The Mother

Agenda

Volume 3

May 18, 1962

The other day you said, “What I call Me high above, my consciousness, is completely outside the body.” And on April 3, you also said something that gave me a kind of jolt: “I am no more in this body.” Why?... Have you really left this body?

(very long silence)

How can I explain it?..

(long silence)

I don't know how to explain it....

I could almost tell it as a joke: for years and years I felt my consciousness to be outside my body – I always used to say it was there (gesture above the head), and not in my body. But from the time of that first experience [April 3], when the doctor said the heart had been physically affected and would stop working if I wasn't careful, from that moment on I felt... I felt that my body was outside me! It sounds like a joke, but that's how it is.

So to be understood I said, “I am no more in my body.” But it isn't that. I hadn't been in my body, my consciousness had been outside my body, for quite a long time! But there was a kind of connection, you know, something that made me feel it as “my body.” (If I spoke carelessly, I could now say “what used to be my body,” although I know well enough it's still alive!). Well, from April 3 on, when everyone claimed I was so sick and I was forbidden to get out of bed, I had the impression that what was called my body was now outside me.

There was a relation, I kept a link with it, but it took some days to get established (I don't know how many, because for a long time I couldn't keep track of anything). After some days (say ten days, twenty days, I don't know), the will began to function, the body was again under the control of the will. But that didn't happen right away – for some days, the will that deals with the body was annulled (I was entirely conscious and alive, but not in my body). The body was merely something moved around by the people looking after me. Not that it was separate, but I couldn't even say, “it's a body” – it wasn't anything any more! Something.... Having undergone so much preparation, the universalization of the body-consciousness and all that, the experience didn't even seem strange to me (in fact, it was certainly the result of all that preparation). The body was... “something” like a mass of substance being driven by the will of the three people looking after it. Not that I was unaware of it but.... I wasn't much concerned with it, to tell the truth; but as far as my attention was turned to it, it was a corporeal mass being moved around by a few wills. The supreme Will was in full agreement; the body had been entrusted, in a way (I don't know how to express this)... yes, it was like something entrusted, and I was simply looking on – I watched it all for I don't know how many days, with hardly any interest.

The one really concrete link was... pain. That's how the contact was kept.

When you said, “I am no more in this body,” I thought that because of the necessities of the Work some part of you had withdrawn.

Oh, no! Nothing withdrew – it had already withdrawn a long time ago. The consciousness wasn't at all centered in the body. When I said “I,” for instance, it NEVER occurred to me that “I” was this (Mother points to her body). I, the I who spoke, was always a will ENTIRELY independent of the body, entirely independent.

But there has been a strange phenomenon [since April 3].... Before, I used to say, “I am outside my body.” It was always “I am outside my body.” But this time, the body seemed to have been consigned or entrusted – more like entrusted....

It has gradually come back, in the sense that actively.... No, I can't even say that – it's not true. What has come back is the increasingly precise memory of how I had organized the life of this body, the whole formation I had made, down to the smallest details – for the things I was using, how I was making use of them, how I had organized all the objects around the body, all that. What has come back is the memory – is it memory? The awareness of all that has returned, as if I were putting the two back into contact. And so, instead of the body being left totally in the hands of those around me, the formation I had made is coming back, with certain changes, certain improvements and simplifications (but mind you, I had neither the intention nor the will to change anything – those things are simply coming back into the consciousness like that, with certain changes made). In short, it's a kind of conscious formation recrystallizing around this body.

And I have the perception... a sensation, really, the sensation of... something not at all me, but entrusted to me. More and more now, there is the feeling of something being entrusted to me in the universal organization for a definite purpose. That's really the sensation I have now (the mind is very calm, so it's difficult to express – I don't “think” all these things, they are more like perceptions). And it's not the usual kind of sensation: the ONLY (I insist on this), the ONLY sensation that remains in the old way is physical pain. And really, those points of pain... they seem like the SYMBOLIC POINTS of what remains of the old consciousness.

Pain is the one thing I sense the way I used to. Food, for instance, taste, smell, vision, hearing – all that's completely changed. They belong to another rhythm. And this condition has come progressively, like a crystallization of something behind the senses that doesn't come from here – in taste, smell, vision, hearing, touch.... Except this one point.... Even the sense of touch is different now – but PAIN ....

Pain is the old world.

It's quite odd, you know; pain is like the symbolic (and rather too concrete!) sign of life in the Ignorance.

And even there I have had an instant (but it was like a flash – the flash of a new experience), an instant when pain disappeared into something else. It has happened three or four times. The pain suddenly became... something completely different (not a pleasant sensation, not that at all): another state of consciousness.

If that state remained, I would truly be free of the world as it is.

Nonetheless, people can still hear me, can't they? And I can still see, but in a peculiar way – a very peculiar way. At times I see with greater precision than ever before (generally, as I told you the other day, I seem to see from behind a veil; that's constant). I hear things that way too. Certain sounds.... On one occasion I noticed a sound, a seemingly imperceptible sound, coming from about a hundred yards away, and it seemed to be right here. All this has changed – I mean the whole way the organs function. Have the organs themselves changed, or is it their functioning? I don't know. But they all obey another law – absolutely.

And I have the definite impression that that so-called illness was the external and ILLUSORY form of an indispensable process of transformation; without that so-called illness there could be no transformation – it is not an illness, I KNOW it: when people speak of “illness,” something in me laughs and says, “What a bunch of geese!”

It is not an illness.

A disengagement?

Perhaps.

Perhaps.

It was a bit violent! (Mother laughs)... And yet not so violent, because.... There's something I have never told anyone, but when the doctor was called.... I was constantly fainting, you know: I would take a step and – plop! So the doctor was called and they began watching over me (everything was supposedly going wrong, all the organs, everything breaking down), and he declared I was sick and wasn't to stir from my bed (for a while I wasn't even supposed to talk!).... Well, at that point, something (not exactly what you would call my consciousness; it was far, far more eternal than my consciousness – my consciousness is the consciousness of one form of the Manifestation – well, it was far more than that, beyond that)... something said YES. And if “That” had not agreed, I could have gone on living almost as usual. “That” decreed, “That” decided – I have never said anything about it.

Otherwise, you know, I would not have consented. If “That” had not agreed, I would have said to my body, “Go on, keep going, move” – and it would have gone on. It stopped because “That” said yes. And then I understood that that whole so-called illness was necessary for the Work. So I let myself go. And then what I told you about happened: this body was consigned to the care of three people, who looked after it marvelously, by the way – really, it filled me with constant admiration – a selflessness, a care... oh, it was wonderful! I was saying to the Lord the whole time, “Truly, Lord, You have arranged all the material conditions in an absolutely marvelous, incredible way, bringing together whatever is necessary, and placing around me people beyond all praise.” For at least two weeks they had a hard time of it – quite hard. The body was a wreck, you know! (Mother laughs) They had to think of everything, decide everything, take care of everything. And they looked after it very, very well – really very well.

It's a wonderful story, seen as I see it. And I have observed it very carefully: it isn't an ordinary story seen with an exceptional knowledge, but a true Knowledge and a true Consciousness witnessing an exceptional story. Those three people may not be aware of how utterly exceptional it is, but that's simply because their consciousness is not sufficiently awake. But they too have been, and continue to be, exceptional.

The whole story is a fairy tale.

And the only concrete thing left in this world – this world of illusion – is pain. It seems to me the very essence of Falsehood.

But what feels it feels it very concretely!... I clearly see it's false, but that doesn't stop my body from feeling it – and there is a reason: it is the battlefield.

I have even been forbidden to utilize my knowledge, power and force to annul the pain in the way I used to (and I used to do it very well). That has been totally forbidden. But I have seen that something else is in sight. Something else is in the making.... It can't be called a miracle because it's not a miracle, but it's something wonderful – the unknown.... When will it come? How will it come? I don't know.

But it's interesting.

(silence)

Something really radical has happened, in the sense that.... I tried once just to see if I could do it (I had wisely been told not to try) and I didn't succeed: I can't go back to the old way of relating to my body. It's impossible.

What is coming back is the way “objects” – the whole mass of material substance making up this body's environment – had been organized; that's what is coming back, with some small changes (none of this comes through the head; the head has nothing to do with it). It is a sort of formation reconcretizing itself for life's outer organization.

The old way of relating no longer exists at all.

(silence)

It can truly be said that for a short while the body went out of my consciousness completely. I didn't leave my body; the body left the consciousness.

There you have it.

I hope you can cope with this – it's the first time I have tried to explain it. In fact, it's the first time I am looking at it. And it's interesting. An interesting phenomenon.