August 10, 1963The Mother
Agenda
Volume 4
August 10, 1963
93 — Pain is the touch of our Mother teaching us how to bear and grow in rapture. She has three stages of her schooling, endurance first, next equality of soul, last ecstasy.
As long as we are dealing with moral things, this is absolutely obvious and indisputable: all moral pain, when you know how to take it, shapes your character and leads you straight to ecstasy. But when it comes to the body...
It's true that the doctor himself said ([laughing], the doctor1 symbolizes Doubt with a capital D) that if you teach your body to bear pain, it grows more and more enduring and doesn't get disrupted so fast – that's a concrete result. People who know how not to be thoroughly upset as soon as they have a pain here or there, who are able to bear quietly and keep their balance, it seems that in their case the body's capacity to bear disorder without breaking down increases. That's very important. You remember, in a previous Agenda I asked myself the question from a purely practical and physical point of view, and it does seem to be true. Inwardly, I have been told many a time – told and shown with all sorts of little experiences – that the body can bear far more than people think, provided
they don't add fear or anxiety to the pain; if you can get rid of that mental factor, the body, left to itself, without either fear or fright or anxiety for what will happen – without anguish – can bear a great deal.
The second step is that once the body has decided to bear pain (it really takes the decision to do so), instantly the acuteness, the acute sensation in the pain vanishes. I am speaking on an absolutely material level.
And if you have calm (it requires an inner calm, which is another factor), if you have inner calm, then the pain turns into an almost pleasant sensation – not “pleasant” in the ordinary sense of the word, but there comes an almost comfortable impression. Once again, I am speaking on a purely physical, material level.
The last stage: when the cells have faith in the divine Presence and the divine sovereign Will and trust that all is for the good, then ecstasy comes – the cells open up, become luminous and ecstatic.
That makes four stages (this aphorism refers to only three).
The last one is probably not within everybody's reach (!) but the first three are quite obvious – I know it works like that. The only point that bothered me (I told you once) is that it isn't a purely psychological experience and that enduring pain causes wear and tear in the body. But I inquired with the doctor (I casually made him talk), and he told me that if the body is taught very young to bear pain, its capacity to bear increases so much that it can effectively withstand illnesses, which means that the illness doesn't follow its course, it aborts. That's precious.
The last experience (which I've had these last few days), in which apparently there was a hitch (it wasn't really one) was a sort of demonstration. I told you what it was, you remember: it's like a purge of all the vibrations that are false vibrations, that aren't the pure and simple response to the supreme Influence (all that in the cells still responds to the vibrations of falsehood, either from habit or from the people around or the food taken – fifty thousand things). Then, with an aspiration or a decision, almost a prayer for purification coming from the body, something happens which, naturally, upsets the balance; the imbalance in turn brings about a general discomfort. The form discomfort takes is habitually the same: first, pains and all kinds of sensations I need not describe; if that state goes on developing, if it is allowed to assume its full proportions, it results... in the past it resulted in a faint. But this time, I followed the process for about two hours from the moment I got up: the struggle between the new balance, the new Influence that was getting established, and the resistance of all the existing elements forced to go away. That created a sort of conflict. The consciousness remained very clear – the consciousness of the BODY remained very clear, very quiet, perfectly trusting. So for two hours I was able to follow the process (while going on with all my usual activities, without changing anything), until I felt, or rather was told sufficiently clearly that the Lord wanted my body to be completely immobile for a while so that He might complete His work. But I am not all alone: there are other people here to help me and watch over everything (but I don't say or explain anything to them, those are things I don't talk about – I don't say what goes on, I don't say anything), so I sat there wondering, “Is it really and truly indispensable?” (Mother laughs) Then I felt the Lord exert a little more pressure, which heightened the intensity of the conflict, so that I had all the signs of fainting – I understood (!)... I stood up, let my body moan a little to make it plain it didn't feel too well (!) and I stretched out. Then I was immobile, and in that immobility, I saw the work that was being done – a work that cannot be done if you go on moving about. I saw the work. It took nearly half an hour; in half an hour it was over. Which means there is really... there is a fact I cannot doubt, even if all the surrounding thoughts and forces contradict it: I cannot doubt that the consciousness is increasing more and more – the consciousness in the body. It is growing more and more precise, luminous, exact – QUIET – very peaceful. Yet very conscious of a TREMENDOUS battle against millennial habits. Do you follow?
When it was over, I saw that even physically, bodily, there is a strength: the result is an increased strength. A very clearly increased strength.
But it's still going on. Now, there's a great battle against all the ideas, the habits, the sensations, the possibilities, everything, concerning death – “death” (laughing), not “death” in the sense of the consciousness departing (that, of course, people talk about, but... those things no longer exist), no: WHAT THE CELLS MUST FEEL.2 And all the possibilities are presented to me... With that consciousness (the consciousness accumulated, compressed in all those cells), when the heart stops beating and it's understood that, according to human ignorance, you are “dead,” how does the force that groups all those cells together abdicate its will to hold them all together?... Naturally, I was told right away (because
the problem – all the problems – come from everywhere, and it's purposely that I am shown the problem and made to struggle with it; it's not just as an “idea”), I was told right away that that force, that consciousness which holds everything together in really superconscious cells (they don't have at all the ordinary type of consciousness; ordinarily, it's the inner, vital being [Mother touches the heart center] that's conscious of oneness, that is, conscious of being a being), that this aggregate of cells is now an aggregate OF ITS OWN WILL, with an organized consciousness which is a sort of collective gathering of that cellular consciousness; well... Obviously this is an exceptional condition, but even in the past, in those beings who were very developed outwardly, there was a beginning of willed, conscious cellular gathering, and that's certainly why in ancient Egypt, where occultism was very developed. exceptional beings such as the pharaohs, the high priests, etc., were mummified, so as to preserve the form as long as possible. Even here in India, generally they were petrified (in the Himalayas there were petrifactive springs). There was a reason.3
And I saw for Sri Aurobindo (although he hadn't yet started this systematic transformation; but still, he was constantly pulling the supramental force down into his body), even in his case, it took five days to show the first slight sign of decomposition. I would have kept his body longer, but the government always meddles in other people's business, naturally, and they pestered me awfully, saying it was forbidden to keep a body so long and that we should... So when the body began to (what's the word?) shrink – it was shrinking and contracting, that is, dehydrating – then we had to do it. He had had enough time to come out, since almost everything came into my body – almost everything that was material came into my body.
But the question arose for this body [Mother's], “just to see,” you know. And I saw all kinds of things, and finally the answer was always the same (you see, the problem was presented to me to enable me to understand the situation in all its aspects and see the necessities), that naturally everything would be for the best! (Laughing) Without a doubt. But I mean it was presented very concretely and, I could say, very “personally” to make me understand the problem. And there was that old thing I was told the other day (old, that is, a few days old! i: I was told that THE CELLS THEMSELVES
would be given a free choice. So the conclusion of all that meditation was that there must be a new element in the consciousness of the cellular aggregates – a new element... a new experience that must be in progress. The result: last night, I had a series of fantastic cellular experiences, which I cannot even explain and which must be the beginning of a new revelation.
When the experience began, there was something looking on (you know, there is always in me something looking on somewhat ironically, always amused) which said, “Very well! If that happened to someone else, he would think he was quite sick! (laughing) Or half mad.” So I stayed very quiet and thought, “All right, let it be, I'll watch, I'll see – I'll see soon enough! It has started, so it will have to end!...” Indescribable! Indescribable (the experience will have to recur several times before I can understand), fantastic! It started at 8:30 and went on till 2:30 in the morning; that is to say, not for a second did I lose consciousness, I was there watching the most extraordinary things – for six hours.
I don't know where this is going....
Indescribable; you know, you become a forest, a river, a mountain, a house – and it's the sensation (an absolutely concrete sensation) OF THE BODY, of this (gesture to the body). Many other things too. Indescribable. It lasted a long time, with a whole variety of things.
So at 2:30 in the morning, I said to the Lord, “That will do, won't it?!” (Mother laughs) And He gave me a blissful rest till 4:30.
Good.
All that on the aphorism!... Anyway, you can use the beginning. But you should ask me a question. Ask me a question.
I asked myself if for everybody the supramental process will always automatically involve a lot of physical suffering.
No.
No, because I have a growing proof that those things I have mastered now, in the body, I have the power (I keep receiving letters and notes from here or there, from people here or there who have an illness)... it is beginning; so far it's only a beginning, a very small beginning: the power to eliminate pain.
You know, on a smaller scale, what happened with your illness.
Yes, but I didn't mean sick people. I mean people who today or in the future will seek to effect the transformation in themselves.
No, they...
Will they have to go through all that suffering?
No! That Sri Aurobindo wrote very clearly: for all those who have faith and open themselves in surrender and faith, the work will be done automatically.4 As long as he was here, mon petit, all the thirty years I spent with him working, NOT ONCE did I have to make an effort for a transformation. Simply, whenever there was a difficulty, I repeated, My Lord, my Lord, my Lord... I just thought of him – hop! it went away. Physical pain: he annulled it. You know, some things that were hampering the body, some old habits that had come back, I only had to tell him: off they would go. And through me, he did the same for others. He always said that he and I did the Work (in fact, when he was here, it was he who did it; I only did the external work), that he and I did the Work, and that all that was asked from the others was faith and surrender, nothing more.
If they had trust and gave themselves in perfect trust, the Work was done automatically.
In your body's cells, it is therefore a universal progress that is being made, it's the earth that progresses.
Yes.
(silence)
This body was built for that purpose, because I remember very well that when the war – the First World War – started and I offered my body up in sacrifice to the Lord so that the war would not be in vain, every part of my body, one after another (Mother touches her legs, her arms etc.), or sometimes the same part several times over, represented a battlefield: I could see it, I could feel it, I LIVED it. Every time it was... it was very strange, I had only to sit quietly and watch: I would see here, there, there, the whole thing in my body, all that was going on. And while it went on, I would put the concentration of the divine Force there, so that all – all that pain, all that suffering, everything – would hasten the preparation of the earth and the Descent of the Force. And that went on consciously throughout the war.
The body was built for that purpose.
At the time, there was still a lot of mental activity, and those experiences took all the forms the mind gives to things – very nice, very literary! Now, all that is over – happily, thank God! A complete silence – I don't make speeches on the thing. But the experience of last night!... And to think that when an experience lasts half an hour, three quarters of an hour, one hour, it's considered extraordinary – it lasted from 8:30 till 2:15, nonstop.
A sort of ubiquity in the cells?
Yes, yes.
A oneness – the sense of Oneness.
(silence)
It is clear that if this experience becomes natural, spontaneous and constant, death can no longer exist: even for this, I mean (Mother touches her body).
There's something I SENSE there, without being able to express or understand it mentally. There must be some difference, even in the behavior of the cells, when you leave your body.
It must be another phenomenon that takes place.
During all that period of concentration and meditation on what happens in a body after death (I am speaking of the body's experience after what is now called “death”), well, several times the same kind of vision came to me.... I had been told (shown and told) of certain saints whose bodies did not decompose (there's one here, there was one in Goa – fantastic stories). Naturally, people always romanticize those things, but there remains the material fact of a saint who died in Goa, left his body in Goa, but whose body didn't decompose.5 I don't know the story in all its details, but the body was removed from India, taken away to China and remained buried there, in Hong-Kong, I believe (or somewhere in that region) for a time; then it was taken out, brought back here, buried again. For ten or twelve years it stayed buried in those two places: it didn't decompose. It dried out, became mummified (dried out, that is, dehydrated), but it remained preserved. Well, this fact was presented to me several times as ONE of the possibilities.
Which means, to tell the truth, that everything is possible.
But what I was shown clearly and what I saw was... (I have
difficulty talking because it all came to me in English: Sri Aurobindo was there and it was in English), it was the stupidity and carelessness, really, the ignorance – the stupid ignorance and I-couldn't-care-less attitude the living have towards the dead. That's something frightful. Frightful.... Frightful. I've heard stories from everywhere, all sorts of appalling things.... For instance, one of the stories (it took place while Sri Aurobindo was here): there was a disciple whose son died (or at least they thought him dead), and as they weren't Hindus, they didn't burn him: they buried him. Then at night, his son came to him and told him... you see, he saw his son at the window, knocking at the window and telling him, “But why did you bury me alive?” (I don't know in what language, but anyway...) And that idiot of a father thought, “I'm dreaming”!! Then the next day, long afterwards, he had second thoughts and asked himself, “What if we took a look?” And they found him turned over in his coffin.
When the man told me the story and how he found it quite natural to think, “I am dreaming,” I can't find words to tell my indignation at that moment, when I saw that... you know, it's such a crass, such an inert stupidity! It didn't even occur to him how he would have felt if the thing had happened to HIM. It didn't even occur to him!
There was another case of a man who had been brought to the cremation ground, but a torrential rain started – no question of burning him. They left him there and said, “We'll burn him tomorrow.” But the next morning when they came, he wasn't there any more! (Laughing) He was gone. But that's not all: thirty years later, he returned (he was a Raja): he had been picked up by sannyasins, taken into solitude, and had become a sannyasin, until, thirty years later, for God knows what reason, he thought it best to go and claim his possessions, so he returned with proofs that he was indeed the same man....6
I have heard countless stories of that kind, which show the point to which men... They want to get rid of the dead, don't they! And the faster the better.
I remember someone who told me (someone who claimed to be a sage), he told me, “But if it's untrue that the same beings reincarnate many times, then the dead increase more and more in number, and the atmosphere is going to be terribly crowded with all those
dead!... They'll become a plague. What will we do with all that? They will be far more numerous than the living and will crowd everything – what will we do with all that?” There, you see the type of reflection.
(silence)
The attitude of the living towards the dead is one of the most loathsome expressions of mankind's selfish ignorance.
It's either a complete I-couldn't-care-less attitude, or else, “Ohh, anything to get rid of that!” I have some children here (they're no longer children), who live here with their fathers and mothers (who aren't very old), and some of those children told me “dreams” in which they saw their fathers or mothers dead and coming to them... and they sent them back violently, saying, “You're dead, you've got no right to come and bother us”!...
You're dead, you've got no right to come and bother us. There you are.
That's... few will be frank enough to say so, but it's very widespread.
Many things must change before a little bit of truth can manifest – that's all I can say.7
1 The “doctor” is not an abstraction here, but the person who watches and will watch over Mother up to the end.
2 After “death” or at the time of “death.”
3 Many years earlier, Mother had told Satprem a vision she had had of one of her bodies petrified in a Himalayan cave, near a route of pilgrimage.
4 When Satprem suggested publishing this passage in the Bulletin along with the beginning of Mother's comment on the Aphorism, she observed, “I don't want to speak of that now, it isn't yet time. We need not tell them too clearly that the work is being done for them, they know it only too well! (Laughing) No need to insist!”
5 St. Francis Xavier.
6 It is the story of the Raja of Bhaowal, which created a sensation in the Indian press around 1930.
7 Can we ever overemphasize the fact that what happened to Mother ten years later, in 1973, is an unspeakable betrayal... of which she had a presentiment?