April 14, 1973The Mother
Agenda
Volume 13
April 14, 1973
(Mother is very short of breath, she seems to be in pain.)
My nervous system is being transferred to the Supramental. It feels like... you know, what people call “neurasthenia”1 – they have no idea what it is; but the entire nervous system is.... It's worse than dying.2
Yes, Mother.
But I think... I think I can transmit the divine Vibration.
Oh, yes, definitely!
Will you tell me if you feel it?
But, Mother, being with you is fantastic – it's being... it's a torrent... it feels like a purifying fire, it's.... It widens you, it fills you – that's IT, in a word!
So, would you like to stay [to meditate]?
You know, Mother, ever since you've become supposedly powerless, I have started to feel the supreme Mother. When you had all your powers ....
But I know it's my body... this body.... Look, I have accepted – the Lord asked me if I wanted to undergo the transformation, and I said yes (I would have said yes in any event), but it's... to the ordinary human consciousness, I am going mad.3
Yes, I understand, Mother. I understand.... Anyone else would have left umpteen times, rather than sit through all this I really understand.
What about you, are you all right?
Yes, yes, Mother!
What do you feel when we sit like this [in meditation], is it all right?
Oh, Mother, I feel at the very Goal of my life!
Good. What's the time, tell me?
It's 10:25.
So up to... I don't know, 11:00 or 11:10... I'll keep you with me.
Yes, Mother, keep me!
(Mother plunges in)
ADDENDUM
A Grain of Rice?
“To the ordinary human consciousness, I am going mad.” What happened on November 17, 1973? Or rather, what is happening?
I have pored over Mother's every word for so many years, I have LIVED them all with a pounding heart – or a broken heart. What actually happened? And why?... I can never accept the idea that she left because the attempt failed – we may as well say that evolution has failed, or that she quit the game, or that it was too difficult – nothing was too difficult for her, she fought like a lioness. To say – as they all said – that “the body failed” because it was too old, or due to one thing or another, demonstrates that they never felt or even grazed that Power: “That” can revive a dead man and all the dead... without its making any difference. So... what happened? There was one moment when Mother lost the contact with her body, or rather, when THAT lost the contact with Mother's body. Did she not say (on March 10), “If I lost the contact – but that's impossible!” Another day in 1971 (on December 4), she had said, “Only a violent death could stop the transformation, otherwise it will go on and on and on....”
Therefore, there can be only two solutions to the mystery – I was about to say “murder mystery,” but can one call it by any other name? What other term could better elucidate the enigma? Assuredly, Mother had that horrid entourage, but it was in no way exceptional, neither in good nor in bad: the people around her exactly represented the average humanity and the ordinary physical consciousness, for which what she was doing was just questionable dreams and hallucinations. They all believed her old, senile or even “insane,” and on the brink of death – but could the beliefs of human pygmies get the better of that Consciousness? Of that Power? Of that Will? Could the attempt fail because of our belief or disbelief?
Thus she was alone among them – she was soon to be truly alone, from May 19 onward, exactly thirty-five days after the present conversation. I still hear Mother's son artlessly asking me, a few days after that May 19, “How will we communicate with Mother now?” “There will be NO MORE communication,” I replied. He was flabbergasted – not I. WHO could she “communicate” with? But as I said, I was positive that the experience would continue with or without communication: Mother was going to sever the nutrient link to the old physiology – they did not let her. There remained cataleptic trance, the fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty – they did not want it. I can still hear the voice of the Brute: “No, I don't want to.”
So?...
Did she decide to leave? No one will ever convince me that Mother “decided,” or that she was old, or insane, or incapable.
Did “the Lord decide”? Well, of course, it is He who decides in any case. But He also uses human instruments – otherwise this world would have never existed – and these human instruments have a freedom of choice, they are not mere puppets in the hands of “God” Or rather, to be more precise, they have a choice between being the Divine's puppet or the devil's – and maybe BOTH ways conspire to lead us to an unforeseeable goal.
Hence, humans decided They said no to the trance, no to the experience, no to the fairy tale; they could not stand it anymore – it had to stop.
A particular fact has haunted me for the past seven years, a particular passage in Pranab's speech which he delivered a few days after Mother's departure. (Once again, I am not accusing anyone: I am chronicling History; I would like to report the facts, the words, the characters as accurately as I can – I am Mother's scribe, that is all... and I love her, because it's lovely to love.) Now, in that
speech, we find a small remark, the kind of remark one makes in passing, as the most “natural” thing in the world. Pranab is describing the “last days.” You call them the “last days” AFTERWARDS, when the story is over – in the meantime, it's just life as usual:
(original English)
“At night [on November 14], She said, ‘Make me walk.’ We were very hesitant, but as She insisted, we lifted her up from the bed. She could not walk, staggered a little, almost collapsed. Seeing this, we put Her back in bed. We saw that Her face had become absolutely white and the lips blue. Then we decided that whatever She said, we must not take Her out from the bed again to walk. She took about 20 minutes to recover; She started saying, ‘Lift me up again, I shall walk.’ We refused. She asked why we were refusing. We said, ‘Mother, you are in such a weak condition that it will do you harm.’ Then She said, ‘No, lift me up.’ We did not. She began to plead, sometimes shout. All this continued until fifteen minutes past one. At that time we thought we would give Her some sedative, so that She might rest quietly. Then we gave Her SIQUIL as the doctor had prescribed. It took Her about 45 minutes to become quiet and She slept from 2 to 4 o'clock, but after getting up She started saying, ‘Pranab, lift me up and make me walk. My legs are getting paralysed; if you help me to walk again, they will become all right.’ But we did not listen. She went on entreating till about 6 o'clock when She fell asleep.”
Yes, she fought like a lioness – till the very end Is this the plea of someone “who has decided to leave”?
This was on November 14, three days before the “end”
“On the 15th,” Pranab reports, “at night again... She wanted us to help Her to walk, we refused to do that. We said, ‘Mother, you should not walk.’ She immediately obeyed us.... From that day She became absolutely obedient.”
How long had they been giving her SIQUIL? And what is SIQUIL, in the first place?4 A doctor friend of mine had explained to me: “It's a dangerous drug.” But I could not believe in that kind of thing, it was simply too horrible.
Seven years later – it took me seven years – one day in September 1980, as I was passing a small local pharmacy on my way back from Madras, I decided to get to the bottom of it. I went in, asked for SIQUIL, pulled out the “directions” from the box and... read, dumbfounded:
“Studies have revealed that over-sedation is not always necessary to benefit such psychotic symptoms as agitation, delusions, hallucinations or delirium. SIQUIL greatly simplifies home management of emotionally deranged patients, many of whom might otherwise previously have been hospitalized. These patients adopt a more realistic behavior, become less of a burden to their families and are more easily approached for training purposes and eventual rehabilitation.... SIQUIL is especially indicated in the treatment of severe acute and chronic mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, mania, depression, delirium, senile psychoses and psychoses caused by organic brain disease.”
So, that body... whose cellular consciousness had been prepared, refined, trained by decades of yoga....
There is simply nothing to say.
They had had enough. They were unanimous.
I now recall a “dream” I had twelve years earlier, in which Mother seemed dead “because she had eaten a grain of rice.” What kind of “rice” was it, that minuscule particle capable of breaking her body?
Yet, even if we find the physical cause of her departure, we will not have found the true reality – for the Divine uses everything, including our human errors, to turn it into his unforeseeable Honey.
I recall Sri Aurobindo: “the Eternal's dreadful strategy.”5
Indeed, Mother's “end” is not the end. “Wait till the last act,” she had said.
But still....
1 Mother may have used this term in its original Greek root meaning: “strengthless nerves.” Unless she meant “neuralgia” in its broader sense.
2 We recall Mother also saying, “When people come into my room with ill thoughts, all the nerves are tortured.”
3 See the Addendum.
4 SIQUIL is the Indian brand name for triflupromazine hydrochloride, which is manufactured in India by Sarabhai Chemicals, and by Squibb in the U.S. (under the brand name VESPIUN).
5 Savitri, I.II.17.