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The
Mother Answers on The Divine Body - V
It
is quite difficult to free oneself from old habits of being
and to be able to freely conceive of a new life, a new world.
And naturally, the liberation begins on the highest planes
of consciousness: it is easier for the mind or the higher
intelligence to conceive of new things than for the vital
being, for instance, to feel things in a new way. And it is
still more difficult for the body to have a purely material
perception of what a new world will be. Yet this perception
must precede the material transformation; first one
must feel very concretely the strangeness of the old
things, their lack of relevance, if I may say so. One must
have the feeling, even a material impression, that they are
outdated, that they belong to a past which no longer has any
purpose. For the old impressions one had of past things which
have become historic—which have their interest from that
point of view and support the advance of the present and the
future—this is still a movement that belongs to the old
world: it is the old world that is unfolding with a past,
a present, a future. But for the creation of a new world,
there is, so to speak, only a continuity of transition which
gives an appearance—an impression rather—the impression
of two things still intermingled but almost disconnected,
and that the things of the past no longer have the power or
the strength to endure, with whatever modifications, in the
new things. That other world is necessarily an absolutely
new experience. One would have to go back to the time
when there was a transition from the animal to the human creation
to find a similar period, and at that time the consciousness
was not sufficiently mentalised to be able to observe, understand,
feel intelligently—the passage must have been made in
a completely obscure way. So, what I am speaking about is
absolutely new, unique in the terrestrial creation,
it is something unprecedented, truly a perception or a sensation
or an impression... that is quite strange and new. (After
a silence) A disconnection: something which has overstayed
its time and has only quite a subordinate force of existence,
from something totally new, but still so young, so imperceptible,
almost weak, so to say; it hasn't yet the power to impose
and assert itself and to predominate, to take the place of
the other. So there is a concomitance but, as I said, with
a disconnection, that is, the connection between the two is
missing.
It
is difficult to describe, but I am speaking to you about it
because this is what I felt yesterday evening. I felt it so
acutely\dots that it made me look at certain things, and once
I had seen them I felt it would be interesting to tell you
about them.
(Silence)
It
seems strange that something so new, so special and I might
say so unexpected should happen during a film-show [A Bengali
film, Rani Rasmani]. For people who believe that some
things are important and other things are not, that there
are activities which are helpful to yoga and others which
are not, well, this is one more opportunity to show that they
are wrong. I have always noticed that it is unexpected things
which give you the most interesting experiences.
Yesterday
evening, suddenly something happened which I have just described
to you as best I could—I don't know if I have succeeded
in making myself understood—but it was truly quite new
and altogether unexpected. We were shown, comparatively clumsily,
a picture of the temple on the banks of the Ganges, and the
statue of Kali—for I suppose it was a photograph of that
statue, I could not manage to get any precise information
about it—and while I was seeing that, which was a completely
superficial appearance and, as I said, rather clumsy, I saw
the reality it was trying to represent, what was behind, and
this put me in touch with all that world of religion and worship,
of aspiration, man's whole relationship with the gods, which
was—I am already speaking in the past tense—which
was the flower of the human spiritual effort towards something
more divine than man, something which was the highest and
almost the purest expression of his effort towards what is
higher than he. And suddenly I had concretely, materially,
the impression that it was another world, a world that had
ceased to be real, living, an outdated world which had lost
its reality, its truth, which had been transcended, surpassed
by something which had taken birth and was only beginning
to express itself, but whose life was so intense, so
true, so sublime, that all this became false, unreal, worthless.
Then
I truly understood—for I understood not with the head,
the intelligence but with the body, you understand what I
mean—I understood in the cells of the body—that
a new world is born and is beginning to grow.
And
so, when I saw all this, I remembered something that had happened...
I think I remember rightly, in 1926 [24
November 1926].
Sri
Aurobindo had given me charge of the outer work because he
wanted to withdraw into concentration in order to hasten the
manifestation of the supramental consciousness and he had
announced to the few people who were there that he was entrusting
to me the work of helping and guiding them, that I would remain
in contact with him, naturally, and that through me he would
do the work. Suddenly, immediately, things took a certain
shape: a very brilliant creation was worked out in extraordinary
detail, with marvellous experiences, contacts with divine
beings, and all kinds of manifestations which are considered
miraculous. Experiences followed one upon another, and, well,
things were unfolding altogether brilliantly and... I must
say, in an extremely interesting way.
One
day, I went as usual to relate to Sri Aurobindo what had been
happening—we had come to something really very interesting,
and perhaps I showed a little enthusiasm in my account of
what had taken place—then Sri Aurobindo looked at me...
and said: "Yes, this is an Overmind creation. It is very
interesting, very well done. You will perform miracles which
will make you famous throughout the world, you will be able
to turn all events on earth topsy-turvy, indeed,..."
and then he smiled and said: "It will be a great
success. But it is an Overmind creation. And it is not success
that we want; we want to establish the Supermind on earth.
One must know how to renounce immediate success in order to
create the new world, the supramental world in its integrality."
With
my inner consciousness I understood immediately: a few hours
later the creation was gone... and from that moment we started
anew on other bases.
Well,
I announced to you all that this new world was born. But it
has been so engulfed, as it were, in the old world that so
far the difference has not been very perceptible to many people.
Still, the action of the new forces has continued very regularly,
very persistently, very steadily, and to a certain extent,
very effectively. And one of the manifestations of this action
was my experience—truly so very new—of yesterday
evening. And the result of all this I have noted step by step
in almost daily experiences. It could be expressed succinctly,
in a rather linear way:
First,
it is not only a "new conception" of spiritual life
and the divine Reality. This conception was expressed by Sri
Aurobindo, I have expressed it myself many a time, and it
could be formulated somewhat like this: the old spirituality
was an escape from life into the divine Reality, leaving the
world just where it was, as it was; whereas our new vision,
on the contrary, is a divinisation of life, a transformation
of the material world into a divine world. This has been said,
repeated, more or less understood, indeed it is the basic
idea of what we want to do. But this could be a continuation
with an improvement, a widening of the old world as it was—and
so long as this is a conception up there in the field of thought,
in fact it is hardly more than that—but what has happened,
the really new thing, is that a new world is born, born,
born. It is not the old one transforming itself, it is
a new world which is born. And we are right
in the midst of this period of transition where the two are
entangled—where the other still persists all-powerful
and entirely dominating the ordinary consciousness, but where
the new one is quietly slipping in, still very modest, unnoticed—unnoticed
to the extent that outwardly it doesn't disturb anything very
much, for the time being, and that in the consciousness of
most people it is even altogether imperceptible. And yet it
is working, growing—until it is strong enough to assert
itself visibly.
In
any case, to simplify things, it could be said that characteristically
the old world, the creation of what Sri Aurobindo calls the
Overmind, was an age of the gods, and consequently the age
of religions. As I said, the flower of human effort towards
what is above it gave rise to innumerable religious forms,
to a religious relationship between the best souls and the
invisible world. And at the very summit of all that, as an
effort towards a higher realisation there has arisen the idea
of the unity of religions, of this "one single thing"
which is behind all these manifestations; and this idea has
truly been, so to speak, the extreme limit of human aspiration.
Well, that is at the frontier, it is something that still
belongs completely to the Overmind world, the Overmind
creation and which from there seems to be lookingtowards this
"other thing" which is a new creation it cannot
grasp—which it tries to reach, feels coming, but cannot
grasp. To grasp it, a reversal is needed. It is necessary
to leave the Overmind creation. It was necessary that the
new creation, the supramental creation should take place.
And
now, all these old things seem so old, so out-of-date, so
arbitrary—such a travesty of the real truth.
In the supramental creation there will no longer be any
religions. The whole life will be the expression, the
flowering into forms of the divine Unity manifesting in the
world. And there will no longer be what men now call gods.
These
great divine beings themselves will be able to participate
in the new creation; but to do so, they will have to put on
what we could call the "supramental substance" on
earth. And if some of them choose to remain in their world
as they are, if they decide not to manifest physically, their
relation with the beings of a supramental earth will be a
relation of friends, collaborators, equals, for the highest
divine essence will be manifested in the beings of the new
supramental world on earth.
When
the physical substance is supramentalised, to incarnate on
earth will no longer be a cause of inferiority, quite the
contrary. It will give a plenitude which cannot be obtained
otherwise.
But
all this is in the future; it is a future... which has begun,
but which will take some time to be realised integrally. Meanwhile
we are in a very special situation, extremely special, without
precedent. We are now witnessing the birth of a new world;
it is very young, very weak—not in its essence but in
its outer manifestation—not yet recognised, not even
felt, denied by the majority. But it is here. It is here,
making an effort to grow, absolutely sure of the result.
But the road to it is a completely new road which has never
before been traced out—nobody has gone there, nobody
has done that! It is a beginning, a universal beginning.
So, it is an absolutely unexpected and unpredictable adventure.
There
are people who love adventure. It is these I call, and I tell
them this: "I invite you to the great adventure.''
It
is not a question of repeating spiritually what others have
done before us, for our adventure begins beyond that. It is
a question of a new creation, entirely new, with all the unforeseen
events, the risks, the hazards it entails—a real adventure,
whose goal is certain victory, but the road to which is unknown
and must be traced out step by step in the unexplored. Something
that has never been in this present universe and that will
never be again in the same way. If that interests you...
well, let us embark. What will happen to you tomorrow—I
have no idea.
One
must put aside all that has been foreseen, all that has been
devised, all that has been constructed, and then... set off
walking into the unknown. And—come what may! There.
10
July 1957
- The Mother
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