The Mother

Agenda

Volume 3

December 4, 1962

(Mother speaks again of the direct experience of the Supreme she had when Sri Aurobindo left his body:)

I don't quite understand. Didn't you have the experience of the Supreme before Sri Aurobindo's departure?

Spiritually, you have that experience as soon as you come into contact with the Divine within; mentally, you have the experience as soon as the mind is purified; vitally, you have it as soon as you get out of the ego. But it's the consciousness of the BODY – the consciousness of the cells – which had the experience at that moment. Everything else had had it long before and was constantly aware of it, but the body.... It had been told about it and believed in it, but it didn't have the experience in such a concrete, total and absolute manner that it can't be forgotten for a single second.

At that moment, the physical being and the individual, personal body had the experience once and for all.

The body always used to let itself be carried along. It was one in consciousness with Sri Aurobindo's presence, and depended on it without the least worry; it felt that its life depended on it, its progress depended on it, its consciousness, its action, its power all depended on it. And no questions – it didn't question. For the body, it was absolutely IMPOSSIBLE that things could be otherwise. The very idea that Sri Aurobindo might leave his body, that that particular way of being might no longer exist for the body, was absolutely unthinkable. They had to put him in a box and put the box in the Samadhi for the body to be convinced that it had really happened.

And that's when it had that experience.

This body is very conscious, it was BORN conscious, and throughout those years its consciousness went on growing, perfecting itself, proliferating, as it were; this was its concern, its joy. And with Sri Aurobindo, there was such peaceful certitude, there were no more problems, no more difficulties: the future was opening up, luminous and peaceful and certain. Nothing, nothing, no words can describe what a collapse it was for the body when Sri Aurobindo left.

It's only because Sri Aurobindo's conscious will entered into it – left one body and entered the other.... I was standing facing his body, you know, and I materially felt the friction as his will entered into me (his knowledge and his will): “You will accomplish my Work.” He said to this body: “You will accomplish my Work.” It's the one thing that kept me alive.

Apart from that.... There's nothing, no physical destruction I can think of, comparable to that collapse.

It took me twelve days to get out of it – twelve days during which I didn't speak a single word.

So the experience I mentioned is the PHYSICAL experience.

(silence)

What he is now striving to give this body is the consciousness of Permanence, of Immortality, of the Certitude of absolute security – in Matter, in Life, in every moment's action. And that is becoming nearer and nearer, more and more constant. Gradually, the mixture of old impressions is disappearing – that's the BEDROCK, the basis of the transformation.

In the true movement, you feel the Absolute and Eternity physically. How?... It's impossible to describe, but that's how it is. And the minute you get out of That, when you fall back even slightly into the ordinary movement, the old movement, there's a feeling of ABSOLUTE uncertainty! Uncertainty at every second. It would be impossible for an ordinary human being to live in that consciousness, with that sense of total and absolute uncertainty, of total and absolute impermanence – it's no longer a destruction,¹ but it's not yet an ascending transformation. Absolute instability. It doesn't last more than a fraction of a second – just enough time to become aware of oneself, that's all.

If the other movement weren't getting more and more established, it would be unbearable, as they say in English.

The quality of those two vibrations (which are still superimposed, so one can be aware of them both) is indescribable. One is a kind of fragmentation, an infinite fragmentation and absolute instability: like a powdery cloud of atoms in ceaseless movement; and the other is eternal immobility, just as I described it the other day: an infinite Immensity of absolute Light.

The consciousness is still going from one to the other.

(silence)

Everything else... what to say? It might almost be called a diversion. Outside of that, all the other experiences are pastimes, just something to fill the void.

A perpetual picture show.

(silence)

And with this new perception I feel, inexpressibly, a concentration of... the truth of what we call Sri Aurobindo gathering around and on and within this body (there is really neither “within” nor “without”). And the body, which has reopened the doors it had closed² to be able to go on, feels an increasingly total and unmixed identity, to the point where, if I give my hand free rein, my handwriting begins to resemble Sri Aurobindo's – tiny, like his.

And it's not what one might imagine, it's not one form entering another – it doesn't keep him from being wherever he wants to be and doing whatever he wants to do, appearing as he wants to appear and being involved with everything happening on earth: it doesn't change any of that. And it's not just a part of him... [that is in Mother, but his totality]. And that's how I know he was manifesting the Absolute, he was a manifestation of the Absolute. Of course, afterwards he revealed himself as what I had called “the Master of Yoga”; that was the reason he came on earth (what people here in India call an Avatar). But that's still a way of seeing things SEPARATELY: it's not the thing – THE thing.

We'll see tomorrow... [December 5].

All right, mon petit.

(silence)

Actually, what we call “dying” ....

Death can be overcome only when it no longer has any meaning. And I clearly see a curve, a curve of experience leading to the point where death no longer means anything. Then we'll be able to say, “Now it no longer makes sense.”

Only at that point can we be sure.

That's why I have never been given any assurance, because it's only when one enters that consciousness that Death no longer makes sense.

We've still got a long way to go.

¹ As was the case when Sri Aurobindo left his body.

Back

² When Sri Aurobindo left his body.

Back