July 15, 1961
Before coming downstairs I felt like writing a few words. These words … are the result of everything now being done. They almost expressed a protest. After all, I thought, to be a saint or a sage is not very difficult! (Mother laughs) But the supramental transformation is another affair. Oh!
And it has become acute since …. [[Since Mother began reading Sri Aurobindo’s letters in On Himself, which seemed to put her into contact with all the difficulties of the Work. ]] No, I don’t read these days, because I’ve had a hemorrhage in this eye. There have been too many letters, and it’s difficult for me to decipher handwriting – the result is this hemorrhage. So I have gone on strike. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I won’t read any letters for a week. People can write as much as they please, it’s all the same to me – I’m not reading any more.’ But just before stopping (I stopped reading for only three days), I read a passage where Sri Aurobindo speaks of his own experience and his own work and explains in full what he means by the ‘supramental transformation.’ This passage confirmed and made me understand many experiences I had after that
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experience of the body’s ascent [January 24, 1961] (the ascent of the body-consciousness, followed by the descent of the supramental force into the body); immediately afterwards, everything (how to put it?) … outwardly, according to ordinary consciousness, I fell ill; but it’s stupid to speak this way – I did not fall ill! All possible difficulties in the body’s subconscient rose up en masse – it had to happen, and it surely happened to Sri Aurobindo, too. How well I understood! How well, indeed. And it’s no joke, you know! I had wondered why these difficulties had hounded him so ferociously – now I understand, because I am being attacked in the same relentless fashion.
Actually, it springs from everything in material consciousness that can still be touched by the adverse forces; that is, not exactly the body-consciousness itself but, one could say, material substance as it has been organized by the mind – the initial mentalization of matter, the first stirrings of mind in life making the passage from animal to human. (The same complications would probably exist in animals, but as there is no question of trying to supramentalize animals, all goes well for them.) Well, something in there protests, and naturally this protest creates disorder. These past few days I have been seeing…. No one has ever followed this path! Sri Aurobindo was the first, and he left without telling us what he was doing. I am literally hewing a path through a virgin forest – it’s worse than a virgin forest.
For the past two days there has been the feeling of not knowing anything – NOTHING at all. I have had this feeling for a very long time, but now it has become extremely acute, as it always does at times of crisis, at times when things are on the verge of changing – or of getting clarified, or of exploding, or…. From the purely material standpoint – chemically, biologically, medically, therapeutically speaking – I don’t believe many people do know (there may be some). But it doesn’t seem very clear to me – in any case, I don’t know. Yogically (I don’t mean spiritually: that was the first stage of my sadhana), it’s very easy to be a saint! Oh, even to be a sage is very easy. I feel I was born with it – it’s spontaneous and natural for me, and so simple! You know all that has to be done, and doing it is as easy as knowing it. it’s nothing. But this transformation of Matter … ! What has to be done? How is it to be done? What is the path?
Is there a path? Is there a procedure? Probably not.
(silence)
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To be in a condition in which all is the Supreme, all is wonderful, all is marvelous, all is marvelous love, all is … all is profound Joy – an unchanging, immutable, ever-present condition. To live in That, and then to have this bodily substance contradict it through every possible stupidity – losing sight, losing strength, pains here, pains there, disorders, weaknesses, incapacities of every type. And at the SAME TIME, the response within this body, no matter what happens to it, is, ‘O Lord, Your Grace is infinite.’ The contradiction is VERY disconcerting.
From experience, I know perfectly well that when one is satisfied with being a saint or a sage and constantly maintains the right attitude, all goes well – the body doesn’t get sick, and even if there are attacks it recovers very easily; all goes very well … AS LONG AS THERE IS NOT THIS WILL TO TRANSFORM. All the difficulties arise in protest against the will to transform; while if one says, ‘Very well, it’s all right, let things be as they are, I don’t care, I am perfectly happy, in a blissful state,’ then the body begins to feel content!
That’s the problem: something totally new is being introduced into Matter, and the body is protesting.
After my ‘interview’ with Nature, when she told me that she would collaborate, [[Experience of November 8, 1957. Mother has commented on this experience in ‘Questions and Answers’ of January 1, 1958. See Agenda 1, p. 131. ]] I thought this difficulty would cease; many things have improved considerably (ONE part of Nature is collaborating), but not this. Plainly and clearly, it comes from the subconscient and the inconscient (wherever there is consciousness, all is well); it’s rising up all the time, all the time, and with – oh, disgusting persistence!
And then of course it’s accompanied by all the usual suggestions (but that’s nothing, it comes from a domain which is easily controlled). Suggestions of this type: ‘Well, but Sri Aurobindo himself didn’t do it!’ (I know why he didn’t. but people in general don’t know.) And every adverse vibration naturally takes advantage of this: ‘How do you expect to succeed where he didn’t!’ But… my answer is always the same: ‘When the Lord says it’s all over with, I will know it’s all over with; that will be the end of it, and so what!’ This stops them short.
But it doesn’t keep them from starting up again! They did so particularly after I read the passage where Sri Aurobindo affirms, ‘THIS time I have come for THAT – and I shall do it.’ The day when I read this I turned towards him, not actually putting the question
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to him but simply turning towards him, and he told me, ‘Read the book through to the end.’ And I know, I know it’s true – when I have read the book through to the end I will understand what he has done and I will even have the power to reply to all these suggestions. But meanwhile, everything that wants to keep me from doing it, all this obscure and subconscious ill will, tries its best to keep me from reading, including giving me this eye hemorrhage.
Well, since I believe – rightly or wrongly, I don’t know – that the doctor has more experience than I, that from the therapeutic and biological standpoint he knows a bit more, I showed him the eye and asked, ‘Can I read?’ ‘Better not read until it’s finished,’ he replied, and told me to wash my eyes with glucose. (It’s a useful piece of information for those with tired eyes: mix the glucose – liquid glucose, the kind that comes in ampoules for injection – with something like the ‘blue water’ we make here, half and half. Open the ample, put a third of it in the eye-cup, then add the ‘blue water.’) I have already tried it once and found that it gives a great deal of strength to the eyes. Tomorrow I’m going to start doing it regularly. There you are.
What made Sri Aurobindo stop?
He hasn’t stopped.
Stopped him physically, you mean?
Yes. What made him stop?
He decided he had to go.
We tried, oh – myself in particular! I concentrated all my power to prevent him from going, and it made him suffer greatly, because … he WANTED to go, he had decided – ‘he’ – the Supreme Lord had decided that he would go.
Yes, but why exactly was there this halt? He had come for that.
But nothing has stopped! That’s precisely the point – he refuses to acknowledge that anything has stopped. Nothing has stopped. He came for that, and he arranged things to… to give a maximum number of chances (‘chance’ is one way of putting it), of possibilities – to put all the winning cards on our side.
(long silence)
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Obviously, were I to leave now I can say there would be a halt, because I don’t see anyone at the moment who could continue. But there’s a good chance that…. We will see….
Yes, we will see.
Everything depends upon the balance (not the equilibrium, the proportion) between the amount of resistance in physical substance, and the Power.
But are these merely material resistances or are they rather hostile forces?
No; outside Matter, the hostile forces don’t have even a BIT of power: NONE.
Their power is in Matter?
In Matter; practically inconscient Matter.
They are in inconscient Matter?
More accurately, they represent the unconsciousness of Matter. Hostile – we say ‘hostile,’ but of course this is just a manner of speaking.
You see … (Mother is about to say something, then decides not to). Now is not the time to speak of these things.
We will see.
(silence)
For example, as I was saying at the beginning, the body’s formation has a very minimal, a quite subordinate importance for a saint or a sage. But for this supramental work, the way the body is formed has an almost crucial importance, and not at all in relation to spiritual elements nor even to mental power: these aspects have no importance AT ALL. The capacity to endure, to last is the important thing.
Well, in that respect, it is absolutely undeniable that my body has an infinitely greater capacity than Sri Aurobindo’s had.
That was the basic problem – because the identification of the two [Sri Aurobindo and Mother] was almost child’s play, it was nothing: for me to merge into him or him to merge into me was no problem, it wasn’t difficult. We had some conversations on precisely this subject, because we saw that … (there were many
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other things, too, but this isn’t the time to speak of them) the prevailing conditions were such that I told him I would leave this body and melt into him with no regret or difficulty; I told him this in words, not just in thought. And he also replied to me in words: Your body is indispensable for the Work. Without your body the Work cannot be done. After that, I said no more. It was no longer my concern, and that was the end of it.
This was said in … 1949, just a little more than a year before he left.
(silence)
And that’s really how it is.
But now I am set face-to-face with the fact … the immensity, or the … something…. This work is so formidable!
In the final analysis, everything obviously depends upon the Supreme’s Will because, if one looks deeply enough into the question, even physical laws and resistances are nothing for Him. But this kind of direct intervention takes place only at the extreme limit; if His Will is to be expressed in opposition, as it were, to the whole set of laws governing the Manifestation – well, that only comes … at the very last second. Sri Aurobindo has expressed this so well in Savitri, so well! At least three times in the book he has expressed this Will that abolishes all established laws, all of them, and all the consequences of these laws, the whole formidable colossus of the Manifestation, so that in the face of it all, That can express itself – and this takes place at the very last ‘second,’ so to speak, at the extreme limit of possibility.
I must say that there was a time when, as Sri Aurobindo had entrusted his work to me, there was a kind of tension to do it (it can’t be called an anxiety); a tension in the will. This too has now ended (Mother stretches her arms into the Infinite). It’s finished. But there MAY still be something tense lurking somewhere in the subconscient or the inconscient – I don’t know, it’s possible. Why? I don’t know. I mean I have never been told, at any time, neither through Sri Aurobindo nor directly, whether or not I would go right to the end. I have never been told the contrary, either. I have been told nothing at all. And if at times I turn towards That – not to question, but simply to know – the answer is always the same: ‘Carry on, it’s not your problem; don’t worry about it.’ So now I have learned not to worry about it; I am consciously not worried about it.
(silence)
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Oh, it’s measured out with such wisdom! I mean the … awareness - not exactly consciousness, but a state between consciousness and perception – the awareness of the stupendous difficulty of the ‘thing’ is given to me drop by drop … so that it won’t be crushing.
But there has evidently been some rather considerable progress, because lately the enormity of the thing has been shown to me far more … concretely, oh! … I tell you, it has reached the point where all spiritual life, all these peoples and races who have been trying since the beginning of the earth, who have made so many efforts to realize something – it all seems like nothing, like child’s play. It’s nothing: you smile and then … you are joyous. It’s nothing at all, nothing at all! …
To put things in ordinary terms, mon petit, this work is without glory! You get no results, no experiences filling you with ecstasy or joy or wonder – none of that. It is … hideous, a hideous labor.
If there weren’t this clear vision and constant aspiration within – oh, it’s so dreary and exasperating … so dull, so gray … ugh!
(silence)
Some months ago, when this body had once again become a battlefield and was confronting all the obstacles, when it was suspended, asking itself whether … it wasn’t wondering intellectually, but asking for a kind of perception, wanting to touch something: it wondered which direction it was taking, which way things were going to tilt. And suddenly, in all the cells, there was this feeling (and I know where it came from): ‘If we are dissolved out of this amalgam, if this assemblage is dissolved and can no longer go on, then we shall all go straight, straight as an arrow’ – and it was like a marvelous flame – ‘straight to rejoin Sri Aurobindo in his supramental world, which is right here at our door.’ And there was such joy! Such enthusiasm, such joy flooded all the cells! They didn’t care at all whether or not they would be dissociated…. ‘Oh,’ they felt, ‘so what!’
This was truly a decisive stage in the work of illuminating the body.
All the cells felt far more powerful than that stupid force trying to dissolve them; what is called ‘death, left them entirely indifferent: ‘What do we care? We shall go THERE and consciously participate in Sri Aurobindo’s work, in the transformation of the world, one way or the other – here, there, like this, like that – what does it matter!’
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This came more than a year ago, I think. It has never left. Never. All anxiety and all conscious tension have gone.
Only – there is an ‘only’ in all this – if there were a more liberal proportion between the ‘refreshing’ (if I may say so) freedom of solitude and the necessity for collective work, there would probably be fewer difficulties…. Towards the end of the first year after I retired upstairs [[End of 1958. ]] (perhaps even before, but anyway, some time after I began doing japa while walking), I recall having such sessions up there! … Had there been a personal goal, this goal was clearly attained; it is indescribable, absolutely beyond all imaginable or expressible splendor.
And that was when I received the Command from the Supreme, who was right here, this close (Mother presses her face). He told me, ‘This is what is promised. Now the Work must be done.’
And not individual but collective work was meant. So naturally, because of the way it came, it was joyously accepted and immediately implemented.
But when I remember that experience and consider what I have now….
(silence)
Well, what Sri Aurobindo did by leaving his body is somewhat equivalent, although far more total and complete and absolute – because he had that experience, he had that, he had it; I saw him, I saw him supramental on his bed, sitting on his bed.
(silence)
He has written: I am not doing it individually, for myself, but for the whole earth. And it was exactly the same thing for me – but oh, that experience! Nothing counted for me anymore: people, the earth – even the earth itself had absolutely no importance.
(The clock strikes.)
*
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Later, just before leaving:
But you know, this present state gives me the feeling that actually we know nothing at all, at all, at all – nothing at all. Everything else, everything leading to the spiritual life, to liberation and so forth – well, yes, it’s all very well, all very well. But compared to what one must know to do this work….
Perhaps it’s better not to know.
Because evidently I can’t say that my experiences are the result of a mental aspiration or will or knowledge – I don’t know, I don’t know at all. I don’t know how it should be, nor what it should be, nor anything at all. I don’t know what should be done, I don’t know what should not be done – nothing. It’s truly a blind march (gesture of groping along), in a desert riddled with all possible traps and difficulties and obstacles – all this heaped together. Eyes blindfolded, knowing nothing (same gesture of groping blindly), one plods on.
The only thing to do is to be like this (Mother turns her hands towards the Heights in a gesture of abandonment). Provided you don’t fall asleep! You mustn’t enter into a beatific state where you…. No, we must keep moving on.
I don’t know what to do. It’s not easy.
(Mother rises)
Ah, I have something for you, but I forgot to bring it! (Mother laughs) [[If memory serves, it was a tin of foie gras! ]]
It’s part of an experience…. I was told that NOTHING joyful should be rejected – but it’s an entirely different kind of ‘joy,’ it has nothing to do with what is called joy when one lives in the vital – nothing of that! (Laughing) It’s a funny kind of joy!
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