Satprem explores the hidden meaning of human evolution, revealing destiny as a long journey toward freedom, consciousness and joy.
Satprem dévoile le sens profond de l’évolution humaine et révèle le destin comme une longue marche vers la liberté, la conscience et la joie.
AI tools (Claude etc.) have been used to produce this translation in English of the original French, La Légende de l’Avenir
The reader should note that the quotes by Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have also been translated from the French and hence may not match the actual English text in the The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo or Collected Works of Mother.
toa brother of the West
I write here what I have never stopped writing for forty years, but I still carry this same cry in my heart for my brothers of the West who come and go without knowing where they come from or where they are going.
May I be forgiven if I repeat myself, but one would so dearly wish that our old human disaster never repeated itself again.
And what can we do about it?
Satprem, 20 February 1998
I'd just like to say... for all those who run without knowing what a very old man can convey to them with brotherly love, which looks at what what beats in every second of time, as if everything was already known, but now you have to live it step by step.
I was running along this boulevard, and so many other boulevards of life, I wanted to know what I know now. But could I have lived it, then? We have to live step by step, in the darkness, but we wanted, we wanted so much, so that this Darkness becomes brighter. Sometimes this beacon of light suddenly pierces a whole life, this moment fills the centuries. I've read so many books, and they fell out of my hands, I was silent, And all human ages have been here.
Page 3
I loved, loved so much and there was peace in my heart, but my Love is still here, it's wider, more spacious, deeper and it will never dry up, while it's alive, it's a child who runs, not knowing where. Can I just say that what haunts the one I was and who will I always remain? Can I throw a lifebuoy to my brother in pain Who would like to know what haunts a man, now as it did millennia ago In this second, that contains all the lost seconds, as if everything were same under so many masks and under all this never-relenting pain, Data now beating and beckoning us under their weight of questions So simply, I would just like to say what is beating under these questions, under this Darkness that stubbornly lives under this Love that doesn't know and which is always striving and fighting on this boulevard of today so similar to the boulevard of forgotten centuries. A beacon of Light in the ancient Night.
Do we know more than in the time of Socrates or Queen Nefertiti? And do we have power over our destiny and over the world?
We live in complete ignorance Of the true laws of life. The West wanted to convince us Of the superiority of his Science and Churches. But today we live in lies more hideous than Hitler, who, at least, had a head on his shoulders, very recognizable, but now this Monster has a thousand heads and a thousand mouths vomiting hypocritical and hypnotic Lies, when he fails to be openly cruel. Barbarianism is galloping.
Where is the path to our future among this disgusting geography? Where is our human power among this perverted Epoch?
Page 4
There were happier Ages.
But these happier Ages are nonetheless dead and in ruin, although they may still live secretly in our forgotten recesses. And we go searching in the ruins for what is perhaps there, still alive in us, as if it were only yesterday.
There is an unknown geography that connects everything — all our old paths, happy or unhappy. It is this "native" geography, one might say, that I would like to recount to the ignorant, or forgetful, children of today.
Why, then, did they die, those old paths that were once more sun-filled? And what still lives in us, despite all the provisional thoughts we may place upon it, all the catechisms and all the "marvellous" discoveries of today that discover nothing but further engulf, beneath their clutter, the simple thing that was there since… always. Since our very first birth into the world.
Our human time, so brief, contains quite simply the symbol of all the Ages and all the vanished paths. Life grows weary of going in circles: one is seventy, or fifty, or whatever, and for so many years one has plied one's trade — as a doctor or a scientist or a taxi driver, or whatever — with its stories, little stories, happy or unhappy. Life grows weary… but one always hopes ahead, further, elsewhere, and that "elsewhere" is never there, or perhaps always there, but unknown, in some unspeakable, never-made geography. Life wears itself out from not having found that "path" which would not wear out. Then, one does not know why, one catches cancer, or this illness, that illness. But there is no cancer! there is no "illness" that makes one… There is Life that has had enough of going in circles and catches cancer or whatever lucky or unlucky trifle, some pretext to escape from its old Misery, just as the happier and more sun-filled Ages caught a Hittite or Roman or Gothic invasion to break out of their pretty round that was no longer so pretty and wore itself out from not having found the path further ahead, elsewhere, out there in front — there was no "Invasion": there was Life wanting to let itself be invaded by something else. And finally, there is no "death," there is always Life searching
Page 5
for its lovely path, its distant and yet ever-present geography, in this lost minute on today's boulevard just as in the time of Nefertiti and Akhenaten and their solar God — but that sun sank into the sands and our hypogea are full of the dead. Will we always live this "life" that wears itself out without having found its lovely path? Perhaps we are in the hypogeum of a true Life not yet born? Species, too, wear out their millions of years; they produce little kangaroos and gentle iguanas, or eiders gliding in the northern wind, or even men who tire of their clutter and their trade — that is less pretty, but it must be quite ugly or unhappy before one wishes to exit that round. So the species "catch" glaciations or deserts, black plagues, viruses or bombs or victorious wars to escape from their perpetual Defeat and their mortal Illness, just as one catches Invasions or geriatric seventy-year-olds. But there is no Illness! there is no cancer, there is no death, there is no extinction of species — there is an eternal Species seeking its lovely path, through life, through death, through suns and darkness, to find its true geography and its great Bear without compass and without age. Its true Life without death and without walls.
We have some millions of antiquated years in a provisional and entirely outdated geography.
There were less barbaric Ages.
But Barbarism gallops today as if resurfaced from some forgotten Continent, as if it had never ceased beneath one mask or another. But Life also tires, even of its barbarities: it always seeks, and through everything, its lovely path.
The little iguanas were quite charming and the kangaroos — and would one grow weary of gliding through the air with the Arctic tern over hills of snow?
Sometimes one might regret that Evolution did not stop at the birds, but it was necessary to produce this incongruous species with its protruding skull. That is a pity.
Let us be a little insolent, then. But that is better than being dogmatic.
It was going to conquer everything, this ambiguous and uncertain species, so sure of itself; it was the king of creation — but does one know how many "kings" have passed before it, and how many kingdoms have vanished in the sands? To conquer was its virtue, while the less barbaric species stopped at their forest or maritime boundaries, and their compass was reliable enough to find their path on its own through the air or the forests, even virgin ones, while ours veers from one pole to the other and from one thinking aberration to another: we bump around, we go from one limit to another, but we want to cross those limits, and we find more reliable compasses with which to collide into other limits: to conquer limits and impossibilities is our virtue, happy
Page 6
and unhappy. As if there were a seed inside pushing and pushing despite everything — despite our misfortunes and our errors, or because of those errors and misfortunes. The animal had no "misfortune": it was part of its geography, like lightning and storms or floods, and if its species disappeared, it was to produce another: Nature used Death, or whatever it took, to break out of the old round and find its other path. Now our incongruous species has found all the means (or nearly all) to divert lightning and dam floods. It is the deus ex machina of all creation (or so it believes). But it has not stopped death nor dammed viruses — on the contrary, death seems to gallop all the more and men are very ill, with or without viruses. For old Nature catches up with us at the bend, and its Death watches to dam all our "wonders" and to deny or falsify all our discoveries and conquests: it always seeks its lovely path. And the more disastrous it becomes, the closer it draws to the new path.
What will be our next invasion?
Or perhaps it is already here.
There is a seed, a seminal power at the base of this humus, which produced men as it produced swallows or red howler monkeys shrieking in forests that predate our inventions.
Has anyone ever seen a tiny seed in the darkness of the earth? How it seeks tirelessly, inexorably, patiently its path, through all the roots and the creatures, winding around every pebble, or breaking them, coiling around to emerge at last in the great Sun and in joy — its inescapable Goal. It even uses its obstacles to grow stronger.
There is "something" invincible in all of this.
And we? the conquistadors of all limits, the inventors of the indubitable Geography with all its infallible degrees of latitude and longitude… in what nocturnal soil does our Seed navigate, and where does it go?
And what if it were about to circumvent our latitudes and burst through the crust of our Geography?
Are we going to emerge into the great Sun? or manufacture ingenious little suns that will reduce us to ashes so that… once again we search for the lovely path?
When the seed has emerged from its old nocturnal soil, a long story begins.
It produces wild grasses, bindweed, great beeches with white bark that shed their leaves in the russet autumn, an entire intertwined jungle in which also teems an entire fauna of little beings emerged from the same soil and the same Seed. And yet, there are a few solitary banyans among these wild shoots, there are a thousand strange and so contradictory stories beneath so many latitudes, rising from where and going where? So many battles with old rocks that finally also shatter, and so many creatures and entanglements that end up smothering one another, so many pathless paths that nevertheless take shape here or there, under this equator or this Far North; and the very-very-old Seed that still grows stronger from its thousand battles and its thousand stiflings that always seek more air, and its interminable defeats that push further toward…
Page 7
Each of us is a small story of the great History, and the "good" as well as the "bad" work toward the same forward push. The humus piles up, the old Seed buries itself, or is forgotten, beneath so many entangled branches that war for more space or… more of what?
There are old sorrows that make stronger shoots, old wounds that make more thirsting plants, arising here or there in this harsh or more clement climate — but "where do I come from?" some wind-lashed brush sometimes wonders.
They teach you so many things at school, here or there, in this tribe firmly rooted in this rock and that land. It is all solid and inhaled with the first breath of maternal air, and yet some wild and solitary shoots vaguely remember another air and another country — perhaps many other unknown countries that still blow through some old twig and still wound in some old vanished root — but it is like a forgetting never forgotten, an old thirst that is so very thirsty. And suddenly, on a pretext as trivial as a passing wind, a stray note of music, or a "stroke of fate" that cuts into the fragile bark one thought so solid, something gapes open — and then it is a terrible gulf. As if over nothing that is terribly "something."
Like a sudden birth among a thousand births.
There are many wild herbs, and others not quite so wild.
But it is strange, all the same, when some savage from our jungle and our present geography begins to open another eye in that protruding skull — it is even astounding. Let us see! where do I come from among all these well-educated little Christians? Certainly, there are great white beeches, solitary banyans amid our thinking hordes, and why did those ones suddenly emerge after some brief fifty years, or even at nineteen, like a certain brother-poet who already announced:
"Now is the season of assassins."
So, one says, to "explain" these somewhat too sudden births amid our long centuries
Page 8
: they are "seers," or they are "more intelligent." Their protuberance is more protuberant.
Or again, in the language of our learned geography: they see "ahead." But from where did this "ahead" emerge from our nocturnal soil amid these millions of intertwined roots? — there must surely be a continuity "somewhere," why "me" in the middle of all this suddenly? this me of a small decade that would contain centuries, this tiny torn second that would open immense eyes? A "stroke of fate"? But from where did that fate emerge! And there are so many other little wild herbs that say nothing but have a sudden small shiver and understand nothing of this unexpected blow or this sunny smile that comes to overturn their life, as if that smile had always been known, as if that path had always been run.
Sometimes one dares to say to oneself: there is no "knowledge," there are only re-cognitions: that something which suddenly surges and that is it.
Decidedly our geography is worthless.
And what if this "ahead" were already behind?
And if this unexpected second had not been long in the ripening?
If this sunny Smile did not come from a very old forgotten tenderness and this Sun had not always been at the heart of our nocturnal years on a lovely path that ran with us from always?
We inhabit a Fortress of Ignorance, and sometimes it cracks — just a small tenacious root poking its nose out.
Sometimes, a child of man escapes from the Fortress.
It takes a true miracle to get out of there, because it is solid. Or a "stroke of fate" (ah! those strokes of fate, one always wonders where they come from) that makes a hole for us. It is like crossing centuries of darkness in one leap. Decidedly, there are tenacious roots.
The "miracles" that make the hole are somewhat terrible.
But from one species to the next, there has always been a miracle that resembled a catastrophe — a gracious catastrophe — an old root pushing despite the old splendours and old joys. Some wild and solitary brush always wanted to get out of there.
So, a modern child of man had escaped from a hideous Fortress, as thick as two thousand years of Western time, and by chance (ah! those "chances," where do they come from too?) he suddenly found himself in Upper Egypt as if in a miracle fully alive, fully trembling, where everything seemed familiar to him though he knew nothing of it. He was no Egyptologist, God knows! he was anything that no longer has a name or a country — the old countries were all dead at once with the Fortress, like the genealogies of little people who beget little ones and re-little ones. Like a vast cemetery. And yet, some old Memory trembled and vibrated on those
Page 9
waves of sand that did not even form a trail. Everything was moving with a nameless emotion, as if this small one was suddenly on a trail. Or perhaps on the trail.
He wanted to touch the pink walls, to feel those enormous pillars vanishing into an infinity of silence, to sit at the edge of the Nile and listen to that smooth flow that had no voice and yet murmured with a thousand unknown-yet-known voices, like a scent of memory clinging to a bare rock, an old lichen that would hold the entire fragrance of an ocean. It was very moving, and yet it belonged to no sense, like another kind of sense feeling its way through the dark and pressing on and wishing to scratch and scratch there to find out what it was, to breathe in once more that smell of a thousand nights.
And then he suddenly found himself in a tomb at Thebes: a corridor in the half-light, a fresco painted on an old wall. He was alone. He looked and looked for a long time, but with a dumbfounded gaze, like a man who falls upon another planet. A gaze that plunged far and far through lost ages, it was full-full and it was nothing looking at a formidable "something," an incomprehensible comprehension going far out there, plunging through the walls and the painted lines, like a chisel of light aimed at a black point. And that black point opened suddenly like an iridescent flower.
An Enigma… that kept its enigma while casting out living rays.
It was all understood and the small "I" of now understood nothing, except that something had torn open in his consciousness. It was a deep tear, perhaps like a baby who gives a cry and opens a first eye to the world.
Slowly, the child of the old incomprehensible Fortress re-emerged into the corridor, he looked at the outer lines, the drawing, this painted fresco — it was immense. And before his astonished eyes, he saw a long-long serpent, like a python, undulating, uncoiling its rings — one cannot tell where it began or where it ended — and under each fold of the great Serpent there was a little figure carrying a ring:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5… one does not know how many little figures, like a sacred procession emerging from an infinity behind and heading into the night of Time… toward a Now which was perhaps him, under a ring of the same Serpent, and others perhaps who would again be him in this incomprehensible Present to come. An eternal Present ever springing from an old forgotten ring.
But he, never again would he forget that ring or that second.
He went to sit at the edge of the Nile and he listened to a thousand silent voices telling him a long Story, and for once everything held together! like a thousand shattered pieces rejoining, a thousand notes of an old song making a melody… unfinished.
It was gripping, it was alive like a great Adventure.
And now he walked in the night and the darkness ahead as if the Night had never been nocturnal and the next step into the Dark would leap forth entirely new from a little figure who had shed his old burden to invent his future and his new story.
Page 10
Strange… the trail ahead always seemed to go behind.
But this "past" was neither dead nor buried, on the contrary! it was like the ever-springing source of every present moment, and not merely springing but pressing, imperative, one might say — a kind of unknown that absolutely wants to become known.
And our escapee tumbled into India as into a trembling, vibrant ocean, a formidable laughter running everywhere — everything spoke to him, told him an extraordinary Story that was his story, his own story. It ran through the streets like a crowd of a thousand voices that was one same Voice, mute, imperious but tenderly pressing, like a vanished Mother still calling her child.
That little figure under a ring of the great Serpent, under a Now going ahead or behind, we cannot tell, but it was perhaps one same flow of always, a surge of an irresistible creative sap wanting to grow its tree in the great jungle — but what tree? until it has emerged one cannot know, it comes out little by little and in the dark, but that darkness now seemed animated, and the little figure went step by step — he ran rather, and galloped and bumped left and right, but each blow opened a door, each "error" drove deeper or unearthed a more profound light, a more mysterious reality opening onto a vaster mystery, an Enigma that never stopped telling its enigma. It was the great Adventure, a youthfulness of life that had thousands of years and never ceased drawing its sap, finding its tree root, its lovely flower. And where did it all stop?
This time, the young escapee came upon words that seemed to tell him, perhaps, what the Thebes fresco murmured to him in the half-light, but truly words are only the translation of a sound, of "something" that vibrates more deeply and seems all the more powerful for remaining to vibrate far away like a lost call, like a music of no language and no country, that would nonetheless be the Country of always, the Note for which one is so thirsty.
It was the Rig Veda:
"Old and worn, he becomes young again and again…"
The Rig Veda was four thousand years before Thebes, before Nefertiti and Akhenaten — four thousand years!
"He becomes young again and again." What was this "he"? this himself pushing under this ring of now, wanting to become tree and flower and rainbow again and again…
There is an Enigma at the heart of a man as at the heart of millions of years and we are perhaps in the prehistory of a great Story not yet born.
Page 11
The Enigma keeps running.
And when we think we have caught it in a trap, it is ourselves we are trapping, to lock ourselves into a new prison. This escapee wanted no more prisons, ever-never. He listened from afar to that Voice of the Rig Veda, which had already lost its bronze echo, its language from before our languages, its deep murmur, to be rendered into translation. But nonetheless…
That Voice still said:
"Let us conquer here and now Let us run this race and this battle along a hundred paths…"
It was palpitating, it was to be lived. It was before Thebes, and some seven thousand years before the iron gates of our old Fortress would close upon us… He ran along a thousand trails, wild and not so wild, this escapee. But always an old shadow ran with him, as if two paths always ran one over the other, or two memories: a very old trail, unknown and yet always alive like Akhenaten's sun buried beneath the sands, and another that made its steps on a black crust, equally unknown but deadly. A perpetual Challenge: let us see! do you want life or do you want death? A lovely path and the other. And the "other" was "a hundred paths" in the dark, with, from time to time, "strokes of fate" that made you take vertiginous turns. As if the old lovely path awoke all at once to put you back on the trail.
Some call that "Destiny."
One day, on a trail in Afghanistan, in those landscapes desolate with infinity, as if desolate from their own bare grandeur, near a fortress of rock and ochre mud called Ghazni, swarming with a strange dark crowd emerged from a Middle Ages before our Middle Ages — as if, always, there had been Fortresses, here or there to hold back the Infinite — our young escapee recalled another voice, that of another great Escapee who seemed to murmur in his ear:
"Let others confuse surrender to chance with this relentless premeditation of the unknown."
That was André Malraux
At once, chance was no longer haphazard! it was courageous and solitary — and premeditated somewhere beneath some ring of the little figure from before, forgotten in the sands. But always relentless.
And who, then, is doing the premeditation?
What is this "he" of now?
Back when he was still inside the old Fortress, this one thirsting for escape had a very seafaring and navigating mother who held to all the winds; she had navigated much in the old life and
Page 12
she watched her children the way one watches landmarks and buoys in the old channel, and she said to this runner of moors and forbidden paths (the more forbidden, the more adorable), she said in her small tranquil clear voice: "You see, this one is entirely like grandfather, and that one is like Uncle Victor, and this one is like Cousin Mariette, and then this line that will not run free is more from the father's side, it is rooted like the end of the dock." And she would add in her seafaring philosophy: "Atavism is everything."
The young rebel looked, suddenly struck still like a black gulf, and he saw at once a string of little grandfathers begetting little grandfathers and re-little ones… It was frightening, like a genealogical cataclysm.
He said: "But look! Mariette already has a lover, and Victor divorced to run after loose women, and all of them embrace and un-embrace, or they stay together like two barnacles glowering at each other on their rock. I will nev-er beget little grandfathers, nev-er."
— You will do as everyone does, my child.
Full stop.
But that was the one thing not to say to this stubborn one — the more it was ordered and decreed, the more it was to be disobeyed or broken through, at whatever risk.
He much preferred the virgin trails of Afghanistan (except for the fortresses), and that infinity heading into more infinity, as if, all the same, at the end, one would emerge at some point of finitude that would be closed nowhere, some small figure of here-and-now that would be always-always and would navigate in an endless geography.
So now, our entirely new escapee found at each step of his palpitating trail other phantom steps as tenacious as the dock's end beneath the wave, a shadow-path over the lovely path he ran barefoot and at all risks without knowing where he was going or where he came from, two memories: of clinging shadow, and of a Sun vanished but still illuminating through some badly sealed crack — a small unknown and premeditated figure who wanted to break through every wall and become that Sun, that "he" from the depths of the ages who would be "I" forever in a story without end.
It was the great Challenge, the relentless Adventure beneath all our adventures, happy or unhappy.
That extraordinary India… That enigmatic Egypt… And those wild trails running through the sands…
And "someone" premeditates.
Never has the first Seed of this mysterious Earth seemed more alive than there, in
Page 13
that India, like a first living efflorescence. In India, the word "seed" translates as "sound" — a sound. Like a first powerful vibration that, later, covered itself with words. A sound that is the power of meaning. Like a first language from before our languages. Vedic Sanskrit retained this power of the word that expresses or "musicalizes" the Sound of a deep Truth when it springs from the entrails of the Night and attempts to resonate or to stammer in a first human language. The frescoes of the hypogea, so many millennia later, attempt to seize in lines that same springing which has no language and yet resonates to the very tips of the fingers to tell one same living Mystery — there is nothing to "decipher," but to listen and listen deep within, to look and look deep within this well of silence until a Note tears open that seems eternal and awakens in us a living and irresistible echo: that is it. Like a comprehension that does not yet have its human comprehension, and would not even need one! it vibrates, it lives, it is a Power in motion. It is the very Meaning that walks. It is the Seed that walks. And what matters is to walk. It is another powerful gaze that opens a trail and seizes our steps to go on its unknown and premeditated path outside us, or deep within us, and that operates its unexpected turns or its silent catastrophes to open other doors and other trails. As if this first Seed continued invincibly and irresistibly to forge its passage through our small lives and our rubble, through our civilisations, our joys and our sorrows and our ruins again, our geographies of one kind or another, our lights and our darknesses that burst upon another day, another road. And again.
It walks. It is a Power in motion.
It is the very Meaning that walks.
Our dazzled escapee had the impression of arriving in this enormous living Mystery like an anthropoid emerging from caves, or from some alignment of menhirs where the shadow of the Druids still lingers. A memory suddenly awakened that pursued its enigma, and this time wanted to understand.
To understand is difficult, it is perilous because one uses a tool that is not the right one for probing the corridors of Thebes or for listening to the Vedic chanters, and yet it was the question of Now, of the Today after all those millennia, the today of this stunned little figure beneath a new ring of the great Serpent — and perhaps the Today of everyone.
It was truly more gripping than the story of the Newfoundland whalers or the discovery of the shores of the New World — Francis I was four thousand years after Akhenaten, and we were still under the reign of the Inquisition and the stake. But we had not discovered our own enigma, we were still inside the old Fortress and in a geography that is bursting today under the pressure of a new ring of the great Serpent.
Page 14
Today we do not walk upon Meaning, we walk upon words that have lost their meaning. Like a music that has lost its notes. And small senseless figures who no longer know where they come from or where they are going.
The Greeks before us still sought the trail, they probed the Enigma like that escapee wanting to scratch and scratch in the Egyptian sands to wrest from it that buried Memory. They were not yet the amnesiacs of the year zero. They sensed something beating and vibrating beneath and they asked questions, almost with a sombre tenacity, pushing the tragic of our lives to its most fatal point so as to make its truth of light burst open — they wanted to know what was in those entrails.
Death was always the question, and the injustices of "fate" and the various "tyrants" and the tortuous windings of a trail that seemed to use darkness to make a cry spring forth or the reality of a man.
"Darkness, O my clarity!"
cries Ajax, the colossus, the vanquisher of Hector, struck mad by the goddess Athena, while Tecmessa, his gentle captive, bends over this delirious body: "He wants to know where he stands."
A strange cry.
And these tragic figures addressed the gods or summoned them, prayed to them or defied them, for it was still a time when the Earth — our earth — was not yet separated from the Heavens by abysses of forgetting. What was this divine trail, this "thing" that wanted to exist through our steps or despite our steps, through our ruins and our victories and our defeats again and our ills forever?
Aeschylus, the first of the great Greek tragedians, looked and looked like our escapee in the corridors of Thebes before the great Serpent, and he shook his head without piercing the Enigma to its end:
"The ways of divine thought go to their goal through thickets and thick shadows that no gaze could penetrate."
Thirty years later, Sophocles, the immense Sophocles, so full of tenderness and human pity beneath his tragic masks, would give a first name to this enigmatic Trail:
"Destiny is on the march."
Thus, a first word sticks itself onto our question and will darken or freeze it: Destiny, Anankē.
Page 15
It was no longer the silent gaze of our dazzled anthropoid emerging from the corridors of Thebes: it was the gaze of an Intelligence.
"Misfortune is on the march…"
Such are the opening words of Antigone at the dawn of a new day, after so many others that had risen since the solar sons of the Valley of the Kings. Our Fortress would be built five hundred years later. But a great shadow already loomed.
And the Chorus takes up again with its slow chant — for there was always a music to accompany the stumbling and the sorrow of men, as if words were a kind of uncertain shadow to bring forth a deeper song — perhaps always the same, here and there across the centuries:
"It is a terrible power, the power of Destiny. Neither riches nor arms nor ramparts nor the black ships that beat upon the waves can escape it."
But Antigone rebels, she will not let herself be crushed by the decrees of the powerful Creon, the tyrant, who has forbidden her to give burial to her brother Polynices, and she wants to draw her timid sister Ismene into her rebellion:
"Alas! what an undertaking!" cries Ismene.
And it is the undertaking of all those who, one day, want to escape from the established powers — to escape is always into the unknown Dark, into that unknown-yet-known and deep song that persists at the heart of men.
But our escape has never been radical enough, or total. For there is a solar Seed that leads us, despite everything, to that Place of total change where we shall arrive in our own sun and in our joy at last.
And the first step counts… dangerously. Right away, one runs into the very first question: life or death. Always to discover that death was inside our walls, and life begins on the other side — but there is that passage… perilous.
That sun-drenched Greece before our Fortress, which seems so tragic through Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and which even outdoes its own shadow:
"You were born of a mortal, Electra, remember. Orestes was mortal too. So do not grieve too much: we are all destined for the same fate."
But that was already a defiance, that was man wrestling with his Enigma.
And Sophocles, the immense Sophocles, three years before his death (in 406 BCE) would put these
Page 16
words in the mouth of Philoctetes, like a call to men to come, or a provocation:
"Ah! misery! Did our father, then, engender us to be slaves and not free men?"
A lovely path ran beneath our miseries and our old deaths. A deep song beneath the old Night. A forgotten trail. Seven thousand years before Sophocles, the Vedic chanters in the valleys of the Himalayas watched those distant men and made resonate something that would still beat in our hearts and beneath our layers of forgetting:
"O Seers of the Truth, weave the inviolable work BECOME THE HUMAN BEING, create the divine race, sharpen the spears of light, carve the path toward that which is immortal."
When we look at this long History, it seems, indeed, that there were two Times and that we have entered into a profound aberration — two Times or two Memories running one over the other, and nothing remains but a crust of shadow, solid as iron: grandfathers begetting little grandfathers and re-little ones, marching toward… nothing, according to their chances, their means, and their heredity.
There is always the Paradise of the dead for consolation.
Coming before the birth of our iron age, Sophocles is the symbol of a first Question, or of a Revolt that would silently spread through all of modern consciousness — he poses the true questions of our Age; just as Sri Aurobindo, like a Rishi resurfaced from the depths of this human Cycle and these interminable deadly trails, brings the first answer, the key to our Enigma and the true means of our physical deliverance; and just as the Vedic Rishis, who came before the birth of our long human journey, bring the announcement and the true Meaning of our human destiny. These are the three great lighthouses of our human Evolution.
But Sophocles is not only the symbol of a Question: he is a living Challenge, or a cry of Impotence looking at the gods — and perhaps it is this cry, this long cry of our Misery that
Page 17
will open the doors.
"It is precisely when I am nothing that I become truly a man!"
cries Oedipus.
This impotence, we have tried to fill with marvellous machines, which were going to do everything for us, even run on the moon; but before the death of our brief seventy years and all those great-great-grandchildren in our cemeteries, we find ourselves before the old Enigma that threatens to engulf us all in the sands of vanished civilisations, unless it be the whole Earth that dies… from not having found its enigma.
And Sophocles pushes the Challenge as if wanting to wrest its mask from it:
"Neither sobs nor prayers will wrest your father from the Marsh of Hell to which all must descend…"
the Chorus coldly tells Electra.
"You are slowly killing yourself without any further deliverance from your ills."
But this "Destiny," from where did it fall?
And yet, each person, each man, however rough, has the feeling, however vague, of a trail running beneath his steps that sometimes gapes upon a stunning unknown, upon a "chance" pulsing with a thousand small breaths, upon an encounter that seems to have been encountered many times, and a smile coming from elsewhere.
Or an enormity also coming from elsewhere.
And again everything closes under the grey steps of every day. And we are still not delivered from our ills.
The earth no longer knows quite "where it stands."
Sophocles gazes at the Divine Olympus, but perhaps it is the other end of things one must look at — those imperturbable roots forging their way through the night of the Earth and the Ages, and the small figures emerging today from the old jungle.
The Delphic oracle had foretold Oedipus's destiny: he will kill his father, he will marry his mother. He will be "the defilement." Arrogant and proud, Oedipus does not accept it, he wants to unmask these oracles and soothsayers he despises; he leaves Corinth and sets out on the march…
Page 18
"I want to know the Truth."
only to fall back upon the very Destiny he was fleeing.
Others too, from our dark Age, have set out on the march: Villon escapes the gallows, only to throw himself onto other trails of brigandry, which vanish into the sands. Rimbaud emerges from his Infernos to run a thousand trails all the way to the Sunda Islands and Abyssinia, and falls back into France to have his leg amputated, and dies at the Hôpital de la Conception.
He ran until he could walk no more. But Destiny caught up with him in another hell.
Was not the important thing to walk?
Was not the important thing to defy?
The oracles are perhaps not wrong, and what does it matter!
Our "modern" priests have replaced Destiny with the confessional: if you do not commit too many mortal sins, you will go to heaven beside God our Father, at the end of your sensible little trail and your well-packed seventy years — packed with what? And one watches the string of grandfathers continuing the absurd, deadly trail, with or without sins.
And Destiny smiles behind its mask.
But some rebel escapee ends up saying, like Villon:
"I know all things, save only myself!"
Ah! this self… this person who calls itself I.
Is it not strange that the very root of the word means "mask," as in the Greek theatre?
No, the Enigma does not unravel in thought or on Olympus, but in Matter, in facts, under our steps. And if the voices or murmurs that run with our steps deceive us, what does it matter! provided that one walks, and these murmurs persist through a thousand deaths and a thousand defeats — but others will still listen.
This old earth that drives its roots through the night frantically seeks its sun, it is the simplest of things, entirely natural, and why would all these shoots and brush not seek their sun too! you and I and every being in the world?
There was a great mathematician, among all these you-and-I of the old jungle, who said:
"Nature is the realisation of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas."
That was Einstein.
This astonishing nature produced all manner of wild herbs, or less wild ones, and innumerable bindweeds coiling around some dead post, or sometimes around a great trunk emerging in the forest… like Einstein, like Sophocles and others before him. All seek and die only to be reborn stronger, taller. These great trees, these beeches with smooth white trunks, were not born suddenly, and there are other young ones growing — there is younger matter and older matter.
No one would say it was a stroke of fate that made this great tree and these little mortal sins
Page 19
around it. But sometimes a "stroke of fate" can make an old murmur burst open, and Destiny is a very old child of us who did not fall suddenly from a thunderbolt of Zeus, like Oedipus and his mortal defilement on the shores of Corinth.
There was another great tree among us, amid all those centuries of darkness, he had run many trails, in Cambodia, in Laos, he had fought many battles, in Spain, in Lorraine, he was a resistant, like Antigone, like Villon, like Rimbaud, or like Giordano Bruno on his pyre — and everyone fights his battle in his own way, that old "battle along a hundred paths" — and this great Escapee, named Malraux, looked at those trails and those trails, those battles won, lost soon… and said at the end of it all:
"To transform into consciousness as wide an experience as possible."
He too saw that mask on the small person of today and he heard long centuries murmuring behind him. He had walked much and he knew his walking did not stop with this small death, any more than the great tree dies when one twig falls. No, it was not a stroke of Destiny that had suddenly made this cry and this call spring up — the great trees look around and he saw those entangled shoots that did not know their meaning, that Fortress around that wanted to smother everything within its small meaning and its narrow creed.
Two thousand years — what is that?
And small, barely-born people who had only a few years to find a scrap of sunlight, quickly imprisoned, and sometimes (or often) never found? The hells or heavens at the end of these thin lives were scarcely any "experience" to transform, it was "three little turns and off they go," as in the song. It was so absurd and revolting that it would have to crack one day under the pressure of some tenacious root. What was "Destiny" for these thousand shoots, who sometimes heard an old murmur in the Night and wondered… what?
In the time before Sophocles, when the old trail traced back toward the Valley of the Kings, and further still toward a very old Murmur singing in the ravines of the Himalayas and running through so many rivers and smiling and colourful crowds, one did not say "Destiny," and yet everything seemed destined, purposeful, heading toward… but that current came from before and would flow still, and again, there were no races, no religions in it, no walls, and it was the current of all men toward their ever-present Sun: this small span of time given to them was the fruit of an old root that would make other, more beautiful fruits, and the old failures would make stronger, more conscious shoots. One did not say "destiny," one said Karma: works and the fruit of works, the happy or unhappy consequences of past acts; and a Great Work being built slowly, patiently, through light and night, through battle won or lost — but nothing was lost, all went toward a deeper experience, a wider consciousness, a more vivid discovery: a taller tree, richer in flowers beneath a Sun never extinguished.
Page 20
Later, the thinkers covered over with an abstract word that old living song running beneath our steps, that call from the past that made a silent music and drew us forward, further, again and again, to bloom into a great melody never completed — those thinkers translated the old deep seeing and they placed a word (or was it a shadow) over a Note that vibrated without the language of this or that country, over a living memory that was like that Country of always.
They said: reincarnation.
In fact, we are born entirely displaced, and there is something in us perpetually trying to find its tracks and its country. We grope and we lay the tracks of a family, a thought, a nation, but there is always something missing — something terribly missing.
There is an immense aberration.
Have we run all these centuries and all these sorrows to do "three little turns and off they go"… to paradise, and more often to the hells.
We have made so many revolutions that revolve nothing. Are we going to make the real one, for once? The revolution of Man.
Once again we hear brother Villon who left his trails to turn brigand and vanish without a trace: "I know all things, save only myself!"
But his trace haunts us still.
"Health and brotherhood!" the brothers of a young revolution would cry, and it is perhaps the only cry that remains alive from our sacred national trinity — liberty, equality, fraternity — for of "liberty" little remains, save the freedom to "think" what our various radio stations think and to catch a medical and fully predicted death, and hypnotic news that brings no News, save of our growing chaos and our perennial stupidities, with a few warlike diversions and discoveries that discover only our perfected slavery. As for "equality," good God! it only comes about from below, equalising everything in the same filth. But these young shoots, all the same, they push all the same and they would dearly like a wider, freer air, and a round that would not close back upon a ready-made Fortress and a Paradise of the dead — they have not yet grown their tree. Where is the perspective,
Page 21
the space, the horizon that closes nowhere? Seventy years of a single life is little and so idiotic that one would never want to start again but rather light fires — not of joy — to end this ineptitude. Or scatter bombs here and there — and in fact that is what is happening at the end of our two thousand years of Western baptism.
Where is the trail?
Where are the traces of our past, individual and collective, vanished into the sands of Abyssinia or Egypt and that haunts us still with some cry of Antigone recognised within us, and that would awaken or reopen in us the trail toward the future? That escapee who looked with stupefaction at the great Serpent of Thebes and those little figures in single file, each beneath a ring of the Karma heading into the infinity of the future, suddenly gaped upon a living enigma that was himself and more than himself, and this "more than" was like charged with a formidable dynamism… Fifty years later, or three thousand, that dynamism still carries us and we gape before a Mystery that has never stopped uncovering itself.
There was a great Revolutionary, a Seer and a Lover of the earth, named Sri Aurobindo, who said:
"The very nature of our humanity supposes that souls have been formed by a different past and that, in the same way, they will have a future accordingly."
And he added:
"Plato and the Hottentots, the privileged son of saints or Vedic rishis, and the hardened criminal who was born and lived throughout in the fetid corruption of a great modern city, would equally, by the acts and beliefs of this one and only unequal life, create their entire eternal future? "This is a paradox that offends at once the soul and reason, the moral sense and spiritual intuition."
One truly wonders how the West has managed to live within this aberration — and it is dying of it. There remain a few great solitaries who cry out in the jungle. And human fraternity demands that we cry out still with Philoctetes:
"Did our father, then, engender us to be slaves and not free men?"
We have yet to make the greatest of all our revolutions: the human revolution.
Our first trace is evidently in Matter.
Page 22
But to find it, one must have shed many masks, for what seems closest to us and most felt has literally been engulfed beneath tides and tides and Ages. But if one arrives at a null and empty point in life, resembling the death of everything that had made our life, strangely there is a song that springs up, as if that song had always borne all our lives and all our sorrows, and this Void fills with a Fullness never known, like an ocean rushing into a hole. It was death, and suddenly it is Life always, but a life so new that it is like a first life in the world sprung from centuries that were only living death.
The young escapee from that life had a very seafaring mother who had long gazed silently at the Sea, listened to the echo of that surf and she said to this rebel of the time: "Atavism is everything," like the tides and tides that pass with different hues and rumblings according to the times, the places and the small inlets that swallow the wave. And the one who was now rumbling resembled that other… She knew only one country, and it was the country of the Sea. Then she "died," as they say, at the age of ninety having lived a full life, and she came to see her rebel child to tell him what had happened after she departed. But then, it was an astonishment. She showed us an Immensity, but as nothing is immense in this world, in the middle of which there was a small white form, and in her crystalline, simple voice like a child, she told us: "It was a blow! Wide-wide-wide…" She could not get over this Wide, she who knew so well the open sea in the wind. "And… an enthusiasm of joy." She was astounded.
For a long time, the child of this great Escaped One stood listening to the crystalline echo of that small voice, and he recognised what had always seemed to him familiar.
Some years later, she came back to see her child, but it was an entirely different thing: she straddled her old bicycle, but a bicycle all garlanded with pomegranate flowers and red hibiscus, and she went toward the North…
She was resuming the old path of men, with its forgetting, its sorrows and that old song running beneath the steps, and the long road toward our human Goal. Even well-filled and rich with obstacles as it was with its ninety years and its string of children, that life had fashioned only one type of experience, and in what way did it represent a complete and flowering tree, a human accomplishment powerful and vast enough to advance toward our human revolution and the transformation of Matter in a body?
When shall we live this Escape without needing to escape? And that Wide-there in a conscious body without forgetting? In a Matter without mask and without walls and in a life without death.
Doubtless it is necessary for the human experience to be vast and old enough, and powerful enough, to break through these unreal walls and transform this prehistoric carcass.
We are perhaps arriving at the Hour when it is possible, precisely because this single life becomes so mad within its senseless Fortress.
This first Matter from which we emerge, what is it? this evolution from which we emerge painfully like some clever chimpanzee? For a less clever but escaped chimpanzee of its future progeny, it is something that vibrates, that is sniffed and finds its North without a compass.
Page 23
"Matter, this milieu of all our evolution, is apparently unconscious and inanimate, but it appears so to us only because we are unable to perceive consciousness beyond a limited field, a determined scale or range to which we have access. Below us there are lower vibrations to which we are insensible and which we call subconsciousness or unconsciousness. Above us there are higher vibrations which, for our lower nature, are an unseizable supra-consciousness… This unconsciousness of Matter is a veiled consciousness, a buried or somnambulant consciousness that contains all the latent powers of the Spirit."
- Sri Aurobindo
Then a formidable horizon opens. Like that nameless emotion that seized the young escapee in a Theban hypogeum looking at the unfolding of the great Serpent and all those little figures frozen in infinity, like that relentless urge casting a small figure of today onto the trails of Afghanistan, onto a thousand senseless trails that were nonetheless purposeful through a small figure from before… and from further still before, and perhaps premeditated by some Spirit from still deeper, from the depths of those years and those walls…
"The true foundation of reincarnation is the evolution of the soul, or rather its efflorescence and its breaking through the veil of Matter, and its gradual discovery of itself."
It was Paul Valéry who noted:
"Thus the grain of wheat, found in a hypogeum, germinates, it is said, after three thousand years of dry slumber."
And Sri Aurobindo adds in The Life Divine:
"Each degree of cosmic manifestation, each type of form capable of sheltering the immanent spirit, becomes, through reincarnation, an instrument of the individual soul to manifest more and more the masked consciousness that is within it — each life, through the growing progression of consciousness within it, becomes A STAGE IN THE VICTORY OVER MATTER, until, finally, Matter itself becomes the instrument of a total manifestation of the Spirit."
The victory over Matter…
We are far from that "total," but our present stage, so materialistic, threatens to destroy the very Matter that bears it. We are barbaric sleepwalkers. But our materialism is false, as false as our religions that destine us for the paradise of death.
Page 24
When life goes in circles, whether that of a man, a nation, an Age, or a species, it calls for death, as we have said, or some invasion that will put an end to its round and make a hole in its walls. There is no death! it is our last and tenacious illusion, death comes from our own choice.
The one-who-knows, the Poet, would cry:
"Whether I live or whether I die, I am always!"
And yet, our old Misery also calls for something that would be always upon this earth and in a body — there is that old Song beneath our steps that knows it and says it, there has always been this quest for immortality among us.
"There are means of attaining physical immortality and death is by our choice and not by any constraint of Nature, says Sri Aurobindo. But who would care to wear the same coat for centuries or to be confined in a narrow and invariable dwelling during a long eternity?"
It is this very structure that must change, this outdated heritage of the old evolution of fossils. Our provisional "coat." It is Matter itself that must transform, as it transformed from the jellyfish to the vertebrates. And it is not finished. The Immortal calls to the mortal.
And yet, there are also seconds that are an entire refreshing eternity, an immortality all right there — an immense crack in our walls and a ray smiling with tenderness, like a Mother watching her child.
One would say there is a perpetual yes-no in our lives, and never the total Yes that cries for always, save a sunny second that bears us still through our nights and our hells. And the Enigma, the sublime contradiction, remains buried beneath the long path that trudges obstinately on.
"The heavens beyond are great and wonderful, but greater still and more wonderful are the heavens within you. It is this Eden that awaits the divine worker."
Thus spoke that Great one among our divine poets, Sri Aurobindo.
We are the workers of more than one life, and our old ruins were preparing a Great Work, our old errors, our old sins too. And if there is some "sin," one must, good God, go and ask our first creator to account for it!
And all the same, we are in quest of that "Eden," despite everything, or because of this old Misery.
Page 25
For want of Eden, we throw ourselves into a thousand pleasures and distractions that end up wearing out — but it is not bad, while it lasts! It lasts so briefly, and the "coat" wears out too, the "dwelling" narrows. And the enigma buries itself ever deeper. It is not Eden that is immediately obvious, no, it is rather this long march, and finally the great Fraternity of our misery.
The great Escapees of our long centuries cannot stop their gaze at the small individual and his thin story, they would "know the true," like Oedipus condemned by Destiny; it is rather the other end of things they contemplate with a poignant question. And we hear again the chorus of Antigone:
"They go far back, the ills I see beneath the roof of the Labdacids, ever falling after the dead upon the living, without any father ever delivering the children…"
It was the great Impotence proclaimed and recognised, four centuries before the iron gates of our Fortress closed upon us. But two centuries earlier, before Sophocles, when Greece sunlit was barely awakening, the Buddha too saw those old ills striking men, and in his immense pity, his silent contemplation, he had seen only one door of escape, the supreme Evasion into Nirvana, the abolition from above — which left the earth to its old Misery… inconsolable.
The merit of our sunless Fortress is perhaps that it was going to create a world so hideous, so strangling, that it would be absolutely necessary, out of sheer necessity, to find the key to the enigma or perish for good.
We have perhaps not gone deep enough into these "heavens within us." We have not found the Eden of this world.
Seven thousand years before our sick era, strange Vedic chanters made their conch shells resonate through the valleys of the Himalayas, and their hymns still vibrate subterraneously in our heart of today like a lost memory, like a living enigma all complete that would cast out rays and a sound of truth, incomprehensible and yet comprehended by some soothsayer deep within us running on hazardous trails in quest of what it already contains within its human skin.
And truly, it is like a stroke of a gong resounding there, like the very answer to Antigone's question (and all our own):
"Deliver your father, your father who becomes your son and who bears you."
Page 26
Deliver your father…
There is something we lack, a central Knowledge, and that gap — that gap of memory, one might say — has ruined all our lives since that year zero, aptly named. So we invented Saviours and machines to fill our void.
But for a plant in the night of the earth, there is no void! there is an intensity pushing irresistibly toward its sun… which it does not even know, but it knows it is there through a million pores of its surging, it knows that it is its flowering Eden, and where is the "father" who delivers?! it is the very father who delivers itself little by little in the womb of its earthly mother.
And the father becomes its own son in the great sunlight of day:
"A formidable Child in the entrails, he is called the son of the body…"
thus chanted those astonishing Vedic Rishis long before our Western birth, but our sun seems to have buried itself along with us.
But it pushes and pushes despite us and despite everything — does one believe that this thrust will stop with our small two thousand years of ignorant fortress?
"You bear us forward like an ocean bearing a wave forward."
It is this formidable dynamism that suddenly gaped under the eyes — or under the steps — of that young escapee who contemplated, dumbfounded, the great Serpent of Thebes.
Are we going to remain bound by our own will, or walk with the great Push of this formidable Child within our own entrails?
This Child has walked for a long time, through lives and lives, fruitful or not, and it is not to vanish into posthumous Paradises that it has toiled so much, but to find its Fruit right here.
We are "materialists," and so much the better, but we are not materialistic enough! for we have examined this Matter only with the instruments of our thought, as the fish examined its world with its fish-instruments and saw exactly its world as it is for it — its exactness is no different from ours, except that it did not imprison it.
As this Child walks within us, subterraneously at first and bumping into a thousand things, it gropes at much around it without having words to say so, it feels many beings around it as if made of the same substance and directly perceptible by the same means as itself, like a language without words, or a sound that would touch the same notes — one day, that Child stammered its surprise, its encounter with so many other similar encounters; and that meeting place, that mute language of all the earth, and perhaps of the entire universe, it called "consciousness," or it called it "soul," or "spirit." Or it simply sang. It was per-
Page 27
meable and fluid like the ocean, it was everywhere and like itself. It was like its own breath — a formidable Breath, as formidable as that Dynamism that a surprised, escaped Child discovered beneath its own steps.
Decidedly, there were formidable "entrails" there.
But within that same "I-everywhere," there were very old trees, as in our forest, and wild brush. And there were old Rishis and that great solitary banyan named Sri Aurobindo.
He said:
"As we progress and awaken to the soul in us and in things, we realise that there is a consciousness also in the plant, in the metal, in the atom, in electricity, in everything that belongs to physical Nature; we discover even that it is not, in all respects, a lower or more limited mode of consciousness than the mental; on the contrary, in many so-called 'inanimate' forms, consciousness is more intense, more rapid, more acute, though less developed on the surface."
It is on this surface that we live and believe we know everything with our mental instrument, we have even made impeccable geographies and placed our finger on the atoms of a terrifying Matter.
But…
"This unconsciousness of Matter, says Sri Aurobindo, is a veiled consciousness, buried, a somnambulant consciousness that contains all the latent powers of the Spirit…"
And another stroke of the gong resounds here:
"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."
Then one understands!
This omniscience of our cells, of our atoms, is the one that "premeditates" beneath our steps and casts us onto those relentless trails, as if in search of what is there. And one understands also: this omnipotence of our cells, of our atoms, is the one that can remodel here and now our living matter and this prehistoric carcass, and CHANGE our implacable human Destiny.
Then, where is the Impotence?
We are all on the relentless and increasingly imperative, perilous trail of our Future as free men, this "son of the body," this "formidable Child in the entrails": this human revolution. This solar blossoming of our first Seed.
And once again, we repeat this prodigious "premeditation" of Sri Aurobindo:
"Each degree of cosmic manifestation, each type of form capable of sheltering the immanent spirit, becomes, through reincarnation, an instrument of the individual soul to manifest more and more its masked consciousness; each life, through the growing progression of consciousness within it, becomes A STAGE IN THE VICTORY OVER MATTER, until, finally, Matter itself becomes the instrument of a total manifestation of the Spirit."
Page 28
In 1913, when that great solitary banyan looked upon the children of a more human future, he said:
"Machinery is necessary to modern humanity because of our incurable barbarism."
Is it incurable?
This old world found the means to cure itself of many ills and many outdated forms. This old Earth always found the means.
This "terrifying" Matter that must be hammered again and again to extract the somnambulant consciousness that is there and that could change everything… Have we not been hammered enough to understand, finally, our own secret? Or will some "natural" accident be needed yet again to deliver us?
We live in the terrible illusion of a false consciousness that devours us — and this is not a Buddhist illusion, it is a physical illusion, like that of a plant unable to find its sun. The plant wants space, air, flowing water. And what flows in our veins? what is this false heredity they would paste on our backs, for us to walk ever more bent and burdened beneath the weight of an old pot in which they want to pot us forever. It is no longer our cells at all that sense and become! it is the collective hypnosis of the old fortress in which we live, and which is stifling us.
"We are drugged by the domination of Matter."
But this Matter is no longer even what it once was, raw and porous! we have dogmatised it, hardened it, covered it with mortal and medical sins — and everything in it is deadly. But where was the "mortal" in the first plant of the Ages? It pushed, simply and indisputably, and if it did not push there, it pushed otherwise and went around the obstacle. But now the "obstacle" has become inescapable, it is thinking concrete that becomes what it thinks, or what the fashionable dogmas and slogans think.
"Our bodies have been fatally indoctrinated by the mind into false habits."
Page 29
Those are "laws," they say, but the old earth got along perfectly well without laws! which it ignored or arranged in its own way through the old powerful thrust that drove it; it even made "miracles" in its way, that no man would be capable of inventing or few of bearing — miracles are very unbearable, it is like suddenly stepping into another skin.
Perhaps we need to change our skin, and breathe a different air… or a different consciousness.
We, the "conquerors" of all limits, the "conquistadors" of all discoveries, we have not noticed one simple thing: our Limit is the very instrument we use to examine Matter and to calculate exactly the geography of our own eyes: the Mind. Like the fins and gills of the fish were the instrument for measuring their world, and at the same time their limit for becoming land-dwellers. This outdated, hypnotic, "drugged" Mind, entirely demented and barbaric, become its own science, is our immediate Limit to conquer in order to arrive on the next Earth and in our next body: a body conscious and free of its old slavery to the so-called "laws" of Matter.
"Any given law is simply an equilibrium established by Nature, it is a stabilisation of forces. But it is only a groove in which Nature has taken the habit of working to obtain certain results. If you change consciousness, the groove changes too, necessarily."
That is the next miracle awaiting us.
But one must want it.
After all, this Matter is perhaps not "terrifying" nor shattering nor deadly, it is miraculous.
But one must want it and change one's skin in time.
"I want to know the true" said Oedipus.
With a touch of humour, Mother said:
"Death is the most ingrained of all habits."
Page 30
Paradoxically, when a section of this Fortress crumbles, one becomes both less human and more human: one is precipitated into an immense Human that is like all the sorrow of men in a single heart, all the thirst of men in a single cry, an entire world within a single skin. Then one physically and totally understands the great Pity of the Buddha, one understands the great Revolt that smoulders at the bottom of this Misery and that has shed so much blood, our own even, on so many altars and useless pyres — and nothing is useless and everything is unacceptable. Then one is like an old tree in the great wind not knowing whether it wants to fall or hold on still — and "falling" means beginning again the same Misery in so many young shoots that are oneself and that push nonetheless. And at the same time, beneath this great wind of Misery and at the heart of these thousands of sorrowful hearts, one senses a Tenderness so gentle, and so powerful, that it could split the heart of a rock and melt all our sorrows and revolts into a Smile. One is at once in a great Wide like nothing is wide, and a very small constricting present plunging into an interminable prehistory and pushing nonetheless toward a future borne by this immense Tenderness, as if one had the urge to nestle there forever. One is in a small crumbling prison, and there is all that infinity gaping before one like our sky of always pearling in this second and one could vanish there as if nothing had ever been, save that Love.
It is the paradox of all our lives, it is the sublime Contradiction, the yes-no entwined in the same arms and in a body. Life and death in the same body.
Like an Illusion and a Reality knotted together.
It is the battle of the worlds, of yesterday and of so much time, heaven and hell in a single body, the small crumbling prison and… what else? Death is a small span of time passing within a smiling infinity, an interlude, then the doors reopen onto… what else? They will reopen always until the Battle of God is won on the earth and in a body.
Neither revolt nor the sleep of God nor evasion will heal us until the entire Fortress is dismantled and the slavery of men is delivered into the great Wide and into a divine body.
"Arise and fight"
says the Bhagavad Gita.
Page 31
We can.
"Awaken and will!"
said Mother in 1963, at the very moment of Kennedy's assassination.
"Let us conquer here and now let us run this race and this battle along a hundred paths…"
said the Rig Veda.
In fact, we have arrived at the anti-miracle.
We have arrived at the iron gates of our Fortress.
Our Science would have us believe that we are the triumphant product of a long evolution of skeletons, the ultimate "intelligent" product, at last, of all those old beasts and millions of years; and if we are even more cunning, we will go to other moons and govern the earth by the power of our machinery and our bombs.
The result is not too impressive: the country of men has become the country of assassins and the "great" leaders of the world, pomaded and photogenic, democratic and humanitarian, are the first terrorists, suppliers of bombs and other remote-guided ingenuities that blow up in our faces here and there — business is business.
If Mother said to those same ingenious gnomes: Awaken and will! they would gladly make Titans and super-financiers in the great Stock Exchange of the commerce of death. And if death turns out badly, they will be able to go to other moons to begin their exploits again and engender improved little barbarians.
The heart of men is very sick.
But on the other side, the aberration of our Churches is no less.
In the time of those happy "pagans," 442 years before our dark illness, Attica still vibrated with the great chant of Antigone:
"There are many wonders in this world, none greater than man."
Then the year zero: an unhappy crucified man.
Crucified by whom?
Three hundred and twenty-five years after the death of their new god, we see "317 infallible bishops," in grand attire, going to Nicaea to proclaim the dogmas and wishes of that unhappy man among men: "He is God of God, light of light…" — the Church builders were at their trade. And he died to redeem our sins.
Page 32
Whose sins?
And there is only one path, a single one, to go to God, through the gates of the Church, and to save our soul from death.
But Death reigns everywhere and the old "Sin" of millions of years has produced men suffocating in a Fortress, condemned to death in perpetuity.
It is the definitive and fateful anti-miracle, something Oedipus himself would not have dreamed.
In the year 325, our Church sealed the Death and the destiny of men.
They dogmatised God and sliced his infinity into small incoherent pieces of men, just as the others dogmatised Matter into small fateful and unconscious pieces of atoms.
We are born of millions of years of sinful and unconscious matter and we leave our old mortal and unconscious bones to fly off to the priests' Paradise after seventy years of a single short incoherent but perfectly hereditary life.
The paths are blocked on all sides, we are born into a monstrous world.
In the fifth century after Jesus Christ, the sanctuary of Eleusis was converted into a Christian cemetery.
The heart of men is heavy and torn.
How is it possible to emerge into such despair or non-hope after so many centuries of struggle and sorrow?
Or is Man totally incoherent and impotent?
We are like a plant deprived of the sun that draws it and its flowers and its joy of living — that toward which it tends. And what would this young shoot say if presented, as the symbol and ideal of its thirst, with a crucified tree, split and cut to pieces by the rapacity of men? Or an irrefutable diagram of the molecules, particles and cells that make it grow and destine it… to what? Another dead tree? And if told: others will grow after it and after you, ad vitam aeternam, will this young shoot be consoled?
We do not need consolation! we need to live and to flower! we need joy.
Then all the guardians of Death, priests of Science or priests of the sacrosanct Fortress, will tell it with the coryphaeus of Electra: "So do not grieve too much, we are all destined for the same fate."
Is Man, then, irremediably imbecile or irremediably destined to an "intelligence" that knows only how to improve its old disaster and fill its Fortress with a few gadgets and trinkets? And beware! if you want to escape from there, there have been cruel, Nietzschean Titans before you, and there have been wrecks.
Page 33
We are perfectly bound by ourselves within our small thinking fortress.
No, we do not need supermen or super-gods, but something else, radically:
"It is not a crucified body but a glorified body that will save the world."
said Mother in 1957 — "glorified" means transformed: this child of our own body, not fallen from Heaven but mutated or transmuted within our own skin like a caterpillar wrapped in its iron cocoon.
We are in the process of drawing the entire Earth out of its cocoon of Lies. We are not dying or annihilating ourselves odiously: we are moulting. The Fortress is crumbling, and so much the better! but sadly and sordidly so much the better.
"The end of a stage of evolution, said Sri Aurobindo, is marked by a powerful recrudescence of the elements that are to go out of the Evolution."
Are we going to "go out of Evolution"? Or walk with it.
Are we going to find our own Secret, unravel the Enigma in our own body, or become wrecks like the fossils before us?
We can be the conscious collaborators of our own Evolution and not its stunned and helpless subjects.
We need joy and sun and space, that toward-which these millions of roots have tended through so many centuries and obstacles.
"When a man must give up what brought him joy, I hold that he no longer lives; he is, to my eyes, no more than a walking corpse."
Thus spoke the Messenger in Antigone.
Something singularly went off the rails in Western consciousness — it was a year zero as if nothing of men had existed before that sad birth, like a great historical fracture in our Continent. Socrates perhaps drank the first hemlock of our aberration. There was still a smile on men's lips, there were still nymphs at the fountain, sacred dances, and Dionysus, son of Heaven and Earth, of Zeus and Demeter, reigned, men still conversed with the gods. Even our Tragedies sang — there was always a Song. Something singularly went out, like a sudden gap of memory. But that Song still pursues us, like an ill-healed wound at the heart of men. And that "fracture" of an Age seems to replay itself with each of us, one day by chance when we gape upon a deadly "Nothing," and that nothing seems to fill with something at last amid our ruins, something that was always there and had always smiled at us, like our lost and rediscovered Song, like our Country of always and a second of sky beneath our steps that come and go.
Page 34
But we, the torn and fractured men, would dearly like to live at last what a dazzled second had sensed. We would dearly like that sky to become real, to become all of life. And the joy of living. Not that "walking corpse."
No, it is not a question of "philosophy," it is a question of life or death. It is not a question of "religion" — religions are a modern invention. In former times one sought, simply, and loved what one found. Now there is nothing left to seek, it is all found for us, by our infallible Churches that indoctrinated our minds with their dogmas and baptised us into death, and by our Science (but at least they were seeking something) that indoctrinated our cells with its infallible laws and baptised us under X-rays. We are born into a ready-made world. There is no more enigma! We are a "walking corpse."
What can change in this blocked world, save the governments of the same story and the slogans of the same stupidity? But the cruellest of all this Lie is that of our Churches, which have clouded and falsified our own search — Science only followed in the negative, revolting against this religious absurdity, without seeking to see what was deeper beneath this ecclesiastical crust of Lies, and without further delivering us or answering our human question: what can a man do, what are our own human means, save dying with dignity and courage.
One day, or rather one night, the young escapee from our Fortress, precipitated into that Wide that seemed to contain everything, encountered Sri Aurobindo in that place where everything meets and recognises itself, and he suddenly said to him with a cry that was like the cry of all men, that very cry that splits the Wall:
"There are centuries of sorrow in the heart of men!"
Page 35
It was a deep-deep emotion, like a mute prayer for all men.
Sri Aurobindo said nothing. He looked at this small child of man in that immense and so powerful Peace that it could have split all the walls and precipitated us forever into its eternity of Love. But it was not Eternity he wanted for one individual, not one more escapee, but Victory over all that Misery.
Later, after many relentless and revolted trails, our escapee, prisoner of men's sorrow and of that Fraternity of Misery, slowly understood-touched the old root, the old fracture of our aberrant and erratic Continent like blocks of rock abandoned by ancient glaciers. It was Sri Aurobindo who said simply, in the simplicity of the tranquil Truth:
"Human life is torn from not having known how to wed the Earth and the Heavens."
So each goes its own way, unhappy and chagrined — chagrined at not having been able to embrace the Earth and chagrined at not having been able to nestle in the arms of the Infinite. It is an absurd division. The Churches did much harm (or what good they could!) in sanctifying this terrible Divorce, in which they had every interest, alas (and what would they do if there were no more death!) So they divinised Death instead of divinising Life and making of it a wide and smiling life without death.
"Our humanity, said Sri Aurobindo, is the conscious meeting-point of the finite and the Infinite, to become ever more that Infinite in this physical birth itself — such is our privilege."
There was an old trail among those "pagans," and we are quite chagrined not to have followed it.
There was an impetuous Madame de Staël, the "indomitable," whom Napoleon had exiled, who said with unexpected clairvoyance:
"The pagans divinised life, and the Christians divinised death."
That was in 1805.
Seven or nine thousand years ago now, the Vedic Rishis refused this cruel fracture:
"He has entered into the Earth and into the Heavens as if they were one."
And again:
"He is there in the midst of the dwelling, He is like the life and like the breath of our existence, He is like our eternal child…"
And more deeply still, as at the source of our misery, which is at the same time the source of our own power:
Page 36
"They found this Truth: the very Sun that dwells in the Darkness."
It is obvious that all this creation could only be the simply ONE. Spiritual intuition has always said so. The True is the Simple, always. Einstein understood it better than our sovereignly ignorant Pontiffs and our deadly religions. Even Goethe's last words on his deathbed in Weimar say it: alles ist licht, "all is light." Like Oedipus at Colonus, cursed by Destiny, walking upright toward "the dark abode of the dead":
"O light, invisible to my eyes, yet for a long time you were mine."
And the Messenger watches from afar as Oedipus disappears through the "brazen threshold":
"Shortly after… we see him adoring AT ONCE in the same prayer the Earth and divine Olympus."
And the Chorus likewise gazes upon those "plains of darkness":
"Those gates crossed by countless passersby…"
and its song ends with a cry that is like the cry of all our centuries:
"O gods of the underworld! O unconquered monster."
At the end of this long path through the Ages, we lacked the one thing that would change everything, the ultimate discovery, the key to our Enigma: that "very Sun that dwells in the Darkness." The power to change. For if all is ONE, death too is Him and our human task is not only to climb to the bare summits of Truth, but to find the other half of things, beneath our steps, what Sri Aurobindo called "the dark half of the Truth," and to tear away that mask of Him to conquer The Divine Life on earth.
Our scientists, with the technical and diabolical means of their small mind, shattered Matter only to find a terrifying nuclear sun. They did not follow the eternal Trail of the ONE walking slowly with us to teach us how to live — and how long it takes us to notice what is there, beneath our steps, and how many blows and disasters to split our own walls in a true cry.
Goethe's noble Weimar was twenty kilometres from the Buchenwald crematorium.
Always, men have stood before this terrible and sublime Contradiction, this Yes-No that simultaneously dynamises our life and challenges or devours it.
We lacked following the Trail of the ONE, without fracture, and understanding this at last:
Page 37
"All this infinite becoming is a birth of the Spirit in forms… The Spirit is the original force-substance; all other powers (Life, Mind and beyond) are variants and derivatives of the force of the Spirit, degrees and modifications of the substance of the Spirit. Matter too is nothing else than a power and degree of the Spirit, Matter too is a substance of the Eternal."
This is the first Rock of our Mystery. This starting point of our Enigma.
"This well of honey covered by the Rock"
said the Veda.
"This Delight of Thee that is entirely wide entirely full and without breaks."
And they prayed:
"Pour in here the Nectar pour it forth and fill us with its light even to the very skin."
It is this Nectar hidden in our matter that "annuls death in mortals," this Joy finally un-covered, powerful and living in a body. And how many interminable births it took us to awaken this somnambulant consciousness and to individualise, step by step and painfully, or terribly, a little conscious substance in a human matter — in an old tragedy that finally pushes forth its powerful cry…
Then the "groove" changes.
"The most binding law of Nature is only a fixed process conceived by the Lord of Nature and constantly used by him; the Spirit made it and the Spirit can exceed it, but first we must open the gates of our prison-house and learn to live in the Spirit more than in Nature."
That is the Challenge offered to our modern humanity, or else the old disaster again.
We must make a hole in our Fortress of Ignorance — "a colossal Ignorance," said Sri Aurobindo — instead of making a hole in our cemetery.
We must break once and for all…
"This wall of death that separates us from a vaster self"
Page 38
thus sings Savitri, daughter of the Sun, in the epic of Sri Aurobindo.
Then we shall find the "lovely path" that ran everywhere with us, beneath our steps, and we shall fulfil the prayer of the ancient Rishis some nine thousand years ago:
"The human path and the divine path meet in one and both are conquered."
Then perhaps we shall finally hear
"the music born in the silences of Matter and which causes to spring from the bare abysses of the Ineffable the meaning they had kept but could not say."
We shall rediscover that Song and that Meaning and that Power that always walked with us. For there is a Music that composed the universes as well as our bodies, a Music in the abysses of Matter, our matter, and that can make our atoms, our particles, our cells vibrate differently, and recompose our body according to a vaster melody and in a life that is no longer death standing upright.
Then our trees shall have flowered in the wild forest, and this Seed of always shall finally have touched its Sun which was there at the beginning
"When the earth lay alone with its great lover the skies."
Such is the last human revolution.
If we wish to survive.
The body holds the key to our enigma and it is in a body, through a body, transmuted, glorified, that the world shall be delivered, if it can be.
Thus shall be answered the last prayer of Rimbaud in his Season in Hell:
"It will be within my power to possess truth in a soul and a body."
And the Monster shall be vanquished.
Page 39
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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:
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
Home
Disciples
Satprem
Books
Share your feedback. Help us improve. Or ask a question.