Mother's
Vision
I
have been asked if we are doing a collective yoga and what
the conditions for the collective yoga are.
I
might tell you first of all that to do a collective yoga
we must be a collectivity (!) and then speak to you about
the different conditions required for being a collectivity.
But last night (smiling) I had a symbolic vision
of our collectivity.
I
had this vision in the early part of the night, and it made
me wake up with a rather unpleasant impression. Then I went
back to sleep and had forgotten it, and just now when I
thought of the question I have been asked, the vision suddenly
came back. It returned with a great intensity and so imperatively
that now when I wanted to tell you exactly what kind of
a collectivity we want to realise in accordance with the
ideal Sri Aurobindo has given in the last chapter of The
Life Divine—a supramental, gnostic collectivity,
the only one which can practise Sri Aurobindo's integral
yoga and be physically realised in a progressive collective
body that grows more and more divine—the memory of
this vision became so imperative that it prevented me from
speaking.
Its
symbol was very clear though of quite a familiar kind, so
to speak, but so unmistakably realistic in its familiarity...
If I were to relate it to you in detail, probably you wouldn't
even be able to follow; it was very complicated. It was
the image of a kind of—how to put it?—of an immense
hotel in which all earthly possibilities were accommodated
in different rooms. And all this was in a state of constant
transformation: fragments or entire wings of the building
were suddenly demolished and rebuilt while all the people
were still staying in them, in such a way that if a person
went somewhere even inside this huge hotel, he ran the risk
of not finding his room again when he wanted to get back
to it! For it had been demolished and was being rebuilt
on another plan. There was order, organisation... and there
was the fantastic chaos I have described, and in that there
was a symbol. There was a symbol which certainly applies
to what Sri Aurobindo writes here [The Divine Body] on the
necessity of the transformation of the body, what kind of
transformation should take place for life to become a divine
life.
It
was somewhat like this: somewhere in the centre of this
huge building, a room was reserved—in the story, as
it seemed, it was reserved for a mother and her daughter.
The mother was a very old lady, a self-important matron
with much authority and her own views on the whole organisation.
The daughter had a sort of power of movement and activity
which made it possible for her to be everywhere at once
even while remaining in that room which was... well, a little
more than a room; it was a sort of apartment, and its main
feature was to be right in the centre. But she was in constant
argument with her mother. The mother wanted to keep things
as they were with the rhythm they had, that is, with precisely
that habit of demolishing one thing to build another out
of it, and then again demolishing another to rebuild another
one—which gave the building an appearance of frightful
confusion. And the daughter didn't like that and had another
plan. She wanted above all to bring something quite new
into this organisation, a sort of super-organisation which
would make all this confusion unnecessary. Finally, as it
was impossible to come to an understanding, she had left
the room to go on a sort of round of inspection... She went
her round, saw everything, then she wanted to go back to
her own room—for it was her room as well—to take
some decisive action. And it was then that something rather
peculiar began to happen. She remembered quite well where
her room was, but each time she set out to go there by one
route either the stairs disappeared or things were so changed
that she could no longer recognise her way! And so she went
here and there, climbed up and down, searched, went in and
out... impossible to find the way back to her room! As all
this was taking a physical appearance, which was, as I said,
very familiar and very ordinary, as always in these symbolic
visions, somewhere there was—how to put it?—the
administration of this hotel, and a woman who was a kind
of manager, who had all the keys and knew where everybody
was staying. So the daughter went to this person and asked,
"Can you show me the way to my room?"—"Oh,
yes, certainly, it is very easy." All the people around
looked at her as though saying, "How can you say that?"'
But she got up and, with authority, asked for a key, the
key of the room, and said, "I'll take you there."
Then she took all sorts of routes, but all so complicated,
so bizarre! And the daughter followed her very attentively
so as not to lose sight of her. And just at the moment when
obviously they should have reached the place where this
so-called room was, suddenly the manager—we shall call
her the manager—the manager with her key... disappeared!
And this feeling of disappearance was so acute that... everything
disappeared at the same time.
If...
To help you to understand this riddle, I could tell you
that the mother is physical Nature as it is and the daughter
is the new creation. The manager is the mental consciousness,
organiser of the world as Nature has made it until now,
that is, the highest sense of organisation manifested in
material Nature as it is now. This is the key to the vision.
Naturally, when I woke up I knew immediately what could
solve this problem which had seemed absolutely insoluble.
The disappearance of the manager and her key was a clear
indication that she was quite incapable of leading to its
true place what could be called the creative consciousness
of the new world.
I
knew it but I didn't have the vision of the solution, which
means that this is something which is yet to be manifested;
this was not yet manifested in that building—that fantastic
structure—and this is precisely the mode of consciousness
which would transform this incoherent creation into something
real, truly conceived, willed, executed, with a centre which
is in its true place, a recognised place, with a real
effective power.
(Silence)
It
is quite clear in its symbolism, in the sense that all possibilities
are there, all activities are there, but in disorder and
confusion. They are neither coordinated nor centralised
nor unified around the single central truth and consciousness
and will. And we come back, then, to... precisely this question
of a collective yoga and the collectivity which will be
able to realise it. And what should this collectivity be?
It
is certainly not an arbitrary structure like those made
by men, in which they put everything pell-mell, without
order or reality, and the whole thing is held together only
by illusory links, which were symbolised here by the walls
of the hotel, and which, in fact, in ordinary human constructions—if
we take as an example a religious community—are symbolised
by the monastery building, identical clothes, identical
activities, even identical movements—I'll make it more
clear: everybody wears the same uniform, everybody rises
at the same hour, eats the same things, offers the same
prayers together, etc., there is a general uniformity. And
naturally, inside, there is a chaos of consciousnesses,
each one going according to its own mode, for this uniformity
which goes as far as an identity of belief and dogma, is
an altogether illusory identity.
This
is one of the most usual types of human collectivity: to
be grouped, linked, united around a common ideal, a common
action, a common realisation, but in a completely artificial
way. As opposed to this, Sri Aurobindo tells us that a true
community—what he calls a gnostic or supramental community—can
exist only on the basis of the inner realisation of each
of its members, each one realising his real, concrete unity
and identity with all the other members of the community,
that is, each one should feel not like just one member united
in some way with all the others, but all as one, within
himself. For each one the others must be himself as much
as his own body, and not mentally and artificially, but
by a fact of consciousness, by an inner realisation.
(Silence)
That
means that before hoping to realise this gnostic collectivity,
each one should first become—or at least begin to become—a
gnostic being. This is obvious; the individual work should
go on ahead and the collective work should follow; but it
so happens that spontaneously, without any arbitrary intervention
of the will, the individual progress is controlled, so to
speak, or held back by the collective state. Between the
individual and the collectivity there is an interdependence
from which one can't totally free oneself, granting that
one tries. And even a person who tried in his yoga to liberate
himself totally from the terrestrial and human state of
consciousness, would be tied down, in his subconscious at
least, to the state of the mass, which acts as a brake and
actually pulls backwards. One can try to go much
faster, try to drop all the weight of attachments and responsibilities,
but despite everything, the realisation, even of one who
is at the very summit and is the very first in the evolutionary
march, is dependent on the realisation of the whole, dependent
on the state of the terrestrial collectivity. And that indeed
pulls one back, to such an extent that at times one
must wait for centuries for the Earth to be ready, in order
to be able to realise what is to be realised.
And
that is why Sri Aurobindo also says, somewhere else, that
a double movement is necessary, and that the effort for
individual progress and realisation should be combined with
an effort to try to uplift the whole mass and enable it
to make the progress that's indispensable for the greater
progress of the individual: a mass-progress, it could be
called, which would allow the individual to take one more
step forward.
And
now, I shall tell you that this is why I thought it would
be useful to have some group meditations, in order to work
on the creation of a common atmosphere that's a little more
organised than... my big hotel of last night!
So,
the best use one can make of these meditations—which
are gradually becoming more frequent since now we are also
going to replace the "distributions" by short
meditations—is to go within, into the depths of one's
being, as far as one can go, and find the place where one
can feel, perceive and perhaps even create an atmosphere
of unity in which a force for order and organisation will
be able to put each element in its place and make a new
coordinated world arise out of the present chaos. That's
all.
3
july 1957
- The Mother
