You have, Mother, while admitting us to Your experience, also tried to initiate us into this profound yoga of the body. You have evidently wished us to do it. We wish we did, but now we will.
You told us:
“…as you descend into that domain, the domain of cells, even the very constitution of the cells seems as if less heavy. This sort of heaviness of Matter disappears — it begins again to be fluid, vibrant. That would tend to prove that heaviness, thickness, inertia, immobility, is a thing added, it is not a quality essential to… it is the false Matter, that which we think and feel, but not Matter itself, as it is.”[1]
“The best one can do is not to take sides, not to have preconceived ideas or principles — Oh! the moral principles, the set rules of conduct, what one must do and what one must not and the preconceived ideas from the moral point of view, from the point of view of progress and all the social and mental conventions… no worse obstacle than that. There are people, I know people who lost decades in surmounting one such mental construction!… If one can be like that, open — truly open in simplicity, the simplicity that knows that it is ignorant — like that (gesture upward of self-abandon), ready to receive whatever comes. Then something can happen.
“And naturally the thirst for progress, the thirst for knowledge, the thirst for transformation and, above all, the thirst for Love and Truth if one keeps that, one goes quicker. Truly a thirst, a need, a need.
“All the rest has no importance, it is that one has need of.
“To stick to something one believed that one knows, to stick to something that one feels, to stick to something that one loves, to stick to one’s habits, to stick to one’s so-called needs, to stick to the world as it is, it is that which binds you. You must undo all that, one thing after another. Undo all the ties. And it has been told thousands of times and people continue to do the same thing…. Even they who are most eloquent and preach that to others do s-t-i-c-k. They stick to their way of seeing, their way of feeling, their habit of progress, which seems for them the only one.
“No more bonds — free, free, free. Always ready to change everything, except one thing: to aspire, this thirst.”[2]
Further You told us:
“…every second all the cells must be (gesture of offering upwards) in adoration, in aspiration — adoration, aspiration … nothing else. Then after a time there is also delight, then that ends by blissful trust. When this trust is established all will be well. But… it is easy to say, it is much more difficult to do. Only for the moment I am convinced that this is the only means, there is no other.[3]
In this connection, we recall what You have called the A B C of the transformation of the body. You have said: “…would you be able to tell exactly, at every meal, the amount of food and the kind of food your body needed? — simply that, nothing more than that: how much should be taken and when it should be taken…. You know nothing about it, there’s just a vague idea like that, a sort of imagination or guesswork or deduction or… all sorts of things which have nothing to do with knowledge. But that exact knowledge: ‘It is this I must take, I must take so much of it’, — and then it is finished. ‘It is this my body needs.’ Well, that can be done. There’s a time when one knows it very well. But it asks for years of labour, and above all years of work.
…And to know also how to determine for one’s body, exactly, the amount of physical effort, of material activity, the amount of expenditure of energy, the amount of recuperation of energy, the proportion between what is received and what is given, the utilisation of energies to re-establish a state of equilibrium which has been broken, to make the cells which are lagging behind progress, to build the conditions for a possibility of higher progress, etc….It is a formidable task[4] …are you conscious of your physical cells and their different characteristics, their activity, the degree of their receptivity, of what is in a healthy condition and what is not? Can you say with certainty when you are tired, why you are tried? Can you, when there’s something wrong somewhere, can you say: ‘It is because of this I am suffering’?…Well, this is the A B C of the transformation of the body.”[5] Surely, we haven’t a clear awareness of the body and its needs. We do not even know when we are really hungry and when we need to eat, much less know precisely what we need to eat, how much we need to eat and when we need to eat. Or when we are tired or what exactly the cause of a suffering is.
We wish and we aspire that we may become clearly aware of our body and its vicissitudes. It will be splendid to know one’s body so well and use it rightly, properly and effectively and over a long vista of life.
Mother, grant that this happens.
And then we should become aware of our cells themselves and then be able to deal with them yogically in aspiration, rejection, surrender, self-opening and so on as we do at the levels of the vital and the mind. Then surely a descent into the cells would be a possible venture and they could enjoy adoration of the Divine and exercise a real aspiration and a real self-opening.
When we read these ‘Notes on the Way’ earlier, we did try to put ourselves into our best sympathetic contact with You and Your inner work. But now we feel seriously called to it. We are sure You are promoting it most energetically and this is the work that is to be carried forward to its completion. We are poor Adhars, but we aspire, we seek to serve You, will do Your will.
Mother, make us fit instruments of Your sublime work and we look forward to its progress and final success.
We are, Mother, Your little children, very ignorant, very weak.
[1] Ibid., p. 85
[2] Ibid., pp. 86-87.
[3] Ibid., August 1965. p. 103.
[4] Ibid., November 1973, pp. 73-75.
[5] Ibid., p. 75.
