Recorded by Satprem in the course of numerous personal conversations with Mother, the complete logbook of her fabulous exploration in the cellular consciousness of the human body. Twenty-three years of experiences which parallel some of the most recent theories of modern physics. Perhaps the key to man's passage to the next species.
When we have passed beyond humanity,
then we shall be the Man.
SRI AUROBINDO
This Agenda.... One day, another species among men will pore over this fabulous document as over the tumultuous drama that must have surrounded the birth of the first man among the hostile hordes of a great, delirious Paleozoic. A first man is the dangerous contradiction of a certain simian logic, a threat to the established order that so genteelly ran about amid the high, indefeasible ferns - and to begin with, it does not even know that it is a man. It wonders, indeed, what it is. Even to itself it is strange, distressing. It does not even know how to climb trees any longer in its usual way - and it is terribly disturbing for all those who still climb trees in the old, millennial way. Perhaps it is even a heresy. Unless it is some cerebral disorder? A first man in his little clearing had to have a great deal of courage. Even this little clearing was no longer so sure. A first man is a perpetual question. What am I, then, in the midst of all that? And where is my law? What is the law? And what if there were no more laws? ... It is terrifying. Mathematics - out of order. Astronomy and biology, too, are beginning to respond to mysterious influences. A tiny point huddled in the center of the world's great clearing. But what is all this, what if I were 'mad'? And then, claws all around, a lot of claws against this uncommon creature. A first man ... is very much alone. He is quite unbearable for the pre-human 'reason.' And the surrounding tribes growled like red monkeys in the twilight of Guiana.
One day, we were like this first man in the great, stridulant night of the Oyapock. Our heart was beating with the rediscovery of a very ancient mystery - suddenly, it was absolutely new to be a man amidst the diorite cascades and the pretty red and black coral snakes slithering beneath the leaves. It was even more extraordinary to be a man than our old confirmed tribes, with their infallible equations and imprescriptible biologies, could ever have dreamed. It was an absolutely uncertain 'quantum' that delightfully eluded whatever one thought of it, including perhaps what even the scholars thought of it. It flowed otherwise, it felt otherwise. It lived in a kind of flawless continuity with the sap of the giant balata trees, the cry of the macaws and the scintillating water of a little fountain. It 'understood' in a very different way. To understand was to be in everything. Just a quiver, and one was in the skin of a little iguana in distress. The skin of the world was very vast. To be a man after rediscovering a million years was mysteriously like being something still other than man, a strange, unfinished possibility that could also be all kinds of other things. It was not in the dictionary, it was fluid and boundless - it had become a man through habit, but in truth, it was formidably virgin, as if all the old laws belonged to laggard barbarians. Then other moons began whirring through the skies to the cry of macaws at sunset, another rhythm was born that was strangely in tune with the rhythm of all, making one single flow of the world, and there we went, lightly, as if the body had never had any weight other than that of our human thought; and the stars were so near, even the giant airplanes roaring overhead seemed vain artifices beneath smiling galaxies. A man was the overwhelming Possible. He was even the great discoverer of the Possible. Never had this precarious invention had any other aim through millions of species than to discover that which surpassed his own species, perhaps the means to change his species - a light and lawless species. After rediscovering a million years in the great, rhythmic night, a man was still something to be invented. It was the invention of himself, where all was not yet said and done.
And then, and then ... a singular air, an incurable lightness, was beginning to fill his lungs. And what if we were a fable? And what are the means?
And what if this lightness itself were the means?
A great and solemn good riddance to all our barbarous solemnities.
Thus had we mused in the heart of our ancient forest while we were still hesitating between unlikely flakes of gold and a civilization that seemed to us quite toxic and obsolete, however mathematical. But other mathematics were flowing through our veins, an equation as yet unformed between this mammoth world and a little point replete with a light air and immense forebodings.
It was at this point that we met Mother, at this intersection of the anthropoid rediscovered and the 'something' that had set in motion this unfinished invention momentarily ensnared in a gilded machine. For nothing was finished, and nothing had been invented, really, that would instill peace and wideness in this heart of no species at all.
And what if man were not yet invented? What if he were not yet his own species?
A little white silhouette, twelve thousand miles away, solitary and frail amidst a spiritual horde which had once and for all decided that the meditating and miraculous yogi was the apogee of the species, was searching for the means, for the reality of this man who for a moment believes himself sovereign of the heavens or sovereign of a machine, but who is quite probably something completely different than his spiritual or material glories. Another, a lighter air was throbbing in that breast, unburdened of its heavens and of its prehistoric machines. Another Epic was beginning. Would Matter and Spirit meet, then, in a third physiological position that would perhaps be at last the position of Man rediscovered, the something that had for so long fought and suffered in quest of becoming its own species? She was the great Possible at the beginning of man. Mother is our fable come true. 'All is possible' was her first open sesame.
Yes, She was in the midst of a spiritual 'horde,' for the pioneer of a new species must always fight against the best of the old: the best is the obstacle, the snare that traps us in its old golden mire. As for the worst, we know that it is the worst. But then we come to realize that the best is only the pretty muzzle of our worst, the same old beast defending itself, with all its claws out, with its sanctity or its electronic gadgets. Mother was there for something else.
'Something else' is ominous, perilous, disrupting - it is quite unbearable for all those who resemble the old beast. The story of the Pondicherry 'Ashram' is the story of an old clan ferociously clinging to its 'spiritual' privileges, as others clung to the muscles that had made them kings among the great apes. It is armed with all the piousness and all the reasonableness that had made logical man so 'infallible' among his less cerebral brothers. The spiritual brain is probably the worst obstacle to the new species, as were the muscles of the old orangutan for this fragile stranger who no longer climbed so well in the trees and sat, pensive, at the center of a little, uncertain clearing. There is nothing more pious than the old species. There is nothing more legal. Mother was searching for the path of the new species as much against all the virtues of the old as against all its vices or laws. For, in truth, 'Something Else' ... is something else.
We landed there, one day in February 1954, having emerged from our Guianese forest and a certain number of dead-end peripluses; we had knocked upon all the doors of the old world before reaching that point of absolute impossibility where it was truly necessary to embark into something else or once and for all put a bullet through the brain of this slightly superior ape. The first thing that struck us was this exotic Notre Dame with its burning incense sticks, its effigies and its prostrations in immaculate white: a Church. We nearly jumped into the first train out that very evening, bound straight for the Himalayas, or the devil. But we remained near Mother for nineteen years. What was it, then, that could have held us there? We had not left Guiana to become a little saint in white or to enter some new religion. 'I did not come upon earth to found an ashram; that would have been a poor aim indeed,' She wrote in 1934. What did all this mean, then, this 'Ashram' that was already registered as the owner of a great spiritual business, and this fragile, little silhouette at the center of all these zealous worshipers? In truth, there is no better way to smother someone than to worship him: he chokes beneath the weight of worship, which moreover gives the worshiper claim to ownership. 'Why do you want to worship?' She exclaimed. 'You have but to become! It is the laziness to become that makes one worship.' She wanted so much to make them become this 'something else,' but it was far easier to worship and quiescently remain what one was. She spoke to deaf ears. She was very alone in this 'ashram.' Little by little, the disciples fill up the place, then they say: it is ours. It is 'the Ashram.' We are 'the disciples.' In Pondicherry as in Rome as in Mecca. 'I do not want a religion! An end to religions!' She exclaimed. She struggled and fought in their midst - was She therefore to leave this Earth like one more saint or yogi, buried beneath haloes, the 'continuatrice' of a great spiritual lineage? She was seventy-six years old when we landed there, a knife in our belt and a ready curse on our lips.
She adored defiance and did not detest irreverence.
No, She was not the 'Mother of the Pondicherry Ashram.' Then who was She? ... We discovered Her step by step, as one discovers a forest, or rather as one fights with it, machete in hand - and then it melts, one loves, so sublime does it become. Mother grew beneath our skin like an adventure of life and death. For seven years we fought with Her. It was fascinating, detestable, powerful and sweet; we felt like screaming and biting, fleeing and always coming back: 'Ah! You won't catch me! If you think I came here to worship you, you're wrong!' And She laughed. She always laughed. We had our bellyful of adventure at last: if you go astray in the forest, you get delightfully lost, yet still with the same old skin on your back, whereas here, there is nothing left to get lost in! It is no longer just a matter of getting lost - you have to CHANGE your skin. Or die. Yes, change species. Or become one more nauseating little worshiper - which was not on our program. 'We are the enemy of our own conception of the Divine,' She told us one day with her mischievous little smile. The whole time - or for seven years, in any event - we fought with our conception of God and the 'spiritual life': it was all so comfortable, for we had a supreme 'symbol' of it right there. She let us do as we pleased. She even opened up all kinds of little heavens in us, along with a few hells, since they go together. She even opened the door in us to a certain 'liberation,' which in the end was as soporific as eternity - but there was nowhere to get out: it WAS eternity. We were trapped on all sides. There was nothing left but these 4 square meters of skin, the last refuge, that which we wanted to flee by way of above or below, by way of Guiana or the Himalayas. She was waiting for us just there, at the end of our spiritual or not so spiritual pirouettes. Matter was her concern. It took us seven years to understand that She was beginning there, 'where the other yogas leave off,' as Sri Aurobindo had already said twenty-five years earlier. It was necessary to have covered all the paths of the Spirit and all those of Matter, or in any case, a large number geographically, before discovering, or even simply understanding, that 'something else' was really Something Else. It was not an improved Spirit nor even an improved Matter, but ... it could be called 'nothing,' so contrary was it to all we know. For the caterpillar, a butterfly is nothing; it is not even visible and has nothing in common with caterpillar heavens nor even caterpillar matter. So there we were, trapped in an impossible adventure. One does not return from there: one must cross the bridge to the other side. Then one day in that seventh year, while we still believed in liberations and the collected Upanishads, highlighted with a few glorious visions to relieve the commonplace (which remained appallingly commonplace), while we were still considering 'the Mother of the Ashram' rather like some spiritual super-director (endowed, albeit, with a disarming yet ever so provocative smile, as though She were making fun of us, then loving us in secret), She told us, 'I have the feeling that ALL we have lived, ALL we have known, ALL we have done is a perfect illusion. ... When I had the spiritual experience that material life is an illusion, personally I found that so marvelously beautiful and happy that it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life, but now it is the entire spiritual structure as we have lived it that is becoming an illusion! - Not the same illusion, but an illusion far worse. And I am no baby: I have been here for forty-seven years now!' Yes, She was eighty-three years old then. And that day, we ceased being 'the enemy of our own conception of the Divine,' for this entire Divine was shattered to pieces - and we met Mother, at last. This mystery we call Mother, for She never ceased being a mystery right to her ninety-fifth year, and to this day still, challenges us from the other side of a wall of invisibility and keeps us floundering fully in the mystery - with a smile. She always smiles. But the mystery is not solved.
Perhaps this Agenda is really an endeavor to solve the mystery in the company of a certain number of fraternal iconoclasts.
Where, then, was 'the Mother of the Ashram' in all this? What is even 'the Ashram,' if not a spiritual museum of the resistances to Something Else. They were always - and still today - reciting their catechism beneath a little flag: they are the owners of the new truth. But the new truth is laughing in their faces and leaving them high and dry at the edge of their little stagnant pond. They are under the illusion that Mother and Sri Aurobindo, twenty-seven or four years after their respective departures, could keep on repeating themselves - but then they would not be Mother and Sri Aurobindo! They would be fossils. The truth is always on the move. It is with those who dare, who have courage, and above all the courage to shatter all the effigies, to demystify, and to go truly to the conquest of the new. The 'new' is painful, discouraging, it resembles nothing we know! We cannot hoist the flag of an unconquered country - but this is what is so marvelous: it does not yet exist. We must make it exist. The adventure has not been carved out: it is to be carved out. Truth is not entrapped and fossilized, 'spiritualized': it is to be discovered. We are in a nothing that we must force to become a something. We are in the adventure of the new species. A new species is obviously contradictory to the old species and to the little flags of the already-known. It has nothing in common with the spiritual summits of the old world, nor even with its abysses - which might be delightfully tempting for those who have had enough of the summits, but everything is the same, in black or white, it is fraternal above and below. SOMETHING ELSE is needed.
'Are you conscious of your cells?' She asked us a short time after the little operation of spiritual demolition She had undergone. 'No? Well, become conscious of your cells, and you will see that it gives terrestrial results.' To become conscious of one's cells? ... It was a far more radical operation than crossing the Maroni with a machete in hand, for after all, trees and lianas can be cut, but what cannot be so easily uncovered are the grandfather and the grandmother and the whole atavistic pack, not to mention the animal and plant and mineral layers that form a teeming humus over this single pure little cell beneath its millennial genetic program. The grandfathers and grandmothers grow back again like crabgrass, along with all the old habits of being hungry, afraid, falling ill, fearing the worst, hoping for the best, which is still the best of an old mortal habit. All this is not uprooted nor entrapped as easily as celestial 'liberations,' which leave the teeming humus in peace and the body to its usual decomposition. She had come to hew a path through all that. She was the Ancient One of evolution who had come to make a new cleft in the old, tedious habit of being a man. She did not like tedious repetitions, She was the adventuress par excellence - the adventuress of the earth. She was wrenching out for man the great Possible that was already beating there, in his primeval clearing, which he believed he had momentarily trapped with a few machines. She was uprooting a new Matter, free, free from the habit of inexorably being a man who repeats himself ad infinitum with a few improvements in the form of organ transplants or monetary exchanges. In fact, She was there to discover what would happen after materialism and after spiritualism, these prodigal twin brothers. Because Materialism is dying in the West for the same reason that Spiritualism is dying in the East: it is the hour of the new species. Man needs to awaken, not only from his demons but also from his gods. A new Matter, yes, like a new Spirit, yes, because we still know neither one nor the other. It is the hour when Science, like Spirituality, at the end of their roads, must discover what Matter TRULY is, for it is really there that a Spirit as yet unknown to us is to be found. It is a time when all the 'isms' of the old species are dying: 'The age of Capitalism and business is drawing to its close. But the age of Communism too will pass ...' It is the hour of a pure little cell THAT WILL HAVE TERRESTRIAL REPERCUSSIONS, infinitely more radical than all our political and scientific or spiritualistic panaceas.
This fabulous discovery is the whole story of the Agenda. What is the passage? How is the path to the new species hewn open? ... Then suddenly, there, on the other side of this old millennial habit - a habit, nothing more than a habit! - of being like a man endowed with time and space and disease: an entire geometry, perfectly implacable and 'scientific' and medical; on the other side ... none of that at all! An illusion, a fantastic medical and scientific and genetic illusion: death does not exist, time does not exist, disease does not exist, nor do 'near' and 'far' - another way of being in a body. For so many millions of years we have lived in a habit and put our own thoughts of the world and of Matter into equations. No more laws! Matter is free. It can create a little lizard, a chipmunk or a parrot - but it has created enough parrots. Now it is SOMETHING ELSE ... if we want it.
Mother is the story of the free Earth. Free from its spiritual and scientific parrots. Free from its little ashrams as well - for there is nothing more persistent than those particular parrots.
Day after day, for seventeen years, She sat with us to tell us of her impossible odyssey. Ah, how well we now understand why She needed such an 'outlaw' and an incorrigible heretic like us to comprehend a little bit of her impossible odyssey into 'nothing.' And how well we now understand her infinite patience with us, despite all our revolts, which ultimately were only the revolts of the old species against itself. The final revolt. 'It is not a revolt against the British government which any one can easily do. It is, in fact, a revolt against the whole universal Nature!' Sri Aurobindo had proclaimed fifty years earlier. She listened to our grievances, we went away and we returned. We wanted no more of it and we wanted still more. It was infernal and sublime, impossible and the sole possibility in this old, asphyxiating world. It was the only place one could go to in this barbed-wired, mechanized world, where Cincinnati is just as crowded and polluted as Hong Kong. The new species is the last free place in the general Prison. It is the last hope for the earth. How we listened to her little faltering voice that seemed to return from afar, afar, after having crossed spaces and seas of the mind, to let its little drops of pure, crystalline words fall upon us, words that make you see.
We listened to the future, we touched the other thing. It was incomprehensible and yet filled with another comprehension. It eluded us on all sides, and yet it was dazzlingly obvious. The 'other species' was really radically other, and yet it was vibrating within, absolutely recognizable, as if it were that we had been seeking from age to age, that we had been invoking through all our illuminations, one after another, in Thebes as in Eleusis as everywhere we have toiled and grieved in the skin of a man. It was for that we were here, for that supreme Possible in the skin of a man at last. And then her voice grew more and more frail, her breath began gasping, as though She had to traverse greater and greater distances to meet us. She was so alone to beat against the walls of the old prison. Many claws were out all around. Oh, we would so quickly have cut ourself free from all this fiasco to fly away with Her into the world's future. She was so tiny, stooped over, as if crushed beneath the 'spiritual' burden that all the old surrounding species kept heaping upon her. They didn't believe, no. For them, She was ninety-five years old + so many days. Can someone become a new species all alone? They even grumbled at Her: they had had enough of this unbearable Ray that was bringing their sordid affairs into the daylight. The Ashram was slowly closing over Her. The old world wanted to make a new, golden little Church, nice and quiet. No, no one wanted to become. To worship was so much easier. And then they bury you, solemnly, and the matter is settled - the case is closed: now, no one need bother any more except to print some photographic haloes for the pilgrims to this brisk little business. But they are mistaken. The real business will take place without them, the new species will fly up in their faces - it is already flying in the face of the earth, despite all its isms in black and white; it is exploding through all the pores of this battered old earth, which has had enough of shams - whether illusory little heavens or barbarous little machines. It is the hour of the real Earth. It is the hour of the real man. We are all going there - if only we could know the path a little. ...
This Agenda is not even a path: it is a light little vibration that seizes you at any turning - and then, there it is, you are IN it. 'Another world in the world,' She said. One has to catch the light little vibration, one has to flow with it, in a nothing that is like the only something in the midst of this great debacle. At the beginning of things, when still nothing was fixed, when there was not yet this habit of the pelican or the kangaroo or the chimpanzee or the XXth century biologist, there was a little pulsation that beat and beat - a delightful dizziness, a joy in the world's great adventure; a little never- imprisoned spark that has kept on beating from species to species, but as if it were always eluding us, as if it were always over there, over there - as if it were something to become, something to be played forever as the one great game of the world; a who-knows-what that left this sprig of a pensive man in the middle of a clearing; a little 'something' that beats, beats, that keeps on breathing beneath every skin that has ever been put on it - like our deepest breath, our lightest air, our air of nothing - and it keeps on going, it keeps on going. We must catch the light little breath, the little pulsation of nothing. Then suddenly, on the threshold of our clearing of concrete, our head starts spinning incurably, our eyes blink into something else, and all is different, and all seems surcharged with meaning and with life, as though we had never lived until that very minute. Then we have caught the tail of the Great Possible, we are upon the wayless way, radically in the new, and we flow with the little lizard, the pelican, the big man, we flow everywhere in a world that has lost its old separating skin and its little baggage of habits. We begin seeing otherwise, feeling otherwise. We have opened the gate into an inconceivable clearing. Just a light little vibration that carries you away. Then we begin to understand how it can change, what the mechanism is - a light little mechanism and so miraculous that it looks like nothing. We begin feeling the wonder of a pure little cell, and that a sparkling of joy would be enough to turn the world inside out. We were living in a little thinking fishbowl, we were dying in an old, bottled habit. And then suddenly, all is different. The Earth is free! Who wants freedom?
It begins in a cell.
A pure little cell.
Mother is the joy of freedom. Joyous Agenda !
Satprem
Nandanam
Deer House
19 August 1977
[1951-1960]
This first volume is in great part devoted to what might be called "Satprem's psychological preparation," from his arrival in Pondicherry in February 1954, "after having knocked on all the doors of the old world." Ultimately, he would stay beside Mother for 19 years, listening to her and recording the account of her experiences in the cellular consciousness - what forms the 13 volumes of the Agenda.
Satprem, "True Love," as Mother called him, was a reluctant disciple. Formed in the French Cartesian mold, a freedom fighter against the Nazis during the Second World War, and in love with his freedom, he was always ready to run away, yet always coming back, drawn by a love greater than his love for freedom. Being with Mother was, in his own words, like "struggling with the jungle, machete in hand - ultimately to melt, to fall in love, so beautiful it is.... It was fascinating and detestable, overpowering and warm. One felt like screaming and biting, and running away, but always returning." Slowly she conquered him, slowly he came to understand the poignant drama of this lone indomitable woman struggling to unseal man's evolutionary future, to open the door to a new species after man. And how does one open the door to a new species?
540 pages
[1961]
In this year of the first American trip in space, Mother strikes at the heart of "the great mystery": "It's double! It's the same world and yet it's - what?" In one world, everything is harmonious, without any possibility of disease, death, or accident - "a miraculous harmony" - and in the other world, everything is awry. Yet it's the same world of matter - separated by what? "More and more I feel it's a question of a vibration in matter."
What is this "vertical time" that suddenly opens up a new way of living and being in matter where things are no longer the inexorable consequence or cause of one another? "A kind of absoluteness in each second." A brand-new world at each second, without trace, age, or past imprint.
And what is this "massive immobility" in a lightning-fast movement, this "speckling of vibrations," as if Mother were no longer experiencing her body at a macroscopic level but at the level of subatomic physics.
And sixty years of "spiritual life" crumble as "a far more serious illusion" before - a new Divine? Or a new mode of life in matter - the next mode? "I am absolutely in the process of cutting a path through the jungle."
460 pages
[1962]
This is the year of the Cuban missile crisis and the first Sino-Indian conflict. "Could it be the first sign of something really ... big? It seems something has been profoundly disrupted, in the depths," Mother said. Indeed, the whole earth is disrupted. This year Mother emerges into a "third position" in her body.
Neither life nor death as we know it. Another side of the "web" where physical laws no longer apply and which curiously resembles the subatomic world of "black holes": time is changed, space is changed, death is changed. Could this be the material site, in the body, where the laws of the world are overturned - they were only our self-imagined laws - and where evolution opens on an incredible bodily freedom, a third position that will be the position of the next species on earth? "The body is beginning to obey another law. The sense of time is disappearing into a moving immobility.... A mass of infinite force, like pure superelectricity.... A movement of undulating, corporeal waves, as vast as the earth.... All the organs are changed; everything follows a different rhythm. Such a tremendous power, and so free! Something different ... it's something different! I don't know if I am living or dead.... The nature of my nights is changing, the nature of my days is changing.... The physical vibration is becoming porous.... No more axis - gone, blown away! It can go forward, backward, or anywhere at all.... Ubiquity, or something like that."
And then this cry: "Death is an illusion, illness is an illusion! Life and death are one and the same thing! It's just a shift of consciousness. Why, this is fantastic!"
And then a simple discovery, in the flesh: "The closer you come to the cell, the more the cell says, 'But I am immortal!'" A third cellular position in which "one becomes incapable of dying because death no longer has a reality."
Has Mother uncovered another reality of Matter this year, at the age of 84? "Right there, just in the background, is a sort of fairy tale.... Something in the
making that will be exceedingly beautiful, beyond all expression: a beautiful story Sri Aurobindo was trying to bring down onto the earth - and it's sure to come!"
540 pages
[1963]
This is the year of president Kennedy's assassination and the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split. While the destructive race between the superpowers intensifies and science questions the laws of the universe, Mother slowly carves the path to the next species on earth.
"The path I seek is always downward," into the consciousness of the cells. Will it be global death, then, or the beginning of a new world, as the birds followed the reptiles? "I am on the threshold of a stupendous realization that depends on something very tiny." She is 85 this year. Will it be a more "intelligent" species within the framework of our physics, or one with a different intelligence that will alter the laws of our physics as the frog alters the laws of the tadpole in its bowl? As she descends closer to the cell, Mother suddenly emerges into a different physical universe: "Everything becomes as if it were seen for the first time, even the movement of the earth and the stars.... There's no distance, no difference, not something seeing and something being seen.... One becomes a mountain, a forest, a house.... One sees thousands of miles away and up close at the same time - a sort of cellular ubiquity." And then, yes, this astounding realization: "The body is everywhere!" A global next species? What happens to the laws of the old physics when the bowl is shattered, when distances no longer exist? "All the usual rhythms are changed.... A universal movement so incredibly rapid that it appears motionless.... A true physical in the background."
And what happens to death when one escapes the wear and tear of the time inherent in the bowl? "If this becomes a natural state, death can no longer exist! ... It would mean a new phase of life on earth." And there is not far to go: "The field of experience is right here at every second.... We strive to come in contact with something that is right here." A new cellular consciousness that will form a new physics and perhaps the next biology on earth?
485 pages
[1964]
"The only hope for the future is a change in man's consciousness. It is up to men to decide if they will collaborate with it or if this change will be enforced on them by overpowering circumstances." As the new Force infiltrates Mother's body, it is the problem of the earth that is increasingly in question. How will the earth take that "vibration with the intensity of a superior fire"? "I see very few bodies around me capable of withstanding it.... So what will happen?"
This is the year of the first Chinese atomic bomb. Mother is 86. "A minuscule, infinitesimal, speckled infiltration - the miracle of the earth!" A catastrophic miracle? Is not the butterfly a sort of catastrophe for the caterpillar? "Death isn't a solution, so we are searching for another solution - there must be another solution." Imperturbably, Mother goes deeper into the cellular consciousness, and deeper still: "A sort of deep-rooted certitude in matter that the solution lies there.... It is at that atomic level that the change must take place; the state of infinitesimal vibrations in matter is what it's all about." Where time switches to something else: "Perhaps it's in the past that I go, perhaps in the future, perhaps in the present? ..." And even the laws of matter are changing: "The minute you go down to the cellular level, that sort of heaviness of matter disappears. It all begins to be fluid, vibrant again. Which would tend to prove that heaviness, thickness, inertia is something that has been added on - it's false matter, the one we think or feel, but not matter as it really is."
A true matter, then, which would be the matter of the next species? "I am on the verge of a new perception of life, as if certain parts of the consciousness were mutating from the caterpillar state to the butterfly state...." And the earth groans and protests - against what? "The whole youth seems to be seized by a strange vertigo...." Will we move to a next species or not?
350 pages
[1965]
"A whole world is beginning to open up." This is the year when Mother reaches the "mind of the cells," pure, beneath the old genetic coating that seems to want to make us a species forever saddled with death: "There's such an accumulation of power there ... as if this were the tail end of the solution." Another power of consciousness in matter that will undo the old program: "A sort of memory being set up from the bottom up" - a new cellular memory having nothing to do with old age, illness, death, gravity, and all our "real" world? And simultaneously, at this cellular level free of the old laws, Mother discovers "two worlds within each other: a world of Truth and a world of Falsehood. And this world of Truth is PHYSICAL; it isn't up there - it's MATERIAL. And this is what is to come to the fore and replace the other - the true physical." That's what Mother called "the transfer of power." Is it really possible that a marvel of physical freedom is concealed within our cells while we keep seeking illusory external panaceas? "Even if only a tiny number of cells could manage to have the experience of total transformation, to the full, it would be more effective than all the great revolutions. But it is more difficult.... Death must be
overcome! There should be no more death; that's very clear." Is the whole earth not in the process of experiencing that "transfer of power," as it did when it went from the animal kingdom to the mental kingdom a long time ago? "Everything is giving way. No more support anywhere. It's the transition to the new movement.... And for the old, it always feels like a dangerous loss of equilibrium."
370 pages
[1966]
"Humanity is not the last step in the terrestrial creation. Evolution goes on and man will be surpassed. It is up to each one to know whether he wants to participate in the adventure of the new species." This is the year of the cultural revolution in China. A more profound revolution was being accomplished in a body that was waging the one revolution that would change everything for all the little terrestrial bodies: "We are seeking the process so as to have the power to abolish death.... It is the mind of the cells that will find the key." This is the perilous transition from a human body animated by the laws of the Mind to a next body animated by a nameless law in the heart of the cell: "A coagulated vibration, denser than air, extremely homogeneous, of a golden luminosity, with a tremendous power of propulsion.... Everything is becoming very strange. The body is no longer dependent on physical laws." What was the sensation of the first vertebrate to leave the marine world for another, nameless world in which we breathe today? "For each part of the body, the moment it changes, there is a feeling it's the end.... All the supports have gone. I no longer
have a path!" And where is the path to the next species? "There have to be some who make it." Sometimes, that other "environment" breaks forth: "An instantaneous marvel.... A condition in which time no longer has the same reality. An innumerable present. Another way of living." Eighty years before, a little girl had lived her first revolution of Matter: "When I was told that everything is 'atoms,' it created like a revolution in my head: Then nothing is true!" A second revolution of Matter takes place at cellular level: old Matter and its overt laws change into a new world and a new way of being in a body.
[1967]
That year, all the features of the yoga of the cells became clear: "The increasing conviction that perfection achieved in matter is far more perfect than anywhere else. The consciousness expressed in cells that have been transformed is a marvel; that legitimates all these centuries of misery. All these gods, what a fuss they make!" This is the year of the discovery of "true Matter," without fuss: "In this [cellular] limpidity, there is no longer any problem; the solution precedes the problem. In other words, things are organized automatically." It is another life mode on earth - "Such a natural way of being!" - in a body free of its mental prison and of the laws of false matter: "This extraordinary feeling of the unreality of suffering, the unreality of illnesses....
It does not cure the disease; it cancels it, makes it unreal.... And so it is quite
clear that, as this process perfects itself, it will mean the victory over death." In the meantime, "Surveyor" is on its way to dig the lunar soil with its mechanical arm, while our own secrets remain buried in our cells: "We can go anywhere, know what's happening everywhere, but we don't even know what's happening inside ourselves." The war is raging in Biafra; the Israeli army is marching toward Suez; the U.S. air force is bombing Haiphong; the Chinese are exploding their first thermonuclear device, and on and on. "A tremendous conflict above the earth." With the stakes of a new earth or the return to the old disaster: "A local and momentary manifestation is not impossible, but a collective transformation of some magnitude is necessary to create a new species on earth.... That fact is certain." Will we understand where the true solution lies, and the marvel concealed in a human body?
[1968]
That year, a fire swept across the world from Warsaw to Columbia, from Nanterre to Alexandria: "There are long periods when things are being prepared, and then there comes a time when something happens, and that something brings a new development to the world - as when man appeared on the earth. Now, it's a new being." This is the second turning point in Mother's yoga. She is ninety. Auroville has just been founded - "A center of accelerated evolution." Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy are assassinated, the Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia - what is going on? "I have a strong impression this is intended to teach us something like the secret of the [human, terrestrial] working. We are constantly being shown that the process we have learned is wrong, that it does not conform to reality, and we are being taught the true process by living it." As if the earth were shut in a glass bowl, prisoner of a "false matter": "There is as if a web covering the entire earth, and the body is being taught how to extricate itself from it.... Gradually, the consciousness of the cells is freeing itself from that domination." And suddenly, from the other side: "I have never seen or felt anything so beautiful in all my life! ... The most wonderful hours one can have on this earth - why are they seeking above what is right here?" The short-lived miracle of 1968 seems to be swallowed up while the walls of our glass bowl are slowly but inexorably exploding in each country, each continent, each branch of human knowledge. "It would seem that an immense period of time will be needed before everything is ready to change. And yet, there is almost a promise that an abrupt change will occur." Could it be that, one morning, one last turn of the screw of circumstances will propel us into a new consciousness?
380 pages
[1969]
This time Mother has found the "passage," what she calls the "new consciousness," that which will open a new world to us, much as an amphibian created a new air by shattering for the first time the surface of the waters: "I don't know what is happening; it's a state of intense vibration, like lightning-fast waves, so fast that they seem motionless. And I go to America, I go to Europe.... Never has this body been so happy; these cells, other cells - there
was life everywhere, consciousness everywhere; all the other bodies were itself!" At the same time, all our physiological aches and pains vanish: "There is as if a dilation of the cells; limits dwindle, fade, then pains go away physically." And this is not "another world," it is the earth, our earth, but experienced in a different way: "It's as if we had entered an unreal falsehood, and everything vanishes the moment we get out of it; it doesn't exist! And all the artificial means of getting out, including nirvana, are worthless. SALVATION IS PHYSICAL! It is here, it is here. Everything else, including death, truly becomes a lie - there is no disappearance, no 'life and death'! ..." And while she breaks through the walls of our glass bowl, the whole world is in revolt, including the people around her, as if under the pressure of a new air: "A huge number of desires that it [Mother's body] die, everywhere, they are everywhere! ... The whole gamut, from the worries in people around me, the longings for a quick end, to the restless desires: free at last! ... I would like not to be
put in a box; the cells are conscious.... What is going to happen? I don't know. This defies every habit." A new species very much defies the world's old habit. Will the world accept her, or will it ultimately remove her?
560 pages (translation not yet completed)
[1970]
The beginning of the terrible years. It is as if Mother had found the secret of the change, conquered all she could in her own body, and she now sat there, amid the pack of disciples, taking in all the resistance of the old species. "The change IS DONE. Everything is raging like wild beasts, but it is finished." A new mode of being of the consciousness of the cells had appeared on earth, much as a new mode of being, called Life, had once appeared in inert Matter - except that this time it was "overlife": "The feeling that there is a way of being of the cells that would be the beginning of a new body, but when that happens, the body itself feels on the verge of death." What would be the "feeling" of the first corpuscle to experience life? "The body has a feeling it has reached the point of ... the unknown. A very, very strange sensation. Like a new type of vibration. It is so new that - it's not exactly an anguish, but it's ... the sense of
the unknown. The mystery of the unknown." And there, what we call "death" is like the inside of the bowl for the former fish, yet it is not "another world": "It is surprisingly one within the other! Is that possible? Well, overlife is life
and death together." Then, this cry of the breakthrough: "What appears to us as 'the laws of nature' was an absurdity!" Another terrestrial world where the old mortal laws of the glass bowl collapse into ... something else? "I just have had a fantastic vision of the cradle of a future ... that is not very far away. It is
like a stupendous mass hovering above the earth." But will the pack let her go to the end?
320 pages (translation not yet completed)
[1971]
The last turning point in Mother's yoga, from which she emerges with a cry: "I walked a long, long time. I was nothing but a cry, all the time, as if everything were being torn from me. It was the whole problem of the world."
This Agenda is increasingly strewn with heartrending little cries. It was not enough to have found the secret for herself; others too had to understand, her own disciples, those dominions shut in their egoistic power.
"They don't have faith! 'She's old, she's old': an atmosphere of resistance to the change; 'it's impossible, impossible' - from every side.... Not a single minute should be wasted; I am in a hurry.... The reign of the Divine must, oh, must come.... If the entire Russian block turned to the right side, that would be an enormous help! The victory is certain, but I don't know which path will be followed to reach it.... We should cling, cling so tightly to the Truth.... They
no longer listen to me."
She is 93 years old. She gropes her way in the unknown. "I see better with eyes closed than with eyes open, and it's physical vision, absolutely physical, but a physical that seems fuller. The consciousness of the cells is what must change; everything else will follow naturally! I have the feeling I am on my way to discovering the illusion that must be destroyed so that physical life may be uninterrupted: that death is the result of a distortion of consciousness."
Will she be heard? Will she be allowed to continue? "Only violent death could stop the transformation. Otherwise the body knows that the work will go on and on...." And then this cry: "There will be a miracle! But what, I don't know."
395 pages
[1972-1973]
"Before dying falsehood rises in full swing.Still, people only understand the lesson of catastrophe. Will it have to happen for them to open their eyes?"
This is the year of Watergate, Nixon's first trip to China, the murder of the Israeli athletes in Munich, the first oil embargo. It is Mother's last path. A path strewn with heartrending little cries and staggering visions. The end of one world, the beginning of another ... if we wish, and even if we don't. "Sometimes it's so new and unexpected that it's almost painful."
And Satprem asks her, "But is it a state outside matter?" "No, I am not going out of this material life, but ... it appears different. But it's curious. And it's
physical; that's what is extraordinary! As if the physical had become double.... A new state in matter. And ruled by something other than the sun, I don't know by what.... I am touching upon another world. Another way of being ... dangerous,
but wonderful."
Satprem intently listened to her increasingly halting breath as she gasped for air - a breath that seemed to come from another side of the world: "There's no difference between life and death. This is neither life nor death; it's ... something. You see, it isn't that death disappears; both are changing into ... something one doesn't yet know, which seems both extremely dangerous and absolutely marvelous." What if "death" were only the other, material side of our human bowl, a sunny shore for a forthcoming species? A new state on both sides of the world in which both life and death change into ... something else? "I am walking a very thin and narrow line...." And then this cry, this entreaty: "Let me do the work!"
On November 17, 1973, she passed away - why?
395 pages
Published by Institut de Recherches Evolutives, Paris.
ISBN 2-902776-33-0