mire below—for excellent reasons, since Nature always knows perfectly what she is doing. It is strange how we constantly think we obey higher or lower principles, heav­enly or muddy free wills, and how we are simply the parrots of the Mind, while forces infinitely more powerful than our own pull us in an unexpected direction and make us do what is needed for "reasons” that have nothing to do with the words we cover them with. The day we emerge from the Mind, we will be as astounded as Gulliver in the land of the Houyhnhnms. Now, Indian writings of some two thousand years ago had precisely foreseen that fall in a fourfold cas­cade of “ages,” or yugas, which saw, successively, the age of the thinkers or truth-knowers (Brahmins), that of the | knights or warriors (Kshatriyas), that of the merchants or | the middle-class (Vaishyas), and finally our own age, that .] of the laborers (Shudras), or rather the servants—of the ego, of the machine, of sex and comfort. The age of the "small dirty bodies,” ksudra deha samskara-barjitah, as the Vishnu Purana literally says.¹⁵ And each time, the Shakti came down from one center to another: from the mind center to the heart center to the stomach center to the sex center—that is, the center of Matter. We have come down all the way there, because the evolutionary work of our age—Kali Yuga, the Dark Age¹⁰¹—is taking place there, in Matter. We may deplore it rationally and morally and aes­thetically, but Nature could not care less about our reasons and our morals. She does not reason: she does. She is forcing us into another age—for it is said that this Dark Age, excruciating but brief and endowed with an over­whelming Grace as no other Age, is to be followed by a new Age of Truth, Satya Yuga ... or by a total decomposition, a complete recasting so as to attempt once more, perhaps beneath more clement galaxies, the eternal Experiment She WANTS to work out.

If we have reached this point, it is undoubtedly because sex is one of the keys to the body's Secret, and sexual mas­tery, says Sri Aurobindo,¹⁶ is the imperative condition for the manifestation of the new evolutionary Force, the supra­mental Force in the body. As always, the supreme obstacle is the supreme lever. Why?... It is no use giving abstract reasons, we must come to grips with the thing itself to understand what it conceals—unless we have tried, we cannot understand. We delude ourselves, involve our heart, ideas, feelings, thousands of masks and wonderful “reasons” in covering up what we want to hold on to. But it is obvious that if the new Shakti is to radiate in the body without exploding it by her sheer power, some transparency and wideness are needed there, just as they are needed in the Mind to let the first rays of Consciousness in, or simply a clear idea. The old mud cannot coexist with the new Force, and yet through its very resistance, narrowness and thick­ness, this mud compels a corresponding Force to manifest. Dams accumulate the Force necessary to get over the dam. But it can also break. The yoga of descent is a difficult and dangerous yoga for individuals as well as for the earth. It is a challenge to everyone and a challenge to the earth. We cannot do it without getting our hands dirty; we bump into things and fall, and in the very force of our fall, we find the force to jump farther. This yoga demands absolute sincerity, to use Mother's keyword; the least cheating with ourselves can have fatal consequences. But the slightest sincere open­ing has overwhelming results. This is the time of the infinite Grace as well as of the inexorable Sword, the time of all or nothing, of giant progress or gigantic collapse, in individu­als, nations and hearts, and everywhere on earth. No one is spared: it is one single Coup. The great coup d’etat of the New Consciousness. We get over the dam or we do not. And woman, this primal Shakti, has a decisive role to play in this supremely difficult Work—provided she under­stands her true role of creator and inspirer, which has no longer anything to do with the old small literary, aesthetic or conjugal stories, but with a new world and a new body difficult to give birth to, difficult to know, difficult to con­quer—for it must be conquered step by step in the most humble Matter and most obscure gestures, every minute of the day. At every minute, there is that or the old world of the "improved” ape. There can be no compromise, you under­stand, Mother said, it is not like convalescing after an illness: we have to CHANGE WORLDS.¹⁷

It is the most extraordinary adventure of all times—no continents to discover, no Vasco da Gama; an entirely unknown world within our own body, the conscious making of a being not yet existent on earth, the invention, as it were, of a new mode of consciousness and a new mode of perception. To replace all the old organs by new ones. Another vision, another touch, other means of communi­cating—another earth. And ultimately, another Matter. The way out of the old genetic program. Even the higher apes, when they were stirring up the first idea that would make an Einstein, had not experienced such a thrilling transition. But whether we like it or not, we are right in it, in the middle of the Transition. It is the only important Fact since the Stone Age.

Will we work it out, or not?

I know with absolute certitude, said Sri Aurobindo, that the supramental is a truth and that its advent is in the very nature of things inevitable. The question is as to the when and the how. That also is decided and predestined from somewhere above; but it is here being fought out amid a rather grim clash of conflicting forces. ...My faith and will are for the NOW.¹⁸

Such is the sense of the meeting between Mother and Sri Aurobindo on that March 29, 1914, a sort of zero hour of the new evolution.

The Whole Life

Mother would stay in Pondicherry almost one year, until February 1915, before leaving once again for Europe, where She would spend one last year, followed by a long four-year detour to Japan with Richard—the years of hell—before returning for good to Sri Aurobindo in 1920. I have often wondered why She did not stay with Him immediately and avoid this long circuit of pain. But Mother is One who exhausts every path and touches every difficulty to absorb them into her consciousness; we cannot transform what we have not borne.

Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change¹⁹

How far we are from the ascetic yogas which reject all darkness to sit enthroned in their pure light—and become a ruler over nothingness, as Mother would say. It really seems as if the yoga of descent consisted in swallowing all poisons, one after another, to grow stronger through the very force that wants to destroy. To run away from difficulties in order to conquer them is not a solution—although it’s very appealing. In those who seek the spiritual life, there is some­thing that says, “Oh, to sit down under a tree all alone, to remain in meditation, to remove all temptation to speak or act, how nice!’’... The true victory has to be won in life. You must know how to be alone with the Eternal and the Infinite in the midst of all circumstances. You must know how to be free, with the Supreme as your companion, amidst all occu­pations. That is the true victory.²⁰ And Sri Aurobindo said: We will enrich our realisation with the booty tom from the powers that oppose us.²¹ As we practice this gymnastic, we begin to touch a wonderful truth and to realize everywhere, in the least circumstance, that there is not one atom of adversity in the world, not one speck of “evil," not a single “enemy," and that everything is meant to compel us to uncover truth everywhere, purity everywhere, freedom everywhere—a huge conspiracy of light—and to build our own shakti to conquer farther, even farther, down to the last root of “Evil," to the very last mask:

An immortality cowled in the cape of death ²²

The conquest of death begins at the first street comer.

The great wonder of Sri Aurobindo’s and Mother’s Yoga is that it makes us discover the absolute positiveness of everything, including death. All of life, down to the last detail, becomes utterly positive, meaningful—not a single thing is “against." The only “Evil" is to take it as evil. It is incredibly simple, like Mother and Sri Aurobindo.

That yoga did not seem much at all, if one would look at it back in 1914; everything was so natural that it scarcely seemed like yoga, or perhaps everything was yoga, like the very air we breathe. Sri Aurobindo was surrounded by half a dozen boys, mostly Bengalis, who had followed their "leader” into his exile, and were all waiting for the moment He would return to the revolution—no one suspected that He was doing the revolution. Sri Aurobindo was always doing things without seeming to; even during the revolution, He preferred to remain in the background, and it took the “bomb case” and his final arrest for him to become known as “the brains behind it." He never laughed, except uproari­ously, like a god; He never raised his voice and He let everybody do as they pleased, but He silently applied his will to run things as He saw them. His apparent noninter­vention was so extreme that one day a disciple asked him, “But wouldn't you intervene if someone were drowning in front of you?"—No, not unless I was asked to. He well understood that changing circumstances is useless if people did not want to change within: you un-drown them, and they re-drown themselves at the earliest opportunity. For Sri Aurobindo, the problem lay elsewhere and was more central. But if He was called upon, if He was asked the least thing, He responded instantaneously, like a hurricane— without seeming to (as He still does). Indeed, Sri Auro­bindo was unlike anything we have ever known. Sparrows had built their nest on his bedroom door. He went all the way around so as not to disturb them—it was like that. To Sri Aurobindo, everything was perfectly equal, everything had an equal value; there were no pluses or minuses, everything was absolutely important: the sparrows, the Viceroy of India or the revolution, it was all the same, because He was conducting the revolution at every moment, in every gesture and every step. Actually, if the revolution does not begin with the sparrow, it begins nowhere. If we only grasped that secret, we would be very near to really revolutionizing the world.

So He did not sit in meditation or distribute blessings. He went about his work, walked—a great deal, eight hours a day, up and down his veranda, to bring consciousness into Matter. He had found that walking gave energy to meditation. In short, it was a physical meditation, which did not seem much. A meditation of the body. Walking was yoga, eating was yoga, climbing up and down the stairs was yoga, everything was yoga—All Life is Yoga, He would soon inscribe as an epigraph to his first book, The Synthesis of Yoga. That is why nobody could discern anything, for yoga, like life, was everywhere. And the "boys'’ went in and out at their own sweet will, discussed politics or the latest soccer game—their favorite, if not main occupation—with the youths of the Pondicherry Sports Club. Sri Aurobindo was their companion, their friend. If they wanted to learn, they just asked him, because they were young and with the revolution had not had too much time to go to university. They could ask Him everything. Some wanted to learn lan­guages, French, for instance; so, going straight to Moliere, he selected L’Avare, which was there amidst the piles of Sanskrit, English, German and Italian books scattered about his room and right on his cot, for they were too poor to afford even a cupboard. Or else He taught Italian, Greek and Latin (Antigone, Medea, The Aeneid) to one of them who proved particularly interested in literature—this was Nolini, Sri Aurobindo’s oldest disciple, who would become the General Secretary of the Ashram. But the boys did not regard themselves as “disciples,” and besides, Sri Aurobindo did not try to teach anything, unless He was asked to. There was no question of an "Ashram,” because Sri Aurobindo did not want to hear this word mentioned and his yoga had nothing particularly “ashramic” in it. Yet something in Sri Aurobindo, which they could not very well figure out, opened their hearts and consciousnesses. As for him, whenever He was not busy walking or answering their questions, He was reading the Rig-Veda in the original Vedic Sanskrit. He discovered the Rig-Veda with amaze­ment and wonder, finding in it all the experiences He had spontaneously had in Calcutta right in the middle of his revolutionary activities—not unlike Mirra in the midst of her artists life. He rediscovered The Secret of the Veda, He who had spent all his early years in the West and learned English before learning his own mother tongue.

He lived the Rig-Veda quietly in the midst of that "camp life," as the boys called it. In fact, since his arrival in Pondicherry in 1910 with a false passport, they had lived a "bohemian" life, as one of them would say,¹⁰² moving four times in a row from one house to another depending on the state of their finances, until they ended up in that famous but slightly dilapidated "palace" in the "European quarter,” the Guest House, which Sri Aurobindo had considered worthy of renting for the fabulous sum of thirty-five rupees per month in honor of the Richards' arrival. He would even send an SOS to Calcutta to pay the rent. They used to take their baths under the tap in the courtyard, and as Sri Auro­bindo was the last to wash, He had the privilege of using the only soaked towel which the six others had used before him. Electricity had been installed just the day before, otherwise there was only a single candle reserved for Sri Aurobindo's use, as He had the most incongruous habit of reading at night, walking during the day and sleeping God knows how and when on his camp cot. The others slept on mats, without any pillow, and of course they had no mos­quito nets, let alone fans. They ate as they could, with the boys taking turns cooking, each one according to his own speciality; one would do the rice, another would take charge of pulses with, God willing, a few vegetables and chilli, and that was about it. Sri Aurobindo was not difficult, He would remain twenty-three days without eating, "to experiment" —already facing the problem of the absorption of energies (which would preoccupy Mother till the very end), and He sought gropingly in his body to see how to change that whole animal functioning without disintegrating Matter: When I did my fast of about 23 days or more when I was living in Chetty’s house [Sri Aurobindo's first house in Pondicherry'], I very nearly solved the problem. I could walk eight hours a day as usual. I continued my mental work and sadhana [yogic discipline] as usual and I found that I was not in the least weak at the end of 23 days. But the flesh began to grow less and I did not find a clue to replacing the very material reduced in the body. When I broke the fast, then also I did not observe the usual rule of people who observe long fasts,—by beginning with little food and so on. I began with the same quantity as I used to take before.²³ Like Mother, Sri Aurobindo broke all the rules, including physiological rules. But that did not prevent him from smoking big, hardly yogic cigars, (Spencer's Flors, if you please!) but He dropped cigars overnight as soon as He realized that the smell disturbed Mother. In short, a quite illegal and unmedical scholar, terrorist, gentleman and yogi. But when people came near him, in his simple white dhoti (one end of which He drew over his left shoulder, leaving a part of his body bare), they could not help but say "Sir" and bow before something calm and majestic, with an immobile fire inside.

Then this fire melted into a blue infinity.

And there were also spies. They were well guarded. The British Government had rented a whole house in Pondi­cherry where it lodged a squad of plainclothes Anglo-Indian policemen, who took shifts at Sri Aurobindo’s door, watch­ing every gesture, taking down the visitors’ names ... and inventing all sorts of delirious stories to justify their sur­veillance and keep the legend of the "dangerous terrorist” alive. There was even a spy among the six “disciples,” who, after having learned one day that Sri Aurobindo was "also" a yogi, threw himself at His feet, terror-stricken. Sri Auro­bindo smiled quietly; it was all the same to him. A spy was a man with two feet like everyone else, after all, and who was going to spy on the Rig-Veda? Once, they even hid “secret maps” in the well, along with duly forged, “incrimi­nating" letters; whereupon the British amiably advised the French police to “investigate” and make sure that nothing was hidden in the well (the British Government tried every­thing to have him extradited). The Police Commissioner, in white gloves, would come with a detachment of sepoys, discover the documents, search the rooms and finally come upon Sri Aurobindo’s table—the only table—to find a scattering of books in Greek and Latin ... and walk out, throwing up his hands in the air: “He knows Greek! He knows Latin!” Such a man obviously could not make bombs. And Moliere, somewhere between the Rig-Veda and Aristophanes, burst out laughing. All of life was there.

The Supramental

Such was the life they led until Mother’s arrival.

He was forty-two years old, She was thirty-six. The day after their first meeting, She returned to see him, but this time with Richard. She again climbed the stairs, holding a veil over her long, flowing hair. He was waiting for her on the large veranda upstairs. There was only a microscopic little table, less than three feet wide, covered with a blue cotton cloth. This is where He would soon type the five thousand pages of his first written work, in one single stretch. A straight-back hardwood chair, and a few hardly more comfortable seats, rented the day before in honor of the visitors. And the tall stucco columns, the sky already ablaze. He started to talk with Richard about the war; He already knew in March that the war was going to break out (it would break out in August). He knew a lot of things in his silent pacing up and down—the mind’s small limitations were no longer there. I was sitting there on the verandah. There was a table in front of him, and Richard was on the other side facing him. They began talking. Myself, I was seated at his feet, very small, with the table just in front of me—it came to my forehead, which gave me a little protection ...I didn’t say anything, I didn’t think anything, try anything, want anything—I merely sat near him. When I stood up half an hour later, he had put silence in my head, that’s all, with­out my even having asked him—perhaps even without his trying ... Oh, I had tried—for years I had tried to catch silence in my head—I never succeeded. For years, I did end­less exercises, all kinds of things, even “pranayama”—if it would only shut up! I was able to go out (that wasn't diffi­cult), but inside it kept turning.... But at that moment, all the mental constructions, all the mental, speculative struc­tures, none of it remained—a big hole. And such a peaceful, such a luminous hole! Afterwards, I kept very still so as not to disturb it. I didn't speak, above all I refrained from think­ing and held it, held it tight against me—I said to myself, “make it last, make it last, make it last”... How happy I was! Aaah ...It was really the reward for all my efforts. Nothing, I knew nothing any more, understood nothing at all. Not a single idea left in my head! Everything I had carefully built up over so many years, through all my experiences: conscious yoga, non-conscious yoga, life, experiences lived, classified and organized (oh, what a monument!).... crash! It all came tumbling down. Magnificent.... Everything was gone, abso­lutely gone, blank—as if I had just been born. Then slowly, slowly, as though falling drop by drop, something was built up again. But it had no limits, it had no ... it was vast as the universe and wonderfully still and luminous. Nothing here, in the head, but THERE, above the head; and then everything began to be seen from there. And it has never left me—you know, as a proof of Sri Aurobindo’s power it’s incomparable! A miracle. It has NEVER left me. I went to Japan, I did all sorts of things, had all possible kinds of adventures, even the most unpleasant, but it never left me—stillness, stillness, stillness. ...²⁴ And all this while He was talking to Richard, without his even trying. In other words, a power that acted directly from Matter to Matter, or from body to body, without mental intervention. Like a contagion. That is the supramental power.

But the word is misleading. When we say “supramental,” we imagine a superintuition, a supervastitude of conscious­ness, a superpower that would be like a glorification of all the powers of human intelligence; but that is not at all how it is. It is natural power itself. It is the very consciousness of Matter, or in Matter, acting directly, automatically and spontaneously. We see this power at work in the bird, the animal, everywhere around us in Nature; it is that power which guides the birds flight toward its infallible goal, the movement of a little beast toward its precise need, the motion of the atom in its regular gravitation—everything is exact to the electron and the millionth of a meridian. It is perfect exactitude. We speak of “instinct” or of “the laws of Nature,” because we label everything and think we exorcise a mystery by running it through Sciences baptis­mal font, and we nearly declare—not even “nearly”—that it is a total “Unconsciousness,” in other words, a total stu­pidity, which fulfills the tasks of a perfect intelligence. How it manages, we do not know, but that is “instinct," so everything is explained; that it is a “law,” so everything is natural—indeed, it is perfectly natural, and everything is natural—except us. And everything is perfectly conscious, except us, and perfectly exact, except us. We are on the way, in the process of becoming conscious, of rediscovering the very consciousness and exactitude that lies in the heart of a little beast and in the center of the atom. Only, instead of being an "unconscious” power, in the sense that the instru­ment does not know the Force that drives it (a bird does not know what impulsion pushes it toward the tropics or the lime-washed wall that will provide the shell of its egg), it will be a conscious power, a conscious movement, and an instrument which knows the Force, consents to the Force and puts it to work or lets it work consciously through itself. It is the Consciousness within that is conscious, and the unconscious instrument that becomes conscious of what was always there. Then, instead of a long evolutionary course and a long circuit in which the Consciousness had to act through more and more complex instruments and finally through a mental shell in which it perceived itself as an individual, with all the distortions and infirmities of the mental environment, it will be that same “involved” Consciousness, as Sri Aurobindo calls it, confined within the cells and electrons, hidden behind life, hidden behind the mind, which, at the end of the circuit, will express itself directly, instantly, all-powerfully, within an instrument that will let it flow without distorting it and will experience the individual joy of knowing what is happening, how it is happening, where it is going and why—everywhere at once, because Consciousness is one and Matter is one. Sri Aurobindo called that infallible Consciousness the "Truth- Consciousness” (because it is automatically true), or the Supermind. Yet, in the blindness of Matter itself, He says, there are signs of a concealed consciousness which in its hidden fundamental being SEES and has the power to act according to its vision and even by an infallible immediacy which is inherent in its nature.... The purposeful drive and workings of the inconscient material Energy are precisely such as we can attribute to the presence of an involved con­sciousness automatic, not using thought like the mind.... The entirely and inherently enlightened Truth-Consciousness we attribute to Supermind would be the SAME reality appear­ing at an ultimate stage of the evolution, finally evolved and no longer wholly involved as in Matter or partly and imper­fectly evolved and therefore capable of imperfection and error as in life and mind, now possessed of its own natural full­ness and perfection, luminously automatic, infallible.²⁵ It is “the One conscious in unconscious things,” as say the Vedas. Evolution results from an involution—only that which is already within can come out. If Consciousness did not already exist in the atom's core, it could never come out, for nothing can come out of nothing; there is no seed which does not contain its fruit and consciousness cannot result from unconsciousness. At the end of the circuit, we rediscover what was there, pure, in the heart of the first atom.

The whole problem lies in that “pure” something.

Of course, the first thing Sri Aurobindo spoke about to Mother was this Supermind. He had just been discovering with amazement his first confirmations in the Veda. He himself did not very well know how it all worked; it was a “jungle,” as He put it: Our yoga is like a new path carved out of the jungle and there is no previous road in the region. I myself had great difficulties ...²⁶ For us, everything is simple and clear, explained, the path has been opened; but when you are in the middle of an Amazonian jungle that exists on no map, first of all, you do not even know that it is the Amazon, and whether you should go right or left, whether Peru exists over there or whether the Orinoco is a part of the path, or if you are only going round in circles—you walk through nowhere. Only afterward can you say, “This is the source of the Amazon” or “This is the Truth-Con­sciousness,” but when you are in it, it is Darkness, which lights up only as you walk. You walk in “nothing,” you invent the Amazon—there is only the invisible compass within which guides your steps as a bird is guided toward its unknown lagoon six thousand miles away. But for the compass to work correctly, you must be pure, you must not let your own ideas interfere suggesting ten thousand other possible paths—you must be silent. You must listen to the Amazon within which leads you to the Amazon without, or rather which creates the Amazon as you walk. Ambulando solvitur was Sri Aurobindo’s favorite maxim: we solve the problem while walking. And did He walk! And He was silent, letting the great Shakti flow through him—surrender, total abdication, that is, total transparency, is the only Power. But if we begin to build a lovely little Central Park in the middle of the way, we get shut up within our Central Park—the walls arise instantaneously and magically the moment we think them. We must really have the courage to walk in nothing and not let ourselves be shut up by any­thing, not even by the supreme splendors, or what we take to be supreme splendors. To use a truism, a new world is a world that DOES NOT exist, or exists only out there, in the future, once the map is completed; and yet, we are walk­ing in it all the time, it is what guides our every footstep in its invisible, involuted seed. Thus we can understand that Sri Aurobindo felt somewhat relieved to be able to talk to someone who understood at last, and to break his solitary tete-a-tete with the six- or seven-thousand-year-old Vedas. Oh yes, I know! exclaimed Mother, laughing, when He first told her about the supramental creation. I have seen it up there! These had been her experiences in Tlemcen, and even earlier, in Paris.

Here again, our language is misleading, for it is all made up of “high,” “low,” "future,” “past,” a three-dimensional language to describe a world that has never been three- dimensional, any more than the sun has ever “risen” any­where. We are the ones who revolve, who travel in our consciousness. Indeed, that Supermind was "up there,” at the end of the journey, as complete as the Amazon and for years and years Sri Aurobindo and Mother would speak of the supramental "descent" upon earth. They would keep “pulling" the Supermind onto the earth, until a certain day in 1956 when it “descended." They traveled in a Supermind that was there all the time, just like the Amazon, and which became the Supermind as They walked. Theirs was the work of the pioneers. And one day we will find ourselves naturally in a well-mapped-out Supermind, just as today we are naturally in a well-organized Mind. But this journey of consciousness does not take place in the Brazilian jungle, but through the thick layers of our being, which are every­body’s layers. It is a journey to meet up with something that has always been there, only veiled from us by ideas, feel­ings, millennial habits of being, living and feeling, layers upon layers like a deposit down to the bottom of our cells— a journey, indeed, through the millennia—and suddenly, at the end, there is the “Supermind,” when everything has been crossed down to the last little coat of electrons, when everything becomes transparent and pure. Then the “high” meets the “low,” the “future” enters the "present,” the map is completed, the Amazon spreads itself out before us, we have arrived. It is transparent, it shows through. The “over there” becomes the "right here.” We live in the always-there involuted in the core of the atom, unfolded through each step of the journey, and which secretly guided every step of the journey. Sri Aurobindo and Mother are the ones who were going to establish the first connection. But the “Supermind” was still a kind of nothing, seen “over-there- and-above,” in a vision of the future, mysteriously perceived in the body’s cells (as Sri Aurobindo and Mother were gropingly beginning to perceive it in their bodies), with a whole opaque world in between. Purity and transparency had to be driven between the two, just as one day the first ape must have driven purity and transparency into its ape habits, so that the first mental vibrations might pass through without being engulfed by the old simian mecha­nisms. Only here, there is not just one level to clear up, but quite radically the whole gamut of evolutionary levels right down to the first mechanism of life in Matter. And finally, it is the same Force that is at work, through the Mind, the heart, the body or the stone—depending on the level we have crossed, we speak of mental force, vital or atomic force; and it does take on a mental, vital or atomic vibration, but it is always one and the same Force, the Supramental Shakti, at work clearing various levels of herself. The pure Shakti of the beginning is at the end. A still heart, a clear mind and untroubled nerves are the very first necessity for the perfection of our Yoga.²⁷ Thus did Sri Aurobindo define the conditions of the supramental yoga in a letter of 1913 to a disciple in Calcutta. In other words, transparency on every level. This is what Mother already called "the purifi­cation of Matter.”

For the strangest experience is to discover suddenly, quite stupidly, that the body knows better than we do and has a fantastic vision, perhaps even a very simple and fantastic power, only veiled by our mental habits. An “enlightenment” of the body. Perhaps the very amazement of the hominid when he realized that he had just built the first bow in a second’s thought. A power of the body. A vision of the body. A direct knowledge of Matter.

This was Sri Aurobindo’s very experience in Calcutta, beyond Nirvana. At the end of the circle, we topple again into the beginning of things.

True liberation is in the body.

15: An Upside-Down Volcano

Sri Aurobindo groped his way through the supramental jungle. Except for bits and pieces, we do not really know what He was doing. He who wrote so much, thousands of letters and pages, and who did not refuse to speak abun­dantly with Richard or the first nucleus of disciples, never said anything about the body’s practical secrets—perhaps because no one would have understood him, or rather, because there is no use “explaining.” At the level of the body, things must be lived, experienced; one cannot teach the Shakti of the body as one teaches geometry or the paths to Nirvana; each one must walk, or perhaps even must invent his own path, because each body is different from the others, and one body’s obstacles are not another body’s obstacles. I had the surprise of my life when, one day in 1962, Mother told me quite simply, Sri Aurobindo left with­out revealing his secret.¹ It was not until Mother’s own yoga, when she was all alone, that Sri Aurobindo’s secret came to light and we could find out what He was really doing. That is how it was; Sri Aurobindo never imposed anything, we could even say that He did not teach; He simply set into motion the deep material, physiological mechanisms that would work silently and invisibly in everybody’s flesh and in the earth’s flesh, and which one day will break forth unexpectedly, from within, in all those who are ready. In short, He set into motion Matter’s truth so that Matter itself would do the work—which is precisely what happened while Sri Aurobindo was speaking with Richard; without his even trying, through the simple, material radiance of his presence, silence was established in Mother from within. He did not apply any special concentration or special will­power as all yogis do: He let Matter itself speak, if we may say so; Mother caught the contagion of Sri Aurobindo's silence. This “contagion” is the fundamental key to the working of the supramental power. It is not something imposed from without (this is the old failure of all powers), but something that is awakened from within and aspires by itself, from within. In fact, at the risk of sounding para­doxical, we might say that the Supermind is the only thing in the world that is not a “power”; it is the Truth of Matter, which, because it is, has the power to act—automatically, simply and naturally. It is that which is “natural” par excel­lence. To be is the real power. Silence was in Sri Aurobindo’s matter and it acted automatically on all matter able to respond. All other powers crumble, because they are imposed from outside, and they crumble as soon as the imposition ceases, as we have already said. Only what is cannot be undone. And what is most extraordinary is that Matter alone seems to have that power of being, purely—all the powers of the other levels fluctuate, come and go, burst, dazzle, work miracles and turn into dust. But this one does not budge. As if the body were the place of the supreme stability. Once the body has understood, it has understood forever, and it never forgets. But it is the one that has to understand. Hence, the vanity of teaching. Only a material contagion can do it. Sri Aurobindo and Mother were going to spread the great supramental contagion on the earth. Which is why Mother said. In the world’s history, what Sri Aurobindo represents is not a teaching, nor even a revelation, but a decisive ACTION direct from the Supreme.² Whether we believe or not in the “Supreme” or in Sri Aurobindo does not make any difference—Sri Aurobindo does not at all need to be a new god among the collection of humanity's saviors—besides, if we had to wait until each of us believe for the earth to change, we could go on waiting thousands of years more, for the Mind believes, then disbelieves, then believes again, then darts off somewhere else in the great bazaar of ideas. But Matter does not need to believe. For it, to feel is to believe. It was in Matter that Sri Aurobindo worked, directly. Perhaps He worked to make Matter believe in itself.

How did He go about it?

The Work on Matter

He went about it first on his own matter, and this is where we have a few scraps of information or external clues. In a letter of 1912 to a disciple in Calcutta, He speaks of his work to achieve immunity from disease—not that Sri Aurobindo personally cared about being immune to dis­ease, as there was very little of the “personal” in Him; but diseases are Matter's falsehood, an opacity equivalent to mental stupidity—and He said, I am now attempting suc­cessfully to perfect [the immunity] and test it by exposure to abnormal conditions.³ The only way to work on Matter is to make it react. You can work on a cold or a toothache like you mentally wade through the dusty pages of The Phenomenology of the Mind, or as you grapple with the whirl of emotional reactions. Instead of jumping for the first aspirin, you study the movement that relaxes the brains cells, for example. It is exactly like a chemistry experiment: this vibration produces such or such an effect, this attitude neutralizes or crystallizes, and that other one clears every­thing up, like a drop of sodium hydroxide in a vial of iodine. And you repeat the experiment until it is clear, precise, instantaneous, until it penetrates the substance of the cells. In fact, "to penetrate the substance” always means “to cleanse the substance,” because there is really nothing to inject into it, but rather all kinds of evolutionary impedi­ments to reject: underneath, it is all pure, natural and automatically powerful. True naturalness is the ultimate cure of everything. There is nothing to impose; it is, and it is automatically what it should be. This restoration of pure Matter, true Matter (the true physical, as Sri Aurobindo would call it) is the ultimate triumph of the transforma­tion. But meanwhile, one must remove one impediment after another. We do not know what those “abnormal con­ditions” to which Sri Aurobindo exposed himself were; they were probably as inconspicuous as a cold (there is nothing less “conspicuous” than this supramental yoga; it is the mere trifle looking like nothing that you catch at any moment, when speaking to your neighbor or tripping over a step—it is the most invisible yoga in the world). We know, at least, that He experimented with food, fasting (as we have seen), sleep, and even drugs (not to get “experiences,” God knows, but the opposite of an experience, in other words, nervous control and clarity of the reflexes while under the influence of massive doses of hashish or opium —He tried both—which would have smashed anyone else or sent him straight to Nirvana). “To test” was his favorite expression: I have been testing day and night for years upon years more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method on the physical plane.⁴ One day, as his right eye was red and swollen, one of his disciples suggested that it could be due to His cigar smoke—“Wait,” He replied (we do not know if He was so mischievous as to light up another cigar under their very noses), then He began walking back and forth; two hours later, the eye was all white and clear, and the swelling had gone. We would be quite mistaken to think that Sri Aurobindo used a mental or vital power as healers or yogis do, or that he concentrated specifically on his eye; He only restored the Shakti's natural flow by the rhythm of his walk. He accustomed his cells to respond exclusively to the influence of the pure Shakti—a whole exhaustive program, which He would continue for thirty-six years. The working of the supramental power envisaged is not an influence on the physical giving it abnormal faculties but an entrance and permeation changing it wholly into a supra- mentalised physical,⁵ He wrote. In other words, a pure physical freed from all its evolutionary accretions and distortions, and endowed with its normal powers. For in truth, in every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter there live hidden and work unknown all the omniscience of the Eternal and all the omnipotence of the Infinite.⁶

But all this work on his own matter was only a prepara­tion for the work on terrestrial Matter—though indeed, experience shows that the two cannot be separated; there is no such a thing as “your” matter and “my” matter, there is but One Matter. Our isolation inside a brainbox is the most tremendous illusion ever created in this good evolu­tionary field. The sadhana [the work on oneself] shall first be applied in things that do not matter and only afterwards used for life,⁷ He noted in a letter of 1914. From the common cold one moves quite naturally to the battlefield of the Marne. We seem to be joking, but few and far between are those who can grasp the compact precision of the great terrestrial field and how a pure little vibration here, in this plot of matter, has worldwide repercussions—but to see that, one’s eyes must be cleared up. Already in a letter of 1913, Sri Aurobindo enumerated the four stages of his program as follows: What I am attempting is to establish the NORMAL working of the Siddhis [faculties or powers] in life, i.e. the perception of thoughts, feelings and happenings of other beings and in other places throughout the world without any use of information by speech or any other data; 2nd, the communication of the ideas and feelings I select to others (individuals, groups, nations) by mere transmission of will­power; 3rd, the silent compulsion on them to act according to these communicated ideas and feelings; 4th, the determin­ing of events, actions and results of action throughout the world by pure silent will-power ...in the 1st, 2nd and even 3rd I am now largely successful, although the action of these powers is not yet perfectly organised. It is only in the 4th that I feel a serious resistance. In other words, He says in this same letter, it is the attempt to apply knowledge and power to the events and happenings of the world without the nec­essary instrumentality of physical action.⁸

We may find it difficult to understand how one can go from a veranda, which one paces back and forth while letting the Shakti flow into one's body, to the great world stage. But it is quite simple, as we have said: when one is clear, everything is clear. There is no “you” over there in the distance; everything is perfectly here, as distinct as the pulse of our own bodies—and if it flows here, it flows over there as well. Only we must be clear, and above all, there must be no more separate “I”. The “I” is the Great Wall of China. So long as the “I” is there, there is no room for the rest of the world. This is the first carapace to break through before we can understand, that is, embrace a little of the world in our consciousnesses and eventually in our own bodies. Then we realize that curing a swollen eye can also cure a tumid pouch in some other place on earth—Serbia or Bengal—if need be. Sri Aurobindo had reached the point where the physical "I” (the "I” of the body) had to disappear so that the work in his own matter could flow out into all Matter. The first step is to get rid of the “I” in the head (the most difficult), then in the reactions and feel­ings, then in the body. My subjective Sadhana may be said to have received its final seal and something like its consum­mation, He wrote in 1913, by a prolonged realisation and dwelling in Parabrahman [that is, supreme Oneness—or supreme Transparency, as we prefer] for many hours. Since then, egoism is dead for all in me except... the physical self which awaits one farther realisation before it is entirely liberated from occasional visitings or external touches of the old separated existence.⁹ There only remained the “objec­tive” sadhana. That is when Mother arrived. One day, as a disciple asked him how his Supermind in the body could change the earth, Sri Aurobindo simply replied: If it [the Supermind] comes down into our physical it would mean that it has come down into Matter.¹⁰ And with his typical Aurobindonian humor, He said, At least you will admit that I have got some matter in me and you will hardly deny that the matter in me is connected or even continuous (in spite of the Quantum theory) with matter in general?¹¹ But simultaneously, Sri Aurobindo discovered the reverse side of Matters oneness: indeed, one goes everywhere, one is everywhere ... but one swallows everything, too. In myself it [the power] is trying to manifest as rapidly as the deficien­cies of my mind and body will permit, and also,—this is important,—as rapidly as the defects of my chief friends and helpers will permit, He wrote in June 1914. For all those have to be taken on myself spiritually and may retard my own development. I advance, but at every fresh stage have to go back to receive some fresh load of imperfection that comes from the outside.¹² This would be Mother's and Sri Aurobindo’s major problem right to the end.

The Work on the World

She came to see him every day, in the afternoon, at around 4:30. She lived nearby, in a little terraced house next to the Governor’s Palace, rue Dupleix. From her ter­race, She could see Sri Aurobindo’s room. She came and silently prepared a cup of tea or cocoa for him, while the others went to their soccer game. The house had changed imperceptibly since her arrival; the only bath towel had multiplied and there was less dust on the piles of books scattered all about the room right up to the visitors’ chairs. She looked after things, and Sri Aurobindo was able to drink his favorite tea more often—very strong tea, any hour of the day or night... if someone thought of making it for him. As an absolute rule, He never asked for anything and treated everyone as his equal. When inadvertently his foot hit a young Tamil student who had just joined them (it was Amrita, the future treasurer of the Ashram), He got up from his chair, and in the best British manner, bowed and said: I beg your pardon. The rather wild group that sur­rounded him—and respected and loved him, for who could have ignored that special “something” in Sri Aurobindo— began to notice that Mother never sat on a chair in Sri | Aurobindo’s presence, but always on the floor at His feet,? and they slowly realized that their “leader” was also some-? thing else. Not for a moment did they suspect what Sri Aurobindo was silently working on through them, nor did i they guess that they had unknowingly entered the yoga, 1 and that through them and their passion for soccer or literary interests, Sri Aurobindo was working on a whole youth. How? We will not understand unless we understand that each man is a summary of the world and when one point of the whole is touched all the points in the same category throughout the world are touched: Each one rep­resents a type of humanity and if one type is conquered that means a great victory for the work.¹³ Everything is linked; we shall never realize it enough. In 1913 already, He wrote to a disciple in Calcutta: I have also begun ... the second part of my work which will consist in making men for the new age by imparting whatever Siddhi [powers] I get to those who are chosen. From this point of view our little colony here is a sort of seed plot, a laboratory. The things I work out in it, are then extended outside.¹⁴

And all this took place in complete silence, we could almost say with the complete ignorance of the “laboratory subjects," and that very ignorance was Sri Aurobindo s best asset and the best condition for the effectiveness of his work. The “disciples” did not think of themselves as dis­ciples, and as they did not know that they were doing yoga, they did not instantly raise all their “ideas” of yoga between themselves and Sri Aurobindo—the greatest obstacle, in fact, is our own idea of things; we erect instantaneous walls. In no time at all, we have drawn up a whole list of "do's and don’ts,” of “it’s allowed” and “it’s not allowed,” “it’s yogic, it’s unyogic.” And nothing can get through any­more. We think that we do nothing and can do nothing if we have not “understood,” but the best part of our develop­ment takes place when we understand nothing and seek unknowingly, banging against everything and falling head­long in the unknown. Once we have “understood,” we are walled up in our own understanding. It takes hammer blows to undo our saintly ideas—which are far more resil­ient than our devilish ones. At least the devilish ideas have the humility to admit that they are foolish. As early as 1914, in a letter to a disciple in Chandernagore who was interested in tantric disciplines, Sri Aurobindo dropped an extraordinarily luminous remark which seems like nothing: The power that I am developing, if it reaches consummation, will be able to accomplish its effects automatically BY any method CHOSEN¹⁵ (the emphasis is Sri Aurobindo’s). Even through soccer. We say “this is part of the thing and that is not,” "this is an experience and that is not"—but every­thing is The Experience! Everything is part of the thing, everything moves in the right direction, it is Matter itself that is being transformed by any means. What misleads us is our mental education. Despite ourselves and despite everything, we cannot help thinking that the next stage of evolution involves the mind and that it is a kind of improved mind, but the evolutionary business does not take place there! Even if we understood nothing and no one in the world understood anything, it would no more prevent man from moving on to the next type than all the cries of the mammals prevented the advent of the human type. It is a Yoga meant for life and life only,¹⁶ Sri Aurobindo exclaimed one day, when asked once again if He had withdrawn to seek some salvation or other. It is The Mind that seeks its salvation, the Mind that invents disciplines, the Mind that builds heavens and windmills (and hells, too), but life is not saved in the least, even after millions of hours of medi­tation and miles of discipline.

A power that will be “able to accomplish its effects automatically”... This word “automatic” often recurs in his writings between 1912 and 1914. Sri Aurobindo must have touched upon quite a universal mechanism. A very central point.

And the war broke out on August 1.

The German cruiser Emden would even come as close as the waters off Pondicherry, as if Sri Aurobindo had to see for himself, and fire a few shells at Madras.

Fifteen days later—on his forty-second birthday—Sri Aurobindo brought out the first issue of the Arya, He who did not want to “teach” anything, day after day for seven years would in one go write almost the whole of his work, more than five thousand pages—pouring onto the world the call for the new evolution—while the dark seethings of the old bestial evolution were rumbling over Europe, spreading over the world, and would not have ceased rumbling even sixty years later, as if some dark universal mainspring, some supreme darkness, had been touched at the same time as that almighty and automatic power in the heart of “every particle, atom, molecule, cell of Matter”—as if, truly, the very root of Death had been touched. It was the beginning of the great, long death of Death. One year ear­lier, in 1913, in a letter to the Chandernagore disciple who had sheltered him when he was on the run, Sri Aurobindo spoke of a yogic sadhana that would help in the restoration of the Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth, and He added, That work has to begin now but it will not be complete till the end of the Kali [Yuga].¹⁷ It is the descending path for the whole world ... right down to the supreme mainspring. We cannot touch one point of Matter without touching all of Matter. We cannot destroy Death without destroying the root of death in every consciousness, every group and nation. That which emerges, rumbles and spreads outside is that which for millennia has lived cozily under the covering of our wisdoms, morals, religions and salvations. The Thief is driven out of his central shelter, he runs from door to door, waving his bombs and terrors, but he has lost, he has nowhere to hide, there is no longer any wisdom to shelter him, any pretence to disguise him; he is naked, he is the one who is terrified. He sows his great work of nakedness and transparency everywhere until nothing is left standing, not one hidden crack, not a single construction of the mind. Then, what is will shine.

The first book to come out of his typewriter would be The Secret of the Veda. The beginning of the cycle was link­ing up with the end of the cycle, the secret of the beginning was found again at the end. “Our fathers by their words broke the strong and stubborn places [the subconscious fortress of the pants, or robbers of the Truth], they have shattered the mountain rock [that is, Matters shell] with their cry ... found that Truth, even the Sun dwelling in the darkness” (1.71.2; ΙΠ.39.5) “The hill parted asunder, heaven accomplished itself.” (V.45)

The high meets the low, all is a single plan.¹⁸

Through the layers of darkness as well as through the German subconscient and the subconscient of all peoples one after another, the connection was slowly being established, down to the fundamental rock, that Truth-Consciousness in Matter’s depths which the Vedic Rishis called the “Sun of Truth," Savita, like the sun in the atom. And philosophy! Let me tell you in confidence that I never, never, never was a philosopher,¹⁹ Sri Aurobindo exclaimed, when He was told about his “philosophical” work. The Life Divine is not phi­losophy but FACT. It contains what I have realised and seen.²⁰ For seven years He would pour the “fact” over the world, just as the Vedic Rishis hammered the mountain rock with their “cry.”

He had, moreover, a strange way of writing. He would type out everything directly on his small portable Reming­ton, without correction—a minimum of sixty-four pages every month, which Mother herself punctually brought to the “Modern Press" on the fifteenth of each month. He corrected all the proofs himself and did all the work. “I used to find him sitting before his typewriter,” recalls his younger brother Barin, who had come to visit him, “tick­ing away his ideas and thoughts instead of writing them down ... He had made it a rule to go through as many as five proofs of each printed form. There was not that loose habit of doing things shabbily in Aurobindo which we find everywhere in India. He always wrote and worked with infinite care and patience, his actions springing from pure limpid energy,—sustained and patient, devoid of all taint of inertia or hurry."²¹ Even Barin, who knew nothing (he was the “bomb-maker,” later deported to the Andaman Islands by the British), could not help noticing that "lim­pid energy.” But strangely enough, He did not "tick away” one book after another; He started three simultaneously.

The first issue of the Arya contained the beginning of The Secret of the Veda, The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga (the two latter books alone would run to more than one thousand pages each). Then He started writing five and even six books at a time. No writer who knows a little what writing is about can imagine such a phenomenon, if only in terms of organization of consciousness, to mention only the external part of the task. Even if we put together all the geniuses of the world, we could not conceive of Plato writ­ing Phaedras, The Republic, The Laws and God knows what else at the same time, nor can we imagine Goethe managing Faust, Wilhelm Meister ... and whatever else in one go. Furthermore, Sri Aurobindo was also writing poetry and drama simultaneously, which He did not publish in the Arya, not to mention his voluminous correspondence. No, this is not the feat of a human or even superhuman genius. This has nothing to do with genius. What was at work was another order of consciousness. He would bring silence into his head, Mother relates, and he would sit at his typewriter. Then, from above, from the higher regions, everything that had to be written came down, already composed, and He had only to move his fingers over the keyboard—it was tran­scribed.²² But the phenomenon is even more interesting than we think, because this "from above” is still a way of saying things to make oneself understood by children; “from above” in no way explains how a human (that is, mental) consciousness can simultaneously pull on ten thousand threads and a number of sentences, all in logical, coherent order, and what is more, without using the brain! What was it that organized this totality of knowledge or inspiration? "Above,” it is quite total and put together in a bundle of compact light, we can see it clearly as soon as we make contact with the so-called higher regions. It is like an enormous ball of living electricity-light. But in Matter, it has to trickle down one sentence at a time, unless we have quite a few arms, like the god Ganesh; it descends one by one, unless we are fitted with half a dozen brains functioning simultaneously—but here the brain was not even function­ing. We speak of “inspiration,” which is well and good, but inspiration needs to use something as an instrument: how do you force a hurricane through a funnel? And what fun­nel? A logical funnel at that, since Sri Aurobindo was still addressing beings fitted with a mind: it was in order to break their mental shell that He did all that. Mother gives an answer to our question, but the answer may be even more enigmatic than the question, for it calls everything into question! Sri Aurobindo’s consciousness was above, in the Supermind [again that famous “above” which actually means nothing], and it was the consciousness IN HIS HANDS that gave expression to the words. He became aware of the words only as they were expressed.²³ And Mother added, From the intellectual point of view, the Aiya is perfect: clarity, order, logic. Yet the mind had nothing to do with it. Then what was it that had something to do with it?—The hands in fact. As the words were being typed on the platen, He "learned,” as it were, what He was writing. It was the consciousness in his hands—the material consciousness, the consciousness of corporeal matter—that did all the work. Sri Aurobindo was perfectly silent, transparent, and Matter went straight through the philosophical jungle, just as the Siberian bird flies straight to its exotic lagoon, without straying once and without knowing the route beforehand— but its wings know the way very well—we could say its “chromosomes,” if it is any consolation for us to trace the problem a few earlier generations back. Yet a moment comes when we are faced with the problem. A moment when we are faced with Matter, quite simply, a Knowledge in Matter, a Consciousness in Matter, which can produce perfect philosophy just as it produces little birds or earth­quakes, with an exactness to the second and an intelligence that surpasses all our geniuses. This is the Truth-Con­sciousness. The “above” is quite simply the thickness of the layers to be crossed (the mental layer has a particular thickness of its own), and once everything is clear, “The high meets the low, all is a single plan.” In the heart of Matter quiver the tornado of light and a few other songs yet to be known which will forever console us for the loss of our labor as galley slaves of the Mind. Thus would Sri Aurobindo write nineteen volumes in one stretch, in seven years, hammering the world with his cry of Truth.

An upside-down volcano, Mother would say.

Then Sri Aurobindo would put a full stop to his “teach­ing” by declaring quite simply, in a voice so tranquil that it seemed to travel through eternity like a slow-flowing river, so self-confident, so far away already, so far ahead, like Mother in her ever-forward moving cyclone: Super­mind would remain even if the whole of the Arya were rubbed out or had never been written.²⁴

The Divine Man

For the Supermind is an evolutionary fact as inevitable as the appearance of vegetal life or animal life on earth, and even if no one believed in it, everyone would be heading there all the same. It is really the first time on earth that one of those beings we call the "pioneers” of evolution has come to do, to open the way, not just to teach, preach or reveal. Here, the way opens up in the body, not in the thought. If it opens in one human body, it will automati­cally open in the body of the earth. And no amount of words will change anything to that. But we can understand, if only with our minds, and hasten the evolutionary process —shorten the misery. And who knows, we might even find a brand-new interest in the world and witness, in a multi­tude of microscopic, material details, the unfolding of the prodigious transition that previous species underwent unknowingly. But this time, it is a much more prodigious transition than that from ape to man, for it is a question of getting out of animal evolution; it is no longer Matter that will create new forms through successive groping attempts, it is Consciousness itself that will directly create its own forms, this Consciousness buried in Matter that took so many millions of years and countless instruments to emerge in a human body. Instead of a brain, it will make use of something else. And what is now taking place is the making of this “something else”—there is nothing to teach, nothing to believe—all that is needed is to see. Only, we have to look in the right direction. Then our brain will be able to usefully fulfill its role of observer, which is its true evolutionary function, until we radically move on to a new form. Sri Aurobindo's thousands of pages actually invited us to enjoy the performance instead of being tossed about without understanding anything and trying to patch up old cracks which are as unpatchable as an earthquake. We are in the great quake of Consciousness in Matter. In reply to a Calcutta student asking him whether He was not going to return among them to “make men”—“we need men”— Sri Aurobindo wrote, I have done my share of man-making and it is a thing which now anybody can do; Nature herself is looking after it all over the world ... My business is now not man-making, but divine man-making.²⁵

Sri Aurobindo called this divine man, who would be only the first stage in the transition to "something else” (the first subject, we might say, lending himself or lending his body to the Experiment), by the Vedic term "Aryan” (which is why he called his review Arya). For in the Veda the Aryan peoples are those who had accepted a particular type of self-culture ...²⁶ And Sri Aurobindo did stress that the “Aryan” is above all a self-conqueror (the root ar means to plow, to strive): The Aryan is he who strives and overcomes all out­side him and within him that stands opposed to the human advance. Self-conquest is the first law of his nature²⁷—the question is actually to conquer something very difficult in our own matter, against millennia of evolutionary habits. It is a yoga for conquerors and heroes. The magnitude of the problem is clearly laid out by Mother, who as usual goes straight to the heart of the question—the conquest of death. Death is not an inevitable thing, She said; It is an accident that has been occurring till now (in any case, which appears to have always occurred till now), and we have put it into our head and our will to conquer this accident and overcome it. Yet it is such a terrible, such a formidable battle, against all the laws of Nature, all collective suggestions, all terrestrial habits, that unless you are a first-rate warrior whom nothing frightens, it’s better not to begin the battle. You must be an absolutely intrepid hero because, at every step, at every second, you have to fight a battle against all that is established. So it is not very easy. And even individu­ally, it is a battle against oneself, for if you want your physical consciousness to be in a state which admits of physical immortality, you must be so much free from everything the physical consciousness presently represents that it is a battle of every instant. All feelings, all sensations, all thoughts, all reflexes, all attractions, all repulsions, all that exists, all that forms the very fabric of our physical life must be overcome, transformed and freed from all its habits. This is a battle of every second against thousands and millions of enemies.²⁸ And in that first issue of the Arya, Sri Aurobindo enumer­ated the Aryans three conquests as follows: He overcomes earth and the body and does not consent like ordinary men to their dullness, inertia, dead routine and tamasic limita­tions. .., He overcomes life and its energies and refuses to be dominated by their hungers and cravings or enslaved by their rajasic passions. ...He overcomes the mind and its habits; he does not live in a shell of ignorance, inherited prejudices, customary ideas, pleasant opinions.²⁹ That is a tall order!

In a country that had been dedicated to ecstatic con­templation for twenty-five hundred years, Sri Aurobindo brought the sword, as He had brought it to the peace-loving Congressmen who sought independence through political speeches. He brought the “armed revolution" into his yoga; as for "independence,” He sought it right down into the body. After fifty years of “non-violence” dinned into us as the supreme panacea, we see today, even in India, our so- called pacifisms burst in our faces, rising from the depths of dark entrails clothed in immaculate linen, because we lacked the courage to go down there and wage the war that deep. Indeed, it was never nonviolence that liberated India; it was the very Force set in motion by Sri Aurobindo at the beginning of the century and in spite of nonviolence. Another of those "sacred cows” we dare not speak of too loudly at a time when spiritual pygmies reign. No real peace can be till the heart of man deserves peace; the law of Vishnu [the god of love] cannot prevail till the debt to Rudra [the god of destruction] is paid. To turn aside then and preach to a still unevolved mankind the law of love and oneness? Teachers of the law of love and oneness there must be, for by that way must come the ultimate salvation. But not till the Time-Spirit in man is ready, can the inner and ultimate prevail over the outer and immediate reality. Christ and Buddha have come and gone, but it is Rudra who still holds the world in the hollow of his hand. And meanwhile the fierce forward labor of mankind tormented and oppressed by the powers that are profiteers of egoistic force and their servants cries for the sword of the Hero of the struggle and the word of its prophet.³⁰

In the middle of the First World War, at a time when his Ashram was not even founded, Sri Aurobindo declared, I want strong men. I do not want emotional children.³¹ Indeed, we must be made of steel to descend into the body’s secrets.

And absolute stillness. Nothing moved in Sri Aurobindo, not a quiver of thought, not one emotional vibration—Sri Aurobindo was total impersonality, like pure, crystalline high mountain air. And inside, a volcano. A motionless vol­cano. Truly, the union of the two poles: absolute dynamism within absolute immobility, as though this very Dynamism sprang from this very Immobility. For such is the supra­mental consciousness: all opposites change into a third thing which is their real force.

The New Evolution

And how far ahead He saw! In January 1910, just before he escaped to Chandernagore, at a time when Europe and the world were still half-asleep, when the Chinese Revolution had not even begun, when the Tsars were still solid and William II was secretly seeking “colonial compensations,” while Edward VII, “The Pacifier” (when you read the list of all the "pacifiers” in history, you do wonder how come there are wars), was sitting on his throne of Emperor of India, Sri Aurobindo made this amazing statement, or prediction rather, to an astounded correspondent of the weekly "India”: Since 1907, we are living in a new era which is full of hope for India. Not only India, but the whole world will see sudden upheavals and revolutionary changes. The high will become low and the low high. The oppressed and the depressed shall be elevated. The nation and humanity will be animated by a new consciousness, new thought and new efforts will be made to reach new ends. Amidst these revo­lutionary changes, India will become free.³² India was to become free thirty-seven years later. What strange Fire was burning within him? He used to sign all his letters then Kali—the Warrior of the Worlds, the mighty Mother who pokes the world and the hearts because She loves human beings, not in their small virtues or spotless whiteness, but in the upright Truth of their hearts and a greatness greater than all our humanisms. For the Mother, She who is called the Mother in India, the Shakti, She whom Sri Aurobindo served and venerated in his acts as well as in his works and his silence, is indeed the very Force, the powerful Fire that drives the worlds to their supreme evolutionary achieve­ment. Without Her, we can meditate for millennia, invent democratic and electronic paradises and go round in circles ad nauseam ... until She shatters our paradises and virtues and littleness, compelling us to fashion the Divine Life on earth and the Divine Man in a body. There is in her over­whelming intensity, a mighty passion of force to achieve, a divine violence rushing to shatter every limit and obstacle. All her divinity leaps out in a splendour of tempestuous action; she is there for swiftness, for the immediately effec­tive process, the rapid and direct stroke, the frontal assault that carries everything before it... for she is the Warrior of the Worlds who never shrinks from the battle ... Her spirit is tameless, her vision and will are high and far-reaching like the flight of an eagle, her feet are rapid on the upward way and her hands are outstretched to strike and to succour. For she too is the Mother and her love is as intense as her wrath ... If her anger is dreadful to the hostile and the vehemence of her pressure painful to the weak and timid, she is loved and worshipped by the great, the strong and the noble; for they feel that her blows beat what is rebellious in their material into strength and perfect truth. But for her what is done in a day might have taken centuries; without her Ananda [Bliss] might be wide and grave or soft and sweet and beautiful, but would lose the flaming joy of its most absolute intensities ... Therefore with her is the victorious force of the Divine and it is by the grace of her fire and passion and speed if the great achievement can be done now rather than hereafter.³³

She is the Power which brings always the greatest possible good out of apparent evil,³⁴ He wrote in one of the first issues of the Arya, while the murderous "trench warfare” was raging in Europe. This short sentence, so simple, con­tains a whole world—perhaps the whole world. Each one can put it to the test in his own consciousness. Blinded by appearances, by the struggle, by the necessity to choose and act, and more often to choose and act wrongly, and still more often to err and make mistakes, sometimes even to cause suffering and destruction, we do not see that at every moment and in the least detail each of our errors was the secret door to an unexpected good, each of our false steps was a step toward the necessary progress, every pain, every darkness prepared a vaster light, a clearer field—and that everything, in a huge, terrible but fruitful plot, imperturb­ably and meticulously conspired to our own widening and the widening of the world. Then, sometimes, we pause for one second, the mirror turns over and we glimpse the whole other side—the dark half of truth,³⁵ as Sri Aurobindo called it. “He became knowledge and ignorance, he became the truth and the falsehood,"³⁶ say the Upanishads—And we realize that everything is a single Truth in motion down to the most microscopic detail, a single Good being fulfilled, a single marvelous Force transmuting at each instant, relieving at each instant, changing each drop of poison into its nectar... if only we know how to look in the right direc­tion. Sri Aurobindo is truly the One who comes to show us how to look in the right direction. Light in darkness, the Hope everywhere, the Positive in everything, the Meaning of everything. And all is embraced: not one obscure atom escapes that total Meaning, not one shadow of pain remains without its profound light, not one straying step without its infallible direction. It is a relentless transmutation. It is Truth taking everything in its arms, because everything is herself progressing toward Herself; Falsehood is an invention of our eyes, Evil is an invention of our eyes, and suffering, the only suffering in fact, is to be unable to look in the right direction, because if we could, just one second, see what the world really is without all our false vision of good and evil or yes and no, we would be cured forever, and the world, without altering, even for one second, what it is at this cruel and dark minute, would be wholly different. It is a veil of Falsehood over an unimaginably beautiful Reality.

Perhaps the veil of the Mind. Sri Aurobindo is the one who unveils. Sri Aurobindo is the one who changes the gaze of the world. Sri Aurobindo is the whole vision, the embrace of everything. And She whom He serves is the great Transmutress who relentlessly changes our relentless follies into their content of light, our relentless stumblings into their imperturbable direction, our relentless misery into the only Force that one day will give us the courage to shatter the mirror and dare the joy of the world because we shall have seen what really is. Sri Aurobindo came to give—not a hope: a certitude of the splendor towards which the world is moving. The world is not an unhappy accident, it is a marvel moving towards its expression.³⁷

No, Sri Aurobindo is not a “teaching”—No teaching! Mother exclaimed, She who was so afraid that Sri Aurobindo's words and her own might be made into a new religion: Men are such fools that they can change anything at all into a religion. ...I don’t want religions, an end to religions!³⁸—Sri Aurobindo is another way of seeing. The great Transition to the next species begins with a look. To move from one species to another does not consist in a change of structure, but in a change of consciousness. The caterpillar and the butterfly look at one and the same world. And when a few start seeing in the other way, then the great contagion of the supramental vision will begin; we will emerge from the mental nightmare, feel differently, breathe differently and we will build our world differently, because we will see it differently. And in the end, Consciousness itself will seize this body to recast it according to its vision of immortal beauty.

Thus nowhere in Sri Aurobindo will we find any yogic or spiritual mechanism; all is part of his yoga, there is not one direction but millions of directions and ways on every side, above, below, right, left, and every step is part of the path, every look is part of the path, every blunder is part of the path—everything is the path. But we must see. That’s what people have always reproached Sri Aurobindo for, Mother said, because he doesn’t tell you, “Do this in this way and that in that way...." And that's precisely what made me feel that there was the Truth. People cannot live without reducing things to a mental system, but as soon as there’s a mecha­nism, it’s finished. The mechanism may well be very good for the person who found it: it’s HIS mechanism. But it's good only for him. As for me, I prefer not to have any mechanism! After writing all those thousands of pages in the Arya, Sri Aurobindo used to tell his disciples that He had not writ­ten all that to “teach” them anything, but to quiet their minds. Once the mind is quiet, we can set to work—to the real microscopic vision of every instant, the hunting down of the meaning in everything.

And truly, in this age when we frolic on dead moons with tungsten helmets and brush past the planets with our com­puterized trajectories, when our very future is presented as a choice between one devouring mechanism or another, Sri Aurobindo simply invites us to our own adventure within our own body and within the chromosomes of our species. No big problems—no, no, no! Mother exclaimed. Sri Auro­bindo has come to tell the world that man is not the final creation, that there is another creation. And He said this not because He knew it but because He felt it. And He began to do it. That’s all... And mind you, it can be very beautiful in its simplicity, a beauty sorrowful people can feel, people who are tired of life, people whose heads are sick of all these arguments and dogmas—people who are tired of thinking too many great thoughts—and I am the first among them! Noth­ing tires me more than philosophers!³⁹

In 1915, Sri Aurobindo wrote in a letter, My present “teach­ing" is that the world is preparing for a new progress, a new evolution. Whatever race, whatever country seizes on the lines of that new evolution and fulfills it, will be the leader of humanity.⁴⁰ He was thinking of India, of course, as long as they do not merely copy European politics,⁴¹ but He was also thinking of France, for which He felt an “attachment... as a second country.”⁴² With France's intellectual quality, the quality of her mind, said Mother, the day she is truly touched spiritually, it will be something exceptional. Sri Aurobindo had a great liking for France. I was born there—certainly for a reason. In my case, I know it very well: it was the need of culture, of a clear and precise mind, of refined thought, taste and clarity of mind—there is no other country in the world for that. None. And Sri Aurobindo had a liking for France for that same reason, a great liking. He used to say that through­out his life in England, he had a much greater liking for France than for England!... There is a reason.⁴³

Perhaps France will find this reason and “seize the lines” of that new evolution. Perhaps we will then rediscover what we have forgotten since a certain revolution which changed the face of Europe and which was really the first faraway chimes of the new world. For it might after all be appropriate that the country of clear intellect be the first to be clear enough to dethrone the obsolete king of the Mind and wage the revolution of consciousness.

And the face of the world would thus be changed.

Just one country having the courage to strike against the Mind, its means and its institutions.

When He launched the Arya, Sri Aurobindo foresaw one thousand copies for India, and He sought 250 subscribers from France.

16: One Pure Little Cell

She would come to see him every afternoon on the spacious veranda of the Guest House, and He taught her Sanskrit; we can picture her poring over those beautiful characters that seem charged with power, and the silence between them. Or else practical pieces of news—Mother was always practical, the rest has no need for words. She had formed a small group with Sri Aurobindo's “boys” and a few soccer players from the “Sports Club,” some Tamil youths from Pondicherry: L’Idee Nouvelle—The New Idea. It would be hard to imagine a more humble beginning for this “labo­ratory,” and how astonishing for us to see Sri Aurobindo, the revolutionary leader who had only to say one word to have all India behind Him and millions of men ready to follow his orders, attending to that handful of boys, well, pretty much “like anyone else at all.” Perhaps this is another of those illusions we must shatter if we have to acquire the “other way of seeing”—the distinction between “big things” and "small ones.” We do not realize how absolutely important everything is and how the least gesture reverber­ates throughout the world if it is absolutely the gesture— if it is. Life does not happen the way we think; there is a totally different way that needs to be learned—the way of ONENESS. Then we realize that a point shining here, in this banality, is the only thing that shines among a million frantic gestures throughout the world and hundreds of tremendous events which are merely hot air. We do not know what counts; we walk through a great forest whose signs we do not know, nor whether this little pebble is not precisely the first landmark to an unimaginable treasure— if we could conceive of the treasure, it would already be there. We constantly walk over the treasure, and at times we become aware of it. The moment we are constantly aware of it, we will be walking in a different world—which will nevertheless be the same one. Sri Aurobindo and Mother had a handful of very “ordinary” boys count the pebbles of the new world—but everyone is so utterly ordinary; extraordinary people are only the extraordinary ones of the old world, like pretty Ming vases of the Mental Dynasty. The treasure of the New World is to be found in what is most ordinary—which is not yet extraordinary, that is all. Curiously enough, the best response came from the Chris­tians of the “Sports Club,” more than from the local Hindus, Nolini remarked¹—we have so many sacred vases to smash before having a right to the extraordinary of the ordinary.

There was the news of the war, too: It is curious that several things that my mind was hammering at got done after I had dropped the idea altogether, Sri Aurobindo told a disciple. At one point I had an idea that France must get back Alsace-Lorraine. It was almost an obsession with me and when I had ceased to think about it, the thing got done.² Yes, Sri Aurobindo loved France, and He who never said anything about his past lives (when asked what He had been doing in his previous lives, He laconically replied, Carrying on the evolution),³ told Mother that He had had a French past life and that French had come to him like a spontaneous memory. So every day She read the "dispatch" at the gates of the government building. Sri Aurobindo was surrounded by maps; He followed Moltke's advance along the Marne step by step. When the Germans were marching upon Paris, He said, I felt something saying, “They MUST NOT take Paris. ” And as I was consulting a map I almost felt the place where they would be stopped.⁴ He would do the same thing during the Second World War. He "felt”: the map under his fingers was really the Marne under his fingers, in a body that no longer stopped at small physical borders and well understood the continuum of Matter. We have yet to shatter that great phantasmagoria of the separation of bodies before being able to see and touch the world in the other way—we are still babies of Matter, as it were, we do not know all that remains for us to discover, once we stop playing around with our futile machines—which bring nothing nearer but our own walls. In 1914, Mother, too, noted in her journal, The work in the constitution of the physical cells is perceptible; permeated with a considerable amount of force, they seem to expand and grow lighter. But the brain is still heavy and asleep...⁵ Fifty years later, Mother would tell me the same thing: it is the brain cells that remain the least receptive, almost the most opaque, as if they found it more difficult to become universalized, while the other cells very spontaneously extended everywhere. Probably because they have become extremely "mentalized,” covered over and permeated with mental substance, while the other “natural” cells, if we may say so, have a very direct perception of Matter’s oneness. Like Sri Aurobindo, She was beginning to expand everywhere: I feel I have no more limits, She noted, only a few days after receiving mental silence from Sri Aurobindo. There is no longer the perception of the body, no sensations, no feelings, no thoughts A clear, pure, tranquil immensity, permeated with love and light, filled with an unutterable bliss is what alone seems now to be myself⁶—We will never realize well enough what a wall the Mind is. We literally live under an artificial bell jar which seals us off from the whole world—which is probably why we had to invent so many machines to replace what a little cell knows quite directly and naturally ... and nicely. Without any hindrance. In fact, we have yet to learn how to live. In the body lie priceless and unknown treasures.⁷

However, we would be completely beside the point if we thought that Sri Aurobindo and Mother were endowed with superhuman powers. They used the most human powers there are, but human in a clear sense. And once everything has become clear, it is no longer a question of "power,” but of being, quite simply, like pure love. And it is all-powerful. Infinite. It is the Amazon all spread out, the treasure everywhere, and natural.

So life went on quite “banally.” She even had the idea of opening a shop to remedy Sri Aurobindo’s chronic state of penury—the “Aryan Stores,” an authentic variety store right in the middle of the bazaar, Rue Dupleix, where one of the boys enthusiastically sold split-peas along with soap and cosmetics, and even clothes swinging from a string in the gentle Pondicherry dust. But they were not to make a fortune, for the dear boy, yielding to pity, could not help selling things on credit and never got his money back— which was in fact Mother’s money. And Sri Aurobindo watched it all, like everything else, like the Battle of the Marne, while Mother was having her first experiences with commercial and financial organization, which was to take on considerable proportions in the future Ashram. She could have a genius for business, as she had a genius for music or for handling rain and storms—to her, too, it was all the same: forces to handle, and the power of money had to be mastered and transformed like all the other forces, from sex to Nirvana. Nothing was "outside.” You can act as easily upon the world of money through a street stall as you act upon a battlefield through a map—the magician of yore did nothing else when he took a piece of his enemy’s fingernail to cast a spell over him. The part contains the whole. There is no need of “big things” to work on the world, only pure instruments—although even their "impu­rity” is part of the general work of rectification, like the idiocy of the soap-peas-underwear seller. Mother and Sri Aurobindo would have many more idiocies to "rectify” ... A humble work indeed, very humble. You must not have a mania for greatness, Mother would never cease repeating. Sri Aurobindo listened to the tally, or perhaps the tales, of the Aryan Stores, while correcting the proofs of Arya and finalizing The Life Divine—the life divine begins with the first rectified idiocy, and God knows there are millions of them everyday, in our words, gestures, looks, a whole swarm of inexactitudes checking the pure flow of the Shakti —a bird makes no inexact movement, it goes straight to its goal. Or else Sri Aurobindo left his typewriter to admonish Amrita, the young Tamil disciple who had been scolding the typesetter of the Modern Press for he was something of a drunkard and was always late with his proofs: You have no right to interfere in his personal life, Sri Aurobindo remonstrated. It is meaningless to advise him. He has per­fect freedom to drink. What you should tell him is to observe the terms of the contract and give proofs regularly.⁸ This was quite typical of Sri Aurobindo: no interference. Puritans have been distributing their good advice to the world for a few thousand years now—we really need SOMETHING else for things to change. Sri Aurobindo was changing the inside of things, He was going straight to Matter—in silence. He was going where the cell responds to the exact vibration, the very one that made the Arya flow through his hands. One pure little cell in a single comer of matter is what can change the world. Everything else is the huge mental edifice a single thread of which we cannot touch without getting entangled in a million threads equally sticky with false­hood—everything in the mind lies, even the truth lies. And the “bearers of light” are just as sticky with falsehood as the rest. One ... pure ... little cell. That is all. The Force is there in matter’s inconscient depths, as the Irresistible Healer,⁹ Mother wrote in her journal of 1914.

And She was getting impatient. No, Mother was not—not yet—like Sri Aurobindo; She was the hurricane that wants to knock down everything in its path. She saw this planet suffering, She saw these people slaughtered here and there, this sordid Falsehood everywhere, right down to Richard with his noble philosophies, and She had touched, felt, seen the Secret of the Cure, here in this very Matter: The formidable omnipotence of Thy Force which is here, ready for manifestation, waiting, preparing the propitious hour, the favorable opportunity ...¹⁰ She would have liked to wrest it from her own matter and hasten the hour: But why dost Thou spare the body’s animality? Is it because it must be given time to adapt itself to the marvelous complexity, the powerful infinity of Thy Force? Is it Thy will that makes itself gentle and patient, not wanting to precipitate anything, but leave to the elements leisure to adapt themselves? I mean, is it better this way, or IS it IMPOSSIBLE OTHERWISE? Is it a particular incapacity that Thou toleratest with magnanimity, or is it a general law, an inevitable part of all that has to be transformed?¹¹ She still did not know what world is touched when a single little cell is touched and how one has to toil through the whole Matter of the world to earn the right to change one single little cell truly and completely. No, She was not at all aware of the long, dark path that She would have to open step by step, death after death, like successive little deaths in her own body, in order to open up the path of the world. Why spare us so much? We must triumph or perish! Victory, victory, victory I We want the victory of Trans­figuration !¹² And She asked, Will You bring about a lightning transformation, or will it still be a slow action in which one cell after another must be wrenched from its darkness and its limits?¹³ She did not know what She would have to go through for the next fifty-nine years, She who asked me one day in 1973, How many years left till I reach my cente­nary? "Five years, Mother," I replied. Five more years in this hell!¹⁴ Fifty-nine years of that relentless hurricane which kept pounding and pounding Matter’s door ... until the day She opened her hands totally, wanted nothing more, could do nothing more. What You will, What You will ... And perhaps that was the moment when the Door opened up. She had reached the end of her formidable Amazon, the path was hewn, the hurricane abated. It was right there.

When the amphibian wants to move on to the mammal, it is not the amphibian’s philosophy that must change, nor its morality: it is its cell.

We must discover the new form that will make the new manifestation possible.¹⁵ This was in June 1914, the 18th of June. It was perhaps the first time on earth that a being fitted with a human body had ever spoken of the deliberate transformation of the species. Mother is the extraordinary story of this change of species. It is a story more incredible than Jules Verne, more profound than Dante, more mys­terious than all the planets yet to be explored—perhaps another planet within this planet. A mystery that we must decipher together. For in truth, we do not know what the mystery is. If we knew, the New World would be all there, visible. Perhaps this book is a desperate attempt to make the mystery visible: to conjure up the new world, like the Rishis of old who hammered the mountain with their cry.

Our common cry.

We must change into a new species or die.

We must find the key to the New World.

17: Japan

Once again, She crossed the old postern with its liana of “Faithfulness," but this time it was to leave. It was February 22, 1915. She would come back only five years later. Solitude, a harsh solitude ... flung headlong into a hell of darkness!¹ The outward reason was Richards mobiliza­tion, but who actually was Richard? I have never been inclined to complain and even now I am not inclined to speak in more detail, She wrote to her son ten years later.² Mother was not one to meet just anyone; her whole life was a work upon one element or another, and how can one speak of "transforming the world", if one is unable of trans­forming what is right next to one? To a certain extent, She had transformed, or neutralized, Theon and the rather formidable power he represented, but Richard was more elusive—a thunderbolt can be caught, but who can catch an octopus? The mental octopus with its thousands of tentacles slithering into everything. She could have stayed very comfortably near Sri Aurobindo—No flight out of the world! The burden of darkness and ugliness must be home to the end,³ She wrote aboard the Kamo Maru. She would fall ill, gravely ill (a kind of generalized neuritis) just after going through the Suez Canal. For the next five years, She would go from one mortal illness to another, intrepidly, ] indomitably. After her return to Pondicherry, She would d write to her son, 1 did not expect to live many more months. । This very rapid decline was mainly due to an almost total j nervous exhaustion stemming from the virtually hellish life i I had been living for many years, until November 1920.⁴ She j spent exactly one year in France, finding enough strength i to take care of the wounded—She had to touch all the world’s wounds to be able to heal them—while spending her nights, as She told me, going through gardens full of snakes. Snakes are all the bad and distorted thoughts. And she almost fiercely blamed herself: Matter has to be rigorously churned to become capable of fully manifesting the divine light.⁵ Such was the way She took everything; each thing, each being, each illness and each difficulty was an opportunity to work on her own matter by taking the difficulty into her own body. Everything Mother did was physical. She never blamed “others,” She blamed her own body—perhaps because everything was gradually becoming her own body. The being is progressively and methodically expanding, She noted about an experience of 1915, breaking through all barriers, shattering all obstacles to contain and manifest a Force and a Power ceaselessly growing in vastness and intensity. It was a sort of progressive dilation of the cells until a complete identification with the earth was reached ...⁶ Years later, She would tell me, I remember very well that when the war—the First World War—started, every part of my body, one after another (Mother touched her legs, her arms, her chest), or sometimes the same part several times over, represented a battlefield: I could see it, I could feel it, I lived it. Every time it was ...it was very strange, I had only to sit quietly and watch: I would see here, there, there, the whole thing in my body, all that was going on. And while it went on, I would put the concentration of the divine Force there, so that all—all that pain, all that suffering, every­thing—would hasten the preparation of the earth and the Descent of the Force.⁷ Each of Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s illnesses has coincided with the earth’s illnesses.

From Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo wrote to Mother: It is a singular condition of the world, the very definition of chaos with the superficial form of the old world resting apparently intact on the surface ... And He asked this question: Will it be a chaos of long disintegration or of some early new birth? It is the thing that is being fought out from day to day, but as yet without any approach to a decision.⁸ Sixty years later, it would seem that the world has chosen the path of a “long disintegration,” but who besides Sri Aurobindo knew in 1915 that the world would never again return to its old form and that an irreversible process had begun? Each one was eager to rebuild his own little world as fast as possible (Ah, the Folies-Bergeres!). But to what degree, even today, are people aware that the old world is dead? It is a corpse they keep filling with penicillin and monetary laws. What Sri Aurobindo perhaps did not know was that the disinte­gration would be so slow and the battle so long: Everything internal is ripe or ripening, He wrote to Mother, but there is a sort of locked struggle in which neither side can make a very appreciable advance (somewhat like the trench warfare in Europe), the spiritual force insisting against the resistance of the physical world, that resistance disputing every inch and making more or less effective counter-attacks.... And if there were not the strength and Ananda [joy] within, it would be harassing and disgusting work.⁹ Three days later, like an echo, Mother noted in her journal, The heavens aredefinitively conquered, and nothing and nobody has the power to take them away from me. But the conquest of the earth has yet to be made ... ¹⁰ As Sri Aurobindo said, we must, “according to the Vedic formula,” make "Heaven and Earth equal and one." ¹¹

The first round of the battle would last for thirty-five years, until that day in 1950 when Sri Aurobindo ... I was about to say “succumbed,” but when I read those words to Mother in 1962, for a book I was writing at the time,¹⁰⁰ She immediately reacted: He did NOT “succumb. ” It's not that he couldn’t have done otherwise. It’s not the difficulty of the work that made him leave; it's something else.¹² Perhaps the “second round” will reveal to us the secret of his departure as well, for the departure of one and the departure of the other stem from the same reason—though this word “departure” does not make sense. The secret of Death may be right here, quite obvious before our eyes, but we must make it obvious. It is like the little pebbles in the virgin forest—we do not know which is the precious one, and we can step right over it without knowing that it is gold. In fact, the “pioneers” are those who come to show us the ever-existing gold: to render things obvious.

In March 1916, Mother embarked from London on the last boat bound for the East—the next one would be sunk. Richard, who was definitely an expert in marvelous pre­texts, managed to get himself demobilized and sent to Japan. Why, we do not know. But this, too, was a pretext, like the electoral campaign in Pondicherry—an infallible Hand guides our destiny and uses the most improbable pretexts to weave its threads. Here, too, there are many miraculous little pebbles that we do not even see, for if we were to understand a single one, perhaps we would understand everything. The world is a perpetual, obvious miracle. And perhaps evolution is the slow uncovering of what is obvious. Four years in Japan. Two mortal illnesses. Matter was definitely being “churned." The photographs taken in Japan show her very pale, always dressed in a kimono—for Mother is the one who belonged to all nations —but with two small lines at the corners of her mouth, the first lines, and who knows what pain behind them.... Yet She laughed very heartily. She was always laughing. She enumerated her mortal illnesses while making fun of her­self. Oh, how She made fun of everything! I have seen her emerge from umpteen heart attacks with that laugh of a little girl puffing up her cheeks—She was taking up the gauntlet—Mother was a constant challenge to everyone and everything. One had to be solid to live near her (or perhaps so unsolid as to extend everywhere like a limpid infinity—the solidity of the infinite). I can’t stand drama. I don’t want to be tragic. I would rather make fun of everything than be tragic!¹³ During the first Japanese war epidemic, which caused hundreds and thousands of deaths, people walked in the streets with masks over their mouths, and Richard asked: “But what is this illness, what is it? You who know the occult secrets, what's behind it? What is it? Why don’t you go and catch it, to see?" Mother recounted, laugh­ing. She got on a tram, crossed Tokyo, and came back with the disease. Not a single medicine: just the battle against the forces behind. Indeed, She had to practice with disease and death, since this was to be her battlefield to the very end. She came out of it "miraculously," as they say, but "miracles” are but the reverse of our medical superstitions; on both sides there is a tremendous superstition. An obvious "something”... to uncover. Perhaps the cure simply consists, too, in uncovering the Obvious. Once we really see, all the Falsehood will collapse. The power of Falsehood lies in our false vision—including death and disease. But this is a long path, which Mother was learning step by step. She had to wear down death exhaustively. Then She contracted tuberculosis, which would really be cured only with Sri Aurobindo: but Sri Aurobindo was present the whole time I was away from him. Here too, who could ever describe the relationship between these two beings?... Yet they hardly spoke to one another; we would be wrong to think that Sri Aurobindo and Mother, together for thirty years, exchanged many words—yet everything was known instan­tly in the other, whether in Tokyo or in the next room. "Wordless telegraphy,” as She said, laughingly: The only reason people cannot have wordless telegraphy is that their instruments are not properly tuned!¹⁴ Indeed, we still have many things to “tune” before bolting our interplanetary spaceships.

But all this did not keep her from enjoying Japan’s beauty: For four years in Japan, I went from wonder to wonder.¹⁵ First with the architecture: houses that seem to merge com­pletely into the landscape... not like a punch in your face. And then, as always, Nature, her old accomplice, the secret understanding, the mute communication between them, as with beings, as with everything—Mother flowed every­where. In Tokyo, I had a garden, She told the Ashram children, and in this garden I grew vegetables myself. So every morning, I would take a walk after watering them, to choose the vegetables I was going to pick for eating. Well, just imagine, some would say, “No, no, no, ” while others would call me from a distance and say, “Take me, take me, take me. ...’’So it was very simple. I went and picked those that wanted to be taken, and I never touched those that didn’t.... I loved my plants very much; I took care of them, and I put a lot of consciousness into them while watering and weeding them.¹⁶ Vegetables, flowers, cats and everything were her field of work (as for cats, She was trying to make them undergo a metempsychosis in reverse,¹⁷ She humorously explained). What did She not apply an interest to? (Some­times, we are inclined to forget that in evolution everything evolves—not only man.) But She also tried to put a little consciousness into men, or rather into the women of Japan, by urging them not only to stop bringing children into the world as rabbits do, but to make a conscious creation,¹⁸ in other words, to deliberately form an exceptional being by surrounding themselves with harmonious and exceptional vibrations of consciousness—a child absorbs his mothers thoughts as well as her blood—for, as She remarked with her ever-present humor, That the superman shall be born of a woman is a great indisputable truth 1... The true domain of women is spiritual. We forget it too often.¹⁹ Even Tagore, who was passing through Japan, was struck by Mothers clarity of vision and invited her to organize the education in his ashram at Shantiniketan—but what interested her was the Ashram of the world.

In her “Talk to the Women of Japan,” She announced in prophetic terms the coming of Sri Aurobindo and the signs by which one can recognize the advent of the New Age. It was in 1916. But let us listen: No sign will enlighten those whose eyes remain closed. But for those whose look is clear, darkness itself becomes a sign. Fordo they not know that the night grows darker as dawn approaches? Nevertheless, we will give to everyone a means of discernment: when all moves and quakes, when a shiver passes through the people, awak­ening those who had been plunged in sleep for centuries and threatening thrones, when that which seemed immovable begins to waver, when the proudest and most solid construc­tions shake on their bases and threaten ruin because the very foundation of things is displaced, then can be known the advent of the one whose superhuman steps make the earth tremble.²⁰

Her stay in Japan, which we know little about, or prefer to say little about, drew to an end, as did her own strength. Richard kept on philosophizing all the same. Sustained by Mother’s force, he was perhaps dreaming of becoming a mental superman, just as Theon had dreamed of becoming a vital superman. But Theon did not lack for greatness. It is a strange experience, sometimes, to realize how literally covered over we are by our mental constructions, so elegant and refined, often even wreathed in light, seeking Truth and Beauty for the world, preaching the Truth if necessary, while underneath there simply lies a human ego that has grasped hold of the Truth as it would grasp hold of False­hood, just as readily; it is merely another way of feeding itself and proliferating. The minute we touch the pretty fortress, it is there, claws out. How clearly Sri Aurobindo and Mother had seen this, how well they knew that the solution cannot be found there, in the Mind. Even the truth is rotten there. It can philosophize forever and add to this morals, light, or even yogic disciplines and austerities, Zen meditations and contemplations of every shade, it all amounts to the same thing: it is “I” feeding itself. And as long as this “I” keeps on nourishing itself, it will turn into its "opposite” the next day or the next minute or twenty years later, once its truth is no longer so nourishing. And the farce goes on. The Mind is the great mystifier. We recall that delightful story when Sri Aurobindo received Gandhi’s son, who was shocked to see Sri Aurobindo with a cigar in his mouth and exclaimed, “What! You’re attached to smok­ing, you, a yogi?” etc. Whereupon Sri Aurobindo replied, What! You're attached to non-smoking?... There we have it in a nutshell, quite simply. There is something radical to change. When our ultimate truths have collapsed and our hands have let drop their smoking or non-smoking, vio­lence or non-violence, divine or non-divine, we will silently begin to breathe a light air, which seems like nothing and is perhaps the truth of everything. To those same women of Japan, Mother said, The civilization which is ending now in such a dramatic way was based on the power of the mind, a mental handling of matter and life.... Thus, man’s road to supermanhood will be open when he declares boldly that all he has till now developed, including the intellect he is so rightly and yet so vainly proud of, is no longer sufficient for him, and that to uncase, discover, set free a greater power within shall henceforth be his great preoccupation.²¹ In Japan, with Richard, Mother had perhaps learned how useless it is to convert the Mind, that is, to do what all the “saviors of the world” have tried to do one after another; we must go down to the root, then everything else will change automatically. As for Sri Aurobindo, He had under­stood from the beginning: I am not here to convert anyone.²²

One pure little cell.

The four years were coming to an end with an absolute inner certainty that there was nothing to be done, Mother said, that it was impossible, impossible to do it this way (to convert Richard). There was nothing to be done. And I was intensely concentrated, asking the Lord, "Well, I made You a vow to do this, I had said, ‘Even if it’s necessary to descend into hell, I will descend into hell to do it.Now tell me, what must I do?... ” The Power was plainly there; suddenly everything in me became still; the whole external being was completely immobilized and I had a vision of the Supreme ... more beautiful than that of the Gita. A vision of the Supreme. And this vision literally gathered me into its arms; it turned towards the West, towards India, and offered me—and there at the other end I saw Sri Aurobindo. It was ... I felt it physi­cally. I saw, saw—my eyes were closed but I saw... Ineffable. It was as if this Immensity had reduced itself to a rather gigantic Being who lifted me up like a wisp of straw and offered me. Not a word, nothing else, only that. Then every­thing vanished. The next day we began preparing to return to India.²³

The last page of her journal, dated from Oiwake, simply says, Nothing remains of the past but an overflowing love which gives me the pure heart of a child and the lightness and freedom of thought of a god.²⁴

The granddaughter of Mira Ismalun, who had taken Paris by storm with her sky-blue tarboosh tipped low, had come to the end of her journey—the pupil of thundering Theon, the friend of Rouault, Rodin, Matisse, the patient student of all the mental and spiritual gymnastics, the mathematician sister of Matteo, the musician of a great blue note, was going to lay down her burden at Sri Auro­bindo’s feet to take on a still heavier burden—for the whole world is there, when there is no longer an “I”.

In 1920, on her way back to India, Mother would stop in China. She would touch Chinese soil (we do no know where exactly), to feel the atmosphere, as She said ... at the very moment when Mao Tse-Tung, fifteen years her junior, was completing his first work, "The Great Union of the Popu­lar Masses,” and founding the first Chinese Communist cell. Was it mere chance? She came into contact with that, too—twice. What evolutionary knot is situated there?... What onslaught of forces?

She was going to take one pure little cell by storm.

"We lived together for a year,” recalled an elderly Japa­nese gentleman by the name of Ohkawa. “We sat together in meditation every night for an hour. I practiced Zen and they practiced yoga.... There was a light in her eyes like that of the great morning of the world that was about to dawn.... She had a will that moved mountains and an intellect sharp as the edge of a sword. Her thought was clarity itself and her resolve stronger than the roots of a giant oak.... An artist, She could paint pictures of an unearthly loveliness. A musician, She enchanted my soul when She played an organ or guitar. A scientist, She could formulate a new heaven and earth, a new cosmogony. I do not know what Mirra had not become or was not capable of becoming.... She was beautiful in Western clothes. And She looked surpassingly lovely when She wore a kimono. If I could see her now, I would surely have said that She looked equally lovely in an Indian saree.... How could I, who lived in the very heart of the Fujiyama, tell you about the volume of its fire and flame and the dimensions of its light? "²⁵

18: The Physical Plunge

It was April 24, 1920.

I felt Sri Aurobindo’s atmosphere, felt it materially, ten miles from the shore—ten nautical miles, not kilometers! It was very sudden, very concrete, a pure and luminous atmo­sphere, light, so light that it lifts you up.¹

Once again She crossed the old postern with its garland of “Faithfulness,” climbed the stairs to the spacious col­umned veranda. Sixteen years earlier, She had seen him for the first time in a “vision attire.” But that vision was never completed, its end had not taken place: Only after a series of experiences—a ten months' sojourn in Pondicherry, five years of separation, then the return to Pondicherry and the meeting in the same house and in the same way—did the END of the vision occur.... I was standing just beside him. My head wasn’t exactly on his shoulder, but where his shoulder was (I don’t know how to explain it—physically there was hardly any contact). We were standing side by side like that, gazing out through the open window, and then TOGETHER, at exactly the same moment, we felt, "Now the Realization will be accomplished.” That the seal was set and the Realization would he accomplished. I felt the Thing descending massively within me, with the same certainty I had felt in my vision. From that moment on there was nothing to say—no words, nothing. We knew it was that.²

That ... the Divine, the Lord, the Supreme, the Supra­mental, whatever—the next stage of evolution, the next consciousness. But it is that. The Obvious Fact. Personally, I call it “Supreme Consciousness” because I don’t want to say “God".... It's full of... the very word is full of deception. It’s not that way, it’s: We ARE—We ARE the Divine who has for­gotten Himself. And our task, the task is to re-establish the connection—call it by any name you like, it doesn't matter. It’s the Perfection we must become, that's all. The Perfection, the Power, the Knowledge we must become. Call it what you like, it doesn't matter to me. That’s the aspiration we must have. We must get out of this mire, this stupidity, this uncon­sciousness, this disgusting defeatism that crushes us because we allow ourselves to be crushed.³ And the foremost defeat­ism is death. This was in 1972, one year before She left.

They were going to "reestablish the connection,” but this time not for an individual little salvation in a dream of consciousness that believes it is liberated while everything else rots: to reestablish the connection in Matter—to uncover the Obvious Fact there, the wide-open air there, the great vastness there, the infallible knowledge there. How you speak of it does not matter. What matters is to follow the path, YOUR path, any path—yes, to go there.⁴ Like the bird, the electron, thunder and the monsoon—each one in its own exactness. Because all the pain in the world lies in that inexactness which does not know what it is doing, why it is doing it, how to do it in that unconsciousness, that powerlessness, that misery of not knowing the exact place of things, their exact role and exact value; everything is a tremendous approximation and everything is pain because we see nothing as it is and live nothing as it is. And as it is, it is simply THAT.⁵ That is the great Exactness which is Harmony, the plenitude of doing what we have to do, of being what we are, which is the love of everything that is, because we see the Wonder everywhere, the Treasure everywhere, the unimaginable Solicitude behind a million errors and false steps that were never an error, never a false step, but the imperturbable straight line of a Consciousness forever leading us to our own totality of consciousness. That, at last, purely. Infallible—like the electron, the bird or the thunder, but in a million, a billion certitudes looking at one another everywhere through our gaze and everywhere at the same time. For such is the Supramental Conscious­ness. It might also be called the Exact Consciousness. It is what reestablishes the connection—with everything. With what is. Man is a transitional being: We are the distorting intermediary between the purity of the animal and the divine purity of the gods.⁶

She is forty-two, He is forty-eight.

The realization begins.

The Evolutionary Laboratory

To tell the truth, it was the first question that arose when I met Sri Aurobindo: should we do our yoga and go right to the end, then see about the others, or should we immediately let all those who have an identical aspiration come to us and walk all together toward the goal?... Both possibilities were there: either to do an intensive individual sadhana by with­drawing from the world and having no contact with others, or to let a group form in a natural and spontaneous way without preventing it from forming, and then setting out all together on the path.⁷

This is the very question of the world.

For after all, we have a certain conception of the world. We have seen or think we have seen what the next stage of human consciousness is to be, the inevitable development, but what does evolution itself think of it? Evolution, mean­ing Tom, Dick or Harry—everything is part of it, even little cats and the vegetables in the garden—not to mention our own stupidity, which is also part of the evolution and may not feel at all like replacing its stupidity with states of con­sciousness that after all must seem rather problematical. Throughout the world, there has never been any lack of human pioneers (we know nothing about ape pioneers) who also strove to accelerate evolution, only to end up at the stake like those moving Cathars (see the entry “heretic sects” in any dictionary), and others who have disappeared under the silt of the Nile or the dust of Bamyan—the her­etics may well be tomorrow’s orthodox, but in between, this is just abortive evolution, or a drop of water in the evolutionary ocean. There is no way round it: the whole of evolution has to move together, which is why it nicely breaks or burns all those who try to keep to themselves. And what a bunch of selves!... Mother and Sri Aurobindo saw the problem quite clearly and ruthlessly: Your idea of what things should be is so infinitely removed from what they will be that, even if you try to see things as globally as possible, you will still leave out such a great part of the uni­verse that it would amount to an almost linear realization, or in any event, so small and narrow that the greater part of the universe would remain unchanged. But even if you had a very broad view of things, even if you could conceive of something more total and advance on the path that is ready —for it is with paths as with beings: some of them are ready —without having the patience to wait for the others, that is, if you try to realize something that would be very close to the real truth in comparison with the actual state of the world, what would happen?—The disruption of a certain whole, a break not only in harmony but in balance as well, because a whole part of the creation would not be able to follow. And instead of a total realization of the Divine, you would have a small, local, infinitesimal realization, and nothing of what must ultimately be done would have been done.⁸

It is clear that Mother and Sri Aurobindo had no inten­tion of becoming super-Cathars for the benefit of fiscal stakes and bureaucratic Inquisitions of the 20th century, which are very efficient at evolutionary purges. We always make the same mistake: each one does his job, even the torturer, even the victim. And in the end, who does if not She, always and everywhere—except that her reasons have nothing to do with the fiscal or spiritual labels we stick on them. In other words, what is the Intention?... It is global, obviously. I am concerned with the earth, Sri Aurobindo wrote, not with worlds beyond for their own sake; it is a terrestrial realisation that I seek and not a flight to distant summits.⁹ Therefore, there was no question of isolating oneself for an “intensive sadhana,” and afterward coming back to collect the rest that would have been comfortably waiting in its evolutionary mud—“afterward," it is no longer possible. This “afterward” is an extraordinary illusion. You can go on meditating all alone for one hundred and seven years, you “take off your coat,” as Mother said, but after­ward you return to frantic subconscious notations catching up with their hundred-and-seven-year-old fast that break you at one stroke. For we all have the same mud inside, inevitably. Right away, Sri Aurobindo and Mother donned the world's mantle: The decision was not at all a mental choice; it came spontaneously. The circumstances were such that there was no choice; in other words, the group was formed quite naturally and spontaneously, in such a way that it was an imperative necessity. And once you begin like that, there is no going back—you have to go right to the end.¹⁰

This is how the Ashram formed around the first soccer players—later joined by dozens, then hundreds and hun­dreds of others over the years. The coat of the world was there, the whole world was there, all the types of mud and all the types of light or human ingredients needed to make up the evolutionary laboratory: an attempt at conscious evolution,¹¹ Sri Aurobindo said as early as 1925. In other words, a whole range of elements, each one ready to work on his own particular little plot of mud. And that is the whole difficulty, for each of the elements who eagerly rush into the laboratory, precisely because he or she wants to get out of the ordinary stupidity and hopes to have “experi­ences” or discover beautiful and breathable expanses of consciousness, stumbles at the first attempt, or the second (more often the second, after a preliminary period of euphoria), into the opposite of the light, a mud all the more sticky the more one strives to change it. It is really the world’s coat, without a missing crease. And it takes many samples, if we may say so, for the laboratory to be complete, with all possible test-tubes and conceivable mix­tures so as to put to the test a conscious and accelerated evolution on an approximately terrestrial scale. Mother and Sri Aurobindo had seen this clearly, too: If you want to do the work in a solitary way, it is absolutely impossible to do it in a total way, because every physical being, however complete he may be, is only partial and limited; he represents but one law in the world. It may be a very complex law, but it is only one law. ...¹² And Mother did not place herself outside the law, nor even Sri Aurobindo; She saw the whole problem with crystal-clear vision, because She saw it not only at the psychological level of the particular and idiosyncratic little bits of mud, but at the corporeal, physiological, we could almost say “genetic” level: Each individual being, even if he is of quite a superior quality, even if he has been created for quite a special work, is only an individual being; that is, THE totality of the transforma­tion CANNOT TAKE PLACE THROUGH A SINGLE BODY.... If we want to have a general action, a minimum number of physical individuals is required.¹³ Because the transformation of the muddy little subconscients is only a first stage in the evo­lutionary operation; at the end, there is the transformation of bodies, the change to another species. And it is no use saying “afterward-later”; afterward is right now or it never is. The horn of the evolutionary bull must be grasped totally and at once; the ultimate transformation is already contained in the very first second you seize hold of the problem. You seize hold of it in the right way or in the wrong way. It really is a dangerous operation, let us face the fact, and we do wonder why thrill-seekers go to the moon. There are tremendous craters right within and tumultuous Vietnams fully unknown. But it is also quite possible that those who fight outside, in Bangladesh or Chile, are the physical and mechanical—and very uncon­scious—counterparts of the phenomenon which is taking place in the inner laboratory. Everyone goes there, by all possible means. “By any method chosen,” Sri Aurobindo said kindly. The difference lies in the fact that here we work out conscious evolution: each of us “represents/' on an accelerated and tiny scale, the great battle outside. In fact, the real Vietnams are within, with no possibility of cheating, and one silent little victory may have its repercussions on the whole evolutionary battlefield—but of course, it is one and the same Battlefield! A single stupidity purged within is worth a whole Mekong Delta. One clear little cell clears up the whole terrestrial field, prepares and brings the trans­formation of the great body closer. We become "represen­tative” beings. Maybe if there is a symbolic being, said Mother, a symbolic being who has the power (it takes a great deal of endurance I), the power to CONTAIN the representation of all those disorders and to work on that symbolic represen­tation, it must help the whole.¹⁴

Sri Aurobindo for the next thirty years, and Mother for the next fifty-three years, were going to be “a symbol” and contain the sampling of every possible disorder.

But once again, “a representative group” is needed, according to Mothers words; a single being is not enough, a single law is not enough, a single quality of cell is not enough (or so it seems to us, but after all, the process is in the making and we are not so sure of its laws or whether a single tiny atom does not hold the key to everything else— chain reactions do exist). This is why, She said to the Ashram children, though you are unaware of it or do not conceive of it clearly, each of you represents one of the diffi­culties that has to be conquered for the transformation. And that makes quite a few difficulties! I had even written some­where that it was more than a difficulty; I had said that EACH ONE REPRESENTS AN IMPOSSIBILITY TO BE RESOLVED. And it’s all these impossibilities together that can be transformed in the Work. They are no longer isolated difficulties, they are collective difficulties—because you are not doing your yoga for yourselves alone, you are doing the yoga for everyone— without wanting it, automatically.¹⁵

Such is the meaning of this evolutionary laboratory called “the Ashram."

No, the Ashram is not a hermitage; it is a sampling of the world—with a Light proportionate to the thickness of the Mud to be transformed. Both are there in exactly equal proportions. And, well, each one can turn his gaze either here ... or there.

And perhaps the point lies in neither of them, but in a third thing—which is growing quite shyly.

Will it grow or not?

It would be interesting to see.

But the real question for the world, through this little symbolic plot, remains: Has the time come, or is it just one more botched evolution? Which assault will prevail, that of the little cell, or the other? ’

The Iridescent Light

When I returned from Japan and we began to work together, Sri Aurobindo had already brought the supramental light into the mental world and was trying to transform the Mind. “It’s strange,” he said to me, “it’s an endless work! Nothing seems to get done—everything is done and then constantly has to he done all over again. ” Then I gave him my personal impression: “It will be like that until we touch bottom.”¹⁶ Indeed, Mother had just had a vivid experience with Richard in Japan: the Mind is a perfect eel, or perhaps a chame­leon; it takes on whatever color we wish, depending on taste or circumstances—actually, in a way it is right, for the Mind is made for whatever one wishes—everything depends on that “one.” It is not made for discovering the truth or discovering anything whatever, but for putting the materials in order—-any materials. So instead of continuing to work in the Mind, both of us descended almost immediately (it was done in a day or two) from the Mind into the Vital,¹⁰⁰ and so on quite rapidly, leaving the Mind as it was, fully in the light but not permanently transformed... Then we descended into the Physical—and all the trouble began. But we didn’t stay in the Physical, we descended into the Subconscient and from the Subconscient to the Inconscient.¹⁷ The Inconscient, that is, what we might call the beginning of the world, Matters bedrock, the famous “something" on which all the evolutionary layers have been piled up and from which all forms rose—the first “chromosome” in the world, if we may say so, that which lies in our body’s depths with all the rest of the evolutionary accumulation. That was how we worked. And it was only when I descended into the Incon­scient that I found the Divine Presence—there, in the midst of Darkness.¹⁸ It was the experience of Tlemcen that was being repeated, “the Sun in Darkness” or the “Black Sun" (Martanda) of the Vedas—what we, in our rational lan­guage, might call the Exact Consciousness, the one that drives the atom and the beast’s instinct, the pure little law that rules all of Nature’s movements. What Sri Aurobindo called the Truth-Consciousness, or Supermind. And there I suddenly found myself in front of something like a vault or a grotto (of course, it was only something “like" that), and when it opened, I saw a Being of iridescent light reclining with his head on his hand, fast asleep. All the light around him was iridescent ,..¹⁹Iridescent, meaning made up of all colors, and this is quite important, for we will often meet that light which has very special qualities, in other words, a very special power over all the forces of disintegration (disease, death, the obscure NO in Matter’s depths, as though it were simultaneous or concomitant with that light). By "light” we do not mean some psychic’s practice or an apparition of Saint Theresa, but a force—there is an atomic force, an electrical force, and others ... or perhaps THE OTHER FORCE, which is the pure source of all these. It is always the same thing: there is but one Force and one Light which takes on various colors or darkens to varying degrees, depending on the layer it crosses. This iridescent light may well save our lives. But then a rather remarkable phenomenon occurred: when I looked at him [this being of iridescent light], he woke up and opened his eyes, express­ing the beginning of conscious, wakeful action.²⁰ What had taken place until then through instinctive or “natural” layers (or less natural ones, like our brain), was now going to come to the surface—at least this was the attempt, the challenge of the whole work. Would it succeed or not? And how can one bring this to the conscious surface of the world without bursting everything or toppling all the neatly piled-up layers? How can this light be made to act directly? —That iridescent light which immediately seems to stand out as a constructive light, as opposed to all the countless little deadly and decaying phenomena that characterize all the other “lights” or forces.

This is the whole problem of the work.

The connection had to be made through Matter. “Up above," at the top of the ladder, in the great transparency of the evolved consciousness, things are perfectly supramental, because they are perfectly clear; at the very ‘/bottom,” in Matter’s depths (behind Matter, as it were), they are per­fectly supramental, too, because they are perfectly pure. In between there are all the gradations of impurity, all the more or less dark or clear (rather less than more) milieus, all the charming, teeming evolutionary compost that has settled over that "something” one finds pure up above and at the very bottom—in fact, it is one and the same thing, the same "Supermind” (if we wish to name it by this word), continuous, uninterrupted from top to bottom, full and round like a sun, but veiled, sealed off, eclipsed by the intermediate layers. The individual consciousness is like a big curtain: transparent and luminous at the top, then changing to silver gray to flaxen yellow to a deeper and deeper blue (in the various strata of the Mind) to a deeper and deeper red (solar plexus) to an emerald green to the purple of power (in the umbilical and pelvic areas); then the curtain gets muddy and dark, completely black (as it approaches the knees and feet—there is even a center below the feet, according to Mother), and suddenly, at the bottom of the curtain, one emerges into purity and transparency again—that light as iridescent as a rainbow, as if made up of all the intermediary colors combined. In short, we have to draw the curtain. That is what Sri Aurobindo and Mother called “to bring down the Supermind,” connect high and low, which are neither high nor low but the two extremities of the spectrum of consciousness. That is what ancient tra­ditions had symbolized by a snake biting its tail. As Mother said, if you go straight to the tail instead of evaporating into the higher heavens, you will reach the same thing, but with a transformed and illumined Matter instead of a Nothingness of light. But the problem is, will Matter accept to be transformed? Or rather (and this is what we strongly believe), will the intermediate layers accept to be cleansed, because Matter, true Matter, is infinitely purer and more flexible than all the brilliant, intermediary obscurities we juggle with frantically and, it would seem, with great delight.

The "intermediate layers” made up all the samplings of the charming evolutionary laboratory that had formed itself around Mother and Sri Aurobindo, or rather had spontaneously stuck to Them, as if the whole earth— perhaps we should say the difficulties of the earth—had chosen to meet there. Now we begin to understand the endeavor.

The Physical Plunge

Thus came the plunge into the physical.²¹

Apparently nothing had changed, except that Mother's arrival had begun to introduce a little order and well-being into the bohemian life of the Guest House. “Paul and Mirra Richard came to see Sri Aurobindo every evening,” writes Barin, Sri Aurobindo’s younger brother, "to talk of Yoga and discuss the great future, when man will be capable of bridging the gulf between matter and spirit, by divinizing even his body ... Nobody knew at the time what a tremen­dous role this foreign lady was to play in Aurobindo’s sadhana ... She was exceedingly beautiful.”²² Then one day during a cyclone, as the roof of the seaside house She was living in was threatened with collapse, Sri Aurobindo asked Her to move in with them and, from that day on, She never left him again. It was the 24th of November, 1920. Paul Richard, “incapable of accepting this life of self-surrender,” as Barin expressed it, would soon disappear. Two years later, Sri Aurobindo and Mother would move a short dis­tance away to the present Ashram building, 9 rue de la Marine, with its white-bordered pearl gray walls, its postern crowned with a big jasmine bush and its columns in the style of those old, spacious, fresh and not yet utilitarian colonial houses. An old Pondicherry archaeologist¹⁰¹ used to say that this was the very place where the Vedic Rishi Agastya, coming from the North, like Sri Aurobindo, with his wife Lopamudra, had founded his Ashram some seven thousand years earlier. The place was then called Veda Pun, the City of the Vedas. We do not know whether the location is exactly the same, but this is the area where tradition situates the retreat of the first Rishis to speak of the “Sun of Truth” beneath the rock of the “mountain.” The Truth in Matters depths. Lopamudra’s very words come back to us like a pure little echo, so poignant in its simplicity: "Many autumns have I toiled night and day; the dawns age me. Age dims the glory of our bodies” (Rig-Veda, 1.179.1). Would She who was seeking the “Nectar of Immortality," find it this time?

The divinization of the body.

This is the period of the "Evening Talks"—and Sri Auro­bindo’s voice could still be heard before his complete withdrawal in 1926. There were now about a dozen dis­ciples around him (twenty-four in 1926). "One always felt,” writes Purani, one of the earliest disciples, “that his voice was that of one who does not let his whole being flow into his words; there was a reserve and what was left unsaid was perhaps more than what was spoken. But there were occasions when He did give his independently personal views on some problems, on events and other subjects. Even then it was never an authoritarian pronouncement. Most often it appeared to be a logically worked out and almost inevitable conclusion expressed quite impersonally though with firm and sincere conviction. This imperson­ality was such a prominent trait of his personality! Even in such matters as dispatching a letter or a telegram it would not be a command from him to a disciple to carry out the task. Most often during his usual passage to the dining room He would stop on the way, drop in on the company of four or five disciples and, holding out the letter or the telegram, would say in the most amiable and yet most impersonal way: ‘I suppose this has to be sent....' The expression He used very often was ‘It was done,’ 'It hap­pened,' not Ί did it.'” ²³ His younger brother, Barin, observed the same silent reserve in Sri Aurobindo; nothing ever “ostentatious,” no miraculous display: “His quiet, dreamy eyes seldom lost their inward absorption even in the midst of his most engrossing outward preoccupations.... Sri Aurobindo’s method of inducing yoga in others was then what it is now—a silent unobtrusive transmission of his yogic power slowly helping to open some door in the aspirant.”²⁴ This “unobtrusiveness” would remain with Sri Aurobindo right to the end, He who had a deep, perhaps British, distaste tor any thing, resembling a miracle—there, miracles, you know, are such a show of bad manners!—I have not come here to accomplish miracles, but to show, lead the way, help on the road to a great inner change of our human nature.²⁵ Indeed, it was not miracles he sought, but just the opposite of miracles: the very “natural" of the world—even if it meant disappointing the man in the street, or even his own disciples: Only if we had given them a good bag of dubious miracles, would they have been happy, he told Mother one day. And if by chance some of them asked to meditate with Him, He would receive them in the morning on the spacious veranda upstairs, near the Ashram entrance, where He used to live in those days, and He allowed them to meditate ... “while He read the newspaper,” notes Champaklal²⁶ with a touch of surprise, who would be Sri Aurobindos faithful attendant until the end. No, Sri Auro­bindo did not at all need to close his eyes or to concen­trate—what does "concentrate” mean? To concentrate in one’s head? But it was his body that was concentrated, his body that did the yoga and radiated the yoga. "To plunge into the physical” means to live in the physical: we never live in the physical, we live Matter through the Mind, except perhaps for a few blissful gardeners or artisans (though most of the time even they continue to race around in their heads, amidst their rose-cuttings or pottery). In fact, to descend into the physical means first of all to descend into inertia and darkness, because our substance is so accus­tomed to obeying the mind’s orders and being manipulated by the mind that it no longer knows how to live by itself; everything is covered over by a mental crust which lets nothing filter through. We are the pioneers hewing our way through the jungle of the lower Prakriti [Nature].²⁷ The body must slowly be taught to live its own life again, and this cannot be done from the heights of the mind; it is done by lifting buckets of water (Sri Aurobindo's preferred exercise in the Alipore Jail), climbing stairs or doing anything at all—which in the end is no longer "anything at all/’ but something that begins to live its own life, breathe its own air, feel with its own feeling. It was another constitution of the physical consciousness²⁸ that Sri Aurobindo sought, a fact he had so much difficulty impressing on his disciples, who remained stuck to the traditional notions of yoga: cosmic consciousness and so on: One can feel merged in the Cosmic Self or full of ecstatic Bhakti [love] or Ananda. But one may and usually does still go on in the outer parts of Nature thinking with the intellect or at best intuitive mind, willing with a mental will, feeling joy and sorrow on the vital surface, undergoing physical afflictions and suffering from the struggle of life in the body with death and disease.²⁹ And he would keep repeating to his disciples: Our Yoga can suc­ceed only if the EXTERNAL man too changes, but that is the most difficult of all things. It is only by a change of the physi­cal nature that it can be done, by a descent of the highest light into this lowest part of Nature. It is here that the struggle is going on... but the external [being] still clings to its old ways, manners, habits. Many do not seem even to have awakened to the necessity of the change.³⁰ (This was fourteen years later, in 1934, but even forty years later the situation would not be better.) There is a certain way to climb stairs that can make a tremendous difference in life.

But it is not “conspicuous." Sri Aurobindo’s yoga is the most inconspicuous there is, as we have said. Though when it does become conspicuous, then there will no longer be a few pretty thoughts capering down to a grave: there will be a changed earth—conspicuously changed. Not a “pretty earth” as seen through the eyes of some super-Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, but another earth, another Matter. The next Matter is to be made, or rather revealed, through the breaking of a million little habits of seeing in the wrong way, living in the wrong way, being in the wrong way. As for cosmic consciousness, we will find it in Matter, every minute and in the smallest pebble. The time has come to emerge from the Minds old cosmic imposture. Mao Tse-Tung’s “Great Union of the Popular Masses” may well be a truer step in the direction of evolution than all our spiritual tomes—only, instead of a mechanical, outer and oppressive oneness, we should need a conscious, inner and ... smiling oneness. The question consists in knowing which will forge cosmic oneness: our willing matter, or a crushed matter? It comes down to that.

The divine materialism or the other one.

The Physical Consciousness

We do not know what Matter is. It is the most obvious and most mysterious thing in the world. Once we have cleansed the body of its mental coating and cleansed even more this Matter of a thousand vital vibrations throbbing with their reactions of desire, attraction or repulsion, plus or minus, yes or no (and this is not even a true “vital" like that of the animal, but still the Mind creeping in and lurk­ing in Matter), once clarity has been achieved and the first jungle cleared, then the physical consciousness, the consciousness of the body, begins to emerge. A perfectly autonomous consciousness—once it has been freed from these two usurpers, the mind and the vital. And a con­sciousness endowed with quite peculiar qualities: When that consciousness is present, Sri Aurobindo says, you feel the calm like something solid, substantial, settled like an immovable block which cannot be shaken even by the most material shock, less so by the mental or vital shocks.³¹ This solidity of calm, we might almost say this solid immobil­ity, which was Sri Aurobindo’s distinctive characteristic, is the foundation of an awesome power still entirely unknown to the earth—we know nothing of the body’s secrets or of its little miracles, as Mother would say. The strong immo­bility of an immortal spirit,³² wrote Sri Aurobindo in one of his books, which is exactly what He was. A cellular immobility "freezing” everything, neutralizing everything, dissolving everything and almost immediately letting us glimpse or discern or even concretely realize that in their natural state, uncorrupted by the Mind, our cells are invul­nerable to disease; they do not want disease, do not want disorder, this is a foreign thing they reject, or do not even need to reject: the disease cannot cross that barrier of immobility. The cells have the sense of their own immor­tality. There is only a problem of wear and tear that destroys this impermeability, as it were. But the power of that cor­poreal, cellular calm is so amazing that it can even act upon surrounding material circumstances: Matter within acts upon Matter without, in perfect continuity. The most striking example is that of Pondicherry’s “great cyclone” (I no longer remember which year, but it was earlier than 1930), as narrated by Mother: During the night of the great cyclone, as the noise was frightening and floods of rain poured down all over the town, I thought I should go to Sri Aurobindo’s room to help him close his windows. I half-opened his door and found him quietly sitting at his desk, absorbed in writing. There was such a solid peace in his room that nobody could have imagined there was a cyclone raging outside. The win­dows were wide open, but not one drop of rain was coming in.³³ It could not come in. Indeed there is no need to perform miracles—Matter itself can perform its little miracles quite well if we only allow it to do so. But what is even more remarkable is that this spontaneous power of Matter (Sri Aurobindo did nothing, He did not even pay attention to the cyclone) can radiate and act even upon human masses, which would seem harder than acting upon a cyclone (1) for in this case the human Mind intervenes. Once, as He was told of accidents and attacks, Sri Aurobindo remarked in his ever perfectly neutral tone, like a source so obvious it does not need any emphasis: As regards violence—for example, of a riot—I would have to concentrate for four or five days in order to protect myself³⁴ For it was really a question of “concentrating” Matter (which took more time than for a cyclone and a deliberate action, because human forces are not at all natural). Who would ever imagine that Matter, through its own radiation, without any extra­human or occult powers like those of Theon and all yogis, could by itself erect such an invisible barrier that a human mob is suddenly stopped without knowing why? Though in truth people always do things without knowing why. The more reasons they put on it, the more it escapes them.

But it does not escape a little cell.

We still know nothing of Matter.

But the jungle is deepening. It sends us delightful and unexpected, all-powerful little clearings, innocently, unas­sumingly, only to close again, all of a sudden, on something thicker and more mysterious: it was just “to lure” us farther ahead, farther into its Mystery, as if it wanted us to find out its Mystery. What is surprising about our first setting out on this “path”—which would more rightly be called a “non­existent path”—is that it automatically seems to give rise to little clues left and right, which begin springing up everywhere, as if the Secret itself wished to get caught—but it is as complex as Matter itself, and there are thousands of signs, detours and pitfalls. And yet it is extraordinarily simple. Right to the very end, it seems to you that the Secret is transparent, and yet it all remains an absolute jungle. The physical layer is a very obstinate thing and it requires to be worked out in detail, said Sri Aurobindo dur­ing the “Evening Talks.” You work out one thing, then think it is done; something else arises and you have again to go over the same ground. It is not like the mind or the vital where it is easier for the Higher Power to work. Besides, there—in the mind and in the vital—you can establish a general law leaving out the details; the physical is not so; it requires constant patience and minutiae. ,..³⁵ And Sri Auro­bindo gave an example: In the case of Swami Brahmananda (of Chandod) he lived up to 300 years so that he was practi­cally immune from the action of age, but one day a rusty nail pricked him and he died of that slight wound. On the physi­cal plane something you have not worked out turns up and shows that your conquest is not complete. That is why the process takes such a long time. You must establish the higher Consciousness IN EVERY ATOM OF THE BODY, otherwise what happens is that something escapes your view in the hidden depth of the lower physical being which is known to the hostile forces and then they can attack through that weak point. They can create a combination of circumstances which would give rise to the thing not worked out and before you can control them they are already beyond control. In that case they can destroy you.³⁶

In every atom....

Nothing is done unless everything is done, Mother said.

In fact, it would seem that the jungle wants to lead us into death. And it may well be so; not really to destroy us, but because that is where the Secret lies. It wants us to find its Secret. There is not one obstacle in the end that is not the key to a more complete discovery and a more total realization. The art, always and everywhere, consists in changing the poison into nectar. As long as we go on apply­ing penicillin or morality to the poison, we will understand nothing and will never understand anything about Matter. One must approach Matter bare handed, but with a fire in the heart, a faith ... which is the memory of the soul,³⁷ as Sri Aurobindo put it. Something within that remembers the whole Amazon, unfolded, victorious. Faith is the Ama­zon itself driving us to its own discovery.

Now the most material level remains and that is the most dangerous, added Sri Aurobindo in that conversation of 1924.—“Why dangerous?” the disciple asked—Because it is solid, compact, and can refuse or even give up its own stuff completely. It is the least open to reasoning and in dealing with it you require the highest divine Power. Besides, the whole samskara—established imprint—of the whole uni­verse is against your effort.³⁸

There comes a moment when it is no longer one body or one bit of matter: it is the body of the world and universal Matter. It is the Subconscient of the world, the Inconscient of the world. As if the problem could not be solved for one individual but for the whole world, or not at all.

This is where the sampling of the evolutionary labora­tory plays a considerable ... and saddening role.

19: The First Round: 1926-1950

The Unbearable Pressure

“From the beginning of November the pressure of the Higher Power began to become unbearable,” ¹ notes a dis­ciple. How right he was! It was weighing on their heads. Perhaps it was starting to weigh on the head of the earth. It was in 1926. And suddenly, on the 24th of November, around 5 p.m., Mother had all the disciples called in. They were rounded up from everywhere—from the seaside bou­levard to the soccer field. By 6 p.m., everyone was there. On the spacious upstairs veranda, behind Sri Aurobindo’s chair, hung a black silk tapestry embroidered with three golden dragons—Chinese dragons—biting each other’s tail. Sri Aurobindo never liked staging, but there may be times when there is a stage on the earth, after all. I believe that Mother was the one who brought back that tapestry from her Chinese stopover. In any case, the dragons had a signifi¬cance: a Chinese prophecy predicted that the Truth would manifest upon earth when the three dragons—the dragon of the earth (earth=body), the dragon of the mind and the dragon of heaven—would meet. That day may well have been the first moment of meeting between Matter and “heaven”—that “something” weighing on their heads. Once again, China had stuck its head right into Sri Aurobindo’s room and was present, as it were, for the event. It may have been mere chance, but there would be no end to such “chances.” Who knows whether China does not represent the dragon of the Mind?... The Chinese are the most intelligent people in the world—they give us the shivers. At 6 p.m., Sri Aurobindo came out of his room, followed by Mother—there was always that tranquil slowness in his movements. He had already changed a great deal (physi­cally changed); some time earlier, an old disciple who had come back to see him had exclaimed, “But what has hap­pened to you?" And Sri Aurobindo, eluding the question, had mischievously replied, “And what has happened to you?" Then He had simply added: When the Higher Con­sciousness, after descending to the mental level, comes down to the vital and even below the vital, then a great transforma­tion takes place in the nervous and even in the physical being.² Sri Aurobindo’s complexion had taken on a different color. He who had a rather dark skin, “like that of an ordi­nary Bengali,” Purani, that old disciple, remarks, “I found his cheeks wore an apple-pink color and the whole body glowed with a soft creamy white light."³ A “great” change. But that was nothing: we shall never know or see what Sri Aurobindo was between 1926 and 1950, when that creamy light turned to gold, as if permeating his whole body, visible to all, that stature that had shed its ascetic angles of the 1920’s to be filled with that solid stillness, as if one suddenly were entering the Himalayas, but such very soft, vast and crystalline Himalayas that one could melt into them as if into eternity, and it was eternity, living, solid, right there— Oh, to have had the privilege to enter there, to gaze or rather to be gazed at by those eyes, which had somehow changed from the glowing ember black of a warrior of Kali to a golden brown and then into that melted infinity which one no longer knew if it were blue like the sky or even if it had any color at all, because one went far, far away, as if adrift, toward a great Country of Forever where one was forever at ease, forever at home, forever true and pure. That was it, and that was all. We will never know, never see again that softness of infinity trapped in a few cells. He never let himself be photographed, except the last year, in 1950, when He had already decided to leave—and this was already a Sri Aurobindo from the other side, his matter left behind—but even that photograph we will never have in its purity, as a photographic halo was added to it for those who do not know how to see. Such is the way of the world. They give you a post-mortem halo, but when the halo is there, alive, it is rather “unbearable” ... except for those who know how to melt. And how soft it was to melt there, to forget the small human pygmy there, to remember there the only Memory that is alive in a man. I saw Him only once, but once is like a lifetime. Afterward, one knows what to love means.

At six p.m., He came out of his room, followed by Mother, very small and slender—this Mother, She was very small, with such a fragile air, and yet She was lightning and thun­der and you felt physically exceeded on all sides, as if She were very tall. But that is another story (without “as if”), a long story we want to be absolutely true—and which will be true. No haloes: the pure truth is more marvelous than all our saintly niches. He sat down and She sat at his right on a tiny stool. The meditation beneath the three dragons lasted about forty-five minutes. There were twenty-four of them. “Every one present felt a kind of pressure above his head. The whole atmosphere was surcharged with some electrical energy.... It was certain that a Higher Consciousness had descended on earth,”⁴ wrote Purani. And that was all.

All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour ... Rigid, stone-like, fixed like a hill or statue,

Vast my body feels and upbears the world’s weight; Dire the large descent of the Godhead enters Limbs that are mortal....

All the world is changed to a single oneness.⁵

That is all a poem written on that day alludes to. It was the beginning of the cells’ opening. As for Sri Aurobindo, He simply said: I called you to tell you that from today, I am withdrawing for my sadhana and the Mother will take charge of everyone; it is She to whom you should address your­selves, She who will represent me, She who will do all the work. This was the Ashram’s official founding. From then on, they would see Him no more than three times a year (later four) on darshan days, when each one would file silently past Him to receive that Look. For twenty-four years He would remain in his room, to work things out,⁶ as He said in his untranslatable language, so full of euphe­misms : to work things out, until the day he was brought beneath the huge copper-pod tree with yellow flowers in the Ashram courtyard that Mother called the “Service" tree:

Thou shalt bear all things that all things may change ⁷

When I read this line from Savitri to Mother, She added, even death—that’s why Sri Aurobindo left his body.⁸

Did He really have to die to change death? What does changing death mean? There remain so many mysteries to solve in those two lives that we are before these lines as in prayer.

The Microscopic Discipline

He had said, “She will do all the work," but this is not what Mother said! He had supposedly passed on the respon­sibility to me, but he was standing behind. HE was actually doing everything. I was active, but with absolutely no respon­sibility!⁹ She was tremendously active. She created a whole life from scratch—from the bakery (these people had indeed to be fed), the gardens, the laundry, the mechanical workshop and shoe repair store to the acquisition of build­ings, their repair and maintenance—all scattered about the town (from the very beginning, even before the Ashram was founded, in 1920, Sri Aurobindo had clearly said, My own idea was for our system to grow up in the society, not out of it)¹⁰ with all the problems arising from this sticky mixing with so-called “ordinary” life. It was really a question of taking everybody’s life, at the crudest level, with both men and women together, and trying to make something else out of it without seeming to, in the very conditions of the world. There was no question of an Ashram enclosed within four walls; nothing was more unlike an ashram than that Ashram—hence the difficulty, both in people and in circumstances. Nothing is easier than to be an ascetic who all at once embraces the “spiritual life” and casts off the coat to concentrate on his virtues; you know what to expect—a bowl of rice, pure and simple, rags to wear, a straw mat on the floor (or no mat), and it is marvelous, you cut off everything and enthusiastically discover the joys of freedom. But the moment you are handed everyone’s plate­ful of food, everyone’s clothes, a bit of a house with its garden, like everyone, and even a servant, you begin finding that the food is not salted enough, the clothes are badly pressed, the garden is full of weeds and the servant a head­ache and a liar: it grates and grates on every side. It grates microscopically, meticulously, relentlessly, from morning till night, in every detail. Matter begins to suffocate you. Sri Aurobindo and Mother knew very well what They were doing. Oh, it is quite easy to be a hero! But heroism at the level of ordinary matter, step after step, is unimaginably difficult—everything comes out, spurts up and springs out of every nook and cranny of the subconscient: old heredi­tary, familial, culinary and even patriotic habits—nothing escapes; at every second, at the slightest pretext, there it is, stark naked, ridiculous, petty, obstinate, all its bristles up. It is exhausting. It is endless. At every turn you catch your­self not being what you should be. At every instant you realize that you never do things in the true way. The old reactions seethe and swarm, as does the old way of looking, the old harping routine of the mind, the old vital vibra­tions ; it growls in the depths, it rebels in the depths, not at all happy—it is all of Matter groaning and refusing the Pressure of the Light, or even just the faint mental pressure to do things in a less automatic, unconscious and obscure way. To take a razor and shave while remaining conscious of each gesture is an odious task—it refuses, it sticks, it resists, it does not give a damn. And there you are, push­ing against walls on every side, in all you do, all you think, all you say! It is petty, it is sordid. It is an obtusely rebellious Matter—thousands of years of matter and hundreds of grandfathers clinging to the slightest of gestures.... A Matter conscious at every minute, clear at every minute, exact at every minute? No, it is not at all easy. It is the very characteristic of this physical world to demand an unflagging vigilance, She said in a letter to her son, as early as 1924. The conquest of the material realm allows no lapse, even of short duration; and the weakness of a single instant almost always results in disastrous consequences which seem out of proportion to the sheer importance and duration of this weakness.¹¹ As if one grain of false Matter or a false mate­rial reaction contained the very seed of destruction and death. In the mind, we make speeches; but in Matter, every second pulsates either toward life or toward death. On this level, the choice is very simple and very drastic. Once our eyes open to these microscopic little things, we will be touching a chain of events that range from a false step on the sidewalk to the greatest catastrophes. We will touch the overwhelming complicity of Matter, which makes no dis­tinction between great or small: there is simply life or death, on any scale and all perfectly continuous. It is one or the other. There is no approximation. The evolutionary laboratory was undergoing a severe, microscopic and invisible discipline. But how could Matter ever change, if it were never touched?

She went from one person to another, seeing to every­thing down to each nook and cranny: the quality of the flour, the wall to be repaired, the semicolon, the bowl badly washed, this one’s scratch, that one’s revolt, these quarrels or those stupidities. She repaired, rectified, silently encour­aged or directed Her pure light onto each point, smiled and flooded hearts with a sparkle of mischief or sweetness, or that sudden Vastness opening up like the azure in the depths of Her eyes and driving out everything, sweeping everything away in a cataract of triumphant joy, or this torrential energy which topples obstacles and makes everything brand new—as if, with Her, life could begin again at every second. Mother was constant re-creation. In a flash, you could become like a child again, new, virgin, even if all the old stupidities caught up with you two minutes later; but She began again as tirelessly as you tirelessly began again. All my realisations ... would have remained theoretical, as it were, said Sri Aurobindo. It is the Mother who showed the way to a practical form.¹² Yes, Mother was the bridge to universal Matter. The Shakti in motion. And the laboratory grew and developed. In a letter of 1930 to her son, She wrote, We are at our twenty-first house; the salaried staff of the Ashram (workers and domestic servants) has reached 60 or 65 people, and the number of Ashram members (Sri Aurobindo’s disciples living in Pondicherry) ranges between 85 and 100—5 automobiles, 12 bicycles, 4 sewing machines, a dozen typewriters, many garages, automobile workshops, electrical and building services, tailoring workshops (with European and Indian tailors, embroiderers, etc.), a library and reading room containing several thousand volumes, a photographic service and general stores holding the most varied articles, all imported from France, large flower, veg­etable and fruit gardens, a dairy, a bakery, etc. ...As you can see, it is no small affair. And as I supervise all of it, I can rightfully say that I am busy.¹³ In 1950, there would already be 741 of them. A young French Polytechnician had joined them (the Polytechnique was decidedly pursuing Mother) coming from the Mongolian lamaseries where he had gone in search of the Truth, after leaving everything. He would become one of the most efficient, clearest (and rare) assistants in this laboratory. Sri Aurobindo called him Pavitra, “the Pure one.”¹⁰⁰ He was also an eminent chemist, and it seems that in 1923, in the laboratories of Japan, where he had arrived just after Mother's departure, he discovered an astonishing way to release the atomic energy of most common metals (especially copper and aluminum), which would have made the atomic bomb available to any purse and any madman. He destroyed his notes and left for the Mongolian lamaseries. Through him, science was symboli­cally being converted to its own tomorrow. All the same, he grumbled like the others and did not understand very well, either, the process of this strange yoga in reverse in which you were prevented from reaching “liberation”! Just as he was about to cross the barrier and get out of his body into the expanses above, Mother would pull him back in: "Instead of helping me go beyond, it seems She brought me back into the physical consciousness!” he exclaimed in a conversation with Sri Aurobindo. And Mother replied, Yes. The question is to link both consciousnesses, which means to bring the higher consciousness down into the physical body. Everything must be present, here, in the natural con­sciousness. ¹⁴ We do not know the extent of the profound revolution Sri Aurobindo and Mother have brought to the world.... And in her quietly mischievous way, She added, Every time you try to escape, you will be brought back this way. It was categorical, but Mother also knew how to be perfectly categorical and without approximation. He would be Mother’s right-hand man.

She did not spare herself for a second. “Her body was frail,” one of the Ashram doctors remarked, “food and sleep were medically quite inadequate to cope with her super-abundant vitality.”¹⁵ But Mother and Sri Aurobindo had always been unmedical, needless to say, along with fostering a number of other illegalities. I am an atheist of medicine! She exclaimed, laughing. It was really a kind of "churning” of Matter, as She put it, twenty-two hours out of twenty-four (She slept only two hours a night), continu­ously, day after day, down to the most microscopic details, for thirty-six years, until that day in 1962 when She with­drew ... to do what Sri Aurobindo had been doing. It is in action, in effort, in the advance forward that one must find rest,¹⁶ She would say. It is indeed the very characteristic of the Supermind to unite the opposites: rest and movement, etc. There lies an extraordinary, practical formula for life. There is a certain way of letting the Shakti flow through the cells without friction. Friction is what creates wear and tear, weariness and finally death. There is a clear little cell to create which will be an infinitely more powerful source of energy than all our atomic bombs: an inexhaustible energy, She said. Around one o'clock in the morning, She went to Sri Aurobindo's room for the last time. It was her haven. The rest of the time, She was literally pursued by the disciples and barely found time to breathe or have a few minutes’ rest except... in her bathroom, where at least no one dared to disturb her. What was going on between these two beings?—silence and a gaze. We were in marvel­ous accord, in an identical vibration.... Whenever there was a special force descending, or an opening, or a supramental manifestation, we would know it at the same time, in the same manner. And we didn’t even need to talk about it; we would sometimes exchange a word or two concerning the consequences, the practical effects on the work, but that’s all.

I never had this with anyone except Sri Aurobindo.¹⁷

And life thus went on limpidly until that fateful day in 1949 when Sri Aurobindo told her, One of us must go. In his tranquil, neutral tone, just as one asks what time it is.

What had happened?

Why? How many times since then I have asked myself that question!¹⁸ She was still asking it in 1969, twenty years later. Of course, reasons can be found, can always be given, Mother herself gave some, but ... We have a rather awe­some “but” to delve into, for the answer would perhaps tell us the very fate of the world. A failure? ... Something else? He didn’t succumb, She said. It was truly his choice—he chose to do the work in another way, a way he felt would bring much more rapid results. So we can't say that he “suc­cumbed.” “Succumbed" gives the idea that it was against his will, that it just happened, that it was an accident—it cannot be “succumbed."¹⁹

So what is it?

“Why? How many times I have asked myself that question!”

We can’t both remain upon earth—was one of them needed on the other side? But She, too, went to the other side, so? Where is the other side? What is the “other side”?... Has this side changed? Or is it the other side that has changed?... Unless it is no longer on the "other side”?—an incredible junction?... Something.... A mystery like that of the next earth. We must find the mystery, because to find it may well be to make it exist. Someone who will be able to say “there it is,” and there it will be. The curtain will be pulled open. We will have realized that it was open. But what? How?... We have to see. We have to find it. It must be here, right in front of our eyes, but we do not see it. We are not used to seeing. There is a certain habit to be found, a way to be found.

There is something to be found.

At one o’clock in the morning, her work over, She was at His feet at last, in peace. A sense of total, total security—for thirty years ... Nothing, nothing unfortunate could happen, for he was there.²⁰

Then She would return to her room and find all the flowers that had been brought from the gardens on big trays, and She would sort them, cut them, put the roses in vases according to their colors until two in the morning, and “sleep” until four o’clock—the flowers She would use the next morning to say to the disciples, tirelessly: "Aspiration,” “Flame,” “Transparency,” “Opening,” “Purity,” “Simplicity”....

Flame, flame! So much flame was needed for the Work to succeed—has it succeeded?

Has it succeeded?

It would be necessary to see. It would be necessary to know how to see.

A flame is perhaps what is necessary.

Or else all is lost. But it cannot be lost, for He said, My faith and will are for the NOW. ...I have never had a strong and persistent will for anything to happen in the world ... which did not eventually happen even after delay, defeat or even disaster.²¹ This was in 1946, after the war.

One more disaster?

Or the flame within, the flame that hastens time.

The Perpendicular Section

And what was He doing behind the curtain?

We really know so little about it; whenever the disciples insistently asked Him to explain "his” Supermind (with an indefinable little touch of doubt, mixed with faith and a taste for the miraculous, along with the deep-rooted, secret mistrust of Matter wondering what was going to fall on its head), Sri Aurobindo patiently answered: What's the use? How much would anybody understand? Besides, the present business is to bring down and establish the Supermind, not to explain it. If it establishes itself, it WILL explain itself— if it does not, there is no use explaining it. I have said some things about it in past writings, but without success in en­lightening anybody. So why repeat the endeavour?²² The supermind will explain itself ... As a matter of fact, we do believe that it is irresistibly explaining itself, like a bull­dozer, in every recess of consciousness and every corner of the world—what escaped the disciples in those days has become virtually visible to everyone. A floodgate has been thrown open. We can even understand why Sri Aurobindo was hardly concerned with his written teaching—not until 1939, more than twenty years after he wrote it, did He publish The Life Divine in book form, and only because a publisher from Calcutta had asked Him to do so. “What abnegation!” we might think with our very human con­sciousness, and we wonder whether many geniuses would dispassionately leave their masterpieces unseen for twenty years in a drawer.... But Sri Aurobindo saw so much far­ther, deeper, beyond his own person; that Supermind had to be established: The descent of the supramental means only that the power will be there in the earth-consciousness as a living force just as the thinking mental and higher men­tal are already there.²³ The disciples protested, saying: Who can follow you? Not everyone is capable of doing the yoga and making the necessary effort of purification (sigh). And Sri Aurobindo answered: It is, in fact, to ensure an easier path to others hereafter that we have borne that burden ... it is for them I am putting forth all my efforts to bring down the supramental Force within a measurable time.²⁴ It was not taking place in small books, or even in big ones, neat and gilt-edged; it had to, He wanted it to enter universal Matter and tomorrow’s man to breathe it as naturally as today we breathe (badly) the Mind. But instead of a new idea to be caught in midair, it is a new vibration in matter —what vibration, what is it? Perhaps (surely) it will explain itself, but if we could only catch a few glimpses of the mechanism, in spite of Sri Aurobindo’s "discretion,” that would perhaps hasten the time—for time is running short. Though this is probably our misinterpretation and every­thing proceeds exactly as it should do. Let us just say that we could have the privilege of assisting consciously in the evolutionary transition instead of jumping like a marmoset from one cracking branch to another without understand­ing anything. The details or method of the later stages of the Yoga which go into little known or untrodden regions, I have not made public and I do not at present intend to do so.²⁵ This was in 1935. He never did. He left without telling us what He was doing,²⁶ Mother noted.

There was a reason. But this is for later on.

We can, however, go off in search of Sri Aurobindo’s mystery and gather a few clues in the manner of Arthur Conan Doyle's "dear Watson.” When we come to Mother, it will no longer be Arthur Conan Doyle, but an enterprise akin to deciphering hieroglyphics, mapping a forest, with biology and a dash of Rudyard Kipling and Wells in it, and also a little Mowgli who will never again recover from his rapture ... and something else, which perhaps partakes of love and divination, to wrest out the secret.

We need the secret.

The first clear clue to the mechanism is given to us in a conversation of 1923, when Sri Aurobindo had not yet “withdrawn.” “May we know something about the present state of your Sadhana?” asked Purani, that charming old disciple now no longer with us, to whom we owe the record­ing of these "Evening Talks." In a distinct but low voice, Sri Aurobindo answered: I cannot call it a state, or a condition. It is, rather, a complex movement. I am at present engaged in bringing the Supermind into the physical consciousness, down even to the sub-material. The physical is by nature inert and does not want to be rendered conscient. It offers much greater resistance as it is unwilling to change. One feels as if “digging the earth,” as the Veda says. It is literally digging from Supermind above to Supermind below. The being has become conscious and there is a constant move­ment up and down. The Veda calls it “the two ends"—the head and the tail of the dragon completing and encompass­ing the consciousness. I find that so long as Matter is not Supramentalised, the mental and the vital also cannot be fully Supramentalised. The physical is therefore to be accepted and transformed. ...I am trying to bring the highest layer of the Supermind into the physical consciousness.²⁷ This up and down movement is what is most perceptible to all those who have ever tried their hand at it. Freed from its mental coating and its various fixations, inferior and utili­tarian to varying degrees, the consciousness becomes like a beam of force (Consciousness-Force, said Sri Aurobindo) moving freely through the body, rather like a current with varying intensities and densities. It is like a mass of force in motion. It ascends, descends, directs itself outwards or inwards, on people or events, or inner difficulties to be resolved, rather like cobalt bombs—there are small “bombs” and big “bombs," it all depends on the degree of evolution. But the general tendency, when both of your feet are stuck in this terribly thick and suffocating Matter, is to go up “above,” like a drowning man in search of a little oxygen, into the clearer strata of consciousness, easier to breathe— in other words, the transparent top of the curtain. And you go back and forth, up and down, each time bringing back a little thread of light, so fragile that it keeps breaking, right down to the level of your two feet in Matter. It is rather like blowing oxygen bubbles in the mud. But gradually the thread becomes established, grows stronger and no longer breaks as often. The bridge is built. At first, it is no more than a tiny rent of light across geological layers, whose cross-section resembles what you might see if you followed a very special ray of light thrown across the ocean surface (or a fishbowl), then darker and darker liquid depths (in the Mind), then the first bottom sediments (the Vital), then increasingly thick and heavy mud, down to the bedrock. The deeper you “dig,” as Sri Aurobindo or the Veda says, the purer or more powerful the ray must be. Ultimately, you do not dig into one little body, you dig into the body of the earth. And the rent of light widens, gains ground, sinks inch by inch into deeper layers—“just like that," while you pace back and forth, climb the stairs or clean your tooth glass. It takes place everywhere and all the time, unassumingly. There is nothing more unassuming. But the deeper it reaches, the more it hurts, the more it all begins swarming everywhere like a knot of serpents or the teem­ing of larvae caught in a ray of light. It is the world that swarms. It is the whole world swarming all over and starting little revolutions right and left, without knowing why. It is the little dasyus, as the Vedas call them, thrashing about: the cave dwellers of the depths. They do not like oxygen at all, they do not like the ray of light: they like their mud, and that is that. And everything trying to intrude is a merciless slayer and a dangerous enemy of the public mud’s safety.

Such is the picture, "in cross-section,” as it were.

There comes a moment, however, when “the supramen­tal below,” at the very bottom of the hole, is reached: the same Light as above, the same Power as above, the same transparency, the great Exactitude. It is “the well of honey covered by the rock” the Vedas speak of (II.24.4). The tre­mendous task of opening up the physical cells to the Divine Light,²⁸ as Sri Aurobindo said even before withdrawing in 1926. This is the supremely dangerous moment: things either break or hold out. Will the body hold out? Will the earth hold out?... That is the question. Will it just burst under the “unbearable pressure” or open up to the infiltra­tion and the fresh air—will it adapt? This is what Sri Aurobindo called a concentrated evolution.²⁹

The Resistance

Yes, He was “working things out.”

The other clues will be found in the reactions of the labo­ratory itself and a few fragments let dropped from Sri Aurobindo’s pen.

The laboratory did not so well withstand the manipula­tion, or rather the "pressure.” At first, it is the bigger fish that show up; they are easy to spot and even their long teeth are not that awesome: you know they are teeth. Then all the sticky, flat fry of the deep come bursting to the sur­face, half-asphyxiated and struggling wildly. They keep coming up again and again.... And a strange phenomenon takes place when you come down to that level instead of gazing at the world from the height of your cosmic trapeze: the asphyxiation of the fry is felt like your own asphyxia­tion, you are that, and you struggle with it as if evil could not really be cured except by swallowing it up. It is quite hard, and foul; you are suddenly filled with very unpleas­ant odors and reduced to the size of a dwarf, which makes you think, “What! Is this yoga? Is this me...? ” It is excru­ciating. “Look, I set out seeking cosmic consciousness, not these stinking trifles! ” Yes, but sorrow, the great sorrow of the world is made of a million trifles—sharks are charm­ing, that is not where death is: it lies in those countless “trifles" which fill our daily lives, invisible beneath our pretty words and puffed-up ideals. And the wearisome voice of the Vedic Asuras—titans and demons—keeps droning in your ears: “You won’t succeed, it’s a hopeless endeavor, it's doomed to failure, you’re wasting your time.... Go on, soar into the cosmic consciousness!” On and on, day after day, tirelessly, and night after night without respite, it is there all the time: it is either you or me. Which one will win? Sometimes, you feel like Mr. Seguin's goat,¹⁰⁵ which is doomed to be eaten at dawn, and the horde of malicious devils keeps on whispering in your ear, "You’re going to be devoured, you’re going to ..." It is a hideous and sticky battle, we must admit. We can understand the sages and saints who all scampered off like rabbits into the heaven of consciousness. This is the Subconscious, what Sri Aurobindo calls the “subconscient” (nothing to do with our surface psychologies); in other words, the whole sub-human evolutionary past, all the layers, not only human but ani­mal and vegetal, that have settled at the very bottom of our cells. It is a Herculean labour, Sri Aurobindo notes, for, when one enters there, it is a sort of an unexplored continent. Previous Yogis came down to the vital. If I had been made to see it before, probably I would have been less enthusiastic.³⁰

The disciples were hardly so; after the first wave of enthu­siasm, one focuses on microscopic irritations that keep grating and grating—everything is microscopic. Yet the work was being done for them, that is, they did not need to fight themselves (it was Sri Aurobindo who was doing battle), but only to follow, to adhere, to open themselves. To open oneself means to undergo the experiment, to allow the battle to take place. All the progress Sri Aurobindo made, I made automatically,³¹ Mother remarked. This is the auto­matic law of the Supermind, but for it to work, one must, to some extent, allow the progress to enter—side with the Ray, not with the swarming. It seems they spent their time putting up walls—oh, not up above 1 Above was the pretty consciousness, poeticizing, spiritualizing and making speeches, and full of veneration for the Master. But down below is quite a different matter. A commonplace “matter” you skip over, do not want to see, for you are "above” all that—though not always. So you ask for "experiences”— after all, you have come to the yoga to have “illuminations,” poetry at the tip of your pen, articles for your periodical, inspiration for your book, or stretches of light... for sleep­ing. Thousands and thousands of complaining letters to the Master. And patiently, imperturbably, He answered each one. He tried to make them understand: The pressure, the call is to change in that part of the nature which depends directly on the Inconscient [when the yoga had already gone one degree deeper, from the Subconscient to the Inconscient], the fixed habits, the automatic movements, the mechanical repetitions of the nature, the involuntary reactions to life, all that seems to belong to the fixed character of a man. ...As for experiences, they are all right but the trouble is that they do not seem to change the nature. They only enrich the consciousness.³² This was not easy to accept, even when one had quite understood in the higher parts of one's conscious­ness. Below, it was grumbling, taking offense, clinging to a thousand daily details: no one wanted to let go of his little fry, and might even assert one’s right to darkness and suf­fering. Reading that fabulous correspondence between Sri Aurobindo and his disciples a bit closely, we feel our hearts tighten when realizing all that He must have endured and swallowed, day after day, in terms of trifling questions, hair-splitting pettiness, quarrels, threats of suicide, hunger strikes, illnesses of resistance—everything resisted. And if someone happened to die, they would express surprise that this deceitful Supermind had not immunized them against death. If I want to divinise the human consciousness, wrote Sri Aurobindo to one of his disciples, to bring down the Supramental, the Truth-Consciousness, the Light, the Force into the physical to transform it... the response is repulsion or fear or unwillingness—or a doubt whether it is possible. On one side there is a claim that illness and the rest should be impossible, on the other a violent rejection of the only con­dition under which these things can become impossible.³³ The contradiction of the “only condition” would prevail right to the end. The “automatic law” worked in reverse: Sri Aurobindo automatically received all the obscurity of his disciples. And Mother remarked, with perhaps a touch of sadness, though sadness had always been foreign to her nature: Here, even among the best, among those who would not hesitate to offer their lives unreservedly on a great occa­sion, there is hardly anyone who would be ready to give up his little habits, little preferences, little comforts so the final victory might be won more quickly. Such is the score. Small occasions are very difficult. And we would be very mis­taken to think that the disciples were particularly “bad”— we must even say they were angels compared to those who would follow, when Mother assumed the burden in turn— they were perfectly good and perfectly bad, like everyone else: they were everyone. It was not “disciples” who were there, it was the earth. It was the resistance of the earth, the bad will of the earth, the difficulty of the earth. A per­fectly “representative” group. Not one of the noble lights that can be found elsewhere would have withstood the test without falling into the same stupidity. It is the stupidity of the earth. It is the misery of the earth.

It is “A God’s Labour”:

I have been digging deep and long Mid a horror of filth and mire A bed for the golden river's song, A home for the deathless fire.

I have laboured and suffered in Matter's night
To bring the fire to man;

But the hate of hell and human spite Are my meed since the world began.... My gaping wounds are a thousand and one And the Titan kings assail ...

A voice cried, "Go where none have gone!

Dig deeper, deeper yet
Till thou reach the grim foundation stone
And knock at the keyless gate...."
[I] plunged through the body’s alleys blind
To the nether mysteries.

I have delved through the dumb Earth’s dreadful heart
And heard her black mass’ bell.

I have seen the source whence her agonies part
And the inner reason of hell.³⁴

The Whole Earth

In the West, dark rumblings were rising from the blind depths of Earth. Even before a certain house-painter became Chancellor of the Reich, Sri Aurobindo saw the danger. Throughout his letters can be felt His growing concern. He clearly saw where this mud rose from; it was perceptible in his own flesh, even in Mother's flesh as early as 1925 (was it also mere chance?) when She sustained a nasty attack of phlebitis, complicated by a generalized inflammation: Twice in one night my heart wanted to resign,³⁵ She wrote to her son. 1925 was the year the Nazi Party was formed. The legs are the center of the Subconscient. It was rising up: a perfidious, muddy inflammation. Sri Auro­bindo took so much pain to make his disciples understand the danger of this howling tribe;³⁶ the disciples, in their unyielding hate for the English Invader, naively reasoned that the enemy of our enemy is our friend—even Gandhi would later send an open letter to the Members of the Brit­ish Parliament exhorting them not to take up arms against Hitler and to practice nonviolence...¹⁰² And Sri Aurobindo wrote over and over again: The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces: the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.³⁷ And He categorically added: this would mean the destruction of my work.³⁸ In 1938, when shown a photograph of Chamberlain and Hitler in Munich, He said that Chamberlain looked like a fly before a spider, on the point of being caught.³⁹ The struggle was slowly getting closer, more merciless, in that silent room upstairs. "So, when will this supramental descent take place?" they all kept asking—this descent akin to a myth they reluctantly believed in and whose slowness disconcerted them. “When will it take place? Is it for now? Is it possible?" Yet the first clues are clear, already in 1925, as if the whole picture were before Him: I would not attempt it if it were not possible.... It all depends upon things outside myself, He answered. It is to be seen whether the physical plane is ready to receive the Light....⁴⁰ Of course, it is one and the same plane! How could Sri Aurobindo bring that Ray "down” into his own body without bringing it down into the whole body? The harder He tried to bring it down into Himself, the more everything thrashed about and struggled everywhere, in the disciples as it did east of the Rhine: I find, He went on, that the more the Light and Power are coming down the greater is the resistance. You yourself [He was addressing a dis­ciple] can see that there is something pressing down. You can also see that there is the tremendous resistance.⁴¹ "Does this mean,” asked the disciple, “that the atmosphere necessary for the Supermind to descend into the physical plane has to be created?” That is the whole attempt. You OUGHT TO HELP IN IT BY CREATING THE NECESSARY CONDITION, if you want it to be done this time.⁴²

The Pressure grew, the Resistance grew, and so did the number of disciples: there were 172 of them in 1938. And Sri Aurobindo fully understood the problem; not once did He protest against the aberrations of this one or that one— He kept on writing tirelessly and patiently to help them understand, to send the force or dissolve the difficulty. He worked on each one as on a plot of earth, and could one plot of earth be cut out on the pretext that it was not very pleasant? It is the whole earth that would have to be cut out! "Why not 'dismiss' the whole staff and get it done quickly?" a disciple innocently asked him, since the “staff" resisted. I am not Hitler, Sri Aurobindo wrote back. Things cannot be done like that. You might just as well ask the Mother and myself to isolate ourselves in the Himalayas. ...⁴³ He took in all, understood all, only saying discreetly, "You ought to help. ...’’I believe in a certain amount of freedom, freedom to find out things for oneself in one’s own way, free­dom to commit blunders even. Nature leads us through various errors and eccentricities. When Nature created the human being with all its possibilities for good or ill, she knew very well what she was about.⁴⁴ We can understand noth­ing about Sri Aurobindo s immensity unless we understand this totality of vision He had in which nothing was omitted, neglected or condemned; everything was part of the work, the “evil” as well as the “good,” and ultimately nothing was good and nothing was ill—it was something else that had to be instilled into this substance wrapped in a false good and a false evil. To Him, all the disciples were good, the whole earth was good; it was his field of work, that is all. At the risk of sounding paradoxical, we might say that they helped through their difficulties. There were also those who quietly washed dishes in a corner. Those were really the "Ashram.” “But why don’t you and Mother, at first, live fully in this Supramental—for you its very easy; afterwards it could radiate throughout the world?” They did not grasp the problem, they could not see it in its totality, and Sri Aurobindo kept on trying to explain so clearly: If we had lived physically in the Supermind from the beginning nobody could have been able to approach us nor could any Sadhana have been done. There could have been no hope of contact between ourselves and the earth and men. Even as it is, Mother has to come down towards the lower consciousness j of the Sadhaks [disciples] instead of keeping always in her i own, otherwise they begin to say, “How far away, how severe j you were; you do not love me ... etc. ”⁴⁵ Already, with a few ; drops of that Ray, they found the Pressure “unbearable.” So j what about the whole cataract? Already the earth was grat- j ing. What would have been the point of being radiant and divine, all alone in an upstairs room? All that mud had ; indeed to be taken in. The whole earth had to be taken in. ! This is the whole problem; and it would be Mother's j problem. If you are not patient enough to wait for the rest, 1 you lose contact and become completely “unbearable.” 3 Some lights are blinding for the little fry, some forces are 3 unbearable for the uncleansed human substance—they J dissolve it. Mother and Sri Aurobindo were not about to dissolve the world at one radiant Supramental stroke. My Sadhana was not done for myself but for the earth­-consciousness. ⁴⁶

They went on digging and digging, purifying.

And the Pressure went on growing.

An Honest Work

You do not realise that I have to spend 12 hours over the ordinary correspondence, numerous reports, etc. I work 3 hours in the afternoon and the whole night up to 6 in the morning over this.⁴⁷ This was in 1933. Tens of thousands of letters. An inconceivable labor. And each one posed the same questions again and again, their little problems, their big problems, their unique problem. Sri Aurobindo tire­lessly answered through this massive silence that let the Force flow; He pushed nothing aside, nothing was too small or too silly. Through each person and each letter, He worked on a human type, a category of consciousness, a particular specimen of difficulty or resistance. The cells of his body absorbed a certain type of obscurity and “worked things out.” And if by chance He did not reply quickly enough, they became impatient: "What has happened to my typescript? Hibernating?" Because He also had to take care of the disciples’ poetry, the disciples' literature, and Goodness knows what. Even their colds. My dear sir, Sri Aurobindo replied, if you saw me nowadays with my nose to paper from afternoon to morning, deciphering, deciphering, writing, writing, writing, even the rocky heart of a disciple would be touched and you would not talk about typescripts and hibernation. I have given up (for the present at least) the attempt to minimise the cataract of correspondence.⁴⁸ This was in 1936. When people write four letters a day in small hand—running to some 10 pages without a gap anywhere and one gets 20 letters in the afternoon and forty at night (of course not all are like that, but still!) it becomes a little too too.⁴⁹ But it would go on ... until He became blind. And even after that, He would go on dictating and dictating....

And they would reproach him for living “up there” in his supramental dream while the poor humans had to face the "hard realities of life”: But what strange ideas again! He patiently replied, that I was born with a supramental tem­perament and that I know nothing of hard realities! Good God! My whole life has been a struggle with hard realities, from hardships, starvation in England and constant dangers and fierce difficulties [during the revolution] to the far greater difficulties continually cropping up here in Pondicherry, external and internal. My life has been a battle from its early years and is still a battle: the fact that I wage it now from a room upstairs and by spiritual means ... makes no differ­ence. But, of course, as we have not been shouting about these things, it is natural, I suppose, for others to think that I am living in an august, glamourous, lotus-eating dream­land where no hard facts of life or Nature present themselves. But what an illusion all the same!⁵⁰ Or else they would reproach him for being an "Avatar," some god clothed in a body who “pretends” to suffer like humans but knows nothing of their woes—“sham,” one of them would literally say. You think then that in me (I don’t bring in the Mother) there was never any doubt or despair, no attacks of that kind. I have borne every attack which human beings have borne, otherwise I would be unable to assure anybody “This too can be conquered. ” I had to work on each problem and on each conscious plane to solve or to transform and in each I had to take the blessed conditions as they were and do honest work without resorting to miracles.⁵¹

Then, one day in 1942, when He was not yet completely blind, He let a letter slip out (perhaps) in which He tried to apologize for having momentarily interrupted the cor­respondence because of the war and the work on the war: / had to establish the rule [of not writing] not out of personal preference or likes or dislikes, but because the correspon­dence occupied the greater part of my time and energies and there was a danger of my REAL WORK remaining neglected or undone if I did not change my course and devote myself to it, while the actual results of the outer activity [i.e., the cor­respondence] were very small—it cannot be said that it resulted in the Ashram making a great spiritual progress.... This, too, is a reckoning. Those mountains of correspon­dence—what for? And He added, with that touch of serene tenderness: All the same I have broken my rule, and broken it for you alone: I do not see how that can be interpreted as a want of love and a hard granite indifference.⁵² This was in 1942. Surrounded by maps, reports from all the war fronts, day and night, He was in the thick of his battle against Nazism. Then He would let himself be overwhelmed again by the correspondence, until He remarked once more to the one who took the dictation: “My work remains undone.” This was in 1945. “He only made the remark,” his secretary notes, "and continued until... 1949.”⁵³ Seventeen years of correspondence.

His real work ...

But could He reject a single one of those letters without rejecting something of the earth? We might say, “At least the disciples could have...." But it is not a question of disciples! Could the earth have been otherwise? Sri Auro­bindo assumed “the blessed conditions as they were” and He worked on them ... “honestly.” But just one letter less, one little letter spared.... Who ever thought of it?

Every atom, He said.

All the same, the disciples quite resembled a pack of devouring wolves.

His real work ... He did it while walking for hours after his correspondence, until He could no longer walk, either. He pounded Matter with his footsteps—while repeating what silent Word, what open sesame? The first time his faithful bodyguard came to the Guest House, he noted a strange groove running across the veranda and the rooms, “a quarter of an inch” deep: they were the footprints of Sri Aurobindo. Never again shall we see those footprints either, in the corridor leading to his Ashram room—this high- ceilinged corridor with ultramarine tiles, where one hears something akin to the vibration of Luxor—one day, they brought a pot of black glue and laid a superb linoleum over them. Oh, we could get indignant or sad, but who among us does not have his own barbaric hinterlands—only it is another kind of barbarism which we fail to see because it is not like our neighbor’s. Indeed, this complicity with Barbarism is what should be pounded on and on in every detail—Barbarism is microscopic! It is there every minute. And when He could no longer pound with his footsteps, He remained sitting in that big, rather faded green armchair, His eyes wide open, or half-closed, for hours and hours, gazing at the wall in front of Him.... until those eyes, too, closed, one 5th of December, 1950.

A wall.

The Landmarks

Of his real work, we have a few sparse clues, unearthed here and there between two falls of the cataract: a mixture of advance and retreat, cries of victory followed by a slow underground labor—the whole story of the earth is there, simple, stark, in a few lines, laconically poignant:

March 1924

The earth-law has to be changed and a new atmos­phere has to be created. The question is not merely to have knowledge, power etc., but to bring it down; the whole difficulty is to make it flow down.⁵⁴

August 1925

I find that the more the Light and Power are coming down, the greater is the resistance.⁵⁵

August 1932

I know that the supramental Descent is inevi­table—I have faith in view of my experience that the time can be and should be now and not in a later stage.... But even if I knew it to be for a later time, I would not swerve from my path or be dis­couraged or flag in my labour. Formerly I might have been, but not NOW—after all the path I have traversed.... It is now, in this life, that I insist on it and not in another or in the hereafter.⁵⁶

Nov. 1933

No, the supramental has not descended into my body or into Matter—it is only at the point where such a descent has become not only possible but inevitable.⁵⁷

Sept. 1934

The supramental Force is descending, but it has not yet taken possession of the body or of matter.⁵⁸

Feb.1935

Let all men jeer at me if they will or all Hell fall upon me if it will for my presumption,—I go on till I conquer or perish.⁵⁹

April 1935

I have no intention of achieving the Supermind for myself only.... My supramentalisation is only a key for opening the gates of the supramental to the earth-consciousness.⁶⁰

May 1935

(Disciple): It seems another victory has been won by you. Some people saw red-crimson lights around the Mother... (Sri Aurobindo): But after­wards all the mud arose and it stopped.... As it is, there is the Revolt of the Subconscient.⁶¹

August 1935

Now I have got the hang of the whole hanged thing—like a very Einstein I have got the math­ematical formula of the whole affair (unintelli­gible as in his own case to anybody but myself) and am working it out figure by figure.⁶²

August 1935

As for people (the disciples), no! They are not floating in the supramental—some are floating in the higher mind, others, rushing up into it and flopping down into the subconscient alterna­tively, are swinging from heaven into hell and back into heaven, again back into hell ad infini­tum, some are sticking fast contentedly or discon­tentedly in the mud, some are sitting in the mud and dreaming dreams and seeing visions, some have their legs in the mud and their head in the heavens etc., etc., an infinity of combinations, while many are simply nowhere.⁶³

Nov. 1935

The tail of the Supermind is descending, descen­ding. ... It is only the tail at present, but where the tail can pass, the rest will follow.... My formula is working out rapidly.... It is my private and particular descent.... The attempt to bring a great general descent having only produced a great ascent of subconscient mud, I had given up that.⁶⁴

Sept. 1938

Munich

Nov. 24, 1938

Sri Aurobindo seriously breaks his right leg above the knee.

Dec. 1938

(Disciple): When will it descend?
(Sri Aurobindo): How can it descend? The nearer it comes, the greater becomes the resistance to it.
(Disciple): Have you realised the Supermind?
(Sri Aurobindo): I know what the Supermind is. And the physical being has flashes and glimpses of it.... I am not satisfied with only a part of the Super­mind in the physical consciousness. I want to bring down the whole mass of it, pure, and that is an extremely difficult business.⁶⁵

January 1939

Everything looked all right and it appeared as if I were going on well with the work, then the accident came [the fracture]. It indicated that it is when the subconscient is changed that the power of Truth can be embodied; then it can be spread in wave after wave in humanity.⁶⁶

Sept. 1939

The war.

August 1945

I am ... personally, near the goal.⁶⁷

April 9, 1947

... The lightening of the heavy resistance of the Inconscient.⁶⁸

Aug. 15, 1947

Independence of India.

July 1948

Things are bad, are growing worse and may, at any time grow worst or worse than the worst if that is possible—and anything ... seems possible in the present perturbed world.... All that was necessary because certain possibilities had to emerge and be got rid of if a new and better world was at all to come into being; it would not have done to postpone them for a later time.... The new world whose coming we envisage is not made of the same texture as the old and different only in pattern.... It must come by other means—from within and not from without.⁶⁹

1949

First Russian atomic explosion.

Mao Tse-Tung proclaims the People’s Republic of China.

August 1949

(A note by Sri Aurobindo's secretary): Practically all the correspondence came to an abrupt halt, only the work on Savitri proceeded steadily. I wonder if he had taken the decision to leave the body and was therefore in a hurry to finish his epic in time.⁷⁰

Undated

It is only divine Love which can bear the burden I have to bear.⁷¹

20: He and She

This Time?

We would very much have liked to decipher this “math­ematical formula”.... Now a lot of things have become more comprehensible in the “body's alleys blind.” All the same, there remains a Secret. Sometimes it feels almost palpable, it is so simple, almost transparent, unexpected ... and then it eludes us like a breeze. The world’s future depends on a mere trifle. The more transparent it is, the more mysterious. That Secret is to be found.

“Personally,” He was near the goal. I saw him supramental on his bed, Mother said. Meanwhile, they read the newspa­pers in His room and played “pranks" behind his back¹— until the day Mother had the piles of newspapers removed. He was near the goal, but what about the others, the rest? What good is it to be supramental all alone? The others were busy rebuilding their petty world, creating U.N.'s and making plans: the nightmare was over—not for Them. They knew. They saw all that was still to emerge: Certain possibilities had to emerge and be got rid of, if a new and better world was at all to come into being.² This was in 1948. The long, slow riddance, the slow upsurge from the depths into every corner, every country, every consciousness, the difficult catharsis of the Subconscient before the Power-of- Truth can spread “wave after wave.” It was all before Him, as He sat in that pale green armchair with little white arabesques, his eyes half-closed or wide open, while they played. He gazed at the wall. There was a time when Hitler was victorious everywhere and it seemed that a black yoke of the Asura [the Devil] would be imposed on the whole world; but where is Hitler now and where is his rule? Berlin and Nuremberg have marked the end of that dreadful chapter in human history.... But Sri Aurobindo added: Other black­nesses threaten to overshadow or even engulf mankind.... This was in 1946—after Hitler! And yet always this far- reaching, serene and unshaken vision: but they too will end as that nightmare has ended.³ Would He hold on till then? The fracture of his right leg was already like a knell. And they kept on playing, sending letters upon letters, and He dictated on and on.... He “lightened the Inconscient.” She too saw, and with that marvelous, crystalline simplicity— like a pure mountain spring—She said to the children: We got rid of Hitler because he had a whole nation and a physi­cal power behind him, and had he succeeded, it would have been disastrous for humanity; but we had no illusions.... The death of one or the other [Stalin or Hitler] does not matter, it does not make much difference—the thing goes off elsewhere. It is just a form. It is as if you did something very bad while wearing a certain shirt, then you throw your shirt away and say, "Now I won’t do anything bad anymore”—you just continue with another shirt on!⁴ It continues with an­other shirt. Death is not a solution! How clearly They saw the invisible transmigration of the mortal disease—until it is struck at the very root. The terrestrial root. He gazed at that in his armchair, pushing against the Wall, pushing until his last breath.

A blank dark wall, And behind it

Heaven.⁵

Something has to be uprooted from the terrestrial con­sciousness, some sinister mystery has to be “worked out,’ and how childish we are, there outside, with our little panaceas and diplomatic miracles ... like those children playing around His armchair. What will it take for us to understand that our part of mystery is right here, within our body, as is our part of the victory or the defeat? Death is so tiny, death is at every moment. The miracle of the earth may well be in our hands. He looked, kept on digging and digging, and the deeper He dug, the more the mud surged up. You ought to help....

Till the day He saw—what? One of us must go, we can’t both remain upon earth. She reacted violently, like a wounded lioness. I remember clearly, so clearly—I still see the room and everything, how He was, how He told me, “We can’t both remain upon earth.” That's all.⁶ Not one word more. This was in 1949, perhaps at the beginning of the year, a little less than two years before his departure. I reacted violently, I concentrated all my power to prevent him from going, and it made him suffer greatly, because He WANTED to go, He had decided—“He": the Supreme Lord had decided that He would go.⁷ Why? How many times since then have I asked myself that question? “I am ready, I’ll go,⁸ and She had her son come, made arrangements. “No, it can’t be you, because you alone can do the material thing." And that was all. He said nothing more. He forbade me to leave my body, that’s all. “It's absolutely forbidden, he said, you can’t, you must remain.” She insisted, fought—who knows Mother’s hurricane?— but Sri Aurobindo was stronger than hurricanes, He swal­lowed all the hurricanes into his infinity: No, you can’t go, your body is better than mine, you can undergo the transfor­mation better than I can do.⁹ To undergo.... to endure all the little wars within one’s body, day after day, all the little Vietnams that do not want to die and grow back right and left, because we do not want to go and uproot them in the minuscule death on our own doorstep while we gape at the moon and let twenty thoughts gallop through us—there are minuscule Mongol hordes carrying out their little devasta­tion, their sly, mortal invasion day after day, and "it is not important” and we pass by them—we live completely beside the Mystery ... yet we are in the midst of the Mystery. Your body is indispensable for the work. Without your body, the Work cannot be done. And nothing more was said, the hur­ricane had passed, life seemed to go on as if nothing had happened; Mother did not believe it was possible, She did not want to believe it.

And the illness slowly manifested. In 1948, some signs of diabetes had appeared—within a few months, He had cleared it up, got rid of the illness. Sri Aurobindo could not be ill, nothing could enter that body which held cyclones at bay, it was too pure—the cell, there, was pure. As early as 1924 (and even more so twenty-five years later), He said that only three things could bring about his death: 1) Vio­lent surprise and accident. 2) Action of age. 3) My own choice, finding it not possible to do it this time, or by something shown to me which would prove it is not possible this time.¹⁰ Did He find that it was "not possible to do it this time?" No, nobody can believe that, for it would mean losing faith in the world’s future, and we have had enough of putting things off indefinitely—He himself so often said: this time ... this time.... hie et nunc. We have had enough of delayed heav­ens. What happened? Has the battle been lost? But He himself said that the "other blacknesses” would vanish like Hitler’s nightmare. And Mother stayed on. And Mother, too, left. And I am here struggling with this mystery as though something depended on the comprehension of one man. If we understood the mystery, it would be all done. One day, twelve years before She left, Mother abruptly stopped in the doorway, turned back toward me with those diamond eyes, and, as if She were staring into the eyes of Destiny, in an impassive and inflexible tone, with that Authority, as though She were speaking with the very voice of the Lord, She told me (we had been speaking of death), In any case, one thing: never forget that what we have to do, we shall do, and we shall do it together, because we have to do it together, That is all—like this, like that, in this way, in that way, it has no importance. But that is the true fact.¹¹ We shall do it together, we shall find the Secret together ... this way or that.

But now, it is “this way" and “in this manner.”

And the Secret remains unresolved.

Will we know it at the end?

We are entering this book as if traversing death.

The Infinitesimal Death

The symptoms reappeared in 1949. He simply said, Tell Mother. And He continued his work. He didn’t want us to know that He was doing it deliberately; he knew that if for a single moment I knew He was doing it deliberately, I would

have reacted with such a violence that He would not have been able to leave. And He did this. ...He bore it all as if it were some unconsciousness, an ordinary “illness, ” simply to keep us from knowing..., And He knew that I had the power to leave my body at will. So He didn’t say a thing—He didn’t say a thing right to the very last minute.¹² She did not want to believe it. Almost ferociously, She carried on her activi­ties which had grown heavier since the war with the arrival of the first children from Calcutta fleeing the Japanese bombs: the Ashram was opening up to the outside. 123 children in 1950. She had to reorganize everything, create a school, train teachers and physical-education instructors, check the wave of discontent among the old disciples who looked on this hardly “yogic” youth and all those frivolous gymnastic exercises with reproach or incomprehension.... She went through it all with a heavy heart, a mute, secret anguish, and whenever She could steal a minute, She flew to His room only to find Him always surrounded by people —the small, privileged troop that had formed around Him since the fracture of His leg and His slowly advancing blindness. There was always someone between us, She remarked years later with a touch of sadness, as though the wound were still there. Once, only once, did She sit at His table: 1 had no time to eat today.... Sri Aurobindo smiled. “This was the first and the last time we saw them taking food together,”¹³ notes the faithful Champaklal. It was in August 1950, three months before Sri Aurobindo's depar­ture. She would bring Him a glass of fruit juice, a bowl of soup, the rare food He could take ... comb His long, white hair like slightly golden silk. Sometimes, She even went out of Her body in the midst of a gesture, the comb in Her hand, while the others bantered behind Her: I have eyes in the back of my head.,¹⁴ She told them, simply. She was con­stantly late, stopped a thousand times on Her way by one or another, the countless microscopic difficulties that had to be disentangled one by one, patiently, in each little consciousness, each little detail of Matter—the countless traps of Matter that cause an accident, a revolt or a sudden devastation only because that little speck has been over­looked —the very same traps He was disentangling, tire­lessly clearing up, letter after letter. It was a sly, invasive, minuscule horde, like an onslaught of death disguised as a thousand little cockroaches. We do not know what death is; we believe in the great blows of Destiny, but we do not see the thousand little blows that are death. This infinitesi­mal death that He kept uprooting and uprooting, and which kept growing back again and again. Sometimes, He let a cry slip out: I feel a great longing that the Sadhaks should be free of all these strifes and doubts; for so long as the present state of things continues with fires of this kind raging all around and the atmosphere in a turmoil, the work I am trying to do will always remain under the stroke of jeopardy and I do not know how the descent I am labouring for is to fulfil itself In fact, the Mother and I have to give nine-tenths of our energy to smoothing down things, to keeping the Sadhaks tolerably contented etc.... One-tenth and in the Mother’s case not even that can go to the real work; it is not enough.¹⁵ This "real work” never done, constantly obstructed by their Lilliputian stupidities. This was in 1934, but it would be the same sixteen years later. We can put it this way: the world was not ready. But to tell the truth, it was the totality of things around him that was not ready. So when He saw this (I only understood this afterwards), He saw that it would go much faster if He were not there. And He was absolutely right—it was true.¹⁶ Sometimes, these words seem to make sense. The people around him, those little symbols of the world at large, would not have been able to withstand the “charge,” in the electrical sense. All the little cockroaches inside would have exploded, bringing about the “great” death outside. The minuscule, implacable under­ground horde had to emerge into the broad daylight of the world and swarm visibly everywhere, driven out of its com­fortable retreat, so the Current could spread wave after wave without breaking the very carriers of this swarming horde. Sri Aurobindo was the opposite of destruction— except as regards myths. He could not accelerate things without wreaking too much havoc around Him, so He left. He left to wreak the havoc underground.

On dim confines where Life and Matter meet ...a weird and pigmy world ...
Where this unhappy magic had its source.¹⁷

But that is another story, and perhaps it is not the whole story.

So they kept on reading their newspapers, chit-chatting, playing their innocent little pranks in corners, putting a thousand idle questions to Him whenever He emerged from His long, motionless hours of gazing at the Wall, or perhaps at those “dim confines” of Life and Matter. "All that was visible to our naked eyes,” His secretary notes, “was that he sat silently ... in the capacious armchair, with his eyes wide open just as any other person would. Only he passed hours and hours thus, changing his position at times and making himself comfortable; the eyes moving a little, and though usually gazing at the wall in front, never fixed ... at any particular point. Sometimes the face would beam with a bright smile without any apparent reason, much to our amusement, as a child smiles in sleep. Only it was a waking sleep, for as we passed across the room, there was a dim recognition of our shadow-like movements [Oh, how true!] Occasionally he would look towards the door ... when he heard some sound which might indicate the Mother’s coming”.... He was always waiting for Mother. No, this was not sleep or even a "waking sleep”—they had no idea of what it was, they understood nothing whatsoever. "When he wanted something, his voice seemed to come from a distant cave; rarely we would find him plunged within, with his eyes closed.”¹⁸ And He dictated His end­less letters, always tinged with those little touches of humor, like the only oxygen in that sticky morass. Sometimes, we think it a grace that He broke His leg, for it allowed Him to stop for a while the flood of correspondence and devote Himself to revising The Life Divine, which a publisher from Calcutta had asked for. It was the first time in twenty-five years that He had enough time to revise His work. Had He been given the time, He would also have corrected and completed the never-finished The Synthesis of Yoga, and we would certainly have found there some glimpses of his “mathematical formula,” but Sri Aurobindo’s correspon­dents decided otherwise—perhaps He considered it more important to deal with those little deaths than to write out His formula ... which will explain itself, as He said, if it is implemented. Nevertheless, He would dictate The Supra­mental Manifestation upon Earth because Mother had asked him for some articles for the Bulletin of Physical Education, which She intended for the Ashram children. Then, He would let himself be devoured again by the correspondence until that day in 1949 when He remarked for the fourth time: My real work remains undone (first in 1934, then 1942, then 1945)—and finally a fifth time, in October, 1950, two months before He left—after the correspondence and the other things had again sneaked through the doors (the disciples’ literary articles, poems, etc.). This time, He would categorically say: I am finding no time for my real work.... Take up SAVITRI, I want to finish it soon,¹⁹ to the great amaze­ment of His secretary, who had never seen Sri Aurobindo in a hurry. He did not understand. No one understood.

He had sixty more days to live.

Savitri

To this day, a sort of solid eternity seems to reign in that high-ceilinged room with stucco walls, as if the very walls, the big empty bed, even the faded carpet with its sea-blue flowers on a jade background had retained His silence. The clock is stopped at 1:26 a.m. There is also a big calendar stopped on December, 5. A drapery sways gently in the east wind between His room and the bathroom: two silver dragons on bluish silk. Everything is so perfectly still, so perfectly sure, as if it were the sure place in the world. One can stay there while the long centuries pass like a gentle breeze over wheatfields. There is a depth of sweetness behind this peace, like the depths in His half-closed, golden- brown eyes, with some imperceptible, somewhat tender smile in the left eye, if one looks behind the creases long enough. He is there. His two hands are resting on the arms of the green chair; His torso is bare, wide, bright, plump like a little child’s, sometimes half-covered with a white dhoti that He throws back over His left shoulder. His feet are bare on the carpet. He dictates while looking straight ahead, to what future? His voice is "low, measured, quiet”— almost neutral, with a clear English accent. The words flow regularly, like a long, smooth river opening into the ocean, “some 400 to 500 lines in succession.”¹⁰⁰ This is Savitri. Savitri, which He has been correcting, revising and expand­ing for more than fifty years. ¹⁰¹ His epic, his message. Some twenty-three thousand eight hundred and fourteen lines. The story of Satyavan, the son of King Dyumathsena, doomed by Fate to a premature death, and of Savitri, the Princess of the Sun, who goes down into death to reconquer her Lover. The passion of a single woman in its dreadful silence and strength pitted against Death,²⁰ He said in a letter to His brother. The Story of Mother and Sri Aurobindo. It is the legend of the Mahabharata, Orpheus and Eurydice reversed, but with all the knowledge of the invisible worlds and a fabulous geography of what people call “death.” He corrects The Book of Fate, the last He would revise. Twenty days later, He would be gone. And Mother would begin the slow conquest. Savitri is the epic of the victory over death, She said. He had to die, but why? His body is a little like millions of bodies that die—Satyavan is the soul of the earth bound to death—it is the earth dying again and again. Will someone go down into death to wrest the earth from its fate? Will someone find the key, the means to get there and come back, and bring Satyavan back to the light of an immortal day? Will the earth be freed from death?

There's EVERYTHING in it. The realism of it is astounding, She said. An exact description, step by step, paragraph by para­graph, page by page.... It’s a miraculous book.²¹ All the keys may be there, the "mathematical formula,” for those who know how to read. Tiny little keys at the corner of a para­graph. They must be sought out, they must be unearthed. It is not every day that the earth has the opportunity to learn its own secret. He dictated without a pause, imper­turbably, His eyes fixed on the stucco wall. He saw “the end of Death,"²² over there, the sun-eyed children of a marvellous dawn²³ rising behind the ruins of the Iron Age.

Even should a hostile force cling to its reign And claim its right’s perpetual sovereignty And man refuse his high spiritual fate, Yet shall the secret Truth in things prevail... And Matter shall reveal the Spirit’s face.²⁴

Was the "secret Truth in things” set in motion, that auto­matic supermind in Matter’s depths? Or was it to occur soon, through this plunge of conscious spirit into Matter's night?

He looked at coming Fate. He looked at Mother, always in a hurry, always late, assailed by the mob. She came to lay a garland of jasmine on His bed around one o'clock in the morning. They did not speak. Only that shared look. There was a cyclone of repressed pain within Her, a fierce refusal to accept. She looked at Him like a lioness, Her heart ablaze, She who, thirty-six years earlier, had said: “He whom we saw yesterday is on earth... ,”²⁵ “It is not enough to triumph in the inner worlds, we must triumph right down to the most material worlds....” ²⁶ Right down to death. “O Lord, ignorance must be vanquished, illusion must be dispelled; this sorrowful universe must emerge from its dreadful nightmare, cease its frightening dream... ”²⁷ She looked at the whole earth in that body. “How much greater a splendor than all that have gone before, how marvelous a glory and light would be needed to draw these beings out of the horrible aberration!...”²⁸ She had said that exactly one month before meeting Him—that light could not leave. Or what? “To be a vast mantle of love enveloping the whole earth, entering all hearts....”²⁹ She enveloped Him in her love, She enveloped this whole earth that keeps on dying and dying—She did not want death, for anyone in the world. Savitri is the greatest love poem—like Mother, like Sri Aurobindo—it is the refusal of death. Until Her ninety-fifth year, She would hew Her way through death, and what is She doing now? Will She bring back Satyavan? Or is the battle lost and the earth forever doomed to die?

What happened in 1973? What happened in 1950?

He added the last punctuation marks, attended to each detail to the very end—it was his way of instilling truth into Matter. If truth does not begin with a semicolon, where does it begin? If it would never enter Matter—where could it get in? “Every word must be the mot juste, every line perfect,” His secretary commented, “even every sign of punctuation flawless. One preposition was changed five times; to change a punctuation sign one had sometimes to read a whole section.”³⁰ Once the work was over, He walked a little while the tapestry with the silver dragons swayed gently in the breeze. It was quiet, powerful like Luxor, peaceful like Himalayas without end in the evenings soft­ness. No one will ever know what that Peace was. "Be it eating, drinking, walking or talking—He did it always in a slow and measured rhythm, giving the impression that every movement was conscious and consecrated."³¹ And sometimes He lay down on his bed, his arms crossed beneath his head, his gaze on the ceiling, and He smiled “like a child in sleep.” Until the day when The Book of Fate was completed at last: Ah, it is finished? He asked with a little glimmer of a smile in that left eye (it is strange how His right eye seemed as if fixed forever upon eternity). What remains now? “The Book of Death and The Epilogue, ” his secretary answered. Oh, that? We shall see about that later on....

Later on was at the door. It was November 10.

Twenty-five days left.

The Descent into Death

Then the “illness” began to gallop. Like Mother, He could have left his body by a simple act of will: draw the breath above and leave the garment. He wore it till the very end, with all the suffering and even the medical tortures, “with­out resorting to miracles”—honest work. “Won’t you use your force to cure yourself?” his secretary asked him. No, He replied in his quiet, neutral, indisputable voice. They could not believe their ears, they were dumbfounded. They repeated the question a second time: “But why?” Can’t explain, you won’t understand. Mother would tell me later, Each time I came in his room, I saw him pulling down the supramental light. She stood there, fierce, immobile, with­out a quiver of apparent emotion. And the others around them. “We were never alone.” He kept on pulling that Light down. What desperate connection with this rebellious earth, this earth He loved, was He attempting till the end,

He who said in Savitri:

Thy servitudes on earth are greater, king,
Than all the glorious liberties of heaven.³²

We do not really know what He was doing, perhaps we do not realize the enormity this accepted death represents in a body whose every cell, every atom was conscious—a conscious death. A conscious descent into a coffin. Con­scious—meaning that every cell, every atom, all that formed that majesty of Sri Aurobindo, entered death with eyes wide open. Who can know what this means?... One day, as a mere beginner, I had the living experience of entering there, while still linked to my body by a thread: entering there is unthinkable. There is no thought there. There is just an abyss of black basalt, like a formidable, asphyxiat­ing negation—the dreadful and naked NO in the depths of the world. The atrocious refusal strangling all that comes into contact with it. A kind of naked hatred of life. Some­thing that does not pardon Life for being, and that strives to annihilate everything within its stony blackness. A sti­fling, airless abyss of basalt. It is perhaps this No, this root, this "grim foundation stone” that He wanted to confront with all the light of his conscious cells. To enter there wholly, consciously. It is terrifying.

The stubborn mute rejection in Life's depths, The ignorant No in the origin of things.³³

That great No hiding a thousand times behind all the little stumblings, the little sufferings, the little falsehoods in our gestures, our eyes or our bodies, the thousand roots of death that await the great Death as a final relief from this misery of being and living—that will for death in the depths because we have not found real life! Because we have not lived—life does not live, life is not yet life! It is only death moving about. Death in a hurry to be done with all this pain of being, of never being what one should be, never being what one is.... And behind—behind, at the bottom, beneath that rock, that falsehood, that rebellious no—there is something else biding its time. Yes, the "well of honey beneath the rock,” the Life that is yet to be. This is what the Supermind is: real life. The life that breathes without death. The life that really is, without a shadow. The Truth, simply —living. There, beneath that rock. There, beneath the thou­sand little no’s of a thousand footsteps that come and go, climb up and down, without knowing why, without even wanting Life. An automatism of pain. Something that clings to death. And if any pressure is applied to it, one feels as if wholly uprooted—three drops of that Ray, and all the little mud here and there begins to revolt and protest: tens of thousands of letters. What dark and desperate plunge was He about to take? And why this No, why all that? What suddenly went wrong in that Life?... Sri Aurobindo will never tell us his mystery; no one ever asked Him the real question. But She is there, fierce, standing beside him— She never accepts defeat. For another twenty-three years, She would use her every breath, each second of the day and night, to wrench that Mystery, that death out of her own body—to reconquer Satyavan step by step beneath the thousands of deaths and thousands of hideous little false­hoods that would plague Her, surround Her, weigh Her down, right up to the end—in each one She would recon­quer Satyavan. In each one She would confront death. We do not know, perhaps we will never know all She did, She too ... unless it all “explains itself” one day, and real life, freed from its negation, bursts in our face and sweeps away all our pygmies amid a great divine laughter.

One day I shall return, His hands in mine,
And thou shalt see the face of the Absolute.³⁴

And we do believe that the great sweeping away of the pygmies has begun.

Perhaps Sri Aurobindo was going to trigger that great earthquake in the depths. Outside, the pygmies are raging, they have lost the game. The more they rage, the closer their death is: the death of death. We are each facing death, our death, or the possibility of real life. This is the time of choice for the earth. We do not realize how fateful this hour is in the whole history of evolution, as if the earth were about to be thoroughly reborn, or die in its black hole of negation. And victory lies in each one, defeat lies in each one: a microscopic little death to be uprooted in each of us. As if victory depended on a speck of dust: a tiny little adherence in the depths, a tiny yes we carry with us every­where, while going up and down the stairs, walking, eating, through everything, and in spite of everything, even our own mistakes—an imperturbable yes to that, which is the real life. And this real life will do its work automatically, pro­vided we side with it. We have to be on the right side—the right side of evolution.

We have to be true.

And his breathing grew shorter, more stifled. They wanted to "cure” him! They cannot help torturing you medically for the sake of the false life, they will not let your body leave in peace. “We insisted on dangerous remedies”³⁵ one of them admits. Mother refused, Sri Aurobindo refused— once. Then He stopped saying anything, He let it happen, for the disciples’ peace of mind—He bore the burden right to the end, honestly. A faithful disciple, a surgeon from Calcutta, arrived; “Sri Aurobindo was on his bed, eyes closed, like a statue of massive peace.” He opened his eyes: Trouble? Nothing troubles me. And suffering—one can be above it, and He asked for news about the Bengali refugees. Then He plunged back into a coma. He is losing interest in himself, Mother simply said. “She looked so grave and quiet,” the disciple notes.³⁶ Sometimes, He took a little fruit juice or water that Mother offered him, smiled, drank docilely, then plunged back again: “a very strange type of coma,” the surgeon remarked, “a body which for the moment is in agony, unresponsive, laboring hard for breath, suddenly becomes quiet; a consciousness enters the body, He is awake and normal. He finishes his drink, then, as the consciousness withdraws, the body lapses back into the grip of agony.” The uremia was gaining ground. It was December 4. He is withdrawing, Mother said. But Sri Auro­bindo got up again, sat down in the big pale-green arm­chair with little white arabesques, majestic, serene, staring straight ahead. “The Master seems cheerful again and tak­ing interest,” said the surgeon—Hmm ... was all Mother replied. Then He went back to bed, and the end came at a gallop. At eleven o’clock at night, She came back, gave him a little tomato juice which He drank, quietly emerging from his coma. Then, at midnight, She was there one last time. She stood very straight at the foot of his bed, with­out a gesture, without a quiver of movement: He opened his eyes. They looked at each other for a long time.... Then She went out.

At one o'clock in the morning, She came back for an instant: Call me when it is over.

Years later, with a burning intensity, as though it had just happened, she told me, I didn't want to believe it. And as long as I stayed in the room ...he couldn’t leave his body. And so there was a terrible tension in Him—on the one hand the inner will to depart, and then this thing holding him there in his body: the fact that I knew he was alive and could only be alive. He had to signal me to go to my room, supposedly to rest (I didn’t rest); and no sooner had I left his room than he was gone. They immediately called me back...³⁷

It was 1:26 a.m.

“I perceived a slight quiver in his body, almost impercep­tible,” the disciple notes. He drew up his arms and put them on his chest, one overlapping the other—then all stopped."

She remained standing at the foot of his bed, her hair unbound: “Her look was so fierce that I could not face those eyes," said the surgeon.

I was standing beside Him, and all the supramental force that was in Him passed quite concretely from his body into mine—so concretely that I thought it was visible. And I felt the friction of the forces passing through the pores of my skin.... Then people say, He’s “dead”....

As he left his body and entered into mine, He told me, “You will continue, you will go right to the end of the work. ”³⁸

The Moment

Now She has joined him beneath the big copper-pod tree with golden yellow flowers. They have both left. And what has been done?... What we must now decipher is the slow advance of the forces that one day create another Story. "Will the work be done this time?” the old Purani asked in 1924. So many times have prophets and enlighteners come, so many times have they left, but the earth continues its painful round. I can’t prophesy, Sri Aurobindo answered, I cannot say, “It will be done." But this I can say: "Something will be done this time. ”³⁹ Something will be done. Never did Sri Aurobindo utter a word in vain. And He did not care about being recognized, admired, or even read—He does not need worshippers! He does not need to be believed, so well did He know how people’s faith comes and goes, sinks and spins like a weathervane—but the work had to be done, an indestructible seed had to be planted there, in this rebellious soil, and it had to grow despite all our faith or non-faith, our worship or non-worship. Why do men want to worship! Mother exclaimed. It is much better to become than to worship. It’s out of a laziness to change that they worship.⁴⁰ Will something change this time, in spite of us? Will man decide to become 7 True, She said, The lack of the earth’s receptivity and the behavior of Sri Aurobindo's dis­ciples are largely responsible for what happened to his body.⁴¹ This is even truer of Mother’s disciples. And She left.

What happened? What is her secret?

From the large corridor that overlooks the Ashram court­yard, She watched until the very end as they carried Sri Aurobindo down beneath the yellow copper-pod tree. She was all dressed in white—pale and straight. Alone. She was seventy-two. She was thirty-six when She met him. Three weeks earlier, He had written:

A day may come when she must stand unhelped On a dangerous brink of the world’s doom and hers, Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast, Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge.