November 11, 1958
(Mother arrives with a new change in her message for January
1, 1959: instead of ‘an almighty spring that cast me up forth
with into a formless, limitless Vast, generator of the new
world,’ Mother puts ‘a formless, limitless Vast vibrating with
the seeds of a new world’)
The objectification of the experience came progressively, as always happens to me. When I have the experience, I am absolutely ‘blank,’ like a newborn baby to whom things come just ‘like that.’ I don’t know what is happening, and I expect nothing. How much time it has taken me to learn this!
There is no preliminary thought, preliminary knowledge, preliminary will: all those things do not exist. I am only like a mirror receiving the experience, the simplicity of a little child learning life. It is like that. And it is the gift of the Grace, truly the Grace: in the face of the experience, the simplicity of a little child just born. And it is spontaneously so, but deliberately too; in other words, during the experience I am very careful not to watch myself having the experience so that no previous knowledge intervenes. Only afterwards do I see. It is not a mental construction, nor does it come from something higher than the mind (it is not even a knowledge by identity that makes me see things); no, the body (when the
Page 230
experience is in the body) is … like that, what in English is called blank. As if it had just been born, as if just then it were being born with the experience.
And only little by little, little by little, is this experience put in the presence of any previous knowledge. Thus, its explanation and its evaluation come about progressively.
It is indispensable if one doesn’t want to be arbitrary.
So in fact, only the final wording is correct, but from the point of view of the ‘historical’ unfolding, it is interesting to observe the passage. It was exactly the same phenomenon for the experience of the Supramental Manifestation. Both these things, the experience of November 7 and of the Supramental, occurred in the same way, identically: I WAS the experience, and nothing else. Nothing but the experience at the time it was occurring. And only slowly, while coming out of it, did the previous knowledge, the previous experiences, all the accumulation of what had come before, examine it and put it in its place.
This is why I arrive at a verbal expression progressively, gropingly; these are not literary gropings – it is aimed at being precise, specific and concise at the same time.
When I write something, I don’t expect people to understand it, but I try to avoid the least possible distortion of the experience or the image in this kind of ‘shrinking’ towards expression.
What is this spring?
The spring? It means exactly this: in the deepest depths of the Inconscient is the supreme spring that makes us touch the Supreme. It is like the Supreme making us touch the Supreme: that is the almighty spring. When you arrive at the very bottom of the Inconscient, you touch the Supreme.
So that is the shortest path!
Not the shortest path! Already for me, it was hard to touch the bottom of the Inconscient, but for others it would take an eternity.
It is something similar to what Sri Aurobindo has written in ‘A God’s Labour.’
Was it the Supreme at the very bottom of the Inconscient who
cast you up directly to the Supreme?
Page 231
Yes. Because at the very bottom of the Inconscient is the Supreme. It is the same idea as the highest height touching the deepest depth. The universe is like a circle – it is represented by the serpent biting its tail, its head touching its tail. It means that the supreme height touches the most material matter, without any intermediary. I have already said this several times. But that was the experience. I didn’t know what was happening. I expected nothing and … it was stupendous – in a single bound, I sprang up! If someone had had his eyes open, I assure you he would have had to laugh: I was bent over, like this, more and more, more and more, more and more, my head was just about to touch my knees when suddenly – vrrrm! Straight, straight up, my head upright in a single bound!
But as soon as you want to express it, it escapes like water running through your fingers; all the fluidity is lost, it evaporates. A rather vague, poetic or artistic expression is much truer, much nearer to the truth – something hazy, nebulous, undefined. Something not concretized like a rigid mental expression – this rigidity that the mind has introduced right down into the Inconscient.
This vision of the Inconscient … (Mother remains gazing for a moment) it was the MENTAL Inconscient. Because the starting point was mental. A special Inconscient – rigid, hard, resistant – with all that the mind has brought into our consciousness. But it was far worse, far worse than a purely material Inconscient! A ‘mentalized’ Inconscient, as it were. All this rigidity, this hardness, this narrowness, this fixity – a FIXITY – comes from the presence of the mind in creation. When the mind was not manifested, the Inconscient was not like that! It was formless and had the plasticity of something that is formless – the plasticity has gone.
It is a terrible image of the Mind’s action in the Inconscient.
It has made the Inconscient aggressive – it was not so before. Aggressive, resistant, OBSTINATE. That was not there before.
Yes, that’s it. It was not an ‘original’ Inconscient. It was a mentalized Inconscient. With all that the mind has brought in in the way of OPPOSITION – of resistance, hardness, rigidity.
It would be interesting to mention this.
Because the starting point, precisely, was to look into the mental unconsciousness of these people. It was the mental Inconscient. Well, the mental Inconscient REFUSES to change – which is not true of the other one; the other is nothing, it doesn’t exist,
Page 232
it is not organized in any way, it has no way of being, whereas this one is an ORGANIZED Inconscient – organized by a beginning mental influence. A hundred times worse!
This is a very interesting point to note.
It is not the experience, which I had once before, of the original Inconscient. The experience I had this time is of the Inconscient that has undergone the influence of the Mind in creation. It has become … It has become a FAR greater obstacle than before. Before, it did not even have the power to resist, it had nothing, it was truly unconscious. Now it is an Inconscient organized in its refusal to change!
It was a very new experience.
That’s where we are.
And this almighty spring is the perfect image of what is happening – what must happen, what will happen – FOR EVERYONE: suddenly, one is cast forth into the vast.
Page 233
ISBN 2-902776-33-0