The Mother

Agenda

Volume 5

November 12, 1964

Is there anything new?

It's you who had something to find. You said you would look for the cause of those sorts of faintings.

There is something interesting (not the faintings!). You know that Z has started a yoga in the body (I didn't ask her to do anything, she did it spontaneously); she wrote to me her first experiences, and there were observations quite similar to those I had made and with an accuracy that interested me – I have encouraged her. She is going on. I don't have the time to read her letters: they're piling up there. But what I found very interesting is that yesterday I was read a letter from an English writer (a lady): she has a little group there, they meditate together, and they had a sort of Indian guru (I don't know who) who was teaching them meditation. Then they came across Sri Aurobindo's writings, and they began to study and follow his indications and try to understand. As it happened (about a year ago now), during their meditation, instead of their making an effort of ascent to awaken the Kundalini and rise towards the heights, all of a sudden the Force – the Power, the Shakti – began to descend from above downward. They informed their guru, who told them, “Very bad! Very dangerous, stop it, terrible things are going to happen to you!” That was about a year ago. They weren't quite sure that the gentleman was right and they went on, with very good results. Then, yesterday, that lady wrote, giving a detailed notation of their experiences – almost the SAME WORDS as Z! Now that's beginning to be interesting. Because it represents an impersonalization of the Action, in other words it doesn't express itself subjectively according to each individual: it has a WAY of acting.

I was very happy, I wrote her a note to congratulate her.

And I notice – from letters I receive, from remarks made to me – that the Action is becoming truly general all over the earth, and with SIMILAR effects (a slight coloration according to each individual, but that's nothing), similar effects. And it's a whole discipline, a sadhana of the body – not a mental one: of the body. So it is concrete.

(silence)

There is this phenomenon: as soon as the physical organism, with its crystallization and habits, is put in the presence of a new experience without being carefully forewarned (“Now be careful, this is a new experience!”), it is afraid. It's afraid, it panics, it worries. It depends on the person, but at the very least, in the most courageous, in the most trusting, it creates an uneasiness – it begins with a slight pain or a slight uneasiness. Some are afraid immediately; then it's all over: the experience stops, it has to be started all over again; others (like those English people I was talking about, or like Z) hold on and observe, wait, and then the “unpleasant” effects, one may say, slowly die down, stop and turn into something else, and the experience begins to take on its own value or color.

With those faintings of sorts I told you about the other day, I observed (it went on the whole day), and I saw (saw with the inner vision): it is like the travel – at times as quick as a flash, at other times slow and very measured – of a force that starts from one point to reach another one. That force travels along a precise route, which isn't always the same and seems to include certain cells on its way: the starting point and the arrival point (Mother draws a curve in the air). If you aren't on your guard, if you are taken by surprise, during the passage of the force (whether long or short) you feel the same sensation (“you,” meaning the body), the same sensation as before fainting: it's the phenomenon that precedes fainting. But if you are attentive, if you stay still and look, you see that it starts from one point, reaches another point, and then it's over – what that force had to do has been done, and there is no APPARENT consequence in the rest of the body.

I mentioned (not with so many details) the fact to the doctor, not in the hope that he would know, but because (it's amusing) when I speak to him, he tries to understand, of course, and then there is the mirror of his mental knowledge, and in that mirror, sometimes I find the key! (Laughing) You understand, the scientific key of what's going on.

As a matter of fact, it was after I spoke to him (I mentioned it to him as a sort of dizzy spell) that I was able to perceive precisely those “routes.” I wondered if it wasn't the projection on a magnifying screen of phenomena taking place between different brain cells? Because those sorts of dizzy spells always follow (today there hasn't been anything at all), they always follow a moment or a day of intense aspiration for the transformation of the brain. It may be that.... You know, all those brain cells in there are hitched together, and if those “hitchings” are disturbed, generally people become deranged; and it gave me the impression of a magnifying projection enabling me to follow the connections established between certain brain cells, so that the functioning may not be the automatic, semiconscious functioning of the old state anymore and the brain may truly become the instrument of the higher Force. Because the formula of my aspiration is always, “Lord, take possession of this brain,” and it's always after this intense aspiration that those kinds of phenomena occur. So it is to prepare the brain to be the direct expression of the higher Force.

This is what I have learned these last few days.

I also noted something down, an experience I had this morning. It lasted half an hour, and during that half-hour... (Mother looks for her notes among a series of little scraps of paper)... You know that with people who have a revelation, their state of consciousness changes all at once, and at that moment they have the feeling that everything is changed; then, the next moment, or after a certain time, they realize that all the work... (how should I put it?) of working out the experience remains to be done; that it was only like a flash lasting a certain length of time and that they have to work it out through a process of transformation. This is the usual idea.

And all of a sudden, I saw – that's not it at all! When they have the experience, at the time of the experience, it is the thing ITSELF, the perfection ITSELF that has been reached, and they are in a state of perfection; and it is because they COME OUT of it that they feel they have to slowly prepare themselves for the result.... I don't know if I am expressing myself clearly, but my notation was like this: perfection is there, always, coexisting with imperfection – perfection and imperfection are coexistent, always, and not only simultaneous, but in the SAME PLACE (Mother presses her two hands together), I don't know how to put it – coexistent. Which means that at any second and in any conditions, you can attain perfection: it isn't something that has to be gained little by little, through successive progress; perfection is THERE, and YOU change states, from the state of imperfection to the state of perfection; and it is the capacity to remain in that state of perfection that grows for some reason or other and gives you the feeling that you must “prepare” yourself or “transform” yourself.

That was very real and very concrete.

(Mother gives the text of her note:)

The perfection is there coexistent with the imperfection and attainable at each and any moment.

Yes, it isn't something that becomes: perfection is an absolute state that can be attained at any moment.

And then, the conclusion is very interesting (Mother looks for another scrap of paper).... You remember, I told you that for the body consciousness, the problem that remains hard to solve is that notion (to me, it has become just a notion, it isn't a truth), of the preexistence of all things: of the state in which each thing IS, even in its unfolding.... You understand, it would be as if all the POINTS of the unfolding were preexistent.

I was on the threshold of an understanding (an “understanding”: I am not talking about a mental understanding, I am talking about the experience of the fact). The experience of the fact is the experience of the coexistence of the static state and the state of development – of the eternal static state and the state of eternal unfolding (indefinite, rather, not to use the same word). Then, at that point, there was this vision (Mother holds out a note):

“When the truth manifests, the false vibration disappears...”

Disappears, it is CANCELED (“CANCELED” is the word).

“...as if it had never existed, before the vibration of truth that replaces it. This is the real basis of the theory of Illusion.”

Yes, all of a sudden I understood what they really meant when they said that the physical world as it is is illusory.

You can say it is illusory only if it has no lasting existence, of course. And this experience – which I saw, felt, lived – is that the vibration of truth literally CANCELS the vibration of falsehood, which doesn't exist – it existed only as an illusion for the false consciousness we have.

I don't know if I am making myself understood, but it's very interesting.

It isn't the world that's illusory, it's the perception...

It's the perception of the world that's illusory – the perception of the world, the perception we have of it, is illusory. The world has a concrete, real existence in what we could call the Eternal's Consciousness. But we, the human consciousness has an illusory perception of this world.

And when the Vibration of Truth triumphs, you see and have the sense of the true reality of the world; and as I said, that illusory perception disappears immediately. it is canceled.

Which means that their way of saying or thinking or understanding that “all that is has existed from all eternity” isn't... it isn't “all that is” as they see it and conceive of it, it isn't even the principle of all that is, it is... it is the ONE Truth that's eternal, and the unfolding... It's difficult to say.... The unfolding follows a law and a process that are quite different from what we conceive or from what we perceive.

It's the same thing again: Truth is there, Falsehood is there (Mother presses her two hands together); perfection is there, imperfection is there (same gesture); they're perfectly coexistent, in the same place – the minute you perceive perfection, imperfection disappears, the Illusion disappears.

Only, I am not speaking here of a mental conception of some vague and general state: I am referring to that state of infinitesimal vibration (which they discovered when they tried to find the makeup of Matter: that's what they are trying to reduce Matter to), it is that state of vibration, it is THERE, it's in that state of vibration that, for the concrete world, imperfection must be replaced by perfection. Do you understand what I am saying? Or does it make no sense?

I don't see. You mean it's at that stage, at that level that...

Yes, it's at that level that the change must take place. At the mental or even vital level, it's a psychological question, it's nothing, it's not really THE THING (it's the thing expressed in a HUMAN consciousness). Because the other day... the other day, suddenly I went out of humanity. My consciousness went right out of the human consciousness. And then I said to myself, “But... all that they say, all that they know, all that they have attempted, all that so-called knowledge which has been accumulated on earth, it's nothing! It's something that belongs only to MAN – eliminate man... and everything exists! And all the explanations man has given about things are like zero.” That's it: everything exists.

I had the experience of the universe outside the human perception of that experience; and then the vanity of that human experience was so obvious, you know, that at that point a door began to open onto something else.

All this is perhaps the Lord taking possession of the brain?

It's hard to explain, but as an experience it was extraordinary. You see, we live INSIDE a formation,¹ which was the human – human – formation, all human knowledge.... Because I was beginning to try to find what we know of human life and life on earth: it's almost nothing at all, a very small thing (Sri Aurobindo wrote somewhere that there were billions of years BEFORE²). So what we know is practically nil. All right. So, to get out of that. And it led me quite naturally to go out of humanity – out of the earth, of the universe; of the earth that has been the product of all that we know (at any rate we are explaining what happened, what was there). And then suddenly, yes, the futility, the vanity of that knowledge appeared very clearly, and there was a sort of flash of something else.

(Mother goes into that flash and remains in contemplation)

¹ “Formation” in the sense of the “fishbowl,” the “milieu” in which we live.

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² Mother is perhaps referring to the following passage of The Hour of God: “The experiment of human life on an earth is not now for the first time enacted. It has been conducted a million times before and the long drama will again a million times be repeated. In all that we do now, our dreams, our discoveries, our swift or difficult attainments we profit subconsciously by the experience of innumerable precursors and our labour will be fecund in planets unknown to us and in worlds yet uncreated....” (XVII.149)

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