May 15, 1962The Mother
Agenda
Volume 3
May 15, 1962
(During the night of April 3, Mother had encountered an asuric being who had managed to assume Sri Aurobindo's appearance, as well as a group of people wanting to found a Nietzschean-type religion. Following this encounter, a heart attack had gravely endangered Mother's life. But this was not the first such meeting.)
I had said [on April 3] I would find the date of my first encounter with that fake Sri Aurobindo. What I found was the date of another experience that followed that encounter by perhaps three or four weeks, so that pins it down (Mother holds up an old desk-calendar page on which she had written.)
“Night of July 24-25, '59: first penetration of the supramental force into the body. Sri Aurobindo alive in a concrete and permanent subtle physical body.”
I told you about that experience of meeting Sri Aurobindo (the true Sri Aurobindo) in the subtle physical. This is the exact date – early that morning I jotted it down on this paper. And it gives me the approximate date of the other vision: that is, I must have had my first experience with those people somewhere around the end of June or the beginning of July, 1959.
Did I tell you about it?... It was a sort of vision that I took for a beginning of work on the subconscient. I had come to a place where Sri Aurobindo was staying and found him closeted in his room. There was a sort of large hall, an immense hall with rooms opening onto it, and his apartment was off to one side (gesture). I asked to see him. I was told it wasn't possible and I had to wait. I was astonished. Then certain things happened in the hall concerning A. and M. (rather interesting things, but concerning them personally). And at the same time, I was waiting. When it was all over, I asked once again to go into the room. Then through the doorway I saw... I saw a tall Sri Aurobindo – much taller than he actually was – strong but rather thin, thin in a way that... not the way he really was – it was rather a gauntness, very harsh, very cold; and he was somewhat darker than he used to be. I saw him there, walking up and down; and when he was told I was asking to see him, I saw him in the distance saying, “No, I don't want to see her. I won't acknowledge her and I don't want anything to do with her – she has betrayed me.” Something like that (I couldn't hear the actual words, but the gestures were plain enough). Well, that was the very first time – nothing of the kind had ever occurred before.
And I immediately felt that it was the expression of certain people's thoughts. During the war there was a whole clique (I know their names and all the details) who said I had influenced Sri Aurobindo, made him deviate from his nationalist path and turn towards the Allies; they considered me to have ruined his life, his consciousness, his work – everything, you understand.1
And I was seeing the very IMAGE of that in this vision. A person I won't name (but I spoke to him afterwards; he's still here) came out of the room to tell me all this. In my vision I told him two things (it seems very distant now – it was back in '59 – and I no longer recall if I told him one thing after the other or both together). First of all, I protested against everything that fake Sri Aurobindo was saying about me, and at the same time I was going towards the person coming out of the room (it's someone living here, you know, who is, who was quite close to Sri Aurobindo. Apparently he was under the influence of certain doubting thoughts, certain doubts, that's why he was there). I called him by name and spoke to him in English: “But surely we have had a true spiritual relationship, a true union!...” Immediately he melted and said yes, and rushed headlong into my arms. In other words, that was his conversion, and that's why I spoke to him about it afterwards; I didn't tell him about the experience but I spoke of the doubt that was in him. It was truly a beginning of conversion in one part of his being, and for that reason I won't name him. And along with this, in answer to what that fake Sri Aurobindo was saying, I said forcefully (also in English): “This means the negation of all spiritual experience!” And immediately the whole scene, the whole construction, everything – poof! Vanished, dissolved. The Force swept it all away.
Later, when I had that second vision
[April 3, 1962], I saw that the same being was behind this would-be Sri Aurobindo (and with a whole group organized around him – people, ceremonies and so on). So from that I concluded that the thing had been developing. But when I first encountered those people [in 1959] it was merely
something in the Subconscient and the effect was only psychological (an hour or two was enough to sort things out and put them in order). It didn't affect my health. But this time....
So it was in '59 that I first saw them, and it must have been the end of June or the beginning of July. This note [the desk-calendar page] is what gave me the clue, because I know that the other experience [of Sri Aurobindo in the subtle physical] came a few weeks later.
You say there was a whole group organized around that asuric being – people, ceremonies....
Ceremonies?
You can take that out – it's not that sort of thing; it was a whole ORGANIZATION.
But what I would like to ask is whether those people exist in the subtle physical or in our physical world....
No, no – my visions are in the subtle physical, but those people exist here on earth, although I don't know who they are.... As I said, I knew only one of them. But it's certain that a physical organization corresponding to these visions does exist. I don't know the details – they just haven't been given to me. But it corresponds to a group of PHYSICAL people.
Powerful?
I don't know. I don't know them.
There is certainly at least one Tantric among them – and a highly skilled Tantric, someone who knows his business. That, yes – all the signs are there!
But how powerful are they outwardly?... The people around that fellow [the fake Sri Aurobindo], who leveled all those reproaches at me, used to be in the Ashram – they have since left. They were quite real. But the ones in the last group [in the most recent vision], I don't know – I don't know them physically, so I can't say.
One day, perhaps, I'll find out.
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(Satprem then reads to Mother his notes from the May 13 conversation and asks for further details on the April 13 experience:)
About that promise you received....
I didn't receive a promise – this Voice made me remember a promise I had made. I was saying to myself, “How to connect this true Consciousness to the other one – it's impossible!” And just then I seemed to hear... not Sri Aurobindo exactly, because then you immediately think of a particular body, but that sort of Voice saying to me, “Your promise. You said you would do the Work.” So that's when I said, “Yes, I shall do the Work.” And from that moment on the process of materialization began, the entire transition from the true Consciousness to the ordinary consciousness.
I didn't receive a promise, but a reminder of the promise I had made.
And was that what allowed you to say, “The thing is done”?
No – it was the experience.
The experience. When.... I haven't told you this part.
(long silence)
When I was those gusts, those gusts of Love.... When I was conscious of the last one, the one organized outwardly, as it were, by Sri Aurobindo – materializing as the avatar Sri Aurobindo – then came the absolute certainty that the thing was done, that it was decreed.
And the moment I became aware that it was decreed, I thought, “But how can THAT be translated into that? How can the two be joined?” That was when the words came: “You promised to do it, therefore you will do it”; and slowly the transition began, as if I were again being sent back to do it. Yes, as if... “You promised to do it and you will do it”; well, that's what I meant by a promise. And I came back towards this body to do it.
I said [on April 3] the body was the battlefield, that the battle was being waged IN this body. And then in that experience [of April 13] I was sent back into the body, because the thing – that last creative gust – had to be realized through this body.
(silence)
The experiences are going on....
For instance, I am walking a little now, with someone's assistance, to get the body used to it again. And when I started walking, I became aware of a rather peculiar state... I might describe it as: what gives me the illusion of a body (Mother laughs).... I entrust it to the person I walk with. In other words, it's not my responsibility: the other person has to make sure it doesn't fall, doesn't bump into anything – you see what I mean. And the consciousness is a limitless consciousness, like a material equivalent or expression of these gusts – it's like waves, but waves with no .... Not separate waves, but a MOVEMENT of waves; a movement of what might be called material, corporeal waves, as vast as the earth, but not... not round, not flat.... Something giving a great sense of infinity but moving in waves. And this wave movement is the movement of life. And the consciousness (the body-consciousness, I suppose) floats along in this, with a sensation of eternal peace.... But it's not an expanse – that's not the word for it. It is a limitless movement, with a very harmonious and very tranquil rhythm, very vast, very calm. And this movement is life itself.
I walk around the room, and that is what is walking.
And it is very silent – there is no thought; there is barely, barely the ability to observe.... And all kinds of movements, an infinity of movements and vibrations of something that could be the essence of thoughts, move there, rhythmically, in a movement of waves without beginning or end, with a condensation like this (gesture from above down), with a condensation like that (horizontal gesture), and a movement of expansion (gesture like a pulsating ocean). That is, a sort of contraction, concentration, and then expansion, diffusion.2
Yesterday I had the total experience – I let myself go completely. It lasted something like forty minutes as I walked around the room.
And actually, apart from the fact of suffering (you know, an ache here, an ache there, a pain here, a pain there, giving the sense of bodily individuality), apart from that, that great undulating movement of life is my normal consciousness. Meaning that I... what I call Me (gesture high above), my consciousness, is completely outside the body. That's what the consciousness of the body is (what I've just been describing), with only points of pain as reminders of what a body usually is: an ache here, an ache there, another ache here.... That's what it's like. And this pain has a
small and extremely limited life; it's not general, it's not a body that suffers: it is suffering that suffers. It's a point, a point of pain – a scratch here, a sore there, things like that. That's what is individual and suffers – it's not the body that has a sore, you understand.
It is difficult to express.
But that's my experience. Yesterday I observed it with special care, to be able to tell you about it.
But are you making a distinction between the body-consciousness and the physical consciousness?...
Oh yes! The physical consciousness is something very complex; it includes the whole physical, conscious world.
My physical consciousness has been universalized for a long, long time, it encompasses all terrestrial movements3; but the body is limited solely to this small concentration of substance (Mother touches her body) – that's what I call the body-consciousness.
And when I said, “I have left the body,” 4 it certainly didn't mean I have left the physical consciousness – my overall contact with the terrestrial world has remained the same. It concerns only the purely bodily aspect, the specific concretization or concentration of substance giving each of us a different body – a different APPEARANCE.
And a rather illusory appearance, besides. As soon as you rise to a certain height (I saw it quite clearly during that progressive reconcretization5), this appearance quickly loses its reality. Our external appearance is very, very illusory. Our particular form (this one's form, that one's form), the form we see with our physical eyes is very superficial, you know. From the vital world onwards, it's completely different.
Well.... I think that's all I can say for today.
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(Somewhat later, Mother gives Satprem the old desk-calendar page on which she had noted the experience of July 24-25, 1959 – the first meeting with Sri Aurobindo in the subtle physical – along with another sheet of paper on which she had written: “I am only realizing what He has conceived. I am only the protagonist and the continuator of His work.” 6 Mother explains.)
Some people wanted to get me nominated for the Nobel peace prize; I was asked for a statement and that's what I wrote. I wanted to say that it wasn't this person who did things – it was all Sri Aurobindo.
They had wanted to give the Nobel prize to Sri Aurobindo, but he left the year before the decision was to be made. And as they don't give the prize to “dead” people, he never got it. Then they wanted to transfer it to me, and I wrote this note, because the last thing I want is name and fame. That's all there was to it. They didn't give a peace prize that year.
I believe the whole affair is now buried and forgotten.
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(Mother then starts working on the next Bulletin. She asks Satprem to speak slowly and distinctly:)
There's a sort of universal cloud between me and other people – I seem to see through a veil and hear through a kind of cloud. That's why I ask people to be very clear.
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NOTE
(On the wave movement Mother lived in her body:)
Once again, with Mother, we find ourselves deep into modern physics. All theories of physics attempting to describe the structure of our universe and the composition of matter, whether they emanate from “official” scientific laboratories or from the work of independent researchers, point to the wavelike or sinusoidal movement as the constituent and dynamic foundation of physical reality. Indeed, whether in electromagnetic or gravitational fields, or in atomic interactions, everything, from the heart of the atom to the farthest reaches of the universe, moves or is propagated as “waves.” With striking succinctness Mother says, “The wave movement is the movement of life.”
“...A movement of waves without beginning or end, with a condensation like this (gesture from above down), with a condensation like that (horizontal gesture) ....” We cannot fail to be reminded of the electromagnetic field with its two perpendicular components, the electric and magnetic fields, which are propagated along an infinite sinusoidal wave. And then again: “A movement of expansion... a sort of contraction, concentration, and then expansion, diffusion.” Unmistakably, this is an exact description of the propagation in space of a sinusoidal wave.
Striking though the parallel may be, there is still a fundamental difference between these mathematical concepts and Mother's experience. In the first case, we are dealing with conceptual instruments used by the human mind to better explain and master the world: no one has actually seen electromagnetic waves – not to speak of gravitational ones! They are images, convenient “models,” invisible and nonexistent in themselves. They exist only through their effects: a beam of sunlight, which is an electromagnetic wave, strikes our retina and enables us to distinguish a flower; by means of gravitational waves, Newton's apple falls from the tree – but no one has lived the reality of those waves. The way Mother grasps reality, on the contrary, is first and foremost through lived experience. She is the movement, she is the wave: “I walk around the room, and that is what is walking.” Here we touch upon a stupendous mystery and a formidable question: How is it possible for a material and cellular body to be the wave that at once constitutes and carries the worlds along in its infinite undulating movement and governs the existence of atoms and galaxies? How is it possible to be an infinite and ubiquitous electromagnetic wave while remaining within the narrow confines of a human body?
In being THAT, it might be said, Mother thus resolves the famous question of the “unified-field theory,” the theory to which Einstein devoted the last years of his life in vain, that would describe the movements of both planets and atoms in a single mathematical equation. Mother's body-consciousness is one with the movement of the universe, Mother lives the “unified-field theory” in her body. In so doing she opens up to us not merely one more physical theory, but the very path to a new species on earth, a species that will physically and materially live on the scale of the universe. The posthuman species might not simply be one with a few organs more or less, but rather one capable of being at every point in the universe. A sort of material ubiquity. It may not be so much a “new” as an ubiquitous species, a species that embraces everything, from the blade of grass under our feet to the “far” galaxies. A multifarious, undulating existence. A resume or epitome of evolution, really, which at the end of its course again becomes each point and each species and each movement of its own evolution.
1 There was, in fact, a whole group of Ashram people (they might be called the Ashram “intelligentsia”) who, influenced by Subhas Bose, were strongly in favor of the Nazis and the Japanese against the British. (It should be recalled that the British were the invaders of India, and thus many people considered Britain's enemies to be automatically India's friends.) It reached the point where Sri Aurobindo had to intervene forcefully and write: “I affirm again to you most strongly that this is the Mother's war.... The victory of one side (the Allies) would keep the path open for the evolutionary forces: the victory of the other side would drag back humanity, degrade it horribly and might lead even, at the worst, to its eventual failure as a race, as others in the past evolution failed and perished.... The Allies at least have stood for human values, though they may often act against their own best ideals (human beings always do that); Hitler stands for diabolical values or for human values exaggerated in the wrong way until they become diabolical.... That does not make the English or Americans nations of spotless angels nor the Germans a wicked and sinful race, but....” (July 29, 1942 and Sept. 3, 1943, Cent. Ed., Vol. XXVI.394 ff.) And on her side also, Mother had to publicly declare: “It has become necessary to state emphatically and clearly that all who by their thoughts and wishes are supporting and calling for the victory of the Nazis are by that very fact collaborating with the Asura against the Divine and helping to bring about the victory of the Asura.... Those, therefore, who wish for the victory of the Nazis and their associates should now understand that it is a wish for the destruction of our work and an act of treachery against Sri Aurobindo.” (May 6, 1941, original English.)
2 See note at the end of this conversation.
3 To illustrate this, Mother added: “I was always BATHED in the atmosphere of the people around me – their thoughts, their ways of feeling and seeing and understanding.”
4 On April 3, Mother said: “I am no more in my body.”
5 The experience of April 13, which Satprem had mistakenly called the “descent” towards the body-consciousness.
6 Original English. The note dates from 1951.