Evokes Mother's last years, from 1968 to 1973, the most critical and poignant period, and attempts to unveil the Secret.
If this true Vibration, this small lining of Truth replaced the false vibration, we would be faced with an immensely transformed world⎯unimaginably transformed, because we cannot imagine what is simple. We can imagine fairies, gods and all kinds of bedazzling complications or superartifices, but in fact we keep inventing complications to simplify our complications, but that which does not need any artifice, that which is as obvious as spring water…. A spring is new at every moment. Something which finds its path according to its slope of truth and opens its way through the simple power of what it is. To be is to be able to be what one is at every second: an apple tree, a gazelle, a song in one way or another, and it sings, that’s the way it is. Man, this human transition, was exactly to be capable of being what one is not, and as it is not truly possible, it was a power of unreality in a stronghold of unreality⎯now the unreality is simply exploding in our faces, that’s all. But how about that real, suddenly real world, disillusioned … and clear? How about those not-yet-suffocated men suddenly opening their transparent eyes … by the million? It is very vertiginous. It is awfully miraculous! Perhaps it is also very funny, but what is it? A world where suddenly everything communicates⎯for that was what the fortress was: nothing communicated. A world where one knows what is needed at every second and what exact amount is needed, as the bird does, very simply. One knows all that one does not know, because the fortress was what created the wall of not-knowing. Then, to begin with, all schools collapse. There only remains the immense School of the Game of Life, and also, perhaps, training schools for the body, or rather for the consciousness of the body. There is no more cramming, because there is no more fortress to cram: it is the great manor of the world. And everyone is what they are, which makes for many different types of music; and since one no longer needs to rob his neighbour in order to fill one’s own cellars, earn a false living in order to try and stealthily make a true one with it, be anything other than what one is, it all results in a sudden collapse of all competition: one will not “succeed” in being like one’s neighbour. And everyone, every country, every group, if one still needs groupings, does not have to be other than what it is, very joyfully, because to be means the joy of being what one is, purely, without addition or subtraction. And without borders. There is nothing to gain! Except oneself, more and more beautifully, more and more limpidly, more and more powerfully. For one can also do all that one cannot do: the fortress was what created the wall of non-power⎯though very wisely (or automatically, we could say), because we would have immediately grabbed hold of this Power to wring our neighbour’s neck and twist everything, as usual. But there, in this disillusioned world, there is no need of morals anymore, of policemen or of courts: it is the automatic power … of what we are, and naturally of accomplishing what we are. Where could the fakers be in this clear world? If they could possibly exist, they would be admirably visible: twisted like their thoughts, enveloped in grey and black like rats. There is no need to pretend: it can be seen, it is clear, and everybody out! But what is really marvellous is that, by themselves, the fakers will no longer be possible⎯those poor fakers, they delude themselves a lot, harbour many illusions, thirst for everything, suffer and toil a lot to catch what they are not … but if they can no longer delude themselves? That’s it, a world where one can no longer delude oneself. Is one going to paint one’s face like a Punchinello? There is but one means of power left: to be, more and more. Who would choose cancer? The true cancer, that of Falsehood, that which creates all the little cancers in our skin.
Of course, a world where there will be no more doctors, lawyers or.… The list of all our complications is very long. No more telephones, since communication is everywhere: it was a walled fortress. No more distance, or separation, it is consciousness everywhere: it was the fortress of unconsciousness. The web has given way and one runs, it runs everywhere. No more trepidation or hurry … hurry for what? Tomorrow is perfectly today, each second is perfectly what it must be, new, like the little spring. An extraordinarily simple world … as truth is. Just a veil that tears. A few million clear gazes that suddenly stop and weigh together on the veil.
The ghosts will say that it is not possible, because for them, everything is not- possible, except the cage that creates all of their power⎯their evangelical, governmental, scientific, eternal and constitutional power. All tarred with the same brush. These are the evangelists of death, so they cling to it, of course! But there remains a point. A mortal point: this body. And this point of Death is like the key to Falsehood, or to the Truth hidden by that Falsehood⎯for in fact, only Truth exists in the world, even Falsehood could not exist if there were not a Truth behind it. It is the great simulacrum of Falsehood stuck on an imperturbable Truth. The Falsehood comes off and the true Earth emerges⎯it can happen tomorrow, it is not far, it does not take “time”: all those little consciousnesses have only to reach the “homogeneous point,” as almost happened in 1968, but without the knowledge of the process or of the reason or the Power behind it. The Amazon is there, radiant, funny, unveiled. A formidable world breathing. But this old body is still here⎯this old body which worked out the transition so far, this old animal residue. What is happening to it? Mother had exactly reached that point: for her, all was unveiled, without limits, without possibility of illness, for illness is only the material, corporeal expression of Falsehood. She was in the true earth beforehand. She was preparing the true earth for everyone by wearing down the web in her own body. Illnesses are eliminated, even wear and tear can be eliminated: there is no more “friction” or trepidation in the cells of the clear world. But they are still animal cells nonetheless. And what is the point of lingering in a ninety-year-old body? And even if we can conceive⎯as it can really happen⎯of younger bodies, even very young ones, achieving the transition and breaking through the web at eighteen, what about this body which has to eat, digest, weigh something? It seems that its mode of functioning in itself, even pure, even freed from illnesses, contains its own seed of death and decay: one eats, which necessarily means that one is also eaten. It seems that this body is the very symbol of Death.
But what does death mean, when there is no more “other side”? The other side is here, isn’t it, when we have cut through the web. So, what happens then? We enter our “body of consciousness,” as one could say, the very one that is lining us and is our reality, our body of reality, the one that Mother saw more clearly than the fakers’ skin and bones, and which shone or faded depending on the quality of consciousness. It is an old story, we have always had a body of consciousness⎯we even come back life after life to make this body grow, to develop it, universalize it and embellish it … to teach it how to love. For the cage is the site of Love⎯the site of suffering. This is perhaps the great secret of the cage. One comes back to it again and again until one has learnt how to love everything and be everything⎯in brief, how to be divine. There are not many people who do their true job in the cage, but a few of them do it. Fakers vanish, they have no body on the “other side,” they are only aggregated Matter, which dissolves. But what happens to the others at the end of the growth cycle, when the true body, the body of consciousness is fully shaped, developed, conscious and loving?… Does one drop the animal rag and disappear, disencumbered, into the true earth?⎯like “ghosts” in reverse. We could easily imagine a world where all conscious bodies joyfully frolic … on earth, the true earth, while the “real” ghosts are in the foreground, the false earth⎯and the two worlds remain as if superimposed, without communication. This is how things already are. It is the dwelling of Sri Aurobindo, and of many conscious beings. But this does not seem to be the evolutionary solution. If we have been shaped in Matter, it means that this Matter holds its own plenitude and its own accomplishment⎯where is the seed that ends in a non-tree? Thus this seed of Matter, symbolized by this body, must have its own meaning and its own key.
The body’s death must hold the key to its transformation.
Yes, a butterfly that emerges from a caterpillar, but in a material body, “on the right side” of the world.
Or is “this side” decidedly false and this Matter false? Then, one leaves it: it is
Matter of the cage and one goes on to be a butterfly in an elsewhere that is here.
And there remains a corpse, doesn’t here? It is the symbol of death. And how could a fully conscious, fully truthful being end up as a corpse, even if it is a false corpse and he is frolicking about in another body? Truth cannot end up as Falsehood.
Death must be the final key: the corpse. It is there that something must happen. The key to death.
The very obstacle and Negation must be the means of the passage to another state in Matter.
Or else Matter has no meaning, and let’s all go and become charming little ghosts … if we can.
What is Death’s secret? What is Matter’s final secret?
This is the mystery of Mother’s last five years.
A dangerous ... unknown,2 she said.
Perhaps we will transform this last cage that is the body only when we have discovered the absolute Love that hides itself behind this absolute pain. Then we will discover that Matter is the site of absolute Love. Death cannot be transfigured except into its own absolute opposite that is Love. That is what this cage invented itself for. This has been Matter’s very quest since the first fire of the atom.
And it is the last Fire that transfigures.
On August 22, 1968, I received a small note from Mother. I had not seen her since August, 10. Her heart gave out, her pulse was “more than erratic.” All the same, She appeared on her balcony upstairs, as on the poop of a big ship, on August 15, for Sri Aurobindo’s birthday. She was all draped in her silver cape, so pale. She remained standing for five minutes. There were two assistants behind her to prevent her from falling. And that crowd below. Then I remembered that anecdote about Queen Elizabeth, the 1st, who tore herself from her deathbed, despite her doctors’ protests, to receive a delegation of merchants: “We shall die afterwards.” It was Mother who recounted this story to me, and it was so like Mother. That small note of the 22nd is very typical. Here are some soups, you must be hungry [there were packets of dehydrated soups]. This time, it is TRULY interesting—but rather total and radical. How far, far away we are from the goal I will try to remember.1 One is dying perhaps, but it is very interesting: a subject for study. Mother would have been a perfect physicist⎯but after all, this was a new sort of physics. And remember to eat, when She herself couldn’t even manage to eat anymore!
The Horrible Thing
It was, in fact, “rather total and radical.” She was seated in a very low rosewood armchair, which would be, from then on, her chair up till the end, always facing west, towards Sri Aurobindo under the big copper-pod tree. She wore tabis [sandals] on her feet that rested on a small cushion. The armchair was lined with light yellow silk from Bangalore. It smelt of “May lily,” her favourite perfume, which came straight from Provence (the “Power of Purity,” as She called it). She was strangely diaphanous, her voice, most of all, had changed a lot. It sounded more and more like a child’s voice. I had never thought that She would die, in fact, I have never thought that She could die. The violence of the shock was only the acceleration of the process: ten years were compressed into eight days. I must work fast, you see....
They all think it's the end. ⎯“No, no!” I cried out, “no, we all have faith that it is really the ultimate possibility, and that it cannot not work.”⎯ Do they understand? ⎯“They know that it is work that is on the way.”⎯ Yes? All right, then.2 And She laughed without believing a single word of what I said.
A radical operation, the exact repetition of the turning point of 1962, but more total and definitive.
The mind and vital sent packing so that the physical be truly left to its own resources.3
And She showed me a bit of an indecipherable note scribbled in pencil. That is, the experience of the body, pure, all by itself. If you like, in appearance, I had become an idiot. I didn't know anything.4 She no longer could see, She no longer could hear, She no longer knew how to do anything, even move⎯She had forgotten everything. Yet, “something” was there to make her continue to move, act, coordinate⎯and speak with a crystalline (but very particular) intelligence. She spoke to me up to the end, and her stammerings were like drops of pure light, at times fulgurating with power. It was this “something” that was under study. That which remains when everything has been removed: the pure body. And not an atom anymore of vital force⎯an almost impotent body⎯while there was those torrents of crushing power around her…. A surprising contradiction. But those last five years are full of fulgurating contradictions⎯fulgurating, because through that impossible living paradox that She was more and more, one thought at times to grasp something that was so new … that it was almost unbelievable. As if the earth gave way under one’s feet, but not into an empty hole: into a Wonder, yes, an incredible Wonder, there is no other word for it. No more Mind, no more vital force⎯which She was never to recover. Gone forever. But She would come to move all the same, walk and write again, receive one to two hundred people a day. She would even take an oculist’s chart to learn how to see in our way again and would do daily reading exercises⎯a will that was indomitable. But it was another law. It was “something” else. Another
Possibility which silently, invisibly, but irresistibly, grew in that body that had been completely annulled and could grow only because all had been annulled.
Hell. Five years of hell.
It's hell, really; it's only thanks to this Possibility that it's not hell. It's because behind that hell, there is this Possibility—which is living, real, existing, tangible and livable—otherwise it's infernal.... You understand, in ordinary men, one gets the impression that all the states of being [reflexes, feelings, instincts, thoughts, ideals, etc.] have been whipped together (you know, like when you make mayonnaise!), all the states of being well mixed together like that, in a great confusion, so naturally the “horrible thing” is bearable ... because of all the rest in there. But if you start separating ... Oh!5 Remove feelings, thoughts, automatisms, memories, and of course, all possible ideals, tastes and mental constructions from A to Z, from top to bottom … and there remains “the horrible thing.” Mother was to be in the horrible thing, pure, until the end.
A new being can only be created with decoded cells. Without any mental, vital or material code. And what is it that can emerge from there, from that horrible nothing?
An impossible state.
A very unlivable state.
But it could only be because it was unlivable. Pure Matter, one could say.
And universal Matter to boot. Not an atom of protection against the tidal wave of the world, the thoughts of the world, the reactions of the world and the illnesses of the world…. Sometimes, one could hear her small childlike moans down in the Ashram courtyard. It was heartrending. And She apologized. You see and hear this CLAMOUR of protest, misery, suffering—it’s a clamour all over the earth, and that makes the cells feel a little ashamed. 6. I spend almost entire days and nights in silence, but seeing—seeing....7 There were no thoughts left, nothing, only pictures, an immense living film, all the time, one screen then another, which She entered fully alive, here and there and everywhere, to live this call for help or that illness, this assassination and that nasty thing or petty act…. Everything was living and lived. A bath of pain: the pain of the world. There isn't any sensation or perception of a separate individuality; there are innumerable experiences, dozens of them every day, showing that it's the identification or unification with other bodies that makes you feel this person's misery, that person's misery, the misery of ... it's EVERYTHING that is one's misery. In other words, it's not an egoistic complaint.8 She seemed to apologize. Then She looked at all of this earth in front of her, or within her. There is a very clear and spontaneous perception that it's impossible to extract a small part from the whole and make something harmonious out of it when the whole isn't harmonious. But why, why?... This physical is truly a mystery. I understand people who have said, “It must be abolished, it's a falsehood.” Yet that's NOT TRUE, IT'S NOT a falsehood, it's ... what is it? If we say “a deformation,” it doesn't mean anything. When I am told that someone is ill, at least ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I have already experienced the thing, I have already experienced it as being part of my physical being, an immense physical being, you know, immense and without a precise form. So… 9 And I told her: “Well, it means that the consciousness of the WHOLE must change. It is always the same problem: once the whole has progressed, changed its consciousness, the ‘material’ fact should become different.” It appears to be like that. There's no escape, no way to divide that. Individuality is merely a means of action for the transformation of the whole. I understand why they said one had to escape! It demands such a transformation ... it's almost an eternity of time.10 “One cannot transform one element, without transforming the whole, I insisted. That is, one element accelerates the transformation of the whole.” Yes, that’s it. And, after reflecting, She added, It's perfectly obvious that if it weren't unbearable, it would never change. And if it's unbearable, well it really makes you feel like running away—which is impossible, of course, it's foolish to think you can get out of it: it's NOT POSSIBLE. It delays the result.11
She lived in this growing “not possible,” as if She were at the very heart of the pounding of the world. One cannot get out of it, there is no “other side,” and everything must always be done again, painfully done again, one Christ after another, but something else can come out of it, by the fact of that very impossibility. One cannot ever get out of evolution, whatever side one is on, alive or supposedly dead, but one can draw a new being out of the remnants of the old Matter. That’s all.
It is the only possibility. For who could say that our much vaunted chromosomes can invent a new being? Whose chromosomes?… The ones of our atavistic hodgepodge? Or of a mad lottery?
Perhaps for the first time on earth, in any case on the earth of men, we were in the presence of a phenomenon of Matter aggregated in a human way, but without any of all its genetic memories⎯except for the great living and lived memory of human Pain: the “horrible thing,” pure. And in there, under the Pressure of that pain, something….
Truly interesting, she concluded, and She laughed whenever She could, because to laugh was the best way to rout Death.
A New Mind
There were still other small pencil notes scribbled during those nights of August, ’68, “in order to try to remember.” In her great turning points or difficulties, Mother always turned her beam towards me, remembered me, even when She could not see me, as if She knew of that hour of separation beforehand, when a fragile bridge would have to be slung over the unknown, trying to link yesterday’s earth with the earth of tomorrow. Those little broken, overlapping lines furthermore said:
For several hours, the landscapes were wonderful, perfectly harmonious. Constant visions. Each thing with a precise reason and purpose, to express nonmentalized states of consciousness. Landscapes. Constructions. Cities. The whole thing immense and very diverse, covering the entire visual field and expressing states of consciousness of the body. Many, a great many constructions, immense cities being built....*
Yes, the world being built, the future world being built. I couldn't hear anymore, couldn't see anymore, couldn't speak anymore: I was living inside that all the time, all the time, night and day. A body without mind and without vital. There were only those perceptions. It was living in soul states: there were others' soul states, the soul states of the earth, the soul states Those soul states were expressed in pictures.12 In that pure and annulled Matter⎯inconceivable to us, for it would not even resemble the Matter of a baby⎯there remained nothing but the pain of the world, and pictures. It was the only instrument of perception. Not pictures that were seen: pictures that were lived. With that “perception of soul states,” there were things ... marvels! No mental conception, none at all, can be as wonderful—none. I lived moments All that one can humanly feel and see is nothing in comparison with that. There were moments... absolutely wonderful moments. But without thought, without thought.13 And they were physical, material “pictures” of the earth⎯not “visions”: the true earth. Perhaps we do not realize how beautiful the earth is. A “more effective,” “more complete” vision, as Mother said. But it's not “seen” as you see a picture: it's BEING IN, being in a certain place. I've never seen or felt anything so beautiful! And it wasn't felt, it was ... I don't know how to explain it. There were some absolutely wonderful, marvellous moments—unique. But it wasn't thought, I couldn't even describe—how can you describe? You can only start describing when you start thinking.14 This may well be the next instrument of the new being: one no longer thinks things, one lives them; each thing unfolds its own complete landscape which explains everything. Mother was trying to describe the functioning of the new being.
The mind and vital have been instruments to knead Matter—knead and knead and knead in every possible way [to awaken this Matter to its own buried consciousness]: the vital through sensations, the mind through thoughts. But they strike me as transitory instruments which will be replaced by other states of consciousness. They are a phase in the universal development, and they will fall off as instruments that have outlived their usefulness.15 The evolutionary atrophy of useless old limbs.
And Mother pointed to another note:
The body's state of consciousness and the quality of its activity depend on the individual or individuals among whom it is....
Ah, that was very interesting! It was very interesting because I saw… and it changed. If someone came near me, it would change. Something would happen to somebody, and it would change. 16 Every minute, the “landscape” of each person (the assistants, those who served Mother), changed, said or expressed what was taking place, automatically, with all the depth, the colours, the “decors” and the close or distant ramifications, down to the smallest details⎯all our thoughts about the world and all our “real” eyes are like flat photographs of an unsuspected terrestrial reality. And with the slightest thing changing in their consciousness, ah, everything would start changing! It was a sort of perpetual kaleidoscope, day and night. If there had been some way to record it it was unique [Matter’s eyes]. And the body was in it, you understand, almost porous—porous, without resistance, as if the thing were passing through it.17 There are no more barriers, it is the instant and exact consciousness everywhere … marvellous … and painful. A simultaneous Wonder and hell. Like the right side up and reverse of the earth lived simultaneously. One and the same earth.
And a “porous” body.
What actually takes place in such a body? How can it live, function, organize itself? Yes, it was perhaps like a new-born child of the earth. Nonetheless, one has to eat in the old way, sustain oneself in the old way, listen to and live stupidities in the old way and pain in the old way⎯keep a coherent contact with the old world, dwell in an old body in the depths of which … something was beginning to stammer. Something that would be like the formation of a new body. And this is where we begin to touch a very concrete and practical phenomenon, which, in its almost insignificant simplicity, is the greatest terrestrial turning point since the appearance of the first protozoan. A new form of life. Such is the experience that is going to unveil itself little by little, without our really realizing what it is at first, so insignificant it is. Was the small protozoan so significant in its pond?
The body, the cells of the body would like to make contact with the true being, without having to go through the vital or even through the mind. That is what is taking place.
And suddenly Mother remembered: Ah! I noticed that the cells, everywhere, all the time, were repeating the mantra, OM NAMO BHAGAVATE, OM NAMO BHAGAVATE ... constantly, all the time.
OM Namo Bhagavate is repeated spontaneously and automatically in a sort of hazy peace.18
It was the last scrawled little note.
A body, a new body. An awakened, conscious cellular Matter, freshly born to the world, which has no longer any laws, any code, and gropes its way … within a vast Consciousness, a Matter which repeats and repeats the mantra, rebuilding a new way of being for itself⎯a “way” means a form. Can we imagine a baby growing up in an old body, there, at the cellular root? Something that no longer creates enzymes or disasters and is absolutely decoded, un-coded, with the building power of a young shoot⎯have you ever seen a young shout breaking out of the frozen ground? Blop, the ground breaks open. An unthinkable thing. But it is a fact. For five years, we would watch the fact unfold⎯painfully, paradoxically. The old earth is cracking, isn’t it? The old forces are no longer there; the old tyrannical but convenient Mind, coordinator of all this substance, is no longer there⎯but what remains? How does a body that no longer has any laws stand up? A porous body. What are those pure, virgin cells going to create?
This is where something that is very simple, but of incalculable⎯perhaps formidable⎯consequence begins to take shape in Matter: a new mind. A mind of the body, of the cells. Something that begins to organize itself and furrow this Matter by repeating the Mantra⎯but with furrows that would no longer form a cage, turn round on themselves and get stuck in a molecule of amino acid. Something that would correspond to that “vertical time” in which everything that takes place is new at each second, without trace, “imprint” or memory, and yet like a memory of the future, as we could say with Sri Aurobindo, a forward-looking memory instead of a backward one⎯no longer a small granary that piles up grain on grain, grows larger and transfers its accumulated, stereotyped push to you more and more: a pull, not a push. The great pull of the Future at every second. A Mind that would be the exact opposite of the physical Mind and would take its place⎯and was beginning to take its place in Mother’s body. Another Vibration takes the place of this small mortal trepidation which, as if panic-stricken by the rush of life, tries to close itself in, barricades itself, while at the same time storing and piling up food it can no longer gather from the great flow of life, freezing all movements in an invariable and invulnerable frame, sleeping and sleeping to imitate the stone’s peace, and dying to be finished once and for all with all that labour⎯a trepidant Mind, which is only a tissue of coagulated repetitions and habits and which even managed to coagulate Matter into a certain form of being, as if it were the very vector and propeller, the true agent of the coagulation of Matter into a particular form, the very support or deep vibration of each molecule of DNA or amino acid. A new mantra of Matter, instead of the old malefic mantra of the physical Mind which repeats and repeats its mortal refrain. A new agent of coagulation of Matter. We say that the molecules of protein are what gives shape to bodies (a giraffe, a mouse, a man) but it is the superficial, external translation, the material covering of a certain vibratory quality. If the vibration changes, the type of coagulation or materialization changes. If the physical Mind, which collects or perpetuates this vibratory mode changes, the whole organization of Matter must change.
This was the phenomenon that occurred in Mother’s body.
Cells that spontaneously repeat the mantra.
A new Mind in Matter or of Matter, like a new force of propulsion and the agent of a new type of body upon earth, which will not necessarily be coagulated in the old way.
It is not a new way of thinking that is taking shape in Matter, it is a new way of being of Matter.
It is the embryo of the new species.
It is the key to the transformation of the body.
For ten years, from 1958 to 1968, She strove to break through the web, purify the cells from their old recordings, that spell of the physical Mind, and now it had become the Work: the building up of a new type of body in Matter.
In fact, this germination of the Mind of the cells, this capital turning point in Mother’s (and Sri Aurobindo’s) yoga, so capital that Mother would say three years later, in 1971: But it is radical, mon petit!200 You can't imagine, it's like ... I could really say I've become another person.1 (another person at ninety-three, after living the countless experiences that others would have regarded as a summit), this simple, so simple and fragile a thing which stammered in her body, this mantra that repeated itself on its own, was the real knot of the battle that Mother had been fighting since 1958: ten years. Not that the Mind of the cells had not tried, many times, to supplant the physical Mind, but each time it was as if engulfed again or, at best, it passively obeyed the higher Mind and the spiritual Vision, like a baby somewhat crushed by its parents of Light. Even when released from the sordid physical Mind, it shyly turned to the “higher” Light so as to “do its best”⎯but that best was worth nothing, or it could only, at the most, keep madly grinding out some higher humanity, sanctified and purified, the whole old improved evolutionary jumble. It took the radical cleanup of 1968 for those cells to be freed from the “good” of the higher Mind as well as the “evil” of the physical Mind⎯for them to be themselves, purely. And this was when the miracle truly started. It is the secret that every “man” of the next species will have to discover⎯and which will probably be easier to discover, now that one body has uncovered it and understood the formidable power and the formidable freedom that lay there.
The Fundamental Cage
We say “the mind of the cells,” “the intellectual mind,” “the intuitive mind,” or “the liberated mind” in its heaven up above, but it is but one and the same Mind and perhaps the word is inadequate: it is but one and the same consciousness, one and the same power in various vibratory modes or various “milieus.” Sri Aurobindo even said that that “Mind,” or Force-Consciousness, existed in each atom and each particle. That Consciousness or Power has always circulated freely through Matter⎯in fact, it is the very constituent of Matter, the Energy that Einstein put in an equation (but what was not formulated is the consciousness of that Energy). From the small ball of gelatine to the hominid, with every species growing in evolution that Power concretized itself, coiled up into one way of being or another, one vibratory habit or another⎯a certain molecule that fixed its circuit and seemed to be bound to repeat forever the habit it had got into, except when, by “miracle” or “mutation” (both words are equally hollow), the habit broke at one point or another and a new species or a new type began spinning and repeating a new habit or a new vibratory mode of the same eternal Power. Our “molecules” and “mutations” explain nothing, they are the outer crust of the phenomenon; we can continue, ad infinitum, to dissect molecules and particles and we will always find something else, which hides something else, which hides something else…. What we will never grasp hold of is the internal tension of the Consciousness that causes this and only this break, at that and only that moment. We can violate all the molecules we like, like laboratory demiurges, but we will not produce what follows man, it is that simple. We will not have obtained the secret of man. This is the exact limitation of our science. Just as we can force and bombard all the particles we like, but we will not master the great Energy, except to produce deadly machines out of it. We will not have the secret of Matter. But at the human level of the evolution of that great Power, it seems that a black curtain has been drawn, a second cage over the first fundamental, physiological cage that is specific to each species. But that which is our “accident” is also the key to demolishing the original cage. Instead of letting the Power coil up as usual, as it does in other mammals, and follow the small circuit of the simple cellular Mind which endlessly repeats its seasons, marriages, urges and impulses within an open milieu where everything communicates, “feels,” “responds” and lives in a certain harmony that could well seem divine to us compared to our own grating, we have built the cage of the ego, of the “I,” and taken on individual appearances within a carapace of non-communication with all the rest. Hence all the complications, distortions, suffocations, fears and what not, which slowly came to build up the leaden cage of the physical Mind, from the Pleistocene on, to such an extent that the cellular Mind could not even spin its simple, healthy habits without the other one interfering and terrorizing, medicalizing, hypnotizing and deeply traumatizing everything, with all the artifices made necessary by its imprisonment and all the false habits of its individualization in rivalry with everything else. A mongoose has no physical Mind, man has one, a diabolical one. This is our great misery. It is the vast web that is so deeply rooted in human Matter that we feel we cannot uproot it without uprooting life itself from our bodies.
It is this cage of the “I” that all philosophies, religions and sociologies come up against; it is to remedy or break it open that one creates Marxism, heavens and hells, democracies and telephones, but the true way out⎯the evolutionary door⎯is down below, as we have seen, behind or under the web of the physical Mind, in the Mind of the cells. And if we broke that cage, we would doubtless rediscover the freedom and the happy harmony of the animal⎯and many other things that Mother discovered while going through the web. There lies the integral unity that Marxism, religions or all our equations have vainly sought. It is Einstein’s “unified field.” But first of all, Evolution never went backward. We will not return to the mongoose; even there, the fundamental cage would still remain. This digesting, aging structure. And this is where we perfectly understand the evolutionary stratagem that has made us painfully transit through the “I” of the super cage. One of these days, compelled by our very asphyxiation to get out of the web, we will find ourselves⎯but with an individual way of seeing, an individual comprehension of the evolutionary programme⎯faced with that primal cellular substance freed of its old ghosts, and we will make discoveries that no animal could have made, because it feels perfectly at ease in its cage. Our evil was the hiding place of our supreme good.
The Agent of Mutation
Mother’s discoveries spread out over many years, they started long before ’68, but it was not before the last higher remnants of the Mind were swept away that her cells suddenly found themselves left on their own, without orders, except for whatever could spring from their own depths. And from that moment, a formidable Power began to emerge⎯the very one that had animated atoms, little or great men, saints and sages, all the evolutionary circuits, but through one filter, two filters, or layers upon layers of filters. And it was there, pure, as it really was. All-powerful. A Power that can crush everything to bits and rebuild everything. It was in 1964 that Mother touched that cellular foundation for the first time, and what is extremely interesting is that there is no more “personal” experience at that level⎯of course, as there is no more person there, it is the whole world⎯and when you have an experience there, it is as if, it is (not “as if”) the whole terrestrial field that has the experience, is put into contact with it. This is what Mother said in 1964: Something began to descend—not “descend”: to manifest and permeate; permeate and fill this terrestrial consciousness. What a force it had! What a power!... I had never felt that kind of intensity in the material world. A STABILITY, a power! Everything in the sense of a power, of a thrust forward: progress, evolution, transformation. It was the joy of progress.... Amidst all that—that mass of experience—there was, standing out from the rest, the impression of the gorilla, of the fantastic power of progress that would turn him into a man It was very odd, it was an extraordinary physical power, with an intense joy of progress [that joy of the cells, always: it is the main attribute of the cellular consciousness], of the thrust forward, and it made a kind of simian form moving forward towards man. And then it was like something repeating itself in the spiral of evolution: the same brute Power, the same vital force (there's no comparison, of course, man has lost all that completely), the fantastic force of life that's found in those animals was coming back into the human consciousness, but with all that has been brought by the evolution of Mind (a painful enough detour), and TRANSFORMED into the light of a higher certitude and a higher peace. And, you know, it wasn't a thing that came, diminished and came back again, it wasn't like that. It was an immensity, a full, solid, ESTABLISHED immensity. Not something that comes and presents itself to you to tell you, “This is how it will be,” it wasn't that—it was HERE. It wasn't a permeation into the Mind: it was a permeation into Life, into the material, earthly substance, which had become alive. Even plants participated in the experience: it wasn't something that was the privilege of the mental being, it was the whole vital, material substance of the earth that received this joy of the power of progress—it was triumphant. Triumphant That diamond-like sparkling. When I got up this morning, I had the feeling that a corner had been turned. But not at all—oh, not at all a subjective thing: a corner has been turned FOR THE EARTH. It doesn't matter in the least if people aren't aware of it.2
As Sri Aurobindo observed: it explains itself.
And Mother added: At any rate, the experience was decisive in the sense that it coordinated all those scattered little promises, all those scattered little advances [the hundreds of little experiences that sprouted up on every side, while She advanced blindly through the Forest]. But there was a fairly clear perception that soon the state of being or way of being (I think they say the “modus vivendi”) of the body, of this fragment of terrestrial Matter, could be altered, ruled, entirely driven by the direct Will [that is, the great total Consciousness]. Because it was as if ALL the illusions had fallen away one after another [the illusion of illness, of death, of decay, of the instinct for survival—all the indisputable physiological illusions that stick to us along with the web of the physical Mind], and every time an illusion disappeared, it produced one of those little promises that came in succession, announcing something that would come about later.3 It was only four years later, in 1968, that this great “direct Will” would take possession of the cells without passing through the filters of the Mind, of the Vital or even the most “spiritual” filters in the world.
But not only does one have to be able to bear the Power⎯and this is the whole preparation, widening, universalization and impersonalization that Mother’s body had to undergo⎯but it still needs something that catches it, if we may say so, some kind of turbine or condenser, a fixative element that prevents it from slipping away like a breeze. What on earth in those cells can “condense,” “fix” the Power? It was the very first question Mother asked herself in 1958. But in 1965, a double discovery, both negative and positive, occurred, an absolutely capital but very simple discovery (on the cellular level, nothing is spectacular: it is the Mind that enjoys making a fuss). This double discovery is truly the prelude, the key to the new species, or perhaps rather to the change of species. The agent of mutation. For a mutation to take place in this cellular substance, something has to shed its skin, or cease coiling up the current as usual and endlessly grinding out the same vibrations. Until then, it was the physical Mind that served as a condenser, with its peculiar habit of “condensing” disasters and coiling up the current in or according to the old atavistic, medical and “sensible” patterns (how “faithfully” it duplicated the medical dictionary, to such an extent that it made you wonder whether it was the illness that followed the dictionary or the dictionary that followed the illness), and Mother had striven a lot to silence and annul it. But She realized this, which was her first, negative discovery. It was very difficult to get rid of it because it was so intimately linked to the aggregate of the physical body and its present form ... it was difficult; and when I tried and a deeper consciousness tried to manifest, it used to cause fainting. I mean that the union, the fusion, the identification with the Supreme Presence [or the Power, the “other thing,” the great Current] without that, WITHOUT THIS PHYSICAL MIND, by annulling it, caused fainting4. Which means that the physical Mind was a kind of link, of connector between Matter (or the body) and the Power that drives, animates Matter⎯ suppress it and nothing holds the Current anymore, it just goes through: you faint. So, it was like a death sentence for the human system: you cannot rid yourself of this old maker of disasters, without it everything collapses. There is no possible mutation, you spin the disaster out until the end. There is no other connector.
But in 1965, on July 21 to be precise, a tiny, stammering microscopic phenomenon took place, which changed all the data.
Under that kind of fossilized crust of the physical Mind, something suddenly emerged, a crack, a hole in the carapace, and another voice, a new murmur in the body: There is a slight hope that this material mind, the mind of the cells, will be transformed—all of a sudden, here was all this mind saying a prayer. A prayer ... you know how I used to make prayers before, in “Prayers and Meditations” [Mother’s former diary at the beginning of the century]. It was the Mind saying prayers; it would have experiences and say prayers; well, here we are, now it's the experience of all the cells: an intense aspiration, and suddenly all that starts expressing it in words. It is as if this body-mind, on behalf of the body [it was the body beginning to be “mentalized”], were saying a prayer And it very much has the sense of the oneness of Matter. So there was the sense of the totality of Matter—terrestrial, human Matter— and it said:
The other states of being, the Vital, the Mind, may enjoy the intermediate contacts....
That is, the relationship with all the intermediary states of being: the gods, etc., heavens, illuminations, revelations and all sorts of music.
The supreme Lord alone can satisfy me.
And then, there was suddenly such a clear vision that the supremely perfect alone can give this body plenitude. I found that interesting. It's the beginning of something. It started with disgust—a sickening disgust—with all this misery, all this weakness, all this fatigue, all this discomfort, all this friction and grating, oof!... And it was very interesting because there was that disgust, and along with it came a sort of suggestion of Annihilation, of Nothingness: of eternal Peace [the physical Mind’s great aspiration: the immobility of stone]. And it swept all that away [yes, it is the cellular mind itself that does the sweeping away], as if the whole body straightened up: “Ah, but that's not it! That's not what I want. I want ... ” (and then there was a dazzling burst of light—a dazzling golden light) ... “I want the splendour of Your Consciousness.” The first pure reaction of the cellular consciousness. I feel as if we had caught the tail of the solution. It's a whole world that's beginning to open up. We'll see.5
The Mind of the cells itself reacting against the catastrophic hypnotism of the physical Mind and stammering a “prayer”⎯a prayer means word, vibration. The first pure vibration of the cells.
It was the new connector of Power: the Mind of the cells.
The demolition of the old pattern: the agent of mutation. Something that was going to coil up the Current, pure.
Just a little whisper in the cells. A first mantra of Matter. Like a freshly born Matter.
And an aspiration, a joy of intense aspiration in those cells, like a golden breath in the depths of Matter. Everything that was mental seems to me cold and dry ... yes, dry, lifeless. It's luminous, it's lovely, pleasant, but it's cold, lifeless. Whereas this aspiration here, oh, it has a power—a power of realization—quite an extraordinary power. If this becomes organized, it will be possible to do something. There is an accumulated power there.6
It is the very power that moves the atom, the pure supramental power, the Energy of all mutations and transformations of Matter: “A power that can crush everything and rebuild everything.”
One had now to learn the “new language” of the cells, “organize” this new Mind of Matter, coil the golden vibration until it transmutes the old skin.
But the key had been found.
It is the key to getting through the second web, the one that binds us to a mammal body, as it binds others to an aquatic or a reptilian body. We wonder how we poor humans can go through that Wall, when Mother and Sri Aurobindo had to display so much heroism and tenacity to carry out the operation, but the way is open. Now we know where the key is⎯all of the difficulty does not lie in the difficulty itself! It lies in not knowing how to tackle the difficulty. This is the very work of the pioneers of evolution: to find the way. Now, we know: the cells have to engage a mantra which will continue working by itself and will undo the old mesh by itself. It is the mantra that will sweep the web away and purify the cells by itself, automatically. An automatic power. We must learn to plant a mantra in the body, which will repeat it as stubbornly as it used to repeat: I forgot to turn off the gas, or I am going to get cancer, or…. It will repeat it like a mule, round the clock. It is that simple. As capital a discovery as the functioning of a little mental vibration in a few grey cells.
This might well be Sri Aurobindo’s “mathematical formula.”
Great revolutions are always simple.
We passionately believe that we need great measures to upset the world and perform spectacular changes, but we upset nothing, there is no mutation: we only mix the same elements in a different order, and since those elements are worth nothing in whatever order, we always find ourselves up against what one could called an improvement of the catastrophe. A revolution, a true one, a true mutation is a minuscule new element that infiltrates and changes all the values of each of the old elements. It is not a change of order, it is a change of value. And what was worthless or wrong in any order suddenly takes on a new significance as if… as if it had simply not found its key and was wrong because it had not found its key, and ultimately nothing was wrong, not an atom, everything was awaiting its little key. That is why we will have found nothing, changed nothing and revolutionized nothing until we have found the fundamental key⎯because it will change all the signs. And what must be found finally? What must we uncover in this huge universe, with us in it? Let’s be simple. Joy, of course, joy which is love, but what is the contrary of this simple reason for being? Death, of course, which is non-joy and the non-reason for being. And if it has no reason for being, obviously it must not exist, it is the unreality of the universe⎯yet it is that which strangles us most, which affects all other signs and almost annuls them. There are not a thousand things to find, there is only one. Not a thousand revolutions: only one. A single mutation of death. And everything else will be changed, automatically. All the other signs will take on a new value.
Now the small key is possibly to be found precisely with what we have to mutate or within what we have to mutate, there where death is made: and what is it that dies?⎯cells which die because they keep spinning a song of death, an unreal song, a non-reason for being. But this is not true! Life cannot spin non-life, it can only spin joy and more joy, because it is joy itself. It spins death only because it has not found the small key or in order to oblige us to find the small key of the real⎯the true life. It is that simple: what creates death creates life as well, it is a key that is turned in the wrong direction. It is not something to get rid of, there is nothing to get rid of in the universe⎯to deposit it where, in what dump outside of the universe? It is something whose direction has to be changed, and once changed, it will change the direction of everything else. We are seeking the process in order to have the power to undo what was done, she said. To undo death. But after all these years, there is something in me that would like to have the power or the key: the process. And is it not necessary to feel or live or see (but by «see,” I mean, see ACTIVELY) how it was twisted this way [Mother bent her hand in one direction] in order to be able to do like this? And She bent her hand in the opposite direction. To live how it created death in order to be able to turn in the other direction. To live death.
It is perhaps what She was going to do for five years … and more.
And She added this: What's interesting is that now that this mind of the cells has been organized, it appears to be going with dizzying speed through the whole process of human mental development, in order to reach ... the key, precisely. The key of death. There is of course the sense that the state we are in is a false unreality, but there is a sort of need or aspiration to find, not a mental or moral “why,” nothing of the sort, but a HOW—how it got twisted this way [Mother bent her hand again], in order to straighten it out.1 It is the cells that hold the key to the spinning in one direction or the other. But there is no death in fact, there is no fact of death: there is a false spinning. Death is not a cellular phenomenon, it is a cellular non-sense. It is an unreality stuck onto a reality that we have not yet found. Once that reality has been touched⎯that reality of joy⎯death will become unreal all by itself. Death is not a reality of Matter, it is a particular unreality of Matter⎯it dies because it is not what it really is. Each time I ask my body what IT would like, all the cells say, “No, no! We are immortal, we want to be immortal. We're not tired, we're ready to struggle for centuries if necessary; we have been created for immortality and we want immortality.” And this is just what I am realizing (I don't think it's anything unique or exceptional): the closer one draws to the cell itself, the more the cell says, “But I am immortal!”2
This is the cellular fact, the only real fact. The reality of the cells is immortal life.
Perhaps even modern biology would not disagree with us? In the substance of the cells, there is nothing that is death.
The mutation of death lies in the joy of a small cell, a pure cell.
A covert Tread
Such was the simple, great revolution that unfolded from 1968 onward: suddenly, the pure cells, left to themselves, began to spin in the other direction, as if it were the most natural thing in the world⎯in fact it was the only thing that was natural in the world. They began to undo death, very spontaneously, very naturally⎯a simple little wonder that has no words because it is so simple, so inconspicuous; and yet it is that which is going to change the whole world, whether we like it or not, whether we are aware of it now or not. This is what has begun on earth. The mutation of death has begun. A cell is not alone, is it? it runs all over the place, it is one single body. And I was witnessing the tiny wonder as it grew and stammered hesitatingly on Mother’s lips⎯so much so that at times I even thought I had caught it in my own body. People have experiences ... And they know nothing !3 she would say. And this because it is not mental, because we do not look where we ought to and do not understand an “experience” until we have mentalized it and thereby “understood” it; but it happens without our understanding anything about it and without any need for understanding: it happens constantly! The world is veering without it knowing it, it does not grasp the little golden breath that simply undoes death, just like that: death does not “happen,” so we don’t notice it! One has to die for good in order to notice the damned thing. But those microscopic little deaths that spin themselves on and on and lead up once and for all to the other one, who notices them? And that little breath that ensures it does not happen. For it is truly like a tiny, imperceptible golden breath that blows all by itself without one’s interfering⎯no one interferes, it occurs by itself, that is the beauty of it! When suggestions of death or annihilation or eternal peace touched the cells, they rejected them, like that, puff! no, I don’t want you. That’s all, it is simple. When suggestions of illness drew nearer: no, I don’t want you! When suggestions of ageing came: it is falsehood, I don’t want you. And everything was like a world of constant, malefic suggestions, everywhere⎯truly a bath of filth through which we slog our way without noticing it and which we drink like our natural air⎯puff, I don’t want you! It is the cells themselves that blow them out. But to notice it, one has to be somewhat out of the mental brouhaha, for it is so tranquil, crystalline and without violence, like the very lightness of the cells, and with the evident omnipotence of the child for whom it does not exist, it is not: pfft, I blow you away, you don’t smell good. It is not me. I told you about that “morbid imagination” the body had—completely gone, finished, cleaned out! The moment the body reacted by saying, “No, it’s disgusting, what’s that!”—gone. That’s what is so remarkable with this body : in the vital, in the mind, you have to do things over and over again for the experience to be established; the body is less prompt in opening itself, but once it has understood or has had the right experience, it’s over, the thing is ESTABLISHED. That’s what is remarkable. And it’s very tranquil. So then, when certain things tried to come back (even when they were some distance away, just on the periphery), it said, “Ah, no! I no longer want that, it belongs to the past.” ... It’s the One that has done the work, it is the change of this mind.4 It is Matter itself that wages its own revolution.
This phenomenon I could observe myself each time I became somewhat “clear”: one senses a suggestion approaching from a distance, on the “periphery,” as Mother would say, perhaps one or two meters from the body, a suggestion of grating, like a tiny wave, with a particular smell, or a suggestion of an accident, a suggestion of sex, a suggestion of a headache⎯nothing but suggestions, we live in a world of suggestions!⎯and suddenly a kind of swelling of the cells is felt in the body, yes, like something that gorges itself on sun or light and produces a warm intensity (curiously enough, it almost has the quality of love), a very compact vibration, but clear and light at the same time, and it rises from within, on its own, without our willing it or even calling it, without any to-do, in the simplest of ways in the world, automatically, and hop! The suggestion dissolves⎯it no longer exists. A golden swelling. We can fight ten times, a hundred times with the Mind, keep the suggestions at arm’s lengths to prevent them from coming in, but the second we relax our guard, it is over, they come in, and we have to fight for good to remove them, or else catch a fever for good; but now there is nothing to do! It is automatic and radical. Just a little golden breath. It is the cells that do the work.
And if one has a mantra, it becomes formidably active.
And they do this constantly, everywhere⎯wherever there is an atom of sincere goodwill. It is like a constant cleansing of death: those thousands and billions of sly suggestions that make for a corpse in the end, a cancer, a nameless mess, while there was nothing in truth, in fact, but a single little golden song which wanted to spin the joy of life and the beauty of life. So, we wonder what is going to happen? Because it is occurring in the bodies of individuals, of nations, it is occurring in the body of the Earth⎯a big cleansing. Of course, the thickness becomes thicker and more and more black, almost visible to the naked eye, as if swallowing a double or triple dose of death while furiously spinning its little mortal trepidation⎯but it gorges itself with its own death, the unreality becomes fantastic, almost phantasmagorical. But it is a complete unreality, there is not a breath of Life in it, it is an enormous, empty balloon covered in steel, a bogeyman inflated to the dimension of the earth⎯a wind bag. And beneath it, quietly, imperceptibly but imperturbably, there is this golden little vibration which cleans and cleans until no root of death is left, only that balloon over our heads. It is then that the corporeal substance will be clear and the balloon will deflate⎯poof! it doesn’t exist. It never existed. Perhaps even there will be no “wicked ones” and “good ones” there (again our human stupidity): the corporeal substance is entirely good; the whites as well as the yellows will find themselves cleansed in their bodies without having noticed it, and when all is fully clean and clear underneath, they will look at their wind bag without understanding anymore. They will no longer understand anything about it. Then all that will truly collapse out of stupefaction.
And now we seem to clearly understand those few lines of Sri Aurobindo, so often quoted, but which contained a mysterious single line that really nobody at all understood:
When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast AND MAN’S CORPOREAL MIND IS THE ONLY LAMP, As a thief’s in the night shall be the covert tread Of one who steps unseen into his house. A voice ill-heard shall speak, the soul obey, A power into mind’s inner chamber steal, A charm and sweetness open life’s closed doors And beauty conquer the resisting world, The truth-light capture Nature by surprise, A stealth of God compel the heart to bliss And earth grow unexpectedly divine. In Matter shall be lit the spirit’s glow, In body and body kindled the sacred birth... A few shall see what none yet understands; God shall grow up while the wise men talk and sleep; For man shall not know the coming till its hour And belief shall be not till the work is done.5
Will we let the phenomenon occur without even looking a little … and vibrating a little with that golden softness that runs as if inadvertently beneath our unreal monsters?
The mutation of death is right now.
But the fundamental cage would still remain.
Even with that mortal spinning abolished along with all its causes of illness, distortion and sadness⎯all this human pain which is a kind of radical ill- health⎯even with life prolonged at will, as it were, with the disappearance of all friction and the flexibility of the great universal Rhythm, there would still remain that which creates fundamental death: the death of the bird, the beast, of all species until now. For death will remain until the evolutionary goal is fulfilled, because it is the evolutionary means of progress. If the evolutionary goal were to produce an enhanced and harmonious humanity, without clashes at any level, Death would probably vanish once that goal has been reached, since there would no longer be any reason to die. But evolution nonetheless causes little birds to die. So there is something more or something else to discover. Death still remains the door to the secret, the irrefutable sign that the one and only evolutionary Secret has not been found. And from stage to stage, we are led ever closer, ever deeper into the heart of that fundamental Matter that creates death because it cannot, at least not yet, do as it wants. Because it has not found itself. And finally, this body which seems an instrument, a mere material support for us to frolic intelligently around on this good earth’s surface might well in fact be the very essence of the story. A living heart of Matter, of each cell of Matter, of each atom. An original secret principle that appears only at the very end, when all of the Amazon and each particle of the Amazon uncover themselves. We believed that it was the small mental man who was to be the explorer and ultimate discoverer, but it could be that the “something” that created primal Matter so many thousands of millions of years ago also created ultimate Matter and that the traveller of this long journey was there with the first atom and the first molecule, or rather within that atom and that molecule. We knock at the old traveller’s door, every death knocks at his door, every life knocks at his door, we will keep dying until we find that traveller.
Thus Matter remains our enigma. What is it that lies therein?
No philosophy, of course, no religion either, thank “God”! But what?
The nearer we approach the cell, the more mysterious it becomes, one could say marvellous, but it is a marvel that is so “different,” so gaping, if one may say so, that it is rather frightening. It is truly the big “gap” or the big evolutionary rift through which one suddenly emerges into another country⎯not even a “country,” but like another being of ours. In any case, a “something” that is a bewildering possibility for all our physiological structures which quietly keep spinning their little enzymes, tissues and exquisite ready-made molecules. Suddenly, nothing is “made” anymore. Nothing works anymore or if it works, it works quite differently. We are reaching the very root of the fundamental cage, the one which created charming birds and could create charming little men, if such were the evolutionary goal. But it appears that we have gone through a first web only to have to traverse a second one as well. It is quite clear that we were not created to be exquisite prisoners, even of a molecule. We keep on knocking at the door of death.
Death is perhaps the traveller’s last mask.
And let’s finally just be simple, very simple, for what is it that matters in this whole damned or not so damned evolutionary business in which we are scarcely willing and painful pawns? What has all this been created for? To end up as superbirds … which will become tired of their small or big wings. To create marvellous and ubiquitous supermen, gorged with ubiquity, sated with marvels, enough! To create marvellous lands with coloured, fairylike superforests and seas beyond compare …? To create, to always create something else⎯but as long as there is a something else, it will never be that.
That, in its fullness.
That, simple and right here, without plus or minus.
A “that” which fills us at every second without the need of anything else. “That,” simply as one breathes, that’s all.
“That,” as one loves, and forever.
“That.”
“That”, yes, and if “that” is missing, nothing is there and thousands of paradises piled on each other, whether earthly or not, will never fill that hole.
Perhaps this is what the traveller is. Love is perhaps what the traveller is.
We knock at love’s door, and as long as we have not found that, we will have found nothing. This is perhaps the secret of Matter. And when we have touched that in every cell and atom, the doors of death will open⎯it was so simple.
It is what’s Simple.
That was why a little atom caught fire, one day.
It is to live “that” at every second and in all things that we put on this carapace, this feather mantle, this human mantle, but it was there, within, at all times⎯and now it wants to be what it is, and what will its mantle be?… This mantle of Matter, what is it? The rag we throw away after use or the traveller’s very body?⎯an unknown body, but which must have its means of fabrication in the cells. The traveller is not going to drop from heaven, he has always been here on the ground, crawling with us, moving with us, toiling with us. And now?
Where are you, traveller, what are you going to do with your little cells that have toiled for so long?⎯food for death, or for another, inconceivable life, another body yet to be built?
A body of your love which will be our sole love. And all will be full.
And all will be simple. It will be that.
In the wide eyes of the future, we see a golden flame arise.
It is a whole new world that reveals itself at the cellular level, a very unexpected and amazing world, which seems to correspond only distantly to the knowledge of the microscope and the biologist’s rigid laws! It is almost like the difference between a bird’s eye view of Guiana’s forests and the same forest experienced step by step along the smooth banks of the Oyapock. But it is a cellular level that is lived. This is the whole difference. And those laws that appeared so implacable, those chains and coils of DNA that seemed to be the key, the cellular reality, look like mere usual concretions floating and whirling on a big river and flowing with that current, well, because the current happens to be going that way. We have mistaken the spinning of the small wreck for the law of the great Current and it is true that the stars floating in the great sea above, passing each other, coming together or moving apart, seem momentarily to determine the character of a man or of a people, for everything responds and corresponds, the small wreck, the weightless star and the molecule, but there is a great Current that carries everything along. Instead of entering a cellular prison, one discovers an extraordinarily flexible, fluid and open world. We have imprisoned everything, we are completely imprisoned in our heads. And amazingly enough, the small docile molecule obeys the dictionary’s edicts, it can continue obeying them for thousands and millions of years because nothing is more docile than a cell, until some convulsion of Nature makes a hole in them, or simply someone who is a little less stupid comes and tells them: but why don’t you spin in another direction? Then they spin in another direction, it’s that simple⎯only there has to be a small “I want” in the heart of the molecule. Perhaps we have travelled thus far just to discover that I-want. Our journey is a journey towards freedom, with love at the end, for pure love can only be found in absolute freedom. Basically, we are the prisoners of our laws only insofar as we need to be prisoners: they are the little evolutionary ramparts for the babies of the earth; and all of evolution tends to create new needs that come to shatter the old law, which is quite natural⎯as long as there is no need, it is hopeless, they keep spinning. Perhaps we are at the moment of the Great Need? But to take laws for laws is the eternal human madness.
Cellular Plasticity
So, I had expected to see Mother battling against cellular and millennial imperatives, a “pleasant” sort of physiological impossibility, since after all, even the cellular Don Quixotes have their worth in a world dried-up with legalities from tip to toe⎯but not at all! The problem or difficulty does not lie where we imagine it does. What seems implacable to us is child’s play⎯it is what does not appear to be implacable that is most terrible! What takes the most time is becoming conscious of what must be changed, she said, having a conscious contact that enables it to change.1 A contact. Step by step, Mother proceeded from one discovery to another⎯one could almost say that there is nothing to “discover,” that we have only to get rid of all the walls that prevent us from seeing that which is there. Illusions upon illusions to be disillusioned before we reach the real. Mother is a great destroyer of illusions. With her, one breathed in a world that was at last possible, there where everything is not-possible-not-possible-not-possible. And one wonders how one can live in that without suffocating. But it is coming, the joyous, final suffocation that will shatter all those little legal windmills. We have only to reach the right dose. Now, as soon as the world of impossibility of the physical Mind had been crossed, Mother discovered a world that was so totally flexible that it was amazing⎯frightening, too (it is the other side of the difficulty, the one we were not expecting). As if that so very rigid Matter were only the Matter of our fear. Mother had been telling me that for years, but I could not completely understand her (because like my fellow human brothers, I am singularly saddled with my own physical Mind), until the day a small experience cleared up the whole “problem” (we should rather say: “deflated the problem”). It concerned the beginning of a tumour in someone’s neck. And Mother explained: Probably a hair that coiled up and the body covered it in a layer of skin, and then, out of habit, went on building skin around it: one layer, then another layer, then ... It's an idiotic goodwill. The whole cellular story was there, in those three words: idiotic GOOD will. And that's how it is for almost all illnesses. The trick (there is a trick) is to tell the cells that that's not at all what is expected of them; that what is expected of them isn't at all to gather there into a bundle like that; that it isn't their duty to do that—you must convince them. It's rather peculiar. It is the origin of habits, of course; they are under the impression that “This is what we have to do, this is what we have to do, this is...” [Mother turned a finger in a circle]. It's the same thing with me, but I told them. Only, one should be conscious of the movement, [that’s the whole point, we are not conscious of the movement, not clear, everything is covered over by the mental din, so naturally we need microscopes and surgery⎯but is only a movement, a current] then, very quietly but very, very confidently, very confidently, you tell them as you would children, “No, it's not your duty to do this; this isn't your duty. ” All chronic illnesses come from that. There may be an accident (something happens, an “accident”) and then there is a sort of submissive and unconscious goodwill that causes the effect of the accident to be repeated: “We must repeat, we must repeat, we must ”
And it stops only if a consciousness is in contact with the cells and can make them understand that “No, in this case, you mustn't go on repeating!” And Mother laughed a lot. Oh, it's very interesting. But one has to be very modest to do this work, with no liking for brilliant displays—very modest. And very quiet.2
Not anyone will of course know how to traverse the layers and come into contact with the cells in order to “speak” to them, and in truth Mother hardly expected to find this type of hero of the microscopic, because it demands a “silent” heroism; She was doing the work for all bodies; but it is the fact, the phenomenon in itself that is of capital importance in its simplicity. For it is a human, terrestrial fact: there are billions of little cells that are all alike throughout the world⎯and it is a world of passive goodwill. Not a single law there, not a single rule, not a single fatal and prohibitive DNA, but flexible Matter that spins whatever you like. You give the impetus and it carries on and on…. It catches anything at all and it continues. But it is quite formidable if we think about it⎯why would it not catch a vibration of joy and of sun?… There is nothing that impedes, NOTHING. It is total freedom, a completely malleable world! Mendel’s revolution in reverse. The physiological future unblocked⎯oh, how one could breathe with Mother. She was far beyond all myths. Only it cannot be done in three days, can it? (the Heavenly Father, after all, needed at least seven days), and since we cannot see the instantaneous miracle that is right in front of us, we do not believe in it⎯but the miracle IS DONE. The body is learning its lesson—all bodies, all bodies. It’s the change of authority.... It’s difficult. It’s hard. It’s painful. Naturally, there is some damage done, but ... But truly, one can see—one can see. There is something that is really changed in the world That was the work Sri Aurobindo had given me. Now I understand. Now I see, I see how his departure and his work so ... so immense, you know, and so constant in this subtle physical, how much it has helped! How much he has helped prepare things, change the structure of the physical. Truly, it is not as it was, NO LONGER as it was. And all, all circumstances are as catastrophic as they can be: everything is unleashed like that, like wild beasts, but it’s over. The body knows that it’s over. It may take centuries, but it’s over. This completely concrete and absolute realization that one could have only when going out of Matter, it’s sure, sure and certain that we will have it RIGHT HERE.3
It is the end of the “mental barbarism” that Sri Aurobindo spoke of. A barbarism from top to bottom, from the religious summits down to the genetic code.
An open, fluid world, where everything is possible.
Another little golden vibration is being spun in bodies, as imperturbably, quietly and irresistibly as our old cancers, which were only cancers of the Mind. Ever since that day of 1968 when Mother’s body was left to itself, cut off from its memories, its Mind, its old forces, the Mind of the cells grasped the last thing it could in order not to be dissolved into nothingness and decay completely (it was decay and death indeed: something is needed to mass those cells together, a vibration, a beam of habitual forces that repeat themselves, or else it crumbles, everything crumbles). The cells caught the Mantra, the Consciousness, the sole great Current that remained in that general rout of small genetic concretions, and they started repeating it round the clock, day and night, without a second’s respite, like mules, as invariably and imperturbably as they used to repeat the old round of habitual death.
When everything has vanished, that remains. The supramental vibration.
The vibration of pure, true Matter. The primal fire that ignited the stars.
But it is an awesome fire…. “A vibration that has the intensity of a higher fire,”
Mother said. And which resembles love.
And with her ever present humour, Mother added this, which gives us both the key to the old Matter that keeps on spinning its little cancers and the key to the new Matter that is spinning … something … the secret of the future in the making: There are cases in which this power of repetition is extremely useful! I even think that this is what gives stability to the form, otherwise we would change form or appearance, or we would liquefy.4
It is the coagulator of forms.
Matter is only a vibration that repeats itself.
Matter is neither a hardness nor an opacity nor a thickness⎯nothing of what our eyes see, nothing of what our hands touch, nothing of what our fabricated reactions feel: a quality of vibration that makes for more or less thickness, more or less opacity, more or less of death⎯a heavier or lighter coagulation. Death is the scattering resulting from the absence of the usual coagulative vibration. One changes the vibration and Matter changes. Density changes. And so does Death.
It is the secret of transformation. It is the secret of the next body.
A new Matter born of a new vibration. Or perhaps of an eternal Vibration.
It remains to be seen whether the old body can bear the change of vibration without dying from it⎯transform itself without paying for it with its life.
A dangerous unknown.
The traversing of the second web is what is most simple and most difficult at the same time. Maybe because it is, or should be, extremely simple in a certain way. So radical a simplicity, in effect, and which eludes us so totally, we who are built on complications, that it is almost vertiginous. Something prodigious ... which looks idiotic1, Mother said, after a last small “operation” that occurred in 1970. All the difficulties we thought of⎯the implacable laws, gravitations and decompositions, genes that coil and uncoil themselves, cells and tissues that wear themselves down, the limitations of age and physiological impossibilities⎯were precisely difficulties that we thought. All that was before, they were the impossibilities and “laws” of the first web, Matter according to our heads and the laws of our physical mind; when we reach the second web and that cellular substance freed from its phantoms, the difficulty is the reverse of the old Wall that we have crossed: the difficulty is precisely that there are no longer any walls, that we are floating in non-law, and that all is possible! But it is a bit frightening for a body. Nothing is solid anymore. It is marvellous and scary. Not the smallest of mechanisms to hold on to, except for the great Mechanism, and if one lets go of it even for a second, it is nothing at all any more, it is a volatilization. And where does that nothing, or that great “something,” go? One becomes aware that the vast world we have constructed is a formidable illusion of death, sickness, gravity and electronic microscopes, but the other … it is somewhat elusive, it is still inexistent for a body, it has never yet been lived by a terrestrial body, there is no reassuring memory in it. It is as if a body, a first terrestrial body had to colonize the unknown in some way, enter a nothing that will then be something by the fact that one enters it. But each step forward is a step into nothing. Columbus was at least entering a solid unknown. The nonentity of the person—the absolute nonentity and incapacity. 2 And what person would there be?
You need memories to keep a person standing on an “I.” And what memories would there be, as they were all memories of the old cage, what “capacities,” as they were all capacities of dying brilliantly? So it is the gaping hole at each step. And an hour is made of many small seconds ... piles of small seconds, “riddled with holes.” No one will know what Mother lived. She was always asking what time it was: what time is it? What time is it?... And they thought She was exaggerating, or going senile. They would even tell her “to get lost” up to the day when She no longer asked the time. But it's really the consciousness of the cells that must change, you understand? ... And there are no words to express it, because it didn't exist on earth.3 It is another person to be built. A cellular person. What is it that can happen in such a sort of body?
The Direct Functioning
In fact, all sorts of marvellous, incredible, infernal and fantastic things occurred, which She spoke of to no one, because they would have thought her mad—I always think of Sri Aurobindo’s silence. But it happens that I had once traversed a sort of human no- man’s-land in a concentration camp, which bore a distant resemblance, perhaps, to Mother’s cellular no-man’s-land, and which had freed me once and for all from all human rationalities. After that, one had to truly believe in a superior earth, or die. I did not die, thanks to Mother, because with her I encountered someone who wanted to build this superior earth and I was ready to understand all and everything, except for the human prison, the despair-inducing physiological concentration camp that ends up in the hole and begins again in another “ameliorated” concentration camp. So I understood her totally; the “impossibility” for me was the old world. “The horrible thing” was living, palpable for me. In fact, under the Pressure of that nothingness, or that need—that old evolutionary key—something other was born in Mother’s cells. Another way of being in the world.
One had to hold oneself upright first and foremost. One had to make gestures, pronounce words in French and English. There were ten, twenty, fifty people who were waiting and others around watching. There was that invisible silent pressure of all the small consciousnesses that wanted this, wanted that, expected this, expected that, there was money to be distributed and this house to be rented or not, to be repaired or not, hundreds and thousands of absurd things that are life, a nibbling, hectic, harassing life. That body was bathed in that, it was small death innumerable and pulsating on all sides⎯it understood nothing of it, it meant nothing to it. And what does a check mean? And the quarrel of this one with that one, what does that mean? It was small pain everywhere, one bumped oneself everywhere in a world of incomprehensible pain, an aggressiveness as voracious in its expressions of love as in its expressions of falsehood. And at times, just a small clear vibration that wanted nothing, asked for nothing, expected nothing—a miracle. When all of a sudden that vibrated somewhere, then She would stop, turn inwards towards that small miraculous twinkling and smile with her eyes closed. A breath of sweetness. And then it would all begin again. When I was silently next to her, groping around in the new world, I could feel her stretching out into this immense tranquil sweetness, so formidably powerful, and if by chance for one second in a moment of weakening, a thought would approach me, simply on the periphery, at a distance, instantly She would start, all her body would gather itself up and She would open her eyes: What time is it? A thought, the most innocent thought was a shock in that. Thought is the Enemy, she would say, the enemy of the cells. Ten times I saw that. For them it is the devouring. For millenniums they have been in this devouring hypnotism. A thought is the master, it is what comes and says: I want and you must do, it is cold, you will be sick, it is hot, you will be sick; it is late, you will be tired It is the world of instantaneous pain, the old slavery that begins anew. And you will take Coramine, otherwise your heart will stop and you will She fought and struggled within that. She lived each second in death—no: She lived death. “Living” was death at each instant, at least living the way that they all wanted around her. One day, I was speaking to her of the unfolding of the experience, and She was explaining a functioning, another functioning, when through some old absurd human habit, I wanted to know what would happen in the future (always this mania of the “future” when we are not even capable of living the present second), and as She liked me, She tried to find out, closed her eyes and concentrated her gaze within, when all of a sudden She abruptly came out of that, pulled on her shawl as if She were suffocating, sweating as if about to faint. You see how it is: now, as soon as I try to know something, I feel such a suffocating heat I think I am going to die. There. Do you understand?4 And it is exactly that: a world where one cannot “try to know,” a world where one cannot try to do or even want to do. A world where nothing is moved by the Mind anymore, not even to lift a spoon and move it towards your mouth. One “knows” nothing and can do nothing, but whenever it is necessary, it is known, that is to say it is done: to know is to do; to see is to have the power to do—automatically. And if it is not to be seen one does not see it, it’s that simple; if it is not to be done, one does not do it, very naturally, one does not even know how to do it. That is to say that all operations proceed conversely to human practice where one has to first “know,” “understand” and “want” in order to be able to do. And as our understanding is uncertain, our action is also uncertain, as is our entire life. There, action is infallible, it is immediate, down to the second. A check has no sense, does it, but the pen writes out the check or does not—there were papers that Mother quite simply could not sign, She no longer knew even how to sign! And one would become aware two days or a month later that it was a lie. Or She could not accept that flower, could not touch that money offering, as in the background it was full of calculations and poison. And in the most microscopic, most “insignificant” details, She “knew” or no longer knew, saw or no longer saw, spoke or did not speak any more. For instance, if I am not “supposed” to say something, instead of its going through the thought, “Mustn’t speak, you mustn’t speak”—I just can’t speak anymore!... All sorts of things like that. The functioning is direct.5 Nothing passes through the Mind any more. The Mind loses its usurped rank of creator and impulse- giver. The supramental action is decided by a leap over the Mind. The Mind is an immobile zone of transmission.6 Now it is perfectly tranquil, peaceful, and it sets itself in motion only when it receives a command to do so, an imperative command. It receives a command, then does something precise for a precise reason, a very precise action, and then ... silence and calm. The Mind recovers its true role: that of a tool, like antennae, crab’s pincers or a nightingale’s throat. So then, that rehabilitates everything. It's only the quagmire it has been turned into that ceases to be.7
A Smile That Knows Everything
It was a long apprenticeship of the direct functioning, which only became really perfect at the end of many long gropings, after the turning of 1968, when all of the Mind drew back except that of the cells. But in truth, it was not something to “learn” as one learns judo or swimming: it was a way of being that made the automatic and correct functioning. Or perhaps a way of non-being, of not existing. A transparency that allows for that to flow all naturally in one direction or the other. The more “inexistent” one is, the more total one is! The more the “I” disappears, the more the totality of the universe is there. The more one does not know, the more one wants nothing, decides nothing, the more it is total knowledge, the vision everywhere, in all the nooks and crannies of the universe—one is at the centre of everything, because one is in the Centre. Then one knows, then one does. It is the body that knows, it is the body that sees. The countless small cells everywhere. Everything communicates, everything is there. It is the great Consciousness that flows and innumerably knows the slightest movement of each detail of its body. The slightest mental intrusion from the old movement spoils it all, observed Mother, I mean the old way of behaving with your body: you want this and you want that and you want to make it do this and you want to make it.... The minute“ that” pops up, everything stops. Progress comes to a standstill. One must be in a beatific state ... then one can feel the new functioning begin. But it has become such a delicate play! A minute thing, minute, is enough⎯a mere ordinary movement, the movement of the ordinary functioning; if through habit you slip back into it (these are infinitesimal things, not easily seen, subtle, tenuous-tenuous; one must be very, very, very alert), if this happens, everything stops. Then you have to wait. Wait until the ordinary functioning consents to stop, and that means entering into contemplation—going over the whole path again. Then, when you have caught hold of That again and can stay there for a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes (it's marvellous when it lasts a few minutes) everything is fine And then it gets jammed again and everything has to be done over.8 That is to say that thought is automatic jamming. The mental world is the world of jamming. And naturally, as everything is jammed, one has to invent a load of complications to disentangle the tangle or to tangle the untangling a little more. It is the world where one knows nothing directly, where one has to “foresee” everything, “organize” everything. It is the great organization of the tangle, while there, there is nothing to “foresee”—foresee what? Every second of the universe is perfectly new, perfectly free and organized in an innumerable single marvel, ONE, where the bird’s flight over the Arctic concurs exactly with the little breath that makes the leaf tremble under our noses. It is ONE movement ... accurate to the second. We have only to live that second, that’s all, or rather to be that formidable second in everything. And that, in the body’s cells. It is beginning to obey another law, Mother remarked. For instance, to know at the exact moment what needs to be done or said, what's going to happen—if there's the slightest bit of concern or concentration to know, it doesn't come. But if one is just like that, simply in a kind of inner immobility, then for all the little details of life, one knows at the exact moment. What needs to be said comes: you say this. And not like an order from outside: it just comes, there it is. What needs to be said is there, the reply that needs to be sent is there; the person who enters, enters—you're not forewarned. You do things in a kind of automatic way. In the mental world, you think of something before doing it (it may happen very fast, but both movements are distinct); here it isn't like that.9
A willing automatism,10 it was how Sri Aurobindo described the supramental life. Instead of the inconscient automatism of the animal and atom, it is the same automatism in the fullness of the light.
And it is the great universal rhythm in the slightest detail. At each second the great rhythm, for everything. There only remained “that”... something (how can I explain?). The English word “smooth” is the most expressive: soft, regular. Everything is done smoothly, everything without exception: getting washed, brushing one's teeth, washing one's face, everything.... There is no “big” and “small,” no “important” and “unimportant”). And it's something so ... uniform in its multiplicity, there is nothing that clashes or grates or causes difficulties anymore or …it's something that moves forward on and on, in so smooth a movement, without resistance. I don't know. And it's not an intensity of delight, it's not that: that also is so even, so regular, but not uniform: it's innumerable. And EVERYTHING is like that, in a single...? rhythm (the word “rhythm” is violent). It's not a uniformity, but something so even, and which feels so sweet, you know, and with a tremendous power in the smallest things There are no memories left, no habits; things aren't done because you learned to do them: they are done spontaneously by the Consciousness. It's not, “Ah, I have to go there,” no: you are every minute where you should be, and when you come to the place you had to go to: “Ah, here it is.”11
At each second it is there. At each second one is.
Or one is born, perhaps.
It is the world “without sequel,” without “before,” or “after,” without fatal consequences—nothing is fatal! It is our head that is fatal and prolongs its sombre small and morbid cogitations into the future, perpetuates sickness, perpetuates death, perpetuates everything. It’s the Consciousness constantly at work, not as a sequel of what was there before, but as a result of what it perceives EVERY INSTANT. It’s the Consciousness which CONSTANTLY sees what has to be done. It’s the Consciousness which, every second, follows—follows its own movement! That allows everything! It’s precisely what allows miracles, reversals, and so on—it allows everything. It’s the very opposite of human creations.12
Nothing is enclosed anymore. Each second total, pure.
We have locked up everything in our heads, even time, space and chromosomes, but the world is not like that, it is a caricature of the world, a scientific and mathematical hell. An illusion of the world. The “miracle” is only when there is a breach in our logic. Then it is the instantaneous miracle. Scientists are the last sorcerers. You try out a number of landmarks in order to build yourself a cage.
And then, suddenly, a breath—a luminous, golden, warm, relaxed, comfortable breath: “Oh, but it's obvious, that's how it is! But I will be CARRIED quite naturally to the place— what's all this complication!?13... I am here, there are lots of circumstances, complications, people ... and everything is so tangled up; but then in the background there is a sort of it's not a mere Force, it's a CONSCIOUSNESS-Force—a Consciousness— and it's like a ... like a smile—a smile ... a smile that knows everything. That's it, you see.14
The smile of the next world.
I am sure that it's the passage from this life to that Life. When we are completely on that side, oh, we'll stop speculating, wanting to “explain,” wanting to deduce, conclude, arrange—all that will be over.... If we knew how ... to be—simply TO BE, to be.15
But how could this new way of being create a new Matter?
The body moves in another way, it knows in another way, it acts in another way, but it is opaque in the old way, it digests just like everyone, breathes just like everyone, and even if its heart obeys other laws (if it did not, it would have died twenty times over), it is nonetheless a heart that pumps blood through the veins. Even if wear and tear is stopped, it is suspended in time in the midst of death. It is not the next species, but an amelioration of the old one. Geneticists imagine, maybe, that by rehandling or changing the molecular order they will produce another being by chance. But if that is truly their hope, they are mistaken. They will produce monsters and caricatures, or perhaps improved super-brains, that is, if they succeed, but these will be variations of the same thing and woven of the same substance. One can put the molecules of Napoleon, Dante and Shakespeare together—it would be amusing to behold—but it would still be of man all the same, perhaps even worse. What follows man will possibly (certainly) produce itself from man but with an element that is not of man. A new element that makes all the difference—and in what gene, what molecule will they go looking for this new element? We always think of the development of species as a continuous (?) series but these are species of the same animal Species. The next species does not belong to the animal reign. It is not a variant, it is something else. It is a new evolutionary saltus like that which separates the vegetal from the mineral or the animal from the vegetal. A new reign. Another Matter issuing from the same eternal Matter. Can one imagine a being that will be made of a Matter as different as the matter that constitutes granite is from that of the rose or the dragonfly, something that is neither vegetal nor mineral nor animal? It is impossible, they will say, it does not come into the existing compositions or else they are bodies of fantasy, celestial apparitions and the whole esoteric calendar. But we are speaking of Matter, are we not, not miracle, unless it happens to be the miracle of Matter. The physical mind, said Sri Aurobindo, always comes in with its fixed line of the present and “No farther” and when the fixed line of the present is unfixed and overpassed, it again erects a new line and cries “No farther.” If an “elemental” who had attained to the physical mind had been present at the different stages of the earth-history he would have argued like that. When only matter was there and there was no life, if told that there would soon be life on earth embodied in matter, he would have cried out, “What is that? It is impossible, it cannot be done. Life is possible only in a subtle body. It has never been and will never be embodied in gross matter. What, this mass of electrons, gases, chemical elements, this heap of mud and water and stones and inert metals, how are you going to get life in that? Will the metal walk? Can the stone live?”16
And now that “life” alone exists, and not an “over-life,” will these bodies made of DNA and these pulmonary alveoli and exquisite grey cells ever live anywhere else than in the good air of the good Lord, somewhat polluted (the good air, that is) and in a Matter that is palpable, at least reasonable? It is not possible, one must rise to heaven.
But how is this other Matter produced? What does it look like? It won’t fall down from heaven, will it?
A Way of Being
We are approaching the most mysterious part of Mother’s great Forest, and yet we feel that it must be so very simple. She did not know the way, She walked, that’s all. She said: I saw that, I felt this, I had that experience.… And that seemed to come out of just anywhere, go just anywhere—it was a fact, yes, but the fact of what? There were thousands of facts ... of something one could neither name, nor define, nor sew together. When the baby grows, there is that “garden”: stones, grasses, a whole assortment of unspeakable and unnamed things that feel, live, happen, and then what? It is only long after that it all adds up to “a garden.” And sometimes, even as late as 1972, a year before the far end of the “garden,” I would complain to Mother that I “did not quite understand the path that we were following.” Why, I myself don't understand it at all! Simply ... (and She would open her hands in a gesture of surrender) It isn't easy.17. So if the reader believes I want to “demonstrate” anything at all, he or she is mistaken. I would only like to understand this garden, I do not even know where it leads, or what it is. It is perhaps the new world. But in the meanwhile, it is very bizarre.
One morning in 1970, Mother simply remarked: My own impression is that there is a part that tries to take form in the body, that is, a way of being of the cells that would be the beginning of a new body. When it happens, it’s a bizarre sensation. A bizarre sensation. The very body feels as if it’s dying—something, it doesn’t know what it is. It’s only a state of intense faith that enables you to bear it. As if the one was being changed into the other As if what is were trying to change into something else. But that’s ... it’s hard to bear. Something wholly new.18 The entire mystery lies there. A way of being of the cells that would be the beginning of a new body How can a way of being form a body?
Obviously, there is a way of being that makes a lizard, a way of being that makes a flower, or a man. And what is it after all that makes a lizard, there at the very beginning?… It is always that famous “beginning,” that “first time that.” We come afterwards, so we say: it is very simple, it winds itself into small molecules of protein that follow such and such a schema, and if one disturbs the schema, it no longer produces a lizard, it produces ... produces what? What is it that made it wind itself in that way, that made it want to wind itself in that way and not in another? Then one says “Nature,” it is very convenient, or “evolution,” it’s simple. But where is that lady or that man, that something that wanted—unless one thinks that nothing ever wanted something, or that nothing wanted whatever, or the heavenly father perhaps? We still have the impression that our scientists are secretly transporting the heavenly father under their Greco-Latin molecules. But something did want— one must want in order to do or see in order to do, damn it! Or one must be ... something. In the case of a baby, it is the parents that push, but in a globule of unorganized gelatine, there must be “something” that pushes (if one says “life,” one is again shifting the mystery under the aegis of another lady), something that “tends towards”—something, that means a being, a consciousness of self, even if it does not resemble our superb cogitations; a way of vibrating or of tending towards something that makes use of whatever the means at hand to wind or secrete its existence. If one says it is the sun and amino acids and the bombardment of particles plus a number of degrees centigrade ... one might as well say the prison produced the prisoner. It is a science of prisoners. Even those amino acids wanted to be something, they are a way of vibrating—a way of being. We are not philosophizing and we mock philosophy to the utmost, we have no need to be Marxist or even spiritualist: we are trying to understand the phenomenon. The phenomenon is that of a body, or more exactly of the cells of a certain body, that have lost their habit of coiling in the way that the physical Mind had fixed in its grooves, but which have not lost their habit of being: to be means to beat, vibrate, tend towards ... perhaps to want, but without very well knowing what it wants nor where it is going. In other words, cells that would be “at the first point that,” but after having accomplished the whole human journey. What are they going to spin, what substance, what is happening? Necessarily a being weaves its body, a way of being or vibrating must coagulate Matter or substance in its own way—with what is at its disposal, if one dares say so. And what is it?
If we knew what is there, the pure thing to be spun without any of the old schemas, we would be very close to touching the secret of the world. Perhaps we have covered this enormous circuit of spinnings across evolution in order to arrive at the moment where, individually formed, individually conscious, we can touch the secret of the start, the impulse of the start, the energy or the matter or the being of the start—what there is, pure, without all the evolutionary crutches that have carried us this far. Then we will move from the science of crutches to the science of being, from the science of our old successive prisons to the science of freedom. For once it will be a very interesting science.
The Exit from the Second Web
Here, we are reduced to “facts” (even though we do not yet know the fact of what), that is to the experience of those pure cells that Mother stammeringly tried to express. And there are so many experiences, sometimes almost contradictory, but probably no more contradictory than grasses and stones contradict the pond of the garden; only we do not well know the relation, because we do not know the “garden.”
The phenomenon that seems to most often repeat itself at the beginning is a state of cellular fluidity (or of cellular consciousness), that is to say, the principle of the amalgamation of those cells, the normal vibration that binds them together, that shapes an “I” into a man or a lizard, the something that repeats itself, seems to dissolve. There seems to be a dilation—a dilation—and like something that would want to melt. A very, very strong impression. And throughout the cells it brings about an extraordinary power of vibration. Something wholly out of proportion to the human body—tremendous! And it goes through like that.19 That vibration is precisely our mystery. We call it the supramental vibration, but we would like to know what that supramental is. And when it comes, when I look, some people melt (not many, very few), but others are terrified! They get up and run away...20 And indeed, when one felt “that” coming through, it was a bit ... awesome, but awesome probably because a human body is completely unaccustomed to it, a vibration so foreign to its substance that it is almost menacing. I just have to stop my [outer]activities even two or three seconds, one or two minutes at the most, for the body to feel as if it's floating, floating like that, floating. And one sees an immensity, like an ocean of this vibrating, luminous, golden, powerful Consciousness, and the body floats in it 21 And we wonder if primal Matter is not precisely that. The “something” that each and every one and every species has spun, canalized, concretized or fossilized in its own way: the primal substance of the world, the vibration from which all other vibrations derive, or of which all the other vibrations are a diminutive, a deformation or a formation the size of a flagellate or a lizard. What we call “Matter” is a way of spinning or imprisoning that, and there are all possible degrees of Matter. So what will happen in a body that let itself be traversed purely by that? Will it dissolve itself in that, or “imprison” that in another way? What could the new principle of amalgamation be, that is, if it is at all possible?
The beginnings of the experience are very “troubling” for the body. This “dilation” is absolutely like a dissolution; there is no longer any corporal “I” that wisely repeats its little coagulating vibration, that incessant, invisible trepidation that allows it to stick together: How to keep the form without the ego's presence?— that's the problem. That's precisely the so interesting curve at present unfolding. At times, you feel as if everything, everything is dissolving, getting disorganized; and I have observed closely: at first the physical consciousness wasn't sufficiently enlightened, and when those inner preparations took place, it would feel, “Ah, this must be what heralds death”; then, little by little, came the knowledge that it wasn't that at all, it was only the inner preparation to be capable. And then, on the contrary, the very clear vision of this plasticity so particular, this suppleness so extraordinary that if it were realized it obviously means the abolition of the necessity of death. That is to say, an unknown state which we may call “physically unrealized.”22 Nothing imprisons the current anymore, then there is no more reason to die, of course, because it is the prison or the hardening of the current that makes for the necessity of death. But how to stand upright in that “plasticity”? It was Mother’s problem for months and months; and to a certain degree it will continue to be the problem until the moment when something new forms in the body, a new type of “supple solidity,” as She would say. It was the transition that was difficult. Spontaneously, that is to say, left to its old habits and ways of being, it’s very difficult for the body, it results in an internal organization that quite looks like disorder—it’s difficult. You see, problems crop up all the time, for everything—everything—there isn’t one activity of the body that’s not called into question by that [that fluidity].23 Eating is becoming a problem, sleeping is becoming a problem, speaking is becoming a problem—everything is a problem 24 The process is no longer the old process, it’s no longer as it was, but “as it is,” it hasn’t become a habit, a spontaneous habit, which means it’s not natural, it demands that the consciousness should be constantly watchful—for everything, even to swallow lunch.... Oh, how difficult! Through a sort of conscious concentration, you have to keep up a state, a way of being that isn’t natural according to the old nature, but which is clearly the new way of being. But it’s an almost Herculean labour.25
This new way of being is at first almost a way of not being, because “to be” comprises all the old habits of being. It is something that naturally no longer has any particular centre, no more prison, it is spread everywhere. The body feels forces coming, but ... it doesn’t even feel them going through. It all goes through without ... through what, one doesn’t know. Very nonexistent. And then, if the body starts being conscious of itself or of something, it’s most unpleasant, a discomfort—an inexpressible discomfort. It’s limitless, you understand [and Mother pointed to her body], that’s the strange thing 26 There's a phenomenon, for example (among many others), a curious phenomenon: I don't feel “I” am eating, you see, so I am not aware of putting things in my mouth and having to swallow them and No, it's something which is at once in me and IN THE FOOD, it isn't like something that “comes in,” it's like something [and
Mother traced what seemed like a circle of forces in the air] something which develops, which is free to develop. Well then—then it's very good. But as soon as I become conscious in the old consciousness, which means eating, tasting the food, putting it in my mouth—it's difficult! I have all the trouble in the world not to swallow wrong....27 There’s no more at all the sensation of “this through which,” this through which the Divine flows—there isn’t. It’s still and nonexistent, without any self- awareness, aware only of ... the Divine Action, like that. Then everything is fine. And the minute there’s even a slight impression of the thing flowing “through,” discomfort comes. See, I might say (it sounds like literature!) that in a certain state, in that state in which it no longer feels itself and only the awareness of the Divine remains, there’s the sense of an immortality, of Eternity; and if there’s the least sensation of “something in which” the Divine manifests, it absolutely becomes the sense of death—you instantly become mortal again.28
One falls back into the prison. One spins out death, immediately.
It has become a very acute state, she added. And it was to become more and more acute. The slightest thing upsets it—I can't swallow anymore or even breathe anymore. The feeling of a life which is about to depend on different conditions than the usual ones. But the other conditions aren't there yet, nor is the body familiar with them, and so the transition from one state to the other is a perpetual source of problems.29 It was a sort of constant paradox for everything, a radical, dangerous contradiction at every minute, basically between the state of life and the state of death, the new state and the old one. It's an incredible situation: either true consciousness or the sensation of an impending and general danger. Everything— eating , taking a bath—is a danger, you see. 30 It’s as if the body were shown how, in all sorts of circumstances—innumerable circumstances—how one goes towards death and how one goes towards life: with everything, everything, every part of the body, every organ, every activity, one after another—impossible to tell 31 Strangely, as soon as there’s the slightest slackening in the attitude, for instance, a second of forgetfulness (what I might call “forgetfulness,” that is, the former old habit, the old terrestrial habit of being returns), the body instantly feels about to be dissolved. And so, at such times, brr! There can come two or three seconds like that: you feel everything, but everything is about to be dissolved.32
And sometimes Mother no longer knew at all where She was, on this side or the other, going towards life or towards death, disintegration or something else, and a cry would escape from her: You understand, I feel as if I am plunged in a world I do not know, struggling with laws I do not know, and to work out a change I do not know either—what’s the nature of this change?33 And I attempted to tell Mother what I profoundly felt, like some intimate self-evidence: “Yes, but sweet Mother, I absolutely have the feeling that through this obscurity, this ignorance of the “laws,” you are KNOWINGLY carried to the point where the solution will be found.”—You are right. You’re right. If you like, I might say that I “think” that way (I don’t think, but ), there is a perception like that. But ... there’s everything in between. And then She would laugh, would poke fun at me: Well, then! Go on thinking that way!34 And I would protest, I was so sure of the deep logic of that hell, I could almost see the other side of that no-man’s-land: “It is not possible for it not to succeed!”—Why? Then it would spring forth from my heart, as if the entire hope of the earth was there, in that impossible transition: “Because ... because you are the body of the world! Because it is truly the Hope.” —That... isn’t that poetry? And this was so typical of Mother, that “poetry” that She wanted nothing of, which She was ashamed of perhaps, because after all, She was making that poetry.—“But no! sweet Mother, it is not poetry, it is like that. One only has to see: the external world is more and more infernal.” Ah, yes, that’s true.35 ⎯ “Well, it’s that in your body.”
And in fact it was that, it was the passage to another world, another reign, to a true earth, a free earth, on the other side of all cages.
The exit from the second web.
The physiological and genetic cage. This was in 1970.
The Key to the New Body
In fact the solution being sought was right there, next to one, without one’s knowing it. It was within the difficulty itself. The passage from the mineral to the animated (but still static) vegetal life must have been a formidable scattering of the stone cage, and that of the vegetal to the animal’s movement another vertiginous stampede—and the next one? A superman is easy to understand, but the other one? What is it that is neither the movement of life nor the static immobility of the stone?... The contradiction, or paradox became more and more sharp in this animal life that was dying to be born to one knew not what. At times, the body feels such a great strength that it gets the feeling it could ... anything, a strength … a strength of a different quality, but much greater than before. And at other times, it can’t even hold itself upright, and for a reason which isn’t ... physical. It no longer obeys the same laws as those that keep us upright. So...36 And this: A strange experience. It's a strange experience. The body feels it no longer belongs to the old way of being, but it knows that it is not yet in the new one and that it is It is no longer mortal and it is not yet immortal. It's quite strange. Very strange. And sometimes I go from the most dreadful discomfort to ... the marvel. I have to be concentrated all the time, concentrated in order to do things [and one could see Mother trying to pull towards “herself” something that was spread out everywhere]. Sometimes, not a word in my head, nothing; sometimes I see and know what is happening everywhere.... I have to be careful when I am with people, otherwise they would think I am going crazy! It's really peculiar. A sort of total impotence and an overwhelming power side by side. But at the same time ... sometimes I can't even eat!37 And I asked Mother, “If one could know exactly what makes one swing to one side or the other?...” Yes! There is clearly an attempt to let the body know, and it suddenly finds itself outside all habits, outside all actions and reactions, consequences and so on; then it’s …a wonder. And then it disappears. It’s so new for the material consciousness that each time you feel as if on the verge of a precipice. There’s a minute of panic in the consciousness. Because from the beginning and constantly, there’s a sort of commonsense firmly rooted in the being, which refuses to imagine things; it says, “I don’t want to imagine this, I don’t want to imagine that....” Past ninety, Mother appreciated Mathilde’s virtues. So then, the consciousness takes up things only when they are totally concrete—it’s too easy to start spinning tales and ... None of that. Totally practical, concrete.38 Therefore I am certain this isn't a tendency to mystic dreaming in me, not at all, not at all, this body had nothing mystic! Nothing ... Thank God!39 And it was then that I said to Mother: “What if all of a sudden we gave to a caterpillar, by accelerated evolution, the eyes of a man.…”—Yes, She exclaimed. “It would be frightening.”—Yes, that’s it.
And it was exactly that.
Nonetheless, as if implicitly, something else wanted to be born or filter through, but one does not know, does one, when one is in it⎯one does not see oneself being. One clearly sees what is on its way out; and what is coming is so new that it is as if invisible. For it to be seen the eyes must become accustomed to it, perhaps what is required are eyes adapted to the next mode—what does a man mean for a dragonfly? Does it even exist? There is no pollen on it nor a pretty shimmering of fresh waters. Our eyes are awfully functional, and if it is no longer our function, be it but an aesthetic one, then what is it? The body consciousness is slowly changing, in such a way that its whole former life seems foreign to it. That seems to be someone else’s consciousness, someone else’s life. Its “situation,” if you like, in the world, is changing. As if there were no past, you know, one is wholly like this (gesture ahead), there’s nothing behind. A curious sensation of something beginning. Not at all, not at all something ending. It’s a curious sensation: something beginning. With all the unknown, the unexpected. Strange. I constantly feel that things are new, that my relationship with them is new. And the body’s impression too is that of a new way of feeling, new way of reacting.... It’s very strange.40 And always this “inexpressible unease” that seems to punctuate each step or each movement, maybe a hundred times a day, as if it were the back and forth from the cage to something else, the marvellous opening and then the recoil—perhaps the stepping back in order to have the strength to jump even farther? We do not understand our difficulties at all, they are always our springboard! Generally, it comes like that, that discomfort; so, immediately, the body surrenders—surrenders as if saying: “If it’s death, well, may Your Will be done.” You understand, total surrender. So then, when the surrender is more or less effective, I don’t know, sometimes a clarity comes, an understanding, a SELF-EVIDENCE OF EVERYTHING.41 And we wonder whether this other life that is coming, this other reign that is no more of the mineral, the vegetal or the animal, this other inconceivable movement of being, might not be life innumerable? No longer enclosed within a shell or a tegument, nor a skin of whatever sort, whether stone, tree or man, but something that runs innumerably, that is innumerably—the self-evidence or everything. The state of self-evidence. Nothing is obvious for us: we always have to run after things, and even when we seize them, we still have to “look.” Here, one is within, in everything: it is obvious. But where is the body that can do that? A body, isn’t it, not just a consciousness that navigates. A truly remarkable state. But it doesn’t last. The least thing disrupts it. I know. The body feels that if it could surrender TOTALLY—have no independent existence, no personal effort, no personal will... insofar as that’s possible, everything is fine.42
Surrender, yes, and how could one become the other by hanging onto even the best of the physiologies of the old?
A total surrender. For the body, this means the acceptance of death. A physiological acceptance…. Mentally, it is all very well, but when your breath becomes strangled?
Now, it is here that we begin to touch the key or the lever. In this inexpressible uneasiness where the body was thrown, that sort of return to death (that actual suffocation: a body suffocates when it enters the surroundings of death), something occurred that was always the same, very simple, automatic and repeated thousands and millions of times, because nights and days are made up of lots of seconds (86,400): an intense aspiration in the body. It is the simplest of phenomena. There is nothing anymore, so one must perforce hold onto something. It is the very movement of the first breath of the world, which must have been an aspiration. A suffocation of nonbeing that wants to be. It is the deep beat of life, of all life. The first spinning of something around a nucleus. The secret prayer of things. The hidden name of beings. It is there, deep down; but generally it has to cross layers upon layers, and it only spins a habit. But that first cry of Matter, that need of being, or perhaps of loving, it is at the beginning of each species, each thing, it grows with each species, each step of the long journey, and sometimes torn from everything, broken perhaps, it springs forth from the depths of our body. A burning. An intense heat that resembles love, something that is very immobile but is like a firmly packed power, compact, almost overflowing—a too much of something that is at the same time very sweet and very unbearable, as if one were going to explode. It is in the body: it seems to rise from all sides at once. It has nothing to do with sentiments: it is like a tidal wave of flame. And curiously, it loves. It is as if one were at the same time filled with the greatest of anguishes, the most intolerable of emptinesses, almost a pain, and the fullness of something that is as if itself for the first time in the world. Everything else falls into dust but that is, sovereignly. It is even all that there is. Moments of death that are like a sovereign but inexpressible life. Twenty years later, it shines like pure gold, as if they were eternal moments, in the body. One day, I asked Mother what this type of intense aspiration was that took hold at times in the body: I think what we call intense aspiration must be the supramental vibration.43 It is that in the bodies’ depths—the depths of all bodies—that first vibration that spun life into forms and forms, that became crusted over, hardened, schematized, but one only breaks or scratches the habit a bit and it is there. It is there instantaneously, it is the very being of everything that moves, sleeps, eats, kills and forgets, so much forgets what it is. And in each thing, there is that luminous, golden, imperative Vibration⎯ which is necessarily all-powerful.44
So, we have the key to the new body, because it is the key to all bodies ever created on this planet. It is the original Matter of the world, the true Matter.
A wave of a very particular type.
Primary Matter
We can quite easily visualize this “warm golden powdering” that was Mother’s first direct experience of the supramental twelve years earlier, in 1958, when She descended to the rock-bottom of this “Inconscient,” that is, (as I can now understand) when She pierced through the crust of the physical Mind: the rock of the Rishis. A powdering like an atomic dust, but with an extremely intense vibration,45 she said. And it could well be that our very atoms are a first covering or coiling of this fundamental vibration. A vastness that was made of countless, imperceptible points. 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 splendour!...46 And today it seems that I better understand the trajectory of those twelve years: the slow preparation in order to traverse the web of the physical Mind, the widening, the universalisation to sustain the “boiling porridge” of this supramental powdering without disintegrating, the Movement that exceeds the force or power that concentrates the cells, 47 she noted in 1963. This slow clarifying of the opaque periphery of the cells to reach the nucleus, the primal vibration divested of all its old spun layers—that “vibrating immensity” into which it seemed to her at times that She was going to dissolve. It was like a return to the material origin of the world. And the experience is each time the same, year after year (like little dashes of experience to progressively habituate the body), again in 1969: There’s an intense aspiration, and at times—a moment when there is like a swelling—I don’t know what happens, it’s something going on in the cells and then ... it’s a state, a state of intense vibration, with at the same time a sense of all-powerfulness, even in here, in this old thing [and Mother pointed to her own body], a luminous all-powerfulness, and STATIC, that is, with the sense of eternity in the cells 48 It is the strange contradiction of this
Supramental that seems to mix or unite an extreme velocity, perhaps so extreme in its vibration that it gives the perception or sensation of immobility as if one re-found there the immobility of the stone in its lightning-like intra-atomic movement. And we remember Sri Aurobindo:
A fiery stillness wakes the slumbering cells49
Something COMPLETELY, completely new for the body.50 Yet it was in 1969. Whatever could it have been that was new in this experience, which seems so similar to so many others that we have already noted?... Perhaps it was not the experience that was new, but the level on which it was situated. It was as if, down the years and as the layers were traversed, the experience—the eternal same experience—became purer, more material, more corporeal, at the very heart of the cleared cellular substance. And in fact, we say “Supramental,” but it is that which functions everywhere, through all levels, through mental force on the spiritual summits as well as through sentiments, instincts, formations or deformations, or depravities, through everything; it is that which is the sole driving force through complications or thickenings, innumerable and various coilings—and then the experience becomes pure in a little cell. It is a state which seems to be perfectly still.... I don’t know what it is: it’s not stillness, not eternity. I don’t know, it’s something, a “something” that is ... Power, Light, and really Love ... something To such a point that when you leave that state, you wonder if you still have the same shape!51 And She laughed.
Of course! It is the first coagulating agent of all forms.
Something that unites the apparent immobility of the mineral reign to the more and more accelerated movement of the vegetal, animal and mental reigns—a new acceleration in an apparent immobility? What type of Matter is this anyway?... We say “primary Matter,” that’s very pretty, but what does it look like, how is it handled? Matter is not a breath, although there is a certain gassy matter from which we have created stars. The scientists even tell us that Matter is in large part composed of void, with its minute nuclei distantly surrounded by their mantle of electrons. It is what they have seen at the end of their microscopes. And what was Mother seeing at the end of her direct microscope, “in situ,” if one dares say? And there, strangely, her oft-repeated experience, repeated dozens of times, meets up with that of Theon at the beginning of the century when he spoke of “A Matter denser than physical Matter, but with qualities that physical Matter doesn’t have, like elasticity, for example.” And what is the most curious is that they found in Mother’s papers, after her departure, the noting down of an experience She had had in 1906 and had completely forgotten about, noted in pencil on the back of bills for paintings of the “Edouard Morisset workshop” (the father-in-law, who painted portraits of the little princesses of Egypt), and in which She related the following: Suddenly, I found myself caught up in a vertiginous fall [and we have the impression that this “fall" is the sudden traversing of all the layers of consciousness or memories formed by the evolution of bodies], a fall that seemed to me more and more vertiginous, to stop, as if stuck, in a place that I could not easily make out at first and where I felt a totally strange sensation which was also, so to speak, unknown to me: I felt myself in a surrounding that was denser than the earth itself, a surrounding that seemed to me as dense as a diamond but which was elastic and I was closely surrounded to the point that I clearly felt the contact of this matter on all of my body and particularly on the face, the arms and hands (the parts that were naked); the sensation was not disagreeable but so new that I was surprised by it. The thought then came to me that the best would be for me to rest a bit to assimilate myself to the surroundings, which is what I did, and after a moment I found myself at my ease and I saw that this matter was a bit luminous on its own and of various colours, with molecules of varying density as well; there was also some self-luminous gold but very different from the essential gold, a bit of colour but mainly because of the difference of density; this luminous gold was not transparent. Bit by bit I saw a large sphere of this matter forming itself AROUND me, and this sphere was of all colours....
This Matter formed itself around her. Now this is what is truly interesting. And we find again there our irised “scintillation of multi-coloured light.” But what was it that made it form or agglutinate around her body?... This is a question that She perhaps took sixty years to resolve, or rather live. What She saw then distantly, “in vision” and as if at the end of a “vertiginous fall,” took her sixty years to touch directly in her body, with her eyes wide-open, after having traversed all those layers, which are like layers of sleep for us, the layers of false matter, or dead Matter, one could say, piled up by the evolution of bodies: all those residues of the vegetal, animal and mineral that have made and still make a body. In 1961, when She spoke to me for the first time (still a bit “distantly”) of this “other Matter,” or this “new substance,” having totally forgotten her experience of 1906, She told me, It’s something more compact, denser than the physical: the New Creation. One always tends to think of it as something more ethereal, but it’s not! The impression I get of this atmosphere is of something more compact—more compact and at the same time without heaviness or thickness. And solid! Oh, so cohesive, so MASSIVE, and at the same time ... I don't know, it's something completely different from anything you might expect. You can't imagine it Something that is compact and undivided. I mean that there's a feeling of being on the wrong track: ordinarily, when seeking the “Supermind,” one looks for it on the heights. But that's not it! That's not it. And one always imagines a sort of subtilization, something etherealized, but it's not that.52
Decidedly, there is a logic and a continuity to this experience spanning sixty years.
Again in 1967, She told me: If you like, it might be like molten gold—molten and luminous. It was very thick. And it had a power—a WEIGHT, you know, it was astonishing.53
And now that her body was directly in contact with this primal substance, what was going to happen? What we call “Matter” is obviously something that is “hardened,” as Mother would say, a stereotyped, frozen movement, an imprisoned force down to the atom, and it is because it is shrivelled, frozen and hardened that we can seize hold of it: we touch the prison. The prison is “Matter.” All in all, we can only touch that which has a sufficiently slow vibration: the slower it is, the more opaque it is. We only seize what is opaque. There is a whole scale of lights that are too swift for us to seize upon, sounds too “high” to touch us. There is a whole “wave band” of existence that escapes us. But beyond what our instruments can capture, there is a whole range of primary Matter without opacity, too rapid for all our senses—a Matter that rejoins the very movement of consciousness. And immediately we dig a sort of supernatural abyss between Matter that can be touched and verified and this imponderable quantity which we call “consciousness.” It is our fundamental error. “Have you seen metal walk?” Sri Aurobindo’s imaginary being inquired at the beginning of the Ages of the earth, when Life did not yet exist. It is only a supernatural matter, or rather a supernatural and disembodied consciousness that can move upon this mineral crust. We are perhaps making the same error today with all our scientific apparatus: it is only a supernatural matter or some disincarnated consciousness that could walk upon the face of our good earth with something other than all our excellent composites of the vegetal, animal or mineral reign⎯that is, all the products of the successive hardenings of evolution. We only touch what is hardened. Everything eludes us, because we have not grasped Matter’s central secret: Matter = Consciousness. Any more than the central secret of evolution: Evolution = development of Consciousness. And because this does not exactly resemble all our listed and labelled fossilizations, we deduce from it that Consciousness is not a type of Matter⎯but it is probably as much of a superstition as to say that Matter is not an energy. Or perhaps we believe that it is a product of all our small improved prisons? A sort of superior secretion. But it is the very Matter of the world. And the whole evolutionary experiment underway, the evolutionary challenge that is being thrown more or less brutally in the faces of all those small metals that walk is that this end product must find again what first set it in motion, and produce with its conscious cells a body of conscious Matter that will perhaps keep itself upright thanks to other laws than those of the gravitation of bodies, but will walk on the surface of this good earth as surely and solidly—more solidly perhaps—and with nothing more supernatural than the small thinking metals of today. The secret of the beginning is at the end. Matter is not betrayed by consciousness, it does not “subtilize” itself nor faint into a cosmic dream (“it was very thick,” Mother said): it enters a new acceleration or a new reign. The reign of conscious Matter.
Matter without a prison.
A Mystery of the Unknown
But a form means a delimitation or a structure. What can a non-supernatural body endowed with a recognizable form that is not a prison look like? A body that will not fall from heaven, for god’s sake! as we are in a logical, sensible evolution even if it does not correspond to our present sense and leaden logic.
The experience is simple.
In this kind of dissolution of the form that seemed to project the cells into nothingness, or into an “ocean of vibrant consciousness” where nothing subsisted anymore of what they had slowly, painfully built up over millenniums of evolution, in that sudden suffocation, in that negation perhaps of all that had made them beat, hope and live through bodies and more bodies, they were seized with an intense aspiration: to be again, to be forever, it was for that that they were made! Death was the awful negation, be it a death in the light; they were of Matter, those cells, they called in the truth of Matter, the life of Matter, they hooked the Mantra, the small golden vibration of the depths; they repeated, repeated their prayer of being, their love of being; they spun, spun that sole golden substance, dense, as the plant spins out the light of the sun, as the butterfly beetles on pollen, as simply, as blindly: it was a question of life or death. There was no more memory to spin, no more “I” in the way of all bodies: there were only those thousands of pure beats in the depths of the cells, which would swell and gorge themselves on the only air that remained. A way of being on the frontier of death, a way of calling, praying as at the dawn of the world, when there was nothing yet except that small pure vibration that wanted to be forever, to love forever. Something very simple, so simple that all our words seem stupid or pompous. “Poetry again,” she would say. But it was truly the primal poetry: it made. It made a body. A new body, slowly, day after day, year after year, like the shell spinning out its calcium. A spinning of dense substance, irised, at times golden, around that nucleus of prayer or of love at the heart of each cell; something that married that form, modelled itself on it, around it, perhaps slowly filled it. Perhaps absorbed it or slowly made it pass into something else: A bizarre sensation. As if the one were being changed into the other. As if what is were trying to change into something else. But that’s ... it’s hard to bear.54
She did not know it very well herself, She did not understand it very well herself; She no longer had a Mental that looks at itself upon a stage: She was only thousands of small conscious cells that called, called day and night, repeated and repeated the Mantra, like a golden hymn: an incantation, you know, a call, the incantation to the supreme Power,55 and then if it ceased for a second to call, it was the instantaneous dissolution, the “precipice.” That’s all. Mother was only like a prayer of Matter. It was a body, a certain body of the old Matter which was passing into something different and unknown, which had the impression of dying at each second and at each second entered something else that it did not know or understand, that it did not even perceive as another body. There is a moment when ... the word “anguish” is too strong, much too strong, but the impression is of being on the verge of ... the unknown—the unknown, the ... something. A very, very odd sensation. Almost constantly, the body really has a very ... (at least a very odd) sensation of being ... of no longer being this and not yet being That. Inexpressible. But it’s quite strange; there’s absolutely no fear, there’s no acute sensation, no acute sensation at all, and there is something.... Well, I might say: it’s a sort of new vibration. It’s so new that ... you can’t call it anguish, but it’s ... the unknown. A mystery of the unknown. But there’s nothing mental about it, of course, it’s just in the sensation of the vibration. And that’s becoming constant. So there’s only one solution for the body, it’s ... total surrender— total. And in that total surrender it realizes that that vibration (how can I explain?), that vibration is not one of dissolution, but something ... what?... The unknown, completely unknown—new, unknown. Sometimes it’s struck with panic. And it can’t say it’s in pain much, I can’t call that suffering, it’s something ... quite extraordinary. So, the only solution is ... to snuggle up in the Divine: what will happen will happen. 56
Then I understood so deeply, I said to Mother: “Yes, the ‘other thing’ must be so other that it is like a death for the body!”—/ It’s the equivalent, at any rate. That’s right. But [and She smiled]... it doesn’t confuse the two. It doesn’t confuse the two, it KNOWS this is not what people call death t’s a funny life, at any rate!57
And then She laughed, I will soon have a dangerous contagion, you know!58
That was in April 1970.
The mystery of the unknown.
Something the cells don't quite understand yet, but they know, they sense. They feel as if they were thrust forcibly into a new world.59
It is Matter that finds the key to Matter.
The exit from the mineral, vegetal, animal reign. The beginning of the supramental being.
It was a mystery indeed, deeper than that of the appearance of mental man amidst the animals, deeper than that of the appearance of any species whatever amidst other species of the same substance; perhaps one would have to go as far back as the explosion of life in the midst of the mineral world. It was like another life being born. How did a mineral learn life, is it not a little bit that? It was the explosion of its untroubled solidity, it was a wave of “something” that was indistinct, impalpable, “unreal” and supernatural, or of another nature, that seized hold of its crystals and atoms, ground and decomposed them— an enormous decomposition. But the recomposition? This “life” might well have been something invisible for it, too rapid for it and it only measured its decomposing effects. And in what way is this supramental life accessible to us—us thinking men solidly installed in our cultivated molecules? Decomposition is something we can see, but if it be that our interest goes beyond the narrow or large round of our mental life in its search for political, economic or aesthetic panaceas in the midst of small collapsing minerals, how can we hope to participate in or collaborate with this supramental life that, after all, appears to be the dissolution of all our good life, perhaps even the dissolution of these amiable bodies, if one were to judge by the experience of the human prototype called Mother. And who will ever have the courage to traverse such an evolutionary ordeal cold-bloodedly?... It is true that Mother’s experience was a bit “compressed,” as if one were stuffing centuries into a few years or months, and we assume that the experience will stretch over generations whose cells will become more and more refined, clarified, supple. We also suppose that the great supramental wave will lay hold of (or is already laying hold of) all bodies unbeknown to them, whether they think well, ill or nothing at all of it, and will work on them secretly from the other side of the web of the physical Mind, on the cellular level, and will wear away, undermine, pound this fortress of sickness and death and unchanging laws to make them suddenly or progressively emerge into Matter delivered from mental tyranny—a life already made radically lighter, with the beginning of a small song within. But at the end of all that, what will happen to this body of the old reign? The final decomposition or what? One moves into what is invisible and insubstantial (for us, even if it is another substance and another visibility), or what?... But after all, the plants and small animals of the good Lord continued to remain quite substantial and visible after the explosion of the mineral, so there is no reason to suppose that evolution will be less unreasonable than before, even if it disturbs the metal’s reason. Who knows, perhaps other eyes will come to us? Perhaps we do not yet know all the earth’s visibility—all of its natural, we could say—and that it is not forever imprisoned in a spectrograph? What is going to happen?
This is in some way the question that Mother’s body poses to us, as if we were facing there an accelerated hurried specimen. And one must well believe that that body could not be “accelerated” without us undergoing the acceleration as well: the “dangerous contagion,” as She would laughingly say. Truly, it is as if evolution, for once in its long history, placed us in the presence of its future data in a body, in vivo. Will it live, will it not live? Will it succeed or not succeed? Where are we going?
Something She asked herself as well.
The son of the cells
The heart of wood is tender, then it lignifies: the concentric rings of its “age” form themselves year after year. No doubt one observes the same process or an analogous one with layers of coral or mother of pearl, at all levels and in all branches of evolution, starting with the atom that weaves or attracts its electrons around it up to the sun with its planets. And always there is this hardening, this calcification, this agglutination, and we cannot help but think that what we call “Matter” is not the original fact, but a hardening. “Matter” is a hardened habit. And it seems that the supramental being follows the same process of formation or ingraining as all other bodies, but without the hardening. The original substance agglutinates itself around the small pure vibration of the cells, slowly depositing itself around this nucleus of call, or prayer, or perhaps love, indefinitely repeated by the Mind of the cells. But while in the first ages of Life, a crust or carapace of any sort eventually formed itself to separate beings, forms, distinct modes in the midst of this mass of Consciousness-Force or amorphous Matter-Consciousness and to protect this precarious life, here at the other end of evolution, the individual is already formed—it was the goal of this long journey—already cellularly conscious, and because he is conscious, individualized, he can voluntarily amalgamate the original substance without having the need to lignify or encrust it in order to separate and protect itself from the rest of the universe. The great Fear is gone. Its protection is the very density of this substance of consciousness: each time, Mother’s physical cells had the sensation they would explode or volatilize in this tide of solid power. But not being imprisoned in a fixed, hardened form, this body—this new body—can move about or blend into everything, everywhere. It is life innumerable. It is physical life without separation. It is the great unity of Life—unity of Matter, of Consciousness—lived materially. It is the wonder of that life that was being prepared by thousands of years of painful separation in a small prison of fossilized Matter. And one well understands that one had to become conscious cellularly in order to be able to build that life. It is Matter itself, evolved, conscious, individualized, that spins out its own, pure body, with the very substance it started from, back in the first amorphous ages.
A son of the cells.
For, let’s not be mistaken, it is not the Mind that weaves that body, it is not the heart or feelings or spiritual concentrations that build up that body—we all have a body of consciousness, it is an old story, even if we are sufficiently blind or ignorant not to perceive it with our eyes blinkered with obscurity. The moment one is slightly formed, conscious, developed in one’s mental consciousness, when these are no longer mere “ideas” that one juggles by the dozen, but a mental force, an emotional force or a spiritual one that one concentrates around oneself and handles, a subtle body starts forming itself: a mental body, a body of consciousness, of energy, one could say, formed of all our agglomerated vibrations and in which one travels. It is the oldest story in the world. It was in this subtle body that Mother met Sri Aurobindo without even knowing him, in Paris in 1903. It was in this subtle body, as I have related it, that I travelled 10,000 kilometres to witness the suicide of a friend in a room that was unfamiliar to me, in a city I did not know, but which I saw and described as exactly as if I had physically gone there. Here as well lies the old principle of the spinning-out of forces: one spins out and weaves mental, vital or psychic forces as others spin out layers of calcium. And a “body” is formed. But with Mother, it is not at all a question of that type of body, nothing to do with a “subtle” body: it is a material body, made by material but conscious cells. Only it is not Matter, or the degree of fossilized Matter that we are familiar with. It is the primary Matter. It is the cells alone that can “understand” that Matter and recognize it. The first time Mother discovered this world of matter where the living and the “dead” are together, without a difference, it was the body, the cells that became aware of the existence of this world—which Mother had been unaware of for eighty-four years (1962), She who had all the visions possible to be had. The Mind lives only in its head, and our microscopes are only the perfected eyes of that head. But the cells know. They are precisely reaching the point of their evolution when, freed from the cage of the physical Mind, this first body of fear, they will be able to become aware in their direct manner of the material universe, and discover their own means of locomotion. It is a new species that is forming itself, with a new perception, of course, but a very material species, probably even more material than that of our Mind. It is the supramental species.
And finally, it is quite right and logical that an evolution of Matter ends up with a blossoming, a flowering of Matter itself, and not with the triumph of a little canary in its mental cage.
And then we will become aware that we know nothing of the world.
Cellular Ubiquity
For a very long time, Mother did not know very well what was happening, and we understand more and more why Sri Aurobindo did not tell her anything, why He had not revealed his secret: it was the body itself that had to find the way, create the way. Explanations concern the Mind alone and the Mind has nothing to do with that. On the contrary, it runs the risk of mistaking its imaginations for reality. For the body, there is no “imagination,” it can only understand what it itself is. Yet, at times, strange experiences would literally burst out, as it sometimes happens that one suddenly comes upon a glade, then the curtain of the forest closed again and it was once more the long, slow blind march, where it seemed that nothing happened for years. Then again the experience would come back, sharper, vaster, more precise, as if it had been making its way underground, and one did not even always know that this linked up to that or was the follow-up of that. This new body was forming itself very invisibly and slowly around the cells, by small layers or microscopic coatings, with each of its aspirations, its silent prayers, its vibrations of call in the great rout of the old body.
One morning of 1962, just a few months after the experience of the great “pulsations,” after her exit from the first web of the physical Mind, when Mother had altogether ceased leaving her upstairs room, I found her with a sort of disconcerted, dumbfounded expression, like someone faced with an incomprehensible problem. Some rather strange things have been happening. I don't know whether you understand the difference between the memory of an inner experience (from the subtle physical, the Subconscient, all the inner regions) and the memory of a physical fact? There is a very great difference in quality, the same difference that exists between inner vision and physical vision. Physical vision is precise, well-defined, and at the same time flat—I don't know how to explain it: it's very flat, totally superficial, but very accurate, with the kind of accuracy and precision that defines things which are really not defined at all. Well, there's the same difference in quality between the two types of memory as between the two types of vision. And in the last few days I've realized that I had the memory of having gone downstairs, of having seen certain people and things, spoken and organized certain details—several different scenes of the PHYSICAL memory. Not at all things I saw with the inner vision while exteriorized, but the MATERIAL memory of having done certain things. Afterwards, I had to look into it: it really was a memory. It suddenly struck me, and I wondered, “Did I really go downstairs physically?” ... There are plenty of people here to prove that I didn't, that I didn't stir from here. And yet I have the PHYSICAL memory of having done so, and of having done certain other things as well; I even remember going outside!... Well, it confronts me with a real problem. Not only is that memory absolutely physical, but the effects of what I said and did ARE THERE. 60 “Were you able to verify that changes had occurred?” I immediately asked Mother. But it happened! “Here's how this should be,” I had said, and it became like that. For example, if I told someone to put something in a certain place, he did it. The person doesn't know I told him, because he's not in the same consciousness as I am, but he did it. And I found out about the immediate effects of it even before recalling it, for it all unfolded in reverse: when a certain thing was done, I thought, “What on earth! This person is wonderful!” And then I suddenly realized, “But I told him to do that!” I told him. Then the image came—“the image” ... I don't mean the sort of memory one has of a vision, but the memory of something one has DONE.61 So I asked: “It’s not an exteriorization in the subtle physical?”—Not at all! The memory of an exteriorization in the subtle physical is very different. I have a lot of experience of it, you know, for something like sixty years. I know this phenomenon. But this is entirely the type of experience one has in the physical Falsehood, if you will, in the ordinary physical consciousness. 62 “A material doubling?”—Possibly. It may be that. Ubiquity, or something like that.63 And Mother was no further on than she was before, after having put a label on the phenomenon.
But the other people that had made the required material changes according to
Mother’s instructions did not have the physical memory of having seen Mother. Strange. And yet they had made the changes. How can it be? To which Mother answered: When experiences happen to other people (they have no knowledge—ignorance is the most widespread thing), they take them all for dreams. So there's no point trying to explain anything to them, they just don't understand. Everything gets classified as dreams, dreams, dreams.64 Then two physicals? Or a single one within two degrees of Matter, two ways of living the same Matter, separated by the barrier of the physical Mind. A true physical, as Sri Aurobindo said, and the other. True Matter, Matter seen and lived by the cells of the body, and the other seen and lived by the Mind? But for the ordinary consciousness that lives in the mental cage, everything that happens on the other side of the cage, in the same Matter however, is like a “dream,” another “world.” And if one asked them why they had made these changes, they would answer: I thought, I felt, or: I had a dream where Mother told me.… That is to say that the body of the cells is of a degree of Matter that is finer than our substance, there is no carapace. Our present eyes seize upon the opaque carapace alone. And yet it is a material body that moves about materially in our material world.
But Mother remained facing her problem and all the “ubiquities” of the world explained nothing to her, except that one had added one more small label, as always, to mask one’s ignorance and tame the unknown. Our world is chockfull of labels, in Greco- Latin to boot.
It was in 1962. A year later, a sudden bursting-open in the forest, unexpected, incomprehensible as always, but this time more “situated”: There must be a new element in the consciousness of the cellular aggregates—a new element.... The result: I had a series of fantastic cellular experiences, which I cannot even explain and which must be the beginning of a new revelation. When the experience began, there was something in me looking on (you know, there is always something looking on somewhat ironically, always amused) ... [That’s exactly Mother] which said, “Well, if that happened to someone else, he would think he was quite sick! Or half mad.” So I stayed very quiet and thought, “All right, let it be, I'll watch—I'll see soon enough.... Indescribable! Indescribable. The experience will have to recur several times before I can understand, fantastic! It started at 8:30 and went on till 2:30 in the morning; that is to say, not for a second did I lose consciousness, I was there watching the most extraordinary things. I don't know where this is going. Indescribable: you know, you become a forest, a river, a mountain, a house—and it's the sensation (an absolutely concrete sensation) OF THE BODY, of this [Mother pinched the skin of her hands]. Many other things too. Indescribable....65 This time again, I took out my small label and asked Mother: “Ubiquity?”—A oneness, she answered. The sense of oneness.66 Of course, on the cellular level everything is ONE, it is the great unity that runs everywhere, without separation, without a carapace—even the mountains have no carapace, it is men who have a carapace. And She added this, which is rather mysterious, or so it seemed to me at the time: It is clear that if this experience becomes natural, spontaneous and constant, death can no longer exist: even for the body.... There's something I SENSE there, without being able to express or understand it mentally. There must be some difference, even in the behaviour of the cells, when you leave your body. It must be another phenomenon that takes place.67
What happened in 1973? What is happening?
A body of the cells that does not die... It was in 1963.
Then the curtain of the forest closed once more for six years, and all the time Mother would tell me, would repeat to me without my really understanding: It's the CONSCIOUSNESS of the cells that must change.68 I did not very well understand how the consciousness of the cells could change the modalities of the body and She did not know very well herself either, only She knew that the key to the mystery was there and She worked, laboured to awaken this Mind of the cells, this small pure vibration at the bottom of the cells, to clarify and deliver all this substance from the old hypnotic vestiges of the physical Mind. And bit by bit, She began feeling something weave itself within, like an explanation without an explanation that rose up blindly from the depths of that body: What takes time, She told me in 1966, is to prepare Matter, this cellular Matter as it is now organized, to make it supple enough and strong enough to be able to bear the divine Force. 69 And in fact, it was that tide of power that came as if by small touches as the web gave way, that “boiling porridge” of the primary Matter, those thousand experiences of “dissolution,” until She could sustain “the golden invasion,” as Sri Aurobindo would say, when the second web at last came undone. That takes a lot of time. But it explains everything, everything—everything is explained. The day we can describe that in detail, it will be really interesting.70 She would never explain it: She would live it. It is I who am trying to unravel the creepers of the forest, hew a way with an axe through the obscure curtain and link up together the unexpected clearings. And there is a small beginning of how that being which Sri Aurobindo calls “supramental” will be—the next creation. A small beginning. And it is, as Sri Aurobindo said, an explanation from within outward—the “outward,” the surface, has only a quite secondary importance and it will come at the very end, when it's ready. But it begins from within outward, and it begins in a rather precise and interesting way. A great deal of time.71
From within outwards: like the butterfly in the caterpillar.
Then, all of a sudden, in 1969, just six months after the great turning point of 1968, when Mother’s body was left alone to itself with this Mind of the cells that had no choice but to develop itself, as nothing remained anymore except it, another bursting, a radical one this time: Never, never had the body been so happy! It was the complete Presence, absolute freedom, and a certitude, it didn’t matter [that it dies] : these cells, other cells, it was life everywhere, consciousness everywhere. Absolutely wonderful. It came effortlessly, and it left simply because ... I was too busy. And it’s the DIVINE SENSE, you understand, that’s what having the divine sense means. During these few hours (three or four hours), I understood in an absolute way what having the divine consciousness in the body means. And then, this body, that body, that other body [gesture here and there, all around Mother, showing bodies of this or that one], it doesn’t matter: it moved about from one body to another, quite free and independent, aware of the limitations or the possibilities of each body—absolutely wonderful, I had never, ever had this experience before. Absolutely wonderful! It left because I was so busy that.... But that state lasted for several hours. Never had this body, in the ninety-one years it’s been on earth, felt such happiness: freedom, absolute power, and no limits—no limits, no impossibilities, nothing. It was ... all other bodies were itself. There was no difference.72
Innumerable life. Innumerable material life. No more carapace, no more prison.
And a life on earth.
In a terrestrial body formed by the cells. A body that does not die.
The Fact of the Corpse
After that, Mother looked at death differently—but not for long. A month after this experience, Mother believed She had found the solution (and in fact it was perhaps a part of the solution) and She said this: This question had been asked: “All this work of transformation of the cells, of consciousness in the cells, won’t it be wasted since the body is going to disintegrate?...” Then there came in a very precise, almost concrete manner: there is a way, which is, before dying, to prepare within oneself a body with all the transformed, illumined, conscious cells, to collect them together and form a body with the maximum number of conscious cells ; then, when the work is over, the full consciousness enters it and the other body can dissolve, it no longer matters.73
Now there is something that is simple.
But which seems to us an evolutionary non-sense. One discards the rag.
This rag that has painfully, lengthily prepared this mutation to the nymph stage over millenniums.
There must be something else.
There must be a missing, living link that connects that other body to this one. A transformation of Matter or a dissolution of the old Matter?
But then, where is our sense in all that?
To the consciousness, this fluidity or plasticity is growing more and more evident, with only, only just something outwardly which ... is increasingly becoming an illusion.74 It's like a piece of bark that clumsily covers certain spots.75
What is going to happen to this “bark”?
It is the mystery of the last three years of Mother’s life. A more and more acute, painful, almost crying mystery up to that day in 1971 when She exclaimed: The inner consciousness can say and be conscious that that suffering is unreal, but the physical consciousness can't!—it can't, it HAS to change. It's not a matter of entering a consciousness where one leaves this physical consciousness to disappear: it has to change, it HAS TO change.... The FACT has to change, you see. For the transformation to be genuine, the body ALSO has to attain a harmony above—above all illnesses and accidents.76
The Fact has to change. What is going to happen?
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.77
It will change, She said.
It is the whole mystery.
It is no longer the mystery of the formation of a new body in evolution, it is the mystery of the transformation of the old body: the link between the two.
Or no link?
It seems that this old Matter remains our keystone. The fact of the corpse.
The curtain of death must be lifted in all bodies.
It is possible that it is our human sentimentality that makes us desire the transformation or glorious blooming of this old body. Evolution is not sentimental, and it has often proved that it lets intermediate species fall by the wayside or extinguish themselves, or perhaps subsist for a certain amount of time until all the elements capable of evolving have reached a higher level. And if the evolutionary goal is to form this new “innumerable” body, what would attach it to this old form once it has fulfilled its task? Sri Aurobindo had very well foreseen that humanity would not raise itself suddenly “as one mass,” to the supramental level, and that perhaps, for some centuries, the two levels would coexist side by side (probably in two worlds separated by a veil of unconsciousness or “death”) until the moment when all the absorbable elements cross the threshold, and from one body to another or century to century, all the species would slowly ascend the ladder of consciousness or remain in their stagnant but harmonious perfection. What one does not know is to what extent, perhaps formidable and unpredictable, the formation of this new body or of several new bodies endowed with this vibratory power⎯somewhat fantastic as it is the very power, in its purity, that animates atoms, this “innumerable powdering of gold” that moves freely in and through everything⎯will not change, upset or accelerate the present data of evolution, overthrowing on its way a number of perfectly scientific walls of impossibility. It is in fact what is in the process of happening. What is today insurmountable is perhaps a small breath of which only a smile will remain. But we are concerned with the transition, our transition, and we ask ourselves two things: first, why these physical animal cells, which have laboured so long, which have become conscious, which have ended up emitting their small signals of call or distress, formed a Mind of the cells like a vibration of prayer, of joy or pure love, tirelessly, a small nucleus of gold, a small scintillation of the innumerable golden scintillation of the universal substance and woven, spun this substance around themselves, why wouldn’t they impregnate all of the old body, change this old substance, impose another functioning on it and clarify this opacity—why would they decay? And firstly, if they are truly conscious, they cannot decay, only what is unconscious dies. Death is the very sign of unconsciousness. There is thus no “theoretical’ impossibility to the transformation of the old animal body, to an evolutionary continuity that would justify our long pain ever since thousands of cradles, human or non-human. This would be the “visible” proof.
What remains to be seen are the practical difficulties.
But there is our second question, which invisibly revolves around the first one. Everything revolves around this famous “visibility.” We cannot help looking or wanting to look at the next species with the eyes, understanding and sentimentality of the old species. If we were endowed with animal organs that allowed us to see this original substance, to visibly witness the formation of a new body within the old one, to watch it slowly take form, move independently and radiate its beauty and joy, in what way would we be attached to the old simulacrum, even if it was what allowed for the birth of this beauty? One sheds the old skin. The other is gloriously, visibly there But in fact we have these organs: the cells see, the cells know, and we have thousands and billions of cells; they are simply covered, veiled by the web of the physical Mind that superimposes its painful, sad reality, its old habit of suffering, being sick, dying, its innumerable grey illusion which envelops each gesture and each step of its fears, apprehensions, laws and legal catastrophes, like an octopus. It is the veil between the two worlds. It is truly the veil of death. So we say the “concrete,” real world is on one side and the impalpable, “invisible” world is on the other, a “subtle” world, though perhaps physical. But if the veil, that opaque periphery, wore down and fell, if our cells perceived reality, what would happen? Firstly, it is probable (without talking about outer upheavals) that a formidable desire for transformation would result in all our human bodies, as if they were breathing true air for once—they would no longer want to breathe any air but that. But there perhaps will be many who would find that air very unbearable for the thickness of filth that covers them. It is perhaps for this reason that the wearing thin of the veil is slow, merciful and chaotic. There are no chosen ones, mind you : all of evolution is chosen. And we always come back to those two worlds existing side by side, one within the other, two “humanities,” one might say, one slowly opening the eyes of its cells, slowly spinning a new body of beauty and joy, and the other, laggard, which by the sum total of its pains and chaos would also be led and compelled to look for something else, to want something else, to also open the little eyes of Matter in its cells. And when everything is at a homogeneous point, then there will no longer be “this side” and “that side”: it will all be the same side. The demarcation line is the death of a body. It is the point where the old Matter no longer follows the movement of the new Matter and does not manage to transform itself. So it sheds its skin and moves into the other. But it is the very phenomenon of Falsehood. The corpse is the residue-witness of Unconsciousness. It is the very sign of the veil. And one wonders if, as long as death is not conquered there, changed there, in its very nest of Falsehood, it will be possible to have a complete and real life, a true life on earth, entirely unveiled—because the very origin of the veil would remain there. What seems to us the last illusion, the ultimate simulacrum contains perhaps the very key to the last unveiling and perfect plenitude. One must really change the death of Matter, it is not sufficient to overleap it into another species. It is in the body that the veil that separates the two worlds must be destroyed.
And one morning, I saw Mother arrive with four verses of Savitri from “The debate of Love and Death”:
The great stars burn with my unceasing fire And life and death are both its fuel made.
Life only was my blind attempt to love:
Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory.78
And Mother had I know not what light in her eyes, as if She had received the message, touched the message : Savitri says, life and death are the fuel, then: In my blind attempt LIFE ONLY was my attempt to love. It’s not “Life was only”, but “Life only”: Because my attempt to love was blind, I limited it to life—but I won the victory in death [that is, in “heaven”]. It's very interesting.79
Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory.80
“And yet,” I asked Mother, “Earth should see the victory, the victory should be on earth?”—Yes, but Savitri couldn’t win the victory on earth because she lacked “heaven”—she couldn’t win the victory in life because she lacked death and she had to conquer death in order to conquer life. That’s the idea. Unless we conquer Death, the victory isn’t won. Death must be vanquished, there must be no more death. That’s very clear.81
And then She added: According to what Sri Aurobindo says here, it is the principle of Love that is transformed into flame and finally into light. It isn’t the principle of Light that is transformed into flame when it materializes: it’s the flame that is transformed into light. The great stars give light because they burn; they burn because they are under the effect of Love. It is my experience of the “pulsations.” The last thing beyond light, beyond consciousness, beyond ... the last thing one reaches is Love. [That is, the supramental fire, that “golden onslaught.”] According to the experience, it’s the last thing to manifest now in its purity, and it is the one that has the transforming power. That’s what Sri Aurobindo appears to be saying here: the victory of Love seems to be the final victory. He said Savitri is “a Legend and a Symbol.” It’s he who made it a symbol. It's the story of the encounter of Savitri, the principle of Love, with Death; and it's over Death that she won the victory, not in life. She could not win the victory in life without winning the victory over Death. It's very interesting.82
One does not jump over death.
Some years earlier, speaking of death one day in 1963, Mother had told me: It's as if it were THE question given me to resolve.83
How was She going to resolve the problem?
The transformation of this physical, animal body is the very symbol of the victory over death. It is the very nest of Death.
Must one die to conquer death?
How can one win the victory in death and at the same time win it in a body? Or then one must die, traverse death in the body, and come back victorious. It is a mystery.
Mother clearly said: The victory IN death.
It might well be the “dangerous” mystery which She had been struggling with since 1970.
Perhaps she is still struggling with it. But death must be vanquished in a body.
When the veil has been lifted there, it will be lifted for all bodies.
Death must be vanquished, there must be no more death. That’s very clear.84
For a long time, and perhaps until the end, Mother did not know the way. If one dares say so, it is perhaps now, with this pen, that the path tries to trace itself for the first time— bodies do not need to know, they walk: it is our heads that need to know, that is to say, to have a map in front of their eyes. But the map is of no use to the body. The new world is only that step; the map is just that aspiration. And all the bodies that want to set out on the path need but that aspiration alone—for truly it is the only path since the protoplasm: an aspiration. And it will always be the way. One finds at the end that with which one started out. One always carries the goal with oneself, the goal is at each instant. When one becomes aware of this, time dissolves: today was a million years ago. If it is the head that becomes aware of it, one drifts off in contemplation into a white eternity, and nothing changes. When it is the body that perceives it, one perhaps touches one of the levers of transformation, because time is the body’s enemy: one enters a golden eternity that seems to have strange qualities. The body is what carries the key to the long journey. So it has no need of a map, it has a need to be. And it is quite curious, when the body finds that eternity, it is no longer at all a static eternity like that of monks, poets or meditators, but an eternity that seems made of supreme dynamism—an eternity in lightning-like movement. It is another time. And it is not the eternity that we know. There is a “time” of the body that contains perhaps the secret of another space, that contains perhaps the secret of Matter, because Matter is already a sort of frozen time. And the secret of the dissolution of Death that goes along with time. In the face of Death, we have only found a white eternity: two types of dissolution, in white or in black. When we have found the third time, the body’s time, the time that does not die and the time that does not get caught in eternity’s rut, we will perhaps have the complete key. Only the body can know.
Slowly, Mother’s body was veering into a third time.
Transformation or Change of Perspective?
It was a sort of living contradiction, as if Mother found herself not in front of, but on two totally different paths. Our heads can very well follow contradictory ideas and live their chaos as best as they can, but a body, how can it have one foot here and the other there? Two paths or two bodies that seemed to go in two opposing directions, or parallel ones that met at the infinite—but the infinite is far. On one hand, She vaguely, imperceptibly felt this new body forming itself in her: I am not quite sure that I do not already exist PHYSICALLY with a true body, She said as early as 1963, there, in Matter on the other side of our cage. I say “not quite sure” because the outer senses have no proof of it!... But from time to time, it somehow imposes itself: for a minute, I see myself, feel myself, objectify myself as I am. But it just lasts a few seconds, and pfft! gone—it’s replaced by the old habit.85 And all of a sudden, we wonder if this formidable, indisputable “scientific” materiality of the world is anything more than a habit, an old habit of seeing things. People who see me at night (those who have this vision in the subtle world) don’t see me like this [and Mother pointed to her outer bark]: they see me as I am, and they tell me—they say, “Oh, but you are like this, like that ” And She added: But for the one to take the place of the other ?86 It was the whole question. It was the whole ambiguity of it: was the one going to take the place of the other or was the other going to transform itself into the one? She did not know it, She oscillated from one to the other. It was a sort of infernal coming and going from one to the other—and it was evidently in that hell that the key to the solution was hidden. It was in the very contradiction that the possibility of a junction of the two was to be found. It is very simple to say, but not at all convenient to live it. In fact, it was unlivable, except for Her. Then one day in May 1970, things concretized themselves. She saw this body Herself: Well, I saw it, I saw my body, how it will be. It’s fine! [Laughing] It’s fine. A form resembling our body, but sexless: neither man nor woman. It’s a body ... not very different, but so refined! So ... such a refined thing. Its colour was ... a little like Auroville’s colour [orange], like that, but vibrant, that is, as if ... not luminous, but with a sort of luminosity. I was fully awake, I didn’t sleep, it wasn’t a dream. I had the same objectivity we have when awake.87And I remember, twelve years earlier, that vision of the supramental boat and the tall orange-coloured beings. A whole journey. As if what She had seen over there, far-off in vision, had entered Matter—but it is not really “entered,” it is all the opaque layers of consciousness to be traversed: it is only “at the end,” “over there,” on the other side of the sleep of our physical Mind. Once the curtain crossed, it is there, with one’s eyes wide-open, as “objective” as the table or the chair, and even more objective because it has more content of consciousness than a table or a chair: it is denser. I think that I even understand what Mother meant when She said that this new Matter was “without division”: our scientific Matter is full of emptiness, it is composed of a formidable splitting-up of particles separated by enormous distances (on that scale),* whereas that one is compact, dense, without “holes.” “As dense as diamond, but elastic,” she said in 1906.
And it is quite curious to remember that the first revolution or revelation in Mother’s life occurred when She was eight or ten years old and She was told: “You see this table? You think it’s a table, that it’s solid and it’s wood—well, it’s only atoms moving about.”.... It caused a kind of revolution in my head, bringing such a sense of the complete unreality of all appearances. All at once I said, “But if it’s like that, then nothing is true!”88
Now She was in the second revolution, behind the other “surface”: the atomic one.
We have never found what is behind the atom. Where is the ultimate indivisible nucleus?
And Mother asked herself what was going to occur between this old body and the other. Would the old habit of seeing not change amongst humans? Will there “Like a ping-pong ball in relation to Houston’s baseball field,” remarked the American scientist Jastrow, speaking of the distance that separates the nucleus from its electrons. (Red Giants and White Dwarfs: The Evolution of Stars *(Harper, 1967).
always be a world like the one we know?... We can readily imagine a world where you would live in a new state which would develop according to its own laws. But would the existence of such a world cancel out this one?... So you see, here we face a problem that has yet to be solved.89 And She was already wondering in 1962 if, in fact, the whole problem did not come down to a sort of collective mutation of outlook, something that would make the experience gradually spread like oil on water, because we always forget that nothing is separated, no experience is isolated as if within walls, the earth is one body of evolutionary experience. It all practically comes down to a capacity to spread the experience, or to INCLUDE things in the experience (it’s the same thing). You really have to forget this business of one person and then another, one thing and then another Even if you can’t realize it concretely, at least imagine that there is but ONE Thing, exceedingly complex, and one experience taking place in one spot, or spreading out like oil on water, or embracing everything, depending on the case. And the sole explanation for “contagion” is in that Oneness.90 An experience that is sufficiently contagious. But it is the whole experience of Sri Aurobindo and Mother: the collective wearing down of the veil of this physical Mind. If it is worn down in their bodies, it must be worn down in the body of the world. And sometimes Mother thought that She had caught the “tail of the solution,” as She would say. A sort of knowledge (is it a knowledge?) or foreknowledge given to the body of how this appearance will be changed. And it sounds so simple, so easy, it can be done in a flash, because it’s not AT ALL—it won’t at all be done in the way people think or expect. It’s rather like the vision of the TRUE internal movement that would IMPOSE itself in such a way that it would veil the false vision There is something that is true, that is the true Physical, which, although it’s not perceptible to our eyes as they see, could make itself perceptible through an INTENSIFICATION.91 It is what Mother always said: it is not as if this other world had to be created from scratch. It is there, totally existent, “a small trigger would suffice,” an invasion of the Real. And that intensification would be what would effect the transformation outwardly—that would replace the false appearance with the real form.... Now, of course, when I say that, people imagine it’s a “psychic” or mental vision—that’s not it, I don’t mean that ! I mean a PHYSICAL vision, with these very eyes [and Mother touched her eyes]. But a true physical vision, instead of the distorted vision we have now.92 A physical mutation of sight? We cannot help but think (we = the fish in the fishbowl) that this “other” world is “another” reality—but it is the same seen with other eyes! It is not supernatural, it is a more exact natural. This , concluded Mother, means, basically, that the true reality is far more marvellous than we can imagine, because all that we can imagine is always an improvement or glorification of what we see—but that’s not it! That’s not it. We can only conceive of things changing from one to another: you grow young again, all the signs of aging disappear and so on [in short, the improvement of the fish in the same bowl]—that’s old hat, that’s not how it works. That’s not it!93
It is very simple: the world-wide touch of a magical wand. And it is very possible that things will happen in that way, up to a certain point. It is quite possible that all of the Falsehood of the world suddenly fills up with grey or black, and fades from sight But we do not know how many humans would suddenly “fade out,” if the only measurement and weight is that of true consciousness. I have no idea whether the false appearance wouldn’t still exist for those not ready to see the true thing, Mother asked herself. At any rate, it would be an intermediary period: those whose eyes are open (what is called “open eyes” in the Scriptures) would be able to see, and they would be able to see not through effort or seeking, but the thing would impose itself on them. While those whose eyes are not open For a time, at least, it would be that way, they wouldn’t see—they would still see the old appearance. The two may be simultaneous.94 It is obvious that if even a few hundred or thousand of humans were “included” in the new vision, the contagion of the new world, this would have incalculable repercussions on the rest which could not but be “affected” by this other human “species” whose superior qualities and superior joy, superior harmony, would come to pose a somewhat formidable question mark, perhaps even a challenge, an invisible constraint on the less evolved others, more and more pain-filled in their suffocation. It would obviously be a phenomenon as similar, and perhaps more powerful, than that of the invasion of the first wave of amphibians amongst fish. It is perhaps the phenomenon that is underway, the less and less invisible contagion.
But.…
There is a formidable “but.”
The appearance of the world changes for those whose eyes are open. The very appearance of the body changes: the true light, the true consciousness, the true content imposes itself. And it is certain that the more the true vibration becomes evident, visible, the more it will, as if automatically, rectify the false, lying vibration—and the more we will be obliged to be truthful. There will be no possibility of rigging anymore. An enormous step will have been taken in the consciousness, with incalculable consequences for the harmonization and organization of life But there will remain a body to bury.
All is there.
A body that ages, shrivels, dies.
The very symbol of Falsehood lies there.
Mother observed this new body that was more and more perceptible and that death pressing more and more in her old body. What was going to happen?
The FACT must change, she was to say ultimately. Can it change?
And it was as if Mother were on two simultaneous paths: a path of life, a path of death, an imperishable body, a decomposing one. She was at the same time in life and in death, on one side and the other of the bowl as if the two had to become one, or change into a third thing.
The body is the bridge.
The Problem of Transformation
It is difficult to imagine the passage or entry of this “vibrating body”—dense but fluid, rather luminous, without structure as we know it—into this old body equipped with a skeleton and whose very opacity seems the sign of its existence. It is true, it is certain that it was impossible to imagine, at the beginning of the primary era, the passage or transformation of those metals and stones into living and “fluid” forms when compared to that complete and inert original opacity. The phenomenon is therefore not improbable nor even anti-scientific on the evolutionary scale, no matter what it seems to us today. But practically, on a day to day basis? An evolution does not start tomorrow, it is done day after day, and even if there is a sudden mutation, that mutation is the fruit and result of a long preparation, an accumulation of factors that suddenly provoke a rupture and change in balance. What is the process of this new transformation, there must be a rational process, even if it is slow, invisible and answers to a “reason” that eludes us obviously because it is the reason of the next being. If we had always expected the reason of metals, it is probable that we would continue to have a very metallic universe. Mother is the logic of the future, which did not in any way impede her from handling the logic of today with the rigor of a mathematician: She always pursued things to the very end, coldly, to dismantle the mechanism. The “mechanism” was her passion. There isn’t much difference between the calf being formed in a cow’s womb and the child being formed in its mother’s womb. There is one difference: that of the Mind’s intervention. But if we envisage a PHYSICAL being, that is, as visible as the physical now is and with the same density—for instance, a body that wouldn’t need blood circulation and bones—it would be an infinitely greater transformation than that from animal to man; it would be a transition from man to a being that would no longer be built in the same way, that would no longer function in the same way, that would be like a densification or concretization of ... “something.” Up till now, it doesn’t correspond to anything we have seen physically.95— “One can conceive,” I said, “that a light or new force gives the cells a sort of spontaneous life, a spontaneous force.”— Yes, that’s what I said: food can disappear. That’s conceivable.96— “But the whole body could be animated by that force? The body could remain supple, for example, while still having its bone structure, have the suppleness of a child.”— But that’s just why a child can’t stand! she exclaimed. What would replace the bone structure, for example?97 “It could be the same elements, but they would have a suppleness: elements whose firmness would not come from hardness but would come from the force of light, no?”— Yes, that’s possible.... Supple and plastic, we can also conceive it could be plastic, that is, the form wouldn’t be fixed as it is now. All that is conceivable, but 98 “But,” I insisted, “one could very well see that as a type of flowering or luminous swelling, like the bud of a lotus that blossoms. A bud is hard. The light must have that force. And that destroys nothing of the present structure.” But Mother was like St. Thomas: But visible, that can be touched?99 (She too was very attached to the “concrete.”) “Yes, simply it is like a flowering: what was closed blossoms like a flower, but the structure of the flower remains.” She nodded her head: I lack experience, I don’t know.100
Concrete experience was the only thing that concerned Mother, and whenever I tried to imagine or to guess, She would coldly cut me off: “Again poetry,” “Vague things,” she would say. During the nineteen years spent near her, I never once saw her in vagueness. I am absolutely convinced (because I’ve had experiences that proved it to me) that the life of this body—its life, what makes it move and change—can be replaced by a force; that is to say, a sort of immortality can be created, and the wear and tear can disappear. And it can come about psychologically, through total obedience to the divine Impulsion [i.e., a willing automatism],which means that at every moment you have the force you need, you do the thing that must be done—all these things, all of them are certitudes. They’re not a hope, not an imagining: they are certitudes. You must educate the body and slowly transform and change the habits. It can be done, all that can be done. But the question is, how much TIME would it take to do away with the necessity (to take just this problem) of the skeleton?... Time, yes, that was the problem. So a supramental body suspended in a world that’s not the earth is not the thing! How true!... Only, what I mean, she added, is that it may again take place through a large number of new creations. The transition from man to this being, for instance, will perhaps take place through all kinds of other intermediaries. You understand, what I find formidable is the leap from one to the other I can very well conceive of a being who could, through spiritual power, the power of his inner being, absorb the necessary forces, renew himself and remain ever young—that’s quite easily conceivable, even providing for a certain suppleness so as to be able to change the form if necessary. But the complete disappearance of this system of construction right away—from one to the other right away, that seems It appears to require stages.101 There will probably be intermediary beings who won’t last, you see, just as there were intermediary beings between the chimpanzee and man.... But I don’t know, something has to happen that has never before happened.102
Something that escapes us, but which is perhaps right in front of us, incomprehensible.
In all our data, we always forget the “something” that is not the data of the past.
But that is not all. Mother saw the problem in its totality: The personal experience is like this: all that I do with the Lord’s Presence, I do effortlessly, without difficulty, without fatigue, without wear and tear, like that in the great Rhythm, but it’s still open to the whole influence from outside and the body is forced to do things that aren’t directly the expression of the supreme Impulsion, hence the fatigue, the friction.... Something is needed that has the power to resist the contagion. Man cannot resist the contagion from the animal, he can’t, he has constant relationships. Well, how will that being manage?... It would seem that for a long time—a long time—he will still be subject to the laws of contagion. “I don’t know,” I answered in my innocence, “but that does not seem to me impossible; I have the impression that that Power of Light being there, what could contaminate it?” And Mother exclaimed: But the whole world would disappear! That’s the problem, you understand. When That comes, when the Lord is there, there isn’t one in a thousand for whom it’s not terrifying. And not to the reason, not to the thought: to the flesh, like that. So assume—assume it happens and a being is the condensation and expression, an embodiment of the supreme Power, of the supreme Light—what would happen?!... I’ve seen adults come (I did the experiment: I charge the atmosphere, the Lord is present), well, I’ve seen forty-year-old men enter that and ... brrt! literally run away, disregarding all social courtesy, and after having ASKED to come, you understand! Anyway everything was there to allow them to behave decently—impossible, they couldn’t. It’s too strong. “Well, that’s the whole problem,” I said to Mother.… And She would agree. “... Because I don’t see the difficulty of the transformation in itself. It seems to me more the difficulty of the world.”
The difficulty of the old recalcitrant species.
If everything could be transformed at the same time, she said, it would be all right, but it’s clearly not like that. If one being were transformed all alone.... Perhaps it would be unbearable.103
Such is the problem of the transformation, which is perhaps not only nor essentially a physiological or anatomical one, but a total problem, because evolution is everything, from the protoplasm up to us. There is no material impossibility, there is no physiological impossibility, no more than in the Iron Age or the Age of nickel—there is always, eternally, a difficulty of the past that does not want to die and clings to the old forms. To its favourite suffocation. Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s experience is no doubt the most violent traumatism the earth has suffered since the appearance of Life. It is but a beginning.
And everything can be miraculous.…
If something gives way in our consciousness. There are only difficulties of consciousness.
A little datum of joy.
And we wonder if it won’t be our bodies that will want joy before we do ... and take us by surprise?
Cellular Stabilization
This transformation of the body is as slow and invisible as the formation of the new body, and in fact, it is concomitant, one cannot separate the two phenomena: that which produces the spinning of the new substance, the primary Matter, also produces an in-depth alteration in the cellular functioning and in the material, corporeal substance; only there, for obvious reasons, the action is slower— everything would break if the change were too brusque. Fall apart or be transformed, it’s ... almost the same procedure!104 Mother exclaimed. So one begins to understand a bit the hell of the last years, the frightening paradox that She lived. “To undo oneself forward”.… The process of the transformation is the same as the process of the formation of the new body, quite simply—what seems to us extraordinarily complicated, a sort of unimaginable impossibility, has the simplest key there is: it is the Mind of the cells that attracts or stops the formidable Current of the primary, supramental substance. It is the fixative or connector of the supramental vibration. That was why Mother fainted every time She wanted to enter into contact with the Supramental by abolishing the Mind of the body: for it is the intermediary, the bridge between Matter as it is now, hardened, stuck in its evolutionary habits, and the primary Matter, supramental, fluid, vibrant, and so formidably powerful, without a “hole.” Obviously, one does not “fix” such a current with impunity: it is a sort of low-flame demolition, if one may say so. The first bodies that formed themselves, particles, atoms lost no time in encrusting and dividing this substance by dividing themselves from the formidable magma and everything came to encrust itself on this first crust. One really needs a total widening of the cellular consciousness—just the opposite movement of the first encrusting—in order to bear the formidable supramental tidal wave with just, just that very small vibration of the Mind of the cells, that minute nucleus of prayer or of call, which fixes or spins out the quantum that it can sustain. This Mind of the cells is therefore the key, the simple key to the transformation as to the new body as well, but one had to reach this key. Sri Aurobindo’s “mathematical formula,” when He reached the cellular bedrock, was precisely that: He found the missing link between Matter and the Supermind, and all that remained was to “elaborate” it ... cell by cell. The mind is everywhere, he observed in one of the only revealing texts that He left on this subject and which we have already partially quoted And there is too an obscure mind of the body, of the very cells, molecules, corpuscles This body-mind is a very tangible truth; owing to its obscurity and mechanical clinging to past movements and facile oblivion and rejection of the new, we find in it one of the chief obstacles to permeation by the supermind Force and the transformation of the functioning of the body. On the other hand, once effectively converted, it will be one of the most precious instruments for the stabilization of the supramental Light and Force in material Nature.105 It is Mother’s whole experience: once delivered from the hypnotism of the physical Mind, this corporeal, cellular mind began to fix the supramental vibration and form a new body. It began to repeat the Mantra as invariably as its old catastrophes. It is the stabilizer. That is why that mind alone was left, She said after the radical cleansing of 1968. If you like, in appearance I had become an idiot, I didn’t know anything. And it’s that mind that developed, slowly, slowly. Sri Aurobindo said that if the physical Mind is transformed, the body’s transformation will follow quite NATURALLY. We’ll see!106
And we wonder whether the formation of this new body is not only the first stage of the transformation instead of the last one as many think. Whether the two phenomena are not complimentary. For if only the new body remains, it is still something that is “suspended in a world that is not the earth”: one evaporates. It is not that, Mother would say. But it is this new body, more rapid to form because precisely it does not have to demolish the old encrustations, that must or should infuse itself slowly into the old formation as much as it is able to support it up, until the two are melted one into the other; then we would have something that would no longer be the old bone structure that we know and no longer the imponderable new body, something that would confer a ponderability to the new body and a new materiality to the old one, and it would be truly the supramental body on earth. The old body would be the bridge.
The whole question lies in this “ponderability” or in this new materiality; there we are completely in the unknown—perhaps “the dangerous unknown” that Mother spoke of—and we will not truly know until the thing is done. How could the mineral understand the “materiality” of life?
Cellular Survival
No doubt one can think that this ponderability is simply a question of vision and if the human vision changes, the imponderable will become perfectly ponderable. But there still remains this old rag that we bury, and I do not know why, but I feel that the whole secret is precisely there. Otherwise why talk of transformation? The first time that Mother went into “Sri Aurobindo’s home” in 1959, I asked her if this “other” world, this true “lining” of the earth was the supramental world. She answered me thus: My feeling is that this life which Sri Aurobindo is living right now is not the full satisfaction of the supramental life for him. In this “other” world, there was infinity, majesty, perfect calm, eternity—all was there.... Perhaps it was joy that was missing. Of course, Sri Aurobindo himself had joy.
But I had the impression that it was not total and that this is why I had to continue the work. I felt that it could only be total when things here have changed.107
Changed here, that is to say, when the two sides are ONE. When the other body and the body of the earth are ONE. What is the mystery that separates the two?
It was perhaps this mystery that was being “elaborated” in Mother’s body?
We can’t both remain upon earth, one must go, Sri Aurobindo had said to Mother. And Mother had answered him, “I am ready, I’ll go.” Then he answered me, “No, you can’t go, your body is better than mine, you can undergo the transformation better than I can do.”108And Mother cried out, with an I don’t know what, which was like a pain mixed with anguish, still nineteen years after the fact (it was in 1969): Why?... How many times since then I have asked myself that question Why?109 As if the transformation of this body were the condition for the two sides to join, as if the body were the place of junction, the place where the veil is torn. But what, what veil, what “mechanism”? And I asked Mother: “Is it that your presence here (on this side of the veil) could help (Sri Aurobindo) one day to materialize?”—Yes, yes. That he said clearly (I asked him), “I’ll come back only in a supramental body. ” But there’s the big question of that supramental body, I don’t know.110 What change in this body of Matter could make the very nature of Matter change to the point that the other body could infuse itself here, in our terrestrial conditions? It is perhaps this change in the nature of Matter that is the knot of the story: a “hybrid” Matter, if one may say so, between the supramental fluidity and the opaque hardness of our terrestrial bodies? A new transparency of Matter. Like a new milieu to be created that would allow for the joining of the two sides. “Perhaps there is just a passage to open ?” (for Sri Aurobindo and that world to materialize), I asked Mother. —That may be But this body has never had a desire or ambition to work miracles—it’s not interested in that. It has seen many miraculous things, but it has always felt it was the Supreme Lord who was doing all that (which it finds quite natural, by the way). But imaginings.... When they come, it drives them back, it says, “No, that doesn’t interest me.”111 And in fact it was not a “miracle” to accomplish, it was Matter itself that had to be changed, the body itself to be changed: the sole imaginations of the body are reality. Perhaps it was in the process of creating the “miracle” without knowing it. Things people find “marvellous”, Mother continued, all of that doesn’t interest it. It wouldn’t be surprised to see Sri Aurobindo walk in one day—not in the least; but it doesn’t have ... it feels no urge to do it, you understand. It feels no need to astound people—none at all. We’ll see!112 And She laughed. But I insisted, because I clearly felt that it was not a question of miracle, nor even of Sri Aurobindo’s appearing, but of the transformation of the earth, truly, the transformation of the physical, material milieu that would permit the junction of the two sides, a bit like the transformation of the mineral opacity had given Matter its first eyes, and the afternoon of the day I had had this conversation with Mother, I sent her a two-line note: “Savitri goes seeking Satyavan in death⎯therefore Mother will bring Sri Aurobindo back?”—
Something of the sort,113 She answered.
“To bring Sri Aurobindo back” means to join the two sides.
And truly the question defines itself; everything centres around something to be transformed in the nature of this terrestrial body, of this terrestrial Matter, so that the veil is torn—now, this veil is what makes the very death and separates the two sides. It is in the body that death can be conquered, it is in the body that the veil tears. It is the body that has the key to the junction of the two worlds as in ONE—it is that that makes “Satyavan” return. The mystery of the transformation is not really the mystery of a marvellous growing young again of the bodies, nor even of the glorious change of the bodies: it is the very mystery of death in its nest.
Mother’s body now is in the very nest of that death. Has it failed? Or is it pursuing some incredible task? “Earth saw my struggle, heaven my victory.”
There is only one transformation to be done, it is the transformation of death. This was the point that Mother was reaching, slowly, dangerously.
She was entering death, alive.
And those cells, those very small cells with their unflagging vibration of call, repeated thousands and millions of times as much as there are seconds in the day and in the night, slowly accumulated a strange life, as if indestructible, beneath that bark that seemed to disintegrate as quickly as they were integrating themselves— what were they going to do? Were they that site where one remains alive in death? The site of the ultimate mystery and perhaps of the transformation of death. The place where the supramental light is “stabilized,” the light that does not die. In 1965, when for the first time Mother succeeded in piercing the crust of the physical Mind and reaching that Mind of the cells, She said this: There has been a whole work of PREPARATION for the transformation. What could I call it?... A transfer of power. The cells, the whole material consciousness, used to obey the inner individual consciousness—the psychic consciousness most of the time, or the mental (but the mind had been silent for a long time). But now this material Mind is organizing itself like the other one, or the other ones, rather, like the Mind of all the states of being—do you know, it is educating itself. It is learning things and organizing the ordinary science of the material world. That’s very interesting.... You see, all the memory that came from mental knowledge went away a long, long time ago, and I used to receive indications only from above. But now it’s a sort of memory being built from below. It’s like a shift in the directing will; it’s no longer the same thing that makes you act—“act” or anything, of course: move, walk, anything. It isn’t the same centre any longer.114 An autonomous cellular life governed by the Mind of the cells, by that small indestructible, universal vibration. And as I did not understand very well back then what this new Mind was, I asked Mother: “How do you define this physical Mind, that which was subject to this transfer of power?”—That isn’t the physical Mind. It is the material Mind—not even the material Mind: the mind OF MATTER. It is the mental substance that belongs to Matter itself, to the cells. That’s what was formerly called “the spirit of the form,” when it was said that mummies kept their bodies intact as long as the spirit of the form persisted. That’s the Mind I mean, that completely material Mind.115 So, it was like a revelation.… All of a sudden, I could see that small silent girl looking at that mummy in the Guimet Museum.… She had covered the whole trajectory, fifty years of “descent” to reach there.
The place that survives death.
Stabilized, the Mind of the cells no longer stops, it vibrates no matter where, even in death.
It is the site of the transformation of death.
It was there that Mother entered more and more. A dangerous unknown.
And time changed: Time does not exist anymore. As if another time had entered this one.116
In the Mind of the cells is found the double secret of the transformation of death and the transformation of the body—perhaps one and the same secret.
It was a life that was more and more bizarre, incomprehensible for everyone, and Mother had the wisdom to say nothing, like Sri Aurobindo, otherwise they would have thought that She was mad, and yet She spoke to me—less and less, not for reasons of silence but because She was more and more devoured by the invasion of people, their quarrels, their lies: a rush of Falsehood117, she would say. It was the year of Bangladesh. And She had to live in the midst of all that, each minute in the midst of all that, while her body was traversing a sort of low-flame hell—smiling to everyone, answering everyone, accepting everyone, swallowing everything. Anyone would have been truly exhausted, emptied, robbed by that incessant crush in her room. No, it was not a silent retreat. And sometimes, more and more often, the precious hours—precious for the world—that She would reserve for me were encroached upon and swallowed up by their sordid stories: They shove my head into such a mush I would be surrounded by a black cuirass, absolutely coal black, if I didn’t do my work of purification all the time, all the time).118 And when I would arrive for the interview after a line of an hour or two hours, She was so pale that I would just place myself at her feet, in silence, and would not have the heart to ask her questions. Lots of secrets were lost, many links missed because this one did not like his neighbour or that one had been unfaithful to this one. It was distressing. I would look at the “secretaries,” I wanted to tell them: for heaven’s sake, don’t you understand that these few moments with Her are of interest to the world? They would have not understood. That is the way it is. And Mother was seeking the transformation of the world, wasn’t She, so it was necessary that all the elements enter the crucible. But the crucible was pure poison. And finally, because of this very situation, that was so contradictory, because of this ever increasing silence, of this growing invasion that seemed to slowly, irresistibly try to separate me from Her, cut me off from Her, I touched something else: She was building another way of communication and from then on those extraordinary silences near Her were the best “explanation” of the impossible way: Shall I take you? and She would take my hand, and then ... it was not even a “journey,” because we would go into no “over there” at all, but we would begin to palpate, to touch unsayable secrets that had no name and were like the formation of a new being within, of a new perception, almost of a new substance: a substance that was all of that at the same time—being or power (a formidable one), vision, knowledge and love, as if everything were made of love on that level—where we moved together in so intimate an accord that the slightest movement of one was perceived by the other, followed by the other, and there was no longer any “other,” It was as if encompassing your body in the same movement of the cells.119 And today, like already two years ago, I feel the same experience that continues, as if She had built a way of communication for all times. And they say that She is dead. Or they say that She is in a “subtle body.” But that body is more concrete and more living and more physical than all their movements of ghosts! If it is a “subtle” body, then subtlety is decidedly more solid that all their empty gourds.
But the fact was that She was devoured.
And as always (it is truly the strangeness of this path), one would have said that the solution was born from the very contradiction, that the difficulty, the obstacle, the impossibility were the very key. No, She understood nothing of the way, but it was born of its own under her feet, minute by minute. And if one tried to go against the difficulty, to “rectify” the difficulty, it was as if the key instantaneously escaped. Mother accepted EVERYTHING. The destiny of the world or the sordid quarrel of this one, it was all the same, without priority. It was the same thing. At every instant it was the destiny of the world, everything was the destiny of the world. And more and more one recollected Sri Aurobindo, who would make a whole detour not to disturb the nest of a sparrow on his door: that detour and that bird and that work never finished, because of the thousand epistolary detours of these ones and those, were a single Movement. The work is at every instant. There is not a single detour. When we have understood the absolute sense of each instant and of each thing in that instant, we will be very close to an innumerable life and to a body that is everywhere.
Iridescent Materiality
But how was that body going to enter this one? It was the “burning” problem, if one can very adequately say so. How was that growing, formidable vibration, that tidal wave of golden power going to modify the corporeal substance or even just enter there without demolishing everything? The experience had begun years before in fact, without one knowing very well what it meant nor where it was leading and as of 1961 Mother had observed “that small scintillation of vibrations that seems indispensable to be able to enter that Matter,” as if that could not pass purely through, obviously, without setting everything aflame. A small multi- coloured scintillation that seemed to be the first “adaptation” of the supramental substance for it to be able to infiltrate into the body. She had seen this some fifty years earlier, in 1906, but so far off, at the end of that “vertiginous fall,” and it is quite curious to note the precision of the experience of back then; when She opened her eyes at the end of the experience, She wrote: There are also luminous, golden clouds, but dense, not transparent, and in those clouds are small dots of iridescent light. I felt it was the materiality brought by the trip. The materiality of the new world. And it seems that across the years, imperceptibly, the small iridescent scintillation has come closer, layer after layer, to the pure body, to pure Matter, as if truly we were separated from our own body by thick layers of consciousness without our being aware of it. The body is what is the farthest away from us! Across lie all the atavistic residues, of course, but the more one approaches, the more one uncovers the old primary layers, the residues of the animal, vegetal and mineral, as if in truth the end of the journey were the beginning of the world. We are millions of years from our body! the one that one touches and which seems so strappingly standing. But it is an enormous crust. It is that which makes for our dying. And the whole phenomenon (in fact since 1906) is the slow perforation or infiltration of this small scintillation until it traverses this obscure enveloping and reaches the small pure cell: the direct body. Then that which was all the way out there is all very much here. When we feel that is so very much out there, we say: Oh! It’s a “subtle” world, it’s a “subtle” body, it’s a “vision,” a dream.… And when it is come here … well, it’s fully physical! it is one and only one physical separated by walls of consciousness and layers of filth. In the pure little cell, the two worlds are ONE, the “subtle” is as perfectly physical as Mr. Jones in a suit (perhaps even more so). It is exactly the phenomenon that occurred in Mother, slowly, patiently, carefully; and as the small scintillation entered her body, it was as if, simultaneously, the “other world” hewed its path into this one and She found herself suddenly, with her eyes wide-open, in “Sri Aurobindo’s residence,” that so-called “lining” of the world where the living and the dead go around together as if there were nothing to it.
So it becomes evident that what makes the veil between the two worlds is the physical Mind and what makes death is the physical Mind—one and the same thing. A coating of false matter or of fossilized Matter on ... an immortal physical reality. Death is not on the other side, it is we who are on the mortal side and die, precisely because we are not in the immortal reality of the earth, in the true physical.
How to make this true physical pass through or infiltrate into the old crust is all of our question: truly a question of life and death for the species. One can say that for the first time in the world Sri Aurobindo and Mother asked the true question. For the first time someone found the true question of evolution, which is neither a flight into little bodies of paradise nor the scientific imprisoning in a mortal, legal and inevitable Matter. Then truly our millions of years of effort and pain find their sense. Earth becomes sensible. Otherwise it is simply a scientific monstrosity or a similar religious monstrosity in reverse. We are coming out of this contradictory stupidity. We are coming out of the false dilemma which has blocked the true paths of the work for so many centuries—but perhaps the time had not yet come. Even our science and our religion have worked well to bring us to the point of such absolute and painful contradiction that the earth really had to emerge into a third position. We are there. We are in the physical passage to this third position. It is not a question of philosophy: it is a question of skin, bones and viscera. The whole question is to know how the said skin and viscera will sustain this small scintillation of new—and oh! so old light. And Mother’s body begins to appear to us in all its reality as an evolutionary laboratory. Her undertaking is truly OUR undertaking. And those who want to divinize her or make a new religion of her are foolish—it is the earth that must be divinized, it is men that must be divinized, it is Matter that must be divinized. It is the reality of the earth that we want and of those that inhabit it— finished with religions.
Let’s get to the work of true Matter.
The Supramental Invasion
Now, Mother took years to understand that this small, strange scintillation that She saw in everything, “associated with everything,” even with her eyes open, was the process of infiltration, or of “permeation” as She would later say, of the true physical or true Matter into her body and into the whole body of the earth—it was not particular to her body, even though her body, and Sri Aurobindo’s body before, may have triggered the terrestrial phenomenon (before or simultaneously, because after all it was as far back as 1906 that Mother had her experiences). But it was in 1962 that the phenomenon began to become a bit clear for Her—fifty-six years after her first experience! The two [the ordinary physical and the subtle physical] seem to be fusing more and more. Instead of SHIFTING from one to the other, it’s as if one were permeated by the other and you can almost feel both simultaneously. It’s one of the results of what’s going on these days. A very slight concentration, for example, is all it takes to feel both at the same time, which leads me to a near conviction that true change in the physical results from a kind of PENETRATION. The most material physical substance no longer has that sort of density that resists penetration: it is becoming porous, and thus can be penetrated. Several times, in fact, I’ve had the experience of one vibration quite naturally changing the quality of the other—the subtle physical vibration was bringing about a sort of ... almost a transformation, or in any case a noticeable change in the purely physical vibration. As soon as the body is motionless, there’s this perception of the two vibrations, and of the physical vibration becoming porous. That seems to be the process, or at least one of the most important processes. And it’s not like something more subtle penetrating something less subtle without altering it: the essential point is that this penetration actually changes the composition. It’s not merely a degree of subtlety, it’s a change in the internal composition. Ultimately, this action probably has an effect on the atomic level. And that’s how (how to say?) the practical possibility of transformation can be accounted for.120
An atomic alteration?... without exploding from it?
And Mother added: On the surface, it’s a very humble work, nothing sensational.
There are no illuminations filling you with joy and All that is fine for people seeking spiritual joys—it belongs to the past. It’s a very modest work, very modest. And at each step, it’s as though you had to take great care that nothing gets thrown off balance.121 The “ridge,” as Mother would say, was to become more and more fragile and dangerous. All the powers, all the realizations, all these things are ... the grand extravaganza—the great spiritual spectacle. You go from fairground to fairground, displaying your feats of skill.122 But this isn’t like that! It’s very modest, very modest, very unobtrusive, very humble, nothing showy about it. It takes years and years and years of silent, quiet and extremely careful work before there can be any visible and tangible results, before anything can be noticed....123 “Every atom,” Sri Aurobindo would say. And the problem of time would always come back.
The atomic level of the problem would come back as well. In that same year 1962, Mother noted rather mysteriously: There is nothing to “change”! The relations between things are what changes. As an analogy, look at what Science has discovered about the so-called composition of Matter at the atomic level—there’s nothing to change. Nothing to change! The constituent element doesn’t change: the relations between things are what change. Everything has one and the same constituent element, you see; and everything lies in the interrelations. Well, it’s exactly the same for the transformation.124 And as I was rather perplexed, Mother added: You can’t grasp what I mean by the word “relation” unless you take it scientifically. Your body, and my body, this table, this carpet, are all made up of atoms; and these atoms are constituted of “something” that is the SAME. The differences we see—different bodies, different forms—are due to the movements or the interrelations within this same thing. Well, I say that the Power must change this intra-atomic movement. Then, instead of disintegrating, your substance will obey the movement of Transformation, you follow? But it’s all the same thing! What must change are the relations among things. And so it becomes evident that immortality can be achieved! Things get destroyed simply because of their own rigidity—and even then, it’s only a semblance of destruction; the essential element stays the same, everywhere, in everything, in decay just as much as in life.125
Was Mother only making an analogy? Or should we understand it literally.… Without doubt one understands that the supramental Power is the very power that animates and constitutes the atom, and therefore it can maneuvre what it has constituted and which to us seems immaneuverable, except by the frightful methods of apprentice sorcerers. But what would result from it?... We lack experience, as Mother says, we can only note the fact and understand there as well that this “change of relations” could only come about with infinite precautions—and with time. Ultimately, She observed as a conclusion, it’s all the constructing Will. The constructing Will is eternal and infinite—it’s obvious—so there’s no reason why Its creation shouldn’t partake of immortality and infinity—things don’t necessarily have to go through the semblance of disintegration to change form, it’s not indispensable.126 Eight years later, in 1970 (and one sees the slowness of the “very modest” and very precautionary process), Mother noted: That union between the two, between the subtle physical and the material physical, is taking place all the time—day and night and day and night. You might almost say that there is an attempt to substitute one for the other. There’s a sort of ... not exactly fusion, but a permeation (it really is a permeation), which doesn’t drive away the other, but ... at length, it will probably transform it. This subtle physical is working to take the place of the other one, but not through elimination: through transformation. But I can see (as I perceive the two at the same time, I can see very clearly) that it’s a tremendous work. It takes away some of the fixity. Our physical is crumbly, and the subtle physical takes away that crumbly character: wherever it would break, now it bends; wherever it would crumble, it’s fluid, it becomes.... It’s very strange. It’s hard to explain. But, of course, it’s a colossal work.... The experiment is under way: for months and months [years in fact] it has started with the more subtle, and then, very slowly and progressively, it has descended into a more material field 127 All the layers were worn through and one was reaching the pure, direct body. And simultaneously, the “other” world, the so-called “subtle” world, the so-called “other side” entered this one (not “entered,” as it had always been on this side: it showed through): Last night, remarked Mother in that same conversation of 1970, it was really remarkable.... One would have been unable to say, “This is the subtle physical, and that is the material physical.” It was ... surprisingly one within the other. You don’t get the impression of TWO things.128 The junction of the two sides was done. But to say true, this “other side” did not preoccupy me at all, even if it was on this side; it was the earth that interested me, the visible earth and I asked Mother, “But in a terrestrial manner, how are things happening? How is the permeation of that subtle physical into the earth happening?”— But in that way! Mother exclaimed, in that way. That is the work—the permeation.129And I insisted, like St Thomas: “But is it happening terrestrially?”—Yes. “In everyone?”—Yes.
And the experience grew, intensified. I no longer have the impression of dreaming, no longer at all. It no longer has anything to do with a dream: it’s an activity that goes on and on The “over there” goes on, and it’s as real, as tangible as physical things. There, those with a body and those without a body are mingled without difference. They have the same reality, the same density and the same conscious, independent existence. The physical appears to be less imperative, less ... 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 And Mother remained suspended there, looking right in front of her, towards Sri Aurobindo’s tomb. It was as if that subtle physical world wanted to ENTER into this one (and there is indeed a great power in it), but I don’t know how to explain as if it wanted to force its way into this world.— “An invasion of the subtle physical?”—Yes, that’s what seems to want to happen 130
The supramental invasion.
But the more the junction occurred and the more that descended or entered her body, the more that began to boil and become infernal: the irised light changed into molten gold. Truly a small death at every minute. And the same thing in the body of the earth. Two years later, in 1972, the phenomenon had become even more tangible, crying, one could say. There’s a kind of golden Force pressing down; it has no material substantiality, and yet it feels terribly heavy and it presses down on Matter. And the apparent outcome seems to be inevitable catastrophes. But along with this sense of inevitable catastrophe, there come solutions to situations or events that look simply miraculous. As if both extremes were becoming more extreme: the good getting better and the bad worse. Like that. And a stupendous Power PRESSING down on the world. And then even in life circumstances, many things otherwise indifferent are becoming suddenly acute—situations, differences, ill wills that become acute—and AT THE SAME TIME, singular miracles. People on the verge of death are saved, inextricable situations are suddenly untangled. And the same for individuals too. Those who know how to turn to ... who sincerely call upon the Divine, who feel it’s the only salvation, the only way out, and who sincerely offer themselves, then ... within a few minutes, it becomes a wonder—for the least little thing. There’s no big or small, important or unimportant, it’s all the same. The whole scale of values changes. The vision of the world is as though changed. This is as if to give an idea of the change brought about in the world by the supramental Descent. Things that were insignificant are becoming quite categorical: a small mistake becomes categorical in its consequences, while a little sincerity, a true little aspiration becomes miraculous in its results. The values are intensified, they stand out more.131 The same for the body: the least thing seems to produce consequences completely out of proportion—in either good or bad. The customary “neutrality” of life is disappearing.132 Day by day, hour by hour, this is getting truer and truer. The feeling that this Force has power, a REAL power—the power to move Matter, you understand; it can cause a material accident, or save you from a wholly material accident, it can cancel the consequences of an absolutely material event—it is stronger than Matter. Things are no longer what they were. It’s truly something new, it is NO LONGER what it was. A new world, really. We can call it “supramental” to avoid confusion, because as soon as you say “Divine,” people start thinking of a God, and that spoils everything. It isn’t like that. Not that, it is the descent of the supramental world, which is not mere imagination: it is an absolutely material Power, but [and Mother smiled] with no need for any material means! A world is trying to be born into this world.133
It was the year of Bangladesh, Watergate, the assassination of the Israeli athletes at the Olympic Games in Munich, the withdrawal from Vietnam. The first journey of Nixon to Peking as well.
And the problem of the transformation of this body begins to link itself definitely to the transformation of the world. It is the burning “permeation” here and there. The miracle and the catastrophe side by side. The precipitation of Death and the transformation of Death.
What is going to happen?
Cellular Interdependence
It was more and more “a race between transformation and death,” as She said twelve years earlier, in 1958. She received blow after blow, it was more and more the “rush of Falsehood” around her as in the world: It’s as if, through the Pressure, all the Falsehood had been brought out. As if there were a poison, you know, and by putting pressure, the poison comes out to be got rid of—and how it’s coming out!...1 And one well understands that it was not a sudden turpitude or degradation: simply what was hidden—hidden for millennia—came out of its hole. And how it came out! It had to come out of its hiding place there, in that animal filth around the cells, so that the “other thing” could come out—it was the very sign of the operation. The famous panis of the Vedic Rishis, the wolves, devourers and gnomes of all sorts hidden in the “cave” and who were impeding the “dawn,” the breaking out of the “sun in the obscurity,” the forcing open of the “mountain,” they had all come out, in the full light of day, they no longer had a hiding place—it is the time when everything is plain for all to see. And how it becomes plain.… Things unmask themselves, people unmask themselves. It is not the “worst” time: it is the time of truth. And her body got thinner from day to day. But you must know, She wrote to one of the disciples, that in each of my children and everyone of them, whenever they speak or act under the impulse of Falsehood, it acts on my body like a blow.2 They knew it perhaps, but the blows continued. They would climb, impeccable and draped in white, the small turning stairway padded with a carpet of golden wool. They have put on a mask of goodwill. But the inner vibrations still belong to the world of Falsehood.3 Oh! She was not fooled by her children, and She loved them, but.… This body is acquiring a terrifying sensitiveness,4 she remarked at the beginning of 1970. Naturally! it was everywhere, in everything. And She scolded herself: to sense and feel pain was still the sign of a hidden “I” in the body, an “I” that felt. Basically, what still has the illusion of being something separate must dissolve. It must say to itself, “It’s not my business, I don’t exist.” That’s the best attitude it can take. Then ... It goes into the great Universal Rhythm.5 It was more and more this movement of fusion that one felt in her body. Instead of walling itself up in suffering, like all bodies, to become frozen and ever more encrusted in order to build a protective wall, which is finally a wall of death, She tried to explode the last traces of the wall, the last small layer that retains pain and piles up death. Yes, but.…
A small incident, one day, came to provide the exact dimension of the problem. The incident occurred in the “music room,” where Mother was still, at times, receiving people. I had a very clear experience, She told me after the “fact”. I was with X., who was in a dreadful state of agitation, revolt, confusion ... everything one can imagine. And for certainly nearly three quarters of an hour, he kept throwing it all on me violently. I was there—I didn’t notice it! I was laughing, speaking, acting, moving around, and the body felt per-fect-ly fine. I came back to my room here, Y. and Z. were here and they had heard the whole thing (he was shouting like a madman); they were full of a sort of horrified pity because of what that boy had inflicted on me—and INSTANTLY the cells felt the fatigue, the terrible tension ... which they had not felt all the while, not for a minute! When I got up to leave X., everything was charming, it was amusing [exactly like Mother!], and instantly, when I entered this room, there was a fatigue and tension ... COMING FROM THEM! It gave me an interesting measure of the interdependence. The body follows the action very well and does all that it has to do, but when around it there are consciousnesses that feel or think otherwise, that still has a considerable action. Although the consciousness isn’t affected: it’s perfectly lucid, it sees the whole play all the time, and it is conscious of the forces that come. So how is it that, the consciousness being conscious of the forces that come, those forces still have the power to act on the cells directly?... That’s a problem. It means a cellular interdependence that makes the program very, very difficult.6 And in fact the “program” was to become more and more difficult.
Then Mother added this, which gives another dimension to the problem: So an all-powerful vibration is needed to flatten all that: vrrm!… But as Sri Aurobindo wrote, if that came ... maybe it would destroy too many things?7 And we are exactly in the heart of the contradiction: on one hand one needs an all-powerful Force to overcome the obstacle, and on the other, if this Force only shows the tip of its nose, it is the crushing of all that resists around it. Because those were vibrations of goodwill, there was no hostility in Y and Z, nothing, absolutely nothing—the hostility was before, with X.! The revolt and so on had no effect whatsoever.8 It is not the obstacle of “evil,” it is also the formidable obstacle of all the false “good,” sanctified, sentimentalized, constitutionalized and medicalized. There were also doctors around Her, there were all sorts of people who wished her the greatest “good.” So.… After that, I said to myself, “How little we know! How limited all our understanding is in comparison with what IS: the mechanism.”9
She was looking for the mechanism.
How to overcome this cellular contagion ... without crushing everything around her?
How to avoid that the new species be swallowed up by the old one?
The Central Experience
Now, there is an experience, repeated thousands and tens of thousands of times during those years since the first exit from the web of the physical Mind in 1962, that tended to take on a new depth, as if deep down underneath thousands of forms or faces, we were always in front of the same Experience, the same Reality, which unveils what it is little by little—the same Matter which we are made of gradually revealing what it is. But this true Matter, as it is, obviously cannot reveal what it is except by breaking a little the comfortable habits within which it had been enclosed. So, we cry, we protest, we suffer because we do not know how to see that each thing, each accident, each circumstance is in truth a formidable and innumerable grace which is given to us to reach the Secret, or a layer closer to the Secret, and that everything is marvellously organized—but we want to counter the Marvel, we pass by or we put a layer of penicillin on it, ten layers, twenty layers to “rectify” the abominable disorder, or the abominable Falsehood. And we do not see that that break or that crack was just the occasion for a small new reality to squeeze through the ruins or the exploded scales. If we were able to apply that to the
slightest thing, life would begin to abound in miracles—because finally the Miracle is constantly there, it is only clogged by a certain habit of seeing. Matter is a miracle, it is the last miracle: The rejection of falsehood by the mind seeking utter truth is one of the chief causes why mind cannot attain to the settled, rounded and perfect truth, said Sri Aurobindo, not to escape falsehood is the effort of divine mind, but to seize the truth that has masked behind even the most grotesque and far-wandering error.10 And Mother made the same discovery IN HER BODY with sickness and death Instead of the selfish answer that consists in saying, “Ah, no! I don’t want that, I don’t want any of it!—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’s the acceptance of everything—and Victory. This is really (as far as I know) the new thing Sri Aurobindo has brought. Not only the idea that it’s possible, but that it’s the true solution, and the idea that we can start now. I am not saying we’ll reach the end now, I don’t know, but the idea is that we can begin right now, the time has come when we can begin, and it’s the only true solution, the other solution is no solution; well, it was a necessary experiment in the universal march, but flight is no solution⎯ the solution is Victory. And the time has come when we can try.11
The truth behind illnesses and death. One must be fearless, that is all.
And one must have faith in the true miracle of Matter.
We can go back several years to choose the simple, classical example of it, which was soon to take on another depth. There is a sudden perception of a sort of disorganization, like a current of disorganization; at first the substance making up the body feels it, then it sees the effect, and everything starts being disorganized: that disorganization is what prevents the cohesion necessary for the cells to constitute an individual body, so then you say, “Ah, it’ll be the end.” Then the cells aspire, there is a sort of central consciousness in the body which aspires intensely, with as complete a surrender as it can make: “Your Will, Lord, Your Will, Your Will ” Then there is a kind of ... not something thunderous, not a dazzling flash of light, but a sort of well, the impression is of a DENSIFICATION of that current of disorganization; [and it is here that we approach the key] and then something comes to A HALT: first there is a peace, then a light, then Harmony—and the disorder has vanished. And when the disorder has vanished, there is instantly IN THE CELLS a sense of living eternity, of living for eternity. That is to say a sort of time-change in the cells: a densification of time. The current stops. Well, that experience, such as I’ve told you, with the whole intensity of concrete reality [a heart attack or neuritis is something very concrete], occurs not only daily, but several times in a single day. At times it’s very severe, that is, like a mass; at other times, it’s only like something that touches. But those aren’t thunderous events, the human neighbour isn’t even aware of them; he may note a sort of cessation in the outward activity, a concentration [She would place the palms of her hands over her eyes for one or two minutes], but that’s all. So of course, you don’t talk about it, you can’t write books about it. That’s how the work goes. It’s a very obscure work. And She added, as if She saw Sri Aurobindo’s face, all those years of silence, his last immobile years in the large green armchair, staring at the Wall: Proclamations, revelations, prophecies, all that is after all very comfortable, it gives a sense of something “concrete”; now it’s very obscure, there is a sense that it’s very obscure, invisible (it will be visible only in results far, far ahead), and not understood. And as a matter of fact, insofar as it's truly new, it is incomprehensible.12
She did not understand herself, She felt her way along in the forest. She had well observed a sort of “vertical time” that seemed to have strange properties, but it was a fugitive phenomenon, was it not, and in fact, as Pavitra said, it is an eternity that never has time! Mother never had the time. She had to be on the very verge of death for them to give her the time to catch her breath—one, two days—then She would begin again. But the curve developed itself, became more and more precise, more and more acute, the blows rained down on her ... in order to teach her the mechanism: It’s as if the two extremes—a marvellous state and a general decomposition—were here like this, intertwined. Everything, but everything is falling apart: people you count on give way, it seems there’s a general dishonesty spreading, people getting sick all the time [that is to say, their illness fell on Mother]. As difficulties go, there have never been so many, never, and compounded: big difficulties with ruinous ones. But at the same time, for... a flash (it comes for a few minutes, then it goes away), there is a ... marvellous state (the body feels it), unimaginable, you know, like the extreme opposite. As if it wanted to take over—but the other fights back fiercely. And so, all circumstances are like that, all the people are like that, from the government on down to the people here. And then that marvellous state: it comes into my body for a few minutes, then it goes away. There you are. That’s what I’ve been living since ... night and day without let-up. Three minutes of splendour for twelve hours of misery.13 Two states one in the other, like life and death together. And in that the cry of the cells, constant: the call, the aspiration, the Mantra. And sometimes the Marvel that was lived: The very air seemed to change into divine Presence. Everything was touched, touched, permeated [Mother made that gesture of dots everywhere in the air], but with ... above all, there was a dazzling Light, a MASSIVE Peace, a Power, and also such sweetness ... something ... you felt it would be enough to melt a rock. And it’s the BODY’S experience, you understand, physical, material, the body’s experience: everything, absolutely everything is full, full, there’s nothing but THAT, and we are like... everything is like something shrivelled. You get the impression that things (not completely—superficially) have become hard, dry, and that’s why they don’t feel. That’s why they don’t feel Him, otherwise everything, but everything is nothing BUT That; you can’t breathe without breathing Him; you move about, and it’s within Him that you move about; you are ... everything, the whole universe is within Him—but MATERIALLY, physically. Physically. It’s the cure of the “drying up” that I am now seeking. I feel it’s fantastic, you understand.14 On the other side of the web, under the dried-out sheath of the cells, a massiveness of Power. Another air, miraculous. The miracle of Matter is there, there at each instant. What impedes to live that? Or is this crust of old Matter decidedly incapable of letting that filter in? And then, when I listen, It also says things; I told Him, “But then, why do people always climb up above?” And with the most extraordinary, fantastic humour: “Because they want me to be very far from their consciousness!” So the body is trying to be fluid, it’s trying to melt; it’s trying, it understands what it is. It’s trying—not succeeding, obviously!15 And Mother looked at her hands, her bones that went through her skin.
But the experience became each time more evident, imperious, up to the day when She touched the key, after again having had a bad time with the most common of disorders: a tooth abscess that tumefied her face: I’ve spent days when I really lived all the horrors of the creation. It wasn’t moral things at all: it was mostly physical sufferings. A physical suffering that lasts—unceasing, going on night and day. And all at once, instead of being in that state of consciousness, you are in the state of consciousness of this exclusive divine Presence—the pain is gone! And it was physical, quite physical, with a physical reason. You understand, doctors might say: “It’s for this reason, that reason....”—quite a material thing, absolutely physical: poff! Gone. Your consciousness changes: it comes back. Then Mother went on in her small, slow voice: And if you stay LONG ENOUGH in the true consciousness, the appearance, that is, what we call the physical “fact” itself disappears, not just the pain I have the feeling of having touched the central experience.16
With time the physical fact changes.
But it’s a very small beginning, she continued. One would have the impression of having touched the supreme Secret only if the physical were transformed. According to the experience (the tiny experience in details), that’s how the transformation should occur.17
It was towards this supreme Secret that Mother was being slowly led, “in details.”
It was in 1968, a 23rd of November.
But then, Mother asked herself, would there first be ONE body in which this Consciousness was expressed, or must everything, but everything be transformed?... That I don’t know.18 Can one body make, live the experience without all the other bodies? It is still a question. It is perhaps the decisive question. But there is no physical impossibility. Two years later, in 1970, Mother made this mysterious remark: Last night, suddenly I saw a functioning, and I said to myself, “Oh, if we knew this, how many things—how many fears, how many combinations, how many would crumble away, would lose all meaning!” It was ... what we see as “laws of Nature,” “ineluctable” things, it all was absurd, an absurdity! With the true consciousness, it crumbles away. And Mother concluded: Several times like that, when people tell me they feel as if in front of an ineluctable law (“There is this + this, and therefore that is inevitable”), the answer is always the same: if you want it so! YOU are the ones who decide it’s ineluctable!19
But this “functioning” that reverses the ineluctable laws, what was it, this something that forces the physical fact to change? And one would have said that Mother had heard our silent question: It’s probably a ... there’s a POSITION to be changed, a position of the consciousness to be changed.20
A position of consciousness that heals the drying-up, allows the infiltration or the permeation of the old Matter and changes physical laws.… I feel it is fantastic, do you understand?
Perhaps another position in time. A densification.
Another time within time.
Not a time “over there,” eternal, not a time that takes time: a time here in
Matter.
A new time of Matter.
Or, its true time?
The Change of Position or Massive Time
And one well understands that if the rhythm of Matter changes, all of its structure must change. All of matter is built or made of a certain movement, from the atom to our outer metabolisms, and all our scientific manipulations tend to finally act on this movement, to accelerate it, to slow it down or conquer the forces and gravitations that it engenders. Small electrons make a solid wall in their movement. Everyone has observed the metabolic modifications that occur during the marmot’s winter sleep. And the caterpillar in its cocoon. Cryotherapy and the cold temperatures that are provoked are still a tentative science. Recent studies on drosophilas201 (fruit flies) seem to have shown that the cells that do not belong to the germinal line, those that do not reproduce and do not regenerate themselves and thus grow old, like, for example, the cells of the brain, would only grow old because of the accumulated “noise” resulting from all the exterior stimuli, and that this “noise” could be theoretically effaced, as one effaces a tape recording, by a cooling of the said cells.… A cooling means a change of rhythm. I am no scientist, I know nothing really of their stories and manipulations, but the fact is that all modifications of movement or of time engender modifications of structure and this joins up with Mother’s central experience. “If one remains long enough in the true consciousness, the physical fact changes.” But scientists only know an exterior time, superficial, if one can say so, which they have to brutally and somewhat barbarically manipulate like the apprentice sorcerers that they are, without truly modifying the structure of Matter except in a somewhat catastrophic way—they do not have the central lever. They do not have the lever of consciousness that produces the movement and all the forms of Matter that result from the movement. They do not have the secret: Matter = Consciousness. One can say that Mother’s whole experience consists in reaching the consciousness of Matter, the pure substratum, or the pure Movement, the pure vibration around which all forms have encrusted and enrolled themselves. It was those distant “golden clouds” that She saw as of 1906, that powdering of gold of 1958. Then slowly, slowly, that scintillation—which seemed to colour, to become iridescent while traversing the layers of old Matter, the old evolutionary encrustations—became as if coagulated anew, densified, unified, once it had finished its voyage of infiltration and touched the pure, direct, veilless corporeal substance, once Mother was capable of sustaining that “boiling porridge.” It was “like gold that had melted,” She said the first time, “it was very thick ... of a weight that was surprising.” That is to say, the “bottom” of Matter had traversed the web and joined the surface of Matter. And in 1969, while She was talking of that eternal same thing that was surfacing, She said the “new consciousness”—it was nothing that was “new” but it was for the first time perhaps on earth that true Matter, the true Movement, the pure Consciousness at the bottom of Matter emerged into the terrestrial field—and She said this that rejoined the schema of thousands of small, scattered experiences that had come to her across the years like heralds: There’s such a power! A tremendous power. Tremendous.... As if it were inflated with power. An almost concrete power, I don’t know [and Mother felt the air]... it’s a light, but a light you could touch, as it were: if it goes through your fingers, it’s so concrete that you feel it go through. A deep golden light. We could say this: if you compare the consciousness, not of ordinary humanity but the higher consciousness of humanity, with this Consciousness, you feel that as soon as the human consciousness tried to contact higher things, to purify lower movements, to widen, it used to become fluid, transparent, ethereal, whereas this Consciousness, with a vision, a perception infinitely superior to the other, is SOLID and concrete. And the impression is ... it’s so strong! Solid. From the point of view of consciousness, it has been the greatest change in my whole existence; I’ve had many of them, I’ve worked a lot, but .... nothing in comparison with what has taken place since the 1st of January [1969]. To such a point that the body feels like a different person But it’s not enough.21
Solidity, massiveness, density: always the same schema. Something that densifies itself.
She was thus arriving at the heart of the story, “the golden clouds” were there. But it was a low flame (or high flame) hell that started in her Matter that was subject to this formidable agent ... which seemed to be the very agent of transformation, since it was the first agent of all material formation. But “that was not enough.” A new adaptation or something other seemed necessary for the agent to be able to work without demolishing everything and without taking centuries that Mother no longer had in her old reduced body. And it is there that we begin to approach the most enigmatic part of Mother’s forest. Of course, in the moment, one understands nothing of it, one does not know what is going on, it is “something,” a phenomenon amongst thousands. It does not have a logic, logic is for later, when it is “understood.” It is that logic that we are trying to track down in the dense thickets and the miraculous undergrowth of the thirteen volumes of Mother’s Agenda.
It is in 1961 that we find a first hint of the phenomenon, and truly these are thousands of minuscule phenomena which seem like nothing, appear and disappear to resurface five or ten years later with all their sense, as if they had journeyed underground, so much so that one does not know where things begin and the transformation, to say truly, is thousands of phenomena together without a date and without a special “moment.” There is nothing sensational, interesting to recount, She told me one day in 1961. It’s a miniscule labour, minute to minute. Every day and all the time, night and day and at any moment whatsoever, there are tiny, tiny things, tiny things, tiny—it’s not interesting. There are successive curves, each second of which would have to be noted down; and in the course of one of these curves, something is suddenly found This type of (one can scarcely speak of a Mind) this kind of mind-like activity in Matter [the physical Mind] interfering it is sordid. I haven’t yet been able to eliminate it completely. There are moments when it’s brought to a dead halt. Oh, sometimes while I walk for the japa, everything is held like this, inflexibly.22 [And Mother made a gesture as if She were suddenly immobilized: the physical Mind stops and it is the instantaneous opening of the web, an invasion of massive Power] The difficulty is that for the ordinary consciousness—and unfortunately I am surrounded by a lot of people who have a very 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. But all these things keep coming from outside, all the time, coming and trying 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.23
And in fact, it did lead somewhere⎯six years later.
And then She continued: But I could not remain in that state long enough (it would have to go on for HOURS), I could not, due to all these constant interruptions... And six years later, the problem remained the same, there was always something that interrupted, and the rush of people. And then, when the body is pulled brusquely out of it, it seems to lose its balance—it has a few difficult moments.24
It was the beginning of that “change of position” of the consciousness that was to have the power to change the physical fact.
And once again it is remarkable to observe that this first change of position of the consciousness coincided with the first attempt to traverse the physical Mind. On the other side of the cage, another time begins, another material time, not a spiritual one (unless the Spirit rejoins Matter). A massive time. Because I asked Mother, practical and materialistic as I was (but so was Mother, as much as me!): “But what happens, when everything is like that, immobile, does something happen?”— Something happening?... I don’t know. But that state IN ITSELF is something. When the body is conscious of that it means precisely that it has come out of its narrowness: it is the same Infinite as the one you get when out of the body. It’s very difficult for the body to have, very difficult: something is always vibrating and moving. Not only silence: it is immobility [and Mother made a massive, compact gesture, as if it could be cut with a knife], WITHOUT TENSION, without tension, effortless, without anything. It is like a kind of eternity—in the body. It’s as if it put everything back in order, but nothing is moved.202
An eternity of the cells.
And that happened while walking, while She was repeating the mantra. So there is a true immobility of Matter behind its apparent movement, and those who would like to practice some cryotherapy of transformation, manipulate the appearances without manipulating the real fact, would be deeply mistaken just as those who think of mastering atoms with cyclotrons, because it is Consciousness that one has to touch, it is the movement of Consciousness that one has to truly change in order to change Matter—otherwise one only touches the grimace of things—and one ends up only with monsters or caricatures of power. One can “freeze” Mr. Smith, but he will only make for a cryogenic Mr. Smith perfectly fossilized in his filth.
When the scientists become yogis, they will understand and they will master Matter.
It is perhaps the time that is to come.
The time of the physicians of consciousness. A change of position on a terrestrial scale.
Because, having the key to the consciousness of Matter, the beings of the supramental species will have the power to model Matter directly, by emitting the corresponding vibration in their own Matter: they will act from Matter to Matter in the same way that today we communicate and act from mental consciousness to mental consciousness. It was why Mother said: The foremost realization for man is understanding—understanding things. For the Supermind, realization means Power, the creative Willpower.25 Like the beings of the supramental boat that modified their corporeal appearance or their means of transportation by the simple deployment of their will.
The position of the consciousness must change and go from the mental to the cellular level. One must go from reflected to cellular time in order to act directly on Matter and to transform its structure.
There is definitely a logic in that forest.
The Contradiction
And Mother advanced.
The problem tightened itself from day to day, or rather defined itself—our problems are insoluble because we do not know what the problem is. It was no longer at all the problem of death such as we conceive or see it: a body that ages, diseases that pile-up, deterioration, a wearing down. She had seen, lived the unreal absurdity of all these “natural laws” as soon as She had crossed the web of the physical Mind. They do not exist, death is something else. I have seen more and more often, more and more clearly, that all that takes place, all the people we meet, all that happens to us personally, all of it is always a test: you stand firm or you don’t; if you stand firm, you make a progress forward; if you don’t, you have to go through it again. Now it has become that way FOR THE BODY: when it hurts, when it gets disorganized, when it threatens to fall apart And then, there is always that Consciousness, inside, straight as a sword, saying, “Now, will you stand firm?” So you remain very quiet, very peaceful, and then you call—you call the Lord. And you say the mantra, which comes automatically, and ... peace establishes itself. And after a while the pain has disappeared—everything, just everything, all the threats disappear one after another. And you know, such dazzling, indisputable proof of this Presence, which is so wonderful and so simple, so simple, so total, in all that comes, all that happens, down to the smallest details, so as to lead you as fast as possible to the transformation. It’s this extraordinary experience that when you take all that comes as the means to learn what you should be—you immediately feel a wonderful, all-powerful Presence, but concrete. Then you understand that nothing is impossible. 203 Just a drop of THAT.204 One must learn to be. All the difficulties of evolution are meant to teach us to be what has the power to conquer the difficulty. On the other side of the web, it is the perpetual, or rather natural miracle. There is no death, it is the impossibility of death, there, at that level, at the pure cellular level where the great primordial Consciousness- Substance-Power circulates that Sri Aurobindo called the “Supramental.” True Matter. So where is death exactly? Where does it hide? If the whole corporeal consciousness moves into the true position, there is no longer any material reason to die. Is there something, in the body, that cannot or does not want to move into the true position? A sort of implacable point or corner of death by which one can be caught? What? Where is eventually true death, if it is not found in any of the pseudo- sicknesses, agings or wearing downs? What is it that refuses That in the body: That, life? And Mother described circles that were more and more concentric and closer around the central point. It seemed that the more the cellular level cleared, clarified and illumined itself, the more the invisible scoria outlined, which before was mixed up with the general opacity. Until the day Mother placed her finger on it: The impression was that death is now only an old habit, no longer a necessity. It’s only because first, because the body is still unconscious enough to, not to “desire,” because that’s not the word, but to feel the need of complete rest, that is, inertia At the end of all the concentric circles, one finds the mineral again. Rock, primitive stone. When that is abolished, there is no disorganization that cannot be mended, or at any rate (the field of accidents hasn’t been studied, but let’s say in the normal course of things) no wear and tear, no deterioration, no disharmony that cannot be mended. It’s only this residue (a considerable one), this residue of inconscience that asks for rest. What it calls rest is the state of inertia. That is to say, the refusal to manifest the consciousness.
It’s no more than that.26
Mother was reaching the bottom. It was in 1967.
And then...
And then that FORMIDABLE collective suggestion... weighing down. The form which accepts a progressive deterioration because of the formidable weight of the collective suggestion—the habit of millennia: “It’s always been like that, it can’t be helped.” The great argument. Which isn’t true, besides.27 It was the other face of the problem. Inertia and the desire of rest in the body, bad will and mortal suggestions around; and of the two it was the collective problem that was going to become more and more painful, almost insurmountable: There are minutes when the body feels it has escaped that law of death. But it doesn’t last; it’s for one minute, then it passes and things are back as they were. But the body consciousness is beginning to wonder why it’s like that: why, why?... Then, people come with all their thoughts Some come, sit down in front of me, and start thinking, “Maybe it’s the last time I am seeing her!”
Things of that sort, you understand 28 There are worries around (of all kinds), from an anguish at the idea that it could happen [and Mother laughed] to a haste for the end to come: “Free at last! Free at last to do all the foolish things I want to do!...” A considerable number of desires that it should die. Everywhere, they are everywhere! The body has become very conscious: it’s very sensitive to what comes from people. 29
So it all comes (gesture like a truckload being dumped), and because of that, it’s a bit difficult. There are other things [i.e., good ones] that come too, but those other things ... there are perhaps oh, they happen perhaps once or twice in twenty-four hours: all of a sudden, a light that is pure something pure, which makes what we might call a minute of eternity. That’s good. But it’s rare. A little flame.... And that Presence… That Presence, that Presence.... These cells are like children: when they feel, everything, but everything disappears except that Presence; then, for this body, there is like a sigh of relief. Generally, when it suffers, it doesn’t complain: it calls. It calls and calls and calls And it’s quite aware that it’s absolutely useless, that if it only knew how to go into immobility, go into silence, it would be enough. As soon as it does it But I am not quite sure that all those pains it feels all over, all the time, aren’t coming from ... aren’t the effect of all the bad wills. They are all over the earth, you know.30
The difficulty of the world was there.
Inevitably, in front of this contradiction, something had to happen: either death or something else. And in fact, through or because of the very contradictions Mother was led to the solution. Contradictions were only the key to the other door.
Cataleptic Trance?
Yet, one morning in January 1967, at the very moment She reached the bottom of the hole, at that last (or first) layer of fundamental inertia, that residue of the stone, simultaneously and as if by necessity, a solution sprang forth, and the first rough shape of an experience. One would truly say that there are never “problems” but only moments when one arrives exactly at the centre of the difficulty, and when one is there, the solution is there, along with the problem. One must only proceed up to the exact centre of the contradiction.
There was never any contradiction!
The “solution” was hardly satisfying, at first sight, but the experiences that followed were decidedly of a very new order. Hardly satisfying, but it imposed itself on Mother like an imperious order, “as if” it were Sri Aurobindo who dictated the solution to her, and in fact that morning, very suddenly, Mother stopped in the middle of the conversation, and in a neutral voice, separating her words in a very imperative tone, She dictated the following note to me (let’s mention that just before, Mother had had a series of very important physical experiences that could have signalled a beginning of the transformation of the body, but they had all been interrupted half way through by the “rush of people”: But I am not accusing anything of having made the state go away: it went away because the body isn’t yet capable of holding it, that’s all). Thus was conceived the note:
Because of the necessities of the transformation, this body may enter a state of trance that will appear cataleptic Above all, no doctors! This body must be left in peace. Do not hasten, either, to announce my death [And Mother laughed like a very amused little girl] and to give the government the right to intervene. Keep me carefully sheltered from all injuries that may come from outside—infection, poisoning, etc.—and have untiring patience: it may last days, perhaps weeks, perhaps even longer, and you will have to wait patiently for me to come naturally out of that state once the work of transformation is accomplished.
I was a bit stunned and I asked Mother: “It is therefore something that is going to happen?”
It looks like that.... Because I was fully conscious that this [the body] needed... it takes time, that’s the problem. The disciples never left Mother the time! And She added: Instantaneous things are miraculous and don’t have the power of duration: they don’t correspond to the STATE—the vibratory state of something lasting. So then, this intimation came. It was very imperative, it was an imperative necessity—which to me seems to prove that it will happen.... I became aware of all that needed to be changed for this body to be capable of holding the thing constantly, for it to be there all the time. So that intimation came.— “But there would have to be a little bit of wisdom amongst the disciples,” I remarked.—Yes. Nobody should say anything except, “Mother has gone into trance.” That’s all. But if they are prepared for the idea beforehand, they might be more reasonable?...31 The reasoning of the disciples is one of the wonders of the world yet to be discovered.
A few days later, Mother explained to me: I have seen rather clearly that the work depended on the ratio between two aspects, the proportion between two aspects: that of the individual transformation (that is, the transformation of this body), and that of the general, collective and impersonal work. If a certain balance is kept, that state of prolonged trance may be dispensed with, but then the same work which would have been done in a few weeks or months (I don’t know) will extend over years—years and years. So it’s a question of patience—patience isn’t lacking [but it was beginning to be lacking in the disciples]. But it’s not only a question of patience, it’s a question of proportion: there must be a certain balance between the two, between the outside pressure of the collective work, and the pressure on the body for its transformation. If the instrument [the body] is constantly and infallibly capable of doing exactly what is expected of it, then the trance might not be necessary. It would only be if there is a resistance in the execution.32
There was to be much resistance, more and more.
But no more than I (let’s say it) was Mother satisfied by the “solution.” One would have said that it was only the foresight of a Consciousness that envisages all accidents. This possibility of transformation in trance was announced to the body some ... yes, about sixty years ago now, and periodically afterwards. And there has always been a prayer: “No, may it not be necessary: it’s the method of laziness.” Mother was someone who was always standing; it is strange, usually I would meet her as She was sitting in her chair, but She always seemed to me standing up and heading somewhere. It’s the method of inertia, She concluded. There is an increasingly awakened consciousness, but awakened to the point of being alerted to the possibility of unconscious resistances.... All depends on the plasticity, the receptivity.33—“But what purpose would this trance precisely serve?” I insisted.—To transform what’s not receptive. There are billions of elements in the body, so it’s a mixture of receptivity and non-receptivity. It’s still mixed. And that mixture is why the appearance remains what it is. You understand, it is a formidable work. If it had to be done in detail, it would be impossible, but through the pressure of the Force it can be done.... On the condition that the pressure does not make everything boil and explode. So then, the trance would be made necessary precisely so it’s done fast (relatively fast). This work is BEING DONE, but, you understand, it may stretch over hundreds of years! That’s what Sri Aurobindo said: a state of consciousness has to be established in which the collective life of the cells can be preserved for as long as desired.34 And effectively, it was what was in the process of happening with the development of the Mind of the cells, that small golden vibration that repeats and repeats itself. But hundreds of years mean an entourage that follows and consents.
And all those centuries give us a shiver in the back when already the present hour is suffocating.
It has always been said, she continued, that the external form would be the last to change; that the whole internal, organic functioning would be changed before the external form, the appearance (it’s only an appearance, of course); that the appearance would be the last to change. And truly, the whole problem came back to that, to that exterior crust, that “bark” as She would say, because a cellular body very well existed within, physical, independent, which could journey everywhere across the world and move without encumbrance, on the other side of our veil. This bark was the test, the bridge between the two sides—the mystery ... apparently unsolvable except through interminable centuries. This appearance seems to me to be the legacy of primordial habits—the habits of Matter. This Matter, of course, comes from total unconsciousness, and throughout the ages and all the ways of being, it returns to total consciousness—it goes from one extreme to the other. Well, what gives that need for trance is the habits of static immobility. It shouldn’t be necessary. One should replace the need for immobility and immobile rest by. 35
By what?
One had to reach this new state of Matter that unites immobility to movement, death’s repose to the movement of life, the inertia of the stone to the dynamism of existence. To change the base of inertia that drags us all into death. It was another time that one had to live in Matter: a time that would no longer be the time of tiredness and decomposition. Nor the time that takes centuries. Time is the very sign of death. To change time is necessarily, automatically to change the very foundations of Matter, its encrusted “way of being.”
A cellular time that changes the conditions of Matter.
It was precisely the experience that began to trace itself, as if emerging from the very heart of the problem. One had to reach the heart. Always one has to touch the bottom, then one reaches the door.
And we recall Sri Aurobindo:
A voice cried, “Go where none has gone! Dig deeper, deeper yet Till thou reach the grim foundation stone And knock at the keyless gate.”36
At the bottom of death is hidden the last door.
The Innumerable Present
Just a month after Mother dictated that note on the possibility of a cataleptic trance, and exactly as She arrived at that last layer of inertia, that mineral residue in the cells, truly that root of death, a very small experience came that Mother did not very well understand at first but which was the exact continuation of her experience of 1961, six years earlier, when She found herself seized by that strange “massive immobility”: “It must well lead somewhere,” She said. Things take a long time to get going. At first, She thought that She was learning a new way of resting without going out of the body,37 and it was perhaps that also, but it was very much something else. For years—eighty years perhaps—Mother had spent her time leaving her body in order to rest: She would climb in the fraction of a second to the supreme regions of consciousness up there, in that great white immobile light (as all accomplished yogis do methodically, and as we all do or almost, without our being aware of it, for some seconds at night where we lose all contact). For men it is a complete fainting, there is no link, we have not built up the intermediary steps of consciousness, and when we “fall” there, it is a hole from which we come out of refreshed. It was how Mother was able to live more than a half century of her exhausting life while only taking two hours rest per night. She would go there as if it were home. But as She advanced in this yoga of Matter, She became well aware that that means, that sort of negation or oblivion of Matter complicated her cellular work in a strange way. It is without doubt a great relaxation and rest to escape from the stranglehold of the physical Mind, but it is the exit from the cage above, not below, and during that time the cells, Matter, flowed in their primordial Inertia: a sort of death in white, one could say. That is to say, exactly the inverse of the sought-after goal. That is the exact preparation for death—a refreshing death. That very convenient means was to be radically and brutally cut from her, so much so that She could no longer escape from her body, She was bound there, in all sorts of infernal pains, in order to find the solution there. No more current one cuts, no more nervous sensibility one anesthetizes with a small inner concentration—all the yogic tricks gone. And tricks they were, a super medicine that we would truly hope for all of humanity, but which only sealed off the problem, like others with their sleeping tablets or tranquilizers. It is truly Matter that must find its own solution—She was precipitated to it.
I was sure I was then “awake,” as it’s called: there was nothing resembling sleep. There was only the consciousness watching. But interiorized. And a will to get up at 4:30 [when Mother got up every morning]. I looked at the time once in between—it was 3:15—I was surprised, I thought, “How come? It was 2:30 a minute ago ” And at exactly 4 : 30: “How come? I’ve just seen it was 3:15!” It was dumbfounding, because I DIDN’T LEAVE my body, I know I didn’t sleep, and the consciousness was perfectly still, motionless, so to say. It was as if instantaneous. It happens to me now and then during the day. I go into a certain state (it only lasts for a minute or two), a strange state: you are perfectly awake, perfectly conscious, and at the same time totally unaware of time and things around you not exactly of things around you, but NOT CONSCIOUS OF THEM IN
THE SAME WAY—I don’t know how to explain.38
It was the change of position that was taking place. It was the beginning of cellular time.
In fact, the beginning of a completely new state which could well mark the beginning of a new age of Matter. But then, after all, words are big, but when that happens, one does not know that it is a new age, it is ten in the morning and that seems so simple, almost ordinary. And we would be totally mistaken if we thought it was a sort of definitive state, like that of the fish, the monkey or of the Mind: it was the beginning of something. It must lead somewhere, as Mother would say—we do not know for when this somewhere is nor if it will not change form on the way. It is something that is being born, a new state that is being born in Matter. It would not come to the idea of anyone that the next species would be a sort of super-marmot— and first of all because it is not sleep. It is ... something that was going to develop in a bizarre but very rapid way. Perhaps we will only truly understand the phenomenon in twenty or fifty years, or in a century, when it has taken on its true form or led up to its true formula in evolution.
A year later, in 1968, the curve of the phenomenon had already become more precise: I am getting lazy.... It’s strange, it imposes itself like that: I’ll be following a movement, and then ... I’ll go off in trance. It happens at any time. I’ll be eating: in the middle of the meal, something comes like that, I follow the movement and I remain absorbed; then afterwards, I see all the people waiting!39 And in fact, Mother sometimes remained for 45 minutes with her spoon in her hand, suspended in mid- air.—“I have noticed that,” I told Mother, “since a few months, it has been like that. I even had the impression sometimes that ‘Mother is becoming distant’. —No. I am WITHIN, far more within than before—not within here, in “me,” but within all things.... Extremely sensitive to all the movements of those around me. And She once again remarked: The relationship with external things is no longer the same.40
It was a whole new world that was tracing itself, or a new way of being in the world.
“But what do you do?” I asked, as I was hopelessly fixated on the practical side of things—When I go off like that, “within,” she answered, I always seem to ... to be shaping vibrations. And afterwards (the next day, or later in the day) I’ll learn that something has happened to someone: he called me and asked me that. It’s always a call. And it’s a response. Something has happened to him, something has got twisted; so one works on it, one sets it straight again, puts the light, the good vibration back on it, and then, later in the day, or the next day, I’ll receive a line, “I was in a lot of pain” or “ I called you.” Like that.41 But these vibrations that Mother “moulded,” it is precisely the beginning of the new manipulation of Matter: it will be like that, eventually, that the supramental beings will mould all of Matter to their will. It is a state in which Matter is moulded. And if it appeared to us negligible to look at the small twisted hurts and scratches or the small cancers that Mother “set right,” we are completely missing a capital phenomenon. It is not at all a question of healers, it is Matter that rectifies itself by the sending out of material vibrations, an action from Matter to Matter. A direct connection, without cyclotrons, sleight of hand, or aspirin. Something strange is happening which I don't understand—and it's getting stronger and stronger: it took me more than an hour to eat my breakfast, and I really thought I had finished in twenty minutes! Time . . . I have completely lost the sense of time. I was convinced I had finished in twenty minutes and it took me more than an hour—to eat nothing! I take a bite or a sip, and then ten minutes, twenty minutes go by⎯I don't know where, I don't know what. I feel I am in a light. A light that's . . . . “But,” I insisted, “is this light active, or what ?”—Yes, it does all SORTS of things. But, not, not in that way. It is...?? And Mother did not know how to say.
It’s the quality of time that’s changing, She observed towards the end of 1968. There’s a sort of intensity of consciousness that alters the value of time. I don’t know how to put it. It’s a beginning....42 You enter a state in which time no longer has the same reality. It’s something else. It’s very peculiar... it’s an innumerable present.43 And what is very remarkable is that it concerns the body. It is the body that enters this other state of time, it is not consciousness that escapes into ethereal regions where time no longer exists, the old yogic trick. It is Matter itself that changes its sense of time. But what does that mean, for Matter, to change time? What time does Matter have?!
It has the time of its trepidation.
And it is where the phenomenon begins to take on other proportions.
“It is a beginning ”
We are walking in a forest where no one has ever been. In fact, we are now leaving the paths of universal evolution, which seem sufficiently laid-out with the discovery, the implementation and the functioning of the Mind of the cells: this mind will automatically elaborate its own results and will reach its own inevitable evolutionary formula in a new species. It will find its own manipulation of Matter, as did the mental man of the Neolithic. This book could stop here, even with suspension points, because evolution is always in suspension points. It is a question of time ... and perhaps of human collaboration. But do we have time? That is the question.
From now on we are entering Mother’s last Mystery, which seems to circle around this question of time, and the only way to approach it is to follow the chronological order of the experiences without trying to gather them together in groups of the same nature (groups of what? what nature?). In what way does this last Mystery link itself to our evolution?... If we knew it exactly, a great rent would be made in the veil. A Mystery that perhaps outmaneuvers all other mysteries and would undo all our immediate impossibilities. Constantly, we are next to a small “something” that changes all the data. This little something is perhaps the Grace ... or the gracious smile of the next world—as if it were not already there! lying in wait for us and silently preparing its smiling coups d’Etat.
Or perhaps its worldwide coup d’Etat.
The Missing Side of the Atom
All of the work, secretly, consisted in illuminating and transforming the ultimate mineral layer, that “grim foundation stone” Sri Aurobindo spoke of, that primary tomb in the body.
All the time, we think that we do things in a certain direction and we build up all sorts of justifications and theories around that, then we uncover another layer of meaning and the theories are reversed⎯but we simply walk towards … “something.” Mother never made any theories: She walked, and She recounted what She saw as She proceeded, that was all. So, the meaning was never distorted, no more than a river is. In one or two centuries, one will still be able to immerse oneself in this Agenda, whose water will be as clear as ever. We stick a pretty, magical little label: “cellular time,” but what is it that hides behind? Perhaps we do not know it as yet. It may be similar to the time of the man who linked the trajectories of a few stars and built an entire world⎯but these are other stars and this is a new world. And the former prepared the latter, which prepare what? I am not very sure that that “cellular time” has all the meaning that we try to decipher.
Step by step, this was how it appeared to Mother (and what is very striking is that, since She used to forget everything, experiences were always new, lived for the first time, the world was new at each moment, very fresh as if it had just been born⎯pure, not a stain of past that weighted down … except precisely in those cells, which were rediscovering their past, their very old past, the old mystery): For the cells of the body, it’s a transition from the tranquillity of “tamasic” origin (the calm that was, in the distant past, the outcome of Inertia), to the calm of All-Powerfulness. There is a difficult transition. For the cells it's difficult. It's this transition that's being worked out in the details, and it's not easy.1
It is the very change of the movement of the cells. In fact, it is perhaps what we would feel if our bodies were suddenly hurled into “death.” It is such a radical change of time, or such a different state, that it is like the death of everything else. Can we understand?… Mother was learning in small doses, without knowing very well where it led her, whether it was death for good or something else. Has one ever seen a living species move into another species … while noting down the transition? It was a little that. Mother’s self-control was something that almost terrified me. I say terrified, because I saw and felt, She drew me a little into the “movement” of her cells and, well…. To traverse that, one needs to make real fun of it, with Sri Aurobindo’s great irony or Mother’s sense of humour, or to desperately want something else. Then if it all breaks, it does not matter. In 1969, the picture was becoming rather “clear” (but the picture of what, we do not know). For the Force to be able to go through rapidly so as to reach the body, a GREAT passivity is needed, She noted. I can see that: every time there is a pressure so as to act on some part of the body or other, it always begins with an absolute passivity, which is ... the “perfection of Inertia,” do you understand? What Inertia imperfectly represents—it’s the perfection of that. And Mother looked at me out of the corner of her eye. It is very difficult precisely for those who have a great mental development, very difficult. Because its whole life long, the body has worked to be in that state of receptivity to the Mind, and that state, which is what brought about its obedience, docility and so on, is what needs to be abolished.2
And all of a sudden, I understood the extraordinary miracle of Sri Aurobindo who lent his fingers’ cells to the keyboard of his typewriter without anything moving in his Mind. And the current passed through directly. The current that perfectly leads small birds and big stars as well.
How can I explain? Mother further said... The development through the Mind is a constant and general awakening of the whole being—even the most material being— an awakening as a result of which there is also something that’s the opposite of sleep. But to receive the supreme Force, what’s needed is, on the contrary, the equivalent of stillness—the stillness of sleep, but an ABSOLUTELY CONSCIOUS SLEEP. “Stillness,” I don’t know how to explain that It’s almost the opposite of Inertia in stillness. That’s what now makes me understand why the creation began with Inertia.3 Perhaps because only the primary Inertia was capable of bearing the lightning-fast Current in all its purity? A non-inertia, that is, a resistance, might have exploded everything (?) So then, Mother continued, we had to recover that primary state after going through all the states of consciousness⎯a whole journey. The impression is that only the body— receptive, open, at any rate partially transformed—is capable of having the understanding of the creation, of what we call the “creation”: why and how, the two things. And it’s not at all something thought, not something felt: it’s something lived, and that’s the only way to know.4 All the same, I did not understand the mechanism of that “immobility” at the human level and I pointed out to Mother that, in the highest states I knew, there was an intense aspiration, even in the body, and that it was the exact opposite of an immobility. It was an active aspiration. So? “What must one do, I asked, has one to let everything go slack or persist in that active aspiration?” It’s hard to say, She replied, because I am convinced that everyone has his own path, but for this body, the path is to have that active aspiration. “But then it is no longer that immobility!” It has found the way, it has understood how it can be done. “You mean both together? The union of the two?” I asked without understanding. Yes, they are together.... And this is where the mystery of the supramental time, or cellular time, begins to unveil itself. That’s what the body has managed to get : a complete stillness and an intense aspiration. And it’s when stillness is left without aspiration [i.e., pure Inertia] that it falls into a dreadful anguish which instantly “wakes it up.” That’s it, you understand: an intense aspiration. And it’s absolutely still within, as if all the cells grew still [the trepidation in the cells fades away]. That must be it: what we call intense aspiration must be the supramental vibration. I have often said that to myself. But if even for five minutes the body falls into the state of inertia— stillness without aspiration—it’s woken up by an anguish as if it were about to die! To that point, you understand [the precise point that separates death from immortality, which look almost like twin sisters with just a tiny difference of aspiration]. For the body, stillness is ... Yes, it feels that the highest vibration, the vibration of the true Consciousness, is so intense that it’s ... it’s the equivalent of the inertia of stillness. That intensity is so great that, for us, it’s the equivalent of inertia. That’s what is now being established. That’s what made the body understand (because now it understands) the process of the creation We could almost say that it began with a state of perfection, but an unconscious perfection, and that the creation must pass from that state of unconscious perfection to a state of conscious perfection, and in between is imperfection.5
A new time, which is a very old time, but conscious. The protoplasm remembers what set it in motion. Only the body can understand.
And Mother’s schema actually meets that of the original creation with the apparent immobility of the stone in a lightning atomic movement: the passivity of Matter that enables it to bear the formidable Energy, and at the same time provides it with an automatism that has all the appearances of infallibility. At the end of the curve, Mother found again that original “perfection,” with a difference that really separates the path of life from the path of death. And one cannot even say that the difference lies in the intense aspiration of the final product (Mother), while the original product would be devoid of aspiration and consciousness⎯there is a consciousness in the depths of the atom, there is an aspiration in the depths of the atom, in the depths of any form of movement: the very movement is the sign of that aspiration; that aspiration in the depths is what made the whole evolution ascend. But as soon as there was a “form,” were it to be the form of an atom, there was an imprisonment of the Current, an aspiration “to oneself,” as it were, like a child clasping its doll to its heart: it is mine; and a will or a reflex to keep that particle of “self” to oneself⎯it is the very face of Inertia, the copy or caricature of immortality. It is the beginning of death. Something that appropriated that particle of current and keeps sticking to it. So every time one has to break the form so as to move into a higher form, or a higher aspiration. That inertia is the stability of every form: a frozen, stereotyped movement, which wants to continue to be what it is, perpetually. And that is why every form says no-no-no. Each form is a formidable NO which fears to lose its life, to let it vanish through the least little pore, the smallest hole, and turns and spins around so as to build a wall of electrons or of anything else, and save its ego-centric gravitation. Inertia is the NO. Death hangs on a mere “no.” But that same Movement can make for endless life ... if we let it flow, if the “something” that says “no” finds the same rest, the same security and the same stability in an open immensity instead of a closed point. There is no death indeed: there is a difference of behaviour. But it is the behaviour of Matter that must change. It is the YES of Matter that has to be found. It is really the transition from the inertia of a dead aspiration, buried in an individual whirl which gives it the appearance of an opaque tomb of eternity, to a living, open aspiration, bursting into a universal movement, so swift that it has all the density of the walls of electrons, but without their hard opacity, and all the real immobility of eternity, but without the tomb. The Supramental, the cellular time, is precisely that which gives the missing side of the atom, the one that the whole evolution desperately seeks: immobility in a ceaseless motion. An immobility one does not die of. The whole journey of evolution consists really in rediscovering the immensity that contains everything in a form that is not a tomb.
And one wonders whether those scientists who are “peeling” Matter layer after layer, continually uncovering more infinitesimal and “massive” particles205, as it seems, in the depths of the nucleus, are not looking for a fundamental unity that is everywhere here, dense, golden, without any gap, in a time that is too swift for all their microscopes and in which the ultimate velocity of the movement meets the immobile instantaneity of eternity. The missing side of the atom. The one that the body will perhaps uncover before them.
The whole question consists in knowing whether Matter is capable of saying “yes,” of relaxing, we might say, without being pulverized, of opening to the formidable Movement without resistance, without anything that holds back⎯which means that one has to be totally immense, and yet in a body, in a form. This was Mother’s whole cellular training for so many decades. It is the change of time or change of position that is to ultimately transform Matter, that bark that is hardened and frozen because it does not let the Current through and falls asleep in the false peace of death. Matter has to find its own eternity, then it will no longer seek to die, it will no longer contract in a position of death. It was the experience that began to settle in Mother’s body. Looking at what happens from one day to the next, the body’s experience is like this: In a certain way, at certain times, it’s in the consciousness of Immortality, and then, out of influence (also out of habit now and then), it falls back into the consciousness of mortality, and that’s really ... As soon as it falls back into the consciousness of mortality, there’s a dreadful anguish; it’s only when it emerges from that, when it enters the true consciousness, that it passes. So now it’s like this, now it’s like that [Mother made a to-and-fro gesture, from one consciousness to the other]. And the other state, the state of Immortality, is immutably peaceful, tranquil, with ... like lightning-fast waves, so rapid that they seem still. It’s like this: complete motionlessness (apparently) within a tremendous Movement.6
A cellular eternity in a lightning-fast movement.
“A moving immobility,” Mother would say.
Then suddenly, Mother would close her eyes, go off into that “light which did so many things,” her spoon in her hand: an innumerable present, an “inside all things”⎯not at all adapted to the life that surrounded her and watched her every gesture, relentlessly trying to obtain something from that body, to ask it to do this or that, sign this or that, a thousand things mostly deceptive. Even to make her take medicine in order to cure her of her bizarre eternity, which some of them (many of them, in fact) mistook for senility. The body is beginning to wonder ... to wonder what it will be like, that is to say, the way of perceiving, the relationship with things: How will the new consciousness relate with the old consciousness of those who will still be humans?...7 It was at the beginning of 1970. Exactly seventeen years before, She had asked those rebellious little samples on the Playground the same question: Is it possible for one body to change without something also changing in the surroundings?
What will be your relationship with others if you change that much?... It would seem that a whole range of things would also have to change, at least to some relative degree, in order for that body to exist, to continue to exist.8 The question was to pose itself more and more painfully⎯who followed? It was not only in her body that the NO had to be vanquished, but in all the bodies around her. There’s a background (it’s mostly that), a background of unconscious Negation which is still behind everything, but everything; it’s still there everywhere: you eat or breathe—you receive that Negation For everything to be transformed, it’s still a colossal work.9
And we seem to hear Sri Aurobindo:
The stubborn mute rejection in Life’s depths,
The ignorant No in the origin of things.10
What was going to happen?
Where did that cellular unity lead, to what impossible state among men? Would She be able to make that negation melt away, that residue of the original Inertia, and could one change one bit of matter without changing all of Matter?
Or did it lead to another, deeper layer of meaning, where the Yes, instead of confronting the No, and immortal life, instead of confronting Death, would both change into something else, a third state?
A Question of Patience
Mother did not know, She cruelly did not know anything. Why, but why am I not told what will happen ? I don't know I think it's to insure a kind of very passive state.11 Perhaps because we do not know what we have to fight against: we say “death,” but what does it hide? Perhaps there is nothing “against,” but successive means, successive steps to reach that “something,” that ultimate mystery, and everything is a means of stirring up the flame of aspiration which will open the last door.
Death, for now, was that fixity of Matter that led to the slow disintegration of the form. And yet the experiences multiplied, obvious, convincing, always following the same pattern. The body is beginning to feel in an extremely precise and clear way that the moment it’s aware of itself—the moment it’s aware of itself and of the rest in relation to itself [i.e., the old egocentric position]—it falls into a hole; and the moment it’s aware of the Force acting—the Force acting, the Consciousness acting— then this [the body’s solidity] has no more than a wholly relative reality The body is learning well, it sees, it can see that in tiny details, all the time: as soon as it feels it’s “something” and the Force is “something else,” there’s a pain here, a pain there, this goes wrong, that goes awry.... A world ... a complex and thoroughly ugly world. And when it has a movement ... (how could I put it?), the opposite of condensation, like a dilation, something like a dilation in the consciousness, then limits grow dim, they fade away, everything becomes supple, and pain goes away PHYSICALLY. It’s an experience the body is given day after day, now on one spot, now on another, now for one thing, now for another.12 The body feels that the solidity of matter is an illusion and that it may ... be overcome.13
And one wonders whether that “dilation of consciousness,” that sort of acceleration of consciousness, which at the same time eternalizes and universalizes, should not have a more powerful movement than that which coagulates and immobilizes this Matter in its mortal position⎯or is this old Matter completely unable to bear the change of movement without dissolving? Mother did not know. She felt that movement of fusion, but…. I have the most peculiar feeling that there's a kind of ... like scales, or tree bark, or turtle shell, melting. What seems like Matter to man is like something shrivelled up which has to fall away because it is unreceptive. And in this body (Mother touched her own body), it is trying ... it is trying to It's really curious! It's a curious sensation. If one could last long enough for all that to melt away, then it would be the real beginning.14
To last long enough.
Always that problem of time. It was probably that that was trying to settle in her body through that more and more accelerated change of position, that sort of eternity in the cells. In the true position, there would be no friction The body itself senses that it must learn to live in eternity,15 she said as early as 1962. Yes, but would She be given the time to live in eternity?
Or else the cataleptic trance?
And the question became increasingly acute: There is an impression of fluidity and plasticity asserting itself increasingly with the growth of the true consciousness. The hardening seems to be the result of Unconsciousness; the lack of fluidity and plasticity seems to be the result of unconsciousness. Not only in the body: for everything the impression is the same. With the growth and the normal state of consciousness, there come a suppleness and fluidity that completely change the nature of the substance, and the resistance comes from the degree of unconsciousness alone, it's proportional to the degree of unconsciousness. The appearance of materiality is in proportion to the unconsciousness....16 [This is quite interesting. The world we experience, the Matter we experience are immobile and opaque only through their degree of unconsciousness⎯through nothing else. A real illusion, as it were. An opaque illusion.]
The interesting thing regarding this body is that I have a growing impression ... of a “residue” which still remains unconscious.17 There are still layers that remain as a residue of all that preceded: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, all that. So the whole fully conscious part of the cells is fully illumined, but ... Besides, one just has to see [Mother touched the skin of her hands, visibly untransformed]. It appears not to have the same “density” ... but the appearance is exactly the same. Those who have an inner vision see something, but that’s only because they have the capacity of inner vision.18 The new way of being would only be visible to someone who himself or herself had the supramental vision.19 And yet that so-called “inner vision” or supramental vision is a material vision, since Mother saw material facts: I MATERIALLY see all sorts of things, which aren't visible to others. But it's materially. A funny state....20 We are always brought back to those two worlds of Matter, one within the other: an illusory, unconscious, opaque crust, and the other. And I looked at Mother: I could well understand the growth of that new consciousness, that new vision, that new body, but the other, the “residue”? That was really where the mystery lay, the bridge. Or else the illusion dissolves and all the old bodies in the world crumble into dust⎯which would make a lot of dust.
Mother seemed to have heard my question: What I don't know yet, what's not very clear, is ... what will be the fate of this residue?… To people's ordinary thought, it's what they call “death,” that is to say, the rejection of the cells that weren't able to enter this plastic state of consciousness. But the way the work is being done, there is no categorical division into groups of conscious or unconscious cells: there are imperceptible (almost) states of variations between the different parts of the being. So you wonder, “Where? What? When? How? What's going to happen?...” It's increasingly becoming a problem.... The impression is of a remnant, but the remnant isn't something that's rejected: it's something which hesitates, lags behind, has difficulty and tries—it would be only too pleased: if, for instance, there is in one spot a perceptible disorder, a pain, the body no longer starts fidgeting, worrying, wanting medicine or doctors or interventions, no, not at all; it asks ... it says, “O Lord ... ” That's all. And it waits. And generally, in the space of a few seconds, the pain goes away. What complicates matters is the ENTRY from outside of formations, with thoughts, ignorant attitudes, impressions—all kinds of impressions that swarm around. Most of the time it has no effect, but sometimes it gives a shock. So that complicates matters somewhat. Like this fact that I am increasingly stooped (although it's neither the result of fatigue nor the result of a lack of equilibrium, nor ... it has no material cause), my impression is that the present part of the body (or rather the part belonging to the past) is shrinking, while I myself, my consciousness, I am so vast and on the contrary so large and so powerful, I don't know how to explain, it's a strange sensation. It's as if you were still dragging some old baggage along. But it's not that it isn't willing. It's more or less difficult, you understand, so it takes more or less time. It's like elements lagging behind.21
Time, always time.
But I'd like to know, Mother continued. I am beginning to be interested in the problem [there was always that touch of smiling humour running in the background]: Will this residue. ? But the question isn't like that, it's a question of TIME.
With time (Sri Aurobindo said three hundred years), with time EVERYTHING would get to change. But there is the wave of habits, and the easy solution which consists in quite simply taking this old garment and throwing it away: “Off with you, I no longer want you!” It's disgusting. Because it can no longer get along fast enough, one takes it and says, “Off with you! Go away, go to decomposition.” It's disgusting. And I feel the atmosphere. There is the whole collective thought, people writing to me, “I hope you'll still live for a long time”! And all the usual nonsense. It makes a difficult environment. I look at this body; at times it says (at times, when there is too much incomprehension, when the people around are too absolutely unwilling to understand), it says, “Ah, let me go” (“it,” what is it? what's still unconscious, too unconscious and not receptive enough), it says, “Very well, leave me, it doesn't matter, let me go.” But not disgusted or tired. So I say to it [in a tone of voice as if speaking to a child]: “No, no, no.” It's a question of patience, of course. 22
Whom for? For her or the others?
But there was no question of letting the old residue crumble into dust.
Question of patience. What's going to happen? I don't know. We'll see. You, at any rate, you will know. You'll be able to tell them, “Things are not as you think they are....” [And Mother laughed, mocking, as if She were already seeing the whole “atmosphere.”] I would tell them, but they won't hear me. I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. What's going to happen? Do YOU know? And I looked at her, it was so obvious! “One day it will be glorious.” When you do something for the first time, no one can explain it to you.23
She was alone, so alone.
At the frontier between decomposition and something else.
But one morning in February 1970, Mother suddenly remarked: It’s a curious thing. I am not asleep, yet I am not awake; it’s neither one nor the other. It’s a sort of new state I have; whether I am in my bed or sitting in my armchair makes no difference.... It’s something else. Yet I don’t sleep! What is it?... I don’t know. There’s something there.... Is it possible?... And I don’t go out of my body.... Or is this body replaced by another?—I don’t know. And everything is different.24
Is it possible?
A new state in Matter…. Mother’s last mystery.
All the data were clear, there only remained the unknown.
Mother was 92. She had three years left.
Since a small girl flew over the stones in the forest of Fontainebleau, spoke to the big Python, listened to the story of a mummy in the Guimet Museum and looked, through the transparent pages of her book, into a living History that she thought she had known for a long time and perhaps everywhere, so many experiences had flowed: the strange types of Matter in Tlemcen, the vertiginous falls, the journeys without the body, the first entry into death and the Impressionists’ explosion of light, the revolution of the atoms, the revolutions flaring up from the Yangtze Valley to Moscow, then a postern which a vine of “faithfulness” was hanging from⎯a long, immense faithfulness to the Earth’s history, to the old walk of Matter towards its accomplishment. Throughout all times, all pains, black or golden experiences, in the corridors of Thebes or the dungeons of the Palazzo Ducale, that same quest for a truer, larger, freer world, without borders, without religion, without police, a “sunlit path” for the Earth. I say you don't need to suffer.1 And at the top of a small staircase leading up to a big white veranda, the One who said: “The world is preparing for a new evolution.” This Mother, how She walked, walked until the end in this prison of Matter that She so much wanted to open up for man, in that golden-carpeted dungeon where She was assailed by the old pain of a world that clung to its Falsehood and opacity. And She laughed, She opened her wide immobile eyes on an earth that had already changed, She said strange things while panting and still pulling the thread to desperately make herself heard on this side⎯pure imagination?… I prefer that imagination to yours,2 She simply said to the evangelists of death: those who believe in the tomb, believe in science, believe in the prison forever. Oh! how She wanted to give to men, to give back to the earth its own creative power, its “imagination of truth,” to wrest from Matter its own miracle. The miracle of Truth, for there is no other. And in everything, through everything⎯the good, the evil, the minuscule or the big thing, the white or blue or black sample, and all the samples of the world’s pain⎯to love forever.
At least, we’ll have tried.
The Old Way That is Dying
And I say that She has not failed, any more than evolution can fail. Only there is something that we do not understand⎯not yet⎯an unknown piece of data. Or something that is not yet manifested, but ready, like the chick in its eggshell. Or perhaps like the caterpillar in its cocoon. How could the man who has never seen a chick emerge from an eggshell imagine that that calcareous crust has ever contained a bird? It took us quite a while only to move from Neanderthal to Lascaux and from a bare cliff to a first little lavender. The secret, always, lies in discovering what is there, in the evolutionary shell. That unknown piece of data is there, in Mother’s last years. That is what we have to decipher now. And it is not Mother’s secret, really, it is our secret as a species walking towards … what Mother was precisely looking for.
A “bizarre state,” as She would say. All we can do is to “clinically” observe the unfolding of the phenomenon and see if, by chance, we stumble upon the whisper of the future. She was blind and deaf, according to medical standards: a walled-in world, the absolute shell of Matter, a sort of living tomb for any of us. And yet She heard our least words and saw better than we did the smallest vibration of our being or objects that told her where they were. She could hardly walk any longer and Yet She went everywhere and knew all the bodies’ miseries and the movements of the world and of circumstances. She no longer slept as we did, barely ate, and yet there was that formidable energy around her. She seemed to be in a senile torpor, but there was that crystalline lucidity which saw everything, understood everything, and She smiled, with her eyes closed, at all our nonsense or at a pure little flame. She forgot everything but made every gesture as if infallibly, knew the exact duplicity and the exact truth of everyone, each thing at each minute. It was a paradox of consciousness, of vision and wideness in a walled-in, annulled Matter, like an increasingly thinner shell. A triumph of consciousness over Matter, or perhaps the extreme product of the long evolutionary march. It seemed that all there was to do was to get rid of the simulacrum and extend the wings of an immortal consciousness which now encompassed the Earth and beyond⎯who could still care about a digestive tract at that stage? Who could bear all the countless miseries of a body that was so stooped that it could not even lay in a bed anymore, when She could disconnect in a breath: She knew very well how to “die” at will. “Anyone else would have left a thousand times,” I told her one day, “rather than stay in that and bear all what you are bearing.” It was completely inhuman, doubtless. All that for a mere little shell. But the “shell” was our whole terrestrial envelop, it was the evolutionary stake: the triumph of consciousness over Matter, or the triumph of consciousness in Matter?
She had reached the ultimate mineral, or atomic layer, that first beginning of the shell and of any shell: She was facing the beginning of the world in her body, right where the original hardening of Matter had taken place; just a thin, tiny peel which bathed and steeped in a flow of lightning-fast Energy, but as if immobile. A “permeation” that had all the appearances and gave all the sensation of a formidable trituration, a hammering, a demolition in the flesh, perhaps not unlike what takes place in our cyclotrons, and which was bearable only because of that kind of “dilation” of the corporeal consciousness that broadened her to the size of the universe, as it were. One second of loosening, to fall back for one second into that “hole,” as She would say, into that body-I, that perception of “I” move, “I” eat, “I” speak, was perfect hell, it was entering the demolition alive. There was no longer any layer of unconsciousness and obscurity to protect her from that “assault of ether and of fire” Sri Aurobindo spoke of: all that was left was that body, pure, without ramparts, or which was itself perhaps the last rampart undergoing its own transmutation. And on the other side, a physical universal consciousness, another state, a different way of being … unspeakable, but which no longer obeyed the laws of the tomb, no longer needed eyes, ears, a memory and even a body to move with, and for which the body’s very pain was a kind of unreality⎯yes, perhaps a different time, a “moving eternity” in the depths or behind that atomic film, a different state of Matter behind that hardened crust. On one side, the hole of death and pain; on the other side universal life, without any possibility of pain. A “funny” physical life on two levels, a paradoxical duality: This body’s life is a miracle, She said in April, 70, after a series of heart attacks. Which means that if it weren’t what it is and the way it is, anyone else would be dead. But then, if you knew how it becomes strange. The body is conscious, it says, “After all, it would make a difference mainly for others! [if
Mother “died”] For me. ” Only, you understand, they are still in this kind of illusion of death because this [the body] disappears; and even this [Mother’s body] no longer quite knows which of the two is true! For it, the truth should be Matter—well, even about that, it isn’t quite sure what that is! There is the other way of being. And the body is beginning to wonder ... It knows that the old way is no longer that, but it’s beginning to wonder what it will be like. At times it comes it’s strange, it comes like a breath of air and then it disappears again. Like a breath of another way of seeing, another way of feeling, another way of listening. And that’s something drawing near, as it were, and then getting veiled. Actually that new functioning had manifested itself for quite some time, but each time it was a discovery for Mother.... The body suffers; sometimes it suffers with a very a strange kind of suffering! A very strange kind of suffering: my body groans, literally groans as if it were suffering terribly, and at the same time it says to itself, “Ah, this is bliss!” And it groans! You understand, the two are like this [fused gesture]. It depends on a little something that looks like an act of will—but that’s not it. I really don’t know it’s something new. The “little something” was the imperceptible shift from one position to the other, from one type of time to the other The body groans, and it says to itself it’s suffering, then a little something occurs, and there’s no more suffering, yet it’s not at all what we call “bliss”—we don’t know what it is . .. it’s something else. It’s something else. But extraordinary. New, completely new.... It is truly the beginning of a new state in Matter. It’s no longer ... visibly NO LONGER the body consciousness as it was. No longer: the relationships are no longer the same, the way of hearing, of speaking.... And it isn’t yet oh, it’s on the way to something, but it’s not there yet. But the presence of the Grace is an absolutely marvellous thing! Because as I see things, the experience as it is if I were not given at the same time the true meaning of what’s taking place, it would be endless agony—it’s the old way of being which is dying. Naturally, there is the whole yogic preparation, but the body is ... you know, it’s a constant miracle! People couldn’t bear it for more than a few minutes, and it goes on and on and on 3
It was to go on for three years.
Three years of nonstop agony during which, slowly, imperceptibly but irresistibly, a new state of Matter was born, which was no longer life as we know it, death as we imagine it, time as we measure it or eternity in which one falls asleep; no longer the suffering that makes us faint or the beatitude of the sages in which one faints in another way; no longer the Matter that dies of a heart attack or the non- Matter in which one bathes in a transcendence…. Something else. A fully new state.
And in all that, a shell between two worlds or within two worlds. And Mother added this, which is decidedly very mysterious: We think that this, this appearance [the body] is ... to the ordinary consciousness it seems to be the most important thing—it’s obviously the last thing that will change. And to the ordinary consciousness, it seems to be the last thing that will change BECAUSE it’s the most important: that will be the surest sign. But it’s not that at all! It’s not that at all. The important thing is this change IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS—which has taken place [the change of position regarding time]. All the rest is a consequence. For us, when this [the body] is able to visibly be something different from what it is, we’ll say, “Ah, now the thing is done.”—That’s not true: the thing IS done. This [the body] is a secondary consequence.4
So we are full of questions. What is it that, in that new state or new position, is such a decisive factor that it makes the very conditions of the shell negligible, or at any rate secondary? Is the outer transformation⎯that is, the transformation of our whole visible terrestrial Matter⎯of no interest compared to another piece of data? Is the “transformation” … something else?
“If one knew what it is,” Mother had said ten years before, “it would be done already”⎯perhaps She was nearing the point or the position where She was beginning to know what it was?
As for us, we do not know at all.
Perhaps she will give us the key to that last mystery?
The Mystery of the Contradiction
The clinical picture continues.
A growing paradox, more and more acute. It’s difficult… The English would say, it’s not a joke… Everything, everything is getting disorganized. It’s easy to see that it’s getting disorganized TOWARDS a higher organization but nothing at all is working in the ordinary way any longer. So the body can no longer eat, can no longer It’s a very strange sensation: no relationship remains as it was before. Nothing: neither of the body with itself, nor of the body with others, nor anything; it’s all like something that has disappeared. Now and then, you know, it’s like a breath of air passing by, a small thing ... I can’t say how it is—charming. It’s not a pleasure, not a joy, it’s a breeze passing by, something quite special—and charming, quite charming. The next minute, it’s gone. The body suddenly feels a sense of peaceful and luminous rest, something quite ... adorable—the next minute, it feels pain all over. So everything is like that. A sort of identification with everything, which is far from being too pleasant (it’s not unpleasant either), but ... it gives a bizarre impression of life. One moment, the impression that you don’t depend on anything, that you are an expression (how could I put it? [Mother smiled] an expression of the Lord, and that you depend on nothing; the next minute, that you are nothing at all, merely a sort of semiconscious movement in the middle of a general semi-consciousness—very unpleasant. It’s like that, and all the time like that.... At one time, things become so repugnant, almost, that you feel like screaming—and in fact, if you don’t keep a check on yourself, you do start screaming. Another time everything is so peaceful that you feel as if you are entering an eternity. So you understand All that you can do in the middle of all that is to be still!5 A good thing there was no tendency towards madness! Mother said. Lucky chromosomes from Mathilde. Then, it comes along with an awareness of all that people think, all that people think OF IT, all that ... it’s all oh, so pitiful! 6
Mother said that the change WAS DONE, but quite obviously something was not yet (?) done. Or what? And the contradiction accelerated, if one may say so, the shifts from one state to the other became shorter and shorter, like a kind of electric arc ceaselessly traversing a hole of darkness and going in one direction, then in another, and it seemed that the experience always thrust her in the same direction, so as to oblige her to find the solution. It has been this experience that a very slight shift, a very slight change of attitude, which isn’t even expressible, and in one case you are in divine bliss; then, things remaining exactly the same, it almost becomes a torture! That’s something constant. At times, you know, the body would scream in pain, and ... a very slight change, which is almost inexpressible, and it becomes bliss—it becomes ... it’s something else, this extraordinary thing of the Divine everywhere. So the body is constantly switching from one to the other, like a sort of gymnastics, a struggle of the consciousness between the two. And all these suffering vibrations are as though supported by the mass of the general human consciousness—that’s right.7 Something that supports pain in the world, that almost likes it. One day (once more), as She was suffering from a tooth infection that She had managed to “densify,” stop, and reduce the swelling of⎯someone came near the body, thinking: “Oh, poor Mother, how she must suffer”⎯it came back immediately. Yes, She must suffer. The cellular contagion was obviously there, perpetually there. And at the same time, progressively, the direction of the solution in the very contradiction: …
This body goes from one to the other, she continued, and sometimes ... sometimes almost the two together! So then, to the vision of ordinary things, anyway of life as it is, it gives the perception of a general madness, and no really perceptible difference between what people call “mad” and what they call “reasonable.” That ... it’s comical, the difference people make. All that is a world of simultaneous perceptions, so it’s really impossible to speak. It’s something which has an INNUMERABLE experience at the same time, with a capacity of expression that has remained as it is, that is to say, incapable. But that “passage” is the most constant work. There are no more ideas, no more feelings, almost no more sensations, it’s this kind of shift, and a shift SO different, you know, and in total immobility!8
Such was the phenomenon that was more and more clearly emerging: a sort of cellular eternity or cellular immobility in the very midst of the contradiction, or which perhaps even arose from that contradiction … so much so that one wondered whether in fact one was not wrong to think that there was a side of death and pain, and a “true side” of eternal beatitude⎯whether there was not another place which was made of both sides, as it were, a third … incomprehensible state. And in the body, you know, in Matter. It was not a question of ethereal states: it was a question of toothache or of a body that was (or seemed to be) dying. A state that seemed to be the exact opposite of what we call the natural state, the state of the world of Nature, and yet which belonged to the physical world. Perhaps a new physical Nature? It is obvious that the physical Nature that controls the fish and that which controls man are very different, and yet they are the same. All the functions that worked naturally—that is, in accord with the laws of Nature—all of a sudden, brrm, finished! They stop. Then ... something ... which I call the Divine—perhaps Sri Aurobindo called it the Supramental, I don't know; it's something like that, which is tomorrow's realization (I don't know how to name it); so when everything is thoroughly upset and I feel really awful, then “That” consents to intervene. The transition isn't pleasant, that's all. Along with sharp pains, and ... impossible to take any food, etc. etc. Evidently someone had to do it.9 She was working out the transition, the transition from what to what, and in what? One does not know. Can the caterpillar describe the transition to the butterfly? And the caterpillar is quite comfortable in its cocoon⎯but to do it with one’s eyes wide open and without hibernation?… Sometimes, I tried to ask her questions (though less and less, because it was heartrending), I wanted so much to decipher what it all meant: But I don’t know! She exclaimed. My body is in the middle of living the process.10 And that was it. It does feel a process of transformation taking place. But sometimes it feels it's impossible—it's impossible, you simply can't go on existing like this—but then, just at the last minute, something comes, and then it's ... it's a Harmony totally unknown to this physical world. A Harmony—the physical world seems appalling in comparison. But that doesn't last. My perceptions are getting clearer and clearer, more and more luminous—vaster and vaster. It's really like a new world that wants to manifest itself.11
And I am obliged to say that I do not understand⎯the end, yes, one can understand; the other side, one can imagine. But the transition, that which creates that new state⎯the mechanism. We can only observe that it is when everything is completely disorganized that “That agrees to intervene.” Obviously, the caterpillar has to be completely disorganized for something of the butterfly to agree to intervene. A sort of total contradiction of the caterpillar is needed. And what was taking place within that contradiction?⎯always the same movement of densification or “eternization” (perhaps it was the particular form that hibernation took at the level of a human transformation with one’s eyes wide open). But was it only that⎯a trick to work out the transition⎯or on the contrary the new state itself? I am obsessed by the idea of that old body which, I suppose, must “transform itself,” and it will actually have to transform itself, it is not meant to remain this frozen and hardened old garment. But first of all, is it not the very conditions of its “breathing” that have to change⎯a physical way of breathing that makes for a certain death or decrepitude, and another way that makes for life without death and decrepitude? If the latter way or breathing environment settles in physical Nature (I really mean another mode of breathing, made of something other than oxygen and nitrogen), there is truly no problem of transformation anymore, it is a “secondary consequence,” as Mother says; it will take place very naturally in the whole species, little by little. And I remember the story of the Mexican axolotl, this sort of animal which is half-worm, half-fish and lives, blind and colourless, in the depths of caves, in the water falls of the high mountains of Mexico, where it had reproduced, died and reproduced … perhaps for centuries, until the day some scientists brought a few samples back to observe them further in their laboratory. To everyone’s utter amazement, within a few days, because the conditions were different, those worms took on colours and changed into … salamanders! (which they called amblystoma), which reproduced normally. They discovered this extraordinary thing: the axolotl was a larva which lived, reproduced and died without leaving the larval state⎯one changes one’s environment and the implacable circuit breaks open, the larva becomes another being which lives and reproduces in its own way. An environment to change. An air to change. And everything changes. What has to be created is the new breathing environment (it is hardly a metaphor). Perhaps it was that new environment that tried to open up or be created in Matter through that bit of Matter that She represented. It is like a kind of new composition of the air, which should be breathable or absorbable by all those who have reached the needed degree of aspiration⎯one has to aspire, of course, in order to breathe! There is a quality of aspiration in humans that should open to them the door or the window to that new physical air. Of course, it is not physical like the nitrogen, but it is physical all the same, compared to the subterranean air that we breathe, or to the air of well- brought-up crucian carps that we absorb in our rather muddy fishbowl.
Was it that that was happening in Mother’s body?
Of whom are we the larvae?
Was that acute, painful, infernal contradiction not the very instrument of that new mode of being or breathing? Because one day, in 1970, She had made this remark: It has become very interesting. I spent the whole of last night with Sri Aurobindo, but with a world of explanations. He made me understand lots of things, but quite ... well, extraordinary. A demonstration in detail of the difference between the two consciousnesses. Among other things and in a quite practical and positive way, he explained to me that the cause of all illnesses, all disorders, all conflicts, here in the material world, is that the two simultaneous movements (one is the movement of duration—what we could call Stability—and the other, the movement of transformation), the two movements in the original Consciousness are only one and not in contradiction; and I was shown how here, they are separate, and that’s what is the cause of death. It’s because they can’t be in harmony—they don’t know HOW to be in harmony: they can, but they don’t know. One is the movement of transformation, the other the movement of stability.... In other words, they are like Eternity and the Becoming, the movement of progress and immobility. When they are not in harmony where they should be, it causes a break in equilibrium and the being dies—things die, everything dies because of that. It’s so simple! So obvious once you have the experience. We could say (almost) that if the two find their equilibrium of SIMULTANEOUS existence, it re-creates the Divine. He is in us, but not in harmony.12
And we are again dealing with that cellular, supramental time which combines both perfect immobility and lightning-fast movement. This was the corporeal, physical state, the “environment” that tried to permanently establish itself in Mother’s body, through and even because of the acute contradictions that threatened to engulf her into death at every instant. This was the other breathing.
And one day, the mystery of the contradiction (which I mistook for the transition to “the other state,” the other side, the “blissful” one), proved (or seemed to prove?) the very condition or the very site of the new state⎯we have not to move to the other side! For I would complain to Mother, and at the level of my own experience, which seemed to psychologically follow what She was physically living, I told her: “The farther I go, the more contradictions I uncover in myself⎯acute contradictions. One has the impression that they are like impossibilities. And She answered this: No, not impossibilities—it probably means you have to go deeper or higher to their meeting ground. That's how it works: the opposites get increasingly vehement until we find the point where they where unity is established. One must go deeper and deeper, or higher and higher—it's the same thing. All our old ways of understanding things are worthless—WORTHLESS. All, all our values are WORTHLESS. We are on the threshold of something truly marvellous, but we don't know how to keep it. Never, never before have I had such a sense of ignorance, of impotence, of of being a jumble of frightful contradictions, and I know, I KNOW—deep down, beyond speech— that it's because I don't know how to find the place where they they harmonize and unite. And strangely, almost at the same time, there's torture and bliss—almost at the same time. There you are.13
Of course, a new state which is neither bliss nor torture, neither good nor evil, neither life nor death … something else … that combines all that together and makes for a new substance, a new being, a new air. All our values of caterpillars⎯medical, spiritual, moral, legal or scientific⎯are worth nothing, because they are their own admirable thing, inflated and magnified. Even our ideas about transformation are perhaps pure human imagination…. There is another air, another environment. There is a place where everything meets. We carry all the contradictions that are needed to reach that place. So did Mother.
Would She reach that place in the body where the contradictions of the earth are reconciled⎯where life and death are reconciled? Or rather where they meet and fuse into a something else that is the third state we are looking for. A state in which transformation would not be a kind of individual feat, but the natural consequence of a certain way of being and breathing. Like the axolotl in its new environment. Some forty years earlier, in 1930, Mother had said: The true change of consciousness is one that will change the physical conditions of the world.
The Layer of Carbon
Then the great blows fell. Truly a frenzied demolition.
As if the passage were being dug in her own body.
The first one happened in August ’70, when her personal assistant, who had served her for so many years with great fidelity had to stop her work. One year before, She had already lost her smiling treasurer, Amrita, then Pavitra, her General Secretary, one of the only pure and solid elements around her. She was increasingly alone in front of the pack. For a month, during those days of August, 1970, her body struggled with death. Once more, the turning points of 1962 and 1968 repeated themselves: The experience of the body left to itself....14 It is the body, always, that must find the solution. And each time, it is emptied of whatever it may have acquired in the meanwhile. One has to go down to the place where the thing is done. I still hear her panting voice (her lung was affected, She was always coughing). If I remember once it’s over, I’ll have something really interesting to say. But I don’t know whether I’ll remember 15 And a few days later: This little body is like a point, but its impression is of being the expression of an awesome power, and it’s ... like this: no capacity, no expression, nothing—and rather miserable. And yet ... it’s like the condensation of an awesome power! At times, it even has difficulty bearing it, you understand? All experiences are as if multiplied a hundred times.... And then the legs hurt. You see, twenty-four hours a day, no possibility of real rest. That’s it.... If I let myself go, I would cry out.... Terrible! So that night, I said to myself, “Yes, this is how hell is.” Terrible, it’s terrible. I don’t see why I’ve had to go through this Because, you understand, that way, it was death that wasn’t a solution. That was frightful.16 She was touching the point, reaching the point where death was no longer a solution. Because in fact there was no death left in her body, no forgetting, no “one closes one’s eyes” and one leaves⎯leaves for where? She was fully conscious, each cell of her body was fully conscious, there was no “other side” of forgetting, nowhere to escape from that. Can we understand?… It’s so horrible that it ... I am tempted to say, pray for me.17 Lord….
At the same time, a disciple who had a remarkable power of vision saw this, which I noted down: “Mother was going down and down, sinking into the earth, then She was as if completely enveloped in a carbon layer. There was light where She was, but the thread that linked her to her origin was very tenuous: a tiny little thread that went through that layer of carbon. And at times the contact was cut⎯and Mother was in difficulty.” She was reaching that root of death. The radical asphyxiation. And at the same time, that formidable, almost crushing Power one felt around her, as if growing increasingly formidable as her body was annulled. I had the impression that I was all the pain of the world ... felt together. I don’t know how to explain. That sense of being crushed hasn’t gone yet. It’s like something preventing me from breathing freely. I had (and that was frightful), I had the consciousness of all that Sri Aurobindo suffered physically. And that was one of the things most ... the hardest to bear [Mother’s eyes were full of tears]. And our physical unconsciousness beside that, and the kind of physical torture He was subjected to. That was one of the most difficult things.18 Sri Aurobindo had reached the same place, there, among all those recalcitrant little axolotls. Now, She understood. And they “treated” him … as in medical books. “But that pain of the earth, I told Mother, is it not to call the supreme Consciousness there too, in the very depths? Yes, of course. That’s what I say to myself, what I try to find. There is something to find And She stopped, out of breath, as if suffocating. And it’s still there. There is one spot, like a spot where there is such a dreadful anguish.... It’s constant. It’s here. [Mother drew a bar across the top of her chest]. It’s here. And I am as if forbidden to exteriorize myself She could no longer leave her body. As if I absolutely had to find something. “We’ll overcome, sweet
Mother”. Yes. You understand, that it will be conquered I am absolutely certain of, but ... has the time come? That’s the question. And it’s this, this doubt, that’s a torture.19
Then She recovered. She started pacing her room again, indomitably, and her cough stopped ... the invasion of people started up again. If I could have purged the world of it by having those days of horror, then it doesn’t matter, I don’t mind.20
But She had not yet found the “something.”
Five months later, just a break to breathe a little, the second blow fell, even more radical, if possible. That place of the change had to be reached indeed. This time, it was a paralysis of her left leg (a blood-clot, it seems), I saw her again a month and a half later. What ties me down is this leg that became paralyzed, the lower part of it, from the knee to the heel. So naturally you become an imbecile, you can no longer do anything!... It is coming back little by little. There was a time when it was total: it was as cold as ice. There was no circulation. But it was not an innocent paralysis! For at least three weeks there was a continuous pain, night and day, 24 hours out of 24, without any let-up, none whatsoever: it was as if everything were being torn out of me.... This one [Mother touched her right leg] was on the verge of being paralyzed also, but the day it happened, I concentrated with a vengeance, I walked for a long, long time to keep it from being paralyzed. She would walk until the end. You could say I was just a cry all the time. It lasted a long time. It lasted several weeks (I didn't keep track). Then, gradually, it alternated with moments of peace when the pain in the leg subsided. And for the last two or three days, it seems to be recovering.... You know, it was such a it was the whole problem of the world—a world that was nothing but pain and suffering, and a great question mark: why? I tried every possible remedy: changing pain into pleasure, suppressing the capacity to feel, thinking about something else. I tried all the “tricks”—not a single one worked.
There is something in the physical world as it is which is not which still is not open to the Divine Vibration. And that “something” is what causes absolutely all the trouble.... The Divine Consciousness is not perceived. And so there are lots of IMAGINARY things (but very real to the sensation) that exist, while That, the only thing that's true, is not perceived.21
And here we reach something that is capital, as if all of that pain of the world, so concrete (a paralysis is not “innocent” or imaginary) were only due to a false consciousness of Matter or in Matter. But it is quite capital, because a consciousness can change. One could believe that death cannot change, any more than cancer or paralysis, but a consciousness can change.
There is a consciousness to change in Matter. There is a mode of vibration to change in Matter.
There is a true vibration that changes everything⎯including death.
Would a conscious axolotl, endowed with vision, not say that its subterranean environment is a false environment, a real unreality? An opaque illusion. Only, in the present case, the true environment already exists. We are in it. It is here.
One year earlier, in 1969, Mother had had an experience that was exactly the same but that I did not very well understand at the time, and in the same conditions of physical disintegration and pain as in 1970. Suddenly, in the midst of disintegration and suffering, a light, “something,” and everything was physically changed. As if that whole pain did not exist. A sort of corporeal repetition of the Buddhistic experience of Illusion⎯but instead of being destroyed in one’s consciousness up above, while the body continues to suffer below, it is destroyed in the body. It is in the body that there is an illusion to destroy. Never, never in this body’s whole, entire existence, has it felt such a total and profound sorrow as on that day, said Mother. Oh, something that made it ... You know, separation, then wickedness, cruelty, suffering, and then all disease, decomposition, death—destruction. (All that is part of a single thing.) The experience I had was the UNREALITY of those things, as though we had stepped into an unreal falsehood, and when you step out of it, everything vanishes—it does not exist, it isn’t. That’s what is frightful! What to us is so real, so concrete, so dreadful, all that does not exist. It’s ... stepping into Falsehood. Why? How? What?... And at the end of it all, Bliss. And then, pfft! it faded away, as if all this, which is so awful, did not exist. Something in the body that makes evil, death and destruction unreal. And all the methods—which we may call artificial, Nirvana included—all the methods to get out of it are worthless, Mother added. Beginning with the fool who kills himself to “put an end” to his life: of all stupidities, that one is the biggest. From that up to Nirvana (where one imagines one can get out of it), all of it is worth NOTHING. Those are different stages, but they’re worth nothing. And then, after that, when you really have a sense of perpetual hell, all of a sudden ... (nothing but a state of consciousness, it’s nothing but that), all of a sudden, a state of consciousness in which all is light, splendour, beauty, happiness, goodness “Oh, here it is,” and then pfft! It shows itself, and hop! it’s gone. And Mother asked herself: Is this, is this the lever?... I don’t know. But SALVATION IS PHYSICAL—not at all mental, but physical. I mean it’s not in escape: it’s HERE. There’s only ONE way out of all that, only ONE—ONLY one, not two, there’s no choice, there aren’t a few possibilities, there’s only one: it’s ... the supreme Door. The Marvel of Marvels. All the rest ... all the rest is an impossibility. But it’s not that it’s veiled or hidden or anything: it’s here. Why? What in the whole deprives you of the power to live that? I don’t know. It’s here, HERE! All the rest, including death and everything, really becomes a falsehood, that is to say, something that does not exist.22
Another environment where all that does not exist.
Mother was reaching the central point: that knot of Falsehood and pain, that layer of carbon. The absolute contradiction. The suffocation of the axolotl. And right in that, suddenly, something … a bliss, the Marvel. The lever. Something that changes in the vibration of Matter and that changes everything⎯including death: the old circuit of the axolotl. There has been a tremendous change, noted Mother after the days of horror in 1970 and 1971, but I can’t say anything about it 23 But the whole body has changed drastically. It really seems as if this physical being had been prepared for another consciousness, because for certain things ... its reactions are entirely different, its attitude is different. I went through a period of total indifference in which the world represented meant nothing. And then little by little a kind of new perception grew out of it I am only in the middle of it. But I have noticed how those things, the so-called catastrophes or calamities or mishaps or difficulties or how they all come JUST at the right moment to help you—JUST when it's needed to help you. You see, everything in the physical nature that still belonged to the old world and its habit and ways of doing and being and acting, all that couldn't be handled in any other way than this: by illness. It certainly was interesting.24 Just like Mother: She was studying the phenomenon. And after a long silence during which She peered into the distance, She suddenly remarked: The world is in a dreadful state. It too, within the carbon layer. “But, I told Mother, I never felt as intensely as I do now that the moment was close, very close!” ⎯Yes, yes, very close.... I think something has been achieved from a general standpoint; it wasn't just the difficulty of one body or one person: I think something was achieved in terms of preparing Matter to receive in the right way, correctly It will come. I don't know whether it will take months or years for the thing to become clear.25
And little by little, the thing became clear. A new passage was being dug in her body. Or a new state.
A state of consciousness that changes the physical world and the physical nature⎯resolving that eternal contradiction of life and death, of pain and bliss, of escaping to heaven or into Nirvana and the earth that rots. Truly a new evolution.
Salvation is physical.
So it is obvious that, if we find that, the physical transformation begins a natural, spontaneous consequence, as the amblystoma is the natural, spontaneous consequence of a little axolotl waking up from its layer of black silt.
This book is a challenge, all of Mother’s enterprise is a challenge, Sri Aurobindo’s silence was surely very wise, but what? I am trying. This is my own challenge and I have not finished looking into that stammering of a new world, I struggle with Mother’s forest just as She fought and struggled with the unknown. All the secrets are there, but unnamed⎯what formula will ever imprison the Amazon?⎯but one can walk there, lose oneself there, wander in all directions, and everything is as if full of meaning. Near Mother, one had the impression that She walked with a perpetual open sesame⎯each thing had its open sesame, down to the least trifle, everything was a perpetual open sesame. And the great Door can open at any page, any line of that Agenda: there is no need to understand, perhaps it is not even necessary, but to grasp hold of that straight little vibration which goes through all appearances and opens up the new world like a sudden cascade of laugh among hopeless trivialities and most obscure contradictions.
We do not know how to read what is here, right here. Mother is really the One who un-covers.
She grasped every minute of her life, every circumstance, in order to un-cover. Until the end. Never did She put a definitive meaning on things, because the meaning was to walk. Nothing was ever established, fixed: it was always the next step. She walked strangely upon nothing to make the something spring up at every step. And it was alive, it was brand new, it was like perpetual dynamite in the old crust that we carry about.
And now, what was She going to blow up?
No, She would not leave behind any Gospel or system or anything one can really walk on, but I don’t know what definitive hole in the carapace of the terrestrial habits of seeing and living, and an open sesame that only waits for our becoming aware of it.
The whole evolution is meant to lead us to Matter’s last open sesame.
Two States of Matter
A hole, of course, is illogical, things do not continue to be as they were before. And Mother did not know where on earth She was setting foot⎯neither do I. So, the best I can do is to go on with the “clinical picture,” in case it would happen to give a curve in the end. After those days of horror, something had really been given birth, but what? “One cannot say anything about it,” she said⎯one only understands the lotus seed when it has become a flower. The next world will understand Mother very well. I am in a state where I know nothing, that's all. And so my one and only refuge is to sort of curl up in the Divine, you know.... As if. To be You, that's all. Do what You want with me, that's all It's as if you were standing on a ridge and the least misstep would pitch you into a hole. Everything seems different, all the everything seems so different. The nature of the relations with people is changing, the nature of everything is changing, but what? What? It's like being on the brink or point or ... hanging in balance—a tremendous Power (there's a tremendous power, I have some examples), and at the same time, an incredible helplessness. You know: it's like being suspended between the most marvellous and the vilest. Like that. I don't know, better not to speak of it I don't even know where I am going—whether I am going towards transformation or towards the end.1 Never would She know. “I am not told.” And transformation, what was it? There was the vile old thing, then…. Nothing in between. Or something so new that it was really unidentifiable⎯if one could identify it, it would no longer be new! And it is always the same story: it takes a lot of time to identify what is there. In life’s ordinary condition, the body has a sort of stable base as a result of which it isn’t uncomfortable, it can be quite busy with other things while remaining neutral: its existence goes unnoticed, and it doesn’t require a continuous attention in order to be in a ... favourable state. It’s an automatically functioning instrument. But in this present condition, the minute the body’s attention stops being wholly turned to the Divine, it becomes very miserable. But the whole rest of the time, if it’s not ACTIVELY concentrated, it’s enough to make it feel quite miserable. Then it becomes terrible 2
Concretely, the “Divine” was the other state, the other automatism, the one that made that body walk, breathe and last rather miraculously, and if the body forgot that or got out of that even for a second, it was like instant suffocation⎯of course, as the old laws did not work anymore. As soon as She went back into the cage, it was instantly the law of death. And yet, She was right in it … without being in it. In the old world and in the new one. One foot here, one foot there. Torture and bliss. Life, death. I don’t know if this is special to it, but the atmosphere is full of the most absurd suggestions [catastrophic thoughts everywhere and constantly, up to the end]. All that disappears only when it’s ACTIVELY concentrated.3 Truly a poisoned air, the carbon layer without interruption. So then: suffocation, light air; life, death, at each breath in fact. Can one understand? At each instant, each second, one had to transform the air of the old species into the air of the new one⎯or else to die or give up and go into bliss for good, outside of that wretched story. I don’t know if that’s special to this body or if it will be the same thing for all bodies. Naturally, it’s fully aware that this is a transitional period, but ... it’s very difficult.4 Perhaps She was in the process of creating another “air” with her little gasps, an air for all those who were beginning to suffocate too. Now and then, for a few seconds, there is perhaps a “specimen” of what is to be, what will be—when, I don’t know—it lasts a few seconds.
That’s wonderful, but It’s a very strange impression, as if one were on the edge— but on the edge of what? I don’t know.5
And everything was different. Not only did her body no longer breathe in the usual way and move according to the usual laws, as if suspended between two airs or two ways of being, yet equally physical since it involved a body⎯a mortal physical and another physical one did not know what it was, except that it was its true breathing, its air that did not suffocate, the automatism that made it move exactly, work smoothly, “that” which allowed things to “go on and on”⎯but its perception of the world was different. One might say or think that She was living or seeing in another world; but there lay precisely the mystery: it was not more a nonphysical world than it was nonphysical laws. It was one and the same physical world, but differently seen and lived, as if there were another category of physical laws, another category of physical sight, another category of existence, one within the other. Perhaps the next world and the next species that strove to emerge, still half-veiled by the residue of the old species. Yes, between the caterpillar and the butterfly, and at times it was the caterpillar, at times the butterfly⎯but the caterpillar and the butterfly are both physical. Strangely, they seem to be just the same, and they become very different.6 I'll be eating, and suddenly everything present vanishes from the consciousness, and long afterwards, I realize I am like this, with a spoon in my hand! ... Not very practical! “But what happens while you go off like that?” I asked. Oh, it's quite interesting! But I don't “go off,” you see. I am not at all in a trance: I am wide awake and fully active. I see things, I do things, I hear people, I ... the whole time. But I forget—I simply forget about material life. Then someone comes and abruptly calls me back. I don't go out of material life, but it appears different.
And Mother sat staring thoughtfully. I really think the physical world is changing. People will probably notice it only in a few hundred years, because it takes a long time for it to become visible to the ordinary consciousness. But the touch … [Mother felt the air, the atmosphere between her fingers] feels ... as if a different texture. Yes, the world of the butterfly beginning to emerge, or perhaps the air that will allow the next species to breathe⎯the air that perhaps is already preparing the next species, which we already breathe unknowingly and which slowly gets our cells used to a new way of being, breathing and seeing. A slow, invisible transformation. Then She added with a smile: From time to time, something tells me, “Don't talk, don't talk!” I have to keep quiet, otherwise people around me would think I am becoming deranged. And I insisted, repeating: “It is not just the vision of the physical world that changes, it is the very quality of the substance?”⎯Yes, yes, it's not at all my own way of seeing—not at all But it's odd. It is PHYSICAL, that's what is amazing! Before, I used to withdraw into an inner state of being (I know them all, I've experienced them, I've had a conscious life), but all that is finished. Completely finished. As if the physical world were becoming double.7
Two worlds, one within the other. Two levels of physical reality.
And one can wonder who or what it is that has this vision or perception of the other physical reality, because it could be simply another “way of seeing,” as a visionary has another way of seeing, or even as a being of another species has another way of seeing, as the butterfly’s vision is different from the caterpillar’s. Now, what is very curious in the present case is that the butterfly was within the caterpillar’s very body. It was not another species that saw, not a higher vision of Mother: it was the body that saw, the body’s cells that saw, the very material consciousness that saw Matter and saw it in a different way, lived it in a different way. It was not outside of Matter, another type of Matter: it was Matter itself. For, one day, Mother made this very revealing remark: For the body consciousness that remains conscious when the body is asleep, the world as it is (externally or superficially) is dark and muddy—always. That is, it’s always a half-darkness—you can hardly see—and mud. And that isn’t an opinion or a feeling: it’s a material FACT. Consequently, this body consciousness is already conscious of a world ... that would no longer be subject to the same laws.8 The consciousness of Matter, of the body, not veiled by the mental crust and by the organs of the external senses submitted to the laws of the Mind⎯the consciousness that is left in the body when everything else is asleep and the external organs are obliterated, blind, closed, that consciousness that is almost like that of a man who is dead to the world⎯which sees and perceives the physical world in another way, and not only does it see it differently, but it is submitted to other physical laws, which we never have the opportunity of knowing, except under hypnosis or in abnormal states, because they are hidden to us by the whole mental superstructure. It is the cellular level, the one at which Mother lived, from which She saw the material world differently and which made her body live according to laws that were miraculous for a body assailed by age, heart attacks and the rush of the world.
“As if the physical became double”: the old physical of the mental world, mental vision, mental laws, and the other one. So we understand now how strangely She came and went between all that drew her to the surface, suffocated her on the surface, which was like death to her, and the other, cellular state. Every minute: do you want life, do you want death; do you want life, do you want death?... It's as if every minute the body could die, and every minute it's miraculously saved. It is ... incredible. Incredible. And with a constant perception of world events, as if everything, but everything were ... as if interlinked—a link. 9
A universal, cellular level. Two states of Matter.
But I was eager to know more about that other state, what was it like, how did it work? She answered me in her clear little voice, slow and hesitant, as if her words had layers upon layers to cross before crystallizing in little drops as at the end of a stalactite. When I remain like that… quiet… after a while a whole world of things gets done, gets organized, but it's ... another kind of reality, a more ... substantial reality. How is it more substantial? I don't know. Matter seems unsubstantial compared to that. Unsubstantial, opaque, unreceptive. Whereas that is ... and Mother sat smiling. The funny part is that people think I am asleep!... I hardly belong to the old world anymore, so the old world says: she's finished—I couldn't care less! And She laughed, then pulled on a small garland of flowers She was wearing around her wrist and which She called “Patience.” Patience—do you want my patience? She put her garland round my wrist. Repeatedly it's: patience, patience, patience But the others, too, must be patient.10
“I hardly belong to the old world anymore….”
What was going to happen between those two states?
A great illusion of Matter and … an unknown reality.
Tomorrow’s Unknown
It is difficult to describe the hell She traversed those last three years and to say where it was leading to or what it was hiding or preparing. There is no clinical picture of pure pain. There was a mystery that one felt growing, becoming more and more acute, almost palpable⎯something that was full of an unknown meaning: it was there, one could touch it. But what? I hardly dared ask Mother questions anymore. She was herself a mute question, ardent, immobile and traversed by little cries of pain. And sometimes She laughed and laughed, making fun of all that hellish contradiction in her and around her, as if only humour could bear all that, or Love: A silence ... that worships.11 And the pain of the world, the chaos of the world seemed to grow, the contradiction of the world as in her own body⎯one and the same body in transition … towards what? One day, as if strangled by that suffocation of the world, I told her, looking at her body as if really one could read, touch and feel there all of the mystery of the earth imprisoned in its carbon layer: “The only solution is for you to have a glorious body, visible to all, then everyone could come and see: Come and see the Divine, what it looks like!” And She laughed and laughed: Yes, of course! That would be really convenient. Will it be like that?... That’s certain, I wholly agree! And I would be very happy if it were anyone, I don’t have the least desire that it should be mine!12 “Because, I said, the world has reached such an acute state of suffering and pain that … it seems that the TIME has come?” She sat staring in silence. There’s a refusal to answer.13 She could say nothing, She was herself the question, the living question of the world. “Because really,” I urged her, “it is the moment for one body to change enough to be able to give a concrete hope to humankind. The day that Power has sufficiently entered your Matter, you will be able to pass it on to other bodies that will be ready?” Ah, but the possibility ALREADY exists. I have constant proof of that—extraordinary proof. You know, little miracles take place all the time, all the time.14
Little miracles of a new air… which does not put on airs.
Lots of surreptitious little miracles that cross the web, or the carbon layer, without putting on airs. “Something” is perhaps taking place, without our being aware of it, as we do not know where to look. And that miraculous transformation of a “representative” body may vanish in front of something far more serious, profound and ineradicable that was being built for the world, silently, painfully, behind the little cries of that body imprisoned in the black misery of the world.
It is the mystery to resolve.
Mother’s “unknown.”
And there, we have nothing but our heart to grope our way through the ultimate redoubt of Mother’s forest…. There was the “other state” that made her move, breathe, see and hear⎯a miracle of each minute⎯and this one, our state, mortal and suffocating; and in between, the no-man’s-land She never stopped ploughing in a frightful back and forth movement, suspended in nothing: “One could not bear it more than a few seconds,” and it lasted and lasted…. There are many little seconds in three times 365 days. Perhaps that ploughing was the road of the “little miracles” leading to our earth’s crust? There was a road that was being hewed, but what road? She did not know, She was hewing the road, She was the road. She was her burning question in between. And sometimes, it was suffocating with mystery. It's as if all the ways of seeing the world were passing by one after the other: the most detestable and the most marvellous—like this, like that ... [Mother turned her hand like a kaleidoscope], and they all come to tell me: “See, you can look at it this way, you can look at it that way, you can....” But the Truth ... what is true? ... There is all that and “something” we don't know. First of all, I am convinced that the need to “see” things, to think them, is purely human and is a transitory device. It is a transitory phase, which seems terribly long to us, but in fact is rather short. Even our consciousness is an adaptation of the Consciousness—THE Consciousness, the true Consciousness is something else.... But what? And so the conclusion for my body is ... to curl up in the Divine. Not to try to understand, not to try to know: try to BE And “like this” [in that
“being”], the Power is tremendous, in the sense that for instance, for some people, a particular illness vanishes (without my doing anything outwardly in fact, without my even speaking to anyone, absolutely nothing—it's cured); for still another person, it's the end, he goes over to the other side. But then that other side has become both quite familiar to me and ... totally unknown.15
And that is where we are really entering an enigma. It seemed that She well knew that “other side,” among the so-called dead, She constantly went to that place where the living and the dead are together. “Crowds,” she would say. At the cellular level, in the corporeal consciousness, the barrier no longer exists, the “other side” is on the same side, it is only the other side of our mental web, of our mental Matter.
And suddenly, that “other side,” so familiar, was becoming as if unknown. What did it mean? What was happening? What change was taking place in Mother’s structure, which made that it was not as before? A new state of Mother?… What state?
And Mother continued: I remember a time when the memory of past lives, the memory of night activities was so very concrete; the so-called invisible world was totally concrete—now ... now everything is like a dream—everything—everything is like a dream veiling a Reality ... an unknown Reality, and yet appreciable.16 The “invisible” was becoming as imaginary as the material?! So where are we? Past lives, excursions out of the body, worlds, levels of consciousness⎯and even this visible Matter. What was happening? You asked me, Mother continued; When I am silent and motionless like this, what is happening?” In point of fact it's an attempt: the truth as it is. Not trying to know or understand it (it is all one to me): to be—to be—to be And then [Mother had a smile so full of sweetness.] Then curiously enough: at the same time—at the same time—not one in the other or one with the other, but one AND the other, at the same time: marvellous and dreadful.... Life as it is, as we feel it in our ordinary consciousness—as it is for men—seems something but so dreadful that one wonders how it can be lived even a single minute; and the other, AT THE SAME TIME: a marvel. A marvel of light, consciousness, power—wondrous. And a power, a power! 17
And all that in the body, simultaneously. A sort of unknown Reality that seemed to cross the road of that no-man’s-land and emerge, mixed with the most absolute pain, with the frightful misery of our condition inside the carbon layer. So at one and the same time one can be in a painful and incomprehensible and absurd life and absolutely at the same time ... unutterably marvellous. So naturally I can't speak to anyone anymore, I can say it only to you, because people would think I am going mad.18
A third state … which seemed to be on the other side and here at the same time. And which changed both the other side and here. An unknown, impossible new Reality. Almost unlivable. An incredible junction which created an insufferable contradiction of pain and marvel⎯in the body.
What did all that meant? Where was it going?
It was in 1971. Mother did not know.
I have a feeling I am becoming another person. No, not just that: I am entering ANOTHER world, another way of being ... which might be called a dangerous way of being. As if ... [and Mother nodded her head] dangerous, but wonderful. The feeling that the relation between what we call “life” and what we call “death” is becoming more and more different—yes, different, completely different And Mother remained silent, with her blue eyes wide open on the yellow copper-pod tree and Sri Aurobindo’s abode…. NOT THAT DEATH DISAPPEARS, mind you (death as we see it, as we know it and in relation to life as we know it): that's not it, not it at all. BOTH are changing ... into something we don't yet know, which seems at once extremely dangerous and absolutely marvellous. Dangerous: the least mistake has catastrophic consequences. And marvellous. The least mistake? To lose the thread in the no-man’s- land that is in the process of … in the process of what? Of filling with that unknown new Reality? Our natural tendency, Mother continued, is to want certain things to be true (those which seem favourable to us) and other things to disappear [like “death”]—but that's not it! It isn't like that. EVERYTHING is different. Different. Then Mother closed her eyes, perhaps listening to the beat of that strange new “life” that did not belong to any side. From time to time, for a moment (a brief moment): a marvel. But the very next minute: the feeling of ... a dangerous unknown. There you are. That's how I spend my time.19
And if it were the world as it is? The true “as it is” that emerges? It was in 1972. Mother was 94.
The body has the sensation of hanging between two states: one which people call life, and the other which people call death. The body feels it’s hanging between the two: neither alive nor ... [laughing] dead, like that, neither one nor the other. It’s between the two. In no-man’s land.... And that’s very odd. Very odd. There is an impression (not an impression, it’s a perception) that the slightest disorder would be enough to fling it to the other side, and that this very slight movement “this way” is made impossible by something one doesn’t understand.... Something that kept you from “dying.” And it takes very little to ... One just has to keep very still. And suddenly Mother added this: There is clearly an active Will at work for this body to learn to live in a state in which there is neither life nor death—a state which is something else.20
The third state.
But sometimes, She gave a cry all the same, so gripping was that new mystery⎯gripping like a new air one is not used to breathing, probably it was exactly that: Obviously, everything is designed so that the only support is in the Divine [of course, for She literally walked on nothing, except that “something”]. But I am not told what the “Divine” is—how do you like that!... Amazing!... At ninety-four, Mother no longer knew what the Divine was! Everything else is collapsing, except the ... the WHAT? The Divine ... something—what?... And She sat staring so intensely, one felt in one’s veins, one’s body and heart such an intense question that it burnt⎯it was burning to live near her. Then She added: It's like an attempt to make you feel there isn't any difference between life and death. There. That it is something else than life or death—neither what we call “death,” nor what we call “life”—it is ... something. And that ... is Divine. Or rather it is our next step towards the Divine.21
Then everything tears open, gets clearer: It is the next step, the next state of human consciousness, a state that transforms both life and death. It is the true consciousness of immortality.22 That which has the power to undo death because death no longer exists, it is something else. Something that has melted into a third state where both sides are one. No more sides, finished. The no-man’s-land is filled, that is where we are going. This is what was being built in Mother’s body: the unknown of tomorrow. The mutation of both sides. The constant “little miracle.” Then the transformation of the body is a secondary consequence, we can see it now: if we breathe that air, everything changes, everything is different. Death exists only if we want it or are unable to follow the movement of progress; transformation is the natural, inevitable result of that new breathing. It is no longer life, it is no longer death, it is something else… a divine something else.
Divine life on earth.
An immortal consciousness in the body that remoulds the body in its immortal image. What was up above or at the very bottom of Matter under the carbon crust has come HERE. All the splendours you experience by rising, going out, leaving the body, are nothing. It's nothing, it doesn't have that concrete reality. It appears vague in comparison with HERE. This is truly why the world was created.23 The Supreme only becomes perfect in terrestrial Matter, on earth.24
It is not death that must be abolished, it is not life that must be embellished. It is radically something else that changes those two nightmares into a marvel.
The unknown of tomorrow.
Which is right here, in the air, waiting to be breathed. Truly a mutation of death.
In a clear little cell which has journeyed the long course of pain since original Matter is hidden the ultimate key to the two worlds as if in one.
Matter performs its own miracle.
The eternal traveller rediscovers his complete eternity in a body, its totality in a point.
There we are. This is the Hour.
And Mother, one day, grasped hold of and gave a name to that Hour that I did not know how to define, that state that I did not know how to describe⎯for once, She gave a name. And She named it “just like that,” by chance, among other things, as She used to do, without attaching too much importance to it, for in truth, She lived labels, She was creating our next label (if we absolutely have to have one). That’s what I have learned: the bankruptcy of religions was because they were divided—they wanted you to follow one religion to the exclusion of all others. And all human knowledge has gone bankrupt because it was exclusive. And man has gone bankrupt because he was exclusive. What the New Consciousness wants is: no more divisions. To be capable of understanding the extreme spiritual, the extreme material, and to find ... to find the meeting point where ... it becomes a true force. And it’s trying to teach that to the body too, through the most radical means.25 The impossible contradiction the true force sprang up from, or rather which was becoming the true force, the other state. And She added this: The step forward humanity must take IMMEDIATELY is a definitive cure of exclusivism. They all say, “This and not that”—no, this AND that, and this too and that too, and everything at the same time. To be supple enough and wide enough for everything to be together. That’s what I keep knocking myself against at present, in every field—every field. In the body too. The body is used to, “This and not that; this or that....”—No, no, no: this AND that. And of course, the great Division: life and death—there you are. Everything is the effect of that. Well (words are stupid but...), overlife is life and death together.26
Overlife.
The state of the superman.
And with her crystalline humour, She corrected herself: Why call it “overlife”?! We are always tempted to lean to one side: light and darkness (“darkness,” well ...). Ah, we’re quite small.27 Indeed, we could call it overdeath!… And it is precisely in that “darkness,” the very one that saints, doctors, police, governments or moralists tried to deny, abolish, change or improve, that the key is to be found. In the very darkness of that carbon layer, that absolute contradiction, lies the Force where the two meet and are transmuted into WHAT IS.
“The Sun in the darkness.” Matter’s next state.
Divine and immortal Matter.
In 1953, nearly twenty years before, a little girl had had a strange vision which she had noted down in English in her school notebook, without understanding a thing. And that notebook fell into my hands, open at the entry of January 5, 1953: “I saw Mother coming back from the balcony. Pavitra was there. He asked Mother for a “message.” Mother handed him a drawing and said: “This contains Life and Death. You can choose what you wish. The person capable of joining the two doors will be saved.” On the drawing, one could see two houses with lovely green trees. Through the trees, I saw two doors: they were separated and closed.”
And the two doors are ONE. In the body.
It is the supreme Door.
But Mother’s mystery is not over.
Perhaps even it is the true mystery that is beginning.
We have found a pretty little label, “overlife,” and all is exorcised, we think⎯and that air is actually there, light, new, for those who know how to breathe (and even for those who do not want to breathe), but all that could take centuries. Ineluctably, obviously, that overlife is the next step of the species, it is as inevitable as man after the small lizard. A change of air, or of environment, which will modify all structures. All evolutionary beginnings, we suppose, seem like nothing. A tiny golden lichen that clings to a bare stone; a few, rather mad men who live bizarrely here and there. But can we afford to delay for centuries? There were Charlemagne and Louis le Débonnaire and at the time, well, one could wait centuries; then suddenly life accelerated in a strange way which had even nothing to do with our machines⎯an inner acceleration, as if we were hurled into a funnel that sucks us forward, makes us convulse, kneads, builds and demolishes us in three seconds, cuts all of the scientific, moral or legal ground from under our feet, and we walk as if on nothing, ceaselessly inventing a nothing that is immediately demolished. And all that proceeds towards something that is not to happen centuries later, it is obvious. We are not rushing, we are being rushed towards something. We would have to be completely blind not to understand that the supermind, or overlife, or whatever we call it, is at the door⎯not even at the door: in our blood, in our veins and cells. With a lot of strange little things becoming stranger and stranger and swarming on all sides as soon as we begin to look more closely, in the right direction. It is swarming with small miracles, small encounters, small coincidences, as if the carbon crust were beginning to let strange signals break through all its pores. It even resembles a gigantic intertwining of signals. It is like small animals in a forest: You remain silent for a while and they start moving everywhere. Only, we do not know that type of silence, which is not even the silence of meditation, no: a certain silence in Matter, in our bodies, in our eyes. We say: “Oh, this is granite; this is a toothache, this is a scorpion, this is my foot bumping into the sidewalk, and this is … as usual,” a million optico-physiologic small labels which hide the real, the absolute miracle of each thing. The innumerable message that everything brings us. They haven't found, they haven’t found the true path, Mother said one day about the young. Because it's not a mental path.1 It has nothing to do with going off to inaccessible regions: it's RIGHT HERE. Although, for the moment, all the old habits and the general unconsciousness have put a sort of lid on it, which prevents us from seeing and feeling. We must ... we must lift it off. It's everywhere, you see—always everywhere. It doesn't come and go: it's always there ... everywhere. It's we, it's our stupidity that keeps us from feeling it. There's no need to go off anywhere ... no need at all, none at all.2 Indeed, a cow looking at a meadow and a man looking at a meadow do not see the same thing. We have to look at the terrestrial meadow differently. To lift off the mental lid.
And it is there, everywhere there.
But what is very interesting is that when we begin to look there, it seems to multiply the phenomenon, as if it only awaited a sign to swarm everywhere in a kind of formidable complicity of everything. Then… then we wonder whether those huge, leaden centuries could not instantly melt in a kind of general little twinkling, the moment when suddenly we begin to look there. Perhaps it will be the moment when an immense laugh seizes us, or a sense of marvel that will make us definitively leave our human skins. Like that, suddenly, we will be there.
Perhaps it is when Mother’s last mystery will reveal itself.
For there is still a mystery.
Mother’s forest is full of mysteries.
Only one has to look with one’s body’s eyes.
Another Physical Air
Slowly, She was joining the two doors in her body.
We say “overlife” as if it were settled once and for all, a sort of new fixed state, rather strange perhaps, but delimit able and nameable; but for her, nothing was settled or exorcised, nothing stopped anywhere, it was always the same shifting and dangerous unknown that developed, progressed, one did not know in what mortal or living⎯or supermortal or superliving⎯direction, and brought her into a growing contradiction, which would result in … what? What seemed clear was that that state created the conditions that were necessary to the transformation of the body⎯transformation, but when? She could not wait centuries (or if She could, the others could not), and transformation, how?… She advanced in all that without knowing anything, between torture and bliss, disintegration and a transformation that strangely resembled the disintegration of the end. And all that with a clear, lucid consciousness which perceived everything, saw everything and observed the phenomenon almost scientifically, in the least detail. So we can hardly do anything but continue the clinical picture (perhaps we should rather say the lab notebook) in the hope that a curve will emerge⎯we are interested in that curve, it is our curve, it is tomorrow’s mystery. It is our path that opens up. Afterwards, we will go as if it were quite natural; telegraph posts will be there and we will say: “But it was so simple!” Or perhaps: “But come on, this is evolution!” Amen. Unless we are cured of labels and begin to see the living miracle of everything.
The phenomenon of the contradiction was clear and well laid out, painfully led out: Truly, the ordinary state, the old state, is consciously death and suffering. And then in the other state, death and suffering appear to be ... absolutely unreal—there you are.3 And it is not a psychological “unreality,” a sort of fantasy of a “liberated” consciousness on its clouds, no: pain subsides physically, heart attacks stop physically, and death cannot act. When I say nothing and just stay like this, immobile ... an attitude of absolute surrender, things go on well. But if the slightest thing pulls me out of it, I feel ... as if I were about to die. Extraordinary!4 In fact, it is not “as if”: it is a sort of instant asphyxiation. I feel as if to make myself heard I have to lift a staggering weight. I feel as if I have to speak very, very loudly to be heard [her voice actually seemed to traverse layers]; it's almost like a mass ... yes, as though I were buried underground and had to shout very loudly in order to be heard. But the underground was precisely our outside, in the old state, whenever She had to speak, explain, solve sordid problems. ... And it's an effort, a considerable effort. There is a sort of mass, the colour of brownish earth, weighing down on me, as though I were buried and had to shout. Like the axolotl waking up in the depths of its hole. And I told Mother, trying to understand: “It must be the thickness of consciousnesses that you feel?” It's the air—it's in the air.5 Of course, her physical air was made of something else. There was another physical air. Another way of breathing in which death, illness and pain did not exist, could not come in. They were an impossibility there. There was a true Matter beneath the carbon layer. And the phenomenon was becoming more and more pronounced. Things have taken an extreme form. There's a sort of lifting of the whole atmosphere towards an almost ... inconceivable splendour, and AT THE SAME TIME, there's a feeling that one can ... die any moment—not “die,” but the body could dissolve. Both things together make up a strange consciousness She hewed a path through the carbon layer, her very asphyxiation pierced, bored the path to the other state in this one. She made the “thing” emerge with each of her little gasps for air. And She nodded her head: All past experiences seem puerile, childish, unconscious. And this [the other thing] ... is stupendous and wonderful. But the body has a single prayer—always the same: Make me worthy of knowing You; Make me worthy of serving You; Make me worthy of being You There. I can barely eat anymore, and I am not hungry. I feel a growing strength in me but new in quality ... in silence and contemplation. Nothing is impossible.6
Nothing is impossible there.
Transformation is child’s play.
It is the natural, obvious, almost obliged consequence of that state⎯there are no “laws” there. There is only the Law. But … one has to make the junction with the old bark. She spent her time making the junction. So it’s something that must change in the body’s vibration for the Consciousness to manifest without distortion. The very body, the physical consciousness, is full of all those falsehoods and all those illusions and all those preconceived ideas, and when that is gone, then the Lord can manifest in there. Distortion is what creates ... a misery, you know, which now the body finds frightful. When that disappears, gets transformed : it’s a bliss.7
Something that must change in the body’s vibration. As if transformation only and simply depended on a little “something” that falsifies, veils, distorts, in the body’s consciousness. “That little vibration which falsifies,”8 She had already said in 1950. No tissues to transform, no cells to rejuvenate, no bones to make supple or regenerate: a mere vibration to change. A vibration that causes all aging, rigidity, illness, decomposition⎯the whole damned story. Not a hundred things: only one. And that little distorted vibration is perhaps even the very one that creates the whole carbon layer. Change that, and the true Consciousness flows into the tissues, the bones, the nerves … the earth. Then nothing is impossible. A change of position in the physical consciousness. Something that annuls the distorting little vibration.
But through what mechanism? How does the axolotl in its hole manage to breathe the other air?
Another Physical Rhythm
As usual, the remedy lay in the contradiction itself. Mother was living the solution, it was arising by itself, more and more. The phenomenon that seemed to accompany and almost characterize the state of overlife was a change of time. We saw it emerge and develop at the cellular level, as if the pure cells, freed from the physical Mind’s web, were endowed with another time, just as they were endowed with universality and so swift a movement of consciousness that it was as if instantly everywhere. It is the time of true Matter, we could say. The time of overlife. It was that phenomenon that was to accelerate and reach bigger proportions, so much so that it seemed to invade Mother’s body, visibly taking hold of the old bark⎯filling the carbon layer as if to change its substance and content, the vibration that veiled and falsified.
A change of time necessarily means a change in the vibration of the body’s consciousness: something that accelerates or slows down. And that is where the experience was to take a new curve, or perhaps simply follow its curve right to the end. I don't know how to describe what it is. And when it's normal, it can last indefinitely, there's no sense of time or fatigue or duration. When the old consciousness comes back, there's almost unbearable suffering: I am suffocating or I can't breathe, or it's too cold or too hot, all sorts of things ... which are aggravated by a consciousness which shouldn't be there anymore. You see, my body is full of pains, but as soon as I go into that state everything is done—time doesn't exist anymore. Time is endless in the old consciousness, while it doesn't exist in this one. I don’t know how to describe it. Being flowery, I would say: the old consciousness is like ... it's death, it's as if you were going to die any minute: you suffer, you ... it's the consciousness that leads to death. And the other one is life ... peaceful life, eternal life.9 In the body, in this old bark itself.
And the phenomenon was to get denser day after day, take shape before our very eyes. When I remain still and enter that Consciousness, time flies with fantastic speed, in a kind of ... luminous calm. But the slightest thing that pulls me out of it seems to pull me into hell. Exactly. The discomfort is so great one feels one couldn't last a minute or a few minutes like that. So one ... one calls the Divine. You feel like curling up in the Divine. And then it goes well.10 But what happens in that state? “What do you see there, what do you look at?” was my eternal question. And She smiled. I feel like saying: nothing! Nothing, I see nothing. There's no longer “something that sees,” but I AM, I am a myriad things. I LIVE a myriad things. There are so, so many—so many—that it's like nothing! And She laughed. Then She further explained: A state which is so, so vast ... peaceful and so powerful—where things are accomplished. But there are no words or explanations—nothing satisfying for the Mind.11
And She laughed at me. But one day, nonetheless, She tried to explain, a mysterious explanation in which I seemed to seize, without understanding, a secret, a great secret.
She was looking at all those difficulties of the world, of the body, that hell, and She said, in her hesitating little voice, as if She were traversing layers upon layers, “the colour of brownish earth.” More and more I am convinced that we have a way of receiving things and reacting to them that CREATES difficulties—I am more and more convinced of it. If you succeed in being in the true Consciousness all the time, there are no difficulties—and yet things are the same.12 There is no such thing as illness, tiredness, unbalance⎯no death⎯and yet things are the same. The microbes are the same. The day before yesterday, I was sick as a dog, and yesterday circumstances were the same, my body was in the same state and yet ... all was peaceful. If only I didn't have so much trouble speaking. That explains everything. It explains everything, all, all. The world is the same—but it is seen and felt in a totally opposite way. It's like death, you see. The phenomenon is transitional, but seems to us to have existed forever (it's forever for us because our consciousness is like this) [Mother drew a little square in the air], but when you have that divine consciousness, oh! things become almost instantaneous, you understand. I can't explain it. There IS movement, there IS progression, there IS what is translated for us by time, that exists, it's something ... something in the consciousness.... It's hard to express.... It's like an object and its projection. A little like that. All things ARE, but for us, we see them projected on a screen, one comes after another. It's a little like that. But Truth is ... the Divine as totality—totality in time and totality in space. And that consciousness, the body CAN have, because this body had it and while it has it, everything is so you see, it's not joy, it's not pleasure, it's not happiness, nothing of all that ... a sort of blissful peace and luminous and creative. Magnificent, magnificent. Only, it comes and goes, comes and goes And when you go out of it, you have the impression of falling into a horrible pit, our ordinary consciousness (I mean the ordinary human consciousness) is a horrible pit. But we also know why it had to be momentarily that way [in evolution], for it was necessary in order to go from this to that: everything that happens is necessary for the full development of the goal of creation. You could say (to use pretty words): the goal of creation is for the creature to become conscious as the Creator. It's word-painting, but it's in that direction. This creation's goal is that Consciousness of the Infinite and Eternal, all-powerful ... outside of time: each individual particle possessing that Consciousness; each individual particle containing that same Consciousness Words are stupid, but that's how it is. That gives both the reason and the goal of creation— both at once—and almost the METHOD of development. Yes, it's like something that IS, that is as a whole and is successively projected on a screen. And yet it exists as a whole—and it is projected successively on a screen. I have the impression [and this is where Mother touched that Secret] ...that I am on the way to discovering the illusion that must be destroyed so that physical life can be uninterrupted—discovering that death comes from a ... a distortion of consciousness. That's it.13
The screen that imprisons time, the vibration that distorts.
A “distorting magic,” Sri Aurobindo said.
And She added: Something IS happening—that's all I can say.14
It was Christmas day, 1971.
Remove the screen and everything is the same, and there is no death. Death has never been there. A change of consciousness, a change of time that suppresses death. Death was the transition, the long evolutionary transition within the cage in order to find, hounded and whipped by pain, the total state in the body.
Remove the screen, and the two sides are ONE.
There is a distortion, a false vibration in the body that creates death⎯illnesses, unbalances, disorders. The abominable chaos of this world. A … real illusion. But an illusion nonetheless. An evolutionary illusion for us to grow within the cage … then break it open. Break the screen and physical life can go on uninterrupted, nothing impedes. Nothing impedes. Death was a necessary illusion in order to reach the total state, without death, in a body.
Just a small vibration which distorts. Which veils.
A false time in the body’s consciousness.
Transformation means a change in the physical consciousness of time.
Then the world will be exactly the same, but it will be lived differently altogether⎯without heaven and without tombs.
As great a difference as between the consciousness of the mineral and that of the animal.
Something that must change in the physical vibration of the earth.
Perhaps it is what is happening without our being aware of it: another rhythm in the body’s cells (not in our heads, the head does not understand anything about it⎯but the body understands). There is a rhythm of the mineral, a rhythm of the vegetal, a rhythm of the animal, and there is the other rhythm.
That was what was trying to take place in Mother’s body, and through her in the body of the earth.
It is like another time that has entered this one.
“Something is happening. That’s all I can say.”
At Any Second
And one wonders whether that mysterious screen is not there everywhere, before our very eyes, so totally visible and simple that it is as if invisible⎯that is, EVERYTHING is exactly as it should be, marvellously as it should be, at every moment as it should be, luminously as it should be, without an atom of darkness anywhere, without a grain of error anywhere, without an iota of contradiction: the constant Marvel, constant Light, constant Truth of everything, in the least detail, even in apparent horrors, apparent disorders, apparent falsehoods, apparent pains, apparent deaths, but … it is SEEN IN THE WRONG WAY. And the second it is seen as it is, in its truth behind the falsehood, in its light behind darkness, in its bliss behind the pain, in its eternal life behind death, in its all-powerful and smiling Rhythm behind the chaos, everything is REVERSED, instantly: there is no longer anything but That. And the death we were about to enter, the pain and despair we were about to sink into, the physical disorder, the illness and the murder that were about to happen or had even laid their mortal grip on our body, vanish, instantly disappear, beyond all physical laws, medical laws, the millions of laws⎯they no longer exist. That shines. Instantaneously. And everything is the same. And there is no darkness anymore. It was seen wrongly. It was not seen divinely. Because there is only the Divine, there has never been anything but the Divine, Joy, Light, the quiet and smiling and all- powerful Rhythm. And we are reminded of Mother’s words: There is a CONSTANT Reality, a CONSTANT divine Order, and it's only the incapacity to perceive it that makes the present Disorder and Falsehood.15 A wrong gaze. And She uttered these mysterious words, which now become clearer: At every moment, all is exactly as it should be—that is Omnipotence.16 To see that is all-powerfulness. It is the instant reversal of death and of all appearances. It is the murderer’s arm that stops. For in truth, there is nothing but that. Only it is not in our heads that we have to see it, but in our bodies. That state of infinitesimal vibration of Matter, it is THERE, at that level, that the change must take place. And She said this: Perfection is there, always, coexisting with imperfection—perfection and imperfection are coexistent, always, and not only simultaneous, but in THE SAME PLACE. Truth is there, Falsehood is there [Mother pressed her two hands together]; perfection is there, imperfection is there [same gesture]; they're perfectly coexistent—the minute you perceive perfection, imperfection disappears, the Illusion disappears. The false vibration disappears ... as if it had never existed. The vibration of truth literally CANCELS the vibration of Falsehood, which doesn't exist—it existed only as an illusion for the false consciousness we have.... Which means that at ANY SECOND and in any conditions, you can attain Perfection: it isn't something that has to be gained little by little, through successive progress; perfection is THERE, and YOU change states.17
And that is how the world’s formidable screen of Falsehood can fall suddenly, in one second, for Perfection is there, in the same place and in the same abominable conditions. You change states. The world changes states. A reversal of states. A global coup d’état. There is nothing to do to rectify, improve, cure or transform: there is that crust, that screen of Falsehood to cross, and it is there, immediately there, the next second. And the vibration of Truth literally cancels the vibration of Falsehood.
At one stroke, it is done.
We do not need to go far: it is here.
There is no “later on” to walk to: it is here.
There is no tomorrow, there is no perhaps, no if … it is here.
But it is in Matter’s infinitesimal state of vibration that the vibration has to change.
Then we suddenly understand the true meaning of the change of rhythm that was taking place in Mother’s body⎯She was drawing the screen of illusion in Matter, the small vibration that falsifies. The something that tenses in the body and says no to anything may happen. A small vibration hunched in a closed space and an aggressive time. And one understands how the world can change … if it is capable or when it is capable of bearing the removal of the screen without being blinded.
Not that there will be fabulous lights or fabulous apparitions, no: but the world
as it is will be such an instantaneous marvel that….
The miracle of the world is that it is as it is. The illusion consists in not seeing what is.
So we have to look there and look at everything as that veiled miracle. And who knows if our gaze thirsting for Truth, our breathing thirsting for true air, our millions of eyes thirsting for the true world will not suddenly make the Truth emerge. The world as it is.
We must look at everything as the miracle there. And the miracle will be.
The great, miraculous natural of the divine world.
Like the axolotl, suddenly brought to its true environment.
And physical life will flow uninterrupted, because at each instant it will breathe the true air, it will move in harmony with the rhythm and will perceive the absolute meaning of everything.
Mother’s last years are no longer the mystery of the new species : it is settled, ineluctable; they are the mystery of that global “second”⎯how to reach there. What is the strategy?
That other rhythm, that time of the future species was not trying to establish itself peacefully in a specimen freed from all human contingencies. She was assailed, She was invaded by people, it was a constant crush in her place. Until her door closed, She would receive one to two hundred people every day and ceaselessly listen to, or rather live, swallow all of their sordid, increasingly sordid stories. This was another contradiction which seemed to grow very proportionally to the inner changes that She was undergoing⎯it was even striking, this perfect coincidence between an exasperated Falsehood and the formidable Power in which one was bathed near Her, while her body grew slimmer and slimmer. The more She seemed to disappear, to vanish, the more unbearable with power it was⎯in fact, it was unbearable for the Falsehood. And She kept carefully reading her “occultist’s chart,” every day before the rush, as if She had to continue to see as we do, and She tirelessly paced her room, leaning on someone’s arm when She could no longer stand by herself, obstinately, indomitably⎯in fact, She was desperately struggling to keep a contact with the old human way of being, while that same old way made her suffer constant agonies. And in that impossible contradiction, She advanced day after day in the midst of a growing unknown, more and more unknown and new, which made her undergo strange internal modifications: it was perhaps life, it was perhaps death, it was perhaps another life. But it was agonising. A very strange kind of suffering.18 And yet nothing is wrong with me; the doctors say that everything is fine.... It was perhaps all of the suffering of the world. It was perhaps the transformation into another species. It was … what?
And the movement was accelerating. It accelerated in three ways.
The Triple Acceleration
First of all, that other time that irresistibly invaded her and left her suspended in the middle of a gesture, of a meeting. The “instant” could last 45 minutes or a second, or perhaps it was already the next day: What time is it? She repeated, what time is it?… The funny part is that people think I am asleep! I don't at all sleep A
Force at work.19 And in that consciousness, the strange thing is the importance of one minute, which to our consciousness is nothing—there it has an importance.... In one minute, something ... general can be done. Naturally, all words are stupid, but that's how it is. One minute. In one minute To such a point that the body perceives that one minute like this [Mother slightly rotated two fingers] is a victory; and one minute like that [She slightly rotated her two fingers the other way] is a catastrophe. And not only for itself, but it's general.20 And we remember what She said one day: It’s a key, 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. Something like a dissolution of the world.21 Is it that that will allow the screen of the world to be suddenly lifted, one day, when everything is ready? And it is not a “power,” really: one is the whole earth, as one is one’s own body, without fuss or even sensation of “big” or “small”⎯it is simple, and terribly all-powerful. But try and lift the screen a bit brusquely in the body⎯what will happen then? A strange condition, you must admit. A dangerous position, though it is devoid of all the solemnities, enormities and cosmic implications that the Mind thinks⎯all that is nothing but the Mind that inflates. It is very simple, there. It is dimensionless. It is like a body, that’s all. With all sorts of pains within. And symbolically, all kinds of small terrestrial samples around, which were beginning to think that “really, Mother….” And then, all of a sudden, in all this chaos, this struggle, this friction, this suffering, and this ignorance and this darkness and this effort and this and that (oh, it's much worse than when it takes place in the mind: it's here in the body) and it's a question, yes, of life and death in the true sense of the phrase. And then, all of a sudden, just one drop ... it's not even a drop (it's not liquid!), it's not even a flash of lightning, it's ... yes, it's a vibration, a DIFFERENT vibration—luminous, so wonderfully sweet, peaceful, powerful, absolute. It's like something lighting up. And then there's no need anymore of discussion or explanation or anything: you've understood—it's to become conscious of THAT, it's to live THAT. But just THAT, one vibration of that, and then you understand everything.22
It was that different vibration that She was trying to bring into the body of the earth as into her own body. Truly another rhythm. We say “time,” we say “rhythm,” we say “consciousness” or “power,” but it is all a way of vibrating in Matter. But a way of vibrating that changes Matter. Such was the deep trauma⎯the traumatic bliss! It was very traumatic for those who were around her. The physical world is changing. People will probably notice it only in fifty years.23 That way of vibrating which was not that of the mineral, the vegetal or the animal had to take place very softly; even her body had to absorb and assimilate it in a state that precisely resembled a sleep, in which time was “frozen”⎯this false time of pain. It was true life there, while elsewhere it was pure hell, more and more. In fifty years perhaps we will not need to play the marmots or scream with bliss (!), Matter will have well adapted, it will be very natural like the air we breathe, but in the meanwhile…. Meanwhile, not only did She have to control the state of her body, the speed of the process and that strange time that invaded her, but the state of people around her, that is, She had to draw herself alive into hell in order to keep a contact. She had to slow down. It's already very baffling for all those who live with me, but if I were as I should be, I think it would be quite intolerable. We must, we must have the endurance for the transition. There has to be a transition.24 The endurance was not really there around her, less and less there. It was the second of the three accelerations we have spoken of: the “unbearable” acceleration, we could say, the acceleration of the small terrestrial samples’ resistance.
But there was a third acceleration, which was purely physiological, that of the old physiology. There, too, there was an insoluble contradiction. And curiously enough (or not), that contradiction began to show when Mother reached that ultimate mineral layer, the residue of the primary evolution, that last (or first) envelope of the cells: food. She could no longer eat, or less and less, a few sips of glucose or fruit juice, and it was a kind of torture for her, it could not go down. Food is obviously the residue of the primary habit of devouring: even galaxies “eat one other,” according to the astronomers. It is a something that does not possess and wants to possess, that lacks and wants to take, that is separated and wants to encompass. It is the ABC of evolution, to begin with the small protons. But it is not at all a “necessity for feeding oneself,” really: it is a want of being that seeks to be fulfilled, it is the first cry of separation. One devours, because one is not all. Because the fundamental need of evolution and of each particle of evolution is to be all. So one “loves,” takes, kills: one eats. Everything is a way of filling the primary hole, the something that started to be a separate individual. The beginning of the cage. The beginning of death. She reached that layer in her body and immediately the problem arose: She could not eat anymore. Food carries in itself a seed of death, She observed. So obviously, it must be replaced by something else.25 But what? And the problem became an inextricable tangle, it was the problem of everyday. There is this fact that existence itself needs to depend on something material, which naturally brings back every time an old recurring difficulty.26 Every time, one swallows the old unconscious negation, that “background of negation behind everything,” that NO of the primordial I against all the rest. All that is under observation at the moment (a very minute observation, which I might almost call “scientific”), and, well, the cells are conscious of the divine Force and of the power that Force gives, but they are also conscious that in order to last as they are, even in a state of transformation, they still need this complement of something coming from outside—with that, every time you swallow a new difficulty. Can we conceive of something that works in the human way yet without deteriorating? Would this, as it is [Mother pinched the skin of her hands], would it be capable of being transformed by the Force? Can it be done?—We’ll know when it’s done and not before!27 And She laughed. “But all possibilities are there!” I told her. “It is only that Matter has to adapt to the infiltration of another force.” That’s the whole point! CAN Matter do it?28 “Doubtless it can. If the Spirit wants, it can. If the Spirit sees that the moment has come, it can. There is no reason why not.” And She laughed again. That would be interesting to see!29 She looked at the “object” very scientifically, but the object was becoming more and more tenuous. And the more tenuous it became, the more formidably powerful it was! Go and understand. And in that Power, She needed or felt that her body still needed to feed itself, “to gain strength”! To gain.… That was it, She touched the root, and it was obviously not the problem of a “body to be nourished”: it may well have been the whole problem.
There was a leap to take.
The question was not to “give up food,” but to overcome the NO. To vanquish that layer. Or to traverse it in order to see what hid behind, for, as always, the obstacle held the key.
And the problem became more complicated because of her entourage. Meals are prepared in a kitchen. And if She does not eat, oh! She is going to die…. Death was thrown in her face at every minute and under any pretext, without even their being aware of it: it was “natural,” wasn’t it? They'd like me to eat more, whereas personally, I feel that eating detracts from the Work..... My system is beginning to refuse to work in the old way, and then the doctors want everything to function as usual—it's impossible. So it puts me in a state of it creates a sort of conflict in the nature. You see, things are going too fast and at the same time there is a resistance of the old nature—encouraged by the doctors and habits.30 This is what we always forget: the hypnotism of the physical Mind. We will never know to what extent the substance (including Mother’s substance) is hypnotized by those “do’s and don’ts.” Mother would struggle until the end, and until the end they would throw their hypnotism at her: Oh! one must take some Coramine for one’s heart, oh! one must…. And the body is like a hypnotized baby. At each instant, She had to undo again and again, undo the collective hypnotism⎯until the day She stopped struggling. And I could not manage to understand why She did not decide to take the plunge, or why Sri Aurobindo, or the Consciousness, did not categorically tell her what She had to do. “Better to be mistaken while listening to the new consciousness than not to be mistaken while listening to the doctors!” I told her. But the Consciousness doesn't contradict anything. I don't know how to explain it If there were a strong and clear indication, I would certainly listen to it, but that's not the case....31 She was told nothing, it was the eternal mystery. She was left to flounder by herself between life and death⎯naturally! it was the body that had to find the solution. But…. The cook is used to doing things a certain way and does them that way; the doctor says to give me such and such a thing and they listen to him.... I live in such conventionality that it's very difficult. And always the idea that I am OLD, I am getting OLD, and so for them my consciousness must be half veiled. They don't have faith, what can you do! So I have taken the attitude of saying: let it be. I make myself as passive as possible—passive to the Divine Will—and I pray for it to guide me. That's the only way.32
And I did not yet understand the whole extent of the problem, which seemed absurd to me, even while recognizing the part played by the collective hypnosis. “Why don’t you feed yourself on the air?” I told her one day. “That is what some yogis⎯many yogis⎯did in the past.” Ah no, the air is disgusting!33 I had forgotten that She could smell the odour of an atomic bomb five thousand kilometres away. They have ruined the earth, She exclaimed, they have ruined the atmosphere, they have ruined everything. They have truly made a mess of Matter 34 So that complicates matters. Ah, what time is it?35
She seemed to touch the centre of the contradiction in her body, with an absurd problem that seemed to me completely stupid.
And “one” told her nothing, neither in one way nor in the other.
There was something to find.
There was an ultimate resistance to transmute, symbolically contained in a spoonful of fruit juice. A central NO. But the whole world was in it. It was the problem of the world, not the problem of a yogic and dietetic tour de force. And could one take that leap forward if nothing followed? What is the point of being the new species all alone?
And the triple acceleration accelerated more and more.
More and More, More and More...
The world, too, was following its accelerated curve towards some central contradiction, or some knot of the old History, which the mechanical appearances mask to us. Our high civilization rejoins the savage: only a few toys have changed. The only merit of our terrible toys is, as it happened in Mother’s body, to force us to find the true solution, the evolutionary solution: to change species or die. This was the whole curve. It was not a question of improving or idealizing the human fishbowl. The old evolutionary laboratory is bringing its work to a conclusion. So did Mother. It is a pity for us if we do not understand the meaning of it. Five years had passed by since the revolt of May ’68, and the suffocation was growing implacably⎯it will continue until we cry out for good, the true cry that will break the huge Illusion. Until we land in true Matter, on true Earth. The Marvel will be there, when we have had enough of all our clever stupidities. 1973 was the year of the second war of Israel, the first oil embargo and the fifteenth Chinese thermonuclear bomb, the fifth French nuclear explosion, Watergate and the filth plain for all to see everywhere, commandos and students’ unrest in Barcelona, Bangkok, Athens…. Almarik, Solzhenitsyn, the first American space laboratory⎯towards what truer space? What less suffocating air? It springs up from all sides, through all the pores of the carbon layer, more and more, more and more, through good or evil, into something that we do not know yet, as it did in Mother’s body. It is “the transition of the earth,” she said as early as 1963. This new Consciousness seems to be intensifying all things so as to make them more perceptible: all the circumstances of life. Diseases, misunderstandings, quarrels, everything but everything has become acute, so acute, as if to really force people to see them.36 It’s the method of this Consciousness. I very clearly see the way in which it works: it puts a pressure for all that resists in someone’s nature to come to the surface and manifest, and so the ridiculous or wrong side of the thing becomes conspicuous, and it has either to go or to ... 37 And Mother made this so strange, but so revealing remark: I have the impression that just as this Consciousness has tried, not exactly to dissolve religions, but to get inside them and remove barriers, it’s taken it into its head to do the same thing with politics. It seems to be working to create, not a disharmony, but a sort of ... to take away cohesion among people: cohesion among parties, cohesion among religions 38 A formidable Force, which is not of incoherence but of de-coherence. To dismantle the Machine: the worst and the best. To reach the “unknown point,” as Mother did. And if we are not able to see that, the true sense of our story escapes us. Do the tadpoles bother about improving their fishbowl, or jumping overboard? We think that things are going wrong (they are going very wrong in the fishbowl) but they are going marvellously, exactly and implacably towards the exit. It is this exit that we have to look at. Will it take a complete bankruptcy of the Mind for people to understand? Will it burst to end in a zero?39
Or will we have the courage to wage our own “immobile revolution,” pierce a hole in that huge mental balloon, and emerge into the true air⎯it is here! only waiting for our billions of cries. It is here. It's difficult, things grate. But it seems to be a mere appearance: it's the great Pressure of the Light—a warm, golden, powerful, supramental light—and it goes on increasing and increasing and increasing. 40
Will this last year of Mother’s body, this end of the laboratory, give us some clue to our own mystery, or will things have to truly explode for us to understand?
Ineluctable Victory
And the little world around her was the exact reflection of the big world, with denser shadows and a few rare lights, as is usual under the light source. It was the evolutionary laboratory under pressure. Everything was taking place there, on a small scale. There were no “disciples or “non-disciples,” not faithful or unfaithful ones, no good or wicked people: there were only small terrestrial samples, the old ingredients of a strange evolutionary concoction boiling at a high heat⎯was it to succeed or not? It was a little how things were. One felt that everything was there, every possibility and every marvel were there, poison and Falsehood were there (how much so!), the old terrestrial calamity, clinging death, and the Miracle … if one wished. She was there, so fragile, so vast and tranquil⎯without a shadow of a person in that small body: a formidable, quiet active witness who welcomed everything, looked at everything, good and evil, poison and nectar, who embraced all in her great, immobile white Fire, without any difference, without pluses and minuses. It was the world, her world. These were the data of the problem, and each piece of data had its immense, absolute sense, as if that small black whirl that entered her room brought all the miseries of the earth in its wake⎯everyone was one misery⎯and that sudden, mute little flame all the hope of the earth. And it was like that, each day like a great, silent Act whose actors did not know the stakes. They climbed up the stairs with their obscure little business, their microscopic quarrel out of a million quarrels of the world, their tiny pettiness out of the general pettiness everywhere⎯and who prayed for the earth? Who had that single little cry within for a true earth at last, that flame which forces the Moment and breaks the door open? She was mute, vast, impassive. She was waiting. I am millions of years old and I am waiting.41 She was the prayer of the earth. It gives me the feeling of a bell that no one rings!42
Was the Moment to be missed? As in 1950. The Moment of the earth?
No. What has to be will be in spite of everything, or BECAUSE of everything.43 Oh, because, yes, because of all this misery, this pettiness, this ugliness, because of all that which rends our hearts and strangles us. It has to be. It has, it has to be…. It is not possible otherwise, it is monstrous otherwise. A true little prayer to trigger the Moment and open the Door. I used to go to her place as if counting the heartbeats of the earth.
I have much difficulty in speaking of that so-called “end,” first of all because it is not the end, it is something completely other than what we think, even what the most enlightened think⎯something totally other, the Mystery, really, the one I have been struggling with for exactly one year and eleven months to the day⎯October 17, 1975. I do not really struggle: I listen to Mother, but with so intense a prayer…. Not for one moment did I expect that “death” that most of them were so kindly, so naturally foreseeing. For me, Mother could not die, the question was irrelevant, it was a sort of simple, self-evident fact⎯things could not happen as usual. She had lost the habit of dying, one could say, it was something else⎯but what? What was going to happen, how was it going to happen, this was my only question, because transformation was bound to take place, it was obvious, but how, by what path? For me, Victory is certain, but I don't know if it's tomorrow or ... I don't know what road we will take to get there.... Such an ardent faith would be needed. 44
So we can only try and trace the curve, pick up the “laboratory notebook” again, walk further in that marvellous forest where we never know what is going to happen, suspended between the marvel and the precipice, the old earth and the unknown, impossibility and all possibilities as if by magic. Impossibility…. I have definitively erased from my dictionary this word that is between impose and imposture⎯forever. And when the earth consents to discard that impossible word, things will definitely improve.
Meanwhile, it was strange, but it was surely heading for somewhere, faster and faster. I felt her gradually establishing herself in that “uninterrupted physical life,” and all kinds of ailments that had never ceased assailing her for so many decades were as if frozen or had stopped showing: heart attacks, terrible neuritis, eye haemorrhages, colds, raging toothaches, that whole harvest that She got from the ill wills around her. I hardly know what being tired is anymore. But there was that strange agony which took hold of her without medical reason and at times made her cry out in pain, whenever the “outer” world drew her a little too much into its mud or its perpetual invasion, its decaying thoughts. “Mother, what will happen when you are no more?” one of the little samples kindly wrote to her. And it was how things were, more and more so, at each instant. Come on, a thought, what is it! But it was as if they shoved her instantly into death. This body has become very, very sensitive. If someone comes displeased with something I did or said, all of a sudden, all the nerves (the body’s nerves) are as if tortured. And it comes from the person who’s there—and who shows all the signs of devotion and so on, absolutely no external sign, no spoken or direct manifestation: all the nerves are tortured ... It’s something ... it’s an influence that must cut off the body from its contact with the Divine, probably. It’s under study.45 She “studied” a lot. She was so desperately seeking to solve that mystery of the cells and of the cellular contagion, but in reverse: to pass on the true vibration, the one which will transform Matter, the golden contagion, to the bodies and Matter around her. It resisted ferociously, stubbornly, the whole Matter resisted. But if that could be passed on, it would mean the end of the Screen. She was studying. She studied until the end.
And in that strange vulnerability (her vulnerability was her means of communication!) truly an agony, which was not only due to the world but to a deep alchemy, an internal restructuring or de-structuring resulting from the great Pressure, a whole movement She did not explained to herself but which was like pain piled up in her body as if it died at each instant to be reborn in the same instant; amidst that strange hell, the other state seemed to progressively develop, the other rhythm or other time which “froze” or changed all that into something else. And it was neither this nor that, but a sort of hybrid, incomprehensible existence, painful and blissful, marvellous and infernal. It’s strangely fragile at the same time, that’s the curious thing. There’s a sense of having gone out of all ordinary laws, and ... it’s hanging in suspense, like that. Something which is seeking to be established.46 And that “something”⎯yes, perhaps the state of the butterfly, the state of the next species, that kind of incomprehensible thing which tried to sneak through the mesh of Matter⎯it was as if everything strove to demolish, impede it.
One cannot even say that the samples around her were especially bad, no: they were simply the earth, the earth’s state, the earth’s breathing, the earth’s habit. The earth’s pettiness, the old catastrophic habit. There’s all the old habit, which simply has to be conquered.47 Not that simple. It’s like a rubber band that you let go of, and it all starts up again : you have a pain, you ... And the moment the body identifies with this Vibration, everything becomes like a ... radiant expression of the Consciousness, and then everything is smooth, free from clashes or difficulties; then, if you let yourself go like that, it becomes a marvel. It becomes a marvel. Unfortunately, there’s the whole influence of the outer world which makes it difficult for the body to be CONSTANTLY like that and makes it tend to fall back into the ordinary way. That’s why it can’t settle in permanently.... Life could be so marvellously simple and beautiful.... Man has really made it idiotic. I quite understand it was necessary to churn Matter, but ... the time has come for this to end, for a way out to be found.48 She so desperately strove to bring the moment of the other thing into this Matter. And all of the difficulty, truly the Screen, hung only to that nasty little vibration of the physical Mind that could not prevent itself from wanting and foreseeing and concocting its old death, in every detail⎯all right, it was necessary to churn and knead this old Matter, but.… The fight between the two states was taking place in Mother’s body, She was the battlefield at each moment, the “sordid battlefield,” there, while pulling on the rubber band: the marvel and the asphyxiation, the earth’s tomorrow and the endless yesterday. I have difficulty keeping that, She exclaimed one day, because all contacts bring back the old consciousness—I don’t know anyone in this condition.49 Exactly a butterfly all alone in a world of caterpillars which ceaselessly pulled her back into the old mud. The medical and triumphant little axolotls. The passage had to be opened up, could that ever pass ? Her body was the site where it strove to enter the earth: to “be established,” as She would say.
It’s a relentless struggle. Then, if you remain there [in the true Consciousness], everything is fine—EVERYTHING is fine: the body is fine, everything is fine. And as soon as you go out of that state and get into other movements, you see that all, but all is a world of contradictions: chaos and contradiction. But there, everything is perfectly harmonious.50 I am shown to what extent the disequilibrium which, in circumstances, results in what people call “death” (which is death only quite apparently), how the two things, so to speak, are constantly there: this all-containing Harmony which is the very essence of Life, and this ... division, this fragmentation, this apparent, UNREAL division, which has an ARTIFICIAL existence, and which is the cause of death—how the two are interwoven in such a way that you can go from one to the other at any time and on any occasion. And it’s not at all as people think, that there needs to be something “serious”—it’s not that, it can happen with the most futile thing! It’s simply being here or being THERE, and that’s all. So you are here and remain here: it’s over; you are here, and then you are there [gesture in between the two]: it makes for a life with sufferings and troubles—all kinds of things. And being THERE is perpetual Life, absolute Power and ... you can’t even call it “peace,” it’s ... something immutable. And at the same time, everything is there: this state and that state are both there. And man makes a more or less clumsy mixture of the two things.51 Tomorrow is right in today, the other state is right in this one! Only a minuscule distorting web changes the Vibration on its way. There are no centuries to traverse, no miraculous transformations to work out, no immense, endless process⎯it is here, the instantaneous place where life and death change into the other thing, true Life, overlife. Almost a question of position of consciousness. And the Screen falls away. That had always been there…. But a few seconds of the true state in its purity and there’s ... an awesome power. Only ... [and this is where Mother put her finger on the problem] … the whole makeup of the world still seems to act as a brake, there still seems to be something ... [and She sat there staring perhaps at all those little samples around her, the actors of the great Act] … And that “something” is what this Consciousness is working on. For it to be established, a change in the earth consciousness must take place.52 But one can’t get out all alone.53
One cannot be the other species all alone.
So, what was to happen between that more and more aggressive negation around her (but that very negation was part of the game, it was the game, or the terrestrial stakes) and that small golden breath, more and more fragile and gasping for air? And yet, the Victory WILL TAKE PLACE. But by what path?… Will we know how to discover the path to that ineluctable victory? It is our last path in Mother’s great forest.
Where is the path, where is the Victory, our victory? Where? Ineluctable Victory.
The Negation
And the contradiction closed in, very implacably. But very surely towards the desired Goal.
Everything is exactly as it must be. Only we have to find the sense.
We live for decades and centuries with a thousand little senses, and we seem to go nowhere and go round in circles. Then comes the hour of the Sense. We pile up discoveries that discover nothing, until the day the only thing un-covers itself, and everything is uncovered. We are reaching that hour. And if the contradiction is so black, it is only to compel us to its golden sense. Or else, better to pack our bags and go jump in the lake elsewhere⎯but there is no “elsewhere,” we are perfectly trapped. Like Mother. So we are obliged to find.
This body has a conviction that if it lasts till one hundred, then it will have a new strength and a new life. But ... these are just the difficult years,54 she said in 1972. It was a question of time. It was a race against time. How many years left till my centenary? “Five years, sweet Mother.” Five more years in this hell!...55 It was in 1973. Apparently, this was the contradiction of that body, so surprising a contradiction, really I did not understand: one had just to sit next to her and there was that cataract of power, so incredible, so formidable, which hammered, kneaded one and seemed to be capable of flattening everything (not “seemed”: it could do it), but … it was as if nothing went into Mother’s body: it went through it. She was like a breath. “A small puppet,” as She would say … in a torrent of incredible power. The pipe, I am the pipe!56 she exclaimed, laughing. And She poured that onto the earth, but nothing remained in her own body. It’s very interesting. In appearance it’s something completely absurd [pointing to her own body], with apparent weaknesses that human beings scorn, and ... [laughing] awesome forces that human beings cannot bear. It’s curious.57 It was very curious indeed. There is, at the same time, the fact of an all- powerfulness without limits, and of a powerlessness without limits. And all that here, AT THE SAME PLACE [Mother closed her two hands together, one on top of the other] ... And by temperament I am sensible enough not to talk, because if I were to say all that I see, all that goes on and all that's there ... they would say, “That's it, she's gone, she's lost her balance; with her mind she's lost her head!” So I take a very serious look and say to myself, “Let's see, let's take one of their so very important problems—problems of life and death to them—let's see, let's look at it straight in the face, let's be a little serious ” [and She laughed and laughed] And it's all right, the balance is still there!58
Oh! that sense of humour which saved her from the revolting stupidity she was showered with. But sometimes, when the general doubt came and assailed her, in front of her body’s impotence, She had a cry: Lots of people did that in fact: they went off elsewhere, into another, more or less subtle world. Of course, there are millions of ways to escape—there is only one way to stay, and that's to truly have courage and endurance, to accept all the appearance of infirmity, the appearance of powerlessness, the appearance of incomprehension, the appearance, yes, of a negation of the Truth. But if one doesn't accept all that, nothing will ever be changed! Those who want to remain great, luminous, strong, powerful and what have you, well, let them stay up there, they can do nothing for the earth.59
But why, why this total lack of junction with her own body? A thousandth, a millionth part of that, of that cataract of power, could have propelled her forward for centuries as if in the twinkling of an eye. And I understood without understanding⎯without understanding the immense Compassion that leads things. If that came, maybe it would destroy too many things!60 When this luminous Power comes, it's so compact—so compact that it gives the impression of being much heavier than Matter. It's veiled, veiled, completely veiled, otherwise ... unbearable.61 But why could there not be just a small drop of that? I thought innocently. And She patiently explained: It’s REALLY an all-powerfulness. That is, entirely, totally and exclusively existing. It contains everything, but what is contrary to its vibration is forced to change, you see, since nothing can disappear; but then that immediate, brutal, so to say, and absolute change is, in the world as it is, a catastrophe.62 A drop or everything, it is obviously the same; it can be borne only because of our thick layer of filth.
To understand, one only had to look at the small seething laboratory around her. The Ashram seemed to be the centre of the resistance to the Work⎯of course! Sri Aurobindo had known it for fifty years. It was the symbol of all the difficulties of the earth. It is as if a superhuman Power were trying to manifest through millenniums of impotence.... This (the body) is made of millenniums of impotence. And a superhuman Power is trying to ... is exerting a pressure to manifest. That's what it is. What will be the outcome? I don't know. 63 I don't think THE result is possible with the present conditions on earth: it would be a miracle, upsetting too many things. The consequences would be worse than 64
So what was to happen, if at the same time the body had to last, to gain time, while the environment not only did not have the necessary patience, but could not bear what would have permitted the change?
She was trapped in an insoluble contradiction. The sips of glucose had more and more difficulty going down. The feeling of hanging from such a slender thread ... in an absolutely rotten atmosphere of disbelief, futility, bad will. A slender thread, and it's a miracle it does not break. They don't even understand that if this Vibration of Truth imposed itself, there would be the destruction of themselves! Of what they think to be themselves. The wonder—the wonder—is this infinite Compassion thanks to which nothing is destroyed: it waits. It's there, waiting with its full power, its full force, and ... it simply asserts its presence without imposing it, so as to reduce the damage to the minimum. It's a marvellous Compassion! And all those fools call it impotence!65
“Mother can no longer do anything,” was their leitmotiv,” and “Mother is going away very fast”… Some even circulated a warning: “Get ready, She is going to leave.” An “absolutely rotten atmosphere.” So what?
One could almost laconically give the bulletin of her little cries, which sounded like an appeal to the earth:
There seems to be a more and more powerful Pressure, and all difficulties are arising. People quarrel and ... oh! And it’s all over the world.66
“She's old, she's old....”67 It creates an atmosphere of resistance to the change. It almost creates a conflict in the being. “It's impossible, impossible, impossible ...” from every side.68
The people around me don't help. Those immediately around me have no faith.69
I'm ready to struggle 200 years if necessary, but the work will be done.70
I really think that those who can begin the new race are among children. Men are ... crusted over. They're all old and I am the only one who is young! That's it, you know, that flame, that will They are satisfied with stupid little personal satisfactions which lead nowhere. While you feel you could hasten the coming if you were if you were a conqueror! Basically they just don't care.71
It's only by clinging desperately to the Divine—but to the purest and most powerful Divine— that we can avoid a general conflagration. There's not a single minute to be lost, we should constantly, constantly cling to the Divine to compel his descent here. Otherwise.... So I need ... I need all those who love me to understand me. We have to get rid of everything that still holds us down in order to be really ready to receive that Divine Will. The urgency for that ... frightening.... That's it, nothing is left, nothing, nothing only a will—a will, an aspiration, a compelling need: oh, the reign of the Divine must come, it must! I am in a hurry.72
If things went any faster, everything would break.73
The time has come to take a clear stand: all that (illness, death, pain), all that is unreal. It’s high time.
Sri Aurobindo said, he wrote: The time has come. Because He went away, people thought He was wrong.74
There's only one direction—towards the Divine. And as you know, it's as much inside as outside, above as below. Everywhere. It's in this very world that we must find the Divine and cling to Him—to Him alone, there's no other way.75
The body sees plainly, very clearly, the marvellous protection it has, otherwise it would be slashed to pieces.76
When I can get back into my normal atmosphere, it's as if everything vanishes, I am not in pain anymore. But back it comes from outside like a ferocious attack: people quarrelling, circumstances going awry, everything. And all that is thrown on me, so 77
For centuries and centuries, humanity has waited for this time. It has come We want a race without ego.78
Let us be something that is not an extra obstacle.... A transparent transmitter.79
Before dying, Falsehood rises in full swing. Still people understand only the lesson of catastrophe. Will it have to come before they open their eyes to the Truth?... It is only the Truth that can save us.80
I have just had a fantastic vision ... of the cradle of a future ... not a very distant future. A future ... I don’t know. It’s a pro-di-gious mass hanging over the earth.81
All the beautiful dreams will become real, with a reality far more marvellous than anything we can dream of.82
I always think of that passage of Sri Aurobindo: “God shall grow up in Matter,” ... and you see the Divinity grow up in Matter, “... while the wise men talk and sleep.” It's exactly that.83
There is the possibility of a breathtaking success—not in the sky: here.84
There isn't any “we must be patient,” there isn't any “it will come in its own time,” there isn't any ... of all those very reasonable things, they don't exist anymore—it's That, like a sword- blade. And it's That despite everything: the Divine. The Divine alone. All the rest is falsehood—false, false, false, and a falsehood that must disappear. There is only one reality, there is only one life, there is only one consciousness: the Divine.85
There will be a miracle. But what, I don't know. One sees clearly that external circumstances are being brought to the point where things will suddenly crack up. But how? I don't know.86
You have the feeling of being on the edge of a cliff—you mustn't make a single false step. As if the Consciousness were putting pressure on circumstances so they become more definite and clear.87
Even if one person could put himself or herself faithfully at the disposal of the Truth, he or she could change the country and the world.88
Only some kind of violence could stop the transformation 89
There are people who are sending catastrophic suggestions. The body fights all it can to accept only the suggestions from the Divine, but there's still a pull.90
The sensation of my body is as if I were as big as the world and holding everything in my arms, truly the way a Mother holds her children. I can't explain.... Later.91
Everything is becoming a discomfort: a perpetual discomfort, as if my body were made to live through every single thing that must disappear. Nonstop. Everything—external things, internal things, things in so-called others, things concerning this body—all, all is terrible, terrible, terrible As if all the negations had accumulated here so that I do the work, and I don't know who that “I” is anymore. The body, this poor body, is the negation of what it sees as the ... Beauty to be realized.92
I'd like to stop talking.93
As though the battle of the world were being fought in my consciousness. Yes, because it isn't one person's subconscient: it is the earth's subconscient. It's endless. Yet we must ...
Stopping that would mean stopping the work. Going on with it means it will take ages I don't know it's endless. As if this consciousness were the meeting point and the centre of action. So my sole means is to remain quiet—very quiet so the divine rays can pass, pass through it. It's the only solution. It must be the Divine who ... who fights the battle.94
A Bliss is there ... waiting for us.95
The slightest contradiction that enters the atmosphere causes me such discomfort, I feel I won't be able to stand it.... It's ... I don't know what it is. It is like a negation, a painful negation.96
The ultimate outcome is obvious.97
I feel like screaming When I am still, I have an almost limitless power. But when I am in my body, I feel so uncomfortable 98
It has become very intense. And at the same time the knowledge: now is the time to win the
Victory.” Like this, from above: Hold on ... hold on, now is the time to win the Victory.”99
What could possibly happen?
What would be the last path to that final, “obvious” ending, that ineluctable Victory in spite of everything, or because of everything? Oh! because of everything. “The reign of the Divine must come, it must come, it must….”
Or what? To start all over again?
She was so vast and so perfectly immobile in the great battle that was being fought. One merged into Her as into an immensity of soft snow, and yet so formidably burning in its immobility. One went far, far away and forever, and yet it was there. One was at home as if in the deepest inner sanctuary, and yet it was the world that was beating there. One was bathed in Love, yet it was a merciless war … in perfect silence, as if outside of all wars, as if they had been won from all times. And the small drops of her words, her little breaths from the depths of eternity, brought the fire, told of hell or the Marvel, of the contradiction and the eternal question, in the same, so totally even tone, as one watches a river flowing: here it turns to the right, there it turns to the left. It was the transparent truth, colourless and without a ripple: pure. Without anyone. And yet it was her.
And more tenderly her whenever She laughed.
On the Threshold of a Great Secret
But She no longer laughed very often, that’s true. She was now in a very tight game. But one never felt it was tight, one was not truly aware of the gravity of the situation, except that She seemed more and more engulfed in that strange time. Near her, there was such a bath of compact and light eternity that really one could not see where and how it could finish. There was no death there, obviously, but there were all those gazes of death around her. That was the assault. Her 95 years could have been 395 without making any difference, but time mattered for the others. One did not even feel that her body was getting old⎯“old” sounded so strange near Mother⎯but all those eyes…. And I remember again, with a flash of comprehension, what she had said one day: The impression is that the visible form is as much (at least as much) the result of how you are seen by others as of how you yourself are. I don’t know how to explain that.... When someone else sees you, you see yourself the way others see you. But there is a way of being which results from the true consciousness and is felt quite concretely, but which is ... not exactly in contradiction with, but wholly different from the way you see yourself according to others’ vision of yourself. That’s why something must be found for it to be independent of everybody’s influence.1 Perhaps we will never know to what extent Matter, corporeal Matter, is miraculously supple and fluid, though as if frozen, hypnotized by habits. Really, the world is completely distorted. Matter is completely distorted. It can be miraculously otherwise … if we get out of the bath⎯if we see otherwise. If we are otherwise. Mother was seen as old. She was seen as dying. This was the horrible story. And She was not struggling for herself, but to free a spot of Matter from that dreadful hypnotism. Oh! how they believe in death. The power of Death is that they all want to die!2 she said one day.
But there was “the other way,” “the product of the true consciousness,” that “son of the cells” that had been slowly built up, aggregated by the prayer of the body, the aspiration of the body, the millions of Mantras repeated night and day. A second time, She had seen it, in 1972. I don't know whether it's the supramental body or a transitional body, but I had a completely new body, in the sense that it was sexless It was very slender. Really lovely, a truly harmonious form.3 What was very different was the torso—the breathing. The shoulders were strikingly broad. That's important. The chest was neither feminine nor even masculine. And all that—stomach, abdomen and the rest—was simply an outline, a very slender and harmonious form, which certainly wasn't used for the purpose we now use our bodies What will change a great deal, of course—it had acquired a prominent role—is breathing. That being depended much on it. 4 And I told Mother: “Several times, I felt that rather than a transformation, there would be a concretization of the other body?”⎯Ah! But how? “Yes, we don’t know the passage. But instead of this body becoming the other, it would be the other that would replace this one.” Yes, but how?.... Understandably, if the body I had two nights ago were to materialize . . . . But how?...5 The passage? The passage, which for most people is like passing from the waking consciousness to the sleep consciousness and from the sleep consciousness to the waking consciousness.... There is still a step; there is still this-that [Mother twisted two fingers as if to indicate a shift or change of consciousness from one state to the other]. You-know-nothing. It’s peculiar how we know nothing.6 For her, there was no “passage” anymore, there was no longer a side of sleep and a waking side, a side of death and a side of the so-called living. It was one and the same side. Such was her strange, paradoxical life, as if in two worlds (two worlds for us, for our distorted vision within the cage). She was building that overlife where there was no longer any “side.” I see many scenes from Nature, like fields, gardens ... but all behind nets!7 she said to me, laughing. And those “nets” were so visibly, obviously (and symbolically) the “web” that separates us from the “other side.” I could almost see them as Mother spoke. I saw a kind of sardine net, light and streaming in the wind, between her and a true earth, so smiling. There is a net of one colour, another colour ... And it has a meaning. Absolutely everything is behind a net, you are ... as if you moved about with nets. But it’s not a single net, it depends: for its form and colour the net depends on what’s behind. And it is ... the means of communication. You understand, it’s lucky I don’t speak because they’d say I have taken leave of my senses! And I see that with my eyes open, during the day, can you imagine! So I’ll see my room, for example—I’ll be here, seeing people—and AT THE SAME TIME I’ll see one landscape or another, and it all changes and moves about ... with a net between me and the landscapes.8 It is all very pretty and one can conceive very well of a mode of overlife that would be devoid of… safety nets (!) but meanwhile, there is an enormous Screen, with a body that is perhaps very slender in true Matter, but another one that is very poorly regarded in this Matter and forced to decay. So what?… What indeed? The day the Screen falls away, it will be all right (unless it is another kind of catastrophe!) but precisely, we feel that for the screen to fall away, the present Matter has to open up, hew the passage in its own flesh, drag itself out of that leaden fixity or general hypnotism. That was exactly what was painfully taking place in Mother’s body, amidst the formidable collective Negation. That kind of “old thing,” as She called her body, was the site of the experiment, one could say the site of the passage⎯if it did not pass through that, where would it pass? Through what other crack in general Matter? It was not a question of leaving the old rag and frolicking around in a less wretched story: it was taking place there, in those 95 years that were so poorly regarded. And if nobody around wanted that, who would and where, in this damned collective Matter? The laboratory was perfectly representative. It was “the battle of the world.” So Mother came up against the eternal mystery: “It is curious how we know nothing.” And time was short. It has to go fast.
Sometimes, She sat staring into the distance, her right hand pressed on her lips, and one felt such an intensity of question. She stared at the conditions, the implacable conditions, and what way out? It was not a way out for her body! It was a way out for the earth. And who wanted it, who? Where was the small pure flame in all that quagmire that came to her room, draped in white and with its official yogic smiles⎯oh! there were the others, those who were never spoken of, who had neither names nor titles and obscurely worked for love, washing the dishes or greasing cars, those you met sometimes, with such a pretty little flame in their eyes. It was thanks to them that Mother kept holding on, the ones who could hardly ever see her and were not even allowed to bring her the little breath of their pure love. But there was all that obscure carapace around her, it was in it that She had to work, it was from that Negation that She had to wrest a cry of consent. She toiled and toiled, and sometimes it seemed hopeless. If there were a certitude, if, for instance, Sri Aurobindo said, “This is like this,” then it would be very easy ! But what’s difficult is ... You see, you are surrounded by people who think you’re ill and treat you as such; you are surrounded by a certainty that you’re fast moving towards the end, so this poor body is like this, it doesn’t know. It isn’t concerned with it, but it doesn’t have a certitude of how it will end. So all it can do is to be tranquil, trusting, and ... endure.9
Sri Aurobindo did not say anything, of course! It was the body that had to find. To find, for the body, means to do. And yet, invisibly, one felt She was approaching something, in spite or because of that very Contradiction. One could feel her oscillating faster and faster between two extremes of splendour and demolition, of victory and abyss, as if, perhaps, both were going to merge into an incredible something else. Oh! one felt it was so near: the more raging it was, the more obvious and palpable. And Mother did not know. She was learning nonexistence in order to exist and last in that frightening oscillation from one side to the other. She was building the bridge. She was the bridge. Was it death for good, was it something else? The apprenticeship of personal nonexistence. Forgetting the Divine even for a minute is becoming catastrophic. Now and then, for a few seconds, the true beatific consciousness comes—but only now and then and for a few seconds. That's all. Otherwise, the struggle. Once, twice, for a few seconds “Oh!...” And it's gone. Is this ... this body to be left and another one built? I don't know.... It doesn't fit with ... I have not been told that it has to be that way.10 “But if you left, what would we do here?” I protested. “We feel that the only moments we can breathe are when we are near you!” But it has no desire to leave. It doesn't know. But … either we have to manage to make this body more plastic so it can be transformed, or else it will be for another life. Although I must say that Sri Aurobindo said to me, “Oh, to have to begin all that over again, the whole childhood and all that unconsciousness—no.” Before he left, He said no. “No, I shall return when it can be done in a supramental body.” But there have to be bodies capable of lasting at will. And I have the feeling that that is possible. I can spend hours like that, in a kind of receptive contemplation, and it seems like a second. The sense of time is really curious ... time simply ceases to exist. I sense I sense I am on the threshold of a great Secret ... but ... not mental—not in thoughts. It's ... “something.”11
The Great Immobility
We do not really know that great Secret, not yet. It cannot be something that is confined in a mental formula⎯a new functioning in Matter, perhaps. What can be the great secret of the caterpillar, which seeks to become a butterfly without knowing what a butterfly is and wraps itself up as if in death? She did not know. She spoke less and less, and it was very difficult: even our conversations were eavesdropped on. She did not have one true refuge left, except for that growing “something” into which She tried to draw me, silently, while holding my hand. She was building a last line of communication, She wanted me to touch the site of the experience. Then one day, She abruptly went out of the experience, as if compelled by an imperative something. I want to see you every day.12 We called in one of her attendants, arranged a schedule…. It happened once … and it was “not possible” any more⎯there were so many reasons for it to be “not possible.” The wall of Negation around her was slowly, inexorably closing in. I’ve lost control—I’ve given up saying “I want,” completely.13
Something was ineluctably pushing towards an impossible point⎯or perhaps the very site of the solution?
And “something” seemed to develop simultaneously⎯was it the same something? The other face of the Negation, the lever within the obstacle? We never understand anything in the world because we always see “opposite” things. But really everything is a mystery. We will not understand until we have reached the end. I am perplexed by what's happening with clock time.... Oh, yes! I feel, I know—I know positively that my body is being accustomed to something else.14 But what? It seemed that everything revolved around that question of time. Life is a torture if I am not exclusively turned to the Divine. That's the only remedy; otherwise, it's true, life is a torture. Existing becomes intolerable. The only remedy is to be like this ... when time ceases to exist.15 What was happening in her body?
The laboratory notebook is more and more sparse and laconic. I am walking on a very thin and narrow line.16
At each moment, it was a vertiginous balance between an indefinable “something,” the “marvel,” as She would say, perhaps the state of the next species, and the death of the old species. A sort of living death. A kind of Pressure—a frightening Pressure—which compels the necessary progress. I feel it in myself, on my body. Really, it was everyone’s body. But my body isn't afraid; it says, “Well, if I must be finished, I'll be finished.” That's how it is at every instant: the True Thing [Mother lowered her fist] or the end.17 In Mother, there was such an extraordinary mixture of peace, so impassive and vast, beyond everything, and at the same time that terrible, almost ferocious will, in an absolute stillness. I had seen many things in this life, but sometimes shudders ran through me near Mother. It was like a living sword of light Imperative, at every minute: life or death. No halfway. You know, we have spent centuries being neither too uncomfortable nor too comfortable. Well, that time is over.
The body knows this is necessary for the supramental body to be formed: it must be ENTIRELY under the Influence of the Divine. No compromises, no half measures, no “It will come later.” Just like this [Mother brought down her fist again]: a dreadful Will.... But it's also terrible because it means perpetual danger. I don't know, perhaps a hundred times a day, a sensation like: life or ... disintegration (I mean a sensation in the cells).18 And one wonders whether it was not life and disintegration, that was the impossible paradox. And if they don’t become tense as is their wont, then things are fine. It's as if the body were being practically obliged to learn eternity.19 We were always brought back to that other time, through every possible detour, as if the key lay there.
Then a last blow was struck. It was in April, 1973. What Mother called the “transfers.” One after the other, all the body functions, all the organs had undergone a “change of authority,” that is, the passage from the old, automatic functioning of Nature to the conscious functioning of the great Consciousness, the supramental functioning, that which Sri Aurobindo and Mother called the “conscious automatism.” The uncoupling from the old laws of Nature and the coupling to the other rhythm. And one morning, visibly shaken, Mother simply said: My nervous system is being transferred to the Supramental.... It feels like ... it's worse than dying.20 It was the last transfer. Which meant that nothing in her body obeyed the old law anymore. Perhaps the last thread or the ultimate transition to the other state. And we can well understand that it was becoming quite unbearable to suffer that alive, while speaking to people, signing checks and swallowing a thousand poisons from all sides. A caterpillar builds a cocoon to undergo the operation. But I think ... I think I can transmit the divine Vibration. So, would you like to stay?21 And Mother took my hand to bring me into the experience, perhaps She wanted me too to touch the key. “But when one is near you, it’s a torrent!” I exclaimed. “It feels like a purifying fire, it’s…. It widens you, it fills you⎯That’s IT in a word. Ever since you've become supposedly powerless, I have started to feel….” Look, She said interrupting, I have accepted—the Lord asked me if I wanted to “undergo the transformation,” and I said yes (I would have said yes in any event), but it's ... to the ordinary human consciousness, I am going mad.22
And at the same time⎯at the same time, a phenomenon was beginning to take place in her body, so strange, so new…. Perhaps it was really the “dangerous unknown”? Dangerous because we do not know what it is, because it is new. Would a caterpillar not find the butterfly state dangerous?⎯Fortunately, it is not aware of anything! But Mother counted all the moments. The difference is such that I wonder ... sometimes I wonder how it is possible—at times, it is so new, so unexpected it's almost painful.23 What was happening? How I would have liked to understand, to feel…. Now that “unexpected” was growing and developing, inexplicably: it was visible, there was like an acceleration … towards what? And one morning in April 1973, as I had been immersed in the experience with her for around half an hour, She suddenly opened her eyes: Why do I feel like howling?24 I was so stunned. Then I immediately thought that I had perhaps brought in some poison with me, oh! we are so full of dark little miseries: “Well, I wonder if it’s not me who hurt you? ⎯No, mon petit! ALL THE TIME I feel like that—it's not you. Something. It isn't really painful, it's just....25 And She sat staring out towards the big yellow copper-pod tree in front of her, staring at that something that made her howl and was not painful. I think—I think it's something so new that the body is frightened. That's the only explanation I see. I start howling, but it's no use—the only thing to do is stop howling and change.
Perhaps that was precisely the change. Yes, that must be it: something so new that the body ... doesn't know how to take it. And She turned to me in order to try and understand what was happening. You didn't feel something while we were meditating? What do you feel? But it was so hard to tell: “Like a fire melting into your Fire,” I answered. But what do you feel?⎯ “I don’t know… the great Power.” And She nodded her head and insisted, as if I had not touched the thing: You don't perceive anything in particular? So I managed to explain: “No, sweet Mother, what I feel is first that great flame that sinks into you, and then a kind of vast immobility—a powerful immobility.” And suddenly I remembered that “immobility of fire” Sri Aurobindo spoke of. Ah, that's it! And Mother smiled as if She had touched that something that I did not understand: That must be why! Yes, the body must be getting alarmed. Yes, that must be it.26
But what was “it”?
As for me, around the end of the meditation, after that torrent of power that seemed to knead and engulf me at the same time, I felt the same thing almost every time, as after a cataclysm: something that spread out more and more, then settled, and nothing moved anymore, not a breath, as if the body no longer breathed, or breathed without breathing. Immobile. A compact, burning immobility, and yet weightless. Everything stops. Everything had stopped. Yes, perhaps that “eternity of the body.” But what was it like for her*? For her body? I only felt a reflection, a minuscule reflection of what She felt. So what? And She said: “That’s it, that must be it”…. An immobility like that of death, felt as death by the body, but a death … that would have been living. Words are absurd, but it is something, a state that is completely outside of life, obviously, outside of the breath of life, but which breathes nevertheless, which is not death nevertheless⎯another breathing … so new. The death of the old species, of the old breath, the birth of … what? And it is like a real death. “The body doesn’t know how to take it.” It feels like howling, yet it is “not painful.” Is it really what the transformation is? The passage. The zero time. Of course, one cannot be a butterfly while remaining a caterpillar. But … how is it possible with one’s eyes wide open, while fifty people wait at the door and a few others are there, spying? Can one become the other thing in the old body? How is the physiological transition worked out? She was visibly right on the threshold of the unknown, of the great secret.
And the only answer was that immobility in another type of time. The great immobility.
Was it life, was it death?
Was it transformation or disintegration?⎯“It’s almost the same process,” She used to say. As if to show you that to vanquish death, you must be ready to traverse death.
So what?
It seemed that She was being taught to enter death alive.
As Inside an Egg
Where was all that leading?
I understood very well that it was a question of time and patience. “Given time, everything will change,” she had said. There was no reason to go through death, I thought, except, perhaps, as a radical experiment that would last a few days or a few weeks, then everything would be changed. I felt that that timeless immobility was like the laboratory condition for the bottom of the substance to be able to change, that “infinitesimal vibration” in Matter, that intra-atomic movement which is the first hardening, the coagulation of the Screen. It was the “missing side” of the atom, the one which had the power to modify the movement by “freezing” it in its lightning-fast immobility. But I did not really know, nor did Mother. You see, we don't know, we don't have the slightest knowledge of what the supramental life is. Therefore we don't know if this [Mother pinched the skin of her hand] can change enough to adapt or not—and to tell the truth, I am not worried about it, it's not a problem that preoccupies me too much.... And I stared at Mother without understanding. The problem I am preoccupied with is building that supramental consciousness so IT becomes the being. It's that consciousness which must become the being. That's what's important. As for the rest, we'll see (it's the same as worrying over a change of clothing). I did not understand at all. And in order to do that, all the consciousness contained in these cells must aggregate, form and organize itself into an INDEPENDENT conscious entity—the consciousness in the cells must aggregate and form into a conscious entity capable of being conscious of Matter as well as conscious of the Supramental. That's the thing. That's what is being done. How far will we be able to go? I don't know.27 Yet I remained obsessed by that appearance, the “piece of clothing,” as if it were the most difficult thing to change, to transform, while Mother, on the contrary, seemed to see it as an ultimate consequence, which would present no problem: “At the end, it will be nothing: a mere breath and that will be it. What’s difficult is all the rest.” I perfectly knew, of course, that that “son of the cells,” that body newly created with all the agglomerated consciousness of the cells, was there, already formed, and that was what Mother truly cared about: that it become an independent being⎯that is, independent of the body⎯and capable of being simultaneously conscious of our old material world and of the world of true Matter, the supramental world. What did that mean? If this old piece of clothing is, after all, the site of the ultimate transformation, the site where the Screen falls away, the bridge to true Matter, what is the role of that cellular body regarding the old body? What is it that will open the door to the other Matter, if not old Matter itself? What is it that will transfuse the other substance, if not the old substance? The supramental world will not drop from heaven or break old Matter’s doors open without something consenting to the process on this side. One body is needed to receive it, a place for it to come in, doesn’t it?…
Unless the screen is worn thin and the darkness disgorged everywhere at the same time and the carbon layer asphyxiates so radically and unbearably that it will break all of a sudden through all the pores of our despair⎯perhaps this is how it will happen. “There will be a miracle,” she said.
But until that “last breath and that will be it” takes place, there is this transition, this time to gain, and what is the role of that cellular body which seemed to be Mother’s first problem, the body that was to “become the being,” that is, in a way, replace or relieve the old body? Did it mean that Mother was about to get rid of the rag?… But it was not true at all! Mother had said and repeated time and time again: Death is not a solution! NOT AT ALL. There is no solution except ... except if ... [Mother touched her body, indicating material transformation].28 She had said it again in 1971. And so many times. Always, always, I receive the same answer, which isn't an answer with words, but an answer with a Knowledge (how can I put it?...), a FACTUAL Knowledge: “It's no solution.” Something that comes from a very absolute region—which makes me feel or understand or grasp the uselessness of death. So we are after another solution. There MUST be another one.29 And She was categorical: Death is the acceptance of defeat, so ...30 for me it's a falsehood—death and falsehood go together.31 It's still the memory of a disastrous past.32 And there's no point in giving up, because it would just have to be started all over again next time 33 Begin again in a little baby?34 Mother shook her head.
There is only one way out: the supreme Door.
So She was seeking another solution. Or rather She was working out the other solution. What part that cellular body played in all that, if it were not simply meant to replace the other?… I do not know if there is an answer to that question or if there will be an answer before we have reached the end of the evolutionary operation (of this particular one in any case), but my recurring impression is that the cellular body is the one that can assume all the old body’s functions, keep all the links and contacts with the old world of Matter as we know it, physically survive death without its making any difference to the central consciousness (“it would make more difference to them than to me,” she would say) and thus watch over the old body (really like a guardian and a support) as long as it is necessary for it to be transformed and remodelled in its image. A sort of luminous cocoon that watches over, protects and regulates the deep and intra-atomic transmutations of the old substance. It was in that that Mother enveloped herself more and more, in that timeless body without wear and tear which could keep her functioning indefinitely in its conscious automatism … if the rest of the world allowed it. And one felt very well, in fact, that there, as long as She was there, She was completely outside of the 70 or 80 pulse beats and of the 95 years which the day after would be implacably 96. She was outside of all medical and baptismal conventions … as long as the rest did not stubbornly throw its old mortal convention in her face. An “independent” being, a small golden vibration repeating itself on and on in the depths of the cells, and which will keep repeating itself until the operation is over. Until the golden invasion has taken place in every point of the old body. It was only a question of time and patience. In 1972, in that same conversation in which She explained to me her foremost preoccupation, the formation of an independent body, She told me: I feel that if I last up to my hundredth birthday, that is, another six years, much will be accomplished—much. Something significant and decisive will be accomplished.35
And again in 1972, one day, She made this very significant remark (all the more significant than it was about the Mind of the cells): It is only when the Supramental manifests in the physical Mind that its presence can be permanent.36 And as I did not understand what had “to be done” (we always have the impression that one has to do!) in order to engage the Mantra in the body’s cells, that is, fix the Supramental in the body, Mother replied to me: I don't know what has to be done, for it's spontaneous. Perhaps this is the means: a contemplation of the Divine. This is its natural state. I think it's really the sensation of the helplessness of a baby, you understand? The actual feeling is even curious, you know ... the body feels as if it were completely enwrapped like a baby, exactly like this Two or three days ago, something was pressing on my heart—and it hurt. It hurt, I really had the feeling that the body had the feeling it was the end. But then immediately, it felt as if enfolded like a baby carried in the arms of the Divine. And after some time (a long time), when the body was exclusively in the Presence, it went away. The body didn't even ask for the pain to go; it just left. Absolutely the sensation of being a baby nestling in the Divine's arms. Extraordinary! I think [and that really opens up new horizons] I think my body has become excessively sensitive and needs to be protected from all those things coming in. As if it had to work inside, you know as in an egg. And She sat staring for a moment.
Yes, that's it. Exactly. I think a whole work is being done within. Oh, in terms of the old way, it's becoming more and more stupid, but the new way is beginning to emerge. One would like, so much, to remain enfolded like this, to remain like this for a long, long, long time.... It's coming, we must be patient.37
As within an egg.
And the material consciousness repeats, OM Namo Bhagavateh.... Like a backdrop to everything. OM Namo Bhagavateh You know, a backdrop you can use as a physical support. OM Namo Bhagavateh 38
She was weaving the cocoon of light. It was in March, 1973.
The “new body” is decidedly the cocoon of the body under transformation.
Sleeping Beauty
In my heart, I felt that the Moment was drawing near⎯the Moment of the Earth, truly, the one we had so much struggled and suffered for throughout all those ages. I had no doubt about it, we were approaching⎯but by what path? I had the impression of a poignant Performance of which Aeschylus and the medieval Mysteries were only pale copies. It was now the Performance of the earth. And She was smiling, immobile, as if draped in white light. Time is no longer the same time ... And I can't eat anymore. Well. What's going to happen, I don't know. “Very good things!” You're sweet, she answered. “But I am sure, sweet Mother!” Of course! So am I! And She laughed and took a big white hibiscus in her lap. What is this one? “It’s a Grace,” I answered. Then it's for you. Oh, that And She sat, her hands open on her knees. Can't speak anymore, can't eat anymore ... And time goes by like lightning.39
Food: I thought it was the next step She was about to take. Naturally, it was the “seed of death,” the very symbol of the first turning in on ourselves, the devouring copy of Love. The last change of functioning before moving to … what? It was also the last communion with the old terrestrial way and I felt that it was something other than a small operation more; each time, one came up against the whole world, there, in that absurd symbol, as if to infringe that was to break the human law, the path from which there was no return⎯and they struggled around her to make her eat: if She did not eat, “She was going to die,” mind you, it was obvious, and She yielded to their hypnotism, sometimes She even told them: Force me to eat, even if I don’t want to. It was so poignant to see that body struggling to escape, then falling back into the suggestion before escaping again. “She was going to die” was written on every wall around her, whispered everywhere, it kept pounding and hammering her cells. “The world’s structure is still a brake,” she said. No one believed in the miracle! No one wanted to believe in the “other way.” It is hard for one body to believe against the whole world. Mother was nothing anymore but a body alone, a pure terrestrial physiology which was desperately striving to work out the transition of the species⎯but what can you do if the species does not want, does not understand? And good wills were as harmful as bad ones finally: it was another will that was needed! Night and day, I spend my time in the battle 40 It isn't done for ONE body: it is done for the earth.41 This body has become a kind of representative and symbolic object—it is the battlefield, it is the field of victory, it is the Defeat, it is the Triumph, it is everything.42
To infringe the law all by oneself?
One sensed that that step hid something that was very radical. A radical change was needed in the terrestrial consciousness, in that small laboratory around her.
Was the Hour to be missed?
Sometimes, they gorged her with so much defeat, impossibility and negation that her body no longer knew⎯was it not mad, all alone there, struggling against all the scientists of the world? Those irrefutable little axolotls. I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen. There are times when things become so difficult that I wonder if the body will be able to hold out, but I would like 43 Oh, I haven't told you: yesterday or the day before, all of a sudden, for two or three minutes, my body was seized by the horror of … the idea of being put like this in a tomb was so horrifying! I couldn't have stood that more than a few minutes. It was horrifying. Not because I was buried alive, but because my body was conscious! It was considered “dead” by everybody for the heart had stopped beating—yet the body was conscious. That ... that was a horrible experience.... I was displaying all the signs of “death,” you know, the heart wasn't working, nothing was working—but I was conscious. The body was conscious. We must ... we must warn people at least not to rush to 44 If the time for transformation comes, if my body grows cold, they should not rush to put it in the hole. Because it could be ... it could be only temporary. You understand? It could be momentary. You understand? Do you understand what I mean? 45 Oh, I understood so well! And that day, I remembered a question that I had asked Mother a few years earlier: I wondered whether one could “experience death without dying”: Surely! She had said. You can have the experience in a yogic way, you can even have it materially if ... [and she laughed so much] if death is brief enough not to give the doctors time to declare you dead!46 So I could picture the scene. What if they declared her dead? That’s how it is, you know, one HAS, has to die, that’s the terrestrial law, don’t be silly. And She, too, imagined the scene. I know, She continued, an attempt is being made to transform the body—it knows it and is very willing—but I don't know if it will be able to do it.... Do you follow? So for some time it may give the impression that it's over, although it would be only temporary. It would start again—it might start again. But then I would be. I may be incapable of speaking at that time, of saying this. So I am saying it to you 47 I don't know. At any rate, I would like someone to prevent such a stupid thing, because then all the work would be ruined. People with some authority should be there and say: YOU MUST NOT DO THIS—Mother DOES NOT WANT.... What about you? 48 ⎯“Who will listen to me? I interrupted. They will say that I am mad. They won’t even let me enter your room!” I did not know how prophetic I was. Then She corrected herself: It seems silly to make a fuss. Better say nothing.49
One “makes a fuss,” but it is the earth that is concerned.
Come on, how silly, things are as usual. It is difficult to make History all alone.
Was it the sign that it was “not possible”?
And weeks “flashed” by (for her). I have become only this, a force pushing against a world of obstacles,50 she had said twelve years earlier, but it was like yesterday. Any effort to retain the old way has become it brings about a discomfort, an almost intolerable discomfort.51 She could no longer remain in the old way, something had to happen. We just have to bear up, that’s all!52 And something happened. One day (we cannot know if it was a black day, because behind each night a greater light is hidden) things took a turn … we do not know in what direction⎯it was probably still the Direction, because there is not two. And that same day, so dark, it seemed that Mother had touched the key. It was April 7, 1973.
She did not smile that day. She was grave, “as when I pull all of the world’s weight.” She had a white lotus in her lap. I seem to be gathering all the world's resistances.... They come to me one after another, and if I weren't ... If I stop calling the Divine for a single minute, the pain is unbearable, mon petit! To such a point that I now hesitate to speak of “transformation” to people, because if that's what it is, one really has to be a hero You see, there's something in the body that would almost howl nonstop. Yet it looks to me that there is something very simple to be done to make it all right But I don't know what. Sometimes I wonder, “Does the Lord want me to leave?”
I am ... quite willing, you know; but does He want me to stay? No answer. And that is 53 Yes, always that silence, perhaps until the end⎯not A SINGLE answer. Why? If we could find that “why,” we would have the key to what happened…. I truly, truly sense there is something to be done that would make everything go right—but I don't know what it is. “I sense there's an increasingly faster movement that's that's absorbing you.,” I said. Yes, yes, it's quite true. You see, I have a solution for the transformation of the body, but ... it's never been done before, so it's extremely hard to believe. I cannot, I cannot believe that that's it. Yet, it's the only solution I see Then
I stared wide-eyed. The body has a wish to go to sleep and awake ... (“sleep” in a certain sense, of course: I remain perfectly conscious) and awake only after it is transformed. 54 Suddenly, it sprang out, a revelation: Sleeping Beauty! Yes, that was it⎯the cataleptic trance, the cocoon of transformation. It was obvious, it was the only solution. The “very simple” thing to be done. Then She immediately corrected herself But people will never have the patience to stand it, to take care of me. The task is colossal, a Herculean task; they're nice, but they're already doing their utmost, and I can't ask for more. That's the problem. Yet, it's the only solution to which the consciousness assents: “Yes, that's IT.” But who? Who? To ask that of the people who take care of me is almost impossible. “They’ll understand, at least a few will understand,” I innocently replied.⎯But I can't ask them.⎯I can do it, I stupidly replied. Will they believe you? I was astounded. For me, it was so simple. Perhaps you can explain to them in front of me, Mother continued when they come.55 Then She closed her eyes, plunged into the experience, bringing me into that so strange, powerful immobility. And that was when She suddenly came out of her state: “I want to see you every day.” That everyday lasted only once.
Then it was time. They came in.
And my heart sinks.
One of the samples came up to us⎯one of the “guardians.” There was an instantaneous explosion. Thirty years of safety valve suddenly bursting out. Oh, I will not repeat, I cannot repeat that ugly monologue, that tidal wave of anger. And She was there, so white, immobile. Oh, there is no one to blame, it was not a “man” who stood there, and I do not know if one being on earth could have endured the trial of that formidable Pressure day after day⎯it was the earth that was saying NO. These were the laboratory conditions. It was there that She had to work: there were no “good” or “bad” people, they were the samples of the terrestrial enterprise. Those nearer to the centre of descent are very shaken up,56 she had already said nine years earlier. But the facts are there, we cannot erase them from History…. She tried to speak out: I can't speak.⎯Don’t speak, Mother. I would like to explain ⎯“I am not interested.” It's because there is an attempt to transform the body....⎯ “Whatever happens, happens.” But you don't want to know?...57 asked Mother in her little childlike voice.⎯ “No, I don’t want.” That was it.
That day, fate was sealed.
The solution was there, along with the impossibility of the solution.
She could not continue any longer, and they were closing the only possible door.
She could no longer transform herself without flattening all that resisted around her.
Like Sri Aurobindo.
Nothing was left but the “hole.”
And yet, yet I felt, I knew that in that very impossibility the ultimate Solution lay⎯the one nobody had foreseen. The very reason why She was told nothing. The last path to the ineluctable victory.
There is no NO anywhere, there is only a Supreme Yes, everywhere and always, which follows its imprescriptible ways through all the no’s, all the refusals, all the good and the bad, the violent and the peaceable, and everyone does exactly what has to be done … without their knowing it.
As men, we grieve (oh!) and lament, yield to an outburst of anger or reprobation⎯but it amounts to the same thing, we understand nothing. “Something” keeps following its imperturbable path. The supreme Door hides in the ultimate negation.
I held a white lotus in my hands when I went out of Mother’s room and I no longer understood anything. I only understood that an invisible page had been turned. “One day, they will close Mother’s door on us,” I said to my companion like a robot. I did not know how prophetic I was being for the second time.
The raging voice still resounded: “In thirty years I’ve seen enough ... enough of humbug!”
There is something very simple to be done 58
If only the earth knew how very simple the thing to do is for everything to change.
So simple.
A certain yes in our hearts.
A yes that makes even tombs melt away. Then the Hour will have come.
A mere breath, and it will be done.
Mother had seven months left. The last path.
Sleeping Beauty needs a Prince Charming.
What would the path be now?
Surely and obviously, another path had to exist, the terrestrial enterprise could not fail. Perhaps She will come and tell me what this path is, I don’t know. She spoke to me for so long, surely She will come and tell me the Truth. We do not need tall stories, we need an Earth of Truth.
Death was not a solution and I did not think about it once, from that black April 7 to that November 17 which fell on my head like a cry: NO. It’s not possible. It’s not that, it’s not how it is! Oh, how I cried no that day, and how I have never ceased crying no. It was not possible. Or else, what?
For one year and eleven months, I have never stopped hunting down that “what,” listening to it, struggling with it and tracking it down in each line of this book, as if it were the very blood of the Earth that strove to know and understand⎯I set every possible trap to capture it and never tried to delude myself, I explored every corner of that terrible and marvellous forest with my sword, and at the end, I simply pray: the truth, the truth, let the truth be.
May we be told how we can build that true earth. What is the path? The last path?
And I seem to see her smiling.
The Last Meeting
So, we resume our journey. Seven more months. I did not know that destiny had taken a turn on that April 7, I looked forward without fear, only a great question in my heart. I could see Mother’s growing pain, of course, but … will I dare say that for me, it was like a struggle against unreality? One only had to touch her atmosphere to understand and feel that formidable Reality, far more solidly than any suffering. She was struggling against the Earth’s past. She was struggling against all the ghosts of evolution, symbolized by all of that Negation around her. It was the
No of the earth that had to be vanquished, not “death”, that ghost of ghosts. Mother was not 95 years old! She was … as one wished.
And what did they wish around her? What was the reality for them?
I feel I am being pulled in opposite directions by the old world and the new. 1
The laboratory notebook was becoming very sparse, I had no longer any question in my heart. The day after April 7, they had stopped the daily flow of one to two hundred people. Only the dozen “regular” disciples remained, but those were precisely the dreadful nucleus⎯those who knew that She was going to “die,” oh! they knew everything, they were so well-informed⎯it was not the 150 others who weighed down on her. She had indeed to battle until the end. I feel like screaming ... But.... I haven't seen anybody this morning. They're all here [waiting at the door]. What can I do, mon petit?2 And that “what can I do?” was so poignant. It was really “what shall I do,” what? What one could do?⎯”We need you, sweet Mother,” I said, and that was all. Oh! ... Oh, thank you.... she said. And it was so heartrending. Then She plunged into her eternity that flashed past like a second and it was half an hour. Then they would come and ring the bell near her. Oh, they are ruthless! 3
Then, on April 14, the last operation I have already spoken of took place: the transfer of the nervous system. From then on, the whole body was to function automatically, independently. It was the cells’ little vibration, the new body, that enveloped her and made her move, breathe and feel; nothing obeyed the old laws anymore. There was a logic in all that, obviously, but the logic of what? The last operation of the caterpillar in its cocoon may precisely be that removing of the nervous system. But in her case, without a material cocoon to protect her from the onslaught of the environment⎯or a cocoon of light which was constantly broken by the outer contacts that made her suffer every time⎯what was possibly going to happen, since the cataleptic trance was impossible, as the people around her would never have the needed patience? What solution? “What can I do?” All the time I have to keep a grip on myself not to howl.... she told me on May, 14. From time to time, there's a marvellous moment—but it's short!4 She could not break the contact, that contact was precisely what allowed her to transform the old Matter⎯or else, one disconnects, it is over. She could not even exteriorize herself as She had done for so many decades in a fraction of a second, outside of that whole terrestrial jumble. For SO MANY years, so many years, I would lie down in bed and phew! I would go into the Lord. And I am now forbidden to do this—that’s probably what is the greatest suffering. When I start doing this [gesture of rising above the body], instantly, instantly a terrible discomfort: it’s NO. If I persist, I literally start howling as if I were tortured. It’s only when I am concentrated here that it gets better.5 But that “better” was a strange hell. Indubitably, it was in the body that She had to find, She was tied up there until She reached the solution. And the only solution was transformation, there was no other⎯but circumstances seemed to impede the only condition that would have enabled her to undergo the operation. So?…
So May 19 came. It was our last meeting, but I did not know it.
I climbed the small stairway covered with wool. The door opened, and there was that ray of sunlight on her nape. Her armchair was turned towards Sri Aurobindo’s tomb. She was bent over herself in her immobility, her hands open in her lap as if She were offering all of this world, all of this misery. “What You will, what You will….” Truly, She was the prayer of the earth. Then She opened her eyes with a smile, took my flowers. What is it?⎯“It’s Joy in the Physical.” It was a very small champagne-coloured hibiscus, with a bright-red heart. We badly need it! She exclaimed. And you? No questions? That day, precisely, I was full of questions, I who had been silent for weeks. “Yes, I was thinking about something Sri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri, He clearly says: Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.6⎯Ohh!... Oh, that is interesting!... He doesn't say anything else?⎯“No, not on that subject…. The consciousness of your cells seems to be awakened but not the power.”⎯You said “awakened”?⎯“Because had the power been awakened, there wouldn't be any weakness in your body”⎯No. And I was stupid enough not to understand that if that Power “awoke,” manifested itself, it would have been the upheaval, the destruction of all the negations around. There, too, She was trapped, trapped on every side: the very conditions of the transformation could not happen without “a miracle that would upset too many things.” So?… “But how to awaken it?” I asked. Through faith, our faith.... If one knows that and has trust.... But you see, my physical, my body is deteriorating very rapidly—what could stop it from deteriorating?⎯“I do NOT believe it is deterioration—it's not. My feeling is that you are physically being led to a point of such complete powerlessness that the most complete Power will be forced to awaken . . . .” Ah! ... you're right,7 she said. “That Power will then be COMPELLED to come out.”
And She remained silent, her hand resting on her lips. There were crows in the big yellow copper-pod tree, flowers galore, a golden cataract. It was May. Or else I could ... I could leave this body, no? She said that so quietly, perhaps to tease me, or tease the earth a little, to see if it really did not care.⎯“ Ah, no. No, sweet Mother, it must be done now. It’s now…. You see, I am certain it's NOT disintegration, not at all. It is NOT disintegration.
You know, I have always seen that the other pole springs up from the most extreme opposite. So the supreme Power must spring up from the sort of apparent powerlessness you are in. By no means is it a disintegration.”⎯For me, you see, the question is food. More and more I find it impossible to eat. Can this body live without food? Sweet Mother, I insisted (I had the impression of fighting with her, or rather with the suggestion that weighed down on her, that “completely rotten atmosphere”), “I really think you are led to the point where something ELSE will be forced to manifest. You know, as long as that point . . . of impossibility has not been reached…. ⎯Oh, it's almost the point of impossibility. ⎯“Yes, sweet Mother, yes, that's also what I feel. I feel you're reaching that point, and something else is going to emerge….” And She replied nothing. “It is not at all the end; quite the contrary, it will soon be the beginning.”⎯I was told that the beginning would take place when I am a hundred; but that's a long way off!⎯“ No, Mother, I don't think it will take that long. I don't think so. I really don't think so. Another type of functioning is going to set in. But the end of the old has to be reached, and that end is the terrible part!”⎯Oh ... I really don't want to say, I don't want to insist, but ... truly... And She shook her head, and all the pain of the world was in that shake. The consciousness is clearer, stronger than it has ever been, and I look like 8⎯“ “Yes, Mother, YOU’RE GOING
TO PASS into something else, I sense it—it isn't faith in me that speaks, it's something else deep down that understands. It's really like something telling me: that's THE WAY.
She closed her eyes on her eternity. Never was I to see those eyes again. Those were our last words.
Two days after, they barred everyone from her room. There was no longer any communication with the outside.
“There will be no communication anymore,” I replied to a disciple that stared at me, dumbfounded. They did not understand that, by closing her door on me, they cut the thread! Oh! there are always two ways of looking at things and everything is decreed, everything follows the divine Plan. She probably had to be alone. But sometimes, one wonders whether things could not have been different, oh! they could have been, they could…. But it was the whole earth that should have been different. So?…
There was no longer anyone to pull on the thread. She was alone with the Negation.
Or perhaps alone with the Answer.
Not for repose do I aspire, but for Thy integral Victory,9 she said. By what path?
And we recall Sri Aurobindo’s words, the last lines He dictated in 1950, The Book of Fate, in Savitri.
A day may come when she must stand unhelped On a dangerous brink of the world’s doom and hers. Carrying the world’s future on her lonely breast, Carrying the human hope in a heart left sole To conquer or fail on a last desperate verge. Alone with death and close to extinction’s edge, Her single greatness in that last dire scene, She must cross alone a perilous bridge in Time And reach an apex of world-destiny Where all is won or all is lost for man.10
Hold On
What happened during those six months?
All appearances called for death, all doors were closed, there was no way out⎯except the supreme Door. Except the best possible path to ineluctable Victory. It is my theorem, my stubborn faith. And I know that I am right. But…. I am not seeking consolation, I do not need to be consoled, I have a Fire within that laughs at all deaths. That’s it. And Mother is with me. But the earth? What is the path of this beloved, damned and painful earth, how does Mother’s last path meet up with the path of the earth? The earth was her path; She hewed the path for the earth. What is the path? Sri Aurobindo told us in a positive and definite way that the supramental creation will follow the present one, so, whatever is in preparation for the future must be the circumstances needed for the advent whatever they are.11
It is that “whatever they are” that I want to look into, without childish nonsense or sentimentality: the truth. Pure.
But the truth of the earth.
I can only recount my experience. There must have been a reason why She built that last line of communication.
Here are the facts:
Thus I was waiting for the last “change of functioning,” the cessation of food, it had been a simple self-evidence to me for those last six months. She appeared a last time on her balcony, on August 15, 1973, for Sri Aurobindo’s birthday. She was completely bent over, still struggling. She was such a small figure up there, on that big poop deck, while the peanut sellers made clanging noises as at a fair. It was the small world, so very small, as usual. Were we going to get out of that habit at last? Really, if it is only a question of “superman,” it is hopeless⎯it must be something else. A sort of physiological cataclysm is needed for all that to change⎯not a war indeed, not millions of bombs that change nothing, and people make small babies and they start all over again. NO. Something else. How I watched out for that “something else” in that small bent figure. Then She grasped the railing with both hands and slowly, slowly, She disappeared in her small golden cape.
What I was to see was a corpse, three months later. But I did not believe it. Can one believe in the failure of the earth? Could man fail after the ape, or the batrachian after the tadpole?⎯what we have to know is the path. That is all. There must have been more than one ape to say “no” to man⎯who cares?
On November 10, She began to choke, as if She could no longer breathe: a slow asphyxiation. The time of that breathing was reaching its end. The time of that air. What did death matter to her? One cuts the thread, so what? And it is done with that bag of misery⎯She could have cut the thread ten years earlier, She would have avoided a lot of misery. She never cut it. Even “dead,” there, on that chaise longue, She was as if stuffed with consciousness⎯a fierce consciousness. What did those days, those last days, mean for her, when She was suffocating? “I am told nothing….” She was told nothing until the end. She had to be there until the end, until the last second. She had to enter death fully alive. That was the dreadful thing. One day in 1972, She told me three things which seemed not linked one to another, three things I have already spoken of separately, but they had been said together: Its prayer, the prayer of the body was: “Let me know when the time for dissolution comes, if dissolution is necessary, so that everything in me will accept the dissolution, but ONLY IN THAT CASE.”12 She had not been “informed,” nothing in her body had accepted dissolution−⎯She was fiercely there, on her chaise longue, at the “end.” And in that same conversation, She had also said: My body is in the middle of LIVING THE PROCESS. It's only when I am immobile, in a sort of cellular contemplation ... then—then it's magnificent. Time vanishes, everything ... everything is changed into something else. 13
She lived the process until the end. It was the process that continued. And She said that same day, on the same subject: It has become very intense. But at the same time, there's the knowledge: “Now is the time to win the Victory.” Which comes from above. “Hold on hold on, now is the time to win the Victory.” Quite interesting really.14 All three things together. If we gather all three things together, what do they mean?… Probably what She lived more and more acutely until that November 17. She was told nothing, so She kept going, it was that simple. The process kept going. “She went out like a candle,” related one of those who used to watch over her⎯no heart attack, nothing. Not even a trance or a coma. She continued as long as it was possible. She had to stay there completely and until the end. Why?… The process probably had to continue in death. She was not allowed, her entourage did not allow the cataleptic trance, they would never have had the necessary patience. But they allowed death, it was “recognized,” accepted as a medical fact. And since She could not perform the operation in her bed, She went into a tomb to do it. There, nobody would disturb her, it was the best possible cocoon, they would even burn incense sticks. You have to go through death in order to conquer death,15 She had said. There are no tricks in a tomb. Trance is still a yogic trick. There is no door left. So, it remains the supreme Door.
On November 14, around midnight, She asked to walk. I want to walk, otherwise I’ll become paralyzed. She leant on the arm of one of her attendants and She walked … until She turned blue.
And the days became more and more painful. She refused to eat, then accepted, and refused again. They scolded and cajoled her like a sick person. She was always half-seated: her back was full of burning bed sores. Every twenty minutes She would ask to be lifted from her chaise longue. Lift me up…. During the night of November 16, She asked again to walk. I want to walk⎯oh! She would have liked to enter death on her two legs. They refused. She struggled until the end, as long as there was a breath left in her body. In the afternoon of November 17, the signs of suffocation accelerated. At 7:10 P.M., her doctor gave her a heart massage. At 7:25 P.M., her breath stopped.
That was when the incredible madness began, truly.
Hardly seven hours later, at 2.30 AM, they took her out of her atmosphere, carried her downstairs to the “meditation hall,” put her on a chaise longue under burning spotlights and served her up to the crowd. Oh, whom can we accuse? They did what one ever does in “such cases,” they did “as usual.” And there were three doctors to certify that She was dead and … Come on, you are not going to make a fuss, are you? And I could still hear Mother’s own words: “They must not, they must not, Mother doesn’t want, you will tell them.…” And yet, those people were supposed to have some type of yogic knowledge … No?
I arrived among the crowd around 5 A.M., informed by rumour. She was there, so emaciated, on her chaise longue, in that white satin dress. And that concentration on her face … almost ferocious. Nothing like Sri Aurobindo’s smile in his massive peace. A stubborn concentration, as in the days when She was right in the thick of the battle. And that whole conscious body, stuffed with consciousness⎯it was palpable⎯ … served up to those millions of vibrations of grief and death and….
Hold on.
And the fans were humming, they hummed for two days at 85 degrees Fahrenheit under the suffocating zinc-plated ceiling lit with golden neon lights, while the whole town filed past her⎯exactly what was needed to decompose a body. And She looked at all that. At times, I almost expected her to have one of those small starts, just as when She came back to the surface: What time is it?
There was no grief in my heart. I was like a stone. I stared at that on and on, at that incredible spectacle.
Hold on….
Then, on November 20, at 8:15 A.M., they put her in a box. I was standing to the right of that coffin. She was half seated against white cushions, her hands in her lap. There was a ray of light on her nape. Then the cover was lowered: there was no more ray, there was nothing. There were half a dozen men driving 25 screws into that.
They carried her away.
A solemn voice was delivering solemnities into a microphone on the Ashram’s roofs. And it talked and talked. People were full of grief, people were full of thoughts. I could see through them all, through everything, the world was transparent. It was a dreadful masquerade. A Lie. An enormous Lie, a comedy of death such as one can see in dreams. It was not true. There was not a sole true minute in all that. That death was an awful lie.
They lowered her into the tomb.
As soon as it was over and I could decently leave that solemn masquerade, I ran away.
I am sorry, but this is what I saw, what I felt. It was my experience of those two days: an unreal Falsehood.
So what does all that mean? What is the sense?
The Most Beautiful Fairy Tale
And now the last fact.
In the thick of that incredible masquerade, on November 18, as I was among that crowd, staring and staring without understanding at that small white form under the humming fans, I had the most powerful experience of my life. I was unable to have any experience, I was there like a dumbfounded stone, with a splitting headache. I simply stared, without even a prayer in my heart, nothing. If She had get up to take her leave of that whole incredible jumble, it would have seemed to me the only sensible thing. She did not get up, but all of a sudden, something took hold of me, literally pulled me above that headache and that dreamlike crowd, then … it was a tidal wave. I knew what Power was, it was not in vain that Mother had taken my hand and drawn me into the experience. But there, it was not someone that had “an experience,” it took place as if outside of me, I was nobody, I was only witnessing a fact. I was immersed in a formidable wave of a Power that was made of elation, as it were⎯perhaps love, but it was an elation that was love⎯elation like a cataract, uninterrupted, without a gap, and it pealed out: a formidable peal all over the universe. All the flood-gates of the world were open. And it said, it rang in my ears as all over the world, a formidable, though soundless voice : NO OBSTACLE … NOTHING IMPEDES … NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING IMPEDES…. And it kept pealing over and over again, each word as if all the bells in the world were pulled together in a single, formidable peal of bronze: NO OBSTACLE … NOTHING IMPEDES … NO OBSTACLE …. And a joy in it, a triumph, oh! something that laughed so splendidly, but so formidably, and swept everything away on its way, toppling the walls, breaking the gates open⎯nothing impedes … no obstacle. As imperative as a Last Judgment. A cataclysm of joy.
I held out for a quarter of an hour, then I went out into the street, or else I would have burst. And it still kept pealing. I walked to the seaside, my body was shaking with it. Then it calmed down. And there was no “Mother” or “I” or even an experience in that⎯or rather it was the world that had the experience. Yes, in fact it was like the first manifestation of “something” over the world. We can stick labels on it, but it laughs at all labels. It was a formidable Fact. On that November 18, something happened.
Perhaps the first terrestrial wave of the joy of the new world.
So all that wailing there, those admirable close disciples who cried so much after having shoved her into death, those faces draped in their dignity, with questions of money behind, questions of prestige behind, questions of … oh! they were stuffed with questions, they were about to take over the management of the business⎯it was so ridiculous. That was the masquerade. And Mother laughed, She pealed out in my ears, swept that Ashram away like a feather, along with all their ridiculous little walls and all the sanctities they were about to saddle her with⎯NO OBSTACLE … NOTHING IMPEDES … NO OBSTACLE …
And they said: Oh! the transformation is stopped, oh! the Hour of God has been missed, oh! the Moment is passed, the world was not ready⎯the fools! Could the pithecanthropus have ever stopped the torrent of mental evolution and prevent themselves from becoming men!? Did they really think that Mother was so small that She could fit in the four walls of their Ashram and in their mortal conventions? She was there, before my eyes, bursting with consciousness, She was going to enter that tomb since it was the only place where they could tolerate her for a long time⎯now they had all the necessary patience. But She was laughing.
That is all that I know. That peal of joy all over the world. It is the Fact.
So what does it all mean?
I am really reaching the end of Mother’s forest, I know nothing more. It has been one year and eleven months since they stuck her there alive. For one year and eleven months I have never ceased repeating: what, what does it mean? It is my own peal. What does it mean, what is really there, what is happening, what is the truth, the truth… And I remember Sri Aurobindo’s words:
In that tremendous silence lone and lost Of a deciding hour in the world’s fate,... Alone with her self and death and destiny As on some verge between Time and Timelessness When being must end or life rebuild its base, Alone she must conquer or alone must fall.16
Now, She is in that “tremendous silence,” that night, that cocoon of grey marble. Cement above, cement to the right and to the left, night, marble slabs: a tremendous silence. Each of her cells repeats and repeats the Mantra, indefinitely, like a golden little pulsation. She is undergoing the formidable operation. She is rebuilding the base of life, the “process” continues. That is what She had been prepared for for the last months, “my body is being prepared for something else.” That is why She was told nothing, because She had to enter there alive⎯I can still hear her little cry the first time She had the vision of her death. Nothing, nothing at all is working in the ordinary way any longer. So the body can no longer eat, can no longer.... The consciousness striving to help the body in the work has made it understand per-fect-ly well that going away isn’t a solution. Even if there was earlier a curiosity to know what the body will be, that curiosity is gone; as for the desire to stay on, that went away long ago; the possible desire to leave when things become a bit ... suffocating went away with the idea that it would change nothing at all. So only one thing remains for the body: to perfect acceptance. That’s all. The only thing that really consoles it (but not for long) is the idea, “What you are doing is useful for all; what you are doing isn’t for you, a stupid little person, it’s for the whole entire creation to profit by it....” I don’t know. I don’t know what will happen. But I would like ... I would like people not to put me in a box and shove the body ... like that, because it will be aware of it, it will feel it, and that will mean adding one more misery to all those it has had. I am saying this to you, so you will be able to say it to others if necessary. [They informed me nine hours after Mother left]… It doesn’t desire that, it doesn’t fear it— things will be as they will have to be, that’s all. Only, it would really like people to understand to understand the effort it has made, and not to rush to shut it in, with a heap of earth above it. Because even long after doctors will have declared it to be dead, it will be conscious: its cells are conscious. So there, that’s all.17
She is there, alive.
Aeschylus and Orpheus look pale in comparison.
And there is no one to really blame in that formidable tragedy, each of the actors probably did exactly what they had to. I remember, one day in 1969, Mother told me about the amazing circumstances of an Ashram girl’s “accidental” death, as if everything had conspired to oblige her to die, down to the least detail: it seemed that everyone had made just the required gesture, had the required distraction and the required lapse, the required three-minutes delay. But Mother knew that that girl had to die, wanted to die and that it was her soul that had organized all the needed circumstances to “help” her departure: Curiously enough, when you see things with this Consciousness, the perfection of the organization is so tremendous that you are ... you’re almost terrified! All our emotions, our reactions, all that absolutely looks like childishness. Mon petit, we don’t know anything! Day after day after day, I am increasingly convinced that we know nothing. We think we know, we think and we know nothing. We are in the presence of hidden wonders that elude us completely because we’re idiots. It’s what Sri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri: God grows up on earth— God GROWS—but man ... [And She laughed], the wise man talks and sleeps and no one will notice it till the work is over. That’s how it is.18
What is hidden behind that formidable performance of Mother’s “end,” The Eternal’s dreadful strategy,19 as Sri Aurobindo called it? What marvels, or what lost silence? Or what?
What stratagem?
And Mother’s words are coming back to me: Seeing the world such as it is and seems meant to be irremediably, human intellect has decided that this universe must be an error of God.... But the Supreme Lord answers that the comedy is not entirely played out, and He adds: Wait for the last act.20
What is that last act, that bottom of Mother’s forest? That last path of the earth?
And my bells start again to peal out.
NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING IMPEDES….
And this: “We don’t know anything.”
We do not know anything. What tall words are we going to utter?⎯it is not words that the world needs! It has been kept harping on with every possible theory. But what if it heard that peal, if those bells came and rang on the earth?
Will they ring?
We can say: Oh! Mother will come out of that tomb one day, radiant, and the transformation will be done. And perhaps it is true. But Mother has never been inclined to impress people. A great show is not what will change the earth indeed! A deep miracle is needed, a change in this substance in spite of all we may think, want, say, believe or not believe. This life⎯this physiological life⎯has to rebuild its own base. We have to be seized by the miracle, in the miracle, engulfed into it. We have to get out of the carbon layer so that it bursts open and we emerge from this ridiculous little brain of axolotl and its ridiculous little panaceas and this small, so small humankind. What is the instrument, the lever, the open Sesame that will perform the miracle in this stubborn substance?
And I seem to see this.
A split. A tremendous split.
An old, obsolete humanity, drivelling and hopeless⎯the one which wears and tears faster and faster and is simply false matter held together by a necktie or a white piece of clothing and a frozen yogic smile. That one is dying of its own death. It rushes faster and faster into ineluctable dissolution. It reaches the last suffocation.
No need to push it, it is crumbling into dust, very solemnly. And then….
When darkness deepens strangling the earth’s breast And man’s corporeal mind is the only lamp21
… something that is very young, very new, and bumps here and there unknowingly. The new species, which is not really aware that it is the new species, except that it wants another air. So….
So this is where the miracle can happen. The open Sesame? We hold it.
All of Mother’s and Sri Aurobindo’s work, their real work, consisted in opening the cells’ consciousness, opening up that fortress. The demolition of the old genetic code: the old way of seeing, understanding and feeling⎯the old way of dying. The axolotls’ cave. A small new vibration that winds and winds in the cells. We must engage that little vibration, as others engaged the Mind’s vibration at the beginning of this wretched story. It is not complicated, there is not far to go, no superbrains to build, no cross-legged supermeditations: a Mantra. A password⎯whatever it is⎯provided it is the cry of our being, the breath of our breath in all that general decomposition, something that makes us break through. The last lifebuoy. And one clings to it, one repeats and repeats the Mantra until it pierces through the crust of banality, the daily stupid trifles, the millions and millions of useless things that we live instead of something else that never comes. One repeats obstinately like a mule, until the cells take hold of that vibration of call−⎯then they repeat it night and day nonstop, automatically, stupidly … and marvellously. This is where the Marvel begins. This is where the miracle begins. The cellular, physiological Miracle. For Sri Aurobindo and Mother have opened the way. It is not as if we had to break through impenetrable layers: the path is open. So everything is possible. It is a world where everything is possible⎯it was impossible only because of all the impossibilities that we conceived of. And there is no need to believe: we have only to go there, to that level. We have to touch that. And the marvel is that, when we touch that, it is the new world that starts to build itself on its own, without our needing to want, seek or understand: it does it by itself, spontaneously, automatically. It develops on its own. It changes the movement without our knowing how, it makes us do things without our knowing how, see all kinds of meanings where there was only incomprehensible blackness, connects and interconnects all sorts of unexpected paths⎯a formidable complicity of everything. And a power … a strange power, which is neither powerful nor formidable, but so fantastically magical, as if it dissolved all obstacles, all shadows, all fears and illnesses⎯a rout of ghosts on all sides. But … a firm Position to keep to: that. Always, in all circumstances: that, the Mantra, the new Truth, the supreme new Possibility. One holds to that, and that’s it.
So not dozens, but thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands or even a few millions of young shoots in the world which after having seized, understood the lever, pull that, want that, call that…. But it is instant multiplication! A formidable contagion, as if just a little bit of Possibility, lived, believed in, called for, made thousands and thousands of other Possibilities emerge⎯forced the Possibility out. And everything begins to change: physically, materially. The old laws crack. One looks at all that and it melts away, it stops being. It no longer exists, it is over. And the more one laughs to see that, to touch and live that, the more it develops, grows in a marvellous smile, as if it were only too pleased to smile and smile again, always smile, smile everywhere. The end of the mental Ghost.
And there we are. The Screen falls.
And Mother is there, the true earth is there. The end of the axolotls.
The true earth is only in our stupid tomb, our impossible tomb⎯the one they shoved Mother into because no one wanted to believe that it was possible.
So She will not need to “get out” of there, to impress people, because everything will be the Miracle, everything will be the Marvel. She is only behind our Screen of impossibility. There is no miracle to perform: it is already done. There is no Marvel to invent: it is already invented. It is the Marvel everywhere. It is the Miracle of the earth right there. We have to go there, to the true level of the Marvel.
And perhaps death will be the death of those who do not know how to see the Marvel. They will suffocate all by themselves in their open-air tombs.
And the division will be made, automatically. The dead go to death, the living go to life.
A small golden vibration in the body’s cells.
An open Sesame to the true earth.
Bells pealing out all over the ruins of the Mind. No obstacle, nothing impedes.
Mother is not dead! She is alive, She laughs, She is there, waiting for us to get out of our stupidity⎯it is not She who needs to get out, it is we.
And when the carbon layer is completely worn thin, even her body will come and laugh with us. She is there, wearing down Death from within. In fact, her body entered that tomb only to wear down our own death. It is her last sacrifice to our impossible Falsehood. She is waiting for us to accept to see WHAT IS. She wears down Unreality.
Sleeping Beauty is there.
She lived in spite of death, she conquered still.22
Sleeping Beauty needs a Prince Charming. Perhaps She needs many Prince
Charmings … for her Prince Charming is the soul of the earth prisoner of death.
Slowly, She is performing the mutation of death in her cells. Each little cell like a cry for the truth of the earth⎯there are one hundred thousand billion cells in a body. And when we have had enough of the masquerade, when our cries meet up with hers, well, the masks will fall.
And it will be “the end of death.”
Why not help her a little?
You see life, you see how it is, you are used to this sort of existence; and it's dreary and it's sad (some people find it entertaining—because it doesn't take much to entertain them!).... Well, behind it all there is a fairy tale. Something in the making, something that's going to be beautiful, beautiful, inexpressibly beautiful. And we shall take part in it You have no idea, you think you will forget everything when you die, leave it all behind you—but it's not true! And all who feel the call to a beautiful, luminous, joyous, progressive life, well, they will all take part in it, in one way or another. You don't know now, but you will after a while. There you are. Yes, a lovely story. And Sri Aurobindo was trying to draw that story down to earth, and it is sure to come. “And if you like, you too can help make that story come down to earth.”23
What if we pulled a little?
A small golden vibration into the cells. A radiant new species.
A body of our joy.
And it's true! It is the most beautiful fairy tale in the world. There's none more beautiful. I am going to tell you the most beautiful story in the world… 24
That’s it, Mother, your geographer has finished his map: let the true earth be.
Deer House Nandanam October 26, 1975
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