Follows from 1950 to 1968 Mother's descent into the depths of the human body, leading her to the next mode of life on earth.
A new life was beginning.
Something had closed in this violent heart, 2 like a heavy silver door behind which She held her pain in a silence that was perhaps terrible. Something had taken root there forever and for each and every day, a sort of gaze which could be intensely black with gold in its depths, an iron will that stared at Death unflinchingly. Now She knew: it was "the question given me to resolve." She was tracking down the Enemy in all its guises; behind all the gestures, the steps, the words, one person or another, She was looking at that and piercing a form of it. I know of no other being in the world who bore so constantly and so inexorably a sole and undivided will—not a breath of that life, not a second of those twenty-four hours in a day was worth living, or even could be lived, except to conquer and to find that out. He had left, had he not? A complete collapse. And it was not even Sri Aurobindo She was looking at—Sri Aurobindo was herself, like her own breath—it was beyond Sri Aurobindo, "something" that was like the great That of the world: the Absolute, the Supreme—and what do words matter, words are absurd anyway. That, which keeps everything from collapsing straight away like a monstrous farce. For, as it is, from the way things look at first glance, the world is a sheer monstrosity veiled only by our unconsciousness. Without that veil of unconsciousness, it would be unbearable. Without all its pretty snares of illusion, it would be intolerable. Remove the illusion and the only choice left is the path of Nirvana, or of suicide—or else That, the only hope for finding any sense. The Positivity of this enormous non-sense. Death's counterpart. Otherwise it is Death alone, triumphant everywhere, in every corner, waiting for us at the next bend in the road, when it will pull off its mask and, with a laugh, kick away all our painful stupidity. That or Death. There is nothing else in between, except a masquerade and the puppets in the masquerade. So one looks toward That or one is already in death. That, the only possible and living thing in this parody of a life which is not life, the only Intensity that matches the intensity of death everywhere. And if we do not believe in it, so much the worse for us—it only means that our name is already on the list of the candidates for death. Actually, it is not a matter of "belief," it is a matter of breathing; once the illusion is undone, it is no longer a question of pondering whether oxygen exists or of studying the metaphysics of oxygen: one breathes or dies. It is that simple. That means breathing. We may call it a "whale" if we wish, but if we are not on the back of that whale, we will soon be sucked down to the bottom—it is at the door, it is for tomorrow. It is even right under our noses: death slips past and slithers back again at every moment, like a silent shark, elegant and smiling—charming. The real truth is that it (Sri Aurobindo's departure) projected me DIRECTLY towards the Supreme, with no intermediary. 3 It is That or nothing, quite simply. Nothing, that is, Death. She said "the Supreme" or "the Lord" or "You"—it does not matter. It was simply her way of calling that something which does not care in the least what name we give it, but which is the only breathable thing in front of this omnipresent intensity of death. And it may be that all human experiences—all without exception—no matter the color or the language they are clothed in, exist exclusively, solely and absolutely to lead each of us to that single Second when we turn to this unique Possibility: suddenly we say that, or it is death. We turn to the Positive Thing, catch hold of the oxygen, open our hands, and like idiots, or not, we say: That, that, that... the one and only absolute is the Supreme; the one and only permanence is the Supreme; the one and only security is the Supreme; the one and only immortality is the Supreme! 4 And that alone exists. Otherwise it is not possible, otherwise it is living death. All experiences, all without exception, are meant to lead us there. That is the first second of life in the reign of Death. And it becomes such an absorbing and absolute experience.... The uncertainty, the instability, the fleeting, inconstant and impermanent nature of all things—everything collapses, there is nothing to lean on, except the Supreme, for He is all. One thing alone is unfailing: the absolute All. Words are stupid—it's an experience. Once you have the experience, that's that: all the rest simply follows from it—details.5 Then we are truly safe; or rather, we are assailed from all sides by death—which we had not seen before. We are safe because we are in the Breathing. We begin to see the real face of "life." We begin the battle against death. We side with those who pull evolution over toward the breathable side—actually, we do not side "with those": we side with the Supreme. "With those" is still part of the mortal mixture. And we can bear, without a quiver, that great, intense gaze of Mother which opened, at times, behind the Silver Door... because that gaze is terrifying for all the little deaths we hold within ourselves. I have spent my time veiling myself: one veil over another veil over another veil, so as to remain invisible. Otherwise... unbearable.6
At times... I saw.
So now we know what Life means in this reign of Death. This is what She had set out to conquer, the real life for the earth—versus our countless little deaths. When the earth can bear that Gaze, it will come closer to being the true earth, for it will have purged its incredible identification with death. There is not a single being, perhaps, who is not an accomplice of Death in one way or another. It is frightening. But these twenty-three years of Mother's were to be frightful years.
In short, each one in this evolutionary laboratory was like a little specimen of death "to be worked out."
It was almost a new Ashram that was emerging. Actually, we accept everything, the entire earth, and then... there's a churning. And everything useless goes away.1 Children, a lot of children, more and more. And truly speaking, She was much more interested in them than in the disciples who knew everything that was or was not to be done, and were full of light and yoga and experiences: They have become set in their ways. Very good objects for shelving in a museum but not for doing work.... I must say that for my work I prefer someone who knows very little, who did not make too much effort, but who has a great flame of aspiration and plenty of good will. Something malleable, progressive, that doesn't need to be broken into little pieces in order to make progress.2 Actually, it is obvious: the next life which is to come, the next step in evolution, is so radically different from all we are and think and see upon our summits of orthodox light—even our qualities are so utterly worthless and almost unrelated to those which will animate the next species—that we must make up our mind to cultivate something else if we do not want to go on being the head of the class of an obsolete species. There is no point in cultivating an expertise in tree swinging or even in "yoga," for in any case, the future will be something else entirely. What are the qualities of the future? It would be interesting to find out.
She saw things clearly, She saw far into the future. She had founded the Ashram School in 1943 with twenty-five students; nine years later, there were nearly two hundred of them, and She launched the Sri Aurobindo International University Centre. Don't forget, all of you who are here, she told them, that we want to realize something that doesn't yet exist on earth; so it's absurd to seek elsewhere for an example of what we want to do.3 Essentially, She was trying to inculcate in them the wonder of the future, the unexpected of the future, the strange "something" being fashioned in the evolutionary crucible—yes, evolution is to be "fashioned": why don't we fashion it together? Let us fashion another being upon earth. That is far more interesting than looking forward to becoming the contributors to the Social Security of the hundredth democratic dynasty after Christ, and we start over and over again. First of all, She tried to uproot the old routine of death from the teachers' consciousness; in other words, She began by teaching the teachers. The teachers sat on the students' bench and She kneaded all the dough together in a strange, unprecedented mixture in which no one was a teacher and no one a student, and in which everyone was seeking together the future's formula: the children with a spontaneity free from anxiety about some false "future" to be secured, and the teachers with their recalcitrance promptly pinched by Mother and by the students themselves until, willy-nilly, an uncommon product was formed. To start with, no diplomas and no examinations (eighteen years before the famous events of May 1968). But what a struggle to uproot that particular seed from the teachers' heads—diplomas for what? To become the superprefects of a decaying species? For about a century, the human species has been suffering from an ever-spreading disease which has now reached its most acute state: it might be called utilitarianism.... Children stricken with this disease are out of place in the Ashram's Centre of Education.4 It had indeed to be drilled into their heads that they were making the future: "It's amusing, don't you think so?" She would say. We invent the future. We invent it without getting bound by "this-is-not-possible" or "this-ispossible." Everything is possible, as She would never tire of repeating to them: When does a thing seem impossible to you? It's when you try to do it. If you had never tried to do it, it would never have seemed impossible to you. And why do you try to do it in the first place? It's because it is somewhere in your consciousness. If it were not in your consciousness, you would never have attempted to do it. And the minute it comes in your consciousness, it's quite obvious that it is something you will realize. Only what's not in your consciousness you are unable to realize. Simple as that5 No?
Consciousness was the crux of the future; the change of consciousness was the key. To change consciousness means, first of all, to dismantle all the old impossibilities, to throw open the doors and stop putting walls up between ourselves and the possibilities of the future—we constantly put up walls, we are constantly pre-fabricated. To tear down that pre-fabrication, it would be necessary to descend right into the body's cells, but meanwhile She was striving to open doors: Doubt hardens the consciousness, it puts a crust on it, which blocks its receptivity. It's like putting a coat of varnish on something to prevent contact.6 For we are all the time in the pure marvel, we bathe in the Future; it is right here, full and overflowing—but we can touch and realize only that which we are able to establish contact with. The Amazon is here, complete, the Supramental is here, complete—it all depends upon what we can touch. Had we faith enough, we could be transformed in a second.... Only, that faith must extend right down to the cells. And the first step to the cells is an open mind. The first wall is in the mind; a formidable wall, collective, millennial, upheld by millions and millions of "reasonable" people: "But, look here! This is impossible!" If you understood once and for all, she told them, that the whole universe (or if you like, our earth, to condense the problem) is nothing other than the Divine who has forgotten Himself then where do you put weakness in that? Surely not in the Divine! Therefore in forgetfulness. Hence if you fight against forgetfulness, you fight against weakness!7 She taught them, first of all, to believe in themselves. The change of consciousness really begins with the uprooting of the old forest around us. Were we purely ourselves, we would be purely divine. It is true. It is even the key to the future. "Oh, but look here!" retort the old evolutionary specimens—they say "but," and instantly sink deeper into the mudhole. Afterwards, they can easily quip, "I told you so." There must be no buts. There must be an absolute YES. We must emerge from the old mudhole of the world. We must cease being among the dead who think they are alive and only carry on with their grandfather's chromosomes. Basically, the ONLY THING you should do assiduously, she said to the teachers, *is to teach them to know themselves and to choose their own destinies.... Teach them to examine themselves, to understand themselves,* AND TO WANT THEMSELVES. It's far more important than teaching the past history of the earth, or even how the earth is made.8 And to the children, she said over and over: You are here to become the representatives of the new race. Everything depends on your will and your sincerity. If you no longer want to belong to the ordinary humanity, if you no longer want to be only evolved animals, if you want to become new men realizing the supramental ideal of Sri Aurobindo, if you want to live a new and higher life upon a renewed earth, then you will find here all the help needed to succeed...9 Humanity is not the last rung of terrestrial creation. Evolution continues and man will be surpassed. It is for each one to decide whether he wants to participate in the adventure of the new species. 10
A Little Window of the Soul
"Yes, but still," retort the wise men, "they must be taught a little history and geography, and also chemistry, and also some trigonometry while they are at it, and also...." The whole list, right down to death. It begins with a simple, little, microscopic "yes, but still" and you are ensnared right to your corpse (which, moreover, does not even belong to you, it is the legal possession of the authorities with burial certificates). And it is a fact that Mother had them taught chemistry (with superb laboratories organized by Pavitra), geography and all the rest—but in another way. Everything is in that "another way." "By any method chosen," Sri Aurobindo had said. The Supermind will steal in through any means, even through trigonometry, only we must remember that these are means... to something else. From the start, we must understand that these are just "gymnastics," like other kinds of dumbbells to train the muscles of consciousness, and that consciousness is the lever—the mind is simply an instrument... to knead matter," 11 to permeate and impregnate this substance which inherited the mechanical inertia of the protoplasm. We believe that it is meant for creating gospels or philosophy or Marxism, but these are merely passing evolutionary fancies, not unlike the beautiful plumage of the male bird, there to attract more and more consciousness into Matter. For such is the goal, the hidden key, the reason for all this movement. The Mind is indeed a singular tormentor, it does not leave you in peace for a minute; nothing better could have been found to prevent your dozing off in the beatitude of natural evolution. If we have mistaken chemical valences and a Harvard Ph.D. for the goal, however, that is simply our misconception of "evolved animals." The intentions of evolution are far more marvelous, luckily.
And so She taught them "in another way."
In the evening, after her tennis game, She would come to the Playground, so slight, quiet and white, wearing Japanese getas, long, puffed out pantaloons tight round the ankles, a kameez of different colors depending on the day—because colors, too, have their meanings with specific powers and centers of consciousness—and a headdress of white muslin because of the wind. Although She had had her long hair cut. And in "winter," a little silk cape covering her already stooping shoulders. She was seventy-three. This Playground was really the heart of her special laboratory. They did gymnastics there—a lot—exercises on the bars, judo, hatha yoga asanas, everything imaginable, boxing and vaulting horses, and what not. The girls wore white headscarves and shorts—shorts in India, in 1950, were a scandalous outrage—and they mixed with the boys in groups identified by different colors: there was the group in red shorts, the blue group, the khaki group and the green group for the little ones, the white group for over eighteen, the gray—and what not. It was fresh, full of laughter, with a sort of transparent atmosphere. After all, it was fun to prepare a new species. And no parents—She did not want any parents, those parents are horrid beings.12 They immediately stuff you again into the old atavistic-culinary groove with their anxieties centered around the common cold and ((good manners." There are children who come to you terribly well-brought-up—so polite, so well-mannered, they answer you so properly... they give the impression of little half-alive puppets—well-polished, well-brushed, well-groomed, on the outside, but inside, there is no response.13 She wanted a response inside. She wanted a fire inside. She knew exactly one's degree of evolution by the kind of response. For Her, people were a whole spectrum of colors and vibrations expressing, down to the last atom, the quality of consciousness and its degree of intensity. When you look at someone who is conscious of his soul and lives in his soul, you feel that you descend, you go deep, deep, deep into the person, far, far, far within... and then you get... a little response, very quiet... something that is warm, calm, rich in content and very still, very full, like a softness—that is the soul. And sometimes there are eyes you do not enter, they are shut like a door: two black screens. And also, there are eyes that are open, you enter, and just behind the surface you meet something that vibrates and even shines at times; it vibrates. You can be fooled and think: "Oh! he has a living soul." But its not that: its his vital." 14 The charming little whirlpool. She took in everything except "the black screens." She plunged her diamond look mingled with sweetness or laughter or irony, She descended to the very depths, as though penetrating swamps, thicknesses, layer upon layer of dark good manners, and She drew, drew forth, as if from the depths of a pit, a little pure flame of being, something that seemed to stir for the first time, something strange, unknown, craning its neck like a fledgling, which filled you with an entirely new and unexpected kind of life—and you felt like dancing and laughing, or even weeping as if all the old walls had been shattered, and you suddenly found yourself in the light of the world, no longer able to recognize yourself. And it was delicious to no longer situate oneself in that old, absurd muddle one had lived in for ten or twenty years as a well-groomed little robot. The old habit falling away. Another way of breathing. All of a sudden life had a meaning. Another meaning. And everything became possible. But sometimes people fled before that look: the swamp within found it unbearable. So much the better—an automatic sorting out. It would be lovely, she said one day while giving me a flower, if one could take people's consciousness as one takes a flower, and then, because one looks at it and holds it and the vibration is that Vibration of supreme Love, it opens up, like that, becomes organized, and grows magnificent. 15 "Yes, that's just what you do!" I replied. And She laughed like a mischievous child. She so much wanted each and everyone, all beings, to open to the real life, their real life—which is there so simple and noiseless behind the absurd layer. The first little window looking out upon another evolution. The first step of the new species. A "something" that is concealed in the very heart of Matter freed from its human ways. Evolution always seems to lead backwards: one finds what was there from the beginning. One un-forgets. I only put in you the necessary truth-consciousness, and the rest works itself out automatically. 16 Mother took a closed rosebud and held it in her hands: the rose opened. Oh, how She wanted to open the rose of the world!
And through that little window there opened another perception of the world. This little window is so simple, it is almost always open or about to open in children. But we plaster laws over it, warnings, anxieties, family doctors, deadly ideas and manners, the you-shoulds and you-shouldn'ts, the you-cans and you-can'ts; then we send the children off to school to fill up what has been sealed off behind the door: false geography, false history, the false law of life. Yet everything was there, open, immediate, through the little window, the world at our fingertips, instant geography, history everywhere: the great History that flows unchecked and dateless and enables us to understand all history and all beings. She was teaching them the great History, in the evening after their exercises. She sat beneath a large, relief map of India on the wall—one India, the one that had never been truncated by the British or by the sad falsehoods of history—with a small table lamp beside her. She looked very white, and most of all one saw her eyes, which seemed so huge below the little tulle headdress pulled low over her forehead. They all sat on the ground in a semi-circle around her, the teachers and students and disciples, already almost a thousand in number. She read a few pages from The Synthesis of Yoga, or possibly the last chapters of The Life Divine: "Man and Evolution." Philosophy was becoming simple—it was living experience, what one sees and touches when the inner door opens, it was evolution right under one's nose: you see it, so you become it. You have it within, so you are in it everywhere, you enter the world everywhere as you would enter your own home, for the world is in you. But everything is there! Everything everything you can experience and infinitely more which you can't experience... 17 The knowledge that seems to come to you from the outside is just a pretext to bring up to the surface the knowledge that is within you. 18 The teachers were not meant to "form" in this school of evolution, but to inform, she said. There is nothing to be taught! You have only to draw out what is already there, that is all. We are a prodigious totality of immediate knowledge which has forgotten itself... in a corner of the brain.
But how can we touch this direct knowledge?
Perhaps a very simple, ordinary example drawn from my personal experience might help to seize better the extraordinary physical, and even physiological, precision of this immediate knowledge. One day someone brought me a photograph of a total stranger living six thousand miles away; I looked at it... impossible to explain. There was a totality of simultaneous perception embracing all the levels of the being—all the vibrations, fluctuations, contradictions of this person—how can you express that in a mental language? Our mental language is as flat as a photograph, abstract, hollow, with long or short noses, virtues or sins, but nothing of those living, fluctuating and intermingled depths which make up a being. As it was impossible to make any mental comment to the person who had brought the photograph, I was suddenly impelled to make a gesture, an absurd gesture, like someone dealing cards in a game of bridge! "But that's exactly his mannerism! That's what he always does when he speaks!" So it is: one is in the person, six thousand miles away, not only in his head but in his body, taking on his mannerisms and physiological reflexes. An exact knowledge, down to the vibration (not always pleasant). And it is all there. You are in a pebble, in the moon, in the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty, or more pleasant, the smiling flower at the edge of the path. With Mother, it was this totality of the world that was opening up, the future, the past, the tangible evolution, the marvelous Possibility; the simple present suddenly lighting up with a depth of meaning, as though all the dynasties of the world and the millennia of History came back to be remembered in a trivial gesture, endowing it with a meaning for the earth's future. It was as if great doors were opening up in the consciousness, her words carried the experience, imparted it: with her one saw, one touched, the world became a concrete unified whole, an open book. And it was like that. The little individualities melted away, one began to be everywhere at once, to feel in everything, perceive in everything, live with all that lived over there and right here and everywhere. It was simple, it was ONE. You can understand and know something only because in some way it's in you or you are in it. 19 The little numbered and baptized bags of skin were there merely to prevent everything from blending together like soup, a kind of evolutionary trick to shape individualities, but behind it all, or within, the great Consciousness was flowing freely, without barriers, without laws—and once you caught hold of that Law, then.... Then everything became possible, then you were already in the next evolution, you were entering the new species with its great Consciousness, round and ONE, like a sun: If we were spread out in everything, if all the vibrations that come to us or go out from us expressed the need to melt ourselves with everything, to widen, to grow, not by remaining in our own limits, but by leaving our limits behind, and ultimately to identify ourselves with everything, we would have nothing left to lose because we would have everything. Only we don't moon, in the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty, or more pleasant, the smiling flower at the edge of the path. With Mother, it was this totality of the world that was opening up, the future, the past, the tangible evolution, the marvelous Possibility; the simple present suddenly lighting up with a depth of meaning, as though all the dynasties of the world and the millennia of History came back to be remembered in a trivial gesture, endowing it with a meaning for the earth's future. It was as if great doors were opening up in the consciousness, her words carried the experience, imparted it: with her one saw, one touched, the world became a concrete unified whole, an open book. And it was like that. The little individualities melted away, one began to be everywhere at once, to feel in everything, perceive in everything, live with all that lived over there and right here and everywhere. It was simple, it was ONE. You can understand and know something only because in some way it's in you or you are in it." The little numbered and baptized bags of skin were there merely to prevent everything from blending together like soup, a kind of evolutionary trick to shape individualities, but behind it all, or within, the great Consciousness was flowing freely, without barriers, without laws—and once you caught hold of that Law, then.... Then everything became possible, then you were already in the next evolution, you were entering the new species with its great Consciousness, round and ONE, like a sun: If we were spread out in everything, if all the vibrations that come to us or go out from us expressed the need to melt ourselves with everything, to widen, to grow, not by remaining in our own limits, but by leaving our limits behind, and ultimately to identify ourselves with everything, we would have nothing left to lose because we would have everything. Only we don't know it. And, as we don't know it, we can't do it. Instead, we take in order to accumulate, accumulate, accumulate—but it's impossible, we can't accumulate: we must become identified. So, the little we have we want to get back: we give out a good thought and expect some recognition; we give a little affection and expect the same.... Because we don't have the capacity to be the good thought in everything, we don't have the capacity to be the affection and tenderness in everything. We feel that's how we are, limited and cut off from the rest, so we're afraid of losing everything, we're afraid of losing what we have because we think we would be diminished. Whereas when you are able to identify with things, you no longer need to take. The more spread out you are, the more you have. The more identified you are, the more you become. And instead of taking, you give. And the more you give, the more you grow. 20°
She was teaching them the true Oneness of the world—not the one that crushes and levels down for "the sake of the masses".; but the one that embraces and enters within and respects the infinite complexity of the elements because it is everything that moves, feels, lives, and, being everything, it knows the real need of each thing and the correct movement each instant. She made them touch the Spontaneity of the great Exact Consciousness: no plans, no foresight, which always fails, but oneness with the great Flow which makes you execute at each instant the necessary gesture. And the entire Ashram developed like that, unplanned, impromptu, in a kind of spontaneous growth. Another law seemed to be at work there. A direct key that doesn't need any complicated science to express itself.21
If those children had been pure long enough, perhaps today there would be a rather strange place in the world, like a sample of the next way of being on earth—but would the rest of the world have tolerated it? Oneness works both ways. The "rest of the world" was there, too, in the cells of those children. Something more radical than a few widened consciousnesses was needed; it was imperative to go down into the very cells of the world, in order to change things at the root. The "direct key" had to be found there.
A Matter of Attitude
And they asked questions, those children, a thousand and one chaotic questions, but always in French. She wanted everyone to speak French, and She answered only in French. Mixed with the young Indians there were now children from almost every country—it was really the laboratory of the world. These were the "Wednesday classes," the time of Questions and Answers, which would last for eight years, until 1958. In the simplest language, a language for children, She brought flowing down, like crystal water, all the occult knowledge which used to be carefully guarded for initiatory schools. These simple classes would constitute the most formidable "de-occultization" ever to take place in History. She wanted nothing "occult," She wanted all the secrets to be told, She wanted all of it right here, natural, without any fuss. And She wanted them to live what was being said. It was the living Veda. There is nothing simpler than Truth. It is as transparent as the air, we breathe it at every moment, it is an unaffected Marvel. How odd that we need so many special effects simply to begin to understand this. "But then, what's the purpose of the Mind?" asked the more rational ones. "Why do we go to school? Why do you take so much trouble to make us study, if the Mind is to be surpassed?" And quite so, when we begin emerging from the mental muddle, 22 as Mother said, when things begin to clarify above and all around, we begin to live in an ever-renewed wonder, down to the smallest detail: knowledge we did not know we had, unthinkable precision, distances abolished, as if someone or something cared—really cared—to let us know everything we need to know, even in the most unexpected details, and not only as a mental awareness, but tangibly, in life, through living answers, as it were, and "trivial" little scenes exemplifying a whole slice of the world with a smile... slightly humorous. As if, through this mental clearing, the whole of life were coming to show us the answer. Everything answers. It is a singular complicity between ourselves and the thousand and one things we encounter daily, as if they were all living a single life, knew one another quite well and were sending little signals to one another, "You see, that's how it is," most naturally and without any fuss. ONE life. Sri Aurobindo, when asked how He had been able to write five, six books simultaneously, replied: [I could have written] seven issues of the Arya every month for 70 years and still the knowledge that came from above would hardly be exhausted.23 And so it is. We are bathed in an infinite wealth of knowledge which knows no "details": everything counts, utterly, absolutely. Everything is interrelated. And there is not one thought in all that unless we need to make speeches or write a book, for instance. The thousand imperceptible, simultaneous threads, unseizable by the Mind which advances step by step like a donkey on the path, are grasped by an exact superthought which reconciles the entire picture in the blink of an eye and guides you straight to the point through a virgin forest with millions of entangled branches. And everything is contained therein, with a quality of order, a powerful and translucent coherence unseizable by the Mind. In truth, there is nothing the mind can do that cannot be better done in the mind's immobility and thought-free stillness. 24 But then why continue in the old mental groove if this next evolutionary stage, so much lighter, is meant to transcend it?
It is obvious, Mother explained, that if we have a simple three-note instrument, or a piano with eighty-eight keys, or even an orchestra with three hundred musicians, the music might be the same, but the quality of expression or transcription would be incomparable. We are creating keys, she told them, so that the other Consciousness can make use of a complete keyboard. But it is merely a keyboard for something else. The Mind began to degenerate when it composed incredible arpeggios, like Franz Liszt, for nothing other than a grand piano. And that is where the school of the new world, as we might call it, the school of the next evolution makes an imperceptible detour—imperceptible to everyone, Sri Aurobindo's yoga is the invisible yoga par excellence, like the air we breathe, perhaps like truth: ONE
CAN DO WHAT ONE IS USED TO DOING, BUT ONE DOES IT WITH A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT ATTITUDE.25 This simple sentence contains a formidable power... if only we knew. Years later, while She was fully engaged in this terrible yoga of the body which is really a battle against death and against the age-old physiological laws, Mother said to me: The right attitude is the real key to the whole problem of transformation. 26 She had said the same thing thirty years earlier. As simple as that. But it is perhaps the most profound mystery we have yet to fathom. We do everything as usual—mathematics, boxing, reciting Shakespeare or brushing our teeth—with another attitude. This attitude has the power to change the circumstances—identical circumstances with totally different results. We go through a flu epidemic, or a page of mathematics, or cross the street, and these two worlds are so totally different that with one attitude we leap across years of life and consciousness compressed into a second, whereas with the other we partake of the round of death and catch the flu. Everything is different, all the laws change. These are really like two different worlds, one within the other, with only a slight inner difference of attitude. In one case, we are attuned to the old life as usual, or rather the old death as usual, and in the other we are attuned to... something, the next consciousness, the next life, the next evolutionary discovery—the incomprehensible something that will be our post-human stage, which must be built, for it is not going to fall from heaven ready-made. To build it means to call it. Like an incantation of the future. And this call forces it to be; it even causes it to take birth beneath our feet, as it were: It is like a magnet that attracts from everywhere the opportunity to make progress. A magnet to capture the next mode of being on earth. In times past, in ancient times, the candidates were told: "Now prepare yourselves: you will have to undergo terrible tests. You will be shut up in a coffin, you will face terrible dangers. These are tests meant to determine whether or not you have the required qualities."... But this is no longer the method. It isn't done like that any more. It is life itself the everyday circumstances that are the tests you must go through. 27 We are right in the evolutionary test-trial. The Mind is simply an immobile zone of transmission,28 and, in that silence, behind everything we do, everywhere, in each gesture, each encounter, we carry with us a kind of antenna pointed toward... what? The future, the thing. What we must become, what we must extract from our body as one day the ape extracted man. But had the great ape been told: you know, you have only to sit under a tree for five minutes and look at... nothing... or simply at a growing shoot, he would have thought it a useless stupidity. He would have understood nothing about the difference in attitude.
"Mother," asked a somewhat reflective child, "when the mind came down into the earth's atmosphere, the ape didn't make any effort to change itself into a man, did it? It was Nature that supplied the effort. Yet now..." And Mother instantly replied: But it isn't man who is going to change himself into the superman! "No?" queried the astonished child. Just try a little! Mother replied amidst laughter in the Playground. That's the point, you see, it's SOMETHING ELSE that's going to do the work. But now (yes, there is a "but," I don't want to be cruel), MAN CAN COLLABORATE. That is, he can lend himself to the process, with good will, with aspiration, and he can help to his utmost. That's why I have said it will go faster—) HOPE it will go much faster.29 This was in 1956. Obviously the Mind is not going to create what surpasses it, any more than the apes' expertise in tree swinging created mental man. But once in a while the mistakes of the apes paved the way to man's thought. In man's case, the missed branch is the usual mental support that is constantly called upon to uphold the slightest gesture, the smallest circumstance—everything is a branch. When we let go of the mental branch, there is at first a void, a gap—quite a scary nothingness in which one might fear losing one's mind. Yet it is this very void which calls the other thing. Before the other thing can enter, there must be room for it. And one notices with surprise, then with amusement, then with increasing wonder, that it answers.
The answers come from all sides, they swarm everywhere, beneath our steps, before our eyes, in chance encounters, gestures... they flood in from everywhere. It is unexpected, unforeseeable, we could pass right by and not notice anything: suddenly, things mean something, everything means something. Truly the other life seems only to be waiting for us to free ourselves from the old in order to emerge. "You see," she said, "it is something else that is going to do the work."30 We do not need to "fashion" the superman: we only have to let him be fashioned. We always forget that we are growing up in a world where everything already is; it is the future that compels our steps, the future beneath our steps... depending on our attitude, the old way of seeing or the new, the old habit of being, or the new one. Thousands of years of habit veil an ever-present radiance. A time comes when the evolutionary cage that has formed and carved all these little forgetful and separate selves—separate of necessity, in order to become conscious of themselves—must break open so that we may become conscious of the Great Consciousness and reproduce the total consciousness in a single point. This is the time. Man can collaborate. We are journeying through an ever-existing Amazon. only to realize at the other end that it is the Amazon. Then our way of seeing changes: everything remains the same yet everything becomes clear. The whole world is in the same magic forest—including the caterpillar. For the Marvel to exist, perhaps the whole has to become aware of it. A formidable change in outlook. Another way of being in the world—in the same world. Perhaps that is what the superman is?
The Evolutionary Bridge
But the superman is still a tiny transition—at best a few more swollen heads in the universe. Although a prerequisite, it is not the core of the problem. The sense of Oneness, the concrete perception of Oneness, is only the abc's for the children of the new evolution, it only means the unblocking of the old natural door—and as a matter of fact, it is not even meant to give a few vaster perceptions or enlarge one's field of investigations and produce little world citizens. There would be no lack of candidates for the world brain. And so what? We shall merely perceive the world's sordidness, misery and pain a little more universally. The first effect of this "oneness" is more commonly painful than pleasant. It is unbelievable what one swallows—this consciousness is very "exact." In fact, the cause behind the unifying abc's, or re-unifying rather, is not mental as we presume. We cannot refrain from transplanting the old mental man into the skin of the next being, but this is our mistake. The real cause is almost mechanical, as it were, a physiological mechanics, not at all meant (or only secondarily) to provide great world panoramas. For the New Consciousness is crushing, it is formidable and utterly disproportionate to the little network of nerves that faint when a finger gets pinched in the kitchen door. This Consciousness is first and foremost a Power, or it appears to us as such and is perceived as such by the microscopic consciousness enclosed in the network of veins, capillaries and pyramidal cells which burst like bubbles. Hence the very functionings of the material substance must expand to bear the charge. A corporeal change has to take place. The body consciousness itself must try hard to widen (or clarify, which comes to the same thing), the physiological counterpart of the mental expansion that differentiates Neolithic man from present-day man in front of his TV set. We know nothing of what this next being will or can do, unless, once again, we attempt to transfer to this being our own glorified human qualities, for which he would probably have no use. "Only the body can understand," Mother said. The body will know and perceive before we do what the next life will be. Evolution is unfolding at the level of Matter, not at the level of the brain—the brain is but a pretty appendage to help us understand the phenomenon—if we want—and perhaps to take part in it. And here we come upon two key texts which completely opened my eyes one day, as I was still incorrigibly seeking the world's next meaning through little pyramidal cells. First, an excerpt from Sri Aurobindo, a small sentence as He had the art of writing them, amidst other things, with the air about it of nothing at all: A fully conscious body might even discover and work out the right material method and process of a material transformation.... THE BODY would be thus a participator and agent in its own transformation... 1 Next, an extraordinarily illuminating text of Mother's: As it is, the physical body is really only a very disfigured shadow of the eternal life of the Self but this physical body is capable of a progressive development; through each individual formation, the physical substance progresses, and one day IT WILL BE CAPABLE OF MAKING A BRIDGE BETWEEN PHYSICAL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT AND THE SUPRAMENTAL LIFE THAT WILL MANIFEST.2
The body will be the bridge. The key is in the body. The whole mystery begins there.
Hence the supreme importance She attached to the culture of the body in her laboratory. How She watched over it, down to the smallest details, how much attention She lavished on each and every one, each exercise, each movement of the body! Never in the world had there been (especially in those years between 1945 and 1950) an "organization" that devoted so much time and care to the body: several hours every day. And there were no specialized exercises; each one had to practice a whole range of exercises, and the girls took up boxing as well as the horizontal bar and weightlifting. One might wonder how boxing could produce a new body (apart from a muscular one) and whether sprinters might have a better chance in the next stage of evolution than M.A.'s in literature? But why not, after all? It all depends on the way you sprint. And it all depends on the way you study to get the arts degree. And here again lies the imperceptible detour that this invisible yoga of the next world takes: we do everything we usually do, but "with a different attitude." Climbing stairs can be done consciously, or lifting a bucket of water, or using one's body—we can even apply consciousness to the act of running. Sports are simply a means or pretext for infusing consciousness into Matter—perhaps even a different consciousness. Or perhaps simply to help clarify a certain number of cells, thus allowing the Consciousness in the depths—the Exact Consciousness, the real Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness of Matter—to pierce through the obscure layers of bodily inertia and start operating directly in the body as it operates in a bird, the atom, and everywhere, although indirectly, through a particular habit or way of being a bird, a plant, a table, or any mould at all. It is the old mould of being, the old bodily way of being, which must let itself be permeated and handled differently. A next way has to be found. The body must discover and work out its next way. A real adventure.... How She exhorted those children, how She encouraged them! What tons of energy She poured onto them, the atmosphere seemed electrified by her presence, as if the doors to the Possible were really open: No one has gone there! No one has done this; it's a beginning, a universal beginning, she told them. Therefore it is an absolutely unexpected and unforeseeable adventure.... Every evening after their exercises, they filed past her, one by one, to receive that look that battered down doors, freed the impossible from the depths of a body smothered in atavism—undoing, undoing, undoing all the old habits, the old refuges of death, the little negations stemming from the great fear of the new in those cells. I invite you to the great adventure. There's no question of spiritually redoing what others have done before, because our adventure begins AFTER THAT. The question is of a new creation, entirely new, with everything it entails of the unforeseen, of risks and hazards—a REAL adventure whose goal is certain victory but whose course is unknown and has to be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something which has never been in this present universe and which will never again be in the same way. If that interests you... well then, let's embark. What will happen to you tomorrow I don't know We must leave aside all plans, all projects, all constructions, and... walk into the unknown. Come what may.3 She was there, slight and very white, beneath the great map of India. She twirled a frangipani flower—which she called "Psychological Perfection"—in her fingers as She spoke and it really, truly did seem that a new chapter of evolution was opening in a corner of the earth.
If only they had truly understood.
If only a few—even two or three—had really, totally tried.... And yet, in those first years, a handful did try. I saw the great Possible shine in a few eyes, and a beautiful and promising sincerity, so simple and fresh, in a few girls (more than in the boys, I must admit) who, beneath their headscarves of white tulle, did their exercises with a bright enthusiasm and worked during the day at a monotype machine or washing dishes. A few pure samples were there. But the second wave of children was already no longer the same, the wave of the world was already there—ever there. Truly the problem was a world problem.
The Contagion
The beginnings of a new evolution are frail, as threatened as a young shoot. We do not know how many species Nature has tried out, destroyed, tried again and again until the sprout—one sprout—survived the millions of little insects and the climatic hardship. This is the stark picture of what happens and has happened and will happen each time a new attempt labors to germinate in the evolutionary terrain. Perhaps Nature wills these difficulties to make her young sprouts stronger; we always misunderstand the vast wisdom of our Mother, and we never sufficiently realize that her obstacles are her means of work and that, after all, she is also in the little insect that wants to destroy the pretty sprout. Humanity must indeed clearly understand the situation, as it will have to undertake the evolutionary venture, here or there, in one form or another, with one vocabulary or another, with a tulle headscarf or an astrakhan hat. That is how it is—we are all heading there. The problem is the same for all, whether this caterpillar or another. We must try to unify the terrain, she told them, to create a particularly fertile soil to obtain the maximum collective receptivity.4 Yes, just as young trees aspire, aspire for rainfall, and when they are there, huddled together tightly, the cloud will come there, and it will not drop its rain anywhere else—plants are needed, many, many young plants to attract the rain. The alternative is a civilized desert where nothing grows except machines. It is a simple law; evolutionary meteorology exists, too. There is a moment in each one's life, a moment when the need for a perfect sincerity comes as a decisive choice.... Sincerity is to aspire for the lovely rain that makes things grow, but strangely enough we simultaneously aspire for germs; we always pull in two directions. There is also a moment in the collective life—if one is part of a group—there is a moment when a choice MUST be made, when the purification must be achieved. Sometimes it is imperative, it's almost a question of life and death for the group; it must progress in order to survive.5 How She mothered those saplings, how She poured, poured down her rain of light upon them! The "Ashram" was only a name, what did She care about ashram stories! She had not come to "create an ashram": This spot on earth was where a sapling, just one sapling, had to take root in the evolutionary terrain. The problem had to be conquered somewhere on earth. And Sri Aurobindo and Mother had deliberately chosen to cultivate their evolutionary experiment amidst the very conditions of the world, not on some Himalayan peak, not within four walls, but right in the midst of society—the experiment had to withstand the world's climate, or of what use was it?
But the world is very contagious. Day after day, She explained the whole problem to them in the Playground, which was perhaps a playground of evolution. It was indispensable that a few humans take in the task's magnitude. To understand what had to be done was to participate; this was the real role of our pretty brains, not playing arpeggios. Even the ascetic, the hermit who goes off and sits in a cave or under a tree in the jungle cannot completely free himself from his solidarity with the rest of the world. The air he breathes is full of the vibrations of the world, the food he eats contains the vibrations of the world, and consequently his mere physical existence makes him share the difficulties of the world.6 For such was the constant refrain: If only I went away for a while to the Himalayas, I could overcome my difficulties so much more easily! After that, I would come back stronger, I would have made a step—after that, one puts on the coat of the world again, and it is all the same as before. Afterwards never comes! The work must be tackled in the conditions of the earth's laboratory, there is no escape. You can, to some extent, achieve an inner balance, but the environment you live in is full of imbalance.... You give and take, you breathe and absorb. And so the result is a mixture; and it can be said that everything is contagious, for you live in a world of constant vibrations.7 And yet it was very simple; we do not know how simple it is: the sum of personal difficulties is not what counts, not even stumbling on the way; being virtuous or sinful does not matter at all—where is he, the lone saint in the world? We swallow our share of germs like everyone else... but with a difference: SINCERITY of purpose. This was her own refrain: be sincere, be sincere.... It was the only defense in this generalized cataclysm, the only solid ground. Simply a sincere attitude so that throughout everything, through the most obscure, rebellious or contradictory of states—and we carry a world of contradictions in us, every obscurity and every possible germ—in spite of everything and against all odds, "something" inside keeps to the evolutionary course: that's where I'm going, that's what I want. Each contradiction then becomes an additional impetus to move farther ahead. The battle of evolution does not consist in never making mistakes, but in seizing all that happens in its true sense. Then we are always in the Sense, no matter what turn we take. It is the need for truth that creates truth, it is the need for another air that creates the next evolutionary air, as the need to emerge from the swamp made reptiles of the Jurassic Age grow wings. It was not its reptilian virtues that pulled it out of its predicament. That is what Evolutionary sincerity means: to go in the true direction by all possible means—yes, to want to go there. That's where I'm going, and even if I fall into the fires of hell, that's still where I'm going, for only there can I breathe. There comes a moment, she said, when life as it is, when human consciousness as it is, seems truly impossible to bear. And you say to yourself: "No, that's not it, that's not it, that CANNOT be it, this can't go on." When you reach that point, the only thing to do is to throw in your all—all your effort, all your strength, your life, your whole being—into this chance or, if you like, the exceptional opportunity which is offered to go to the other side.... Taking THAT leap is well worth leaving behind a lot of baggage and unloading a lot of things.8 She said that that sincerity, that need for something else, was so powerful in its simplicity that it had a power even over death. We shall never know how simple the keys to the next world are—as simple as the difficulties are tremendously complicated.
And once the sapling takes root, it will automatically spread to the rest of the terrestrial field: the contagion, too, works in both ways.
Interdependence
The years were passing, and the problem seemed to become more acute, more urgent. Something had to happen. What? She herself did not very well know. I wish we had hundreds and hundreds of years before us to do the work,9 she was already telling them. She was facing that human mass, more than a thousand people-1,185 in 1958—her laboratory, and it moved so slowly, so much like everyday life. People are shocked when a few thousand rupees are wasted, but they are not shocked when torrents of consciousness and energy are diverted from their true ends!... To do a divine work on earth, one must come prepared with tons of patience and endurance, one must know how to live in eternity and await the awakening of consciousness in each one—the consciousness of what true honesty is.10 They did not really understand what the terrestrial stakes were and how their acts, one little "honest" and conscious act in a small detail of Matter, could have repercussions throughout all Matter. For there are moments in Matter's history, exceptional moments, when evolutionary or "climatic" conditions, if you will, are such that one tiny grain of pollen for the love of the thing, pretty, deliberate and simple—pure—can spark a whole new way of being on earth. We have no idea what "big" things in the world are about, we look for them in all the wrong places, in human pomp and circumstance while it is something other than the human that has to emerge: post-human "uselessness." An inconspicuous way of being with a different quality. In the Ashram, there was a crazy old man, perfectly "useless" and quarrelsome to boot; and everyone was amazed that Mother kept such a black sheep (the implication being: "I am so much better" and not crazy, of course): "Why do you keep So-and-so?"But he makes such nice envelopes! No one makes envelopes as well as he does! And there you are: someone in the world who could glue perfect envelopes. And She invented all sorts of "unlikely" occupations for this one or that one, a minuscule work for five minutes a day: mixing nail polish to get an exact shade of salmon pink, arranging flowers in a vase in a certain way and counting the petals to obtain a particular number, filing stamps from New Caledonia or Patagonia according to their date of issue... there is no end to the improbable lists, sometimes "useful," but apparently not always. Each of these invented occupations was a particular way of touching Matter. With each one She was touching Matter in a specific manner. Who understood the exact, conscious and "honest" gesture? Who understood that the other way is not created in the old way, but it must be created just the same? You must start somewhere, it is not going to fall from heaven. The next world begins with a small gesture. And that gesture has to be made. We must start somewhere. What would the chimpanzee of the Neolithic age say about a certain human way of polishing flint?... He would have a good laugh—if chimpanzees laugh.
We are completely beside the point.
And they thought, "Mother is here, she will do it, we are not going to do all that by ourselves...." Obviously, they were not going to do it all by themselves; not a single man is capable of creating the next man, because in order to create something, we must first know what it is—how do you create the unknown, the nonexistent? Yet there is a way of giving ourselves to the other thing and not constantly blocking the door with our old mortal routine. They were only asked not to block the door, to create an opening there so that those tons of consciousness She poured down may enter in. Mother could not do it all alone. This is one dimension of the problem which She tried to explain to them with a kind of pathos which now wrings my heart. She stood there, as an Ancient of evolution who knew the story so thoroughly, who had lived it so many times, had suffered through it so many times and would so much have wished them to take the step, the saving step. She could not take the step all alone. Is it possible to achieve total individual transformation without some measure of correspondence in the collectivity?.. It doesn't seem possible to me. Human nature remains unchanged—one can greatly change the consciousness (for sure, one can purify one's consciousness), but the total conquest, the material transformation, certainly depends to a great extent on some degree of progress in the collectivity.11 What would Einstein do, all alone in the midst of flint polishers? He could not have existed, that is all, he would have been asphyxiated by the psychological climate. Mother lived her last years in an agonizing state of asphyxiation. She saw, She knew; how She entreated them, exhorted them! The individual progress is, in a way, restrained or checked by the collective state. Between the collectivity and the individual, there exists an interdependence from which it is impossible to free oneself totally, even if one tries. And even he who, in his yoga, would attempt to free himself totally from the terrestrial, human state of consciousness would, at least subconsciously, be bound to the state of the whole, which impedes and pulls backwards. One can try to take shortcuts by giving up all attachments and responsibilities, but even so, the realization of even one who is at the very top and foremost in the evolutionary march, is dependent upon the realization of the whole and upon the state of the terrestrial collectivity. And that pulls backwards in such a measure that it sometimes takes centuries for the Earth to be ready....12 Still more centuries? And yet it depended—it depends—really on such a trifle, a microscopic new way in Matter, our Matter, a tiny little "honest" gesture—will there not be such a gesture somewhere? A sudden break in the old habit of being human. And that's why, she continued, to the endeavor for personal progress and realization must be joined an endeavor to uplift the whole and make it progress so as to allow a greater progress of the individual: in other words, THE PROGRESS OF THE MASS ALLOWS THE INDIVIDUAL TO TAKE A FURTHER STEP FORWARD.12 Will this "progress of the mass" be that which is dully rumbling in the East, or will it rather be one we wrest from our own Matter? Because "progress" there will be, whether we like it or not—the more rebellious we are, the more heavy and merciless and crushing will the process be. Nature is no moralist. Why not do the same thing but in a nicer way? she asked.... We would thus avoid Nature's macabre joke. For her, it's of no importance whatsoever; she sees the entirety, the whole, she knows that nothing is lost, that it's only a reshuffling of various quantities, it's like innumerable tiny and unimportant elements being thrown back into the cauldron, mixed thoroughly, and a new thing comes out of the cauldron. But this game is not pleasant for everyone. So if in consciousness, we managed to be as vast as she is... why couldn't we do what she does but in a nicer way?13 Always She called and invoked the great Possible, She endeavored to sow it in their consciousnesses, the great-Possible-always-there which depends upon... a nothing—the formidable tomorrow depends upon a mere breath. It is unimaginably easy, if only we knew... but there have to be a few who do know, and who want to take THAT step. It looks like madness, but all new things have always looked mad before becoming realities. The time has come for this madness to be realized.14 I wish we, here, could open up the way, go a little beyond, everyone together.15
A little, she said....
She was trying to open up the Age of Conscious Matter.
She pulled this mass along—what torrents of energy and light did She not lavish upon that handful of humans in that obscure Playground, so small and white and frail in their midst, and so terribly powerful. She would have broken all bondages had it depended solely on her, She would have rushed like a hurricane to conquer her own Matter. But one cannot force open the door all alone—or can one? That is yet another mystery to clarify. What did She do in spite of us? What could She do? In 1953, exactly twenty years before her departure and in that very Playground, She asked the question—She asked the very ones who would be with her to the end, those human specimens who would turn out to be the symbols of the world's great Negation, but who nevertheless expected her to become radiant, all-powerful, rejuvenated, transformed, the living miracle of the next earth: Is it possible for one body to change without something changing in its environment? What would be your relation with other objects if you have changed so much? And with other beings?... It seems that a whole range of things should also change, at least to some degree, to enable such a body to exist and continue to exist.16 This was on May 20, 1953.
On May 19, 1973, all contacts with the outside world were severed, and She entered... what? Death, or something else?
Who will ever understand those years when Mother slowly asphyxiated amongst us?
Was it in vain? What happened?
Did something happen?
Something we do not yet understand, for we can only understand the posturing and glitter of the immediate human present. A universal beginning is usually understood centuries later, when historians suddenly realize that that pillaging tribe was France, or that wrinkle, the Tertiary. I am trying to stammer out the history of the next Age like a scribe without a memory.
Alone with Mother. Through a curtain which one should destroy, or exorcise perhaps.
Then, abruptly, this universal beginning concretized itself. On a 29th of February, 1956—a leap year.
In fact, if things depended on the good will or ill will of men, or even on what they think, there would be very little hope for the Earth. Sometimes I have the strange impression that the earth's entire history is read the wrong way: the facts and events are true, the same as we all know, but they seem to be read on a single level, through one type of lens, while, in fact, things have a completely different meaning. Geologists and palaeontologists are probably nearer to the earth's true movement, their vision is less falsified, closer to the bare material facts; basically they do not look at the earth with the Mind. We see Renaissances, Mongol invasions, political doctrines and spheres of influence, but nothing of Matter's own movement, of the terrestrial experience seen as the progress of a species whose every instrument and speech and even history may crumble to dust and disappear forever without changing an iota in the progress of... something that has to do with collective and terrestrial human physiology. Our interpretation of this progress could very well have never existed, or could have been read in a completely different way—with different words and quite different principles—yet the fact would have remained the same. We are actors in a play we have no knowledge of, or of which we know only one layer, like geologists of a surface layer. What meaning did the first Achaean tribes attribute to their existence? Certainly not the same as we now attribute to them, and ours is probably as erroneous and limited as theirs. There is another layer which completely escapes us, and as long as we have not touched that bedrock of Man, touched his true purpose concealed in a tiny cell, then all our Histories are but the childish travesties and charades of an entirely different tale.
We must remove our mind-glasses if we are to truly understand the real movement of the world. We must get out of the mind's translation. We live nothing of the world as it is, we are living in a translation of the world. But the spectacles, too, may be part of the evolutionary plan; it may have been necessary, for a time, to see the world in a certain way so as to commit all the necessary "errors." We shall never be sufficiently aware of the utter wisdom of things and how even our errors have a totally different meaning. Evolution does not err, it advances step after step, using every means, using both good and ill wills, or no will at all; it moves toward an inevitable goal, in whatever language we may like to name it. For it is not Mind's evolution, but Matter's evolution.
And we are all in it together, little Marxists and little Christians alike.
The Change of History
But a moment comes when the spectacles can fall off mean, collectively and terrestrially. A moment when glasses are changed. A pure and unobstructed vision may well be the final goal of evolution. As though a number of filters were initially needed to screen from us too blinding a reality. The Supramental is Matter's direct vision. It is Matter itself seeing, doing, effectuating and knowing directly, without going through the Mind. It is Matter's own consciousness—in Matter—directly and infallibly shaping its own world. We cannot really understand anything of this Supramental, because we always put a mental coating on it; if we could just sense a little this consciousness buried in Matter, in the atom, in the cells, the one which governs so infallibly all of Nature's movements, including the flight of birds, and for which nothing is separate, nothing "different," or far, or past, but everything is one pulsation, one continuous space, one single terrestrial movement which knows itself each instant everywhere and thus each instant knows the right action, the right direction, the exact coordination of everything—and without "thinking" about it: it quite simply is, and it is like that—we would probably start shedding great, colossal scales, and the world would become utterly different, stunningly so. All of our Histories would vanish into a formidable non-sense. It is another mode of being. And the body is the "bridge," because this consciousness is in the body, not in the mind. It is not an improvement of the mind, it is a clarification of Matter, which sees for itself and does what it sees. A fantastic simplification of everything. The great Exactness. Really another life. Perhaps the life.
In short, a mutation of and in the body consciousness. But the word "mutation" is again the mental adaptation of a phenomenon that we do not really explain in the least, it is a pseudo-scientific label to exorcise something which eludes us—and that something is everything. We constantly translate in physiological and material terms, within the frame of reference of our present human perception, something that is of another order, or of another layer of time and reality. Thus, "mutation" denotes to us physiological oddities bursting out right and left like a butterfly from a caterpillar (and there well may also be phenomena of this kind, but probably not as we imagine it), and we see ourselves facing strange variations, chubby megalocephalics, perhaps men growing a third eye or telepathic organs or changing their color—we constantly transpose the present, like incurable children. But what is going to mutate first and foremost is consciousness, the perception of the world and of Matter, or rather our false perception of something that is a false matter, because it is falsely seen; instead of seeing through a mental mudbath, the body is going to start seeing directly in its own milieu. And that changes everything! It is as if another reality were taking birth, another world, and yet the same. When the body sees differently and perceives Matter differently, it will naturally handle it differently, by means we cannot even conceive of, because we can conceive only of means that work "through" scalpels, cranes, telescopes, pulverizers.... We understand nothing of what the handling of real Matter can be, because we do not know what real Matter is. And naturally, perceiving itself differently, the body will be lived differently, perhaps it will remold itself—because it will have seen itself differently. The body can only become what it sees as possible for itself. At present, its only possibility is to grow old and stiff, deteriorate and die, because it is imprisoned in a system, an air, which is not its own. How did the other evolutionary transitions or mutations take place? We know nothing about them; all we do is stick labels on them. It seems quite unlikely, though, that the crayfish suddenly began growing another kind of legs through some aberration similar to our pseudo-scientific fancies (although that too is possible: everything is possible). More likely, at each evolutionary stage (at any stage whatever), a change of perception occurs first, another mode of perceiving the milieu, which is probably set in motion by outer circumstances, climatic or otherwise, and which automatically triggers a refashioning of the being and eventually a more appropriate change of form. It is always the consciousness that works first, the perception that starts to touch Matter in a different way and therefore starts handling it differently. We have no idea how wonderfully adaptable Matter is, because we see it as fossilized as our own perception. One lives, dies, lives again, dies again, one falls ill, recuperates and falls ill again and dies again—that is the law. But it is the law of our mental perception. Mutation means a mutation of consciousness. It means another order of the same reality—a more clarified one—unveiling itself.
The Supramental is perhaps a new unveiling, or a new "clarification," in the history of Matter. Naturally, this new clarification has to create its own means and instruments, its own mode of being within this "other" Matter. Our great History will then appear to us in quite another light, for we can only see it in the light of our mental perception and only with the meaning given to it by the Mind. Truly another era. An era as radically different from the present one as the explosion of Life must have been among the pebbles of the world.
A sea change of History.
The Incorrigible Need
"When is it going to happen?" the children asked. They took up the old refrain of Sri Aurobindo's disciples: "The Supramental—when? When is it going to come down?" Because naturally, for them, it was something which was going to fall from heaven, as it were. They did not see how much road had to be cleared between that "heaven" and our Matter bogged down in thousands of years of mental habits. Matter is completely engulfed and caged in a mental web; "Heaven" shines up above for the experts in cosmic consciousness, who drift off to sleep there very honorably and religiously, but in between there is quite a "mudhole" to clean out—the path must be cleared! We have been much too busy playing with our new mental toy, haven't we? It's so much fun to have a new game, she told them. We played with it and tried out every way of using it... like children on a playground: they invent, they look for something, they play, they find it, they scuffle and fight, they quarrel and make up, they discover and destroy and build. But there is a purpose behind all this.... More and more there is a purpose. And perhaps all this surface play is nevertheless leading towards something which will happen one day...1 "When? What will it be like?" She answered them patiently in this Playground: That depends on you.2 They did not understand that through their own purer gestures and less clogged up bodies She was in the process of making them bring the answer into being. When you can be completely conscious of the infirmities and stupidities of the outer consciousness, she said to them, of the utter falsehood of so-called material knowledge and physical laws, the so-called needs of the body and the "reality" of these needs, if you begin to see how false all this is, how stupid, illusory, dark and idiotic, then you are very close to the solution.3 She was trying to peel off the mental scales that tyrannize over the body and govern it by their laws, their you-cans, you-cannots, you-musts, or you-must-nots. And how painstaking it is! The first reflex of each one is "But still, I need this vitamin, and I need bread, and eight hours of sleep is essential, and...." The list is endless, microscopic, and crafty at each and every turn. And this is how the new species begins, in this microscopic cleansing. The cleansing must begin somewhere. "When is it going to happen?" For the mind or the higher intelligence to conceive of new things is easier than for the vital being, say, to feel things in a new way. And for the body it is still more difficult to have a purely material perception of what a new world will be. Yet, this perception must PRECEDE the material transformation; the strangeness of old things, their lack of relevance to the present conditions must first be felt very concretely, if you will. EVEN MATERIALLY they must be felt as obsolete, and as part of a past which has no longer any reason to exist.4 The body must begin to perceive what the new mode might be, and for this to happen, obviously the old mode must first become obsolete in its own eyes. The process is always the same: it is not so much a question of educating the body as of de-educating it, knocking off the Mind's spectacles. To "need" something else is essential, the need is the key to all evolutionary transitions.
The need: the ancient memory in our depths that remembers the great Possible from long before the Mental Age. It is the driving force within, the memory of the earth really—perhaps the real Earth remembering its existence. The mental transition is an obscure evolutionary transition whose meaning we shall fully understand only when we arrive beyond the Mind, in true Matter. We shall then say: "So that's what it is—that's what it was!" But this implies that someone will be there to say, "So that's what it is!"whereas prior to the Mind's advent, no one would have been there to say it, or to feel or enjoy it: there would only have been a huge cosmic soup floating in itself quite indifferently—and perhaps with great delight, who knows? The whole earth must feel this need—a few more or less recalcitrant beings on some Playground are not enough. Every man who has gone beyond the stage of animal-man and becomes man-man truly feels a need—which I could call "incorrigible"—to be something other than this wholly unsatisfying semi-animal.5 It is this "incorrigible" need that must become utterly incorrigible in humans. They must no longer be able to endure being stuck in their asphyxiating skin. And it may be that right now Nature is tightening the screws to make the asphyxiation more certain or the need more obvious. I think it will happen when a sufficient number of conscious people feel without a doubt that there is no other choice.... Everything past and present must first appear as an absurdity that has to go—only then can it happen, not before.6 This was in 1955. The screw was already tightening then. Quite clearly, the present time with all its turmoil and chaotic inanities is the time when this need is awakening; there is almost a sensation of how things could and should be—that means that the hour is at hand. For a long, long time it was said, "It will be, it will be," as a promise to come. Thousands and thousands of years ago, we were already being promised the advent of a new consciousness, a new world, something divine that would manifest on earth, but all that was really said was, "It will be, it will be"— meaning in millions and billions of years. But never before has there been the present feeling that it MUST come, that it is very close.... Despite everything, a moment will come when it will happen, a moment when the movement will swerve into a new reality7.
Day in and day out, She was pouring into their consciousnesses this yearning for the Moment. She seemed to have taken hold of the whole Earth. She was lifting up the whole asphyxiating mass through those little specimens, pummeling them like dough. One could almost feel the whole Earth in that corner of Playground—how vast She was, this Mother, how She pummeled and kneaded that obscure dough! There was a MOMENT. There was a moment when the mental being was able to manifest on earth. The starting point may have been quite poor and incomplete and partial, but it was a starting point just the same. Why could it not be now? 8 There will be a moment when a human consciousness reaches a state sufficient to allow the supra-mental consciousness to enter and manifest in it.... It does not keep stretching like a rubberband, you know: it has to happen sometime. It may happen in a flash. 9
The "Descent"
It was a "Wednesday class" on February 29, 1956. She had read a few pages from The Synthesis of Yoga and answered their questions—the same old question of the world's unconsciousness: "How can unconsciousness aspire to become conscious?" they had asked. Meaning a stone, or this Matter? But we are quite mistaken, for the stone is conscious, Matter is conscious (not as we are, to be sure), one can have a contact with a stone (sometimes more easily than with a human being): amethyst does not respond the same way as granite, and a piece of granite that has lived near a conscious being retains the imprint of the contact; the walls of Thebes have such an imprint. Even our houses sometimes have sad imprints. We could not make contact if there were no consciousness; an "unconscious" object would quite simply be invisible, because it is consciousness that makes the contact possible. Without consciousness, there is no contact. In reality, it is not Matter that is unconscious, it is the Mind. The mind has covered everything with a layer of unconsciousness and separation. It has separated itself from everything—like the Swiss cuckoo in its clock. That evening She told them: It is the Divine in unconsciousness that aspires for the Divine in consciousness. Without the Divine, there would be no aspiration, and without the consciousness concealed in unconsciousness, it would be impossible to change unconsciousness to consciousness.10 Sometimes we wonder if Matter, our own corporeal matter, will not become conscious before we do; or rather if its true, pure, already existent consciousness will not circumvent the Mind by a sort of evolutionary strategy and, taking us by surprise, reveal an unexpected world. It is a question of allowing Matter its free expression, of the Mind releasing its obscuring grip—such is the endeavor of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. But even if the Mind does remain recalcitrant, could it not be that, because of the evolutionary thrust and in spite of ourselves, this consciousness in Matter, this truly divine and exact and supramental consciousness, would begin to thrust its antennae irresistibly outward, as the caterpillar is irresistibly transformed into a butterfly in spite of all caterpillar laws and principles? For, once again, evolution is not a process of the Mind but of Matter or of the consciousness of Matter—that is where the seed is, not in any cerebral convolution, and because the seed is there, that is where it must develop, inevitably and automatically. The only requirement is favorable evolutionary "climatic" conditions. Today Matter has taken the shape of a man endowed with a brain, but who knows whether tomorrow, through its own impetus, it will not take still another shape endowed with yet another instrument for making contact? It is this evolutionary inevitability which prompted Sri Aurobindo to write in his Life Divine: If, then, man is incapable of exceeding mentality, he must be surpassed and Supermind and superman must manifest and take the lead of the creation.11 The whole effort of Mother and Sri Aurobindo may have been to make the process occur with rather than without us.
That evening, for some mysterious and favorable reason, or perhaps without reason, by grace, the Manifestation occurred. The "general descent" Sri Aurobindo had strived for, for so long, took place. Why at this time rather than six years earlier? That is yet another question. We call it a "descent," like falling rain, but that is still our childish language. In fact, for years and years Sri Aurobindo and Mother had tried to establish the connection in their own substance, to clear the passage between the pure Consciousness they had seen on their clear summits and that same Consciousness buried in Matter; and there were moments the connection was made, then everything closed up again. Then another opening, which closed again. The first anthropoid must have gone through a similar experience (let us say, the pioneer of the anthropoids): he was trying to make the connection with that same thing (there are not hundreds of them), that same Force which produced strange little vibrations in his head, that is, in the most unhampered or cleared part of himself, and sometimes, for some bizarre reason, it "happened": he found himself "reflecting" and making unexpected associations—as if the world had acquired a new kind of coherence—but then again it closed up, the passage became obstructed by the old ape habit. Nevertheless, a time came when the "thing" took place more naturally, when it even became contagious—probably when the universal preparation was adequate (we always forget that the world is a single whole). In a way, the ape shed its monkey skin for a moment and became aware of the great universal, total Consciousness, and because he was an ape, the opening, the point of contact, took place at the most clarified level of his body, i.e., in his evolved cranium; and, entering that level, the great Consciousness was expressed by a certain quality of vibration which we call mental. At each level where it enters or is able to enter, that same total Consciousness takes on a particular color or quality of vibration. Until such time when it can be purely and totally itself in an undistorted medium. That medium is Matter. It is the story of the dragon biting its tail. The supramental realization is the perfect union of what comes from above and what comes from below.12 On February 29, 1956, the union was achieved, no longer at the level of the cranium and through a mental medium, but at the level of Matter and in all points of the body. The barrier was broken and the flow rushed forth. 13 Something in the collective human barrier had perhaps given way. Why? It would take a total world vision really to understand. The universal movement is like this: through inner effort and progress, certain individuals, the pioneers, the forerunners, establish a contact with the new Force that is to manifest and receive it in themselves. And because there ARE calls like that, the thing becomes possible, and the age, or the era, or the moment for the manifestation comes. This is how it happened—the Manifestation occurred.14
But our mental language is a constant snare. We say "the new Force," but what is "new"? It is as old as the world. It is we who are very young and become aware of a very old world! Years ago, as I was mentioning to Mother the work of an Italian scientist on the electric energy produced by the body's cells: It is ALL the same Force! she exclaimed The Power is mixed with different states: mental, vital, or even the purely material state, in which case it becomes electricity—the Lord as electrical vibrations! And She laughed. It's their material notation of the Fact.15 There you are! We have still not really understood anything about the Fact, for the electric or atomic or magnetic level is still a superficial level, a translation, as it were, of that same Power through a given medium, which we believe is Matter, or which we call Matter—but there is something even more fundamental... which is perhaps true Matter, matter without our mental looking glasses: the Fact. Truly the Mystery. The mystery that Mother was slowly going to unveil. One day, the ape opened up the passage to the Power in his cranium, and, by so doing, he opened up the mental world and a mental perception of Matter—including perception through telescopes and microscopes, for what looks if not the Mind? One day in a remote corner of India, a being opened up the passage to the Power, or Shakti, or Consciousness-Force, in his body, and he opened up the supramental world and the supramental perception of Matter—the same "something," but seen differently. The same Power, but lived differently. the forerunners, establish a contact with the new Force that is to manifest and receive it in themselves. And because there *ARE calls like that, the thing becomes possible, and the age, or the era, or the moment for the manifestation comes. This is how it happened—the Manifestation occurred."
*This body, she said, is just the same as all the rest of the earth, but for some reason or other, it happens to have become conscious in the *OTHER way; well, that normally shoul be expressed in the earth consciousness as a "coming," a "descent," a "beginning".... But is it a beginning? What has "come"?... The experience came as the experience of an eternal fact: not at all something just now taking place.16 The "what was always there" revealing itself... more and more clearly. It is the eternal Amazon becoming the Amazon by the fact of our walking through it—perhaps Matter progressively becoming what it truly is.
And now the earth is on the way to becoming aware of "the other way."
A Little Pulsation
What does the Supramental look like?...
Were we able to define it or to describe it fully, it would be fully there, on earth. It is not a fixed quantity like hydrochloric acid or the moon: it grows and develops—or rather our perception of it grows and develops. Mother was going to develop this perception for seventeen more years, as if to accustom human eyes and human substance to it. She was clearing the passage. Exactly the same extraordinary vibration which I recognized when the supramental world descended. It comes in and vibrates like a pulsation in the cells.17
Very few were to recognize it on that evening of February 29 at the Playground. To recognize it, the physical consciousness must already be very free from its mental coating, its mental swarming, we might say. In fact, we become aware of it negatively through the reaction of the "swarming." The lights in the Playground had been turned off; the reading of The Synthesis and the children's questions were over. They were sitting on the ground in a semicircle around Her. The roar of the sea could be heard, and the lighthouse swept its beam across the tops of the walls: two short, one long. It was the "Wednesday night meditation." Mother could be discerned in the shadowy light, seated on her low chair, a little bent over, a frangipani flower in her motionless fingers. She was always very white, this Mother, even when She was dressed in red or in many colors, as if something were filtering through her body, a sort of white luminescence, which sometimes became compact and visible to our material eyes. And the disciples were there in the silence with the children in green shorts sleeping near her chair. She was "unifying a field," as she said. She had gathered all these young shoots of the earth together to produce her "evolutionary meteorology"—and She laughed. She laughed about everything, this Mother. She laughed especially in the face of difficulties: the best way to dissolve them. I must admit to you that I personally feel much more myself when I am cheerful and playing (in my own way) than when I am very grave and serious—much more. When I am grave and serious, I feel as if I were dragging the weight of this whole heavy and dark creation; but when I play in it—when I can play, and laugh, and enjoy myself—it feels as if a powdering of joy were drifting down from above, imparting a special glow to this creation and this world, bringing it much nearer to what it is essentially supposed to be.18 For joy is the truth of the Earth, only we have forgotten it: we are sad and suffer. She wanted to bring down her rain of joy, her "sunlit path," as She called it. Why suffer? You don't need to suffer; it's not necessary.19 The supramental is, in fact, the joy of the world prior to the advent of the Mind; one's suffering consists in not being what one is. The real Earth is an earth of joy, it is for joy that the whole thing was created in the first place. Only we are not there yet. She wanted to accelerate the process. She kept drawing down her lovely supramental rain onto this substance. And silence. A terrible Pressure could be felt. (Mother thought everyone on the playground would be knocked flat on the ground.) That a Power was there was obvious; it was so dense you could almost cut it with a knife. It was even suffocating at times. At other times something melted, something opened, and you were carried away in the Great Current, life became utterly fresh and your substance was full of sparkles—perhaps those were the little' "pulsations," but it was almost too "natural" to be noticeable. The Marvel is so natural that, idiots that we are, we only notice it afterwards, once it is gone. I was there that evening; it was during the first years of my stay. The meditation had barely ended and the lights turned on when I wished I could have packed up and gone away as far as possible, to the devil, if possible.... I spent ten years trying not to go to the devil—only trying. The "swarming" within was suffocating.
A negative way of experiencing the phenomenon, we might say.
I went to town to have a drink to the health of the "integral" yoga. I am a free being, after all! This is what is so sad really, this something in us which clings to pain, to the freedom of pain. This suffocating night within, which does not want to yield and repeats No, No, No. The Supra-mental is the night's great suffocation. The swarming routed from its hiding place, forced out into broad daylight by the surreptitious little pulsation engaged in creating the joy of the world in spite of us—it forces everything outside, it insists on being but itself, pure. It is inexorable and irresistible—a kind of little sparkling inside, in Matter: so there is nothing we can do about it. We may cry and scream, but it keeps on growing. It is embedded in the world's Matter, deep inside, ineradicably within. And it will go through to the end—to the total joy within—and will not leave us a minute's peace before; it will not let go of us any more than the first thought let go of the smartest baboons two million years ago (or was it three?). We are merely in the year 20 or so after this universal beginning. We can already appraise the situation; a simple look at the world around us is enough. It is writhing and thrashing about. This Consciousness is kneading them from within, whether they want it or not.20 How well we understand Sri Aurobindo now: "The attempt to bring a great general descent having only produced a great ascent of subconscient mud I had given up that...." The mud is rising up and overflowing. It is frightful. In 1956, things were still fairly decent, almost charming. Let us take a look back: France had just chivalrously offered its place in Indochina to the United States, the Warsaw Pact was newly concluded. Insurrection in Budapest, and the calling in of the Russian troops. President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, French and British troops landed at Port Said, only to retreat—Suez was closed. The Israelis march on the Sinai desert. It was the period of the independence of Sudan, Morocco, Tunisia and Togolandthe beginning of the great "independences." Khrushchev had just indicted Stalin in a secret session of the communist party... four days before the 29th of February. The Polish workers were rioting in Poznan, and Budapest was occupied by the Russians. The first congress of the Chinese Communist party confirmed Mao Tsetung as president of the Central Committee....
There is quite a seed there. But not the seed we think. We shall see—we shall see more and more.
It could have been a continuation with some improvement, a widening of the same world... but, she said, what has happened—the truly new thing—is that a new world has been BORN, BORN, BORN. It is not the old world which is being transformed, it's a NEW WORLD that has been BORN. And we are in the middle of the transition period, when the two are intermingled: the old one still persists, all-powerful and entirely controlling the ordinary consciousness, but the new one is stealing in, still modest and unnoticed—so unnoticed that, externally, it disturbs very little for the moment [this was in 1957] and is even quite imperceptible to the consciousness of most people. Yet it is working, it is growing—until such a moment when it is strong enough to assert itself visibly.21 Forty years earlier, when He was writing the Arya, Sri Aurobindo had commented: When the conscious Spirit [the supermind] intervenes, a supremely concentrated pace of evolutionary swiftness becomes possible.22
The acceleration is quite breathtaking.
But why now? Why at this particular point in time?. One would think that this new supramental world would have been born more peacefully and decently in the midst of refined humans, in the Renaissance, say, or perhaps during Pericles' time? In any case, during an age when men had a certain. I was going to say "polish"—but that is the point: the polish is now wearing thin—because underneath, it is all the same, whether in the skin of Pericles or the Khmer Rouge, it is the same inner swarming. Only, now it has become unrelieved. It is even being forced to show its face everywhere, in the broad daylight of the world, for everyone to contemplate. The Supramental is like a huge pair of clothespins hanging out all the dirty laundry of the world right under our nose, until we become sufficiently asphyxiated and disgusted to... consent to something else. "Why have the difficulties increased since this supramental descent?" complained a disciple one day at the Playground, four months after the famous "descent." Who says it is not because you have become more conscious! That your difficulties were there before, and you just weren't aware of them? If you see things more clearly and see things that are not very pretty, it is not the Supramental's fault, it's your own! It is providing you with a light, a mirror in which you can see yourself better than ever before, and you are a little upset because what you see is not always too pretty? But what can I do !23 A formidable searchlight, indeed, the harshest of all, which compels all the hidden little beasts to emerge from their lairs.
The Supramental is a formidable power that draws all out.
In 1925, Sri Aurobindo had made a strange remark, when asked what would be the signs of the imminence of the supramental descent. He enumerated four signs, the fourth leaving us pensive. Firstly, the knowledge of the Physical world has increased so much that it is on the verge of breaking its own bounds [perhaps in order to reach beyond them and find the little "pulsation" there]. Secondly, there is an attempt all over the world towards breaking the veil between the outer and the inner mental, the outer and the inner vital and even the outer and the inner physical [this "inner physical," still unknown to us, is precisely where the vibratory foundation underlying what we call Matter lies]: Men are becoming more "psychic." Thirdly, the vital 200 is trying to lay its hold on the physical as it never did before. It is always the sign that whenever the higher Truth is coming down, it throws up the hostile vital world on the surface, and you see all sorts of abnormal vital manifestations, such as an increase in the number of persons who go mad, earthquakes, etc. Also, the world is becoming more UNITED on account of the discoveries of modern science—the airplane, the railways, the telegraph, etc. Such a union is the condition for the highest Truth coming down and it is also our difficulty [indeed!]. Fourthly, the rise of persons who wield tremendous vital influence over large numbers of men.24
This is something to ponder over.
Why these "large numbers of men"? Why this world all tied up in one net with its "airplanes" which became "jet planes," its abolished distances and its televisions? A compact human knot. You raise your voice in Peking, and it sends ripples all the way to Chicago or Tierra del Fuego. Pericles is long gone. But what has evolved since Pericles? Science? That is not sure. But for sure the human net has become inextricably tied up—indissolubly, we might say. We cannot move an atom without moving everything. A terrible universal disease... or something else? An unthinkable contamination of everything. Pericles would never have thought of it—but we are all "thinking of it," nonetheless.
And it comes to us in flashes that this frightful state of things may in fact be the best possible condition for the supramental contagion. It is not Pericles' brain that is progressing through evolution; evolution is not meant to produce some super-Pericles: it is all of terrestrial Matter that is evolving simultaneously; it is in Matter that the little ((pulsation" is happening—so very new and upsetting for everything.
The whole earth is rounding the bend, all together, whether we like it or not. Mother laughingly called it the supramental catastrophe. She said: Anything that disturbs the Inertia is, for Inertia, a catastrophe. In the world, the earthly world (it's the only one I can speak of with competence; of the others, I have only overall visions), in the earthly world, for Inertia (which is the basis of the creation and is necessary to fix, to concretize things), anything that disturbs it is a catastrophe. That is to say, the advent of Life was a monstrous catastrophe, and the advent of intelligence in Life another monstrous catastrophe, and now the advent of Supermind is the final catastrophe! That's how it is.25
Indeed, we would be absolutely wrong to think that the present chaos can be patched up—it is not going to be patched up, it is going to be un-patched completely, until the very last atom of night is pushed out—until we get to the OTHER THING... which may well spring up right under our noses in spite of ourselves, surreptitiously born of our own Matter. It is happening within there, it is there we have to look. And the less we rely on our mental glasses, the more we will be able to see the beauty of the phenomenon, as it were. Another history is beginning, which will give us the key to everything: From this point of view, the phenomenon that is now taking place, she said to the children, is unique in the history of the Earth; and probably (most certainly), once we reach the end of this transformation process, we will have the key to all prior transformations, in other words, everything we are now trying to understand will be known in relevant terms once the process has recurred from the mental to the supramental being.26
And to the rebellious children sitting on the playground—I being one of them—She declared a little banteringly and with an underlying touch of humor: You are therefore invited to develop in particular your capacity of observation, so that all this does not happen to you in a half-dream, and you do not wake up to a new life without knowing how it all happened. You must be quite vigilant and wide awake and, instead of focusing your attention on small inner psychological events which are rather... old hat (they belong to a whole human history that has lost its novelty, at any rate), it would be better to pay attention to more universal, more subtle and impersonal things, which will give you a chance to make new discoveries of special interest.27
In short, we must start pre-perceiving tomorrow's Matter.
But there are also those human mobs rumbling in the background....
4. The Supramental Descent
If we were an explorer returning from some faraway continent and had to describe the marvels we had encountered, forests unlike any others, winged beings, metals with strange properties, it would be easy enough. But it is not the case. The future world is right here before our eyes. It is an unexplored land, and yet it is beneath our very feet: it is another continent within the continent. We live in it without seeing it. The world in which apes capered about and the world we walk in are the same, and yet.... This other world, she said, is necessarily an entirely new experience. You must go back to the time of the transition between the animal creation and the human creation to find a similar evolutionary period. At that time, however, the consciousness was not sufficiently mentalized to be able to observe, understand and feel intelligently, so the transition had to be worked out in a totally obscure way. Consequently, this thing is really new and unique in the terrestrial creation: it's something unprecedented and is really quite a strange and new perception or sensation or impression....1
A new perception.
Nor are we even sure there is a real analogy between this transition and previous transitions, for not only is the physiological difference between ape and man negligible, or even between the mongoose formed in the womb of its mother and the child of man formed in the womb of its mother, but the perceptions of apes and men, although vastly different, still apply to the same Matter, which is simply used in a new way because of the new perception. We perceive Matter differently, so we use it differently, we discover new ways to deal with and handle it, but it is the same Matter. Up to a certain point, this is also what is going to happen to us. The apes merely grafted a new device, mind, onto the old terrestrial substance. But in the present case, it is not a new graft, not a new device, supermind, that is being added to the terrestrial arsenal; Matter itself is changed. We could say that Matter's properties change—are in the process of changing. We might think: "Okay, we shall see when it will be done." Indeed, if a giraffe started growing a second neck, we would surely notice it. The trouble is... it is quite possible that our old human perception will not permit us to see the new Matter, and that this new Matter has no intention of indulging in physiological oddities as we imagine them, for it is we who imagine them, we who keep incorrigibly transposing the old way of being onto another way that has nothing in common with ours and is the way of the new Matter. In short, the task is to perceive, or pre-perceive with human organs something human organs cannot grasp. To make an advance in evolution beforehand, if we may say so. It is a challenge. The ape's task was easier... perhaps. But all the same, our substance must contain a connecting link—how could the transition, the bridge between the present state and the future one, be made otherwise? There must be a way, a sort of perception of the "vanishing point," as it were, of the direction where things escape us; and if we have the courage to let ourselves slip through that aperture—rather dizzying for our old reference points—we might find ourselves on a new track. To set foot on the path is to work out the transition. What we are going to find at the other end, we truly cannot know, it is unimaginable by our human means. A strange adventure. Perhaps a dangerous one.
Fossilized Appearances
The first signs of the transition are to be found in our perception. The ape, too, acquired a new perception, but its eyes remained unchanged: it only established new connections between old habitual things. Here, the organ of perception is not changed or improved or enlarged, but the very object of perception and the whole field of perception is changed, because it is not seeing with new eyes: it is all of Matter seeing, in a way, and perceiving itself differently, as if it had thousands of eyes everywhere—it is the cells that see, conscious atoms that move, and all this in a total oneness in which the superficial and artificial separation of little bodies dressed in European or Chinese or literary or mathematical suits no longer exists. The line of demarcation becomes as unreal as barbed wire on the slopes of the Alps. It no longer exists, as everything exists simultaneously. The purpose of the individual consciousness, so laboriously carved out by evolution, is simply to focus a ray on a certain point of that totality, to allow the movement of force to flow in a certain direction according to the needs of the moment; and it does not pour or direct it "over there," for everything is within that totality. One body, or the entire universe, it is all the same. It is conscious Matter. obviously not the Matter we perceive through our present eyes, fingers, or television sets. That Matter is not what we see or as we see it, is quite evident: our microscopes blare it out. From the standpoint of science, she said to the children, you are a mass of... not even atoms, something infinitely finer than atoms, and in constant motion. There is simply nothing like a face, a nose, eyes, or a mouth, all this is just an appearance. And so the scientists have come to this conclusion—the same one as the old incorrigible spiritualists—that the world is an illusion. This is a great discovery, a very great one.... One more step and they will reach the Truth.2 In Tlemcen, we have already seen another kind of Matter. Well, this time, it is not supermicroscopes that will tell us, nor the visions of psychics nor occult powers: Matter itself will tell us, will experience itself. It is real Matter, direct, unalloyed, that will see and operate: the spontaneity of pre-mental, "natural" evolution will be reproduced on a conscious scale. Only, instead of a bird restricted to its trans-Siberian route, there will be a totality of consciousness and being encompassing all the routes in its own substance. Life will no longer be "thought"; it will be lived, simply. Matter itself will live instead of a thought of Matter. We see nothing of life, we live nothing of life—we only think it. Everything comes to us through a mental veil. It is that screen which has been removed. All the millennia we have spent laboriously weaving that veil were only meant to allow a centralized, individualized consciousness to become aware one day of the unimaginable wholeness of matter and life, to live everything, to be everything, to understand everything, to feel everything.... Truly another life. To love everything and feel joy in everything, because the goal of this whole affair is the joy of being, which we so miserably lack.
But first, we must come into contact with that true Matter. How? Through what perception? Our senses are liars!3 Mother exclaimed. How can we release that other continent within the continent? Probably—certainly—it will emerge on its own: the Supermind is quite capable of explaining itself. The "little pulsation" is already at work, formidably so. It is in the process of startling all the cells in the world despite the pandemonium of our mental complications and surface revolutions which revolutionize nothing. This is the real revolution, within and inescapable. Hence it is not some happier "posterity" that concerns us, but our immediate present, whether or not we wish to participate in the process, whether or not we wish to accelerate the movement and witness the transition instead of reeling through it in the unreal nightmare of the Mind. For, after all, we may awake in two or three generations (probably more) as the next ordinary or great men and find all this as natural as today we solve an equation or call the Observatory on the telephone. Future History will show us how stupid we used to be, and we shall no longer be the same fools—for the time being, however, we are clearly still in the stupidity, and some find it asphyxiating. Future history is for them. One day while looking at Mother and the dreadful labor in Matter She had taken upon herself to do, in order to release that truer world and those truer cells, I was struck by this thought: "But they will find all this completely natural once it is done! They will say: WE have done it all, it's our own evolution!" And Mother smiled: The world will go on. Things will come to pass. And there will be perhaps a handful of men who will know how they were done. That's all.4
For those who are eager to work out the transition with open eyes, some initial idea, or better yet, an initial perception of the supramental process is necessary: how and in which way should we look, since our eyes are deceptive and our thoughts are deceptive? And that's it: the very first step is not "to do," but to undo: I challenge you to transform your body if your mind is not transformed. Just try a little to see! You can't move a finger, say a word or take a single step without the mind intervening. So with what tool do you expect to transform your body if your mind is not already transformed?.. .5 As long as your mind is real for you, as long as your way of thinking is something true, real, concrete for you, it only shows that you are not there yet. You must first cross over to the other side.6 We do not know just how simple and yet fantastically different it is. A brief personal example, a very simple one, might better illustrate how sly and invisible the phenomenon is, so perfectly natural that we live in a net without realizing it—quite naturally, of course, otherwise we would have left it long ago. What takes the most time, Mother said, is becoming conscious of what must be changed...7 To break away from the old natural way. Well, one day, on a riverbank in a remote part of the world, I was alone, in rags, cleaning a copper pot that was my sole possession in the world, and while scrubbing my pot with sand from the river, I considered my rather strange and miserable life of begging for food during the day and fighting insects at night, with a body that any decent society would have considered ill—and surely I would fall ill if I looked at it all too closely. If I had had a thermometer at that moment, I would certainly have fallen ill with fever. But suddenly, a thought—more than a thought, a force—seized hold of me: "What does it matter what you think of it!?" Instantly, like scales falling from my eyes, the sickness left the body, the situation was transformed, the world changed: I stopped thinking about it... and the millions of thoughts stopped having any relevance, they scurried off like rats—suddenly everything was the same, and it was utterly different! It was the thought that had created the picture of fever—a false image. Take away thought's false picture, and the body lives very joyously. It was the body that suddenly became quite buoyant, as if emerging from a mud bath.
We constantly live in that mud. It veils everything, distorts and falsifies everything. The first step is to step out of it. It is the "vanishing point" for the other reality. What we think is of no importance whatsoever. And on top of it, it is wrong. They would rather die clinging to their habits than let go of them and live in an immortal way. 8 Death, too, results from a certain habit, as does misery, and false vision, and illness, and the entire falsehood of the world. We live in an incredibly false habit: "I can see this, therefore it's true; I touch this, therefore it's true; I feel this, therefore it's true...." Well, that "truth" must first fall away like dust, it is like a first piercing look breaking open the old armor so as to release the perception of true Matter. We must break out of this vague and murky way of looking that sees just appearances, which are so deceptive, so unreal—so fossilized.9 Our Mental Quaternary is a fossilized and obsolete age, like primitive mosses in carbon layers.
Only, the Habit must be uprooted down to the cells. That is Mother's whole work. And we have to start somewhere. We are at the time when we are going to see things.... There are long, long, very long periods during which things are prepared; there is, afterwards, a very long, very long period during which things develop, organize, settle and bear consequences; but between this and that, there is a moment *when things are done, when they happen. It's not always very long (sometimes it is, at other times its very brief), but that's when something happens. And that "something" is what will give the world a new development. Well, we are just—as it happens, we are just at such a moment. Which means that if we are (people, most of the time, are blind), if we aren't blind, if our eyes are open, we *WILL SEE, we will see things.... Some people are in the night, in the past, in falsehood up to here... they see nothing, nothing, nothing—they will go right to the end without seeing anything.... But those whose eyes are open will see.10
She repeated this endlessly to the children in the Playground: Those who know how not to be weighed down by old habits...11
The Supramental Substance
All the same, if only we could know what is at the other end.... Once we lose the Habit, we enter the Great Forest; we are like the blind of a nonexistent world, or a world whose existence increases as we walk through it, and what will there BE in that Peru at the other end, when we get there? That Peru is right under our feet, but we are blind to it. If we could only see a little, or know the direction, what the supramental world looks like, the journey would perhaps be less blind. In fact, the wonder of Pioneers is that they walk through nothingness, and it becomes something by the fact of their walking through it. It is their grace, their gift to the world.
But, just one year before entering the great unnamed Forest where She was to spend fifteen years hacking away in the dark, in nothingness, in death, Mother had a vision, which was like the sweep of a searchlight over this tangled nonexistence of undone habits and of a new, yet unborn habit. It happened on the 3rd of February 1958—February is a decidedly lovely month. But unfortunately, She was unable to see till the end of the vision, because, as usual, someone clinging to her skirt abruptly called her and dragged her from the next world back to... the old habit of being an idiot. The degree of human stupidity mixed with this stupendous adventure is simply unbelievable; at each step, each moment, and right to the end, it would surround her, as if She not only had to carve out the New but also uproot the old. But so it is, the two go hand in hand. She had to uproot the old habit of the world in each little specimen around her so that a lovely Peru may be born under our feet. She wanted so much the earth to be lovely. She truly loved the world very much. Anyone else would have blown the whole snake pit apart—that is what we all do, war after little war after little war, and it all starts over again. She wanted so much for things to become different. So She took the lot, that which resisted and refused, that which was stupid and petty and crablike, and She swallowed and swallowed the poison of the world, tirelessly transmuting each and every pettiness. She hewed the path with an axe, and left her love behind as a trail of light so that we too might walk... a little.
In that vision, She suddenly saw the supramental world in a symbolic way. A glance into the future, into the ever-existent that unveils itself gradually. It seems far, far away... and yet? There is more than one miracle in that Forest, who knows? A squirrel looking at man certainly does not understand much about him, there is almost no connection between its small, inquisitive eyes and our haughty airs in a three-piece suit; but it was suddenly as if a connection had been made, a bridge spanned between the mysterious future species and our large, inquisitive eyes. Once we hold a thread, we can pull on it. We must pull on the great Thread, the thread of joy perhaps. That vision is like a first bridge, a contact with the already-here. What takes thousands of years is to establish the contact, to conceive of the possibility of contact. Then, it is the contact that pulls us; alone, we could not possibly extricate ourselves from the old bog—"Just try a little!" Mother would say. Evolution is simply a great future pulling us, for how could the Night ever pull anything but night?
There was an immense ship, the symbol of the transit site where human-men were being prepared for the supramental life: a sort of training ship for the supramental world. And all those who were ready, who fulfilled the required conditions, were about to disembark in the supramental world. On the shore of this world stood tall beings, supramental beings; they were to review the young apprentices from the ship to determine whether or not they were able to disembark. I say able to disembark, because living, breathing and existing in that new milieu, in that supra-mental world, was really like a question of oxygen, or rather of bodily substance. The next substance seems to be a singular discovery. And, not only the beings onshore, but the ship itself, the entire ship's substance, were made of that same supramental substance: The supramental substance nearest to the physical world, the first to manifest. The light was a mixture of gold and red creating a uniform substance of luminous orange. Everything was like that: the light, the people, everything had that color, with varying nuances to differentiate one thing from another. It gave an overall impression of a shadowless world: there were nuances but no shadows. The atmosphere was full of joy, calm, order. Everything went smoothly and silently.12 And this is where it decidedly becomes very curious and interesting: On that ship, things were not made as they are made on earth; for example, clothes were not made of cloth, and the material that looked like cloth was not artificially manufactured: it was part of their body, it was made of the same substance that took different forms. It had a sort of plasticity.... Plasticity is the great characteristic of the Supramental World: it is like going from the rigidity of our present, false Matter to something resembling the movement of the subatomic Matter of modern scientists. When a change had to be effected, it was not done through artificial and external means, but by means of an inner operation, THROUGH AN OPERATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS that gave form or appearance to the substance. LIFE CREATED ITS OWN FORMS [my emphasis]. Everything was a single substance, which altered the quality of its own vibration according to the needs or requirements...12 We thus catch a glimpse of that "conscious Matter" which takes on forms at will out of a total oneness of substance. It all seems like a fairy tale, but our evolution is perhaps a fantastic fairy tale. After all, we are but the mental babies of the second millennium after Christ. What do we know? The little lemur in the Philippines would certainly have found it quite fantastic if it had been told that a fellow on two feet was to be its posterity. In short, we are invited to take a look at our own posterity: The tall beings on the shore were not the same color, they did not have the orange hue: they were paler, more transparent. Except for a certain part of their bodies, only their contours were visible. They were very tall, they seemed to have no skeleton and to be able to take on forms according to their needs. Only from the waist to the feet did they have a permanent density, which you did not feel in the rest of their body. Their color was much paler and contained very little red, it verged on gold or even white...12 How far away all this seems!
But less distant were the young supramental recruits, the apprentices. They were from every country and every age, but on the whole they were not old. Some were sent back to the ship as though their preparation were insufficient or their substance not yet ready. The quality of the substance was the criterion: Those who were sent back for further training were not of a uniform color: as if their body had spots of a grayish opacity, of a substance resembling the earthly substance. They were dull, as if they had not been entirely permeated by the light, not transformed. They were not like that everywhere, only in places.12 Opacity is the very attribute of false matter—what we know, or rather see as unconscious Matter ("unconscious" because of our own unconsciousness). And we wonder if the difference—the apparently enormous difference—between those beings and ourselves, between that Matter and this one, is not simply a question of a little screen to be knocked over—a screen of unconsciousness that hides real Matter from us and makes it appear opaque and rigid. What a surprise if those opacities started to clear up, became light and began to move away by virtue of a mere change of consciousness!... Yet it is the same Matter, we need not imagine or create another Matter; it is the same one. In one case illumined, in the other sealed—by what? Perhaps by our idea of Matter, or by our mental vision of Matter.... There is a mental process to be undone right down to the cells. But it is not a different kind of Matter, it is here, the same one- only unsealed. Perhaps like the difference between a primitive moss fossilized in a layer of carbon and the same primitive moss fully alive in the sunlight.
What has the power of unsealing this Matter, of cleansing it? Obviously not what we think of it, neither the superphenomenologies of the mind from the little Hegels of the Quaternary, nor even all our religious or Marxist virtues.... There must be something else. It is this "something-else" that is of interest to us. What are the "virtues" that will help make the next species? If we knew that much, the road would be clearer. The "opaque" ones were sent back to terrestrial life. The criterion for deciding was based exclusively on the substance of which people were made, that is, whether they belonged completely to the supra-mental world, whether they were made of that very special substance. The criterion was neither moral nor psychological. Very likely, the substance of their body was the result of an inner law or an inner movement....12 What is that law, that movement? Perhaps a certain way of aspiring in Matter. In the Mind, we aspire for beauty and truth; in the heart, we aspire for love and oneness.... There must be a similar movement to be initiated at the level of Matter, in the body. A new rhythm to be found. Probably one must first be quite detached from all mental and vital movements in order to understand what the true movement of bodily Matter may be. On that riverbank, with a copper pot in hand, my body suddenly free of thought had become very carefree and joyous—as if there were another kind of breathing in it: everything was clear, sparkling and light. The body is perhaps the movement of joy, the world of joy. The true movement of Matter is joy. It does not last because of the old habit which returns, the old habit of being ill, or thinking we are going to be ill, or... the whole mortal routine. The habitual opacity. That criterion had nothing mental in it and gave the strange inner sensation that many things we consider good or bad are not so in reality.... 12 Indeed, the false sense of reality! What is really bad is not to grasp everything in its true sense, for everything makes sense in terms of tomorrow's life: only either we embrace that sense, or we do not. For the supramental world, "sin" is simply not changing everything into the sparkling little rhythm, or not taking everything as an opportunity to establish the little rhythm and undarken Matter. The abyss, the sin, is to remain opaque, whether in sickness or in health, in vice or in virtue—the worst opacities are the virtuous ones! Yes, we must catch this misery and force the joy of tomorrow into it, fill it with the lightness of the right Sense, the true Sense, the Great Sense—where we are going. For everything is going there... if we want to. There is no good or bad, there are only missed opportunities. Clearly, everything depended upon the capacity of things, upon their ability to express the supramental world or to be in contact with it.... In one way, we are in contact, in another way, we are sealed off. An ape swinging in the trees is quite sealed off from mental life; a man wearing moral and mental spectacles is quite sealed off, too. It was so unbelievably different, sometimes even so contrary to our ordinary appreciation of things! Quite obviously, our appreciation of what is divine or not divine is incorrect...12 Is it so surprising? Sometimes we wonder if Sri Aurobindo and Mother were not discovering a new divine! A divine who laughs, who dares to laugh for once, after centuries of crucifixions and Sinais under the thunder of Jehovah and ascetics in their solemn cosmic trance. A hell of a change, or in any case a sacred one. Perhaps cosmic consciousness in Matter? And endowed with humor moreover. I saw that what helps and what prevents people from becoming supra-mental is very different from what our usual moral notions imagine. I felt just how... ridiculous we are.12 Amen. Indeed, she concluded, the shortest road from one point to another is not the straight line that men imagine!12 And we wonder if that Supermind—far, far away, at the other end of... of what?—is not perhaps reachable in one second. It is all here. It is everywhere. Only a certain way of establishing the contact is lacking. We must find the way. We must find the Sense here. And tomorrow's mystery could suddenly become amazingly simple.
Something to be unblocked.
The Missing Link
We wonder what this unblocking depends on. Not a psychological unblocking, but a material one, an unblocking of Matter. Real Matter, here. Or should we say the next Matter? We are struggling awkwardly to create the language of butterflies with caterpillar words.
All the same, there is something quite mysterious. When She narrated her experience in the supramental world, Mother said: On February 3rd, I was there walking concretely, as concretely as I used to walk in Paris in the old days, in a world which EXISTS IN ITSELF, outside of all subjectivity....12 Let us see, She clearly said "concretely" and "outside all subjectivity." In other words, an objective world... like the Champs-Elysees. Forgive me, but I am extremely materialistic: You won't be satisfied until you are supramental from head to foot, She once said to me. Indeed, preferably first the feet. However, I replied: "I'm not even sure." I was not sure of ever being satisfied with anything. A kind of absolute thirst, you could say. And no tall tales please. You will be satisfied when it is in Matter. Actually, the whole point is perhaps that true contentment can only exist in the body, and all the rest is just some vague daydream. But all the same, this Matter must be prepared, made up, unblocked. I firmly believe in that. Matter is obviously not what it should be—or rather it is not what it is. But where is that ((concrete"? It is a fact that She did not say "as concretely as I used to go walking on the Playground"—She chose an analogy in Paris. The Champs-Elysees is far away, six thousand miles from the Playground and four and a half hours earlier by the clock time during the summer days—but then this difference, too, is rather subjective. A few more jet engines and perhaps it will be the day before. And She said: It is as if a bridge were being spanned between the two worlds.12 Her vision was like a first bridge. And if it is "concrete" or material in some way, it would indicate another Matter in Matter or behind Matter—another world within this one? And if there cannot be two identical kinds of Matter one inside the other, it must mean that there is a true matter and a false matter... or perhaps both are true and the same, but perceived differently—two different levels of perception. Just as there is the level of Mr. Jones reading his newspaper and the level of the electron microscope. Another kind of "materiality"—the next kind. But truly speaking, we know nothing about it at all; we do not have adequate eyes. All we know is that something is in the process of happening. When I returned [from the supramental world], along with the memory of the experience, I knew that the supramental world is permanent, that my presence there is permanent, and only A MISSING LINK IS NEEDED TO ALLOW THE JUNCTION WITH THE CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE SUBSTANCE, and it is that link which is in the process of being built.12
For Matter to be unblocked, it must first begin to perceive itself differently, which means that it must abandon a certain way of perceiving itself or of being perceived by us and enter into another way. This new way would be the means of the transition. In a way, it is the new perception that opens up the road to the new world. The supramental Amazon is there, concretely, in its entirety, but as we walk through it, it takes on visible contours, relief, rivers and small birds that were always present. Walking through it is probably what builds the missing link between a glimpse of the Amazon and the perception of the entire Amazon. When it is completely perceived, it will be entirely there—but it must be perceived in the material substance. It is the body—and by no means the head—that makes the crossing through the supramental Amazon and perceives it little by little. We are now walking through this same Amazon with our head, which is why we do not see it (or see it in another way). The "evolutionary bridge" is truly the body consciousness, that is, what opens the passage in its own substance, what gradually becomes conscious of the other way and builds the "missing link" between an obsolete, fossilized perception and the other. It is decidedly a very remarkable and rather strange phenomenon. The missing links between a certain Pithecanthropus and some quadrumane or between this reptile and that pterodactyl were usually sought in the external forms; but now the link is in the consciousness and in the perception of the consciousness. It is quite possible, however, that each evolutionary transition took place in the consciousness before taking place in the form. It has always seemed to us that there first had to be a certain perception or pre-perception of a future possibility for the possibility to see the light of day. In a way, something in the reptile had first to grow inner wings or have a need for wings in order for them to grow materially. When we say that something suddenly "mutates" in the cells, we simply push back the problem by making it a mechanical one, because we do not know that the cells are as conscious and intelligent in their own way as our little anthropological brains—there certainly is a cellular consciousness. And it is precisely that consciousness in our own substance which will work out the new evolutionary transition; it is not a game of probability that puts ten million molecules of DNA or RNA into a big bag, shakes it well and suddenly pulls out a new species. It does not work like that. It has never worked like that.
A Sudden Change?
By means of that first perception of the "future," Mother wove the link in her own substance and in the earth's substance. She was beginning to grow the "inner wings" of the next species. But that future is wholly here, you see. So the problem becomes very. I was about to say miraculous. Mother's Great Forest is magical, as I have said—perhaps far more so than we can ever imagine. Because if everything is here and only one small link of perception is missing, that future cannot be out there millions of light years or geological and anthropological ages away. It is a tomorrow that can be here in a flash, the unblocking may happen in a burst of laughter—yes, perhaps an outburst of joy could undo all the old mental nightmare and open our true eyes of Matter, who knows? Or the eyes of true Matter. We suddenly break out of our old carbon layer, and it is here. For where is the "supramental substance" that is to make the next being if not in some little outbursts of joy that suddenly reveal to us an unexpected matter, a completely fresh and carefree body, which never knew it could be "like that"? The body must learn it can be "like that." It must come into contact with the true movement of its cells. The supramental movement is here, in the heart of all Nature. The supramental substance is there, just behind this false substance smothered by ten million mental, medical, logical and atavistic theorems, with Newton and all the rest of all the false gravity of our heads. On 29 February 1956, a true little pulsation began to palpitate in the cells of the world, or rather a first being endowed with a terrestrial body became conscious of that pulsation. A first bridge was spanned between false and true Matter, and who knows, perhaps the complete fusing, the final unblocking, will happen in a flash. I can tell you that by the fact of your living on earth at this time, she said to the children—whether you are conscious of it or not, whether you even want it or not—with the very air you breathe, you are absorbing that new supramental substance which is spreading throughout the earth's atmosphere. And it is preparing things in you that will materialize VERY SUDDENLY, as soon as you have taken the decisive step.13 The decisive step must be taken in one's consciousness. We must open our eyes to the POSSIBILITY. If the consciousness believes it is possible, then everything is possible! The only impossibility is to believe that it is not possible: it blocks the door completely, and buries you in the old fossilized perception—the reptile would have stubbornly remained a reptile, it would have dried up in its swamp and never worked out the transition. But for those of us who do want to work out the transition, we have only to open the Door of the Possible, which opens the door of the new perception, which opens the door to the great change of the world, to the transformation. That is what is expected of us. To collaborate with evolution means to refrain from constantly putting the sticks of an old evolutionary logic into the spokes of the new evolutionary logic—for obviously, it is not the same logic! But it is logical nevertheless. If you consider the material world, she said to the children, and you go down to the most minute element (you know, don't you, that they have found innumerable, absolutely invisible things), if you take this element as the part and the material world as the whole, and you imagine a Consciousness [the great total Consciousness, which we are gingerly becoming, in small doses, so as not to explode], or a Will that would delight in making an infinite number of combinations with all these elements but without ever repeating the same combination... we would have to conclude that the universe is new every instant of eternity. And if the universe is new every instant of eternity, we are forced to acknowledge that absolutely nothing is impossible; not only that, but what we call logical is not necessarily so.14 It is only the repetition of the combinations that gives an appearance—we insist on "appearance"—of stability to the universe, whence we derive laws, principles or "facts," but the fact of the bird is not that of the reptile. We constantly imprison the universe in our little network of facts, as if it were to remain "humanized" forever, but it may be that the universe does not care for human facts, just as one day it did not care for certain simian facts. You can understand, she told them, that if through your aspiration or through YOUR ATTITUDE [the emphasis is mine], you introduced a higher element—what we can now call a supramental element—into the existing set of combinations, you could SUDDENLY change their nature, then all these so-called necessary and inescapable laws would become absurdities. In other words YOU YOURSELVES close the door to the miracle by having certain conceptions, certain attitudes, and by the acceptance you give to certain so-called principles.... And it is YOU YOURSELVES who shut the door by saying with a logic that seems entirely reasonable to you: "Well, if I do X, necessarily Y is going to happen, or if I do not do X, necessarily some other thing is going to happen." It is as if you were hanging up a steel curtain between yourselves and the free action of the Grace.... How wonderful it would be to imagine another kind of logic, that of the unexpected. Don't you think it would be delightful? We have had enough of the world as it is! Why not let it become at least what we think it should be?15
The world is on the verge of a miracle—it is here, possible, almost palpable. But on what little trigger does that reversal of appearances depend? What will happen to make human beings see differently all of a sudden? Or will we have to wait for centuries until slowly, slowly, almost imperceptibly, perceptions change one by one, through millions of repeated experiences that gradually clarify and lighten matter—and we glide into the other way almost without noticing it? But this is very unlikely. The phenomenon is growing from within; it will take us by surprise, because it is not happening in our heads nor even with our mental consent, but in our bodies and in the general substance of the earth. For the moment, we are witnessing only the negativity of the phenomenon, big waves of terrestrial mud flowing everywhere, the great universal cleansing of Matter, which is throwing out all the old falsehood, pounding and kneading and pulverizing everything until we thoroughly lose our bearings. And perhaps that is exactly the point—no one will be able to find his bearings any more. We will not have a handle any more. Nothing will explain anything any more, nothing will be worthwhile any more, we will stand mouths agape before an incomprehensible and ungovernable world in which everything contradicts itself, each remedy annuls the other and everything is mutually reduced to zero. A chaos of perceptions. But behind is a supremely Positive element that is pushing and pushing and is in the process of breaking the old structure open to reveal to us its naked Marvel. It is there. We must come in contact with that, we must let ourselves be drawn by that. The very quality of the atmosphere has changed,16 She said. And She knew the difference of "airs," She could detect the odor of an atomic explosion thousands of miles away. No, it does not depend upon a slow, interminable evolution of consciousnesses. It is not a question of refining or sharpening any instruments, developing new antennae or concentrating and meditating and reaching higher regions; it is right here before our eyes. We even wonder if the phenomenon will take place on our side or on the other, as it were; if we will go to it or it will come to us. But what is the human point, the terrestrial moment that will make the two meet? There must be something to do on our side, a movement to make.... Perhaps a point of impossibility, something that cries out everywhere in the earth's consciousness: each one is as though placed before a certain impossibility that is the point through which he will gain access to the new door. Perhaps the whole earth and each nation will meet its point of impossibility, where it will be forced to call for something else. We do not know, we know nothing about it really. We only feel an extraordinary Possibility, an incredible new perception which is veiled from us only by... perhaps only by the amount of time it will take for enough people to perceive it. A contagion of the new perception. Each time a new element is introduced into the sum total of possible combinations, she said, it results in what could be called a tearing of the limits.... It is obvious that the modern scientific perception is much closer to something of the new reality than, say, the perception of the Stone Age. But even that is suddenly going to find itself outdated, surpassed and probably shattered by the intrusion of something that did not exist in the universe as we had studied it. Well, it is this change, this sudden transformation of the universal element which is most certainly going to result in a kind of chaos in the perceptions, out of which a new knowledge will emerge. This is, in broad terms, the result of the new Manifestation.... The quality, quantity and nature of the possible universal combinations are suddenly going to change in such a drastic way that it will probably stun all those who are doing research in life.
Now we are going to see. 17 And She placed her arms on her chair with that air of such laughter within, like a child hiding an enchanting surprise. Then She got up, glanced at everyone with a twinkling of mischief and challenge in her eyes—and She was gone.
Perhaps a gesture of joy and faith in the true earth. Something very simple, almost candid.
And it dissolves the shell of appearances.
There we are.
It was always there.
We had always been that light vastness. But this time, in a body.
A terrestrial mutation.
5. The Supramental World
This change in our perception of Matter, whether sudden or gradual, individual or more general, must necessarily be followed by a change in our handling of Matter. A considerable change. After all, there is no essential difference between an ape gnawing through a liana with its teeth and a man cutting down a tree with an electric saw: both are using a mechanism. Man is but the perfection of mechanism. The difference might seem awesome in its effects, but essentially it is an intelligence that applies itself to Matter and elaborates more and more sophisticated means or instruments: a muscular arm or electronic pincers. Matter remains the same, we have only violated it more or less judiciously or used some of its forces extracted by more and more complex machines. We are perfectly and completely the heirs of the apes, except for the illusion that makes us believe in our superiority, which, however, is in the process of crumbling under the very weight of the formidable Machinery we have devised. Even in our bodies, there is no appreciable difference: the physiological functioning of the monkey and ours are identical, except that ours has considerably deteriorated just because of the weight of this machinery. We have grown a bit too intelligent (I was about to say much too super-apes). We speak of the superman, but come to think of it, where simply is man?
The next evolutionary bifurcation will be a radical one, that is to say, it will take us totally out of this ape, however much "improved," and bring us into... perhaps into the true man.
The Supramental Creation
Man is an improvement upon the methods of the ape. The next man will be a man without methods. There will be only one "method," as it were, and that is consciousness. The entire universe has never been anything other than a "method" of consciousness, or rather a fact of consciousness, which has been veiled from us by the development of that substitute for consciousness we call the Mind. Having ceased to understand and to see the fundamental process of the universe, we have naturally been forced to resort to devices, instruments, "gadgets" and various pairs of spectacles to handle outwardly what we could no longer touch directly through consciousness, i.e., from consciousness to consciousness. Even a child can understand this. In any case, little Mirra understood very well the aspiration of a plant, the movement of an animal or the vibration of a stone; her consciousness touched the same consciousness everywhere—of course, since there is only that! We can understand each other quite well through it and in it, whether we are ten thousand miles away or just across the room, as if there were no separation. And there is no separation, except in our clever little brains that suddenly thought they were more intelligent than all the little cells in the universe. Anyway.... It was a necessary stage in evolution. And when I think of how we could ever believe that all this evolutionary labor was designed merely for composing rhapsodies whether Hungarian or in Blue, or for sending handsome boys to the moon!... We have such a poor idea of our future. Yet if we could only understand the workings of the next being somewhat more clearly, it would perhaps help us to create him. This is really the great grace of Mother and Sri Aurobindo: to help us see into our own future. The forest is immense, or seems immense, and we do not know when we will get to the other end, in this complete, supramental Amazon, but knowing what we can expect at the end may help us to get through the forest more quickly. What we always lack is seeing; we cannot realize what we do not see, it does not exist for us, it is in limbo. But as soon as we can perceive the thing a little in our consciousness, it is as if the first bridge were built, and the means are worked out almost automatically, almost necessarily we might say. The miracle of pioneers is to wrest the new vision out of a seeming nothingness.
Now, it is for us to see and make this new vision grow in our own substance—but perhaps it is growing all by itself. So let us just say, to help it grow faster.
In the vision of February 3, 1958, aboard the "supramental ship," which is a pictorial representation of the next Matter, true Matter, conscious Matter—just what the Mind veils from us—there were some very interesting details that bear repeating. There was ONE SINGLE substance in all things1—whether for the objects aboard the ship, the ship itself, or even the tall beings on the shore. And actually, even scientifically, it is obvious that all Matter is a single substance: it is only we who have superimposed differences of skin and neckties and religion onto something that moves or should move as a single whole (and everything grates precisely because it does not move as a whole; it is obstructed, diverted and distorted by all the misleading differences of neckties or what-have-you—and boxed in, without the least communication). The Marxists very clearly saw the falsity of separation and division, which is why I said that they were nearer to the sense of evolution than a good many spiritualists who seek to re-create oneness above, in the clouds, or the idealists who make great speeches on oneness, which are however rather ineffective, because their oneness is woven or seeks to be woven in the Mind, where oneness cannot be: it can and must take place in the material substance—and the Marxists' mistake is to believe that that oneness can be achieved in the manner of super-apes, through outer means and repressive methods and social mechanisms. We eternally transplant the machinery everywhere. Whereas the next man is the man without machinery. Oneness can only exist at the level of conscious Matter, because it is the only thing that is ONE in the world.
But Matter must become conscious, or rather we must remove what prevents it from being conscious or what prevents us from perceiving its consciousness and handling it accordingly.
Now, this single substance in everything changed the quality of its vibration according to the needs or uses; the tall beings on the shore did not seem to have a skeletal structure, and they could take on any form according to their needs; and even aboard the ship, when a change had to be made, it was done not by artificial and outer means but by an inner process, by a working of the consciousness that gave the substance its form or appearance—life created its own forms.2 This is an extraordinarily new phenomenon, and extraordinarily logical, one might say—natural for once.
Instead of drawing a picture, an imitation of a vision, a translation with hammer or chisel and pincers of something one sees: it is created as it is seen. It is the vision that creates. What takes place in the consciousness here is automatically translated in the substance over there, because it is the same consciousness, the same conscious substance, which is molded according to the particular needs, feelings or moments. A constantly new, renewed and renewable life, which is not imprisoned in any form except that of a beauty that changes and develops and ceaselessly reinvents itself. The only limit to the working of this new substance is the limit of our own quality of vision and of consciousness. That is, no one can deceive anyone; if you are gray, you only produce grayness, and there is no way to improve it with a few neckties, university degrees or bank accounts—one perfectly resembles oneself. The world we create is the exact replica of the quality of our soul. The means at our disposal are exactly in proportion to our power of "radiation," as it were. In other words, a real world—for once. That is why Mother said that the supramental world would be the perfect hierarchic manifestation, spontaneous, essentially true—and without coercion of any kind—where each one will be conscious of his own perfection.3 What coercion? One is one's own coercion, and the spontaneous urge of each being, then, would not be to acquire false external means, false powers and false substitutes for consciousness, but to grow inwardly, to perfect oneself inwardly, to develop one's quality and power of radiation in order to ceaselessly mold a life and an environment that grow according to one's own vision. We are different from each other by virtue of the quality of our soul or let us say, the quality of our vibration, and the scope of its radiation.
For the Supermind is not a milieu where all are alike. Here, in false matter ruled by mind, we constantly mistake oneness with uniformity, we reduce the true and essential oneness to a mechanical, paring-down and stereotyped equality. But it is a hideous caricature. For we know only one way of creating oneness, which is to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator: Those whose heads are above get them chopped off and those who are too small get pushed up from below. But that doesn't do any good,4 she said simply. The very law of the world is a law of oneness in diversity. No two leaves on the same tree are alike. But oneness does not lie in the external expression or behavior: it lies in consciousness and substance. But since we are not conscious of the real consciousness, not alive to the real substance, we are constantly forced to use false means to act upon a false substance and a false life—so everything is false, everything is instantly falsified. We fabricate means because of an incapacity to be, we make up rules because of an incapacity to be, we mechanize things because of an incapacity to grasp the real Mechanism of the world. Whereas in the true oneness—supramental—of the supra-mental consciousness and substance, everything is an infinitely varied play of one and the same thing. So this single thing is never in competition with itself, no more than one's feet are the enemy of one's arms, they feel no need to imitate the graceful movements of the metacarpus. It is one single body in an infinite diversity. How do you imagine the supramental life? she asked the children. As a paradise in which everyone will do the same thing in the same way? Everyone becomes a harp-playing angel?... That would be a dreadful world!5 No one needs to look alike in the supramental world, and no one needs to do better than his neighbor, or to have more than his neighbor! Each one is his own model and has the perfect and complete joy of expressing what he is—being himself is his joy, very simply, but since it is a true world and not a fossilized one, everyone is also conscious that perfection can grow, beauty can grow, vision can grow, joy can grow, and that there is an ever vaster way to express the particular mode of being that each one represents in the universal totality, while simultaneously having the essential joy of everything in the universe, because it is a world where everything is concretely ONE.... There remain many things to discover, unimaginable for our present understanding.
And finally, our false world is devoured by the means necessary for living. We live nothing at all. We spend our time devising ways to attempt to live an illusory life that is never lived! We do this in order to have that. Nothing is lived instantly, spontaneously; we constantly strive toward something that is always for later, always for afterwards, ((sometime," farther, over there. The artifice devours the artifice. The process swallows itself up. The most essential difference between our world and the supramental world (and it is only after having consciously gone there with the consciousness that usually operates here that I became aware of the enormous difference, as it were) is that everything here, except for what takes place very deeply within, appeared to me absolutely artificial. None of the values of ordinary, physical life are based on truth. Just as we have to get cloth and sew it to make dresses for ourselves and then wear them, so also to feed ourselves we need to get things from outside and put it inside our bodies for nourishment—for everything, our life is artificial. A true, sincere, spontaneous life as in the supramental world is a springing forth of things through the action of a conscious will, a power over substance that makes the substance accord with what we decide it to be. And he who has the power and the knowledge can have what he wants, whereas he who doesn't cannot use any artificial means to obtain what he wants. In ordinary life, EVERYTHING is artificial. Depending upon the fortuity of birth or the circumstances, you have a more or less high position or a more or less comfortable life, not because it is the spontaneous, natural and sincere expression of your mode of being and inner need, but because the fortuity of life's circumstances placed you in contact with those things.... It is an absurd world because it is an artificial world. Any imbecile has more power as long as he has the means to acquire the necessary artifices. Whereas in the supramental world, the more one is conscious and in touch with the truth of things, the more the will has authority over the substance. Authority is a true authority. If you want clothes, your have to have the power to make them, a real power. If you do not have this power, well, you remain naked. There is no artifice to substitute for a lack of power. Here, not once in a million times is authority an expression of something true. Everything is colossally stupid. 6
How true!
And the body itself becomes a true body.
Even the body takes on a form or a hue or a luminosity reflecting our real inner movement; we cannot pretend, we are what we are. But we can change also depending upon mood, state of consciousness or encounters. There are days when we might be like a lyre bird, other days when we flow like a silver river, and others when we are in a bad mood we simply do not exist then. An infinitely flowing world like living music expressing the changing tonalities of a perpetual soul. A spontaneous hierarchy of light and beauty.
And death no longer is. For only what is unconscious, devoid of inherent light, dies. Our world of reflected light is a mortal world. Whereas there, the light is within: the very substance is conscious and emanates the luminosity of its own consciousness. And how could light ever cease to be luminous?
Something in our present Matter eclipses the true light of Matter—what is it?
A veil of death over.., something.
Perhaps we are already something else behind that veil? There then remains to establish the connection with this already-otherwise.
A veil of death to cross.
The Mystery
It is strange, it is even very mysterious and probably the very heart of the mystery, but it would seem that there are two possible yet almost radically different ways of effecting the transition from this opaque body to the new body, from this false and obscure matter to that true and conscious Matter—what Sri Aurobindo and Mother call "transformation." It may be that they are not contradictory, perhaps they complement each other and meet at some point along the way. If we could define them or see them clearly, a great veil would be lifted. But after all, it is not like a problem in arithmetic that can be solved by thinking it out; it is not a mental problem at all—we can envisage it mentally, but it is not at that level that it is really visible: it is in the body, that is where the transition takes place, that is the level at which we must understand. Is it this opaque body, this false body, as it were, which is gradually going to become "unblocked," lightened, clarified and illumined through evolution? Or is it true Matter, matter as it already really is, that is going to come toward and join with the other and replace it through a process that may now seem incomprehensible to us but is perhaps extraordinarily simple, almost instantaneous, like lifting a veil: a sort of change in consciousness or change of material vision, something as radically different as the vision of the butterfly is to the vision of the caterpillar.... In which direction is the phenomenon going to unfold: from us to it or from it to us? Will it be evolution or revelation? In a certain sense, all evolution is a revelation of something that was already there in the seed. But the revelation is slow and seems to take its own nonchalant and endless time to move from one form to the other. And what is a "form" after all? A form is a certain expression of consciousness, a certain mode of being, and we are heading step by step toward a vaster, more total consciousness. Yet, a moment must come, a juncture in evolution, when one reaches the edge of that total consciousness, when it is ready to emerge in a sufficiently refined material form prepared through millennia of evolution—when, in short, what matters is no longer so much a question of a change in form as of a change of consciousness. So the problem amounts to knowing whether the old refined form will allow this consciousness to infiltrate, if its old obscure mold can be permeated, "transformed," or... There lies the mystery. Or what? Or will the consciousness itself directly produce its own new body?... It seems a formidable proposition. Yet, that is always how things have transpired in evolution: the change of forms has always been produced by a change in consciousness—it is because something in the cellular consciousness of the reptile was awakened to a new need that a change came about in its matter. And this is also the key to this new transition. Mother said it clearly: The real transformation is the transformation of the consciousness, all the rest will follow automatically.7 Sri Aurobindo said the same thing in The Life Divine:... The consciousness itself by its mutation will necessitate and operate whatever mutation is needed for the body.8 And this time, it is not a question of going to another, higher form of the same obscure Matter, but to another Matter, which is perhaps the same one but unobscured, conscious. So again, the whole problem is: will it be a gradual transformation of one into the other, or a dissolution, we might say, of the obscuring element? And what obscures—what is that element? If we knew, the whole problem would probably be solved—this is what She would set out to seek gropingly in her body just a few months later. But in either case it is the change of consciousness that produces the new body, either through a slow process of clarification or a sudden unblocking. And it is quite possible that the two processes intersect or overlap at some point along the way, that a certain degree of inner clarity or a certain threshold must first be reached, or slowly conquered, before the obscuring veil of false matter can be torn away—but can it be torn away in a single individual without its being torn away for the whole earth? This is yet another question. Matter is ONE—we keep forgetting that.
Everything revolves round this point: is it really a different matter, unknown, imperceptible to our coarse senses, or is it the same matter, only clarified and transformed In one case, we are in the supernatural (or in any event, in another kind of natural), while in the other, it is a logical evolution that unfolds (or a future logic). I personally believe it is the same matter, only perceived differently—but before reaching the threshold of a "different perception," a considerable change in our opaque substance of improved apes is needed. Which means that the two processes overlap here also. And what does this point of different perception imply? When we perceive something differently, we act upon it differently (microscopes attest to this, they have already changed our handling of Matter dramatically); if we perceive Matter differently, we will handle it differently, just as the supramental beings aboard the ship were doing—but those who do not have that perception see nothing, because to them Matter is still the same old obscure thing. In other words, we could very well continue to be apparently as we are in Matter, while having a different relationship, imperceptible to others, with this very same Matter. There is a border, a wall of perception to be crossed. There remains the same mysterious transition that seems to have to do with collective transition, collective perception. And what happens to the old body when it reaches the point of a different perception? Is it visibly going to change its old structure, or change it only to its own perception? But how can it change visibly when this "visibly" is precisely what constitutes our false perception, our old perception of Matter? Or else, having evolved its new perception, having perhaps even created its new body, allowed its true Matter (invisible to us) to emerge, the old body falls away, its destiny accomplished?—One "vanishes" into real Matter. There would then remain only the new body, which would be visible to all only when all will have equally gone through the wall of perception and fashioned and freed true Matter in themselves, which is the next body. Hence, there would really be two worlds, one within the other, a continent within a continent; both are equally material, but one is left behind, we might say, it is old, obsolete, merely hanging on, and the other is developing under the old crust.
This is as far as we can go mentally. Now it remains for us to look at the evolution of the process in Mother, in the experience of her body, in the flesh. In a way, hers is the witness-body of the world, the evolutionary crucible, the living example of what may come to take place—which will perhaps help all of us to cross over. She opened up the passage in her own body.
Mother's Forest is decidedly very mysterious. She was herself uncovering the mystery, little by little—She herself did not know just how infinitely mysterious it was when She set out. Already in 1958, after the experience of the supramental ship, She had said to the children: When I invited you for a journey into the unknown, a journey of adventure, I did not know just how true my words were, but I can promise those who are ready to embark upon the adventure that they will make some very interesting discoveries.9
And this was only the beginning.
The Improved Body
In short, the body must allow real Matter to emerge. The body is the evolutionary instrument, the means, the bridge. It must construct the "missing link." In other words, up to a certain point, it must operate in false matter as it is—or at least as it appears to be—as the body lives, feels and perceives it; then, there comes a moment when it begins perceiving differently, and its methods of operation change or should change. At least we suppose so. So the first part of the course, which seems the most concrete to us because it still deals with the old familiar Matter, would only be a preparation for the mysterious other thing, a pretext or a means to reach the other perception. Whether or not this is actually the case, we really do not know, for we know nothing yet: we shall only understand the process when we, or when one being reaches the other end. Until we reach the end, we cannot say at what stage we are. IT IS THE FINAL STAGE THAT WILL COUNT. So only one who comes in a few hundred or a few thousand years from now will be able to say, glancing back: there was such and such stage, such and such realization.... This will be History, a historical perspective of the event. Until then, we are all in the movement and in the work. At what stage are we, and just how far will we be able to go?—It is better not to speculate too much on these things because it hampers you and prevents you from running properly. It is better to think only of running and nothing else.10 This body, then, has first to become more refined, light, clarified and even to widen its limited material perceptions, get rid of its old animal habits, emerge from the mortal routine: an improved body.
The clear and simple fundamental Direction for this sailing into the unknown is given by Mother in a few words: It's in the direction of Matter's perfect obedience to the Consciousness.11 She told me this in 1970, therefore it was something clearly seen, experientially seen. Here the purely physical discipline of gymnastics, sports, etc., can play an important role, and that is why She gave such a prominence to physical education in the Ashram. The fuller physical mastery given by hatha yoga can also be of help—all means are good. But actually, the tiny, unobtrusive method of a certain "attitude" in and toward the thousand gestures of daily life is an extraordinarily rich and virtually infinite source for the free development of Matter; we have already said it, but it bears repeating because of our compulsive need to mechanize everything we do, to make everything go through some mechanism—including even a mechanism for transformation! Each time we manage to instill a little consciousness into a gesture, we are nearer the goal than if we had lifted a hundred pounds of barbells for two hours, while observing the development of our muscles in the mirror—it is the muscles of our material consciousness that need developing. And that can be done while brushing our teeth.
Consequently, a huge field of possible development opens before us. There are genuine and duly recorded experiments in the annals of nearly all countries, and if they appear exceptional, the exceptional can be generalized, it is a matter of training: mastery over the vital body functions, over respiration and heartbeat, controlled channeling of the energies throughout the body, concentration of the energies on one point, suspension of the energies, perfect rest in trance (or yogic catalepsy), renewal of the energies by drawing from the universal substance through a kind of osmosis similar to that of the early stages of evolution, or better still, by drawing energy from the inexhaustible regions of the higher consciousness, and so forth. All these masteries lead naturally to the first essential desiderata of the transformation: immunity from disease and prolongation of life at will, for this whole laborious process seems to demand a considerable amount of time just to arrive at the starting point.
Along the way, another important development occurs which begins to change the perspectives of the body drastically and can accelerate the laborious process a thousand times over: it is the opening of the centers of consciousness, or chakras, which are the relay stations for the universal energies through the various planes of our body. In fact, our physical organs and the various plexuses are a rough expression or material adaptation of those centers of energy. Generally, all that filters through those centers is a thin trickle of current needed for the performance of our routine animal functions. But once the centers are opened, there are no such limits to the development of the body, as Sri Aurobindo notes in The Supramental Manifestation upon Earth: new powers as well as new and universal—or at any rate worldwide—means of communication would then emerge in this little body henceforth connected through its centers to all the possible levels of universal Energy and Consciousness; distances are annulled, the vision reaches everywhere, the perception reaches everywhere; the manipulation of energies and the means of action also reach everywhere; even the functioning of the organs could then change. For it may well be, said Sri Aurobindo, that the evolutionary urge would proceed to a change of the organs themselves in their material working and use and diminish greatly the need of their instrumentation and even of their existence. The centers [of consciousness] would pour their energies into material nerve and plexus and tissue and radiate them through the whole material body; all the physical life and its necessary activities in this new existence could be maintained and operated by these higher agencies in a freer and ampler way and by a less burdensome and restricting method. This might go so far that these organs might cease to be indispensable and even be felt as too obstructive: the central force might use them less and less and finally throw aside their use altogether. If that happened they might waste by atrophy, be reduced to an insignificant minimum or even disappear. The central force might substitute for them subtle organs of a very different character or, if anything material was needed, instruments that would be forms of dynamism or plastic transmitters rather than what we know as organs.12
Such is the improved body.
The Breaking Point
All these results are possible... on a scale of centuries of evolution. The substance becomes refined and the newly acquired characteristics may be transmitted hereditarily—an endless story, the very one we have lived painfully enough for ages. A sort of superman would emerge from that labor, not as we imagine him, with a big brain or even big muscles, but with a conscious body, infinitely receptive to all the world's vibrations, wrought of oneness, bathed in oneness, controlling the forces and capable of directing the flow of the force on each point of the world to heal and help his less evolved brothers, to influence circumstances by manipulating the vibrations that create circumstances and put a little harmony in this whole painful chaos. This summit would seem enviable to us, and it is actually possible that things partially occur in this way, because everything is possible and we can expect all sorts of intermediary transitions as was the case for every evolutionary phase. Nature tries out one formula, then another—thousands of formulas with her great lump of modeling clay—and she comes out with all kinds of bizarre forms that survive or vanish, vegetate or are the stepping stones for another, more complete, better adapted formula, until she reaches the last rung of that particular transition: I think, Mother said to the children, that all possibilities are foreseeable and that every sincere aspiration and total consecration will bring a response, and the methods, the means, the transitions, the transformations will be innumerable in their nature—it is not at all that things will be done in one particular way and not in another.13
Yet, this laboriously achieved superman, however improved, would still be a man, he would have the same old body, only improved, which would still continue to die like all animal bodies, even if it manages in part to prolong its life almost at will or die almost at will—because the world would still be under the rule of Death, the root of Death would still be there, unchanged, we would only have acquired the power to outwit it... for a while, until some little unexpected nail punctures our foot on the bank of a pretty river. Indeed, that "enviable summit" looks rather like an inflation of the human, or a little too human—and Nature rarely tends to inflate the same species indefinitely—something like the cosmic end point of the Peripatetics' old walkabout; perhaps we could even put the entire collection of the world's idealists together, shake that charming pretty bag and pull out the ideal species—which Nature would doubtlessly try to realize, because Nature is very obliging, she lends herself to each and every slightly sincere caprice... for a while. But actually, as long as Death is lurking somewhere nothing can be charming. As long as a single man dies, something in us will die a little and will suffer with him. And live three hundred years in the same bag of bones... what for? A swarm of doubtfully improvable children? Possibly, we would no longer need to build up bank accounts and libraries because we would perhaps also have devised a more just social order and a less murky means of knowledge than our cerebral libraries. All this is quite possible. But then, what? There is something called Death that is like the root of all the poison in the world, and it seems to us that as long as that root is not dissolved, the world will be poisoned again and again in one form or another, perhaps unforeseen today, but it will ultimately thwart all of our knowledge and wisdom and "improvements." Rot cannot be improved. There is a foundation of rottenness in the world which will decompose everything in spite of all the human or superhuman powers that we may plaster over it.
The only problem in the world is Death.
The only root to be changed is that one.
And meanwhile, we turn in circles, around and around, and sometimes it is an iron circle, sometimes a golden circle, but we turn in circles, we turn in circles, and the children will turn in circles and the grandchildren will turn in circles—and it will just go on and on.14 How well She put it.
If we knew what Death really was, the problem would be three-fourths solved because we would know how to handle it, instead of injecting penicillin into a phenomenon that totally escapes us. Death is not where we think it is. Where is Death, then? Where is it hiding?... It is right here, under our very nose.
Perhaps Mother's voyage leads through it.
And indeed, Mother and Sri Aurobindo have seen another species, another body, another substance—another kind of Matter no longer subject to the rule of Death. A supramental world. They saw it, it exists. But how does one get there?... Perhaps Death has actually to be gone through? But then where is it? Where is Death? Death is not in the corpse, it begins long before that: it is everywhere. The corpse is merely the result. Illness is merely the result. And all the stupidity in the world, all the madness of the world results from this... something. So really, if we must wait centuries upon centuries and improved body upon improved body to reach the threshold and get into the other Matter... then it is frightening. The pain of this world is dreadful—a geometrical and cataclysmic progression of pain, almost as frightening as the number of little babies that keep multiplying and multiplying along the roads of India. It is not possible. We all feel we are fast approaching the point of the not-possible. Something has to burst, something has to change, turn around. We do not need supermen, really, we need SOMETHING ELSE. We do not need to improve or to regulate our rottenness, we need to get out of it, to breathe another air. But since we do not believe in celestial paradises, because evolution does not believe in heaven, she believes in the earth—that is why she created her in the first place—something has to happen in this Matter! Not in a century, but soon—it is urgent.
But what?
We must get into that real Matter, since it is there, but what is veiling it, what is preventing the passage?... We can no longer wait. We cannot wait for the millions and billions of eyes of the world to open, if it is only a matter of a change in perception. For who will cleanse those millions of eyes, which for the most part do not even want to be cleansed, which even rejoice in their filth? We cannot, no, we can no longer turn out a few elite beings to serve as an example to the world—we no longer have the time! Great universal Death is knocking at our door. The asphyxiation is utterly asphyxiating; it almost takes heroism to keep on living in this world once one is slightly awake or awakened. So what, then? The question is almost appalling when lived with eyes wide open, with eyes that see and touch the misery everywhere, with cells that feel the misery everywhere.
But then Mother left; She tried. Did she succeed, or did She fail in the attempt, our attempt, since it was all being played out in the cells of her body? She was the crucible of the world, our bridge, our passage over.... What did She achieve? Did She achieve something? Did She open up the passage? If we knew that, it would perhaps help us to open the passage fully: it is as if a door were there, before us, almost in the air we breathe, we can feel it, and it would be enough to see where the door is. The phenomenon must come to us; that is the only possible hope, for not one in a million is ready to make the sincere effort to go to the end of the forest—nor even to the edge of the forest—and yet, there must be some act on our part that would unseal the door, if only we knew where it was—if we understood where.
It is this, our journey together through this book, as if through Death, as if toward a hope for the world.
To find the door.
Will there be a continuity or a 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...? Will the human species be like certain other species that have disappeared from the earth?15
6. A Veil
But is not all the present cataclysmic acceleration just the result of the acceleration of the "other thing"? The phenomenon rushing our way? We always look in the wrong direction, we always see an "against" whereas there is nothing but a "for." The whole world with its millions of aberrations or "right directions" is going in but one direction, and it is going there through the aberrations as well as the nonaberrations—for ultimately we do not at all know what is really happening, we are actors in a bogus play, here, on the outside, while something quite other is pushing within. We have taken the practical and pragmatic necessities of action for ideal and moral ends, because the particular situation required us to act "for" or "against," but these are merely processes for another end far exceeding all our ideals or moral speculations. When we have seen this once, we are cured forever of the deception of appearances, and can begin to appreciate the problem on a world scale—and to see the precipitation of the Other Thing in the chaos of appearances and by every means. True, it was not exactly the case in 1950, but since 1956 a new fact has come into the world which changes all existing data and gives them a strange acceleration. The world has changed. It has truly and radically changed—we have no idea just how radically. Appearances will have to explode in our faces before we begin to understand—but then this is just what is happening.
In 1958 that world is still very young, it is only two years old. Mother is discovering it step by step or perhaps should we say "un-covering it." She is removing the lid or the veil. I recall a very remarkable vision of a young, a very young Indian girl, a child of Mother, who did not very well understand herself what she was seeing because no one could really understand what it was about at the time—but now it is fairly obvious. In her vision, she was with a very "important" gentleman, a prominent grown-up, suitably attired in a hat (this gentleman was the Mind), and she herself was very young, a child of no more than ten or twelve years old. The two of them suddenly came upon the door of a sanctuary. It was clear that the gentleman was not supposed to go in there, but since he had the key to the door, they both went in. In the sanctuary, quietly seated on his throne, was the god Krishna, the child Krishna, very small, with an aura of blue light as he is usually depicted in Hindu mythology (blue is the light of the Mind and Krishna is the symbol of the higher regions of the Mind), and he was very much alive and smiling. As soon as he saw the young Indian girl, he got up, came toward her, took her hand, and notwithstanding the protests of the prominent Gentleman, he went outside... into the world. He was no higher than the little girl's chest. And together they set out hand in hand: "Wait, I'll show you something..." he said, with a charming, mischievous smile as only Krishna can have, "We are going to have a good time." So off they went, and as they walked peaceful folk began to quarrel, quiet fields began to swarm with people, towns fell into confusion—he sowed chaos everywhere, laughing all the while. A bit uneasy, the little girl turned toward him and suddenly noticed that instead of looking down at him, it was he who was looking down at her! Her Krishna had grown very tall—he had even changed color! Krishna was in gold! In solid gold, and yet light, smiling, mischievous, gamboling with her through the world. And he kept growing and growing and growing. And as he grew, the chaos kept growing and growing and growing. Finally, seeing this chaos everywhere, the very dignified and by now indignant Gentleman attempted to lock Krishna back up in his sanctuary (the sanctuary of the Mind) so that he could be worshiped as he ought to be, under lock and key, and cease sowing his chaos. And Krishna accepted the gentleman's plea, all the while keeping the little girl's hand in his, but when he arrived once again at the door of the sanctuary, he said to her with a smile in the corner of his eyes: "I'll show you something...." Krishna in gold went back inside and began growing, growing so much that the roof of the sanctuary flew off in splinters! His head went right through the top of the sanctuary, then, laughingly, he tore apart the walls with his bare hands, strode over the ruins, strode over the Gentleman who was beneath the debris, and... everything came to a close in the child's vision with an immense burst of laughter.
The divine laughter of the new world.
Gold is the color of the supermind.
Krishna in gold is growing up amongst us. Beware of the sanctuary.
And what is a vision? It is the translation, in a visual language, of a phenomenon that can be seen in all kinds of languages, on all kinds of levels, and with as many explanations as there are levels. The whole problem is to see things from the right level. For Mother, it was at the level of her own body that She was to see things, or rather it was the body that was to see things, not as a symbolic translation of "something" on the microscopic level, or the level of the Mind or the heart, but the living phenomenon itself, in its own milieu. Because ultimately, there is only one thing that truly understands, and that is Matter, the body—all the rest are translations. But then, which Matter?
The phenomenon was becoming more explicit or uncovered, as it were. The year 1958, the last year before the great turning point and Mother's "withdrawal" to plunge into the body (like Sri Aurobindo in 1926), is marked by two experiences, or rather three, since one dates from a little before 1958. These experiences could almost be identified as A2, G3, C4, etc., like laboratory experiments, because each experience initiates a whole line of experiences of a certain type, A1, A2, A3, etc., which eventually come to intersect another line B1, B2, B3, etc., to form ultimately a whole network of experiences with certain, more prominent lines or curves. There are thousands of such experiences, and they are only the beginning of a huge diagram where a new configuration of the world is gradually taking shape.
Or perhaps a new configuration of Matter.
But when you are in the midst of the experience, you do not even know that "X leads to Y" or "Y leads to Z," you do not know which way it is all going; it simply happens. It is "something" that is happening. Afterwards, we attribute, or try to attribute a meaning to it, but at the time it does not make any sense: you are immersed in a bath that produces various modifications of the body consciousness, which are quite puzzling until they are repeated a thousand times over. So it is very simple: A2 + V4 +... produces X0. And at X0, a new curve branches off. But you can never be sure of anything until you have reached the end, because, as Mother would say, "It is the last stage that counts." What is on the path and what is not, then? What is important and what is not? An overlooked speck of dust might perhaps contain the whole key to the mystery.
A very difficult diagram. Because if the new world were already explained, it would no longer be new at all!
A Friable Body
The action, development and effects of this new Power gradually became more distinct in the body. A body that was a sort of "representative object" of the world, as She said, to test whether this Power can grow there and be borne by this earthly substance, and from there spread to all Matter. A new Power is always difficult to bear; had the current of mental energy been abruptly poured into an ape's brain, its very opaqueness would have created such resistance and friction that the ape would have been knocked senseless or left utterly stunned. The experiences are thus dosed out, the "quantity" or quantum of supermind manifests gradually, as the body becomes accustomed or clarified. It was first perceived as a kind of pulsation in the cells, something that left a perception or a sensation or an impression... utterly strange and new.1 In a second experience (Was it the second? For we really do not always know when it is an "experience": there are thousands of little unobtrusive and barely perceptible contacts, like a difference in the air or a sort of peculiar, elusive sensation, and they come again and again, preparing the substance without seeming to—actually, the experience is taking place constantly), this time, however, a few supramental "features" were going to emerge more clearly: A supramental entity had entirely possessed me, Mother notes, something a little taller than myself..2 And effectively, the experience always gives the impression of extending beyond the body, as if boundaries do not stop where we think they do, or where we perceive them; the body is a kind of stunted and hard object, like a doll or a wooden actor: a mere puppet. Something a little taller than myself: its feet extended below my feet and its head went a little beyond my head. A solid block... one single piece. And it was denser than my physical body.2 We shall often come across that particular feature. Already in Tlemcen, fifty years earlier, Theon had spoken of—and Mother had perceived—"a substance denser than physical Matter." What this dense matter exactly is we do not know for the moment, but it is a fact. The Upanishads do mention a "dense consciousness," chidghana, but it is only a "consciousness"—unless this consciousness became material or condensed like the clouds of primordial gas? Real Matter, therefore, would be "denser" than the one we perceive through our senses.... Future experience will perhaps clarify this point. And within that density, the physical body seemed to me almost unreal—as though friable—like sand eroding away.2
Obviously, if the supramental substance is to be molded in the way we have seen and if forms are to be able to change at will, the apparent rigidity of Matter as we perceive it will have to disappear. The body must start to perceive itself differently to be able eventually to handle its own substance differently. As long as it feels rigid and hard, it can be nothing but an opaque and irrevocably mortal piece of matter. The body is incredibly subject to its own self-perception, it is as though hypnotized by its own sensations: they represent the truth for it, much as justice and righteousness constitute truth at the mental level... and yet we know how very fragile and fluctuating and alterable these truths are. Therefore, the body has to be able to perceive itself differently if it is to have the least hope of changing—in short, it must lose its habit of false matter and its false sensations of a false matter: The perception must PRECEDE the material transformation,3 Mother said. When the body begins to realize that things can be different, it is as great, or greater a revolution as knowing in its head that the earth revolves around the sun, and not the reverse. But what is truly remarkable about the body is that its whole way of being changes as soon as it knows something; things begin to stir at a cellular level, whereas we can stir up millions of ideas and cosmogonies in our heads without our life changing an iota. To know, for the body, is to be able to do. Each time you perceive a detail with precision, it means it is about to be realized.... The body consciousness can know a thing with precision and in every detail only when it is ON THE VERGE of being realized. And that will be the sure indication.4 Indeed, the body does not speculate, it feels it either can or cannot do something, plunge or not plunge, jump or not jump: the body is the "bridge," it is the body that will perceive the possibility of its own next way of being. Thus Mother's body was beginning to perceive itself as porous, or "friable," permeable. But many repeated experiences are needed for all the cells to know.
Such is the basis of the process of supramental transformation.
And it radiated from me, Mother concludes: Myriads of little sparks that were penetrating everybody.... I begin to see what the supramental body will be.5
The light of Matter was beginning to appear. Myriads of tiny sparks. Yet always this question remained: What is it that veils it?
The Treasure in the Rock
Another experience, in June 1958, is even more important, because it disconcerts all that we can think about the phenomenon (that is what is unfortunate: we think out the phenomenon). The experience took place in Mother's bathroom, of all places, as if to show us that it is not at all necessary to be seated in meditation or contemplation to participate in this type of experience. They always occur in the most banal of banalities—but of course! the supermind is not in heaven; it is the banal that ceases to be banal. Mother said it with her delightful sense of humor: If you want to have material experiences, you have to be in Matter! And curiously, this very material experience of hers was a sort of repetition, in Matter, of some of the divine experiences that one has outside Matter, in deep meditation, outside one's body, in a state of so-called "ecstasy," way up above on the summits of consciousness—in other words, heaven in Matter! All of a sudden, we are reminded of the words of the ancient Vedic Rishis, who had found "the Treasure of heaven hidden in the secret cavern like the young of a bird—this Treasure in the infinite rock" [1.130.31. Here, it was not a rock, but bottles of mouthwash! After all, a bottle is made of Matter, just as we are. Now suddenly, those bottles, and all the objects in the bathroom, including
Mother's body, began to vibrate with a strange, continuous life, a life without division and so harmonious, a world so compactly ordered and luminous, that not a single atom of disorganization could occur in that Harmony. All the objects in the bathroom were full of a joyful enthusiasm—everything obeyed, everything!... Well, the whole time it remained actively like that, it was absolutely impossible to have the LEAST disorder in the body [Mother was unwell at the time], and not only in the body, but IN ALL THE SURROUNDING MATTER. It was as if every object obeyed without even needing to decide to obey: it was automatic. There was a divine Harmony in everything, constantly. So if that is established in a permanent way, there CAN NO LONGER be illness, it is impossible. There can no longer be accidents, there can no longer be disorders, and everything should harmonize (probably in a progressive way) just as that was harmonized.6 The veil over Matter had been removed. And automatically, everything was in order, harmonious: no illness, no accidents, no clashes. Everything responded. A kind of oneness of Matter, of which the body was as much a part as the rest (no more or no less than the rest). And a conscious Matter, which responds to everything and responds to itself everywhere, without separation. But that Matter had not suddenly become conscious by the touch of a magic wand, had it?... Probably we suddenly become conscious of something that has always been that way through some opening or "unveiling" in our consciousness. But heavens, to become conscious of it is an inestimable step! Because if it truly works like that, it means that a whole new range of conscious action upon Matter becomes possible—upon all terrestrial Matter, for where does Matter stop? At what boundary does it stop if not at the boundary of our little brain? A direct handling, from Matter to Matter, from the body to bottles or to any nearby or far-off Matter. I really had the feeling that it was a first experience, new upon earth. For I have experienced an absolute identity of the will with the divine Will ever since 1910, it has never left me.... [We might indeed imagine that this is some sort of higher Will or higher vision which looks upon Matter differently from the height of its summits and handles it differently, through some kind of divine decree.] It isn't that, its SOMETHING ELSE. It is MATTER BECOMING THE DIVINE. And it really came with the feeling that this thing was happening for the first time upon earth.6
We wonder if the first hominid to be visited by a thought wave did not feel also that the strange little vibration in his head, the "mind," was not the "Divine" coming to prompt him to join this liana with that piece of wood to make a bow. But here, the strange little vibration was taking place in Matter (even in bottles of mouthwash) and it was not prompting anyone to take a bit of matter and add it to another to obtain a result by combining the two—no, there was nothing to add, nothing to join, no outer manipulation: it was Matter itself moving, responding to itself, interacting and producing its own results. Not unlike Madame Theon's sandals that came automatically to her feet: the vibration of this unit of matter (the sandals) responded to the vibration of another unit of matter (Madame Theon), because it was all the same conscious Matter. It is no longer a divine revelation on the summits of Nirvana in some soporific consciousness, but a divine revelation... in a bottle of mouthwash (And why not? How is silicate less noble or less material than sleeping cerebral fibroblasts?).
Matter becoming the Divine....
Come to think of it, it is a rather stunning reversal because it brings down (and very much so) all the religions and all the spiritualities of the world. It is a revolution even greater than that of Copernicus. If heaven is in Matter, where are we running to, where are they all running to? And what of all their wonderful cosmic and nirvanic and celestial consciousnesses? In short, we humans have been too dense to have any access to this "Thing" we call "Divine" or "God" or "Supreme Consciousness," except through a little opening in our minds, a little hole in the shell—whereupon off we dash to heaven. Amen. But it is merely our own evolutionary thickness that concealed from us something that was here everywhere, materially here, God beneath our very feet (and in our feet and walking with our feet, and not only man's feet, but bottles of mouthwash). Though "God" is a word so full of falsehood that it would almost be better to forget it; we sometimes think that God is the cleverest invention of the devil—why, of course, they go together! For what is that omnipotent demiurge who rules over the earth from the heights of his heaven? It is childish and revolting for any enlightened mind, even if he does send down his son from time to time to repair the whole mess he has after all created—for if he has not created it, who has? Why, the devil, of course—and there they go, the two inseparable and indivisible accomplices; you just wonder who is the father of whom? But perhaps we are through with fathers versus "the others," whether they be "Gods" or "Devils," as well as with pieces of Matter separated into little bodies, and great illumined heavens soaring over the earth's old unchanged rottenness. The evolutionary "mess" was perhaps designed to lead one species, whatever it is and by whatever means, to the point where it would be compelled to find its own divine secret in Matter. Perhaps we are entering the reign of the divine oneness of Matter, without "otherness," without distance, without over there. We are perhaps beginning to put our finger on the key that will change Death. Because if this Matter is conscious, if this Matter is divine, it cannot die—consciousness does not die. Only unconsciousness dies. Only our unconscious vision creates death, just as it was forced to create gods and paradises to replace what it could not see with its body. Now the body will see, and seeing, it will be able to do.
"The Treasure in the infinite rock.”
But what was it that made Mother suddenly see that divine vibration in Matter (like the Rishis some seven thousand years earlier, the only ones who seem to have escaped the general aberration)? What triggered it? What veil was removed? We certainly would like to know something about that trigger, wouldn't we? That sudden divine microscope that makes Matter stir. And even this is incorrect, because it is not an "instrument," a supermicroscope, something outside Matter giving us another vision of Matter—it is Matter itself that perceives itself this way, as it really is, with its own eyes. It was Mother's cells, Mother's body, that suddenly perceived everything differently. It is in her body She suddenly noticed that the objects responded, just as in our heads we may suddenly notice a vibration signaling the presence of Peter or John. But what had triggered that new perception? It had nothing to do with her eyes (or rather it had also to do with her eyes). It was consciousness there perceiving consciousness here, in a perfect continuum, as if within the same body.
Mother gives us a partial answer. She explains the why but not the how (for the simple reason that She herself probably did not yet know how it happened): This last experience is the result of the descent of the supramental substance into Matter. Only this substance, what it has put into physical Matter, can make this possible. It is a new ferment. Yes, perhaps like a drop of sodium hydrate in a test tube of dark iodine: everything gets cleared up. The Supermind is what clears Matter up, what makes all Matter one, just as the Mind is what cuts Matter up into millions of pieces... only to try awkwardly and reunite them afterwards with a brain wave. But this does not yet explain how the phenomenon works: what created the veil? If we could understand the mechanism of the veil for the whole earth, it would be the most overwhelming revolution of all time. It would be a new earth. And Mother continues: From the material standpoint, this supramental substance removes from physical matter its tamas [inertial, its unconscious heaviness, and from the psychological standpoint, its ignorance and its falsehood. Matter becomes subtler.... Some unconsciousness, a veil of unconsciousness, is removed. But it has surely come only as a first experience to show how it will be. It is truly a state of absolute omniscience and omnipotence in the body which changes all the vibrations around it.6 "Omniscience," "omnipotence"—these are somewhat frightening words, but it is probably just the reaction of our old human bag-of-bones way, because if the body, one body, becomes conscious of the consciousness of Matter, it becomes conscious of the total body: everything becomes one single body, its own body, and it should not be surprising if it becomes aware of what is happening in any part of its own body, nor if it acts on any part of its own body. It is all ONE, the bottles of mouthwash and all the rest. Hong Kong and Paris.
We shall see....
But these conscious bottles of mouthwash raise an unexpected question and perhaps whisper to us a first unforeseen clue (please forgive me, but there also has to be a little humor in all this, because if we carry our human solemnity everywhere into this process, we undoubtedly miss the smiling joy of Matter, already veiled enough by centuries of "scientific" gravity and gravitation). And yet it is very serious, but it is joyfully serious, it is weightlessly serious, at last! What a terrible weight we have lugged around with us since Hippocrates and Jerusalem! So to continue, if the aforesaid bottles were conscious, then why not us? We should rightly come before the bottles, shouldn't we? In fact, because my dignity as a higher mammal was probably bruised, that is the very question I asked Mother. And She retorted immediately (and this is where our eyes began to open wide before something quite unexpected): I am convinced that among plants, for example, or among animals, the response will be much quicker than among men. It will be more difficult to act upon a very organized mind; beings who live in an entirely crystallized, organized mental consciousness are as hard as stone! It resists. According to my experience, what is "unconscious" will certainly follow more easily. It was a delight to see the water from the tap, the mouthwash in the bottle, the glass, the sponge—it all had such an air of joy and consent! There is much less ego, you see, it is not a conscious ego. The ego becomes more and more conscious and resistant as the being develops. Very primitive, very simple beings, little children will respond first, because they don't have an organized ego. But these big people! People who have worked on themselves, who have mastered themselves, who are organized, who have an ego made of steel, it will be difficult for them.6
And all of a sudden, it looks as if we humans were a huge artificial creation in the middle of "something" that is unfolding in the most natural way in the world; a semblance of a being confined in a thinking fishbowl through the walls of which he sees nothing and feels nothing of what truly is, who prides himself on knowing everything but is really a ridiculous tissue of impotence acting artificially on his own artifices seen through his artificial eyes. The world is something else. What is "unconscious" will follow more readily. Our so-called consciousness is the veil. Matter is more conscious than we are—more totally conscious than we are; only it does not know how to say it, it does not write fat volumes to impart false knowledge to us. It is content to live, which is precisely what escapes us. Yet what seems so distressing to us is actually our greatest hope, because if the future of the species truly depended upon our mental "adherence," our general human adherence, there would be no recourse but to wait for the final and unavoidable collapse of a species that adheres only to its own stupidity; but it is Matter itself, conscious Matter, that will adhere before us and explode appearances before our bewildered eyes—Krishna in gold is growing amongst us. Furthermore, if our mental consciousness is really the veil, a veil over something else that is true Matter, conscious Matter, then the evil of the world is fundamentally nowhere, except in the veil. An evil veil, a veil of death is covering the world. But a veil can be torn! Death is not inherent in the world, evil is not inherent in the world, the world was not born with death and evil, they are something added on—probably a momentary evolutionary expedient to help us realize ourselves (albeit painfully) as individuals—but if we remove the veil, death is no longer, evil is no longer. If Matter is conscious, nothing essentially prevents it from being immortal, it is something else that creates death—unconsciousness creates death, the mental veil creates death. We do not have to acquire, through superhuman efforts, capacities we do not yet possess: those capacities are here, those possibilities are here, immortality is here, perfection is here—only shrouded in a veil.
The Supermind is what is in the process of tearing down the world's veil in spite of us.
There behind the veil is the divine, immortal man (as a matter of fact, at the end, Sri Aurobindo spoke of the divine body, and not the divine man, as if to suggest that the body would understand better and quicker than *we). And the proof—I have the proof because I experienced it myself—is that from the minute you are in the other consciousness, the true consciousness, all these things which appear so real, so concrete (all the so-called physical laws, the causes, effects and consequences, everything science has discovered physically and materially) change *INSTANTLY. There are a number of things, certain material conditions of my body—material—that changed instantly. It did not last long enough for everything to change, but some things changed and never returned, they remained changed. In other words, if that consciousness were kept constantly, it would be a perpetual miracle—a fantastic and perpetual miracle! But from the supramental point of view, it would not be a miracle at all, it would be the most normal of things.7
A fantastic change of reality is at our door.
What we call concrete reality is a false reality.7
Now, there remains for us to understand the mechanism of the veil. It is Mother's next story.
Will we all make it, or will there be some casualties
The All-Powerful Spring
That "Treasure in the infinite rock" was going to further reveal its nature, power and hiding place—or rather what conceals it—in a third experience, of November 1958, just one month before the great turning point in Mother's life. I am here trying very awkwardly (I am quite aware of it) to decipher what belongs to tomorrow's language with poor images that probably seem as obscure as a child's multiplication tables would seem to a man of the Stone Age. But there is a fact. We must take hold of the fact. We are no mystics, we are only struggling hard with a reality that is difficult for our senses of children of the new world.
That experience happened during one of the last "Wednesday classes." Mother was seated there, before that whole amorphous mass that listened willingly; but then, life went on as always, you see, and they were there as if in a lovely meadow of light, grazing and chewing their cuds; they even asked questions that made you think that the Mind was not so bad after all, and Mother, like Sri Aurobindo, might have gone on speaking through a hundred thousand classes instead of writing a hundred thousand letters as Sri Aurobindo did without the Ashram making a real progress. That is what Mother was beginning to realize. It was not the problem of the Ashram that interested her, it was the problem of the world: I have not come on this earth to create an Ashram! It would be a very poor objective indeed...8 And later She told me: Over there at the Playground, I had to struggle to find some receptivity.... The situation would hardly improve later on, but anyway, that evening, after their hopeless "questions" and after the lights had been turned off for the usual meditation, Mother began wondering: But what is there in these brains who are interested in nothing but their personal little affairs? I felt, 'Well, really, can anything be done with such material?... So during the meditation, I began descending into their mental atmosphere, in search of the little light, of that which responds. And it literally pulled me downwards as into a hole.... And in that hole... I can still see it as I saw it. I was descending into a crevasse between two steep rocks, rocks that appeared to be made of something harder than basalt, BLACK, but metallic at the same time, with such sharp edges—it seemed that a mere touch would lacerate you. It appeared endless and bottomless, and it kept getting narrower, narrower and narrower, narrower and narrower, like a funnel, so narrow that there was almost no more room—NOT EVEN FOR THE CONSCIOUSNESS—to pass through. And the bottom was invisible, a black hole. I went down and down and down... as if I were sliding down this crevasse. There was no end to it, and it was becoming more and more compressing, stifling, oppressive...9 I am extraordinarily struck by Mother's description, because I myself had a very similar experience, and it was the experience of death. 200 I entered a black death of basalt, suffocating, exactly as Mother described it. Is this the place of death, then? If so, the rest is very interesting....
I asked myself, 'But what is there at the bottom of this hole?' And as soon as I had uttered this question, I seemed to touch a spring that was in the very depths—a spring I didn't see but that acted instantly with a tremendous power- and it cast me up forthwith, hurled me out of this crevasse into a formless, limitless Vast... vibrating with the seeds of the new world.... And it was all-powerful, with an infinite richness, as if that immensity were made of countless, imperceptible dots—dots that occupy no space—of a deep, warm gold.... Something equivalent to a mathematical point, but like living gold, a powdering of warm gold.... [We shall speak of this powdering of warm gold again, at length. It is the supramental substance—at the bottom of the hole, behind "death."] I cannot say it was sparkling, I cannot say it was dark, nor was it made of light, either: a multitude of tiny points of gold, nothing but that. They seemed to be touching my eyes, my face and with such an inherent power and warmth—it was a splendor! It would seem we are taking part in a microscopic description of what the world of true Matter is "behind" the obscure powdering of our atoms and other microparticles, the true bedrock of things. And all this was absolutely LIVING, living with a power that seemed infinite. And yet motionless. A perfect immobility in a sense of eternity—but with an extraordinary INTENSITY of movement and life!... Again, one of the supramental "features": the supramental is the meeting place of opposites, incredible dynamism in absolute peace, as if that very dynamism were born of the power of immobility. And a peace—the peace of eternity. A silence, a calm. A POWER CAPABLE OF EVERYTHING. And whatever was formless had the power to take forms.9
That is the supramental substance, which will make tomorrow's bodies and tomorrow's objects—and is perhaps making them already—the real Matter everything is made of, but which we do not yet see and live as it is: there is still a "missing link," a veil. What is extraordinarily interesting in the mysterious geography we have begun to explore gropingly is that Mother found that supramental "place," that supramental world, on the other side (or at the bottom) of the mental inconscient. Although it looks like nothing, this is a stupendous discovery—an un-covering, really. Because it means that all this, this new world and all-powerful powdering of gold capable of creating forms, is not located out there, at the end of God knows what remote evolution and developed muscles and centuries of toil and of matter to be endlessly purified, clarified and subtilized—it is behind the mental inconscient. It is here, immediately: "a spring that I had not seen." It is separated from us only by the Mind: by the roots of the Mind. The Mind is the veil—but the mystery is to know how deep the roots, that is, Mind's darkening veil, go into Matter. We used to think that the Inconscient, the one Sri Aurobindo and all the Rishis have described, was the primordial substance of the world, the first evolutionary layer, as it were, the first soil in which all the rest grew. But it is not so! Or rather it is no longer so. The primordial soil is not unconscious. The Rishis spoke quite clearly of "the ONE conscious in all things un-conscious"; Sri Aurobindo himself said, This nescience of Matter [precisely because He did not want to call it inconscient] is a veiled, an involved or somnambulist consciousness which contains all the latent powers of the Spirit.10 The real Inconscient, that is, nonconsciousness, was born later in evolution, a veil of unconsciousness fell over Matter, masking its power, its light, its malleable plasticity to make a stark, hardened, unchangeable and degenerating caricature out of it—something that dies because it cannot renew itself. It is this world of rocks with their sharp, metallic edges that Mother saw—black, airless.
Death. Death is a mental phenomenon, not a material one. It is our mental body, as seen by the mind, lived by the mind, felt by the mind, that dies. It is a false death, as false as our life—it is the false life that dies. And it is a veil... over something else, which is material. No—not at all the paradise of a consciousness up above, after "death," but a material world of true Matter on the other side of the veil of death, which is only the death of the Mind. Another Matter in Matter, another continent in a continent. But we do not need to die to get there! That is the crux of the matter. We need only pull that veil back and let real life enter our life, true Matter enter our unclogged eyes and cells, and let in the true movement of Matter, its true malleability, its true light and warmth, its true form-creating power. The physical body appeared "friable" to me, Mother noted in her first experience. A formidable change of reality—without death.
A formidable discovery, greater perhaps than the day the first hominid realized that the next world was not to be found in a miraculous dream on the other side of sleep, but just behind a minute of reflection.
The whole difficulty is to know where the new world is.
And Mother indeed indicated her surprise, without yet realizing all the consequences of it (the consequences would have to be "worked out"): *It was the *MENTAL inconscient. Because the starting point of the experience was mental [She had descended into the mental atmosphere of those children to understand why they were so obtuse]. A special unconsciousness—rigid, hard, resistant—with all that the Mind has brought into our consciousness. But it was far worse, far worse than a purely material unconsciousness! [even the bottles of mouthwash are not like that l] A "mentalized"
Inconscient, as it were. All this rigidity, this hardness, this narrowness, this fixity—a FIXITY—comes from the presence of the Mind in creation. When the Mind was not manifested, the Inconscient was not like that! It was formless and had the plasticity of something that is formless—the plasticity has gone. It is a terrible image [the rocks of basalt] of the mind's action in the "Inconscient." It has made the Inconscient aggressive—it was not so before. Aggressive, resistant, obstinate. That was not there before.... It was not an 'original' Inconscient. It was a mentalized Inconscient. With all that the mind has brought in in the way of opposition—of resistance, hardness, rigidity.... Well, the mental Inconscient REFUSES to change—which is not true of the other one; the other is nothing, it doesn't exist, it is not organized in any way, it has no way of being, whereas this one is an "organized" Inconscient—organized in its refusal to change. A hundred times worse!... It was a very new experience.11 We do indeed believe that the experience is extraordinarily new, with consequences we have not yet begun to fathom. Because it changes all of death, as well as all of life, as if that death went along with that life, or rather as if that particular death were as false as that particular life. Death does not exist, it is something else—perhaps the key to the phenomenon. There is a veil of death to traverse—and the whole earth must traverse it together, with eyes wide open. In a sudden inspiration, while dictating to me the notation of that experience of November 7, 1958, which read: At the very bottom of the Inconscient, most hard and rigid and narrow and stifling, I struck upon an almighty spring that cast me up forthwith into a formless, limitless Vast vibrating with the seeds of a new world, Mother paused, looked at me as though seeing the whole Earth before her: And this almighty spring is the perfect image of what is happening—what must happen, what WILL HAPPEN—for everyone: suddenly, one is cast forth into the vast.11
The whole earth.
Krishna in gold is growing up amongst us. A "powdering of warm gold" is in the process of breaking and shattering to pieces the mental rock of the world. Death is dying.
We must find the spring.
7. Krishna in Gold
Mother was reaching the turning point.
There is no doubt that She saw better than we do the supramental world, the supramental Power, so formidable, the incredible supramental creation, but it was for her as great a mystery as it is for us: how does one get there, how does one connect with it? In our heads, we can make any connection we like, but that is not where it takes place. And how is it to take place in the body? How can it take place? It is a kind of living impossibility. And yet, there is that formidable Power—She had seen it: A Power that can undo everything and re-do everything. Yes, that is all well and good, it would be almost child's play if it were a question of starting from scratch, but we have to begin with what is already there, with an old body and its old way of being, its cellular functioning and organs like everyone else's: As for the heart, the heart would be replaced by the center of Power—a fantastic dynamic power! She said, laughing. At what MOMENT do you stop the circulation and throw the Force in?... What seems unthinkable is the transition from one to the other, more so than the reality of a body animated by supramental energies. That to live we depend on the circulation of blood, and on food to have blood, and so on and so forth, with everything this entails—what a terrible limitation and slavery! As long as material life depends on this kind of things, it is obvious we won't be able to divinize our life.1 How do we get there? That is how the mystery first appeared to her and quite logically She concluded, We must first acquire the capacity to prolong our life at will. Because if all the organic, nervous and cellular workings are to be transformed one by one, it will take time, and very conceivably several centuries. So, if you have resolved to transform your body, you must be willing to have all the patience necessary—three hundred years, five hundred years, a thousand years or whatever—whatever time is needed for the change. I personally see that three hundred years is a minimum.2
Until She chanced upon some entirely unknown and new data along the way. Actually, She remarked four years later, We call it "transformation" because we don't know what it is. For if we knew what it is, it would mean that we had already begun to realize it. And fortunately so, because, to tell the truth, the prospect of all those centuries makes me shudder. I would imagine that they make everybody shudder, except those who do not care, or rather, who only wish to continue their little mechanical round without too much trouble—there are hundreds of millions of them.... The great insensate masses are yet another aspect of the problem—"insensate" in the Buddhist sense: who have no sense. So what of them? In 1958, the "supramental catastrophe" had not yet visibly created its felicitous havoc.
The first victim of the havoc was going to be religions. The religious order. The second victim would be politics and finances and the whole system they engender: the materialistic order. And the third?... Perhaps a mysterious and rapid degeneration of the elements that cannot evolve.
An hour of choice.
A whole part of humanity, the part that is consciously or unconsciously open to the new forces, is going to be more and more impregnated with the new substance and the new consciousness to the point of rising toward it to serve as a link between the two... but those who cannot be raised up, those who refuse to progress, will be "dementalized": they will automatically lose the use of the mental consciousness and regress to an infrahuman stage. One must rise above, emerge into the Light and Harmony, or fall back down to the simplicity of a sound animal life without perversion.3
For once, metempsychosis would have a meaning.
This was in 1958, the year of de Gaulle and Khrushchev.
The End of Religions
Mother had her own terrestrial specimens before her.... It was heavy, even crushing sometimes—a mass that was very little inclined to move and would have been quite content to live on a sort of little sanitary island with a few proper meditations (because after all, we are "spiritualists") a little work—not too much—to be at peace with one's conscience, and some physical exercise to keep the body out of trouble. As for the rest, well, life goes on. Humans fly low, and when they decide to fly higher, they merely pierce a hole up above and smile at the angels... only to fall back down on the good old four animal paws, which makes you feel that, after all, life is "real." And it goes on—how frightening. Mother repeatedly blew her hurricane over all that, and her smile; but one felt—and She herself increasingly felt—that She could have gone on blowing tons of hurricanes without changing anything very much. And one day in the
Playground, with a touch of sadness and indignation, She told them, *At the beginning of my present earthly existence, I came into contact with many people who said they had a great inner aspiration, an urge toward something deeper and truer, but they said they were bound, subject, slaves of the basic necessity of earning their living, and this weighed them down so much, took so much of their time and energy that they were unable to devote themselves to any other activity, outer or inner. I heard this very often. I saw many poor people (I do not say "poor" from the standpoint of money), but poor because they felt imprisoned in a narrow and soul-destroying material necessity. I was very young then, and I always said to myself that if I ever could, I would try to create a little world—oh, very small... but anyway, a little world where people could live without having to be preoccupied with food, housing, clothes and all the other imperative necessities of life—in order to see if all the energies thus liberated by the certainty of a secure material existence would spontaneously turn toward the divine life and inner realization. Well, toward the middle of my existence—or what is usually considered the middle of a human existence—the means were given to me and I was able to realize it, to create those conditions of life. Now, however, I have come to the conclusion that it is *NOT the material ial bondage that prevents people from devoting themselves to an inner realization, but rather listlessness, a lack of aspiration, a miserable sluggishness, an I-don't-careism, and those who have even the most trying conditions in life are sometimes the ones who react the best and have the most intense aspiration.4
In a way, it is a stock-taking.
As a matter of fact, there was no shortage of respectable and irreproachably "spiritual" people suggesting that the
Ashram needed a "purge," whereupon Mother retorted, They are still in the mentality that wants to eliminate all the obstacles—just the opposite of what Sri Aurobindo did. Sri Aurobindo took them all, embraced them, and then He worked on them so that they would no longer be obstacles.... Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate. But if you eliminate everything from life which is unresponsive to the Divine, what will be left?..5 I'm even told that there are some people who shouldn't be in the Ashram. My reply is that the whole world should be in the Ashram! But as I cannot contain the whole world, I have to contain at least one representative of each type. And with her charming smile, She concluded: All those people who make a spiritual effort bring me truckloads of morality!6 Indeed, it was not a question of the Ashram's morality nor even of the Ashram's spirituality; the problem was elsewhere entirely. What was really needed was a reversal of spirituality, one could almost say a reversal of Divine, to open Matter's divine doors, and not of washing away one's little sins or polishing one's little virtues. But the minute you speak of going beyond morality, people instantly fall headlong into immorality. It is a vicious circle, it is either yes or no, God or the devil, good or bad.... This "spiritual" gymnastics has been going on for a few thousand years now. And so we meditate and meditate to get out of this impasse, but the more we meditate, the more animal the animal becomes and the more saintly the little saint. And so it goes on. And we create a plethora of little ashrams to make it go on—they are the "good" of creation. Amen. The villains are outside, they are of course not us. Mother did not at all intend to make such little ashrams. But the "good" in the Ashram did not understand that, any more than the "bad"—no one understood the kind of revolution She was trying to bring about. A way to be opened that is still blocked, not a religion to be founded,7 Sri Aurobindo had said twenty-five years earlier.
Most of all, the way was blocked in the consciousness, in a certain habitual way of looking at the world, and whether you looked at it through spiritual or materialistic glasses made virtually no difference, as false on one side as on the other: the same kind of distortion, one from above and the other from below. How She tried to explain that to them! Those last Questions and Answers at the Playground—eight years of questions and answers—are almost poignant in retrospect: one feels how much She was trying to open a way in those consciousnesses, how She took them all in her encompassing look as though She were trying to take in the whole earth: if only one or two could understand! Comprehension had to begin somewhere, in some corner, if only in one single being in the world. A new world begins with one. And one particular day, after the showing of the weekly film at the Playground—a very beautiful Indian film on Ramakrishna and Hindu religious devotion, on the meaning of the gods in life and that "supreme" something all these gods are the image of, and that song of the soul, behind everything, everywhere (in brief, something far superior in quality to the Western conception of "God")—She said to them, I was seeing the whole religious world of worship and aspiration, the whole human relationship with the gods, which was (I am already speaking in the past tense) the best of the human spiritual effort to reach something more divine than man, the highest and almost purest expression of his endeavor toward what is superior to him. And suddenly, I felt in a concrete and MATERIAL way that it was another world, a world that had ceased to be real and living, an obsolete world that had lost its reality, its truth, that was outmoded, surpassed by something that had just taken birth and was only beginning to be expressed, but whose LIFE was so intense, so true, so sublime, that all this appeared false, unreal, worthless. Then I really understood, for I understood not with the head, not with the intelligence, but with the body—do you understand what I mean?—I understood in the cells of the body that a new world is born.8
It is all here, really, only we must look at things differently. As long as our eyes are fixed on heaven or fixed on false matter, we shall understand nothing and see nothing: we are right in the Wonder, and we do not see it. The great turning points in evolution occur not by attaining a higher or wider consciousness, but by a new and more exact awareness of what has always been there. One could call it a growth in exactness. Oh, how She tried to shake all that up, it was almost pathetic to listen to her, as if the destiny of the world depended on a few less obstructed eyes. But they only said, "We don't see anything." As for me, I asked Mother, "But doesn't the soul have the power to change Matter, to produce physical wonders as the scientists do?" (Because I could not help thinking that the "other thing" had to be miraculous, some sort of abnormal disruption that comes and is planted on the face of the earth like a superwonder exceeding all scientific wonders. In other words, taking today's sorcerer, the scientist, and trying to do better than the sorcerer, that is, wanting to do like the sorcerer—with some improvements. But it is not that at all!) It [the soul] has that power; Mother answered me, and it uses it CONSTANTLY, but the human consciousness is unaware of it! And the great difference is that the human consciousness becomes aware, but it becomes aware of something that's ALWAYS there! The power isn't so much of acting on Matter—that's something happening CONSTANTLY-but... the difficulty is to open the understanding, that's what is so difficult.... The thing which you haven't experienced is nonexistent. The transformation can take place up to a point without your even being conscious of it! You see, it is said that there is now a great difference, that when man came, the animal didn't have the means of taking notice; well, I say it's exactly the same thing: in spite of all that man has realized, man doesn't have the means; certain things may happen, but he will know they did only much later, when "something" in him is sufficiently developed to enable him to take notice.9 Our conception of what is miraculous is part of the false means, it is the Mind that has created the notion of the miracle, because for the mind everything obeys laws, so if something eludes the "law," it must be a miracle. But these laws are mental laws, mental creations, it is Matter as seen by the mind—outside of the Mind, everything is miraculous and a constant miracle. Or rather, everything is miraculously natural. A natural we do not see. The supermind is the natural miracle of Matter. True vision is vision of the constant miracle. There is no need to create miracles and wonders. They are already here! We need only to see them, live them, and let ourselves be shaped by them without interposing the iron net of our mental impossibilities. And everything changes—changes materially. "It is the Divine becoming Matter," Mother said. It is the next stage of evolution, that which is being created, or coming to the forefront. Yes, breaking up the old crust.
And by the same token, all the supreme experiences of liberation, nirvana, cosmic vastness and all the divine visions in every language and from every age and every country, were as if annulled or "ousted," by this new perception of Matter; as if all the gods, miracles, liberations, paradises and all the rest came still from the Mind and were mental projections; perhaps the magic lantern of the mind, but a lantern nevertheless in comparison to the golden dust of Matter. The supramental is not an improved mental vision, widened, extended, and more divine: It is not something higher than the summit we can attain here, Mother tried to explain, it is not ONE MORE RUNG, not that. Here, we have reached the end, the summit, but... it's the quality that is different.... It is truly a new reversal of consciousness. When we begin living the spiritual life, a reversal of consciousness takes place which for us is the proof that we have entered the spiritual life; well, yet another occurs when we enter the supramental world. And probably each time a new world opens up, there will again be a new reversal. This is why even our spiritual life, which is such a total reversal compared to ordinary life, seems something still so totally different when compared to this supramental consciousness that the values are almost opposite.... It's as if our entire spiritual life were made of silver, whereas the supramental life is made of gold—as if our entire spiritual life here were a vibration of silver, not cold but simply a light, a light that goes right to the summit, an absolutely pure light, pure and intense; but in the other, in the supramental one, there is a richness and a power that make all the difference. This whole spiritual life of the psychic being and of all our present consciousness that appears so warm, so full, so wonderful, so luminous to the ordinary consciousness, well, all this splendor seems poor in comparison to the splendor of the new world.... It was almost as if the Supreme Himself were different.... 10
It is the end of religions. Because religions are the Mind looking at something other than itself. The other world is just... as it is.
Meanwhile those disciples were still trying to work out a "synthesis between East and West," a "union of the world's religions," a high "continuity" of the world's traditions... and so on. Continuity, yes indeed, as the bird followed the reptile, but it is not by adding up the visions of all the saurians of East and West that we shall ever produce a bird's vision. Nor in adding together the Upanishads + the Gospels + the Koran, then shake it all a little.... It is ANOTHER world! How difficult it was to understand, of course. Sri Aurobindo and Mother would live for 78 and 95 years respectively without even having three disciples who understood; that is what Mother told me before she left—and there are four and half billion people in the world.
The End of Materialism
Other means had to be found. It is not through "questions and answers" that the world can be transformed. Somehow, the process had to take place in spite and outside of people's heads, otherwise it was hopeless. And time was pressing. In 1958, She was eighty. All her material time was taken up by a Herculean task that would have demolished any man in his prime. Obviously She used a source of energy unknown to humans; what She could do during twenty-two out of twenty-four hours is simply unimaginable... since 1926, nonstop. The Ashram had become a rather gigantic affair with nearly 1,200 inmates in 1958, including more than 300 children and 250 houses. And She looked after everything down to the very smallest detail, from selecting the quality of paper for a book at the press to the way to paste a stamp on a package or to moving a disciple to another house so he might have a little garden with a breeze from the east. Nothing was overlooked. And endless letters. And endless quarrels. And the finances. unbelievable and miraculous. And the criticism... so petty, so inane! For instance, a look into the archives of the Quai d'Orsay would reveal the venomous little reports of generations of dutiful civil servants stationed in Pondicherry, it is unbelievable—none of them understood what Mother represented, if only for France, for their own country! But Mother just laughed. One day She told me with her humor, the humor that cures everything, including all the outbursts of pettiness, whether from the ranks of the "good" or the "bad," I receive letters positively exuberant, full of bombastic words, and then there are others who tell me very frankly that they are full of doubt, that I quite simply use "tricks" to run the whole "business"(! )... both make the same impression on me.... It's their opinions—they have the right to have any opinions they like. To tell the truth, all that we could reply to them is, "Have the opinions that make you progress."" This Mother, She was always seeking so simply for progress, ever further, always striving to derive the best from the worst—it was the progress of the world that interested her: Be "good," be "bad," it does not matter; think well of her, think ill, it does not matter but for God's sake (or the devil's), get a move on!
It was not the Herculean task that weighed her down, but time, which was pressing. One day, in one of the last "Wednesday classes," this sentence escaped (or perhaps not) her lips: Basically, the question in this race toward the Transformation is to know which of the two will prevail: the one who wants to transform his body in the image of the divine Truth, or the old habit of this body to go on decaying.... It is a race between Transformation and Decay.12
Does transformation mean all those centuries of slow labor? Or something else? Sometimes we feel that it is not really so much a problem of transformation as it is a problem of death: this resolved, or discovered, or annulled, all the rest must follow almost automatically, as if death were just what makes up the substance of false matter, the one we see, opaque, rigid, unchangeable except by death—only by death, decay and a return to atomic dust can it change. Yet there is also that "golden dust." What we want or need is not to slowly transform this false matter through the drift of centuries, but to replace it by the true one, or to remove the "something" that veils it. Then the operation could be strikingly swift... assuming the rest of humanity is not struck down by the violence of the operation. The rest of humanity that lives in death and by death, because they are death, they are made of it. Can one being really lift the veil without lifting it for the whole world, and once he lifts the veil for himself, can he continue to exist without vanishing from the eyes of the dead we call living? With what eyes would they see him, those "living ones" who see only death and the substance of death? When it is no longer opaque, they see nothing. There has to be a minimal connection with the old human organs. Perhaps Mother was going to make that connection, or prepare it. Prepare the eyes of the world. The thousands of eyes of our cells. And only the Mind will be struck down, one day, while our bodies will awaken from a long nightmare. Sometimes we have the feeling that the entire mystery of the future is incredibly simple, of an unthinkable (precisely so) simplicity, and something will take us by surprise. Sometimes we feel that everything is here, really here, and a little click would suffice —we just need to find where. If only one being could see, understand the mechanism. Mother saw everything, and She said everything—it can be read, it is written thousands of times over in her own words, only we do not realize that it is that. There is something that just cannot be grasped by the Mind. There is something to find. We grope along in Mother's discovery. We move through a great Amazon that lacks only a name, not unlike a first man trying for the first time to name his world and its objects and to draw things out of nonexistence by means of the word—he makes them come into being by naming them. Are we going to find the place, find the key that will make us see, the word that brings into being?
And her last words, her very last words in the Playground to the assembled children whom She had so much wanted to become able to see and touch the new world, come back to me now with an inexpressible poignancy: Basically, the vast majority of men are like prisoners with all their doors and windows shut, so they suffocate (which is quite natural), yet they have with them the key that opens the doors and windows, and they don't use it.... They are afraid—afraid of losing themselves. They want to remain what they call "themselves." They love their falsehood and their slavery. Something in them loves it and clings to it. They feel that without their limits, they would no longer exist. That is why the journey is so long and difficult.13
This was on November 26, 1958.
And while She was speaking, the tiny tots of the "green group," who were fast asleep on mats on the ground near her chair, began to "see things." Now that they are in their twenties, they could tell what they saw. They saw a strange Mother, taller than She was, with a body that seemed to be made of another substance, a substance that emanated light from within, as it were—a true Mother; for them this was the "true Mother." And they asked, or one of them asked, "Why have you come as we are? Why didn't you come as you really are?" The typical reaction of a child not yet perverted by the Mind; what seemed surprising to her was not that Mother was different, luminous and taller, but that She was not materially like that. "Why didn't you come as you really are?" And Mother quite typically also replied, Had I not come as you are, I would never have been able to be close to you and tell you: "Become what I am. "14
But of course! The world does not need to be struck down by a miracle, even by the miracle of one glorious body: it needs to find its own miracle. When it finds it, then all miracles will be natural. The mystery of Mother is our own unconsciousness. We must find the key, we must open the door. Then we will all become as She is—or perhaps we are already as She is! Perhaps the real body is already here. A link is missing. There is a veil of something to lift away.... Matter is altogether different, the world is altogether different—we understand nothing of it. There is a veil of death over the world. There are eyes that see death and create death. They will call me mad or schizophrenic or paranoiac—because they are so fatally enamored of their death, they just want things to be "as they are," it is their "law," their "common sense," their "but-I-see-it-I-touch-it"—like monkeys feeling the shadows of trees. We feel the shadow of an unseen world. Our patent facts of today are scientific puerilities of improved apes. Basically, Mother said in a strikingly trenchant way, materialistic thought is the gospel of death.15
But suppose we were done with gospels once and for all, whether those of death or of eternal paradise? Suppose we start believing in Matter's truth, in the divine possibility of Matter, in the divine life in a true body?
Well, then we must go and seek true Matter, that is all, without any prejudice of death or of life, without any of the prejudices of improved apes, whether scientific, materialistic or spiritualistic. Ingenuously. With eyes open for the unexpected. Because in any event, it is where we least expect it.
And that will be the end of materialism. Because materialism is the Mind dealing with something other than itself. The other world is just... as it is.
That materialism goes with that religion.
The End of Death
On December 9, 1958, exactly eight years to the day after Sri Aurobindo was placed beneath the great flame tree with yellow flowers, Mother was going to be stricken in her body and forced to stop all her outer activities. On December 7, She would play her last game of tennis and make the last of her daily visits to the Playground. She did not need to decide anything or to do anything arbitrarily: the very circumstances made her do what She was supposed to do—somewhat brutally. And that is precisely the characteristic of the new Power at work in the world: it works materially, it creates the circumstances that compel our action. When a "problem" or a difficulty or a hesitation arises, it never gives a mental answer: it gives a physical answer, through facts and circumstances. It is a Power that acts exclusively and overwhelmingly at the level of naked Matter—and brutally, through "striking" examples, if need be. Through the years I have watched with a growing sense of wonder and bewilderment this Power develop in precision. People want to see miracles. One wonders why—the world is swarming with miracles. But one has to look in the right place and in the right way, without preference for the circumstances to go in one direction or another, even without preference for enjoying so-called good health. Then one sees the working of things—in the most microscopic details. One begins to appreciate the formidable total oneness of Matter in which the tiniest circumstance, the least encounter, the slightest shock is as if instigated by the same great wave of Power that triggers an earthquake or a revolution. And sometimes one even catches a glimpse of how a little impact here, if true, can create an immense impact there; how a true little vibration here, in a small cranny of Matter, has its repercussions throughout the whole world of beings and things. The new world is truly new. It is a world that no longer uses the Mind: it is Matter playing with itself, as it were, conscious Matter, true Matter pushing and breaking through all the mental unconsciousness that covers it.
At eighty-one, Mother entered into the yoga of the cells. She entered into the why and how of Death. She was going to try to dissolve the veil, to traverse death without dying and to prepare in the cells of her body the thousands of eyes of our little cells that one day will awaken, perhaps without our knowing why. And everything will be changed.
Death will be dead because we will no longer see it.
Except those who want to.
There will be the mysterious and rapid degeneration of the elements that cannot evolve: those who believe in the truth of death.
Now we enter the forest.
We enter there blindly, without knowing anything, really. Things shoot up on all sides, it is a jungle of experiences. Illuminations, hundreds of illuminations springing up, you think you have understood, grasped the whole thing, the mechanism, and you are whisked off elsewhere, where it seems to be just the opposite; you no longer understand anything, but whether you understand or not, the experience keeps on developing, singularly indifferent to what you might think of it; you come upon mystery after mystery, clear, transparent, obvious... and utterly unthinkable mysteries. They are obvious and incomprehensible at the same time. Yet everything is full of meaning, rife with meaning, in a way, like a tree in the jungle with all its lianas and delirious splendor; but what sort of tree is this? It is without a name. In 1950, when I was in the middle of the virgin forest, the geographically "real" one in South America, how many times did I find myself before the wonder of a gigantic, disheveled tree, collapsing under lianas and the cry of birds, but with no name for it; the birds had no name, and absurdly, even while I was beholding the marvel, those thousand marvels, I felt rather deprived of something: I was unable to name the tree, to name the birds; there were thousands of things, plants, creatures without names, rivers without names, swamps without names, in an unbelievable sumptuous delirium. So I invented names for the rivers and birds, in order to tame the wonder, to bring it a little under control. It was absurd and childish. The marvel was perfectly there without all my names, but it was as though it did not fully exist, was not totally mine. In the midst of her experiences, which kept growing and growing, Mother, too, was as in a state of knowing without knowing. One day, facing one of those nameless facts, She said to me: The day I know... it will probably be done. Because it will come like a massive fact: it will be LIKE THAT. And only much later will the understanding say, "Ah! So that's what it is!" First it comes, afterwards we know it.1
Thousands of times it was to be "like that," and Mother never knew.
Mother never knew.
It seems unbelievable, but it is so.
She went through the forest from one end to the other without ever knowing what it was, where it led to, or even its purpose; She never had a single name, or a single explanation—or thousands of explanations, each thing was its own explanation. It kept growing, straight up, like a tree, and that was all. And there were thousands of trees. There was nothing to do but to go through it all, and the very fact of going through it made up a whole world... a nameless world. A jungle of experiences that did not seem to relate to one another, any more than the "balata tree" by the "Marie-Louise" river was related to the "iron-heart tree"—yet at the end, it made a world. One did not emerge anywhere, one was in it everywhere. But unexpectedly, the forest would open up onto a savanna of emerald palms, and then there was the sea. You could not see it, some hundreds of yards or perhaps miles away, behind this endless swamp of slender trunks where the "insects" and the "birds" were chirping—but you heard and smelled the sea. It was like one end of that world's outline—but which end? There is no "end." When we know it, it will be done. But it is already done! It has been done automatically by Mother's passage through it, only we do not know this is that, there is no name—no map. She traced the entire course without a map—but of course! You do not go into the unknown with the map of the unknown. It becomes known because you walk through it. Once we have charted the map—if only we succeed in charting it—they will say: Why, that's it! It will become "clear," as they say: the trees will be listed in the dictionary and the rivers will be colored in pink in the atlas, with dotted lines and contours. But meanwhile, it is not yet "done"... at least not for us. To sum up, we are going into a not-yet-done world that is all done!
Mother never knew what She was doing: She simply kept going on. More and more, she told me, the life allotted to this body is to do things without knowing it, to change the world without seeing it, and to... to ignore all that, to be absolutely unconcerned with the results.2 The "result" is the map. And sometimes we wonder if charting the map will not make the new world emerge. A kind of magic. If only one being could manage to open his eyes, see the outline, connect the lines and put the coordinates on the contour lines and join the streams to the river and this river to that mountain... will it not suddenly bring to life that nameless mass that looks simply like a green wall before us?
Which is tomorrow's world.
I have followed Mother's journey step by step without understanding anything, or rather, with thousands of successive understandings, and I am scarcely better off today, on page 164, than eighteen years ago when Mother first began with me. So let there be no mistake: I am not skillfully leading the reader in a direction that I know in advance and am carefully saving for the end. I do not know what the direction is! I am leading the reader "nowhere"!—but perhaps just going there will make it "somewhere." That is all. I am going blindly into that, clinging to Mother's hand on the other side of the veil and praying that She guides me in the right direction—I do not know the direction. It is an adventure into the unknown. I am writing each line without knowing the next one. No one can possibly imagine what that means.
The story began one day in 1957, when I had already been in the Ashram for three years, fighting with myself every day not to run away. I wanted to go back to the virgin forest, the only place in the world where I seemed to be able to breathe, with the macaws, the tapirs and the red howlers, and snakes, a lot of snakes, but you get quite used to them; after some time, you feel them without even seeing them and everything moves in the same rhythm, you step over them or to the side, you feel everywhere and are in tune with everything, all things flow through your body, life streams in your veins, the trees speak to you, your legs run all by themselves as if they knew where to go—I lost my compass many times in the jungle, and each time my legs knew better than the compass the infallible direction in that green tangle where everywhere was the direction. So I very much wanted to return to the forest, supposedly to look for gold, but the iguanas were worth their weight in gold, and the gold was mostly in the searching. But I was very obstinate, I had seen Sri Aurobindo in 1946 or '47 and that had opened up a kind of hole in me, a sort of inexplicable clearing in my forest of negation of the world, and Sri Aurobindo was following me step by step, smiling (He always seemed to be smiling, his left eye especially), while I ran through the woods and leaped about like a young anthropoid from an age before men. I was vaguely drawn back to India, "just like that." All right, I said, let's go and try it for two years, "just to see," in the event it might really be a world unlike the others, and most of all unlike the one that had civilized me.
The first evening I arrived in Pondicherry, I wanted to run away immediately, to catch the first train out. But I am stubborn, it is my weakness: I had said "two years".... I spent more than ten years trying not to go back to my forest. Mother had another one in store for me.
And I could not make out anything, I was seduced in spite of myself and very angry at myself for that seduction. Mother laughed a lot—not me. She put up with everything from me, I held my own for ten years. For such was the mystery of the human samples around her, I was one of those samples. involuntarily—and if I mention the kind of sample I was, it is merely to give some idea of the collection of negations that surrounded Mother. Each one was a particular negation. A particular form of death, actually. Somehow, I had found an excellent "trick" to escape, since I could not extricate myself physically from the place: the trick of "liberation." I had discovered a certain way of drilling a hole in the shell from above, a tiny little skylight and off you slip into an expanse... oh, so vast and clear and rhythmical, almost musical, without any movements, problems or questions: it is, it marvelously is. You bathe there as if in eternity.... Until the day I said to Mother: "Well, one could really remain there for an eternity ..."—Not for an eternity—for Eternity,3 She cut me short, "... without anything changing." In other words, I was trapped. No one could ever extricate me from there, not even Mother, not even "God": it was impregnable with light and beauty. Perhaps it was even God, who knows! But all of a sudden, I was in my eternity as in a jar of honey, stuck—I did not want to be stuck, even in eternity. That was the beginning of my downfall.... Mother was waiting for me at the bottom.
But the day I understood, then I understood totally, and I loved Mother totally. And I began to enter the new world. And up to Mother's last day I lived in a total faith that was totally obvious, and I threw all my negation of the world into a negation of death. Because it was not really the world I was rejecting, I can see now, it was the smell of death in the world, it was the world of death. I am perhaps the only one or one of the only two people who have never believed in Mother's physical death. And I still do not. Because I have seen, touched, felt—only I do not know how to tell what I have seen. The map is not charted yet. We are going to chart it together. Perhaps we shall see Mother at the end of it. We do not believe in death; death is the falsehood of the world.
We are going to shatter the myth of death.
We are going to make what is true visible.
For those who want it.
The Birth of the "Agenda"
I wanted to see, it was my foremost aspiration when I arrived at the Ashram: for me, the yoga was first of all a kind of education of sight which one did with one's eyes closed in long meditations. I was convinced there was something to see. What? I really did not know. In fact, I knew nothing at all, I was a "complete" Westerner in revolt, and any way to change the world seemed a priori excellent to me: Europe was simply suffocating. But I meant to change this world materially. The Spirit was of interest to me at the level of my two feet. And there I was, receiving my first and rather shattering reverse from Mother's hands: in fact I remained shaken by it for years. She had me called twice a week on some pretext of work, and She talked to me. This was in 1957. I accepted the work as part of life's "duties," but I had not at all sought or even desired the privilege of meeting Mother personally. For me, yoga was to be done in one's room, when all alone, and also in walking down the streets with a certain kind of thirst. Mother laughed up her sleeve, took me very seriously, and casually recounted a thousand and one happenings of her life, of Tlemcen, of her experiences... which demolished bit by bit, almost unnoticeably, my whole way of seeing the world. These were her experiences, there was nothing to say, it was not theory—with Mother there was never any theory. And when She spoke... oh, that wonderful mixture of thunder and sweetness and laughter, always this laughter, this barely veiled teasing, and then those sudden bursts of light that opened up an immense vista in front of you: you remained suspended there and began to see things with her. You saw as She spoke, as if the power of truth were made palpable, as if the word came alive, a vibration that made you see; and always at the most unexpected moments, when She had just been laughing or speaking of some "trifle," suddenly her immense diamond eyes would open up and you entered into something else, it was there. It was beyond discussion: you do not contradict a cataract. I would come out of it shaking my head: oh, that Mother!... I was enormously afraid of being caught, I did not want to be caught, by anything—except by myself, of course. One is one's own best laid trap. And I did not understand very well why She was telling me all that—so many lost treasures, never noted down, I did not have the least idea that it was the beginning of the story of the new world. 200 In any case, it was very "interesting"! And so I went there week after week, without quite realizing to what extent She was uprooting me with her thousand stories that seemed like nothing: it was as though She were slowly forming me to walk the earth in another way. It has taken me all these years to understand how stubbornly, fiercely, unrelentingly we humans are shut up in the prison of a certain atavism. It is a prison of glass, but it is harder than concrete and allows in only one type of ray—and we believe we possess the whole spectrum of the world! We see everything through a little colored ray or, if we prefer, a discolored one. She was breaking down my walls... gently, because She was fond of me (Why, I did not know, either). She could break everything down, except my little infinity there up above; that was untouchable, it was my great hiding place. She broke that down too, after ten years of precaution. Then, I was so utterly flabbergasted that it was like being born to the world for the third time—a world that was no longer the atavistic falsehood of material birth, nor the semi-falsehood of the spiritual birth up above... it was like a rebirth in Matter, but a strange kind of matter, which has not ceased to amaze me.
But my first astonishment, or my first tumble, came earlier, during the first years, when She spoke to me in Pavitra's office, seated in her big carved straight-backed chair, which always reminded me of the throne of the Queen of England. This Mother, She had the air of a queen, and something more. One felt infinitely close, and exceeded on every side; She was there with me, and She was inscrutably thousands of light-years away as if there were a Mother behind a Mother behind a Mother; and sometimes a veil fell away, then another, and there were other depths of Mother, other, radically different faces, yet somehow with the same kind of smile, and eyes that became jet-black, or golden, or ultramarine, or azure blue... and something else again when there were no longer any eyes but a sort of infinity moving upon an immensity. And you entered a new dimension each time: you no longer saw Mother from the outside, as a spectator: you entered into her. With Mother, there was never any theory or even images: She made you become what She was or what She was seeing at the moment. Each time I returned from seeing Mother, it was like coming back from a new journey. I have traveled through all ages, I have traveled through many spaces. But I was terribly materialistic, just the same, and yet a peculiar kind of materialist because I never doubted that there were other ways of seeing than that of the scientists, but I was certain also that that other way of seeing had to be another material way of seeing things. In short, I was a materialist of the Spirit, without knowing it. For instance, I was convinced that the "visions" one had were a kind of material precipitation or condensation or unveiling: the god, or whatever it is, actually comes into the room. He may come through the wall, but he is physically there. Well, not so! The day Mother said to the type of Western savage that I was, Not at all, mon petit! It is not physical. You enter into another plane of consciousness and you see with the eyes of that other plane, everything collapsed. If it's not physical, it's a hoax. A superior hoax, perhaps, but it is unreal, a kind of dream on two feet. I never forgave that particular dream. All the spiritualists will laugh at my childishness—and truly, it is very childish.
But I was right.
I wanted it to be material.
I wanted it to be another way of Matter.
Without knowing it, I was seeking the supramental world.
And She was slowly polishing me, without my noticing anything, except that this Mother seemed so lovable, but I was terribly guarded with that love. She had to become totally helpless, crushed with weakness and pain by the pain of the world, for me one day to understand who Mother was. And it was not She who made me realize, who forced me to realize: it was my body that realized, it was my flesh that realized, it was my human pain that realized, touched, felt and loved. And wept also.
Weeks and months went by, three years went by interspersed with attempts to flee but always returning, as if I could not possibly deny or disown what I had seen with Mother, as if my virgin forest over there were a flight away from myself, a return to the earth's past and not a leap into the future; until the day when Mother said to me, "out of the blue," in the middle of the conversation, with that deceptive little air (but it gave me a strange, incomprehensible little shock): We have something to do together.
That "something to do together" grew surreptitiously: it was the hundreds and thousands of experiences that Mother was to call her Agenda—more than 6,000 pages, 13 volumes: the chronicle of the future—the great Forest both She and I had entered without even quite knowing that it was the Forest of the future. One does not know it is a forest, one does not know it is the future, but suddenly one finds oneself before a tree, then another tree, then another one... hundreds and thousands of trees growing one after the other. And all of a sudden, one realizes: but it's a forest. It is a forest!
We are going to walk together in the forest.
The great forest of Mother.
The forest of the next world.
And this "something to do together" continues behind the veil, as if She were holding my hand... as if She wanted me to reach the point where the veil will disappear.
Then we shall see.
We shall see materially.
The Path of Nowhere
How does one FIX the Supermind in the body?
Mother asked that question just a few days before her first illness, at the end of 1958. And the "illness" was a first answer in the flesh. In truth, we are given all the material means to reach the goal, only we do not know they are the means. A great part of the yoga of the body consists simply in realizing that everything is a means. Although this looks like nothing, it is a tremendous discovery. And of course, we are constantly looking for mental means, a mental system, a mental answer, but if the Supermind is in Matter, Matter itself must give us the answer, i.e., all Matter must give the answer. Matter means the steps you climb, the bottles of mouthwash, a bird flying by, a common cold and the razor blade that nicks your face, and the thousands of little so-called neighboring pieces of matter that surreptitiously teach you that your body is my body and everything is the body. Matter is vast. Matter is tremendously intermingled. And Mother's question in the midst of this material jungle reminds us precisely of the one of the higher ape confronted with a little elusive vibration he could not manage to fix in his head. Mother had perceived the Supermind once, twice, ten times, but it was "behind" something, so to speak: it came, resplendent, omnipotent; and it slipped away, God knows where or how. Actually, the ape must have asked the question for a long time, and it was perhaps his question, the repetition of his question, that finally produced the answer. The fact of asking "how?" was the means. It produced thought. It was already the vibration, the contact with the other thing. But obviously, here, for our supramental transition, it is not the head that should ask the question, it is the body. Does a body really ask questions? Well, not exactly, but it lives them. When confronted with an illness or a suffocating room Or the smell of death, it tries to breathe properly or to get out of the difficulty. It is the body that must call and find the answer.
A body is very mechanical: it forgets, it goes to sleep, it follows its own little routine and anything that disturbs the routine is an awful disaster. Mother spoke laughingly of the "supramental catastrophe," but She was going to realize that the Supermind is first of all the body's great catastrophe. The body must be "catastrophied" for it to begin asking questions and solving the question. It was a rather acute sensation that when the world, the earth, goes from one state to another, there is a sort of transition; it is always like a ridge between two worlds, and there is a very perilous moment when the slightest thing can cause a catastrophe—which means a lot of things would have to be built anew. The same phenomenon exists too on a very small scale, for individuals, in the sense that when they go from one state of consciousness—a collection of states which constitutes their individuality—to a higher state, or when they introduce into their state an element that will yield a higher synthesis, there is always a dangerous period when a catastrophe is possible.1 And the same phenomenon occurs at the level of the body. That transition of the earth, which is beginning to become very striking to everybody, Mother was first going to live it in her body through all kinds of "catastrophes." It is a law of progress: whether the progress of the worlds, of the spheres, or individual progress, its the same thing, though on different scales. I have a feeling that we are in one of those periods.' Perhaps the body of the Earth must also call out. It must begin to raise the question. One could say that raising the question is already the answer, it makes contact with the other thing, just as the ape's question made contact with the world of thought. This corporeal consciousness, so dull and thick... It really gives the feeling of something inert, unchanging, incapable of responding; you could wait millions and millions of years and nothing would budge—it takes catastrophes to get it moving.... Well, I have been swimming in it for months, and my way of being in it is to go through every possible illness.2 Mother was gradually going back to the source of the world's Illness. She was going to set into motion in her body a singular "effervescence" which was soon going to become the question of the whole world. The world is not "sick," any more than Mother was: it is in question.
How does one fix that?
You begin by trying all sorts of things without order or method, without knowing where to begin, and you have the feeling of groping about and searching and meandering and going nowhere....3 Yes, except that this "nowhere" is already precisely "somewhere"! Because what the body calls "home" somewhere is the old millennial habit—it must go nowhere, that is obvious. But it must actually do it. And the fact of doing it, of going into that blind "nowhere," the fact of blindly going in circles, the fact of groping is already the very answer: it causes material answers to pop up everywhere, like tiny creatures which were unseen beneath the leaves of the forest. You set your foot down there, and it is crawling. When you come down to the body, when you attempt to make it take one step forward—oh, not even a real step, just a little step!—everything starts grating; it's like stepping on an anthill.4 And our main difficulty is to understand that that crawling is the very answer. Everything that grates, everything that is "against," everything that pops up is the answer. It is the beginning of "somewhere." Only we see it wrong, we see it through the mind's spectacles, which of course find it does not conform to the normal order and truth and good health and morality—naturally it does not conform! It is another kind of conformity trying to show its face in spite of the mind. A kind of conformity that conforms to nothing but itself. Another "conformity" to understand. It is very difficult to admit that the nuisance is the nuisance of the old, not of the new. And then, little by little, one thing appears or another.5 Things emerge by themselves; that is to say, the moment we accept not to look at them with our usual mental reactions, they automatically show their real face: see, I'm like this. They tell us their pure sense. And everything tells us its sense. It is the Mind that is used to putting everything in a cage: remove the cage and everything is full of sense everywhere.
But it is an enormous world. The tinier it is, the more enormous it is. And in the end, not surprisingly, the entire universe is captured in a little cell. It is all the same thing!
It is the same movement. You wonder why people go to the moon. They want to drown the small in the big. But the big must be found in the small! The body seems like a very simple thing to you, doesn't it? It is a body, it is "my" body, and after all, it has only one form. But it is not so! It is a combination of hundreds of entities, which know nothing of one another and are harmonized by something more profound which they do not know. ..5 Mother was entering the great forest. Where was it all leading? Disorder and chaos the moment you tried to stick your nose in it: So, you want to do better than our automatism? Well, look how stupid you are—One must be extremely stupid to have the courage to do that kind of work. One must accept to unlearn everything. Mentally, it is all very well, you can perform lovely mental anti-mental acrobatics, but when you deal with the body: unlearn to walk, unlearn to breathe? No one will ever quite fathom... I was about to say Mother's heroism, but it is something else, almost simpler and more terrible: you must have nerves of steel. There is such a long way between the body's habitual state, this almost total unconsciousness we are used to because we are "like that" and the perfect awakening of consciousness, the response of all the cells, all the organs, all the functions... between the two there seem to be centuries of work. And each time an element that had not entered the movement of transformation awakens and enters it, you feel that everything has to be started all over again—everything you thought you had done must be done again. But this is not true: you don't actually redo the same thing, it is a similar thing in a new element that had been either overlooked or left aside because it was not ready, and now, being ready, it awakens and wants to take its proper place. But that creates a terrible disorder and everything has to be started again. And there are many elements like that...5
She went step by step, quietly; one heard the rustling of her long silk gown in the corridor, and there She was, smiling mischievously. She was trying to tell us the path of nowhere.
Depersonalization
This corridor was itself a whole forest. A long corridor on the second floor of the Ashram, linking the east wing with the west one. Mother had her room at the very top of the east wing, on the third floor, like a large cabin of a ship amid the yellow flowers of the flame tree and the rustling of the coconut palms. She was to retire to this room in 1962, never to again come down, except in 1973 to rejoin Sri Aurobindo beneath the big flame tree. From her so-called illness in 1958 to her retirement in 1962, there was first a long preparatory phase to clear the ground of the forest that was opening up on all sides simultaneously (or growing dense, if you like). But the forest began in this corridor. —I came down at 9:30 sharp, thinking half an hour would be enough to cross the corridor and get here. [Pavitra's office, where Mother used to meet me.] Apparently not!6 It was to be like that all the time, right to the end, increasingly and in every detail: dozens and dozens of little individual samples in her path, each one with his own problem, his "illness," his revolt, his demand. And as Mother had long ago ceased to be a person confined in a personal bag of bones, She swallowed it all, royally and completely, common cold and all the rest. Ah, you want to be transformed, do you? Well then, you have to transform everything....
The question her body was asking, the "how do you fix that," was first of all swallowed up by everything that prevented it from being fixed. It was not the problem of one body, it was the problem of all bodies. Or else one withdraws altogether, but what does one transformed body all alone mean, and is it even possible? You know the situation: I am not alone for ONE MINUTE, not in the twenty-four hours of the day. And in addition to the outer crowd there is the inner crowd: from everywhere, constantly, it keeps coming and coming—oh, constantly and increasingly. Increasingly.7 Of all the things I saw of Mother—and there were almost horrifying examples—I have found none more superhuman or inhuman than that life devoured by humans without a minute's respite—She had nowhere to hide, except her bathroom, and even there She would be pursued and watched. Not a single second to herself, in her own room, simply to breathe the air—up to the very end. It is humanly inconceivable. Not one second to lay down the burden. They were pitiless, all of them. They would be pitiless right to the end, without a single exception. It was as if all the circumstances conspired to rob Mother of her own person, to depersonalize her, so to say. But of course She clearly knew that the path was everywhere, every instant, in everything, in the good, the bad, the favorable and the unfavorable—everything was going toward the transformation, in the right direction. So it would seem... that if one wants to use his individuality, his body, to transform the whole—that is, if one wants to use his bodily presence to act upon the universal corporeal substance—there's no end to it. No end to the difficulties, no end to the battle... BATTLE! One must truly be a fighter—"fighter" is more exact than "warrior" because you wage war against no one: everything wages war against you!.8 Even to the children of the Ashram, She had already said earlier at the Playground, As soon as you want to progress, you at once encounter the resistance of everything in you and around you that does not want to progress.9 And that is exactly the way it is. Even in her last days, fourteen years later, She would again tell me, I am pushing, pushing against a world of obstacles.
And the obstacles created the path as well. That is the point we have so much difficulty grasping. The obstacles created the body conditions necessary to move forward. Without that crushing asphyxiation everywhere, the body would never have found the means for its new breathing. The school of accelerated evolution is a terrible one. Nature gently ruins and atrophies your organs over the span of centuries in order to make others grow in their place, but when you want to compress the reptile into a bird in a few earthly years, it is very agonizing for the reptile and quite incomprehensible for the unborn bird. The awareness of the stupendous difficulty of the "thing" is given to me drop by drop... so that it won't be crushing.... It's very easy to be a saint! Oh, even to be a sage is very easy. I feel I was born with it—it's spontaneous and natural for me, and so simple! You know all that has to be done, and doing it is as easy as knowing it. It's nothing. But this transformation of Matter...! What has to be done? How is it to be done? What is the path? Is there a path? Is there a procedure? Probably not. It's truly a blind march, in a desert riddled with all possible traps and difficulties and obstacles—all this heaped together. Eyes blindfolded, knowing nothing, one plods on.... I am literally hewing a path through a virgin forest—it's worse than a virgin forest.10 And sometimes, in the early years, a cry would escape her, as if it gave her some relief to tell me things—this Mother, She was also very human, let us make no mistake: her consciousness was not like ours, her energy was not like ours, but her body was made of our substance, the same painful substance. And over the years, it seemed that all the circumstances were going to crush with blows of fist and hammer, as She said, all that power, all those energies, and even all that immensity of consciousness in order to reduce it purely and simply to the physiological state of an earthly body, so that her body and her body alone could do the work, without superhuman energy and superhuman consciousness and superhuman power. Truly Mother was demolished—who can ever understand that? I saw her blazing with power: her power was broken. I saw her command forces and elements: her force was broken. I saw her immense and sovereign: She was confined in six hellish square feet of skin, TO DO THE WORK. The work is in the body, without tricks or miracles. Yes, an "honest work," as Sri Aurobindo said. And She let everything fall away. More and more She opened her hands: What You will, what You will....11It was the first lesson of the pathless path, and in fact the first and only door possible: total surrender, acceptance of everything. Really, the reptile must completely give up its reptile skin and its reptile powers to become something else. And really, the unborn bird cannot know what will make a bird out of it; and in fact the only thing that becomes increasingly clear is that all the difficulties, all the obstacles, all the negations and "illnesses" are the path of transformation. So there is nothing to do but to give oneself up totally and without looking back. So I understand more and more. Everything—this whole organization, this whole aggregate, all these cells and nerves and sensors—are all meant uniquely for the Work, they have no other purpose than the Work; every foolish act that is done is for the Work; every stupidity that is thought is for the Work; you are made the way you are because only IN THAT WAY can you do the Work—and it's none of your business to seek to be somewhere else. That's my conclusion. "Very well, as You wish, may Your will be done!"—No, not "be done"; it Is done. As You wish, exactly as You wish!... And in the end, its quite fun.12 Not always. Sometimes her body cried: If I could remain quiet like this for hours on end, without letters, without... oh, without seeing people! Would it perhaps go more quickly?... I don't know....13 It is very difficult to manage both at the same time: the transformation of the body and taking care of people. But what can I do? I told Sri Aurobindo I would do the work, and I am doing it—I cannot just abandon everything.14
And at other times, there was a total blackness around her that crushed her. Because it is all very well to declare that you "surrender" and you "let things happen" and you can do nothing in any event because you cannot invent a bird out of the reptile, but at the same time there must be something positive in the body that urges, drives and calls, something that suffocates positively, if I may say so. A life in the body means thousands of encounters and gestures to make; each instant the question arises: to do or not to do, to say or not to say, and how to do it and how to say it? Is this going in the direction of the reptile or in the direction of the bird? You probably do not know, it is moving forward BECAUSE OF THE AGONY, that is all. *We know nothing, nothing.... But that sort of tension every minute in your every movement.... You know, to do EXACTLY what should be done, to say exactly what should be said—the exact thing in every movement... it's a constant, constant tension. Or if you take the other attitude, trust the divine Grace and let the Lord take care of everything, isn't there a risk that it will end in the body's disintegration? Rationally I know, but *IT'S THE BODY THAT SHOULD KNOW! When there is someone who has made the experiment, it's so simple! Before, whenever there was the slightest difficulty, I didn't even need to say anything to Sri Aurobindo, everything would sort itself out. Now, I am the one who is doing the Work, I have no one to turn to! So this, too, makes for a sort of tension. One cannot imagine—one cannot imagine what a grace it is to have someone in whose hands you can place yourself entirely, by whom you can let yourself be guided without having the need to seek. I had that, I was very, very conscious of it as long as Sri Aurobindo was there. And when he left his body, it was a dreadful collapse.... One cannot imagine. Someone you can refer to with the certainty that what he says will be the truth. There's no path, the path has to be blazed out!15
Doubt also assailed her—for ten years and right to the end it assailed her, and in the most cruel form: Well, what about Sri Aurobindo, He didn't do it.... So how do you expect to succeed where He did not succeed?! Even in 1965, She said to me, The most severe test I could have been given: Sri Aurobindo's departure.... And it's something that comes and says, "See, it's all dreams for thousands of years hence." And it comes back again and again and again.... And just when you think that things are improving (to give you, as you say, proof that you are making progress), something comes along as if to prove to you that its all an illusion! And its growing more and more acute, more and more acute. There is always a Voice (which I know very well), which comes and tells you, "See, see how mistaken you are, see how you delude yourself, see what a mirage it all is, see...." And then if you listen, you're done for. It's very simple: everything is done for. You just have to put your fingers in your ears, shut your eyes and keep holding tight up above. Well, since Sri Aurobindo left, that's what has been coming again and again, and, you know, more cruel than all human tortures and all the cruelty ever imagined. "You are mistaken, it's not possible, you are mistaken, it's not possible...." And then, "Look, here is proof of the truth of what I am telling you: Sri Aurobindo, He who knew, left." And if you listen and believe in it, you're absolutely done for. And that's what they want. Only... they must not succeed, we must hold on. For how many years now?... Fifteen years, mon petit—for fifteen years. Not a single day passes without attacks of that sort, not a single night passes without.... You say you see horrors—mon petit, your horrors must be something quite charming in comparison with the horrors I have seen! I don't think one human being can bear the sight of what I have seen.16
She went through everything.
And finally, the sole proof She had that She was advancing was quite simply not dying of grief. And all her pain was meant to pound her down to the point where no one existed any longer: only Infinity existing through her. When there was no longer a single atom of the human, not a single atom of the old Matter that felt pain, that felt obscure, that felt... everything we are in a human body, then something else emerged. The bird came out of the reptile. But first all that had to die. A systematic, accepted and willed devastation. A slow, daily death, in each function, each reflex, each automatism—until there was nothing left but... the other thing.
Oh, Mother! What have you not done?
Sri Aurobindo's Abode
The "other thing" emerged very suddenly—and very fleetingly—God knows from where or how, the night of July 24, 1959. It came unexpectedly, in the midst of that "nowhere," without any apparent reason, and it left almost as quickly as it had come. We cannot really say it was a "first experience," because it followed the line A1, A2, A3... (the little "pulsation," the "supramental ship," the "all-powerful spring") each of which liberated one more precise, more explicit, more powerful quantum or modality of the supermind. Then the line disappears beneath the green wall of the jungle, and the suffocating nowhere is back everywhere, the nonpath, the blind march; and it appears again suddenly under one's feet there, without any reason, as if the "somewhere" were everywhere, at every moment, as if the goal, the other thing, the "end" were not over there at the end, but everywhere, only veiled by... something. There is no "distance," you see, no millennia or centuries to go through, one could even say that there is no "over there" to go to, no forest to go through: it is all here, in each point. The "forest"... What is it? It is something in the body that puts up a veil: something in the body consciousness. The "path" is to find that which veils—but the veiling takes place at any point at all; the Supermind is always everywhere beneath that green wall, it does not have to be won, or created. And furthermore, it is not a "green wall," it looks rather like a mud wall. There is something muddy in the bodily consciousness that prevents that state from being here, complete, instantaneous and clear at every moment. Although it is what gives us an immense hope. A miraculous hope. The ape did not have to go "over there" either, to some distant Mind yet to be created: it had to unblock or clear up what was preventing the contact—its "forest" was mainly located in its head. This time our forest is in the body: We have to establish the contact with the same thing, which is no longer perceived only at the level of the cranium but by all the cells of the body. The ape's path was long and difficult because the form of perception and the place of perception was so narrow and "personal," as it were, that it falsified everything, denatured everything, encaged and personalized everything—a cage had to be built—whereas our new place of perception is natural, bodily, impersonal and has nothing to do with what we think or do not think, want or do not want. It is not a question of making a cage but of unmaking one, while preserving all the value of individualization acquired by the ape. But a cage can be demolished in one second. Krishna in gold shattered the sanctuary quite swiftly. We must find the trigger, the spring—the mechanism of the veil.
So on that night it was going to be unveiled. It will take us a long time to know all the consequences of that experience, which raises almost as many mysteries as it unveils. Actually, we do not have the means to understand, not yet. But the fact is there. That night, for the first time Mother felt the Supermind directly in her body. It was no longer something "behind" or in the depths of the Inconscient, no longer something "out there" in some kind of vision of the "future" (again those unreal "distances," there is no "future"!). One could say that the distances had decreased or suddenly vanished. It was there in her body. It was unbearably there. For the first time the supramental light entered directly into my body, without passing through the inner beings. It entered through the feet.... A very symbolic detail indeed. A red and gold color—marvelous, warm, intense, and it climbed up and up. And as it climbed, the fever also climbed because the body was not accustomed to this intensity. As all this light neared the head, I thought I would burst and that the experience would have to be stopped. But then, I very clearly received the indication to make the Calm and Peace descend, to widen all this body consciousness and all these cells, so that they could contain the supramental light. So I widened, and as the light was ascending, I brought down the vastness and an unshakable peace. And suddenly, there was a second of fainting. I found myself in another world, but not "far away".... This world was almost as substantial as the physical world.17* And here we already note a marked difference from the experiences of the line A1, A2, etc., of the "supramental ship," for example: that "other world" seemed to have become more substantial since then, closer to us, as if the "missing link" were less missing! And there, suddenly Mother found Sri Aurobindo again, alive—as if the veil of death had vanished. As if what made death also made Matter and our material perception obscure. In that light—that light in Matter, in Mother's body (which even gave her a fever)—death was abolished, or the veil of death was abolished, one perceived without death. Death is a veil, and the "other side" of death is not elsewhere, in some nonmatter, but in Matter—the true one. Matter that illuminates, real Matter.
This world was almost as substantial as the physical world. There were rooms—Sri Aurobindo's room with the bed he rests on—and He was living there, He was there ALL THE TIME: it was his abode. Even my room was there, with a large mirror like the one I have here, combs, all kinds of things. And the substance of these objects was almost as dense as in the physical world, but they shone with their own light. It was not translucent, not transparent, not radiant, but self-luminous. The various objects and the material of the rooms did not have this same opacity as the physical objects here, they were not dry and hard as in the physical world we know. And Sri Aurobindo was there, with a majesty, a magnificent beauty. He had all his beautiful hair as before. It was all so concrete, so substantial.... I remained there for one hour (I had looked at my watch before and I looked at it afterwards). I spoke to Sri Aurobindo.... He said nothing. He listened to me quietly and looked at me as if all my words were useless: He understood everything at once.... And when I awoke, I didn't have this feeling of returning from afar and of having to re-enter my body, as I usually do. No, it was simply as though I were in this other world, then I took a step backwards and found myself here again. It took me a good half an hour to understand that this world here existed as much as the other and that I was no longer on the other side but here, in the world of Falsehood. I had forgotten everything—people, things, what I had to do; everything had gone, as if it had no reality at all. You see, it's not as if this world of Truth had to be created from nothing: it is fully ready, it is there, like a lining of our own present world. Everything is there, EVERYTHING is there.17
All this is pregnant with incomprehensible mysteries; however, what follows will perhaps clarify it. But personally, the first thing that struck me is this: How come it took Mother nine years—from 1950 to 1959—to find Sri Aurobindo?... For nine years She had not found the way. Why?
Of course, She was meeting him in the mental world and in the vital and psychic world, which happens to most of us (at least those who are conscious) who meet the so-called dead after their physical disappearance. One simply goes into the mental world or the vital world. But here, it was through her body that She found the way, it was the consciousness of her body that found the way. Therefore it is obviously a material world, but another Matter than the one our usual senses understand—another Matter, or the same differently perceived? In other words, She spent those nine years building the missing link (or letting it be built) in the perception or the material substance. When it was clarified, She saw: her body consciousness saw. And things were already less "distant" than in the visions of line Al, A2, etc., they were more physical, almost as substantial as the physical world.17 But if they were able to "come closer," how close can they get, where is the dividing line? Does it actually stop somewhere, are they not going to come closer and closer? Will the dividing line fade away at some point? And why is there a dividing line in the first place, where is the line, where is the veil? What makes the veil?... A veil can be removed. Something is veiled in our material substance, in our material consciousness. And yet, she said, it would take little, very little, to pass from this world to the other, or FOR THE OTHER TO BECOME THE REAL WORLD. A little click would be enough, or rather a little reversal in the inner attitude. How should I put it? It is imperceptible to the ordinary consciousness; a very little inner shift would be enough, a change in quality17… to go from this world to the other, or for the other to come here? Which of the two directions will it take?... Probably neither! Once the veil has faded away, it will take place in every direction—but it can fade away. It takes only a "triggering." We must find that "trigger" in our substance. Perhaps it is in the process of being made all by itself, unknown to us, as it was made in Mother, unknown to her, during those nine years?... Perhaps Mother was going to wear out the veil in her own body, bring about the final connection in her body—if one body, one piece of matter makes the connection, it means that all bodies, all Matter can make the connection. I have a very strong feeling, she said, *that to condense that world, as it were, would be enough for it to become visible to all.18 She had already said that in 1956, after the experience of the supramental "descent." Between 1956 and 1959, there were only three years. What happened in 1973 when Mother disappeared? Where did She disappear?...
In this same experience of 1959, Mother asked Sri Aurobindo a question, only one: And I showed all these people to Sri Aurobindo, this whole field of work, and asked him WHEN this other world, the real one that is there, so near, would come to take the place of our world of Falsehood...19 Note that Mother says "take the place of." It is not that we are going to go into the other, the other is going to come into this one—the other, which other?... It is the same! There are not two worlds of Matter, there is only one, the one seen truly, the other falsely. But seeing truly makes a tremendous difference! Like going from the ape to the bird. It really means going into another world, which is yet the same! And everything changes, everything. Life changes, the mode of being changes. Another continent within the continent. A monumental reversal indeed... which depends on a nothing, a trigger. But one must be able to bear that trigger. Will only certain people be able to bear the trigger, to see—to prepare themselves for the trigger and see, and live—while the others go on in the same way? Will not the experience become "contagious," is not humanity going to cross the line all together—except those who wish otherwise and will continue to believe in death and will indeed die? The Apocalypse is perhaps just that. But the people who wrote the Apocalypse did not know of the supramental world. They did not know that particular Matter, which they located in some remote heaven, thus ridiculing the very meaning of the earth. The Apocalypse will be really for those who stay on this side of the line suffocating more and more in their increasingly sordid world—no one will apocalypse them; they will apocalypse themselves, body and soul. Their own heavy and asphyxiating vibration will automatically take them where they belong: to the mysterious and rapid degeneration of the elements that cannot evolve. They will catch the illness of death—the illness of what they are. We need to prepare the light vibration! We need to prepare the other way of breathing. Perhaps we are just being given the time to prepare ourselves. We are in preparation. We are in question.
When? Mother asked Sri Aurobindo. "Not ready," was all He replied. Not ready.19
But the veil is growing thinner. It has been growing thinner since 1959. What did Mother do in her body between 1959 and 1973? Perhaps the "distance" has been reduced to zero. Perhaps it is devastating... if it were not for a grace, which only awaits our own light vibration, our faith in the real life, our love of the real life, our need for a real life. Do we have the need? The real need? Perhaps that is the whole question.
The heavy ones will become heavier and heavier.
The light ones will be clarified and will smile at the new dawn.
Perhaps simply to add joy would suffice,19 she said.
Then everything disappeared behind the green wall. Or the wall of mud, rather.
In fact, we shall see that this famous veil or screen of mud that masks the true world from us, true Matter, is actually a kind of cellular covering or grimy coating and the whole task, this long, slow, perilous crossing of the veil, is a work of purification of the cells, a cleansing of all their atavistic, genetic and millennial coating, in order to reach the pure little cell. The exit from the cellular programming.
And the foremost covering is not the molecules of DNA or RNA, as we might imagine, but the Mind: the roots of the Mind in Matter.
The first experience of the other side of the veil was not as fleeting as I have said, however; it was not like a "dream" that comes and then fades away: I remained in that state for two full days, two days of absolute felicity. And Sri Aurobindo was with me the whole time, the whole time—when I walked, He walked with me, when I sat down, He sat next to me..1 It was not a dream, it was the body consciousness that experienced it, the one that feels heat and cold, sees what is opaque, touches what is hard. A veil had been removed. For two full days She walked in another world, which was nevertheless ours. Sri Aurobindo gave me two days of this—total bliss.... Had there been a personal goal, this goal was clearly attained; it is indescribable, absolutely beyond all imaginable or expressible splendors. And that was when I received the Command from the Supreme, who was right here, this close [Mother presses her face, her body, her hands]. He told me, "This is what is promised. Now the Work must be done." And not individual but collective work was meant.2 And Mother added this, which suddenly left me pensive: Well, what Sri Aurobindo did by leaving his body is somewhat equivalent, although far more total and complete and absolute—because He had that experience, He had that, He had it; I saw him, I saw him supramental on his bed, sitting on his bed. He has written: I am not doing it individually, for myself but for the whole earth. And it was exactly the same thing for me—but oh, that experience! Nothing counted for me anymore: people, the earth—even the earth itself had absolutely no importance.3 So Sri Aurobindo had it, He knew the double world, when sitting there, in his armchair, looking at the wall.... And He succeeded to live in both worlds simultaneously: He listened to the disciples and saw them playing jokes around him, He waited for Mother's steps.... It was the same world, and yet it was another world. And by his physical presence here, He drew the other into this one, thinning the separating layer, the Wall... which was already no longer a wall when Mother had the experience; something had already become thinner, clarified—until the day, perhaps, when He understood that He would work more effectively from the "other side," less caught up by the external demands of the disciples, the letters, the thousand stupidities that devoured all his time for the real work. It was as if He had been pushed to the other side; five times He had said: I have no time. And Mother stayed on this side of the bridge, until that day in 1959 when the first connection was made. But He did not need to die, He had the "treasure of the two worlds," as the Rishis said, "this Treasure in the rock like the young of the bird." Do we understand what that means?... Probably not really. He accepted to die, to enter consciously, with a conscious, living body into the opposite of consciousness: night, death. As if to throw this seed of being into the rock, into nonbeing. Perhaps that is just it, Krishna in gold growing and shattering the walls. It is rather frightening. Well then, Mother left that real world, that really living world, to reenter our death, which we call life. She did the reverse of what Sri Aurobindo did. She was going to wear away the veil from within, as it were. Attempt the connection for the earth. For indeed, what appears to us as life IS DEATH. So we could correctly say that there are kinds of GRADATIONS in death. Gradations in life and gradations in death: some beings are alive to a greater or lesser degree, or if we want to put it negatively, some beings are dead to a greater or lesser degree. But for those who know, oh, for those who know that this material form can manifest a supramental light, well, those who don't have the supramental light in them are already a little dead. That's how it is.4
To put the supramental light into the body of the Earth is to uproot death. It means lifting the veil of "something" that creates death, the very one that had been lifted for two full days.
The Triple Condition
And everything disappeared. Once again there was the forest. Walking blindly, suffocating, step by step, without a path. How does one fix that—the supramental light in the body? Not a fleeting experience, but something permanent. What prevents that? As always, the difficulty is not to find what must be done, but what must be undone, because the thing to be undone is invisible, like one's habits, as obvious and certain as Newton's apple. There is all the certainty of the laws of death to be undone, and where do they nest, these laws, prior to our putting them into equations? They must be nabbed in their nest. All the "obvious facts" of the world must be nabbed in their nest: why we fall, why we are heavy, why X is followed by Y which is followed by Z, which makes a little death at the end of the line. We must go back to the origin of the whole irrefutable chain, link by link, right to the microscopic source—where the little beast hides. The whole logical, obvious, unchallengeable and mathematical chain that creates the veil. An enormous Falsehood in all its details. Of course, we must first think of it as falsehood—the trouble is, we are not alone in thinking: the cells of the body have their own mode of thought, they have caught the illness of death like all the rest of us dressed in a suit and tie. So we must go and ferret out that little "thought" from its nest.
The first step, therefore, is a work of clarification of Matter, or false matter, rather. When it is clear, it will be true, and the light will be able to go through it; the real life will enter it, the "other" world will be there, while we walk or talk, with our eyes wide open.... But simultaneously there is another kind of work to be done: when that light, that formidable Power enters, it is like a raging fever, it seems everything is going to burst, you feel crushed inside, in all the cells of your body—of course, there is a resistance, an obscurity, a heaviness within which creates an unbearable friction. The current tries to get through, but it cannot: everything turns red. If you persist, it can even blow up everything. It is not a little mental current, of course. But we must say, it is extremely well dosed, the current is simply cut when the going gets bad, or else you faint. The consciousness of the body is like a baby's consciousness; it is very small, it has none of the mental "immensities." Just pinch your finger in the door to understand what I mean. The fainting is not due to pain but to the intensity of the current of reaction, which simply blows the fuses. There must be no more reaction, everything must flow within a corporeal immensity similar to the immensity up above. An unbroken immensity. It is in the body that we have to experience the infinite. And in fact, it is in the body that we have to have all the "great experiences" of up above. Then we will begin to bear the current without fainting like a frail woman (although women are much more solid than men, their substance is far more wrought than ours. Mother always said that they had a decisive role to play in the transformation and they were better able to make the bridge). So the first lesson of the experience of 1959 was the need to universalize this corporeal consciousness, to widen it into the motionless infinite that can bear any hurricane without a quiver of reaction—it flows without obstruction. The obstruction is precisely what creates the veil. Clarification and universalization go together. The body—the body-consciousness—must first learn to widen itself It is indispensable, for otherwise all the cells become a kind of boiling porridge under the pressure of the supramental light.5 And Mother looked at me out of the corner of her eye, stuck as I was in my pallid little infinity up above:
What I am trying to bring about is the great opening. Only when it has opened wide will there really be (how should I put it?) the irreducible thing, and all the world's resistance, all its inertia, even its obscurity will be unable to swallow it up—the determining and transforming thing. I don't know when it will come. And She added (here She had a mischievous little smile), If you concentrate long enough on any one point, you discover the Infinite (it is the infinite that X, Y or Z have found in their own experience), what could be called their own Infinite. But this is not what WE want, not this.... So then it is no longer an individual or personal contact with the Infinite, it's a total contact. And Sri Aurobindo insists on this, He says that it's absolutely impossible to have the supra-mental transformation without becoming universalized—that is the first condition. You cannot become supramental before being universal. And to be universal means to accept everything, be everything, become everything—really to accept everything. And as for all those who are shut up in a system, even if it belongs to the highest regions of thought, it is not THAT.6
The infinite in Matter. The whole universe in the body. But how is it to be done? It is as if suddenly "spirituality" became a concrete affair, almost a matter of cellular mechanics. Infinity must be achieved so that the current can flow without shattering everything, and there must be also some kind of impersonalization or depersonalization of the bodily consciousness so that the pure, exact vibration of the material spontaneity (such as in the bird, the insect and the whole world except us) may pass through without being caught, denatured and falsified by all our so-called natural reactions, which are mentalized, moralized, medicalized or marxified reactions, but false just the same because they are personal and they jam the vibrations—or rather the Vibration. All our reactions are mortal reactions, the most beautiful and the most stupid alike. And now I know why this sort of impersonalization of the material individuality is so important. It is very important for the exactness of this Action, so that it is only—ONLYthe purest divine Will (if it can be put that way), expressing itself with a minimum of admixture. Any individualization or personalization results in admixture.... And then one understands all, all—all the details. Some things can be understood intellectually or psychologically (which is very good, it has an effect and it helps you), but that always seems so hazy; it works through an imprecision. But now the vibration's mechanism is understood—its MECHANICS; and thus it becomes precise. All these attitudes the yoga recommends—beginning with action done as offering, then complete detachment from the result (leaving the result to the Lord), then perfect equanimity in all circumstances, all these stages which one understands intellectually, feels sentimentally—well, all this takes on its TRUE MEANING only when it becomes what could be called a mechanical action of vibration—at that point one understands why it must be like it is.7
Ultimately, the Spirit is understood in Matter. It is most comprehensible there—I was about to say most real, as if the other one up above were a pale copy, a mental imitation. One day, it could well be that all our "spirituality" will appear to us as an enormous travesty of something else—which is really and totally understood only at the level of Matter. And which explains the whole world.
Clarification, universalization, impersonalization.
Yes, but practically, in a body, how does one do it?
The Physical Mind
The body begins at any point and at any minute of the day.
You go down the stairs from your room and something begins to whisper: Oh, what a heavy day!—and you become heavy. You go into the bathroom and it whispers: Watch out, it's slippery, you're going to fall!—and you slip and fall. Watch out, you're going to cut yourself!—and you cut yourself. You go to meet someone and it whispers again: Be careful, he's going to throw his bad mood on you—and you begin to grate inside. You cough, there is a draft: I'll catch cold!—and you catch cold. It creates interminable colds, countless cunning illnesses that have neither a temperature nor medical charts, but that poison and smear and curdle everything—veil everything. Nothing is received as it is: it is veiled in advance. There is illness, disorder, confusion in advance—everything is foreseen, to the last catastrophic detail. Or else (more rarely) it colors everything pink—or yellow, green or indigo—and everything is seen in advance in that blend. Things happen as they were foreseen, it is remarkable, as if some dwarf magician were standing there. But we pay no attention because the tiny little muted voice is covered over with our idealistic rantings, our grave mental decisions, our superorganizations... which become disorganized without our knowing why, suddenly, undermined by an unforeseeable, ridiculous little accident. Here it comes, and everything falls apart. Sometimes it takes ten years to fall apart or to produce cancer—but the falling apart or the cancer is imprinted in the tiny whispering secretion which spins and spins ceaselessly, as you walk, as you eat, as you speak.... "Be careful, you're going to get tired!" and you are instantly tired. "Be careful, you're going to make a mistake!" and you instantly make a mistake, almost compulsively, vertiginously, as if the tentacles of an octopus were quietly winding around the cells. "And then one dies, you know"—well, yes, death is fatal. And you die. When one begins to touch that particular endless, numberless octopus that smears everything, veils everything and asphyxiates everything—but ever so lightly, soft like a breeze, beyond all belief or even a second's "thought"—one begins to touch a formidable black magic that escapes us only because it forms the very texture of our existence. Subtle, almost wordless, it is less than a breeze, the caress of a vibration around or under you, sometimes like a faint odor or a "forethought," a "forefeeling," a vague embryo of something sliding under a dead leaf—and everything decomposes. It is the invisible and constant decomposition of everything. Not necessarily the decomposition of a corpse (that is reserved for the end), but an imperceptible decomposition of color that makes the world fluctuate in a kind of muddy shimmer (the "muddy" is for those who have clearer eyes: for the others, it is simply a charming shimmer) which has a strange power over the thousand little circumstances of daily life—and sometimes over the big ones when the dose is stronger. And a quasi-hypnotic action on the body.
Of course, when you are a little conscious of what is happening, you chase it all away. But it is sticky. You chase it away once, ten times, but it comes back in another form, with another color. You hit it: it goes underground, puts on a saintly air, looks as lovely as an angel. And then, zap! it pops up again. You conquered this difficulty, dissolved that impurity fifteen years ago; it slips back into your memory like a breath: "Oh! That's old, luckily it's finished"—and instantly it enters again, called back by the memory, tickled by the memory,8 as Mother said, all fresh and bubbly, doubly energetic on account of the long torpor; and it starts again as if nothing had been done. You have simply slept on the difficulty for fifteen years. A breath of memory, an imperceptible vibration—NOTHING is dissolved. There is something there, the tissue of something, which uses anything, a draft, a chance encounter, a sneeze, to make it all come back again. And there is not one thing, one difficulty, one weakness, one illness to extirpate, no—there is a whole tissue, almost a corporeal substance. A denaturing substance. Then one begins to see the size of the problem, as if everything had to be uprooted. A kind of rottenness in advance. And so inextricably blended with the body that one wonders if it is really possible to remove it without removing the very life of the body.
This is the "physical mind." A sort of primal thought in Matter.
But then, it is not even a "thought," it is a breath, or rather an imprint. Probably the imprint of all the catastrophes it had to go through in order to awaken to life—a catastrophic awakening. The emergence from the great, quiet Sleep. The material consciousness, that is to say, the mind in Matter, was formed under the pressure of difficulties—difficulties, obstacles, suffering, struggle. It was, so to speak, "worked out" by those things, and that gave it an imprint almost of pessimism and defeatism, which is certainly the greatest obstacle.9 It is the great thirst to get out of the catastrophe. The great basis, the immense basis of Life. Life rests on that, on that NO. A no that assumes thousands and millions of forms and little illnesses or little weaknesses, which all thirst for the ultimate no: death. At last, the peace of death. It is very imperceptible, perfectly covered over with our mental din, our gospels or socialisms, our this and that, which are but little feverish agitations on a platform of death. We merely pretend for a while. Then we no longer pretend (or it no longer pretends), and we call for penicillin, or the doctor, or the pastor, or heaven to our rescue. But death is not of today; it was always there. Things have not really changed: they have only become what they already were. And we call that life. We walk constantly with death at our side, while going up and down the stairs, speaking, or laughing... it whispers and whispers and whispers.... And it can jam absolutely anything: if you dare look closer at that whispering to correct it or lecture it a little, it becomes very shrewd, it assumes the appearance of ten good thoughts, each of them a particular trap. It is a perfect and indisputable trap, no matter how you look at it, as good or as bad. It overtakes you in a flash, catches your own thought in advance and waits for you up ahead with a fresh, unexpected piece of mischief. Right thinking is wrong, wrong thinking is wrong, everything is wrong. Everything is blurred. But of course! This is THE MIND, so no one is mentally stronger than the mind. The mind cannot correct the Mind. There is really a complete rottenness, stuck there, in the body, in each reflex, each reaction, each mouthful you eat, each step you take. You can extricate yourself from intellectual thought, stop the thinking process, enter into liberated heavens. Everything is fine up above, but down below it's swarming. As a matter of fact, it is a battle against small, really tiny things: habits of being, ways of thinking, feeling and reacting...10 A TREMENDOUS battle against millennial habits....11 It's interesting only for someone who finds interest in EVERYTHING, to whom EVERYTHING is interesting, that is to say, who has the sort of will for perfection that neglects no detail—otherwise, it isn't.... As soon as you enter the mental realm, of course, the mind says, "Ah, no! No, it's a waste of time." It isn't, but the mind regards all that as trifles.12 Those trifles make up the very substance of death. Our life is made of a million fatal trifles. It would almost seem that our depths are made of an imperceptible sediment of clay producing a microscopic powder—loamy, dense and absolutely black. It is in the heart of the cells, or rather around them. A veil of powdered clay. Simply touch it a little and it all rises up en masse like a screen, filling the fishbowl, and it is night—it is the night the "living" call day. They bathe in it, in that trifle. Whereas if you let it settle quietly, you certainly see more clearly, the fishbowl becomes transparent, but it is there nevertheless, lurking in the depths. So what is to be done?
It would almost seem that that trifle is the root of the problem.
But certainly when there is an extreme difficulty, there is also an extreme key and an extreme power. It is the obstacle that opens the door. It is there only to lure us toward the discovery. Death is the ultimate obstacle which conceals from us the greatest discovery.
In the beginning, Mother was very proud of herself (may I be excused for teasing her a little, but from time to time we can switch roles). She used to tell me, When this mill starts turning... you take it—as if you were picking it up with pincers, and then (She lifted it upwards), then I hold it there, in this motionless white—no need to keep it there for long !13 Yes, and then She let go of the tweezers and everything started again. Or else you bring down the Power: in one second you are practically bursting with a power of light that dissipates the seething... for five minutes, the time the power is there. Mother clearly saw that that did not work either: I well understand why the Truth, the Truth-Consciousness, doesn't express itself more constantly: it's because the difference between its Power and the power of Matter is so great that the power of Matter is as if cancelled—but then, that doesn't mean Transformation: it means a crushing.... That's what used to be done in the past: they would crush the entire material consciousness under the weight of a Power that nothing can fight, nothing can oppose; and then they would feel, "Here we are! It's happened!" It hadn't happened at all! Because the rest down below remained as it was, unchanged.14 And if you do not want to use or cannot use a Power that crushes the seething, if you do not want to climb or cannot climb above into the motionless Whiteness, then what is left?... And if, on top of that, you cannot use the Mind to fight the mind in Matter, what are you to do?... You are nowhere. Or rather you are completely in it, at the only possible level, in the heart of the mental mud in Matter and, from within, within the obstacle itself you try to find the power that will go through or transform the obstacle. The very power of the obstacle holds the very power of the victory. One struggles with Victory all the time, and perhaps the secret is to know how to look in the right direction.
The Little Seconds of Death
But upon observing this seething closely, we have more than one surprise.
Mother was observing it, "was in it," in the long corridor of the second floor, in the midst of the disciples' thousand little stories that were all "her" story, her difficulty, her opacity; She followed it, tracked it down in all her gestures and movements, and there seemed to be no solution—it was dislodged here only to reappear there, protean and endless—as if the only solution were to live the difficulty. And that is where there is a thin line dividing two different faces of the same thing, the same difficulty, the same impossibility: a face of death and a face of life, a closed, negative face and an open one—depending on one's attitude. One lives the same stupidity and opacity, but on one side it is lived positively, with a question, a call, a kind of deep yearning or embracing of the truth that one feels behind, that one keeps wanting and longing for behind the black glue: one is in the midst of it like a cry. And on the other side one refuses, one says no, one does not want to see it or admit its existence, but it sticks all the same. It means refusing the enemy, and as long as one refuses the enemy, one has no power over him—he simply waits for you at the other end.
Mother advanced step by step into the swamp, and the solution was merely to walk in it, even if one had to keep walking there for three hundred years. This material mind loves catastrophes and attracts them, and even creates them, because it needs the shock of emotion to awaken its unconsciousness. All that is unconscious, all that is tamasic needs violent emotions to shake itself awake. And that need creates a sort of morbid attraction to or imagination of those things—all the time it keeps imagining all possible catastrophes or opening the door to the bad suggestions of nasty little entities that in fact take pleasure in creating the possibility of catastrophes...15 The wisp of imagination it does have (if you can call it imagination) is invariably catastrophic. Whatever it anticipates is always for the worst—the pettiest, meanest, nastiest kind of worst—always the worst. It's... really, its the most sickening condition human consciousness and matter can be in...16 You feel a little pain—oh, is it going to be a cancer?..17 And then that wonderful character, after imagining the worse (in the space of a second, of course), it submits it all to the Lord and tells Him, "Here, Lord, here is Your work, it's all Yours, do what You will with it"! The silly idiot, why did it have to prepare its catastrophes! A catastrophe, invariably a catastrophe, everything is catastrophic—but it offers its catastrophe to the Lord 18 And of course, we do not think for a second that it is a catastrophe, or that it may be catastrophic: "It's trifling," it is only a passing "silly idea"—but we err. It is authentically catastrophic. It is walking death. It just takes a certain accumulation of trifles to cause a real cancer and a real accident. Through these microscopic stupidities, Mother was slowly trailing Death to its source. She was going there "without a solution," She simply went through, went through all that, making a "mistake" each time, having the "wrong reaction" each time, repeating some past blunder or another each time... as if She were nothing but a tissue of error, falseness and blunders. "I" is but constant error. The first step to "clarification" seems to be a quintessential mudbath. And She was right there, She was in it. She was not up above, She was not "impeccable," but She was set on wresting the key to the victory from the very obstacle. It was the sordid battlefield.19
And the story, or the swamp, began to deepen. How many times in the middle of a conversation, or while speaking to someone out there in the corridor, did I suddenly see her stop and place the palms of her hands over her eyes, her head between her hands—five seconds, ten seconds—and become white, but not white like a dead person: as if a compact column of light were descending and enveloping her... then it was over, She smiled again, continued, went step by step from one to another, gave a flower or another, swallowed this poison or another. Or else She remained seated in front of me, her eyes closed, suddenly wrapped in that white light, as if totally arrested, immobile—there was no longer a quiver of being in that body. Then She would quietly say to me, Things don't happen at all as they do in ordinary life; for three or four minutes, sometimes five or ten minutes, I'm a-bo-minably sick, with every sign that it's all over. But it's only to make me find... to make me go through the experience and to find the strength. And also to give the body this absolute faith in its Divine Reality—to show it that the Divine is there and that He wants to be there and that He shall be there. And it's only at such "moments" as these—when logically, according to the ordinary physical logic, it's all over—that you can seize the key. You have to go right through everything without flinching.20 Then She looked in front of her at the great flame tree with its yellow flowers (She always faced Sri Aurobindo, her chair or her bed always faced that direction, as if that were her living question, as if everything was her path toward him, the swamp to be crossed to join him, the opacity to be crossed, the something to be dissolved for him to be there: She was wearing away the swamp as He used to wear away the Wall), and She added, flow many more such experiences will be necessary? I don't know, you see, I'm only building the path.20
There had to be many "such moments," hundreds and thousands of little seconds of death to be gone through in order to "grasp the key." And they came from everywhere, more and more, as if the farther She advanced into the swamp without a solution, the more the difficulty seemed to spring up everywhere, not only from her body, but from everyone's body as well, as if her body extended farther and farther. Truly, the more microscopic it was, the more universal it seemed to become. She was in the body of the world. It is an INUNDATION pouring in from outside! One thing after another, one thing after another—what a mixture! From all sides, from everyone and everything and everywhere. And not only from here, but from far, far away on the earth and sometimes from far back in time, back into the past—things out of the past coming up, presenting themselves to the new Light to be put in their place. It's always that: each thing wanting to be put in its place. And this work has to be done constantly.... It's as if one keeps catching a new illness to be cured.21 The world was becoming a very "material" thing. She was catching all the diseases of the world.
And the problem, or the question, was closing in, becoming very acute, as if everything was being enacted in these little seconds: A sort of intensive discipline, at a gallop—every minute counts.22 Then suddenly, a more serious illness, which concentrated the problem: filariasis. A nasty disease that attacks the legs and makes them swell excessively, those stings burning from inside out, from the tips of the feet up to here, everywhere, in the back... four hours of minuscule tortures.23 Four hours that day; it went on for three years. It's the turn of the lower centers!24 she said simply, like Sri Aurobindo when He fractured his leg. She was reaching the same point He had reached at the end of 1938, just after Munich. The subconscient, the universal swamp. But She would continue to walk, to remain standing for hours, listening to this one and that one, giving a flower, an opinion—the same work. But this time She was going to observe in detail the working of the disease in the bodily substance. Now, the very interesting point is that She had caught this filariasis some twenty years earlier, from a mosquito bite at the Playground. She had immediately applied her Force and Sri Aurobindo had applied his—the disease disappeared... underground. That is to say, a higher yogic power had been applied to cure the body. The same famous power that performs every possible miracle, if you know how to wield it. It is with this power that some Theon or super-Theon could have made a very miraculous and astounding world. Those are the higher powers of the Mind, which we hardly know or do not know at all (and so much the better). But they are powers imposed on Matter from above, they go on working as long as one remains in the proper conditions for the power, namely, in the mental heights. Matter is not really touched: it is muzzled. You can muzzle it for an entire life and be "cured"—but you die in the end, like everyone else. Death itself has not been cured; Matter has not been cured. And this is how we could dance in a miraculous world without changing anything, except we pleasantly sugar the pill for as long as it lasts. Of course, the doctors would go bankrupt, along with quite a few of our cumbersome mechanical devices, but the root of the evil would not have been touched and this world would remain a world of death. We are supposed to find the true key, something much better for us than stunning miracles, we are supposed to find the true life. But for this, naturally, all the powers, meaning ultimately the false powers, must collapse. The key must be ferreted out in Matter—in the natural, which is ultimately the only great Miracle of the world. And thus Mother lost all her powers, one by one, so that the body itself could find the solution. And her old muzzled filariasis, buried for twenty years, quietly returned from the body's subconscient.
The earth itself must find its own miracle.
The Cellular Mind
This long school of pain was going to accelerate the movement and bring Mother to a major double discovery which seems like nothing—but it is always like that, the discoveries in the body seem like nothing, one does not even realize very well that they are "discoveries," they seem so insignificant.... And that is why things last for millennia. The discovery of radium is important; the discovery of relativity is very important—we are so full of important discoveries that we are completely beside the essence of the problem. In fact, we are completely beside life—but of course, we are in death! One day as I was complaining to Mother of seeing no "results," She told me with that special "tone" which opens walls up, I have been shown in a perfectly objective but tenuous way some effects that are insignificant in their dimensions, yet overwhelming, I am telling you, overwhelming in their quality. And with a smile, as if I were made fun of and told, "Oh, so you want results? Well, here they are. You want effects? Well, here they are." And then it went on (you know, what I call "insignificant" is what concerns life's tiny little circumstances of every minute): "You want TERRESTRIAL results? Well, these are far more considerable in their quality than you can see." And indeed, I saw small, very small things, movements of consciousness in Matter, tiny little things that were... truly astounding in their quality, and that are never noticed because they are totally unimportant (outwardly unimportant). Only if you observe in a most tenuous way do you notice them, because they are, in fact, phenomena of consciousness in the cells—are you conscious of your cells? No. Well, become conscious of your cells, and you will see that there are results! All these last few days, it has been coming as... as proofs, proofs that can crush any doubt: proofs of the Supreme's omnipresence in the apparently most unconscious Matter—something so overwhelming that the rational reason can hardly believe it. But it is forced to. Only, of course, you notice it when you have reached that most tenuous degree of attention and when, instead of wanting great things that cause a lot of noise and movement and appear very dazzling, you content yourself with observing very, very little, very tiny things that are to our pretentious reason perfectly insignificant…25 Suddenly you catch the physical Mind in the midst of unwinding its catastrophic reel, and "without reason," spontaneously, something in the body says no, and the reel stops immediately, as if by magic: the headache vanishes, the toothache stops—everything is dissolved by just that little "something" in the body that said no. It seems like nothing, but it is absolutely irresistible. Something that says no to death and has the power to stop the movement of death. (For let us make no mistake, a headache or a bruise or an object one drops on the floor are all death.) It remains for us to find out what that "something" is.
Thus Mother was "in" pain, as She was in all the rest of the insoluble swamp; but pain creates a more intense need to find the solution. Mother knew how to rise up above, cut the current and smile in bliss—it is elementary when the consciousness is developed, the equivalent of morphine, except better and more radical. But spiritual morphine was once and for all a part of the rejected means. Right to the end, She would refuse to cut the current. Now, her way of paddling through pain had this particularity that pain was totally and physically accepted like all the rest: no reaction of the type "no-no-I-don't-want-it, I-refuse, it-hurts"everything was accepted, the entire swamp. And already, through this acceptance of pain (not a mental acceptance, mind you, a physical acceptance), the quality of the suffering changed imperceptibly... as if it were less compact. As if the current of pain, one might say, flowed more easily. A few more steps, and it is just a current flowing through you. And first of all, you realize that it is the physical Mind that furiously magnifies the reaction, flails about, panics, imagines things, writhes every which way and tries to block the current as much as possible, which naturally feels obstructed and opens up its own passage... painfully, through the howling negation of the physical Mind. Because for the physical Mind, everything is a catastrophe—it would almost seem that it seeks catastrophes in order to be done with everything once and for all. When the fellow has calmed down, one notices a sort of subtle aeration of the body as if things could get through more easily and everything could get through more easily—the "pain" gets through more easily. And as one allows things to take their course, without any reaction, without any will (or with the single inner certainty that all this is the "Lord" playing, as Mother said, that all is a certain veiled wonder that we must in fact unveil), the body, the substance of the body, the consciousness of the body, seems to become wide, fluid, rhythmical, almost undulating, endowed with a very different kind of undulatory movement in which pain is only... the same current that has magically changed its face. It is imperceptible, it lasts a few seconds, "unbelievable"—and naturally, as soon as it is "unbelievable," the pain furiously returns. The operation is repeated thousands of times, and it is like going from one world into another in the space of few seconds, from one world into another, back and forth from a world of pain to another... inexplicable one—the same, but completely different. One has reached the consciousness of the body: the body itself, as it really is, its true consciousness, free from the character that covers it up with its magma of howling catastrophe. Almost as if there were two bodies: a body of pain and the other; a body imprisoned and the other; an "undulatory" body, if one may say so, and the other, shriveled up, doubled over upon itself, painful and on edge like a patient in a dentist's chair. And just after one of these almost magical experiences in which the "illness" evaporated, as though dissolved by that real body inside, Mother observed with surprise, But the cells themselves didn't care a whit! To them it was like a... sort of "accident" or an "inescapable disease" or something that DID NOT FORM A NORMAL PART of their development and had been forced on them.26
The beginning of a prodigious experience.
The first time it happened to her, Mother noted, A kind of perception of the almost total unimportance of the external, material expression of the body's condition: the consciousness OF THE BODY was absolutely indifferent to external, physical signs, whether they were like this or like that... such as swollen legs or a malfunctioning liver.... Well, it was all utterly unimportant: IT IN NO WAY CHANGES THE BODY'S TRUE CONSCIOUSNESS. Although we are in the habit of thinking that the body is very disturbed when it's ill, when something is going wrong, it's not so. It isn't disturbed in the way we understand it.27 "But then," I asked Mother, "what is disturbed if it's not the body?" Oh, its the physical mind, this stupid mind! It makes all the trouble, always. "It's not the body?" I insisted. No! "But then what suffers?" Suffering also comes through the physical mind, because if this entity is calmed down, we no longer suffer—exactly what happened to me! The physical mind, you see, makes use of the nervous substance; if we withdraw it from the nervous substance, we no longer feel anything, FOR THAT'S WHAT GIVES US THE PERCEPTION OF SENSATION.27
And here a great big chunk of the wall begins to topple down. In fact it is not a wall, it is a veil of mud, it is that black sediment like a gluey, infinitesimal powder that coats everything—that envelops the cells of the body. The black glue of the physical Mind.... And one begins to get out of the cage. One begins, very slightly and imperceptibly, to lift up the veil of death. One begins to touch the real body, to touch true Matter. Because this discovery is far more prodigious than we think, let us repeat once more: it is "the physical mind that gives the perception of sensation"—hence all sensations are false, absolutely and utterly false. We live in a cage of falsehood. We live behind a veil of falsehood; pain is false and everything is false: heavy, light, big, small, closed, open, opaque, clear... all the perceptions are perceptions manufactured in the cage of that character and by that character—precisely with the view to single out or enclose a given individual in a personalizing cage that gives him the sensation of being separate from the others: I, a person. Such was the first evolutionary aim. We have been shaped as individuals through strokes of falsehood. And now the Falsehood is crumbling—everything is different, we are completely different! The physical world we perceive is a huge falsehood put into an equation by a physical mind that has conditioned everything. The physical body that we perceive and experience is a body of falsehood. And death is another falsehood: it is the death of falsehood.
So we must become the true body through the old.
We must become the true life through death.
We must cross the veil of death fully alive before it decomposes us.
And then the observation becomes very fascinating, infinitesimal as always (on the scale or in the likeness of the fine powder of black clay smeared over everything). For one notices the existence of a link between that physical mind and the pure substance of the body: the physical mind acts upon the body through an intermediary. Two different substances can touch each other or communicate only if there is a minimum of correspondence between them, that is to say, the vibration from one domain must be able to awaken or arouse something corresponding to it in the other substance. Only then can a contact and reciprocal influence—some communication—take place. When Mother entered into contact with the mummy at the Guimet Museum, or when She entered into contact with the python, the geranium or the amethyst, She was touching a vibration there, a form of consciousness which found a mental transcription in her. Thus there was a kind of "mind" there, though it scarcely resembled ours, a vibration perceptible at a certain level, which was obviously not the cerebral level of our intellectual mind: a vibration that She felt or experienced in her body, and which was subsequently translated by words, sensations and images. A corporeal mind. A cellular mind, she would say, or even atomic. Sri Aurobindo had made the same discovery: And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscules. Haeckel, the German materialist, spoke somewhere of the will in the atom, and recent science, dealing with the incalculable individual variation in the activity of the electrons, comes near to perceiving that this is not a figure but the shadow thrown by a secret reality.28 This cellular mind is the missing link between the purely material substance and the primary form of evolved Mind we call the physical Mind. It is through the body that one communicates with the rest of the world, through this cellular mind. It is what makes everything communicate (except us). If we were suddenly reduced to having our cerebral mind and a little pair of human eyes, we would see a dead, photographic world, a crust of the world (this is actually what happens in most cases). But this cellular mind is covered, dominated and subjugated by the physical Mind: it blindly obeys the physical Mind, it seems hypnotized by it. And here we begin to touch the secret more intimately.... One day a little corner of the veil was lifted up by chance, as She was holding the hands of someone with Parkinson's disease. The irresistible, uncontrollable trembling stopped completely for a moment, frozen, as it were, by the pressure of her consciousness: for an instant, She touched the body directly, the corporeal, cellular consciousness of that person, and everything stopped. As if She went through a veil. And the second the veil was stepped through, everything stopped, not a single tremor—it simply did not exist.
It lasted only a few seconds because the physical mind of that person instantly noticed: Oh, I am no longer trembling—and all the trembling started again immediately. The veil fell back into place.
So we begin to measure the enormity of the tiny, microscopic black clay; we are at the root of all illness, perhaps at the very root of death: When this material mentality is seized with an idea, it is actually possessed by the idea and its almost impossible (not impossible but extremely difficult) for it to free itself.... Diseases are just that. It's the same thing with Parkinson's disease: this tremor is the possession by an idea, it's what in the conscious intelligence is expressed as the possession by an idea, a hypnosis—a sort of hypnosis accompanied by a fear in Matter.29 The great fear of the physical Mind, which at heart is the fear of life, the negation of life, what we might call the "catastrophic will": let everything end in mortal peace. It's a sort of TWIST that you try to straighten out and which goes back to its shape automatically, idiotically—you untwist it, it twists up again; you reject it, it comes again. It's extremely interesting, but it's miserable. Miserable. And ALL ILLNESSES are like that, all, all of them, whatever their external form. The external form is only one way of being of THE SAME THING—because things are arranged in every possible way (there aren't two identical things and everything is arranged differently), so then, some follow SIMILAR TWISTS, and that's what doctors call "such and such an illness."29
It is the crease of death.
All human Matter is under the spell of a formidable hypnotism of death, of disease, of obscure and heavy and aging matter... in other words, everything we perceive in the cage of the physical Mind, beneath the veil of black glue of the physical Mind. The experts in hypnosis know this can be cut—they cut it... momentarily. They cut it arbitrarily, forcibly. The veil of our own hypnosis must be consciously lifted up. The body must do its own miracle. And then it is not a little illness or a little pain that we shall cure, annul: it is the illness of the world, the pain of the world and perhaps the death of the world.
It will be another Matter... and yet the same.
It will be the real body, as it is.
It will be the end of the mind's magic.
There is not a new world to be created: there is a magic spell to undo.
And Sri Aurobindo said it three times in Savitri:
A spell is laid upon [our] glorious strengths30
The body's tissues thrill apotheosised, Its cells sustain bright metamorphosis... As if reversing a deformation's spell31
A grand reversal of the Night and Day All the world's values changed...32
And suddenly, Mother perceived the secret: It is the mind of the cells that will find the key.
And sometimes, without really knowing why, the true Vibration, the supramental Vibration or Power, emerged from behind the veil of mud. All we know is that the experience seemed to come more and more often. Twice the supramental world took veritable possession of me and both times it was as if the body—truly the physical body—was going to completely disintegrate, due to... what you could almost call the opposition of the two conditions.1 Of course, we can imagine one of those "tall beings" of the supramental shore, whose body was a sort of condensation of power and light, trying to enter into this kind of rigid box full of nerves screaming at the least scratch.... And suddenly, when we realize that, we get the impression that our bodies are made of some kind of superior cardboard with about as much life as a puppet compared to that life and that light. We begin to touch upon a formidable difference—we simply do not know what life is. And when that life enters this pretence or caricature... the difference between our habitual way of functioning and this new way is something so tremendous and overwhelming that an adaptation is evidently required.' Is cardboard ever adaptable?... To be sure, we wonder if it is this false, muddy and rigid substance that is to "adapt" and gradually become the real substance, or if some other mechanism will intervene. Certainly, there must be some degree of clarification and broadening first, a beginning of infiltration through the veil of mud—later on, we will understand, or rather the body will understand.
The Supramental Vibration
The infiltration took place, slow, controlled and more and more "nourished" through the years, with an occasional great onslaught of supramental Power. And each time Mother's description is very similar, the only difference concerns the amount, which will become more and more colossal, so much so that I often had the feeling of leaving a bath of lightning as I came out of Mother's room, and I seemed to need hours afterwards to digest the few drops that had filtered into me. But Mother did not call it a bath of lightning. She called it "the bath of the Lord!" See, I'm going to give them a bath of the Lord! And She laughed, and sometimes perfectly civilized people fled her room at full speed, all their manners abandoned, unable to bear the charge. It is a special vibration. Don't you feel something like... like a pure superelectricity? And Mother added this remark, which opens new vistas: When we touch That, we see that it's everywhere, but we are unaware of it.2 It is everywhere. It is not really something that must be brought into the world, not really even into the body; it is here, it is the very vibration of the atom and stones and plants and animals, of all that exists. It seems that only our caricature of a body, our false body, we could say, does not realize this or is veiled from it: it is simply unbearable for it. What is so special in this human body unless the mental cage we have built, which is not a "subjective" cage at all, as we might think, but an actual cage that cuts all currents—the other kinds of matter, real Matter, that of the animals or plants or stones, are not like that: they are open. Things can get through. They are not blocked. And this Vibration (which I feel and see) gives the feeling of a fire. That's probably what the Vedic Rishis translated as the "Flame" fAgniiin the human consciousness, in man, in Matter. They always spoke of a "Flame." It is indeed a vibration with the intensity of a higher fire. Even the body felt several times, when the Work was very concentrated or condensed, that it is the equivalent of a fever.3 But perhaps it feels like a "fever" or a "fire" only because it is shut up in a cage. Birds do not get fever! At least not supramental fever. But neither do they know that they are "birds."
Mother described the supramental Vibration to me dozens of times over the years, each time, however, with a sense of wonderment. What is very remarkable is that the perception of that Vibration seems to cause a triple transformation or alteration of our material data: an alteration ot the material boundaries or apparent divisions of Matter, an alteration of the sense of Time—space and time are modified—and a totally radical alteration in the perception of life (what we call "life"). These descriptions will become more precise and will increase in volume, if we may say so, but the essence is already there in her first remarks. The line A1, A2, A3 is beginning to branch out and divide in every direction (poor us!). First, the sense of opaque Matter divided into hard little pieces disappears: *It was a kind of powdering, you know, even finer than tiny dots—a powdering like an atomic dust, with an EXTREMELY intense vibration but without any shifting of place. And yet it's in constant *motion. Something shifting about within something that vibrates on the same spot without moving (something does move, but it's subtler, like a current of tremendous power which passes through this powdering. But the milieu does not move at all: rather it vibrates on the same spot with an extreme intensity).4 A kind of universal current running through all these powder-like concentrations, without boundaries anywhere. It is the Mind that wants to enclose that formidable current in a rabbit cage—and obviously it cannot, it cannot even perceive it, because to perceive it would already mean to explode into something other than itself. The limits indeed vanish with that perception: The feeling of having a much larger (by larger I mean more voluminous) and much more powerful being in my body than I usually have. It was as if it could scarcely be held inside me but was spilling over; and so compactly powerful that it was almost uncomfortable.... 5 Always that "density," that "dense Matter." And we wonder if the "density" is not a superconcentration of consciousness-force, as it were, compared to which Matter, as it is lived in and through the Mind, seems like a flimsy and unsubstantial wisp of straw—it tolerates only a drop of it, a copy in mental cardboard which is of course rather hollow compared to the original. It was as though in each cell there was a vibration, and it was all part of a single BLOCK of vibrations...5 What gives the sensation of Matter here is no longer opacity or hardness. It is the compact density or "thickness," so to speak, of the vibration of consciousness. And it went out about this far [Mother made a gesture to show that her vibratory body extended rather far beyond the limits of her apparent body]. Sometimes, even, the entire apparent body seemed to dissolve [when Mother would faint]: Like molten gold- molten and luminous. It was very thick. And it had a power—a weight, you know, like that, it was astonishing. And then, no more body, nothing anymore—nothing anymore, nothing but that.6 Which indeed poses many problems if we want to continue living in a body like ours, without constantly fainting! How does one hold together in a body that goes off everywhere? The false perception of the Mind in its cage was obviously a protection. Thus there is a problem of "adaptation."
And time changes too. If you let yourself go with the ((movement," that universal movement which flows through the little powder-like concentrations, time is no longer the same, as space is no longer the same: A Movement so total—total and constant, constant—that to any perception it gives an impression of perfect immobility. A Movement which is a sort of eternal Vibration, without beginning or end.... Something existing from all eternity, for all eternity, and without any division of time: it's only when it is projected onto a screen that it begins to assume the division of time. 7 All right, but the apparent body, what we might now call the mental body, for it seems to be our mental creation, continues to live from minute to minute, along with the days, months and years, or at least a perception of days and years... which is perhaps the cause of its aging. Our screen "takes on the division of time." But what if there is no longer a screen? If one can go at will into the past, the present, the future, how is the "normal" life of such a body to continue among people perfectly set to clockwork? Here too lies a problem of adaptation: to remember the present so as not to dart off God knows where... and perhaps in the process forget this apparent body, falsely glued to an armchair, on the 25th day of May, 1961. It would seem that a transitional means of leading a double life in the old body and in the new, without losing one or the other, is yet to be created. These are physiological problems, you see, and not metaphysical. What do you do when metaphysics becomes physics!
But perhaps this is a totally mental problem, because for birds, there is no difficulty. The difficulty is the structure of the mind, and the fact of living with other beings who themselves are terribly caught up in the mind. Truly, a transition has to be worked out from one species to another.
And life changes too—when I say "life," I mean not only the way of relating to people and things, but the very quality of the air one breathes, this sort of breath that moves us: A golden Light, absolutely immobile.... And then things seem to become swollen—swollen with an infinite content.... It's really the feeling of something that is full rather than empty—life as people live it, as I see them live it, is something hollow, empty, dry. Hollow. Hard and hollow together. And empty.... While when the other thing is there, you instantly get an impression of full-full-full-full—full! Overflowing, you know, no more bounds. So full that all, but all bounds are swept away, erased, gone—and there remains only That, that Something.8
How to infiltrate this "something," how to live in this something, tolerate it, bear it, while at the same time apparently remaining in a body that seems to be made of the very opposite of all these qualities?
The Web
She was going through her forest which was occasionally lit up by flashes of light, and sometimes it was almost discouraging. We delude ourselves about life, we clothe it in ideals, movement, agitation, violence and passions, and we declare, "This is life," it is "thrilling," but that is not true! We merely plaster a decoration over some kind of inanity of each second in which there are footsteps and more footsteps and nothing + nothing + nothing, and gestures and more gestures, thousands of gestures for... something else we always run after but which is never there. The true life, the "pure" life, if we dare say so, is this fabric, this tissue of zeros, like a taxi meter ticking away the nonexistent time it takes to get "over there." The "full" time is over there, once we have arrived—but we never arrive! It is always the same. The basis of life is like that. Oh, all of life, WHATEVER IT IS, is like that.... Mother exclaimed. Even events which seem quite extraordinary when seen from afar, which is the way they appear to most people, even historical things which have furthered the earth's transformation and its upheavals—the crucial events, the great works, you might say—are woven from the SAME fabric, they are the SAME thing! When you look at all this from afar, on the whole it can make an impression, but the life of each minute, of each hour, of each second is woven from this SAME fabric, drab, dull, insipid, without any true life—a mere reflection of life, an illusion of life—powerless, void of any light or anything that resembles joy in the least.... It is worse than horrible, it is a kind of... Oh, not despair, for there isn't EVEN any sense of feeling—there is NOTHING! It is dull, dull, dull gray, gray, gray, clenched tight, a closed web that lets through neither air nor life nor light—there is nothing.9 We spoke of a "veil," a "cage," but it is really this same tightly woven web that envelops everything, right down to the cells of the body, as if all of life were smothered by something. And then, at times there is an invasion of the other life without our understanding very well how this invasion works, without our even being able to bear it more than a few seconds or a few hours. A splendor of light—so sweet, so sweet, so full of true love, true compassion, of something that is so warm, so warm.... THAT is what must come forward and manifest in the vibration of EACH second—not in a whole which looks interesting when seen from afar; it must enter the vibration of each second, the consciousness of each minute, otherwise...9 Yes, otherwise... the only alternative is to soar off to heaven or go to hell. But it is down below that the veil must be lifted, not up above. It is down below that we have to disasphyxiate ourselves.
The momentous secret is truly found at the microscopic level of each second, right where we have never wanted to look, because it is hideous—it is "nothing," as Mother says, a suffocating nothing that flings men into every kind of aberration so as not to see, not to see it at any cost, not to be confronted with it. To confront it means to enter into the skin of a black pygmy. For Mother, who had known all the great expanses of consciousness above for eighty years, it was... suffocating. Because the physical mind is not only a driveling fool, an endlessly repetitive parrot that makes you check ten times to see if you have properly locked the door when you know full well you have locked it, but it drivels and repeats sordidly, and freezes everything: in one second it perceives a thousand details that will be served to you ten years later in exact detail, from the remark of the doctor who says, "Oh, this disease will take two years of treatment" (so naturally two years are actually needed), to the most furtive image. It is an implacable memory, perhaps a millennial memory. It is the primal mind of Matter.
Everything gets frozen and crystallized there—indeed, it is the builder of the cage. Everything has a consequence, everything is connected, everything flows from cause to effect, inexorably. It has riveted our cage, microscopically and in every detail. And nothing can be cured as long as that whispering is not cured: in a single stroke, it demolishes all the victories won up above, in the higher realms of consciousness. The roots of sex are hidden there, not in any "sexual organ" or any "instinct" one can very easily detach oneself from, but in the obscure little fixation that wants... ultimately it wants night, decomposition, the disintegration of everything. It is a kind of vertigo in Matter. And it repeats and repeats its little whisperings of death in every gesture, every occurrence and encounter, in everything. Parkinson's disease is sheer delight for it, its element, the "exemplary" summit of its activity. It wants only to freeze everything, tetanus-like—and as a matter of fact that is what it does, stealthily. That is its job: to build a cage. It would like to re-create the peaceful rigidity of the stone.
Death is its greatest success.
So the root of evil is not to be found in any bottomless and psychoanalytic subconscious: it is here, within arm's reach, or ear's reach, rather. Only, if we want to perceive it, we must not cover it up with all the usual racket, including the moral one. All the things that are considered "unimportant," and its all that, the whole mass of all that, which prevents the physical transformation. And because they are very small things (that is, APPARENTLY very small things, without any importance), they are the worst obstacles... very small things that belong to the subconscious mechanism and because of which in thought you are free, in sentiment you are free, even in impulse you are free, and physically you are a slave. One must undo all that, undo it, undo it.... There only remains the mechanism of habit. But it holds on, it clings, oh! 10 And we do not even know what must be done to undo it! Mentally we say: we must become clarified, universalized, impersonalized—that is all very well, but it is a mental picture. How does one do it in the body? How does one puncture that web? How does one have an effect on that black loamy powder? The minute we touch it slightly, it rises up like a curtain of mud.
The Mantra
The only device Mother used on this pathless path for which there is no device, except to be in a certain way, to strain toward in a certain way, and to walk on, was the "mantra."
All the organized forms as we see them are an agglomeration of vibrations (the scientists say atoms because they see only one layer of Matter and with mental spectacles at that) expressing the particular quality of the object, its "aspiration," Mother said, and that is how She could give names to flowers, for example. In a way it is the real name of things, their particular music, which becomes a rather sad one on the human level. It is the repetition of those vibrations that ensures the stability of forms. A change in the vibratory play would entail a rupture of the form (a change of the form if it is bearable, or disintegration and "death" if it is unbearable). Each thing moves with its own particular "sound," which is the movement of the forces composing it. The mantra is the pure sound of a thing, whatever it is, the essence of its vibration, what creates it or maintains it in a form. There is a whole so-called Tantric science that manipulates these sounds and apparently performs "miracles" by reproducing the sound of things—it disintegrates or reintegrates them, combines or alters them. Poetry and music are forms of this "magic of sound" when they are true music or true poetry, that is, when they really evoke certain forces or aspirations, certain forms of being—there is every possible level, down to the most gross. It is also our very commonplace magic—which we do not know is magic, but the effects are there all the same, sad and muddy—when we walk up and down the streets muttering our mute desires or petty anxieties... which naturally occur since we have called them. If men saw the enormous colored glue (and what a color!) they live in, they would find the carbon monoxide of their cities quite charming in comparison. But if a pure sound is injected into Matter, the effect can be equally magical; only, as our false matter is thick and sticky and repetitive, a lot of tenacity is needed. The same repetitive and parrot-like virtue of Matter and of the physical mind can be used in the other direction also and, "miraculously," it can start repeating a true sound instead of going on with its usual mortal rut—insofar as it can do it without traumatic consequences or a dangerous disruption of its vibratory mode. There is here a "borderline" which exactly illustrates the transition from the old material mode to the new mode, the next mode of Matter.
That "pure sound" is not to be found in any magic formula. There is AUM, the Sanskrit sound, a marvel, but as always, the real magic is the simplest one, the one we possess without knowing it, which seems like nothing but which can be extraordinarily powerful if it is pure, if purely uttered • like the cry of our heart, the need of our very being gathered together in a second of life or death. The last word that remains when all else is gone. Our pure sound, the one that resembles no other and makes us this particular person and not just an anonymous someone equipped with a necktie and a doctorate in mathematics. Each of us can find this sound or a translation of this sound in one word or a few words that are our own "password," so to say, our particular Open Sesame: a sound that represents an experience and has the power to recall that experience. It may be a sound of flame, a sound of certainty or freedom, a sound of joy, a sound of pure love... That, which for us has a total meaning. The cry at the summit of our being, or in the abyss of our being when all is lost. And we try to instill this sound in everyday Matter, in every minute, every second, in every gesture, every stupidity, every futility, mistake, sorrow and joy—everything. It must become the music of our material substance.
That is the mantra.
It is an attempt to divinize material substance,11 Mother said. There's a power in the sound itself and by forcing the body to repeat the sound, you force it to receive the vibration at the same time.12 It is the same principle as doing daily exercises on the piano, for example. You keep mechanically repeating them, and in the end your hands are filled with consciousness—it fills the body with consciousness.13
She had found her mantra. It was the first thing She had felt the need of after her first "illness" in 1958: My body would like to have a mantra... to hasten its transformation14 (to change this opaque vibratory mode), She wrote to me then. She found it and repeated it until her last breath, day and night and every second, for fifteen years, as perhaps Sri Aurobindo did when He walked back and forth in the high- ceilinged corridor. And perhaps She is still repeating it now For who can disintegrate that vibration?
Now, this mantra has a surprising power over this vibratory web, the opaque veil of mud that envelops us and creates all our illnesses and aging and endless accidents. This mantra has an action on my body, She remarked the first time. It is strange, but it coagulates something: all the cellular life becomes one solid, compact mass, in a tremendous concentration—with a SINGLE vibration. Instead of all the usual vibrations of the body, there is now only one single vibration, one single mass...15 The countless tremors, murmurs, whisperings of the body, the whole sly network of a thousand little contradictory forces that pull in every direction, is suddenly coagulated into a single vibratory mass. Death does not enter there. Illnesses, accidents do not enter there. The body is as if filled with an unassailable substance. But one must be able to bear that "substance." Still another time, in the beginning, She noted: As soon as I have a quiet minute to concentrate, it always begins with this mantra, and there is a response in the cells of the body: they all start vibrating.... The other day it came; it took hold of the entire body. It rose up in the same way, and all the cells were trembling. And with such a power! The vibration went on expanding, ever widening, as the sound itself was expanding, expanding, and all the cells of the body were seized with an intensity of aspiration as if the entire body were swelling—it became overwhelming. I felt that it would all burst.... And it has such a transformative power! I felt that if it continued, something would happen, something like a change in the equilibrium of the body's cells.16 The dangerous point of rupture. And we are again facing the same problem of the "adaptation" of the substance. From whichever end one tackles the problem, there is the old web encircling everything: can that web, that deadly vibratory network, be broken without breaking life itself and disintegrating the form?
This will be Mother's major problem for years: a problem lived minute by minute, physiologically. In short, She was trying to build the first "new body." Or perhaps to set the true one free. And that means a... perilous passage.
Mother's mantra had seven syllables:
A UM NAMO BHAGAVATE Mother gives it to the world.
The Surrounding Thoughts
Mother's forest was not only in her body, it was in those 1,300 little specimens (in 1960), each representing a particular way of death, a certain way of being in the web and of cultivating the web. Since She had stopped her outer activities, the problem had become more focused instead of diffused: now that they could no longer besiege her at the Playground or on the tennis court or anywhere She set foot, they came instead in the corridors, to the door of her bathroom or of the refrigerator where She kept her flowers, to every door and at every second. It was a regular invasion. And if She allowed a person to come once to receive a flower or her look, it became a right for all eternity—and naturally "Why not me?" Everyone was me, me, me. It was full of little me's brandishing their flowers from Mother... and continuing to cultivate the web. And if Mother did not do exactly as they wanted, the opaque and violent web threw off a lot of muted little vibrations, which Mother swallowed and swallowed. She never said no to anyone. Mother never said no, people themselves had to discover the suffocation of their own web. She simply put her calm light on the web... and it thrashed about even more under her pressure. And letters too: They assassinate me with their letters. Oh, if you only knew all the letters they write me... If you knew, first of all, the tremendous pile of stupidities that need never be written at all; then, added to that, such a display of ignorance, egoism, bad will, total incomprehension and unequalled ingratitude, and all this so candid, my child! They heap all this on me daily, you know, and it comes from the most unexpected quarters.17 And She replied, replied. And at times there was a cry in her: Sri Aurobindo became blind, I don't want to become blind!... She would sit down in the big chair with carved back, remain a moment with eyes closed in front of me, her arms resting on the chair, so pale: What's difficult is my contact with the Ashram people. As soon as I go down and... simply that, having to fidget on my feet, giving people flowers.... And they are so unconsciously egotistical! If I don't go through the usual concentration on each one of them, they wonder, "What is it? What's wrong? Have I done something?..." And it turns into a big drama.18 Her legs, which She carefully hid in Japanese tabis, were swollen from the filariasis, like iron rods. And She kept going here and there, all the while repeating the mantra. But just the same, the problem was there: Every person, every letter, every action brings its own volume of disorder, disharmony and disintegration. It's as if all that were dumped by the truckload on your head. And you have to hold out...19 Each vibration absorbed from the outside instantly creates a disorder [in the body], dislocates everything, creates wrong contacts and disrupts the organization; it sometimes takes HOURS to put it all back in order. Consequently, if I really want to make use of this body's possibility without having to face the necessity of changing it because it can't follow along, then, materially, I would really need, as much as possible, to stop having to gulp down all sorts of things that drag me years backwards.20
She continued "swallowing" right to the end, and more and more so—the nearer She came to the goal, the more relentless became the surrounding web, kicking and struggling as if to death. It was not "her" web: it was really the web of the world. And the problem became more intricate because there was not only the physical presence of 1,000 or 1,300 specimens dancing a saraband in her body, but there was the whole invisible crowd. And to begin with, all the thoughts. As long as we are snug and warm in the web, we do not understand, but as soon as the mesh loosens, it is a total invasion. Thoughts are not innocent: thoughts are actions. It takes our normal armor not to be smashed to pieces. Some thoughts are as deadly as a scorpion, there is a whole swarm of various centipedes. Yes, quite a dreadful mixture, "as if I were constantly coming down with a new disease and had to find a cure for it." If you could perceive this atmosphere I am made to breathe, mon petit! [and Mother held her head between her hands as if She were being hammered, beaten] The foolishness, the stupidity, the nastiness, the inanity. It is full, full of all that—full. One cannot breathe without breathing that!21 Already at the Playground, She had tried to make them understand: If the people around me were receptive, it would help my body enormously because all the vibrations would go through my body and would help it.22 But who understood that, apart from a small handful of silent ones who never asked for anything, never sought to see her and worked silently? And as more time went by, her own mesh loosened: The body has grown terribly sensitive. For example, a wrong reaction in someone, a tension or some reaction of a quite ordinary order, causes a sudden weariness in my body, as if it were exhausted.23 Little by little her body was becoming all bodies. Those innocent (or not so innocent) little thoughts and whisperings of the surrounding bodies were seen at their true value—almost immediately they show their true face, i.e., the death that is inside them. Each of those little murmurs is really, actually and materially a claw of death. We do not die from it because the dose is not strong enough and it takes time. And also, we are thick. But all that entered Mother as it was, "pure," if one dare say so. And Mother was beginning to face the great problem: Oh, it's people's thoughts that are so annoying! Everybody, everybody is constantly thinking about old age and death, and death and old age and illness... oh, they're such a nuisance!24 We do not realize it, but a thought of death is death. We are as unaware of the real movement of forces as a primate of the Paleocene, we know nothing of the play and power of vibrations, we are walled in our mental web! But what of those who no longer are?... You are almost stoned to death with all that.25 This was in 1961, already—She would swallow their thoughts of death right to the end. They exuded death on her every day (and every night), right to the end. And then her humor got the upper hand, She laughed: There are many—many—who think I am going to die and are making preparations so as not to be left completely out on the street when Igo. I am aware of all this. But it's childishness—if I leave, they are right; if I don't, it doesn't matter!26 This was in April 1961. Still twelve years more of this regime.
The problem before Mother, or rather in Mother, was clear.
So what was to be done? Or rather how was one to undo that web without dying for good, without literally being smothered by the surrounding air? One could almost ask • how does one die without dying from it?
Impersonalization
Between 1958 and 1962 Mother was going to learn the great lesson, which is a microscopic lesson, but whose material results are more essentially significant for our species than the splitting of the uranium nucleus. We still do not realize just how overwhelming these microscopic discoveries are—they do not even have a name. They are too radically new to have any equivalent in our language. Mother did not even know what She was doing! Sometimes She would utter a word or a sentence out of the blue, in the middle of the conversation, that left me dazed, and years later you say: Oh, but...! It is not the splitting of an atom, but of the entire conditioning of a species. It is the very power of the atom itself that comes before you with a smile and is almost making fun of you: Oh, so you want miracles! Well then, look.... Look at this law here, and look at that one. It is like the essence of the miracle that comes poking its nose through a crack in the door, or though the mesh of the web; and it does nothing sensational: it simply blows on a little "inescapable" law to let you see clearly how things work... naturally. You rub your eyes for a second: But how come...? And it is gone. There is still a "But how come?" to be eliminated. But then you really understand that the world is on the verge of a miracle that depends on... something that is still a mystery, but is felt as an infinitesimal mystery, a "nothing"—a prodigious nothing. It's something prodigious... which looks idiotic,27 Mother said toward the end. We are perhaps going to stumble upon it, if Mother holds our hand firmly from the other side of the veil.
The first lesson—perhaps the only lesson—is that we can really do nothing. We go into the web and bump into everything, get stuck everywhere, get tangled up with every gesture, in our wish to do good as well as in the stupidity of our "bad" actions. All reactions are false, the good as well as the bad. You refuse something and it bounces right back in your face like a tennis ball; you accept and it goes through endless meanderings. And all the sensations are false. "I do not want to be blind," and it is as if instantly something wanted to be blind, and you see ten times worse; "I'm exhausted," and you feel completely exhausted, like a ton of lead. "But look, I'm spitting blood! It's really serious...." And you catch a little something there that wants it to be serious and wants to be taken seriously, and is very hurt if it is not taken seriously. The day Mother sent me packing by saying, Tell your cells they are stupid to spit blood... !28 I was very offended. Stupidity is abysmal, it is everywhere, in every nook and corner: it is "serious" indeed. It is deadly. All medicine is in question, all physics is in question, all physiology—all the untold Stupidity that envelops us with its impenetrable and irrefutable web, worse than the Hydra: a myriapod with thousand upon thousand of microscopic heads—and IT IS RIGHT. It is always right, it is jam-packed with right reasons and dazzling proofs. It makes you get sick: so there, you see! It makes you fall down: so there, you see! Imperturbably, innumerably, it provides you with all the denials, all the failures, all the defeats, all its proofs. We must be a little childish to contradict Newton's apple. We must be frightfully childish to want to get out of the web. We are too intelligent to be childish. And Mother was moving in this, bumping into one side, bumping into the other, plugging up a hole here only to see it reopen there, taking one stupidity off its shelf only to find a thousand others: you find yourself full of stupidities, full of mistakes, full of mud. A myriad little flash-illnesses. A myriad little deaths, simply while going down the corridor. One is full of prospective illness, full of prospective death. It is swarming and teeming, it is incredible. It's infinitesimal. It's only because they are multiplied millions of times that they can have some importance—but they're nothing! Mere nothings. Yet that's just what blocks the way. All this makes the web. All this blocks the real Vibration—the natural... "miracle." It gives me the impression of a miniature painting done with a magnifying glass and tiny dots—miniatures are painted with a very fine brush, very pointed, and you make tiny dots with a big magnifying glass.... And it takes many, many, many tiny dots to paint just a bit of cheek. Tiny dots, tiny dots.29
And then, if you start looking at the dots, they too begin growing out of complete proportion. You do not know what to do, everything seems fake everywhere. The good is fake, the bad is fake. And there are all the little specimens around you who increase the magnitude of the problem. You are there, just as if you were in the problem of the earth. It is the whole earth, the laboratory of the earth. You say no to someone—or rather no to a harmful reaction in someone—and instantly it is as though you had erected a wall between yourself and the mischief: you are no longer touched, but neither is the mischief any longer touched—it wriggles about on the other side of the wall. And ultimately it comes back to you because the mischief in someone is our mischief, and everything is our mischief. What says "no" in you is precisely what can be touched by that particular mischief: it is there in you, the same thing, hidden, only it says no instead of yes, that is all. As long as there is a response, it means that we are all in the same soup. And naturally, for each of us, the no is really a yes clothed in sanctity—it is a saintly soup. We just do not get out of it at all, not at all. It is all the same thing. But of course, all bodies are made of the same Matter. There is not a saintly type of matter versus a devilish type of matter: there is Matter. Mother was learning that lesson, too: You are beaten and battered until you understand. Until you are in that state in which all bodies are your body. But at that point, you begin to laugh! You were upset by this, hurt by that, you suffered from this or that —but now, how laughable it all seems!30 Yes, it is all the same thing. The body extends to the ends of the earth. There is not a single stupidity that is not absolutely, totally, integrally our own stupidity. Only it is reflected in each of us in a different way. Note that I said "reflected": the Stupidity is held in us, fixed in us by a screen—even if it is a microscopic screen no bigger than the head of a cell. But it is a reflection of stupidity, it is not a reality of stupidity—it is a reflection of illness, a reflection of death... a thousand reflections of the same thing that plays and shimmers in or on all bodies. It would almost seem that it is the screen that makes the stupidity.
Mother was moving gropingly toward a simple and monumental discovery that others had made on the summits of the liberated mind, but She was making it in her body.
When you have completed all those little dots, those interminable little portions of a cheek, when you bump against things everywhere, are sick everywhere—sick in this person, sick in that one—when you are misled and misled again and everything is misleading, the yes as well as the no, good as well as evil, effort as well as non-effort, when the will for clarification becomes an even thicker veil of mud, the will for universalization an even heavier prison, the aspiration for the transformation like one more obscuration, because you just do not know what you are supposed to look for and how to look for it—you do not know the way, you do not know what leads to the goal and what does not, you do not even know what the required qualities are or perhaps the required defects... when you seem to be bludgeoned from all sides, numbed with fatigue (and perhaps that too is a fake fatigue), broken by impossibilities from every direction, assailed by swarming thoughts, when you move somewhat like a drunken man in a cloud of pain, then... then you open your hands: The only thing I do is this [and Mother opened her hands on her knees, very white hands with fine violet veins, they seemed translucent], constantly this, in everything—in thoughts, feelings, sensations, in the body's cells, all the time: "To You, To You, To You. It's You, it's You, its You." That's all. And nothing else. In other words, a more and more complete, a more and more integral assent, more and more like this [gesture of letting herself be carried]. *That's when you have the feeling that you must be *ABSOLUTELY like a child. If you start thinking, "Oh, I want to be like this! Oh, I ought to be like that!"you waste your time.31 Effort is merely the other side of the same screen. "I do not want to be ill" is yet another illness. "I do not want to die" is yet another death. And "I want to be immortal" is still death on the screen. As for "I do not want to make any mistakes," the Mistake comes instantly: its shadow is captured on the screen. There must be no more screen, then illness flows through you, the mistake flows through you, death flows through you—there is nothing left but eternity. The web is destroyed. Stupidity no longer exists. Stupidity is the screen; death is the screen. There is no reality of stupidity, no reality of illness, no reality of death: there is a REALITY of the screen.
The physical mind is the screen.
Remove the screen, and there is no more death.
What makes up the screen is what makes death.
Impersonalization is immediate universalization and immediate clarification, including the clarification of death.
Years later, Mother would tell me, I have tried many things, a great many, I have looked a great deal, and I see only one that's absolute—only one that's absolute and can bring the absolute result, its this (gesture turned Upward): the complete annulment of all that, leaving it all, "To You, Lord—You, You, to You...." And for every difficulty, every time, whatever it is, simply this: "Everything to You, Lord. Everything for You, to You. You alone can do it, You, You alone, You alone. You alone are the Truth; You alone are the Power." And those words are nothing, they are only the very clumsy expression of something... a stupendous Power... It's only the incapacity, the clumsiness, the lack of faith we mix into it that takes away His power. The minute we are truly pure, that is, under His influence alone, there are no limits, no limits—nothing, nothing, there is nothing, no law of Nature that can resist, nothing, nothing.32
No law of Nature.
And indeed a whole series of physical, physiological consequences—incredible for our physical mind—begin to get through the mesh, as if we were dealing with another physical Nature—or perhaps the true one. We are completely misled, not only by false matter but by the false God that has ruled over this false matter. Reality is altogether different: an altogether different "God" and an altogether different "Matter." That God goes with that Matter which goes with that Death. Mother said "You" because there is as yet no language for that other material reality: That's the hitch, you say "Divine" and they understand "God"!... There is ONLY That: That alone exists. That, what?—That alone exists!33 She called it "the Lord," you can call it what you like—it is the other thing. It is the Thing in which "I" no longer exists: squashed, gone. A total consciousness. A total movement, a total power. A totality one is. Without a screen. The next consciousness. Another species which is no longer humanity or superhumanity, not an improvement upon the animal: something else. Something that obeys another law which has no longer anything to do with universal gravity. And yet it takes place in a physical, material body. A divine, material reality. And a "divine" who is no longer "other"... who is what you are, who is everything. Not a "You" up there, at the back of beyond, whom one doesn't know; He is everywhere, He is in everything, He is constantly there, He is in the very being—and one clings to that. It's the only solution.34 "God" was used in order to reach the other side—but what do you say when everything is on the same side?
The first key, and the total key, is to surrender. Only it is no longer a mystical surrender on the summits of the being: it is a material, corporeal surrender. But as long as there is personal effort, it's... oof! it's like the man who rolls his barrel uphill, and down it rolls again every minute.... Because as the balance changes between the parts of the being and as the luminous part increases, the rest grows more and more inadequate and intolerable. Then you are really utterly disgusted and more and more there is the movement "I can't do anything about it. It's impossible, I can't, it's such a colossal work that it's impossible—Lord, do it for me." And when you do this with the simplicity of a child, really like this, you know, really convinced that you cannot do it, "It's not possible, I'll never be able to do it—do it for me," it's wonderful!... Oh, He does it, mon petit, you're dumbfounded afterwards: "How come!..." There are lots of things that... prrt! vanish and never come back again—finished. After a time, you wonder, "How can that be?! It was there..." Just like that, prrt! in a second....35 It's the only solution, there's no other. All the rest is... aspirations, conceptions, hopes... it's still the superman, but not the supramental. It's a higher humanity that tries to lift all of its humanity upward, but... it's useless. It's useless.... It has to nullify itself Then something else can come, can take its place. The whole secret is there.... And then, to let oneself be flattened until one disappears.36
The best way of going through the web is to be like a breeze.
The "I am a reptile" must disappear so the "it is a bird" may appear. The competence of a reptile is quite useless to the bird.
And ultimately the only thing that disappears is the screen. And WE ARE.
Only, Mother added, there is no place for fear—if you're afraid, it becomes dreadful. Fortunately my body is not afraid.37
There are indeed some very radical consequences compared to which our nuclear fission looks like some sinister and powerless childishness, except for dying, because that is the only power in this false world.
Now we are really entering the magic forest.
Now the Vibration can begin to infiltrate.
Now we are entering another world that is nevertheless the same.
The web was not going to be undone in a day and the pure cellular mind simply appear, released from the hypnotism of the physical mind. That would have to wait until 1965. The true body has to be wrested from the night of the world, from the whole world. For the obstacles that prevent one from getting "over there" are not unfortunate errors or useless encumbrances, and when we have cut our way through them all, we shall indeed reach the beautiful supramental clearing. Things actually move according to a more complex rhythm, the experience seems to follow a distant, unending curve through the forest, with days upon days of walking: you touch point B, point C, D..—changes in time, in space, in sleep, in vision, in the sense organs—then another small clearing, another river, each one like a world in itself, and the experience A1, A2, A3... seems now far, far "behind," as if it no longer were. You go from one unconnected world to the other, one unconnected place to the other. Then suddenly, without any reason, at the end of that curve, you find yourself in experience A again, but it is now singularly widened and deepened, with a whole train of new waves and implications as if that same experience had surreptitiously changed and acquired another meaning and other consequences from the fact that you have touched B, C, D... in the meantime. Then you set off again to follow a wide curve, you leave line A1, A2, and find B2, C2, D2... which have also subtly changed in the meantime. It is like a global progression in which no single point is the "good" one and no single point is final or conquered once and for all: nothing is "over there" in particular, everything is anywhere at all. And at times, at some unexpected point of the progression, you find yourself as if standing before the total secret: at once all the lines seem to converge... and again it is gone. And you walk and walk; where is the Secret? Mother touched it a hundred times, a thousand times. And yet one could almost say that She never knew where the Secret was: She lived it, "worked it out," without having a name for it. She walked, and it came into being through her walking. It is not a mental trail through some mathematical problem whose solution lies at the end: it is a cellular trail, a progress of the body. It is a new body being made in the old body or emerging from the old body: a new world emerging from the old. All the points are equally good, are that, but they all have equally to reach the development that results from having gone through all the other points. In a way, we could say that the forest emerges all at once, at any point at all, once everything has been gone through. Mother's was the symbolic body in which the body of the new world was emerging. Only one link is missing for it to be visible to all: the unconcealed forest, the total course, the secret in every point. The Amazon unveiled. The new world beneath our steps. The new body here. We only need to become aware of something. For the crossing is over, She went through it all. So what is missing? The Secret is to know what is missing, not to know what is here.
There is a sort of veil to be lifted somewhere in our consciousness.
We are always wondering if this veil is not the famous physical mind: the "deformation's spell" Sri Aurobindo spoke of. A cellular spell.
True Matter
When the meshes of the web loosen a little as a result of the impersonalization, as well as from the hammering of the mantra, all kinds of phenomena start taking place, rather imperceptibly at first, like a breath, but becoming more precise and amplifying over the years. But first, the true supramental Vibration begins to infiltrate Matter, not in a crushing and "dazzling" way, but in a tenuous form that Mother described many times: As it works to settle itself in here, it produces this little vibration—a twinkling of vibrations—which seems to be indispensable for it to enter into this Matter.1 But one really wonders in which direction the process should be read: saying "penetrate into this Matter" gives the impression of something behind or outside which penetrates the bodily substance, but is it actually a "penetration" from outside or rather a sort of clarification which allows us to see and perceive or feel what was always there, beneath the meshes of the web? We have always wondered in which direction the phenomenon should be understood. The question seems very simple, but it entails radically different consequences that change the whole perspective of the process: in one case, it is the "other" vibration that infiltrates the old Matter little by little and modifies it—hence a transformation of one by the other; and in the other case, it is the real condition, the real vibration, the real form which emerges from the meshes of the web or the veil of mud, and which takes the place of the other—hence a substitution, or unveiling. We shall ask ourselves this question right to the end. Years later, after completing the whole course and going through quite a number of experiences, Mother came back to this "twinkling" infiltration and suddenly, "like that," in the middle of the conversation, She made a remark that left me completely dumbfounded. And this happened all the time with Mother. Those discoveries, so enormous that scientists could write volumes on them, never seemed to be "discoveries" for her: She simply noted the fact in passing, or rather became aware of it, made a remark, and then it was over, She went on—Mother was full of discoveries as transparent as the air one breathes, but She did not always take the trouble to label them so as to be able to say: well, this is a discovery. She simply lived the thing without mentalizing it—the discovery is for later on, when a name is put on it. Basically, everything is discovered in Mother's journey but nothing is named, so it is as if it did not exist—for us. But this time, She named it. She observed that the twinkling infiltration induced a whole new way of being in the body: A way of being that might be luminous, harmonious. That way of being is still quite indefinable; but in this seeking there is a constant perception (which translates as a vision) of a multicolored light, with all the colors—all the colors not in layers but as though combined in dots, a combination of all the colors.2 And we recall the "iridescent light" She had perceived at the turn of the century in the depths of the Inconscient—which means an immense course completed (we could say by the earth: Mother's body is an earthly body like everyone else's), since that light was no longer over there, beneath unfathomable layers, deep in a kind of "cave," but just here, at the edge of her body, twinkling through all the pores of her skin, so to say. The veil had thinned. And She added, But now I see it constantly, associated with everything, and it seems to be what we might call a "perception of true Matter. " All possible colors are combined without being mixed together, and combined in luminous dots. Everything is as though MADE UP of this.2 I believe She never again spoke of "true Matter" after that: it had come and gone. Another time it was something else, which She left unnamed. On the other hand, She would speak of "false matter" more and more often, as if this speckling of multicolored vibrations were Matter's real way of being, which emerged or became more perceptible as the web grew clearer—it was this web She would call "false matter." So more and more it seems that we can read the phenomenon as a substitution by true Matter or an unveiling of true Matter, rather than as the transformation of the old Matter into something "else." Then many things become clear. All those who expected to see Mother suddenly rejuvenated, unwrinkled, unbent and glorious in the same old corporeal substance were looking at the phenomenon in the wrong way. Perhaps we are looking at the whole earth in the wrong way: the new world is perhaps not the old being transformed, but the true one, already here, taking its place. A tremendous change in perspective. A complete dissolution of the web. One had better know which side one stands on.
But that perception of real Matter in her body, in objects, in everything, was not only a vision—for after all, visions are all right for those who are able to see—it was materially and corporeally translated by a completely different way of being in Matter, as if the laws were no longer exactly the same. Thus we can understand that some adaptation is necessary to prevent the body from suddenly disintegrating or vaporizing under the pressure of the new laws, or rather because of the sudden disappearance of the old laws that weighed on it like a ton of lead. Lead feels light to us. The cage does not exist for us. We must get out of it to understand that it is made of lead and is a cage. But the moment we get out of it, there is a rather... peculiar transition for the old body—indeed, how can you be in two bodies or two Matters simultaneously? How do we get into one without dying in the other, or at least fainting? It is like breathing two kinds of entirely different air, one deadly, the other living—and how do you remain alive while in the deadly one? How can you be in true Matter, live in true Matter, without losing the other—which is the bridge, the link with the old terrestrial existence and allows you to go on being, living, apparently doing as everybody else, speaking with others and being accessible to them? We are accessible only insofar as we are mortal like them, false like them, opaque, heavy, aging, painful.... This will be Mother's problem more and more. Somewhat like the problem of the first amphibian. In short, how to be on both sides of the web. To be in death without being in it.
The New Way of Being
This new way of being of Matter (or of being in Matter) took shape very gradually and cautiously, but all the same.... And first of all, on which occasion does it manifest, what triggers the other movement? A body is very simple, in a way: it breathes easily, it breathes heavily; it is comfortable, it is tired; it has a routine, it makes its everyday gestures. The moment one habit changes, things start grating. There are millions of habits for the body, everything is habit. Its habits, whatever they are—good, bad, useful, harmful, breathing well or breathing heavily—are part of the web, they are within the web. The web is ultimately a habit, millions of habits. A habit of good health or poor health, and ultimately a habit of dying because "that's the way it is," the way bodies behave, it is the way of bodies. Now, the new movement tends to emerge when we seek to break a habit, whatever it is, however microscopic and futile it may be. Immediately something starts grating. It falls ill quite easily because it is upset, and everything becomes suddenly very boring: "The world is decidedly quite disgusting." Everything is disgusted. The web is upset. It even feels like dying (oh, only a whisper, it is a big word it would hardly dare pronounce!), and actually the slightest grating always points in that direction, if you but touch or tickle it a little, we could say. You can touch the web on any side at all, at any point, and surprisingly, you always find yourself before death—a sly little death, so stupid that you laugh at it when you notice it, and you throw it out the window; but it does not forget, it simply bides its time. None of our mental boasting can do anything in the end: it does, in secret.
Therefore we can catch the web of habits from any side at all, but if we look closely, there is one habit that is like the mother of the others, or in any case more pronounced than the others: it is the habit of defeat. It can be taken as an excellent opportunity for setting the new movement in motion. For at the least trouble, the body instantly gives up: oh, it's such and such an illness, it's going to last for so many months or so many years, and then I must have an operation, and then... the whole list. There are even dreams of the physical Mind in which you undergo operations that last hours, stoically (with God knows what submissive delight). The physical consciousness, the consciousness that makes the cells function [or more precisely that which hypnotizes the cells] is accustomed to effort, struggle, misery, defeat... so accustomed—that's quite universal. In people, it's only their mental consciousness that holds out; but their physical consciousness tends to foresee catastrophe, so accustomed it is: the end, you know, that end which for centuries and centuries was inescapable.... It weighs down. It's very difficult. It takes a very slow and constant work to replace that sort of habit... of defeat, basically, with a faith, a true consciousness.... The true consciousness that truth is Harmony, truth is Progress, truth is Light, truth is....3 And the body, the physical consciousness falls back constantly into its old habit, what Mother called the "old way": But there is such idiocy in this body. For instance, there is every moment (it's every second or minute), every moment there is the choice between continuation of the old habit and progress towards consciousness. It's constantly like that. And through... listlessness (what is it?... It's not bad will because it's idiotic; its more idiotic than bad will), there is a spontaneous tendency to choose deterioration rather than the effort of progress.... its listlessness. But when it knows and makes effort, it is always, every time, translated as lights, yes, like vibratory waves, and those of progress are the ones which have all the colors, that twinkling of all the colors: a light made of a twinkling of all the colors. Those are the lights that choose the immediate little effort to reject the listlessness.... But its not over important events: it's something going on every minute, for everything, all the time, all the time—for everything.4
There is thus an effort or a way of being that produces a certain porousness in the body.
When that effort takes place, which is rather a call within, a need to be something instead of that amorphous mass that records nonexistent minutes like a taxi meter, when the mantra hammers this heavy opacity, there occasionally occurs in the body—then more and more often—a kind of luminous swelling, like a dilation that is truly the aspiration of the body, its cry, its call for true air in the midst of this walking suffocation: it suddenly begins to suffocate, as if it were becoming aware of the web. This dilation, which is perceived in the cells and everywhere as indeed a "luminous swelling," may even become rather crushing and repressive in another way, as if there were not enough room in the body, as if it were still too clogged. It is the sign of the infiltration of the other movement, which gradually becomes easy and "flowing," as the substance becomes clarified and impersonalized. The intellect does the same thing when it begins to emerge from the first enveloping cocoon of ignorance: it suffocates, it feels it is constantly bumping against ugliness, stupidity, pettiness everywhere, and being boxed in. The process is the same for the consciousness of the body. But here, the stupidity is all the physiological laws. And a new mode of being begins to emerge, imperceptible and almost like a breath at first, but which is to have stupendous consequences. We do not know the tremendous power germinating in those microscopic processes. This luminous twinkling... seems to be the true mode of being, she said at the beginning; I am not yet sure, but at any rate it's a far more conscious mode of being. I see it all the time: with eyes open, eyes closed, all the time. It gives a strange perception (with regard to the body), a strange perception at the same time of subtlety, permeability (if I may call it that), of suppleness of form, and not exactly
When that effort takes place, which is rather a call within, a need to be something instead of that amorphous mass that records nonexistent minutes like a taxi meter, when the mantra hammers this heavy opacity, there occasionally occurs in the body—then more and more often—a kind of luminous swelling, like a dilation that is truly the aspiration of the body, its cry, its call for true air in the midst of this walking suffocation: it suddenly begins to suffocate, as if it were becoming aware of the web. This dilation, which is perceived in the cells and everywhere as indeed a "luminous swelling," may even become rather crushing and repressive in another way, as if there were not enough room in the body, as if it were still too clogged. It is the sign of the infiltration of the other movement, which gradually becomes easy and "flowing," as the substance becomes clarified and impersonalized. The intellect does the same thing when it begins to emerge from the first enveloping cocoon of ignorance: it suffocates, it feels it is constantly bumping against ugliness, stupidity, pettiness everywhere, and being boxed in. The process is the same for the consciousness of the body. But here, the stupidity is all the physiological laws. And a new mode of being begins to emerge, imperceptible and almost like a breath at first, but which is to have stupendous consequences. We do not know the tremendous power germinating in those microscopic processes. This luminous twinkling... seems to be the true mode of being, she said at the beginning; I am not yet sure, but at any rate it's a far more conscious mode of being. I see it all the time: with eyes open, eyes closed, all the time. It gives a strange perception (with regard to the body), a strange perception at the same time of subtlety, permeability (if I may call it that), of suppleness of form, and not exactly a removal but a considerable lessening of the rigidity of forms. As for the body, the first times it felt that in some part or the other, it felt... when it happens it's a bit lost, with the sense of something eluding it. That was when the series of faintings began. But if one remains very quiet and waits quietly, it's simply replaced by a sort of plasticity and fluidity that seems to be a new mode of the cells. It might probably be what, on the material level, must take the place of the physical ego...5 It really seems like nothing, but in a way it means the dissolution of everything that constitutes the foundation or the power of cohesion of our body: what makes you feel as a body, "my" body—that is, the habit formed by the web. Millions of centered habits woven into a vibratory network, and making a physical "I," just as there is a mental "I" and an emotional "I". Getting out of the web is a strange adventure—not an easy one. But somehow Mother was opening the path in her own body, a little like the first ancient saurian learned how to grow wings—except this is more radical. That is to say, Mother continued, it seems the rigidity of the form must give place to this new way of being. Of course, the first contact is always very... surprising. But the body is getting used to it little by little. What's a little difficult is the moment of transition from one way to the other. It's done very progressively, yet at the moment of transition there are a few seconds that are... the least we can say is "unexpected." In that way, all habits are undone. Its the same with all the functionings: blood circulation, digestion, breathing—all the functions. And at the moment of transition it's not that one abruptly takes the place of the other, but there is a state of fluidity between the two which is difficult.5
The Body of the World
This infiltration is difficult to bear at first. Everything gets disorganized, there is a sort of veiled revolt: "Like stepping on an anthill," she said, and it is exactly that. Everything becomes very aggressive, and strange as it may seem, all material things, even objects, animals and all the people around become very aggressive, as if there were some kind of secret complicity in Matter. I have personally observed a very remarkable phenomenon which recurred several times so that I would really get the point. This in itself is a strange experience: as soon as you want to try to understand how things really work in Matter, it is as if everything came to give you a demonstration—a complicity in the other direction—everything comes to life and seems to react, to create echoes everywhere, ten thousand miles away or under your feet. Now, I noticed that on days there was some "disturbance in the atmosphere," not only did all kinds of small, minuscule accidents happen in waves, one after another (in people or the objects around, in my own gestures), but even animals began to grind, and inevitably I would find a scorpion on my doorstep or on the stairway... as if everything moved within the same maleficent, microscopic rhythm. As if all of Matter were grating at once, so to speak. There are little disorders, there are big disorders. The second time the supramental Force came to take hold of her body, in 1961, Mother noted: All possible difficulties rose up en masse—it had to happen, and it surely happened to Sri Aurobindo, too. How well I understood! How well, indeed. And it's no joke, you know! I had wondered why these difficulties had hounded him so ferociously—now I understand, because I am being attacked in the same relentless fashion. Actually, it springs from everything in material consciousness that can still be touched by the adverse forces; that is, not exactly the body-consciousness itself but, one could say, MATERIAL SUBSTANCE AS IT HAS BEEN ORGANIZED BY THE MIND- the first stirrings of Mind in life making the passage from animal to human.... Well, something in there protests, and naturally this protest creates disorder.6 Here we are, before the inevitable physical Mind, the remarkable something that was formed with man and caused the transition from animal to man. There is no physical mind in animals; there is only a cellular mind. The cage exists only for us. The "Inconscient," which every tradition places at the beginning of time like a kind of primal rock, is in fact a human phenomenon. It is a phenomenon of the physical Mind: it is the veil, or the mud wall. The web. Behind it, everything communicates, there are no partitions. Evolution became caged and veiled hundreds of millions of years later, for reasons of individualization that we have already mentioned. But if the fact is correct, if it is really the physical Mind that makes the wall, then we are before a wonderful possibility: we need not accomplish an “evolution," a transformation or a mutation embracing centuries and fortuitous miseries—we only need to break down the Wall. And everything is there. Total Consciousness is there, total Movement, the Shakti, the total Power is there. We sought to break down the Wall from above, but it is down below, in Matter, that it must be broken down. We sought to create super-men in the web, but it is the web itself that must be destroyed, and every "super" is there, far more unimaginable than we could ever think. Only, the moment you touch the web, it starts grating, and everything grates: "It all rose up en masse," Mother said, and She added, as an afterthought, That's the problem: something totally new is being introduced into Matter, and the body is protesting.6
The body of the world protests.
It vehemently protests against the little twinkling of surreptitious light which is disrupting its whole way of being.
But how can one body, one little body all by itself in obscure Pondicherry, change the body of the world? This was my constant question during the first years with Mother. Because it was the problem of the world that concerned me, and I did not see how this smiling little Mother, going back and forth in her corridor among those grating specimens, could "transform the world." It seemed to me a kind of fairy tale. How could undoing a little habit here—really a speck of dust in the great expanse of the world—undo the enormous habit of the world? To be sure, I clearly saw that all the little habits around her were as if grating in chorus, but.... "How can the work You are doing on your own body have a general effect on the corporeal substance outside of You?" In the same way as always, she answered, because the vibration spreads out! For example, each time I have been able to master something, I mean find the true solution for an "illness" or a malfunctioning (the TRUE solution, not a mental one, not some ordinary knowledge, but the spiritual solution: the vibration that will UNDO the wrong working or set you on your feet again), it has always been very easy for me to cure the same thing in others, through the emission of this vibration.... That's how it works. Because all substance is ONE. All is ONE—we constantly forget that! We always have a sense of separation, and that is total, total Falsehood; it's because we rely on what our eyes see, on....
That is truly Falsehood. As soon as your consciousness changes a little, you realize that... what we see is like an image plastered over something. But it's not true, not true at all. Even in the most material Matter, even a stone—even in a stone—as soon as one's consciousness changes, all this separation, all this division, completely vanishes. These are... (how to put it?) modes of concentration, vibratory modes WITHIN THE SAME THING7.
Such is the process of spiritual contagion. All vibrations are contagious, the good ones too.
At the time I was convinced, because Mother made you see things when She spoke, you felt them in your own body. But even so I kept asking the same question in one form or another. "How can this ridiculous little movement whose neck I wring in my consciousness be uprooted elsewhere in the world?" Here I was putting a much more tricky question to Mother, and in effect I was right to do so, because at that point She had yet to find the real mechanism: She was being led to it "by fist and hammer blows." She replied, It's an ERROR to think that there can be a single "personal" movement in the world; it's man's ignorant consciousness which MAKES IT PERSONAL, but it isn't: it's all terrestrial attitudes. And She further added, It came with the Mind; animals don't have that. And that's why I feel a sweetness in animals, even the supposedly most ferocious, which doesn't exist in man.8 All right then, but even if these are waves of a general nature, how is the fact of my having eliminated the movement from my personal web going to eliminate it from the world web? Some root must be touched somewhere. And Mother used to explain to me her method of those days, the one She had used for decades (and it could probably be used for centuries without making any real radical change). It is the spiritual method of all genuine yogis (those who work for the world, silently). Mother would go out of her material body, the individual little web, and inevitably, as soon you go out of the web, everything becomes universal. And She acted upon the various universal layers of consciousness: the mental, the vital or the subconscious layers, all that weaves our brilliant or not so brilliant ideas, our absurd or more harmful reactions: But when one descends to accomplish a work of transformation—to bring Light into the different layers of life, for instance—it is not an individual Subconscient, and the work of transformation is not done through individualization, but through the opposite movement, through a sort of universalization.... The minute you become universalized you act upon the whole.... You can have the idea of being separate, but you can't be separate in reality. In fact, if you are trying to eliminate the Subconscient in yourself your movement must necessarily be general; it can't be personal, you would never get anywhere.9 200
And Mother would tell me of the work She was doing particularly at night, when She had a little peace and went out of her body: It goes on every night. It takes the form of all sorts of scenes, of symbols, of memories, from words to images. It comes in groups and categories of tendencies, it represents the various human tendencies in detail.10 These "categories of tendencies" or "terrestrial attitudes," these thousands of stupid reactions to be undone, used to assume all sorts of faces, sometimes odd composite faces, as if one face represented dozens or perhaps hundreds of faces: it did not represent one person, but rather an attitude: Such characters are sometimes put together with features from several people, to make it very clear that they represent a state of consciousness and not an individual. It's far more often a state of consciousness than an individual.11 Already when I lived in Japan there were four people I could never distinguish during my night time activities—all four of them (and god knows they weren't even acquainted! ) were always intermingled because their subconscious reactions were identical.... There was an Englishman, a Frenchman, a Japanese and one more, each from a different country; well, at night they were all the same, as if viewed one through the other, all intermingled.12 That's how the specimens in the Ashram assumed their universal meaning: The people around me for the work here are like families in those worlds there; they are types, that is—each person represents a type....13 Those types take on the image of someone I am in contact with or was in personal contact with. But to me they are types: "Oh, its such and such a type—but that can be THOUSANDS of people. And the action on the person-type has repercussions on all that he represents.... But Mother added: And that's a labor which seems... infinite—endless, at any rate.14
One wonders if it is really the solution, if the root is really touched in this way. And then her labor in the daytime, amidst all those people to be seen, those difficulties to be resolved, those resistances to be overcome, those thousands of little reactions in and around her body, had the same symbolic character: So the details are unimportant in themselves, but they are symptomatic of the whole.15 Yes, like little scorpions scurrying up to your door. One illness is a million of identical illnesses. I mean that difficulties, obstacles, battles, victories, advances are in themselves nothing but indications of a general movement—at times there are fantastic advances or progress, seemingly miraculous. If you see everything together, you feel, you feel a sort of thrust—an overall thrust....15
A hell of a thrust, for sure.
But will the scorpion species disappear for all that?... Perhaps after a few centuries of "global thrust."
Is it really in this way that the web of the world can be destroyed?... To ask this question is to put into question all the spiritual methods since the beginning of spirituality. It is to admit a priori that all the materialisms of the world that have constantly denied the power of the Spirit and affirmed the superiority of their machinery to improve material existence are right... although they have been a little shaken lately.
And the answer, the only answer—the one Mother was going to discover in her body—is that there is only one way of curing the body of the world: it is to be the body of the world. There is only one way to destroy the web, it is to destroy it in a body that has become the whole body of the earth. One must get out of the web without getting out of one's body. Ecstasy is but a nice little dream. One can really and totally have some action only on what one is. If you want to act on terrestrial Matter, you must be all terrestrial Matter. What is needed is material contagion. It is not from above or within or without, or by meditation, or contemplation or going out of one's body into the fourth or hundredth dimension that one finds the solution, but by becoming each atom, each vibration of the earthly body. And how is it possible? Mentally one understands that one can become the cosmic consciousness and merge with the universal Mind; even vitally one understands that one can become the great Energy of life and merge with the universal Dynamism (even though there is hardly any terrestrial example of this, except, perhaps, on a very small scale, Napoleon, Alexander or Genghis Khan). But corporeally, how can one little body become all bodies and enter all the miseries of the world without dying from it? How can it even physiologically broaden its cellular consciousness without bursting or being dissolved?
And finally, the little twinkling could really enter the body of the world only if Sri Aurobindo's or Mother's body had, in some way, become the body of the Earth.
"Each atom," said Sri Aurobindo.
The Little Doors
Mother would be made to live the answer; Matter itself was going to provide it. As a matter of fact, we are always in the answer! It is constantly given to us, for everything, in the least detail, but we do not know how to see it, we do not even know that it is the answer, we constantly cover everything that happens with a veil: with our idea or preference or reaction or sensation, nothing reaches us purely, everything is veiled and distorted in advance, interpreted in one way or another, and always "it is right," "it is wrong," "it is good," "it is bad," "it is horrible," "it is excellent."... A bird does not ask questions, it does not ask where Siberia is: it goes straight to Siberia. And we are constantly within that "Siberia" or Amazon, that real country we are looking for, the answer to all our questions, this "realization" that is never in the future but always here, before our eyes, beneath our steps—only we do not know this is it. We live in a false future, our sense of time is a Falsehood like the rest of our perceptions in the web, like tuberculosis, death, gravity and the "over there." It is all an incredible tissue of unreality. Mother used to say an objective unrealitym16 and we understand perfectly what She means. Only it is not enough to think things out and understand them mentally: we must learn to live them in our bodies, we must undo the Habit. We must find again the entire Amazon that is here, each instant, with all the answers.
Mother was living the answer, there, amidst all her specimens. She did not know—or not yet—that this was the answer; with a sense of wonder, She was beginning to learn that everything is the Answer. I have said that She never knew what the Secret was, and yet She touched it, lived it a thousand times—but does a bird know that "this is Siberia?" Perhaps it notices certain changes of climate. Similarly, Mother noticed many little changes of climate—Siberia is for the geographers. I am Mother's geographer. In ordinary life, you think of things, then you do them—but this is just the opposite! In this life you have to do things first and understand afterwards—but long afterwards. You have to act first, without thinking. If you think, you get nowhere; you're just reverting to the old way of doing things. And Mother added, But what can be said about That! It simply cannot be spoken of and here's the proof: if we could talk about it, it would be here. And even then we probably wouldn't talk about it.17 She went among her specimens, with the checks to be signed and impossible payment deadlines to meet, complaints here, illnesses there, upset teachers, upset students, "I want" and "I don't want," and the pains of her own body and the pain of everyone's body, everywhere the great misery clothed in pompous words: That suffering, that general misery is becoming almost unbearable.... It has been THRUST on me like a sort of acute anguish—which certainly is necessary to get out of it. To get out, I mean, to cure, to change—not to flee. I don't like flight. That was my major objection to the Buddhists: all that you are advised to do is merely to give you an opportunity to flee—that's not pretty. But change, yes.18 And She realized that even her anguish was already a kind of answer: all the material conditions needed to find the solution were created. Suffocation is the first step to finding the door. Anguish is stupid in itself, but it is the false image or mental transcription of a physiological state necessary to reach the solution. And similarly, everything is false, and everything is true. The state itself is true, it is exactly as it must be, but the mental transcription and the sensation we add to it in the web is a total falsity. And thus everything in the world is false, and everything is perfectly true! Yes, She was learning that "all the stupidities we commit are for the work," it is stupid because of the wrong meaning we give it, it is harmful because of our wrong reaction, it is disastrous, it can lead to death—and the very same thing, when seen and taken differently, is a door that opens onto victory. We begin to see, touch, feel that we live in a world of mirages, and it is very interesting, almost fabulous at times: a tiny something and things turn into Wonder, another tiny something and they turn into Blackness—and it is the same thing, the same so-called material, ((concrete" fact. And we invariably observe that it is everything the physical Mind stealthily adds to the fact, sticks on it, plasters over it, smearing it with black glue. Mother was learning the lesson. And all of a sudden, as if struck by a revelation, She exclaimed, At every instant, at every moment in the universe, all is exactly as it should be.... That is omnipotence.19 These few words, enigmatic as they are, are blazing with power if wholly understood. Omnipotence, Power, the great Open Sesame is perhaps only a matter of perceiving that everything is exactly and marvelously as it should be—but perceiving it in one's body. Then the body sees, and the mirage dissolves. Then it does not die, then it is not sick, then all the false mental consequences crumble. And it is. And it is omnipotent and invincible—it is.
Only, that must be lived. Lived each second.
It seems fabulous, and it is incredibly simple, so simple that it cannot be believed. The Mind cannot believe what is simple—for its role is to complicate and box up and ensnare everything.
In a way, the body must be de-mentalized.
Speaking mentally, we say that Mother was learning "impersonalization," but that is a frightful word which already connotes the victimizing of the little self. There is nothing to victimize! One has only to let oneself flow little by little in the Obvious. Then everything becomes different. But this flowing in the Obvious is not some kind of blissful acceptance of everything (although it can become that, but it cannot really become that so long as the body remains in death—up above one can smile, it is very nice and very Buddhistic and it makes a pretty picture, but the smile must be in the body), this flowing means to open the little door of everything, in everything—everything has a door. Each thing, each most microscopic incident has its "door"; one opens it or one leaves it closed. Saying yes or no will not open the door, but if one lets oneself glide into the heart of the thing, if one adheres—adheres even to the "worst"!then the door opens and the meaning appears, the real face of the thing and its remedy at the core of evil or behind the door of evil. The "evil" was precisely the mental door we put on the thing—which is neither "good" nor "bad," but "something else." The very cunning Mind will at once cry out: then everything must be accepted, even destruction, even.... And you catch it pricking up its ears, for naturally it is expecting destruction—and it will have it. If it accepts in its own way, it will certainly have destruction, and a few good beatings to boot. Its black glue sticks everywhere, it is just hopeless, one cannot walk on this path with the mind, it will glue you down at the first opportunity. This flowing in the Obvious must be actually experienced, these thousand little doors at every minute and every step and in everything must be opened—not even opened: gone through like a breeze while repeating the Mantra... and with a sort of will for the sunlit Truth or a call for Truth everywhere. What Mother calls SINCERITY. And She defined it so marvelously. That's what I call sincerity: if one can catch oneself every minute belonging to the old Stupidity.20 The seething, old stupidity of the mental habit muttering its little disasters, little sins, little nos and yeses, little gratings, its old voraciousness of a punished child in a cage striving hard to devour the cosmos through the bars. All that has to be aired out; one goes through it and walks about with it and carries it everywhere—it is "inevitable"—but there is a certain way of flowing in it while pinching its ear at the same time... because one is not fooled, but one flows in it all the same and passes through it.
Even through sickness—even through death, as Mother will learn. The body is also learning the lesson of "illness", She said. Oh, that's very, very amusing. The difference between the thing itself as it is, the particular kind of disorder, whatever it is, and the old habit of feeling and receiving the thing, the ordinary habit, what people call an illness: "I am ill." That's very amusing. And always, if you stay truly still, there is always a little light—a warm little light, very bright and wonderfully still, behind; as if it were saying, "You have only to will." Then the body's cells panic: "Will, how? How can I will? It's AN ILLNESS"—the whole drama, it's "an illness". Then something with a general wisdom, says, "Calm down, calm down... don't remain attached to your illness! So they consent—"consent," like a child who has been scolded, "All right, very well, I'll try." They try—immediately, that light comes again: "You only have to will." And once or twice, for one thing or another, on THIS POINT, you consent—the next minute, it's over! Not the next minute: a few seconds and it's over. Then the cells remember: "But how come? I had a pain here..."—pop! It all comes back And the whole drama unfolds like that, constantly. So if they really learned the lesson... Oh, they are learning their lesson all the time, all the time. Everything, all that happens is always a lesson—always. Always, always: all the quarrels, all the difficulties, all the so-called illnesses, everything, all the disorders are to make you learn a lesson—as soon as you've learned the lesson, it's over! But then, you are so slow and heavy, you take so much time to REALIZE that it's a lesson that it drags on and on and on... It's beginning to learn. And then, instead of the selfish answer that consists in saying, "Ah, no! I don't want that, I don't want any of it! (Laughing) I am 'above' that weakness and disorder;" let it come, accept it, and see what the solution is. In other words, instead of the old problem- rejection of life, rejection of the difficulty, rejection of the disorder and the flight into Nirvana—it is the acceptance of everything—and Victory.21
Total acceptance in order to find the real meaning of each thing, what is behind the door. The other face of things, what really is, without the travesty of the mind, the travesty of the sensations and reactions, the travesty of "illness" and death and everything. The web. And Mother added, Life is on the verge of becoming wonderful—but we don't know how to live it. We still have to learn. When we truly learn, it will be something.21 And then, as one's acceptance becomes perfected, as one ceases sticking yeses or noes on things and circumstances and encounters, one begins to flow in the "thing," the other thing, the Obvious, and one discovers the marvelous organization: EVERYTHING comes to make you move forward as fast as possible, everything: obstacles, contradictions, incomprehensions, trivial occupations, everything but everything is to make you move forward. It's to touch one point, another point, yet another... and make you progress as fast as possible. If we don't look after this Matter, how is it going to change?22
And all these little doors opening to the left, to the right, at each step and each minute, each gesture, each stupidity, let air into the being, into daily life—and even into the body. Everything starts becoming porous, as it were.
Without our realizing it, we have come to the Great Door: physical universalization.
We have become wide as if by magic.
The little twinkling twinkles everywhere.
The Lights of the Cell
Strangely enough, in order to rediscover the pure functioning of a little cell one has to go to the furthermost bounds of the universe, and having rediscovered the little cell as it is, we can act there as if on all the rest of the universe and live there as if we were everywhere in the universe. Not only does the pure little cellular point, just as it is, unbelievably contain everything—the giant point,1 said Sri Aurobindo—but still more unbelievably, this point does not expand inordinately to swallow or encompass everything into its own consciousness—no: it is everything, instantly; it is not suddenly the sum total of billions of points, it is each of the billions of points as much as itself. And how are we to understand this? Undoubtedly, it is not to be understood but experienced. In any case, the scientists of Matter would do well to note the fact. Certainly Einstein would have understood Sri Aurobindo's "mathematical formula" very well and Mother's stammered nonformulas, as She bumped into things right and left in her incomprehensible forest that went round and round... perhaps just around the same point. One day—later on—at the request of a professor, I asked Mother, "But anyway, what does a true, pure cell look like, how does it operate, how is the connection established?" Mother began to answer me in her soft and slow voice, with those drops of words that seemed to come from far, far away, crossing expanses of light and remaining suspended somewhere in a silence of snow, then suddenly condensing like some pure little pearls of dew on a lotus leaf: it was all shining, they were no longer words but a kind of vibration containing the whole meaning, complete and obvious—we can never recapture that on paper, when these pure little facts are transcribed in ink.... The cells, she said, have an internal constitution or structure that corresponds to the structure of the universe. So the connection is made between identical external and internal states, that is to say, the cell, in its internal constitution, receives the vibration of the corresponding state in the total constitution.2 Then She closed her eyes (but She almost always spoke with her eyes closed, as though from very far away, and yet so very present that you felt everything as if in your own body): Someone (I don't know who) has just shown me.... It was a man's big hand, and there was in it... it wasn't an egg—he told me it was the representation of a cell. It was an object that seemed to me this big [about three inches], transparent and living: it was living. And he showed me the various internal constitutions of the cell, and the correspondence with the center. A wholly precise vision, so precise that I was flabbergasted, I said, "Oh!"... It had a strange shape: not like an egg, but narrower at one end, and... I don't know how to describe.... It was luminous, held up with two fingers, like this.... I don't know what the scientific shape of cells is, but it was like this. And he showed me the various radiances. The periphery was the most opaque [and we wonder if this opacity is not in fact the beginning of the web, the coating of the cell, the obscure envelope of the physical Mind]; the deeper inside, the more luminous it became; and the center was wholly luminous, it was bright, that is, RADIATING. Then there were different colors—not very intense, but different colors... some spots were slightly bluish, others.... There were all kinds of things—it was very complex—with varying radiations. AND THE CONNECTION WAS FROM LIGHT TO LIGHT.2
At once I asked Mother if this meant that the central light works by touching all corresponding lights. Yes, that's it, through an inner contact of the being. It gave the impression that each cell was a miniature world corresponding to the whole.2
So we are beginning to hold the key to "material contagion." We are beginning to see the fires of true Matter sparkle.... To pick up a pulsar from the far reaches of the universe, you need a synchronous radio telescope, that is, tuned to the same wavelength. The central lights of the cell are perfectly synchronous. They see each other and know each other and respond to each other through all space and all bodies.
Naturally, scientists will say that they have never seen the lights of the cell. Democritus and Lucretius had never seen atoms, and yet they were the first atomists.
The Turning
But first, She had to get out of the dark coating of the physical Mind, the thick crust that veils all the pure functioning and partitions everything off in its cage. Mother was "learning the lesson," as She said. She was opening all the little closed doors: in daily circumstances, encounters and gestures. She received everything in a perfect transparency, or one that was trying to become more and more perfect. If a single little thing is refused, the door instantly shuts—a tiny little door that is like the door to everything—you remain locked in the cage. That is to say, perfect neutrality, the way a crystal lets light pass through it. At the time of her very first experiences, Mother had already noticed: To acquire a total and perfect awareness of the world as it is in all its details, one must first have no more personal reactions in regard to any of these details, NOR EVEN ANY SPIRITUAL PREFERENCE as to what they ought to be. In other words, a total acceptance with a perfect neutrality and indifference is the indispensable condition for a knowledge through integral identification.3 Knowledge by identity, which means that one knows because one is: one knows the amethyst or Mr. Smith because one is the amethyst or that Mr. Smith. If there is one detail, however small, that escapes neutrality, that detail also escapes identification!4 The door shuts. And curiously, as long as a single door remains shut, it is as if all the other doors were not really open. There too, the smallest corner or the smallest point contains the Wall of everything. Everyone has a microscopic wall somewhere.
But the walls in the body are very useful, until there is evidence of another species! How to exist when left not only defenseless and at everyone's mercy, quite gleefully devoured by everyone, but at the same time standing on two personal feet? It was a rather ferocious "lesson," indeed—ferocious because someone had to blaze the trail: There had to be someone to do the work,5 she said later, it becomes the Bois de Boulogne 200 with its man-made paths and little signs. She subjected herself to a sort of incredible demolition, we cannot possibly imagine to what innermost point, where you feel you cannot "let go of that" without letting go of the very thread of life. She even let go of the yoga, and even the supreme and divine spiritual realizations—I was about to say even the Divine—and even the thought or the will that the transformation "had to" be carried out, this or that "had to"... everything collapsed—even the Goal collapsed. No one can imagine what that "neutrality" is. Indeed, it is the destruction of the cage: the golden cage as well as the other one. The spiritual cage along with all the rest. You remember that type of detachment I spoke of... well, it has increased to such an extent that it now applies to anything and everything linked with action on earth. This detachment was probably necessary. It began with something like... things dissolving; certain kinds of links between my consciousness and the Work were dissolving (not links with me, because I don't have any, but with the body, the whole physical consciousness, all that attaches it to the things in its environment, to the work and to the entourage.... It's like things dissolving, dissolving, dissolving. And it's more and more pronounced. Formerly, I had the power to get a grip on them and hold them); but now that this type of detachment has begun, things drift away everywhere—everywhere, everywhere.... But you know, it's no joke, this transformation! Yesterday I had such a strong feeling that all constructions, all habits, all ways of seeing, all ordinary reactions, were all crumbling away—completely. I felt I was suspended in something... entirely different, something... I don't know.6
This "something" was the beginning of the new species. This was March 27, 1961. One cannot make the new species while remaining in the old, that is obvious; but when the very light of the old species goes, it becomes... precarious. Mother was eighty-three years old.
And truly, with the feeling that ALL one has lived, all one has known, all one has done, all of it is a perfect illusion—that's what I was living yesterday evening.... It's one thing to have the spiritual experience of the illusion of material life (some find this painful, but I found it so wonderfully beautiful and happy that it was one of the loveliest experiences of my life); but now the whole spiritual construction as one has lived it is becoming... a total illusion! Not the same illusion, a far more serious illusion.... And I'm not exactly a baby; I have been here forty-seven years, and for something like... yes, certainly for sixty years I have been doing a conscious yoga, with all that memories of an immortal life can bring—and see where I am! When Sri Aurobindo says you must have endurance, I think he is right!... The absolute certainty of the Victory is un-ques-tio-na-ble; but I am not speaking at the scale of our bounded mind. It's up to us to CHANGE TACK—this is what's expected of us, to change tack and not keep going round in circles.... And there's no point in giving up, because it would just have to be started all over again next time. What I always say is: "Here's the opportunity—go right to the end." It's no use saying, "Ah, I can't," because next time it will be even more difficult.6
This "far more serious illusion" certainly gives us some food for thought. No one has really fathomed the profundity of the revolution She was carrying out—not a revolution in the head (one more), but in the body, in Matter. The disciples were still engrossed with the Bhagavad-Gita and meditations, or comparing Sri Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin. We understand more and more why Sri Aurobindo attached so little importance to his written work: the Supermind will explain itself. One day, to my amazement, Mother even told me that her entire Agenda could disappear, the Action would be done.7 But all the same, this demolition (this devastation of the "old way," we could say, this "changing of tack" to the other thing) was dizzying. For not only was She being uprooted in her inner being, but in her body. It was an odd thing, it seized me suddenly—I was no longer able to climb the stairs! she confessed to me. I didn't know how to do it! It also took hold of me once as I was having lunch—I no longer knew how to eat!8 All the usual workings were undermined at their base, so to speak. But work, mon petit... I can't work. I can't remember even the simplest things I am supposed to remember! But She smiled: It will last just as long as it lasts.9 Yet She continued to see all those people one after the other, each one bringing her "his quantum of disorder" and semiconscious thoughts: "Mother is going daft, Mother is getting unhinged, Mother is ill, Mother...." And each time it was as if old age and illness entered her body—it was all quickened in her body, it was part of the thousands of hypnotisms that had to be torn out, torn out of this substance. And then the suggestions of hostile voices: "You think you're being transformed, you think that this old Matter is going to change, but see, it's all humbug...."10 The body is very conscious that its millions of miles away from transformation. So... so it doesn't take much to convince it. What's more difficult is to give it the certitude that things will be different. It doesn't even understand very well how they can be different." And how can one understand something that is not a continuation or an improvement of a former state, something that is really "something else"—something else is darkness. It does not exist. If it existed, it would be done! It must be made to become, or uncovered. But to get there, you must accept to be a total imbecile for quite some time!... I see the external world, people like those around me, looking at me and thinking, "Ah! Mother is lapsing into her second childhood11... Their vibrations come to me and unfortunately they sometimes have the power to shake me.... What is necessary is to abandon EVERYTHING. Everything: all power, all comprehension, all intelligence, all knowledge, everything. To become perfectly nonexistent, that's the important thing. The demolition of the old species. But the very atmosphere makes things difficult—what people expect of you, what they want of you, what they think of you—it's very bothersome. Oh, it's like a swarm of flies coming—from here, from there, from above, from below.... You have to spend all your time fanning it away.12 We have yet to become aware of that enormous collective hypnosis... as if the whole world were caught in a web of hypnosis that makes it see in a certain way, feel, experience, live in a certain way; and the body is as if caught in that hypnotic net—it not only has to be torn out in oneself, it is as if it had to be torn out of the whole world! Mother once made this remark, which left me utterly perplexed, as if She had touched upon some kind of Secret impossible to transcribe: The body, the visible form is as much (at least as much) the result of how you are seen by others, at least as much as of how you yourself are....13
The whole earth must change tack.
The State of Harmony
And yet, one by one, the keys began to appear, little whiffs from the "other state" that Mother often called the "state of Harmony" and Sri Aurobindo the "Supramental": Because in proportion to this detachment, the reality of the Vibration—and especially the vibration of divine Love—keeps growing and growing (out of all proportion to the body, even) in a formidable manner, formidable! The body is beginning to feel nothing but that. Yes, it's as if I were living, as if THE BODY were living (despite all the illnesses and attacks, all the ill will besetting it), living in a bath of the divine vibration—bathing in something... immense—immense, immense... limitless, and so stable14 A cellular universality. It was almost as if another kind of divine were emerging from Matter or beginning to go through the mesh; but when we say "another kind," we have a tendency to visualize the same thing with improvements or differences, a super-good of our world: The good things aren't any better than the bad ones! Mother exclaimed. That's not IT. The Divine is something else.15 Actually, what can "the Divine" really be for the body? Obviously, it is not a new kind of Testament: a body pulses, breathes, vibrates—it has no ideas at all (thank "God"!). It is another way of pulsing, breathing, vibrating, stretching out, communicating. It is not a faith, it is a breathing. It is not a commandment of God, it is the infallible vibration that takes you exactly to the necessary place, like an eel toward the Gulf Stream, and impels you to make the necessary gesture. It is another way of being. It is another state. We are completely poisoned by our mental conception of God. All the great Schools, the great Realizations, the great... and then the religions—that's still lower down; all of it, oh, what childishness!... I was looking at the relationship I had with all those great beings of the Overmind and higher, the perfectly objective and very familiar relationship I had with all those beings—all that is very well, but for me it's almost ancient history! The me that exists now is HERE, it's at ground level, in the body; it's the body, its Matter; it's at ground level; and to tell the truth, it doesn't care much about the intervention of all those beings... who ultimately know nothing at all! They don't know the true problem: they live in a place where there are no problems. They don't know the true problem—the true problem is here.... And a kind of certainty, deep down in Matter, that the solution lies THERE-this is very strong, very strong. Oh, what fuss, what fuss, how vainly you have tried! —go deep enough within, stay quiet enough, and then THAT will be. And you cannot understand it: it only has to BE. You cannot understand it, because you are using instruments that cannot understand. But it cannot be understood: it has TO BE. When you are that, then you will be it, that's all, there won't be any more problem. And all this is down THERE, at ground level.16
And suddenly, Mother touched a key. This increasingly "stupendous" and "boundless" and immense vibration came only when Mother was totally defenseless, as it were, when everything went through her like a current of air—and one can easily understand that the most minute obstacle, the least snag inside, would cause everything to blow up, that is why the Vibration was so unbearable in the beginning, "like a fever." It had to travel without any obstruction; all the "disorder" came from the obstructions. The body knows one thing, that it's only when (and because) it can be absolutely peaceful—peaceful like something completely transparent and still—that this Power can act... that total, transparent stillness.17 But then that Power began to reveal all sorts of very surprising characteristics. Effectively, a whole world was beginning to take shape and experiences were going to spring up on all sides; but first of all a kind of absoluteness, all-powerful and... natural, you might say. There is no need to do anything: it does it. There is no need "to have the capacity": it is capable. The only need is to be—to be that. The first experience came as a rather evil little specimen one day threw herself inwardly on Mother with a violence that could have been fatal for a body such as hers, in the state of total surrender, "porosity" one could say, in which She was living. The incident in itself was nothing, but at that moment there occurred a kind of invasion of Power and the "specimen" was not crushed or subdued, as one might think, but cured. Instantly cured. It is not a power that crushes or defends or protects: it is a Power of order. It puts everything back in order—it puts everything back as it really is. It is the miraculous (miraculous for us) restoration of the natural. It was a truly stupendous experience. 18 It removes what was added onto the substance, stuck on it. Perhaps, it actually destroys a strand of the mesh at one point or another, some fraction of the physical Mind's hypnosis. And everything is as if THAT HAD NEVER BEEN. And the specimen who had come to kill Mother went off quite cheerfully, having even forgotten her hate. A kind of miraculous Harmony, but nothing miraculous about it.19
In the beginning, I did not understand what She meant, until the day it struck me as a veritable revelation. First, I asked Mother why She did not use very material occult powers, like those of Theon, for example. No, no use at all—absolutely no use,20 she answered. And She told me that both Sri Aurobindo and She had always refused to perform what are called miracles, because performing these so-called miracles meant calling in all sorts of vital or other forces, which are precisely the perpetuators of Falsehood on earth, the spinners of the web, we could say, and which from time to time indulge in unhooking a link... the better to be worshiped. They remove a bar from the cage, and we say: Oh! They take credit for saving you miraculously from their own mischief. In the world's present state, a direct miracle (vital or material, that is) must necessarily involve a number of fallacious elements which we cannot accept—those miracles are necessarily fallacious miracles.21 On the other hand, she said (and this is where I had my revelation), the number of miracles Sri Aurobindo performed in the Mind is incalculable. What on earth can miracles in the Mind be?... And Mother answered, He would bring into the mental consciousness (the mental consciousness that governs all material movements [that is, the physical mind]) a supramental formation, or power, or force, that instantly ALTERED THE ORGANIZATION. With immediate results... that appear illogical because the process doesn't follow the course set by mental logic.22 I still did not understand very well. I thought Sri Aurobindo performed "miracles" by using a kind of higher power that stopped illness or death. But then Mother added this: Its only the Mind that has the notion of miracle, because following its own logic, the Mind decides that given this and that condition, this or that circumstance can or cannot be. But these are merely the Mind's limitations.23 And suddenly I understood the enormous web. It was not at all a "miracle," it was the opposite of a miracle—you might say it was the disappearance of the Mind's "miracle" It is the Mind that decides that given such and such an illness, so much rest and so many remedies and so many months in the hospital are needed; that decides that given such and such a distance, so many hours of travel and so many trains and airplanes are needed; that decides that given eyes, ears, etc., we cannot see farther than so many hundreds of yards and cannot hear without a telephone; that decides... everything. It decides everything. It decides illness and it decides death. It has already decided everything. It is mathematical and inescapable, like Newton's apple. Given this, you cannot do that. It is a whole cage, infallible, medical and irrefutable. Everything is logical. Sri Aurobindo changed logic and everything became... natural. Everything was as it really is. And the whole “organization changes."
Suddenly, one day in February 1962, Mother was cured of her filariasis—vanished, not a trace left. In one second it was gone—not a gradual cure, no: one second. Like a reversal of condition. And She was really cured, meaning that the disease did not go underground: IT NO LONGER WAS. As if I had a new pair of legs !24 And She did not use any yogic power: She simply was that natural Vibration. And the disease did not exist anymore. The web had given way on that point. And Mother explained to me the minuscule mechanism, one could almost say the minuscule "non-miracles" of that natural Harmony we call the Supermind: But its rather delicate, like a very, very delicate clockwork, like a precision machine, and the least little thing throws everything out of gear....25 This slightest thing is precisely the intervention or the re-intervention of the physical Mind. When someone has a bad reaction, for instance, or a bad thought, or an agitated vibration, or an anxiety—anything of this nature is enough to dissolve all the Harmony. It's not always the events we consider serious or important that produce the most harmful effects—far from it. Sometimes it's an altogether INSIGNIFICANT intrusion of falsehood, for some quite insignificant reason—what is commonly labeled a stupidity.... But it's so lovely when this Harmony comes: you see a joyous, luminous grace manifesting in all things, all things, even those we normally regard as utterly unimportant. But then, if this Harmony withdraws, everything—exactly the same conditions, the same things, the same circumstances—becomes painful, tiresome, drawn out, difficult, laborious, oh!... And Mother added this, which is extraordinarily revealing, It makes you sense so clearly that things in themselves don't count. What we call "things in themselves" are of no true importance! What really counts is THE RELATIONSHIP OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO THESE THINGS.26 Yes, the so-called "things in themselves" are the cage, our mental perception of things, the sticky web that snags everything, puts everything in a framework, freezes everything in its implacable logic, or... the suppleness, the miraculous fluidity, "free of consequence" of the supramental Harmony. And there's a formidable power in this, since in one instance you touch something and drop or mishandle it, while in the other it's so lovely, it works so smoothly. Even the most difficult movements are made without difficulty. It's an unheard-of power! We don't give it importance because it has no grandiose effects.26 Completely invisible miracles because they are completely natural. They have to stop being natural for us to notice them. Actually, mental man became aware of the world as he began upsetting everything. And this is the whole key, the total key. If we want the miracle of the world, we must look closely at those little microscopic miracles... and watch how, in a little corner, the web tears, or closes up tight. If it can tear in one corner, it can do so everywhere—nothing is irremediable anymore, nothing is the consequence of anything anymore. There are no more consequences. At each instant it is, and it is as it is—the Harmony as it is, without its mental coating. There is no appreciable difference between the state that makes you stumble on the stairs and the one that makes you die—there is Harmony, and there is death. And everything that is not Harmony is death, or the beginning of death. That is where we must nab Death: in that little gesture, that little awkward oversight. The Vibration passes or does not pass, things are clear or obscure, it is harmonious or it grates. Everything begins there.
And the whole organization changes.
Then we really understand, completely, what Mother meant at the beginning: "It is not to be understood: it must be.
*To be she said, is the only thing that has power.27
A "crazy" power.*
The Liberation of True Matter
That "porous" state which put Mother at the mercy of everyone, and above all of everyone's disorders, was suddenly going to give her the key to the cure; which shows that the remedy is really always at the core of the difficulty. I can see that this whole peculiar period I've been passing through was a tremendous progress... and I didn't know it.28 This is so remarkably to the point! We do not know at all what progress consists of; it does not at all conform to our "better," more often than not it even conforms to our worse. We are not going toward what is "better," we are going toward something else. I am not at the end yet, but now I understand what it is. And it's something of capital importance.28 That porous state, without yes or no, without walls, is not at all the fuzzy state we imagine; it is perhaps like a breeze, but a strange kind of breeze. As though that emptiness, free from personal reflection, got caught everywhere as a seed gets caught in a bush; suddenly you are in this being, in his reactions, in his illness, as if they were your own—suddenly you become a "self" because you are caught there, or rather you have been caught there. The "self" is anything the current is caught or reflected in. You become a stone, a flower, a bottle of mouthwash. Instead of being caught in a body, your own body, you get caught by (or in) everything that goes by. You are the old age of one who thinks of you as old; you feel yourself die in a thought of death. These are all the little "flash-illnesses" which Mother went through constantly. Indeed, it is not a fuzzy state; it is an extraordinarily precise state, painfully precise—you are in fact everything you touch, or see, everything that happens, down to the very vibration. And then again, it is not that you "see" or "touch" something: you are in it. You are as it is. And the more empty and "defenseless" this emptiness, the more it is filled spontaneously with the Vibration, a vibration which is like Love, as if at the end of everything, when nothing is left, there remains only that: Love... pure love. As if the world were really made of love, once you have stripped it of all its coverings. The supra-mental vibration is really the vibration of pure love. It is the natural foundation of the world, the true state of the world. And that is what happened to Mother when She suddenly found herself before, or inside, that little evil specimen who could have killed her; all of a sudden She was the Love in or at the heart of that little evil; and the little evil was as if cured at once by its own vibration of love—cured by what it really is. The whole world is sick because it is not what it is.
And all of a sudden Mother understood the whole mechanism: It was the perception of Power—the Power that comes from Love.... A formidable Power! And it made me understand one thing, that the state I had been put in [all the illnesses, the disorders, the pain] was for obtaining the particular Power that comes through an identity with all material things, a power possessed by certain mediums, for instance. I saw it with Madame Theon: she would will a thing to come to her instead of going to the thing herself; instead of going to get her sandals when she wanted them, she made the sandals come to her. She did this through a capacity to radiate her matter—she exercised a will over that matter—her central will acted upon Matter anywhere, since SHE WAS THERE. With her, then, I saw this Power in a methodical, organized way, not as something accidental or spasmodic (as it is with mediums), but as an ORGANIZATION OF MATTER. And so... I began to understand: "With this comes the power to put each thing in its place! "... provided one is universal enough. Well, I have understood. And now I know where I stand. And if to this material capacity of identification, of exercising the will, is added that SOMETHING which was there during my experience [this Vibration of Love], it's something formidable! It has the power to change everything—and how! One IS simply that—ONE vibration of THAT.28 You are that, so you put each thing back as it is. No miracle is needed to change the world: it needs only to be put back as it is. To reestablish the contact. I said "to remove the web," but that is perhaps the negative way of saying the same thing. We must sow the little "twinkling" of multicolored light everywhere, that reality of Matter, true Matter, and it will wear away, eat into the veil from within—automatically. It is the "automatic" power Sri Aurobindo spoke of. And Mother added: Since this experience [the little evil specimen], there has been a constant multiplication of facts of identification (one is it, and so one DOES it), for all the small things of Matter, the most trivial things in the material world. But it's the key. The key.28
The key of material contagion.
Only, the universalization of the body has to become total enough to be able to sow or rather awaken or reawaken everywhere the little twinkling of true light.
A formidable reorganization of Matter. Perhaps we should say a formidable liberation of true Matter: the splitting of the little nucleus of light shining beneath its opaque cocoon, in the heart of the cell. One is that, therefore one does that. There is nothing to be changed: we only have to make what is there shine. There is not even a web to be destroyed: it will destroy itself on its own by the effect of that radiation.
This is what is happening.
At the Edge
But still, for Mother to be able to do that work, She had to get out of the web. A microscopic work on little reactions, little thoughts, little reflexes, thousands of habits: Yet there is a kind of fluctuation: it will go on like that [the state of Harmony, the supramental Vibration] for a few moments or a few hours and then suddenly everything becomes muddled again and I am beset by... a fatigue. A fatigue which is—I can't say almost unbearable, because nothing in the consciousness feels it to be unbearable.... For example, at five-thirty in the evening, after I've spent an hour and a half here with people, it's a labor to climb the stairs; and by the time I get upstairs, I feel strained to the breaking point. Then I begin to walk (I don't stop, I don't rest), I immediately begin to walk with my japa, and within half an hour, pfft It has lifted.29 It is really like a veil that is lifted up and falls back into place again, and it is everyone's veil. The little specimens do their job quite well; they give Mother exactly the difficulty or experience needed to find the solution (emotionally, we can be grieved or shocked, but that is a wrong view, the specimens are never any particular people: they are "thousands of people"). And the Harmony returns—the fatigue disappears instantly. As her filariasis had disappeared. As all the rest of the microscopic deaths disappear. It is really the key to death, in miniature. There, death no longer exists. There is no room for it, it cannot be—it is a Falsehood from the other side of the web. Then all of a sudden, for something quite stupid, a draft, a mere nothing, it forgets—it shrinks back into itself it gets afraid of disappearing, afraid of not being. And everything has to be started again from scratch.30 As soon as the body feels itself as "I," it has again entered the web. It becomes the reptile again. And one realizes that this condition of universalization is the bizarre condition to rediscover the pure functioning of a little cell, which is there, just a few inches below the surface. As if one could not be the true, pure little cell without being the whole universe! Then again the Harmony returned, for a few hours, and more frequently: I was walking in a kind of universe that was exclusively the Divine—it could be touched, felt: it was within, without, everywhere. For three-quarters of an hour, nothing but THAT, everywhere. Well, I can assure you, at that moment there were certainly no more problems! And what simplicity—nothing to think about, nothing to want, nothing to decide: to be, be, be!... in the infinite complexity of a perfect unity: all was there but NOTHING WAS SEPARATE; all was in movement yet nothing changed place. Truly an experience.31 An experience while standing, walking round her room with the mantra. Not an experience in meditation: an experience in the body. It is the body that feels, breathes, lives that—and while in that state, does that, spontaneously, because it is here and there and there, without separation. It is the Mind that makes the separation and puts everything in a box, and is later surprised it needs telephones and remote controls.
Mother fought on inch by inch, point by point—without really fighting; it was not a fight, it was a certain way of being in all this, with a sort of cry in the midst of that opaque web, a need for air, a need for light in the suffocation: I looked and saw the realm which is under the influence of thought—the power of thought on the body is tremendous! You cannot imagine how tremendous it is. Even a subconscious or sometimes unconscious thought acts and provokes fantastic results !32 You think of death: it is there. You think of fatigue: the body is tired—you think and everything is poisoned. And then everything became clearer and clearer, precise, as if the mechanics of Falsehood were being unmasked on every side, in every gesture, every encounter: the more "mistakes" you make, the more clearly you see. The mechanics gets heavier and heavier because you see it better and better. And you begin to be able to grasp hold of the mechanism: on one side, with this attitude, everything shifts toward Harmony; on the other side, with another attitude, everything shifts toward disorder. A minute alternation, faster and faster, from one state to another, through the thousand "stupidities" of daily life. And suddenly, Mother understood: I have a kind of certitude (not quite formulated in words: a certitude in sensation, in feeling) that once this microscopic work is completed, the result will be... almost like a thunderbolt. Because the Power's action through the mind gets diluted, qualified, adapted, altered, and so on, and how much reaches down here? While the day it acts through this matter, obviously it will be overwhelming.... 33 A direct power is needed! A power that would make itself felt directly, in other words, that would pass from cell to cell: vibrations of the same quality.... As though you were standing on the threshold of a stu-pen-dous realization that depends on a very small thing.34
If the web tears open, the whole universe is right here, instantly. The whole universe in a body, you could say. Not only that, but true Matter emerges, the lights of the cell emerge, the world of truth, the supramental world emerges and, through one body, begins to infiltrate the WHOLE body.
And Mother added, Its only when a modest work of this kind, a work of "local" transformation, so to speak, is completed and when there is the full consciousness with the full mastery of how to use the Force WITHOUT ANYTHING INTERFERING, that... it will be like a chemistry experiment you have learned to perform correctly: you can repeat it at will every time it's necessary.35
Mother kept looking at the big flame tree above Sri Aurobindo's tomb. It seemed She could see Sri Aurobindo more and more, better and better, as if it were that web, that veil that She wanted to wear away: what separated Sri Aurobindo from her body and from the body of the world, perhaps what separated Sri Aurobindo's abode from our abode here. In Sri Aurobindo's great epic, did not Savitri go fetch Satyavan from death?... Or is it death that She destroys, and the other side is here? You know, we are just on the frontier, on the edge: it's as if there were a semi-transparent curtain—one sees things on the other side, tries to grasp them, but as yet cannot. But there is such a sense of proximity! Sometimes, all of a sudden, I see myself as a formidable concentration of power, pushing, pushing, pushing in an inner concentration to pass through. It happens to me anywhere, any time, at any moment—I see a whole mass of consciousness gathered into a formidable power pushing, pushing, pushing to pass to the other side. When we have passed to the other side, all will be well.36
This was 1961.
The year of the first American space-voyage.
The conquest of another space, or the conquest of another species on earth?
Then came the great Turning Point.
It was March 1962. The beginning of the formation of a "new type" on earth, in a first terrestrial body, or perhaps the second, after Sri Aurobindo—but no one knew it at the time. Not even Mother! It was only in 1967, five years later, that Mother suddenly realized, "why, that is what happened in 1962!" And even then only because I was asking her questions. At the time, one knows nothing about it: it is just "a phenomenon that is taking place." Mother's Agenda is full of unlabeled "phenomena." Who would have noticed the new type Homo sapiens among the primates? Now we speak of "true Matter," but when you only see the first twinkling of light, what is it? Something twinkling, that is all. And when you faint with a bizarre sensation, the doctors take your pulse and give you Coramine200 for your heart. Would they have given Coramine to Christopher Columbus to cure him of America?
We are basically doing some pre-geography, or perhaps paleontology in reverse, before things become fossilized.
Then we will have to evolve another geography for another age.
There will always be a new geography of the same eternal world.
An Undulation
In fact, the phenomenon had started earlier than March.
Little by little, with "alternations"—sometimes hundreds of alternations in the same day, like a veil being lifted up and falling back again, or a door opening and closing according to... according to what?—Mother had reached a sort of corporeal transparency in which her own existence was nothing more than the existence of a particular ray that became aware of "something" whenever it got caught somewhere or met a screen. Sometimes the screen was still within on account of a rather acute pain that instantly made a "me" somewhere, but even then, there was a way of "stretching" that pain out, as it were, of flowing through it and dissolving it by not associating with it any reaction of "it hurts"—and it would go away whenever a particular thought of the physical Mind that made the "it hurts" went away. In any case, "me" is the pain. It is the great disorder. It is the cage. So the false sensations fell away, the false reactions fell away, the false "me versus others" fell away. But as we have said, it is microscopic, it slips back in again on a breeze, a stupidity, a mere trifle—a trifle which kept blocking and blocking up again a formidable new America.
All that made for a bizarre kind of state peopled only by more or less aggressive specimens (naturally everyone wants to take), and it somewhat resembled a nightmare in which at times there was still enough "me" to grow impatient with the nightmare: In the inner worlds of course, certainly! It's all very well, one is very happy living in those worlds. But it is here—HERE! How to make of this life here, this world here, something really worth living.... Haven't yet found the trick. That's all I can say. That's what I am up against.1 "But still," I replied, "here, in the physical life, there are quite a few beautiful things" (I did not understand then to what an extent Mother was seeking something else, something radically different for the earth, I was still dreaming of the virgin forest and sailing around the world), "there are adventures at sea...." Oh, such a trifle! she interrupted, It's nothing, childish. The physical life—yes, it's nothing at all (as it is now). All these things of the physical life—nothing at all, nothing at all! Its childish, not worth thinking about for a second. Even those momentary breakthroughs one can have in life before having found the Truth, when one is on the way and suddenly has glimpses of an immortal consciousness, the contact with a truth, even that.... These experiences are all very fine, it's very good, but it's on the way. It is not THAT. What is worthwhile is to seek the true SENSE of life: to what does it really correspond? What is there behind it all? Why has the Lord created it? What is He heading toward? What does He want? What does He want to happen? That, we have not found. What does He want! He obviously has a secret, and He is keeping it. Well, I want His secret. Why is everything the way it is? It's certainly not the way it is just to be the way it is—it's meant to become something else. And its this something else that I want.1 She so much wanted the beauty of this world and the sweetness and the truth of this world here. A true earth.
Even this "I want" was going to melt away. She was made to live the Secret, she was slowly taught the Secret in her own body—for ultimately what wants to know? It is the Mind that wants to know, the body wants only to live. Things had become absolutely "infernal" downstairs, in that corridor and at every door—sometimes She would go faint in her bathroom, the only quiet place to faint without causing a commotion. Then She would start again. But She did not faint from over fatigue (although fatigue there was, enough to crush a thirty-year-old man, but it was annulled or diffused, you could say): all of a sudden, She would simply go through everything to such a degree that her body escaped her, as if her body were no longer sufficiently hers, so it fell down... to remind her of its existence. It's a very impersonal sort of state in which that whole habit of reacting to outside things, the things around me, has completely vanished. But nothing has come to replace it. It is... an undulation. That's all. She went off into the undulation. When will it change into something else? I don't know. You can't, you just can't try! You can't make an effort, you can't try to find out, because intellectual activity immediately comes in, and that has nothing to do with it. So I have concluded that it's something one must become, something one must be and live.... But how? In what way? I don't know.2 You cannot try to become the new species! Because it is the old species that is trying with its super-old methods. There are no methods! You cannot try to become what is not (or apparently not); how could you do it? You can try to become a mathematician or a poet or even a yogi in the cosmic consciousness, but how do you try to do what is nonexistent? There's no path, nobody went there! So She lived that undulation, interspersed with abrupt returns to the cage.
The Double World
Yet it is in those returns to the cage that our secret lies. To speak of the other state is all very well, it is even rather fascinating—to look at Mother was an adventure, an inexhaustible adventure. It was new every time, as if you were entering the future beforehand—but that transition is the heart of the mystery. How does one get there, and why does one return to the old state again? Mother lived that sort of back-and-forth movement hundreds of times, for years on end, and She always came back to the moment of the transition from one to the other as if it were the great Mystery. Each time, her description was very similar (it is a minute little thing), and each time it was like an enigma. A minute little thing which seems to contain the whole mystery of the world. What is bewildering is the subtlety of the problem. Take absolutely identical circumstances... a few hours—not even a day—apart: the same outer circumstances, the same inner circumstances—the "psychological condition" is the same; circumstances of life, the same; events, the same; people, no appreciable difference. And in one case, the body—that is, the cellular consciousness—feels a sort of eurhythmy and general harmony, everything dovetails in such a marvelous way, without rubbing, without friction—everythin functions and organizes itself in a total Harmony.... Then in the other case... everything is the same, the consciousness is the same and... something escapes—the perception of Harmony is no longer there. For what reason? One doesn't understand anymore. And then the body begins to function wrongly. But note that we might just as well say the world is going wrong—it is the same thing. It is really the problem of the body of the Earth. It's like running after something that escapes. Things become meaningless. In absolutely identical conditions—even the movements of the body (functional movements, I mean) may be identical, but they are felt to be disharmonious (these words are much too crude, it's more subtle than that), meaningless, disharmonious. And what escapes? You can't make it out.... More and more I have the impression of—what? How can it be explained? A question of vibrations in Matter. It's incomprehensible, completely eluding all mental law, all psychological law: a self-existent something.... So many question marks! The more one goes into it in detail, the more mysterious it becomes.3 And Mother sat with her eyes closed as though listening to the pulsations of that Matter: what makes the world go wrong—for the Harmony is HERE! It's so subtle! Mother resumed, it could almost be.... It's almost like being on the border between two worlds. It's the same world and it's—is it two aspects of this world? I can't even say that. Yet it's the SAME world; ALL is the Lord, He and nothing but He, only it's.... And so subtle, so subtle: ifyou go like this [Mother tilted her hand slightly to the right], it's perfectly harmonious; if you go like that [She tilted her hand slightly to the left], oof! It's... it's at once absurd, meaningless, and laborious, painful. But it's the SAME thing! It's all the same thing.... If you stand back from it and employ big words, you would say, "All this [Mother tilted her hand to one side] is Truth, and all that [to the other side] is Falsehood"—but it's the SAME thing! In one case, you have the sense of being carried—not only the body but the entire world, all circumstances—carried, floating in a beatific light toward an eternal Realization; and in the other case, its... deadening, heavy, sorrowful—exactly the same thing! Almost the same material vibrations. And its so subtle, so incomprehensible—there's a distinct impression of it TOTALLY eluding even the highest conscious will. What is it? What is it?... If we found that, perhaps we would have it all—the total Secret.3
Two worlds in one.
A microscopic "something" that makes you tilt to this side or that. And Mother was very familiar with the microscopic battles: She spent her time in them. A breath, and you move to that side. It was almost as if She were going back to the obscure Origin. The moment when something tilted the wrong way in Matter (not in the head, the stupidity is plain there, but at the source, at the first moment). That must have been how Truth became Falsehood. But "how"—what is that "how"?... I am up against this fact: how did Truth become Falsehood ?3 How did it become death, you could say, that moment of death in the world. Death is not in the nature of the world, it is the false world we see, it is something... that became distorted—and that needs to be set right again. For the whole world. A cosmic "accident." I am not asking myself intellectually—that doesn't interest me at all! It is here, in Matter.... It is double, it is double.3 Oh, how long those words have been ringing in my ears and are still ringing: it is double, it is double.... HOW did it happen? (But not just "how" as in a story: the MECHANISM). And how will we get out of it?... with a sort of prescience I see that only the body can know—that's the extraordinary thing!3
If we knew that mechanism, we would get out of death. We would see Mother, we would see Sri Aurobindo, we would see the supramental world—because it is here, everything is here! It is not on the "other side"—the other side of what? It is double, it is double.... A veil of death over something which is the same. And which changes all life. It is the same world!
Obviously, one must seek in the body.
Mother was to seek. She wanted to UNDO the mechanism. Undo death.
What happened? Or what is happening.
She left, apparently. But Mother does not like flights, as we know.
Physical Universalization
She would live that "undulation," then again return to the painful cage, ten times, fifty times a day. Can it even be said that it was the "I" that made the cage? For quite some time She no longer had an "I"—an "I" in Matter, then? Perhaps.... We do not really know, we are walking through the forest with her. But sometimes, "the other thing" came and revealed itself, emerged from Matter—yes, it was there, and it was indeed the same world, it was not that She went into another consciousness (unless the body itself went into another consciousness: true Matter, perhaps, cellular Matter was emerging from behind its veil of inertia): The whole atmosphere became solid...4 That is what is so surprising, every time Mother touched the other thing, She said "the world is becoming concrete," as if it had been abstract before! As if before there really had been nobody in it, as if it were a copy of something: All, all had the taste of the Lord. I don't know how to make it clear. It was quite material, as if you had a mouthful of it, everything was full of it—it was like that. In such a physical way! Like.... You might compare it to the most delicious taste you could ever have—very, very material. It was like closing your hand on something solid—such a warm, soft vibration, and so strong, so powerful, so concrete!... It was as if I had a mouthful of the most marvelous foods one could imagine. And my hands were gathering it up in the atmosphere—it was so funny!4 But curiously, it seemed that approaching that cellular Matter—although it was there, right there, just below the surface—was accompanied by a kind of spreading of consciousness as if you were thrust... goodness knows where, perhaps to the furthermost bounds of the universe. A more and more rapid and encompassing undulation. Until the day in the beginning of 1962, just before the great Turning Point, when Mother fainted once again, but this time with a better perception of the phenomenon: This time I was alone in my bathroom.... For a long time my body had been telling me, "I've got to lie down, I've got to lie down." And I would very sternly reply, "You don't have time!" So then this happened. But it had its own way of lying down! It just stretched out right where it was.... I was spreading over the world—spreading PHYSICALLY, that's the strange thing! The sensation is in the CELLS. There was a movement of diffusion in me, becoming more and more rapid and intense, and then suddenly I found myself on the floor. And Mother laughed, then She went on to explain, It's a sort of... decentralization. You see, to form a body all the cells are concentrated by a kind of centripetal force that binds them together. Well, now it's just the opposite A kind of centrifugal force seems to be dispersing them. When it gets a bit too much I go out of my body; outwardly I seem to faint—but I don't faint, I remain fully conscious. So obviously this creates a sort of... bizarre disorganization.5
That was when they wanted to give her a dose of Coramine to cure her of the new world.
In the end, when She could no longer fight, She swallowed the Coramine anyway, because it made them happy. With disastrous results to her consciousness. A drug means of course an instantaneous veil over the cellular consciousness. It is the return of the possession by the physical Mind —in other words, the return of the possession by death.
But the problem was there, becoming more and more frequent and pressing: I constantly find myself facing this problem, which is utterly concrete, absolutely material when you're dealing with cells that have to remain cells and not vaporize into some nonphysical reality, and at the same time have to have a suppleness, a lack of rigidity, enabling them to widen indefinitely....6 To hold or withstand the crushing supramental Vibration, we must widen (it is "crushing" only because of our smallness and cellular clogging), and when we widen or lose the "center of coagulation," as She said, what happens? How can we live that?... It is probably always the same thing, it seems impossible because it has never been done, but if it is achieved once, we realize that only a tiny little "something" prevented it from being possible. At the very beginning, in 1959, it also did not seem possible for the body to withstand the "bubbling porridge" of the Supermind. The right method has to be found, that is all. Everything is a question of method. Only, it is the body that must find the method. Mentally, it's all very easy. abolition of limits set by the ego, indefinite expansion with a movement following the rhythm of the Becoming. Vitally.... But this body! It's very difficult, very difficult to do without the body losing its center (how can I put it?)... its center of coagulation—without it dissolving into the surrounding mass. Although, if one were in a natural environment, with mountains and forests and rivers, with lots of space and lots of natural beauty, it could be rather pleasant! But it's physically impossible to take a single step outside one's body without meeting unpleasant, painful things. 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.... But this material world, oh I—you get clawed and scraped and battered by all sorts of things which... 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.6 This is exactly what She had felt seventy-nine years earlier in her little child's chair, at the age of five.
Mother was looking for the something that makes this Matter shrivel up. That moment in evolution when things became warped. There is but one thing, one root, however we consider the "problem." A microscopic something that makes it the same world and yet no longer the same. It is wide; it is shriveled up. It lives; it dies. So where is the life that is no longer this life or this death, but is nevertheless Life? The true life.
It is double, it is double....
All the same, one must have nerves of steel.
The Great Pulsations
Mother was going to receive the answer through facts, as usual: a brutal answer. Nineteen sixty-two is the year of the Cuban crisis, of China's attack on the northern borders of India. Instead of "arranging" things, the Force (let us say the one that rules things and moves the world, the Shakti) was going to upset everything—a complete mess, in the body. But it seems that such is Her way of functioning, everywhere: Her way of putting things in order is to disorganize everything—evidently to bring in a new organization. But when it comes to the body... which no longer knows quite how to pulse, how to breathe? During the last meeting I was to have with Mother downstairs, before She withdrew to her room upstairs, never again to come out of it except to rejoin Sri Aurobindo under the big yellow flame tree eleven years later—another eleven years—Mother laughed a lot. In fact, She was making fun of me, and I was quite upset, but nevertheless, a little warning escaped her which should have alerted me, had I been less furious. First, She no longer wanted her words recorded: it's better not to waste the tapes. I tried to make her understand that her path could be of interest to the world later. Well, let's make a date for fifty years from now... Will you have a white beard in fifty years?7 The joke seemed questionable in the first place, but on top of it, Mother said that her Agenda had "no importance": If I make it through to the end, it will be done, WE'LL SEE. And if I go.... But I don't intend to. And She laughed, and I grated my teeth. Listen, she said, I can tell you: when I am like that, when I seem to be making fun of things, it's because at times it's really dangerous, really dangerous. I can't stand drama. I don't want to be tragic. I would rather make fun of everything than be tragic! Instead of putting on grand airs and saying it's difficult, I make jokes. I don't like drama—I just don't like it. The greatest, loftiest, noblest, most sublime things can be said with simplicity. There's no need to be dramatic, to see things tragically. I don't want to be a victim or a hero or... or a martyr or anything of the kind! You know, I don't like the story of Christ. That's exactly the point. The crucified god—no thanks. If he loses his skin, he loses it—so what, it doesn't matter. You understand? Well, that's it. That's precisely the situation.8
This was on March 13. Three days later, Mother could not take a step without "fainting"; not only that, but no mental vibration could go through her head anymore—that is, an appearance of complete imbecility: all the vital and mental strength was gone. There remained only a body... which could not remain standing alone. The body was a wreck, you know9 she said after, laughing. You must accept to be a total imbecile10—are you ready? she asked me later, *for I had enough *of the meanderings of the Mind and yearned for more radical ways. And I was ready, imbecility did not bother me that much, because the Mind seemed to me an imbecilic instrument in any case, except possibly for writing a book! (Although I discovered that a book could be written without the mind; I even had a sort of demonstration of how Sri Aurobindo did it when tens of thousands of lines were passing directly through the cells of his hands.) But I did not quite grasp the extent of the upheaval, and Mother wanted to spare me: Because of the number of years, I have had to do it quickly; that's why drastic measures had to be used.11 And we do understand the enormous crust that covers the body and prevents it from being itself: we cannot take one step without thinking or drawing upon vital strength—the body never functions by itself, except sometimes when the doctors declare it is lost and stop poisoning it, then it has its own "miraculous" way of recovering—it simply escapes the miracles of medicine and performs its own little natural miracle. But generally, the crust is too thick and the body cannot extricate itself from the collective suggestion. Mother was radically freed from the suggestion in order to learn how to live in a body left to itself. Mother was only a body, a sum total of cells... that had forgotten to live in the usual way. Then, after a month of this regime, her heart failed—even the heartbeats could no longer remember very well how to function—which, for a body, is akin to death. But then, from within that "death," a new kind of beat emerged, one could almost say a new body within the old, a new way of being, living, seeing, breathing, understanding and feeling. A new type on earth, really. The first embryo of a new species. Man has been accustomed to thinking that the beings of future evolution, of the next species will be... divine beings; that is to say, bodiless beings, appearing in the light, anyway all the gods in human conception—but it's not that at all!12
Indeed, it was not that at all.
The first signs of this radical experience took place during the night of April 12, 1962, when the old body was utterly failing. Mother could not use many words to tell what was happening, but when She was able to express herself again, She began to speak in English, as if Sri Aurobindo were controlling the process, and the words were brief: It was the formidable pulsations of the eternal, stupendous Love, only Love: each pulsation of the Love was carrying the universe further in its manifestation. This was going on and on and on and on.... The heavens are ringing with chants of Victory. And the certitude that what is to be done Is DONE and the Supramental Manifestation IS REALIZED...13 At that instant, it was done. The work of Sri Aurobindo and Mother was accomplished, as if this one pure contact with That, in an earthly body, had made the Work be. Perhaps much like the first time in the world when a mineral object came in contact with Life—or dissolved enough to allow the first stirring of Life to take place. Mother's body was half-dissolved. The new "something" came in contact with the earth. It entered a terrestrial body.... What entered? We have no words apt for what appertains to another species; Mother said Supreme Love, but it is merely what was there in the depths of the cells, free of any coating; and it was everywhere instantly: it was the whole universe. A pulsating universe, she was later to say. Without the mental and vital cage, the material universe was like one pulsation, one single beating thing: All the results of the Falsehood had disappeared: Death was an illusion, Sickness was an illusion, Ignorance was an illusion—something that had no reality, no existence.... Only Love, and Love, and Love, and Love—immense, formidable, stupendous, carrying everything.... And the thing is DONE. Then She added, this time in French, Later on, I will explain it more clearly. The instrument is not yet ready.... Now, let us get to work.14
Get to work to make that live in a body that is... capable. This "new" thing (It's nothing new! Mother exclaimed. What's new is the capacity to perceive the thing14), this something in the depths of the cells had to find the way to beat normally in a body. It was like creating a new body in the old one or using the old one as a support for the new. Mother's experience had nothing to do with any kind of cosmic super-vision blah-blah-blah as all the others had had on the summits of consciousness: it was the experience of her body, an earthly body, like everyone else's: It is made of exactly the same thing, with the same elements, I eat the same things, and it was made in just the same way. And it was as dull, as dark, as unconscious, as stubborn as all other bodies in the world.... It began when the doctors declared I was seriously ill, that was the beginning. Because the entire body was emptied of its habits and forces, and then, slowly, slowly, the cells woke up to a new receptivity.... In short, it is the cosmic consciousness of the body—its natural consciousness. For the animal to become a man, it didn't take anything else than the infusion of a consciousness—a mental consciousness—and now, it's the awakening of that consciousness which was there, deep down, in the very depths. The central light of the cell. And Mother said, It's a denial of all the spiritual assertions of the past: "If you want to live fully conscious of the divine life, leave your body—the body cannot follow." Well, Sri Aurobindo came and said, "Not only can the body follow, but it can be the base that will manifest the Divine...." The work remains to be done.'s They used to go far, far above, in deep meditation, into something more and more ethereal and thin and "marvelous," which made the world appear as an illusion—and indeed the crust of this world is an illusion: "Death is an illusion, sickness is an illusion," she said, but behind or beneath the crust, there is a corporeal, material and universal reality infinitely more marvelous and concrete—the true concrete—without death and disease and all our Ignorance, and yet it is an earthly life in a real earthly body: the true Matter. These material cells had to acquire the capacity to receive and manifest the consciousness [is it "receive," or simply remove what is standing in the way?] and what permits a radical transformation is that instead of an ascent which is so to speak eternal and indefinite [from plane to plane of consciousness, as all the yoga manuals for the last four thousand years recommend; and then you dissolve up above, at the summit], there is the appearance of a new type. The awakening of that consciousness which was there, deep down, in the very depths. The mind has withdrawn, the vital has withdrawn, everything has withdrawn; when I was supposedly ill, the mind had gone away, the vital had gone away, and the body was left to itself—purposely. And that's why, it's precisely because the vital and mind had gone that it looked like a very serious illness. And then, in the body left to itself the cells little by little started awakening to the consciousness... the consciousness which had been infused into the body through the vital (from the mind to the vital and from the vital to the body) started slowly, slowly emerging.... The same consciousness which was the vital's and the mind's monopoly has become corporeal: the consciousness acts in the body's cells. The body's cells grow into something conscious, entirely conscious. A consciousness which is INDEPENDENT, absolutely independent of the vital consciousness or the mental consciousness: it's a corporeal consciousness.... Then, out of that, once it has been thoroughly kneaded (there's no knowing how much time it will take), a new form will be born, which will be the form Sri Aurobindo called supramentalit will be... anything, I don't know what those beings will be called. What will be their mode of expression? How will they make themselves understood and so on?... There will certainly be stages in the manifestation with, perhaps, a specimen that will come and say, "Here is how it is." And Mother closed her eyes: One can see that.... Only, when man emerged from the animal, there was no way to record—to note and record the process; now it's quite different, so it will be more interesting.... Although Mother had some doubts: But even at this moment in time, the vast majority—the vast majority—of human intellectuality is perfectly satisfied being busy with itself satisfied with its little progress going round in circles.... It doesn't even, doesn't even have a desire for something else! Which means the advent of the superhuman being may well... it may very well go unnoticed, or not be understood. We can't say, because there is no analogy; it's obvious that if one of the apes, the large apes, had met the first man, he would just have felt there was a somewhat... strange being, that's all.15
In other words, the experience of 1962 is the first crossing of the veil, or of the web. The enormous web that conditions all our human existence in a body. The genetic and atavistic and millennial covering that blocks the working of a pure little cell. An evolutionary experiment as new as the first mental vibration in a piece of gray matter—which filled everything with grayness. It is the dissolution of the grayness of existence. It is the pure cell, directly expressing consciousness. Another world in the world. And when I asked Mother how her experience could in some way influence the earth, She exclaimed, But since it's taking place in one body, it can take place in all bodies! I am not made of anything different from others.15
Now to work. Mother is 84 years old. There only remained to "work out and create the instrument" capable of bringing that "other world" or true cellular mode into this one, to develop the new body, which could not even stand very well on its two feet—such are the eleven years that were left to Mother before coming to the Mystery of 1973, the real, great Mystery of this whole story which is perhaps the world's own Mystery. Eleven years in which the incredible ((process" unfolded, step by step, with all its changes of time, vision, space and sense organs: really the making of a new body. Until the year 1973, when something took place. Something happened... what? Perhaps the complete fusion of the two worlds. Sometimes we seem to understand Sri Aurobindo's "mathematical formula"... minus one unknown. There is an unknown.
Perhaps we shall find it at the end.
But now, Mother concluded, there is a certitude. The result is still very far—very far ahead, there is much to do before the crust, the outermost surface experience as it is, can manifest what takes place within (not "within" in the spiritual depths: within in the body). For it to be able to manifest what is within.... That will come last, which is very good because if it came earlier, we would neglect the work; we would be so happy that we'd forget to complete the work. Everything must have been done within, everything must be fully and thoroughly changed, then the outside will express it.15 Sri Aurobindo had said the same thing: from within outward.
The "outward" is perhaps the crust of the world.
In the end, it is nothing: one puff and it will be there. It is the rest that is difficult.
Perhaps we are very near to that puff.
And the veil will be torn.
Something wholly new, wholly unexpected, which they had never thought of.15
Now the forest is beginning to get very dense, and I must admit I feel a little lost. For eleven years, I was the witness of thousands of experiences; I traveled on and on into tomorrow with Mother, but how can one describe a whole world, how can a man, suddenly falling on the planet in Rueil-Malmaison, 100 describe all the rest of the world? Everything is new, from A to Z. So?... Where is the "right" experience, the one that counts? There is Chantilly101 and Hong-Kong and then Alaska and.... I landed in Mother's large room upstairs, with its immense bay windows opening onto a yellow flame tree and coconut palms, and sky everywhere. A tiny silhouette, white and all alone in her wheelchair. There were garlands of jasmine over the back of the chair; there was a big golden-yellow wool carpet, it was like walking on moss. And then those cool hands, almost cold, those eyes where everything seemed to plunge elsewhere, so much elsewhere, into the True thing as if you were breathing at last. You felt like resting your head there and never moving again from that intimate vastness, sweet and clear, so soft, where you sank deep as though into the love of your own heart, a love you did not know you had, as if you discovered another being in you, as if you had long lived in a caricature of yourself, and all of a sudden it was there, everything was changed, you laid down the burden and went off into your own millennia. One was lost to view in Mother, one went into a vast and sweet Country, forever known, and wished one could stay there forever.
"Now to work."... We are here to work, we are here to make that pass through to this side. Then everything will be full, every second will be full of all the millennia and all the vastnesses. More and more it was filtering into Mother, as if She had changed density since March. Before, you always felt a kind of coagulated Power near her, you were seized in a ray; now... it was something else. Yes, perhaps, as if the ray were everywhere: you were not seized, you went off in her. It felt like Sri Aurobindo. And yet it was powerful, tremendously powerful, but powerful as if it came from every side simultaneously, without any particular center: a bath, quite exactly. An immense bath in something that went off into infinity. And very soft. Cool like her hands.
The Great Rhythm
Her "illness" had left its mark, She looked so frail and so extraordinarily tranquil, that was what was so striking: nothing stirred in her body, She seemed transparent, things passed through her as if they went on to reverberate. who knows where, in infinity perhaps, or nowhere, engulfed within that snowy immobility. And She had her little mischievous smile as if She had just played a good joke on everybody, and there you found Mother again. She quietly narrated her latest adventures, that sort of universal pulsation (and I was suddenly reminded of the first time She had felt the "supramental descent" in 1956, there was "a sort of pulsation in the cells"): And it was like gusts—like great gusts ending in explosions. And each one of these gusts was a span of the universe. It was Love in its supreme essence—which has nothing to do with what people normally understand by that word.... The universe as we know it no longer existed; it was a sort of bizarre illusion, bearing no relation to THAT. There was only the truth of the universe, with those great gusts of color—they were colored—great gusts colored with something that is the essence of color.1 The whole creation was colored waves, but not like the colors we have here, it was... this endlessly unfolding creative Vibration.2 And I was wondering how it was possible, with that Consciousness, that supreme Consciousness, to relate to the present, distorted universe. How to make the connection without losing that Consciousness? A relationship between the two seemed impossible.3 "But did you go out of your body, or what? " I asked, because this kind of experience is quite possible when you climb above, in the cosmic consciousness. And Mother gave me a somewhat enigmatic answer (She did not understand the phenomenon very well herself): It can truly be said that for a short while the body went out of my consciousness completely. I didn't leave my body; the body left the consciousness.... Its the first time I have tried to explain it. In fact, it's the first time I am looking at it. And it's interesting. An interesting phenomenon.... For instance, I am walking a little now, with someone's assistance, to get the body used to it again. And when I started walking, I became aware of a rather peculiar state... I might describe it as: what gives me the illusion of a body. [And I quite understand now what Mother meant: to be one particular body felt like a kind of illusion.] I entrust it to the person I walk with. In other words, its not my responsibility: the other person has to make sure it doesn't fall, doesn't bump into anything—you see what I mean. And the corporeal consciousness is a limitless consciousness, like a material equivalent or expression of these gusts—it's like waves, but waves with no.... Not separate waves, but a MOVEMENT of waves; a movement of what might be called material, corporeal waves, as vast as the earth, but not... not round, not flat.... Something giving a great sense of infinity but moving in waves. And this wave movement is the movement of life. And the consciousness (the body-consciousness, I suppose) floats along in this, with a sensation of eternal peace.... But it's not an "expanse"—that's not the word for it. It is a limitless movement, with a very harmonious and very tranquil rhythm, very vast, very calm. And this movement is life itself I walk around the room, and that is what is walking. And it is very silent—there is no thought; there is barely, barely the ability to observe.... And an infinity of movements and vibrations of something that could be the essence of thoughts and that moves there, rhythmically, in a movement of waves without beginning or end, with a condensation like this [vertically] with a condensation like that [horizontally], and a movement of expansion. That is, a sort of contraction, concentration, and then expansion, diffusion.4 A pulsation. A pulsating "body" that would be everyone's body, that would be any body. If I spoke carelessly, I could now say "what used to be my body," although I know well enough it's still alive!5 And She laughed.
But how to make the connection between That and this? The world without a web and the world in the web.
The Battlefield
She knew painfully enough that her body was alive. Strangely, the only link or bridge between that "truth of the universe" and the old bodily substance, the old body, we might say, was pain: So I felt the pain: it was the first sign of individuality coming back. Other than that, there was nothing any more—no body, no individual, no limits. But it's strange, I have made a strange discovery: I used to think it was the individual who experienced pain and disabilities and all the misfortunes of human life; well, I perceived that what experiences misfortunes is not the individual, not my body, but that each misfortune, each pain, each disability has its own individuality as it were, and each one represents a battle. And my body is a world of battles. It is the battlefield.6 And suddenly, it dawned on me that that body, that little conglomerate sitting in a wheelchair, was, so to say, the only terrestrial bridge between that true Matter, total, ONE, which moved in an unbroken Harmony, and this old, opaque, divided and painful Matter—our bodies. She was on both sides at once, and it was as if, through her, in her, in that conglomerate, the pain of the world had to be conquered for the other thing to infiltrate. It was not "her" pain, it was the very screen of the world, that which prevents it from receiving and living that. It was through her old substance that that could percolate from one world into the other. What would we say about a fish breathing its first free oxygen, and its suffocation when it falls back into the water? And yet, if it does not fall back, if it does not suffocate with the others, what will build the bridge between the two? In a way, She was the site of the veil—yes, the site of the battle.
The place of junction. The ONLY sensation that remains in the old way is physical pain. And really, those points of pain... they seem like the SYMBOLIC POINTS of what remains of the old consciousness. Pain is the one thing I sense the way I used to. Food, for instance, taste, smell, vision, hearing—all that's completely changed. They belong to another rhythm. The whole story is a fairy tale.... And the only concrete thing left in this world—this world of illusion—is pain. It seems to me the very essence of Falsehood. But what feels it feels it very concretely!... I clearly see it's false, but that doesn't stop my body from feeling it—and there is a reason: it is the battlefield. I have even been forbidden to utilize my knowledge, power and force to annul the pain in the way I used to (and I used to do it very well). That has been totally forbidden. But I have seen that something else is in sight. Something else is in the making.... It can't be called a miracle because it's not a miracle, but it's something wonderful—the unknown.... When will it come? How will it come? I don't know. But it's interesting.7
A fairy tale for the whole world?
And Mother made this very little and... mysterious remark: It's not a body that suffers: it is suffering that suffers. Its a point. ...8 There is something dizzying in that little sentence. The very vertigo of the world. Perhaps it is better to leave it for the time being....
Then the experiences began multiplying as soon as her body began to recover. As if there were a regulating Wisdom, perhaps the very Wisdom of this totality of consciousness from which we are cut off in a mental body, because birds and animals are not like that, their bodies are not like that—perhaps we are the only real featherbrains! Their suffering is not at all like human suffering, except for those we have tamed and which are beginning to ape us: it is as if their suffering had no individuality, were not fastened and held tight to the mesh of a screaming and medical "I". Perhaps in them suffering does not like to suffer. But that is another story. Take this example: someone accidentally bumps me (it does happen) with an object or a part of his body. Well, it is NEVER something external: it happens INSIDE—the body's consciousness is much larger than my body...9 When there is a relaxation in someone, or when there is a tensing up, I feel it: something in me relaxes, or tenses up; but not "in me" here, like this (Mother in her armchair): in me THERE (Mother in the "other" person). It's becoming more and more like that. The reaction here [in Mother's body] isn't any more intimate than the reaction in others. And it's barely more perceptible: it all depends on the state of attentiveness and concentration of the consciousness. But the consciousness isn't—is no longer individual at all. I am positive about that. A consciousness... which is becoming more and more total. And now and then—now and then—when everything is "favorable," it becomes the Lord's Consciousness, the Consciousness of everything, and then it's... a drop of Light. Nothing but Light.10
Then the experiences started getting more severe, one coming upon the heels of the other, one could say, as though happening hour upon hour; how often I saw Mother suddenly stop, close her eyes as if She were plunging within, sometimes even groan like a child, then resume as if nothing had happened, except for her pallor—there was a key to find, a key for the whole world, for the pain of the world. It was not just a matter of swallowing the suffering of this one or that one, it was a matter of finding the mechanism, the vibration that undoes. To "undo" does not mean cure but put the True back into place, there where suffering does not exist.
And finally, the experience became very clear, brutally so, exactly one year after the experience of the great pulsations. It was April 6, 1963. I am conscious of the body, but it isn't the consciousness of this body (Mother touches her body): it's the consciousness of THE Body—it may be anyone's body. I am conscious, for instance, of vibrations of disorder (most often they come in the form of suggestions of disorder) in order to see whether they are accepted and have an effect. Let's take the example of a suggestion of hemorrhage, (I mention hemorrhage because it will soon come into the picture). Under the higher Influence, the body consciousness rejects it. Then begins the battle (all this takes place all the way down in the cells, in the material consciousness) between what we could call the "will for hemorrhage," for example, and the reaction of the body's cells. But it's very like a real battle, a real confrontation. And all of a sudden, there's something like a general issuing a command and saying, "What's this!"... You understand, that general is conscious of the higher forces, the higher realities and the divine intervention in Matter; and after trying to use the will, this reaction, that feeling of peace and so on, suddenly he is SEIZED by a very strong determination and issues a command—in no time the effect begins to make itself felt, and little by little everything returns to order. All this takes place in the material consciousness. Physically, the body has all the sensations—but not the hemorrhage, you understand. But it does have the sensations, that is, all the sensory effects. All right. Once the battle is over, I take a look and wonder (I observe the whole thing, I see my body, which has been fairly shaken, mind you), I say to myself "What in the world is all this?"A few days afterwards, I receive a letter from someone. In the letter: the whole story, the attack, the hemorrhage, how suddenly the being is SEIZED, the consciousness is SEIZED with an irresistible will, and hears words—the very words that were uttered HERE. The result: saved (he was dying), saved, cured.... I remembered my episode... and began to understand that my body is everywhere!! You see, it's not a question of just these cells here: it's a question of cells in, well, quite a lot of people, hundreds, maybe thousands.... It is THE body—this is not my body any more than other bodies it is seized with such things all the time! All the time, all the time, all the time, you know, they spring tip, brrm! pounce on it, brrm! from this side, that side, every which way. So I have to keep still, and then I start waging the battle.... But then what tremendous, prodigious power has to be *EMBODIED in the physical cells to withstand all that!...11
Twenty times a day She went through death.
She was embodying the other thing in the body of the world. All those miseries were the place of junction with the other thing, one might almost say the means of junction. It was not a matter of curing a little pain here or there, or even thousands of little or big pains, but of transforming THE pain—that pain may be seized by its own reality of love. Or, to put it more "scientifically," to replace this obscurity, this opaque point (and painful because it is opaque) by the luminous fluidity of true Matter: that pulsation, those great waves of Harmony without division. So that it may begin to twinkle everywhere.
Through the old painful Matter of her body, it was beginning to twinkle in the body of the world.
After the lesson was drawn from this story, suddenly something arose in the general body consciousness: an aspiration, something so pure, so sweet... so sweet... something like an entreaty that Truth and Light may at last be manifested here, in this. Not "here in this" (Mother touches her own body): it was everywhere. Then there was a contact—there was a contact—and a pale blue Light, very sweet, very bright, and an Assurance. It lasted only a second, but it was like a new chapter suddenly opening up.11
Only a contact—with WHAT IS THERE.
Then it will be the fairy tale for the whole world.
The Third Position
And by the same token, a whole big chunk of spiritual life collapsed. A big chunk of material life, too. Or rather, the collapse of that material wall or partition, that web, automatically and simultaneously brought with it the collapse of the whole terrestrial spiritual mode, as if one were the reverse side and the accomplice of the other—what will the materialists say when they learn that everything they loathe and refuse is their own lovely offspring? Yet that is what happened during that month of April 1962 (and probably before, but Sri Aurobindo said nothing about it).
Since man has been man, he has vaguely perceived, first in his sleep, then with closed eyes, in his "lost" moments (lost for the material life), all kinds of forces and influences which assumed one face or another, frightening or sweet, luminous or dark, threatening or beneficent; he has felt immense movements that carried him off to "heaven," like another kind of sleep within sleep, a luminous plunge, a radiant swoon from which one never fully recovers; sometimes he has perceived other mysterious movements, as if his own body or another body within this one were traveling, and he has found himself witnessing surprising scenes, which materially took place unexpectedly a few hours or a few days later; or else he has perceived over there, thousands of miles away, some earthly events, or some friends, some familiar landscapes, as if one could travel at will (though not yet completely) to any place in the world; he has perceived strange ill spells that brought all kinds of little ills to his life and around him, or exalting lights; he has received knowledge he did not know he had, information he had no idea of; and sometimes he has awakened cured without knowing how it happened (and other times ill without knowing why either). Through the centuries, he has systematized his knowledge, cultivated a sort of conscious sleep, cultivated meditations and transcendence, strange and not always happy powers. He has distinguished some planes of consciousness, some worlds, recognized some saviors here or there and many little devils everywhere. To navigate through this great mystery of the world, religions were convenient and reassuring, or else sorcerers, initiates—except for those who positively felt nothing at all. But perhaps it was only because they had thicker skins. Anyway, there were "thinkers," and even geniuses (and not necessarily baptized) who did feel "something" up above, such as a downpour of inspiration or a flow of music or "intuitions," some regions of revelation and vivid light—something that exceeded this little confined body and even exceeded its brain, as if the brain were only a receiver of something else. And then there were all those little animals around which behaved so infallibly, without even thinking about it(!), and what is "instinct" really? They say "God," they say the "Devil," they say "chromosomes," and the whole saintly or scientific lot. They have baptized and tamed everything with equations, Graeco-Latin terminology or holy water. And then they have made dictionaries or encyclicals depending on the particular taste or climate.
They have been going on with all that more or less comfortably—but....
There was a "but," just the same. They never really felt secure either on one side or the other. When everything was thoroughly "materialized," there remained the other side with its irrational surprises, and when they had thoroughly "spiritualized" everything, the other side brought them brutally back into the mud at the first occasion. And so the two went limping along, Matter and Spirit, like some unhappy couple unable to divorce and unable to get along, as if they were not on this side and that side, but were the two sides of the same Wall of incomprehension.
Well, it is that Wall that collapsed on April 13, 1962. And one does understand that it could only collapse in Matter, at the material and bodily level because that is where it is actually located. The division between materialists and spiritualists is not situated at the summit of human conscious thought, but in the cell. It is not a metaphysical division, it is a physical one. That is where the Wall is. And when it falls, there is no longer materialism or spiritualism, there is... something else. We could even say there is no longer Matter as we understand it or Spirit as we understand it, but something else. Something that is all ONE-but not ONE on the summits of thought (there is no thought left there!): ONE corporeally, cellularly, physiologically—and universally. Really another world, and yet the same. All now is changed, yet all is still the same,12 said Sri Aurobindo.
It is also one of the first things Mother told me, just one month after her experience: Through yoga I had come to a sort of relationship with the material world based on the notion of the fourth dimension (of the innumerable inner dimensions opened up by yoga) and on the utilization of this attitude and state of consciousness. Using this sense of inner dimensions, and through perfecting the consciousness of the inner dimensions, I used to observe the relation between the material and the spiritual worlds.... [Mother used to go out of her body and travel everywhere, on all the planes]. But now the whole use of the sense of the fourth dimension—along with all it entails—seems superficial to me! And so much so that I can't recapture it...13 But of course! The so-called fourth dimension had merged with this one! The sense had become something else. Mother no longer needed to close her eyes and meditate and ascend from plane to plane to meet some far-removed Supreme, She no longer needed to go out of her body to know what was happening over there, to act upon this one's consciousness or cure that other one, or go into the past or the future—it was all there. The body is everywhere! No more need to "sleep" as we do, or enter deep inside the consciousness: there are no more depths! The depths are outside, with eyes wide open and in all the cells of the body—over there is here, tomorrow is here, yesterday is here. And the Divine is here, it is all Him, there is only That. And not some kind of Divine that is an extension of the other side of the Wall—there is no more "other side": there is only a certain way of being, of breathing, which is the Divine. And we strongly suspect, now, that men needed those states of "sleep" and "trance" and "meditation" and ((concentration," simply to be able to get through the mesh of the physical Mind. When the physical Mind "sleeps," the cage opens up and everything is here. So it looks like the "other side" to us, a "dream," but it is only the other side of the physical Mind, the more or less hazy or distorted "dream" of the old body trying to recall what it saw and lived through the mesh. And now that the mesh has naturally come undone, in the body, in the cells of the body, there is neither "dream" nor another side nor "planes of consciousness" nor "worlds": all that belongs to the Mind's geography. Everything is lived, instantly lived. Everything is touched, we might say. The whole world becomes concrete, palpable, immediate. Everything is a single plane, a single dimension embracing all dimensions. We no longer need "visions" because everything is a lived vision, anywhere in time or space. It is ANOTHER world... in this world. But not "inside" this one: it is the true world that is emerging and the other is like a kind of distorted caricature, indeed a dream—that is where the dream is. We dream the world... scientifically.
And we have begun to realize that it is a nightmare.
For not only is the fourth dimension collapsing, but also the third—which goes with the fourth one. Both are unreal (not in the Buddhist sense of illusion, because Buddhist illusionism is yet another sort of illusion, an illusion of the illusion), both are visual delusions, one might say, or tactile, physiological, congenital ones, of the same reality that can be really and totally perceived only at the cellular level: The other world, the three-dimensional world, is completely unreal; but now that one... (the four-dimensional world) seems... how could I put it?... conventional to me. Like a conventional transcription opening a particular type of approach to you. And as for expressing what the other, the true position is like.... It is so far beyond any intellectual state that I can't manage to put it into words. I know the words will come, but they will come through a series of lived experiences, experiences I haven't had yet. Well, that's the state I am in. I can't say more. I would prefer to make some progress before saying anything else.13
This series of lived experiences will make up her whole new life for eleven years; it will be the slow process of joining the experience of cellular life, what we might call the consciousness of true Matter, with the experience of the old body in the old Matter; something had still one foot on one side and one foot on the other and a bridge had to be built between the two—not built intellectually: built physiologically. A new mode of being. Another "position." A new kind of body with new organs. At the age of 84, Mother was waking up with old, outer organs giving a false perception of the world and inner organs giving another kind of false perception of the world. It was as if She had to work out in her body the transition from the old three-dimensional world to the other one... rather like passing suddenly from fish to bird, in one and the same body.
And that is why it suddenly dawned on her in a concrete, material, physiological way that the scientific position could not provide the solution to the problem any more than the spiritual position could. It was not a question of one or the other, but of something else. You could no more build the new organs or the new mode of being and breathing by seeking it with false eyes through a microscope than by seeking it with other kinds of false eyes through meditation: I thought for a time, a very long time, that if Science went to its furthest possible limits (if this is conceivable), it would join up with true Knowledge. In the study of the composition of Matter, for example—by pressing the investigation further and further on—a point would be reached where the two would meet. But when I had that experience of passing from the eternal Truth-Consciousness [the universal pulsation] to the consciousness of the individualized world, well... it appeared impossible to me. And ifyou ask me now, I think that this possibility of Science pushed to its extreme limits joining up with true Knowledge, and this impossibility of any true conscious connection with the material world are both incorrect. There is something else. And more and more these days, I find myself facing the whole problem as if I had never seen it before...13 Because She was facing the problem in her body. It was no longer metaphysical, it was purely physical. The "other thing" is truly another thing. Not an improvement, a hyper-precision or even a glorification of the old: something different. Both paths [science and spirituality] may be leading toward a third point, and that third point is what I am at present... not exactly studying. I am rather in quest of it—the point where the two paths merge into a third that would be the true Thing." She told me this just one month after the radical experience. But in any case, if it could be absolutely total, objective, scientific knowledge pushed to its extreme limits would certainly bring you to the threshold. That's what Sri Aurobindo means. But he also says it's fatal, because all those who went in for that knowledge believed in it as an absolute truth, thus closing the door to the other approach. In this respect it is fatal. From my own experience, though, I could say to all those who believe exclusively in the spiritual approach, the approach through inner experience, that this—at least if it's exclusive—is equally fatal. For it reveals to them ONE aspect, ONE truth of the Whole—but not THE Whole. The other side seems just as indispensable to me, for when I was so utterly in that supreme Realization, this other falsified, outer realization was undeniably just a distortion (and probably accidental) of something EQUALLY TRUE. This "something" is what we are seeking. And perhaps not merely seeking—we may be taking part in the MAKING of it.... Something none can yet imagine, for so far it hasn't come into being. It is an expression yet to come.13
And Mother remained silent for a long time, bent over, as if listening to the future pulsating in her body. *This is exactly the state of consciousness I am living in now. It's as if I were facing the same eternal problem but... *FROM A NEW POSITION. These positions—the spiritual and the "materialist" (if you can call it that) positions—which consider themselves exclusive are inadequate, not only because neither one will accept the other, but because even accepting and uniting them both won't solve the problem. Something else is needed, a third position that isn't the result of these two but something still to be discovered, which will probably open the door to total Knowledge. Well, that's where I stand.13
A third position to be constructed in Matter.
Something that would be able to move with those great waves without vanishing everywhere. Something that could perceive itself in all other bodies without forgetting "its own" body on the way, live in any time without forgetting the present, express its perception through organs nonexistent as yet... and communicate with other bodies that have remained in the old rhythm without dying from the shock of them.
Something that could live outside death while remaining in a mortal body and in a world of death.
How can one, physically, pass through death?
Because all this is the consciousness of the body, a cellular consciousness—and what is left if the old body disintegrates? Even when conscious, the cells need a body to hold them together.
A new body?
Formed with what?
Or else, does the cellular consciousness have the power to transform the old body, as it transforms the caterpillar into a butterfly?
Indeed, Mother felt the urgency of the situation. The "race between transformation and Death" was becoming very concrete. The "construction" of the third position must take place in the body, it is not an intellectual position (and truly, all those intellectual complications of red versus white, all those dualities and "isms" become so puerile! One wonders how men can still live in that, when the Real Thing, the destiny of the world, the end of pain, the defeat of Death, are right there in a little cell). In the Mind, in the heart also and in the deeper being we have an immortal life, and as soon as the consciousness is the least bit developed, we can perceive the continuity of lives, recall past circumstances more or less accurately, see their extension into this life and the unfolding of the eternal story; but a body just decomposes, that is all. *You see, for our consolation we are told in every possible way that the work done isn't lost and that all this action on the cells to make them conscious of the higher life isn't lost—that's not true, it's absolutely lost! Suppose I leave my body tomorrow; this body (not immediately, but after a time) reverts to dust; then all that I've done for these cells is perfectly useless! Except that the consciousness will come out of the cells—but it *always does!...' "It is really during the Worker's lifetime that the thing must be done," I said. Yes, of course! It's before. Something has to enter here before. And I insisted: "Yes, it is in your body, through your body, that another form must be worked out. For after death, it is over." Consequently, it's a waste. On the physical level, it's a pure waste. The mind and vital are another affair, that's not interesting: we have known for a very long time that their life doesn't depend on the body.... I am speaking of the body, that's what interests me: the body's cells. Well, death is a waste and that's that. "Yes, the transformation must be done in one life. It is not for the next life, it is in one single life. The progress made by your cells will not be transmitted to another body—unless you evolve another body." That is to say, she answered, before this body dissolves, a new creation should be there.... a certain quality of cells should be able to allow the form to become different (the form can change, it changes all the time, it's never the same), but with the conscious interrelationships of the cells persisting. "But it's not impossible!" It's more than possible, she said, laughing, but we have to learn how to do it!1
That is how the "problem" presented itself at the time. But as for the "Transformation," no one knows what it is about, Mother did not know at all—how do you attempt to become something you know nothing about! What is that new body? A transformation of the old, or something else, another kind of unknown? The only plain fact is that these cells would have to create something else before decomposing, unless they found a way not to decompose. Indeed what is the crux of the problem in truth?... In Truth, that which is true is immortal; only Falsehood can die—our bodies are full of Falsehood and of rotting essence. But if these cells are true, purely true, purely light like the light that shines at their center, how could they possibly decompose? They cannot decompose. Any more than the soul can decompose—it is the same thing!. There is an opaque periphery that envelops the central light of the cell. And suddenly we wonder if it is not a completely false problem, if this Matter we see is not false, deceptive, illusory, an opaque covering over "something"—over a true world, a true body. And the whole comedy of death is then a real comedy: you simply lift the veil and you are, exactly the same, and the world is, exactly the same, but now true. We need not "transform" Falsehood: we need to let the Truth shine through. We need to lift the veil, to make Death disappear—that which makes for Death. And perhaps the work of the cells in Mother's body was not so much to transform themselves as to dissolve the veil, that which prevents things from being there, true, pure, immortal—as they are. The opaque periphery around the cells.
The periphery of Death.
But on a global scale?...
We really do not know, we can only follow the phenomenon.
The Two States
In fact, Mother, too, followed the phenomenon rather than "did" anything—She repeated the Mantra and went through all pains, one after the other. She was wearing out the World's pain. All depends on the capacity to go through the necessary experiences,2 she said. It is not something you "do" really, it is something you go through—and by the fact of going through it, of being able to go through it without flinching, the thing is done, automatically. Such was Mother's long journey, with an unutterable something taking place along the way.
A bizarre state, nevertheless. If indeed a third position were taking shape at all, it was doing so very negatively. Of course, the bird is very "negative" for the fish, at the beginning. You relate much more to the fish you are leaving behind than to the bird you are becoming, and most likely it is only when the fish is absolutely left behind that suddenly you realize: Ah! So this is a bird! To leave a body entirely, without leaving it... is difficult. Those eleven years constitute the most astonishing paradox ever experienced by the human species. The paradox of Mother is our secret—our next secret. All the habitual rhythms of the material world have changed.... The body had based its sort of sense of good health on a certain number of vibrations, and whenever those vibrations were present, it felt in good health; when something came and disturbed them, it felt that it was about to fall ill or that it was ill, depending on the intensity. All that has changed now: those basic vibrations have simply been removed, they no longer exist; the vibrations on which the body based its sense of good or ill health—removed. They are replaced by something else, and something else of such a nature that "good health" and "illness" have lost all meaning!3 But it was not only good health or illness that seemed to topple into something else (although for the body it is an important basic element: its functioning is based on that), it was all of life that was strangely toppling into something that no longer felt like "life" and yet, apparently, was not death, as if life and death were another pair of accomplices with a third... indefinable meaning. This "indefinable" is quite all right for the intellect, which, after all, can very well fail to "define" without dying from it, but the body! A body that no longer knows its own definition.... And with that sense of humor that never left her, one day in June 1962, Mother suddenly exclaimed: It has reached such a degree that if I had no regard for people's peace of mind I would say, "I don't know whether I am dead or alive." Mother was to make this remark dozens of times in the years that followed, more and more often and in an increasingly intense way, as it were. And it seems that the whole Secret is there, in that something that is no longer "life" and not "death"—truly a third position. Because there is a life, a type of life vibration that is completely independent of... No, I'll put it another way: the way people ordinarily feel life, feel that they are alive, is intimately linked with a certain sensation they have of their bodies and of themselves. If you totally eliminate that sensation, the type of relation that allows people to say "I am alive"... or "I am not alive", the distinction NO LONGER EXISTS. Well, for me, it has been completely eliminated. That night [of the "great pulsations" in April 1962], it was definitively swept out of me. It has never come back. It's something that seems impossible now.4 And indeed for eleven years Mother's life was something absolutely "impossible." So what they mean by "I am alive" is... I can't say "I am alive" the way they do—it's something else entirely. But really, if I let myself go one step further I would say that I was dead and... have come back to life. And moreover, not "come back" to the same life: come back to something else. It has been a sort of death, that's for sure—sure, sure, sure—although I don't say so, because.... After all, one must have some regard for people's common sense!4 And for eleven years, Mother never said anything (and now we well understand why Sri Aurobindo did not speak, we understand and will understand it better and better, for the whole story is absolutely "impossible"): Better not keep this—in the end they'll be worrying about my sanity! And She laughed. I feel like an egg that has yet to hatch—I mean a certain period of incubation is needed, isn't it?4 The incubation lasted until 1973. What happened in 1973 when She left this so-called life, which was no longer life, to enter that alleged death which was not death either? But of course, She was no longer "alive"—and had not been for a long time! And of course, She is not dead! You only die from this life.
So where is She?
And all this concerns a bodily consciousness, you see, it was not her mind that dreamed of immortality: it was her body that lived otherwise, perceived otherwise, walked otherwise and was... in something else. What is that "something else?" That other bodily, material thing. Another state of Matter in Matter?
As Mother said, there is no lack of question marks! And the reader should not think that I know the Secret but am hiding it up my sleeve—I do not know it at all! It is as if Mother, from the other side of the veil, wanted to make us discover it step by step; and this discovery would be the prelude, or perhaps the beginning of.... I dare not say. Indeed, we shall see.
Perhaps the "Hour of God" Sri Aurobindo spoke of.
Mother stammered out the third position: You get such a feeling of power, so tremendous, so FREE, so independent of all circumstances, all reactions, all events—and it doesn't depend on whether the body is this way or that. Something else.... Something else.... And she added: Only one thing depends on the body: speech, expression... who knows?..4 And Mother sat gazing in front of her, into the future. I wonder if this "who knows" then was not watching this pen trying to stammer out Mother's Secret? Ah, that's enough for today!4 And She broke off, laughing.
A corporeal life independent of the body?
But then what body?... A kind of Matter we do not know. Perhaps a Matter that is in the process of being unveiled. It is twinkling everywhere, you see.
All the same, I wanted to know more about it. If there was no longer "good health" or "illness" (and perhaps no longer "life" or "death"), then what was there, what was She feeling?... She went gropingly into the new sensation that was to become increasingly explicit with the years, but certainly, it is very "microscopic" in the beginning, there are no "miraculous" phenomena—our concept of miracles is completely beside the point; the miracle is microscopic, it lies in the cells. But if a little cell starts behaving differently from its human genetic program, it is a much more formidable miracle than flying in the air! It is exactly the beginning of another species. Now, there is the sense of an established harmony among the cells, increasingly established among the cells, which represents the right functioning, whatever that may be: it's no longer a question of a stomach or a heart or this or that...5 There is Harmony, and there is the old mortal state, in which you feel you have a heart or a stomach, etc., which may very well "malfunction" or "function well," as they say. If you listen to these heartbeats, then you can be sure of getting myocarditis. We must stop listening to that, we must listen to the other thing. If we listen only to the other thing, then everything is naturally well, even if the heart seems to go off into fibrillations. Still, there is the habit of listening in the old way; this habit in every nook and every gesture is precisely the whole difficulty of the transition. And the slightest thing that comes and disturbs that harmony is VERY painful.... Mother's typical euphemism to say that you feel you are dying in the old way—if you feel it too much, you actually die. But at the same time there is the knowledge of what to do to reestablish the Harmony instantly; and if the Harmony is reestablished, the functioning isn't affected.5 To speak concretely, it means that Mother had dozens of heart attacks or other illnesses—little daily flash-deaths—so that She could learn the mechanism of the "right functioning." She was learning the lesson of Harmony. And if the Harmony is reestablished, the functioning isn't affected. But if out of curiosity, for instance (it's a mental illness in humans), you start asking yourself, "What's that? What effect will it have? What's going to happen?" (what the body calls "the desire to learn"), if you are unlucky enough to be that way, you can be sure that you'll have something very unpleasant which, according to the doctors (according to ignoramuses), becomes an illness or disrupts the body's functioning. While if you don't have that unhealthy curiosity and, on the contrary, will the Harmony not to be disrupted, you only have to, we could say poetically [and Mother had her mischievous little smile], bring one drop of the Lord on the troubled spot for everything to be fine again. And Mother added: The body is unable to know things in the way it did formerly.5
To sum up, the body had to forget a whole world in order to learn the new world.
So there is a period when you are in suspense: no longer this, not yet that [No longer the fish, not yet the bird.], just in between. It's a difficult period when you have to be very quiet, very patient, and above all—above all—never become afraid or irritated or impatient, because that's catastrophic. And the difficulty is that from all quarters and without letup come all the idiotic suggestions of ordinary thinking: age, deterioration, the possibility of death—illness, dotage... decay. It comes all the time, all the time; and all the time this poor harried body has to remain very quiet and not to listen, preoccupied only with maintaining its vibrations in a harmonious state.5 It was Mother's eternal problem—perhaps the only problem: the little specimens surrounding her constantly pouring their suggestions or anxieties upon her—well intentioned, but nevertheless deadly. Mother's difficulty was not death, but others' thoughts of death. Nobody ever understood that. But it was probably part of the general Work because, after all, the veil had to be lifted for everyone and in everyone, otherwise what? The "opaque periphery" began right there.
The Deathless State
Slowly, cautiously, Mother was made to tread sweeping circles, and I realize that all these microscopic experiences were tending toward a certain point, or an almost imperceptible moment that links one state we call "life" to another we call "death." She was being taught the mechanism of death. Death is not sensational, it is something very small, minuscule, which makes you tip over—it is in life we must catch hold of the little death-trigger, in those few seconds of the passage: a borderline moment which is as if on both sides at once. The sensational fact of the corpse is only the magnification or end result of an imperceptible little slip that takes place at any time, in the midst of the best possible state of health. Dozens of fleeting experiences that seem to yield the key, then go away, come back again and disappear; each time you are left more perplexed, each clarification reveals another mystery.... Mother went gropingly into Death. She was not afraid, She was never afraid. We know a number of fearless human beings capable of heroism, but these minuscule, staggering pitfalls require a sort of fearlessness on a second's notice, in the cells of the body: nothing must stir there. "Equanimity" takes on its absolute meaning here. And everything seemed to revolve around that transition from the state of Harmony to the other, the state common to everybody, which Mother sometimes called the Disorder (but in fact our whole world is in a state of death; only it dies more or less swiftly. Even its "order" is as deadly as the rest, even its "good health" is as deadly as anything else; so basically it is a transition from the state of Harmony to the old, ordinary evolutionary state). A "Harmony" that obviously has very little to do with what we normally mean by the word—animals would understand better what it means, but the minute they would be able to understand, it would be spoiled instantly! That was what happened to us. This state of Harmony is in fact the supramental state. We must get out of the state of mental "understanding," which, truly speaking, understands very little (it individualizes or encages more than it understands), so that we may enter the total super-understanding that "understands" because it is the object it seeks to understand—and it does not even need to want to understand: it simply is, so automatically it knows. And because it knows, it acts automatically, unerringly. It is Harmony. Oh, nowadays I constantly make a distinction between (what shall I say?)... the straight-line, right-angle life and the undulating life. One life (a choppy one) I might describe like this: everything is sharp-edged, hard, angular, and you're constantly bumping into things; and then there's an undulatin life, very sweet, with a great charm—very charming—but not... not too stable. [Indeed, Mother was none too solid on her feet at that time.] Strange, it's a completely different kind of life.... The art of letting oneself be carried by the Supreme, within Infinity. But it is within the Infinity of the BECOMING. And with none of the harshness, none of the shocks that are ordinarily experienced in life. The art of letting oneself be carried by the Supreme within the Infinite Becoming.... Whatever comes from here [Mother touched her forehead]... it's all harsh, dry, crumpled up—it's violent, it's aggressive. Even goodwill is aggressive, even affection, tenderness, attachment—all of that, it's all terribly aggressive. Like the blows of a stick. All mental life is harsh, actually.... That's it, that's what we must catch hold of—a sort of cadence, a wave movement, and it has such vastness, such power! It's tremendous, really. And it doesn't disrupt anything. It doesn't displace anything, it doesn't clash with anything. And it carries the universe in its undulatory movement—so smoothly!... This sense of not existing, and that the only thing existing—I mean, what one customarily calls oneself—is something that grates and resists.6 What Mother called the "coat of thorns." The old obsolete species.
And She closed her eyes, and the little drops of words came like pearls from far, far away, as if they had to cross the reaches of space: At every moment, if I stop talking or listening or working, at every moment, it's like... great beatific wings, as vast as the world, beating slowly.... A feeling of immense wings—not two: all around and stretching out everywhere. Constantly, night and day. I participate in it only when I am tranquil. But it never leaves me. The wings of the Lord.7
And let there be no mistake about it: it is not a "poetic" state, it is a very practical (to say the least), bodily state, the very state that gently set little Mirra down on the flintstones at Fontainebleau. Yogis are very familiar with this power, they call it laghima: the power of lightness. Only here, it was not a "power," it was the natural state of the body. But Mother was not about to "perform miracles" and fly in the air. She was looking for something far more serious, which is the key to the true life—the something in which Death no longer is. And naturally, in that "undulatory" state, Death no longer existed, you could not die there, it was a sort of state "without wear and tear," Mother said. There was no friction, everything flowed through the body. And then rest—not a stiff and stony and stagnant rest, a rest within the undulation.... You let yourself float.8 And suddenly, I remembered the words Mother had told me in 1959, which at the time had seemed quite enigmatic: we must achieve a deathless state.9 Not immortality, which indeed seems quite puerile to me—for why would anyone want to remain a thousand years in the same old carcass—but a state endowed with such plasticity that it can alter the form imprisoned in its rigid cage—truly speaking, death is rigidity. The deathless state, she said, is what can be envisaged for the human physical body in the future: it is constant rebirth. Instead of again tumbling backwards and falling apart due to a lack of plasticity and an incapacity to adapt to the universal movement, the body IS UNDONE "FUTUREWARDS," as it were.9 It is luminous! Suddenly I understood the real meaning of the undulatory movement... the body is undone but forward. Yes, but you must still keep standing on your feet! It is the transition to the new species that is difficult. How do you "undo" yourself without undoing everything? Mother was learning the transition from the true Movement to the false movement (the one we normally live in, which is ultimately the movement of death), and vice versa, from the mortal state to the deathless state: Its like going from something crisp, precise, defined, into something soft, mellow... soft, transparent and oh, such a peace.... As if nothing in the world could resist that peace." We will indeed discover that this "peace" as well as the "undulation" have very astonishing and "miraculous" properties, but a microscopic kind of miracle that is the very miracle of the world compared to which all the powers of flying in the air are the trifles of mere mortals—nothing resists that, not even death. Death cannot be there. And I am reminded of the cyclone that could not enter Sri Aurobindo's room. Only we must find out that true Movement in the little details of everyday life; we must construct the bird inside the fish, establish it there very gradually, as it were, so that this old Matter may get accustomed and withstand the Movement without vanishing into thin air or becoming "undone" too abruptly. Looking at it in the ordinary way, externally, superficially, you might say there has been a great deterioration [in Mother's body]; well, the body doesn't feel that way at all! What it feels is that a particular movement, effort, gesture or action belongs to the world—this world of Ignorance [i.e., the world of death]—and isn't being performed in the true way: its not the true movement, done in the true way. And its sensation or perception is that the state I was speaking of soft, unctuous, with no angles, has to develop along a certain line and produce effects on the body that will make true action possible, action expressing the true will. With no difference on the surface, perhaps (I don't know about that yet)... but done in another way. And I am not talking about grandiose things, but of everyday activities, of each minute: getting up, walking, taking a bath.... There is another way to be found. But not "found "with the head, it's not like that.... A way that is somewhere in the making.
It is our third position. The state that is neither Matter as we know it nor Spirit as we conceive it, neither good health nor illness, neither "life" nor "death." The next state of bodies.
And we well understand why Mother said, "I don't know whether I am dead or alive!"
Then She added, laughing: It has come to the point where as soon as I change states I get the feeling that the body is sitting on jagged chunks of wood... and yet it is very comfortably ensconced on feather cushions! But the sense of time completely disappears into... into an inner immobility. But an immobility in motion!... If it keeps on like this, they will put me in a padded cell! I still hear her laughter like a little girl's, so clear, so amused: how funny it is!
Strange,10 she concluded.
The Wrong Position
The little vertiginous experiences were multiplying—an I think of Sri Aurobindo, seated there in his big green armchair, and of everything He must have borne and suffered, surrounded by such a total incomprehension. I do not know if the earth has ever seen so absolute an example of self-effacement. He said nothing, not a word; He answered their thousands of stupid or pretentious questions, and He lived that little death; He even let himself die without breathing a word of what He was doing for the earth—He wanted to do it, that is all. No one ever knew anything. If that is not love, then what is it?... But for all times and throughout all space, there is a great Vibration called Sri Aurobindo and which opens infinite treasures to those who love the Truth, even down to their body and in their smallest gestures. There is a secret of Matter, a secret for living in a body, a tiny and formidable secret. Mother knocked at the small doors, at all the doors, each breath of her life from 1950 on had no other purpose than to find out, to do—to wrest Sri Aurobindo from that Death, or rather to wrest the something that veils him, uproot Death from the world, and He will be here, and the world will be true. What is Death? What is it?... We are completely misled by the corpse—death comes earlier. When is it? When does it start? Where is it? Where is the root of death?... Mother was in that great rhythmic Consciousness, the consciousness of her body was flowing in it, inexplicably, as if of one movement with the body of the Earth—as if it were the body of the Earth itself. There, no death was possible, it was the deathless state, but that which boxed this body in, the shell holding all these cells together, this something that was so false and mortal but which nonetheless held that non-death, held that immensity—otherwise everything would simply have vanished into the great Indistinctionhow can we make it participate in the other, shell-less state? What impedes? The very thing that makes up death is what impedes, but what makes up death? Where is death?... Mother was going from the small body to the great Body, from death to the deathless state—it is a sort of paradox, it seems we must die in order no longer to die.... And what is it to die?
Once again, Mother had just gone through a violent little operation: It always feels as if something wants to tear the life out of the body. For three days it's been battle, battle, battle.... You see, there's no longer the slightest feeling of being "ill" or anything like that.... It's a strange sensation, a bizarre perception of both the true functioning and the functioning distorted by the sense of being an individual body. They're not even... you can't even say they're superimposed, they're almost simultaneous, and that's why it is so hard to explain.... As if the consciousness were pulled or pushed or poised in a certain way, and then, those malfunctionings instantly appear—not as a consequence: I mean the consciousness becomes AWARE of their existence. There is a fugitive secret here in this "becoming aware." And if the consciousness stays in that position long enough, there are what we conventionally call consequences: the malfunctioning has its consequences (tiny things, such as physical discomforts, for instance). And if through (is it yogic discipline, is it the Lord's intervention?... Call it what you will)... but if the consciousness regains its true position, the consequences cease IMMEDIATELY.11 And little by little the experience was to become so radical that Mother would discover that incurable or chronic or even fatal illnesses could be cured or dissolved in a second (the filariasis is a case in point): It's like inverting a prism,12 she said, as sudden, "miraculously" sudden as that, by the single fact of the true position being regained—it was really as if illness did not exist in a certain state and existed again in another state. Sometimes, though, it's like this [and Mother moved the fingers of her right hand back and forth through those of her left very rapidly], in other words, this way, then that, this way, then that... this position, then that position, this one, then that one. This movement takes only a few seconds [like going from life to death, or rather from death to life—we always confuse the direction—in a vertiginous back-and-forth movement], so I can almost perceive the two functionings simultaneously. That's what gave me the knowledge of the process, otherwise I wouldn't understand; I would simply think I am falling from one state into another.13 Oh!... but then it is not at all an "illness" followed by a "cure," it is something else; there seems to be a formidable secret here. That's not it, it's just.... The substance, the vibrations, everything is probably following its normal course, you see, and all that is really changing is the way consciousness perceives things. So pushing this knowledge to its limit—that is, applying it generally—life (what we usually call "life," the physical life of the body) and death are THE SAME THING, SIMULTANEOUSLY... it's just that the consciousness moves back and forth, back and forth. I don't know if I am making myself clear. But it's fantastic.13
It is absolutely fantastic. Life and death are simultaneous. It is not life, then death. It is not illness, then a cure. It is the same milieu of something, and in this same milieu the consciousness shifts from one position to another, from a true position to a false position. But then where is death? There is no death anywhere! Or else it exists at the same time as life, everywhere, and we go from a false position of consciousness to a true one. Death is a hardened and inveterate phenomenon of consciousness, one might say, a chronic state of false consciousness. But there is nothing in the life substance that is death. There is no "I have cancer, I have tuberculosis"; there is "I have a false position of consciousness, which produces cancer, which produces tuberculosis, which produces death." We can eliminate every conceivable illness, for not one of them is true; there is only a true consciousness and a false consciousness. There is only an illness of consciousness, a death of consciousness. And all the non-miraculous miracles are there from the minute you restore the natural, i.e., the true position. In one second, the filariasis disappears—it does not exist. In one second, you sail through Parkinson's disease, it does not exist. Death does not exist. There is no physical germ that causes death—there is no germ whatsoever. If you are in the wrong position, you can die from anything, a scratch or a draft, because the wrong position is what causes death. That is the only germ.
Mother said one becomes "aware" of the wrong functioning—one becomes "aware" of death—meaning, it comes up all of a sudden in the midst of the "normal" course of life. It is not that it was there and then you notice it: noticing it means that you have moved into the false position, so automatically, instantly there is illness or death. It is not "another" physical state: it is the same physical state, but pure, with another state of consciousness. We do not fall ill: we fall into the false position, and death is there. We become aware it.
Two positions that exactly mark the passage through the web: one is out of the web, one falls back again into the web; one is in the new species, one falls back again into the old species. The whole experience of this back-and-forth movement is the passage through the web.
But the web is on the cellular level.
That is the opaque periphery.
*And this experience comes with examples just as concrete and as utterly banal as can be. For example (it's only *ONE example), this sudden shift of consciousness takes place (something imperceptible, you can't perceive it, for ifyou had time to perceive it, I suppose it wouldn't happen), and... you feel you're going to faint, all the blood rushes from the head to the feet and: whoops! But if the consciousness is caught in time, it doesn't happen; and if its not caught in time, it does. This would tend to show... I don't know if we can generalize or if this is just one special case being worked out, but there's a very distinct impression that what ordinary human consciousness perceives as death might simply be that the consciousness hasn't been brought back to its true position fast enough. I am quite aware that all this must seem confusing; I can feel how inadequate the words and expression are for describing the experience. Perhaps it means we are drawing closer to the knowledge of the thing—by knowledge I mean the power to change it, of course. If you have power over something, it's because you know it; "knowing" a thing means being able to create it, or change it, to make it last or cease to be—in other words it is Power. That's what "knowing" means. All the rest is explanations the mind gives to itself And I can feel that something is leading me toward the discovery of that Power—that Knowledge—naturally by the only possible means: experience. And with great care, for I can feel that...13
So the only remaining question: what creates the wrong position?
But it is quite phenomenal... if we really look at it. And what if we became un-aware of Death?
If we really and physically realized that it does not exist... it would no longer exist. There is something twisted, false, distorted that causes the perception of death and through its perception creates and engenders death and the whole blessed sequel. But Death is nowhere, it is at no point in physical space and at no point in the physical body.
It is our perception that is deadly.
Where is the root of that particular perception?
But the problem is no longer that of changing something in Matter to prevent it from being mortal: there is something to be changed in the consciousness. It is purely a phenomenon of consciousness. Nothing is preventing this body from being immortal, nothing is preventing this world from being true—they already are true, already immortal, except for a certain perception clinging to them and covering them, which makes a tragic simulacrum of a glorious reality.
There is obviously a cage that creates the deformation.
There is a deadly cage.
A web.
But Death is dead.
There remains to "elaborate" cautiously.
And I now recall, with a kind of dizziness, those words of Mother just two years before the Mystery of 1973: I am on the way to discovering... the illusion that must be destroyed so that physical life can be uninterrupted.14
Dying to Death
You could say that birds live in a perfectly natural state but they die just the same—does death really exist for them? To notice death, an "I" is necessary in relation to which death exists, there must be an "I am dying" or "I am going to die." This is our unhappy lot (momentarily). But there is a fact of death, a stiff little body in a wheat field, and you could say that if the bird's consciousness were always in the true position, death should not exist: i.e., the corpse. Hence, somewhere death exists, even if it is felt quite differently from the way we feel it. I think that in terms of the evolutionary process, death is really no more fundamental than the external gills of the frog: death evolves, like life, it is an evolutionary device like thousands and millions of others; a moment comes when the frog no longer needs its external gills nor the caterpillar its cocoon. Up to a certain point, life needed death to break the old stagnant forms—in reality, to break the incapacity for perpetual self-development: the incapacity to progress automatically caused death. Life had millions of lives to progress with, it never died—it started to "die" with the "I" am dying. With man in his cage. That is to say, a corner, a tiny corner of life, became aware of the "I die," all the while knowing that life continues perfectly. This particular "I" is the whole mystery of the evolutionary transition from an apparently mortal individual to an individual who has acquired enough "I" to include others and the rest of the world in it, and thus no longer has any need of death—that evolutionary device—to develop in accordance with the universal rhythm. The goal of evolution is total consciousness, just as the goal of the seed is a total tree. And naturally, a form better and better adapted to the suppleness and beauty of that total Becoming. Death no longer has any reason to exist once it is replaced by another means of progress: it atrophies, it must atrophy, like a useless limb. As a matter of fact, that is what happens at all the levels of an individual human being from the moment he breaks through his own limits: a mentally conscious individual (not a parrot with a degree or one who forever repeats what he has seen and read and heard according to the old chromosomic and cultural rut, but a being conscious of the universal Mind, who has an independent mental life) does not disintegrate mentally after death, he keeps the acquired dynamism, the special form of his mental life, the imprints and memories of this life, which he carries over into another life, such as certain predispositions or spontaneous openings, certain particular talents or difficulties. This is a plain and concrete fact for all those who are a little conscious, and millions of unconscious people may deny the fact without changing it one iota! The caterpillar may forever deny the butterfly—but the caterpillar will become a butterfly one day or another. The same holds true for the emotional life that is sufficiently universalized, that has sufficiently broken its little circle of feelings to include things beyond the mere genetic circle: disintegration does not take place—one again finds the beings one truly loved and one pursues a common work. But there remains the little corpse that has never yet become a part of the universal consciousness—and as long as there remains a scrap of death somewhere, the tree will not be complete. The body is the complete proof.
We are at the stage of evolution where, thanks to the "I," we have been able to bring the body to an awareness of its own death—to be conscious of the obstacle is already the means of overcoming the obstacle (indeed the only obstacle is not knowing where the obstacle is); and where, because of this same "I," we cannot extricate ourselves from death. A transition in which the former means becomes an obstacle, just as the very qualities of the reptile were what prevented it from flying. The qualities of the old species are the obstacles for the new species. That is the whole story of evolutionary transitions. But if the proper conditions are present, death has to evolve like the rest: either go out of evolution or change into what it is hiding.
That is the whole study now under way.
In the "true position" death no longer exists. Only, the entire body has to know it: when the body is wholly true, it will be wholly outside death. Indeed only Falsehood dies, being the very essence of Death. What is true does not die, at any level whatever, not even at the bodily level. And what is Falsehood in a body? The Falsehood is the cage. The "I-am-all-alone-in-this-little-body-separated-from-the-world-and-others." It is the cage that makes up death. We must become "undone forward," Mother said. And it is the unprogressing cage of the bird or any stagnant species unable to get out of its two wings or four paws or fins that makes up death. It is another type of cage than our own. It is not the same death. There is no such thing as "death": there is but a certain phenomenon of life that has to make a detour in order to still continue living and continue developing because we tend to enclose it. Fundamentally it is not a cellular phenomenon: it is a phenomenon of life flowing wrongly. Death is not the opposite of life! Mother exclaimed after one of her experiences. At that moment I understood, and I never forgot: death is NOT the opposite of life, it is not the opposite of life.15
But the mystery is much greater than we think, and perhaps much simpler also. A strange experience happened to Mother on the occasion of the death of a disciple who fell while walking in meditation: He took a fall, probably because he fainted, and fractured his skull: "loss of consciousness" due to cerebral hemorrhage (that's modern science speaking!). When the accident occurred, he came to me (not in a precise form, but in a state of consciousness I immediately recognized), and stayed here motionless, in complete trust and blissful peace—motionless.... They tried, fought, operated: no movement, nothing moved. Then one day they declared him dead.... And he was here [near Mother] the whole while, immutable. Then suddenly I felt a kind of shudder; I looked—he was gone. I was busy and didn't note the time, but it was in the afternoon.... Later I was told that they had decided to cremate him, and had done so at that time.... The violence of the accident had brutally exteriorized him, but when it happened he must have been thinking of me with trust. He came and didn't budge—he never knew what was happening to his body. He didn't know he was dead! And if... Then and there I said to myself "This habit of cremating people is appallingly brutal!"He didn't know he was dead and THAT'S HOW he learned it!... From the reaction of the life of the form in the body.... [Let us note here that what Mother calls "the life of the form" is in fact the cellular consciousness, what remains in a mummy, for instance, if it is well preserved and enables you to have a conscious contact with it, as Mother had in the Guimet Museum. Thus, that man learned he was "dead" through the violent reaction of the cells being burned]. Given the state he was in, it made NO difference to him whether he was dead or alive; that's what was interesting! He remained in a blissful, trusting, peaceful state. He would never have known he was dead.16
This was like a revelation for Mother... a revelation in her body, not in her head! I immediately said to myself "But he was still existing, living, having the experience, absolutely INDEPENDENT of his body—he didn't need his body to have his experience. "16 So then, what was that "body" they cremated? And that other "body" which continued to have its experience independent of the one being cremated...? Is there therefore a body of cellular consciousness, as it were, independent of the life and "death" of the material body we see—a false matter perhaps? And a true one in which we go on living? It is a question yet to be clarified, but the point, the sudden revelation, is that Mother remembered her own transit in the reverse direction—no longer from life to "death," like the disciple, but from so-called "death" to life—during the experience in April 1962 when She was as if dead, disappeared in those great Pulsations on the other side of the web, then "brought back to life".... And at the moment of transit, just as She was about to come back to her body (which they had not yet had time to bury), She saw or perceived something indefinable and luminous, which was like the total Secret: We have only to die unto death, and that will be that!... To die unto death, TO BECOME
INCAPABLE OF DYING BECAUSE DEATH HAS NO MORE REALITY.... It was clear and... stunningly powerful. And the same impression: easy, easy. There's really no question of hard or easy—it's spontaneous, NATURAL, and so smiling. And that "to die unto death" was filled with such joy! Such joy.... I could almost have said, "It's plain as day! Don't you see how plain it is! But that's it: we have only to die unto death, and that will be that *.17
Like when you are within an inch of something: "That's it! I'm going to catch it, that's it!..." A few seconds' experience which gave me the sense that the most central problem was solved. And then...18
And then everything vanishes—one falls back into death. It was a question of cells and of the consciousness in the cells,Th Mother concluded.
A consciousness in the cells for which death is unreal, does not exist.... To become conscious of death is dying. Something becomes conscious of death and dies—it dies because it becomes conscious of it. Because it slips into the false position. But then, we must learn to forget death while living (and not afterwards, like that disciple!). The body must learn to forget death—the minute it forgets, death no longer exists. We must live where the consciousness of death no longer exists. There are, as it were, two layers in the body: a cellular layer for which death does not exist, and the other... the crust. The opaque periphery. There is a sort of Wall in the body between two types of life. There is an illusion of death on the surface—we must lose the illusion, and that's it! We must die to death. There is no such thing as death, there is a veil of something that causes death. A true position, a false position. And easy, it is easy!... natural. A change of position to be carried out in the body.
But even so it is the body that must understand this.
What I mean by "understand" is having the power to do and undo, that's what I call "to understand": And in the present case, the conscious power would mean the power to give or prevent death equally; to effect the necessary movement of forces—almost... almost an action on the cells, a mechanical action on the cells. With that power, you can give death, you can prevent death. You can easily stop the thing from going this way or that way; you can go like that or like this or like that [Mother made a gesture of pulling the consciousness to one side or the other].19
A veil to be lifted in the material consciousness of the earth. A tilt into the true position.
Nothing to change. Only the position of consciousness to change. The world is the same, and everything is true. Life is the same, and death no longer is. Death is the Falsehood of the world... a necessary illusion to overcome the illusion of mental individualization, to give it the strength and the need to break out of its own entrapment.
Of course, it would mean a new phase for life on earth.19
And I clearly see a curve, a curve of experience leading to the point where death no longer means anything. Then we'll be able to say, "Now it no longer makes sense." Only at that point can we be sure.... You can conquer death only when it no longer makes sense.20
Such is the true position. The position in which death no longer makes sense.
Not an intellectual position: a cellular position.
An obscure cellular periphery to be cured or purified.
For years, Mother was going to move from life to death and from death to life in an infinitesimal, vertiginous pendulum—death at every minute, one could say—in an attempt to learn the secret of the transition, the tiny little second when life goes out and one enters death, and there is not a single second to lose.... Now we more or less understand the process, and it may seem rational enough, but go tell a dying body that its death is "rational"! She really had to have solid nerves. When you do not know that it is a process, you simply ask yourself: is it "old age," the signs of the "end"? Precisely what all the specimens around her were beginning to mutter under their breath—except that the specimens were no longer "around her," they were perfectly within, in Mother, and it was "as if" her own body had all their reactions. So then what? Of course I had noticed Mother's little "tiltings" into the "difficult" (!) state, as it were, and I had also observed that they coincided with a condition in myself, like a suppressed hurricane: everything grated. And finally I mentioned it to Mother: "It's strange how each time you are in difficulty, it grates inside me." Oh, mon petit, I was about to tell you: don't be in a bad mood, it makes me sick! And that is how it is. There were all the illnesses of the little specimens around her (or at a distance: thousands of specimens—they were everywhere). She had indeed to traverse each one's death. Every moment I catch myself being like this, being like that, doing this, doing that—all the things one shouldn't be! Everything comes to me in that form: as if it took place within me. I'll catch myself being like that....1 Then something complains (all this is in the body's consciousness), the body says, "Oh, I haven't got beyond that, what a wretched shame I" And the immediate answer: "But don't you see, don't you see the usefulness of it?" Then I am shown a whole tangled web of movements, vibrations, reactions, actions.... everything becomes clear, everything falls into place! You see so clearly it is egoism; egoism which wants personal, individual perfection: instead of wanting overall progress, it wants personal progress, it still makes breaks where there are none, separations where they do not exist. And you see how a movement going through [the body] should be accepted... so that EVERYTHING can follow its road—it's very, very interesting.2 Mother would say that very coolly just a few minutes after having "tilted" into something that would terrify anybody else. And She added: The whole must go forward together and you can't separate a piece of it to perfect it—it can't be done! It's impossible. It's not that it shouldn't be done—it CANNOT be done. Everything goes together.2
But it's an incalculable work....3
We can understand, now, the reason for that terrible pendulum; but Mother herself did not quite understand where it was all leading. There must be certain laws—laws expressing a Wisdom far beyond us—for the experience seems to follow a sort of curve which, because I am in it, I don' t understand. And it won't be understood till the end is reached; but I am right in the middle of it, or maybe at the very beginning...4 Mother was never to "understand" (it is in some way up to us to understand): She was hewing the path. She was living the phenomenon. And the end?... We shall really understand the phenomenon only when everything is done. Perhaps we are just trying to tame it to make it reveal itself sooner.
The Other Room
All the same, the "curve" seemed each time to hit against a very precise point: There's a strange thing that happens to me all the time, at least fifty times a day (and it's particularly clear at night)... it's like moving from one room to another, or from one house to another, and you go through the door or the wall almost without noticing it, automatically...5 And Sri Aurobindo's "Wall" of is suddenly before us, luminous with meaning. Being in one room is reflected outwardly by quite a comfortable condition, a state where there's no pain at all, no pain anywhere, and a great peace—a joyous peace, a state of perfect calm... an ideal condition, at any rate, which sometimes lasts a long, long time. And then suddenly, with no perceptible or apparent reason (I haven't yet discovered the why or the wherefore of it), you seem to... FALL into the other room, or into the other house, as though you had made a false step—and then you have a pain here, an ache there, you're uncomfortable.... I mean the two states are now distinct—noticeably distinct; but so far I haven't found either the why or the wherefore.... Is it something coming from outside or just an old rut: yes, it really feels like an old rut, like a wrinkle in a piece of cloth; you know, you iron it out again and again, and the wrinkle comes back. And so, when I am in the state of the old crease...5 All the world's pain in an old crease. But where is that "crease"? And Mother came back to that experience again and again as if to tear out its secret, as if death were nothing other than the tiny little thing that makes you tilt into the "other room"—catching death in the raw, we could say. I am in a state where everything flows... flows like a river of tranquil peace.... Truly, it's marvelous—all creation, all life, all movements, all things, and everything LIKE A SINGLE MASS, with the body in the midst of it all, blending homogeneously with the whole... and it all flows on like a river of peace, peaceful and smiling, on to infinity. And then oops! You trip and once again find yourself SITUATED—you are somewhere, in any moment of time whatever; and then there's a pain here, a pain there, a pain...5 This "situated" actually brings back the memory of the cage. And this cage seems also linked to a certain perception of time. If only the mechanism could be found!... Mother exclaimed.... It is plainly something hooked up to other people and reacting to them. But this hook-up is something I cannot undo—I don't want to find anything for myself alone; I have no personal interest whatsoever. I haven't stayed on for that. I have to find the mechanism.5
Then, all of a sudden, Mother was able to give a name to the culprit—but a formidable culprit, perhaps the very one that causes death and certainly all our pains. To name is already to begin to exorcise. An amusing "visual" experience. I was going to see some people who were on the other side of a river. Ordinarily the river water wasn't clean and you needed a boat or something to cross; but yesterday I was in a special state—I just sat down on the water and said, "I am going there." And then, quite naturally, a current of pure, crystal clear water simply took me where I wanted to go. It was a very pleasant sensation—I was sitting on the water, all smiles, and... prrt! I was taken to the other side. "Oh, very good I" I thought. "Will it continue?..." And so once again I said, "I am going there" (that is, back to this side) and... prrt! Back I came. Then someone came.... There are symbolic people in these "dreams"; they seem to be made up of various parts of the beings of those around me, I can't say it's this person or that person, but rather that something IN this or that person is represented in these characters. And one of them is like a "big brother"—he helps out in certain circumstances; if there's a boat, for instance, the big brother steers it. So he came up to me and said, "Yes, I know the method, "and began to try. "Stop, for heaven's sake!" I said. "You'll spoil everything; to make it work I have to say: I WANT TO GO THERE." When he began trying to bring me across with his own methods, the water grew muddy again and I started to sink! "No-no-no!" I protested. "Don't do that, that's not it at all! THAT..." (a certain will) "THAT has to say: I WANT TO GO THERE; then it works." And the water was so real! Clear, crystal clear, transparent, rippled with tiny waves; the depths were dark blue, but the surface was perfectly clear, transparent, almost colorless. The experience was so real that I could feel the coolness of the water; I had the pleasant sensation of sitting on something very soft and cool and swift, carrying me along. Then when the "big brother" came, boasting that he knew how to do it too, and would take me across, the water began to get muddy, as river water always is—a dirty grayish yellow. And Mother remained pensive.... It must be the continuation of that experience the other day [of going from one room to the other]. I was beginning to find the key.6 Indeed it depicts the whole mechanism from a clear life to a muddy life, from a simple and direct life to a painful and complicated.., and mortal life. Life in the web and out of the web.
Who is this "big brother"?
After musing awhile, Mother suddenly said: Material knowledge, I think—I mean the higher use of the physical Mind, which keeps you from entering the true room. Because I simply kept repeating, "I WANT TO GO THERE" (in other words, it was a crystal clear, imperative will).... "I have to say: I WANT TO GO—not that, not your methods!"6
The physical Mind that makes you tilt into the mortal room.
And immediately I was reminded of the story Madame Alexandra David-Neel told Mother at the turn of the century: about this little river in Indochina she had crossed in meditation (she used to meditate while walking) without knowing how, and in front of which she found herself again when she returned from her meditation, and had, this time, to swim across. It is crystal clear, like Mother's vision! The physical Mind sleeps (dozing in meditation) and is not aware of the river, and you cross it perfectly. You wake up (or come out of your meditation) and you become aware of the river—and you have to swim across it, or take a boat, a device: the millions of devices and gadgets that the physical Mind has built in its cage. It is the physical Mind that is aware of the difficulty, aware of the illness, aware of death, aware of the muddy water—it is the catastrophic "big brother." The big brother who is so very clever at undoing the catastrophes he has invented. He has invented everything!... He has even invented death—invented pain, invented heaviness, gravity, medicine (the most serious evil spell of all humanity) and jet planes to conquer his own mirage.
He is the one who initially became aware of the world. He is the opaque periphery around the cells, like an octopus.
So now, the "one must die to death" makes perfectly good sense—all this must cease to have any meaning. But the meaning has to be undone in the body, this sort of hypnotism of the physical Mind that imprisons the free and clear consciousness of the cellular Mind for which all this simply does not exist. One goes into the other room, and it no longer exists.
Another life in life.
We must be aware of what is.
There is an "I wish" to be discovered in the body.
Then, truly, it will be a "new phase in the life of the earth."
And simple, simple! Natural.
The Joy of the Cells
The pretty river was getting murky. Yet it was the same river....
We are beginning to uncover the mechanism by which man could free himself of a number of laws and cumbersome devices and live a more "direct" life, as it were; but flying in the air or walking on water is of course not the crux of the problem and can be left to acrobats—it is everything that must change, the very principle of life. A much more obscure operation, a slow underground labor, invisible, almost imperceptible,7 in order to go back to the root of the Evil and find what it is that makes the pretty river of life murky—to undo the evil Spell, that is what Mother was after. Finding the when and the wherefore of the Evil is a long, interminable physical operation. There was clear water, for sure—there is a clear water of life. But how did it become this Falsehood and Death... of artificial nature, you could say? Sometimes Mother seemed to find a key, and perhaps each time it was indeed the key, but it seemed as if one had to find many keys and go around many points before coming to the central point where all those keys would work at the same time and perhaps all at one go. I was in that Muddle of Falsehood, Mother told me after another of those innumerable vertiginous "tilts," it was really painful, and I was tracking it down to the most tenuous vibrations, those that go back to the origin, to the moment when Truth could turn into Falsehood—how it all happened. And it is so tenuous, almost imperceptible, that deformation, the original deformation, that you tend to lose heart and you think, "It's still really quite easy to topple over... the slightest thing and you can still topple over into Falsehood, into Deformation." And I recall Sri Aurobindo: "A deformation's spell." Because it is really exactly like a deformation—yes, a certain index of refraction, and everything becomes distorted, blurred, mortal. It's like something gluey surrounding you, touching you all over; you can't go forward, you can't do anything without encountering those black and gluey fingers of Falsehood. It was a very painful impression. And last night, there was the Answer, as it were... I was as if made to live the WAY of turning that Falsehood into Truth, and it was so joyful!... In the sense that it's a vibration similar to joy that is capable of dissolving and overcoming the vibration of Falsehood. That was very clear: it isn't effort, it isn't righteousness, or scruples or rigidity, none of that, none of that has any effect on that sadness (it is a sadness) of Falsehood—it's something so sad, so HELPLESS, so miserable... so miserable. The terrible underlying helplessness of the enormous Mechanism that has enveloped the world, much like a paralytic ceaselessly devising new arms and new legs to replace what he has lost—he even tries to create improved genetic codes. It is sad and ridiculous everywhere. And only a vibration of Joy can change it. It was a vibration that flowed like silvery water. Which means that austerity, asceticism, even an intense and stern aspiration, all sternness, all that: no action. No action—Falsehood stays put in the background.... But it cannot resist the sparkling of Joy. And Mother continued: There was even the vision of how the vibrations were in the cells: vibrations that were silvery, sparkling, rippling, but very regular, and precise... (how can I put it?). It was the contradiction of Falsehood in the cells; like little flashes of silvery light.
We are always brought back to the cell. We shall be told that joy is not made to order—but it is not necessary, the cells are joy! There is a joy there, as if all lived very naturally (at long last). As if the root of existence were this Joy and Love. If one can be there, live there, most certainly everything is resolved; it is the clear life, the true life, the "life divine"—but can one live there alone? The little cell is exactly what cannot be cut off from the rest of the world. It is the whole world, the universe. The passage must be found for everybody, and what provokes the tilting into the old room? That little borderline or border-wall between the two rooms, between Deformation and the non deformed state? We have given it a nice label, "the Physical Mind"; it is very convenient, like the doctor who says: this is tetanus. Mother was not creating a new dictionary for the super scientists of tomorrow. She was feeling her way in the mechanism. Up there in the Mind and above, everything is fine—everything is fine; but the big difficulty is to change the Physical, to change Matter.... You get a feeling that you have touched—touched a secret, found a key—and the next minute, pfft! it no longer works, it's inadequate.... And suddenly suddenly —[it is the suddenness of the phenomenon that struck Mother every time]—an almost stupefying Response: all disorder disappears, not only inside but around (around, sometimes over a rather vast extent), and everything becomes automatically organized, harmonized, without the least effort, and it starts... moving within an extraordinary progressive Harmony; then, with no apparent reason, without anything having changed in the consciousness and any outer circumstances making a difference, pfft! it reverts to what it was before: disorder, conflict, chaos, things that grate.9 And let us note that the "things that grate" ranged from a little painful neuritis to the borders of Turkestan where the Chinese were preparing to invade India—it all was one single movement; everything was always one single movement, a sort of general body: There's a keen struggle against the constant Negation [in the body] of all inner life—higher life, rather.... But outwardly, difficulties are coming back, in the sense that the Chinese seem to be seized again with a zeal to conquer—they are massing troops at the border. At bottom, it may be really a rather acute conflict between the Yes and the No, that is to say, between all that struggles to hasten the coming of new things and all that refuses—refuses with increasing violence. 10 This was 1963, the year of John Kennedy's assassination.... As you aren't conscious of the why, you don't have the key!... Which means that the further you go, the nearer you draw to the Goal, the more... inexplicable it appears to be.11
And the nearer She got to the Goal, to the mechanism of the little tilt, the more furious the fury in her body as well as "outside"—something that says NO. We always seem to be brought back to that something at the root of life for which life was a sort of catastrophe. Something in the depths of the body's substance that refuses, that says no—that wants to die, as if Death meant the end of all its pains. The blissful immobility of the stone. Something that is irreparably catastrophe-ridden in the body's depths and that tirelessly continues its little spasm, its little fatal tremor, in order to freeze and arrest everything, to seal life up at last in an unchangeable position. The great paralysis of the Mechanism. And just beneath (beneath what?) there is the joy of the cells. The sparkling of the cells, the free universal flow like a silvery little river.... There is a NO in the body of the world, and a YES just underneath. Two bodies in one. And what is it that keeps them apart?
The Fatal Tremor
Mother was following the phenomenon "down to the minutest vibrations." In the transparency She had become—inconceivable to us—the tiniest vibrations were perceived with a kind of micrometric accuracy: It's like an extremely delicate receiving set, but without any reaction12 [everything went through her without the least quiver of reaction—and that is how everything could go through, from the towering supramental Power which I personally felt as a sort of crushing experience, to the smallest breath of air, imperceptible to us, even the odor of an atomic explosion]. Physical reality has become nothing but a field of vibrations mingling together and, unfortunately, clashing together too, in conflict with one another. And the clash, the conflict, is the climax of that kind of turmoil, of disorder and confusion created by certain vibrations, which are ultimately vibrations of ignorance (they come because people don't know, they are vibrations of ignorance), and are too small, too narrow, too limited—too short. The problem isn't seen from a psychological standpoint at all: it's nothing but vibrations.13 This vibratory knowledge, which was... I can't say a "coldly scientific knowledge" because that introduces mental notions, but it was of such a wisdom!... A knowledge so wise, so calm, so imperturbably quiet, absolutely free from any notion of good and evil, of divine, of positive and negative, absolutely independent of all of that—purely material...14 And Mother added with such a charming smile: But it is so much more marvelous when one knows it is You!... Perhaps the modern scientific mind that has studied atoms would understand better. It's the same kind of understanding as that of the scientist who analyzes the constitution of Matter. Any psychological explanation is meaningless." But all problems, whether psychological or purely material or chemical, all problems boil down to this: they are nothing but questions of vibrations. 200 And there is the perception of that totality of vibrations and of what we could call (in a very rough and approximative way) the difference between the constructive and the destructive vibrations. We can say (to put it very simply) that all the vibrations that come from the ONE and express Oneness are constructive, while all the complications of the ordinary, separative consciousness lead to destruction. So, from the smallest thing to even terrestrial things...15 Once, I even recall having been very struck by a remark Mother made about someone who had dropped something: there is a constant quivering, when you notice it it's frightful! It's a sort of tiny tremor, oh, how horrible!... And it's THE SAME WITH EVERYTHING: earthquakes and tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, floods, or else wars, revolutions, people killing each other without even knowing why...16 The same thing, the same vibration, that makes you stumble on the sidewalk or unleashes mobs. So we really can catch Death in a little gesture—the Death She had been pursuing everywhere, each minute, since Sri Aurobindo's departure. We are utterly fooled by the grandiose or tiny appearance of things. To understand sodium chloride, a chemist does not need all the salt marshes of Brittany—a pinch of salt is enough. A pinch of death. A tiny vibration somewhere. It is all the same.
Mother was encountering this tiny destructive vibration everywhere, mingled with everything in this inextricable "porridge of Falsehood," but even more perceptible, more distinct because of its separateness from all the other mixtures, at the threshold of... the true body, we could say. A narrow threshold, which represents perhaps the primal insertion of Mind into Matter, just where the Mind connects with the cells: the subtlest form of the physical Mind, just when it is born, so to speak. A kind of minute tremor. I am now studying the way in which Matter, the body, can be in constant Harmony with the divine Presence. And its so interesting: it's not at all an opposition, it's a tiny little microscopic distortion.17 Using words that greatly exaggerate the phenomenon (for it is very minute), we could call it a haste ingrained in Matter (in a certain type of Matter). Impatience to get out of the present moment to the immediately next one, and at the same time uncertainty as to what that immediately next moment is going to bring. The whole thing makes a vibration of restlessness.... I constantly catch my cells being like that. Naturally I react, but for them it's a very normal state: always straining for the next moment, never the quietude of the present moment. The result (the words I use give a very concrete character to something rather fluid), the result is the feeling that you have to bear or endure, and the haste to get out of that enduring, along with the hope (a very faint and inconsistent hope) that the next moment will be better. That's how it is from moment to moment, from moment to moment....18 Naturally She was not talking here of the kind of restlessness inherent in our disjointed lives, but of the origin of it: the pinch of death. Basically, it is a kind of haste to be done with everything, to halt that fray and breathe a little. But in the depths of Matter, at that threshold, it is far more radical than that: breathing a little is still restlessness. It aspires for a radical rest: death. The full stop: the state of the stone (and even more than that). Perhaps it is one of the origins of the NO in the depths of Matter (or in any case, at that particular threshold).
Now, the supramental Vibration has one peculiar property, among many others... (but what is it we call the "supramental" after all, if not the Vibration of true Matter, the natural, divine state of Matter, the little luminous pulsation of the pure cells, on the other side of the web): it stops the tremor. It is an extraordinary Vibration in that it combines two opposing qualities in our apparent Matter: boundless and absolute Movement, and absolute Immobility. And very curiously, that Vibration creates another type of time. Entering into it is like entering a time frame (without a frame!) in which the past, the present and the future are as if side by side, or simultaneous! Indeed, it is timeless. And everything is there. It is instantaneous. All space is there also, instantaneously: there is no over there, no tomorrow. And yet it is not still! It is what carries the whole universe at breakneck speed and without moving, as it were. It has nothing to do with the great static Supreme one finds with eyes closed in the "infinitudes" of consciousness above: it is something that is at once the vastness of the cosmic onrush and the immobility of "Brahman," as they say in India. And that is life, the true life. Metaphysics becomes physiological. It is something which is right here, with open eyes, but not very easy to live (not yet) because we are not at all accustomed to it: it is the annihilation of our tremor and of all that gives us the sense of "I'm alive"—in fact, it is the bursting apart of the cage. Birds live it quite well without attaching any philosophy to it, and that is probably why they go straight to a Siberia which is not "over there" but entirely contained in them, and which unfolds all by itself. Only they do not know it. Such is cellular life: it is everywhere at once, without division, and it never feels tired; everything flows without friction. In short, everything works as if it were in perfect immobility. Mother was to make many discoveries, which we shall speak of later, with what She called the "ubiquity of the cells." And since it is everywhere, time is obviously no longer the same. It is a kind of timelessness that creates, or is, all times. When the body rests and enters the static state of pure Existence.... Before [the experience of 1962] when the body rested and entered the static state of pure Existence, it was (or gave) a sense of total immobility, I don't know... not the opposition between something motionless and something in motion, not that—the absence of any possibility of movement. [And it is like that that one feels the whole universe sinking into a sort of illusion]. But now, as it happens, the body has the sense not only of a terrestrial movement, but of a universal movement so fantastically rapid that it is imperceptible, beyond perception. As if beyond Being and Non-Being, there were a "something" that doesn't move WITHIN a space but is both beyond immobility and beyond movement, in the sense that it's so rapid as to be absolutely imperceptible to all the senses (I don't mean merely the physical senses), all the senses in all the worlds.19 Such a lightning-like speed that it appears as if immobile.
Mother was beginning to experience with great caution this tremendous Movement without movement, and here something singular was taking place (many things, in fact) at that threshold of Matter: For the ordinary consciousness I seem to be in a stupor, a coma, a state of imbecility, of... yes, of torpor. It has all those appearances. Something which becomes immobile, unresponsive, stopped short; one can no longer think, one can no longer observe, one can no longer react, one can no longer do anything.... [Mother was not afraid; the trouble was that some of the specimens around her would increasingly regard this as a higher form of decay or senility, or else as a slow retreat from Matter, whereas on the contrary it was a plunge into the very heart of Matter.] But all people's thoughts keep coming from outside, things that come and try to interrupt that state; yet if I manage to prevent this, if I can keep this condition, after a while it becomes something so MASSIVE! So concrete in its power, so massive in its immobility, ohh!... It must lead somewhere.20 And in fact, it led cautiously to the state of the other species. Indeed all the difficulty is nothing really; it is only the novelty for the body that makes for the difficulty. For the body, anything new is like death: a state it has never experienced before, hence it is "death." Yet that state of massive immobility (and of stunning Movement which in fact made for the "massiveness") was truly the beginning of a state that could be considered miraculous, in which not only illness and death were impossible but wear and tear disappeared and a kind of rejuvenation or very radical modification seemed to occur (provided the state could be kept) in all the rhythms of the old body and perhaps, given time, even in its substance. What we call sleep is a sort of caricature of this state (that stiff and stony and stagnant21 sleep, Mother would say); all the toxins that are burned while sleeping, giving us the feeling of rest at the end of six or eight hours, are automatically and instantly burned up in that other state. And it is not sleep either: it is a fully wakened state, even a super wakefulness—multifarious and extending everywhere—and a multifarious action, in absolute rest. And we recall Sri Aurobindo motionless in his big green armchair. As if I were lying upon a carpet of Force, so rapid that it is immobile, Mother said. And all the tiny tremors of the material Mind are frozen there—as if the NO of Matter were entirely engulfed there in its absolute YES, in its Rest at last. But not a rest of Death: a rest of supreme Life. Basically, the aspiration for Death is the dark search for the true life, it is life seeking Life. Death is the caricature of eternal Life; it can be undone only in the Life supreme... on earth. And we are cast back down here again and again until we find the Secret.
Mother was knocking at the door of the infinitesimal Secret.
You know, you are in considerable discomfort, out of sorts, unable to breathe, you have a feeling of nausea, of helplessness, you can't even move, or think or do anything... and then suddenly... the Consciousness—the bodily consciousness of the Vibration of Love, which is the very essence of the creation, just one second: everything lights up, pfft! gone, it's all gone. Then you look at yourself amazed—it's all gone. You were in considerable discomfort—it's all gone.22
One has crossed the web.
But the old body, or the old habit of the body, keeps its stupid habit for a long time: From time to time—two, three times a day—I am given a few minutes of it. It's a marvelous relaxation. But I always come out of it (I mean the BODY comes out of it) with an anxiety, in the sense that it says, "Oh, I've forgotten to live! " Very odd. Only one second, but a second of anxiety: "Oh, I've forgotten to live! "—and the drama starts all over again.23 The little mortal tremor that gives the body the sense of "I'm alive." One has fallen back into the cage. This little tremor is probably what helped Matter awaken to life—to the catastrophe of life. But I believe it is only the catastrophe of an individual life enclosed in an individual body, in which the Vibration cannot flow, in which we are trapped in false time, which is a false space divided by distances of not-I. It is the "I" that creates all distances because it places everything else outside itself. It is life far away, divided, separated, out of breath—abrasive, mortal.
Only a tiny tremor at the threshold.
But instead of falling into the spiritual illusionism of the universe, we come upon the overwhelming Truth of the universe. Instead of cosmic evasion, we rediscover the cosmic invasion in a new time, a new space, at the very heart of Matter and in the absolute repose, absolute extension and absolute knowledge of a little ubiquitous cell.
Another Life in life, just behind this little mortal tremor.
Another species behind the web.
The Earth's Illness
Mother was living this passage from one "room" to the other or from one time to the other (or rather from a non-time to a painful space) minute after minute and in the most frightful conditions possible—but probably what is "frightful" is only a reaction of our human sentimentality and the conditions were exactly what they had to be for the task to be complete. We are always in the best possible conditions—only the true story eludes us and we struggle against a difficulty that is really our great secret Door. She was winning this non-time in the midst of a ferocious time and certainly not in the blissful meditations of a little sylvan Ashram. The new life is most decidedly in the midst of life. She had thought that the "illness" of 1962 had been meant to free her from the "infernal" life She had downstairs: her life became a hundred times more infernal. Instead of the "problem" being spread over a certain physical space with corridors, doors and rooms, everything was now concentrated in a single room with no exit, except for a bathroom which served as passageway to a small "music room" where She received visitors... and where at times, bent over the keyboard, eyes closed, slightly swaying on her stool, She would give herself over to her organ, and we listened to a strange music that was like a bath of the soul, as if one was running through weightless spaces, something that spoke so deeply within that it was like recognizing an old well-known Country, where one had lived a thousand times and where one flowed like a little river—one could have flowed there for ever. And everything was said. Everything was done, there. Perhaps it was non-time. We run off far, but everything is here. Perhaps it was the music of the new world, yes, that silvery light, sparkling like the light pulsation of the cells freed from their thorny coating. But even the music room would soon close, and the whole problem would be implacably concentrated in a 300 square feet space—there was no getting out! One had to get out within, but a within that was not "inner," for She was no more comfortable with her eyes closed than with her eyes open: They leave [my body] in peace physically, but mentally they don't!1 Truly, another way of being in life. 150 or 200 people to see every day until 1973, except for the periods when the pendulum went a bit too far and the body would go through death, as in 1968, the second great Turning Point. An incredible and unthinkable life for any human being, even in his prime. They have a RIGHT to come—and it is my DUTY to see them. And when I say that I don't have the time... they're upset. It's a farce, you know! And that farce has been going on since 1929.... Yoga is simply out of the question! It's a hundred thousand miles away from their consciousness (their mouths are full of words, but it's only lip service).2 But if I weren't in those conditions, a lot of things would be overlooked, a lot. A lot of things would remain undone. There are all kinds of vibrations that aren't in affinity with this aggregate [Mother's pointed to her own body] and that would never have had an opportunity to touch the transforming Force if I weren't in contact with all the people.3
For it is not the cage of one particular being, it is the cage of the world. The nearer She came to the heart of the problem, the more global the problem would appear to her. Up above, in the cosmic expanses, one can find individual freedom (or the illusion of freedom), but here in Matter the problem is utterly ONE. And what seems as a colossal impossibility is perhaps the very sign of a stunning simplicity—only someone has to find the passage, the trigger... the pendulum for the whole world. She was going through the phenomenon step by step: There are all kinds of things.... One, for instance, which I have often observed: an illness is triggered, or a disorder is triggered.... Let's say that a certain number of cells give way; for some reason or other, they submit to the disorder—obey the disorder—and a particular POINT becomes "ill." But that intrusion of Disorder makes itself felt everywhere, it has repercussions everywhere: wherever there is a weaker point which doesn't resist the attack so well, it manifests. Take someone who is in the habit of getting headaches, or toothaches, or a cough, whatever, a host of little things of that sort that come and go, increase and decrease. But if there is an attack of Disorder somewhere, a serious attack, all those little troubles reappear instantly, here, there, there.... And the opposite movement follows the same pattern: if you are able to bring to the attacked spot the true Vibration—the Vibration of Order and Harmony—and you stop the Disorder... all the other things are put back in order, as if automatically. I am speaking here of the body's cells, but it's the same thing with external events, even with world events. It's even remarkable with regard to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc.: it would seem that the entire earth is like the body; that is to say, if one point gives way and manifests Disorder, all the sensitive points suffer the same effect. From the human standpoint, in a crowd, it's extraordinarily precise: the contagion of a vibration—especially vibrations of disorder (but the others, too). It is an absolutely concrete demonstration of Oneness. It's very interesting. It is something I have observed on the level of the body's cells hundreds and hundreds of times. And then, you no longer have at all that mental impression of one "disorder added to another, which makes the problem more difficult—that's not it at all, its... if you get to the center, all the rest will be naturally restored to order. An absolutely concrete demonstration of Oneness. And it is this knowledge of Oneness that gives you the key. People wonder how, for instance, the action of one man or of one thought can restore order—this is how. Not that you have to think of all the troubled spots, no: you have to get to the center.4
And the earth's illness will be cured.
A Thin Onion Skin
More and more one had the feeling that this "center" was there, at the threshold of the cells, at the transition from one state to the other: Of course, when we start thinking of all the zones, all the universal planes of consciousness, and that He's way, way, way up there at the end of all that, well... then it does become very far, very far indeed! she said, laughing. But if we think of Him as being everywhere, in everything, that He is everything, that only our way of perceiving things keeps us from seeing and feeling Him, and all we have to do is this [and Mother tilted her hand in one direction and then in the other], then it gets to be quite concrete: you go like this and everything becomes artificial—hard, dry, false, deceptive, artificial; you go like that [Mother tilted her hand], and all is vast, tranquil, luminous, peaceful, immense, joyous. And it's merely this... or that—How? Where? It can't be described, but it is solely—solely—a movement of consciousness, nothing else. And the difference between the true and the false consciousness becomes more and more... precise and at the same time THIN: you don't need to do "great" things to get out of it. Before [before 1962], there used to be a feeling of living within something and that a great effort of interiorization, concentration, absorption was needed to get out of it; but now I feel it's something one accepts, something like a thin little rind, very hard—malleable, but very hard, very dry, very thin, very thin... something like a mask you put on—then you go like this [Mother tilted her hand], and it's gone.... I foresee a time when it will no longer be necessary to be aware of the mask. 5 But that's it! Something in us becomes aware of the wrong way: an awareness that amounts to catching the illness, the falsehood, the disorder, or death—and not a single microbe! A microbe of consciousness, or a microscopic consciousness, something very microscopic and very thin, but sticky. And Mother added: The mask will be so thin that we can see and feel and act through it, and it won't be necessary to put it back on. That's what is starting to happen.5
This "mask" over one's perception, this little membrane, is an extraordinarily interesting phenomenon with incredible ramifications. One feels one is touching the world's suffocation there, and it does not take much: a tiny pinch of it is enough. Mother was going to deal with that tiny pinch for years in order to find the mechanism. A sort of reversal of consciousness that reverses all material conditions, and in fact reverses the whole condition of the human species. One goes into the "room" of the new species. Only one must not be obsessed with greatness: the phenomenon must be unearthed in the minutest vibration, there where it takes root. Every day she would perform the operation again and again with the little specimens around her. For instance, in this true Consciousness (what Sri Aurobindo called the Truth-Consciousness and Mother sometimes called, in the manner of the Vedic Rishis, the Straight Consciousness, ritam, because there everything is simple, straight, immediate, all-powerful, just as it really is, i.e., the all-powerful simplicity without even our thinking of it, it is automatic and automatically true), in this Straight Consciousness, She would say to a disciple: go and see so and so and tell him such and such in order to obtain such and such a thing. If the disciple is perfectly transparent, if nothing moves or questions in his consciousness, he goes, speaks the words and the thing is done instantly, quite simply. If the person has an active mental consciousness, Mother said, he sees the difficulties, sees the problems to be resolved, sees all the complications—naturally, they all occur! So according to the proportion (everything is a question of proportion, always), according to the proportion, it creates complications, it takes time, the thing is delayed, or, a little worse, it is distorted, it doesn't occur exactly as it should, or, finally, it doesn't occur at all—there are many, many degrees, but it all belongs to the domain of complications (mental complications) and desire. Whereas the other way is immediate. Then people tell you, "Oh, you've worked a miracle!" No miracle was worked: it should always be that way. It's because the intermediary did not add himself to the action.6 The bird does not add itself to the Action, and it goes straight to its unseen goal; there is an "I " that adds itself and everything is instantly turned aside and twisted—a mental "I." The membrane. The membrane that sees every possible complication: a mask over the direct perception which is at the same time the action and the power of doing what is perceived—to perceive there means to be able to do automatically what is perceived. It can even extend to a terrestrial action.... There are examples, in the terrestrial action, of things that were done in that way: no one ever understood how it was done or why it was done—just like that, so simply, very simply, it all worked out. 200 And in other cases, to obtain a mere visa or permit, you have to move heaven and earth! So, from the smallest thing, the slightest physical discomfort, to the most global action, it's all the same principle; it all boils down to the same principle.6
A straight vibration, a crooked vibration. The Action is in a way distorted as it goes through the membrane, as if it were entering a different, deforming medium. It is what I had called "the fishbowl" before. It's like a thin film of difficulties, of complications, added on by the human consciousness7. And it reminds me of that "big brother" who so much wanted to "simplify" the passage across the river by inventing some fantastic boat, while it was enough to say, "I wish." The animal doesn't have that, Mother added, its something specific to man and the mental function, it's something very thin—as thin as an onion skin, as dry as an onion skin—yet it spoils everything... that stupid "onion skin" of human mentality. Its an "onion skin": all our difficulties are onion skins. An onion skin, you know: its terribly thin, but nothing can get through!
The whole change of the world lies in that microscopic passage when the Ray is suddenly distorted. And there are no "big things" to do to get out of it. But it must be done at the cellular level, right where the Mind is enmeshed in Matter. Now, the closer She came to the cellular level, the more Mother discovered the microscopic enormity, if I may say so, or the microscopic universality of the problem, really a very little universal nothing: Over the entire material creation there is a tissue—which we might call catastrophic—a tissue of bad will. That is to say, a sort of web [the first time Mother had used the word was eight years earlier], yes, a defeatist web defeatist, catastrophic—where you botch what you wanted to do, where there are all possible accidents, all possible bad wills. Like a web. And the body is being taught to get out of it. It's as if mingled with the Force that realizes and expresses itself; it's like something mingling with the material creation. And the body is being taught to break free from it. But it's difficult, very difficult. It's the cause of diseases, the cause of accidents—it's the cause of all destructive things. And this web is there constantly, all the time, like that, enveloping the earth.8
A little stupid and mortal skin enveloping the whole earth. An opaque epidermis that separates the material level (that which we know and call "Matter") from the cellular level.
And finally, what is this milieu we call "Matter"?
Can one body undo the web for the whole body of the earth—and is such a thing possible without a formidable trauma?
Illusionism in Reverse
Up until 1968 is a strange period in which Mother was feeling her way between two worlds in search of the new species, or the new type, with all the vertigo that results from leaving a "solid" world for a new world whose laws She did not know very well. But what is it we call "solidity" if not a crystallized habit? For fish, water is perfectly solid. The world is but a huge habit. Hence it would be more accurate to speak of a change of Milieu. You do not invent a Milieu: it is and has been forever. It is an eternal Milieu we live in with different habits, seemingly aquatic or land-bound, but that water and that land are merely the different ways of touching and seeing by a certain consciousness which keeps growing and, as it grows, breaks through the limits of its present milieu and gradually begins touching, seeing and living in another way. It is the ever purer or more total discovery of the eternal Milieu: laws are temporary little walking sticks, a habit along the way. It is the gradual discovery of the great Law that makes all the little laws along the way. Evolution is the conscious discovery of the great Milieu and of the great Law: the thousands and millions of little aggregates, each discovering the wonder of the great All they are. Man is the individualized transition from the great totality unconscious of itself, devoid of self-reflection, you could say, like the bird and all the little creatures, to the great totality conscious of its multiplicity in unity: the return to the great Natural of the world from which they had temporarily cut themselves off in order to evolve this little reflective or reflecting facet. This painful screen is our great "cosmic accident," our so-called fall from earthly paradise. But the earthly paradise is perfectly here; we do not need heaven, we need only to find the great Consciousness again, the true Milieu, the total Law. We need to find again what we are. Our great pain is not to be what we are, there is no other. Then all the little crystallized habits will vanish in the great, happy Rhythm, the immediate Knowledge, the Power to become what we see. It is the great transition from the distorted consciousness in its distorted individual milieu to the Straight Consciousness, the Exact Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness, which we may call the Divine or the Lord or whatever we wish—the important thing is to taste it.
Indeed, it can be tasted: It was as if I was plunged in a bath of the Supreme's Love.... [For the body it is a bath, it is not a sentiment.] And it's a kind of homogenous vibratory mass, immobile, yet with an unparalleled intensity of vibration, which can be described as a warm, golden light. And then, its everywhere at once, everywhere always the same, without alternations of high and low, unchanging, in an unvarying intensity of sensation. And that "something"... is at the same time absolute immobility and absolute intensity of vibration. And That... loves. There is no "Lord," there are no "things"; there is no subject, no object. And That loves. But how can you say what That is?... It impossible. And That loves everywhere and everything, all the time, all at the same time. And once you've lived That... you become so irrevocably conscious that everything depends on the individual perception, entirely; and naturally, that individual perception depends on the inadequacy, the inertia, the incomprehension, the incapacity, the cells' inability to hold and keep the Vibration, anyway all that man calls his "character" and which comes from his animal evolution. But HE is there, He is there, right there! He is there permanently: it's THE Permanence. The Permanence Buddha sought is there. He claims he found it in Nirvana—it is there, in Love. It's there, it's there, it's there—it is there. And it's for things themselves that it's impossible to feel more of it than they can bear. The world of tomorrow, or of the day after tomorrow... an inexpressible glory.... I don't know if this world (I am not talking of the earth alone, but of the present universe), if this world will be followed by others or if it will itself go on, or if... but That, which I am talking about and calling "Love," is the Master of this world. The day when the earth (because we were promised it, and they aren't vain promises), the day the earth manifests That, it will be a glory.... Its rather curious: the vital world is magnificent, the mental world has its splendors, the overmental world with all its gods (who are extant beings, I know them well) is truly very beautiful; but I tell you, since I had that Contact, I have found all that hollow—hollow and... lacking the essential. And that essential thing, in its principle, is here, on earth.9
It is an experience of the body, of the cells.
What did the apes call "God"? Probably lightning, thunder... something very natural and material. What we call "God" is perhaps more natural and material—and less stupid—than our Mental Age imagines. O Aristophanes of the universe,. .. 10 Sri Aurobindo said.
In fact, She was pushing against the walls of the cage, or the mesh of the web, and each time it gave way a little, it seemed as if all the legal or at least reasonable laws, were volatilized—a microscopic volatilization, a little pinch of "miracle." And so the question was becoming very precise: what is "Matter," after all? As if it were no longer so sure. Rather like a fish beginning to fly and wondering: but what is water, after all? For in effect, we do not know at all what Matter is because we are completely in it, body and soul.
A fish can understand nothing about its water, except that it certainly swims in it quite well. But here, it is still more radical because it is not like a fish coming out of a particular form of Matter to enter another, even flying, form of Matter, it is... something else. Yes, another Milieu which we can say is the real constituent of all the possible forms of Matter, and in which what we term "Matter" is decidedly... something else; and yet this Milieu is material: after all, Mother had a body like everyone else, She was not pure spirit! And it is this material body which was beginning to perceive its own materiality in a different way. Suddenly, or progressively, She was discovering a kind of illusionism that was not Buddhist: it was cellular. What others had discovered at the apex of consciousness, leaving the universe to its sorry illusion or its "vale of tears," She was discovering in her body—but with an extraordinary Reality underneath, we could say an extraordinarily different kind of "Matter." And it was not even "underneath," not something "behind" our material illusion; no, it was within, in the very heart of the "illusion," it was the same thing, the same Matter, but otherwise. As if all were seen and lived with the wrong eyes or senses. A superimposition of falsehood over a real fact, she said. What we see is not THE thing; it's a reflection, a distorted image in our consciousness. The thing itself EXISTS outside this reflection, and in that existence it doesn't have the character we attribute to it.12
It is strange: a kind of concrete illusionism—an illusionism in reverse. As the mirage in the desert dissolves, the man dying of thirst sees his golden city vanish into the sands: there was no city. Here, the mirage vanishes and there is a city! It was the mirage that prevented us from seeing the beautiful golden city.
So here we are, in the desert, seeking the real city of men—seeking, perhaps, our true skin.
To begin touching the other thing one must have a great thirst for the other thing. One must push and push against the meshes of the net.
A thin skin of falsehood to peel off.
And the true functioning of the world.
Vertical Time
Among those thousands of experiences or operations, it is difficult indeed to say which ones count, because they all count for something we do not know. The Agenda is a veritable laboratory log, and I think of those metallurgists throwing their useless samples out into the laboratory courtyard till one day, amid the heap of rust, one of them noticed a sample shining, without a trace of rust: it was stainless steel. All our real discoveries are accidental, we dare say, because we do not know what is to be discovered. I am praying to Mother that She will not let us throw Peru overboard, thinking it is yet another piece of useless forest. And actually, Mother was making a somewhat similar discovery: She was discovering the nondiscovery, as it were.
Something as yet imperceptible had stolen into her along with that sort of change of time or state of "massive immobility" which seemed to have bizarre properties: another Vibration, which She called the Straight Vibration or the Vibration of Supreme Love, or... another way of being of life. At any level whatsoever, there is always a goal. We here speak of the "supramental realization" as the goal. Just recently, though, I don't know what happened, but something seemed to take hold of me... with this perception of the Supreme who is everything, everywhere, who does everything—what has been, what is, what will be, what is being done—everything. And suddenly there was a kind of... not a thought or a feeling, it wasn't that; it was rather like a state: the unreality of the goal—not "unreality," uselessness. Not even uselessness: the non-existence of the goal. And even this will that remains in the body to undergo the experience—even this has gone! It's... something.... I don't know. There used to be a kind of mainspring, which had its raison d'être and so persisted: do this to arrive at that, and this leads to that (it's more subtle, of course); but this mainspring suddenly seems to have been abolished, because it became useless. Now a kind of absoluteness prevails at each and every second,- in each movement, from the most subtle, the most spiritual, to the most material. The sense of linking has disappeared: that isn't the "cause" of this, and this isn't done "for" that; there is no "there" one is heading towards—it all seems.... Is this, perhaps, how the Supreme sees?... Perhaps that is what his perception is, the supreme perception: an absolute. An absolute—innumerable, perpetual and simultaneous....13 Its like those pulsations in my experience two years ago [1962], the pulsations of Love bursting forth and creating the world, which followed one another but had neither cause nor effect: one pulsation wasn't the result of the one before or the cause of the one after—not at all—each one was a whole in itself Each moment of the Supreme is a whole in itself..14 The sense of connection has gone, the sense of cause and effect has gone—all that belongs to the world of space and time. Each... each what? What is that "that"? You can't say a amovement," you can't say a "state of consciousness," you can't say a "vibration" (all this still belongs to our ordinary mode of perception), so you say "thing"—"thing" means nothing. Each "thing" carries in itself its own absolute law.15
Which is to say that everything that constitutes the foundation and the sense of connection of our laws of Matter was disappearing. Our "laws" are the inferred consequence based on the repetition of the same phenomenon: there is no such thing as a same phenomenon! There is an ever-new phenomenon. Each "second" [if we can speak of seconds] has its own law. But then, it is a marvelous universe! Each second is new! Each second is free! There is no "I am eighty-nine years old tomorrow": I am zero years old at each "instant"! There is no "I have to bear tuberculosis for the next four years": I am cured of tuberculosis before having caught it, or at the very moment I catch it: it simply does not exist. All diseases are the diseases of time. Our time is very diseased.
As Mother says, The solution comes ahead of the problem.16
This kind of connection [horizontal] doesn't exist; it's like this [and Mother made a vertical gesture].... Something which has neither cause nor effect, nor prolongation nor intention—intention of what! There is nothing "to be done"!... Its like this [and Mother made the same vertical gesture].17
A vertical time.
But what is most important is that this experience is an experience of the body, of the consciousness of the body—were it taking place up there in the mind, the Mind could easily wander round and round endlessly in eternal timelessness, and continue down here to be eighty-nine years old + 1 day + 2 days + the grave. But if the body feels that, lives that...? Probably such was the experience under way. The body had to live that continuously without "tilting" from one room to the other, from one state to the other, from a straight vibration to a crooked vibration, from a timeless time to a diseased time. Because obviously, if the body, if Matter can live that... it upsets everything. Mother was beginning to be "upset" more and more—and strangely enough (or maybe not), the earth along with her. Human beings, she further said, always do a thing FOR something, with a goal, for a reason, from a motive; even spiritual life, even spiritual effort are FOR the progress of consciousness, FOR reaching the Truth, for... it's a vibration that always has a tail—a tail in front. And these cells have realized that if you can have the vibration without the tail, the power increases tenfold—"tenfold" is nothing! At times the difference is fantastic.18
And in this "vertical time" Matter was beginning to be very... slippery, or bizarre—fluid. That is where the Agenda starts to become a magical forest. But a microscopic kind of magic, or rather the reverse of magic: as if a formidable Evil Spell were being undone, minutely. It is not that "miracles" happen, rather, the Evil Spell vanishes, at one point or another. And so things become quite naturally miraculous. There is nothing to "do," only to be... naturally. Only, our body is not at all natural, that is the problem. To be That: when you are That, everything changes, not subjectively but objectively, materially. It is these microscopic phenomena, by the tens and hundreds, day after day, that make up a forest with incredible chasms of light, and sometimes bewildering question marks. For these little "pinches" of miracle or breaks in the Evil Spell occur in the body, you see... but the body means a lot of people, perhaps the whole world. So?... It is the great Web. To undo the web of the world? Perhaps it was what Mother was looking at one day, her eyes closed, bent over, one hand over her mouth as was often her way, while I sat at her feet on the thick golden carpet; abruptly, She looked at me or rather through me, with that immense look of blue infinity, like the eyes of Sri Aurobindo toward the end, and She began speaking in English (So very often, I hear Sri Aurobindo speaking), it was Sri Aurobindo speaking: After some time I will be able to say... [for a long time Mother sat gazing in front of her, perhaps at the flame tree with its yellow flowers in front of the open window] what is meant exactly by the unreality of this apparent matter." Then, after one of those long silences which seemed so substantially made of infinity, as if infinity were actually there, in the quality of the air, but such a light air, She added in French: I have the impression... the impression of being on the verge of finding a key—a key or a "trick"... a procedure (I don't know how to put it: all this is popularization), but something which, if you got hold of it without being wholly on the true side... in one second you could be the cause of a frightful catastrophe. That's why the integral preparation of the consciousness must go side by side with the perception of the Power. And then, there are such subtle differences... an insignificant, almost imperceptible tiny little movement could bring about catastrophe. What catastrophe? I don't know.... Something like a dissolution of the world.19
The dissolution of the world or of the Web? The "unreality" of our apparent Matter? Real Matter unveiled?
So you stand there, as if on an invisible borderline, with an extraordinary, almighty Power which, at the same time, makes you know and prevents you from knowing, with extraordinary tiny subtleties of movement so nothing may happen too soon, that is, before everything is ready.19
This was in 1967, the first Israeli war and China's first thermonuclear explosion.
We seem to be at the core of the problem There is but one single body.
The Unrealization of Falsehood
The farther Mother progressed, the closer it seemed She was getting to something very simple and at the same time very mysterious, something that seemed impossibly. easy. Perhaps the universe is nothing but an easy supreme impossibility—it must certainly be easy for "someone" or in some way, though that way remains to be found. For instance, the tilting to the "other room": Mother was discovering that it was not really another room! There too, something was simplified, brought closer, as if all the walls of impossibility were only in our consciousness or in our way of looking. Oneness is simple; whenever something appears to us "other" or "different" or "beside the point" or even "not part of that," we are mistaken, because everything is That, directly—only wrongly seen, wrongly lived, or wrongly felt. In a certain state, the state which corresponds to That, the essential state, everything is harmonious, with a living, smiling, happy peace; then as soon as there is... a nothing, you know, simply the coming into the atmosphere of something clashing—a mere nothing—it's felt like something extremely acute and painful. Everyone has explained it in his own way: some have called it "falling from the Truth into Falsehood," others "falling from the Light into Darkness," others "falling from Ananda [joy] into suffering," yet others... [the doctors would call it falling ill]. *Everyone has given his explanation, but it's something else.... As for me, I have no words for it, but the body feels it, feels it very acutely, and it sees that at the end of it, the consequence of it, is disintegration. And its whole effort is to strive to re-establish that inner Harmony, that state in which everything becomes harmonious, everything—and in their appearance things haven't changed! Yet in one way they are marvelous, and in the other detestable. The opposition between the two things is growing sharper every minute: one moment everything is divine, the next moment everything is detestable—yet its the same thing. But then, it has nothing to do with thought, or even with sensation: its purely material [here Mother touched her body]; it's the difference between a progressive and unbroken harmony that has no reason to stop... "something"... something so natural, so natural and... with the rhythm of eternity. So there is THAT, and then suddenly you fall back into... exactly THE SAME THING. Everything is the same thing, yet everything is the opposite! To such a point that you have a perception, a material perception... of a perfect Harmony which can, in the consciousness*, turn into a serious disease!20
You fall back into the same room. The same room divided by what? There is only a difference of consciousness or perception which has nothing really subjective about it, it is very "concrete," since in one case there is death at the end, and in the other, uninterrupted Harmony. Indeed, death and life at the same time, in the same room. A perception of death, a perception of life, but no perception of a something that is death: it is the perception itself that is death.
And this other "state" is not even a state of consciousness: It's a WAY OF BEING, not even a "way of consciousness" because that implies "being conscious OF something" and it's not that: it's a way of being. And that way of being is what, in the human consciousness, translates as "Ah, the Divine!— by opposition. It's a perfectly natural and spontaneous way of being.21 Ultimately, the Divine is the most natural thing in the world. Which is why we do not recognize it, unless a certain dose of philosophical and religious falsehood is added to it. But how does That become this? How does That become distorted?... You constantly, constantly [and Mother made a minuscule and ceaseless back-and-forth movement in the air], switch from one to the other, back and forth, over and over again, as if to learn—to learn how That eludes: the mechanism.21
A harmony that becomes a fatal illness? We are undoubtedly standing on the borderline of a certain illusion. A frightfully concrete illusion. As Mother said with her unfailing humor: Go tell someone who is suffering from a renal colic that his pain is an illusion! How shall we disillusion pain and death, that is the question?
And who is the illusionist?
The experience was going on, in countless ways, microscopically, not only in her but in all the sick little specimens around her. *All of a sudden, for two or three seconds, you seem to be holding the key. And all that's conventionally called "miracle" looks like the simplest thing in the world: "But it's perfectly simple, all you have to do is this!"And then... it goes away. And once its gone, you try and try—absolutely useless. But when it's there, it's so simple, so natural! And absolutely all-powerful.... One thing that seems to be trying to come is the power to heal. But not at all as it's described, its not that at all—it doesn't give a sense of "healing," you understand. It's... putting things back in order. But that's not it either.... It's a little something that disappears, and *that little something is... essentially it's the Falsehood. It very strange. Basically, it's what gives the ordinary human consciousness the sense of reality. That's what must disappear. What we call "concrete," a "concrete reality"... yes, what truly gives you the sense of real existence—that's what must disappear and be replaced by.... It's inexpressible. I remember, when I came back after having BEEN those bursts—those pulsations, those bursts of creative Love, when I returned to the ordinary consciousness, well, that state, is... That which must replace here this consciousness of concrete reality—which is, which becomes unreal: its like something lifeless—hard, dry, inert, lifeless. And to our ordinary consciousness that's what gives us the impression, "This is concrete, this is real." Well, "this," this sensation, is what must be replaced by the phenomenon of consciousness of that Pulsation. And That is at the same time all-light, all-power, all-intensity of love, and such fullness! And when That is here, in the body, in the cells, then all you have to do is focus It on someone or something, and order is instantly restored in the person or the thing. So, translated into ordinary words, it "heals." It heals the disease. But it doesn't heal it: it annuls it.... Yes, it annuls it. Any disease, any disease whatsoever. It UNREALIZES it.21
To unrealize death.
But does it not also "unrealize" our life? Because we appreciate all this "concreteness," after all, we have not the faintest desire to go off into a hazy world of consciousness, even if it is very real in another way—we are very attached to this terrestrial way, otherwise why on earth would we have come to this damned planet in the first place? And Mother was smiling, She read me like an open book: She played at being other than me, outwardly, there in her chair. And it doesn't abolish anything, that's the most wonderful part! Everything is there, nothing is abolished.22 Only Falsehood is unreal, not the world.23 It's only a phenomenon of consciousness. I mean it abolishes nothing of the Manifestation; you don't even feel that Falsehood is abolished: it doesn't exist, there isn't any. Everything can remain exactly as it is; it becomes only a question of choice. Everything becomes a question of choice: you choose this way, choose that way.... And in a splendor of joy, of beauty, of harmony, a plenitude of luminous consciousness in which there is no darkness anymore: it no longer exists. And it truly is, so to say, the choice between life and death.... If it could be translated into words, that ineffable Presence seems to be saying, "You see, I was always there, and you didn't know it." And it's lived at the very heart of the cells: "You see, you know that I was always there, but you didn't know it." And then.... It's a tiny nothing—which changes everything. That's how a dead man can come back to life.24
But how does that consciousness of non-death work, where can we catch hold of it? What did Mother practically do to "unrealize" the damned thing? The condition of all the cells (the vibrations that make up this body) is undeniably what makes the healing possible or not; that is, depending on the body's condition, it serves either as a transmitter, or on the contrary as an obstruction. Because it's not a "higher force" acting in others THROUGH Matter: its a direct action from matter to matter. What people generally call "healing power" is a very great mental or vital power that imposes itself through the resistance of Matter—but this isn't at all the same thing! It's the contagion of a vibration. And then its irrevocable.... Right here, this Vibration is felt as a swelling. You understand, it [the body's ordinary condition] is tied up, its tied and bound, I might almost say hardened; and at such times, it seems to swell, to expand.25
Obviously, another kind of Matter, or materiality, or mode of Matter. Something at the cellular level in which Falsehood does not exist, is not. In which death is not. In which our hardening and false opacity are not. In which our "concreteness" is not—and yet where life remains just the same... minus the Falsehood. And it is a natural state. The great Natural of the world. A web of Falsehood that came and stuck itself to Matter as it is, something that makes a wall in the same room—which bring us back, and Mother was always brought back, to that first mentalization of Matter, that catastrophic and defeatist Mind, it is the illusionist! We see nothing as it is, we are never in direct contact with the world and with Matter, not even with our own matter, we always are in contact through the Mind: it is a mental perception of Matter. The Mind sees something outside and says: it is Matter, it is a bird, it is cancer, it is John Smith; while the body—the cellular body—does not "perceive" the world, you could say, it does not perceive Matter, it is not something it absorbs from outside and discharges again as a feeling, a thought or a definition: it becomes or is inside, it is in the world, in things, in people, in the flow, without any separateness. For it, Matter is... something else. It is really like another world." Instead of shrinking the experience down to the individual's scale, the individual widens to the scale of the experience.26 And the nearer Mother came to the pure cellular level, pulling back the meshes of the web, the more "miraculous" things became, naturally miraculous, universally miraculous, without having to do anything: simply being. Being That. And not only did the whole apparatus of illness and death disappear, but Matter itself became different, as if endowed with other properties that seemed to have nothing to do anymore with those of the physicists (and yet...). As soon as you descend into that realm, the realm of the cells and even of the cells' constitution, how much less heavy it seems! Mother exclaimed. That sort of heaviness of Matter disappears: it becomes fluid and vibrant again. Which would tend to show that the heaviness, the thickness, the inertia, the immobility, is something that has been ADDED ON, it's not an essential quality of Matter—it's false Matter, Matter as we think or feel it, but not Matter itself as it is.27
A Worldwide Reversal of Consciousness
Thus an enormous field of discoveries opens up before us. There is nothing to cure! Nothing to change! There is a web to be removed. And death is no more. Truly, a new life on earth. But Mother wanted this new life for the earth, not for herself. She was not about to become a "healer," any more than fly through the air or walk upon water. It is the healing of the world that She wanted—the healing of this false matter: to unrealize it from the earth consciousness. But who understood that, even or especially among those around her? You see, the faith of people is a superstition—it's not faith, it's superstition. Now there are more and more people who think they have faith, and they ask me ridiculous things! Someone brings me a child born with a deformed arm, and the superstition is that if I put my hand on the arm of the child, he'll be healed.... Things like that. It's completely stupid. That's not Power! They need a little miracle, you know, at their level. Humanity is still very small, very small, very small. But even those who might have a power.... Look how it is: certain people could have a power, they would just have to have the true inspiration—they're afraid of it, mon petit! They reject the true inspiration, because they THINK that things have to follow their "natural" course—so-calle natural. Humanity rejects the true miracle. It only believes in.... There are moments—what Sri Aurobindo called The Hour of God—there are moments when the true, the true miracle is possible; if that moment is missed, then the world will go on... at its turtle pace. And it's hard—a lot of suffering, a lot of complications.... But faith, who has faith? True faith.28 The faith that it is here, that everything is possible, right here, behind the web of our mental illusionism—and without miraculous "powers," without "devices": directly, naturally, if we just make a breach in the huge Wall of what we think, what all of Science thinks, a Science stubbornly bent on creating new "powers" to overcome its own illusion. This is not Power! The Power is... transparent. The Power is everywhere—the miracle is everywhere, every minute, separated from us by that web. That is the Miracle we need. Man is the all-powerful master of all the states of being of his nature. His natural state is to be all-powerful—he has forgotten to be so. In that state of oblivion, everything becomes "concrete," yes, in the sense that you may have a mark on the eye [Mother pointed to her left eye just stricken with a hemorrhage], it may have that kind of result, but that's because... because you allowed it to happen.29 "Concrete" reality is only the concrete of the physical Mind which has changed the world into a fatal illness, because it has enclosed the world in its cage, then it has devised the laws of its cage and decided: this is how the world is. "But listen, it's cancer! But listen, it's the law of gravitation! But listen, it's ten thousand miles away...." Of course, it is like that in the cage. But once you come out of it, it is different. Once you come out of it, it is divine. It is the Divine. And everything remains just as concrete and just as real—it doesn't become misty. It's just as concrete, just as real, but... it becomes divine, because... because it is the Divine. Its the Divine playing...30 See, that Lord, how many things He possesses: He plays with all that—He plays, He plays at... changing the positions. And then, when you see it, that whole, you feel the limitless Marvel, and that whatever the object of the most marvelous aspiration, it's all quite possible and will even be surpassed. Then you are consoled. Otherwise, this existence... is inconsolable.30 He plays at being the materialist, He plays at being the spiritualist, He plays in the cage and outside the cage, He plays at taking every possible position throughout time and space—perhaps the time has come to play out a third position... natural at last, divine. Because there has never been anything but That in the world, only we have chosen to forget it awhile in order to find again the totality of That through our myriad individual eyes.
It is the real miracle of the world. The simple position, all-powerful because it includes everything instead of putting everything outside its cage.
How odd that our fiction stories depicting the future and all the children's magazines endlessly invent a world ever more equipped with miraculous supermachines—no one looks in the direction of a simplification of devices, of a direct power. And the more marvelous their machines, the more frowning the faces of the men who run them.
It is the transition to this terrestrial third position that Mother was seeking. The miracle of the earth.
The body is all the time—constantly, unceasingly—all the time brought face to face with this experience that when you are like this [Mother turned two fingers to one side], that is, turned to the Divine, things work out miraculously- miraculously... it's unbelievable; and being like that [Mother turned her fingers to the other side as if she were crossing an invisible wall] is enough for everything to be disgusting, to go wrong, to grate: a tiny little movement.... For microscopic, unimportant things, you understand, that is to say, for EVERYTHING—no question of "important" or "unimportant" things, nothing of that sort—for everything it becomes simply miraculous, yet its the same thing! In one case you are in pain, you suffer, you are miserable, you even fall ill, and in the other case.... And it's the same thing.31 It goes like this, and like that [Mother turned her fingers abruptly from one side to the other], it takes no time, there's no preparation or anything, it goes hup! hup!... as if to show the body's stupidity. It's something perfectly idiotic, like a factual demonstration of the stupidity of the body left to itself and then of this wonderful Consciousness which comes and in which all that vanishes like... something that has no consistency, no reality—it vanishes. And like a demonstration that it's not just in imagination but in FACT: a demonstration of the Power at work so that all this... vain dream of life as it is would be turned into a marvel, like that, simply through the reversal of consciousness. The experience is repeated in every detail, every field, like a demonstration through fact. And it's not a "long process" of transformation: its like something all at once turning itself around.... And all things have remained the same, nothing has changed, except consciousness. We might put it this way: the body has the sense of being shut inside something—shut in, yes—shut as if inside a box, but it can see through; it sees and can also have an action (though limited) through something that's still there and which must disappear. That "something" gives a sense of imprisonment. How is it to disappear?... That I don't know yet.32
A universal "box."
At the level of the cells.
And Mother remained pensive: The relationship must be found between the consciousness in ONE body and the consciousness of the whole. And the extent of the dependence, and the extent of the independence; that is, how far the body can be transformed in its consciousness (and, necessarily as a result, in its appearance), how it can be transformed without... without the transformation of the whole—how far? And to what extent is the transformation of the whole necessary to the transformation of the body? That remains to be discovered.... And She added, The vision of the collective progress which has taken place on earth is very clear (our field of experience is the earth); but if we go by the past, a tremendous length of time would still seem to be necessary for the whole to be ready to change.... Yet there is almost a promise that... there is going to be an abrupt change.... So the body is constantly pushing, pushing like that to catch hold of the secret.32
A worldwide reversal of consciousness?
The last "sedition" announced by Sri Aurobindo, the end of the mental box.
But the Mind will never make the reversal, it is much too preoccupied with performing its superior somersaults: a reversal in the consciousness of the body... which will burst open the box inspite of us?
How will the transformation of the world take place—or is it, perhaps, taking place?
How will the transition from false matter to true Matter occur?
And what is this true Matter, how does it behave? Mother's body had become like the laboratory of the New World.
The Cellular Bridge
Mother was receiving the answers to her questions in her own body. She was living the answer without clearly knowing, there, on the outside, what it all meant, except that it was a strange life, increasingly stranger, where the two extremes of unbelievable splendor and imminent disintegration seemed constantly to intermingle: A sense of treading a very sharp ridge between two precipices.1 And never the assurance that it was the "right" path—though probably everything was the right path. To walk was the path. Sri Aurobindo, when I saw him the first time, told me, "The others came to prepare and left, but this time, it's to ACCOMPLISH." He, too, left. He left. True, He told me, "You are the one who will do it," but he never gave me.... He said it "just like that," as he used to say things, you know. It wasn't something that gave you an absolute certitude.... And I can't say I am asking the question because that's not true, I am not asking it, but the two possibilities are there. Well, there is no answer to either one or the other. At times I have the vision that it's going to be the end and the next minute, there is the possibility of going right to the end of the transformation...2 When everything is in utter confusion, at times I ask for an Assurance—and I see very well, very well that if my body's cells, the body consciousness were told, "You are immortal; all these difficulties are experiences; the pain you feel has no importance; this apparent decomposition has no importance; all these things are necessary experiences, and you will go on to the end of the experience, that is, to transformation," if it were told that, obviously it would be mere child's play, just enduring the difficulties—that's nothing. But never have I been told that, never have I been given the Assurance—now and then the body is in a sort of STATE, a state of immortality, but it isn't constant, it's dependent on other things; so the minute it's "dependent," it is no longer a supreme Assurance. At the same time there is a sort of discernment that there could very well be a general slackening of the cells' effort if they were told, "Never mind, none of this is important, because you will last till the work is done." Maybe they would flag...3 So, that's how it is: I walk on, without knowing what will happen tomorrow. Yesterday, I could have said, "Yes, maybe this is the end...." And then when this state has gone and the other one comes, you say, "What is it to die? How can you say that?" And it's not that the two "states" alternate with... oppositions—it's not that at all, it's almost simultaneous but now you see this, now you see that. And it's one and the same totality of... "something"... which is the Truth. We find it very hard to understand that the Supreme constantly does everything. There. She added, laughing: And that we are just clumsy fools who want things to be otherwise because we don't understand the first thing about anything! Because we think, "Oh, if it were for us, everything would instantly be just fine," no? And that "just fine," God knows what it would be!*4
Mother never received the Assurance—never. And it can be said that She knew nothing to the very end. And I suspect there is a secret there greater than we can imagine. Mother was not supposed to know. Why? Not only to avoid relaxing her effort.... Perhaps because there was a frightening trial to go through. Sometimes we get glimmers of the secret of the end.
The words above were dated 1965. There were still to be eight more years of that singular state in which life and death were as if together at every instant, almost without any transition between the two. I don't know if I am alive, I don't know if I am dead,5 She would often say to me. Perhaps She was learning a new state that was neither life nor death. A new way of being.
And everything was bizarrely different, indeed even disquieting (for anyone other than Mother), in that hybrid state, which was basically like both sides of the barrier together. Perhaps we do not understand literally enough that She was at the same time really alive on one side and really dead on the other (ours), all the while maintaining the appearance of the old, habitual life. Yes, dead, and yet alive at the same time—try making something of that! But this state was not very easy to live. How would a fish react out of water? Yet, in a way, one had to be on both sides at once in order to find the secret of the barrier. When Mother said She did not know whether it was going to be "the end," She meant the end of death, one could say: the body was the strange link between both sides... as if the cells of the body were the meeting ground of life and death, the bridge, the point that is on both sides. That is where the "barrier" is, or rather where it vanishes. That is in fact where the secret is. Quite possibly, all of Mother's strange experiences boiled down to one single experience: the vanishing of the barrier. A sort of invasion of immortality into the death we live, of the "other" world into this one. A little like a constant state of resurrection. Mother is the singular evolutionary witness slowly telling us not only what the other world is like, but how it can enter this one here. And finally how it can transform this one. With just a little cellular hinge. A cellular bridge.
Perhaps Mother is the end of the barrier between life and death.
Which is why She was never given any assurance. She had to find life in death. And the words of the Vedic Rishis come back to us with an added depth: "He uncovered the two worlds (Earth and Heaven), eternal and in one nest" (Rig-Veda 1.62.7). A living body goes to investigate the state where one is supposedly dead, over there in the "other world," as they say, and discovers another physical life operating under other laws, which is not in "another world" but separated from us only by a certain cellular barrier: an opaque periphery. The beyond of the fish is not the realm of the dead, but simply another physical form of breathing. Life and "death" in one nest. The cells are the site of a very subtle tilting where death is transformed into something else. It seems one is done for, it is all over, and then... it is something else.
A Paradoxical State
I am quite aware that I am struggling with awkward words and poor analogies to describe this new world, but what can I do? How could we skillfully describe something that does not yet exist, we who do not have the language of the next world! Anyway....
The basic difficulty in all those physiological experiences they are physiological, you see, not psychological: a new and unknown physiology—is that they require the body to keep on living in a state that is contrary to all the laws of the body; you might almost say that the body must live as though it had no body! But perhaps it is, truly, the phenomenon of the caterpillar becoming a butterfly—and how does one become a butterfly in the body of a caterpillar? How does one keep the link with the old body, that is, remain apparently alive, while having a mode of life, or of being, that no longer belongs to the caterpillar? It is a paradox that is lived down to the cells of the body—a dangerous paradox. So am I "dead," that is to say, am I the butterfly flying, or am I "alive," that is to say, am I crawling on the ground like all other bodies—and where is life, where is death? If there remains some corner in the body that keeps the point of view of the caterpillar, it is dead; that corner feels it is dying; and if all the little corners become transformed together, then it looks as if you are undergoing a radical death and how do you keep from letting everything go altogether? And for the little corner that flies, or begins to fly, what is this crawling state on the other side that is moribund, obscure and rigid? All this lived together, simultaneously, in the same body. Strange.... The experience was taking place on all the levels of the body and in every detail, as if the organs or functions were being taken up one by one, entirely stripped of all their old reassuring nature and equipped with another, frightful capacity (frightful for the organ that undergoes the little operation). The "other thing" is always frightful for the old thing—it is a frightful wonder! And Mother said so often, more and more often: Almost at the same time there's torture and bliss ;6 at times I feel like screaming, and at the same time I say to myself "Ah, this is bliss ! "7 I can't speak to anyone anymore, because people would think I am going nuts.8
Among the dozens of experiences that will go on multiplying and getting worse, as it were, we can mention the one that dates from early 1968 (already). Mother was noting the eternal Fact of the total Consciousness, without separation, and of our little individual consciousness that has fragmented, divided, separated, put everything outside of its cage—for basically, our whole transition from caterpillar to butterfly is only the transition from this separated consciousness to total consciousness, which naturally must have its physiological consequences and perhaps, ultimately, produce a mutation of the form. The universe seems to have been created to realize this paradox of the awareness of the Whole, an awareness lived (not just perceived but lived) in every part, every element making up the Whole.... 9 And it is this paradox that Mother's body was reproducing physiologically. So, she continued, in order to give form to those elements, it all began with Separation, and it was Separation that gave birth to this division between what we call "good" and "evil," black and white, night and day; but from the point of view of sensation—sensation in the most material part—we can say it's suffering and Ananda [beatitude].... It's the tendency to create two poles: the pleasant or good thing, and the unpleasant or bad one. And as soon as you want to return to the Origin, the two tend to merge together again. And it is in perfect equilibrium, that is, where no division is possible anymore and the one has no influence over the other, where the two have become one again, it's there that lies this famous Perfection which we are trying to reconquer.... It is mental error which makes us want to choose one thing and reject another—all things must be together: what we call "good," what we call "evil," what we call right and what we call wrong, what we find pleasant and what we find unpleasant—all that must be together. Rejection of the one and acceptance of the other is childishness. Its ignorance. All mental translations, like that of an Evil eternally evil, giving birth to the idea of hell, or that of a Good eternally good... all that, all of it is childishness.9 And this is where metaphysics connects with physiology, and the paradox of the universe with that of Mother's body: That's far too philosophical for my taste, not concrete enough. But this morning's experience was concrete, and concrete because it stemmed from extremely concrete sensations in the body, from the presence of this constant duality which looks like an opposition (not only opposition, but mutual negation) between what we may take as the symbol of suffering and Ananda. And the true state (which for the moment appears impossible to formulate in words, but which was lived and felt) is an all-containing totality; but instead of containing everything as clashing elements, it's a harmony of everything, an equilibrium of everything. And once this equilibrium is realized in the creation, the creation will be able... to go on progressing without break.9 In other words, without death, we were about to say... but here we again fall into the trap of mentally dividing things into opposite poles, for this is what Mother added: These last few days, there repeatedly came (but it's all methodical and organized by an overall Organization infinitely superior to anything we can imagine) a state which is the state causing a break in the equilibrium, that is, the dissolution of the form—what's usually called "death." And that state went up to the extreme limit, like a demonstration, with at the same time the state (not a perception—the state) that prevents the break in the equilibrium and allows progress to go on without break. The result, in the body consciousness, is the simultaneous perception (so to speak simultaneous) of what we might describe as the extreme anguish of dissolution and the extreme Ananda of union—the two simultaneously. So if you translate it into ordinary words: it is the extreme fragility (more than fragility) of the form, and the eternity of the form.... 9 A state of death and a state of life, simultaneously.*
Then Mother added the following, which definitely is quite astounding on the physiological level: And the Truth is not just the union, but the fusion, the identification of the two. It's the union of the two states that constitutes the true consciousness; the union of the two ("union" still implies division), the identification of the two states is what constitutes the true consciousness.9 The fusion of "life" and "death"?... A third state of... something. At the border between "life" and "death," on that extreme frontier of the anguish of dissolution, something else was taking shape that seemed to be the product of the fusion of the two.
And then, she went on, you get the sensation that it's this consciousness which is the supreme Power. You understand, Power is limited by oppositions and negations: the most powerful power is the one that dominates the most—but that's a complete imperfection! There is an all-powerful Power made up of the fusion of the two—that's the absolute Power. And if That were realized physically... probably it would be the end of the problem.9
No longer a victory of life over death, but a transmutation of life and death into a third state, right there, at the agonizing frontier between the two worlds, the cellular threshold that seems to be the bridge between "life" and "death." The heart of the Paradox. The site of the third state. And we understand more and more what Mother meant by "I don't know if I am living or dead.... I don't know if it is bliss or torture."
The oxygen of the open air is torture for the fish.
A paradoxical state. Or rather THE paradoxical state. An amphibious state.
The transition to a flying species, which does not really involve growing new wings, but changing death into a new mode of life—life without a barrier between one side and the other. Because death and life are simultaneous... and they are something else. There are no more sides. The whole flows unseparated.
Perhaps it is the site of true Matter.
The Lesson of the Miracle
This paradoxical state without barrier slowly took shape over the years; it takes a long time to reach that cellular threshold: there are layers upon layers of evolution to cleanse and clarify, all the residue of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms—an overwhelming habit made of a million habits that form our "natural" way of being. And all this makes the veil, the web: an obscure recording at the surface of the cells that keeps repeating and repeating itself—a sort of "magnetization" of the cells, much like our magnetic recording tapes. Negatively, we could say that we must erase the recording, but rather it is a sort of positive transparency that dissolves the recorded habit. There are... aggregates, or very small groups of cells that have retained imprints, imprints made on them; there are corners—many dark nooks and crannies—and the memory of the circumstances, events, sensations, perceptions that built the imprint: it's all seen in the new Light, to be done away with. And then... yes, as they say, you "travel," you travel in an immense world, indeed; and it's not things from the past, its... an immense Present in which you travel.10 All prehistory and History are right there, directly, without yesterdays. There is a whole memory to be dissolved, an awesome memory—indeed the whole "natural" functioning is to be dissolved. And what is the operation all about, finally? It is a formidable transfer of power,11 as Mother said, the transition from the small individual consciousness which has traced furrow upon furrow and has slowly shut itself up in one cage or another, has "magnetized" these cells and other cells, has hypnotized and frozen its substance into a certain kind of functioning that made for some cohesion, its cohesion, to the great undivided and total Consciousness for which each "second" is a new creation without any consequence, without any memory, you might say: a pulsation. A fantastic, total Pulsation that infallibly and exactly and automatically organizes each one of its "instants": it is and it is perfect. It is a totally new way of being on earth. Another time, another rhythm, another functioning. A fluidity exactly the opposite of our fixity, because for us to fix is to be; if there is no wall, we feel it is just a volatile nothingness. And that is what makes death, the necessity of death, to break through that crust and continue progressing. We lead a fossil life, we are fossilized right from the cradle. The education of the cells' consciousness consists in teaching them how to choose the divine Presence—the divine Consciousness, the divine Presence, the divine Power (all that wordlessly), the "something".... It's a choice of every second between the old laws of Nature—and the government by the supreme Consciousness.12 The government of the open air versus the government of the aquarium, we could say.
A "choice"; it is easier said than done, for how does it get translated at the level of the cells? From high up on its perch the Mind may hold forth, but the recording goes on just the same down below. There is but one way of teaching the cells: to disorganize them completely—that Consciousness we call supramental is a tremendous disorganizer, at every level: it upsets everything. None of the cages, whether moral, spiritual, national or cellular, are spared. And ultimately there is only one cage, precisely the one Mother was slowly undoing—when this one collapses, all the others collapse; our "towering" political or religious stories hang on a little blocked cell. So this Consciousness begins by throwing one good illness, or several, on the body to teach it to function differently (it does the same with nations), and it goes on until you have understood. It is "the illness of transformation," Mother said. Mother had a good half a dozen of them every day. The greatest difficulty is that the body's texture is made of Ignorance, so that every time the Force, the Light, the Power try to penetrate somewhere, that Ignorance [or the old way of breathing, we could say] *has to be dislodged. Every time the experience is similar, renewed in detail... it's a sort of Negation out of ignorant stupidity—not out of ill will, there is no ill will: its an inert and ignorant stupidity which, by the very fact of what it is, *DENIES the possibility of the divine Power [or open air]. And that's what has to be dissolved every time. At every step, in every detail, it's always the same thing that has to be dissolved.13 That is to say, the natural that gives the sense of security: all the rest are just frightful miracles. Indeed, for the cells, "miracles" are a very serious form of illness. The Miracle must have a lot of patience before it is accepted as the most natural thing in the world. If only this sick earth of ours knew that it is in the very midst of living a miracle... perhaps things would go faster. It too is learning its lessons, like Mother.
The experience is repeated again and again... It's not as in the realm of ideas, where once you have seen the problem clearly and have the knowledge, it's over; some doubts or absurdities may come back to you from outside, but the thing is established, the light is there, and automatically things are either repelled or transformed. But this here isn't the same thing! Every single aggregate of cells.... Not that it comes from outside: it's BUILT that way! Built by an inert and stupid Ignorance. An inert and stupid automatism. And so, automatically, it denies—not "denies," there's no will to deny: it CANNOT understand, it's an opposite—an ESTABLISHED opposite—of the divine Power. And every time, there is a kind of action which really in every detail is almost miraculous: suddenly that negation is compelled to recognize that the divine Force is all-powerful. Seen from another angle, it's a sort of perpetual little miracle. I'll give you an example: last time you were with me, I got a pain here [left side], a frightful pain of the kind that makes people howl (they think they're very sick!). You didn't see anything, did you, I didn't show anything. As long as you were here, I didn't bother about it... I simply thought of something else. But when you left, I thought, "There's no reason to leave that here." So I concentrated—I called the Lord and put Him here [on the "sick" spot]. And then it's almost instantaneous: the first thing is a reaction—a STATE—which denies the possibility of divine Action. It isn't a will, it's an automatic negation. Then there is always a Smile that answers (that's what is interesting, there's never any anger or any force that imposes itself only a Smile), and almost instantly the pain disappears—"That" settles in, luminous, tranquil.... It isn't final, mind you, only a first contact: the experience recurs on another occasion and for another reason, but there is already a beginning of collaboration: the cells have learned that with That, the state changed (very interestingly, they remember), so they begin to collaborate, and the Action is even more rapid. Then a third time, a few hours later, it recurs once again; but then THE CELLS THEMSELVES call and ask for the divine Action, because they remember. [They remember the open air.] And then That comes in, gloriously, like something established.... The attitude in the cells changes—not the disorder (! )... it recurs with clockwork regularity—that's its job. It is the way it's received by the cells, their reaction to it, that brings about the change.14 It is not the Disorder we must cure, it is the "reception" of the disorder.... If the world understood that, it would be an all-powerful secret. There is no disorder! There is nothing to cure—no cancer to cure: just an attitude to cure. With this attitude, the Disorder melts away, as if it had never existed. A painful illusion of disorder... designed perhaps to help us or compel us to discover our own automatic omnipotence. As Mother exclaimed one day, The Disorder is not to perceive THAT! (the something, the smiling and miraculous That, everywhere and always). Because there is a CONSTANT Reality, a CONSTANT divine Orden and it's only the incapacity to perceive it that makes for the present Disorder and Falsehood.15 And in the end, the Disorder is the cage, the great Consciousness prevented from flowing—it is illness, death, the mad and mortal trepidation of the world. And Mother concluded: Now I've got it—I've got the knack! It's for training the cells, you understand! It's not just like a sick person who has to be cured once and for all: no, it's a training of the cells, to teach them... to live.16 Mother however added: All that atmosphere of the physical mind is full of every possible stupidity. You have to be permanently on your guard and sweep it all away—the doctors' opinions, the example of other people, that whole... really, that whole terrible muddle of Ignorance all around, which you have to drive back.16 It is our old problem. And it is not just the atmosphere of one body, it is the surrounding atmosphere, everywhere. We bathe in that muddle.
The Transfer of Power
But this is only the beginning of teaching the cells the existence of That, the smiling miracle. There are more radical operations in store for them—in fact, what takes place is one and the same operation: a transfer of power. It is the transition from thousands of years of habits crystallized into laws to the great Law, which is rather a non-law or an invention at every second. Can we conceive of a body that must relearn how to live every second, or, we could say, rediscover life every second—a constant rebirth of the body?... Yet that is the very phenomenon under way. The work consists in changing the conscious base of all the cells—but not all at once! Because that would be impossible; even little by little is very difficult: the moment when the conscious base is changed is... there is almost a sort of panic in the cells, and the impression, "Ooh! What's going to happen?" So now and then, it's difficult17 She would close her eyes and become very pale, or, when the dose was too strong, everything would just become disorganized—although truly, it was never that the dose was too strong, it was perfectly measured, but then there were the surrounding difficulties that were compounded to it: I fought and fought, but... there are too many lies around me.18 I would hear that little sentence up to the end. So then, the various functions are taken up in turn, in a marvelously logical order, following the body's functioning. It's by group, almost by faculty or part of faculty, and some of them are a little difficult. [The transfers involving the nerves and the heart—especially the nerves—would in fact be the most perilous and painful]. I don't know (since its quite new), I don't know if it would be easier if I weren't doing anything? [There was a whole line of people waiting at her door, or even standing in her room.] Probably not, it's not that: it's people's general attitude. It makes for a kind of collective support at the moment of the transition. At the moment when the consciousness that ordinarily supports the cells fades away for the new one to take its place, the cells need ("the cells," I don't know if its them), but there has to be the support of... (how can I put it?)... a sort of collaboration of the collective forces. Its not much, its not indispensable, but it helps a little. There is a moment when there's almost an anguish, you know, you're suspended like that; it may be a few seconds, but those few seconds are terrible. [Moments when all the disciples were watching her, thinking: Mother is very ill, Mother is leaving, Mother.... An opaque collective atmosphere that her cells were directly drawing in.] And even that comes from this idiotic spirit of self-preservation in the depths of any cellular consciousness—it knows that. It knows it. It's an old habit...19 This instinct of self-preservation accounts for the very first wires of the cage. The first individualized Matter that no longer perceives that it has all of Life and the immensity of Power of the entire universe—it is "me," and it is afraid. It has entered death. Mother was approaching that root. And the process was the same every time: At the critical moment, there is a complete abdication of everything, *of its existence and of everything, and it is filled with light and force. That's the Response.19 The cage gives way, and everything is there. The surrender of the old species. Not a day passes without the observation that, not a dose, but a tiny little drop, an infinitesimal drop of That can cure you in a minute (it CURES you, it's not that it "can"), that one is constantly like that, in balance, and the slightest faltering means disorder and the end, and with just a drop of That... it's all turned into light and progress. The two extremes. The two extremes side by side.20
A time will come when they will no longer be side by side but inextricably woven together. It is the slow approach to the mysterious frontier, the paradoxical state that is like death and life at the same time: both on this side and on the other. During all those years, Mother would be "perfecting surrender," as She used to say. We speak of transformation, even of transfiguration, but there is the passage from the old movement to the new movement, from the old status to the new status, which is a break in equilibrium; and always, for what still belongs to the old creation, a dangerous break in equilibrium is what gives you the feeling that everything eludes you, that you have lost your foothold. And that's when you need unwavering faith. But a faith that isn't like mental faith, which is self-supporting: it is a faith in the sensation. And that is very difficult.21 Year after year, we can note the progress toward that new state and follow the curve as if on a laconic chart, we can almost see the curve trace itself: In the transition between the two consciousnesses, there is a moment when you feel you are quite stupid—you feel you can't think anymore, you can't do anything anymore, you have become useless, you have no contact with things. Each part, when it changes (what I used to call the "change of master",) you feel it's finished. The first few times, you are worried; afterwards, you become used to it and keep still; then the light suddenly shines. 22 And this: The millennial habit of being otherwise is so strong that the impression is.... It's like... like stretching a rubber band; so, as long as you keep it stretched, the effect is there; but if the tension stops, even for a second, it falls back out of habit.... Which compels you to a constant tension. But it won't always be like that. It is the transition from one habit to another. And [in the "other" habit] this extraordinary impression of the unreality of suffering, unreality of diseases, unreality.... Its very strange. [The unreality of the laws of the fishbowl.] Then that whole millennial habit comes along and tries to deny and say... and say that it is the state you are in which is unreal!... There are moments, you know, of inexpressible glory, but it's fleeting. And the other thing is there—pressing all around....23 Then the movement becomes more precise and intense: It's this transition that's being worked out in the details, and it's not easy. Its like that habit of the cells of drawing the force from below (through food and so on): when you try to transform that into a constant habit of drawing the force from above, every instant, in every small detail, there's a difficult moment.... ("From above" is a manner of speaking, because there's no sense of direction, high or low or anything of the sort.) But its no longer leaning on the surface for support—for standing, walking, sitting, moving about.... And if the memory of the other method (the ordinary method, the universal method of all human beings) comes back, the body suddenly seems... (it's very strange), it seems to become incapable of doing ANYTHING, absolutely as if it were about to faint.24
And it is not "as if" either.
Then the curve becomes clear: Its no longer the same thing that makes you act—"act" or anything, of course: move, walk, anything. It isn't the same center any longer. This morning, for example, several times for a certain length of time the body's cells, that is, the body's form had the experience that staying together or dissolving depends on a certain attitude. And with the perception (sometimes simultaneously an almost double perception, one being more a memory and the other a lived thing) of what makes you move, act, know; the old way like a memory, and the new way in which, obviously, there is no reason at all to dissolve, except if you choose to do so—it's meaningless, it's something meaningless: why dissolve?25 On the other side of the cage, death has no meaning, it does not exist. But there is this frontier between the two. And when you fall back into the old consciousness.... That's not exactly the point: when the old consciousness comes back to the surface, if you aren't very attentive, naturally it results in fainting.... AT THE SAME TIME, a sense of the unreality of life and of a reality that we could call eternal: the meaning of death does not exist, it's meaningless. It is only a choice. And dislocation has no meaning, NO RAISON D'ETRE: its an extravagance.25 Death is simply being in the wrong position, a wrong attitude. Or else an old disastrous habit. Nothing is mortal except an ill-poised consciousness. And the contrast or the opposition [between the two states] is difficult, painful; both ways of being are complaining: the other way feels as if it is fainting, and the new one as if it isn't left in peace [fifty people were waiting at the door]. When you are in one or in the other, its all right, but when both are there together... it's not very pleasant. And there is a sort of sense of uncertainty: you don't very well know where you are, whether you are here or whether you are there; you don't very well know. And then, the stupidity of people and things becomes cruel, because even in the ordinary consciousness, for me all those things are meaningless; but then with that need to keep two almost contradictory states together, if you add to it a truckload of nonsense, it's not pleasant.25
And yet it was in that contradictory or paradoxical state that the key was hidden. Because it was not really a matter of going to one side or the other, from one position to another, one world to the other, but of transforming the passage itself into a third state that would combine the two. In short, it is almost as if an opening had to be bored or a bridge built between the two, to replace the present toppling from one world to the other. The bridge has to be built in the body, not outside of it. The bridge is in the body. The passage from "life" to "death" is the place where a third reality must come into being. The mesh of the web or the bars of the cage that create a kind of reversal from life to death (or rather from death to life) must be changed into a continuous and unbroken life. This body, which is the place of our imprisonment, must find in itself and through its very imprisonment the key to continuous life. The one which is on both sides and which, finally, has no more sides. There must be no more "sides"—then "death" will be no more: it becomes something else. Something else that is on both sides. Obviously a new type of life.
The one that was slowly being built in Mother's body—slowly and precariously and perilously: Its really an odd state.... There are even times when you feel that a mere nothing could make you lose contact and that only if you remain very still and very indifferent—indifferent—can it continue.26 But still... the minutes are long.27 To be able to join the two sides, you had to establish a total indifference to death, unrealize it, it had to lose its whole meaning. Death had to lose its whole meaning in the body, there had to be nothing but That, flowing without barriers—no more support, no more habits: only the habit of That. And the curve draws to a close: Are you ready for anything? Naturally I answered: anything. And the Presence takes on such a wonderful intensity.... No choice, no preference, no aspiration, even: a total, complete surrender.... All slavery, all bonds with external things, all that is finished, it has completely fallen off—completely fallen off: there's absolute freedom. In other words, That alone remains, the Supreme Master is the master.28 The great total Consciousness. The old species has surrendered. And Mother added: The body no longer depends on physical laws.28
It was the "transfer of power."
It was in 1966.
It was the transition from the obscure automatism of the old cellular imprints to the conscious automatism of the great Exact Consciousness.
Nevertheless, a mere nothing could make you lose contact.
And one morning, in her quiet little voice like a silvery river, Mother told me: I am on the border of a new perception of life.... As if certain parts of the consciousness were in a metamorphosis from the caterpillar state into the butterfly state.29
Life without barriers.
The place that is on both sides.
The place of true Matter.
We shall never fully appreciate the evolutionary significance of what was happening in Mother's body—until the new stage is here, visible and realized. Then we shall say: Oh, so that's what it is! In short, we are asked to understand a little in advance, and it is quite possible that our understanding will help or hasten the evolutionary process. That is what is called a conscious and willed evolution, instead of going through the interminable concoctions of Nature's great cauldron where the little human elements are mixed and remixed, combined and recombined until the new composition is perfect. Perhaps Mother's "That" will seem like a new form of mysticism—what would primates have said of that little alarming mental vibration which today we handle like evolved grown-ups? They, too, were going through a transfer of power from one way of being to another. The supernatural, said Sri Aurobindo, is that, the nature of which we have not attained or do not yet know, or the means of which we have not yet conquered.1 There is no supernatural: there are successive naturals. The whole work of the evolvers is to make it become natural. And once it becomes "natural," then we will no longer notice it at all, it will be like the air we breathe, and we shall say: but what is so Divine in all this? Divine or no Divine, it is all the same—just a little smile... that makes a difference. And this little smile is perhaps everything.
But it is up to each one to discover it.
It has no catechism.
The only catechism today is our scientific laws—others had invented the 10 commandments of God, these ones invented the 10,000 commandments of Physics! It is the world's last religion. Quite possibly its last superstition.
Time and Matter
How does this new natural work? It does not seem natural at all, at times it is incomprehensible and unfathomable (for us). We are trying to understand it. We are trying to put some order in Mother's forest! And God only knows whether our "order" will not appear silly to the new realized species, but anyway.... Each of those who go through Mother's Agenda will be able to discover new and unexpected roads in it. The road is everywhere. I have tried to sort out some lines or curves of phenomena, and I have called them: universalization, impersonalization, unrealization, false matter, Harmony, vertical time, transfer... because things have to be expressed one after the other, it is the law of the Mind, it sees one blade of grass after another; but there is only a single, innumerable and simultaneous phenomenon unfolding, in which each little progress at one point changes the position or the value of all the other points, and each time you advance here, in X4, from that moment on, innumerable little skylights open elsewhere at the same time. In fact, it was a new kind of air that was beginning to flow everywhere. A new perception.
A new breathing too.
And what is this same, identical phenomenon which is innumerably unfolding? It is the web giving way in one area or another, or in all areas, with the various physiological consequences. We are deceived because we do not see Mother flying through the air, but it is far more serious than that—that type of miracle is basically the Mind projecting itself outside of its cage and imagining what it would do. When you get out of the cage, there is no need to fly: you are immediately everywhere. You see immediately everywhere. And you do not see the same Matter as those in the cage—it is evident, because what makes their Matter is precisely that which prevents them from being and seeing everywhere. Such are their ineluctable laws: the law of death, the law of life, the law of gravity, everything is a law. It is their gross and opaque and solidified Matter—although their microscopes are less solidified than their eyes. This is Matter as they think and feel it. While the phenomenon that seems to become more and more precise in Mother's experience is a certain fluidity of Matter. It is always the same Vibration of fantastic speed, yet motionless at the same time (everything is decidedly contradictory in the supramental consciousness, or rather all opposites are together simultaneously), which filters through the meshes of the web and is endowed with very strange properties; it cures illnesses as if they did not exist, cures death as if it did not exist, cures all the miseries or the laws of our Matter as if they did not exist—and it is not really that it "cures," it is rather that it makes you step into another kind of Matter (yet you remain apparently in the same one, since Mother's body was there, "concrete", tangible and firmly seated in her armchair) in which all these things do not exist. A reversal of consciousness, Mother said. A change of vibration that changes everything. A change of Matter, we might say. A Vibration which annuls the opacity and fixity of Matter, as it annuls its illness and death, its distances and laws and the whole caboodle, which are precisely the result of that opacity and fixity. One ought to therefore examine the workings of this strange Vibration more clearly. For instance, could our "concrete" Matter simply be the product of a particular perception of time? Change the sense of time, and space also changes, with everything that is in it, yet you are still very much in the same thing. Now, that Vibration of extreme speed (yet as if motionless) alters the sense of time, freezes it, if one may say so, while at the same time it makes you go everywhere at once, as if New York and everything else were simultaneously right under your feet, without distance and sense of "space"—and in that corporeal "non-space" or non-time (it is the body's perception), age, deterioration and their inescapable consequences disappear. Yet it is the same Matter. And it is like another Matter. Space is connected to time, as we know, but everything contained in this "concrete" space changes properties as if by miracle as soon as the perception of time changes—as soon as the supramental Vibration comes into play. We could say that a particular speed of vibration, or rather a particular slowness, gives us the impression of colliding everywhere with pieces of solid Matter separated by far-flung distances, whereas another vibratory speed seems to melt distances as well as that frozen opacity that constitutes our "perceptual" milieu. They will tell us that Mother's foot still bumps against the table leg and is quite possibly bruised from it, even though Mother's consciousness may be simultaneously in New York and Hong Kong and goes through the meshes of the web. And they will tell us that at the end there is the fact of the corpse. And that all the changes in time and consciousness change nothing of this fact. The corpse is the proof. You simply live within a fantasy of "higher" consciousness (unless it is the fantasy that is higher, the other being of course a lesser one). Your vibration changes nothing.
True, the ape could have also said (if he spoke) that that stupid mental vibration had changed nothing in his ape life—and yet.... Man's "time" is no longer that of the ape, and it has remarkably modified our space and Matter (granted, perhaps not for the better). Therefore we can simply say that the experiment is under way, it is the onset of a new evolution—what will happen at the end, to what extent will the "other matter" or the "other time" be able to modify the old Matter we experience and live in ("the bark," as Mother called it)?... It was a question Mother frequently posed herself. Perhaps it is indeed the question. Perhaps it is also a false question: if the caterpillar began to fly, what would it say of its crawling Matter? There only remains the corpse of a caterpillar and a butterfly within another time, another Matter—which is still the same world and the same Matter. Can one become a butterfly without shedding one's caterpillar body? This is in a way the problem we are facing. Instead of leaving one for the other, can one be changed into the other? That is the unresolved mystery.
But the fact of the corpse in no way negates the butterfly. Perhaps it is only that our vibration is still too slow to seize the butterfly.
Is the difference between life and "death" only one of vibration?
Mother's experience is the place where both meet.
The secret of all transmutations and of the two worlds in one is hidden at the cellular level.
Passing through the Web
It bears repeating that the peculiarity of all these experiences, what makes them so enormously interesting from the point of view of the evolutionary Experience on earth, is that they are all happening in Matter, at the mysterious threshold where the old cellular imprints vanish—the obscure code, we could say, the grill or web that envelops and hypnotizes the cells—and where the pure cell begins to shine, the great Code of the universe, without past, created anew each "instant": the unique Pulsation in which everything beats at the same time. What we call the "past" is only our effort to learn what really *is*—it is our obscure journey toward that, our millions and billions of painful imprints and vain attempts and repeated efforts. And when we reach there, when we arrive at what really is, there is nothing more to learn, no more past: it is forever Present. It was forever present. It will be forever present. And this is experienced in the midst of Matter. So where is death in what no longer is in time? Oh, up above, one can experience eternities of consciousness and eternal waves of Becoming, a desert of bright peace,2 as Sri Aurobindo said, but then what?... We are not born to live in contemplation, or are we? We human beings are here to walk. We are born in Matter to find the Truth of Matter and not the truth of heaven—and the strangest thing of all is that it might well be that there they are ONE.
Heaven in its rapture dreams of perfect earth, Earth in its sorrow dreams of perfect heaven...
They are kept from their oneness by enchanted fears; Sundered mysteriously by miles of thought,
They gaze across the silent gulfs of sleep.3
The old "magic spell" undoes itself at the cellular level, and sleep too becomes something else.
And it is there that the gulf is filled.
It is the stammering of that new life, the groping of that new perception that we are pursuing in and behind Mother's words: We need a new language!4 she exclaimed so often.... That can't be expressed yet. It's not through words and ideas that it must express itself [Of course, for it is concrete life at last, the direct life of Matter!] It's the means of expression that must be found. Ultimately, the big difference with man is that he invented language—and naturally, writing and so on. Well, a means of expression superior to language and writing—that's what must be found...5 In Vedic times they spoke of "The Word"—the creative word.... The word that exactly expresses the vibration...6 The words must have a power—they should carry the meaning in themselves!7 Perhaps the conscious and deliberate manipulation of certain luminous vibrations in addition to sound?..8 But these modern languages are so artificial (by this, I mean superficial, intellectual); they cut things up into little pieces and remove the light behind.9 It is the language of divided and separated life—but how to speak the full and total life everywhere? So at times She took to her organ: I was trying to play music, precisely *TO SAY something.
Others will come and invent a musical language, the creative Word, the mantra of Matter, but in the meantime you had only to be able to walk in that strange life, or rather in that strange kind of Matter, that strange Time, that other Rhythm—everything was different! Truly as if a totally different material world existed at the cellular level. But when the old imprints have vanished, you still have to learn to remain standing "in the other way," as Mother would say. The transition is the difficult thing. She did not have all those experiences while in contemplation, but while walking, moving, and most of the time in her bathroom because it was the only place She was left somewhat in peace: These experiences are so concrete and spontaneous and real (they aren't the result of a will, still less of an effort) that they don't require rest: I was busy washing.10 You do not meditate upon swimming in the sea: you go and enter the water. One enters the sea of new life, quite simply and practically, because it is the same everywhere. It is walkable, drinkable and breathable. Go and make a catalogue on sea-bathing! I understand more and more why Mother always spoke of her "bath of the Lord."
Nonetheless, there was the wavering of the first times when one loses one's footing (what She called the "support" of the old habit, the old dusty but still reassuring code). The quality of those two vibrations (which are still superimposed, so one can be aware of them both) is indescribable. One is a kind of fragmentation, an infinite fragmentation and absolute instability: like a powdery cloud of atoms in ceaseless movement; and the other is eternal immobility, an infinite Immensity of absolute Light.... The consciousness is still going from one to the other.11
Then, the experience develops further and both vibrations seem to merge into one another, as we have already noted: Now the body has the sense not only of a terrestrial movement, but of a universal Movemen( so fantastically rapid that it is imperceptible, beyond perception. As if there were a "something" that's both... I mean, that doesn't move WITHIN a space but is both beyond immobility and beyond movement, in the sense that it's so rapid as to be absolutely imperceptible to all the senses...12 It is the supramental Vibration, which decidedly combines all opposites. I've noticed that in that state, the Movement exceeds the force or power that concentrates the cells into an individual form...12 That is, you feel you are pulverized all over the place. That is what happened in the beginning: Mother lost her footing. And that state seems to be all-powerful; the effect is automatic (not willed): as soon as something takes the form of a physical pain, it disappears INSTANTLY12. as if pain, illness and all the rest depended only on the old code, on too slow a vibration—death also hinges on the old code. Indeed, the cage of pain to teach us... what we really are. But then, and this is most interesting, the second the body reverts to its ordinary state, it recaptures the MEMORY of its pain, and along with the memory comes the possibility of reverting to it.... It is probably the passage from the true thing to the thing no longer true—a first alteration compared to the pure Vibration. It gives the impression of a wrong habit, what remains is merely a question of a wrong habit. And something is to be found to check—check, eliminate, prevent—that effect from recurring automatically. Because it happens constantly. It's a constant phenomenon: passing from this to that, this to that, this to that [and Mother gestured to and fro, as though from one vibration to the other, from one state to the other], to such a point—it's so strong—that a second comes, or a minute, or anyway a certain interval of time (I don't know), when you are neither this nor that; then you have a feeling of nothingness. It lasts just an instant; if it lasted longer, it would probably result in fainting or something. But it happens all the time: this, that. And between this and that, there is a passage.... It's a bizarre life, neither this nor that, nor a mixture of the two, nor a juxtaposition, but as though both were operating through each other. It must be intercellular, the mixture must be very microscopic, on the surface.12 And I have the distinct impression that it is exactly the passage through the web or the opaque periphery: the tilting into the old "memory" takes place at the surface of the cell. It is the long training at the obscure borderline between life and death, not only to learn how not to "tilt" from one side to the other, but also to transform the very transition.
Then, slowly, the "new habit" or the new way is brought under control, the initial panic of the cells melts into total surrender—that "stupid instinct of self-preservation," as she said—but the old organs still have difficulty withstanding that sort of "pulverization" (or the sensation of pulverization, rather): "You look pale," I said to her one morning. I feel as if I am not here.... My body is far away from me.... I am in a very, very diluted consciousness, very diluted." Naturally: She was everywhere! It is truly very difficult not to mistake the new Movement for disintegration. It's like this [and She stretched out her two arms as over an immense sea], im-mo-bile.... But with a great intensity of vibration.... There is a growing sense of a Power that's beginning to be limitless. But that state is in fact linked with those difficulties [cardiac, circulatory]. I am like this... in "something" that feels as if it could be eternally like that. But within it, I perceive waves, movements (and sometimes concentrations, when it has to do with world events) that have a stupendous power. Then She smiled: We just have to keep still and, well, we'll see what will happen anyway.13
She had to learn to be in a body while being everywhere at the same time: "A mere nothing could make you lose contact."
A new life to learn.
A cellular level in which life seemed to spread out everywhere. A fluid and undivided Matter.
My body is far away from me....
Decentralization
In that state, what we call "Matter" seemed more and more problematic, something that seemed associated exclusively with the cage of our mental perception and had a completely different reality—not that Matter was an illusion, but it was perceived and lived illusorily, and this illusion was the cause of all the misery. The question was not of getting out of Matter as one gets out of a nightmare—the way all the spiritualities have recommended—but of removing the pair of glasses or whatever it is that creates the nightmare; and one remains in the same Matter, the true one instead of the false one. And everything is changed. This nightmare or distortion was brought about by the "I" which proceeded to build the world around itself: it has walled itself up in the world. Whereas the other Matter has no "I," or all is "I," and it "flows" without walls—Matter flows. We may be told that it is consciousness that flows, perhaps, or an imagination of consciousness, but not Matter. We could reply that it is another imagination of consciousness that solidifies Matter! But the point is that it is not an imaginary perception of the Mind, but a cellular perception, by the cells—indeed, they even catch the hemorrhage of an unknown person ten thousand miles away. Until proved otherwise, the cells are made of Matter.
But for once in the history of the earth, someone took off the pair of glasses and saw the earth, felt and experienced the earth, as Matter itself feels it and lives it, directly. Thus is the phenomenon being studied. And the whole question is to find out whether this phenomenon, the new perception, has the capacity to transform the body—this body made of false matter, one might say—that has served evolution by being a bridge at the cellular level to the other reality of Matter (without the body—this "old thing," as Mother called it—we could never have built a bridge), or whether the illusion will be dissolved and the body along with it: the skin shed by the caterpillar. That is to say, we go to the other side, into true Matter, which is right here but imperceptible to our deceiving and distorted perception. And the body is shed.
That does not seem consistent with the facts of evolution, which, until now, has always maintained a continuity of its bodies and brought one out of the other.
But whether it is a question of "passing to the other side" or remaining on this side and combining the two in a new being, how does one live without a physical "I," without the something that gives a separated and solid assurance in the middle of this moving enormity of the world? At the cellular level, there is no "I," there is no need to perceive in relation to "someone," because this someone is everything simultaneously; "I" is everything, so how does one deal with that? And what does one perceive? Assuredly, it is not comfortable in the beginning, like a fish that suddenly has to fly: For a long time one has had the impression that if the ego disappears, the being disappears, the form disappears—but that's not true! It isn't true. The trouble is that life's ordinary laws no longer hold. Which means all the old habit, plus the new thing to be learned. It's as if the cells—not the body's cells: the organization that makes up the form (that holds everything together and makes up a form we call human), it's as if that had to learn it can go on living without the sense of separate individuality. While for thousands of years it's been accustomed to existing separately only because of the ego—without ego it goes on... according to another law the body doesn't yet know, and which... it finds incomprehensible. It has nothing to do with a will, it's not... I don't know... a something... a way of being.14
A universal way of being.
And I can see that for years the body and the whole body consciousness used to rush back into the old way to seek safety, it used to find its safety in flight [indeed it was "like" fainting]; but now, the body has been persuaded not to do it any longer and on the contrary to accept: "Well, if it's dissolution, let it be dissolution." "Come what may, we'll see soon enough!" The great adventure.15
The different stages of this adventure look a little dizzying, and we can only note Mother's words, here and there, through the years: The body has become transparent, so to speak, and almost nonexistent; I don't know how to put it... it doesn't obstruct the vibrations: all vibrations can go through. I can see it has come about rather progressively, but it's fairly new, so it's hard to express. But it's this very body that no longer feels limited: it feels spread about in everything it does, in everything around it, in all things, people, movements, sensations, in all that.... It's spread about like that. It has become very amusing, very interesting. Its really new. The body has to be a little attentive and careful not to bump into things or drop them: the gestures are somewhat wobbly. It must be a transitional phase, which will last until THE true consciousness is established; then it will have a wholly different functioning from the one it had previously, but with a precision that can be foreseen to be incalculable... . [Of course, because if you are even in the smallest particle of granite or in any molecule of any body, where is the "secret" then? What remains "to be known," "to be measured?" Everything is exact to the millionth of a second and inch.] And of a very different order. With many things, for instance, the vision is clearer with eyes closed than with eyes open.16 You no longer have to look "over there" at something "other": it is right here; you are what you look at. And there is no need for an organ of vision: the organ is everywhere.
And for everything, everything... there is a change in the mode of being. And the consciousness... is, yes, constantly external to the instrument [the body], like something very vast—very vast and supple—but constantly like this, night and day. Yet it's the consciousness OF THIS BODY. Instead of the consciousness being inside the body, it is the body which is inside the consciousness, yet it is still the body consciousness.17 It would appear that the body—what we call the body, this thin and hard crust on the surface—is carried by, enveloped or contained in that boundless cellular body that goes and feels and perceives everywhere as if it were at home. And the thin crust is no longer necessarily its home. There is no more center: the center is everywhere. It's decentralized, completely decentralized,18 she was soon to say. It's not even like a person who might have expanded so as to take others within himself it's not that: it's a force, a consciousness SPREAD OUT over things. I don't get the sense of a limit: I have the sense of something spread out, even physically...19 it's as much there or there as here.20 This [the body] is like something floating within this consciousness, but it's not active. I can't explain. It's like an ocean of light that keeps doing its work, and then, in it, there floats something.... Its deep ultramarine blue. Do you know that color?... That's it.21 And more and more, in this ultramarine-blue ocean of cellular consciousness, the old body seemed like something rigid, almost unreal, a kind of falsehood: The impression is of something which is still... a bit tough—that's it, a bit tough, somewhat like bark. It was like kinds of vestiges, I don't know; pieces of something a bit hard or shriveled. And nothing, nothing but this Great Vibration so powerful, so calm. [Mother made a gesture of two immense wings beating in infinity.] And this appearance is the only contradiction. That's the interesting point: this appearance [i.e., the body] is clearly a contradiction of the truth; it's something that still belongs to the old laws, at least, in fact, in its appearance. But it doesn't correspond to your state of consciousness, not in the least.... There is a fluidity, a breadth, a sort of totality with only, only just something outwardly which... is increasingly becoming an illusion. And yet, yet that's what others see, understand, know and call "me. "22 And the surface, the very part that gives the sense of bark, is what will change last—what's going to happen? I don't know... I don't know. But it will change last.23
The dissolution of the piece of bark, or the transformation of the piece of bark?
It has been said that Matter is Energy, E = mc2, but at the cellular level a new equation is revealed: Matter = Consciousness. An ocean of consciousness and of omnipotent power, the color of ultramarine.
But how did we go from that fluidity to this solidity, how did the crust, or the piece of bark, become solidified? The whole evolution is a tremendous process of solidification, a building of a cage, at one level or another. "False matter" did not wait for our Mind to start forming—perhaps it has made it thicker than the other species had; it is true that we are the only ones to be cut off from universal life, the only ones to know personal pain and death, the only ones to experience disorder and to be deprived of the knowledge of the exact law and spontaneous movement, but we are also the only ones to have become aware of our individual cage, and perhaps the only ones capable of consciously refinding the mainspring or the source that would allow the transformation of our cage of pain and death and disorder into something else that none of the preceding species know. Such is the Turning Point Mother was reaching. And one morning, as She was nearing that moving borderline of Matter (our "Matter"), the whole picture of evolution became clear to her: We may say that all experiences tend toward a single revelation—that consciousness alone exists. And that it is the decision or the choice of the consciousness that causes the form—all the forms, from the most subtle to the most material ones; and the material world, the APPARENT fixity of the material world stems from a distortion or a darkening of the consciousness, which has lost the sense of its all-powerfulness. This distortion has been still more pronounced since the advent of the Mind, which in its working has so much taken the place of consciousness [the great evolutionary cutoff point that began with our parting of the ways with the "animal"], that it has so to speak substituted itself for consciousness, and that the Mind, in its ordinary working, cannot be distinguished from consciousness—it doesn't know what consciousness is.24 For the Mind, to be conscious is to mentalize, in other words, obstruct the Current, divide things into pieces and put them into little pigeonholes that replace (poorly) the spontaneity of animal life. To be conscious means to label. No label, no "consciousness." All this has a meaning, really a meaning, only if we reach the end. The end is consciousness reassuming its power.24
Will it have the power to transform the "piece of bark"?
This transformation of the piece of bark, or the attempt at melting the bark, will be the last stage of Mother's yoga after the great Turning Point of 1968. To combine the two sides into a new being.
The Zero Hour of Matter
But then, if Matter = Consciousness, depending upon the lightness of the consciousness we shall have a more or less thick and obscure matter. If the vibration is heavy, matter is heavy. If consciousness is slow, matter is slow—almost at a standstill. The thickness of Matter is proportionate to the speed of consciousness. In that true time, Matter is light and transparent, boundless; in false time, it is sticky and imprisons you—yet it is the same Matter. Like that of the caterpillar and the butterfly. With different tempos of consciousness.
To go from caterpillar to butterfly, Matter does not need to change: the tempo of consciousness needs to change. In the chrysalis of the caterpillar, time stops... and Matter is transformed.
This is perhaps an unexpected angle of the problem. The transformation of Matter is a problem of transforming the tempo of material consciousness.
The supramental Vibration is at once perfectly still and characterized by fantastic movement.
Mathematicians say that at the speed of light time stops, or it is the limit of time when it curves back onto its space, and a man traveling at the speed of light would theoretically remain ageless, while his less fortunate brothers would grow old and die on the slow earth. Without knowing it, they have touched a profound law. Only it is not a question of speed in miles per hour, it is a question of speed of consciousness. At the spatial limit of material time, as well as at the cellular limit of material thickness, the same Matter is transformed and changes its laws. At both poles, one meets a single consciousness that forms and re-forms Matter according to its speed... or its joy.
Matter is a property of the speed of consciousness. When time stops, Matter is changed.
The zero hour of Matter.
Death is a change in tempo.
Instead of changing tempo by dying, we must change tempo in a body.
That is perhaps the whole problem of transformation. Now, we are going to see.
But first, how can that cellular fluidity, that life "without barriers," be lived and organized practically?
What does that decentralized life look like?
That passage out of the web, that innumerable cellular life or cellular consciousness, is first of all a frightful chaos. Truly the chaos of a new birth in the world. If it were a matter of being born all fresh and naked, it would be fine, but it is a re-birth in the old bark, or through the old bark, and in spite of it. The eyes will not see in the same way, the arms will not respond to the same will, the legs remain standing by the same law; the body functions will not obey the old imprints, the sleep will not sleep peacefully, time go by the clock and the body remain carefully sheltered in its little glossy armor. It takes time to begin to see things clearly and organize what appeared at first as something rather indefinite, if not an infinite consciousness of ultramarine blue—not to faint: in spite of everything to go on seeing and listening to those fifty, one hundred, two hundred people every day, to answer their questions, untangle their quarrels, sign checks and estimate expenses.... To keep up a contact while having a radically different contact. The "comedy" will continue up to 1973. And naturally, "Mother's getting senile, Mother's old, Mother..." as she told me, laughing, with her humor that never left her, as if humor were truly the only thing that could exist on both sides! Perhaps it is the only thing missing in animals and the only thing in us that the next species will inherit.
And as a matter of fact, all the new functionings that were emerging gradually seemed to alter, atrophy or obliterate the old functionings: sight was diminishing, hearing was diminishing, the pulse beat so oddly that it would have killed anyone else ten years before, memory was failing... all the signs of disintegration. Eating, too, was becoming a problem. It goes without saying that it's part of the things demanded, she said, laughing, the body has to eat. But to what extent and how?... The transition: how to effect the transition? The pace of the transition, the mode of transition?... It knows nothing. This poor body cannot say anything because it knows nothing; all that it thought it had learned for ninety years has been demonstrated most clearly to be worthless! It's been shown that it has everything to learn. So it is like that, goodwilled, but absolutely ignorant. What it tries to do is to be attentive to the least indication—but the indications are... not very clear. It has reached the point where all the things that are accepted and obvious (from a very young age one is accustomed to things taking place "just like that") have become absolutely unreal and fantastic! All the things that are beyond arguing, that are self-evident—unreal and fantastic. At times, it wonders how, how a gesture can be made?... You understand, the whole functioning, all, all of it is called into question.1 And the little specimens watched and took note of everything, and all that swarming was within Mother, or rather She was everywhere in that swarming of worried or impatient or catastrophic reactions—the siege. The siege of Death. It would be there right up to the last second. They had foreseen everything, even her death. They knew everything. Wait, the last act has not yet been played,2 she said. You who know, you will tell them.
You will tell them
I do not know; I am holding her hand on the other side of the veil and strange things are preparing themselves for the world.
We are really on the brink of a new era. Completely unexpected.
Then She would laugh—She was always laughing: All of a sudden, I understood [why the work of transformation had begun so late, after eighty years], I understood, as if Sri Aurobindo made me understand that it has come at this advanced age to give the semblance of reason. My age gives it a semblance of reason.3 And suddenly, it became crystal clear—and I said to her: "Had this happened to you at the age of thirty, no one would have understood the physical ordeal you were going through, because... it seems as if the body has to die in order to pass to the other side."
Bodily Oneness
It is difficult to describe logically what a newborn baby sees and feels when an entirely new world rushes at it from every side—there are thousands of phenomena that the readers of the Agenda will not finish discovering—not even having begun, in this strange forest of Mother's. From the very beginning, Mother had been fantastically gifted with vision, but I have intentionally avoided that subject, first because we have had enough of marvelous visions: we would quite simply like to see our physical life better; second, "psychics" have taken up so much space in our magazines with their dubious visitations that the subject is devalued, like everything else: we are in the age of a general devaluation. The old principle of political economy applies to all domains: bad money drives away good. And perhaps it is for the best, for after all, what we need is not a supernatural but a truer natural. However, a very new type of vision was beginning to emerge through the meshes of the web, one that had nothing to do (or less and less) with our organ of sight, nothing to do with the divine visions of Jacob or any of the prophets, and the yarns of psychics (which however are not necessarily yarns, far from it, but shall we say a poorly mastered instrument in most cases, almost always mixed with other things and too often misrepresented). It was a sort of new vision not only of Matter but of life in Matter: a cellular vision, we could call it, although the term risks being vulgarized and debased; it would be better to call it: a bodily vision. It is the body looking directly at its world, without the intervention of the Mind and less and less the intervention of the eyes which are just as blurred, as if fixed beforehand by the Mind. Years later, Mother would make a very interesting remark following a radical little operation that we shall mention later, which quite simply obliterated the Mind in her: Its strange, I realized how much the Mind influences what we see. She began to lose her physical vision, that is to say, to become blind, when her Mind was removed... as if 90% of physical vision depended on the Mind. But then if it is not the physical eyes that see, not the Mind that sees, if all that is removed, what sees? Mother had never seen so well as when She became blind. So?... Thousands of miles away or up close, it was all the same. Sometimes She could not make out the face of a person in front of her, yet She would see a tiny needle She needed, or people walking in New York. It was another law of vision, and what was that law? If it was not the eyes, not the head, neither contemplation nor ecstasy nor the eyes of sleep, what saw, what was the support of vision? Mother was seeing with the only support left in her: the consciousness of the body. And the body is everywhere! Once it is out of the web, the bodily consciousness directly reaches out everywhere. It sees everywhere physically. It is the body looking directly at the world.
But it does not look at the world as we would were we suddenly endowed with millions of eyes! Indeed, it is not at all a material projection of our false mental vision (which is exactly what we might have imagined, because we always project through imagination our way of seeing in the cage): it is a vision outside the cage, a vision of material reality free from all its mental appearances, by-products and disguises. It is the material world seen without any distortion. "But then how is it different from the old vision and all the old visions?" I asked Mother one day. It's as if the consciousness were not in the same position with respect to things. So they seem completely different.... The ordinary human consciousness, even in people who are broad-minded and all that, is always at the center, and things exist in relation to a center—you're at one point and everything exists in its relation to that point of consciousness. While now, the point no longer exists, so things are self-existent.4 And all of a sudden I opened my eyes wide (these poor physical eyes) as if the whole phantasmagoria of the world was rearing itself. We see nothing as it is! We live in a fantastic mentalization of the world centered on a little point of "I": it is "I" that is projected immeasurably, with all its petty baggage of heredity, philosophy, matrimony and the rest. You see, my consciousness is IN things—it isn't "something that receives" (it's much better than that, but I don't know how to put it into words)...4 So often She did not know how to say it, and how does one say it?! Previously when I used to have experiences (long ago, years ago), it was the mind that benefited more or less, and then it would spread it, use it; now its not like that: it's directly the body, it's the body that has the experience, and it's MUCH TRUER. There's an intellectual attitude that puts a kind of veil or... I don't know, something... something unreal on the perception of things. It's like seeing through a certain atmosphere, whereas the body feels the thing in itself it BECOMES that. It's not as if the thing were taken [in oneself]... it's as if the body itself became that.5
The body, purely, without the addition of organs or thought (really a body of a newborn baby), sees the pure world, pure Matter, pure man and pure everything. It does not even need to "see," as if the thing were in front of it; it does not even need to "become" what it sees: it is everything—the perfume bottle, the passerby, Mount Everest, the war in Biafra—it sees because it is. It is a vision through oneness (and even the word "oneness" presupposes two: there is only ONE). It is lovely to be Mount Everest, but it is less lovely to be the anguish of a disciple afflicted with cancer, the hemorrhage of another, or even the death of a third.
A strange world.
What does the pure world look like?
And is there not some sort of filter to protect you from undesirable experiences? Yes, there is a Filter, a tremendous Filter, a miraculous Filter. For that total consciousness is not the consciousness of a madman: it is an exact consciousness, to the second and to the thousandth of an inch—it is everything. And it obviously knows each point of its totality quite well, from this electron to that traffic cop. Everything moves together and everything is everything. And it knows perfectly well the amount of current that may pass through each thing without blowing a fuse or breaking something. In short, it is everything innumerably experiencing itself. And the world's great delight—toward which Mother was moving and wanted the world to move step by step—is to have in each point the innumerable experience, the innumerable discovery, the innumerable surprise of oneself everywhere in the delight of everything. That is why this damned story was concocted in the first place.
So then it is an enchanting "Filter."
It does not have any beard or any cross or commandments. It is a particular smile to be found.
Perhaps it is really our smile.
For once.
There is only ONE, you understand, so where is the other, the God over there on his perch?
We have still understood nothing of the world.
The Eyes of Matter
This new vision was not established in one day; actually, a whole new life was taking shape on all fronts, as it were, a first outline of the mode of being of the next species; and the transitions from one way of seeing or hearing or moving to the other are infinitely interesting, because through them we can grasp the mechanism that basically makes the difference between the old species and the new one. In the beginning, Mother would say: I am losing my sight, I am losing my hearing, I am losing my memory... It is always "I am losing" when something new must be put in place—there is a certain "I am losing my life" which must also change. And She noted with amusement, because She was always amused: For instance, I'll pick up a piece of paper: I'll see as clearly as I did before; I'll notice that I am seeing clearly —and its finished!..6 She notices. Yes, one "notices" as one reenters the cage—there, one notices everything, so nothing works naturally or miraculously anymore, as it should work. Yet another time, after reading a message with great difficulty, taking her magnifying glass, laying it aside, and finally reading the message in one single breath, She remarked: I just read and I see very clearly; then comes the old habit (or the idea or memory) that I need a magnifying glass to see—and I can't see anymore! Then I forget about seeing or not seeing, and I can do my work very well, I don't notice that I see or don't see! And it's like that with everything....7 Its an apparent incoherence.... It must depend on another law, which for the moment I don't know, and which rules the Physical.8 She was soon to learn this other law: that there is only one organ, consciousness, which through evolution has been conveniently fossilized or associated with an eye or an ear, but which travels everywhere very well without any support—naturally, for it is itself the support of everything!
Then countless other phenomena were multiplying from other angles: old phenomena which took on another meaning or a new sharpness; what formerly She used to see with inner eyes or the eyes of "sleep" was beginning to pass into the physical, as if the very perception of the body were changing and everything were physical, even the "other worlds"! I raised my eyes (I was sitting in front of a mirror, although I don't usually look at myself); I raised my eyes and looked, and I saw many things).... At that moment, I had an experience which made me say to myself "Ah! That's why, from the physical, purely material standpoint, my vision seems to be a bit blurred." Because what I was seeing was MUCH CLEARER and infinitely more expressive... as though Mother were beginning to see the physical much more clearly, but in another way. The senses change—it's not that you employ the senses proper to another plane (we have always known we had senses on all the different planes; its quite different from that): THE SENSES THEMSELVES change. The content is different, you know... The state of consciousness of the person I'm looking at, for instance, changes his physical appearance—FOR MY PHYSICAL EYES. The eyes of the person I am looking at are not exactly the same and the rest of the face too, even the color and the shape—that's what sometimes makes me hesitate. I see people (I see my people every morning) and I recognize them, and yet they are different, they are not the same every day (some are always, always the same, like a rock, but others are not). And I even... I hesitate sometimes: Is it really he? But he is very...9 And the phenomenon was getting more and more precise in its direction or its curve: You understand, it's more a CONSCIOUSNESS of things than purely and merely a vision. And I've noticed, when I have someone in front of me, for instance, with some, when I look at them they grow more and more precise and clear; others become more and more blurred TO MY PHYSICAL VISION. It must depend on their state of consciousness. Some grow extremely precise, especially the eyes, and in their eyes I see the consciousness. Others, on the contrary, become blurred like that; with some, even, in place of their eyes I've seen two black plates. As if they wanted to put a veil. Its very interesting.10 In other words, more and more, the physical world, things, beings took on a clarity for Mother only in proportion to the consciousness they contained—and strangely enough, human beings were not always the ones to contain the most consciousness! Those "black screens" are a typically human phenomenon, perhaps even purely human: how often did Mother speak of the life in stones, not to mention the bottles of mouthwash! Well, some people come to see me, they come in: I see only a silhouette. Then suddenly it becomes clear-cut. Then off it goes again—DEPENDING ON THEIR THOUGHT. It's extremely interesting! 11 And the whole physical world seemed to ebb and flow, become clear or dim, like a fluid picture, according to the consciousness it contained.
And it was the same thing for hearing: I hear things that way too. Certain sounds.... On one occasion I noticed a sound, a seemingly imperceptible sound, coming from about a hundred yards away, and it seemed to be right here.... I hear what's necessary for me to hear, even if it's a very faint sound, but all the sounds of conversation, all the things that make a lot of noise, I don't hear at all!...12 Whereupon they said, "Mother is deaf," "Mother is blind," but She was deaf to their stupid "porridge of Falsehood" and blind to their nasty thoughts, and She knew very well (or rather felt very well, unfortunately). When some people speak to me, I hear absolutely nothing. With others, I hear the drone of a sound devoid of meaning. And with other people, I hear everything they say. But it's a different way of hearing: what I hear is the vibration of their thought and that's what makes it very clear.... For a very, very long time—years—I've had the feeling that when people don't think very clearly, I can't hear. But that's not quite the point: it's when their consciousness isn't ALIVE in what they're saying—it's not so much a question of "thought," it's their consciousness that isn't alive in what they're saying; its a mental machine; then I don't understand anything at all—nothing. When their consciousness is alive, it reaches me. And I have noticed, for instance, that people whom I don't hear think it's because I am deaf in the ordinary way, so they start shouting—which is even worse! Then it's as if they were throwing stones in my face.13 Not once, not for a minute, right to the end, did I ever feel that Mother was blind or deaf. She always heard me perfectly, even my craziest questions, and She always saw me... probably better than I see myself in the mirror!
So then, where is the real vision, where is the "concreteness"? Is it that material grayness which grows dim, or this unexpected object which shines all alone? And with her marvelous sense of humor, one day She remarked: The way in which I see is something very interesting. Something suddenly comes alive (an object or a face or a letter or... ), clear, precise, almost luminous. The next minute, everything is blurred. I seem to be told, "This is worth seeing." So I look at it. "And [laughing] don't bother about that"! 14 Thus letters—piles of letters—objects, people, everything grew clear or disappeared according to... its truth or usefulness. A whole world of human encumbrances was vanishing. What is really concrete is seen. What is concrete is what is conscious. All this has changed—I mean the whole way the organs function. Have the organs themselves changed, or is it their functioning? I don't know. But they all obey another law—absolutely.15
Nevertheless, I kept pestering Mother because I had always had a kind of instinctive and rational mistrust of "psychics." (In fact, it may sound very surprising, but Mother always seemed to me the most rational being in the world, as if at last I had met someone who was reason incarnate compared to this world of madmen equipped with science and television, and all of her experiences, rather bewildering for most people, always seemed to me to have a kind of deep logic, like the true logic of the universe. Mother is the true logic of the universe. She was no more irrational than blind or deaf. Only, it is the next logic of the universe, or perhaps the old eternal Logic we thought we could invent better and "improve" in our cage.) And I asked her, a bit brazenly: "But listen, wouldn't a psychic see that way?" No, not at all! This isn't like all the visions I have had!... This new vision of things—it's not going out of Matter to see the world in another way (that has been done for a long time, of course, it's nothing new, and it's nothing marvelous), that's not it: it's Matter looking at itself in an entirely new way, and that's where the fun is! It sees the whole affair anew and altogether differently.16 Mother did not close her eyes, She did not go off into contemplation nor did She even try to see: things took shape just like that, spontaneously, before her eyes, as if in their true form, as if the consciousness of the body were seeing the world in its way, purely, without the mental covering that gives an apparent gloss of "consciousness," a gloss of culture, a concrete gloss of face powder and moustache... which was not concrete at all, which did not really exist. It was not Mother who "saw": things showed themselves... as they actually were. And She added, with a kind of youthful smile, so clear, so childlike, which would spread over her face (strangely, at such moments, She looked like a laughing Chinese baby!): Everything is becoming like that, as if it were seen for the first time and from an altogether different angle; everything, everything: people's character, circumstances, even the motion of the earth and the stars, everything is like that, everything has become entirely new and... unexpected, in the sense that all the human mental vision—is completely gone! So things are much better!
In short, false matter is gradually vanishing, the one with the waxed moustache—the one that emits heavy waves. But something remains, which is true Matter.
The Veil of Unreality
Little by little, as the result of the gradual loosening of the web's meshes, the phenomenon was increasing in intensity and scope. It was sight everywhere. We cannot even speak of "vision" because it had nothing to do with an enchanting and embellished physical reality—no auras, no shower of flowers or musical-pictorial whorls: a more scientific physical, we could say, meaning more exact, without any misrepresentation. But the more that reality emerged, the more unreal the other became, as if the eyes could no longer see what was not true—exactly the opposite phenomenon to what happens in our world where the more things are false, the louder and more visible they are: It's the same when I look at people: I don't see them as they see themselves, I see them with the vibration of all the forces that are in them and pass through them, and quite frequently with the supreme Vibration of the Presence. And that's why my physical sight is... not exactly failing, but changing in character, for the physical precision that normal physical sight gives is... it's false for me.17 Even her taste could no longer taste what was not true! A few days ago I had the experience that the quality of tastes had changed: certain things had an artificial taste (the usual taste is an artificial taste) while others carried IN THEMSELVES a true taste; so this is very clear—very clear and very precise.18 What is very precise to us is just what becomes most blurred (I am speaking and Mother speaks essentially of the human world, because trees and fruits and the whole natural world kept their natural preciseness). And this blur became a kind of veil She was unable to figure out very well at first, except that apparently She was going blind—one loses all the "qualities" of the old species. It's rather strange, this eyesight. There always seems to be a veil between me and things, constantly [this was in 1965, well before the time She became "officially" blind], I am so used to it.... Then all of a sudden, without any apparent reason (an outwardly logical reason, I mean), a thing becomes clear, precise, sharp—the next minute, it's over. Sometimes it's a word in a letter, sometimes it's an object. And it is a different quality of vision, a vision... (how can I explain it?) as if light were shining from within things instead of shining on them: it isn't a reflected light. It isn't luminous, it isn't like a candle, for instance, or a lamp, not that, but instead of being lit by a projected light, things have their own light, which doesn't radiate. It's becoming more and more frequent, but with perfect illogic. Which means that I don't understand the logic of it; and the vision is so precise! Extraordinary, with the full understanding of the thing seen while you are seeing it. For instance, I noticed this while washing early in the morning: I go into the bathroom before turning the light on; but I see just as clearly as when the light is on! It makes no difference. And then everything was as if behind a kind of veil. Then I turned my attention and I said to myself, "But all this is becoming so lackluster, it's completely uninteresting!" And I started becoming aware of one thing or another. And suddenly, I saw that phenomenon of a bottle in the cupboard becoming so clear, so... with an inner life. "Oh!" I said—the next minute, it was over. This is clearly the preparation for a vision through the inner light rather than projected light. And it is... oh, it's warm, living, intense—and of such precision! You see everything at the same time, not only the color and shape, but the character of the vibration. It's marvelous.... I seem to be behind a veil—that's really the feeling: a veil; and then, suddenly, something lives with the true vibration. But that's rare.... And with her ever cheerful irony, She added: Probably there aren't many things worth seeing!18
This veil resembles strangely that of the physical Mind, which envelops the cells, each and every cell, in a dark cocoon, because as She gradually emerged from the web, the other vision—what She called "the next way"—became not only natural, spontaneous and constant, but universalized. And curiously enough, it was not only a "vision": I can't call it an image: it is a knowledge. I can't even say it's a knowledge, it's... something that is EVERYTHING at once,19 and there, in that kind of global perception, the old ordinary way of seeing with eyes seemed more and more unreal. after all, what would a marmot say if it were progressively equipped with a pair of human eyes? The sense of the "concrete" fades away—it fades farther and farther away. "Concrete" vision, "concrete" sense of smell, "concrete" taste, "concrete" hearing, it all seems far away—far behind in an unreal past. And that kind of dry and lifeless "concrete" is replaced by something that's very supple, very complete in that all the senses function together, and VERY INTIMATE WITH EVERYTHING. Before, each thing was separate, divided, unconnected with the other, it was very superficial—very precise but very superficial, like a pinpoint. It's not at all that way any more. The foremost feeling you get is one of intimacy, that is to say, there is no more distance, no more difference, no more seer and thing seen....20 Mother was beginning to go into that ultramarine ocean of cellular consciousness where the body spreads out everywhere, and what is there to "see"? There is nothing to "see" as if from outside: you are in it. You are, therefore you see and you hear and taste. You are everything that happens in each thing. "A kind of tactile vision," as she would put it. It's above vision. It's a kind of perception: there is no more differentiation of the organs. And its a perception... yes, which is total: at the same time vision, hearing, and knowledge.21 And always that feeling of something smooth, smooth, without any clashes, any complications, as though you could no longer bump into things, no longer.... It's quite interesting.22
A fluid life, everywhere, in everything.
A paradoxical life, more and more paradoxical, on the border between caterpillar and butterfly—but more and more on the side of the butterfly. Before, when I used to use this magnifying glass, I could read very well, but now it's absolutely no use! It doesn't grow any clearer, there is always the same cloudiness. Its bigger, that's all. Strange, it's bigger but it's the same thing, there is the same veil... of unreality.23
Not that Matter was becoming unreal in the way of the illusionists; it was the human way of seeing Matter that was receding into the past. It is very strange; actually it was as if Mother's body were becoming an increasingly clearer and more precise instrument—true and exact because it was total—which could no longer register anything other than what was really there—a kind of total supermicroscope that could not see phantoms, if we dare say so, or nonexistent Matter. Now we do understand why Sri Aurobindo called it the "Truth-Consciousness" and in what way He was "blind." I never saw the world so much as since I have withdrawn, he wrote.
Naturally, we shall be told that the human vision, real or unreal, is perfectly adapted to the human milieu, as is the marmot to its hole—but the point is to know whether death, too, and pain are forever "adapted" to our life or if they are some unreal and removable parasites.
Lived Vision
That innumerable life came in little dabs of experience; one could feel it was groping its way through Mother's body in order to find its right means of expression. A new kind of life to be set up, as when a certain little tarsier in the Philippines had to open its binocular vision for the first time, but here this vision is not a vision and has millions of eyes—truly, it is not a vision, it is a mode of life, a "way of being," as Mother would say. And it is not some final way of being either, it would be quite erroneous to take Mother's experiences as a sort of gospel of the new world, heaven forbid! She would shudder, She who shuddered at nothing. Those experiences, of which we can select only a few here, indicate rather the general direction of the development, its process; and most likely, the new species will perfect, adapt and diversify the instrument. This is only the first stammering of the new world. Hundreds of bizarre or comical or sometimes even anguishing experiences, which would have been rather frightening for anyone other than Mother. Suddenly, Mother was discovering all the merits of Mathilde and her positivist "iron bar" education: A splendid education, mon petit! Splendid. I am infinitely grateful to her...24 I don't think there's anyone more materialistic than I was, with all the practical common sense and positivism; and now I understand why it was like that! It was the most solid base one could have for these experiences. No danger of imagining.25
We are in search of the mechanism, not stories (it is a pity in some respects, but that will be the joy of the future readers of the Agenda). Anyway, we can choose one rather typical and striking experience. Piles of letters were waiting in Mother's basket, and She was saying to herself: "I must absolutely see to them," but there was never enough time and the days were passing. Then one morning, while I was sitting, I suddenly felt something so heavy in my head, heavy in my chest, and... odd. I had never felt that before. And all the sensations had become as if violent. So I closed my eyes, and... you know, an avalanche, a stampede of forms, sounds, colors, even odors, which imposed themselves with a reality and intensity—I had never known that before, never. I watched, then I said to myself "But that's a good way to go insane!" And I started doing what had to be done for it to stop. But it wouldn't stop! It wanted to go on. So I thought, "It's clearly here for a reason. There's a reason for me to have this experience." I watched, studied, observed. And I saw it was a magnified faculty of sensation—inordinately magnified, you understand—because the equilibrium between all the faculties of the being had been disrupted. The natural equilibrium which makes things balance each other, harmonize and organize spontaneously into a coherent whole with a conscious existence, was shattered—shattered to the benefit of the faculty of sensation. Naturally, that faculty of sensation was terribly multiplied (or aggravated, I might say) and even imposed itself brutally.26 Then the experience was filed. Two or three days later, the person who read out the mail took a letter from the basket and read it to Mother: "What do you think of LSD? Can it help human consciousness progress?" Immediately, Mother broke out laughing. She had no need to "think" about the value of LSD: She had experienced LSD. So, I had the experience without swallowing the drug! And everything was there: sounds, colors, smells.... It was not "as if": it was lived. Lived spontaneously.
And all the experiences of this new (I was about to say "vision," but obviously it is something else), of this new perception or way of being, are of this same living kind: there is nothing to "know"—you are. Now, this perception which includes everything—taste, color, smell, sound, knowledge—was groping to find its means of expression, and it appears through certain repeated experiences that it took the form of a kind of movie screen, but not an "external" screen that one watches from the outside like a spectator in a theater: an inner screen... which one enters! You go into the screen and begin living the story: it is happening to you. It is not that you look at it: you live it. Early one morning, the screen opened, and She saw (it is not that She "saw," you see; it happened, it happened to her), She saw a priest and some altar boys coming to give her the last rites! Not that I felt particularly sick! But anyhow that's how it was. They wanted to give me last rites, so I watched—I watched, I wanted to see; I thought, "Well, before dismissing them abruptly, let's see what it is...." (I had no idea why they had come, you understand; someone had sent them to give me the last rites.) I watched carefully to find out if really it had a power of action, if the last rites had the power to disturb the progress of the soul and tie it down to old religious formations.... Once I had seen that, suddenly (it was as if on a screen) the whole story vanished and it was over.27 Nevertheless Mother had actually been given the last rites, if you can believe it! The next day She opened a letter from a dying gentleman from a Catholic family asking her if he should accept the last rites, whether it would not disturb the freedom of his soul.... Now Mother knew. She had undergone the "operation." Curious, isn't it? It's not a mental contact that lets you know what the gentleman has written and so on; no, it was the experience—it always takes the form of an experience, an ACTION: something that has to be done and gets done, or that has to be known and becomes known. It is never the mental transcription of ordinary life. And all this happens IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY, not while I am sleeping. This story happened to me when I had just had my bath! All at once something comes, takes hold of me, and then there's a sort of life in which I live, until something is done—some action—and when that action is done, everything goes away. And it goes away without leaving any trace…27 Nonetheless, She would spend one whole night, eight hours, in the body of a dying disciple with all his agony, and not "as if": She was the dying person. The body, the body consciousness was the consciousness of a dying body, with all the anguish, all the suffering.... And it lasted a long time: it lasted all night. I saw her afterwards, and She was still shaken by it—understandably so. And a few hours later She was given the news that the disciple had passed away. Then I understood…28
But what a marvelous way of "knowing," it is matchless! Now we fully understand the meaning of understanding: it is direct and lived, it is the very thing in its entirety. All our so-called knowledge is just imaginary and indirect chatter, through hearsay, through a veil of unreality. Here, the body itself lives—and a "pure" body, as it were, without the mattress of fabricated pseudo-knowledge and pseudo-sensations, in other words, without the old imprints, the obscure and distorting cellular cocoon. Every day, thirty, forty of them will come and take hold of me, and then, all at once, I'll go into a concentration, LIVE a certain thing.29 I catch myself doing something, to be precise.30 And these kinds of unexpected slices of life—or actions rather, because it always involved doing something (it is a sort of work, a means of work)—will increase in scope, become more and more unexpected and universal: At times I find myself talking with people whom most of the time I don't know, then describing a scene: they can get such and such a thing done, they can be advised to do this or that thing, and it will end with such and such a thing. They are kinds of scenes from a book or scenes from a movie. Then, the same day or the next, someone suddenly tells me, "I received a message from you and you told me to write to so-and-so and tell him such and such a thing"!... And I am not doing it mentally, its not that I think, "A letter must be sent to so-and-so and such and such a thing must be done," not at all: I live—I live a scene or narrate a scene, and it's received by someone else. And it's happening here, in France, in America, everywhere. Its becoming amusing! Someone writes to me, "You told me this," and it's one of my "scenes"! One of the scenes I lived—not "lived," lived and created at the same time! I don't know how to explain it.30 As though, in that particular life, Mother were creating or shaping the circumstances—and quite naturally so, since She was the circumstances. She was the accident, so She turned the steering wheel to the left (to take a simple example) and "quite naturally" the person who was there driving the car pulled to the left. The accident was not somewhere out there: She was in it. She was the accident. There are stories of countries, stories of governments; I don't know the result there—maybe we'll see after some time. And in this type of activity, I have all kinds of knowledge that I don't have! Sometimes even medical knowledge or technical knowledge that I don't at all have—yet that I have, of course, since I say, "This is how it is, that is how it is...." It's rather amusing.30 Of course, there is no need for technical knowledge: She is knowledge, so everything is known automatically!
The direct world—exact.
Continuous Matter
But let us not imagine that it is some kind of grandiose life (unless they are grandiose, things do not exist for the Mind) and that Mother was busy managing the destiny of the world and the government of nations—that also happened, but She was not "busy" doing this or that: it was a natural life in which She did not "choose" beforehand and mentally what She was going to do. On the other side of our mental web, things move in a single Movement and there is no "choosing" between two things or a thousand: each thing has its place (accidents also) and each has its role (blunders also), and depending on the total necessity, you are made to act upon one circumstance or another. And in that totality, strangely (or not), tiny microscopic things and world upheavals have equal value. Each thing is an absolute that holds its total joy or its unique and irreplaceable purpose in the millions of interlacing movements—everything holds together. One day, I was bowled over by a veritable revelation (it was in 1971, the third time Mother was speaking of the "web," I am anticipating): I have a curious impression of a kind of web—a web with... like very loose threads, I mean not tightly meshed, connecting all events, and if you have power over one of these webs, there's a whole field of circumstances that apparently have nothing to do with each other but which are linked together there in such a way that one necessarily implies the existence of the other.... And I have the impression it's something that envelops the earth.... They are circumstances that depend on one another, in a completely invisible way outwardly, without any mental logic, and yet as though connected to each other. If you are conscious, really conscious of that, that's how you can change circumstances. And do you feel you have power over one of those webs?" I asked her. No, it's the other way around: it's because I was working on one of those webs that I noticed it.... You touch one point and everything moves. If you had the power to replace one of those webs with another one, she added, you could change all circumstances that way. It's inexpressible. And I insisted (that's how I got my revelation): "What web are you acting on right now?" But I don't know! They're webs that are around the earth.... There's one... I see.... [and I was hanging in midair, struck, really struck]... I see.... Why, every little circumstance of life is on it.31 The smallest circumstances... together. You drop something, and over there, in the Bering Strait, an iceberg slowly drifts, and this man prepares his coup d'etat and that one revises the 229th page of a book—and everything is connected. Without logic... or with an inconceivable logic. Marvelous. That is how the supramental consciousness sees, or rather how it lives. An innumerable and compact marvel... that moves with this object you drop inadvertently, with the little scorpion that comes to your doorstep, or the white hibiscus that blooms in the garden.
One reads the world in a gesture.
The slightest thing pulsates totally.
One need not go "far" to change the world.
One need not perform "special" things to change the world.
One little act, true. One pure little cell.
It is inexpressible... it is to be seen. To be lived.
One day, as I was rereading the some six thousand pages of Mother's Agenda after her departure, I received the proofs from the reprint of an old edition of her Questions and Answers from the year 1930, page 229. So I corrected page 229, closed the envelope and sent it back to the press. Then I resumed reading the Agenda, the year 1968: on the first page I opened that morning, Mother was commenting on that very conversation, p. 229 of her Questions and Answers.... By what "chance" did all these years of the Agenda, perhaps around page 4000, happen to coincide with that page 229 of an old Questions and Answers, and with what chronometric complicity of the printers, the proofreaders, the delivery boys? The year 1930 of Mother's Questions and Answers had intersected the year 1968 of her Agenda through a singular journey through time, space, printers and typists as if they were on the same web, to the very second. And it had no importance.
And sometimes, for a second, the intertwining is revealed. So we say: oh, what a coincidence!. Millions and millions of miraculous little coincidences.
An innumerable life within a point... without any relevance, or with a total and unique relevance.
One should live each point, each second totally. It is the supramental life.
Mother was learning to live the supramental life. Without any logic She was entering one "screen," then another screen, which, as it turned out two days or two hours later, was perfectly logical. And the most "banal" things came on (or in) the screen. One morning I brought a certain amount of money to Mother as an offering. It had already come on the screen. Everything comes in that way! she exclaimed jokingly... How can I explain?... Its not words, not thoughts, it's something absolutely concrete which comes as if on a screen. If I were in a superficial consciousness I would ask myself "Why am I thinking of this?" But I don't "think" of it and it's not a thought... it's a life being organized. It's very interesting. I must learn to receive things accurately. I don't objectify them, of course (meaning that I don't put them on another screen where they would become objective knowledge), I don't do that at all, so I can't play the prophet—otherwise, what a prophet I'd be! [Mother was not trying to "remember," nor even to "understand": it was like something crossing her path, along with asters, little donkeys and a passer-by, and She kept walking.] From the smallest things to the biggest: cyclones, earthquakes, revolutions, all that, and then very small things, very small, even much smaller than a "pension," a tiny little circumstance of life, or something that's going to come, like a gift someone has sent me or... very small things, very small, totally unimportant in appearance—everything is shown with the same value! There is no "big," no "small," no "important," no "unimportant." And it's constantly like that! Its strange. Its almost... a memory in advance.32
Sri Aurobindo spoke of a "memory of the future." Obviously another way of being.
Another time... in advance.
And sometimes, it was ancient Egypt that came. Another time... from tomorrow? Or a timeless time in which everything is known. A spaceless space where everything is together. The ordinary consciousness is like an axis with everything revolving around it. That's the ordinary individual consciousness. And if the axis shifts, one feels lost. Its like a big axis (more or less big, it can also be tiny), it is planted in time, with everything revolving around it. The consciousness may be spread more or less out, more or less high, more or less strong, but it always turns on an axis. And now for me there is no more axis—gone, vanished! It can go here, it can go there and there, it can go backwards, forwards, anywhere at all—no more axis, no turning on an axis. Interesting. No more axis.33
Mysterious.... Undoubtedly to be lived, not to be understood.
But what is certain is that the cage is narrow... and optional.
And the experience develops and takes shape, but it always seems to look like a "lived film": The moment it comes, I stop the film, and then I work on it to clarify the ideas, put things in their place, see all the relationships... [you would almost think of a film director organizing the various sequences—except it is not a film, it is a slice of material life that is being organized] and when the work is finished, it goes away. Only, it takes the form of a memory, so I ask myself why I remember that. It is odd, these are circumstances that are going to happen, and yet Mother "remembers them".... It's a lack of true objectification. That's how I explain it: otherwise, maybe the film wouldn't be stopped, it would pass on. It would be completely natural and be part of the millions of things that go by or happen without our paying any attention to them—so sometimes She "stops the film" to enter it and work on it, that is, consciously take part in this scene or that in order to alter it or widen it, and then She remembers: it takes the form of a lived memory. A "memory in advance." There are very funny things all the time: I answer letters I haven't received! Then I receive them afterwards—my answer is already written down!34
But what is most interesting—much more than knowing or living through a cyclone, a revolution, or some human event in advance—is that not only there is no separation of time—before, after—but there is no separation of Matter either: there is no "matter there" and "matter here" separated by bodies and miles and "otherness." A continuum of living Matter. Everything is becoming a LIVING consciousness, each thing emanates its own consciousness and exists because of it.... That is where the equation "Matter = Consciousness" becomes very concrete. For instance, knowing in one's consciousness just a second or a minute beforehand: "The clock is going to strike, someone is going to enter, someone is going to move...." And those things aren't mental, they are part of the mechanism of things [a clock is mechanical, the movement of a body is mechanical], yet they are all phenomena of consciousness. The things themselves LIVE (I say "live," but that's not it), they LET YOU KNOW WHERE THEY ARE, where you'll find them; other things suddenly GO OUT of the consciousness and disappear. It's a whole world—a world of tiny, microscopic phenomena that are another way of living, a world that seems to be the result of consciousness without the intervention of what we call "knowledge": its something that has nothing to do with knowledge or thought. The world stripped of its mental crust, the pure world. A body that knows the clock, or the person climbing the stairs to see Mother, or anything whatsoever ten thousand miles away in a perfect material complicity. For instance, from time to time, when I hear people speak of something or other and say, "It will be like this and like that," instantly there comes a sort of "tactile" vision... how can I explain this?... It resembles touch and sight (yet its neither touch nor sight, but both together): it's the thing as it is, that's IT. Someone said to Mother: we are going to build the house here. And Mother replied: no, build there instead, you will hit water. They dug, and there was a spring. Or else someone said: I need two truckloads of cement for this work, and Mother saw eight bags of cement passing in front of her, together with the disciple's deceit. Or I can perhaps give a personal example, because that consciousness of Matter is frankly very humorous in its own way—mercilessly, it sees what is true: I had been told that someone (a young woman) wanted to commit suicide, and I saw her as if in the window of a huge department store, with a revolver to her head. I rushed up only to realize she was looking at herself in the window and... powdering her face with a revolver! Who has ever heard of such a sense of humor? The comedy of the earth, without make-up. Except that it is not always comical. Or else, someone said to Mother: this eucalyptus tree is dying; Mother said: plant another eucalyptus tree next to it, it needs a companion. And the tree started to revive. And they may say what they like, that's IT and it is irrefutable. And so far, there has never been any contradiction. Its a consciousness in which the mental element is absent. It comes just on its own, and it's so clear! It's like an immediate contact with the thing as it is. It is another way of living.35
Sri Aurobindo also felt the battle of the Marne on a map. For us, the mental species, to know is to understand. For the next species, to know is to live, to be—everywhere, anywhere and anytime. I am as though bathed in it and it isn't something I "see" (something foreign to me that I see), it's... suddenly I am it. There's no longer any person, any... I can't find words to describe these experiences.36
And all that happens on the cellular level. They are not exceptional powers but the normal, ordinary perception, as we now breathe or feel. It is not a superconsciousness up there looking at Matter from its luminous height; it is here, in the body consciousness. It would almost seem that without the web, the body lives in another world, which is nevertheless physical and material, because after all, that body lives by the clock, sensibly goes to bed on time and sees two hundred very physical people a day—and its perception is physical: New York is physical, the Chinese troops are physical, and so are the gutters of Thebes. So then, what kind of physical? What is the truth of our material world? And in that same physical, behind the "veil of unreality," death does not exist, illness does not exist, gravity does not exist, rivers can be crossed effortlessly... as if the Matter we now live were a morbid invention of the Mind from one end to the other. A passing invention to make an individual cage. But this is not the truth of Matter, this is false matter.
This is the material, experimental conclusion Mother was coming to: The notion of time and space, objectivity and subjectivity—whether things are concrete or not—all that seems to have been... devices for preparing the consciousness for a new way of being.37 It is like... death, food and money: this Consciousness feels those are the three "awesome" things in human life, that human life revolves around those three things—eating, dying, and having money—and to it, the three are... they are passing inventions which derive from a wholly transitory state that doesn't correspond to anything very deep or very permanent. That's its attitude. And then, it teaches the body to be otherwise.38*
Time, space and death are interlinked.
And all three are passing inventions leading to... what?
Just as Matter is hardened, frozen and divided in our cage, so time is congealed, thick and slow-flowing across the distance of our fragmented Matter—our fragmented consciousness. Time is but a false sensation of separation in a milieu where everything is continuous, unbroken and immediate—and light. Time is a rhythm of consciousness,39 Mother said. Our Matter is in a false rhythm, just as it is falsely thick—if the rhythm changes, Matter will change, or rather become what it really is. Time = Consciousness = Rhythm = Matter.
Another rhythm of Matter.
What is the true rhythm of Matter?
What does that true Matter look like, that physical world as it is, in which Mother's body, Mother's cellular consciousness, "traveled" instantly and everywhere?
The physical world as it really is?
We are now entering a quite mysterious part of Mother's Forest. All is a mystery to us. We are trying to reconstruct a coherent world through the bars of our cage, we are thrusting measuring rods and antennas and microscopes out in order to grasp that enormous whole, but we really grasp nothing of the world, we grasp only what has come into our cage: it is not the world, it is the world of our cage And when we die, we go to the other side of the cage—to nowhere, nothingness, paradise. We can say whatever we like since no one has returned from there, at least not in the same body. When we sleep, we also go to the other side of the cage—dreams, a dark or shining jumble, question marks and disconcerting encounters, and all this is put back into the language of the cage upon returning: it is a translation of the pastoral life, or not, by a perpetual prisoner who has never set eyes on a real field. We can say whatever we like, but it is never these eyes which see, these eyes will have to decay in order to see differently, maybe. When we meditate, we are supposed to go out of the cage—gods, devils, dazzling or murky cosmoses, staggering revelations and lots of question marks that dissolve into an air free of any problems—we can say whatever we like, but when we return, all the problems are there, unchanged. And no one agrees, each one has seen something different, each one creates their own gospel. But finally, what has gone out of the cage? A less ensnared part of the Mind, which after going back through the bars translates what it thought it saw without bars—it is the Mind deluding itself with its own story of the world, only in a wider fashion, with a few additions to make it pretty. And yet all that brilliant or murky nothing, strange and capricious, is what makes the best of our cage, its most comfortable part for those who are not mere machines. But the world, the great world keeps sailing onward, no one will ever catch it, no one has seen it with his blue or brown eyes, as one sees the little leaf that quivers so gently in the wind, right in front of us.
The Living and the Dead
We could say that Mother is someone who has returned from there, but it is not even that. She did not go to the other side of the cage with a view to bring back a story in a mental language. She brought the other side here, not for stuffing it into the cage (as if we could ever stuff that into a marmot's hole), but to the place in the body that is like both sides at once: what the others sought up above and in dreams, She found down here, concretely, in the cells of her body. And since it is not a little piece of the Mind that went on the journey (I was about to say excursion, but it is more of an incursion), it is difficult to couch that in Cartesian language. In fact, only the cage is Cartesian, the rest is much less rigid. It is the eyes of the cells that see, very young eyes that are still rather mindless (happily), but the descendants of the new species will be more gifted to make them twinkle. We always forget that the supramental body, which will live and handle all this very naturally, has not yet been created by evolution—for the moment, there is an old, transitory body which is on both sides at once, as it were, and which is beginning to possess the organs of the "next way" without having the means of movement and expression of the next way. That body will be created, that much is sure—how, we do not know at all, or perhaps Mother will give us some glimpse—but meanwhile, we are at the stage of the butterfly inside the caterpillar. That is exactly what I said to Mother one day, after one of her drastic experiences: "If a caterpillar were abruptly endowed with butterfly eyes, it would be rather panicking!" But Mother was never panicked by anything, She experimented, noted the result and went on. Mother never stopped on the way, not for any experience, even if it were the sublimest one—the moment it was seen, it was done with. To know a thing is to make it die. One must go farther. And so She did.
Therefore we are left with the experience itself, without logic: on such a day, in such and such circumstances, at 95° Fahrenheit (it is always hot in Pondicherry), this is what I saw; others may put any logic they like on it, I have only the Philistine eyes of the New World, or rather the little mischievous eyes of Mother's body. How strange that even Mother's cells were humorous. But since I was the Philistine, She tried to explain to me as best She could: Just try for a moment, try and imagine you're the Divine! Everything is in you; you simply play at bringing it all out in a certain order. But for you, in your consciousness, it's all there simultaneously: there is no time, neither past, future, nor present it's all there together, every possible combination. He's just playing at bringing out one thing and then another [which means, letting them out one after another through the bars of our cage]. But the poor devils down below see only a small part of the whole (about as much as this) and say, "Here's an error!" How is it an error? Simply because what they see is only a small part.... Its clear, isn't it? It's easy to understand. The notion of error belongs to time and space. The same goes for the feeling that a thing cannot both BE and NOT BE at the same time. And yet that's the way things are: something both is and is not at the same time. The notion of time, of time and space, is what brings in the notion of error.1 All the same, this was a bit too much, even for my unorthodox Cartesianism: "How do you mean a thing is and is not at the same time, how can that be?" Something is, and simultaneously its opposite exists. Well, for us it can't be both yes and no at the same time; but for the Lord it's CONSTANTLY both yes and no at the same time!... It's the same with our notion of space. "I am here," we say, "therefore you are not here." But I am here and you are here and all is here!1 And Mother burst into laughter looking at my face. But, here, suddenly something became much more serious: It's the same with those poor "dead." How many, many poor human beings have been destroyed by the very people they loved the most! Under the pretext that they were dead. People give them a very bad time. "Destroyed?" I was somewhat flabbergasted. Yes, burned [i.e., cremated]. Or shut up in a box without air and light—while FULLY CONSCIOUS. And just because they can no longer express themselves, people say they are "dead." They don't waste any time declaring them dead! But they are conscious. They are conscious. Imagine someone who can no longer speak or move—according to human laws, he is "dead." He is dead but he is conscious. He is conscious, so he sees the people around him: some of them are weeping, some of them are... if he's a bit clairvoyant, he also sees that some of them are rejoicing. And then he sees himself put into a box, sees the lid nailed down, shutting him in: "Ah, now its all over, they're going to cover me with earth!" Or he's taken over there [to the cremation ground], and then its fire in the mouth—FULLY conscious. I have lived this in recent days. I have seen it Last night or the night before, I spent at least two hours in a world—the subtle physical world—where the living mingle with the dead with no sense of difference, it makes absolutely no difference there. For instance, when X was in her body I used to see her at night maybe once a year (maybe not even that much). For years she was utterly nonexistent in my consciousness... but since she left her body, I see her almost every night! There she is, just as she was, you know, but no longer troubled, that's all. And there were both living and... what we call the "living" and the "dead"—they were both there together, eating together, moving around together, having fun together; and all in a lovely, tranquil light—pleasant, very pleasant. "There!" I thought, "humans have drawn a sharp line, saying, 'Now he's dead!"
This was in 1962, just after the first great Turning that hurled Mother out of the web. That was the first time Mother saw the living and the dead together—the first time, at eighty-four, after a vast life filled with a deep experience on every possible plane and every possible world. She had gone out of her body thousands of times since the age of five and She had never seen that. She had never seen that world where the living and the dead are together... as if life and death were on the same side. Hence, there is a place in the consciousness where this exists; and the only place where her experience was taking place at the time, was on the cellular level, in the consciousness of the cells of the body. At cellular level, at the bottom-most of the material ladder, the living and the dead are together, there are no longer two sides: there is a single side—just as there is no longer "over there" or "here," "yesterday" or "today." And yet it is a material world, for if the cells are not material, then what is? It means that our physical world extends in quite an unexpected way: its "life" and "death" are not real and definitive data—or "scientific," we could say—any more than its space and time. They are a temporary way of seeing and being that suits our evolutionary transit through the cage but does not correspond to the ultimate physical reality of the universe. It is reality only for the cage.
As for "other worlds," there is no lack of psychics, sages and saints in every age and clime, from Egypt to India, to Eleusis and Dante, who have seen and described them; any person at all conscious and developed has seen his "dead" friends after their death (in sleep, generally, precisely when the web of the physical Mind gives way), and each one has made his own "translation into mental language" of the experience he had on the other side (to make you think, however, that there are 100,000 other sides, as if each one were looking at the same phenomenon atop a ladder of a different height). Whereas here, at the cellular level, in that world Sri Aurobindo and Mother at first called the "subtle physical," then the "true physical," then "true Matter," as their experience became more precise, it would seem that every possible "other side," every possible plane and illumination and revelation and inspiration and the thousand kinds of knowledge always located "above" at various levels or at different depths of sleep, suddenly merged in a single material plane. There was no need of "climbing" or "going out of the body" anymore, of contemplating or meditating or sleeping: everything was right here, quite concretely. The universe was a single continuous plane. Cosmic consciousness was perfectly material and cellular. The "dead" were perfectly coexistent, if I may say so, with the living, in direct continuity with the rest of Matter. This is the great revolution of Sri Aurobindo and Mother, their stupendous discovery: the total Oneness of Matter, the fusion of Spirit and Matter into One—and not a philosophical fusion, but an experimental fusion, just as one discovers a new continent, or rather as one sees anew with other eyes the same eternal continent.
Our next eyes.
Things become... I don't know... concrete. Things that were like this (ethereal gesture), what's called the "realm of the spirit," are becoming concrete, material. Things become... real.2
It is remarkable—Mother would say the same thing each time: the world becomes real.
The Free Earth
It would be absurd to think that Mother was trying to evolve a new kind of physicospiritual theory of the world. First of all, She was not trying to do anything, and secondly She would have been very perplexed if She had to tell what She was evolving: She did not even know where She was going. She was walking, and suddenly the Orinoco was emerging, or Canada, or America; all this without a name, without dotted lines or a dictionary. It was one country, many countries, which in the end would make a new kind of earth. Can you demonstrate the Orinoco through theory? It is exactly the opposite of a mathematical theorem—for us, in the Mind, everything is proved starting from a particular idea. But here, there is no idea, you know nothing: you know as you go along and it is only when everything is done that you can say: here, this is the map. Then Euclid or Lobachevski may come and theorize all they want. All we can say is that it is a new journey on earth—an earth that has somewhat lost its fossilized habit of tamely sitting in the atlas. Thus She had stumbled upon this place where the living and the dead seemed to walk quietly side by side as if it were nothing at all—in fact, as if neither one nor the other had any idea that they were "dead" or "alive." A place where one has no ideas, so obviously one is not dead or living—one simply is. We are probably as fossilized in our idea of life versus death—or simply life—as is the old atlas of Dr. Ptolemy. We have stopped inventing life: we are the dead ones. We have completed the map, the only alternative left is to earn our living and make children to fill life up. But after all, perhaps the world, the real world, is less senseless than that; perhaps it invents itself at every second, perhaps it discovers itself at every second, perhaps it is new at every second—perhaps we are going to enter the era of an ever-new world, like those Pulsations without effect or consequences. A new discovery at each instant. So one lives forever because there is always something to discover. It was what Mother said: Things always come as a new revelation—and not in the same manner.3 Because She had also lost her memory, along with everything else. Our fossilized memory which fiercely remembers that one dies, that one falls ill and cannot fly, and cannot cross the river and cannot... for the memory everything is "you-cannot." So naturally you cannot. It is the memory of the cage. It is what has hardened, frozen and made our matter opaque. It is the physical Mind, the first mentalization of Matter. And that is also what makes the "I'm living," "they're dead," "it's here," "it's over there"—we have lost the memory of freedom. The journey of Mother and Sri Aurobindo is perhaps the great journey of the earth's return to freedom.
When we have totally forgotten that we die, we shall be in the real life—or perhaps, in the other way of looking at it, when we know that That only exists. When we have nothing but a memory of beauty.
And really, that "subtle physical" world, as They at first called it, seemed to be an absolutely free world. The same world, minus our laws. The same beings, minus the memory of our laws. But not beings "in vision garbs," not "apparitions," no: physical beings—Peter, John and perhaps also ourselves, in another way. And what is very curious and extremely interesting is that Mother's perception (and Sri Aurobindo's, too) evolved. It is not that they suddenly saw the "subtle physical," like a satellite photo of America with its neat little ready-made rivers below. No, it is as if gradually, as the web gave way, they were seeing more and more clearly, more and more physically, we could say, what had at first appeared to them as a kind of distant continent: it was not "another world," it was this one! This one without the web. It was not the kind of thing one sees in sleep or while out of one's body: it was something physically seen, with our eyes open, like the same world beneath our crust. A physical world within the physical world. And after calling it "subtle" physical, Sri Aurobindo and Mother went on to call it "true physical," then "true Matter." It was there, just behind that "veil of unreality." It was the real world, the real earth, without the web. And recently I unexpectedly came across a text by Sri Aurobindo that I found very much to the point (and yet it is an old text, from the 1920s, and probably He would have been even more precise thirty years later, but He chose to say nothing): The material realm too cannot for very much longer be our sole or separate world of experience, for the partitions which divide it from psychic and other kingdoms behind it are WEARING THIN [emphasis added] and voices and presences are beginning to break through and reveal their impact on our world.4 We now understand better why Sri Aurobindo used to say that He had no need to "explain" the Supramental: it will explain itself. The screen is wearing thin, and perhaps Mother and Sri Aurobindo, by going through the screen in their very bodies, their bodies of opaque terrestrial Matter, have prepared the rending of the veil in the body of the Earth itself. One day, we shall see. And we will not see mysterious and psychic worlds, but the earth itself, as it is. Although perhaps it is also psychic! It is the supramental earth. And we understand also why Sri Aurobindo called it "supramental": it is a world in which mental laws no longer apply. A world without the mental cage. A world where you do not think of "dying "! You quite simply are alive, but really alive, unlike the ghosts with eyes like "black plates" who just vanish into an unreal grayness, not those digestive tracts equipped with a functional intelligence and perfectly adapted to death—the ones who have literally invaded the earth, the last of the Mongols. Those need not die, since they are already dead, nonexistent. Perhaps they are the ones, the economic super-Philistines, who are suddenly going to vanish behind a veil of unreality. There will remain only the true world. And the others—in a dream. A reversal of the present situation. It is they who will pass "to the other side." Perhaps it is just what the famous "Last Judgment" is about: not the resurrection of the dead, but the vanishing of the really dead. The illusion torn apart. The thunderstruck ones will perhaps die from it for good. Let the others be ready.
An earth that rediscovers the Memory of Freedom.
Conscious Matter
What is this subtle physical, really? How does one get there, what is the means of communication? What are its laws or non-laws? So often I asked Mother these questions. What needs to be done to get there? I don't know, she answered me in the beginning; In fact, I rather followed Sri Aurobindo there.5 And it took her nearly nine years (until 1959) to find "Sri Aurobindo's abode "! This always seemed incredible to me. But perhaps we are seeking very far away something which is close at hand, right here. And as the web gradually loosened, or as the veil wore away, not only would She constantly encounter Sri Aurobindo, but that "other side" seemed to come here, as if there were no longer any transition from one to the other—as if it were part of Matter exactly like the rest, and perhaps more than the rest. It was not at all different from this or that disciple whose face suddenly became blurred or clear—came into existence—according to his state of consciousness, not different from this bottle or that very material object which suddenly seemed lit from within, alive with its own life, not by a reflected light but by the true light it contained. What was supposedly on the other side was living side by side, we could say, just like the disciples or the bottles. But what was false did not have any existence there, was not living there. The phantom disciples were absolutely dead on this side, behind a veil of unreality, while other so-called phantoms from the "other world" were perfectly alive on this side. What made the difference in sides was not "life" or "death," but consciousness or unconsciousness. We could say that the subtle physical is the world of conscious Matter, and ultimately the world of true Matter, the one that truly exists, in which the walking digestive tracts have no place, in which the liars have no place. All the little fakers of consciousness: gone, made unreal.
But we are right in that subtle physical world, we are already in it, everything that is conscious in us lives there constantly and in total continuity with all the rest of conscious Matter, whether "here" or "over there," in Spitsbergen or right next door. Only, for us, there still exists a veil of unconsciousness, a bodily web that scarcely gives way except in sleep and that prevents any communication except in certain privileged states: we then have "inspirations," "visions," "messages"... all kinds of more of less distorted or hazy things—although sometimes surprisingly vivid, even more so than so-called material things, as if one had collected there the most vivid memories of one's entire life—but while going back through the web, something is altered and distorted: there remains only a translation in the cage. We say, "It's a dream." But for Mother, the dream state seemed to be gone—She could no longer have "dreams": She could only see what was really there. And there was no longer any translation: it was direct and immediate, a "tactile vision." "Suddenly, I am that," in the same way She was that in the disciple near her or in a bottle in the bathroom. It was exactly the same, the same world. One was no more real or hazy than the other. She no longer had "visions": things existed or they did not exist, that was all. So where is the "other side," where is "death" really? There is increasingly an impression that our head and our way of seeing are what makes clear-cut limits—but it's not like that! It's all mingled.6 It's a whole... something that moves. So what's going to happen? How is it going to take expression? I don't know. It's contrary to all habits.7
It is assuredly another way of being, but a physical way of being since Mother was perfectly in her body, doing her work here and there in the midst of all kinds of little specimens, real or phantasmal to varying degrees, but absolutely ((material" just the same. It is the way of being without the web. The world without mental partitions. The world as it is.
And what is particularly interesting—what we constantly forget—is that this perception of the world as it is, of the so-called dead and the "truly alive" next to each other, and then Spitsbergen just next door, is not at all the perception of a "psychic," but the perception of the body. It is the body that sees, the cellular consciousness, not the mental or psychic consciousness. You cannot even call it "seeing": it lives, it is, it touches. It is a material perception. The body understands nothing of our tales of visions and psychics and all the rest of our mental theatrics, it understands nothing of our heavens and hells, which are mental creations, it understands nothing of our gods and damnations: for the body, a thing is or is not—like a baby. But a cosmic baby!... Perhaps that is what the "Divine" is. It is quite easy. Any stupid body can understand that, but it is not stupid, it is only covered over with stupidities. We are full of intelligent stupidities that block us off from the natural world—the great undivided natural. Basically, "consciousness" is nothing but the ability to perceive what is really there. The body, the cells of the body, perceive what is really there. For them, without any doubt, Matter = Consciousness. Babies are infinitely more aware of people's states of consciousness than of their good or bad appearances. A necktie is immaterial, even if it comes from Dior. And there are a lot of things that are immaterial to them, and a lot of other things that we may not feel but which are infinitely palpable to them. So what is "concrete"? What is material"? The fossilized Falsehood or the rest? There is no difference between life and death, material and nonmaterial, this side and the other: there is a difference between consciousness and nonconsciousness. We may be medically dead on this side while perfectly alive on the other. And what is not alive here is alive on neither side, because consciousness is the only side of the world. There is but one Matter, divided by a veil of unconsciousness. What we call "Matter" is a fossilized appearance in our cage. You go out of the cage and there is the same Matter in a different light. A stone is real, a tree is real, they carry the vibration of their consciousness; a policeman in black leather shoes carries only the vibration of his digestive tract. You carry the vibration of what you are. The falseness of the mental reign is that, unlike the vegetable, mineral and animal realms, we have contrived what is not. The counterfeiters of existence, you could say. Digestive tracts full of words. For the vision of the body—a childlike vision—the true material world, this same world, is fluid, vibrant, without walls or partitions, without "life" and "death." The degree of reality is in the degree of consciousness. The degree of life is in the degree of consciousness.
A world that definitely seems to make a lot of sense The next world. The world of conscious Matter.
We have to learn the laws of the next world.
A More Complete World
Progressively, through the years, Mother's experience took shape, with a kind of obvious concreteness growing more palpable as the web, that obscure sheath of the physical Mind, grew thinner. It was as if, slowly, what seemed to be on two different sides, like two very close but nevertheless separate worlds, were merging into a single world, which was our material world, only complete. This word "death" is so absurd! I see it as simply passing from one room to another, she said in the beginning. You take one simple step, you cross the threshold, and there you are on the other side—and then you come back. Have I told you about the experience I had the day I suddenly found myself in Sri Aurobindo's home in the subtle physical? Well, it's as if I took a step and entered a far more concrete world than the physical—more concrete because things contain more truth. I spent a good while there with Sri Aurobindo and then, when it was over, I took another step and I found myself back here... slightly dumbfounded. It took me quite some time to regain my bearings here, because it was this world that seemed unreal to me, not the other.8 Then the passage grows thinner over the years, there is no longer any need to take "a step" from one side to the other, but they are still like two slightly different states: Now, the visions are so concrete that they are almost material—they aren't "visions," you understand: its life for a certain length of time. It's certainly in a region where I didn't use to see previously. Very concrete, precise, and the transition from that state to the waking state is almost imperceptible. It's not a reversal of consciousness as it usually is: it's almost imperceptible, as though intermingled.... But the setting isn't the same. It's a VERY familiar setting: I don't feel I am in a new place; it's a place where I am, if not all the time, at least every day. And where there are habits, and.... It's very strange. There would seem to be a whole life like that—a whole life, a whole activity going on, yes, very near, probably in the subtle physical, but very near. Very, very concrete, not at all the impression of a dream. And a continuity: even when I am not conscious of it, and when I become conscious, the continuation is there: and it has changed while I wasn't conscious there. It looks like a material region (material, that is, physical) where the consciousness is more awake—the consciousness is very clear, very clear, and sharp, you know: sharp perceptions. It [this subtle physical world] is like a lining, but a lining that would be more conscious. 9
It is the world of conscious Matter.
And the line between the two slowly melts away: I was with Sri Aurobindo, but a quite joyful Sri Aurobindo, full of liveliness, and slightly more material than what I usually see, as though... and we spent hours working together, seeing things, seeing people, doing things, and so on. But then, the strange part, the peculiar part was that it didn't depend on my. body being asleep: it didn't sleep, it was simply quiet; and in the middle of it I had to get up, but when I did, that consciousness and activity didn't cease. It was the ordinary consciousness (that is, the perception of ordinary things, of the room and all that) which was somewhat less precise. It was as if topsy-turvy, you understand. And it remained for a long time, even in the morning, until I was obliged to see people and do things. It was very particular, it's the first time it has happened like that. Which means that this slightly inner consciousness was more concrete than the ordinary consciousness. The funny thing is that this ordinary consciousness, these ordinary things, it's not that they fade away and are effaced: they become... like paper! Paper, or bark, or... something dry—dry and thin and devoid of true reality, simply like a thin appearance.10 And the experience multiplies, becomes more pronounced, the living and the "dead" seem to move more and more in one and the same world: One phenomenon was there before but has grown more precise: I went to some places where there were lots of people, but mingled, that is, the so-called living and the so-called dead together. Quite together, and used to being together, and finding it quite natural—but CROWDS of people!... It's a place in the subtle physical where those with a body and those without a body are mingled without difference.11 They have the same reality, the same density and the same conscious, independent existence. There's an extraordinary likeness to material life, except that you can feel they're freer in their movement. But that's not new. What's new is... My sleep is no longer sleep at all, I don't know, its a sort of... withdrawal, that is, I go within, and then I am active. And those people are in that same state [the so -called dead]. Among them, some are with people who still have a body: I am also there, and in the same kind of state. But the strange thing is that when I supposedly "wake up" and get up, I go on with something that's not physical! You understand, the state of over there goes on, and it's as real, as tangible as physical things; and after half an hour I realize that I have moved about here and done all kinds of things ENTIRELY in that consciousness!... What's that consciousness?... It's a very clear, very harmonious consciousness, in which there are no difficulties, and very creative.... I don't know what it is.... This morning, for a half-hour I was literally there and I wasn't aware of it! Its afterwards that I wondered, "But... is it PHYSICALLY like this?" There was someone, you understand, I was with someone, and I wondered, "But is this person physically like this? Is it physical? "And I was standing!... So it's as if the two worlds were.... [Mother slipped the fingers of her right hand through the fingers of her left hand]... blended. Strange.... The physical appears to be less imperative. Previously, there was the impression that, all right, it wasn't a "dream" as people call it, but a more subtle and less precise consciousness, and that the physical consciousness was quite concrete and precise. But now this distinction... the other consciousness has become almost more concrete and real than the physical consciousness; the purely material consciousness is more wobbly.... Strange.12*
"But how does one go from one state to the other or from one perception to the other?" I asked Mother. "What makes the difference between the two?" I don't know what comparison I should use, she answered, but I am certain there are some things that are invisible this way [Mother turned her hand in one direction] and visible that way [the other direction]. My impression is that what we see as a considerable difference between the tangible, the material, and the invisible or the fluid, is only a change of position. Because I have experienced this I don't know how many times, hundreds of times: like this [in one direction] everything is what we call "natural," as we are used to seeing it, then all of a sudden, like that [the other direction], *the nature of things changes. And nothing has happened, except something within, something in the consciousness: a change of position. A change of position. It's no more tangible than that, that's what is so wonderful! Oh, the other day, I found another sentence of Sri Aurobindo's: "All now is changed, yet all is still the same." I read that and said to myself "Oh, that's what it means!" It's true, now everything is different, yet everything has remained the same.... The nearest explanation is a "shift"—a shift, the angle of perception becoming different. And it's not, as we might be tempted to think, a drawing within and a drawing without, it's not that at all, not at all *[Mother did not close her eyes or enter contemplation to see]: An angle of perception that changes. You are in a certain angle, then you are in another.... I have seen small objects of that sort that are for the amusement of children: when those objects are in a certain position, they look compact and hard and black, and when you turn them another way, they are clear, luminous, transparent. It's something like that, but it's not that, that's an approximation.13
And it is the same milieu that is being seen: it is not two different milieus or planes. I MATERIALLY see all sorts of things, which aren't visible to others. But it's MATERIALLY. A funny state....14 And then, for sight, for instance, sometimes I see more clearly with my eyes closed than with them open, and the vision is the SAME, physical, purely physical vision; but a physical that seems... more complete, I don't know what words to use.15 Basically, as if the body were seeing the world for the first time without mental glasses. A more complete world.
A funny state... perhaps the transition from the caterpillar state to the butterfly state. From obscure Matter to conscious Matter, as it really is, total and undivided.
And now Mother's words come back to us with an added depth: Life and death are the same thing, simultaneous...
it's just that the consciousness moves back and forth.16 And Mother slipped the fingers of her right hand through the fingers of her left hand. The two worlds "in the same nest," said the Rishis.
The End of the Cage
And death had no more meaning.
I am learning a lot of things about this transition called death. It's starting to become thinner and thinner, more and more unreal.17
It is simply fantastic... the most powerful fact in the universe—painfully powerful—is in the process of changing. Because all this is translated materially, you see, it is not simply an extra trip that psychics were not clever enough to have discovered! I personally could not care less about "visions"; all the gods of the universe can come and dance their saraband on earth and I would be totally unaffected, I would not even take the subway to go and see them! And first of all, let them stay in their comfortable world where they enjoy themselves while we struggle down here with death. But may this death be changed, may this universe locked in its hopeless and more and more cluttered geography be clarified, may pain disappear, may Beauty be, may what is true walk in its path of truth and falsity disappear like a ghost.... It can be, it is possible, it is there, just on the other side of the web. There is only a web to be removed and... all is the same and all is changed. You do not go out of Matter, you do not soar off to paradise: you only go out of Falsehood and pain. So my heart was beginning to beat faster; with Mother one was living a fabulous hope, as if leaning over this painful and lovable earth, so lovable and so false, warped at the same time. One felt that for the first time on earth a breath of air was getting in, and how I clung to that breath, how I listened to the throbbing of that great hope of the world, to the stammering of those strange words, and how I looked at that tiny body, so frail, "as if on a ridge between two chasms".... For the first time, something in a body was crossing the web, and if it could happen in one body, it could happen in the earth's body—such were the stakes. All the while the little specimens watched Mother "disintegrating": going blind and deaf, losing her memory, forgetting the time—forgetting the laws of the Falsehood. But was She going to make that other Law come to this side? "Formerly," I asked, "you often went into the inner states in trance, but now, what is this state in which you seem absorbed (... like Sri Aurobindo in his armchair)?" Completely different. "It's not a trance?" I persisted. No. No, its another type of consciousness. The difference is such that I wonder... sometimes I wonder how it is possible—at times, it is so new, so unexpected its almost painful. "Do you mean that you don't really go out of Matter?" No, not at all! "Is it a new state IN Matter, then?" Yes. Yes, yes, exactly. And ruled by something other than the sun—I don't know what.... Probably the Supramental consciousness.18
"Sometimes I wonder how it is possible...." She was right there at the border, precariously, between life and death: caterpillar and butterfly... together. She was trying to make the earth's body molt.
At her side, I watched Death slowly grow unreal, its meaning so totally changed that there was no longer a word for death... or for life. It was something else completely. Another world. Another earth. And yet our earth.
Really a third position or a third state in Matter. A deathless state. With Mother, I watched that wonderful hope slowly grow, that possibility of an unbroken life—"I am seeking the illusion that must be destroyed for physical life to be uninterrupted," she would say—a life in which you can continue to grow, to develop, to widen, to increase in beauty and knowledge without needing to cut short everything abruptly and start again painfully in total forgetfulness, in a world that no longer remembers anything, except to earn one's living and save for one's retirement, with a few intellectual soarings in between. With her, I was listening to the story of the true earth taking shape. By insisting and pressing on, I have reached the conclusion that there is really no such thing as death. There is only an appearance, and an appearance based on a limited outlook. But there is no radical change in the vibration of consciousness. The importance attached to the difference of state is a merely superficial difference based on an ignorance of the phenomenon in itself One who could retain a means of communication would be able to say that as far as he himself is concerned, it doesn't make much difference. But this is something being worked out at the moment. There still remain gray areas and some details of experience are missing...19 And I interrupted Mother, I was so afraid of losing this earth, I was so fond of our wretched and delightful earth: "You say there's no difference, but when one is on the 'other side,' does one continue to perceive the physical world?" Yes, yes, exactly! "You mean perceive beings, perceive (I wanted to say the forests and flowers and the sea with its gulls)?" Yes. Only, instead of having a perception.... You leave a sort of illusory state and a perception which is one of appearances, but you do have a perception. Not absolutely identical, but with an effectiveness which is sometimes greater in itself But it's not really perceived by the other side." It is the other sideours—that is blocked. And finally I was beginning to understand that the difference did not lie in the physical or in a so-called change of the world—we stayed right on earth—but the human illusion, the illusion of man in his cage, was falling away. Flowers, plants and gulls were not in the cage, one could even perceive them in a more "complete," more "effective" way. It is our eyes that are in the cage, our ears that are blocked, our limbs that are chained, hypnotized by the physical Mind. And it is that Falsehood which is falling away. It is life stripped of its deceptive appearance. The life of the next species. And it was in that life—supposedly of the "other side"—that Mother, or rather Mother's cellular consciousness, was moving about... completely on this side, with her eyes wide open and on her two feet: Things here are always cloaked in a number of clothes, it's never the exact thing, but there, it is the exact thing. And then, I go to America, I go to Europe, I go... all the time. I go to some places in India. And all of that is work, work, work—but so living! Life stripped of its false appearance! It's very interesting, you know! People are so accustomed to... travestying everything—all that is gone; there, it's gone. It’s the BODY'S activity; it's interesting: it's the body's inner life.20 It is the body, the consciousness of the body that discovers the secret of the earth.
Matter discovering the secret of Matter.
The other side is right here—it is we who are totally beside the point!
"But what are the laws there?" I insisted. "What does it all look like?" It's very similar to the material world, only, there doesn't seem to be the same laws of gravitation, because you can move about through the will. You don't have to walk or.... The consciousness and the will have a far greater power than in the material physical.21 In other words, it is our world minus the laws of the mental cage. You cross the river without thinking of it, as Madame David-Neel had inadvertently done when she forgot the existence of the river and the mental laws that govern rivers and gravity.
A world in which we forget the mental laws.
An earth without the laws of the Mind—dehypnotized.
The true earth, free at last.
True Matter, light at last.
The only law, that of consciousness. The only density, that of consciousness. The only existing bodies: conscious bodies. The end of the phantoms.
At the cellular border, the body, freed from the enveloping spell of the physical Mind, forgets about heaviness, thickness, powerlessness, separation and distance, past and future—it forgets death. It forgets the laws of Death. Yet one remains in Matter. One is in Matter, but differently.
It is the beginning of the story of the true earth.
Death was but the painful evolutionary transit through the cage so that we may learn to exist as individuals—but once the conscious individual is made, the cage breaks open. And one remains perfectly in Matter, true Matter, the physical world as it is. I felt that things are much simpler—much simpler—and much less dramatic than human thought imagines. Its very strange, I have a growing feeling of something... without mystery, and that its our way of thinking and feeling that adds the whole mystery and the whole drama—while in fact there isn't any.22
In short, we can say that through evolution we have slowly grown from unconsciousness of the earth's reality to consciousness of the earth's reality—from an obscure and unknown Amazon to the clear and unveiled Amazon. This consciousness of the earth's reality is the last stage of evolution, or perhaps the first stage of a new evolution: the stage of the true earth, the Amazon as it really is, the physical world as it really is. The stage of conscious Matter—which has always been, and which we are gradually becoming aware of. Evolution means to become aware of what is really there.
To reach this point, we had to put on or bear different cloaks, shells and pains on our shoulders. Bit by bit, the veil thins. We are reaching the moment when the veil is about to fall away.
Only the living will remain really alive.
The others will be consumed by their own unreality. There is nothing more deadly than death.
And the pure memory of beauty that had us groping in search of it shines resplendent.
The true earth.
We are nearing the great Turning Point of 1968.
As chance would have it, the year of the student revolutions across the world.
There are so many questions in that forest, so many mysterious and poorly understood areas that sometimes my heart sinks. I have no ready-made explanation, I am going blindly through this forest and sometimes the explanation seems to spring up while walking, and sometimes it escapes to spring up elsewhere. I am not really writing a book, I am blazing a trail in the night, while my body vaguely hears a murmur behind the veil and, by chance, lets its hand wander into the true thing. We must wear down the veil, each of us in his own way. They are slowly wearing down the veil in the body of the Earth. And what is going to happen?
The Three Solutions
There is this true earth, just here, free. Sri Aurobindo and Mother are here, They are working, They see. They are here as much as we are—more than we are. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the President of Bangladesh, is assassinated. It was yesterday, or the day before. A thousand dark and sordid madnesses are perpetrated every day—more and more sordid, it would seem, darker and darker, as if there were no end to the earth purging itself of its darkness, as if more and more sinister phantoms were inhabiting the earth, the lovely earth. Phantoms, indeed, without any real existence, but they kill and destroy—scientifically, medically, theoretically and idealistically or religiously. They destroy and destroy, these phantoms by the thousands, and more and more so. They give birth to other little phantoms who will destroy, destroy more and more—is the earth, the lovely earth, destined to be peopled with nothing but phantoms? Or else with the fakers of consciousness delivering their solemn speeches? The intelligences that have emerged into a higher light are like stars scattered over a perfectly dark sky,1 she said.
What is going to happen?
It would seem we are closing in on the true essence of Death.
No, not the hole; true death: unconsciousness. The world is full of dead men.
Dark dead men in pin-striped suits who televise their eternal words from the heights of intelligent satellites and hypnotize men by the millions. The web of the Mind has grown almost visible, it furrows the sky in every direction and deafens our consciousness at every street corner. They are closing in, they are closing in more and more, almost day by day. And the phenomenon is irreversible. Meaning that the unconscious ones are not going to improve by a miracle. It is a dark and muddy progression. Death is closing in.
And yet it is only a veil. A thin screen reflecting some dark silhouettes filled with murder and barbarous gospels. In terms of consciousness, it is a zero. And yet it reigns. In terms of reality, it is zero. And yet it is our supposedly real world. We vote for them, we prepare degrees for them, we fly the planes and man the laboratories for them—as if preparing a made-to-measure future for them. Sometimes we revolt, but at the first opportunity we act just like them: the College graduation, the children, the progress of Science for them. Each of us picks up his serial number in line. We are of the right or of the left, but they are the two sides of the same Unconsciousness. We work to prepare a silhouette on the screen, and the darker it is, the more visible it is—the more perfect. We all want to succeed in that world. We even want to succeed in the world of yoga or of spirituality. And it is all the same thing. But who wants to get through the screen, really, who wants the true earth?
Who wants something else?
That is what the whole problem boils down to, individually and cosmically.
We could say: all right, let's forget this body of unconsciousness—let's forget death and the dead—and go catch up with the living in true Matter. But this does not seem to be a very evolutionary or very courageous solution. And to begin with, that cage has a very definite purpose, it is not a diabolical invention, it is the evolutionary device to create beings who, precisely, will find the means of changing the cage or opening it. But if we stay in the cage, how can we get out of it while staying in it, one could ask? That is the whole story of Mother. And finally, what happens to this body once it has discovered the secret of its reality, true Matter, the true world? Do the laws of that Matter have the capacity to change the laws of this Matter: a transformation of the old body? Or do we rather throw the old rag away once it has served its purpose: we fly away, a butterfly, into true Matter? A dissolution of the old body. This does not seem to me a very evolutionary solution either. Death is the acceptance of defeat, so ...2 she said. Mother was a warrior (actually I do not know why I say "was"). Or else a third solution....
Mother never knew what was in store for her Right to the end She never knew. There must be a reason for it.
The third solution? We could call it an invasion of the Real. The rending of the veil.... But what a terrible shock for the earth—or in any case, for the parade of the non-living. They may well never recover from it. And we always forget that we ourselves, in our own bodies, are endowed with a heavy dose of unconsciousness—our bodies are not completely conscious, not completely real; if they were, we would be immortal and transformed. So, invasion of the Real or not, we remain with this old body endowed with death, and what happens to it in the end? The hole or transformation? It is always the same question: does the butterfly shed its caterpillar skin, or what? The Real reigns on earth, and nothing remains but real butterflies... but how many will remain in the end? How many butterflies? Perhaps not so many... perhaps not even three.... So?
So perhaps the evolutionary solution is a paradoxical mixture of the three possibilities: a more or less progressive or abrupt dissolution of the Unconsciousness, hastened by an Invasion of the Real, which in turn will hasten the body's transformation.
Mother never knew what was going to happen. Sometimes She thought or felt it would be Transformation of the body—and She fought right to the end with that faith.
Sometimes She thought an Invasion would change everything. And the nearer She drew to the "end," the thicker the mystery seemed to grow: a paradoxical state, the impossible butterfly in a world of caterpillars. As if this very impossibility, the disintegrating old body held the key to the world's mystery.
Can one body become transformed all alone without the rest being transformed, or at least a minimum number of elements? A lone butterfly among caterpillars?
Is the body of the world, too, undergoing a crisis of disintegration in order to arrive at the new state?
When the body of the world is ready, the new butterfly will open its wings.
The invasion of the Real.
We must prepare ourselves,3 Mother said.
The Supramental Power
Through the years, I witnessed quite a surprising phenomenon which finally pulled me down from the paradise of the liberated Mind in which I was more or less comfortably floating ("less" when I had to come down from it only to bump against the same old stupidities); I used to feel a vast rhythm one could enter at will and from which one could draw any required knowledge: automatic books, painting or music. It was enough to sit down and translate the rhythm, or rather to let it clothe itself in words all by itself (or notes or colors, had I been a painter or a musician), everything was known and understood. A lovely transparency in which beings had no more mystery: you just directed the quiet beam this way or that, up close or thousands of miles away, and it was known. And when it had nothing to say, it kept wonderfully quiet in a snowy eternity—with only a little uneasiness or apprehension that this eternity might drag on for long, for an eternity. Mother let me wear out my paradise very gently, She even urged me there, for Mother was always urging people along their way. I had the privilege of meditating with her, and I would take off like an arrow; three seconds later, it was perfect eternity. With her, however, the eternity was a little more powerful than when I was alone (!). But then, dammit, I was beginning to wonder what all this meant—writing books or music is all very nice, it could fill up more than one life, but I felt I had already lived that thousands of times, and then you start all over again and continue: the books pile up, the music piles up, the babies pile up and... phew, is this what life is all about? It seemed quite thin to me. It seemed to prettily fill a mental compartment alone, and then what? The virgin forest had more life, it was more real. But miles and miles of virgin forest make only a virgin forest—it pleasantly and lightly filled a vital compartment, and then what? And you could take anything at all, it was for ever: and then what? Or else you turned the tap off and soared off into the white drifts above—that, too, was another kind of compartment, a spiritual compartment, but there is nothing more alike than miles of virgin sky. So this damned story seemed to me damned or damnable enough, there was nothing but compartments, hardly communicating: the virgin sky could not care less about the virgin forest, which could not care less about little babies, which could not care less about books.... Where was the full and encompassing life? Not in the sum of all the aforesaid pretty ingredients—although millions and millions of men do just that in a little compartment, more or less roomy and stylish.
Then one day, I saw a marvelous healer gifted with astounding powers arrive at the Ashram (and he too surprisingly enough for someone of his kind, had a little paradise of his own, quite a powerful one as a matter of fact, in which he enjoyed a "perfect realization"). He met Mother and meditated with her. "Oh! It's all the same," he told me afterwards. Eternity was exactly the same, in Jerusalem as in Pondicherry—obviously, nothing is more similar to itself than eternity. So he had met Mother, and it was all the same. That is where I had a jolt, because in spite of everything I did feel that it was not "all the same." And what was not the same? Whereupon I began to tumble down from my paradise and to discover the fuller, more encompassing life, without compartments... and something more: a tremendous Power which I had not really felt up above, because up above there is no longer anyone to feel anything, but it became almost crushing when I tuned in to Matter here at ground level; and the more at ground level it was, the more tremendous and crushing it was, almost unbearable, as if you were being kneaded, pounded and pummeled in a frightening way. And there, I finally entered the Thing. There, I landed in a real virgin forest, while Mother smiled—in fact, I was landing on the true earth. And this true earth has a very particular way of landing upon you, which is to pound on everything that obscures or obstructs its passage: you let it flow through you or you break. It is that simple. But this Power was so extraordinarily living, for once, as if for the first time you were touching something real—dangerously real. But once you touched it, you could no longer do without it, everything else vanished into an almost nonexistent dullness. As if one had never lived or breathed before—never known what life was. The great symphonies seemed dull, books seemed dull, life itself seemed dull, yes, not "concrete," as I suddenly understood what Mother meant by "concrete." And "heaven," well, was mere smoke—never again did I return there, not once, not even for a second. I was bathing in a quite incredible heaven that had nothing celestial about it, it was even rather like a cyclone, but a cyclone moves and lives—and ultimately, it felt like a cyclone only because I was blocked: the more unblocked one became, the more the cyclone, or the pounding, changed into a sort of expanse of massive power which you clearly felt moved everything, manipulated everything—all of Matter—and without any division, without "over there." One was astonishingly in everything, except for the little outer shell (here, too, I finally understood what She meant, because it felt indeed like a crust): in the Power that was in everything or, more exactly, that carried everything. Life became strangely close and immediate, a compact oneness. Life really. And there, more and more, the living stood out instantaneously: there was instant communication, they had density, reality, while the others... indeed, they were the phantoms. There was no need to "think" or to try to "understand": it was tangible, it leaped at your face. Or more exactly, it was felt within you in a kind of material continuity in which the "other" became like yourself. "Tactile vision" was beginning to mean something.
So one day, I could not help telling Mother about this "difference": "Before, I used to catch hold of 'That' up above, and I could catch hold of it by prostrating before a pile of stones or anything at all, in the street or anywhere. And it was undeniable. And it was the same thing and always the same thing. And now, I feel that when I am with you, it's not something I catch hold of up above, but rather it's something from within. As if I were seized from within and everything became lit within, in the body. It is not something that falls down on my head from above." And Mother smiled: Yes, that's right. But it's the raison d'être for this body, for the presence here. It's so things may be... from within—not a miraculous descent.4 Then all of a sudden I understood what Sri Aurobindo meant by his "automatic power." It was not something that had to be forcibly seized from above: it was growing in the substance itself, irresistibly, like fire in a volcano. Mother had loosened the threads of the web and that Power—a tremendous Power—in Matter, from the other side of the enveloping veil, or rather the other side of the Wall of the physical Mind, was beginning to infiltrate and invade our Matter from within. A tremendous, invisible revolution within Matter.
And as the years went by, the phenomenon became more extraordinarily striking: Mother was becoming more and more like a transparent breath, a very tiny form more and more huddled in her armchair, and the more She seemed to melt, as it were, the more... fantastic that tremendous Power became, to the point that you could not feel any limit to it, except the limit of what you yourself could absorb without exploding. And it did not radiate from Mother at all! It was not a sort of concentration of power around Mother, no, not at all! It was the opposite of a concentration: an ocean of Power without a center, which seemed to be everywhere, in everything, springing from everything, and near Mother it was as though intensified spontaneously from within. It was not in one body: it was in all bodies, even in a bottle of mouthwash. And you immediately understood who was in contact with it (or what things were in contact with it) and who was not. There were two worlds as it were—really the living and the dead. And those who were in contact were not specially gifted with "spirituality." It was simply... perhaps a clear and sincere simplicity that made all the difference in permeability. Simple bodies and dark bodies. And quite possibly they understood nothing of the phenomenon or believed they were doing hatha yoga, playing football or... nothing at all, it did not matter, they could believe anything at all—"by any method chosen," said Sri Aurobindo—but it entered nonetheless, quite spontaneously and naturally. And others, who displayed their virtuous solemnities, were quite simply like blocks of wood—not even that: plaster. So I could not help telling Mother my amused and amazed observations in the stuttering of an awkward language: "It's a power that seems to invade all the parts of the body and to... I don't know, to fill them with an intense aspiration." Yes, she said, that's how my body feels all the time.5 "As though it were making the body pray. It fills it with a Power that.... It is like warm gold lifting everything up."
A warm gold lifting up the body of the world, unknown to it, kneading it from within.
The supramental Power.
The invasion of a kneading power.
An invisible revolution in Matter.
Not so invisible.
A Little Click
And the earth exactly repeats the individual cellular phenomenon.
The obscure periphery enveloping the cells, this veil of mud that has been slowly deposited and hardened through evolution, this solid screen of the physical Mind that has created our cage and the laws of our cage—this veil of illusion really that covers the earth as it covers our cells—is being shattered, or dissolved, under the Pressure of the evolutionary Movement. We always forget that the meaning of evolution is not human-oriented any more than it was frog-oriented, and that all these millions of years were not intended to improve some little useful gadgets, or even some little useful borders for the well-being of the average democratic man. Sri Aurobindo called it the Supramental Power, we can call it whatever we like, but it is the very Power that forced the amphibian out of the fish and mammals out of the reptiles: the great tidal wave of evolution that laughs at our little momentary conceptions and our nicely catalogued laws bound forever in the directory of the little modern physicist. And actually, it is quite remarkable that this new evolutionary turning is taking place precisely when the physical Mind is most triumphant, at its convulsive apogee, we could say, when the old scientific Parkinsonism is on the verge of locking the movement of the world forever in its implacable straightjacket and making us take its disease for universal salvation: Indeed, it has convinced all humanity! Mother exclaimed. The whole so-called elite of humanity has been convinced that nothing worthwhile can be achieved without this mental organizing power.6 Well, we are just at the hour of the Physical mind's collapse, including everything it stands for—not only the end of Science, or at any rate this particular brand of science, but the end of the so-called genetic code in which they wanted also to confine us, because they want to confine everything, then they enjoy trying to find out how to open the door they themselves have locked. Beneath the crust of the physical Mind, the body of individuals as well as the body of nations and the body of the Earth is, in spite of itself (God knows), rediscovering the great Code of Consciousness and of the Power of Consciousness. Everything else is nonsense. That is the Sense. And everything can be read with that key. Because it is the only key. It is the only Fact of the modern world. There are those who understand and those who do not; and more and more there will be those who do and those who do not, the living of tomorrow and the old dead. On the whole, those who believe in the wonder and those who believe in death. It is that simple. Three quarters of humanity are obsolete,7 Mother said coolly. The whole point is to know which fourth we belong to. One thing seems clear, she observed ten years before the great Turning Point of 1968, when she was still going to the Playground, humanity has reached such a generalized state of tension—tension in effort, tension in action, tension even in daily life—with such an excessive hyperactivity, such an overall restlessness [that is just where our old Parkinsonism comes into the picture with its deadly little trepidation], that the species as a whole seems to have reached a point where it must either burst through the resistance and surge forth into a new consciousness, or else sink back into an abysm of obscurity and inertia. All this is a sure sign that a new principle of force, consciousness and power has been infused into Matter and by its very pressure has produced this acute state.8
The infusion of the Supramental Power into the terrestrial body seems to follow exactly the pattern of its infiltration into the individual body. At first, you feel that everything is going to explode under the pressure of that "bubbling porridge of the Supramental," as Mother would say in the beginning. In actual fact, what is most remarkable is that it does not break (at least not so far); the process seems extraordinarily dosed, it goes to the breaking limit at one point, then once that point is thoroughly shaken, kneaded and pummeled, it moves on to another point, and so on, methodically, everywhere—nothing escapes. And it does not break things, but it disorganizes them so perfectly that one no longer knows which thread to seize—all remedies crumble, one after another. One is led to the point of no remedy, as it were, until one catches hold of the Remedy. Then everything is arranged miraculously and incredibly (but the earth is not quite there yet: it is coming). Thus all the threads of the web are taken up, one after the other, in the consciousnesses, in the body, in countries, in religions, in finance, in whatever... dismantled, loosened—one thread, another thread, then another.... Until there is no solid base left. Exactly as in the body: the earth's transfer of power is being done. So the earth looks very sick, but it is under transformation—not improvement, no, not at all, there is nothing worth patching up; it is cracking everywhere, it has to crack, and all those who are trying to mend it live in a blissful illusion: under trans-for-ma-tion. Transformation does not mean making a supercaterpillar. Are we going to improve penicillin for tomorrow's butterflies? Or the banking system for the savings of supramental beings? But a few have to have the courage to work out the transition. Tomorrow begins today. The transformation is right now, it is being done. One is in it or one is not, this is not meant for our improved little progeny. It is here: a veil to be gone through. Who has the courage to go through?
There are moments when one can go through.
Perhaps the word is misleading: "Transformation" seems to imply a long evolutionary process, like the transition from fish to amphibian, a drastic structural change, but in the same Matter; and such a drastic change may actually take place, but in what matter and with what matter? Indeed, what matter? Our visible Matter, this binocular look on... something, which is precisely the world's utter Falsehood, its sticky, deadly, malignant and gravitationally false illusion. It is not Newton's Matter that is going to be transformed, it is not the falsehood that is suddenly going to grow wings, to the contrary, it is going to collapse under its iron-bound gravity. We are up to our neck, or rather over our head, in an opaque mud puddle whose laws and refractive indexes we have fully catalogued: the mud falls away and the laws fall away. They were merely the laws of our mud. It can happen in a second. The secret of that second is in enough humans becoming aware of the utter falseness of the mud puddle. And this is what is happening in the world's body as it was in Mother's body—but of course, everything is the same Body! A dizzying little tilt into disintegration, sudden illness, sudden death—countless little flash-deaths, continental, national, political and religious, and then, whop, things suddenly clear up, god only knows how, and again, whop, back into the hole, you've had it. And everything seems to have had it, more and more so. The acceleration is dizzying... until the whole earth learns the lesson of the Miracle. It looks like death, and it is death, but it is being "undone forward." The whole earth is becoming undone toward the future. The secret, the extraordinary second, is to know that particular "forward." There are those who will be undone forward and those who will be undone backward. Those who will fall away along with the mud and those whose eyes will suddenly blink in the clear air—in a clear, incredible and miraculous world. Another world, and yet the same. It was the lesson Mother was learning ten times, fifty times a day in her body, with filariasis, neuritis, an abscessed tooth, or a heart attack, and the tilt into dissolution, a minuscule back-and-forth from life to death, life to death.... Until "death" changes into something else, and life along with it. We are moving toward the death of death. It is only the death of what is really dead, nonexistent, unreal—the tremendous muddy illusion we are emerging from through "blows of fist and hammer," exactly like Mother in the beginning. Do we believe in the mud, or don't we? That is all, everything boils down to that. Do we believe in death—certified, registered, guaranteed and legalized by all the scientific experts on death—or do we believe in SOMETHING ELSE? This is where the partition of the world takes place. This is the secret of the coming great Second of Truth—"the Hour of God," said Sri Aurobindo. *You see, it's not as if this world of Truth had to be created from nothing: it is fully ready, it is there, like a lining of our own present world. Everything is there, *EVERYTHING is there.... A little click would be enough.9
An invasion of the Real.
The Invasion of the Real
This invasion of the Real is in fact powerfully, methodically and mercilessly taking place now. But we see only the negative side of the phenomenon: we are abruptly being stripped of our lovely toys that worked so well for so long (not so long: about fifty years), so we are bringing down the roof: "Where is it all leading! Morality is becoming dilapidated, religion is becoming decrepit, honesty is becoming derelict—oh, how bad the world is! And the falling apart of finances, of democracy, of everything, where are we going?" So we patch things up, we repair, and they crack again and again—they will crack right up to the end. Until we throw the lovely, useless toys overboard. We are done with being the baby-galley-slaves-of-the-Mind! All those who seek to restore order pull back toward all the old ideas—that's why they are unsuccessful. But that's all over now. It's over. We are going upward. Only those who can go upward are able to accomplish something.10 And if we do not want to do it, we are being forced to do it! It is thrashing our lovely toys, relentlessly, along with all those who stitch up the laws. It looks like a demonstration of universal ineptitude. These are the last days of the mind's Falsehood, perhaps its last hours. But what we do not see is the tremendously positive side of all this: the formidable and yes, automatic Power that is shaking up the old carcass—and what a Power it is to be able to operate so universally and minutely this great saraband, or rather this worldwide coup d'Etat, in the slightest detail of consciousness, of countries, of organizations. No one considers this side: the tremendous Positiveness that has the universal impudence to knock down our reasonable institutions—as it knocked down the sense of "good health" and "bad health" in Mother's body in order to teach it something other than ideas of good health and bad health: perhaps the state in which that does not exist, and there remains only what really is. The world is being hammered so that it may learn what really is. It is the great devastation of the Mind and of the laws of the Mind in all its forms. That conviction, I am now paying for it! Mother said the day after a new "sickness" had broken out. The body, in its transfer of authority goes through difficult moments, really difficult, and then, seen with the ordinary vision, it would make no sense because difficulties appear to increase with what we might call the “conversion."11 Indeed, the world is going through an unprecedented "conversion," and the more converted it becomes, the more it is falling to pieces; this is what we do not see or understand, we see everything upside down! But it is the conversion of the world. Not its political or religious or economic conversion—its evolutionary conversion, its transition from the crawling of the Mind to the wings of Consciousness. It's the same thing for countries and Nations: it's the same change of authority that causes the unspeakable chaos we live in—because of the resistance.11*
Every evolutionary transition is a catastrophe for the old specimen.
But who sees what is trying to steal in through the meshes of this "catastrophe"?
Through the years, I followed the phenomenon step by step and saw this tremendous invasion of Power from 1962 (the year of Cuba and the Kennedy-Khrushchev confrontation), when the meshes of the web gave way for the first time. The great disorganization in the earth body, the accelerated mudbath, the "illness of transformation" and something else that the true eye could see. I was looking, she noted in 1964, and everywhere there were... as if the world were made of huge engines with enormous pistons that were falling—you know, like in engine rooms: they were rising and falling, rising and falling.... It was like that everywhere. And it was pounding Matter—it was frightful. To such a degree that the body felt pounded. It was a compression—a mechanical compression—and at the same time (both things at the same time such an intensity of aspiration!
There is in these cells an extraordinary intensity: "The Truth, the Truth, the Truth..."12 This suffocation everywhere, this mute prayer that has no name, or obscure names, which rises from the earth everywhere behind its excesses; these driven people, these driven masses—this immense, nameless drive which is like a barbarous prayer: the drugs, the wanderers, the revolts, the desertions, the schisms, anything at all, but SOMETHING ELSE. The body of the world is being pounded, the body of the world in its first primitive aspiration, like a whole herd of pithecanthropus men thrown off balance by the Pressure of the first Mental wave. All the youth seem to be seized with a kind of curious giddiness, she already noted at the time, which for reasonable people would be disquieting, but which is a sure indication that an uncommon Force is at work. It is the disruption of all habits and all rules—it's good. For the moment, it's a bit "strange" (!), but it's necessary.... It's like a Pressure exerted on Matter to draw the response out of it. And WHATEVER FORM that response may take, its part of the general Action.13 Something that was little concerned with any morality, legality, or "humanism," any more than it used to be concerned with simian morality or any other "simianism" at all; but just let something change. There's a very strong Action. But, of course, people expect everything to go smoothly according to their conception, and then they are surprised: how come this divine Consciousness is at work and there are so many difficult or painful or unexpected things?...—They don't understand. But this body understands very well 14 Her body, pounded and hammered as it was, well understood the necessity of the process; the heart attacks and the rest were indeed very "barbarous." The filariasis was quite immoral. But then, there was that Flame which rose up under the painful pressure.... It is the Fire that is growing and growing in the body of the Earth, until the day.... Everything is organized down to the minutest detail, but its not preplanned as we do with our ordinary consciousness: the Force simply PRESSES down and produces the required result. I could almost say: by any means whatsoever—any necessary means. Its a Force that is PRESSING down upon the earth and making people do the most improbable things, those who seem the worst as well as the best, just to... to obtain the necessary result.15 And with that smiling humor, she added: If everything had gone very well, with good results, they would have become puffed up with statistics.16 This was 1964, the year of the first Chinese atomic bomb.
But the other side of the phenomenon, the positive side, also was gradually coming to light through the meshes of the web; in 1965 She observed the positive infiltration of the Power on the reduced but close scale of the small body that was the Ashram. A riot, some buildings set on fire, an obscure mob which instinctively knew that the Enemy was there and hurried toward the Ashram with handcarts and rickshaws loaded with rubble and bricks to attack the gathered disciples. That also was part of the "Action," for better or for worse, on one side or the other, without any preference; it was pounding upon Matter and the difference of sides hardly mattered. Mother was "watching" the phenomenon, quietly seated in her chair and innumerably present on all sides of the battle, at that cellular level where one is fully everywhere. It was an excellent opportunity to study the functioning. Stones started flying; and there were places they could touch and others they could not touch. It was the phenomenon that was "under study." A very small phenomenon "without importance" (except for those who under the painful pressure.... It is the Fire that is growing and growing in the body of the Earth, until the day.... Everything is organized down to the minutest detail, but its not preplanned as we do with our ordinary consciousness: the Force simply PRESSES down and produces the required result. I could almost say: by any means whatsoever—any necessary means. Its a Force that is PRESSING down upon the earth and making people do the most improbable things, those who seem the worst as well as the best, just to... to obtain the necessary result's And with that smiling humor, she added: If everything had gone very well, with good results, they would have become puffed up with statistics.16 This was 1964, the year of the first Chinese atomic bomb.
But the other side of the phenomenon, the positive side, also was gradually coming to light through the meshes of the web; in 1965 She observed the positive infiltration of the Power on the reduced but close scale of the small body that was the Ashram. A riot, some buildings set on fire, an obscure mob which instinctively knew that the Enemy was there and hurried toward the Ashram with handcarts and rickshaws loaded with rubble and bricks to attack the gathered disciples. That also was part of the "Action," for better or for worse, on one side or the other, without any preference; it was pounding upon Matter and the difference of sides hardly mattered. Mother was "watching" the phenomenon, quietly seated in her chair and innumerably present on all sides of the battle, at that cellular level where one is fully everywhere. It was an excellent opportunity to study the functioning. Stones started flying; and there were places they could touch and others they could not touch. It was the phenomenon that was "under study." A very small phenomenon "without importance" (except for those who got hit on the head), but very enlightening. Certain places in the Ashram were as if free from contact with the dark Falsehood of the riot. I was having my dinner, and a little before it started, that experience came, that consciousness: I wasn't this body anymore, I was the earth—the physical truth-consciousness of the earth, to be exact—with a Peace, a Stillness unknown to the physical.... [And Mother sat like a statue, with her spoon in midair, outside the time of the Web and in that strange supramental "immobility" which is like a lightning-fast Movement.] And it all seemed like an absolute Falsehood, without any element of truth behind it. [Meaning unreal, an unreal riot, like a number of other phantoms yet equipped with flesh and blood.] Yet at the same time, I had a microscopic perception (but absolutely precise and exact) of all the points of falsehood in the Ashram's atmosphere that ESTABLISHED THE CONTACT. So if that Consciousness that was there had been collective, if it had been possible to receive it collectively, nothing would have been touched: the stones would have been thrown, but wouldn't have hit anyone. For instance, a stone was flung and hit my window; it fell on the roof there and I saw, that very minute, I saw in the consciousness of the people present the exact vibration of Falsehood that had allowed the stone to hit there. And at the same time, simultaneously (it can't be said, but it was simultaneous), everywhere, all over the town and especially over the Ashram here, I saw all the points, the exact vibration of Falsehood in everyone OR EVERYTHING that made the contact possible...17For there is also falsehood in houses or objects, just as there is in men (probably those who live in them or handle them). For instance, X went out, everyone shouted to him, "Come back in, come back in! You are mad!" But he went across (stones were raining everywhere): not one hit him. And he felt it was impossible for them to hit him.18 Each of us has already experienced one of those special moments when nothing can touch us, and actually nothing touches us—a snake cannot bite you then, or an animal attack you, or a bullet strike you. But then, the very interesting explanation of the phenomenon begins to emerge....
*I know now (I know it in a certain, absolute and unforgettable way) which is the vibration of Truth in the Physical, in which state the Physical must be so as to respond to the Truth—so as to BE the Truth.... You know, it's something which is absolutely immobile, which PHYSICALLY does not budge. Mentally, it's nothing, it's easy. It is like a physical magnet for the true physical vibrations. It doesn't go through the Mind or through intelligence or even through the vital: it's physically a sort of magnet that attracts physical truth. Something that is unshakable. The vibrations of Falsehood: that sort of movement which is like a tremor in Matter. And Mother added this, which definitely opens up very unexpected horizons: This riot was like a demonstration of the discernment between the vibration that responds to Falsehood, and the vibration in which there is no response, which means that no contact is possible—THEY ARE DIFFERENT WORLDS. It's a world of Truth and the other one is a world of Falsehood. And this world of Truth is PHYSICAL, it is material: it's not up above, it is material. *AND THAT'S WHAT MUST COME TO THE FORE AND TAKE THE PLACE OF THE OTHER.
"The true physical?" I asked Mother. Yes, the true physical.18 So, with a sort of feeling of wonder, we are beginning to catch a glimpse of the physical world in which the laws of Falsehood no longer apply: the laws of Newton, the laws of gravity and ballistics, the laws... all the laws. And yet a physical world. There is no contact there, it cannot touch there, they are like "different worlds," yet it is the same world. The contact is the Falsehood one carries in oneself. When the Falsehood disappears, Death can no longer touch us—nothing can touch us. The laws no longer hold. They cease to exist. 200 That is how the cyclone could not enter Sri Aurobindo's room. A kind of immobility in the physical Mind: nothing reacts there. There, at the cellular threshold, beneath the coating of the Physical Mind, the laws of the false world end—the laws of false matter. And we cross the river very easily, we go through the shower of stones, and swamps full of snakes, and everything quite easily. It is that true world, that true physical, which is terrestrially in the process of going through the meshes of the web. And all the Falsehood, the obscurity, the mud, is merely Death thrashing about. It is Death in the process of dying.
And everything is devised and organized, minutely and innumerably and very brutally, to teach us not to react, or rather to cease reacting to the world of Falsehood—to receive or perceive only the vibration of Truth. To be the vibration of Truth.
It could well be that a worldwide process of preparation for those who will survive the Shipwreck is under way. Not an earth-scale plague, not an Apocalypse, no, but the growing dissolution of the elements that are in contact... with their own death. All those who are below a certain vibratory frequency, as it were, will automatically be caught by their own Falsehood, struck down by their own Falsehood, as if by a shower of stones. An automatic, almost microscopic sorting out, according to the intensity of the internal vibration. And the others will see the meshes miraculously loosen—it was a dream.
That is why Matter is being pounded.
It is the time to be true.
Simply true.
In the great disintegration of the terrestrial Unreality, only the real ones will survive.
Because they will have no contact with what does not exist.
Death is what does not exist.
It is the last unreality.
And the Pressure kept mounting.
This invasion of the Real does not seem believable. It is too simple, too fairytale-like. We cannot conceive of something other than everyday life, we cannot believe that one day it will not be so, or it is so far off, so far off.... We have been told so many stories. And when we are caught unaware, unexpectedly, there is always this reflex—even among those who "believe"—it is so spontaneous that it seems ingrained in our very own flesh: well, of course, one dies; well, of course, one grows old; well, of course.... It is yes to death, yes to catastrophe, it is just incoercible—it is like that. The whole tissue of our existence is like that, steeped in death. We may whip it up a bit, stir up attractive ideas, idealize and poeticize, but in our heart of hearts "we know better"—the truly powerful, organized and inescapable hypnotism, as it were, of our primal matter. Even if we know it is hypnotism, at the first disturbing symptom we rush off to the doctor: is it cancer? And the whole edifice collapses. And it has been collapsing for thousands of years. That is why not a single idea, no book, no revelation, no gospel, not even any proof will ever convert that deadly habit—and Sri Aurobindo kept silent—unless "something" catches hold of this Matter from within, in its very depth, at the roots, and extirpates its Falsehood. And belief shall be not till the work is done,1 said Sri Aurobindo. So what hope have we of making the great Hope understood?... And at the same time, one perceives that the veil is so thin, it is nothing really, almost a breath of air. This thing, so fateful and impregnable, which covers the world, is almost a transparent veil, it has never been so thin—a tremendous, invisible change is taking place in the world. Even two years ago it was not like this. Perhaps it is useless to speak of it; useless to speak or try to speak of the secret of Sri Aurobindo and Mother. As long as it is not here, it will not be believed. And that is why Matter is being pounded and pounded, ground from within, tossed and turned in every direction like a dying person on his deathbed, till the thing is wrung out of us; then we shall believe. And one fully understands that it cannot be a miracle seizing us from without—all the sublime apparitions fail two minutes after their appearance. All the divine revelations get entangled at the first bend in the road. It has to be Matter itself that changes, it has to take us from within and be that, as clear and obvious as a crabapple or a punch on the nose. It has to be our own miracle.
All of a sudden, the illusion falls away.
There is nothing more to "believe": it is a fact.
And everything falls from our hands, it no longer means anything.
Perhaps this is how the first invasion of the Real will take place: in reverse. A sudden "dis-invasion" of everything that fills us. A fantastic vacant and "empty" hour. Everything eludes us. It no longer has any meaning. A great, senseless moment. An overwhelming minute of unreality.
The collapse of the Unreal.
Like scales falling from the eyes.
And we seem to hear an immense Laughter rising from the depths of that sudden disencumbrance. No, perhaps not the final catastrophe: an immense laugh of freedom.
Oh, everything is a great mystery, but perhaps, after all, a smiling mystery.
There are only those who will not know how to laugh. The men made of plaster.
And a divine laughter will take men by surprise.
The Substitution of the Vibration
But in fact, men are always taken by surprise. They believe they control the destiny of the world or even that of their countries, their households, even their steps in the street—and they find themselves where they had not expected to be. The Mystery consists perhaps in our not understanding all the mystery of this present little second. At each second the mystery is there. The great "dis-illusion" of the end (or of the new beginning) is at each instant piercing the crust of appearances for those who know how not to look in the "usual way." An enormous veil of habit eclipses to us the stupendous change. The infiltration of the supramental Power into Mother's body, the little twinkling of iridescent, multicolored light is repeated in the earth's body, as if at each second there were a Vibration of Truth coupled with each vibration of Falsehood and, almost according to the look or the attitude taken by this country or that organization, it is either the old catastrophic vibration that prevails, unfolds and causes this accident, that decomposition or distortion, and finally a destruction, or else its clear little counterpart that steals in—and the same circumstances are deadly or beneficent, open or closed. It is really a strange, almost magical kaleidoscope which turns this way or that in the consciousnesses, in nations, in business and everywhere, and which forms a bright or dark picture with the same elements. Truly the magic of each second, which is right there, if we look closely enough. Really as if the entire world could be transformed in one second depending on which side one chooses, or which attitude, which vibration—the Mystery of the end is in each instant, in miniature, scaled-down. It begins right now—it has begun. One tunes in to this vibration, or the other one. One tunes in to the accident or the minute Wonder that seems like nothing: it is an invisible miracle because one notices it only when an accident occurs; one never notices the non-accident, the all-natural. And yet, sometimes, one actually sees.... One sees at each second the Unreal and its lining of Real. The unreal accident, unreal death, unreal conflict and riot, which become concrete or not, hit the mark or not, take the place of the Real or not. When things are completely destroyed or damaged, then we say it is real—indeed, a real illusion. It is all a matter of choice. At each second and in each thing or each circumstance, both vibrations are there, superimposed. The rending of the veil is not for tomorrow: it is being rent microscopically each instant. Exactly like the "great Harmony that changes into a serious illness" Mother spoke of. Each instant her body was learning to choose between life and death, the real and the unreal, the little twinkling of iridescent light and the old habit. Everything is the same, and everything is mortal, or marvelous. It isn't necessary to move, or to move anything, for this Truth-Consciousness to replace the consciousness of deformation or distortion. In other words, the capacity to live in and be this true Vibration—essential and true—seems to have the power to SUBSTITUTE this Vibration for the vibration of Falsehood and Distortion.... Maybe the sense of wonder comes when the quantity that has infiltrated is large enough to be perceptible. But I have an impression—a very acute impression—that this phenomenon is going on all the time, all the time, everywhere, in a minuscule, infinitesimal way, and that in certain circumstances or conditions that are visible (visible to this vision: its a sort of luminous swelling—I can't explain), then, the mass of infiltration is sufficient to give the impression of a miracle—but it is the miracle of the whole Earth.2
Indeed the true Miracle—the one we are blindly taking part in—because the web has given way in the terrestrial body. We are witnessing the vibration of Falsehood thrashing about or showing itself beyond measure because the black threads of the web are standing out against a clear sky unseen by us. Before, we saw nothing at all, except an elegant, polite and compact web, airtight. Everything was so full of polished Falsehood that we were completely taken in. Now things are out in the open. The main thing is to find the secret of letting the air in. That is why we are being pounded. We are put on the brink of every possible accident to learn to choose the non-accident, to go through the meshes of the Unreal. To put it simply, in every circumstance, whatever they are, the most minute or insignificant, we are put in the presence of the two attitudes or two possibilities, the two vibrations: the one that dissolves the Falsehood (illness, death, accidents, the endless meanderings, the countless deformations) or the one that concretizes and hardens it. It is simply a little inner attitude, "a luminous swelling," as Mother said, a kind of call for air in the usual Falsehood. A pause; one gazes elsewhere. One second, one emerges from the habit of being and reacting just any old way, "as usual"—like a jellyfish in the atavistic sea. A little call. Yes, a hole in the web. And immediately it is there. It is there materially. It answers instantly. That is the miracle! Before, we had to do concentration and meditation and purification and.... Now, it is just like a large mouthful of air. The Miracle is extraordinarily simple, and material. That is the work of Sri Aurobindo and Mother: they punctured a hole there; they did not go disappear into the heights, they loosened the web in their own bodies. So it is loosened in all bodies. The passage is open, the famous mahas pathah of the Vedic Rishis, the "great passage." And the whole earth can go through it—it is going through it. If one looks at the dark side, then everything becomes dark, it is hopeless, there is no way out, it is destruction, a sticky porridge; but then, just a little glimpse at the other side, the bright side, and everything changes. One breathes again and everything is clear. Those things did not exist! And each country, everything, is learning the lesson of the Miracle. So who are those who despair of the world?... Those who hold on steadfastly to the web. Those who want death. But let the others breathe in the great mouthfuls of air! Let them not be suffocated by the Unreality—it will suffocate itself very well, without any help. Let them tune in to the light little vibration there, lining this whole enormous and putrid Falsehood: there is no need to "think" about it, or to be "wise" or solemn, no need to know numerous things of the old world of the cage and the laws of the cage—it is a certain way of breathing, a little silvery vibration that runs through the cells, and which sometimes may even seize an entire crowd of people: The intervention or manifestation of the true Vibration doesn't depend on egos or individualities (human or national individualities, or even individualities of Nature: animals, plants and so on), it depends on a certain play of the cells and Matter in which there are aggregates particularly favorable for the transformation to occur—not "transformation": the SUBSTITUTION, to be precise, the substitution of the Vibration of Truth for the vibration of Falsehood. And the phenomenon may be very independent of groupings and individualities (it may happen in one part here, another part there, one thing here, another thing there); and it always corresponds to a certain quality of vibration that causes a sort of swelling—a receptive swelling—and then, the thing can occur.2
That is what happened in 1968.
The Tower of Babel in Reverse
There are moments in History that are like dress rehearsals of a particular evolutionary scene of the future, and in them can be discerned not only the flaws, the obstacles, the contending forces, but also the central thrust and the unexpected lever, perhaps the indescribable "something" which is yet the mark of the future. And the scene recurs here or there, on a small or large scale, in people or nations, until everything is led to one "homogeneous point," as Mother would say.
Strange year, 1968. The second great Turning in Mother's yoga, it is the beginning of the attempt at bodily transformation, the transformation of this old Matter frozen by thousands of years spent in the cage. A tremendous Pressure to change. This is how it is: either change or dissolve,3 she declared in 1968, just one month before the radical little operation. And She was quite serious about it. She was ninety years old that year, still five more years of this life to live. The first war in Israel had just ended, the war in Biafra was beginning. There was the inauguration of Auroville, the city of Sri Aurobindo, a few miles from Pondicherry, a symbol of actual human Unity. It took place on February 28. Some future buildings of concrete perhaps, but above all, a few men, a handful of men and women on a plateau of red earth, who accepted to make the experiment of the new Consciousness in their bodies and in their lives—this Consciousness of the terrestrial body's material oneness. How is it materialized in a collective life? How will human bodies bear the infiltration of this true Vibration, let themselves be molded by it, and thus organize their lives according to norms that are no longer "human" or mental, but supramental and suprahuman? In a way, a first attempt at forming a nucleus for the next species. A field of experimental evolution.
A whole world in the making, from A to Z, without any reference points—everything has to be invented, or rather let itself be molded by the inner growth of this new Consciousness. A sort of challenge, because, by definition, there is nothing more human than man. Each one arrives there with his own baggage of morality or immorality, of spirituality or nonspirituality, with his ideals and so forth—everything has to be demolished, all the old crust, whether idealistic or not, right down to the pure cellular basis. Something that does not require heroism (or perhaps it does, after all), but an extraordinary sincerity of aim that will not let one atom of old reflex block the current of the clear little vibration—and a single faith: the Consciousness of the future and that tremendous Power that can do everything... if one lets it. The whole difficulty of the endeavor is in this single "let it"—no one wants to "let it" of course, each one has his own idea of the way in which things should or should not be done. There, one measures the earth's difficulty, quite symbolically and simply. Auroville is the earth's pilot experiment. It is not a question of raising millions of dollars to build a city, not even a question of finding thousands of men to live in a city, above all not a question of human success with a view to creating an exemplary superhumanity equipped with superschools and superlibraries—a handful of men and women who truly, integrally, will let their own substance be molded by the new Power to see what will come out of it. Some transparent specimens.... Will they succeed or not? Everything will depend upon their sincerity. If only a few men on earth understood, not only in their heads and hearts but in their bodies, that this Power can do everything! Nothing is impossible, no law holds. There are no material problems: only the web to traverse. That is all. On the other side is the constant Miracle, at every second. In short, a few men who are willing to learn the lesson of the Miracle.
A few clear men.
Disencumbered men.
Not so easy....
But silently, like Mother in her room, if they let a few clear drops filter in through the meshes of the web, they can invisibly revolutionize the world more than all the bombs piled up in all our charming countries and more than all the equations of Einstein—because there is only one single body and it is the infallible equation of the future.
Will there be three of them?
Three men.
It would be interesting to see.
Auroville is a great adventure, she said.
I can still picture her half-perched on a high stool, writing the "Auroville Charter" on her windowsill, armed with a large scroll of parchment and a thick felt-tip pen that made her writing look like cuneiform inscriptions. We won't put any solemnities, she warned, half turning towards me (and with that ever present little gleam of mischief in her eyes). "1) Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole...." I didn't put "to no nation" because India would have been furious!4 But that was the idea: no countries. First and foremost, no countries, no borders, no passports! And the four simple paragraphs, a little cuneiform-like, continued while She closed her eyes from time to time "to see better." Then She explained to me: No police, no army, no religions...4 Oh! How wonderful it was to imagine that "free port" on an earth where even the virgin forests are fenced with barbed wire, "mine, mine, mine," everything is mine, mine, mine on earth, even the temples are "Mine," there is nothing but little selves enclosed in civilized leather. And to begin with, the abolition of inheritance: no private property, no money.... The foremost law of Auroville was a vaster self who was lightly himself everywhere and in everything. But the knack of the not-I had to be learned, the little vibration that runs through everything. It's a kind of adaptation of the Communist system, she remarked, but not in a spirit of leveling: according to everyone's capacity, his position (not a psychological or intellectual one), his INNER position.5 An end to the hierarchy of phantoms: the true hierarchy, that of the inner reality, the inner density instead of the bank account and the false degree. And then the reality of work. But to tell the truth, the "work" may be an inner work.... One's participation in the welfare and existence of the whole township isn't something worked out individually: such and such an individual must give so much. It's not like that. It's worked out according to one's means, activity, possibilities of production; it's not the democratic idea, which cuts everything into small equal bits—an absurd machinery. It's worked out according to one's means: one who has much gives much, one who has little gives little; one who is strong works a lot, one who isn't does something else. You understand, it's something truer, deeper. It must be something living and TRUE, not mechanical.... The organization should be such, arranged in such a way, that everyone's material need should be met, not according to notions of right and equality, but on the basis of the most elementary necessities—you don't pay for your food, but you must give work, or ingredients—then, once that is established, everyone must be free to organize their life, not according to their monetary means, but according to their inner capacities.5
And no rules, no "laws"—which a number of individuals lost no time in taking as free license. But one does not cheat the Power. A strange automatic phenomenon occurs: the cheaters are self-expelled, as it were, they expel themselves—all of a sudden they have had enough, they can no longer stay on. Or else they are brought to such baseness that they bring on self-destruction. It is straightforward and categorical. Everything is exposed. No need for courts of law: things spring from within. And this is the true Law of the future world—everything springs from within, so it is inescapable because... it is your own work. One learns the more and more perfect Work. That is all. And ultimately, it is the only joy: to do the perfect work, whatever it may be. It is the work of oneself. Usually (always so far, and more and more so), men establish mental rules according to their conceptions and their ideal, then they apply them. And that's absolutely false, arbitrary, unreal, so the result is that things revolt, or else waste away and disappear.... Its the experience of LIFE ITSELF that must slowly work out rules as supple and vast as possible, in order that they ever remain progressive. Nothing must be fixed. That's the immense error of governments: they build a framework and say, "Here is what we've established, now we must live under it." So naturally, Life is crushed and prevented from progressing. It is Life itself, developing more and more in a progression toward Light, Knowledge, Power, that must little by little establish rules as general as possible, so as to be extremely supple and capable of changing according to need—of changing as rapidly as habits and needs do. At bottom, the problem almost boils down to this: to replace the mental government of intelligence by the government of a spiritualized consciousness.5
It is that "de-certification" of the Mind that must come down into the body. That is the ultimate experience of Auroville. Not a new society: a new type. That's what this body is now learning—to replace the mental government of intelligence by the spiritual government of Consciousness. And it makes (it looks like nothing, one may not notice it), it makes a tremendous difference, to the point of multiplying the body's possibilities a hundredfold.... When the body is subjected to rules, even if they are broad, even if they are comprehensive, it is a slave to those rules and its possibilities are limited by them. But when it's governed by Spirit and Consciousness, that gives it incomparable possibility and flexibility! And that's what will give it the capacity to prolong its life.... Necessities have lost their authority: you can adapt yourself this way, adapt yourself that way. All the laws—those laws that were laws of Nature—have lost all their despotism, if I may say so. All you have to do is constantly and always to be supple, attentive, and responsive to the influence of the Consciousness—the Consciousness in its all-powerfulnessso as to go through all this with extraordinary suppleness. That is the discovery being made more and more. And it's wonderful, you know! A wonderful discovery. It's like a progressive victory over all constraints. So naturally, all the laws of Nature, all the human laws, all habits, all rules, all that grows increasingly supple and finally becomes nonexistent. And then, you see: as the process grows more and more perfect —"perfect" means integral, total, leaving nothing behind—it necessarily, inevitably means victory over death. Not that this dissolution of the cells stops existing, but that it would exist only when necessary: not as an absolute law, but as ONE of the processes, when necessary.5 Because decidedly, the ((process" of death means solely and exclusively an incapacity to progress—the prison cell, the Parkinsonized cage that must be destroyed in order to go further. That is its only evolutionary object. One does not die from cancer—neverone dies from the consciousness being fossilized within a certain kind of experience. Death only attacks death. It's mainly all that the Mind has brought in terms of rigidity and absoluteness and near invincibility—that's what... is going to disappear. And simply by handing the supreme power over to the Supreme Consciousness.5
A testing ground for the mental subversion.
Right down to the cells.
The last sedition.
And in order that the evolutionary endeavor may hold on to something "concrete" according to human norms, in the manner of the ancient Pharaohs, or perhaps the knights of the Middle Ages who had to go through a "test," those Aurovilians received as a first task to build a symbolic center around Sri Aurobindo's symbol, like an enormous lotus bud ("Aurobindo" means lotus) rising from the earth, from the mud of the earth into which the true consciousness, the supramental Truth-Consciousness, must infiltrate. It is what Mother called with her delightful sense of humor "the Tower of Babel in reverse." They united and divided in the construction, so now, they come together to unite in the construction. That's it: a Tower of Babel... in reverse!6
Will we undo the mental Babel?
That is the whole question of the coming twenty-first century.
It is truly the very question evolution is putting before us. That was in February 1968.
The Immobile Revolution
A strange wave ran through the world that year.
I remember the first female Russian astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova, who marveled at the small orange ball that conveyed such a lovely sense of unity when seen from above.... Streams of clouds, magnetic currents span our continents, but we are blind to the invisible stream that terrestrially links our every vein and cell. Yet it is there, pressing, more and more, more and more. There is a certain quality of vibration, which is difficult to describe but gives a sense of something coagulated (not broken up), she already said in 1966, something that feels denser than air, extremely homogeneous, with a golden luminosity, an awesome power of propulsion. And that, that Vibration, exerts a pressure on people, on things, on circumstances, in order to fashion them according to its vision. And it's irresistible. Even people who think the opposite, who want the opposite, do what is willed without wanting it; even things that are opposed in their very nature are turned around. For national events, relations between nations, terrestrial circumstances, that's how it acts, constantly, constantly, like an awesome Power. The resistance of inertia in consciousnesses and in Matter are the reason why that Action, instead of being direct and perfectly harmonious, becomes confused, full of contradictions, shocks and conflicts. Instead of everything working out "normally," I might say, smoothly (as it should), all that resisting, opposing inertia causes things to start clashing together in a tangled movement, with disorder and destruction... which are made necessary only by the resistance but were not indispensable: they might not have been—they should not have been, to tell the truth. Because that Will, that Power, is a Power of perfect harmony in which each thing is in its place, and It organizes everything wonderfully. But when It descends and presses down on Matter, everything starts seething and resisting.7 It is the constant infiltration and substitution by the true Vibration for the false vibration. And what is so extraordinary is that we bathe, in a way, in a world of wonder magically transformed into chaos—an unreal magic, for sure, a magic of unreality to which we are so integrally a party, down to the least detail of our reactions. The Vibration comes, you see it: it is simple and direct; and then everything gets magically tangled up. Really like a veil, or a mist of Falsehood enveloping you and enveloping everything. It has no reality whatsoever, it is almost like a systematic invention of catastrophe. You open your eyes truly and you realize that it is a phantom. And sometimes, the "amount infiltrated" is strong enough to dissolve the cloud for a second, and you open your eyes wide... it is unbelievable—nothing is to be believed of this world anymore.
That is what happened in 1968, unknowingly, as a general rehearsal—a very small rehearsal. And one can perceive so clearly the intermingling of the two movements, the two forces, the true Vibration and the false one; and how, almost instantly, the true and victorious Movement that seemed to carry all those students throughout the world became distorted—one must be able to bear the victory, especially that victory, and that is why you are plunged back into your inanity or insanity and pounded again and again until the infiltration is global enough to dissolve the cloud without breaking everything. Until we decide we really want to see. On February 28, 124 students from 124 countries (along with the representatives from 23 states of India, making a total of 147) came to throw a handful of earth from their countries into the urn at the center of Auroville, as if to blend all those handfuls of earth into a single true Earth, one, an earth of truth—and it was not a question of "Auroville," or any city here or there, any place from the East or the West: quite simply a place called Earth, the little orange ball wrapped in its evil spell. They were 147 wanting to undo the spell. On March 8, nine days later, out of the blue, the students of Warsaw provoke a riot: "Down with Censorship!" they shouted in the squares—censorship of what? Of the true man, perhaps, under his mental collar of iron. On April 23, another wave—or still the same one—seized the students of Columbia University in New York: "The revolt"... against what? No one really knows, or they put labels and banners on it, but it is really the revolt, quite simply. Then on May 2, Nanterre, the University of Paris: "The student strike"—It doesn't look like a strike at all, it looks like a revolution,8 Mother immediately declared. She had seen, She saw. And then all the "porridge of Falsehood" instantly seized upon the great Flame: that which was true History was turned into politics and petty little stories. (But perhaps the great primates would have seized upon that wave to settle their tribal quarrels?) They did not even understand what they were doing. But all the same that wind blew all the way to Mexico, where the army seized the university; to Cairo and Alexandria, to Calcutta and Madras—all the way to Prague in November. Jan Palach would set himself on fire in the first days of January, January 16, while the obscure rumblings of the old Falsehood rolled from East to West and everywhere: in the Pacific, France won the dubious honor of becoming the fifth nuclear nation. There was the assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of John Kennedy's brother. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, the candidacy of Nixon. Finally, the gold crisis, the "worst one since 1930," the London stockmarket closed.... But this was only a beginning: The reign of money is drawing to its close,9 She said, and She saw clearly (She always saw clearly). The false gold of the earth, while a light gold ran for a moment in the veins of the Earth... and nobody knew why. In a few months we would land on the moon with helmets, boots, radars and computers programmed to the second—the "program" is flawless. But perhaps it is the end of mental programming—if we know or want to seize the golden little trigger.
There is in the consciousness the very strong feeling—very strong—that the time HAS COME, she said during the same month of May. 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 repeating 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.... In any case, it is certain that we shall see the signs, or rather that we are now seeing the precursory signs.... Something is really changing. Those are still the precursory signs, the forerunner movements, so it's scattered, not combined, but for one who can see, it's obvious. For instance, all the students and the whole working class have joined forces. Naturally, on the mental level there's a whole mixture of all kinds of ideas, but the Force behind... they themselves are unaware of it, but they are driven by a force that wants the manifestation of a truer truth. It's clearly (not in the detail of it, but in the direction of the Movement), clearly a will to have done with the past and to open the door to the future. It's like a sort of revulsion with stagnation. A thirst for something which is ahead and appears more luminous, better. And indeed there is something—it's not just imagination: there is something. That's the beauty of it, it's that there is something. There is a Response. There is a Force that wants to express itself.10
And Mother added this, which leaves us pensive: It seems its not the students who started the violence, but the police. And that's very interesting, because the police stand for the defense of the past. When later I was given the news [of the riots], then there came in me (it was said very, very clearly, a very clear vision): the Future. It's the higher Power COMPELLING people to do what they must do. Between now and that Future (which is a long way ahead), there must be the power of an IMMOBILE number. And the vision was very clear: if millions—not thousands, millions—of people assemble together and occupy the place absolutely peacefully (simply assemble and occupy the place), then it will have power. But there must be NO VIOLENCE; as soon as one indulges in violence, it's the return to the past and the open door to all conflicts... an occupation by the mass, but a mass all-powerful in its immobility.... I know that. There has been—there has always been—an identification of this body's consciousness with all revolutionary movements. I have always known and guided them even before news of them came out: in Russia, in Italy, in Spain and elsewhere—always, everywhere. And essentially, it was always the same Force seeking to hasten the coming of the Future—always—but constrained to adapt its means of action to the state of the mass. And now, the state of the earth would seem to be precisely such that what is at the very least being prepared (if it's not yet actually like that) is the manifestation of the mass in a kind of silent and immobile will.... And that's an intermediate period to reach the condition in which this mass will be held under the control and directly driven by the Power from above. That's where we are heading."
Mao Tse-tung's "Union of the Masses" has perhaps another meaning altogether.
So, for an instant, we can imagine that little golden trigger pressing on the earth's masses, on those young, open masses that have had enough of this future of intelligent robots, and... everything stops. The pilot suddenly finds that his plane has lost all meaning; the government pen-pusher lifts his ball point from amongst his dusty ordinances and realizes that his paragraphs are suffocating him; the voter—the dear voter—suddenly discovers that his vote is worthless, and he is merely voting for the watchmen of the cage; the rightist, the leftist, the man in the center all discover there is no longer any center or direction and the ship is sinking on every side; people from the East, people from the West, yellow and red, look unbelievingly at those termite walls that imprison them in nonexistent ideologies; the young, the little ones, the not-yet-suffocated, look at the piles of equations and degrees and libraries, and all the charming bombs that their daddies are piling up, and it no longer means anything: we are not living for that, not for anything! Unless we are completely crazy. So we let drop the pen, forget about the paragraph, the locomotive, and the ballot, the equation and all the certified clockwork—and WE ARE NO LONGER IN IT. We have never been in it, it is a Falsehood, it does not exist. We belong elsewhere, we are of the next-world-here which is bursting in our face. And the veil is being rent. Through the power of those millions of looks that want to see the true earth, live the true life, be once and for all, the illusion crumbles. And we suddenly laugh, an immense divine laughter which seizes the entire earth under the very nose of the dazed phantoms—we laugh and laugh beyond belief, beyond all belief forever. It is done, we are in it. We live, we breathe. It is here. The general strike of the mental Machine. Immobile millions who turn their backs on the Machine, let drop the phantom, the laws, and Death. We return to life on the true earth. Simply through the immobile power of millions who want no more of it.
And the web vanishes.
No, not a return to the spinning wheel—a leap into the true earth.
A magical terrestrial act.
An immobile revolution.
And the Machine stops. It is all over, it is finished, it no longer works.
There is nobody left to make it work.
Nobody to elect the prison guards.
Nobody to barricade the borders.
Nobody to tighten the bolts.
There are only the living, that is all.
And they will invent a new future through the power of their joy.
There is a growing feeling that the True is the only way to change the world; that all the other processes of slow transformation are always at a tangent (you draw nearer and nearer but you never arrive), and that the last step must be this—the substitution of the true Vibration.11
Nandanam August 28, 1975
Most of the quotations from MOTHER'S AGENDA have been considerably abridged, at times even composed of different extracts, otherwise several volumes would have been necessary. We indeed apologize for this to the readers of the AGENDA, but they will have the joy of discovering for themselves the pure essence of these unabridged texts.
References to the works of Sri Aurobindo correspond to the original English of the Centenary Edition. The first number refers to the volume number.
We are not at the end of a civilization but at the end of a cycle in the geological or paleontological sense. "Man is a transitional being," said Sri Aurobindo. Indeed this transition from the human species to another species is the question of our time. How does one work out the transition to a new species? How does one create a new species? What is the nature of such a physiological transformation, and hence what is the nature of Matter itself, on which and in which we seem to move as if forever bound to some inescapable nit ratified by every certified scientist? But these are the scientists of a certain species. in the deep caves of Mexico, beneath their sheet of muddy water, certain little axolotls, like larvae, have lived and reproduced for centuries. When suddenly moved into another milieu, they are transformed into salamanders or amblystomas. What becomes of the laws of the axolotls? What would happen if a somewhat "prescient" axolotl saw the next "milieu" and Ivied, in its own flesh and in the midst of the other recalcitrant and merciless little axolotls, to leave the cave and effect the transformation? And what if it discovered that Matter is tun what the axolotls think it is, that the laws of life are' not what the axolotls think they are, and that ultimately even "death" is not the opposite of axolotlian life but something else which is neither life nor death, but an "overlife," the milieu of the next species?
This fabulous experience was Sri Aurobindo's secret, and it is Mother's secret. Why did Sri Aurobindo leave his body? Why did Mother leave? Where are they, and what is happening? Could there be already here, on earth, another "milieu" trying to pierce throughout layers of mud and to propel us by force into a new world?
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