The Legend of the Future

The Legend of the Future

I had a formidable Secret.

Or a Treasure.

It was as if at the end of an era.

I knew what would deliver the Earth from its millennia of lead or iron: the Victory over Death, for it is Death that reigns, we are the dead standing upright or in suspension, and it is Death that makes all our laws and all our catechisms, scientific or religious, in accordance with what it is — and what we are not. Or not yet. We are the product of fossils with something inside that we do not know. Or not yet. We are at the last stage of an Evolution of the dead, who are reborn endlessly to find what they are. Life has never yet been — it is somewhere inside or below, and it is this that pushes and pushes without respite, and without pity, to compel us to find, to un-cover what is there, inside or below, without catechism, without celestial paradises or super-machines that will find for us what we have not found, that will cover with another prehistoric and animal layer what is there, inside or below. History has not begun, or not yet. Man has not begun: we are scientific or religious hominids in transition — interminable transition toward what we must be: another species, new and unknown, truly human, which will no longer be the product of improved fossils and growing cemeteries, as if that were all that was growing on our mortal planet, which contrives to improve Death instead of finding what is there, inside or below — the Power that would change everything, man included.

"Man is a transitional being"

said Sri Aurobindo at the beginning of this century.

"Salvation is physical"

said Mother in the middle of this century.

And we go from catastrophe to catastrophe, and from ruins to ruins across the millennia, to compel us to open the one Door we have not opened, inside or below. As if this species, or this civilisation, had not found the key that would open everything and change everything, and yet another species and yet another "civilisation," and yet more ruins… in perpetuity? But there is something that pushes and pushes, below and inside — implacably. There is nothing more implacable than Evolution or a young shoot beneath the forest, that wants to produce its Tree, and that will die as many times as necessary and will use all the debris, all the decompositions of old dead stumps to burst at last into the open day and free space, and produce its one flower.

Will there need to be yet more dead and growing cemeteries to find what we are and

Page 40

our own Power? But our planet threatens to be nothing more than one great Cemetery, with gnomes or super-gnomes produced by their chemical and genetic manipulations. But where is the "gene" in all of this, or beneath it all, that which engenders — it is Death engendering itself so as to live and beget small living-dead… in perpetuity?

Do we still have time to produce another species — and what species that will no longer come from the old fossils? by what means? Another catastrophe?

But this one threatens to be planetary.

We are at the end of an era. And precisely.

The Thread of Destiny

There is a Legend in the very catastrophe and in the very belly of the devil of old Death — but one must go there and touch the powerful spring.

The Future is far behind us, so far that it is as if lost and engulfed by so many species behind that have left on us indelibly their sad mortal imprint.

Then a radical shock that breaks through everything — or that opens everything.

I had just turned twenty when I entered the death camps — I came out like a dead man, still alive nonetheless. "Man" was NO, it was destroyed forever. It was a void of pretentious Lies. And yet, one day, on a sinister roll-call square, I toppled into a hole of unimaginable Tenderness and was invaded by a Joy never known — it rose from a stupefying and imperious black abyss beneath my feet. Had I not feared being thought mad and subjected to the club, I would have sung.

As if the first word of joy were song.

Through one of those miraculous "chances" — and there one truly touches the thread of Destiny, but a thread so distant and so deep that it is like another abyss — exactly eleven months after leaving that Hell, I was led before Sri Aurobindo and Mother in Pondicherry. It was 24 April 1946. And my whole life toppled into an "Other Thing" incomprehensible, and unbearable, like another kind of catastrophe in reverse. And that gaze of Mother like a gaping Tenderness going so far, so far into some unknown torn and tearing abyss. And that gaze of Sri Aurobindo, so vast, so far away, or from so far away, and so gentle like my infinity of old mariner heading into the Blue and forever, or wanting to plunge there forever. I stood before the one who said: "Man is a transitional being." Then YES! Oh! that yes springing from my torn abysses and from all my raw Hells seeming to rise from so far away too.

The Transition, how?

By another "chance," shortly afterwards, I came upon a disciple who told me: "You know, 'dreams' have a meaning." A meaning?… Everything was so senseless that I cared about nothing, or that

Page 41

I was ready for anything. Anything, but not what I was living or surviving. I was the remnant of a completely materialistic Western anthropoid, and above all anti-religious — I detested religions and dogmas of all kinds, that God of death, what? So, that evening, I said to myself: "Very well, let us see what this is." I always wanted to see things bare and without mask — the masks had fallen once and for all before certain heaps of tortured corpses. And here is what I saw that night:

I was in a somewhat dark medieval citadel — a Western citadel, it was in the West — and I was coming down a narrow cobblestoned alley. I can still see them, solid, polished, uneven, and high walls that seemed to lean over me with small wrought-iron balconies. I walked there, very small, amid an obscure and foreign crowd. It was this crowd that had a smell. A strangely silent crowd: each being was crouching in silence. And a smell of underground. I saw myself among them, very small, almost dark, as if seen from above my shoulders. I was heading toward a gate, I knew there was a gate at the bottom. But as I advanced, I had the feeling that I was not dressed as I should be, that I was not doing what should be done, that I was not like them, that I was from another place or another time perhaps, a kind of intruder, and that I was being watched. And those gazes became more and more menacing, aggressive. And the more I sensed my strangeness, the more their hostility mounted. It mounted from everywhere, even from the walls, the stones — a world of stone. And I did not know what to do; I desperately searched for the gesture, the word: I stooped, I hugged the walls, I filled myself with grey — nothing worked. I had been spotted by that mute crowd. And my unease grew, grew, became almost unbearable, suffocating, as if my clothes were wrong, odiously wrong, my face too, my colour — I was caught in a kind of gnome-me, which was me nonetheless, and I could not find anything that suited me, I could not do as they did, I did not know the word, I did not know the gestures, everything weighed. And then the police were going to come, for certain, and I had no passport either, I had nothing, I was enclosed, a prisoner in that horrible stone fortress… And suddenly, sprung I know not from where, in the middle of the alleyway, an enormous white horse appeared — white, luminous, oh! a marvellous animal, and tall, so tall that it almost touched the walls and towered over the crowd. A gigantic, formidable chest. And before I had even grasped what was happening, I found myself on its back, galloping: a fantastic gallop. A god's gallop, everything opened before me: the crowd, the gates, the guards, nothing resisted. And then open space all at once, freedom, pure air — all the rhododendrons of the Himalayas in one breath. I had my lungs full of it, I expanded, broadened, lit up almost — I regained my stature and my colour. A liberation.

I still feel that white mane in my hands, the warm flanks against my thighs, and then the wind stinging my face, the exhilaration in my veins. Carried by a triumphant, irresistible power… We were entering a forest.

Page 42

It was in 1946. It was the announcement of the entire path that was to follow. My first vision. But what I did not understand then is that this medieval citadel represented not only the (religious) Middle Ages of the eleventh century, but the (scientific) Middle Ages of the twentieth century. That is, the whole of the West. And I galloped like a fool drunk with joy on the back of that formidable white horse… What I also did not know at the time is that this white horse, in the Indian tradition, is the mount of Kalki, the last "avatar," the one who comes at the end of the human cycle to "change the law."

Then YES! that law of Death and of reigning Lies, to establish the reign of the Divine Life and True Man. Yes and yes! it was forever inscribed and vibrating in that cellular abyss that had gaped beneath my feet in the very midst of the Hells.

Another Law, or death, and by my own hand this time.

Anubis

But the Legend continues… always further, further back. More intense.

After many adventures on many dangerous paths where I was a perpetual question of life looking at death and that nonetheless felt drawn by an imperious Enigma, that "over there" in India where there was that one with the great gaze and that Mother of Tenderness who looked at me as if from the depths of an Unknown — like a defiance at the bottom of "all that"… But still my old horror of those Ashrams, those communities amid which I felt a stranger, like an old bear of no pole — at bottom, like an animal from nowhere. That "nowhere" was perhaps my enigma.

And then I took the plunge.

I returned to India, I had just turned thirty.

Step by step, wary and pulled — but I adore challenges — I returned to Pondicherry… She was there, all white, with I know not what ray piercing deep within and stirring strange undercurrents, like a desire to love and to flee and to plunge there nonetheless, and also an old fortress of "self" defending itself. I wanted to KNOW, it was like a thirst after centuries of desert. And then I melted.

For nearly twenty years I became her confidant until that fateful 1973 when I was going to tumble into the ultimate Challenge and work, seize the Enigma with both hands and with my whole body, alone once more amid the hostile crowd, at the heart of the eternal Legend and of the Secret that would change everything. For nearly twenty years I followed and noted the fabulous progression of Mother — all alone, she too, after the departure of Sri Aurobindo — her physical, corporeal experience, in the Future of the Earth, in the making of this next species, which will not be super-human but radically Other — perhaps the true Man, at last and at the end of everything: what

Page 43

Sri Aurobindo called "the transformation." That fabulous document lived groping in the Night of the world — a growing and strangling Night, as if at the end of an era — Mother called it her Agenda. The process of the next Evolution, which will no longer be the evolution of fossils or of electronic gnomes who have discovered nothing save death and the mechanics of Death.

Mother's discovery was dangerous for that whole world of Lies: they were going to be unmasked and laid bare and nullified in their debacle. She paid for it with her life, pushed into the grave by her own disciples.

But in the meantime the thread of the great Legend was re-knotting. One day in 1960, the exact day of my thirty-seventh birthday, during one of our meetings, Mother entered into meditation, and she saw:

"As soon as the meditation began, I saw scenes from ancient Egypt, quite familiar. And you, you were somewhat different, but still very similar… The first thing I saw was their god with a head like this (gesture like a muzzle), with a sun above the head. An animal head, a dark head with… I know it VERY WELL, but I do not know exactly what animal. There is one, it is the hawk, is it not, and the other is a head… (Mother repeats the same gesture).
— Like a jackal?
— Like a jackal, yes, like that. Yes, that was it. With a kind of lyre above the head, and then a sun."

Anubis! the god of the necropolis, the one who helped Isis, the Great Mother — who became Demeter among the Greeks — to reconstitute the body of her husband, Osiris, who had been killed and dismembered by his brother Seth. Isis, aided by Anubis, succeeded in resurrecting him through certain special rites.

We are not far from the great legend of Sri Aurobindo: Savitri and Satyavan. Savitri who wants to pull from the grave Satyavan (or let us say Sri Aurobindo himself) who died in the forest.

And Mother, resuming the description of her vision:

"And this god (Anubis) was very closely related to you, almost as if you were merged: at once you were like a priest of the sacrifice, and at the same time, he entered into you.

"And it lasted. But there were many-many things — old things that I know — and certainly a VERY CLOSE relationship that we had together in the times of Egypt, at Thebes."

And suddenly I remembered that moving visit to Thebes, before coming to India: I touched everything with an indescribable emotion, the walls, the sands, as if I wanted to scratch and scratch beneath and know what was vibrating so strangely there. It was in the time of Queen Nefertiti and Akhenaten. I, the anthropoid, was dazzled by something unknown that was somehow known, an incomprehensible comprehension.

And Mother continues her experience:

Page 44

"But it was interesting, so I began to look, and I LIVED the scene, all kinds of scenes: scenes of initiation, of worship, etc… for a long time. And then this image of Anubis rose up and a much stronger light descended, in admirable silence… And it descended in a thoroughly hieratic and (how to say it?) Egyptian manner — very occult, and very-very defined, very precise. Like a block of silence descending. And it descended, descended, in waves. And it came with a joy within! oh!…"

That god of the dead, all the same… And that extraordinary singing joy springing from an abyss beneath my feet on a sinister roll-call square, amid the death camps.

There are strange things in life — perhaps it is true life poking its nose beneath our fossil crust?

One knows NOTHING. But one would so dearly like to know.

1973

In this strange not-yet life, one is perpetually up against the Victory one must win, as if all contraries were leaguing together to help one toward a deeper, more total victory, and the anti-legend to oblige one to incarnate and materialise the very Legend. And ultimately there is only one Legend, that of this wounded and enslaved Earth which must wrest its joy and freedom from the very Night that engulfs it.

So, death came to knock at my door once more, but in a crueller and more profound way than the death camps of my twenties: it was in 1973, I had just turned fifty. Mother, the great Mother, was gone — one should rather say gagged and condemned by those very "men" she wanted to deliver: assassins in white and impeccable. Six months before, they had closed the door on Mother to me, I who was her witness and her last communication with the world. Gone, she who had made this prodigious progression in the Future of the Earth, opened this Passage of the next species, and at what cost! It was frightening. The door was closing on so many secrets — on the very Secret. The Means, the manner of proceeding with this Change of the earth: the Transformation. I was all alone amid that crowd, which already looked at me with a suspicious eye, as if I were the Enemy of their "yogic" tranquillity. I was barely seated, stunned, before that beloved body, so white, worn thin by great pain and the ultimate effort, barely seated in that large hall below, when one of the community's directors had me called to translate into French his mortuary "message":

"Her body was not destined to be the New Body."

Page 45

I was horrified. I said NO! I wanted to cry out. What did they know of the "destiny" of this body? What did they know of the battle She was waging within her body? She was not dead!

And suddenly I had a crushing responsibility on my shoulders: there was this prodigious Document, Mother's Agenda, this experience lived step by step in the Night of the Earth and the incomprehension of men — that Document had to be saved! It had to be spoken, it had to be made understandable.

They were all afraid of what I knew.

I took refuge with Sujata and Mother's papers in a garden near Pondicherry. And first, frantically, as if I expected to die at any moment, I wrote that Trilogy in which I was desperately trying to speak of Mother's path: Divine Materialism, The New Species, The Mutation of Death.

And right away the battle over the Agenda was declared.

They were the "owners" of Mother and Sri Aurobindo, they wanted Mother's papers, I had "stolen" Mother's papers, they wanted to suppress, to censor everything that could harm the reputation of their holy Ashram, and above all they wanted to make a new Religion out of Sri Aurobindo, a great profitable monetary Business with millions of disciples and tourists — I was disturbing the fine business. There were Financiers all ready. They even wanted to make a false Agenda duly printed with all the desired means, while I was there struggling without a sou to have published purely and simply what She wanted for the earth and for men.

They even tried to assassinate me: three killers in canyons near Pondicherry — how I escaped and disarmed those killers without saying a word, save this prayer in my soul and a sudden tranquil gaze that put them to flight. There are decidedly miracles and a Destiny greater than all human combinations, and a Legend more powerful than all the millennial killings, here and there, under all the Inquisitions and papal or dynastic dominations, and perhaps even under all the democratic and hypocritical masks of "human rights" which are only the rights to take and to reign over the earth, as Hitler might have dreamt but with a good face and televised slogans.

And besides, that fateful month of November 1973 began with the "oil war." Here is what I noted in my unpublished Notebooks — those Notebooks of an Apocalypse, which I had so called because I sensed it was the time of the "laying bare" — of everything, and of myself and of the earth:

"The Lufthansa plane hijacked, eight Western hostages killed in the plane landing in Kuwait. 'The commandos began beating one of the female hostages in front of the open microphone (reports the Indian Express of 19 December) and announced to the Athens control tower: "You can hear — this woman is going to die." Suddenly they dragged a woman before the microphone and she began to scream, says the Lufthansa spokesman.'"

And in my Notebooks of 20 December I add:

Page 46

"Satprem to Sujata: We have entered into a sinister acceleration. We are heading toward the hole… or the beginning of Something Else. The West lets its women be beaten in the ears of the whole world to get the Arabs' oil and sell them arms."

And dated 23 December 73, I note in my Notebooks:

"We see only a small card of the great House of Cards collapsing, then another, because we see things day by day — but the whole house has collapsed. It is the end of the Machine. The world is ruined.

"In my 'editor's note' announcing the forthcoming publication of Mother's Agenda, I said: and perhaps there will be no need to say 'we shall see.' Perhaps even this Agenda will be obsolete — and one will see that the path IS MADE. Besides I wonder if we will still have printing machines! And in the West… will they try, in a last spasm of their ruin, to bring their fist down on the few Arab sheikhs who hold the keys of their machinery? Then, who will confront whom?

"Read in Le Monde hebdomadaire of 10 December, regarding the 'oil war': 'In November 73 a new era opened in the history of the world.'

"They perhaps do not know how well they say it nor to what degree."

Orpheus

That unacceptable tomb.

That first evening, while the cement of the cover was not yet set nor the grey marble slab laid, standing before those two bodies, Mother and Sri Aurobindo side by side and reunited in death, something so deep sprang from my being, like a fierce determination:

WE WILL PULL HER OUT OF THERE.

The "guardian" of Mother (or her jailer rather) was pacing back and forth behind me.

No, I was not Anubis, alas, and I did not have the power to resurrect my Isis, but sometimes I would have wished to be Orpheus, with his lyre too, like Anubis, who could enchant even wild beasts and who was able to enchant even Hades, the god of the Underworld, and received permission to go and seek his Eurydice in the depths of death… on condition that he emerge from the underworld before her, without turning to look at her. But he forgot the condition, and he turned to look at her, and he lost his Eurydice forever.

I have often wondered why that condition.

Page 47

Orpheus belonged to the sixth century before our barbaric era.

That first evening, alone with Sujata, I stood before the terrible WHY.

It is strange how before that Null moment, that terrible Nothing tearing open as if from the depths of time, as if from the depths of a thousand unconsoled deaths, something so powerful springs forth, like the very Power of the world, like the golden Seed of this earth — it has no words and everything is said and KNOWN. Perhaps it would have a song and a Music like that of Orpheus? but those notes, sublime and immense like the rolling of the sea, have no language, or not yet. It is perhaps the first language of the world before it was born into its sorrow and its deaths.

I had all those assassins at my heels.

And I knew that She was not dead.

To pull her out of there, how?

In my torn heart and from the depths of my body laid bare, it was as if I were in pursuit of Mother, without occult powers and without rites, even sacred and Egyptian — without knowledge or anything, without music either, save the cry of my heart and that fierce will sprung from Death itself. I was going to find her again step by step and in the Night, which was the very Night of the world, I was going to follow her traces and find her path, which was that of Sri Aurobindo himself, both seized by death or pushed into death by their own disciples — but this time, we shall prevail and it will be the Victory of the Earth, the deliverance from this horrible reign of Lies, it will be Life at last.

It is in my own body that I shall pull her out of there, going to the bottom of the Hole of men, and, compelled by my prayer and my love, She shall return triumphant upon a true and new Earth.

The Old Gods

But in the meantime, the outside of the earth was as nocturnal and menacing… as it has always been for centuries. Sri Aurobindo, the Seer, the one who had seen and known everything in the depths of his own laid-bare body, the one who loved the Earth like the Great Mother herself, said in May 1916, in the midst of the First World War:

"The old gods are not dead, the old ideal of the dominating Force that conquers, that rules and 'perfects' the world is still a vital reality and has not loosened its grip on the psychology of the human race. Nor is it at all certain that the present War has destroyed these forces or this ideal, for the War has been decided by force facing force, by organisation triumphing over organisation, by the superior use, or at any rate the more effective use, of the very arms that made the true dynamism of the great aggressive Teutonic Power.

Page 48

The defeat of Germany by its own arms would not suffice to destroy the spirit then incarnated in Germany; it would probably lead to a new incarnation of the same spirit, elsewhere, in another race or another empire, and the whole battle would then have to be fought over again. So long as the old gods are alive, it serves little to break or overthrow the body they animate, for they know well how to transmigrate. Germany overthrew the Napoleonic spirit in France, in 1813, and broke what remained of French hegemony in Europe in 1870; that same Germany became the incarnation of what it had overthrown. The phenomenon can easily renew itself on a more formidable scale."

And in one of my writings, I noted: "1940 also passed, and fifty years later, or soon a century later, the old gods are still there, more formidable than ever — more hypocritical than ever and more innumerably incarnated beneath white or black or yellow skin, beneath respectable hats and various beards and respectable slogans in all the languages of the world, machine gun in hand."

Calmly, in 1919, Sri Aurobindo said:

"It is the temporary halt of a flood in motion."

The Flood

But what we do not know is that the flood is twofold.

There is this worldwide filth and this corruption whose worst is not that of the crooked politicians and financiers who juggle with the riches of the world — a ruined and crooked world — but the corruption of consciousnesses: no one sees clearly any more, or those who see are silent, it is the true-false or the false-true everywhere. The economists of my student youth said: "Bad money drives out good." Good money is driven out everywhere, and the false gurus and various charlatans have silenced those who might still say a little truth.

BUT — there is still a saving but —, beneath this flood of nauseating filth, there is an imperturbable golden flood rising and rising, there are the formidable Gates opened by Sri Aurobindo and by Mother in the very night of Matter, in that Unconscious of the first matter of our billions of years, that rock-sleep which has at last awakened and is pushing outward, regurgitating, one might say, all those geological and animal layers and layers, all that world fossilised in its unconscious night, which has produced all manner of limbs and

Page 49

antennae, the last of which, that of our mental man, believes it knows and dominates everything through its "intelligent" machinery, but which is in the process of destroying itself and engulfing itself beneath its deadly and suicidal "discoveries." But the other tide rises, and rises inexorably, invincibly like the very thrust of that Evolution, until the last drop of all that decomposition and those millennial detritus and the last decibel of our din have come out and make clear and clean space for the New Earth and Life at last that was buried in that bedrock, in that first Seed of all our Ages.

The divine flood is in motion.

On Mother's Trail

Very quickly, we understood that we had to hide. A new species, a new being is a dangerous intruder to the old species. We even went, Sujata and I, to look for an island in the Pacific, and we found one — tiny and off the charts, Alofi at some 20° south latitude. Very quickly too we realised it was good for the mud-dwellers and the tourists, and as we walked and walked back and forth, a local inhabitant said to me: "You will wear out your legs" (!)

I wanted to walk.

We finally found a mythical place we called "Mother's Island," beyond all the Pacifics which are no longer Pacific at all.

And I walked in the Future of the Earth. I followed Mother's trail through the tomb — tombs and tombs without end as if all the dead were there. "The dead kill the living," Aeschylus had already said four centuries before our era. And indeed, from the very first step, they leap upon you and want to make you believe that… As soon as a first breath of the new Life wants to enter there, it is like a general riot: but it is Death that enters! You are going to die. And in every organ one by one, with a learned meticulousness, and an almost terrifying hypnotic power, one must face and cross a thousand small false deaths — as if all the Breath of Life, true Life, had to enter by force and innumerably into all the caverns of the body and down to the last underground passage: "down to the last atom," said Sri Aurobindo. And that crushing, new, unknown Power hammering and hammering that abominable bodily magma, as if one were about to be demolished to the foundations — but it is the Fortress of the mental, human self that is being demolished, brick by brick and slab by slab, and perhaps the entire Fortress of the old species entrenched in its false Science and its abyssal Ignorance, with all its priests and its scientific or religious dogmas, for where does Matter end? Is there a corner of matter that one can isolate from the rest? Viruses pass through everywhere very well, but there is perhaps an

Page 50

implacable Divine Virus that is traversing our walls and wants to compel us to be… what we are.

Then, one dismantles piece by piece and gear by gear the entire machinery of Death, the famous "but I think therefore I am," which is only "I think death therefore I live death, and I manufacture it." A formidable Fortress. To perceive at the end (but where is the "end"? it seems endless) and little by little, but so little that it is like nothing, like an atom day by day, and so long that it is like a century every day, until, finally, a kind of cellular evidence establishes itself at the bottom of "all that," something ineradicable like a first "something" in the world that knows nothing and yet knows nonetheless and that lives as if from always and for always — it is obvious, it is all, and it is everywhere, and it is marvellously Divine, at last it is what one loves and what one breathes. All the rest… but that "rest" still occupies the old carcass and surrounds or encircles one on all sides with the old species "as usual." This makes, strangely, as if two bodies one within the other, two lives one within the other, life and death side by side, the invulnerable and the supremely fragile side by side, the eternal and the passing time side by side, the present and the future in one same skin, the here and the there — the Victory, imperious, inescapable, and at the same time a terrible question mark which is like the world's question, its question of life or death.

It is a difficult coexistence — or cohabitation.

But then one understands, one lives cellularly and blindly with other eyes that do not yet have a vocabulary or all the dictionaries of men: the Evidence is without word, it could perhaps sing like that old condemned man on a roll-call square in the death camps while that abyss of Tenderness opened beneath his feet. Incomprehensible abyss. But now my abysses are open and I "understand" through a million and a billion cells what Sri Aurobindo said, un-covered so many decades ago:

"In every particle, EVERY ATOM, every molecule, every cell of Matter live and work, unknown, all the omniscience of the Eternal and all the omnipotence of the Infinite."

Two Bodies

Two bodies one within the other…

And this has not stopped growing, intensifying and burning, oh! that Fire, in this old monkey-skin. It is a vibratory mass denser than anything known at the frontiers of Matter, like Energy about to turn into matter or matter about to volatilise into

Page 51

energy. What is going to happen? How to contain all of it? One is perpetually as if on the edge of… of what? Like an abyss wanting to emerge on the other side of its abyss — but it is an earthly abyss, and they dance upon it, they hold forth, they electronicise, like small puppets of an ancient creation, like old seahorses beneath the waters who have never yet breathed the sun. And on the other side… what is it? nobody knows, one knows it only when it is DONE, when the last rock at the bottom of the abyss has burst open its great air and its sun and its new Life, when a few old fish-things have sufficiently suffocated beneath the black waters and allowed to grow, slowly grow, some burning, calling, crying cells, then… Then it is there, it is all-there, there is no "formula" for the new species; the formula is all inside and always has been; it is the first Seed of all this mortal and tangled story that pushed and pushed, pressed to find its great Sun and its Life at last and its flower of Love and Tenderness. And how many deaths were needed, how many fruitful catastrophes to knock at the last Door.

And they go looking for that in the sky!

Two bodies one within the other… Twenty-five years now I have been on Mother's trail (or was it two thousand five hundred years), and it pushes, it grows, it is a kind of daily or every-second impossibility and it is nonetheless Possible, it is a kind of Miracle as if from nothing, and one knows NOTHING, and yet it KNOWS imperturbably, obstinately at the depths of these millions of cells — it WILLS. It is like a lover seeking his Beloved who will not rest until he has found her. There is an Orpheus in us seeking his Eurydice through all the deaths and defeats. But he must not turn back… She is ahead or deep within, on the other side of the tombs, in the Legend of the Future, and it is She who makes us become what we must be to embrace her in a body and slake our thirst at her lips.

I know, O God,

Sri Aurobindo wrote in 1913,

that a day shall come at last
when man shall awake and,
leaving his mud-toys behind,
shall take in his hands
the sun and the stars
and reshape the appearances,
the laws and the formulas of old.

And the heavens shall grow pale.

And why, then, should this Earth have been made?

There is a Bengali poet (Tagore, not to name him) who said in his singing language what India has always known for millennia before Isis (we translate approximately into our grammatical tongue):

"Without us,
what would the Lord have to love,

Page 52

alone in his paradise!
Thus He made these millions of creatures
to have the joy of loving…
innumerably."

But who notices his joy and his love? who notices what is there? — It is He loving Him! It is He groping toward Him… through how many ages?

Even in stone He is there, said the Veda.

Even Matter is of the substance of the Eternal, said Sri Aurobindo.

They prefer their crucified gods and the paradises of Death.

But when one begins to notice that Thee which is there, in a million and a billion small cells, and in everything that is around, it is a wonder and a Smile deep within, an emotion so profound, and a Fullness, and a Music beginning, like a sea rolling in its own delight. And everything remakes itself each second, the ages and the small dragonflies passing through.

"The era of religions is over"

said Mother.

It is the time of seekers.

The adventure of the second life.

Page 53