Chapter 18May 19, 1973

alive. He smiles slightly, then steps down.

He barely reaches my breast and seems to me like a little boy of eight or ten. The three of us come out of the room. The scene has changed Now it is a countryside. A vast, unlimited expanse stretches in front. A few plots are cultivated, but most of the land is untended.

We walk. We walk on a narrow ridge by the side of a cultivated rice-field, which is to the right of us. It is green. I am nearest to it. The gentleman is the farthest. The Divinity is between us. He has a funny walk. He is so heavy (being made of solid gold) that he seems to lurch from side to side. I feel concerned and hold his arm to help him. I feel a tenderness also as for a child.

Then I turn my face towards him to reassure him. But instead of me looking down it is he who looks down on me! I am really astonished to see how tall he has grown during this short walk of but a few steps! Now it is I who reach hardly his shoulder. He seems to have grown to a lad of 13 or 14.

As I took up, he looks down at me and smiles. Ohh, what a smile! Utterly sweet and full of mischief. It contained a world: “You see, I am quite all right. Now you will see what fun we have!”

We walk on. To our left, sitting cross-legged, head bent, is M. [a disciple very learned in Sanskrit texts]. As we advance, I think, “What a pity, we shall pass right in front of him, but he would not even know WHO passed by!” But as we near, he raises his head and sees. I feel glad for M.

We walk on. Now the scenes change fast. We meet more and more people. Trees. Roads. Still more people. Wherever we go there is trouble, disturbance, confusion. As if the Godhead were sowing disruption everywhere. The Zamindar gets annoyed. He had brought out the Divinity to show people what a fine fellow he was!

Everybody should have great respect for him, obey him, for is he not the Proprietor? But the God had just the opposite effect! He should no longer be abroad. He must be put back where he belonged, and relocked.

So we return to the sanctuary. This time I remain outside. The Zamindar takes the God inside. And tries to shut the door.

But the Godhead will not be shut in. I can see the gold God growing, growing. The ceiling falls in. The god’s head and chest go through the ceiling. He rips oft the walls and throws bricks everywhere. The Zamindar has disappeared under the debris.

The gold God grows. Taller and mightier. And will brook no resistance. With His mighty hands, He pulls down the walls of His old sanctuary.

When I woke up, I called Him “Krishna in gold.”

(Sujata gives Mother a pale yellow, slightly golden hibiscus with a red heart. Mother holds the flower

without seeing it. That day, I don’t know why, I was full of questions.)

What is it?

It’s “Ananda in the physical.”

We badly need it!

Yes, Mother!

And you?

I was thinking about something Sri Aurobindo wrote.... In “Savitri,” he clearly says, “Almighty powers are shut in Nature’s cells.” [IV.IIL370.]

In...?

In Nature’s cells.

Ohh!... Oh, that is interesting!

ALMIGHTY powers.

(silence)

He doesn’t say anything else?

No, not on that subject.... The consciousness of the cells seems to be awakened but not the power.

(Mother did not hear well)

You said the consciousness of the cells is... missing? No?

No, the consciousness is there. The consciousness of the cells is awakened, but the power isn’t.

Ah!... You said “awakened”?

Yes, Mother. Because had the power been awakened, there wouldn’t be any weakness in your body.142 No.

142But everybody around would be flattened! “Smashed egos.” What I failed to understand was this infinite Compassion Yes, there’s no need to seek elsewhere.

But how to awaken it?

Through faith, our faith.

If one knows that and has trust.... But you see, my physical, my body is deteriorating very rapidly – what could stop it from deteriorating?

Mother, I do NOT believe it is deterioration – it’s not. My feeling is that you are physically being led to a point of such complete powerlessness that the most complete Power will be forced to awaken....

Ah!... you’re right.

That Power will then be COMPELLED to come out.

Or else I could... I could leave this body, no?

Ah, no, Mother! No, Mother, it must be done NOW.

(silence)

It must be done now.... You see, I am certain it’s NOT disintegration, not at all. It is NOT disintegration.143

(Mother nods approvingly)

You know, I have always seen that the other pole springs up from the most extreme opposite. So the supreme Power must spring up from the sort of apparent powerlessness you are in. By no means is it a disintegration.

(long silence)

What would you like now?

To stay with you, Mother, naturally.

Like this? (Mother takes Satprem’s hands)

Yes, Mother.

143I was fighting with all my strength against the suggestion of death that was in the atmosphere. That day, the “formation For me, you see, the question is food. More and more I find it impossible to eat. Can this body live without food?

Mother, I truly believe that you are being led to the point where something else will be FORCED to manifest.

I can’t hear.

I think you are led to the point – the point of helplessness or powerlessness where something ELSE will be forced to manifest.

Ah....

Maybe.

As long as that point... of impossibility has not been reached....

Oh, it’s almost the point of impossibility.

Yes, Mother, yes, that’s also what I feel. I feel you’re reaching that point, and something else is going to emerge.

(silence)

It is not at all the end; quite the contrary, it will soon be the beginning.

I was told that the beginning would take place when I am a hundred; but that’s a long way off!

No, Mother, I don’t think it will take that long. I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. Another type of functioning is going to set in. But the end of the old has to be reached, and that end is the terrible part!

Oh... I really don’t want to say (Mother shakes her head), I don’t want to insist, but... truly... (Mother speaks with her eyes closed, all the pain of the world is in the shake of her head).

Yes, Mother. I understand, Mother, I understand Yes....

The consciousness is clearer, stronger than it has ever been, and I look like an old....

Yes, Mother, it’s “normal,” if I may say so. We’re going, you’re going to pass into something else, I sense it – it isn’t faith in me that speaks, it’s something else deep down, that understands.

(silence)

(Mother plunges in, she moans softly, leans forward and seems to be looking for something, then takes

Satprem’s hand again and goes off.)

What time is it?

Five to eleven.... Goodbye, Mother.

(Then the door was shut)

Then the door was shut.

She was to live for another six months, 182 days. Two days before the “end,” she kept repeating, “I want to walk... I want to walk....”

Before my eyes, they drove twenty-five screws into her coffin. There was a ray of sun on the nape of her neck; her hands were tightly clasped together – there was such strength in those hands! Such power in that supposedly dead body. And then that fierce concentration.

She wore a white silk dress and a small blouse with gold buttons.

The long saga unfolds before my eyes – so many years with that young girl’s laughter rippling through everything, and the silences of snow, the beating of wings through boundless space, and the solid fire enfolding the body like concrete love. So many mysteries. “Death is the problem given me to resolve.”

Already night and silence have fallen over the little actors, their good and evil, their sorrow and petty affairs. Tomorrow this scribe, too, will return to the flame of love whence he came, and she, to the sweetness of the Ganges. But what about men? What about History? Still millions and millions of men destined to die? Still sorrow upon sorrow? When will there be undying love? When a lovely earth?

Is it once again put off? “A new way of dying ought to be possible,” she said in 1963. She spoke so much to me about “death” – Savitri, too, went into death to release Satyavan. But what is death?... That coffin? This tomb of gray marble where they go to place their flowers and light their incense, while going on with their petty affairs? But there, within... a mighty silence, there is a body molded of power, whose every cell has repeated year after year, second after second: OM Namo Bhagavateh, OM Namo Bhagavateh....

So, is that all? Is this the end of the story? But Krishna in gold has shattered the chains of the old sanctuaries; rolling and frolicking, he strides along the roads of an old, laggard world, sowing chaos and dissension and confusion everywhere – the inanity and illusion of everything: science and religion, ideals and medicine to patch up the old distressed carcass; everything is crumbling and collapsing; people speak a thousand languages but no one understands anybody; the heads of states look like clowns and clowns look like seers, and everything is the same in black or white, in Chinese or Russian or American. But Krishna winks: “Just wait...” The bomb? No. It would be too childish. The end of all illusions, the end of the human illusion – this is more serious and very upsetting. What if everything was a deception? Medicine and the Holy See, Aristotle and Euclid and the perpetual duplication of the molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid – what if things did not work that way at all?... An earthquake more earthshaking than all the Hiroshima bombs put together. The mental boat shipwrecked once and for all, and man flung on an unknown shore?... The periwinkle out of its shell.

The world looked so complex and awesome and mathematical in that shell. No more shell, no more “mathematics” just... just what?

The most revolutionizing revolution in the world.

Alexander and Lenin and Pompadour (and Einstein and the latest Nobel Peace Prize laureate) were so awesome... in a shell. But without the shell, it’s something else.

A stupendous SOMETHING ELSE. “I am on my way to discovering the illusion that must be destroyed so that physical life can be uninterrupted.... Death is the result of a distortion of periwinkle, then of a man – and then the eyes of tomorrow.

Krishna in gold is breaking the old shell – the shell of good and evil, hope and despair – the shell of life and death. What if there were no more “life” and no more “death”?

Quite a staggering new look.

But unrepentant men go on reciting the Gospel of the periwinkle and burning incense on gray-marble tombs and making babies and more babies, while Krishna in gold is pulling down the ceiling – how are they going to awake from it all?

In that tomb, some thousands and millions of cells are repeating the Mantra, tirelessly, relentlessly – a new vibration is wearing down the partition walls of the world. Alone in that mighty silence, a small human form with her hands clasped together repeats the prayer of the world, repeats the cry of the earth, repeats.... They did not want her alive – she is conquering death.

The veil of illusion shrouding an unknown reality.

She is wearing down death from within.

When our illusions are wholly gone, “that” will come. “I am walking a very thin line....” The world is walking a very thin line. Will it fall on this side or that side?

It is perhaps time to decide what we want.

My gaze is so intense, my heart so grieved that, at times, I seem to penetrate that tomb. And I seem to discern something very still staring at death straight in the face, and an indomitable will – waiting.

Waiting for our prayer to join hers.

Mother, what do you have to say to these human offspring? On that November 18, 1973, she said something. I was stunned, aching from head to toe amid those hundreds and thousands of people staring at a “dead body.” The fans were droning, the neon lights were glaring; there was a scent of incense and jasmine in the air; they were making her coffin with all dispatch. But my heart was filled with such an enormous “This-is-not-possible,” as if the entire earth and all the sorrowful men of this earth were crying out in my heart. So then, this was the “end,” as it always was – as at Thebes and Babylon and Buchenwald. It was the end. And we start all over again. It was so overwhelmingly not-possible. Never, ever will I go through it again. Never, ever will there be “another time” with its sorrow and prayers and fruitless pain of being. There were a thousand men in my heart, all alike, who had waited and waited for THAT MOMENT. And there was no moment. We will have to come again in another life and learn again about Euclid and the law of gravity, and sorrow and “happiness” – and end up in a hole again? I was so broken, shattered on that November 18 – there was only a splitting headache and a blank look staring and staring at that procession of dead people. But, suddenly, I had the most stupendous experience of my life. I who had so much complained to Mother of never having any “experience”! I was in no condition to have an experience, or concentrate or pray, or will anything – I was nothing but a headache, an aching body, a kind of frightful nonentity staring at a small white form. An unintelligible masquerade. It was false, screamingly false. A dream. Not real.

All of life was not-real. Then she lifted me in her arms. She lifted me above my headache, lifted me above that crowd, above all those meaningless little bodies. And I was in a sound-burst. I entered a stupendous peal of bells – vast as the universe, exceeding all universes, all lives, all bodies, and yet WITHIN – A colossal ringing that swept away the worlds, swept away the pains, swept away the whys and the hows; I was

NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING WILL STOP NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING WILL STOP NO OBSTACLE, NOTHING WILL STOP...

...ringing and ringing. The whole world was ringing in a torrent of rapturous, irresistible, triumphant joy. NOTHING WILL STOP.... It was the inevitable new world.

Here.

Done. My whole body was trembling.

Land’s End

Completed (in French) July 12, 1981 with love