January
January 8, 1964
(Mother shows a sketch she has just drawn to illustrate the passage in “Savitri” in which Sri Aurobindo speaks of the “sardonic rictus on God’s face.”)
I wanted to see this “sardonic laugh” of the Lord! So I looked, and instead of a sardonic laugh, I saw a face … with such a deep sorrow – so deep, so grave – and full of such compassion…. It’s after that that I said (you remember, it was over there, [[In the music room, on December 31, 1963. ]] I was seeing that): “Falsehood is the sorrow of the Lord.” It was naturally based on the experience that everything is the Lord – there is nothing that cannot be the Lord. So what is this “sardonic” smile? … I was looking at that, and then I saw this face.
So, as I am supposed to do sketches for H.’s paintings, I did the sketch: Falsehood is the sorrow of the Lord.
(Mother shows the sketch
representing the Lord’s sorrowful face.
Long silence)
Sri Aurobindo had the feeling or the sensation that what was farthest from the Lord (I always base myself now on that experience, which is very concrete in its sensation, of the “nearness” or
Page 22
”farness” – it isn’t a farness in feelings, not that, it’s like a material fact; yet it isn’t located in space), well, Sri Aurobindo, for his part, felt that the farthest was cruelty. That’s what he felt farthest from; that vibration seemed to him the farthest from that of the Lord.
And yet, it sounds bizarre but in cruelty one can still feel, distorted, the vibration of Love; far behind or deep within that vibration of cruelty, there is still, distorted, the vibration of Love. And Falsehood – the real Falsehood that doesn’t arise from fear or anything of the sort, that has no reason behind it – real Falsehood, the negation of Truth (the WILLED negation of Truth), is, to me, something completely black and inert. That’s the feeling it gives me. It is black, blacker than the blackest coal, and inert – inert, without any response.
When I read that description in Savitri,[[ "A tract he reached unbuilt and owned by none...." II.VI1.206 (See conversation of December 31, 1963.) ]] I felt a sorrow which I thought I had been unable to feel for a long time – a long time. I thought I was (how shall I put it?) cured of that possibility. And last time, when I saw that, I saw it was still there; and while I was looking, I saw this same sorrow in the Lord, in His face, His expression.
The deliberate negation of all that is divine – of all that we call divine.
The Divine, for us, is always the perfection not yet manifested, all the marvels not yet manifested, and which must keep on growing, of course.
The far end of the Manifestation (assuming that there was a progressive descent … there may have been one, I don’t know – there have been so many perceptions of what happened, sometimes contradictory, always incomplete and humanized), but if you consider the aspect of evolution, you tend to consider a far end from which you proceed to another far end (it’s obviously childish, but anyway …), or an extreme way of being that grows towards the opposite Extreme Way of Being; well, what seems to me the blackest and most inert, the total negation of “that” to which we aspire, is what constitutes Falsehood.
In other words, this is perhaps what I call Falsehood; because falsehood in the human way is always mixed with all kinds of things – but Falsehood proper is this. It is the assertion that the Divine does not exist, Life does not exist, Light does not exist, Love
Page 23
does not exist, Progress does not exist – Light, Life, Love do not exist. [[Mother is not referring to an intellectual and human negation, but to a material fact that one finds at the very roots of life, in the most material consciousness, and which shows itself as an abyss of black and stifling basalt. It is intimately linked with death. It is the very secret of death. ]] A negative nothingness, a dark nothingness. And it may be this that clung to evolution and made Darkness, which denied Light, Death, which denied Life, and Hatred, Cruelty and all that, which denied Love – but this is already diluted, it’s already in a diluted state, there has already been a mixture.
Oh, if we wanted to make poetry (it’s no longer a philosophical or spiritual way of seeing, but a pictorial way), we could imagine a Lord who is a totality of all the possible and impossible possibilities, in quest of a Purity and Perfection that can never be reached and are ever progressive … and the Lord would get rid of all in the Manifestation that weighs down His unfolding – He would begin with the nastiest. You see it?… Total Night, total Unconsciousness, total Hatred (no, hatred still implies that Love exists), the incapacity to feel. Nothingness.
We’re on the way. I still have a little bit of it [that total Unconsciousness] left.
Ah, let’s get to work.
Page 24